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CHRIST AND OTHER MASTERS: 
 
 AN HISTORICAL INQUIRY 
 
 INTO SOME OF 
 
 THE CHIEF PARALLELISMS AND CONTRASTS 
 BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY 
 
 KELIGIOTJS SYSTEMS OF THE ANCIENT WOKLD, 
 CHARLES HARDWICK, M.A. 
 
 LATE ARCHDEACON OP ELY, AND CHRISTIAN ADVOCATE IN THE 
 UNIVERSITY OP CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 FOUKTH EDITION, EDITE&vBY 
 
 J^RANCIS PROCTE^jj 
 
 VICAR OP 'WITTON, NORFOLK; FORMERLY FELLOW OP 
 
 ST Catharine's college, Cambridge. 
 
 " Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters 
 of Israel? May I not wash in them and be clean? So he turned, and 
 went away in a rage."— 2 Kings v. 12. 
 
 Honaon : 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1882. 
 
 [All Rights reserved,] 
 

 C 
 
 •I have laid it down as an invariable maxim constantly to follow 
 historical tradition, and to hold' fast by that clue, even when many 
 things, in the testimony and declarations of tradition, appear strange 
 and ahnost inexpHcable, or at least enigmatical; for so soon as in the 
 investigation of ancient history we let slip that thread of Ai-iadne, we 
 can find no outlet from the labyrinth of fanciful theories, and the 
 chaos of clashing opinions.'— F. von Schlegel, Phil of Hist p. 8i, 
 Lond. 1847. ^y^^y 
 
 CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY C. J. CLl^Ff^ZIT^raE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 
PREFATORY MEMOIR TO SECOND EDITION. 
 
 The present work contains tlie four Essays published by the 
 late Archdeacon Hardwick in the years in which he held the 
 office of * Christian Advocate ' in the University of Cambridge. 
 It is simply a reprint of the first edition, with the introduction 
 of a few notes from the author's manuscript. 
 
 The central point, around which his whole argument is 
 constructed, is the exhibition of the real position and relation 
 of Christianity in the presence of the other religions, which 
 have had, and still have, the allegiance of so great a part of 
 mankind. It was his intention, in a concluding volume, to 
 discuss these religions as one great whole, and to determine 
 the place of the present argument among our Christian defences 
 and evidences ; and to analyse more minutely the causes which 
 rendered heathen systems so ineffective, and which led in so 
 many instances to their rapid deterioration. He felt, however, 
 that this was too much to undertake in one year. His publication 
 therefore for the fifth and concluding year of his office as the 
 last * Christian Advocate * was intended to be a discussion of 
 the genuineness of the Second Epistle of St. Petei', which 
 had formed the subject of a Latin Thesis composed for his 
 B.D. degree; and a few pages of this treatise were in type, 
 when it, and the conclusion of the present elaborate work, and 
 whatever else was occupying his ever-active mind, was cut 
 short by a death regretted not only by a circle of private friends, 
 but by all admirers of a sound and reasonable churchmanship. 
 * 6 2 
 
vi Prefatory Memoir, 
 
 To those who were acquainted with the Author in the 
 University, his character of patient labour must be well known. 
 To reckon simply the years, from 1845, when he was elected 
 to a Fellowship, to the year of his death, 1859, and to com- 
 pare this period with the number of books written and edited 
 in the interval, will satisfy any one that there could have 
 been but few idle days. But a more intimate acquaintance 
 with his early life causes the greater wonder at the learning 
 which produced these works. A slip of paper written during 
 his undergraduateship, gives the particulars of his previous 
 educational course, which would be hardly credited, if the 
 story rested upon accounts picked up from hearsay evidence. 
 
 Charles Hard wick was born September 22, 1821, at 
 Slingsby, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. He received the 
 first rudiments of English, writing and arithmetic, under Mr. 
 Chapman, the schoolmaster in his native village, who survived 
 his pupil by a few weeks. He was taught also the Latin 
 Grammar by the Rev. Wm. Walker, at that time the Curate, 
 and who afterwards held the Rectory of Slingsby. At the age 
 of twelve, in 1833, he was sent to a school at Malton, kept by 
 Mr. P. Corcoran, a Socinian minister, who is described as being 
 a clever man. Here he began Greek : he did not, however, 
 remain long under his teaching, but was sent to the Grammar 
 School at Sheffield, where some relatives resided. Here 
 again he only remained for one year : weak health compelled 
 his removal home, and kept him there for six or eight months 
 — studying : entering upon a course of self-education : preparing 
 to obtain learning in the only way that seemed open to him, 
 by assisting in teaching others. At the age of fifteen he was 
 taken by Mr. Irving, on the recommendation of his friend 
 Mr. Walker, as pupil and assistant in the Thornton Grammar 
 School near Pickering ; and he was there for eighteen months. 
 
 In the summer of 1838, while not yet seventeen, he removed 
 to the academy at Malton, where he was assistant classical Tutor 
 under Mr. Marshall. Here he remained for eighteen months. 
 While in this situation, he delivered two lectures at the 
 
Prefatory Memoir, vii 
 
 Mechanics' Institute ; and some of liis youthfal essays in Poetiy 
 were published in the Poet's Corner of the York Courant. 
 A longer specimen of his talents in this department, in the 
 shape of a sacred drama, was sent to Lord Carlisle through 
 Mr. Walker, his lordship's chaplain; and this brought the youth 
 a sovereign, and a word of encouragement. He continued 
 to write poetry — sonnets and longer pieces — in his next situ- 
 ation; when he was engaged as assistant by the Kev. H. 
 Barlow, who took pupils at Shirland Rectory, in Derbyshire. 
 Here he enjoyed a salary of £40 a-year. But it does not 
 appear that he was there for a full year — at all events not more 
 than a year. He brought home a half-year's stipend, which 
 enabled him to pay his Caution money. 
 
 In July 1840, he was entered for a sizarship at St. John's, 
 but was unsuccessful at the examination in October. He then 
 entered as a pensioner at Catharine Hall, and obtained a small 
 scholarship after the College examination in the Easter Term 
 in 1841. 
 
 The remainder of his undergraduate course is soon told. The 
 hardworking youth was chiefly maintained by his scholarship, 
 with helps that are obtainable in the University, and for which 
 so steady a student could be safely recommended by Professor 
 Corrie, the tutor of the College. He had also an exhibition 
 (Lady Lumley's) of XI 5 for three years, from the Thornton 
 Grammar School. This fact intimates that he was at that 
 school as a scholar; or if he united the positions of teacher and 
 scholar, he was sufficiently recognised in the latter capacity 
 to be considered a member of the school. 
 
 In the examination at the end of his second year (1842) 
 he was Prizeman in Divinity, 1st in classics, and 2nd hi 
 Mathematics. At the B.A. examination, in January 1844, he 
 stood first Senior Optime. 
 
 Self-maintenance and self-improvement were still the rules 
 of his working life. By the assistance of Professor Corrie, 
 he soon became tutor in the family of Sir Joseph Badcliffe, 
 then residing at Brussels. Here he used the opportunities open 
 
viii Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 to him, and made himself master of French and German. He 
 was unsuccessful in an examination for a Yorkshire Fellowship 
 in the October Term of 1844: but nothing daunted, he con- 
 tinued his work with his pupils, and improved himself so far 
 that he was elected in 1845. 
 
 He was now free to choose his own line of reading. His 
 Fellowship giving him a title for orders, he was ordained Deacon 
 in 1846, and Priest in 1847, in which year he proceeded to 
 his M.A. degree. 
 
 In September, 1846, he received the thanks of the parishioners 
 of All Saints, Cambridge, for duty done during the absence of the 
 Vicar, the Kev. George Maddison. During this year, 1846, 
 he was engaged, for the University Press, upon the new edition 
 of Sir Koger Twysden's Historical Vindication of the Church 
 of England in point of Schism, as it stands separated from the 
 Roman, and was reformed V^ Elizabeth; and found the additional 
 matter introduced into this edition, in Twysden's autograph, in 
 an interleaved copy in the Library of the British Museum. 
 As a Supplement to this work, he was induced to edit Arch- 
 deacon Fullwood's lloma Euit, or the Pillars of Rome broken : 
 Cambridge, 1847. He also completed, for the University 
 Press, the edition of the Saxon and Northumbrian versions of 
 St. Matthew's Gospel (1848), commenced by the late Mr. 
 John M. Kemble. 
 
 His next work was an edition, for the Percy Society, of 
 A Poem on the Times of Edward II. (1849), followed by an 
 Anglo-Saxon Passion of St. George (1850) ; undertaken while 
 engaged on the Catalogue of MSS. in the Cambridge University 
 Library, of which Mr. Hardwick was appointed to be editor 
 in chief, and to which he contributed the descriptions of the 
 volumes of Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-lSTorman, and Early English 
 literature. In 1849, also, he read before the Cambridge Anti- 
 quarian Society, An Historical Enquiry touching St. CatJiarine 
 of Alexandria; which ^as printed with the addition of a Semi- 
 Saxon Legend, and Glossary. (Cambridge, 1849.) 
 
 In 1850, he assisted in preparing an edition of the Book 
 
Prefatory Memoir, ix 
 
 of Homilies for the University Press, under the supervision of 
 Professor Corrie, who fairly * thanks his friend and former pupil 
 for verifying a large proportion of the quotations from Scripture 
 and ecclesiastical writers, and for his valuable aid in correcting 
 the press and supplying an index.' 
 
 In December of this year he preached a course of sermons at 
 Great St. Mary's, on the Connection of the Old and New 
 Testaments. 
 
 In March of the year 1851, he was appointed by the Bishop 
 of London (C. J. Blomfield) to be the Cambridge preacher at 
 the Chapel Eoyal, Whitehall. He had at this time just com- 
 pleted his History of the Articles of Religion, An American 
 edition of this work, of course without the author's sanction, 
 was printed at Philadelphia in 1852. 
 
 In March 1853, at the conclusion of his Preachership at 
 Whitehall, he became Professor of Divinity in Queen's College, 
 Birmingham, an office, however, which he held only for a few 
 months. Church History was occupying his attention. He 
 printed a selection from his Whitehall sermons, under the title 
 oi Twenty Sermons for Town Congregations; and also the History 
 of the Christian Church during the Middle Ages, 
 
 In 1855 he was appointed Lecturer in Divinity in King's 
 College, Cambridge; and Christian Advocate, which office caused 
 the composition of the 1st part of the present work. In 1856 
 he was elected a member of the Council of the Senate, and 
 re-elected in 1858. Earlj^ in 1856 he published the 2nd volume 
 of his History of the Christian Church, embracing the Reformation 
 Period ; and before the end of the year Part II. of this work. 
 The Ilird Part was written in 1857 : and the lYth Part in 
 1858; in which year he also edited Thomas of Elmham's His- 
 toria Monasterii S, Augustini Cantuariensis in the Series, com- 
 menced in 1857, of "The Chronicles and Memorials of Great 
 Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages." In 1859, he 
 carried through the press a second edition of the History of the 
 Articles, much of the work being rewritten. 
 
 Mr. Hardwick had just been appointed by the Bishop (T. 
 
X Prefatory Memoir. 
 
 Turton) to the Archdeaconry of Ely, when his work on earth 
 was cut short. He died by a fall in the Pyrenees, August 1 9, 
 1859, and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Luchon. 
 
 No notice is taken in this survey of articles contributed to 
 He views, or smaller papers read before the Antiquarian Society. 
 Apart also from the works edited by Mr. Hardwick, which 
 involved an amount of labour which a conscientious editor 
 only can appreciate, the original works — the History of the 
 Articles — the two volumes of Church History — and the four 
 Parts of Christ and other Masters — have made him a name among 
 the writers of the English Church, which will not soon be 
 forgotten. 
 
 Francis Procter. 
 
AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 Many of the subjects I am here attempting to discuss 
 have, in one shape or other, occupied the thoughts of 
 previous writers, both at home and on the continent. 
 To some of their productions, as the references annexed 
 will testify, the present work has been indebted for valu- 
 able suggestions: and even where I am not conscious 
 of appropriating the materials, or adopting the results 
 of others, it can hardly be expected that my observations 
 are always original, or my researches independent. The 
 only recent treatise which professes to grapple with exactly 
 the same class of difficulties, is a volume published in 
 1848 by Mr F. D. Maurice, with the title The Religions 
 of the World, and their relations to Christianity. Like 
 other writings of that gifted author, it has naturally at- 
 tracted a large circle of admirers, offering as it does some 
 very choice reflections on the spirit that pervaded the 
 religious systems of antiquity, Muhammedanism included. 
 Still it seems to me, at least, that Mr. Maurice's treatment 
 of the subject would have proved far more successful, 
 had his method been more rigorously historical. He 
 rather helps us to philosophize on what may possibly 
 have been the attributes of those religions, as viewed 
 by the more elevated minds of heathendom, than to 
 determine the precise complexion of the popular belief, 
 
xii Preface, 
 
 and its true relation to the doctrines of the Gospel. I feel, 
 moreover, that the growth and permanence of such systems 
 are always traceable quite as much to their accordance 
 with the lower and depraved tastes of humanity, as to 
 supernatural influences exerted on their constitution by 
 the ever-present Logos, or to fragments of primeval truth 
 they are supposed to have retained. 
 
 The work itself will shew the animus with which 
 objections have been met and answered. I hope that 
 no assailant of Revealed Religion, with whom it is my 
 duty to contend, will ever find his arguments misrepre- 
 sented : and if in any case I manifest what seems to him 
 a needless warmth of feeling, my apology must be the 
 strong conviction which I entertain as to the sacredness 
 of Christianity, and the exceeding blindness of those 
 persons, who, having once embraced it, turn away from 
 all its central doctrines with irreverence, coldness, or con- 
 tempt. *A politic man,' observes Lord Bacon \ 'may 
 write from his brain, without touch and sense of his*heart, 
 as in a speculation that appertaineth not unto him ; but 
 a feeling Christian will express in his words a character 
 of zeal or love. The latter of which, as I could wish 
 rather embraced, being more proper for these times, yet 
 is the former warranted also by great examples.' 
 
 One word of comment on the startling verdict of the 
 Royal Commissioners^ with reference to the office which 
 it is my privilege to fill. ' Objections,' they remark, 
 'have justly been made both to the name and to the 
 office of Christian Advocate : for if the Christian religion 
 requires defence, such defence should be a spontaneous 
 act, not a hired service.* 
 
 This criticism, I would submit, is no less adverse 
 
 1 Of Church Controversies^ Works, iii. 135, Lond. 1765. 
 
 ^ Report of the Commissioners for the University of Cambridge^ p. 69. 
 
Preface. xiii 
 
 to all kinds of religious endowments. Every one who 
 enters into holy orders does so with the understanding 
 that he has been called to preach, expound, and advocate, 
 a definite system of belief; and every one who afterwards 
 accepts ecclesiastical preferment, is converted by that step 
 into a ' hired ' defender of his principles. In what respect 
 foundations like those of Hulse, Boyle, and Bampton, 
 are peculiarly obnoxious to the charge of fostering a 
 sordid spirit in the persons who have been entrusted 
 with the functions they prescribe, it is not easy to de- 
 termine. But while urging this, I would by no means 
 be understood to argue, that such endowments have been 
 uniformly applied in the best manner possible. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PART I. 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 On the Eeligious Tendencies of the Present Age ... 3 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 On the Unity of the Human Race 34 
 
 Section i. ' Scriptural Proof . . . . . . . 38 
 
 2. Psychological Proof 40 
 
 3. Physiological Proof . . . . . . 44 
 
 4. Philological Proof 48 
 
 CHAPTER m. 
 
 On the Characteristics of Religion under the Old Testament 57 
 
 Section i . The Law 62 
 
 2. The Promise 87 
 
 Appendix. The Absolute Religion iji 
 
xvi Contents. 
 
 PART 11. 
 
 RELIGIONS OF INDIA, 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Yarieties of Religious Thought among the Hindus . . 117 
 
 Section i. Vedaism . . . , 121 
 
 2. Brdhmanism 135 
 
 3. Schools of Philosophy i including Buddhism . 146 
 
 CHAPTER n. 
 
 Apparent Correspondencies between Hinduism and Revealed 
 
 Religion 175 
 
 Section i. Hindu monotheism 183 
 
 2. Hindu trinities J or triads 191 
 
 3. Hindu avat^ras or incarnations^ especially that of 
 
 Krishna .... .... 196 
 
 CHAPTER HI. 
 
 Real Correspondencies between Hinduism and Revealed Re- 
 ligion 207 
 
 Section i. The primitive state of Man .... 209 
 
 2. The Fall of Man 213 
 
 3. The Hindu version of the Deluge . . . 219 
 
 4. The Hindu rite of Sacrifice 225 
 
 5. The Hindu hope of restoration . . . . 229 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Contrasts in the general development of Hinduism and Re- 
 vealed Religion . . 232 
 
 Appendix I. The non- Aryan Tribes of Hindustan . . . 257 
 Appendix II. Coincidences between Lamaism and Medicsval Chris- 
 tianity 263 
 
Contents. xvii 
 
 PART 111. 
 RELIGIONS OF CHINA, AMERICA, AND OCEANICA. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction . . » . . 269 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Religions op China 272 
 
 Section i. Confucianism 278 
 
 2. Tao-isniy or School of the Fixed Way . . . 307 
 
 3. Fo -ism 1 01 Chinese Buddhism , . . . 321 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Religions of Ameeica 347 
 
 Section i. The wild Tribes of America .... 354 
 
 2. The demi-civilised Tribes, especially the Mexican 361 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Religions op Oceanica 383 
 
 Section i. The Papuan Family 390 
 
 2. The Malay -Polynesian Family . . , . 394 
 
 PART IV. 
 
 RELIGIONS OF EGYPT AND MEDO-PERSIA, 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Characteristics op Egyptian Heathenism 417 
 
 ^ CHAPTER II. 
 
 Alleged Affinities between the Hebrew and Egyptian Sys- 
 tems ............ 480 
 
 Section i. Bitual Resemblances 4^6 
 
 Circumcision 49^ 
 
 Cherubim 493 
 
 Holy and most Holy Places . . . -497 
 
 XJrim and Thummim 49^ 
 
 The Red Heifer 501 
 
 The Scape-Goat 5°^ 
 
 2. Doctrinal Contrasts 505 
 
xviii Contents. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 PAGK 
 
 Characteristics of Medo-Peesian Heathenism . . . .518 
 
 CHAPTEK lY. 
 
 Alleged Affinities of the Medo-Peksian Ceeed to Hebraism 
 
 AND Christianity . 544 
 
 Section i. The Fall of Man 552 
 
 2. Doctrine of the Evil One .... 554 
 
 3. Doctrine of Holy Angels ..... 558 
 
 4. Doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body . 563 
 
 5. Doctrine of a Benefactor and Mediator . . 566 
 
 Appendix I. Alleged Connexion between Coptic and Hehreiv . 574 
 
 Appendix II. Religions of the harharous Trihes of Africa . . 579 
 
 Index 584 
 
PART I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 " J I 
 
INTRODUCTION". 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 On the Religious Tendencies of the Present Age. 
 
 ^ \vairiiJi.ireL t^julcls cttI ivOecas (wsX^yei) TroLTjrds Kal cro^ovs Kal (pCkoaocpovs. — 
 Origen, contra Celsum, Lib. vii. p. 359 (ed. Spencer). 
 
 Periodic agitations in the moral world. Examples of these agitations: 
 (i) Sixth century before Christ. (2) Fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 
 after Christ. The present aspect of political affairs. The mental 
 activity of the age. In lohat respects peculiar. Different effects of 
 this activity on religious inquiries. First variety of modern thought. 
 Second variety of modern thought. Its parallel in the Primitive 
 Church. Third variety of modern thought. Examination of its prin- 
 ciples. Hoio modified by the Idealistic philosophy. Universality of 
 its sympathies. How affected toioards Christianity. The tendency 
 retrogressive: leading men to Pantheism. 31 ain features of Pantheism. 
 Antiquity of this class of objections. The Clementines. The first race 
 of spiritualists. Celsus and his cavils. Neo-Platonism. Manichceism. 
 Persistency of like objections. The spiritualists of the Reformation pe- 
 riod. Lord Herbert. English and French Deists. Different modes of 
 resisting these attacks. Plan and purpose of the present work. 
 
 There is no more striking aspect in the history of religion than 
 the correspondencies which it from time to time exhibits in 
 remote and disconnected quarters of the world. The scholar 
 who investigates the laws of thought in almost any period, 
 not confining his inquiries to a single people or one group of 
 cognate tribes, is sure to be impressed with a belief that mighty 
 and mysterious agencies do verily exist in the recesses of our 
 spiritual nature, and that He who regulates their action so as 
 to produce phenomena which men are equally unable to create 
 or to interpret, is not human but Divine. 
 
 Conjunctures of this kind vrill often furnish the historian 
 witli his res ting-points, or epochs. After traversing, it may 
 
 1—2 
 
4 Christ and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 be, centuries of stagnant uniformity, where all things promised 
 to continue as they were, his thoughts are suddenly aroused 
 by indications of a tempest, and the growth of some gigantic 
 revolution. A new spirit, whence it came he cannot tell, 
 begins to work at many different points below the surface of 
 society, projecting a new order of ideas, stimulating sluggish 
 faculties, and calling into active exercise another cycle of 
 emotions. Many a problem which the former age abandoned 
 as insipid, or intractable, begins to be discussed with fresh 
 alacrity. The nature of God himself. His attributes, and His 
 relation to the visible world ; the origin, and future destiny 
 of man, — are all regarded as it seems through other media : 
 and these changes, propagated simultaneously, in countries 
 where no outward currents of communication are detected, and 
 in countries linked together by the ties of blood, of language, 
 and of commerce, constitute a different phase of civilisation,- 
 if they do not actually commence an era in the fortunes of the 
 human race. 
 
 Some faint analogy may be perceived in the occasional 
 convulsions of the physical world ; for instance, in great earth- 
 quakes, such as that of 1755. The shock that buried Lisbon 
 never ceased to vibrate till it reached the wilds of Scotland, 
 and the vineyards of Madeira. It was felt among the islands 
 of the Grecian Archijoelago ; it changed the level of the solitary 
 lakes that sleep beneath the shadows of the Noric Alps. 
 
 On turning to the annals of mankind we ascertain that few, 
 if any, centuries have been more pregnant with events of 
 universal moment than the sixth before the Christian era. 
 While the members of the Hebrew commonwealth, honoured 
 with the special custody of Holy Writ, were drooping in the 
 grasp of Babylonic despotism, their sanctuary profaned, their 
 liturgy suspended, and Jerusalem a heap of stones; — while 
 they, alone in that desert of the nations, were conversing 
 face to face with God, and learning more and more the perfect 
 unity and spirituality of His essence, what a change was 
 wrought meanwhile in other regions of the earth ! In Greece, 
 for instance, we behold a young and ardent people rising day 
 by day to eminence in arts, in letters, and in arms. The 
 founders of Hellenic speculation had but recently commenced 
 their struggles for the disenthralment of the human spirit. 
 Colonies like that which had been planted at Marseilles were 
 widening the horizon of men's- thoughts, and drawing Western 
 Europe into union with the East ; while swarms of Orphic 
 brotherhoods, the fresh creations either of Thrace, of Egypt, 
 
CHAP. I.] Religious Tendencies of the present Age, 5 
 
 or of Phrygia, were diftusing in all quarters the keen thirst 
 they felt for reconciliation with the God of heaven, and an 
 objective revelation of His will. In China a successful move- 
 ment issued in the rehabilitating of the ancient state-religion. 
 Almost every village of Persia was the theatre of changes more 
 decisive and profound. A consciousness of some incurable 
 antagonism among the elements of our moral being had there 
 prompted Zoroaster to construct his theory of two rival prin- 
 ciples. And, last of all, the birth of Gotama Buddha in ' the 
 world of men ' was made a pretext for dethroning the religious 
 system of his forefathers, — replacing the mythology of the 
 Brahman by the cold and blank negations, which, in spite of 
 all their dreariness, are still exerting a disastrous witcher;jr on 
 the teeming millions of the East. 
 
 Or glance we at a later stage of universal history, the 
 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries after Christ; and we shall 
 find a second cluster of these wonderful analogies. The day- 
 star of religious liberty was rising in the north of Europe. As 
 the multitude woke up from the protracted slumber of the 
 Middle Ages, dreams that once bewildered them were fading 
 from the mind. The old traditions, social, civil, and ecclesias- 
 tical, were shaken to their roots, and lost their hold in every 
 quarter. God was meanwhile felt to be peculiarly near to us, 
 the living God, the moral Buler of the Universe, the righteous 
 Lord not only of the Church collective, and of Christian 
 commonwealths, but also of the human family at large, and 
 every human conscience. It was mainly by the force of this 
 conviction that the Saxon friar was impelled to lift his voice 
 with such tremendous emphasis against the schoolmen and the 
 Iloman pontiffs, and enabled to attract so vast an audience 
 from all parts of western Christendom. Yet, strange to say, 
 the mighty movement which he headed found some parallels 
 in still more distant regions. 4- new incarnation of the Lama 
 of Thibet effected permanent changes in one branch of Buddhism; 
 while Baba Nanuk of Lahore, the Luther of the Panjab, felt 
 himself constrained to reassert the absolute unity of God, and 
 on the basis of that doctrine laboured to promote the fusion 
 of the Brahman and the Muslim in one religious confraternity. 
 
 Now persons are not wanting who affirm that agitations 
 of our day betoken the approach, if not the actual presence, 
 of some corresponding crisis in the history of man. I do not 
 here allude to the momentous war, in which our statesmen 
 have embarked, — a war, that after slaying thousands of our 
 fellow-Christians, and disorganizing the political machinery of 
 
6 Christ and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 Europe, threatens to extend itself indefinitely among the 
 Asiatic nations, and involve them also in the struggle. Sub- 
 jects of this kind might fairly, it is true, engage the notice of 
 a Christian advocate, who, conscious that the world is God's, 
 and that His arm is ever visible in guiding or confounding 
 human projects, had been urged to combat what is termed 
 the 'positive' philosophy of Comte and other sociologists: for 
 nothing could have more discredited their baseless theories, 
 than the combinations we have recently been called to witness 
 and the perils that beset the future course of western civili- 
 sation. But such is not my purpose now. I rather wish to 
 ask what are the spiritual characteristics of the age in which 
 we live, and whether any of the fermentations in the moral 
 and intellectual world have given birth to tendencies pecu- 
 liarly detrimental to the interests of Christian truth. 
 
 That our own lot has been really cast within a period of 
 extraordinary mental vigour and activity it is impossible to 
 deny. The closer study of the human constitution, physical 
 and psychological; the victories achieved by modern sciences 
 inspiring an idea that every difficulty in nature may ere long be 
 mastered by the progress of invention ; the astonishing facilities 
 of intercourse among ourselves and other members of the family 
 of nations ; the establishment of truer canons both in verbal 
 and historic criticism ; profound researches into the structure 
 and affinities of language ; the more coj)ious inductions of 
 ethnology, elucidating the condition of the ancient world, and 
 helping us to track the pre-historic wanderings of influential 
 tribes ; a broader, and, in many cases, juster view of heathen- 
 dom, the character of its divinities and its relation to the 
 Church of God ; a quick j^erception of the vastness of the 
 i*ational creation, and the higher value we have learned to place 
 on individual souls, — these all have, in a greater or less degree, 
 assisted in the modification of established theories, in opening 
 new veins of thought, and in exciting yearnings that were 
 scarcely ever felt by earlier ages of the world. And, as we 
 might have easily foreseen, the great enlargement of our sphere 
 of knowledge, and our deeper sympathies with everything that 
 bears the impress of humanity, have been combined in certain 
 quarters with a feverish love of speculation, and an irrepressible 
 desire of change. First principles are now more freely called 
 in question, sifted with a bold and microscopic criticism, and 
 not unfrequently rejected with an utter disregard of ancient 
 prepossessions, maxims and authorities. Here also it appears 
 that the portentous agitation is not limited to Christian countries, 
 
CHAP. I.] Religious Tendencies of the present Age. 7 
 
 nor to those of tliem who as distinguished for their intellectual 
 prowess have been commonly esteemed the champions of the right 
 of free inquiry. It has even roused the Jew himself from his 
 supineness^: it has taught him to interpret and defend his 
 sacred books as he had never done before. 
 
 Of course, the epoch is not absolutely singular : there have 
 been many like it, where the human mind was similarly 
 quickened, and gave similar indications of the fevers that 
 possessed it. Still the present generation has peculiar character- 
 istics,^ and is often penetrated by a spirit of its own. I do not 
 say that gifted individuals now reflect more deeply on particular 
 questions, or have grown more clearly conscious of the diffi- 
 culties by which those questions are encompassed. Who, for 
 instance, ever looked the hardest problems of humanity more 
 fully in the face than Origen or St. Augustine, Anselm or Aqui- 
 nas? Who, so long as we continue in the present stage of our 
 existence, will approximate more closely to the right solution 
 of them than such men as Bacon, Butler, Pascal, and Leibnitz ? 
 But granting this, it must be also granted, first, that there has 
 been of late a marvellous increase in the area of the field of 
 speculation; and, secondly, that the number of speculative 
 minds is multiplied almost indefinitely. What hosts of ques- 
 tions that had once been canvassed only in the narrow circle of 
 divines and schoolmen and philosophers, are now dispersed 
 among the mass of the community, and agitated far and near ! 
 The ever-teeming press exposes them to universal criticism ; 
 and thus attempts are making to resolve — to handle, weigh, 
 and measure, one might say — the mysteries of God and man, of 
 life, of death, and of eternity, alike in the saloons of opulence, 
 the crowded halls of science, and the workshop • of the rudest 
 artisan. On every side we recognise the same determination to 
 know more about the real ground of men's convictions, an 
 impatience of restraint, a fearless self-assertion, and a fixed 
 resolve to push whatever principle they may embrace to its 
 remotest consequence, with small regard to other inferences no 
 less legitimate, by which the former should in reason have been 
 traversed and controlled. 
 i> 1. If our thoughts are concentrated on the single province 
 
 ^ * Judaism, roused from her velopment of the Religious Idea, 
 
 lethargy by the mighty upheavings p. 3, Lond. 1855. This able work, 
 
 of the age, has at length arisen and written by a Jew, who speaks of 
 
 steps forth out of her long obscurity the Old Testament almost in the 
 
 into the broad smilight of general style of Maurer and De Wette, ia 
 
 consciousness.' PMlippsohn, De- itself a sign of the times. 
 
8 Christ and other Masters. [part i. 
 
 of religion, we shall see, as might have been anticipated, that 
 the spirit of the age has there left very deep impressions of its 
 power. One class, indeed, of educated Englishmen have never 
 drifted far from the positions of the previous generation. They 
 continue to look down unmoved on all the tossings of their 
 neighbours. Nor can theirs be termed the silence of misgiving 
 or the self-possession of indifference ; it is rather the tranquillity, 
 of deep and living faith. For in their ranks are many of the 
 brightest luminaries both of scholarship and science \ — minds of 
 a gigantic stature ; minds, moreover, that are gifted with the 
 finest critical acumen, and that never hesitate to exercise it in 
 determining religious questions, such as in their judgment man 
 may fairly hope to master. Subject to this limitation they are 
 advocates of progi*ess ; and accordingly we hear them welcome 
 every species of research that may contribute to the stores of 
 sacred knowledge. They are foremost in acquiring and com- 
 paring languages, in tracing the descent of nations, and in dis- 
 interring such materials as are calculated to supply the blanks 
 that we deplore in Jewish or in Christian history. On men 
 like these, however, the effect of modern progress and discovery 
 is to strengthen their belief in the announcements of the Bible. 
 Whichever way they turn, its truthfulness is more completely 
 vindicated, and their hold upon its mysteries proportionally 
 confirmed^. They are most conscious, it is true, that in the 
 kingdoms both of grace and nature, in the volume of God's 
 works and in the volume of His word, a thousand dijfficulties 
 remain which they are utterly unable to decipher; depths of 
 thought they never hope to fathom, discords which they cannot 
 harmonize, and elevations which they cannot climb. Such 
 problems as the origin and growth of evil, that profound 
 enigma into which so many others are eventually resolved; 
 
 1 One of the highest types of this knowledge are animated by his re- 
 school was the late Eegius Pro- verential spirit, 
 fessor of Hebrew at Cambridge, — *Nescire velle, quae Magister Op- 
 the lamented Dr. Mill, who, in the timus 
 
 vastness of his erudition, in the Docere non vult, erudita inscitia 
 
 grasp and clearness of his reason- est.' 
 
 ing faculties, in his scientific attain- ^ t Magis magisque mihi confir- 
 
 ments, and his unswerving ortho- mabatur omnes versutarum calum- 
 
 doxy, was more than a match for niarum nodos, quos illi deceptores 
 
 the apostles of modern scepticism nostri adversus divines Libros in- 
 
 and unbelief. See his Christian nectebant, posse dissolvi.' S. Au- 
 
 Advocate's Fahlications^ passim. gust. (7o7z/ess.,lib.vi. c.3. 'Titubabit 
 
 Few scholars ever knew so much, autem fides, si divinarum Scriptu- 
 
 and fewer still when they have rarumvacillatauctoritas.' DeDoctr. 
 
 reached the utmost verge of human Christ. ^ lib. i. c. xxxvii. 
 
CHAP. I.] Religious Tendencies of the present Age. 9 
 
 such principles of the Divine ceconomy as that of sacrifice 
 or mediation, though they recognise its perfect fitness, and 
 embrace it on their knees, — are felt to be immeasurably above 
 their present comprehension ; yet so numerous and convergent 
 are the testimonies which commend the doctrines of the Gospel 
 to their inmost heart \ that all the arrows of the Tempter fall 
 innocuous, blunted by the shield of faith. A man of this kind 
 knows in what he has believed ; and though he still sees darkly, 
 communing with adumbrations of the truth, and not with 
 truth itself, he waits in patience till that veil which separates 
 the present from the future has been finally withdrawn, till 
 Christianity has been divested of the earthly symbols under 
 which it is presented to his faith, and he beholds it as it is. 
 What happens in the physical world as the reward of patient 
 observation, will, he is persuaded, happen also in the moral 
 world. The seeming incongruities will form at last a concordis- 
 sima dissonantia, and the riddles that now test and try us, will 
 be then converted into proofs of harmony and vehicles of love. 
 
 2. But there is a powerful class of minds in England as in 
 other parts of Europe, who are differently affected in their 
 estimate of sacred topics by the fluctuations of the present day. 
 The widening of their field of vision and the light that has been 
 thrown on many of their favourite studies, so far from adding 
 vigour to the principle of faith, has rather tended to disturb 
 their intellectual balance, and induced a state of feeling which 
 approaches, here and there at least, to very serious misbelief. 
 The causes more immediately at work in the production of the 
 change will doubtless vary with the tone and texture of the 
 individual mind; but all whom I include in this division are 
 alike dissatisfied with what they style ^ the popular religion,' or 
 the views of Christianity now current in different branches of 
 the Church. Devoted in some cases to the study of the 
 mechanism of nature, these persons form the habit of regarding 
 the Almighty rather as a God of law and order, ^a great 
 Mechanician,' who has, once for all, impressed upon his works 
 the tendencies which they are bound to follow, than as ever 
 
 ^ After dwelling on the import- casions ou des motifs qui Font fait 
 
 ance of criteria by which to separate naltre : elle va au delk de I'entende- 
 
 the true religion from the false, ment, et s'empare de la volonte et 
 
 Leibnitz (Th6odicee, (Euvres, ii. 42, du coeur, pour nous faire agir avec 
 
 Paris, 1842) does not fear to add: chaleur et avec plaisir, comme la loi 
 
 ' Cependant la foi divine elle-meme, de Dieu le commande, sans qu'on ait 
 
 quand elle est allumee dans I'ame, plus besoin de penser aux raisons, ni 
 
 est quelque chose de plus qu'une des'arreterauxdifficult^s deraison- 
 
 opinion, et ne depend pas des oc- nementquel'espritpeut envisager.* 
 
10 Christ and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 present ■with the sacred family and as ever active in the 
 government of all things. Hence a disposition to reduce the 
 supernatural elements of Christianity within the smallest 
 possible compass, and in many cases to escape from the con- 
 sideration of barely physical miracles, without, however, any 
 conscious wish to call in question the abstract possibility of a 
 miraculous intervention. The nature, method, limits, and effects 
 of prophecy, and generally of that mysterious influence exercised 
 upon the mind and spirit of the sacred writers which is termed 
 their inspiration, have on similar grounds provoked the criticism 
 of this school of theologians. In their eyes the evidence of 
 Christianity, the single ground on which it ever must depend, 
 is the inherent fitness of its central doctrines to appease their 
 moral and emotional wants. But this position, where exclu- 
 sively asserted, has involved them in the maintenance of others 
 less consistent with the ^ popular theology.' They contend for 
 the importance, not to say necessity, of discriminating between 
 the form of a religion and its essence; or, in other words, 
 require us to abstract the kernel of the truth from what is 
 merely husk and shell, and so determine what portions of the 
 Holy Scriptures are divine, and really entitled to the designa- 
 tion ' Word of God.' Their chief criterion in conducting such 
 a process they derive from what are called * the pure instincts ' 
 of our spiritual nature, which it is affirmed enable us to call in 
 question and correct some representations of the sacred v/riters, 
 more especially of the Old Testament; the letter of which is 
 held to be deficient in moral dignity, and even said to violate 
 in some respects the perfect law of conscience. ' How inscru- 
 table also,' it is whispered, ^ are the views there furnished of the 
 character of God Himself! How stern the aspects under which He 
 is presented in His dealings with the world at large ! How 
 awful and repulsive the idea that beings gifted with such scanty 
 opportunities of knowledge should have power to make them- 
 selves incorrigible in the present life, and so consign themselves 
 to hopeless misery in the next ! How terribly mysterious the 
 arrangement in virtue of which an inconsiderable fraction of 
 the human family has ever been elected from the guilty mass ; 
 while others are abandoned to their own devices, or have only 
 faint and flickering lights to guide them in their searchings 
 after God.' Allusions to these topics have exposed their 
 authors to the charge of striving to disparage the supremacy of 
 Christianity, by placing it in the same line with philosophical 
 systems of the heathen world, and recognising also in such 
 systems a prophetic office and a genuine revelation. It is not 
 
CHAP. I.] Eeligious Tendencies of the present Age. 11 
 
 my purpose to determine liow far the charge has been substan- 
 tiated. I notice it in order to bring out more clearly the 
 supposed connexion of these modes of thought with others that 
 will be discussed hereafter. But candour, in the meantime, 
 urges me to add that wild as may have been the intellectual 
 aberrations of the former class, they are not consciously opposed 
 to Christianity itself. Their reverence for the Person of our 
 blessed Lord is warm and constant; their devotion to His service 
 is indisputable. 
 
 We understand them, in so far at least as their opinions 
 are connected with the present subject, by reverting to the 
 mental struggles of the early Church at Alexandria. As 
 soon as ever Christian truth had come in contact with the 
 speculative yearnings that prevailed in heathendom, its own 
 adherents were divided into schools of thought considerably 
 diverging from each other. One of these predominated in 
 the West, the second in the East, especially in what was 
 then a kind of philosophical exchange for all the various 
 theorizers of the age, — the schools of Alexandria. Origen 
 and others whom he represented, after weighing and con- 
 trasting the claims of Christianity with those of the prevailing 
 heathen systems, occupied a somewhat new position \ They 
 had listened to the pleas of Gnosticism ; they saw it ramifying 
 in all quarters and assuming everywhere the most grotesque 
 expression; yet instead of treating it as an utter falsification 
 of Christianity, they sympathised with it so far as to allow 
 that real mental wants had given birth to many of its theories. 
 They strove accordingly to satisfy the cravings of the pseudo- 
 Gnosis by the substitution of a Gnosis properly so-called. 
 They granted that the faith of ordinary Christians (ttlo-tls) 
 was in many points a popular adaptation rather than a sci- 
 
 1 Mr. E. W. Mackay {Rise and liecontinues(p. r94)/oftheso-called 
 Progress of Cfiristianity, -p. ig^)\fill philosophy seems to have been an 
 not, however, concede the name of enlarged and more liberal compre- 
 philosophy to the Alexandrian spe- hension of former systems ; the ad- 
 culations, because 'a philosophy tied mission, against dogged ignorance, 
 to dogmatic authority is a manifest of the general claims of heathen 
 self-contradiction.' His meaning wisdom as well as Jewish, as part of 
 probably is that philosophy in his a universal revelation ; and on the 
 peculiar acceptation of the term can- other hand the assertion, against the 
 not coexist with an objective reve- onesidedness of heretical Gnosis, 
 lation ; and yet the phenomena of of the plain doctrines of Christian- 
 nature which are the subject of all ity.' A more exact account of the 
 natural philosophy are as truly such principles and tendencies of this 
 a revelation as the Holy Scriptures school is furnished by Guerike, De 
 professtobe. * The chief distinction,' Schola quce AlexandricB Jhruit, etc. 
 
12 Christ and other Masters. [part I, 
 
 entific expression of the truth; and that beneath the ter- 
 minology of the Church there lay a richer vein of doctrines 
 which philosophers, and they alone, could thoroughly appre- 
 ciate. Such thoughts would necessarily colour all the stream 
 of Alexandrine theology, and especially the views of Clement, 
 Origen, and their disciples, with regard to the position of the 
 heathen world. No absolute boundary was drawn between 
 the Christian Church and it; philosophy standing in the same 
 relation to the one as did the law of Moses to the other, 
 and serving as a kind of pedagogue to bring men unto Christ \ 
 They raised the Gospel, it is true, indefinitely above all previous 
 systems, and regarded it as supei'^eding and completing them; 
 but a profound anxiety to place it on a broader basis and in 
 more intelligible connexion with ancient history as well as 
 with the literary and artistic culture of mankind at large, 
 impelled them to approximate as closely as the nature of the 
 case allowed to the position of the pseudo- Gnostics. On the 
 other hand, the Latin fathers, and especially theii* sternest 
 type, Tertullian ^, as uniformly laboured to repel those foreign 
 elements which Gnosticism would fain have mingled and in- 
 corporated with the primitive belief. The barrier which they 
 raised between the old and new convictions was impassable. 
 The pagan world to them was anti- Christian in its very core ; 
 
 ^ See, for instance, the remark- tions of the truth as taught by 
 
 able passage in Clemens Alexand. Plato were derived directly from 
 
 Stromata, lib. i. c. 5 (p. 331, ed. the Hebrew scriptures: Gieseler, 
 
 Potter), and others in Mr Trench's EccL Hist. 1. 163, n. 5, Edinb. 1846. 
 Hulsean Lectures (1846), p. 157, ^ Inldi^ Be Anima, G.2^,hQQQX\Q 
 
 note. It should, however, be re- Plato ' omnium h^reticorum con- 
 
 membered that the eulogies of the dimentarius ; ' but a more complete 
 
 Greek Fathers were generally limit- specimen of his modes of thought 
 
 ed to Platonism, a system which is furnished in the De Prcescriptione 
 
 had doubtless acted here and there Hcereticonim, c. 7 and c. 8: ' Quid 
 
 as a positive preparation for the ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis ? Quid 
 
 Gospel. Many Platonists were num- academise et ecciesias? Quid haere- 
 
 bered among the early converts, ticis et Christianis? Nostra in- 
 
 and some appear to have retained stitutio de portion Salomonis est : 
 
 their scholastic mantle, esteeming qui et ipse tradiderat, Dominum in 
 
 what they had embraced the true simplicitate cordis esse quaerendum. 
 
 philosophy: see Justin's DmZo^. c. Viderint qui Stoicum et Platonicum 
 
 3, c. 8, and Eusebius iv. 26, § 4. et dialecticum Christianismum pro- 
 
 Their main positions were (i) that tulerunt. Nobis curiositate opus 
 
 the Logos {daapKos or cnrepfxarLKos) non est post Christum Jesum, nee 
 
 had constantly communicated to inquisitione post Evangelium. Cum 
 
 men the seeds of Divine truth, so credimus, nihil desideramus ultra 
 
 that the doctrines of Plato were in credere:' cf. Adv. Hermogenerriy c. 
 
 many cases not essentially different viii. and Hippolytus, Philosoph. v. 
 
 from those of Christ: (2) that por- 6, Oxon. 185 1. 
 
CHAP. I.] Religious Tendencies of the present Age. 13 
 
 and even if it could be proved that correspondencies to any 
 rites or dogmas of the Church were manifest in heathen 
 systems, Tertullian and his school evaded the objections drawn 
 from such phenomena, by urging that the whole of Gentilism 
 was only a distorted copy of primordial truth, or else was 
 actually derived from a perusal of the Old Testament Scrip- 
 tures \ The traces left by both these parties on the current 
 literature of the Church it is superfluous to point out. 
 
 3. But then, as now, there was a third variety of sentiment 
 with reference to the claims of Christianity and its relation 
 to the heathen world. I cannot tell how far the members 
 of this third school draw their tenets from the writings of 
 the Alexandrines, or have been affected by the speculations 
 of their modern representatives. The path was very short 
 and slippery from the standing-ground of orthodox Gnosticism 
 to that of Marcion or Carpocrates. Nor can it be disputed 
 that a like transition has been simplified in recent times by 
 treatises of Christian philosophers, who themselves are checked 
 in their descent to scepticism and disbelief. If men like 
 Coleridge have indulged in vehement and indiscriminate charges 
 of * bibliolatry,' intending by that phrase all deference to the 
 letter of our sacred books as absolutely true ; if they have 
 openly repudiated what they term the popular theology as 
 destitute of Christian life and spirit, and have even represented 
 some of its foremost doctrines as no better than a species of 
 * devil-worship,' — one need hardly marvel if a second generation 
 of reformers claim the right of drawing bolder inferences from 
 such ideas, and resolve to free themselves entirely from the 
 
 ^ Thus he asks in his Apolog. c. cimt.' He explains the affinity by 
 
 XLVii: 'Unde hasc, oro vos, philo- urging that Plato borrowed from 
 
 sophis aut poetis tana consimilia? the Hebrews, In his Confessiones, 
 
 nonnisi de nostris sacramentis : si lib. vii. c. 20, he also alludes to the 
 
 de nostris sacramentis, ut de prio- preparatory effect produced on his 
 
 ribus, ergo fideliora sunt nostra own mind by the writings of the 
 
 magisque credenda, quorum ivia- Platonists, but is careful to point 
 
 gines quoque fidem inveniunt.' out the insufficiency of everything 
 
 The Latin Fathers in the age of St. short of the Holy Scriptures to 
 
 Augustine had considerably modi- teach the way to heaven. His cau- 
 
 fied their tone in treating of these tious language is explained when 
 
 subjects. Thus in the De Civitate we remember that he had to d^al 
 
 Dei, lib. viii. c. 11, we read : * Mi- with Christian Platonists, ' Qui di- 
 
 rantur autem quidam nobis in cere ausi sunt omnes Domini nostri 
 
 Christi gratia sociati, cum audiunt Jesu Christi sententias, quas mirari 
 
 vel legunt Platonem de Deo ista et praedicare coguntur, de Platonis 
 
 sensisse, quae multum congruere libris eu-mdidicisse :' cf.De Doctrina 
 
 veritati nostrse religionis agnos- Christiana^ lib. ii. c. 28. 
 
14< Christ and other Masters. [part l 
 
 irksome fetters of tradition. If it be again contended, that 
 all branches of the human family possess the same kind of 
 inspirations, owing to the universal presence of the Word of 
 God within them ; if the Holy Ghost be rather sent to waken 
 up a slumbering consciousness of Christianity already planted 
 in the soul than to infuse the elements of supernatural life, 
 and bring the fallen spirit back to fellowship with Christ, 
 a door is opened for the broad and specious theory, that the 
 Gospel is at best a higher stage of natural religion, or, it may 
 be, one of numerous forms, in which the spiritual instincts 
 of humanity have found an utterance for themselves. 
 
 With this remark on what appears to be at least a possible 
 affinity between the second and third varieties of modem 
 thought, I pass to an examination of the principles enunciated 
 in the latter school. And first, it is observable that when 
 a similar class of questions were discussed some years ago, 
 the dress which they assumed was very different. What is 
 known as the * sensational' philosophy was then in the as- 
 cendant, or was not so commonly abandoned as it now is ; 
 and the fashion, therefore, was to ransack all the chambers 
 and the tombs of history in quest of some objective bases 
 for explaining the resemblances between the heathen systems 
 and that founded by our blessed Lord. It was usual to 
 suppose that certain general truths had been communicated 
 in the infancy of the human race, by means of 'a primeval 
 preternatural revelation V and that Christianity may therefore 
 have preserved at least some fragments of such revelation, 
 like the other extant creeds. They all, it was contended, 
 were ultimately reducible to the same level ; yet as none 
 of them was altogether earthly in its origin, or merely a 
 projection from the spiritual consciousness of man, the hope 
 was entertained that in proportion to the growth of criticism, 
 the aboriginal form of true religion might be rescued from 
 accretions under which it lay concealed. 
 
 During the last twenty years, however, there has been 
 a mighty change in the character of the established philosophy, 
 and that change has gradually influenced the complexion of 
 
 ^ Such, for example, was the looked for in the source of all reve- 
 
 solution adopted by the Unitarian lations, in that with which all reve- 
 
 author, Mr. Belsham ; but Mr. W. lations must be identified to be 
 
 J Fox, originally of the same sect genuine, — the moral . constitution 
 
 {Religious Ideas, p. 66, Lond. 1849), of human nature, the human mind 
 
 corrects his predecessor. * That and heart.' 
 early revelation, ' he urges, * is better 
 
CHAP. I.] Religious Tendencies of the present Age. 15 
 
 assaults on Christianity itself. A species of idealism is now 
 the favourite system. The invisible world is recognised as 
 one province of creation ; a belief in what is spiiitual and 
 supersensuous has returned. Men's thoughts have been di- 
 rected inward, so that speculators are impelled to search amid 
 the silent depths of their own being, for the oracle that is 
 to satisfy their cravings and to disentangle their perplexities. 
 The j)rimitive idea of God, it is maintained, by a spontaneous 
 process of self-evolution leads directly upward to the purest 
 and noblest conceptions of His nature, prompts the various 
 ^races' of mankind to fashion their theologies in harmony 
 with the instincts of the human spirit, and thus determines 
 the religious character of every age and people. While the 
 former generation struggled by the aid of criticism to weaken 
 and destroy the credibility of Holy Scripture, or evacuated 
 and etherialised the special doctrines of Christianity where 
 these could not be utterly expunged, the new school commonly 
 admit that some such doctrines were announced by Christ 
 or His immediate successors, but profess to treat them as so 
 many natural products of the ordinary human mind, as self- 
 devised expedients for appeasing a peculiar class of human 
 wants and aspirations, or as forms assumed by the ideas of God 
 in one peculiar stage of their development. Religions generally, 
 and the Gospel as one member of the class, are therefore mere 
 expressions of the fundamental beliefs inherent in our spiritual 
 nature. These writers commonly refuse to be indebted for 
 their guidance to a sacred book or any kind of outward 
 revelation ^ We no longer hear of Christ importing into 
 Palestine the precious lore which had been gathered from the 
 lips or volumes of the Eastern sages. We have not to answer 
 the objection that His doctrines and precepts may be traced to 
 this or that enlightened Hebrew, or were simply modern 
 adaptations of maxims and traditions which had long been current 
 in some Jewish sect. Objections of this kind have broken 
 down, or balanced and destroyed each other. Of course the 
 
 ^ In this respect the system of extreme indulgence to idolaters, 
 the Mormons, which in other fea- Yet in sifting all other creeds, which 
 tnres is not unlike the Absolute it professes to have done (Gunni- 
 Eeligion, occupies a very different son, The Mormons , pp. 60, 61, Phi- 
 place. It allows that revelations ladelphia, 1852), it makes use of 
 of God's will have been made to all what is held to be the genuine 
 the world, so that there is no people book-revelation, and does not ap- 
 who have not some portions of the peal to mere instincts of human- 
 truth among them. It even shews ity. 
 
16 Clirist and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 general resemblance of Christ's teaching to the teaching of His 
 predecessors is affirmed, but such resemblance is attributed by 
 spiritualists to the unaided operation of the religious sentiment 
 in man, awakened and directed by peculiar circumstances. 
 
 Nor can these be termed the speculations of a band of 
 ignorant or dreamy mystics. They are entertained by men of 
 learning ; who profess moreover a peculiar interest in the 
 progress of civilisation, and who labour to advance what they 
 believe to be the disenthralment of the human spirit. They 
 affirm that something higher, deeper, heavenlier, is reserved for 
 us; that growth must be expected and promoted not only in 
 our apprehension of religious truth, but in the orb of truth 
 itself; that their peculiar mission is to hasten this result by 
 shewing man his real dignity and destiny, by sounding all the 
 depths of human consciousness, and calling to their aid the 
 newest facts of history and the last discoveries of science. 
 They do not, indeed, contemn the worthies of antiquity. The 
 statues of Confucius, Moses, and Pythagoras ; of Socrates, and 
 Zoroaster ; of Buddha, Christ, and Apollonius ; of Mani and 
 Muhammad, are all elevated side by side in the Walhalla of 
 spiritualism. These all in different measures are applauded as 
 the saints, the prophets, the apostles of their age ; yet, notwith- 
 standing the enormous latitude of his belief, the spiritualist is 
 not content with any of the forms in which religion has hitherto 
 appeared on earth. However well adapted to peculiar countries 
 or to transitory phases of the human mind, they are unequal 
 to the wants and capacities of the present century. He would 
 not himself have worshipped either with his ' swarthy Indian 
 who bowed down to wood and stone,'- or with his ^ grim-faced 
 Calmuck,' or his ' Grecian peasant,' or his ' savage,' whose hands 
 were ^ smeared all over with human sacrifice ;' but rather aims, 
 by analysing the principles of heathenism and cultivating a 
 deeper sympathy with what is termed the * great pagan world,* 
 to organise a new system which he calls the Absolute Keligion, 
 the Religion of humanity, the Religion of the Future. From 
 it all special dogmas are to be eliminated; sentiments vwhich 
 every one may clothe according to his fancy, are to occupy the 
 place of facts ; the light of a spontaneous Gospel is to supersede 
 the clumsy artifi.ce of teaching by the aid of a historical revela- 
 tion. Thus, while the promoters of this scheme afl^ect the 
 greatest reverence for the wisdom and the so-called * inspiration' 
 of the past, they aim to soar indefinitely above it. Nearly all 
 the doctrines of ancient systems are abandoned or ex]3lained 
 
CHAP. I.] Religious Tendencies of the present Age. 17 
 
 awaj\ as things which really have no stronger claim upon us 
 than the cycle of luxuriant mythes that captivated Greek ima- 
 ginations in the pre-historic period. The Christ and Christi- 
 anity of the Bible are thus virtually denied: ^superior intellects' 
 are bidden to advance still higher, to cast off as worthless or 
 ill-fitting the old garments of the Church, to join the standard 
 of the Absolute Religion, and so march forward to Hhe pro- 
 mised land.' Mr. Theodore Parker, one of their chief oracles, 
 shall tell us what it is that we are summoned to believe ; or 
 rather (for his system cannot boast of its constructiveness) 
 what points they are that we are urged to throw away. After 
 dwelling on the article of his faith — belief in what is called 
 an ' Infinite God' — he thus proceeds, with painful flippancy of 
 manner far too common in the schools of ^spiritualism:' 
 
 *0f course I do not believe in a devil, eternal torment, nor in a 
 particle of absolute evil in God's world or in God. I do not believe 
 that there ever was a miracle, or ever will be ; everywhere I find law, — 
 the constant mode of operation of the Infinite God. I do not beUeve in 
 the miraculous inspiration of the Old Testament or the New Testament. 
 I do not believe that the Old Testament was God's first word, nor the 
 New Testament his last. The Scriptures are no finality to me. 
 Inspiration is a perpetual fact. Prophets and Apostles did not mono- 
 polize the Father: He inspires men to-day as much as heretofore. 
 In nature, also, God speaks for ever. . . .1 do not believe in the miraculous 
 origin of the Hebrew Church, or the Buddhist Church, or the Christian 
 Church; nor the miraculous character of Jesus. I take not the Bible 
 for my master, nor yet the Church ; nor even Jesus of Nazareth for my 
 
 master I try all things by the human faculties But at the same 
 
 time, I reverence the Christian Church for the great good it has done 
 to mankind; I reverence the Mahometan Church for the good it has 
 done, — a far less good^.' 
 
 Such is one example of the creed commended as a substitute ] , 
 for Christianity. W e are to hold the doctrine of one Infinite ' 
 God, and then are left at liberty to disbelieve whatever else we ! 
 please. Nor is the process of negations even here exhausted. 
 The principles of spiritualism have carried many of their! 
 owners, by a course of fearless logic, into a denial of the 
 Personal God Himself ; and more who join the movement, who [ 
 inscribe the name of freedom on their banners and talk loudly 
 of the progress and perfectibility of man, are drifting in the \ 
 very same direction, — to that vortex in which faith and morals 
 
 1 'Eeligion,' says Mr. F. "W. New- 2 Theism, 'Atheism, and the Po- 
 
 man, 'was created by the inward pular Theology, -pji. 26^, 264. Other 
 
 instincts of the soul : it had after- extracts, serving to elucidate the 
 
 wards to be pruned and chastened principles of this School, are adde(^ 
 
 by the sceptical understanding.' in Appendix I. 
 Phases of Faith, p. 232. 
 
 H. 2 
 
18 
 
 Christ and other Masters. 
 
 [part I. 
 
 I also will be finally engulfed. For all the tendencies of this 
 belief, whatever its apostles may affirm, are absolutely retro- 
 gressive; it is carrying men afresh to paganism^ In spite of 
 all its claims to a superior illumination, it leaves its votary 
 
 \ with no intelligible object of worship but himself : it does not 
 .solve one mystery of his being; nay, it cannot even guarantee 
 
 > the immortality of his soul. 
 
 Mr. Parker, it is true, with small regard to the coherence 
 of his principles, contends for the idea of God, which he has 
 boiTOwed from the Bible, as different in kind from what 
 is called the Universe, as self-subsisting and unchangeable ^* 
 He also, it . must be acknowledged, is impressed with the 
 reality and universality of the * religious sentiment,' which 
 he deems Hhe strongest and deepest element in human nature;' 
 and some other writers of his school are doubtless under the 
 influence of like convictions. Still it is indisputable that 
 for the last twenty years or more the monstrous form of 
 Pantheism has threatened to devour a host of minor infidelities. 
 The young Hegelians of Germany^ are pantheists to a man; 
 fnd even the eclectic philosophy of M. Cousin'* is not easily 
 vindicated from the chars^e of fosterinor the same, delusion. 
 
 ^ Philippsohn, the Jewish writer 
 above cited, has some striking ob- 
 servations on this tendency of mo- 
 dern thought, tracing it into its 
 inevitable effects on morals as well 
 as theology. One section of the 
 anti-Talmudic Jews appears to be 
 influenced by it. 'The Human 
 Idea,' he concludes, p. 253, ' ever 
 produces its own resolution into 
 its various successive phases ; each 
 of these phases abrogates that which 
 it followed, till it reaches its ulti- 
 mate stage, the virtual disavowal 
 of its own system. Such was its 
 course in the religions of anti- 
 quity ; in the philosophemes of the 
 Greeks ; in the later philosophemes 
 of Des Cartes and Spinosa as in 
 that of Hegelism. It is a circle 
 that ever, terminates in itself, the 
 serpent that holds its own tail in its 
 mouth.'' The Pantheism of many 
 Jewish speculators in the Middle 
 Ages has been noticed by Van 
 Mildert, Boyle Lectures, 1. 258 sq. 
 
 2 Theism, Atheism, and the Po- 
 pular Theology y pp. 105 sq. 
 
 ^ One of Neander's latest warn- 
 ings referred to the gigantic pro- 
 gress of this evil: 'Die eigentliche 
 und alles verschlingende Gefahr 
 wahrhaft liegt in dem sich nahern- 
 den entscheidenden Kampfe fiir 
 das ivahre Dasein des Christen^ 
 thums selhst, des Sittengesetzes, des 
 Glaubens an einen personlichen 
 Gott; ein Kampf, gegen welchen 
 ganz unbedeutend erscheinen miis- 
 sen alle Streitigkeiten zwischeu 
 verschiedenen christlichen Gemein- 
 schaf ten, und wogegen zuriicktreten 
 miissen die untergeordneten Gegen- 
 satze zwischen Katholicismus und 
 Protestantismus.' Deutsche Zeit- 
 schrlft, for May, 1850, p. 163. 
 
 •* See Morell's Hist, of Phil. 11. 
 512, 513, Maret's Essai sur le 
 Pantheisjne dans Ics Societes Mo- 
 dernes, 3me ed., Paris, 1845, — a 
 work of great ability, but now and 
 then one-sided, especially when it 
 tries to shew that orthodox 'Pro- 
 testantism' may be convicted of 
 Pantheistic tendencies. The learn- 
 ed author ought to have reflected 
 
CHAP. I.] Religious Tendencies of the present Age. 19 
 
 I shall not here dwell upon the ravings of * material ' 
 pantheists, a minor class of speculators who rejoice to think with 
 Comte that the religious sentiment in man is always necessarily 
 weakened in proportion to his intellectual development, and 
 who accordingly have joined the clamour for some 'ISTouveau 
 
 Grand-Etre;' that is, for no God at all. But disregarding 
 such, we find that even the more 'spiritual' section of the 
 pantheists adopt the same ideas respecting Christianity as 
 those already censured. The universe is in their system 
 deified, or transubstantiated into God, its laws and processes 
 are all identified with Him ; humanity at large becomes a 
 necessary manifestation of the Absolute. He is the ocean, 
 we the waves. The various forms of human thought are 
 all therefore equally inevitable and equally legitimate; evil 
 is itself phenomenal, and nothing more, — the point of depar- 
 ture to a second moral state, which men distinguish by the 
 name of good; while error is no more than uncompleted truth, 
 or truth at some inferior stage of its development. Religions, 
 in like manner, being based on what is termed Hhe spontaneity 
 of the human reason,' or the natural inspirations flowing from 
 the breasts of seers and sages who resign themselves entirely 
 to the guidance of the light within them, are equally fatuitous, 
 and vary with the age and people in the midst of which they 
 flourish. They can never hope to rise above the spiritual level 
 of their authors ; yet they all are to be viewed as true, because 
 the genuine products of humanity, and adapted to the ends 
 they are intended to subserve^ 
 
 that Eomanism is far more open hrew Monarchy, p. 26, 2nd ed.) is 
 
 to the charge of denying ♦ une v^rite compelled to admit that in early 
 
 absolue et immuable' and of advo- times 'the pure monotheistic faiths* 
 
 eating ' la notion d'une v^rit^ pro- could not have been preserved ex- 
 
 gressive et mobile' (p. 24). Thus a cept by what he calls 'intolerance,* 
 
 Romanist writer in the Bevuf. des i. e. want of sympathy with error. 
 
 Deux Mondes, 1854, Tome viii. p. Heathenism in our own age is still 
 
 1097, contends: 'Le catholique pre- most lenient in its estimate of 'col- 
 
 nant le dogme tel que le temps Va lateral polytheistic systems.' M, 
 
 fait est, en un sens, bien plus pres Hue's Travels furnish several in- 
 
 de la grande philosophic que le pro- stances of this, and the following 
 
 testant, qui cherche k revenir sans extract shews that the BrjChmans 
 
 cesse h, une pretendue formule are actuated by the same spirit: 
 
 primitive du Christianisme.' 'Although stedfast in his faith, 
 
 ^ This plea for universal 'tole- the Hindoo is not fanatical: he 
 
 ration' has, doubtless, commended never seeks to make proselytes, 
 
 the philosophical Pantheism of the If the Creator of the world, he says, 
 
 day to one class of English minds: had given the preference to a cer- 
 
 yet even Mr. F. W. Newman {He- tain religion, this alone would have 
 
I 
 
 20 Christ aiid other Masters. [part I. 
 
 It will be shewn hereafter how the same denial of the 
 Personality of God pervaded nearly all the heathen systems 
 of the ancient world, and everywhere produced the same 
 results in ethics and theology. At present I shall only draw 
 attention to the periodical recurrence of a similar spirit in the 
 times posterior to the promulgation of Christianity. This 
 course will serve a twofold purpose : it will render us familiar 
 with the parentage of the objections which are levelled at 
 the Gospel by our modern adversaries; it will indicate hovr 
 deep is the vitality of truth, how constant its resistance, 
 and. how sure its final triumph. 
 
 I For if adversaries, starting up on every side, and armed 
 with every species of objection, sought in vain to strangle 
 Christianity at its birth ; if they were baffled when the fashion 
 was to scoff it down as the religion ' of weavers, shoemakers, 
 and slaves;' if they retired before it till the symbol of the 
 
 / cross surmounting the conquered dragon was impressed on 
 the imperial coinage, and till heathenism itself became Hlie 
 faith of peasants ' (paganismus) ; if they won no credit even 
 as supported by the zeal, the learning, and the power of 
 Julian ; if they furbish the old weapons only to be once again 
 repulsed, when Julian's taunting ^^I'ophecy has been for cen- 
 turies confuted by experience, when those very nations which 
 he deemed impervious to the Gospel rank among its foremost 
 champions, and send forth the missionary in whose hands 
 it is trans]:)l anted fresh at the antipodes, we may assuredly 
 discover in this growth the evidence of supernatural life, the 
 auguries of better things to come. 
 
 When Christianity was first announced in the great theatres 
 of Oriental speculation it was forced at once into collision with 
 those very systems out of which its modern enemies would 
 fain extract it ; and the struggle that ensued elicited in every 
 case an opposition similar to that which it encounters now 
 from persons who are studying to malign it or betray it with 
 a kiss. Among the first assailants of the Pentateuch^, we 
 find a writer who disparaged the idea of all objective reve* 
 
 prevailed upon the earth ; but as therefore beholds with satisfaction 
 
 there are many religions, this proves the various ways in which He is 
 
 the approbation of them by the worshipped.' Bjornstjerna, Theo- 
 
 Most High. Men of an enlightened gony of the Hindoos, p. 67, Lond. 
 
 understanding, says the Brahman, 1844. 
 
 well know that the Supreme has ^ Cf. Neander, Ch. Hist., i. 490, 
 
 imparted to each nation the doc- and Schliemann, Die Clementine Ji, 
 
 trine most suitable for it, and He pp. 193 — 199, Hamburg, 1844. 
 
CHAP. I.] Eeligioiis Tendencies of the present Age, 21 
 
 lation^, sucli as Christians entertained from the beginning. 
 In the room of this it was proposed to substitute the inward 
 revelation of the heart. An early race of Gnostics in like 
 manner drew their inspirations altogether from within. Their 
 composite system, borrowed partly from the Gospel, partly 
 from the ancient creeds of Asia, was designed for the ^ superior 
 intellects ' of the day, whom intuition (so they urged) exalted 
 far above the sphere of faith, and liberated from the bondage 
 of original Christianity. Hence they gloried in the name 
 of * spiritualists^,' and called Hhe man of the Church' by 
 a contemptuous title, intimating that he was still in subjection 
 to the grosser elements of his nature. For a time the flattering 
 speculations of this school obtained extensive currency; it put 
 out branches in all quarters; it attracted multitudes of proselytes; 
 and yet we search in vain for any of those noble fruits brought 
 forth by Christianity. The system of the early Gnostic would 
 not work; and therefore it lias been extinct for centuries, unless 
 perchance some trace of it is still discernible among the Druses 
 of Mount Lebanon, whose doctrines here and there remind one 
 of the creed of Basilides'"^. 
 
 Again, it was by weapons such as those which had been 
 wielded in the school of ^ spiritualism,' though weapons of a 
 coarser edge, that Celsus undertook to stem the progress of the 
 early Church. ^ He,' says ISTeander*, ' is the original represen- 
 tative of a class of intellects which, in the various attacks on 
 Christianity, has over and over again presented itself to our j 
 notice : wit and acumen, without earnestness of purpose or I 
 depth of research ; a worldly understanding that looks at things i 
 merely on the surface, and delights in hunting up difficulties 
 and contradictions.' Celsus was, moreover, an avowed spiri- 
 tualist. He taunts the Christian as belonging to an abject and 
 
 ^ See the Clementine Homilies, Montanists in like manner boasted 
 
 ed. Dressel, xviii. 6: ^ATroKaXvxpb that they were 7r;/ei;/AaTiicot as being 
 
 eoTt TO h irda-ais Kapdiats dudpibirtav in possession of the last develop- 
 
 aTTopprjtus Keifievop K€Ka\vfifjLivov,dp€v ments of truth; while ordinary 
 
 (pojvrjs rri avTov [sc. vlov] ^ouX^ diro- Christians were only ypvxLKol: Giese- 
 
 KaKvirrofxevav. ler, i. 148, and of. Stieren's note on 
 
 2 See Irenseus Contra Hceres. Irenasus, Lib. iii. c. xi. § 9. 
 
 Lib. III. c. XV. § 2. The following 3 other remnants of the early 
 
 passage is significant: 'Plurimi Gnostics may possibly be disco- 
 
 autem et contemtores facti, quasi verable among the *Yezidis,* or 
 
 jam perfecti, sine reverentia et in * Devil-worshippers* of Armenia: 
 
 contemtu viventes, semetipsos spi- see Von Haxthausen's Transcau- 
 
 ritales vocant, et se nosse jam casia, p. 263, Lond. 1854. 
 
 dicunt eum, qui sit intra Pleroma ^ Ch. Hist. i. 227. 
 ipsorum, refi'igerii locum.' The 
 
22 Christ and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 a sense-bound race\ insists upon the duty of tui-ning from all 
 outward things to gain a deej)er intuition of God through the 
 perceptions of the mind, and more especially denounces the 
 idea of all particular revelations to a single people, on the 
 ground that they induce contracted and unworthy notions of 
 the Supreme Being. Yet this champion of a purer creed than 
 Christianity, this propagator of more lofty thoughts, which he 
 affected to support by what he terms the ^ inspirations ' of the 
 heathen writers, does not scruple to decry ' the jealous mono- 
 theism of the Christians V apologising even for the worship of 
 the * daemons/ or divine agencies in nature. He treats the 
 history of Christ Himself in a profane spirit, sneers at Christian 
 humility as a debased and stupid misconception of the Platonic 
 sentiment, has no idea of sin except that it is either necessary 
 or unreal, and is therefore at a loss to understand the meaning 
 of redemption^. 
 
 But the supernatural character of the Christian faith was 
 meanwhile threatened by a more insidious adversary. On 
 the confines of the Church appeared a number of inquiring 
 spirits who were anxious to escape from the prevailing nature- 
 worship, and sustain, if possible, the tottering cause of hea- 
 thenism by giving to it a more spiritual constitution; and 
 from them originated the idea of fusing Christianity with 
 their eclectic system. Affecting to guide mankind into a 
 knowledge of the Absolute, it took the name of JSTeo-Platonism ; 
 and as the founder of it was acquainted with the Gospel, 
 which he once indeed professed*, some precious elements of 
 Christian truth were blended with the empty legends and 
 philosophisings out of which it was compounded. Christ, 
 however, was admitted there as only one of many creatures 
 who had taken rank with the immortals. Pythagoras was 
 to stand on nearly the same level, being honoured by the 
 
 ^ AetXdj/ KoX <f>Lko(T(hiiaTOv yhos. TLavos kv XpLariavoLS 0LvaTpa(f>eU rois 
 
 Origen, cont, Gelsum, Lib. vii. p. yovevcnv, ore tov (ppoveXu Kal ttjs 
 
 357, ed. Spencer. ^iXoaocpias 7J\paT0, ei)^i>s irpos riju 
 
 - See the confession of one of his /caret v6/xovs iroXireiav [xere^dXeToi 
 
 more recent admirers, Mr. Mackay, in Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. vi. 19. 
 
 lUse and Progress of Christianity, Here, however, as in most other/" 
 
 p. 159. cases where a search after the Ab-' 
 
 3 Of. Neander, as above, pp. 231 solute was undertaken indepen-, 
 
 sq. dently of revelation, it issued in' 
 
 * It is curious to notice how Pantheism ; since the Absolute and 
 
 Porphyry himself, a Neo-Platonist the Personal, the Finite and the 
 
 opponent of the Gospel, speaks of Infinite, are only reconciled in ; 
 
 Ammonius Saccas becoming 'a Christ: cf. Maret, as before, pp. 
 
 thinker:' 'AfjLfidbnos fxev yap Xpia- 145 sq. 
 
CHAP. I.] Religious Tendencies of the present Age, 23 
 
 Neo-Platonist prafessors as an incarnation of the Deity, who 
 was ' sent to bring down the light of happiness and philosophy 
 for the salvation of the human race \' Some of them asserted 
 also that the genuine teaching of our Lord Himself had har- 
 monised with theirs, but was corrupted by His followers^. 
 Yet they all evinced the heathen bias of their system by 
 repudiating the monotheism of Christianity, by consenting to 
 adapt their doctrines to the grossest forms of popular super- 
 stition, and by teaching that all nations had their own peculiar 
 ' daemons,' whom it was the duty of the masses to propitiate 
 and adore. So plausible were many of the arguments alleged 
 in aid of this religious syncretism that emperors for a while 
 embraced it ; and had Christianity assented to the compromise, 
 the rage of persecution might have ceased. We read that 
 in the private oratory of Severus, Abraham was now associated 
 with Orpheus, and Apollonius of Tyana with our blessed 
 Lord Himself^; and Hadrian, captivated by a similar class 
 of speculations, was anxious at one period to enthrone the 
 Founder of Christianity among the gods of the metropolis, 
 desisting only after he had calculated the profound and sweeping 
 changes which this measure would have certainly produced*. 
 
 And now the Christian, whose uncompromising temper had 
 survived the calumnies and scoffs, the torture and the flame, of 
 Western heathenism, was called to meet another class of adver- 
 saries, — one that brought to the encounter not only the familiar 
 
 ^ Such was the language of lam- Christum, Abraham et Orpheum, 
 
 blichus, one of his biographers: et hujusmodi caeteros habebat, acj 
 
 Mackay, p. i6i. majorum effigies, rem divinam fa- 
 
 2 'Ita enim volunt et ipsum ciebat.' Lampridius, in Fif. ^ever. 
 
 credi, nescio quid aliud scripsisse, Alex. c. 29. 
 
 quod diligunt, nihilque sensisse * Ibid. c. 43. Speaking of the 
 
 contra deos suos, sed eos potius early Christian centuries Mr. Max 
 
 magico ritu coluisse ; et discipulos Miiller remarks (Bunsen's Univ. 
 
 ejus non solum de illo fuisse men- Hist. i. 119) : 'It was a period of 
 
 titos, dicendo ilium Deum, per religious and metaphysical deli- 
 
 quem facta sint omnia, cum aliud rium, when everything became 
 
 nihil quam homo f iter it, quamvis everything, when Maya and So- 
 
 excellentissimae sapientise; verum phia, Mitra and Christ, Viraf and 
 
 etiam de diis eorum non hoc do- Isaiah, Belus, Zarvan, and Kronos 
 
 cuisse, quod ab illo didicissent. ' were mixed up in one lumbled 
 
 S. Augustin. de Consensu Evange- system of inane speculation, from 
 
 listanim, Lib. i. § 52, ed. Bened. which at last the East was de- 
 
 ^ ' Matutinis horis in larario suo livered by the positive doctrines 
 
 in quo et divos principes, sed op- of Mohammed, the West by the 
 
 times, electos, et animas sanctiores, pure Christianity of the Teutonic 
 
 in quels et ApoUonium, et, quantum nations. ' 
 scriptor suorum temporum dicit, 
 
24* Christ and other Masters, [part I. 
 
 mythes of pagan Greece and Rome, but tortuous subtleties and 
 buge abstractions, which had long engaged the pensive and 
 ascetic spirits of the East. The pure and lofty Theism of the 
 Church already, it is true, had vanquished many forms of 
 Eastern speculation, when the earliest race of Gnostics had been 
 driven from the field of controversy. Still another and more 
 formidable series of attacks, all aiming to confound the Gospel 
 with the old religions of Asia, date their rise from the appear- 
 ance of the Persian Mani, who flourished at the opening of the 
 ; fourth century. His main position^ is, that on comparing the 
 systems of Zoroaster and Buddha with that of Jesus Christ, the 
 same divine ingredients are observable in all, though under 
 various shades and modifications. Hence it was proposed to 
 bring about a reconciliation of the three systems, or rather to 
 incorporate the older creeds with what had been more recently 
 revealed in Christianity. Mani was himself to be the organ of 
 God (the 'Paraclete') for carrying on this fresh development, 
 and one of his chief duties was to purify the intellects of men 
 in order that they might be rescued from all servile bondage to 
 the past, and more particularly from what was held to be a 
 special artifice of the evil principle, the Old Testament oeconomy. 
 To promote this separation he affirmed that inspirations granted 
 to himself enabled him to point out what was merely human, 
 transitory, or accommodated to the prejudices of the Jewish 
 people, in the records of the New Testament; his dictum being 
 pressed on all as absolutely infallible, because it was affirmed 
 that he in his own person represented the last progress in the 
 knowledge of religious truth. But Mani, though he struggled 
 hard and was supported by a train of energetic followers, could 
 not shake the constancy of the more earnest Christians. They 
 perceived that his religion was erected on a fundamental mis- 
 conception, and was utterly antagonistic to their own. He 
 started with ideas of God and His relation to the world, which 
 if not absolutely pantheistic bordered very closely upon pan- 
 theism, and must result in it eventually. His Ahriman they 
 felt was not the Satan of the Bible. But they saw still more 
 distinctly that if his principles were true, they would produce 
 an utter severance of the Old and New Testaments. These 
 they had been taught to recognise as equally divine, as so 
 indissolubly bound together and so mutually interpenetrating 
 that to rob them of the first would be to tear the second into 
 shreds and tatters. 
 
 1 Cf. Neander, Clu Hist. ii. 157 sq. 
 
CHAP. I.] Eeligioiis Tendencies of the present Age. 25 
 
 We occasionally encounter the descendants of such mis- 
 believers even during the inertness of the Mediaeval period. 
 As many tenets of the Neo-Platonist were re-adopted in the 
 ninth century by John Scotus Erigena^ so the errors of the 
 Manichsean^ found a simultaneous echo in the pulpits of Pauli- 
 cians, Cathari, and Albigenses. Other instances might be col- 
 lected from the annals of the following period ; but as soon as 
 the study of the pagan poets and philosophers revived, the 
 general tendency of thought was somewhat different. Oriental 
 speculations were less known, and writers like Boccaccio^ prove 
 their heathenish turn of mind, by using heathen phraseology to 
 designate the highest mysteries of Holy Writ, and otherwise 
 promoting the amalgamation of the two religions. Prayers 
 are offered in the most offensive spirit to Jupiter, to Juno, 
 and to Venus. The incarnation of Hhe son of Jupiter' is 
 mentioned; he is said to have visited the earth, that he might 
 forward its redemption. Other scholars^ of this stamp pro- 
 ceed yet further; they place our blessed Lord in juxtaposition 
 with Socrates and Plato, identify the Persons of the Holy 
 Trinity with heathen deities, and under the patronage of the 
 Medici at Florence threaten to obliterate the characteristic 
 doctrines of the Gospel, or confound them with the theories of 
 Greek philosophy^. 
 
 With the Reformation of the sixteenth century, levelling 
 as it did so many of the ancient boundaries of human thought, 
 and breaking off so many time-worn fetters, came a signal for 
 the reappearance of free-thinkers still more cognate with 
 misguided zealots of the present day. Servetus and the rest of 
 
 1 See a recent article in the ^ This may be seen especially in 
 North British Review, No. xlv. pp. the Filocolo (al. Filocojio), where, 
 12 1, sq. The writer shews, how- as Sismondi (Liter, of Southern 
 ever, that Scotus 'never lost his Europe, i. 300) has remarked, Boc- 
 faith entirely either in the person- caccio * seems determined to con- 
 ahty of God or in the supernatural found the two religions, and to 
 teaching of the Bible.' prove that they are in fact the same 
 
 2 The following extract from a worship, under different names.' 
 Formula lieceptionis Manichceorum ^ Koscoe's Life of Leo X., .u. 
 belonging to the period, shews that 87, 88. Hence the frightful growth 
 Buddha, Mdni, Zoroaster, Christ of infidelity at Eome itself imme- 
 and the Sun, were then treated diately before the Eeformation : see, 
 as different manifestations of the for instance, Erasmus, Epist. Hb. 
 same power: ^AvaOefxari^io robs rhv xxvi. ep. 34, ed. Le Clerc. 
 Tiapdbav Kol BouSai/ koL tov 'Kpiarou ^ Cf. the determinations of the 
 KalTbv'M.auLxouoif,KaiT6v7}\i.ov,(:vaKcd Council of Lateran, Labbe, xiv. 
 rbv avrov elvai Xiyovras. Tollius, 188. 
 
 Itiner. Italic. -p. 134. Traject. 1696. 
 
26 Christ and other Masters, [part I. 
 
 the ^Illuminati' were, in fact, precursors of the English spiri- 
 tualists ^ Thej all opposed themselves to the idea of an 
 objective revelation, often substituting for the Holy Scriptures 
 the distempered products of their own imaginations, and 
 claiming the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit, whom, in 
 cases where the plea was more convenient, they represented 
 as superior in authority even to the Lord Himself. Their 
 utter subjectivity involved them also in the absolute denial of 
 the cardinal doctrines promulgated by the Church, impelled 
 them to devise eccentric institutions, and assert that 'every 
 man shall be saved by the law or sect which he professeth^.' 
 It was not, however, till the following century that men of 
 learning and intelligence were seriously possessed by the desire 
 of founding what is called an Absolute Keligion. Lord 
 Herbert of Cherbury was the first in England who approxi- 
 mated closely to the ground of Mr. Parker. Grievously 
 perplexed by the phenomena of heathenism, he entered on the 
 task of sifting the peculiarities of all religions. Out of the 
 residuum he attempted to compile a creed ^, consisting of five 
 simple articles, which all the world, he ventured to predict, 
 would recognise as true, and deem sufiicient as a term of com- 
 munion and a warrant of salvation. 
 
 Many of his followers in that century and the next 
 proceeded to far greater lengths*. In Tindal, Collins, Blount, 
 
 ^ See the eyidence collected in pro veris indubitatisque habere de- 
 Mr. Riddle's Bampton Lectures bent.' De Relrqione Gentilium, p. 
 (1852), pp. 394 sq. The error there 2, Amstel. 1663. This treatise, 
 noted of CasteUio, who 'separated together with its companion De 
 Scripture from the Spirit,' has been Veritate pubUshed as early as 1624, 
 very common both before and since has been examined at length by 
 the Reformation. Thus Milton Leland, in his useful View of the 
 hinted (Prose TForA;s, IV. 449, Bohn's Principal Deistical Writers (xviith 
 ed.) that 'the Spirit which is given andxviiith cent.), 5th ed. 1798. See 
 us is a more certain guide than also on the general question of 
 Scripture, whom, therefore, it is mod^ern Deism, the sketch given 
 our duty to follow.' by Van Mildert in his Boyle Lee- 
 
 2 Art. XVIII. of the xxxix. The tures (1802— 1805), Lect. ix. — Lect. 
 
 Scottish Confession of 1560 speaks xii. 
 
 inhkemanner, 'of those that affirm, ^ In speaking of Tindal, whose 
 
 that men quhilk live according to Christianity as old as the Creation 
 
 equitie and justice, shall be saved, first appeared in 1730, Leland 
 
 what religioun soever they have pro- remarks (i. 127): 'Others have 
 
 fessed,' in Knox's Works, 11. 108, attacked particular parts of the 
 
 ed. Laing. Christian scheme, or of its proofs. 
 
 ^ After announcing his own five But this writer has endeavoured 
 
 articles, he adds : ' quos non nostri to subvert the very foundations of 
 
 tantum sed universi Orbis coetus it, by shewing that there neither is 
 
CHAP. I.] Eeligious Tendencies of the present Age. 27 
 
 Chubb, "Woolston, and Bolingbroke at home ; and in Dupui?, 
 Yoltaire, and D'Alembert on the continent, we find a class of 
 writers who resolved at every hazard, and with confidence^ 
 proportioned to their daring, to destroy the credibility of Holy 
 Writ, to ponr contempt on all external revelations, and conduct 
 us back if possible to heathenism, or Hhe religion of nature'.' 
 But in vain ; the truth of God was still victorious. Notwith- 
 standing the depressed condition of theology, and notwithstand- 
 ing the corrupted spirit and materialistic temper of the age, the 
 flood of intellectual licence was again rolled back. The ark 
 still rode in conscious majesty upon the bosom of the surging 
 
 nor can be any external revelation 
 at all, distinct from what he calls 
 the internal revelation of the laio of 
 nature in the hearts of all mankind,'' 
 &c. Tindal was a veritable fore- 
 runner of the spiritualists. 'He 
 sometimes speaks as if he thought 
 the deists were infallibly guided, 
 in making use of the reason God 
 hath given, to distinguish religion 
 from superstition, so that they are 
 sure not to run into any errors of 
 moment' (p. 128). Other persons 
 who were in favour of an external 
 revelation he called 'Demonists.' 
 
 ^ Thus, when Dupuis published 
 his Origine de tous les Cultes, the 
 volume on Christianity started with 
 the boast, 'qui doit faire une revo- 
 lution dans le monde religieux et 
 dans le culte de plusieurs grandes 
 nations' (ed. Auguis, v. i). He 
 tells us immediately after, 'Christ 
 serapournous ce qu'ont ^te Hercule, 
 Osiris, Adonis, Bacchus. H par- 
 tagera en commun avec eux le culte 
 que tous les peuples de tous les pays 
 et de tous les siecles ont rendu a la 
 Nature universelle et a ses agens 
 principaux.' 
 
 ^ ' The present unbelievers,' 
 writes Waterland ( * Wisdom of 
 the Ancients,' Works, v. 4), 'are 
 setting up what they call natural 
 religion to rival supernatural: hu- 
 man reason in the heart of man, 
 in opposition to Divine reason laid 
 down in the Word of God; or to 
 say all in short. Pagan darkness 
 in opposition to Scripture light.' 
 
 The kind of worship which these 
 heralds of the Absolute Religion 
 would fain establish in the room 
 of what they found among the 
 Christians of their times, may be 
 gathered from An Apology for pro- 
 fessing the Religion of Nature in 
 the Eighteenth Century of the Chris- 
 tian JEra (Twelve Letters address- 
 ed to Bishop Watson), 1789. The 
 author then adds A Liturgy on the 
 Principles of Theism 'in which 
 philosophers might join without 
 insulting their understandings or 
 corrupting their hearts.' 
 
 The 'First Service' commences 
 thus: 
 
 'Powerful Ruler of the Universe! 
 whatever Thou art — whether Nature 
 necessarily existing; or the ani- 
 mating spirit of mortals, — we adore 
 Thee, who by impenetrable methods 
 conductest all things to Thy pur- 
 poses.'. . . . 
 
 The 'First Service' ends: — • 
 
 'Despotic government has not 
 produced a tyrant; human nature 
 has not generated a monster, so 
 cruel, so revengeful, so wicked 
 as the odious phantom to which 
 superstition is devoted ! ' 
 
 In the 'Second Service' (p. 195), 
 the pantheism is avowed. 
 
 ' How shall we speak of Nature, 
 or of Nature's God! Everything 
 tends to convince us, we should 
 not, for we cannot seek the Deity 
 out of Nature. Everything to us 
 is impossible which is not produced 
 by its laws.' 
 
28 Christ and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 waters ; wliile many rival systems, fabricated in compliance 
 with ' the instincts of humanity/ and directed by * the light of 
 nature,' perished in the storm they had provoked. It is remark- 
 able that not a few of the objections ventilated at this period 
 by the English ^Deists' found their way across the channel, 
 and in Germany communicated a fresh impulse to the National- 
 istic movement ^ They are now returning home, etherialised 
 indeed, and moulded into more fantastic shapes, although 
 substantially the same objections as before. England once the 
 master has become the ardent, apt, and credulous disciple ; 
 and when numbers of our brethren on the continent are just 
 emerging from the fogs of scepticism and welcoming the earliest 
 dawn of better days, it seems as though the English were re- 
 solved to venture out again into the same dreary regions, — 
 only to be taught again the utter fruitlessness of all endeavours 
 to resolve the arduous problems of humanity without the aid of 
 Holy Writ. 
 
 Impelled by the necessity of coping with these wild and 
 retrogressive tendencies, the Christian advocate has never 
 shrunk from the encounter, and has seldom found his labours 
 altogether unsuccessful. He may not indeed be always guided 
 by a sound discretion ; he may fail to understand the nature of 
 the malady in certain cases, and in others may suggest an 
 antidote that does not work its cure ; but still his consciousness 
 of the profound importance of the issue has been ever visible. 
 He feels that to reduce our blessed Lord into the category of 
 human seers is practically to dethrone Him. Christianity will 
 tolerate no riyal. They who wish to raise a tabernacle for 
 some other master, be it even for the greatest worthies of the 
 old (Economy, — a Moses or Elias, — must be warned that Christ, 
 and Christ alone, is to be worshipped : they must hear Him. 
 
 The Eastern Church, as we have seen, appeared at first to 
 use Iqss emphasis in their assertion of this truth than the con- 
 temporary Latin writers ; or rather by evincing a disposition 
 to multiply the points of contact between Christianity and 
 other systems, and so recognising a prophetic element in 
 G-etitilism, they gave a handle to the laxer party who had 
 little or no reverence even for the character of Christ. But all 
 such tenderness for the religions of the heathen world was 
 everywhere forgotten in the Middle Ages^. They who issued 
 
 ^ Tholuck has drawn attention ^ 'vVhen Bede was pressed with 
 
 to this fact in his Glaubwurdigkeit the objection that many heathen 
 
 der evangel. Gescli. : cf. also Mr. philosophers had evinced a large 
 
 iUddle's Bampton Lectures, p. 397. amount of moral sensibility, he 
 
CHAP. I.] Religious Tendencies of the present Age. 29 
 
 forth to plant the cross among the northern and eastern nations, 
 had to deal with men who were not absolutely hostile to the 
 Saviour, but who recognised in Him no more than a pre- 
 eminently gracious Being to be added to the number of their 
 dark divinities^ or else esteemed the Gospel only one manifesta- 
 tion of the Absolute akin to their own religions^ : and hence the 
 ardent missionary, full of zeal, though sometimes wanting in 
 intelligence, was tempted to commence his exhortations by 
 decrying all their gods as evil spirits, and exaggerating the 
 guilt of their departed ancestors. A milder tone, however, 
 grew more common at the period of the Reformation. Many 
 rose to advocate the salvability of the nobler class of heathen, 
 gloried to have found sublimer thoughts in their philosophers, 
 or more tender precepts in their poets, and even went so far as 
 to maintain, that some of them had access to the highest truths, 
 and were instructed by the Word of God unwritten. A most 
 zealous Swiss reformer^ on the one side and a learned bibliothe- 
 carius^ of the Koman pontiff on the other, represented this new 
 
 answered that none who were ig- 
 norant of Christ, the virtue of 
 God and the wisdom of God, could 
 have either true virtue or true 
 wisdom. Yet he adds: 'In quan- 
 tum vero vel gustum aliquem sa- 
 pientiee cujuslibet vel virtutis ima- 
 ginem habebant, totum hoc desuper 
 acceperunt; non solum munere 
 primse conditionis, verum etiam 
 quotidiana ejus gratia, qui crea- 
 turam suam nee se deserentem 
 deaerens, dona sua, prout ipse 
 judicaverit hominibus et magna 
 magnis et parva largitur parvis.' 
 Expositio in Cant. Canticorum; 
 0pp. IX. 197, ed. Giles. 
 ^ See an example in Neander, 
 
 V. 397. 
 
 2 See the striking testimony of 
 a Franciscan missionary in Eay- 
 nald. Annal. Eccl. ad an. 1326, 
 
 §31- 
 
 •* Walter (Gualther) was under 
 the necessity of defending Zwingli 
 on account of the freedom with 
 which he had praised the heathen 
 poets and philosophers, which ex- 
 posed him to the charge of rank- 
 ing idolaters and Epicureans with 
 the Christian saints. The apolo- 
 
 gist then proceeds: *Cum vero 
 illud [i.e. Verbum Dei] non vacuum 
 redire, nee fructu suo carere dicat 
 Bominus, nemo opinor negabit 
 plures ex gentibus quoque ad sa- 
 lutem pervenisse, si nimirum eos 
 Dei verbo vel externa vel interna 
 aliquo modo instructos fuisse de- 
 monstraverimus,' &c. Pref . to Zwin- 
 gli's Works, ed. 1545, sign, e, 4. 
 Cf. Browne, On the Articles^ 11. 75. 
 Erasmus and others used similar 
 language : Hey, Lectures, 11. 360. 
 
 4 The De Perenni Fhilosophia 
 of Augustinus Steuchus Eugubi- 
 nus, titular bishop of Kisamos, was 
 published at Basle in 1542. His 
 principles may be gathered from 
 Lib. X. c. 23: * Claret igitur post 
 multa secula missam diuinitus 
 Theologiam, nihil aliud fuisse quam 
 priscorum seculorum caligantis iam 
 et obscura), quam animis hominum 
 impresserat Deus, et uoce sua in 
 creatione, post in secuto tempore 
 per nuncios tradiderat, scientiie 
 reuelationem. Neque enim fieri 
 potest, quod postea ccelitus est 
 apertum, quodque perfecte decla- 
 raturus uenit e co^lo in terras Deus, 
 ante aduentum eius alia ratione 
 
30 Christ and other Masters, [part I. 
 
 phase of thought. The latter even did not hesitate to urge 
 that the philosophy of the ancients was a kind of * tacit 
 Christianity,' and that the promulgation of the Gospel only 
 took away the inmost veil and brought us into full communi- 
 cation with the source of supernatural truth. Since then the 
 records of the ancient world have been repeatedly examined 
 in order to obtain fresh light for the determination of these 
 questions. Theophilus Gale endeavoured to establish \ Hhat 
 the proud sophists of Greece, esteemed the eye of the world for 
 wisdom,' were 'fain to come and light their candles at the 
 sacred fire, which was lodged in the Jewish Church.' While 
 Cudworth, * anxious to satisfy those amongst us who boggle so 
 much at the Trinity, and look upon it as the choke-pear of 
 Christianity^,' employed his deep and ponderous einidition in 
 maintaining that a similar doctrine was known among the 
 Platonists ; this being, in fact, one only out of many con- 
 sequences that resulted from the co-existence of a true philo- 
 sophy external to the sphere of revelation. But with Cudworth, 
 it should be remembered, such a view in no wise tended to 
 discredit the Old Testament, or to excite the faintest prejudice 
 against it. In the present day the same investigation is 
 actively proceeding ; and now that every corner of the heathen 
 world has been explored, a somewhat different explanation of 
 
 celebre fuisse quam eadem ipsa i Court of the Gentiles ^ 'Adver- 
 
 quod diuinitus esset traditum.' In tisements to the Reader.' 
 
 1548 appeared the ITzsior /a de (Ziis ^Intellectual System^ Pref. p. 
 
 gentilibus of Greg. Sylv. Gyraldus ; xUii., cf. 11. 428 sq. But in making 
 
 in allusion to which Eckermann, out as good a case as possible for 
 
 Religionsgeschichteund Mythologies the heathen, whose polytheism he 
 
 I. 12 (Halle, 1848), remarks: 'Schon appears to have considered as little 
 
 seit dem Anfange des sechszehn- more than a monotheism in dis- 
 
 ten Jahrhunderts hatte man he- guise, this great writer confounded 
 
 sonders in Italien angefangen, die the religion of ancient nations with 
 
 Theologie und die Mythologie des the theological opinions of the 
 
 heidnischen Alterthums in man- leading poets and philosophers: 
 
 nigfaltige nahere Beziehung zu see Mosheim's note, in Vol. 11. p. 
 
 setzen. Man fing an zwischen 251. Coleridge was nearer to the 
 
 den Mythen des Heidenthums und truth, when he wrote as follows: 
 
 den Sagen des Alten Testaments 'Across the night of Paganism, 
 
 Vergleichungen anzustellen, und philosophy flitted on, like the 
 
 griindete namentlich die Ansicht, lantern-fly of the Tropics, a light 
 
 dass Bammtliche polytheistische to itself, and an ornament, but 
 
 Religionem nur als Abartungen alas ! no more than an ornament 
 
 aus, Oder AbfaUe von dem He- of the surrounding darkness. Chris- 
 
 braischenMonotheismusanzusehen tianity reversed the order.' Aids 
 
 seien, und war emsig bemiiht, to Rejlection, i. 146, Pickering's 
 
 dieselbe auf gelehrte Weise zu be- ed. 
 giiinden.' 
 
CHAP. I.] Religious Tendencies of the present Age. 81 
 
 the correspondencies between the Gentile and Christian systems 
 has been generally adopted, at least by all those writers who 
 preserve the ancient reverence for the Bible. There is now no 
 general wish among the orthodox to trace such parallelisms 
 exclusively to the diffusion of the Hebrew Scriptures ^ There 
 is even less occasion to suspect that any critical pressure will be 
 used for bringing the philosophy of heathenism into more 
 perfect unison with the distinctive doctrines of the Church. 
 Yet on the other hand the features of resemblance, few and 
 dim and fragmentary though they be, are welcomed as so many 
 testimonies to the truth of revelation — as * unconscious pro- 
 })hecies of heathendom,' or else as portions of that spiritual 
 heritage which men and tribes bore with them from the cradle 
 of the human race. A living writer^ has observed, that ' the 
 noblest and most effectual way of defending Christianity is not 
 to condemn everything which preceded it, — to turn all the 
 virtues of distinguished heathens into splendid vices, — but 
 rather to make them testify in its favour.' 
 
 Such is also my conviction; and with kindred feelings I 
 now purpose to reopen the investigation of those leading facts 
 and the analysis of those ideas of heathenism which the 
 opponents of Christianity have been accustomed to adduce as 
 parallel to what is found in the sacred volume, and as, there- 
 fore, placing Gentile systems on a level with the Church of 
 God. Such points of correspondency, where they in truth 
 exist, I hold to be explainable without in any way diminishing 
 the lustre of the Gospel or detracting in the least degree from 
 
 ^ The evidence that can be urged regie des moeurs la plus severe, 
 
 in favour of this view has been Je suis loin de penser, toutefois, 
 
 recently collected in Mr. Tomkins's que dans la morale reside toute 
 
 Hulsean Prize Essay (1849). I'essence de la religion; je sais au 
 
 ^ SchafI, Ch. Hist. i. 168. It contraire que les plus nobles ames, 
 
 is gratifying to remark that Creu- et les peuples les plus memorables 
 
 zer in his elaborate Symbolik, des temps anciens et modernes, 
 
 though he manifests no very de- ont demand^ a cette derniere des 
 
 cided prepossessions in favour of lumieres plus hautes sur le mystere 
 
 Christianity, is not influenced by de notre existence et sur nos futures 
 
 any fanatical dislike of it, and that destinees. Entretoutes les religions 
 
 the French scholar (M. Guigniaut) connues, le christianisme me parait 
 
 who translated and enlarged the avoir le mieux satisf ait a ce double 
 
 work of Creuzer is of the same besoin del'homme: mais, soit dans 
 
 mind. For example, he echoes sa doctrine, soit dans les formes de 
 
 the following sentiment: 'Pour son culte, il avait et6 et avait dft 
 
 moi,' dit M. Creuzer, *la meilleure etre prepare par les religions ante- 
 
 religion est celle qui conserve avec rieures.' Religions de VAntiquite, 
 
 la plus grande purete le caractere *Avertiseement,' p. 7. 
 moral et prescrit aux peuples la 
 
32 Christ and other Masters, [part I. 
 
 the supremacy wHcli it enjoys in the affections of the Chris- 
 tian world. 
 
 The order I propose to follow in discussing the religious 
 systems where minute comparison has been thought desirable^, 
 is this :— 
 
 The Religions that arose and still prevail in Hindustan and 
 some adjoining countries. 
 
 The Religions of Mexico, of China, and the Southern Seas, 
 
 Both these groups appear to have always been entirely 
 external to the sphere of Hebrew influence. 
 
 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Persia. 
 
 These, it is alleged, have both at different periods actually 
 modified the development of thought among the Hebrews; the 
 first, during their long residence in Egypt; the second, during 
 the Babylonish captivity. 
 
 The Religions of Ancient Greece and Rome. 
 
 With these the planters of Christianity were brought into 
 immediate contact at the very opening of their work, and over 
 these they won a triumph in the first ^ve centuries of the 
 present era. 
 
 The Religions of the Saxon, Scandinavian, and Slavonic 
 tribes. 
 
 Among these tribes the principles of heathenism appear to 
 have been strongest; and some of them in fact were not con- 
 verted to Christianity for a thousand years after its promul- 
 gation. 
 
 But before proceeding to determine the characteristics of 
 these several groups^, on each of which I purpose to bestow a 
 
 ^ If it be asked why Muham- p. 105). The plan proposed by 
 madanism is not included in the one reviewer is to take the three- 
 series, my reply is, that I consider fold division of the human race, 
 it a dehased form of revealed re- the Semitic, the Aryan, and the 
 ligion, — a Christian, or more pro- Turanian, and assuming that the 
 perly, a Jewish heresy. Paret, in spheres of language and religion 
 the Studien und Kritlken, 1855, are generally conterminous to ar- 
 -ztes Heft, p. 295, calls it *eine range all the religions of which we 
 niedere-Abart Oder, wenn man will, have any authentic information 
 Abklatsch der Offensbarungs-reli- under these three different heads, 
 gion.' 'There is the Semitic family with 
 
 2 Objections have been urged its spiritual monotheism, the Aryan 
 
 against this arrangement on the family with its worship of nature, 
 
 gi-ound that it does not recognise and the Chinese and Turanian races 
 
 *the great watersheds of thought with their vague belief in a Divine 
 
 and language vrhich divide the Being, neither spiritual nor natural, 
 
 principal families of the human but hovering in its ghostly unreality 
 
 race' {Col. Ch. Chr. March, 1858, between heaven and earth, filling 
 
CHAP. I.] Religious Tendencies of the present Age. S3 
 
 separate investigation, it is necessary to my argument that 
 certain other points should be established. These will be com- 
 prised in two preliminary chapters. 
 
 One of them has reference to the question touching the 
 unity of the human race — a question intimately bound up with 
 my present subject. For if it be in any measure probable that 
 all varieties of men originated in a single pair, I shall be pro 
 tanto justified in urging this important fact, as one medium 
 of accounting for traditions which were afterwards diffused 
 through all the human family. 
 
 The second point concerns what may be called the charac- 
 teristic features of the Old Testament religion, and its vital 
 coherence with the system founded in and by our blessed Lord. 
 For if this close connexion be established, I am able to pointy 
 out the ancient germ and nucleus of which Christianity be- 
 came the true development; and if the principles pervading 
 both the stages of Kevealed Religion be fundamentally the 
 same, a standard will have been erected in the ancient world 
 whereby to estimate the real character and tendencies of those 
 contemporary religions, which, as we shall see hereafter, sprang 
 up wild in different soils of paganism. 
 
 the human heart -with fear and 
 superstition, but unable to inspire 
 its votaries with the joy and con- 
 fidence of the Aryan suppliant, or 
 the awe and reverence of the Sem- 
 itic worshipper. ' 
 
 But this criticism, even if the 
 counter- thecJiy could be established, 
 
 seems to emanate from a miscon- 
 ception of the work on which I am 
 now occupied. I am not writing a 
 history of all religions, but am 
 comparing the chief religions of 
 heathendom with Christianity or 
 Eevealed Eeligion. That is my 
 centre. 
 
CHAPTER 11. 
 
 On the Unity of the Human Race. 
 
 'Quanquam in hoc ipso non mediocriter peccent quod non hominis 
 causa dicunt, sed hominum. Unius enim singularis appellatio totum 
 comprehendit humanum genus. Sed hoc ideo, quia ignorant unum 
 hominem a Deo esse formatum, putantque homines in omnibus terris 
 et agris, tanquam fungos, esse generates.' Lactantius, Divin. Instit. 
 lib. VII. c. 4. 
 
 Impugners of the unity of the human race. Mitigation of these assaults. 
 Reasons of the change. Objections. Ansivers. Mental and moral prO' 
 perties common to man. Universal response to the appeals of Christi' 
 anity. Objections answered. Explanation of physiological varieties. 
 Objection i. Answer. Objection 11. Answer. Classification of human 
 languages. Are these three groups reducible to one? Philology has not 
 answered the question. Its bearing on the truthfulness of the Bible. 
 Gradual formation of heathen theologies. Their infinite variety. Truth 
 and unity in the Church. 
 
 The object of this chapter is to indicate, as briefly as may be, 
 the general nature of the evidence producible in favour of the 
 oneness of the human species, or the derivation of the various 
 tribes of man from one common stock^ I cannot hope to 
 enter far into the details of so vast a question; nor indeed will 
 it be necessary. For the main conditions of the argument are 
 satisfied, if I can prove that modern sciences, so far from 
 damaging in this respect the credibility of the sacred record, 
 are all tending to establish and confirm it. In other words, I 
 shall be content with shewing that researches of the present 
 
 ^ Any comparative view of the creatures vrith the same Divine 
 
 rehgions of the world would be Being who is over all. Hence the 
 
 valueless, indeed philosophically questions of the unity of the human 
 
 impossible, unless we may regard race and the unity of God, as vin- 
 
 them as all concerned with one dicated in the Old Testament, are 
 
 subject-matter ; contemplate them preliminary to our mata invesiiga- 
 
 as phenomena of the spiritual re- tion. 
 lations of the same class of rational 
 
CHAP. II.] Unity of the human Race. 85 
 
 age conspire to warrant a belief in the original unity of men, 
 and therefore serve to justify the expectation, that traditions 
 current in the various tribes and peoples of antiquity had very 
 much in common, having emanated from the same primordial 
 source. 
 
 During the last century, when scepticism of every kind was 
 rampant, and when France was in particular embarking on her 
 infidel crusade against all noble theories of man, of God, and 
 of the universe, the fashion was to scoff at this idea of con- 
 sanguinity among the different nations of the globe. Language 
 was regarded as a mere conventional apparatus gradually devised 
 by the untutored savage: * positive religions' were decried as 
 engines of a crafty priesthood, or as 'heresies' of what was 
 called Hhe religion of nature:' while man himself had been 
 reduced to little more than one of the varieties of animal life. 
 
 The same degrading notions led the French Encyclopedists 
 to deny not only the objectivity of human nature, but the 
 common origin of men. It will be found that all intelligent 
 belief in the unity of the human race is naturally associated 
 with belief in God's own unity and paternity, with real con- 
 sciousness of sin, with ardent longings for redemption, and 
 particularly with a recognition of the fact, that Christ and the 
 apostles planted a religious system which provides for men of 
 every age and climate, and is capable of indefinite expansion. 
 These truths the unbelievers of the last century assailed with 
 blasphemous vituperation : and, therefore, we are not surprised 
 to hear them advocating the hypothesis of independent human 
 species. According to Yoltaire, none but a blind man can 
 doubt, that the whites, negroes, Albinos, Hottentots, Laplanders, 
 Chinese and Americans, are entirely distinct races. Since that 
 time, however, there has been a vast reaction in the mind of 
 European scholars. It is true, assailants are not wanting who 
 repeat among ourselves the oft-exploded cavils of the French 
 Encyclopedists. The most cultivated nations are still said to 
 have been formed in the very lowest grade of savage life, and 
 to have struggled year by year into their present stage of moral, 
 social, and religious elevation; passing from the grossest 
 Fetishism to a refined and flexible Polytheism, and so upwards, 
 till they were at last enabled, by some means or other, to evolve 
 the true idea of God\ But even where these principles of 
 
 ^ So think M. Comte, Mr. F. W. p. 65), that in the very oldest re- 
 Newman, and many others, re- cords, *we often find symptoms of 
 gardlesR of the fact, conceded even a more distinct conception of Di- 
 l»y jVIr. W. J. Fox (Religious Ideas^ vine grandeur and infinity than 
 
 3~-2 
 
Christ and other Masters. 
 
 [part 1. 
 
 development are entertained, their authors do not speak so 
 positively as the sceptics of the former age, against the oneness 
 of the human family^; while others who refuse on different 
 grounds to acquiesce in the scriptural account of man's origin, 
 have, notwithstanding, been constrained by philosophical reasons 
 to postpone their judgment on the subject^. Modern science 
 has in fact materially contributed, in this case also, to revive 
 the lustre and to vindicate the truth of revelation. She has 
 wrested from the grasp of unbelief a number of its choicest 
 weapons, and has wielded them against itself with irresistible 
 effect. 
 
 In the first place, Cuvier^, by a series of historical and 
 geological researches, proved that man has not been very long 
 an occupant of the earth; that none of the existing varieties 
 can trace their origin beyond the point at which the Bible 
 seems to place the introduction of the human species; and, 
 therefore, that the modern theory of * creative laws,' acting by 
 * myriads of ages,' is adverse to the facts of history and the 
 
 prevailed in later ages.' Alex, von 
 Humboldt {Cosmos, ii. 113) seems 
 to shrink from expressing any posi- 
 tive opinion either way; and yet 
 instances of tribes relapsing into 
 a savage and ahnost brutal state 
 are not unfrequent; e.g. the Bush- 
 men of Southern Africa. 
 
 ^ Thus Mr. Theodore Parker 
 {Discourse, &c., p. 75) acknowledges 
 *the identity of the human race/ 
 which refers, however, to ideas and 
 sentiments common to mankind, 
 without implying, in his opinion, 
 the doctrine of a common origin. 
 He also admits that the view in 
 favour of several originating pairs 
 is equally without any direct his- 
 torical proof. It is afterwards added : 
 'No one can determine what was 
 the primitive state of the human 
 race, or when, or where, or how 
 mankind, at the command of God, 
 came into existence. Here our 
 conclusions can be only negative,' 
 (p. 76) : i.e. after we have rejected 
 the evidence of the Bible and ex- 
 tinguished the traditions of the 
 ancient world, we find ourselves in 
 utter darkness. 
 
 ^ Niebuhr, for example {Led. 
 on Ancient History, 1. 6, Lond. 
 1852), evades the consideration of 
 the main problem in the following 
 passage : 'Whether all nations were 
 originally of different origin and 
 belonged to different races, or whe- 
 ther their original identity were 
 changed in form and language by 
 a series of miracles, these are ques- 
 tions which do not belong to an- 
 cient history; and we must leave 
 to others to discuss them. With- 
 out a direct and minute revelation 
 from God, we cannot arrive at any 
 certain results on these points, and 
 in reference to them the Book of 
 Genesis cannot be considered as 
 a revelation.' William von Hum- 
 boldt seems to have hesitated in 
 like manner to the very close of 
 his life (see Chev. Bunsen's Out- 
 lines of the Philosophy of Universal 
 History, i. 59, 60, Lond. 1854); 
 but his illustrious brother, the 
 author of Cosmos, obviously in- 
 clines to the hypothesis of unity: 
 see I. 351, Sabine's edition. 
 
 3 Essay on the Theory of the 
 Earth, ed. Jameson, §§ 30 sq. 
 
CHAP. II.] Unity of the human Race. 87 
 
 phenomena of science. Mr Lyell' rendered similar service to 
 the cause of Christian truth, when he demolished the analogous 
 theory of Lamarck, which represented man as one of the 
 numerous links in a graduated chain of beings, successively 
 developed into higher stages; his bodily organism being a 
 modification of the ape, and his mental prerogatives no more 
 than the expanded form of faculties which he enjoys in common 
 with the brute creation. But what has tended most of all 
 perhaps to silence the objections of the antichristian * philoso- 
 phers,' are the strange affinities which have been brought to 
 light by the investigations of comparative philology. When 
 India fell into the hands of Britain, and a class of enterprising 
 scholars, headed by Sir William Jones, began to work the 
 precious mines of history which that conquest opened to the 
 western world, it was established that the 'Aryan' race be- 
 yond the Indus spoke a language fundamentally akin to that 
 of Germany and England. Other languages, in which affinity 
 had hitherto been unsuspected, were also found to range them- 
 selves within the same group; an Aryan, or Indo-European, 
 family was constituted; and as the new principles of classifica- 
 tion were extended into wider regions, it grew obvious that all 
 known varieties of human language, once a dreary chaos, were 
 reducible into a small number of harmonious groups; while in 
 these groups themselves, some evidence was thought to be 
 detected of a radical connexion, such as leads to the belief 
 that all are only modifications of an older and more general 
 type. 
 
 Meanwhile a different process had been leading to the same 
 result. Comparative physiology was moving hand in hand with 
 comparative philology. The skill and industry of Blumenbach"^ 
 in that department, served to shew that in respect of their 
 physical structure and the laws of their animal ceconomy, the 
 varieties of the human race are in like manner all reducible to 
 a very few groups; and Prichard^, by a happy combination of 
 these sciences, was able to push forward the great problem, and, 
 as some imagined, went so far as to establish the original 
 oneness of the human family. 
 
 ^ Principles of Geology, iii. 4 sq. Getting. 1775: but his examination 
 
 6th ed. : cf . Prof. Sedgwick's Dis- and comparison of skulls proceeded 
 
 course on the Studies of the Uni- until 1828. 
 
 versity of Cambridge^ Pref. pp. ^ See his Researches into the 
 
 xviii. sq. 5th ed. Physical History of Mankind, 3rd 
 
 2 His great work is entitled Be ed. 
 Generis Humani varietate nativa. 
 
88 Christ and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 Several lines of proof must, therefore, be regarded as con- 
 verging to the point in question: — (1) the Scriptural, (2) the 
 Psychological, (3) the Physiological, (4) the Philological. 
 
 1. Scriptural Proof. 
 
 I should have judged it quite superfluous to insist upon 
 this head in dealing with avowed assailants of dogmatic Chris- 
 tianity; but there is reason to believe that several persons 
 who revere the Bible as in some degree a supernatural record, 
 strenuously deny the derivation of the human family from one 
 single pair. Thus, when Professor Agassiz^ is reminded of St. 
 Paul's assertion, that ' God hath made of one blood ^ all nations 
 of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth' (Acts xvii. 26), 
 his answer is, that this * figurative expression applies to the 
 higher unity of mankind, and not to their supposed genital 
 connexion by natural descent.' He also argues that the Book 
 of Genesis, to which allusion is here made by the apostle, ' must 
 be considered as relating chiefly to the history of the white i-ace, 
 w^ith special reference to the history of the Jews.' 
 
 Now both these statements seem to me most arbitrary and 
 evasive. (1) Until it has been shewn that such expressions as 
 ' made of blood ' are used to signify any species of relation or 
 descent, save that of natural generation^, we are scarcely justi- 
 fied in seeking for a figurative import. St. Paul there told the 
 men of Athens, among whom polytheism had grown into a sort 
 of passion, that God was really one, the single Lord, the abso- 
 lute Creator of the universe. He next proceeded to announce 
 the great correlative truth, that God has left an image of His 
 own oneness in the oneness of humanity; and that this fact 
 was certified by the production of the human species from one 
 common stock^. All nations were declared to be His offspring; 
 
 1 See his contribution to the i. 13. Neither, as St. Paul in- 
 
 Christian Examiner (American), structs us elsewhere, could it be 
 
 July, 1850, pp. 135 — 137. This predicated of all men indiscrimin- 
 
 periodical is an organ of the Boston ately ; for according to him the 
 
 Unitarians. unconverted Gentiles (Eph. iv. 17, 
 
 ^ A second reading, adopted by 18) are still * alienated from the 
 
 Lachmann, omits at/xaTos altoge- life of God through the ignorance 
 
 ther. that is in them.' 
 
 ^ The only 'higher unity' con- * See Neander's excellent para- 
 
 necting men together, is the spi- phrase {Planting y i. 192, Lond. 
 
 ritual nature they derive in com- 1851). * In the polytheistic stand- 
 
 mon by regeneration from Christ, ing-point,' he adds (note), 'a know- 
 
 the New Head of humanity : but ledge of the unity of human nature 
 
 this birth is most expressly said is wanting, because it is closely 
 
 to be 'not of blood' {al/xdTcjv)^ John connected with a knowledge of the 
 
CHAP. II.] Unity of the human Race, 89 
 
 since they all were sons of Adam, * which was the son of God ' 
 (Luke iii. 3B). 
 
 (2) The second argument is equally unfounded, inconsistent 
 with the general tenour of the sacred narrative, the statements 
 of particular texts, and all the varied prophecies of redemption. 
 Who in reading the Book of Genesis, without a theory in his 
 eye, is likely to suspect that he is tracing out the origin and 
 early fortunes of one section of the human race? Our first 
 mother was herself called Eve, because (the sacred penman has 
 been careful to inform us) ' she was the mother of all living ' 
 (Gen. iii. 20) : and whenever it was subsequently foretold how 
 the disasters that had overwhelmed her progeny should termi- 
 nate on the appearance of some Great Deliverer, every nation 
 from the rising of the sua to the going down thereof, all tribes, 
 wherever scattered and however brutalised, are said to be the 
 objects whom He comes to bless and rescue, to exalt and re- 
 unite. And with this view the writings of the New Testament 
 entirely correspond. Adam is there represented as a * caput 
 gentis,' whose descendants constitute the self-same race that 
 has been reconstructed in the second Adam\ * As by the 
 disobedience of the one (rov kvo^), the many (ot ttoWoX) were 
 made sinners, so by the obedience of the one shall the many be 
 made righteous' (Rom. v. 19). ^As in Adam all die, even so 
 in Christ shall all be made alive' (1 Cor. xv. 22). In Him 
 
 unity of God : ' and when it is the representative of human nature 
 
 remembered how the Athenians in its natural and fallen state.' 
 
 boasted that they were avroxOove^, But such interpretation of St. Paul's 
 
 the drift of St. Paul's observation language seems to me unjustifiable, 
 
 is still more obvious. Cf. on the Adam is affirmed to be the origin of 
 
 whole of this wonderful speech death to all men, just as strictly as 
 
 Baumgarten, Acts of the Apostles^ our blessed Lord ig the origin of 
 
 II. 157 sq. Edinb. 1854. life (i Cor xv. 21, 22); and unless 
 
 ^ When Mr. F. W. Newman calls it be contended that in St. Paul's 
 
 in question the oneness of the teaching Christ is only the re'pre* 
 
 human family, and asks what in sentative of redeemed humanity, 
 
 that case 'becomes of St. Paul's and not the actual bringer-in of 
 
 parallel between the first and second the redemption, Adam must be 
 
 Adam, and the doctrine of headship also far more than a representative ; 
 
 and atonement founded on it;' a seo Eom. v. 19, where the paral- 
 
 writer in the Quarterly Review (No. lelism is most remarkable. I ought 
 
 cxc. p. 474, note) attempts to meet to add, however, that the Quart- 
 
 the difficulty by replying that, *even erly Bevieicer does not admit the 
 
 if mankind had not descended from truth of Mr. Newman's hypothesis, 
 
 a single pair, the truths laid down He holds that scientific research 
 
 by St. Paul in the passage referred has established ' the extreme proba- 
 
 to would be untouched; for when bility' of a single origin for all the 
 
 he speaks of all men as dead in human family. 
 Adam, he is speaking of Adam as 
 
40 Christ and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 the course of degradation that commenced with Adam, and was 
 tending to dissever man from man, and one community from 
 another, is arrested and reversed. Humanity has found a 
 second Head, a nobler Kepresentative : it is generically bom 
 again in Christ; and, therefore, all the individual members of 
 the species, Jew or Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, 
 are made susceptible of Christian influences. ' Go ye,' was the 
 charge of Him, who is the ^ Second Man,' * the Lord from 
 Heaven,' (Mark xvi. 15,) * Go ye into all the world, and preach 
 the Gospel to every creature {irddrj ry Kxto-ct);' 'for we know,' 
 writes the Apostle (Rom. viii. 22), Hhat the whole creation 
 [Trdcra tj ktiuls) groaneth and travaileth in pain together until 
 now.' 
 
 2. Psychological Proof. 
 
 This argument depends entirely on the fact that, notAvith- 
 standing every minor variation in feeling or capacity, in taste 
 or temperament, by which we are enabled to distinguish one 
 people from another, there are certain moral, spiritual, and 
 mental elements, inherent in humanity itself, and underlying 
 all the national types and local characteristics. At first indeed, 
 when our attention is directed to the subject, a picture meets 
 us not of unity but of diversity. We everywhere encounter 
 groups of human beings, each l^etraying some T)eculiar tend- 
 encies, with manners as dissimilar as their physical con- 
 formation; with intellectual habits, indicating all degrees of 
 power and culture; with sentiments, in one case, harsh and 
 barbarous, in a second, gentle, tender, and refined : — a class of 
 variations warranting, as we might judge, the supposition that 
 each separate group is radically independent, and ha,s always 
 formed an independent species. But more thoughtful obser- 
 vation leads us to abandon this hypothesis as crude and super- 
 ficial. It enables us to see that Yerj many of these wide 
 diversities exist at present, and have long existed in the same 
 country, being multiplied in homogeneous populations, or at 
 least in populations where the race of men has been com- 
 paratively unafiected by foreign admixtures. Some diversity, 
 therefore, is not utterly incompatible with unity of origin ; and 
 thus we are admonished to carry our analysis still deeper, 
 in the hope of separating what is merely special in the mind 
 of man or accidental in the phases of society, from broader and 
 more fundamental characteristics. To the latter class we shall 
 most reasonably assign whatever has been held in common 
 by the various families of nations, be their state of culture 
 
JfK 
 
 
 CHAP. II.] Unity of the human Race. \\ .41 
 
 what it may; tliose great specific properties of mankinaj the 
 aspirations, faculties, and sentiments, which have in every 
 period been distinguishing the human from the brute creation. 
 
 Men are like each other, and unlike the rest of animated 
 nature, not only as endowed with similar feelings and affections, 
 or impelled by similar appetencies and aversions, but as speak- 
 ing, reasoning, and reflecting creatures. Wheresoever man is, 
 there we find these marks of his superior dignity. No depths 
 of barbarism have yet been able to obliterate them, however 
 much their brilliance may at times be clouded, or their sphere 
 of action circumscribed. Or look at man as a progressive being, 
 when he differs toto ccelo from the lower animals. The progress 
 has indeed been slow in certain cases where the soil was un- 
 congenial, or the civilising agents inefficient ; but experience 
 teaches us that some advance is uniformly possible; that in the 
 breasts of all men there are latent and mysterious faculties; 
 that all are capable of passing gradually into the higher stages 
 of existence, and readily adapting themselves to novel circum- 
 stances and conditions. If we grant that in so far as our 
 domestic instincts are concerned, a parallel is found among the 
 other orders of creation, it is no less obvious, that wherever 
 such exist in man, their character is uniform, their operation is 
 identical : while in that loftier province of his being, where he 
 is immediately connected with the ^God of the spirits of all 
 flesh,' the traces of a common nature are peculiarly discei-nible. 
 It is a fact that all varieties of men exhibit the same kind of 
 spiritual perceptions, much as these may vary both in sensi- 
 bility and clearness : all are actuated by sentiments of awe and 
 deference to superior genii, blunted though these be, alike in 
 savage and in civilised communities : all are able to appreciate 
 high and noble deeds, and are susceptible of generous impulses : 
 while all are gifted with the faculty of rising out of their 
 subjection to the influence of the senses, and believe in some 
 hereafter. Even where the human type is lowest, where it 
 reaches the extreme of degradation, bordering almost on 
 brutality, as, for example, in the natives of Australia^ the 
 philanthropist is, notwithstanding, cheered by frequent glimpses 
 of the same distinctive nature, and enabled to detect at least 
 the groundwork of a desecrated temple. 
 
 And if this general correspondency of mind and heart is 
 tending to establish that all members of the human species 
 constitute but one great family, much more is such connexion 
 vindicated by presentiments which all of them alike evince in 
 favour of the Christian faith. Wherever it has penetrated, the 
 
42 Christ and other Masters. [part i. 
 
 Good Shepherd's voice is heard, and wakes an echo in the 
 consciences of men ; and what in every case attracts them to 
 His fold, is also that which makes them truly conscious of the 
 universal brotherhood subsisting in all nations. With the sole 
 exception of Muhammadanism, — a heresy that drew its dogmas 
 and its very life-blood from Revealed Eeligion, — we shall find 
 that all the systems of the ancient world were limited in their 
 design and local in their range. They were the images of 
 separate nationalities; they issued from within; they repre- 
 sented special modes of thought and harmonised with states of 
 feeling and imagination that prevailed in certain districts : but 
 with Christianity the case was altogether different. It came 
 fresh from God: it rested on a series of objective revelations: 
 it was active and diffusive as the light, and all-embracing as 
 the firmament of heaven : it dealt with man as man, and never 
 faltered in its claim to be regarded as a veritable Svorld- 
 religion.' 
 
 Obstacles it doubtless met with in appealing to the various 
 tribes and nations whom it struggled to convert; yet few if any 
 of these obstacles can fairly be ascribed to idiosyncrasies arising 
 from diversity of race. The Hebrews, among whom the 
 Gospel was indigenous, became ere long its most implacable 
 opponents; and at present, when it is accepted by the bulk of 
 the Germanic nations, other members of the Indo-European 
 family have manifested no peculiar warmth in their appreciation 
 of its ofier. It knows, in truth, of no distinctions in the 
 pedigree of human souls, because it is the one religion, the 
 religion of mankind. Accordingly it reaps in every soil a 
 harvest of conversions. Heralds of the doctrine of the cross 
 had scarcely issued from their lowly birthplace in Judaea, when 
 they found a welcome in the neighbouring states, and even in 
 the capitals of pagan Greece and Rome. They taught both 
 intellectual and imperial masters of the age to bow before the 
 simple majesty of evangelic truth. They civilised the rude but 
 manly nations of the north. They penetrated far into the 
 plains of Central Asia. They discoursed as freely and effect- 
 ively in tents of wandering tribes, as in the schools and 
 temples of the land of Egypt. And though century after 
 century expired, the Gospel shewed no symptom of decay or 
 imbecility; it was adapted, as at first, to the necessities of 
 every climate, to the temperament of every ^race,' and all the 
 varied phases of society. 
 
 Nor at the present day are we without examples of this 
 universal fitness. The families of Western Africa, including 
 
CHAP. II.] Unity of the human Race. 48 
 
 that which some have deemed a separate and originally lower 
 type of man, are daily proved to be convertible, are folded in 
 the Christian Church, and are invested with the Christian 
 character. The warlike tribe of the Zulus in Southern Africa, 
 the crouching Dyaks on the coasts of Borneo, multitudes of 
 South-sea islanders, who form together an assemblage of the 
 greatest physical variations, are all yielding to the same 
 appeals ; while in New Zealand, where but thirty years ago the 
 natives were ferocious cannibals, the scourge of neighbouring 
 islands, and the terror of the British seaman who was driven 
 to their shores, we now behold a population almost as generally 
 Christian as our own. The chiefs and people vie together in 
 their zeal for the advancement of religion, and exhibit all that 
 catalogue of virtues which distinguish the regenerate nature, 
 'love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meek- 
 ness, temperance.' 
 
 But in urging facts like these to prove the radiation of the 
 human family from one common j^oint, we meet with some 
 objections: 
 
 (1) It is said, for instance, that identity of disposition may 
 exist without implying an identity of origin^ Thus in the 
 large group of cats, including the leopard, tiger, lion, and other 
 species, the same general temperament and habits are every- 
 where observable, and yet it is alleged such animals were 
 originally made to constitute distinct varieties. To this it is 
 sulHcient to reply, that man, as we may gather from the 
 faculties of speech and reason, from his moral susceptibilities, 
 his spiritual nature, and his vast capacity of progress, must be 
 treated as a being sui generis; or, at least, that where differences 
 like these exist we are not justified in reasoning so completely 
 to his case from that of the inferior animals. It is not of course 
 denied that with regard to what are called the animal appetencies 
 and aversions of his nature, and even to one class of sensuous 
 habits, such analogy may be adduced with justice, and pursued 
 into its consequences. But in doing this, we must not overlook 
 the fact that all varieties of men are far more intimately 
 related than the class of animals in question. The various 
 species of the feline genus either intermingle very seldom, 
 or evince a strong repugnance to such union. If hybrids 
 be occasionally produced, and if they threaten by their pro- 
 pagation to commence an intermediate or degenerate race of 
 animals, the wayward tendency is soon arrested by their absolute 
 
 ^ This argument is also urged by Professor Agassiz, as above, p. ii8. 
 
44 Christ and oilier Masters. [part i. 
 
 sterility ; and tlius tlie species do not lose their original 
 characteristics. On the other hand, such intermixtures are 
 both possible and permanent among the different families of 
 man. The ^ races ' which are thought to be peculiarly distinct 
 from each other (the ^ Caucasian ' and the negro), are most 
 ordinary examples of this law ; alliances between them issuing 
 in a fruitful progeny, and, what is specially worthy of remark, 
 the nobler type ere long predominating and absorbing the 
 degraded ^ 
 
 (2) It has also been contended that even were we at liberty 
 to assume that the genus homo has only one species, i. e. 
 to assume that no specific variety exists among the different 
 tribes of man, this fact would never justify us in determining 
 the derivation of all mankind from one single pair; for * similar 
 causes,' it is urged, ' operating on two or more points of the 
 globe under similar circumstances would necessarily produce 
 similar results^.' But surely it is far more philosophical to 
 prefer the simpler of two hypotheses, w^here it will adequately 
 explain the various phenomena of any given question ; in other 
 w^ords, it is unworthy of a thoughtful mind to advocate the 
 notion of ' similar causes ' and ' similar circumstances,' when 
 the facts before us do not call for such plurality. The spread 
 of population and the present variations in the human species 
 can be perfectly interpreted without this multiplying of pro- 
 ductive centres. ^ ]!^othing short of necessity,' to quote a 
 modern writer^, whom we shall not readily convict of super- 
 stitious deference to the letter of the Old Testament, ^ should 
 induce us to seek for an autochthony in different parts of 
 the globe, which v/ould break the ties of blood-relationship that 
 bind all men together ; and so far are we from being able to 
 point out any necessity in this case, that all the attainable 
 evidence clearly points in the opposite direction.' 
 
 3. The Physiological Proof, 
 
 The axiom I have just advanced respecting the preference 
 always due to simple hypotheses, will equally apply to this 
 
 ^ Chev. Bunsen, Phil, of Uni- pediments are removed.' 
 
 versal History, ii. io8, where the '-^ This argument, which has be- 
 
 writer adds : * ISlature always tends come very current, is so stated in 
 
 towards perfection, and the image Mr. BlackwelPs edition of Mallet's 
 
 of God, hidden under deviations Northern Antiquities, p. 25. 
 
 from the perfect type, returns, jure ^ Dr. Donaldson, New CratyluSy 
 
 ^ostlimi7iii, as soon as outward im- 2nd ed. p. 100. 
 
CHAP, il] Unity of the 'human Race. 45 
 
 division of the argument The chief authorities for conducting 
 it are Blumenbach and Prichard, whose laborious researches 
 into tho physical history of man will ever be esteemed ^ among 
 the richest contributions to the study of our present subject. 
 They have shewn that animals acknowledged to form one 
 species will, under the adventitious influences of domestication, 
 climate, and the like, divide into a number of subordinate 
 varieties; and thus establish a presumption that at least in 
 respect of all the functions of his animal oeconomy, man will 
 undergo a similar modification. They have shewn that dis« 
 tinctions in the families of men are not so strongly marked, so 
 uniform or permanent as exist in any given tribe of animals. 
 They have shewn that all diversities insensibly pass into each 
 other by graduated shades of difference, and, what is still more 
 remarkable, that hardly any specimen can be adduced in which 
 the actual transition is not capable of historical proof. Ex- 
 amples have been multiplied to shew that with regard to human 
 skeletons and crania in particular, the conformation is substan- 
 tially the same in all types of man ; while deviations from the 
 nobler types all range themselves within comparatively narrow 
 limits, and present so many intermediate forms as to render 
 the transition very gradual from one case to another. Similar 
 results have flowed from investigations into the varieties of 
 human colour and the texture of the human hair, which had 
 been formerly regarded as the most abiding characteristics of a 
 race, and are at present vaunted by the friends of slavery and 
 the adversaries of Kevealed Religion. Colour is now proved to 
 vary in a great degree with the peculiarities of climate ; 
 while ^ woolly' hair is only one extreme gradation in a large 
 scale of varieties, and is no longer to be treated as the necessary 
 concomitant of a black skin and negro features^. 
 
 These statements, however, have not been suffered to pass 
 on without a challenge. Prichard's work is far from popular 
 in some districts of America ; and two zealous writers^ bent as 
 
 ^ See, for instance, Dr. Wise- depth and candour:' as above, 1.48. 
 
 man's Lectures on the Connexion Some additional facts have been 
 
 between Science and Revealed Re- more recently collected in Smyth's 
 
 ligion, Lect. iii, iv. Lond. 1836, Vnity of the Human Races, New 
 
 and Carpenter's Principles of Hu- York, 1 850. 
 
 man Physiology, pp. 55 sq. Lond. ^ Cosmos, i. 352. 
 
 1846. 'Up to the present mo- ^ Both these gentlemen have 
 
 ment,' adds the Chevalier Bunsen, long distinguished themselves by 
 
 in speaking also of Prichard's great the emphasis with which they speak 
 
 work, 'there exists no book which and write on this subject (see 
 
 treats that question with equal Smyth, p. no), but their chief 
 
46 Christ and other Masters. [part i. 
 
 it would seem on proving at all hazards that the negro type of 
 man is radically distinct from others, have been labouring hard 
 for years to undermine the truth of man's original unity by 
 various artifices. While the great majority of thoughtful 
 Germans are at length persuaded that ' the unity of the human 
 Si)ecies is a fact established as firmly as the unity of any other 
 animal speciesV that conclusion is repudiated in the strongest 
 terms by Messrs. Nott and Gliddon. 
 
 (1) One of their objections which they urge in common 
 with Agassiz is, that the analogy between the human and other 
 animated species, requires us to assign to the varieties of men 
 as well as to the different animals an origin according with 
 their present geographical distribution. 
 
 But to this it may be answered, that even if we should 
 allow that different species of animals were all created each 
 within some zoological district of its own — a point which those 
 who make the statement cannot prove^ — it would by no means 
 follow of necessity that men were also first of all located in the 
 regions which they now inhabit. This argument again is 
 guilty of neglecting all the higher properties of man : it deals 
 with him as nothing more than a variety of animal life. 
 Besides, the facts of history are themselves irreconcilable with 
 the supposed analogy. The tribes of men are found to emigrate, 
 and, after some few generations, flourish equally in very 
 difierent climates. For example, the aborigines of the Ameri- 
 can continent itself, comprising tribes of very different grades 
 of civilisation, from the Esquimaux of the polar regions to the 
 Aztecs of Mexico, are now acknowledged, even by the opponents 
 of our theory, to be strictly homogeneous, i.e. scions of one 
 parent stock. Of course, it is conceivable that adaptations do 
 exist and have existed always in the human organisation, fitting 
 this or that variety of man for some peculiar province. It is 
 
 work has not been long before the cent * facts ' supplied as they main- 
 public. Its title is: ^Ethnological tain by geology and palaeontology. 
 Researches, based upon the Ancient especially the discovery of human 
 Monuments, Painting, Sculptures, fossils in the peninsula of Florida, 
 and Crania of Kaces, and upon These they urge are fatal to re- 
 their Natural, Geographical, Phi- ceived ideas respecting the date 
 losophical, and Biblical History, of man's creation. But neither of 
 &c....by J. G. Nott, M.D., and the latter topics falls within the 
 George E. Gliddon, &c. Philadel- scope of the present chapter. See 
 phia, 1854.' A large portion of it an examination of the authors' 
 is devoted to attacks on what is statements in the ^rziis/iQitar^^rZ?/, 
 called the Mosaic chronology. The No. xliii. pp. i sq. 
 authors aiso dwell upon some re- ^ In Bunsen, as above, i. 352. 
 
CHAP. II.] Unity of the human Piace. 47 
 
 also possible that like beneficent arrangements were already in 
 process of formation and development anterior to the date of 
 the earliest emigrations. Such marks of fitness every true 
 philosopher is always ready to examine and appreciate ; but he 
 nevertheless demurs to the assumption that the human species 
 had no power of self-accommodation to diversities of climate, and 
 no buoyancy enabling men to rise almost indefinitely beyond 
 the limits of their primitive condition. 
 
 (2) It is alleged against one of Prichard's main positions, 
 that the principal types of the human species have not been 
 varia,ble, but that, on the contrary, as far as records will enable 
 us to go, the broader characteristics of man's physical organisa- 
 tion have been absolutely fixed and inelastic. 
 
 A favourite illustration of this argument is borrowed from 
 Egyptian excavations, where monuments are said to prove that 
 in the very earliest dawn of history the great distinctions that 
 exist between the negro and the white man are quite as strongly 
 marked as at the present day\ Unfortunately, so long as the 
 enigmas of Egyptian chronology remain unsolved, we have no 
 hope of ascertaining the precise dates of the inscriptions here 
 referred to. Some are placed as early as the older Pharaohs, 
 and one is cited as belonging to a most remote antiquity^. If 
 we are justified in drawing any inference from these remains^, 
 
 ^ See Morton's Crania Egypt- old Egyptians. One was fxeXav- 
 
 iaca, p. 66; Smyth, Unity of the XP^^, another /AeXi'x/^ws. In Smith's 
 
 Human Races, p. 40. Diet, of Gr. and Bom. Geogr., art. 
 
 2 The authority for this state- ^Egyptus (p. 38), it is contended 
 
 ment is a communication made to that, notwithstanding the dark hue 
 
 Mr. Gliddon by Lepsius, in whose of the Egyptians, they *were not 
 
 opinion negroes are mentioned at a negro race, — a supposition con- 
 
 Sakkara by the name of Kesh, on tradicted alike by osteology, and 
 
 monuments of the sixth dynasty, by monumental paintings, where 
 
 B.C. 3000: see Hamilton, The Pen- negroes often appear, but always 
 
 tateuch and its Assailants, ip. I'j']^ either as tributaries or captives 
 
 and 'postscript,' p. 338: Edinb. The Egyptians may be said to be 
 
 1852. intermediate between the Syro- 
 
 ^ Hamilton, as above, p. 315, Arabian and Ethiopic type; and 
 note ; cf . Prichard, 11. 346 sq. ; as at this day the Copt is at once 
 Wiseman, i. 153 sq. See Pri- recognised in Syria by his dark hue, 
 chard, III. 227 sq. : from the evi- the duskier complexion — brown, 
 dence cited it must be concluded with a tinge of red — of the ancient 
 that ' the subjects of the Pharaohs Egyptians may be ascribed solely 
 had something in their physical to their climate, and to those mo- 
 character approximating to that difying causes which, in the course 
 of the negro' (p. 230). Still con- of generations, affect both the os- 
 siderable diversity existed, as to teology and the physiology of long- 
 figure and complexion, among the settled races.' 'Im Grossen und 
 
48 Christ and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 it is in favour of the clear distinctness of the negro and the old 
 Egyptian families at a very early period. Yet no evidence 
 whatever is furnished by this fact against the doctrine of their 
 common origin. How soon the various types of man had been 
 developed, whether variations did not actually exist to some 
 degree among the sons of Noah\ is a question wrapt, and likely 
 to continue wrapt, in utter mystery. Science freely grants that 
 she has no ability to solve it^; and the Christian therefore may 
 repose in his belief that men are really one species, till the 
 scriptural narrative has been discredited by arguments more 
 cogent and conclusive than the advocates of slavery have as yet 
 extracted from Egyptian hieroglyphics. 
 
 4. The Philological Proof. 
 
 By following out his principles of classification, Blumenbach 
 concluded that the human species is divisible into three primary 
 and two secondary varieties (Ca,ucasian, Mongolian, American, 
 Ethiopian, and Malay). Prichard distributed them afresh into 
 seven classes (Iranian, Turanian, American, Hottentots, Ne- 
 groes, Papuas, and Alfourous) ; while others have since raised 
 the number as high as eleven, conceiving that there is no 
 middle ground between this classification and the reduction of 
 them all to one. But as the question was more fully canvassed, 
 thoughtful writers found it quite impossible, even from a 
 physiological point of view, * to recognise in the groups thus 
 formed any true typical distinction, any general and consistent 
 
 Ganzen,' says Knobel (pp. 277, -278), probable that any original difference 
 
 'gehorten die Aegypter zur dunkel- of type in the family of Noah would 
 
 farbigen Abtheilung der Erdbevolk- be very rapidly developed : for, as 
 
 erung. ' Yet he continues, ' Diese An- Dr. Carpenter observes {Principles 
 
 gaben machen jedoch die Aegypter of Human Physiology ^ p. 53, Lond. 
 
 noch nicht zu rabenschwarzen 1846), 'there would be a greater 
 
 und wollhaarigen Negern.' tendency to the perpetuation of 
 
 ^ This supposition may perhaps these varieties, in other words, to 
 
 receive encouragement from the the origination of distinct races, 
 
 fact that two at least of the sons during the earlier ages of the history 
 
 of Noah bear names expressing a of the race, than at the present 
 
 distinctive colour. Thus Ham, oi time, when in fact, by the increasing 
 
 which the root is found alike in admixture of races which have long 
 
 the Semitic (QDn) ^^d the Coptic been isolated, there is a tendency 
 
 (chame), signifies 'hot,' 'sunburnt,' to the fusion of all these varieties, 
 
 * black,' Jajphet (HS^ from HDJ) in and to a return to a common type.' 
 like manner signifies 'beauty/ re- ^ See the language of the great 
 
 ferring more especially to fairness anatomist, Johannes Miiller, m 
 
 of complexion: cf. Knobel, Die Humboldt's (7osmo.s-,i. 352, 353; and 
 
 Volkertafel der Genesis, Giessen, cf. Mr. Parker's admission, above, 
 
 1850, pp. -239, 22, 13. It is further P- 3^) ^- ^' 
 
CHAP. II.] Unity of the human Race. 49 
 
 natural principled' They all were felt to be conventional, 
 vague, and artificial ; tending thus in no small measure to 
 enforce the supposition that all human forms were only modi- 
 fications of a single species. And the same results are flowing 
 from the generalisations of philology. The two inquiries should 
 indeed be kept as independent as possible, because we are not 
 warranted in affirming that the classification of language will 
 ever strictly coincide with the classification of physiology. 
 The variations in the structure of the human frame may not 
 have taken place concurrently with the confusion and disruption 
 of human language ; and, therefore, we are unable to predict 
 that all who carried with them kindred elements of speech 
 would be distinguished by the same varieties of physical 
 organisation. Still the labours of philology, by disentangling 
 the perplexities in which the subject is involved, all point us 
 to a few grand sources, out of which the various languages of 
 man may have originally welled. 
 
 According to Bopp's arrangement^, which he based on 
 purely philological considerations, the division ought to be 
 tripartite : (1) Languages with monosyllabic roots, but inca- 
 pable of composition, and therefore without grammar or 
 organisation ; (2) Languages with monosyllabic roots which are 
 susceptible of composition, and in which the grammar and 
 organisation depend entirely on this; (3) Languages which 
 consist of dissyllabic verbal roots, and require three consonants 
 in the vehicles of their fundamental signification. The second 
 and third of these classes are known to scholars as the Aryan, 
 or Indo-European, and the Aramaic, or Semitic. From the 
 circumstance that persons speaking these languages have always 
 occupied a high position in the history of mankind, our know- 
 ledge of them is considerable, and nearly all their properties 
 are fully analysed in works of modern scholars. 
 
 Such, however, cannot be affirmed of members of the group 
 which Bopp arranges first in his classification. That group is 
 meant to comprehend all other languages of man, — those, 
 namely, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, which are not included in 
 the second and third groups, together with the various abo- 
 riginal dialects of America. As a first approximation to more 
 systematic treatment, Mr. Max Miiller^ has proposed to form a 
 
 ^ CosmoSf I. 353. specting the Non-Irdinian andNon- 
 
 2 See Comparative Grammar^ i. Semitic Languages of Asia or Eu- 
 
 102, 103; Lond. 1856. rope,' in Bunsen, as above, i. 263 
 
 •^ See his able report on the — 486. 
 
 *Last results of the Besearches re- 
 
 H. 4 
 
50 Christ and other Masters. [part I* 
 
 separate class, which he entitles the Turanian, making it to 
 comprehend all European, Asiatic, and Polynesian languages, 
 that do not harmonise either with the Aryan or Semitic type. 
 Of this Turanian group the principal branches are Tungusic, 
 Mongolic, Turkic, and Finnic in the north, Taic, Malai'c, Bho- 
 tiya, and Tamilic in the south; it being confessed, however, 
 that they cannot offer such distinctive traits of family-likeness, 
 as we find among the members of the other groups. They are 
 rather like so many ^ radii diverging from a common centre,' 
 than 'children of a common parent^' 
 
 But supposing such affinities to be established, supposing 
 that we are not under the necessity of admitting different 
 independent beginnings in structure and lexicography for the 
 elements of the Turanian, as we certainly are not for those 
 of the Semitic and Aryan branches, what is to be said of the 
 sporadic languages in Africa and America, which have not 
 hitherto been definitely placed in any of these groups ? Are 
 they spontaneous products of the several regions where they 
 flourish ? or are they really connected with the languages of 
 Europe and Asia, though the links of union be now losf? The 
 latter supposition is not only more probable on ethnological 
 and traditional grounds, but has received distinct corroboration 
 from researches of the present day^ The native languages of 
 North- America, it is stated, are not only uniform in their 
 grammatical type, as had been long acknowledged, but exhibit 
 many clear analogies to the Turanian forms of Northern Asia; 
 thus according with a supposition, which is rendered probable 
 on other grounds, that the elements of American population 
 were all transported from that quarter. Many interesting 
 results have also been obtained from recent investigations into 
 the languages of Africa^, the general tendency of which suggests 
 
 1 Mr. Max Muller's *Last Re- in this work), enable me to say, 
 
 suits of the Researches, &c.,' as that the Asiatic origin of all these 
 
 before, i. 478. tribes is as fully proved as the 
 
 ^ The Government of the United unity of family among themselves : ' 
 
 States are now printing, under the as before, 11. 112. 
 
 editorship of Mr. Schoolcraft, a ^ Bunsen, 11. 115 sq. The same 
 
 series of volumes containing His- writer draws attention (p. 114) to 
 
 torical and Statistical Information the fact established by William 
 
 respecting the History, Condition, von Humboldt that most of the 
 
 and Prospects of the Indian Tribes. Polynesian languages are connected 
 
 According to the report of the Che- with the Malay, i. e. are capable of 
 
 valier Bunsen *the Hnguistic data being classed with the Turanian 
 
 before us, combined with the tra- group. But whether the remark 
 
 ditions and customs, and particu- can be extended to the Papua lan- 
 
 larly with the system of pictorial guages spoken in Australia, New 
 
 or mnemonic writing (first revealed Guinea, &c., is not yet ascertained. 
 
CHAP. II.] Unity of the human Race, 51 
 
 the grouping of them with Semitic and Turanian idioms, and 
 connects the spread of population over that continent, partly 
 with the northern states that border on Abyssinia, and partly 
 with the southern tribes in which the Kafir dialects prevail. 
 
 The arduous question now remaining for philologers is this • 
 to ascertain if, when the individual languages have been ar- 
 ranged in groups, the groups themselves be also capable of 
 reduction under one primordial group ; or rather to establish, if 
 not the absolute confluence of all languages to one common 
 source, at least the possibility of their original divergence from 
 one common center. Those of which we are best able to affirm 
 the nature and affinities all indicate the table-land of Upper 
 Asia^ as the birthplace of the civilisation they were instru- 
 mental in communicating to other districts. Starting therefore 
 from this point we may perhaps divine the general course of 
 man's migrations into Europe and Asia, and the nature of the 
 process by which tribes were gradually separated from each 
 other in the various provinces of the earth. The earliest 
 emigrants may have proceeded eastward into China, since the 
 language of that country is least of all organic in its structure 
 and the least developed of Turanian tongues. But as like 
 impulses were constantly at work, new colonies would be con- 
 tinually projected till a layer of population had been actually 
 expanded over many parts of Europe and Asia^. It is also 
 
 1 I would here draw attention work Die Volkertafel der Genesis, 
 
 to the confidence with which Sir cited above, for although he favours 
 
 William Jones pronounces on this what is called the document-hy- 
 
 Fubject. After expressing his be- pothesis, professing to ascribe the 
 
 lief in the more than human origin loth chapter of Genesis to the 
 
 of the Mosaic narrative, he adds: older (or 'Elohistic') hand, he is 
 
 *It is no longer probable only, but no less persuaded of its vast im- 
 
 it is absolutely certain, that the portance in all questions of ethno- 
 
 whole race of man proceeded from graphy. 'Die Stammvater' (he 
 
 Iran, as from a centre, whence they writes, p. 9) ' sind mythische Per- 
 
 migrated at first in three great sonen, wahrend die von ihnen 
 
 colonies; and that those three abgeleiteten Volker geschichtlich 
 
 branches grew from a common sind.' 
 
 stock which had been miraculously '^ Eawlinson, Early Hist, of Ba* 
 
 preserved in a general convulsion by Ionia (Journal of the Koyal As. 
 
 andinundation of this globe:' WorkSj Soc. xv. 232), has recently made 
 
 I. 137, Lond. 1799. Cf. A. Fr, the following suggestions with re- 
 
 Gfrorer, Urgeschichte des mensch- spect to the course of the Scythic 
 
 lichen Geschlechts, Schaffhausen, (Hamitio or Turanian) races: — 
 
 1 855> ^*ho also recognises the truth- * Leaving it, therefore, still a matter 
 
 fulness of the Hebrew narrative of speculation whether the pre- 
 
 respecting the dispersion of the historic period may be m,ore cor- 
 
 human family. The same may rectly estimated at two thousand 
 
 be afiirmed of Knobel's learned or four thousand years ; I will only 
 
 4—2 
 
o2 Christ and other AI asters. [i»art t. 
 
 easy to conjecture how tlie isolation of each tribe, and other 
 disuniting agencies, promoted the rapid growth of different 
 dialects, and how the progress of confusion would be expedited 
 by the introduction of secondary formations, tending to obscure 
 the old affinities and hide the verbal roots which all may have 
 imported from the mother-country. But many of the early 
 settlers appear to have been subsequently overflowed, pushed 
 forward, or exterminated by fresh waves of population, issuing 
 from the districts where the Aryan and Semitic idioms had 
 been planted ; since the former of these grew predominant in 
 the north of India, and in nearly all the European continent, 
 while the latter flourished far and wide in western Asia, and 
 diffused itself, as some conjecture, under certain modifications, 
 into Egypt and the north of Africa. Such, I say, was probably 
 the course and order of these primitive migrations ; yet, even 
 had we evidence to justify us in pronouncing definitely on the 
 subject, it would never by itself explain the vast varieties of 
 human speech. Three families of man, or rather three original 
 groups, in which the several members of each group possessed 
 the means of ijitercommunication in the same mother-tongue, 
 may have been either simultaneously, or in succession, parted 
 from each other, and propelled across the continents and islands 
 of the globe ; but how these groups themselves originated is a 
 more recondite question. In truth, as physiology, though it 
 establish the identity of the human species, can of itself deter- 
 mine nothing as to the precise condition and the actual birth- 
 2^1 ace of the aborigines, so are the oracles of philology all silent 
 touching what occurred before the founding of the primitive 
 types of human speech. The question, therefore, in so far as 
 these two sciences extend, is left enveloped in uncertainty. 
 
 remark, that it must have been ritania, Sicily, and Iberia; from 
 
 during this interval that nation- the other, to the southern coasts 
 
 alities were first estabhshed ; and of Greece and Italy. They further, 
 
 that the aboriginal Scyths or Ham- probably, occupied the whole area 
 
 ites appear to have been the prin- of modern Persia, and thence pro- 
 
 cipal movers in the great work of ceeding to the north by Chalcis and 
 
 social organisation. They would the Caucasus, they penetrated to 
 
 seem, indeed, simultaneously or the extreme northern point of the 
 
 progressively to have passed in one European and Asiatic continents.* 
 
 direction by southern Persia into He adds that 'independently of all 
 
 India; in another, through south- reference to the Scriptural record, 
 
 ern Arabia to Ethiopia, Egj^pt, and we should still be able to fix on the 
 
 Nmnidia. They must have spread plains of Shinar, as the focus from 
 
 themselves at the same time over which the various lines had ra- 
 
 Syria and Asia Minor, sending out diated.' 
 colonies from one coimtry to Mau- 
 
CHAP. II.] Unity of the human Race, 53 
 
 Among our English scholars, for example, there are many, who 
 although persuaded that the principles Avhich led to the forma- 
 tion of Indo-European and Semitic families are incontrovertible, 
 despair of bridging over the great gulf that lies between them, 
 so as to establish their correspondence either in organisation, in 
 grammatical structure, or in vocabulary; and when it is further 
 urged that both these families may be scientifically connected 
 with the more sporadic forms of language which we call 'Tura- 
 nian,' such philologers declaim against the gross injustice of the 
 torture, and deny that the generic unity of man is demonstrable 
 by this process. Others, on the contrary, are no less confident 
 that the identification will be ultimately established. As the 
 science of philology advances, they predict that more and more 
 traces of family-likeness will be generally recognised; that 
 radicals, which, under various changes and disguises, have 
 survived in all these different groups of language ever since the 
 first migrations, will be more and more readily detected ; and 
 that, while it is most unphilosophical to derive any one of 
 these groups from the other, they will all at last be proved to 
 have been emanations from some great primordial tongue, the 
 leading elements of which were either broken in the lapse of 
 time, or buried in some vast catastrophe. 
 
 Now, whatever be the issue of those learned labours, and 
 whatever be the fate of these dissuasives on the one hand, or 
 these confident predictions on the other, they give rise to a 
 reflection of the utmost value to all Christians. The veracity 
 of Holy Scripture, far from being weakened by them, is con- 
 siderably enhanced. The book of Genesis aflford-cd by anticipa- 
 tion the best medium for explaining such linguistic phenomena. 
 It tells us that there was in early times a great divulsion in 
 the elements of human language, that whereas the whole earth 
 was formerly 'of one lip' (Gen. xi. 1), the unity of speech was 
 broken on the plain of Shinar, and the human family dispersed 
 from thence 'upon the face of all the earth.' And as the 
 sacred narrative does not specify the nature nor degree of this 
 ' confusion,' it is equally reconcil cable with either of the current 
 theories of philology : it will hold its ground unshaken, whether 
 we are led eventually to the hypothesis that the primitive 
 language is entirely lost, or whether portions of the tangled 
 threads survive in various languages, thus serving to connect 
 us with the earliest fathers of mankind. 
 
 What then is the general inference to be gathered from this 
 chapter in elucidation of our main inquiry 1 We may sum it 
 
54 Chmst and other Masters. [part i. 
 
 up as follows : — Man is a religious being. The ideas of God, 
 of sacrifice, of prayer, have been inwoven with his spiritual 
 constitution, and have, therefore, always struggled for expres- 
 sion in his personal and social life. Approach him where you 
 will, in England, in the tropics, or at the antipodes, and he 
 exhibits this unfailing proof of his humanity, especially in all 
 the sober moments, when he communes most profoundly with 
 himself, in trouble, sorrow and perplexity, in solitude, in sick- 
 ness, or when verging close upon the grave. Exactly, therefore, 
 in proportion as we have established the unity of his origin, 
 we have established also a presumption that the various families 
 of man inherited from age to age a stock of sacred knowledge, 
 and conveyed it with them in their wanderings from the cradle 
 of the human race. 
 
 But it is obvious that in beings ever liable to fall, and ever 
 prone to substitute their speculations for the holy will of God, 
 this great substratum of religion might in course of time be 
 overgrown and buried ; just as primitive forms of speech would 
 disappear beneath a crop of secondary formations. The effect 
 of individual character, of isolation, of climate, the phenomena 
 of nature, and a host of adventitious agencies, would soon be 
 visible in the altered aspects of traditions ; while a correspond- 
 ing modification of the forms of social life would gradually 
 affect the tone and sensibility of the human spirit. Where the 
 tribe, or people, sank in moral culture, the idea of God would 
 also be enfeebled and debased^ The worshipper whose heart 
 was shrinking from the presence of the High and Holy One, 
 would speedily betake himself to more congenial objects. He 
 would look no higher than the earth, and finding, as he grew 
 more selfish and irreverent, that some powers of nature with 
 which he stood connected were antagonistic to him, and opposed 
 the gratification of his wishes, he would chiefly strive to over- 
 come them, or would struggle to disarm theii* vengeance, by re- 
 
 ^ The following confession of 'hoch?,ieny^e^Qn^ausgegangensind; 
 
 A. W. von Schlegel is the more dass die magische Gewalt der Natur 
 
 remarkable, because its author was iiber die Einbildungskraft des da- 
 
 entirely influenced by the force of maligen Menschengeschlechts erst 
 
 historical truth, and not by theo- spater die Vielgotterei hervorrief, 
 
 logical prepossessions. Here at und endlich in dem Volksglauben 
 
 length he was of one accord with die geistigen EeligionsbegrifEe ganz 
 
 his distinguished brother. 'Jemehr verdunkelte, wahrend die Weisen 
 
 ich in der alten Weltgeschichte allein im HeiUgthume das uralte 
 
 forsche, um so mehr iiberzeuge ich Geheimniss bewahrten.' Vorrede 
 
 mich, dass die gesitteten Volker to the German translation of Pri- 
 
 Yon einer reinern Verehrung des ch&id^s Egyptian Mythology, "p.xyi. 
 
CHAP. II.] Unity of the human Race, 53 
 
 sorting to a multitude of exorcisms and other like devices. All 
 his worship would eventually be nature-worship ; all his prayers 
 would take the abject form of deprecation. Or in different 
 regions, where external nature was more joyous and propitious, 
 and where man himself, by the development of his reflective 
 and imaginative faculties, had gained a higher measure of 
 intelligence ; the creed of paganism would also be considerably 
 idealised, it would become more sentimental and poetic. Ite 
 mythes would be far loftier in conception, and would all be cast 
 in gentler moulds. The pagan worshipper might still, indeed, 
 address his homage to the good or evil energies of nature, but 
 no longer to a formless power or an impersonal divineness : he 
 would fashion for himself a group of new divinities, to whom 
 he could attribute human shapes and human properties ; and 
 thus the highest effort of this class of heathen was to bring 
 about the deification of humanity. 
 
 But as in every case the drapery of imagination with which 
 they clothed their gods was the spontaneous product of their own 
 locality, the cycle of religious mythes would be indefinitely 
 enlarged. Each town and village would give birth to fresh 
 divinities, until at length it grew almost impossible in any 
 part of heathendom to recognise the purer doctrine of the 
 earliest ages, to distinguish even broken echoes of the first 
 traditions, or to disentangle the few elements of primitive truth 
 from an interminable mass of aftergrowths, which had corrupted 
 and concealed it. So hopeless seemed the task of restoration, 
 so remote from men's perceptions the idea of one all-ruling, all- 
 embracing God, that, in the fourth century of the present era, 
 when Julian and his pagan followers laboured to disparage 
 Christianity, on the ground that it was far too modern and ex- 
 clusive, they were driven to avow that a plurality of religions 
 is inevitable, nay, is actually demanded by the diverse forms of 
 human thought, and by the multiplicity of * human races^' 
 And the same convictions still prevail, as we have seen, in 
 England and elsewhere among the heralds of the Absolute 
 Religion. 
 
 Yet, in spite of every wayward tendency of human nature, 
 
 ^ Cf. Neander, Ch. Hist, iii. 135 \d^ac ovre a\Xw$ ttju yyjv v(f) hbs 
 
 sq. After some general remarks i/jLTrXTjffdiipai irda-av .... Uavraxov 
 
 on the question of man's origin, 5^ ddpdws, vevffdvrwv dewf, ovirep 
 
 Julian himself proceeds as follows : rpbirov 6 eZs, ovru d^ Kal ol irXeiovs 
 
 *FjVTavda dk apK^crei toctovtov eirreiv^ TrporfkBov avOpwiroiy rots yepedp- 
 
 (is i^ €pbs fxkv Kal jULids ovctlv, oore X^'^ dcois dtroKXrjpbjd^VTcs, 
 
 Toifs vbjxovs eUbs iirl roaovrov irapiik- Ojpp, ed, Spanheim, i, 292. 
 
56 Christ and other Masters. [part i. 
 
 disuniting men from God, and substituting for the steadier light 
 of old traditions, the capricious glimmerings of their own imagi- 
 nation ; there was ever on the earth one ark of refuge, and one 
 beacon planted on a hill. The Church of God, the keeper and 
 the witness of the true religion, rested on a sure and stable 
 basis, so that while the heathen were abandoned to themselves 
 to test the systems of their own devising, and were ^ given over 
 to a reprobate mind ;' its inmates had continual access to the 
 oracles of God, — the children of Israel had light in their dwell- 
 ings. There, in what is verily the moral center of the worlds 
 midway between the principal seats of ancient civilisation, God 
 exemplified upon a single people^ the restoring and exalting 
 process, under which humanity at large, when ready for the 
 great experiment, should be cured of all its guilty wanderings 
 and infatuations, and made one again in Christ. 
 
 ^ a. Theodioretf De Providentiaf rd edvt], rd ttjv avrrjv ^x^^"*"^ 
 Orat. X.: Opj^. iv. 454, Paris, 1642 : (pvcnp, els ttju ttjs eva-e^eias Koivwviav 
 OuTOJ St' hos edvovs tov 'laparjX iravTU €/cdX?t. 
 
CHAPTER HI. 
 
 On the Characteristics of Religion under the 
 Old Testament 
 
 Ov^k ydp did ^lovdaiovs [ibvovs 6 vofxos tjv, ovbk dc avrovs fidvovs ol TrpocprJTai 
 cirefXTTOPTO, dXkd vpos 'lovdaiovs jxev eTri/JLirovTo, /cat irapd 'lovdaiwv idicoKovro' 
 irdaris de rrjs oIkov/jl€V7)$ T}(rav StdaffKaXiov lepov ryjs irepl Qeov yvucrecoSi Kal rijs 
 /card ypvxv^ TroXtretas. S. Athanasius, contra Gentes, cap. xii. (p. 57, ed. 
 Benedict.). 
 
 The non-finality of Hehraism. Progressive character of the old ceconomy. 
 Importance of just ideas respecting God. The Hebrew doctrine of God : 
 its peculiar sublimity. How illustrated by the Exodus: and in the 
 Book of Psalms. This doctrine essentially moral. Example drawn 
 from Solomon's prayer. Contrast between the Hebrew and the Phmni- 
 cian theology. Phoenician divinities. Hebrew doctrine of man. Cha- 
 racter of sin. The malignity of sin especially asserted. Effects of this 
 training. Objections to the ritual branches of the Law. Peculiar tem- 
 perament and position of the Hebrews. Symbolic mode of teaching. 
 Distinction between types and symbols. General principles inculcated 
 by the sacrificial system. Example. Different classes of transgressions. 
 Operation and effects of the Levitical offerings. Suggestive features of 
 the sanctuary. Belation of the Law to the Gospel. The Protevan- 
 gelium. The call of Abraham. Indefinite form of the early Promise, 
 Objections to the received views of prophecy. Germinant accomplish- 
 ments of prophecy . State of feeling on these subjects among the Jews. 
 Admissions of modern sceptics. The scriptural account of prophecy : its 
 reality and objectivity. Assailants of this view. Hebrew prophecy as 
 based on history ^ and intertwined with it. Particular instances. Pro- 
 phecy in the age of David. The Messiah was to be a King : of super- 
 human dignity ; and also a Priest. Doctrine of a suffering Messiah. 
 Prophecy in the age of the Captivity, The new Kingdom. The new 
 Covenant, 
 
 Having now in some measure cleared a way to our investiga- 
 tion, first, by pointing out the special tendencies of modern 
 disbelief, and secondly, by undermining one of tbe more 
 plausible positions which its advocates have sought to occupy, I 
 shall proceed to ascertain the leading traits by which Revealed 
 Religion was distinguishable in all the earlier stages of its 
 progress. For since Christianity professes to reach backward 
 
58 . Christ and other Masters, [part t. 
 
 into periods long anterior to the human lifetime of its Founder; 
 since it claims to be most vitally connected with the Old- 
 Testament ceconomy, and since the roots from which it sprang 
 are there ; we see not only the importance, but necessity, of ana- 
 lysing the ideas embodied in the Hebrew institutions, of reverting 
 to the solemn ordinances of the Law, and studying the oracular 
 voices of the Prophets. 
 
 We shall thus be able to compare the aspects of religious 
 thought and feeling as displayed in members of the sacred 
 commonwealth with contemporary systems of the heathen world. 
 If Hebraism resemble these in such a manner as to justify the 
 inference that it was derived from any or from all of them, then 
 Christianity, in turn, professing to have grown directly out of 
 it, is ultimately resolvable into heathen elements. Or, if again 
 the principles alike of Heathenism and Hebraism be nothing more 
 than natural projections of religious instincts, mere expedients 
 of the human understanding to escape from what is felt to be a 
 burden and a paradox, then Christianity may also be subjective 
 in its origin, — a fresh development of that which, having issued 
 from the human breast in ruder times, was afterwards re- 
 modelled in accordance with the riper judgments of humanity 
 in the Augustan period. 
 
 Now the two great principles of Hebraism, the poles, one 
 might affirm, on which the system absolutely turned, were 
 (1) the Law, and (2) the Promise ; that designed to keep alive 
 the elementary idea of God, and superintend the education of 
 the human spirit during the comparative infancy of the race ; 
 while this was occupied in opening out a brighter and more 
 blissful future, where the limits of the Church of God would be 
 indefinitely widened, and the happiness of all its members 
 inexpressibly enhanced. 
 
 For that Hebraism was never meant to be an ultimate 
 stage in the unfolding of the true religion, is apparent from 
 confessions and arrangements of its own sacred books. They 
 frequently proclaim its non-finality^ The prophets, keeping 
 
 ^ If no other text existed, Jerem. institute: *When God, who is 
 
 xxxi. 3 1 sq. as compared with Heb. highly to be extolled, gave the Law, 
 
 viii. would be sufficient to establish He knew that this form of education 
 
 this position. On the attempts of was sufficient for a certain period, 
 
 Jewish writers to evade the force which His wisdom had fixed, that 
 
 of it, see Schottgen's Horce He- it was sufficient to prepare those 
 
 hraiccBf i. 969, Dresdae, 1733. Yet who received it, and inchne their 
 
 one at least of the later Babbis minds to receive the second form, 
 
 (Albo) distinctly recognises the although God has revealed this to 
 
 temporary character of the Mosaic no man ; but when the time shall 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, &c, 59 
 
 pace with the spiritual development of the nation, cany on 
 men's thoughts beyond a merely ritual service, and lay gr^atsr 
 stress on the obedience of the heart; and in the age of the 
 Captivity, when the observance of the Law was made to some 
 degree impossible, ^ a new covenant' is placed in actual contrat t 
 with the old, and dignity assigned to it which is denied to the 
 preceding. Yet the kernel of that ancient system, — the pro- 
 found relations it exhibited between Jehovah and His people, 
 the principles that underlay its sacrifices and that breathed 
 through all its symbols, — was imperishable. The Law was not 
 to sink without the prospect of some glorious sublimation ; it 
 did not expire without transfusing its own life into the heart of 
 a successor. Christianity is the legitimate offspring of the elder 
 dispensation, because, according even fco De Wette, the Old 
 Testament ^ is a great prophecy, a great type of Him who was 
 to come and has come^ ; ' because the Law in all its breadth and 
 depth is tributary to the Gospel, and because the Saviour came 
 not to destroy, but to transfigure and complete. 
 
 This thought, however, of substantial identity between the 
 old and new ceconomies, has frequently been misconceived, or 
 overstated, in the popular teaching of divines. Persuaded that 
 the Church of God was not without her * Acts and Monuments 
 before Christ incarnate V zealous above all things to maintain 
 the unity and fixity of truth, and to announce those glorious 
 principles that give coherence to the history of redemption, 
 they have seemed to speak of the Old Testament as though it 
 were an absolute and perfect revelation, and have therefore 
 laboured to evolve from it the special doctrines of the GospeF. 
 
 come, God will reveal that second period when there was a strong 
 
 form to men : ' quoted in Tholuck, tendency to Judaize, and reduce 
 
 On the Ep. to the Hebrews, i. 294. the Gospel into a kind of 'New 
 
 ^ See Bahr, Symbolik des Mo- Law.' Thus we find a writer of 
 
 saischen Cultus, i. 16, note, Held- the 12th centurj expressing him- 
 
 elberg, 1837. *Das Christenthum,' self as follows: 'Primus gradus est 
 
 writes Wuttke [Gesch. des Heiden- cognitionis fidei quo nihil minus 
 
 thums, I. 18, Breslau, 1852), *im unquam fides habere potuit: credere 
 
 weltgeschichtlichen Sinne beginnt videlicet Deum esse et eum Salva- 
 
 nicht erst mit dem Auftreten Jesu torem et Kemuneratorem expectare. 
 
 Christi, sondern Christus ist der Usee cognitio fidei simpHcibus ante 
 
 Mittelpunkt des Ghn.8tenth.um.3,nnd incarnationem Verbi ad salutem 
 
 mit ihm bricht die schon lange vor- sufficere potuit, videlicet ut et Beimi 
 
 handene Knospe zur vollen Bliithe crederent et Salvatorem expec- 
 
 auf .' tarent : quamvis ej usdem salvationis 
 
 2 The title of Bp. Montague's suae modum et tempus non cog- 
 work, published in 1642. noscerent. Duo enim in homine 
 
 ^ The true distinction was, how- tantum sunt, natura et culpa : et 
 
 ever, clearly seen even during the Creator ad naturam refertur, Sa.1- 
 
60 Christ and other Masters, [part I. 
 
 They consult it with the eyes of Christians rather than of He- 
 brews, and neglecting to shade off the full illumination which our 
 Lord and the apostles turned upon it, feel themselves at liberty 
 to urge that what is now made clear to us, must have been also 
 luminous from the beginning. And a like forgetfulness to vary 
 the point of view from which we contemplate the records of the 
 Elder Church, has often issued in a disregard of those great laws 
 of sequence and progression that characterise its general history. 
 God, who in the Son spake once and absolutely, had communi- 
 cated only parcels of the truth" (TroXv/xepoj?), and these at various 
 seasons, by the ministry of the prophets (Heb. i. 1). His 
 communications then, as ever, were adapted to the exigencies of 
 the age, and were proportioned to the receptivity of the people. 
 For in the training of the sacred corporation, as in that of 
 individuals under discipline, there was a gradual exercise and 
 evolution of the spiritual powers of man, — a growth from the 
 half-consciousness of childhood to the larger views, the deeper 
 reasonings, the accumulated wisdom of maturity; and, therefore, 
 it is easy to observe how, corresponding with this growth in the 
 capacity of the subject, the illumination granted from on high 
 had also passed through different stages in a measurable pro- 
 gress. Clearer insight into some of the great mysteries of the 
 Cross was only the reward of patient waiting, or the fruit of 
 
 vator ad culpam. Sub lege autem creator credebatur, et ab eo salus 
 
 scripta crevit cognitio, quando jam et redemptio expectabatur ; per 
 
 de persona Redemptoris manifeste quern vero et quomodo eadem salus 
 
 agi coepit, et Salvator per legem implenda et perficienda foret, ex- 
 
 promitti, et post promissionem ceptis paucis quibus hoc scire sin- 
 
 expectari. Sub gratia autem adhuc gulariter in munere datum erat, 
 
 amplius excrevit cognitio, cum ipse a caeteris etiam fidelibus non cog* 
 
 jam Salvator, non ut prius a multis noscebatur. Sub lege autem per- 
 
 putabatur solum homo, sed et Deus sona Redemptoris mittenda prse- 
 
 verus manifestatus est. Et ipse dicebatur, et ventura expectabatur. 
 
 redemptionis modus non in terrenae Qu£e autem ipsa persona haec foret 
 
 culmine potestatis, sed in morte homo an angelus, an Deus, nondum 
 
 probatus est constare Salvatoris.' manifestabatur. Soli hoc cognove^ 
 
 H. de S. Victore, Erudit. Theolog, runt, qui per Spiritum singulariter 
 
 ex Miscellan. Lib. i. Tit. xviii. 0pp. ad hoc illuminati fuerunt. Sub 
 
 III. 73. Mogunt. 161 7. gi-atia autem manifeste omnibus, 
 
 The same writer (De 5'acrammifs, jam et praedicatur et creditur, et 
 
 Lib. I. pars x. c. vi. ) discusses the modus redemptionis et qualitas 
 
 question, * an secundum mutationes personas Redemptoris.' And simi- 
 
 temporum mutata sit fides' {0pp. lar principles were inculcated on 
 
 III. 412 sq.), and concludes in the the English nuns at the beginning 
 
 following passage: — 'Crevit itaque of the next century: *Nime^ god 
 
 per tempora fides in omnibus, ut ^eme, mine leoue sustren, uor hwi 
 
 major esset, sed mutata non est, me ouh Him to luuien. Erest, ase 
 
 ut aha esset. Ante legem, Deus a mon ]?et wowe^ — ase a King 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, etc. 61 
 
 tedious and (as many deem) circuitous probation^ ; while of 
 other truths that constitute the household words of Christianitj, 
 the prophet and the saint alike were ignorant ; they were left 
 to * inquire and search diligently' (1 Pet. i. 10), until the Peda- 
 gogue was superseded by the heavenly Teacher^, and Hhe 
 fulness of the times' had come. 
 
 With this conviction clearly present to the mind, I now 
 purpose to examine the character of the Law, and some of the 
 peculiar functions it was destined to perform in the continuous 
 training of the Hebrews; not of course excluding from our 
 survey what is termed the patriarchal dispensation, since in all 
 its leading characteristics (those of prayer and sacrifice, for 
 instance) it is one with the Mosaic system. 
 
 )?et luuede one lefdi of feorrene 
 londe, and sende hire His soudes- 
 men biforen, j^et weren J^e patri- 
 arkes and )7e prophetes of )?e Olde 
 Testament, mid lettres isealed. A 
 last He com Him suluen, and 
 brouhte ]?et gospel ase lettres io- 
 pened, and wrot mid His owune 
 blode saluz to His leofmon.' An- 
 cren Biwle (ed. Camden Soc. 1853), 
 p. 388. 
 
 1 The objection based upon the 
 length of interval that elapsed be- 
 tween the fall of man and his re- 
 demption, is as old as Celsus and 
 Porphyry. Leo the Great repels 
 it in the following passage, radiant 
 with the light of true philosophy : 
 *Cessent igitur illorum querelae, 
 qui impio murmur e divinis dispen- 
 sationibus obloquentes, de Domi- 
 nicae nativitatis tarditate causan- 
 tur, tanquam praeteritis tempori- 
 bus non sit impensum, quod in 
 ultima mundi astate est gestum. 
 Yerbi incarnatio hsec contulit fa- 
 cienda (?), quae facta (?) et sacra- 
 mentum salutis humanae in nulla 
 unquam antiquitate cessavit. Quod 
 praedicaverunt apostoli, hoc annun- 
 ciaverunt prophetae; nee sero est 
 impletum, quod semper est credi- 
 turn. Sapientia vero et benignitas 
 Dei hoc saliitiferi operis mora capa- 
 ciores nos suce vocationis effecit; ut 
 quod multis signis, multis vocibus, 
 
 multisque mysteriis per tot fuerat 
 secula prEenunciatum, in his diebus 
 Evangelii non esset ambiguum ; et 
 nativitas, quae omnia miracula, om- 
 nemque intelligenti* erat excessura 
 mensuram, tanto constantiorem in 
 nobis gigneret fidem, quanto prae- 
 dicatio ejus et antiquior praecessisset 
 et crebrior. Non itaque novo con- 
 silio Deus rebus humanis, nee sera 
 miseratione consuluit; sed a con- 
 stitutione unam eandemque om- 
 nibus causam salutis instituit. 
 Gratia autem Dei, qua semper est 
 universitas justificata sanctorum, 
 aucta est Christo nascente non 
 coRpta.^ Sermo in. de Nativitate: 
 Ojjp. p. 16, col. I, B, Paris, 1639. 
 
 2 Gal. iii. 24. This metaphor 
 of St. Paul is most expressive, 
 pointing out the true relation of 
 the Law to the Gospel, and vin- 
 dicating its claim to be regarded 
 as an agent (though but elemen- 
 tary and subordinate) in the moral 
 education of the Church. St. 
 Chrysostom [in loc.) expands the 
 same idea with great clearness: — 
 '0 de Traidayuyos ovk ivavriovrai 
 T(^ 5i5acr/caX6j, dXXa koI (rufMirpdrTei^ 
 Trd(T7)s KCLKias aTraXXarrwi' rbv viov^ 
 Kal fxerd Trdarjs crxoXijs rd fxad^/JLara 
 Trapd Tov didacTKdXov Se'xeo-^at irapa- 
 (JKevd^oiV dXX* 6Tav h ?^et yevrjTatf 
 d<pl<rTaTaL Xolttop 6 iraidaycayos. 
 
62 Christ and oilier Masters. [part I. 
 
 § 1. The Law, 
 
 The moral force and grandeur of religions are in every case 
 to be determined by the worthiness of their ideas of God, His 
 nature and His attributes. It has been frequently remarked, 
 that, -as man is, so is the divinity he worships;' but the 
 converse is more rigorously correct : what God is, such His 
 worshipper becomes. If the sacred institutes of any people 
 manifest a disposition to obscure the unity of God, to tamper 
 with His holiness, to waver in their statements touching His 
 essential independence of the properties of matter or of man, 
 that system has been incapacitated in the same proportion for 
 directing and exalting the religious life of the community. If 
 God be represented as no more than the stupendous aggregate 
 of all created spirits ; if divinity be ascribed to nature as a 
 whole, to this or that energy of nature, and to this or that ideal 
 representative of men, no standing-ground is left for urging the 
 intrinsic excellence of virtue : faith, love, justice, purity, and 
 liberty itself, have no intelligible basis ; they become the mere 
 subjective forms of human sentiment and the conventionalities 
 of human law. Or if again, while the Creator is not actually 
 confounded with the laws and operations of the universe, Hi^ 
 power be notwithstanding liable to any species of constraint or 
 limitation ; if He be thwarted by some other substance, fate, or 
 time, or matter, or chaos, or evil, it must also follow that the 
 moral consciousness of the worshipper is wounded and dis- 
 tracted ; he abandons the resistance he was offering to the 
 downward tendencies of his nature ; he drifts away to the con- 
 clusion, either that sin is absolutely inevitable, or that right- 
 eousness is for the present banished from the earth. 
 
 1. Now all the teaching of the Hebrew Scriptures on 
 these points is far above suspicion. They announce at every 
 turn, and under every kind of illustration, the cardinal doctrine 
 of One, Living, Personal God, the Maker and the moral Go- 
 vernor of all things. They draw the broadest possible line of 
 demarcation between humanity and Divinity. They make th3 
 consciousness of the Creator essentially distinct from that of 
 each and all created beings. They demand for Him the wor- 
 ship of the human spirit, because He is a God of unapproach- 
 able perfection, self-existent, absolutely free, and altogether 
 righteous. Such, indeed, appears to be the foremost object of 
 the old ceconomy. Destined as it was for the instruction of an 
 age that was peculiarly exposed to fascinations of polytheism 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, o&c. 63 
 
 on one side and of dualism on the other, it pointed with 
 especial frequency to what alone was able to supply a refuge 
 from these desolating errors, — to the doctrine of the monarchy 
 of God ^ While subjects which might possibly have interfered 
 with it in minds incapable of deep reflection are passed over, or 
 left standing in the background, it is ever prominent in place 
 and definite in expression. Instances there doubtless are in 
 which both ancient and modern spiritualists have been offended 
 by expressions that ascribe to God the organs, faculties, and 
 passions of mankind. Those thinkers do not recognise the 
 clear necessity of such expressions for communicating any 
 definite ideas of God and His relations to the creature; but 
 treat them as mere relics of primeval barbarism, exhorting us 
 to soar at length above all human images, and gain a true 
 conception of the Infinite and All-pervading. Yet, in spite of 
 numerous cavils rising out of these anthropomorphisms, it is 
 generally acknowledged that the Hebrew creed, for some cause 
 or other, was pre-eminently p\ire and monotheistic, — a con- 
 cession which, one might have fancied, also proves at least the 
 possibility of worthy thoughts of God existing with and under 
 figurative representations^. 'This must be confessed,' writes 
 Mr. Parker^, 'that under the guidance of divine Providence, 
 the great and beautiful doctrine of one God seems quite early 
 embraced by the great Jewish lawgiver, incorporated with his 
 national legislation, defended with rigorous enactments, and 
 slowly communicated to the world.' How deeply, for example, 
 is this truth inscribed on the Mosaic record of creation ! While 
 the heathen systems, we shall see at large hereafter, had so 
 abandoned the true idea of God as to acknowledge the co-eternity 
 of matter and to represent the highest object of man's worship 
 fettered more or less by the conditions of the transitory and the 
 limits of the mundane^, it was very different with the Hebrews. 
 
 ^ 'To understand the nature of exalted above all heathenism. ' Dis- 
 
 the Jewish oeconomy, we must be- sertations on the Genuineness of the 
 
 gin with this truth, to which every Pentateuch, ii. 369, Edinb. 1847. 
 
 page of the five books of Moses is ^ discourse, &c. pp. 6$, 66. 
 
 ready to bear witness, That the * It is here granted that isolated 
 
 separation of the Israelites was in declarations do exist in heathen 
 
 order to preserve the doctrine of writers, affirming the essential in- 
 
 the Unity, amidst an idolatrous and dependence of the Divine Being 
 
 polytheistic world.' Warburton,Z)i- (cf. Archbp. Sumner's Records of 
 
 vine Legation^ ii. 419, Lond. 1846. Creation, &c. i. 123 sq., 185 sq. 
 
 - 'The humanity of God,' says Lond. 1816, andMosheim'sDmeri. 
 
 Hengstenberg, 'had its corrective in Cudworth, iii. 140 sq. Lond. 
 
 in the doctrine of His true Di- 1845); yet, as Baumgarten justly 
 
 vinity, by which it was indefinitely adds {Acts of the Apostles y 11. 193), 
 
G4 
 
 Christ and other Masters, 
 
 [part I. 
 
 God was tliere confessed not merely as the animating principle 
 of all things, but the sole and absolute Creator \ He spake and 
 it was done. His fiat quickened all the pulses of the universe. 
 — and as material laws that govern it are only indications of 
 His presence and expressions of His legislative will, so in the 
 world at large He ever acts as on a theatre objective to Him, 
 regulating the destinies alike of the community and of the 
 individual spirit. And the subsequent disclosures of the Bible 
 are in perfect harmony with what is thus recorded in the 
 earliest pages of it. They are one continuous attestation of the 
 unity, the personality, the righteousness of God, revealed in 
 mandates or in prohibitions, and reiterated by the * fiery law,' 
 or a succession of stupendous acts. To look no further than 
 the earliest crisis in the national history of the Hebrew race, 
 the Exodus itself was nothing but a grand religious triumph ; 
 where the majesty of God was vindicated in the presence of a 
 people foremost in the rank of civilisation, yet peculiarly be- 
 
 these declarations are no more than 
 * abstract ideas which do indeed 
 convey an inkling of the truth, but 
 possess no vital energy. The gene- 
 ral popular notion of the gods and 
 of their nature was stamped on 
 their mythes, their hymns and re- 
 ligious ceremonies; and this view 
 [the limitation of the Divine Being] 
 held its way undisturbed by all the 
 philosophical thoughts and well- 
 meaning words that went on along- 
 side of it.' The same remark is 
 even more. applicable to the doctrine 
 of the Unity of God, which, as Mr. 
 Mackay urges [Progress of the In- 
 tellect, I. 133, Lond. 1850), was 
 never entirely lost sight of, even 
 by those who were in act polytheists. 
 The truth is, it was so far in the 
 background as to exercise very little 
 practical influence : cf . Weisse, Phi- 
 losoph. Dogmatlk, i. 670 sq. Leip- 
 zig, i«55. 
 
 ^ Many writers {e.g. Milton, 
 Prose Works, iv. 176) have stoutly 
 denied that God, even according 
 to the Scriptural cosmogony, cre- 
 ated the world out of nothing: and 
 whether the fact of such creation 
 be deducible from the language of 
 Gen. i. i, may very fairly be dis- 
 
 puted (see Bp. Pearson, On the 
 Creed, pp. 76 — 84, Lond. 1842, 
 Witsius, Exercitationes Sacrce, *De 
 Creatione,' Amst. 1697 ; and Ha- 
 vernick, Introd. to the Pentateuch, 
 p. 94, note, Edinb. 1850). Other 
 texts, however, insist with great 
 emphasis on the absolute sove- 
 reignty of God in the world of 
 matter, and some of these appear 
 totally inconsistent with the laxer 
 theory of creation, e.g. Heb. xi. 3, 
 YiiareL voovfjiev KaTTjpricrdaL tovs aiui- 
 pas p-qixaTL Qeou, els ro jultj iK (paivo- 
 fxevojv TO ^Xevofievov yeyovevai, where 
 Bengel aptly remarks: 'Ut creatio 
 fundamentum et specimen est om- 
 nis oeconomise divinse, sic fides 
 creationis est fundamentum et spe- 
 cimen omnis fidei.' The tradition 
 of the Jews to the same effect is 
 preserved in 2 Maccab. vii. 28: 
 'A^LUj ae, reKvov, dva^Xi'^avra els 
 TOP ovpavbv Kol T-qv y^p, Kal rd 4p 
 avTOLS navTa Idopra, ypvovaL ore e^ 
 ovK oPTCov €Troir]<T€P avrd 6 Qeos, Kal 
 TO T(jjv dpdpunruiv ykpos ovtojs yeykvrj- 
 TUL. *Diese aegyptische Kosmo- 
 gonie hat viele Aehnlichkeit mit 
 der mosaischen, die ohne Zweifel 
 aus ihr hervorgegangen ; es findet 
 sich in derselben Nichts von einem 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, dec. ^o 
 
 sotted by their worship of the various energies of nature. 
 There it was that Israel also had defiled themselves with the 
 idols of Egypt (Ezek. xx. 7) ; they were on the point of losing 
 the traditions that connected them with Abraham and with the 
 Evangelic promise ; they were melting fast away into the mass 
 of heathenism by which they were encircled, when the Lord 
 Himself came forward to their rescue. He asserted the un- 
 rivalled greatness of His sovereignty. ' Against all the gods of 
 Egypt ^ I will execute judgment : I am the Lord' (Ex. xii. 12). 
 The influences of nature He employed as agents of His mighty 
 purpose, now restraining them with a miraculous discrimination, 
 and now wielding them with a terrific aim for the confusion of 
 the adversary, till ere long the ransomed multitude could chant 
 in concert with their noble captain, * I will sing unto the Lord, 
 for He hath triumphed gloriously . . . Who is like unto Thee, O 
 Lord, among the gods 1 Who is like thee, glorious in holiness, 
 fearful in praises, doing wonders]... Thou in Thy mercy leadest 
 forth Thy people which Thou hast redeemed; Thou guidest 
 them in Thy strength unto Thy holy habitation ' (Ex. xv. 1, 
 11, 13). 
 
 And the same magnificent spectacle recurs at every stage of 
 Hebrew history. Who has not remarked amid the grandeur 
 of the choral hymns and other Itocs of the Israelites, how the 
 idea of God as the one Lord of all things is ever present to the 
 writer's mind, and how the varied forms of nature are but 
 living testimonies to the personality of their Creator ! Had 
 there been a single germ of pantheism lurking in the Hebrew 
 
 imgeordneten Chaos, wie bei Grie- respect admissible, viz. if it be 
 
 chen Tind Romern ; auch bei den taken to mean that the Hebrews 
 
 Aegyptern ist die Welt aus Nichts looked upon idolatry as the work 
 
 geschaffen, AUes Vorhandene aus of evil spirits, and so ascribed a 
 
 der allmachtigen Hand der schaf- personality to the false object 
 
 fenden Gottheit Osiris hervorge- of worship. But . that this idea 
 
 gangen.' Uhlemann, Thoth. pp. of superhuman intelligences was 
 
 27, 28, Gottingen, 1855. never suffered to trench upon the 
 
 ^ Cf. Ex. xviii. II, XX. 23, Numb. doctrine of the Divine Unity and 
 
 xxxiii. 4, Ezek. xx. 7, 8, which Omnipotence, is clear from nume- 
 
 justify the authorized version of rous texts like Deut. iv. 39: 'the 
 
 ' ' ' •• v: T : \ -^ • '^ and upon the earth beneath : there 
 
 iv Tract rots deois twv Aiyvirritav) . is none else.' In other passages 
 
 When Mr. Newman infers from where the thoughts of the writer 
 
 texts like these {Hebreio Monarchy y are exclusively confined to the 
 
 p. 26, 2nd ed.), that 'the Hebrew visible idol, he speaks of heathen 
 
 creed was not monotheistic in the gods as actually non-existent. See 
 
 sense of denying the existence of Is. xxxvii. 19. 
 other gods,' his language is in one 
 
 H. 5 
 
66 Christ and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 system it would doubtless Lave shewn itself in this class of 
 writings, as we may infer especially from the complexion of 
 the Vedas and the hymns of ancient Greece. Yet, on the 
 contrary, the sacred writer, notwithstanding the peculiar sensi- 
 bility which he displays in picturing the rich and glowing 
 beauties of the universe, is never tempted to invest it with the 
 attributes of God. His poetry is ^a reflex of monotheism:' 
 and nature comes before us * not as self-subsisting, or glorious 
 in her own beauty, but ever in relation to a higher, an over- 
 ruling, a spiritual Power \' 
 
 But the God of the Old Testament is not only the most 
 powerful Being in the universe ; He is not only the Absolute, 
 the Undefined, the Infinite, who having called the creatures 
 out of nothing, rules them as the grand Proprietor, and doeth 
 whatsoever pleaseth Him. This thought of God is there 
 associated with a second. He is indeed the Elohim and El 
 Shaddai, but He is Jehovah also^. His attributes are moral, 
 and not merely physical. He is raised as to His essence indefi- 
 nitely above the sphere of things created, yet He mingles with 
 them as their Governor, as the Be warder of the upright, the 
 Avenger of the wronged, ' long-sufiering, abundant in goodness 
 and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, but not always par- 
 doning the guilty^.' Thus the monarchy of God is ever based 
 on righteousness ; and after the selection of the Hebrew family 
 to constitute the visible kingdom of Jehovah, and to act as 
 conservators of the true religion in the midst of Gentilism, it 
 is continually proclaimed that they are Israelites indeed who 
 labour to be God-like ; that such alone are properly the subjects 
 
 ^ Humboldt's Cosmos, ii. 44. This with singular felicity. The plural 
 
 author instances the civth Psalm. , - n•)•^■^^* -u^ „„„««.,+« w.«,r 
 
 . XT 4. • • 3 1, • XI. form of D^T'cs, he suggests, may 
 
 ' Nature is conceived as having the * •"' °° "^ 
 
 ground of its existence in another, intimate that the true God pos- 
 
 — as something posited, created; sesses in Himself what men were 
 
 and this idea, that God is the Lord disposed to divide among a plu- 
 
 and Creator of Nature, leads men rality. 
 
 to regard God as the Exalted One, ^ See Ex. xxxiv. 6, 7, a passage 
 
 while the whole of Nature is only which develops the great truths 
 
 His robe of glory, and is expended implied in the name Jehovah. The 
 
 in His service.' Hegel. Pldl. of ^^^^^^ n,j, j^i, n,;, j^ yarioixsly 
 
 Hist. p. 204, Lond. 1857. • • • '^ 
 
 2 I am here following Dr. Heng- interpreted, but the rendering here 
 
 stenberg, who in his Dissertations adopted seems most in harmony 
 
 on the Pentateuch, u. 21^ — 393, has with the remainder of ver. 7: cf. 
 
 investigated the Names of God, as Nah. i. 3. 
 
 they occur in the Books of Moses, 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion^ dx. G7 
 
 of the Lord of hosts, and are entitled to approach the seat of 
 His peculiar presence \ 
 
 It is not easy to recal a passage of the Bible where thjese 
 statements are more fully verified than in the prayer and 
 benedictions uttered by king Solomon at the dedication of the 
 temple just completed on Mount Zion (1 Kings viii.). Where, 
 ifc might be urged, are we more likely to encounter gross 
 conceptions of the nature of God's presence, or those narrow 
 and unspiritual views of worship, which opponents of the Old 
 Testament are in the habit of ascribing to all branches of the 
 legal institute ? And yet there is no lack of testimony that 
 the Hebrews were most truly conscious of the spirituality and 
 universal empire of Jehovah, as well as of their own exalted 
 mission in respect of other nations. Solomon, it is true, was 
 penetrated by the thought that God was very near to Israel ; 
 that they were His inheritance ; that He had separated them 
 from all the people of the earth (ver. 53); that He had borne 
 them up on eagles' wings, and brought them to Himself (Ex. 
 xix. 4). He was no less certain that the Lord of Israel would 
 be present with His choicest gifts and blessings to the wor- 
 shippers who bent their knees and made their offerings in the 
 precincts of the sanctuary. Yet he felt that such a national 
 limitation was compatible with universal sovereignty : that God 
 as to His essence was infinite and incomprehensible ; that * the 
 heaven and heaven of heavens could not contain Him' (ver. 
 27) ; that if we ascribe to Him a special dwelling-place 
 it is exalted far above the limits of the seen and transitory 
 (ver. 30) ; that the earthly temple was symbolical of something 
 higher, of a truer and more blissful presence ; and that even 
 the election of the Israelites itself had reference to a glorious 
 future in the progress of the sacred family, when all the people 
 of the earth should know, as Israel knew already, that * the 
 Lord is God, and that there is none else' (vers. 43, 60). 
 
 From such conceptions of the God of Israel, apprehended 
 
 ^ See especially Psalm xxiv, where there may be an animal love and 
 
 the transition from one view of the a favouritism for their own wor- 
 
 Cxod of Israel to the other is very shippers, without regard to their 
 
 remarkable. The thought of Him hearts and lives ; but the God of 
 
 as the great Proprietor of the world Israel, who is God in the true sense 
 
 and all that dwell therein, is made of the word, cannot without ab- 
 
 the basis of an argument for purity surdity be spoken of as having con- 
 
 and reverence in the Hebrew wor- nexion with any except such as 
 
 shipper, to whom He was pleased are of a pure heart.' Hengsten- 
 
 to reveal Himself in a peculiarly berg, On the Fsalms, i. ^ij.'Kdmb. 
 
 near relation. *With other gods 1846. 
 
68 
 
 CJmst and other Masters. 
 
 [part I. 
 
 not in later periods of the Hebrew commonwealth, but as early 
 as the first consolidation of their empire, let ns turn aside and 
 glance at the theology of a neighbouring state, whose ruler was 
 on terms of special amity with Solomon. The Phoenicians had 
 been long the merchants and the leading colonisers of the 
 district. Commerce tended to evolve their intellectual powers, 
 and gave them such preponderance among the nations of the 
 East, as had enabled them in numerous instances to propagate 
 their civilisation and religious system^, and even it would seem 
 to captivate the mind of Solomon himself^. Nor was the inter- 
 course then subsisting between the courts of Sidon and Jeru- 
 salem the oldest bond of union which connected the two peoples. 
 The}^ were, in fact, descended from the same ancestors; the 
 languages they spoke were dialects of the same mother-tongue ; 
 and as early as the residence in Egypt the Israelites had been 
 acquainted with Phoenician modes of thought, the Hyksos^, who 
 were then the masters of the throne of Egypt and their patrons, 
 being also of Phoenician origin. Everything is therefore tending 
 to beget the expectation, that if the general form of men's 
 religious principles depend upon locality, or race, or on the 
 
 ^ Movers, Die Religion und die 
 Gottheiten der Phonizier, pp. 12 sq. 
 Bonn, 1 84 1. The aggressive spirit 
 of their system is illustrated in the 
 history of Jezebel, herself a princess 
 of the court of Sidon. 
 
 2 See I Kings xi. 5. The worship 
 of Ashtoreth ( Astarte) thus tolerated 
 at Jerusalem was not altogether 
 abolished till the reign of Josiah: 
 2 Kings xxiii. 13. An adventurous 
 school of modern critics have in- 
 deed laboured to convince us that 
 what they call the 'Eeformation of 
 Jehovism' in the reign of Josiah 
 was the substitution of the worship 
 of a Supreme God for that of the 
 Phoenician divinities, which had 
 till then been * the established re- 
 ligion' even in the kingdom of 
 Judah: see Mr. Mackay's Progress 
 of the Intellect J 11. 44-2. In other 
 words, they are pleased to repre- 
 sent what holy Scripture tells them 
 of the frequent lapses of the He- 
 brews into the idolatrous worship 
 of their neighbours, as a proof that 
 guch apostasy was not occasional 
 
 or partial, but the normal state of 
 the nation. The unfairness of this 
 mode of procedure is most flagrant. 
 The Bible gives a perfectly candid 
 and consistent, not to say a highly 
 probable account, when it confesses 
 that the Israelites notwithstanding 
 the emphatic warnings of their 
 Lawgiver (Lev. xviii. 21) did forget 
 that Jehovah was the true God and 
 relapsed into forbidden worship {e.g. 
 Judges ii. 1 1 ; iii. 7 ; x. 6 ; i Kings 
 xvi. 31). That account ought there- 
 fore to be either accepted or rejected 
 as a whole. If we reject it, Hebrew 
 history is so far a blank, and there 
 is no material left for theorising : 
 if we accept it, the conclusion is 
 inevitable that the Hebrews from 
 the very earliest period were in 
 possession of religious principles 
 incapable of all amalgamation with 
 those of the adjacent countries. 
 
 ^ Cf. Kurtz's chapter 'Die Hyksos 
 und die Israeliten,' in his Gesch, 
 des alien Bundes, ii. 173 sq. BerUn, 
 1855. 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion^ cfcc. G9 
 
 influence of a dominant and proselytising neighbour, the theology 
 and worship of the Hebrew church will bear considerable 
 resemblance to those of which Phoenicia has supplied the clearest 
 and the boldest type. We ask accordingly what were the views 
 there current with respect to that which is the fundamental 
 characteristic of religious systems, — the doctrine of God ? ' The 
 religion of the Phoenicians,' to quote from Movers,^ one of the 
 most critical and impartial writers on the subject, ^was like 
 that of the kindred Semitic tribes of the ancient Asiatics in 
 general, — essentially a nature-religion, i. e. a deification of the 
 energies and laws of nature, an adoration of the objects in 
 which those energies were thought to be present, and by which 
 they became active and efficient. In this cycle of Religions 
 the Godhead is not a Power distinct from nature and ruling it 
 without restraint, as in the religion of the Hebrews ; but it is 
 the secret energy in nature herself, as she is manifested according 
 to fixed laws, now shaping, animating, sustaining, now again 
 destroying her own works, whom man is therefore wont to 
 supplicate with difierent kinds of homage, according to her 
 various operations.' This writer acknowledges indeed that in 
 the earliest period of Phoenician history, the object of their 
 worship was identical with that of Israel^: and the notice of 
 Melchisedec may also lead us to conjecture that the true idea of 
 God still lingered here and there among the circumjacent tribes; 
 yet long before the age of Solomon it is certain that some mighty 
 changes had been wrought in their religious system, and that 
 both in creed and morals the Phoenicians had grown frightfully 
 corrupt. Belief in God, the Holy One, the personal Creator, 
 was supplanted by luxuriant forms of nature- worship, in which 
 carnage alternated with licentiousness, and groans of abject 
 
 ^ Movers, die Religion und die und es wird sich zeigen, dass der 
 
 Gottheiten der Phonizier, p. 148. Gott des monotheistischen Hebrais- 
 
 ^ ' Wenn sie [the Phoenician re- mus der hochste Gott auch aller 
 
 ligion] von Alters her uns als Ver- iibrigen Stamme der ^emiten war 
 
 gotterung der Natur, ihrer Krafte und blieb, dass jedoch der Natur- 
 
 und Gesetze erscheint, so sind wir dienst die reinere Gottesidee einer 
 
 doch welt entfernt, sie, und damit altern Beligionsstufe allmdhlich 
 
 alle Eeligionen des Semitismus, verdunkelty aber nie auch in der 
 
 fiir Naturreligion von Haus aus zu phonizischen Eeligion vollig ver- 
 
 erklaren. Dies war die phonizische tilgt hat : ' p. 16S. In pp. 312 sq. 
 
 ehensowenig urspiilnglich wie die it is contended that the El of the 
 
 hebrdische. Wir werden an seinem Phoenicians was identical with the 
 
 Orte den Spuren nachgehen, die God of the Hebrew patriarchs, but 
 
 sich namenthch in dem Entwick- was afterwards confounded with 
 
 lungsgange der Ideen vom Baal Moloch, the old fire-god of the 
 
 Oder El bedeutsam hervordrangen, Chaldaic-Assyriau mythology. 
 
70 Christ and other Masters, [part I. 
 
 terror with the frantic songs of revelry. In strict accordance 
 with human analogies the Godhead was now apprehended bj 
 them as male and female, and those special energies of nature 
 were attributed to each that seemed to correspond most aptly 
 to the functions of the different sexes\ Baal was the male- 
 divinity, — a personification of the active or generative power in 
 nature, the giver and withholder of that life which circulates 
 through all the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and the ruler 
 of their destinies. Ashtoreth was the female-divinity, — a per- 
 sonification of the passive or maternal principle in nature, the 
 Aphrodite of Semitic tribes, enkindling the desire of sensual 
 gratification, and enlisting all the grosser passions of her 
 votaries. The fundamental unity of both these powers was 
 also represented in Phoenicia by transferring to the masculine 
 divinity the attributes of the feminine, so as to produce another 
 God, in whom the forms and properties of male and female are 
 exhibited in mystic combination^. 
 
 I leave the reader to determine if a system such as this, 
 whose gods were nothing more than the personifications of 
 external nature, and reflections of corrupt humanity, had ought 
 in common with the lofty and severely moral theism of the 
 Hebrews. I ask him also to consider if the mere existence of 
 tlieir pure and elevating creed upon the borders of a dominant 
 form of nature-worship be not calculated to supply additional 
 proofs that they were guardians of a supernatural revelation, 
 and that God was dealing with no other people as He dealt 
 with them. 
 
 2. Bat the doctrine of one, personal, holy God, was not 
 the only truth on which the Law insisted, and to which its 
 institutions were designed to draw the thoughts of every He- 
 brew. It unfolded also the true doctrine of man : his dignity 
 and wretchedness. It urged not one of these great verities, but 
 both: for only where the origin and grandeur of the human 
 species are fully apprehended, can we hope to understand the 
 
 of thought was commonly associat- like manner sometimes represented 
 
 ed by the Phoenicians with a dis- the moon, but more especially the 
 
 position to find peculiar symbols of planet Venus: cf. Movers, pp. 6oi 
 
 their gods among the heavenly sq. On the dualism of China, see 
 
 bodies. Thus Baal, as Gesenius Wuttke, ii. 12. 
 shews, was often identified not only - The story of Hermaphroditus 
 
 with the sun, but with the planet was carried by the Phoenicians to 
 
 Jupiter, Stella Jovis, as the guar- Cyprus and other regions : Movers, 
 
 dian or giver of good fortune; and p. 149. 
 
CHAP. Til.] On the Characteristics of Religion, Sc. 71 
 
 turpitnde of moral evil and the real nature of the fall of man. 
 The Bible tells us that there is in him a high and God-like 
 element, that instead of being fashioned on the lower model of 
 the brute creation, he came forth into the world erect in stature 
 and impressed with the Divine similitude; that in virtue of 
 tbis kinship human life is sacred (Gen. ix. 6), and that human 
 spirits, on the dissolution of the body, will return to God who 
 gave them^ (Eccles. xii. 7). 
 
 The leading property in which the high original of man has 
 ever been distinctly traceable is the freedom of his will, his 
 power of self-determination. Here lay his greatest dignity and 
 here his greatest peril. He is never represented by the sacred 
 writer as the victim of some stern necessity, or some irrevocable 
 fate^, like that which the Muhammadans imported into their 
 religion from the heathen creeds of western Asia. He is made 
 in the image of God ; and the pre-eminence thus awarded to 
 him is that which helps us to conceive the possibility of the 
 first deflection from the path of rectitude, and to define the 
 character of sin in general. 
 
 Sin is the eflect of self-complacency. It springs entirely from 
 
 ^ I shall not enter far into the 
 question why the doctrine of pro- 
 longed existence after death was 
 rather hinted than explicitly affirm- 
 ed in all the earlier writings of the 
 Old Testament. It may be that 
 the prevalence of a false doctrine 
 of immortality, especially in Egypt, 
 tended to unfit the ancient Hebrews 
 for receiving more specific com- 
 munications on this subject (Heng- 
 stenberg, Dissert, on the Pentateuch^ 
 II. 473). It may be that the thought 
 of individual immortality was often 
 suffered to merge itself in that of 
 the indestructibility of the Hebrew 
 nation (cf. Jerem. xxxi. i6, 17; 
 Ezek. xxxvii. 11 — 14). Hegel, PMi. 
 of Hist. p. 205: 'The individual 
 never comes to the consciousness of 
 independence, on that account we 
 do not find among the Jews any 
 beUef in the immortality of the 
 soul.* But the principal reason for 
 the silence, or at least reserve, of 
 the Old Testament is traceable to 
 the fact that so long as the future 
 world was merely an indefinite ex- 
 
 panse, untrodden by human foot- 
 steps and devoid of human imagery, 
 an appeal to it for motives in aid 
 of the legal institute must have 
 proved inoperative. The character 
 of the whole dispensation was 
 visible and earthly, and with these 
 peculiarities the faint allusions to 
 the world of the invisible entirely 
 responded. See a very thoughtful 
 article on this subject in the Chris- 
 tian Remembrancer y 1849, i. 164 
 sq. Meanwhile the pious Jew, as 
 it is there observed, would find his 
 ground of confidence in the doc- 
 trine of one supreme God. * Fixed 
 upon that spiritual basis of life, as 
 upon a rock, he felt himself secure, 
 come what might. Amid all the 
 changes and decay of nature, con- 
 stant and enduring, he placed his 
 future in Almighty love, and re- 
 posed with a serene content upon 
 an indefinite eternity... prepared in 
 God to go he knew not and he asked 
 not whither.' 
 
 2 Philippsohn, Eeligioiis Idea^ 
 pp. 40, 41. 
 
72 
 
 Christ and other Masters. 
 
 [part I. 
 
 beneath \ It is a voluntary surrender to external tempters, or 
 a self-induced disturbance in the equilibrium of man's will. It 
 is a perverted quality of the creature, by which he is impelled 
 into antagonism with the Creator, refuses to continue in the 
 attitude of worship and dependence, and claims to be his own 
 divinity. When the narration of the Fall is once regarded as 
 a veritable history, and as originally designed for the instruc- 
 tion alike of peasant and philosopher in every age, it furnishes 
 the most intelligible guide within our reach for the elucidation 
 both of ancient records and. of moral paradoxes in our own 
 experience. Man knows that he is ever drawn in opposite 
 directions, that when he would do good, evil is present with 
 him. He is no longer what he was designed to be, nor what 
 he feels he might become. Apart from revelation he is sadly 
 conscious of his malady; the Bible, therefore, tells him of its 
 
 ^ This, of course, is not the same 
 as if I wrote, ' entirely from within.' 
 Such language would exclude the 
 doctrine of a personal Tempter, and 
 therefore would impugn both in- 
 timations of the Old Testament, 
 and direct assertions of the New. 
 Attempts, however, have been made 
 of late, and that by members of the 
 Church of England, to resolve the 
 Fall into an outbreak of sexual con- 
 cupiscence, or inharmonious action 
 of the lower elements in man's own 
 nature. The violence of these at- 
 tempts may be estimated from the 
 specimens contained in A Vindica- 
 tion of Protestant Principles^ by 
 Phileleutherus Anglicanus, Lond. 
 1847, and in Dr. Donaldson's re- 
 cent speculations on the Book of 
 Jashar, pp. 65 sq. In both works, 
 the existence of any order of in- 
 telligences higher than the human 
 is positively denied; and with re- 
 gard to the language of our blessed 
 Lord and the Apostles on the sub- 
 ject of a personal Tempter, these 
 authors either contend that they 
 felt themselves obliged 'to carry on 
 what had become, and in the opin- 
 ion of some persons still is, a neces- 
 sary illusion* {Vindication, p. 77) ; 
 or e^se maintain that passages al- 
 leged in proof of such external soli- 
 citations to evU ought really to be 
 
 construed in a different sense, so as 
 to make Satan only a personifica- 
 tion of moral evil inherent in hu- 
 manity. Now the former statement 
 is entirely at variance with the 
 general character of our Saviour's 
 teaching. Did He not shew Him- 
 self the fearless adversary of all 
 lax interpretations and * traditions ' 
 which the superstitious Jews had 
 grafted on the genuine revelation '? 
 And is it likely therefore that such 
 a Teacher would have winked at 
 serious 'errors' — errors which, in 
 the opinion of our modern critic, 
 are so vital as to trench upon the 
 unity and absolute supremacy of 
 God ? To answer the second argu- 
 ment, I would ask the reader to 
 examine tor himself the principal 
 texts in question, and try if the 
 idea of an internal struggle will 
 fairly satisfy the language of the 
 sacred penman. This is Dr. C. J. 
 Vaughan's suggestion {Personality 
 of the Tempter J &c. p. 20. Lond. 
 1851), who repudiates the proposed 
 explanation of such passages as 
 utterly untenable, and then adds: 
 'from which consequently we must 
 infer, by the strictest rules of rea- 
 soning, either the personality of the 
 Tempter, or (I speak as a man) the 
 error, and therefore the imposture, 
 of Christ.' 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Beligion, doc, 73 
 
 origin, its de]Dtli and its malignity; and to impress and foster 
 this belief the legal institute was more especially directed. It 
 dealt with man as with a wretched and degraded, yet recover- 
 able, creature. It exhibited at every turn the perfect majesty 
 and holiness of God, and through that exhibition deepened 
 man's conviction of his littleness, depravity, and ruin. By the 
 Law was the knowledge of sin. This function it especially 
 came forward to discharge. The clouds of wrath indeed are 
 ever fringed with hope : a prospect of some glorious restoration 
 is unfolded in the distant background: intimations of God's 
 love and placability accompany the most tefrific manifestations 
 of His anger; or, in other words, the sternest tokens of the 
 truth that sin and holiness are incompatible, nay, absolutely 
 antagonistic, are allied with frequent hints that God and man 
 have found a place of meeting and of reconciliation. Still the 
 ordinary and habitual operation of the Law was to excite the 
 conscience of the Hebrew worshipper, to make him clear and 
 sensitive as to the grand distinctions of morality, to waken 
 longings which it could not satisfy, to preach divisions in the 
 heart of man which it could neither remedy nor relieve. Its 
 author knew that to improve the quality of human actions it is 
 necessary to command the will, and regulate the wishes, nay, 
 that such a course is an essential precondition to the fuller 
 understanding of the truth. He knew, moreover, that until 
 these elementary principles of religion are worked, or drilled, 
 as I might say, into the human heart, there is no basis for 
 ulterior training, no foundation for that superstructure, which 
 it was the purpose of Jehovah to erect at some future period. 
 
 Accordingly, the office of the old ceconomy regarded merely 
 on the legal side is that of a schoolmaster; its tone is stern, 
 severe, and peremptory. God is, for the most part, represented 
 rather as the King, the Judge, and the Avenger of iniquity, 
 than as the Pardoner and Kedeemer. A whirling, wasting 
 flame, the symbol of His purity, the proof that evil cannot 
 'dwell with Him,' is visible upon the confines of that spot, 
 which had originally formed an earnest to the human family of 
 theii' Maker's love and nearness^ ; and like images of awe and 
 
 ^ Yet the very banishment from or rather one compounded emblem, 
 
 Eden, and the planting of the of the highest forms of creature- 
 
 sword-like flame upon its confines, life, especially the human ; and 
 
 were not altogether unrelieved by that their appearance was a pledgo 
 
 intimations of God's mercy. I have to man of his continued interest 
 
 shewn elsewhere {Sermons, p. 49) in the seat from which he was 
 
 that the cherubim were emblems, expelled : cf. Bahr, SymhoUk des 
 
74 Christ and other Masters, [part I. 
 
 terror are associated in all future periods with His more imme- 
 diate presence. Man is driven to confess at every step, that 
 sin is a profound reality; and that by sinning he becomes an 
 alien and an exile, at enmity with God, creation, and his proper 
 self. 
 
 It would be easy to adduce examples where the Hebrew 
 shewed a strong conviction of the force and fitness of these 
 verities: but such examples are not wanted in the present stage 
 of our inquiry. The moral sensibility of the whole Hebrew 
 nation, as compared with that of the adjoining states, is com- 
 monly admitted, even by a section of those writers who deny 
 that it was due in any measure to a supernatural revelation. 
 While Greece is recognised as their instructress in the principles 
 of beauty and of science; while Rome is the great fountain of 
 their knowledge with respect to jurisprudence and municipal 
 lights, they are c6ntent to be indebted to the Jew for clear 
 conceptions of '■ the holiness of God, and of His sympathy with 
 His servants^' 
 
 3. But another portion of the legal institute awakens very 
 different feelings in this class of speculators. * What,' they ask 
 triumphantly, * can you allege in vindication of the ritualism 
 and sacrificial cultus of the Hebrews ? Is it worthy of a place 
 in the religious system, which you argue sprang from heaven, 
 and which we too acknowledge inculcates the purest and most 
 spiritual views of God? Must it not rather be an artifice of 
 Satan, or, as Satan is a mere nonentity, of Jewish priests, — a 
 spurious after-growth that rooted itself in the dark ages, or 
 possibly amid the last convulsions of the Hebrew monarchy *?' 
 
 Indeed, the ceremonial law, as it is called, has proved itself 
 a stumbling-block to every form of spiritualism. The school of 
 Philo made it tolerable only by concealing it beneath a multi- 
 tude of allegorical interpretations. The Alexandrines, in like 
 manner, were perplexed by not a few of its provisions, and in 
 reference to the main principles on which it was constructed, 
 viewed it chiefly as a condescension to the weakness of the 
 carnal mind^ ; while many Deists of the last century, and some 
 of their descendants in the present, have not hesitated to de- 
 
 Mosaischen Cultus, i. 311 sq. ; gico-PoUtici, cap. ii. p. 27, Ham- 
 
 Fairbaim, Typology of Scripture^ burgi, 1670) places Solomon higher 
 
 I. 221 sq. 2nd ed. than the Law by reason of his in- 
 
 ^ Newman's Hebr, Monarchy , p. tellectual eminence: *nam ea Us 
 
 332, 2nd ed. : cf. Phases of Faith, tantum tradita est, qui ratione et 
 
 pp. 188, 231. naturalis intellectus documentis 
 
 2 It is remarkable that Spinosa carent.* 
 in like manner {Tractatus Theolo- 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, dx. 75 
 
 nounce the ceremonial law in terms of obloquy, abhorrence, or 
 contempt^ Their opposition is, I think, attributable partly to 
 mistaken views respecting the nature and effects of ritualism in 
 general, but still more to want of insight into the condition of 
 the ancient world and the capacity of its inhabitants. Till we 
 have placed ourselves, as far as possible, upon the standing- 
 ground of those for whom the Law of Moses was designed ; till 
 we have tried to look upon it with their eyes, and think afresh 
 the thoughts which burnt and struggled in their bosoms, we 
 shall fail to understand the drift of very many of its ordinances, 
 we shall be incompetent judges of the way in which a system 
 such as that was calculated to excite, instruct, and edily the 
 members of the Elder Church. 
 
 The Hebrew was in race and temperament a western Asia- 
 tic. The very genius of his native language, corresponding 
 there as always to the bent and constitution of the human 
 mind, bore witness to his general inaptitude for deep and ab- 
 stract thought or metaphysical inquiries^ He was, accordingly, 
 far more dependent than the cultivated nations of the present 
 day on the ideas derived from outward action. He lived far 
 more than they in the impressions made upon the senses^; and 
 on passing into the province of religion manifested an especial 
 quickness in appreciating representations of the truth that had 
 been cast into a concrete shape and carried their appeal directly 
 
 1 Yon Bohlen's language on this not good, and judgments whereby 
 
 subject (Em^eitMTz^r, p. 175) is mere- they should not live.' But it is 
 
 ly a reiteration of De Wette's earlier obvious from the order in which 
 
 views: but the author neglects to this punishment occurs, that the 
 
 tell us that De Wette afterwards prophet did not mean the laws and 
 
 modified them very considerably in institutions of the Mosaic covenant, 
 
 his Bihlische Dogmatik, § 54. See all of which were in fact promul- 
 
 Hengstenberg, Dissert, on the Pen- gated soon after the exodus from 
 
 tateuchj 11. 504. According to Egypt. He was, on the contrary, 
 
 another class of writers (e. g. Bun- referring to cruel and licentious 
 
 sen, Kirche der Zukunft, p. 77) customs of the neighbouring hea- 
 
 the whole of the Levitical system then, to which the Lord declares 
 
 was 'introduced in God's anger,' that He abandoned the Israelites 
 
 and therefore only interposed new for their unfaithfulness to Him 
 
 obstacles between Him and His and to the Law : cf. 2 Thess. ii. 11, 
 
 creatures. This was also the view and Fairbairn's Ezekiel, pp. 1 76) 
 
 of Spinosa: see Hegel, Phil, of 177, Edinb. 1851. 
 
 Hist. p. 205, Lond. 1857. The 2 gge Wiseman's Lectures on the 
 
 single text that furnishes a plea in Connexion between Science and Ee- 
 
 favour of this theory is Ezek. xx. vealed Religion, i. 139. 
 
 25, 26, where God declares that ^ Ci. 0. Miiller, as quoted in 
 
 after the defection of the Israelites Hengstenberg, Dissert. 11. 513. 
 He gave them ' statutes that were 
 
76 Christ and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 to the ear and eyesight. Hence for men like him the language 
 of symbolic action might be aptly substituted, here and there 
 at least, for that of speech and writing, on the ground that 
 it would be more urgent, scenic, and expressive. It accorded 
 with the mental habits of the period ; it fell in completely with 
 the prevalent modes of thought. An emblem borrowed from 
 the outer world, an institution clad in picturesque and vivid 
 imagery was to him the most eJficient sign and best interpreter 
 of things invisible ; for although the popular mind of antiquity 
 when labouring to give utterance co a supersensuous truth, 
 might be impelled by some internal necessity to use symbolic 
 language, there is no reason to infer that it must always have 
 apprehended such truths exactly in the form assumed in their 
 expression^, or could never have been able to detach the thing 
 communicated from its vehicle and outer covering. 
 
 The Hebrew was, moreover, as to the degree of his religious 
 knowledge and his capability of reflection in the childhood of 
 his being. As such his character was marked by childlike 
 simplicity. A stranger to all deep and long-sustained abstrac- 
 tion, he was most accessible to teaching that approached him 
 through the channel of the senses, that spoke to him in ritual 
 acts, in the arrangements of a solemn and imposing liturgy, 
 that fetched its motives from external and immediate objects, 
 from rewards that followed close upon obedience, or from penal- 
 ties that touched his body, and were ever ^ lying at the door.' 
 Jehovah ^led him by the hand' in matters of religion^, rescued 
 him from the seductions of heathen worship, by providing forms 
 adapted to his temperament and his capacity, yet making all 
 such forms the vehicles of pure ideas and noble aspirations, and 
 thus gradually prepared him for the time when his religion 
 would be less outsided and more spiritual, when Hhe tnie 
 worshippers' would * worship the Father in spirit and in truth' 
 (John iv. 23). 
 
 For these and other reasons it was most expedient to clothe 
 some revelations of the Old Testament in figurative drapery, to 
 
 ^ Bahr, 5f?/7w&oZi/»;, I. -24, 25. Tho- same effect: '(2? odv rj fi^u fjL-qrrjp 
 
 luck [Ep. to the Hebrews, i. 107) duyarai reXeiov irapaaxe'ci^ rep ^pi^ec 
 
 quotes a remarkable testimony on to e/x^pco/xa, rb hk ^tl ddupareL tt)v 
 
 the subject from the Persian philo- avrov irpea^vripav d^^aadai Tpocp-qv 
 Bopher MahmM. ' ovtu}^ koL 6 Geos avrbt fxh olbs re "^v 
 
 ^ Cf . Bp. Law's Considerations 7rapa(rx«^ o-tt' apxn^ tQ dvOpdoirCf) rb 
 
 on the Theory of Religion, p. 152, reXetov, 6 3^ dvOpojiros ddCvaros Xa- 
 
 7th ed., and Chandler's Bampton ^elv avro' vq-jrios ydp ^v. Lib. iv. 
 
 Lectures, pp. 49, 50. Irenasus had c. 37, § i. 
 already expressed himself to the 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, (Stc. 77 
 
 employ symbolic and prophetic action^ as an ordinary means of 
 teaching spiritual truths and leading men to an approximate 
 acquaintance with transcendant mysteries, which some ulterior 
 revelation would more perfectly unveil. The forms of Hebrew 
 worship in particular were meant to be a sort of acted parable, 
 precluding, it may be, the fullest measure of religious know- 
 ledge, and, as when the Saviour spoke in parables, implying 
 man's unworthiness and his imperfect receptivity^; yet, mean- 
 while, bringing to the eyes of docile and inquiring spirits many 
 a truth which they might otherwise have failed to apprehend. 
 We should, moreover, bear in mind that symbolic actions were 
 not the only media then employed in the communication of 
 sacred knowledge. The emblems of the legal institute were 
 something more than hieroglyphics, which the future ages of 
 the world might possibly decipher. In many cases where they 
 did not speak emphatically to the warm imagination of the 
 oriental, they would doubtless be explained by Moses, or the 
 line of prophets who succeeded in his room, and thus would 
 borrow fresh significance from naked and explicit forms of 
 teaching by which they were accompanied. The initiatory rite 
 of circumcision will supply us with an instance of the truth of 
 this remark. Its own suggestive character is assumed in 
 admonitions of the Hebrew legislator, as though it were in- 
 telligible to all classes of his subjects; yet the moral duty which 
 it indicates is, notwithstanding, forcibly repeated both by him 
 and by the prophet Jeremiah^. 
 
 I am here expressing no opinion as to the degree of insight 
 which the Israelite enjoyed into the correspondency between 
 the ritual service of the Law and the events of Christianity, i. e. 
 respecting the didactic office of the legal institute regarded as a 
 series of prophetic types. Such correspondency*, I doubt not. 
 
 1 Witsius, de Prophetia et Pro- ^ Deut. x. i6; xxx. 6; Jerem. iv. 
 
 phetis, devotes a chapter (Lib. i. c. 4. That many of the later Jews 
 
 xii.) to this mode of instruction. were still in the habit of assigning 
 
 Ezekiel himself (xxiv. 24) told the spiritual meanings to the symbols 
 
 Jews distinctly that he was on one of the temple service is shewn by 
 
 occasion *a sign' {els repas) to Tholuck, Ep. to the Hebrews, 11. 
 
 them: 'according to all that he 18, iq. 
 
 hath done shall ye do ; and when * The great points of correspond- 
 
 this Cometh, ye shall know that I ency, as noticed in the writings of 
 
 am the Lord God.' the New Testament, are inv^sti- 
 
 * Some interesting reflections on gated with much learning and so- 
 
 this analogy will be found in Mr. briety by Mr. FsiixhsLini, Typology 
 
 Isaac Williams's Stjudy of the Gos- of Scripture, 2nd ed. The author 
 
 pels, Part 11. § 3. is fully conscious of the distinction 
 
78 
 
 Christ and other Masters, 
 
 [part I. 
 
 was iniended, and is now distinctly traceable : but whether it 
 was seen by worthies of the old oeconomy is a very difierent 
 question. They who pondered the suggestive emblems of the 
 sanctuary, who prayed for fresh illumination to ' behold won- 
 drous things out of the Law' (Ps. cxix. 18), may doubtless have 
 obtained in it some passing glimpses of the evangelic Promise^ : 
 yet others, when they worshipped either in the wilderness or 
 on the sacred hill of Sion, may have gathered from the multi- 
 plicity of public sacrifices no acquaintance with the holy Yictim 
 of the Cross. Their own condition intellectually may have 
 
 I am here endeavouring to establish 
 between the typical and symboHcal 
 aspects of the Law : cf. Bahr, 
 SymboUk des Mosaischen Callus^ i. 
 15 sq. 
 
 ^ Archbp. Magee appears to over- 
 state the measure of this insight, 
 when he gathers that ' the ancient 
 sacrifices, those prescribed to the 
 patriarchs, and those enjoined by 
 the law, were types and figures, 
 and known to he such, of that one 
 great sacrifice, which was, at a 
 future day, to be offered upon the 
 cross for the sins of the whole hu- 
 man race.' On the Atonement, i. 
 381, 3rd ed. The authority ad- 
 duced to justify this inference is 
 the following passage of Eusebius, 
 Demonst. Evangel, lib. i. c. x. (p. 
 36, Paris, 1628) : "Ews ixkv ovv 
 ovdiiroj, TO KpelrTov, ovbk to jxeya 
 /cat Ti/Mov, /cat deoirpeires a^dyiou 
 Traprjv dvdpdnrois, tols did ^docov dv- 
 aiais XvTpa T7}s eavrwu ^ojtjs, /cat 
 dvTL\pvx^ T?}s oUelas cpvaeojs Trpoarj- 
 koutcjs dTTodLdovaL XPl^ '^^ ©^V? ^'5 
 Sk iirpaTTOv ol TrdXat deocptXels, aeixvov 
 Ti Kal ^eo0tXes /cat fieya lepeiov rj^etv 
 TTork els dvOpu)TOVS tu) delco irucv/xaTL 
 
 TrpO€L\7](p6T€S, TO TOU TTaVTOS Kuddp- 
 
 <TLOu Kocr/uiov, ov Kal Ta <ru^3o?\a rewj 
 eirLTekelv avTovs 7rpO(pr)Tas ouTas, /cat 
 Td pJWov 'iaeadai 7rporuTrov,a€vovs. 
 But if this passage really warrxinted 
 the inference that the Hebrews, as 
 a nation, were so conversant with 
 all the mysteries of redemption, it 
 would be impossible to explain such 
 texts as I Pet. i. 11, 12, or indeed 
 to understand the utter dulness of 
 
 the first apostles in not perceiving 
 that He whom they revered as the 
 Messiah must go to Jerusalem and 
 be killed, and must rise again the 
 third day (Matt. xvi. 22; Luke 
 xviii. 34). Archbp. Magee himself 
 acknowledges the force of a similar 
 difficulty arising out of what is 
 called ' the mystical sacrifice of 
 the Phoenicians' (Euseb. Frcepar, 
 Evangel, lib. 1. c. x; i. 90, ed. 
 Gaisford) : for he there perceives 
 (p. 389), that if such offering had 
 contained the typical references 
 assigned to it by Bryant [Observa- 
 tions on Ancient History, pp. 286 
 sq. Camb. 1767), the idolatrous in- 
 habitants of Canaan would have 
 possessed 'a more exact delinea- 
 tion of the great future sacrifice' 
 than was accorded to the Hebrews 
 at the same early period. The 
 truth is, that the 'typical' cha- 
 racter of the sacrifice in question 
 cannot be established. The phrase 
 
 KaT€a(pdTT0UT0 d^ ol dLdojiUfOL flVCTTL- 
 
 Kuys signifies that human victims 
 were immolated on these occasions 
 ^with mystic or secret rites,' with- 
 out implying a prophetic reference 
 to some higher Victim. This con- 
 sideration also furnishes an answer 
 to Mr. W. J. Fox {Religious Ideas, 
 p. no), when he dwells upon the 
 theory of Bryant, and endeavours 
 to elicit an argument in favour of 
 his 'religion of humanity,' from 
 such fancied parallels between the 
 Christian and Phoenician views of 
 expiation. 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, <Soc. 79 
 
 resembled tliat of the woman in St. Matthew's Gospel, whose 
 devotion was accepted and rewarded bj the Saviour, but who 
 knew not that in pouring the ointment on His body, she had 
 done it for His burial (Matt. xxvi. 12). 
 
 Apart, however, from its typical design, the Hebrew system 
 had been calculated to exert a present influence on the life 
 and spirit of the worshipper. It was not only a collection 
 of prophetic types that should hereafter grow more luminous, 
 explicit and convincing when the Antitype Himself arose ; it 
 was symbolical of truths already current in the Elder Church ; 
 it was suggestive of ideas that operated then and there upon 
 the springs of moral action. The sacrificial cultus, for ex- 
 ample, which is properly esteemed the root and centre of the 
 legal system, was no empty pageant for exciting a fantastic 
 or appeasing a blood-thirsty populace : it was no mere state- 
 machinery for keeping Israelites together, or retaining them 
 in their allegiance to some earthly potentate. It symbolised 
 a number of profound realities, affecting man's position in 
 the sight of God, and illustrated on what terms the spirit of 
 the human suppliant could approach the glorious Object of 
 his worship. It set forth, especially, in vivid characters and 
 certified in blood of sacrificial victims the great truth, which 
 every nation more or less admitted and deplored, the truth 
 that sin and holiness are utterly imcompatible, and that only 
 by surrendering life can the relations which iniquity subverts 
 be re-established and renewed. 
 
 To render this more plain and forcible, I shall seJgct an 
 instance from the ordinary worshippers of the time of J>^>i,d, 
 when the ark had come in triumph to the new metropolis 
 and when the cycle of the Hebrew liturgy was celebrated in 
 its fulness. Such a man would find that he was planted in 
 the midst of a minute and solemn ritual, its centre in the holy 
 tabernacle, or rather in the ark of the covenant, where God, 
 who ^rideth upon the heaven of heavens* (Ps. Ixviii. 33), ha^ 
 condescended to approach His fallen creatures, and dispense 
 His gifts of grace. 
 
 The tabernacle itself was curtained from the outer world, 
 and subdivided into three compartments, each with its appro- 
 priate office in the worship of Jehovah. The forecourt was 
 a gathering-point for all the congregation of the Israelites : 
 the holy place was destined for a special order ^, for the mem- 
 
 ^ The distinction does not, how- dotal casfe among the Hebrews. The 
 ever, prove the existence of a sacer- idea of caste is inseparably connect- 
 
80 Christ and other Masters, [part I. 
 
 bers of the sacerdotal family, whom God, in carrying out His 
 purpose, had brought nigh unto Himself: while only one of 
 these, and he upon a single day of the year, was authorized 
 to pass beyond a veil suspended at the extremity of the holy 
 place, that he might offer incense near the mercy-seat, or cover- 
 ing of the ark of witness, and so minister in the holiest of 
 all. But other circumstances urged the Hebrew layman in 
 the same direction, and constrained him to reflect on the pro- 
 visions of the Law. He was most deeply interested in the 
 multifarious acts of worship ever celebrated in the mother-city 
 of Judsea. Like his countrymen in general he was circumcised : 
 he stood in a peculiar nearness, or in covenant-relations to the 
 God of Abraham ; and in virtue of this connexion prayed to 
 God as to his own God, and was able to participate in what 
 is found to be an all-pervading element of Hebrew worship, 
 the rite of sacrifice. 
 
 He felt, moreover, that the system under which he lived 
 was such as to accuse, convict, and punish him when he deflected 
 from the course of action it prescribed. Of these delinquencies 
 one section were the open violations of the Moral Law which 
 contravened the letter of the Decalogue; the rest were all 
 transgressions of inferior branches of the legal system, partly 
 moral, partly positive or ceremonial. Now the former class 
 embracing all varieties of heinous sin the worshipper knew 
 would subject him to excommunication or else to death itself. 
 The Law was able to prescribe no remedy for them : it claimed 
 Hhe blood not of a vicarious victim, but of the transgressor \' 
 He was, therefore, either separated, where the sin was public 
 and notorious, from all intercourse with other Hebrews, and 
 was driven to confess with shame and bitter self-reproaches, 
 'Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it ;' or was sen- 
 tenced to die 'without mercy,' an example of the just severity 
 of God, a warning to his neighbours. Hope there might be 
 
 ed with that of different origins words, that as contrasted with Gen- 
 (e.^r. the Br^hmans, and they alone, tile nations, every Hebrew would 
 are said to have issued from the know God in His revealed charac- 
 head of Brdhma). Besides, it was ter and stand to Him in a relation- 
 announced in early times to all the ship peculiarly near. And that the 
 Israelites without exception, (Ex. Israelites felt themselves thus *con- 
 xix. 5, 6) that if they were true to secrated as a whole people,' so as 
 God's covenant, they would be a to become 'priests and prophets 
 special people and a 'kingdom of for all mankind, 'is stated by Philo, 
 priests ' (cf. i Pet. ii. 9, where Chris- De Abrahamo, 0pp. 11. 15. ed. Man- 
 tians are also entitled y^pos e/cXe/c- gey; De Mose,. Ibid. 11. 104. 
 Tov, ^aatXeiov Ispdrev/na) : in other ^ Davison, On Sacrifice, p. 80. 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion^ &c. 81 
 
 for such culprits, even at this dark extremity, but the source 
 from which it sprang was not distinctly indicated by the 
 ordinances of the Law. 
 
 It was, however, diflferent with a second class ^ of crimes, 
 where the offence was either purely ceremonial, or, if moral, 
 one in which the turpitude was not so glaring nor so utterly 
 devoid of palliating circumstances. For all these the Law 
 of Moses had provided means of expiation. An Israelite, 
 for instance, has been sworn as witness, but is guilty of con- 
 cealing portions of the truth (Levit. v. 4 — 6). He can preserve 
 his standing in the sacred commonwealth only by the aid of 
 * trespass-offerings^' — a lamb or kid of the goats which must 
 be offered in his name in strict compliance with the regulations 
 of. the Law. He therefore travels to mount Zion, to the holy 
 tabernacle of God. He brings his offering to the altar : his 
 hand is pressed upon the head of the devoted animal, which 
 he is taught will be accepted as the means of rescuing the 
 
 ^^. 
 
 ^ Offences for which an atone- 
 ment was provided may be classed 
 as follows: i. Bodily impurity. 
 •2. Ceremonial omissions and trans- 
 gressions. 3. Sins of ignorance 
 and inadvertency, or offences un- 
 wittingly committed {ayvorjiiaTd). 
 4. Certain specified cases of moral 
 transgression, knowingly commit- 
 ted, in favour of which exceptions 
 from the general severity of the 
 Law appear to have been recog- 
 nised. Davison, Ibid. p. 78. Still 
 it is quite possible that the pardon 
 of grosser acts of immorality and 
 even of most deadly sins may have 
 been symbolised, and in so far as 
 related to men's outward position 
 in the theocracy, may have been 
 really effected, on the great day of 
 atonement: for the confession of 
 the high priest then extended to 
 *all the iniquities of the children 
 of Israel, and all their transgres- 
 sions in all their sins,' i. e. to sins 
 of every kind. Maimonides (as 
 quoted by Magee, i. 351), declares 
 that 'the scapegoat made atone- 
 ment for all the transgressions of 
 the Law, both the lighter and the 
 more heavy transgressions,' pro- 
 vided the sinner was himself truly 
 
 H. 
 
 penitent: but this theory of the 
 Jewish schoolman rests upon a 
 total misconception of the Levitical 
 sacrifices. None of these 'could 
 make him that did the service per- 
 fect, Si^ pertaining to the consciences^ 
 (Heb. ix. 9, 10; X. i, 11): they 
 were in respect of it impotent and 
 insufficient : they were symbols only 
 of the genuine purification that was 
 to be effected by other agencies, 
 and therefore did not reach beyond 
 ♦the time of reformation.' 
 
 2 The words D^^^ ( = irXwfiiXeia, 
 
 sacrificium pro delictis), and Hi^^n 
 
 ( = afxapTia, irepl rrjs d/jLaprias, sacri- 
 ficium pro peccatis) are so inter- 
 changed in this passage (Lev. v. 
 I — 13), that it is well-nigh impos- 
 sible to say whether allusion is 
 really made to the 'trespass-offer- 
 ing,' or 'the sin-offering:' see Wi- 
 ner, Realicorterhuch, 11. 431 sq. 3rd 
 ed. I have adopted that view which 
 seems more probable on the whole, 
 making the trespass-offerings refer 
 to an offence in which the individual 
 only is concerned, and the trans- 
 gression known exclusively to him- 
 self. 
 
82 Christ and other Masters. [part I.- 
 
 offender from the outward penalty of his misdeed. The blood, 
 or vehicle of life, is taken by the priest who sprinkles part 
 of it upon the altar, and pours the rest upon the ground. The 
 flesh is then abandoned to the ministers of the sanctuary, and 
 in cases such as that we are considering, is consumed by them 
 within the precincts of the tabernacle : while the offerer is at 
 liberty to turn his footsteps homeward, reinstated in his old 
 position as a member of the sacred family, and so far at peace 
 with God whose laws he had infringed. 
 
 Now this was only one of multitudinous rites that exercised 
 the faith and tested the obedience of the Hebrew, that con- 
 strained him to reflect on the surpassing majesty and purity of 
 God, that deepened in his heart the sentiments of fear and 
 reverence, and that kept alive the consciousness of moral evil. 
 The operation of his sacrifice was plainly two-fold \ It produced^ 
 a real change in him with reference to the outward laws and 
 j^rivileges of the theocracy under which he lived : it symbolised 
 and represented, though it did not actually imj)art, those better 
 gifts of grace, affecting his relations to the Searcher of the 
 human spirit, and promoting the purification of the conscience. 
 I will here revert a moment to the case before adduced, and 
 indicate the probable emotions and reflections which the rite of 
 sacrifice was calculated to excite in ordinary Hebrews of the 
 age of David, when they worshipped in a pious spirit, such as 
 that which animates the Book of Psalms. The one locality at' 
 Avhich their offering must be made in order to secure acceptance 
 would itself contribute to impress the doctrine of God's unity". 
 How sacred also and how awful was that place ! How radiant 
 to the eye of such a worshipper with glorious and profound 
 associations ! ^ It is here that Thou, O God, the Unapproach- 
 able, hast condescended to draw nigh and bless the waiting 
 multitude. Dreadful art Thou, O Lord, out of Thy sanctuaries, 
 the God of Israel; He gives might and strength unto His 
 
 ^ Cf. above, p. 8i, n. i, and timae pro pecoato in Veteri Foedere 
 Mr. Thomson's Bampton Lectures peccata expiarint; nimirum Deum 
 (1853), p. 65. Grotius already in- movendo, ut poenam carnalem re- 
 sisted strongly on the same dis- mitteret, idque per satisfactionem 
 tinction : * Lex vetus dupHciter quandam etc.'' Defensio Fidei Ca- 
 spectatur; aiit carnaliter, aut spi- thol. de Satisfactione Christi, c. x. 
 ritualiter. Carnaliter, qua instrii- 0pp. Theolog. iii. 331, 333. 
 mentum fuit iroXirelas, reipuhlicce ^ Els vaos epos Geou" cplXov yb-p 
 Judaicae. Spiritualiter, qua aKlav ael Travrl to ofxoiov. kolvos airdvTojv, 
 6ix€ Twv fxeWovTOJV, uiiihram Jiahe- kolvov Qeov airdvrwv. Joseph, con- 
 hat futurorum...'Ex\\i^ qyxfj^ (irAmin^ tra Apion. lib. 11. § 23: 0pp. 11. 
 perspicuum jam est, quomodo vie- 485, ed. Havercamp. 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, <Scc. 83 
 
 people. Blessed be God' (cf. Ps. Ixviii. 35). So mused he as 
 he wound his way along the sacred slopes of Zion ; or perchance 
 he asked himself with trembling earnestness, ^Who shall 
 ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand in His 
 holy place?' and heard the answer of the Psalmist, 'He that 
 hath clean hands and a pure heart ; who hath not lifted up his 
 soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully. He shall receive the 
 blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his 
 salvation' (Ps. xxiv. 3 — 5). "Where he enters the tabernacle in 
 this spirit, the feelings that subdue him as he stoops beneath 
 the sacred curtain will continue to direct his thoughts in all 
 his subsequent devotions, and will save him from presenting 
 ' the sacrifice of fools.' He leads his offering to the altar, and 
 as he is there again reminded that the victim must be perfect of 
 its kind, without spot or blemish, in full possession of that life 
 which constitutes the noblest gift of God, how calculated is it 
 to suggest and strengthen the conviction that purity, internal 
 purity, will also be demanded of the worshipper, that while he 
 brings an offering to the altar and expresses there his sense of 
 imperfection and dependenpe, he must also learn the arduous 
 task of self-surrender, he must give his soul a living sacrifice to 
 God^ His liand is placed upon the victim, in whose struggles 
 he beholds the image and the representative of punishment 
 
 P ^ Bahr, who has been followed den Tod ist, so soil auch das see- 
 "^ by some English writers of distinc- lische, d. i. selbstische im Gegen- 
 tion, is not satisfied with consider- satz zu Gott befindliehe Leben des 
 ing this as one aspect of the rite of Opfernden hin- und anfgegeben 
 sacrifice, but argues that the sur- werden, d. h. sterben ; well aber 
 render of the human life and will dies Hingeben ein Hingeben an 
 to God was at the very root of the Jehova, den Heiligen ist, so ist es 
 idea. He draws attention, it is kein Aufhoren schlechthin, nicht 
 true, to the blood sprinkled on the etwas bios Negatives, sondern ein 
 altar, but only to blood as the Sterben, welches eo ipso zum Le- 
 vehicle of life, not as giving an ben wird' u. s. w. ii. 210. Accord- 
 especial prominence to the death of iug to this theory there is nothing 
 the victim. ' Der symbolische Cha- strictly substitutionary or vicarious 
 rakter des Opfers besteht aber nun in any sacrifice, and therefore not 
 darin dass das Dar- oder Nahe- in the sacrificial death of Christ, 
 bringen (l''"lpn) des Nephesch in who merely surrendered His life 
 Opferblute auf den Altar, als den to God as an example of perfect 
 Ort der Gegenwart und Offenba- self-renunciation to be imitated 
 rung Gottes, Symbol von dem Dar- spiritually by all His people. See 
 Oder Nahebringen des Nephesch a full examination of Bahr's po- 
 des Opfernden an Jehova, den Hei- sitions in Kurtz, Das Mosaische 
 ligen ist. Wie jenes Darbringen Opfer, Mitau, 1842, and cf. Fair- 
 des Thierblutes (Seele) ein Hin- bairn's Typology, Vol. 11. Append, 
 und Aufgeben des Thierlebens in B. 
 
 G— 2 
 
84 Christ and other Masters. [part i. 
 
 which he provoked^, and he is smitten with a deeper conscious- 
 ness of his pollution and demerit ; he feels that if Jehovah 
 were to deal with him according to his works, the penalty- 
 would fall directly, and would overwhelm himself instead of the 
 vicarious offering. ' Lo ! now,' his plea is, * I repent, and am 
 truly sorry for my misdeeds; let this victim be my expiation^.' 
 Its death is speedily accomplished, and he finds in that event 
 another symbol both of the displeasure and the placability of 
 God. He learns from what is represented to his eyesight that 
 ^ without shedding of blood there is no remission ;' yet he 
 reasons that as natural life is cherished by the agency of food 
 derived from the inferior animals, the love of God is also mani- 
 fested in arrangements which provide that their life shall be 
 taken as a substitute for his. And therefore when he gazes on 
 the flame of the completed sacrifice, new hopes are simulta- 
 neously awakened in his bosom. He feels that God, who has 
 not turned away from the oblation thus j)resented in accordance 
 with His will, who visibly delivers the offender from the tem- 
 l^oral consequence of his transgression, may also be induced to 
 hear his cry of penitential grief, to purge the soul with hyssop, 
 and to heal the broken and the contrite heart (Ps. li. 7, 17). 
 
 The internal arrangements of the sanctuary itself would in 
 like manner serve to generate these deeper principles of faith, 
 of reverence, of humility. The earnest worshippers, for instance, 
 uniformly revered the ark of the covenant as the proper shrine 
 of God, the Self-Existent One, and therefore as a pledge that 
 notwithstanding their demerit He was still the ever-present 
 Guardian of the Israelites, and that His tabernacle was with 
 man. The same was vividly suggested by the mercy-seat, or 
 mystic covering of the Law, where God was pledged to commune 
 with His people (Ex. xxv. 22), and extended to them foretastes 
 of His reconciling love. Yet different thoughts were also 
 prompted by this indication of His saving presence. So long as 
 the most sacerdotal Hebrews were excluded fi-om the holiest 
 portion of the tabernacle, the truth could scarcely fail to print 
 itself upon the least reflecting mind among them, that an age of 
 
 1 That the Mosaic sacrifices were make atonement for him' ("^Vl?! 
 
 in this sense vicarious, and really ..L,. ^^^L ;L\ „ ,, 
 
 instrumental in releasing the offen- ^ V? ^5??? 1^) : of. the arguments 
 
 der from the temporal punishment and authorities iu Magee, Vol. i. 
 
 due to his transgression, is dis- No. xxxviii. No. xxxix. 
 tinctly affirmed in Levit. i. 4 : 2 ggg this and other traditional 
 
 ' And he shall put his hand upon forms in Outram, De Sacrijiciis^ 
 
 the head of the burnt-offering; and Lib. i. c. xv. § 10, 11. Lond. 1677. 
 it shall be accepted for him, to 
 
 I 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, dx. 85 
 
 full and absolute communion with, the Holy One was still to be 
 expected, that the way into the inner glories of the sanctuary 
 *was not yet made manifest' (Heb. ix. 8), that veils were 
 interposed between the human soul and God, and would 
 continue to be there suspended till a mystery ^ kept secret since 
 the world began' was finally unveiled at the inauguration of 
 some new oeconomy, and discovered Ho all nations for the 
 obedience of faith' (Rom. xvi. 25, 26). 
 
 Nor does this version of the Law, regarded under its 
 symholic aspect, differ in essential points from the deductions 
 which the Christian is enabled to derive from typical arrange- 
 ments of the old oeconomy. On the contrary, it will be found 
 that the two lines of thought are strictly parallel. They both 
 exhibit the same general elements of supernatural truth ; they 
 both are tending to produce the same kind of principles and 
 feelings in their subjects, though the last has reference to far 
 higher platforms, and to modes of action far more spiritual, 
 heavenly, and profound^ In different words, there is exactly 
 the same kind of disproportion between the Hebrew and Christian 
 versions of the Law as that which, from the nature and necessities 
 of the case, exists between the ofiice of the pedagogue and the 
 professor. There is a disproportion, but no dissimilitude : the 
 first is elementary ; it hints, suggests, and shadows forth 
 what is distinctly inculcated and effected by the second. In 
 the first, as Moses emblematically veiled his countenance, we 
 have a system veiled, in order that the plenary light of truth 
 
 ^ Mr.Fairbairn(T2/2>oZo<7?/ of Scrip- abasement, self-renunciation, realis- 
 ture, I. 58, 59) has embodied nearly ing faith, childlike dependence and 
 the same idea in the following pas- adoring gratitude. So that the 
 sage : ' In the immediate ends to be preparatory and the ultimate dis- 
 accomplished, and the apparatus pensations, considered in their gene- 
 provided for accomplishing them, ral character and design, disclosed 
 the two dispensations are as far substantially the same views of God, 
 asunder as heaven is from the earth: and in doing so awoke the same 
 but in both alike, we see a pure and feelings in the hearts of His wor- 
 holy God, enshrined in the recesses shippers : but the former only as the 
 of a glorious sanctuary, unapproach- shadow of the latter, a resemblance 
 able by guilty and polluted flesh, but not the substance, a representa- 
 but through a medium of powerful tion in outward, earthly, and perish- 
 intercession and cleansing efficacy, able materials, and with respect to 
 — ^yet to those who so approach, the concerns of flesh and time, of 
 most merciful and gracious, full of the spiritual ideas and principles 
 loving-kindness, and plenteous in which the dispensation of the 
 redemption: while in every act of Gospel embodies in things not 
 sincere approach on their part, there made with hands and with re- 
 is necessarily brought into exercise spect to objects truly heavenly and 
 the same feehngs of contrition and divine.' 
 
86 Christ and other Masters. [part i. 
 
 might not be prematurely manifested, and so dazzle tiie imperfect 
 vision of the subject (2 Cor. iii. 13); in the second, when the 
 fulness of the time had come, the light of the knowledge of the 
 glory of God is ready to shine forth into the heart of every 
 child of Adam from the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. iv. 6). 
 And thus the Law is found to have been neither silenced, 
 abrogated, nor subverted by the coming of the Son of God. Its 
 real character is vindicated ; it is shewn to be a lower form of 
 one and the same religion. It has passed into the Gospel. Its 
 dim and shadowy outlines are filled up by the effusion of the 
 Holy Spirit ; its graphic and mnemonic symbols are converted 
 into quickening and sustaining sacraments ; its bloody sacri- 
 fices pointing ever to the spotless Lamb of God, who taketh 
 away the sins of the world, have been exchanged^ for prayers 
 and hymns, and eucharistic offerings, where the worshipper 
 presents himself, his soul and body, a living sacrifice, holy, 
 acceptable to God, which is our reasonable service (Rom. xii. 1). 
 Faint and transitory ^preludes' of the Incarnation, granted in 
 the time of Hebraism, were just enough to indicate that God 
 was placable, and might hereafter biing Himself into more 
 intimate relations with the human family. But in the Gospel 
 heaven and earth are reconciled and re-united. God has been 
 * manifest in the flesh,' assuming all our nature, body, soul and 
 spirit, into perfect and indissoluble union with di^dnity. The 
 fulness of time arrived, and * God sent forth His Son, made of a 
 woman, made under the Law, to redeem them that were under 
 the Law, that we might receive the adoption of sons' (Gal. iv. 4, 
 5). The Christian, therefore, is not left to raise himself by 
 means of a symbolic ritual to the full perception of these 
 blessed facts, and a belief in these transcendent mysteries : 
 before our eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth 
 crucified amongst us (Gal. iii. 1). In his character of the 
 burnt-offering. He was immolated to replace mankind in their 
 original subjection to the Godhead: as the peace-offering, He 
 completed our imperfect vows and our defective praises : as the 
 sin-offering. He bore in His sinless body to the tree the concen- 
 trated weight of penal suffering that was due to man's iniquities. 
 He blotted out the handwriting that was against us, nailing it 
 
 ^ OvKovv Kal Ovofiev /cat 6u/j.iujul€V' vpoaKo/d^ovres' rork hh (r0as auroiJs 
 
 roTk ixkv TTjv ixvrjixriv tov ixeydXov oKia KaOiepovvres avT<^, Kal ti$ yG 
 
 BtJ/JLaros, Kara, rd irpbs avroD irapaBo- 'Apxiepei avrov A.6ytt), aury (ribfxaTt 
 
 B^vra pLVCTTripLa eTTLreXovvTes, Kal r-qv Kal ^vxv duaKeifievoL. Eusebius, 
 
 virkp aujTrjpias tj/jlcou evx^-piffriav bC Demonst. Evangel. Lib. i. c. x. (p. 
 
 evcc^u)v v/bLvojp re Kal ei^xu;;/ r^ 0e^ 40, Paris, 1628). 
 
 i 
 
CHAP, III.] On the Characteristics of Beligion, <^c, 87 
 
 to the cross. He died the just for the unjust that He might 
 bring us back to God. He passed in triumph from the earth, 
 or outer-court of the eternal sanctuary, and entered not 'into 
 the holy places made with hands, which are the figures of the 
 true ] but into heaven itself, there to appear in the presence of 
 God for us' (Heb. ix. 24). 
 
 § 2. The Promise, 
 
 The possibility of this reconcilement between God and His 
 offending creatures was already liinted, as we saw, in shadowy 
 and symbolic ordinances of the legal system. But there was 
 another and a more explicit way in which the future exaltation 
 of mankind was intimated to the members of the Hebrew 
 Church. As early as the time of Abraham, the evangelic 
 ' Promise' had obtained a definite expression ; the Gospel had 
 been 'preached before' (Gal. iii. 8). 
 
 I shall not reopen old discussions touching the amount of liope 
 derivable from the sentence passed on him who tempted our 
 first parents. Many Christians have discovered there a kind of 
 * Protevangelium, ' or 'grand charter of God's mercy after the 
 falPj' others, the incipient germ which every future promise 
 only served to ripen and developed; and St. Paul appears 
 himself to countenance these expositions when the victory of 
 Christ is represented as the bruising of Satan's power beneath 
 the feet of Christians (E,om. xvi. 20). It may nevertheless be 
 granted that the language used in Genesis might originally 
 produce in man no very definite ideas either of the Person, or 
 the nature of his future Champion. All that our first parents 
 gathered from it may have been the vast but vague assurance 
 that their forfeited possession, with its peace and harmony and 
 innocence, was not lost for ever, but would be restored on the 
 
 ^ Bp. Sherlock, On Prophecy^ Mr. J. J. S. Perowne, ind ed. p. 24. 
 
 Disc. III. p. 78. It is however satisfactory to add, 
 
 2 Fairbaim, TypoL of Scripture, that all Hebrew scholars with whom 
 I. 193. This is not the place to I have had an opportunity of con- 
 take in hand a critical refutation of versing on the' subject, strongly 
 the views propounded in the recent reprobate the exposition there ad- 
 work of Dr. Donaldson with refer- vanced. They hold that it is phi- 
 ence to the correct interpretation lologically desperate, and could 
 of Gen. iii. 15. As one of the never have possessed itself of such 
 assailants of those views most truly a mind as Dr. Donaldson's, had 
 urges, the translation of *what is he not found it useful in the vindi- 
 usually considered as the first cation of his favourite theory, touch- 
 Messianic promise ' is * so gross that ing the non-existence of all moral 
 it will not bear rendering into agents other than the human: cf. 
 English.' Remarks on Dr. Donald- above, p. 72, note. 
 son's Book, entitled 'Jashar,' by 
 
88 Christ and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 discomfiture of him whose instigations led to their expulsion. 
 In that case the how and when would be reserved for some 
 ulterior promise. 
 
 It is however certain that a root and starting-point of such 
 explicit revelations has been found in Abraham, the friend of 
 God, the father of the faithful ; and after his progeny was 
 elected as the special vehicle of true religion, and its guardian 
 in a world fast lapsing from the worship and the fear of God, or 
 growing vain in their imaginations (Kom. i. 21), fuller beams of 
 light were thrown continually upon the future history of liis 
 race, and on the hopes and prospects of mankind in general. 
 * From this time began that line of the divine oracles, which, 
 first being preserved in his family, and afterwards secured in 
 record, has never been broken nor lost, but having successively 
 embraced the Law, the Prophets, and the Gospel, is now 
 completed, to remain the lasting and imperishable monument of 
 Revealed Truth in the world \ ' Accordingly we ascertain that 
 Avhile the better and more thoughtful class of heathen were 
 compelled to seek relief in their embarrassments by dreaming of 
 some golden age that might eventually come round afresh, and 
 reinstate them in some lost inheritance ; the Hebrew always 
 J)roved himself a man of the future. The genius of his religion 
 was pre-eminently hopeful. He was ever in the attitude of 
 expectation^, ever reaching forward to an age of glory, of 
 enlargement, of deliverance, when his race would be super- 
 latively blessed, and prove itself the bearer of unuttered 
 blessings to all tribes and families of man. 
 
 I grant that in its earlier form the prophecy to which these 
 hopes were clinging with so much of ardour and tenacity was 
 comparatively dim, indefinite and enigmatical ; nor could it, 
 under Hebraism, assume the spiritual aspect which the promises 
 of God possess wlien contemplated by ourselves from Christian 
 points of view. Yet on the other hand we should remember 
 that such characteristics harmonise with the prevailing methods, 
 tone and spirit of the old ceconomy. The symbolical and 
 typical versions of the legal system have their parallel in what 
 may be esteemed the Hebrew and the Christian versions of the 
 
 ^ Davison, Discourses on Fro- to testify wonders more august to 
 
 phecy, p. 97, 4th ed. come. From Moses to Malachi, 
 
 2 'Expectation then,' says the these Hebrew Scriptures are, as it 
 
 lamented Archer Butler, *is the in- were, one long-drawn sigh of sor- 
 
 ward spirit of the Old Testament, rowful hope.' Sermons, ist series, 
 
 as Fulfilment of the New. Won- p. 212, 3rd ed. 
 derful itself, its function clearly is 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, &c. 89 
 
 Promise. Thus, the very first conceptions of man's rescue from 
 the consequences of the fall may have been only rude approxi- 
 mations to the great reality. They may have reached no further 
 than the thought of some divine interposition which should 
 mitigate the ills of life, and make the earth a more congenial 
 habitation. Again, although the wording of the curse ^ denounced 
 on men's seducer (Gen. iii. 15), would have doubtless made it 
 evident that God was on their side, and not on hi-s ; the question 
 whether a destructive blow then threatened was to be inflicted 
 by the human species generally, by some peculiar race of Eve's 
 descendants, or a single champion of that race, was for the 
 present left unanswered. 
 
 Nor am I contending that when Abraham received the 
 promise, *In thee (or, in thy seed) shall all the nations of 
 the earth be blessed,' the language was entirely free from 
 corresponding ambiguity^. The patriarch himself would pro- 
 
 ^ The word ^jj (properly * the act 
 of sowing,' hence 'seed' and 'pro- 
 geny ' in general) would not of itself 
 convey the idea of an individual, 
 but rather of a plurality of descen- 
 dants: cf. Rom. xvi. 20, and be- 
 low, note 2. Accordingly Kurtz 
 [Gesch. des Alien Bundes, i. 62, 63), 
 although recognising the prophetic 
 character of the verse, takes the 
 expression 'seed of the woman,' as 
 equivalent to all the human race. 
 'Das ganze Menschengeschlecht 
 (der Weibessame) soil den Kampf 
 mit dem Urheber der Siinde kamp- 
 fen, und soil ihn kraf t des gottlichen 
 Willens siegreich kampfen.' 
 
 2 Gen. xii. 2, 3; Gal. iii. 8. On 
 a future occasion (Gen. xxii. 18) the 
 phrase ' in thee ' is explained ' in thy 
 seed' ('^y."lt?), and in this expanded 
 form the promise was republished, 
 (i) in the case of Isaac (Gen. xxvi. 
 4), and (2) in that of Jacob (Gen. 
 xxviii. 14). But the difficulty of 
 applying the expression VIJ to an 
 individual is apparent even at this 
 last stage of the promise : for in the 
 earlier member of the same verse 
 (v. 14) it is prophesied that the seed 
 of Jacob (^O) ^^^1^ ^® ^s nume- 
 rous 'as the dust of the earth:' cf. 
 
 xxii. 17, 18. On the other hand it 
 has been argued from St. Paul's 
 distinction between 'seed' and 
 'seeds' (Gal. iii. 16), and his ex- 
 position of the 'one seed' as pro- 
 phetic of the Messiah, that the 
 patriarchs may have been taught 
 by such expressions as occur in 
 Gen. xxii. 18, to expect an individual 
 Saviour. I do not think it unlikely 
 that they had by some course or 
 other arrived at this conclusion: 
 the language of our Lord Himself 
 implies as much, when He says, 
 'Your father Abraham rejoiced to 
 see my day ; and he saw it, and was 
 glad ' (John viii. 56). Still it is next 
 to certain that St. Paul, in the 
 passage above quoted, did not mean 
 to rest this inference on the Hebrew 
 equivalent of 'seed.' His meaning 
 rather is, that the promise was not 
 given to all the (nr^pfJLaTa (posterities, 
 or descendants) of Abraham, but 
 only to the single line of Isaac, that, 
 viz. of which 'Christ' (the K€<pa\'ff 
 and TrX^pwyua of all the Christian 
 body) was the representative and 
 consummation: see ver. 29. The 
 form (nripixara is used in this way 
 by Joseph. Antiq. viii. 7, 6 [irats 
 iK ^aaikiKwv aTrep/jLdrwp): and St. 
 Paul elsewhere (i Cor. xii. 12) con- 
 
90 Christ and other Masters, [part i. 
 
 bably discover there allusion to an individual Benefactor of 
 the Abrahamic race. He may have also been enabled more 
 and more, by his own want of territory, and his fuller insight 
 into the mysterious ways of God, to separate the spiritual from 
 the temporal branches of the Promise^, to see through the 
 earthly blessing more and more distinctly in proportion as it 
 was deferred, and so recognise in the Messiah, not only an 
 illustrious Chieftain who should stretch His sceptre over all the 
 land of Canaan, but a glorious Agent for disseminating true 
 religion, and restoring peace and righteousness to man. Yet 
 even thus the image of the future Christ was little more than 
 outline. Subsequent disclosures were required to fill the out- 
 line up, to introduce fresh features, to supply more special 
 characteristics, to combine ideas of death and sufiering with 
 ideas of conquest and of glorification, till the Personage who 
 stands before us in the visions of Isaiah^ might hereafter be at 
 once identified with the exalted Son of Mary, and apostles 
 be enabled to establish from the ancient Scriptures that Jesus 
 is the Christ^. 
 
 But the peculiar forms and aspects thus assumed from 
 time to time by Messianic intimations of the Old Testament 
 have proved a fruitful source of modern scepticism. The 
 evidence of prophecy to which all fathers and apologists of 
 the Early Church assigned the very greatest prominence*, and 
 
 siders o XpLards as involving mys- incredulity of the Jewish people in 
 
 tically the whole spiritual organism, the rejection of it; the adoption of 
 
 the Church united with Him : cf. the Gentile world into the Church 
 
 Tholuck's Appendix to Pissert. i. and people of God ; the peace of the 
 
 Epist. to the Hebrews^ ii. 230 sq. righteous in death, and the triumph 
 
 ^ See the reasoning on this sub- and victory of God's mercy, in be- 
 
 ject in Hebr. xi. 9, 10. half of man, over death?' Davison, 
 
 2 'What less have we in the single On Pi'ophecy, pp. 272, 273. Even 
 book of Isaiah than the scheme of Mr. F. W. Newman was so affected 
 the Gospel, and the establishment by some of these passages that, to 
 of it, unfolded? The mission of use his own expressions, ' they were 
 Christ into the world, his original the very last link of my chain that 
 Divine Nature, his supernatural snapt.' P/mses o/i^ait/?, pp. 195,196. 
 birth in his incarnation, his work ^ See, for instance. Acts iii. 24 
 of mercy and his kingdom of right- . sq. ; xviii. 28 ; xxiv. 14; xxvi,. 22 sq.; 
 eousness; his humiliation, suffer- xxviii. 23. This method they had 
 ings, and death ; the sacrifice of learned from Him, who, ' beginning 
 atonement for sin made by his at Moses and all the prophets, ex- 
 death ; the effusion of the gifts and pounded unto them in all the Scrip- 
 grace of the Holy Spirit; the en- tiires the things concerning Him- 
 larged propagation of his religion; self:' see Luke xxiv. 24 — 27. 
 the persecutions of it ; the moral * Thus, Justin Martyr, speaking 
 characters of it; the blindness and of the evidence of prophecy, says, 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Beligion, &c. 91 
 
 which in fact secured for Christianity a number of its ablest 
 champions and its brightest luminaries \ is decried as shallow, 
 impotent, and inconclusive. A living writer who described 
 the several steps by which the old 'religion of the letter' is 
 gradually 'renounced,' informs us that the Christian Church 
 has been crippled ever since the firet century by its acquiescence 
 in the following proposition, viz. that 'the Jewish teacher 
 Jesus fulfilled the conditions requisite to constitute him the 
 Messiah of the ancient Hebrew prophets^' Others, who de- 
 cline to say expressly whether they have also lost their faith 
 in the Messiahship of Jesus, manifest the same antipathy 
 to all external evidences, and more especially to that by which 
 His claims to such an office have been hitherto supported. 
 The prophets, it is urged, may have in every case had reference 
 primarily to events and persons of their own day, or at least 
 so nearly contemporaneous that the spiritual gift they exercised 
 was rather one of predication than prediction ; and therefore 
 that the Christian acts unfairly to the Holy Scriptures when 
 he construes language spoken primarily of Hebrew kings, or 
 of the sacred family at large, as a direct and literal prophecy 
 of Christ. Such language, say our critics, can be honestly 
 adduced in no other way than as the language of allegory or 
 of general illustration. 
 
 Now without pausing to remind objectors of this second 
 class that all their animadversions will extend far higher even 
 than the saints and worthies of the ancient Church, it may 
 suffice to answer that the strenirth of such an arsrument is 
 
 riirep tieyhryj koL dX-qdecrTaTT} diro- ^ Newman's Phases of Faith, p. 
 
 (5ei^ts Kal v/x2u, cos vofxi^ofiev, (pav^ae- -202. He adds (p. 2? 5) that the 
 
 rat: ApoL i. c. 30. St. Augustine heavy yoke imposed on Christians 
 
 has numerous passages to the same of the present day arises from our 
 
 effect : e. ^. * Nam de prophetia con- claiming * Messiahship for Jesus. ^ 
 
 vincimus contradicentes paganos. ' This, ' it is alleged, ' gave a premium 
 
 Quid est Christus ? dicit paganus : to crooked logic, in order to prove 
 
 cui respondemus, Quem prasnun- that the prophecies meant what 
 
 ciaverunt prophetas. '* Tractat. xxxv. they did not mean, and could not 
 
 in Johan. § 7, ed. Benedict. mean. This put the Christian 
 
 ^ Justin Martyr, Clemens Alex- church into an essentially false 
 
 andrinus, Tertullian, Lactantius, position, by excluding from it in the 
 
 and Amobius were all originally first century all the men of most 
 
 heathen, and all attribute their con- powerful and cultivated under- 
 
 version to the intimate correspon- standing among the Greeks and 
 
 dence between the facts of the New Komans :' cf. the language of an 
 
 Testament and the predictions of ancient scoffer in Origen, contra 
 
 the Old: Lyall's Propcedia Prophe- Celsum, Lib. i. p. 39, ed. Spencer. 
 tica, p. 88. 
 
92 
 
 Christ and other Masters. 
 
 [part I. 
 
 drawn from considerations neither probable in themselves, nor 
 warranted by the phenomena of Holy Scripture. For even 
 were we to admit that all the propliecies are capable of being 
 referred to circumstances actually or proximately contem- 
 poraneous, — an assumption^ than which nothing is more arbitrary 
 and unjustifiable, — does it necessarily follow that a second 
 Person, standing in the same relations, or a second series 
 of analogous events, may not have been embraced within 
 the scope of the original prediction^? May not one fulfilment 
 of a prophecy be leading up men's thoughts and aspirations 
 to another less" immediate but more literal? May not an 
 imperfect realisation of the prophet's language be the pledge 
 and prelude of a second still more glorious and exhaustive? 
 Is the Bible such a plain and superficial document that the 
 discovery of these fresh and deeper meanings should in any 
 wise offend us? The truth is, that a mind impressed with 
 reverence for the Holy Scriptures, searching them with the 
 conviction that Christ is to be found in every quarter, in the 
 
 ^ Take, for instance, one of the 
 first passages in which both Jews 
 and Christians of all times have 
 recognised the promise of a personal 
 Messiah (Gen. xHx. 8 — lo). Whe- 
 ther the true reading (in ver. lo) 
 be n?''^ (retained in the Samaritan), 
 
 or npK' ( = LXX. rd diroKeifieva ai5ry 
 and y dvoKeiTaL), between which 
 critics are divided : and whether, 
 
 secondly, we interpret T]y^ as the 
 subject of the verb, 'Man of Kest,* 
 *the Kest-bringer, ' corresponding 
 to 'the Prince of Peace,' in Is. ix. 5 ; 
 or with those moderns who virtually 
 reject the Messianic interpretation, 
 
 make n?'^^ the object of the verb, 
 and translate (i) 'until he (Judah) 
 comes to Shiloh' (the well-known 
 locality in Ephraim) ; or else (2) 
 'until he (Judah) comes to rest,' 
 i.e. rest in the land of Canaan, — 
 the fulfilment of Jacob's language 
 is in every case removed into a dis- 
 tant future. The same is equally 
 true of the next important prophecy 
 inentionedin the Pentateuch (Numb. 
 
 xxiv. 1 7) : for whether the ' Star put 
 of Jacob ' be an image of the Israeli- 
 tish royalty in general, or of an 
 actual king like David, or of Christ 
 Himself, the king of Israel, a mighty 
 interval exists between the date of 
 the prediction and the earliest ful- 
 filment of it. Other instances are 
 the 2nd and 72nd Psalms, the latter 
 of which Mr. Newman himself urges 
 * was never fulfilled by any histori- 
 cal king:' Phases, p. 194. 
 
 2 Bacon suggests that all inter- 
 preters should aUow 'that latitude 
 which is agreeable and familiar 
 unto divine prophecies, being of 
 the nature of their Author, with 
 whom a thousand years are but as 
 one day, and therefore are not ful- 
 filled punctually at once, but have 
 springing and germinant accom- 
 plishment throughout many ages; 
 though the height or fulness of 
 them may refer to some one age.' 
 Advancement of Learning, Bk. 11. 
 Works, I. 49. Lond. 1765 : cf. Nares, 
 View of the Prophecies, pp. 92 
 sq.,Lond. 1805, and Davison, pp. 
 195 sq. 
 
(JHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, Sc. 93 
 
 Law of Moses, in the prophets, and in the Psalms, will be 
 prepared for such phenomena. Whatever they may be to others, 
 they will constitute for him a portion of that marvellous fulness 
 and fertility which characterise the works of the Omnipotent. 
 He sees, for instance, that when prophets of the age of the 
 Captivity foretell the grandeur of the Messianic period, very 
 many of their figures are derived from the anterior age cf 
 David. The name ^ of him who governed Israel as the righteous 
 representative of God becomes the name of the Messiah; the 
 seat of empire is the Holy Land; the growth and ultimate 
 glorification of the theocracy is shadowed out as a reunion 
 of Judah and Israel on their return from the dispersion : 
 and why? Because the elder system was in all its parts 
 prophetic; because it typified, and was designed to pass into 
 the later; because the Christ of prophecy was the all-righteous 
 King of Judah, and has verily succeeded to the throne of His 
 father David; because the restoration from captivity was itself 
 an earnest and a prelude of the Messianic deliverance; and 
 because all nations, when they met as brethren in the bosom 
 of the Church of Christ, have recognised in Jerusalem the 
 birth-place and metropolis of the new oeconomy, and are ready 
 to exclaim with Jews and ])roselytes of old, ^All my fresh 
 springs shall be in thee' (Ps. Ixxxvii. 7). Or if the sacred 
 writer contemplate the fortunes of the Hebrew commonwealth 
 as in many ways repeated in the life of the Messiah^: if he 
 shew, for instance, that our blessed Lord in early childhood 
 was compelled by hard necessity to sojourn in the land of 
 Egypt, finding an asylum in that very region which supplied 
 a cradle to the Hebrew race, such incidents are placed together 
 as related, harmonising and analogous, because the Christ is 
 
 ^ See, for example, Ezek. xxxvii. and people of Canaan were David's; 
 
 24> 25, which is peculiarly perplex- and only when it becomes His ac- 
 
 ingtoMr. Newman (P/iases,p. 193). tual possession can the prophecy 
 
 He fails to perceive that the whole respecting Him, as the New Testa- 
 
 of the prophet's description is ideal, ment David, reach its destined ac- 
 
 though the re-appearance of ' David' complishment.' 
 
 on the earth is sufficient to intimate 2 (jf^ pj.. Mill's Christ. Adv. Puhl. 
 
 this, and that a barely 'literal' ful- (1844), pp. 411 sq., who justly ob- 
 
 filment is not to be expected. ' The serves in treating of a similar case 
 
 prophecy,' as Mr. Fairbairn remarks, (p. 408): 'There are other matters 
 
 {Ezekiel, p. 363) 'is a detailed pic- necessary to the right understanding 
 
 ture of coming good, drawn, as such of sacred prophecies beside the 
 
 apicture must have been, under the bare rules (which no sane man 
 
 formoftheoldcovenant-relations.... despises) of grammatical interpre- 
 
 The whole earth is as much Christ's tation.' 
 rightful heritage as the territory 
 
94? Christ and other Masters. [parti. 
 
 verily the promised Seed ; because He is the Head and Antitype 
 of God's collective First-born; and because He only realised 
 in all their fulness the exalted characteristics which Israel 
 as a nation was commissioned to exhibit and diffuse. 
 
 And that Hebrews were themselves alive to such ulterior 
 and more perfect realisations of the elder covenant, and fre- 
 quently discerned the fitness of this virovoia in the language 
 and general structure of the prophecies, we are enabled to 
 establish fully from their extant literature \ They welcomed 
 every voice that issued from the desert with the faintest 
 whispers of Messiah. His birth, His life, His kingdom, 
 widely as they often erred in estima,ting the nature, colouring 
 and effect of these, were constantly suggested to their thoughts; 
 and therefore when St. Matthew, writing for the special benefit 
 of Jews, alluded to examples where predictions were fulfilled 
 in that higher sense, or when St. Paul, endeavouring to reclaim 
 the Judaizers of Galatia, declared that the arrangements of the 
 Abrahamic family with reference to the child of promise were 
 so ordered as to intimate that such a child must be extra- 
 ordinary and begotten from above, they neither of them ran 
 the risk of serious misconception, nor were open to the charge 
 of sheltering their ai-guments beneath a fanciful exegesis. 
 
 I grant that earnest minds have varied in their power of 
 tracing and appreciating the great ideas that connect these 
 deeper meanings of the Bible with the naked and more primary 
 sense. I grant that in the present day the general tendency of 
 thought is adverse to such methods of interpretation^, and that 
 writers who pride themselves on the superiority of their critical 
 acumen are never more successful, in the judgment of the 
 undiscriminating and the superficial, than in their attempts 
 to underrate the mj'steries of Holy Scripture. But the course 
 of my argument is not affected by this circumstance. I am 
 
 ^ See Schottgen, Korce Hehraicce^ evangelische Geschichte in den he- 
 
 passim: and Mill, as above, p. 418. deutendsten Momenten der mosai- 
 
 2 It should, however, be stated schen parallel geht. Im Judenthum 
 
 that the age is not without examples lag, wie im Keime Blatter und 
 
 of a healthier tendency. Thus the Friichte, das Christenthum. Frei- 
 
 reaction in De Wette's mind im- lich bedurfte es der gottlichen Sonne 
 
 pelled him to make the following um hervorzubrechen.' And Um- 
 
 acknowledgment in addition to breit has very recently {Studien und 
 
 \vhat has been already cited (p. 59) : Kritiken, 1855, 3tes Heft, pp. 573 
 
 'Kein durchaus leeres Spiel war sq.) abandoned the un-Messianic 
 
 die typologische Vergleichung des interpretation of Is. vii. 14, which 
 
 A. T. mit dem N. T. Auch ist es he had formerly endeavoured to 
 
 schwerlich blosser Zufall, dass die establish. 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, dx. 95 
 
 endeavouring to ascertain what were the leading features of 
 the Old-Testament religion, as interpreted by persons occupying 
 the position of the Hebrews; and with reference to the topic 
 now before us, it remains indisputable that either owing to the 
 character of their sacred books, or to some other agency, they 
 were emphatically men of hope. In spite of every storm that 
 darkened the immediate future of the Church, they looked with 
 yearning conlidence to what they called ' the times of restitution 
 and refreshing,' of peace, forgiveness, and redemption. They 
 took refuge in this 'world to comeV — an age when temporal 
 evils v/ould be all corrected or exhausted, when mercy and 
 truth would meet together, and righteousness and peace would 
 kiss each other, when Zion under the benignant rule of Christ 
 would shew herself the mother -city of a world -embracing 
 system, and ' all nations flow ' to her for solace and for light. 
 
 And it is most observable that, however modern sceptics 
 may account for the origin and intensity of this conviction^ its 
 existence at the birth of Christ is now commonly admitted. 
 The recognition of His claims by many of His fellow-countrymen 
 in Palestine and other regions, is attributed to the fact that He 
 was generally expected. And this fact indeed is absolutely 
 necessary to the establishment of the Straussian hypothesis 
 on the composition of the sacred Gospels. The national mind, 
 it is discovered, must have been occupied completely with 
 expectations of some great Deliverer, or ideal portraits such 
 as those ascribed to Jesus of Nazareth by His followers, could 
 not possibly have been conceived. And with this view accords 
 the language of Mr. Mack ay, a main pillar of the Absolute 
 Religion. ' The fund of Hebrew hope,' he writes^, 'was as 
 
 ^ Schottgen, II. 23 sq. : cf. 7?^. <o terbucJi, s. v. Propheten, 11. 279, 
 
 Hebrews J 11. 5, vi. 5. Winer, who 3rd ed. 
 
 is certainly not inclined to over- 2 Progress of the Intellect, 11. 209. 
 
 estimate the Divine element in He refers to the same phenomenon 
 
 Holy Writ, makes the following in his later work {Eise and Pro- 
 
 statement on this subject: *Nurin gress of Christianity, p. 15, Lond. 
 
 einer Beziehung treten sie [die Pro- 1854): 'Through a long series of 
 
 pheten] aus ihrem durch die Zeit- misfortunes the Jews had been con- 
 
 verhaltnisse bedingten Gesichts- stantly supported by the expecta- 
 
 kreise heraus und richten den Blick tion of a great deliverer, called em- 
 
 des Volks auf eine fern liegende phatically the anointed king, or 
 
 idealeZukunft,dannnamlich,wenn Messiah, who would restore the 
 
 sie, durch die Betrachtung der ancient glory of their theocracy, or 
 
 nachsten Zukunft nicht befriedigt, Divine Kingdom, as it existed under 
 
 Ton dem grossen Nationalretter David and Solomon, inaugurating 
 
 (Messias) und dem hochbegluckten at the same time a new reign of 
 
 Zeitalter reden,' u. s. w. Bealwor- righteousness.' 
 
96 Christ and other blasters. [part i. 
 
 immeasurable as the poM^er of the invisible Sovereign; and 
 it was even anticipated that the prospective kingdom would 
 embrace universal dominion, a dominion coextensive with the 
 theoretical (?) empire of the Deity over the whole earth.* 
 According to Mr. Mackay, the origin of these profound con- 
 victions was entirely human and subjective. The Messiah- 
 doctrine, he conjectures \ was 'a joint product of tlie misfortunes 
 of the times and of the theocratic constitution,' the experience 
 of a want in this and other instances exciting Hhe imagination 
 to fill up the blank out of its own resources.' 
 
 But there is one other class of writers whom we ought in 
 fairness to examine before this startling verdict is accepted. 
 We shall always, it is true, be grateful to the advocate of the 
 * religion of humanity' who confesses the existence of Messianic 
 predictions, or at least discovers new presentiments in favour of 
 the Gospel ; yet he must excuse us if, when he proposes such 
 inadequate explanation of the origin of these presentiments, we 
 seek elsewhere for less fantastic guides and more intelligible 
 reasons. Mr. Mackay and his friends may treat the Hebrew 
 prophets as the /xai/rets, or the preachers, as the rhetoricians, or 
 the improvisatori of the times in which they flourished; he 
 may find in all their loftiest utterances no more than natural 
 guesses of a thoughtful mind, or the creations of an eastern 
 fancy : but we who look at them with different eyes, who have 
 been taught to ^ worship the God of our fathers, believing all 
 things which are written in the Law and in the prophets,' shall 
 rather form our estimate of the phenomena in question after 
 hearing what the sacred writers tell us of themselves and of 
 their own experiences. 
 
 Now prophecy, in their meaning of the term, is a peculiar 
 characteristic of Revealed Religion. There is doubtless no lack 
 of oracles and divination, of augurs and of fortune-tellers in the 
 various records of the heathen world ^; but we shall look in 
 vain to them for what is everywhere discovered in the Bible ^ 
 
 ^ Progress of the Intellect, u. 210. and Modern Infidelity, pp. 120 sq. 
 
 2 On the fundamental distiuction Lond. 1854. 'The Hebrew Scrip- 
 
 between prophecy and all forms tures, then,' writes Archer Butler, 
 
 of heathen divination, see Haver- 'themselves, and the people and 
 
 nick, Einleitimg^ 11. ii. 29 sq., and polity v/hich form their singular 
 
 J. Smith's chapter on the 'Differ- subject, intimate a wonderful/^tiwre, 
 
 ence of the true prophetical spirit and point altogether to it, and are 
 
 from all enthusiastical imposture:' wholly inexplicable unless on the 
 
 Select Discourses J pp. 190 sq. Lond. supposition of it. This at once dis- 
 
 1660. tinguishes it [? them] from every 
 
 2 Cf. Mr. Morgan's Christianity other ancient waiting of the same 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, Sc. 97 
 
 We shall look in vain for series of explicit prophecies, arising 
 not from a mastery which the seer possesses over hidden powers 
 of nature, nor from the effects of some delirious intoxication, 
 where his reasoning faculties are ail suspended, but from bolj, 
 calm, and conscious intercourse with God Himself, the personal 
 Revealer, who in due time vindicates the character of the 
 prophecy by bringing it to pass. * Produce your cause, saith 
 the Lord : bring forth your strong reasons, saith the King of 
 Jacob. Let them bring them forth, and shew us what shall 
 happen : let them shew the former things what they be, that we 
 may consider them, and know the latter end of them ; or 
 declare us things for to come. Shew the things that are to come 
 hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods\' And as 
 Jehovah challenges the idols of the heathen, bidding them 
 establish their title to divinity by putting forth prophetic gifts, 
 so all His messengers were ever conscious of the special nature 
 of their calling, and have drawn the clearest possible distinctions 
 between the true and false in prophecy. ^ Woe,' their cry was, 
 ' unto the foolish prophets, ihsit /ollow their own spirit, and have 
 seen nothing^ (Ezek. xiii. 3). They were persuaded that the 
 office of the genuine seer had brought him into close communion 
 with the fountaia of all knowledge ; and prophecy was therefore, 
 in his case, a real opening of things secret, an objective ;revela 
 tion of the plans and purposes of God^ (Amos iii. 7 '; Is. xliii. 12). 
 He saw what he describes : he was assured of it by some 
 immediate intuition^. Exalted to a higher sphere of thought. 
 
 kind-; among all national literatures rint, ut seu boni sen mali quid ac- 
 
 this makes the Jewish unique.' Ser- cidisset, utrumque posset intelligi.' 
 
 mons, ist ser. pp. 209, 2IO, 3rd ed. 2 Witsius in one of his able 
 
 ^ Is. xli. 21— '23. ' Bp. Lowth Miscellanea {'De Tm-phetis efPio- 
 
 {Isaiahf ip. 106, Lond. 1778) trans- phetia') establishes the following 
 
 lates the second member of v. 21: definition of prophecy: *Cognitio 
 
 'Produce these your mighty pow- etpatef actio rerumarcanarum,quas 
 
 ers,' making the challenge apply quis non ex propria solertia neque 
 
 directly to the false divinities. St. ex aliorum relatu, sed ex coelesti 
 
 Jerome {in loc.) sees in the passage atqueextraordinariaDeirevelatione 
 
 an allusion to the fact that heathen novit:' Lib. i. c. 2, § i. 
 
 oracles were all silenced at the ^ See the recent discussion of 
 
 coming of Christ. *Si ergo suum this subject in Mr. Lee's Jnspira- 
 
 interitum non potuere pr^dicere, tion of Holy Scripture^^ pp. 167 sq. 
 
 quomodo aliena, vel mala, vel bona, Lond. 1854; — a treatise well de- 
 
 potuerint nunciare?' He then adds: serving the attention of all biblical 
 
 • Quod si aliquis dixerit, multa ab scholars who rejoice to see^ exact- 
 
 idolis esse praedicta, hoc sciendum ness of thought combined -svith ful- 
 
 quod semper mendacium junxerint ness of knowledge and a reverential 
 
 veritati; et sic sententias tempera- spirit. 
 
98 Climst and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 admitted to a deeper survey of the world invisible, tlie prophets 
 for the time were made recipients of supernatural communica- 
 tions. These the Lord Himself presented to them, and these 
 they apprehended by an organ of the soul which corresponded to 
 their outer vision, and which equally convinced them of the 
 truth and objectivity of what they saw. While, on the con- 
 trary, all forms of pseudo-prophecy were utterly subjective. 
 There was no external fact according with its utterances, nor 
 with the impulse of the human spirit. The diviner may in 
 many cases have been perfectly sincere, and many of the 
 heathen oracles when consulted on religious questions may have 
 given answers highly calculated to protect the interests of 
 morality : but all their best vaticinations, if not due exclusively 
 to human shrewdness and reflection, were so many vague fore- 
 bodings and presentiments : they spoke ^ out of their own hearts' 
 (Ezek. xiii. 2). 
 
 Such then is the grand distinction which the sacred writers 
 uniformly draw between the nature of prophetic visions and 
 all merely human eiforts to obtain a knowledge of the will of 
 God, and penetrate the mysteries of the invisible. Yet strange 
 to say, the testimony of the prophets on this subject is rejected 
 by the speculators of the present day, in order to make room 
 for novel theories, wild and arbitrary in their form^, if not 
 completely pantheistic in their tendency. Where prophecies 
 of redemption are not construed as the mere projections of the 
 human consciousness, or yearnings prompted by the want of 
 some Redeemer, they are all resolved into peculiarities of 
 natural temperament, in such a way as to discard the opera- 
 tion of the Holy Spirit, and repudiate every trace of an 
 objective element. The founder of tliis school was Benedict 
 de Spinosa. Starting as he did with a belief that God was 
 only a generalised expression for all natural causes, he laboured 
 to obliterate the distinction between a personal Revealer and 
 
 1 Thus, Mr. Edward Strachev, was what our Lord and his apostles 
 ■writing on Hebreio Politics in the understood by the name, and so has 
 times of Sargon and Semiacherih, it always been understood in modern 
 (Lond. 1853), does not scruple to times of earnestness and zealJ* In a 
 make the following unqualified as- postscript (p. 352) the author adds: 
 sertion (p. 5) : ' The prophets were 'I have not now first to acknowledge 
 the preachers, not the predicters, how greatly I owe to Mr. Maurice 
 the forth- speakers of God's eternal my principles and method of con- 
 plan and methods of governing sidering Hebrew prophecy; but 
 man, not foretellers of particular their application is my own.' 
 events of and to their nation. This 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, dx, 99 
 
 the subject of the revelation. He held that the real source^ 
 of all predictions lay in the imaginative faculty ; that when the 
 prophets are said to have been full of the Holy Ghost, the 
 meaning is^ that they were men of singular virtue and exalted 
 piety ; and that as their admirers were ignorant of the true 
 causes of prophetic knowledge, they were in the habit of 
 ascribing it, like other portents, to an act of God Himself. 
 As one corollary from his main positions he contended that 
 * prophetic' gifts were not peculiar^ to the Hebrew nation, but 
 diffused in every part of heathendom. These ]3rinciples when 
 first advanced by Spinosa were generally execrated as 'atheistic;' 
 but after passing through the crucible of certain German theo- 
 logians*, they are not unfrequently espoused in England by 
 the friends of progress, and the adherents of the Absolute 
 Keligion. In spite of all the protests which their authors have 
 inserted to the contrary, the prophecies in general, not ex- 
 cluding those which are entitled Messianic, are stripped of 
 their divine authority, and treated as the outbreak of an 
 ardent patriotism, a feverish zeal, or an exuberant imagination. 
 I grant indeed that some few sparks of truth may be 
 detected here and there amid the theorisings of this modem 
 school. The prophet, for example, never lost his individuality^. 
 
 ^ Tractatus Theologico-PoUtici, 
 c. II. p. 15, Hamburg, 1670. 'Qui 
 igitur/ it is added, *sapientiam, et 
 veram naturalium et spiritualium 
 cognitionem ex Prophetarum Hbris 
 investigare student, tota errant via : 
 quod, quoniam tempus, philosophia 
 et denique res ipsa postulat, hie 
 fuse ostendere decrevi, parum cu- 
 rans quid superstitio ogganniat, 
 quae nullos magis odit quam qui 
 veram scientiam, veramque vitam 
 colmit.' 
 
 ^ Ibid. c. I. p. 13. 
 
 ^ He infers this chiefly from the 
 case of Balaam, who although a 
 true prophet is called by Joshua 
 (xiii. 22) Dpipn, the 'diviner.' But 
 see Kurtz, Gesch. des Alien Bundes, 
 II. 457 sq., where it is shewn (after 
 Hengstenberg) that Balaam was 
 really verging to the confines of 
 heathen magic, though he had not 
 altogether lost his early faith in 
 the One true God. 
 
 * The name of Schleiermacher 
 must be added to this number. 
 His views respecting the Old Testa- 
 ment in general were most deroga- 
 tory. For instance, he maintains 
 the following position in his treatise 
 Der Christliche Glaube (i. 77 sq. 
 3rd ed. Berlin, 1835): *Das Chris- 
 tenthum steht zwar in einem be- 
 sonderen geschichtlichen Zusam- 
 menhange mit dem Judenthum; 
 wasaber sein geschichtlichesDasein 
 und seine Abzweckung betrifft, so 
 verhalt es sich zu Judenthum und 
 Heidenthum gleich.' With regard 
 to the Messianic predictions of the 
 Old Testament, he observes {Ibid. 
 p. 96) that their chief value to us 
 arises from the evidence they 
 furnish of a 'striving of human 
 nature towards Christianity,' and 
 of the preparatory aim of earlier 
 institutions : cf. p. 80. 
 
 5 Cf. Lee, as above, p. 179; 
 Fairbairn, Ezekielf Pref. p. vii. 
 
 k 
 
100 Christ and other Masters. [part i. 
 
 His natural faculties were not suspended nor coerced by the 
 incoming of a higher agency. The style, the language, the 
 poetic colouring, the restricted knowledge of all subjects not 
 designed to be included in the scope of the prediction, were 
 his own. He was an inspired man, the human and Divine 
 factors coalescing, harmonising, and co-operating in the ex- 
 liibition of the thing revealed. But after these concessions 
 have been made, it seems to me unquestionable, that no theory 
 will explain the statements of the sacred prophets, nor account 
 for the sublime phenomena of revelation, which neglects to 
 recognise in prophecy the workings of a supernatural Agent, 
 opening, elevating and directing the spirit of the seers, pre- 
 senting to their inner vision images of things to come, and 
 thus supplying an objective and historic basis for the faith and 
 aspirations of the Israelite. And such is certainly the view 
 adopted by the writers of the !N"ew Testament. Kespecting 
 that salvation which has been accomplished in Christianity, 
 the prophets are said to have ' inquired and searched diligently, 
 who prophesied of the grace that should come unto us ; search- 
 ing what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which 
 was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the 
 sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow' (1 Pet. i. 
 10, 11): 'for prophecy came not in old time by the will of 
 man ; but holy men of God spake as they were moved bv the 
 Holy Ghost' (2 Pet. i. 21). 
 
 Nor are those the only criteria by which genuine prophecy 
 is separable from all human substitutes, and from the auguries 
 and divinations of the heathen world. It stood from first to 
 last in vital union with monotheism: it kept pace with the 
 expansion of man's faculties, and aided in the gradual training 
 of the sacred commonwealth. As one agent in the mighty 
 course of operations that has issued in the planting of a 
 catholic Church, its form and structure were peculiarly adapted 
 to the exigencies of the period^ out of which it grew. Pro- 
 
 1 This peculiarity was noticed antequam venisset in carne. ' Mr. 
 
 long ago by St. Augustine (Epii<t. Trench, Hulsean Lectures (1845) 
 
 €11. § 15: 0pp. II. 211, ed. Bened.) ; p. 86, suggests the same thought: 
 
 *Et tamen ab initio generis hu- *And thus (did time allow) we 
 
 niani, alias occultius, alias evi- might trace in much more detail 
 
 dentins, sicut congriierc temporibus how not only in the idea of type 
 
 divinitus visum est, nee prophe- and prophecy there is obedience 
 
 tari destitit, nee qui in eum ere- to that law of advance and pro- 
 
 derent defuerunt, ab Adam usque gress, which we have everywhere 
 
 ad Moysen, et m ipso populo Israel, been finding, but in the very order 
 
 quae speciali quodam mysterio gens and sequence of the prophecies 
 
 prophetica fuit, et in aliis gentibus themselves.' 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, <Ssc, 101 
 
 pliecy, in other words, was so completely interwoven with the 
 fortunes of the Abrahamic race as to supply continual answers 
 in the moment of perplexit}', and even to convert the dai-kest 
 epochs of their lifetime into fresh occasions for directing them 
 to the Messiah, and that period when they should ' receive of 
 i\iQ Lord's hand double for all their sins.' While the presenti- 
 ments that rose in other countries were but dim and floating 
 visions of the night, with nothing in the past or present where 
 they could attach themselves, and therefore destitute of moral 
 power and practical results ; the Messianic doctrine of the 
 Hebrews was real, living, and coherent. In their nation where 
 it is confessed^ no period seems to have existed when the 
 * historical sense' was not developed, prophecy obtained im- 
 mense advantages by calling to its aid the associative faculty ^ 
 by clothing future incidents in imagery consecrated by the 
 memories of the past, and finding in the altered aspects of, 
 society a stock of fresh material^ for increasing the vividness 
 of its descriptions and the area of its field of vision. 
 
 Prophecy was thus the living voice of God that went along 
 continually with the development of the Hebrew nation. When 
 it spoke the parched and joyless desert seemed to blossom like 
 the rose, and minister fresh streams of comfort and of blessing : 
 men ' drank of the spiritual Rock which followed them, and 
 that Hock was Christ.' It smoothed the pillow of the dying 
 patriarch, convincing him that there was still some better 
 and enduring substance in reserve : it taught his children to 
 
 ^ Grote's Hist, of Greece, i. 492, to some definite fact in the his- 
 
 Lond. 1849. This writer thinks torical present.' 
 
 that the * historical sense' did not ^ 'Mir ist die "Weissagung eine 
 
 arise in the superior intellects of objective Mittheilung gottlichen 
 
 Grreece till B.C. 700. Wissens an den Menschen, aber 
 
 2 Cf. Mr. Lee's remarks on this eine solche, die den Zustanden der 
 
 subject {Inspiration of Holy Scrip- jedesmaligen Gegenwart sich leben- 
 
 ture, pp. 149 sq.) which he intro- dig anschliesst, ihren Bediirfnis- 
 
 duces in the following passage : sen entgegenkommt, den Factoren 
 
 'In considering the single predic- der Entwicklung sich organisch 
 
 tions of Scripture apart from the einfugt. Die Abhangigkeit der 
 
 complete structure of Prophecy, Weissagung von der Geschichte ist 
 
 we may observe, that a certain f iir mich keine andre als die, dass 
 
 method has been almost uniformly Gott die Samenkorner der Weissa- 
 
 pursued, which constitutes, as it gung nicht eher ausstreut, als bis 
 
 were, the Law according to which durch die von Ihm gelenkte Ge- 
 
 the different portions of God's schichte der Boden bereitet ist, des- 
 
 Revelation have been communi- sen das Samenkorn bedarf, um 
 
 cated ; — namely, that each predic- Wurzel zu schlagen und Frucht zu 
 
 tion, with scarcely an exception, bringen.* Kurtz, Gesch. des Alien 
 
 proceeds from and attaches itself Bundes, 11. 550; 
 
102 Christ and other Masters. [part i. 
 
 exclaim, as Jacob did before them : ' I have waited for Thy 
 salvation, O Lord* (Gen. xlix. 18). It inspired the Israelites, 
 when they went forth a youthful people with the Lord Jehovah 
 at their head, to occupy the soil which He had promised to 
 their fathers. It consoled them in the midst of sterner scenes 
 at Horeb ; it allayed the apprehensions there awakened by the 
 awful promulgation of the Decalogue ; and as ^ the light that 
 shineth in a dark place,' it pointed to the possibility of milder 
 institutions and the coming of a second Legislator ^ It grew 
 more definite and explicit in proclaiming the Messiah, when an 
 actual kingdom had been founded in Judaea, when the con- 
 quests of the son of Jesse had well-nigh exhausted the more 
 secular branches of the Abrahamic promise, and the faithful, 
 had before their eyes a noble champion of the true religion. 
 During all that gloomy series of disasters which ensued on the 
 degeneracy of Solomon, and the divulsion of the sacred tribes, 
 the deep-toned voice of prophecy was heard with greater fre- 
 quency alike in Israel and in Judah. It guided and sustained 
 a remnant of both countries by unfolding to their view the 
 picture of reunion and enlargement, when after some thorough 
 sifting of the Hebrew race, the fallen tabernacle of David'* 
 would be re-established in the midst of them ; when exiles 
 would return to ^seek the Lord their God, and David their 
 king^ ;' when enemies of truth and righteousness would dis- 
 appear like some majestic forest; while the Branch'^ emerging 
 
 1 See Deut. xviii. 15 — 19, Acts himself * unconditionally for the 
 
 iii. 23, vii. 37, Hebr. xii. 18, 19: exclusive reference to a single 
 
 and cf. Sherlock, Disc. vi. pp. 127 definite Person, i.e. to the Messiah' 
 
 sq. That the Jews and also the (p. 514). 
 
 Samaritans of our Lord's age 2 Amos ix. u, 12: cf. Acts xv. 
 
 adopted the Messianic interpreta- 16, 17, and Hengstenberg, Ibid. i. 
 
 tion is rendered highly probable 314 sq. 
 
 by John vi. 14, v. 45—47, iv. 25. 3 Hosea iii. 4, 5. Hengstenberg 
 Some writers in modern times (I6id. i. 282) observes that 'by the 
 have argued that a general refer- j^ing David the whole Davidic 
 ence to the * prophetic order' of house is to be understood, which 
 the Old Testament is included in is here to be considered as an 
 the word N''3J ; while they main- unity, in the same manner as is 
 tain, however, that the one Pro- done in 2 Sam. vii. and in a whole 
 phet in whom the idea of such an series of Psalms which celebrate 
 order was fully realised, is the the mercies shewn, and to be 
 Messiah. See the arguments in shewn, to David and his house, 
 favour of both views in Hengsten- These mercies are most fully con- 
 berg, Christology of the Old Testa- centrated in Christ.* 
 ment, i. 95 sq. Edinb. 1854, and * Cf. Is. x. 33, 34 (where the 
 Kurtz, Gesch. des Alten Bundes, proud armies of Assyria are men- 
 II. 513 sq. The latter expresses tioned under the figure of a mighty 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, &c. 103 
 
 from the roots of Jesse would embrace the world beneath His 
 shadow, would inaugurate a brighter era, would be called the 
 Wonderful Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, 
 the Prince of Peace. When heavier ills descended, when the 
 temple was itself defiled, and when the latest caravan of captives 
 brought the tragic news of this calamity to Babylon, the land of 
 the oppressor, it was still the Messianic promise of a righteous 
 King and an eternal kingdom, that came forward to sustain the 
 drooping spirit of the solitary mourner. And when at length 
 the voice of prophecy was going to be hushed entirely, when 
 the Church was to be left in solemn stillness, waiting for the 
 manifestation of the glory of the Lord, the latest breath of 
 Malachi, though stern and terrible for Israelites^ who woidd 
 not rise to any true conception of the Messianic character, was 
 full of hope and solace for the rest : it intimated the approach 
 of times when every Gentile nation would unite in prayer and 
 offerings with the holier section of the Hebrews, and the Sun 
 of Righteousness arise with healing in His wings (Mai. i. 11 ; 
 iv. 2). 
 
 Abundant illustrations of this view of prophecy, elucidating 
 the fitness of the various seasons when it spoke, and its peculiar 
 adaptation to the wants, the faculties, and prospects of the 
 Hebrews, are furnished in all parts of the sacred volume : but 
 my present purpose will be answered if I draw attention to the 
 age of David and the Babylonic exile. 
 
 (1) In order to retain the Hebrews in the attitude of ex- 
 pectation, the time at which the Messianic promise would be 
 realised was always indeterminate ; and therefore when the 
 sceptre came at length into the hands of David, many an eye 
 would turn to him with ardent longing, and behold in him that 
 son of Abraham, on whom their faith had long been centered. 
 'Is this not he that should come*?' may well have been the 
 general question. ' Peace is everywhere established from Dan 
 to Beersheba ; Moab, Ammon, Edom, and Philistia, w^ho have 
 hitherto curtailed our borders and wasted the flower of our 
 armies, are content to rank among the vassals of the sacred 
 
 forest) with the opening verses of where many of the Israelites are 
 
 Is. xi. That the mysterious 'Child' shewn symbolically to be filHng 
 
 of Is. ix. 6 is identical with the up the measure of their fathers by 
 
 * Immanuel ' of Is. vii. 14, and both rejecting the Good Shepherd; and 
 
 of them with the eternal 'Buler' in Malachi iii. i — 3, the Messenger 
 
 pointed out by a contemporary of the Covenant whom they pro- 
 
 (Micah V. 2 sq.), can scarcely ad- fessed to delight in enters on His 
 
 mit of any question. work by sifting not the heathen 
 
 ^ See, for example, Zech. xi. but the sacred family itself. 
 
1045 Christ and other Masters. [part i. 
 
 family ; the last fortress of the Canaanite has been reduced ; 
 and he who was the guiding spirit of those mighty operations is 
 the head and life of our religious system. His hymns are on 
 every tongue, and he has vowed that he will never rest until the 
 worship of the Lord is firmly planted in his new metropolis, 
 and also in the heart and conscience of his people.' 
 
 Now this juncture was the time selected for relieving men's 
 disquietude, and pouring a fresh flood of light upon the Promise. 
 The well-known intimations then conveyed to David form the 
 basis of all future prophecies. Israel was instructed that his 
 kingdom would supply the origin and groundwork of a greater, 
 that when David had been gathered to his fathers, a posterity^ 
 descended from his loins would rear a temple to Jehovah; and 
 that the throne of this posterity would be established for ever, 
 yea, that God would be to it a Father, and it would be to Him 
 a son (2 Sam. vii. 11 — 14). When Solomon was born this 
 prophecy indeed began to be accomplished, and was more en- 
 tirely brought to pass when he completed the erection of the 
 temple, and the glory of the Lord was visible within its courts : 
 yet he might learn from David to extend- his views into the 
 distant future*, and appears himself to have been conscious that 
 his own achievements were utterly unable to exhaust the fulness 
 of its meaning (1 Kings viii. 26, 27). From this time, however, 
 the Messiah was expected as the King, the King of Israel, ex- 
 alted on the throne of David, and, in virtue of His close commu- 
 nion with the Lord Jehovah, an object of universal reverence, 
 
 ^ The word is still y"lT (cf. above, servant's house of things far 
 
 p. 89, n. i), and may therefore be distant' (pin^D?); adding the re- 
 
 nnderstood collectively, i... of de- ^arkable words ^Dnt^H nnin n&<n 
 
 scendants m general, but as consti- . . t t t - : 
 
 tuting an ideal unity. That the ^V)\ ''P^ which, as compared 
 
 reference is not exclusively to with i Chron. xvii. 1 7, are thought 
 
 Christ we must infer from vv. 14, by some to indicate the super- 
 
 15: while, on the other hand, none human rank of the Messiah. See 
 
 but a superhuman Personage could the different renderings in Mr. 
 
 realise the absolute perpetuity of Barrett's Synopsis of Criticisms, 11. 
 
 the race, and fully satisfy the re- 545 sq. Immediately before his 
 
 maining conditions of the prophecy: death we find David occupied with 
 
 of. Acts ii. 30. On its intimate the same magnificent thoughts 
 
 connexion with Ps. ii. and the respecting the destiny of his house 
 
 light which is thereby thrown upon (2 Sam. xxiii. 5): 'For is not my 
 
 it, see Ebrard, Oii the Epistle to house so with God? For He hath 
 
 the Hebrews, pp. 39, 40, Edinb. made with me an everlasting cove- 
 
 1853. nant, ordered in all things and 
 
 ^ In 2 Sam. vii. 19, David says, sure; for all my salvation and aU 
 
 in his address to the Almighty, my pleasure, should He not make 
 
 •Thou hast spoken also to Thy it grow?' 
 
CHAP. III.] 0??. the Characteristics of Religion^ dx. 105 
 
 exercising justice and dispensing mercy to the various families 
 of men. 
 
 The Hebrews thus obtained one definite image of the Christ; 
 an image which enabled every thoughtful mind among them to 
 approximate more closely to a true conception of the great 
 Deliverer. But the humanity of Christ was not the only 
 characteristic which the prophet of that period was commis- 
 sioned to unveil. A hymn^ composed by David on a subse- 
 quent occasion represents his future Son returning as a warrior 
 from conflicts where His enemies were miserably put to flight, 
 and traces at the same time His majestic course to more than 
 human impulses. The Son of David as there pictured occupies 
 ' a most exalted station. He is David's Lord as well : He sits 
 on no earthly throne, but at the side of God, the Unapproach- 
 able, a sharer of His glory, and a joint-administrator of His 
 Kingdom. 
 
 And in order to prepare the Hebrew mind for still more 
 wondrous revelations, and in order to exalt the thoughts and 
 spiritualise the feelings with respect to their Messiah, and the 
 elevation of His throne from earth to heaven, this passage also 
 represents the Son and Lord of David in a difierent aspect, and 
 a totally distinct capacity. The Law of Moses furnished no 
 idea of any priesthood in connexion with the tribe of Judah 
 (Heb. vii. 14): the union of royal and sacerdotal offices was 
 made impossible by the arrangements of the old ceconomy ; and 
 yefc the Christ is there seen by David invested with the 
 dignities of both^ He is the Priest-king of the Hebrews, in 
 order that some work of expiation may be accomplished before 
 a people are prepared to offer themselves willingly to God, and 
 so be worthy of enlistment in the cause of the Messiah, and of 
 sharing in His universal conquests. 
 
 But this image of the Priest, suggesting as it does the 
 thoiight of sacrifice, reminds us of new lessons which the 
 Psalms of David would impress on every one who waited for 
 redemption in Israel. It might indeed have been anticipated 
 from the first that He who undertook the office of our Champion 
 would encounter the resistance of the evil power which com- 
 
 ^ Ps. ex. which is continually Zech. vi. 12, 13, where the Man, 
 
 cited in the New Testament as whose name is the Branch, sits 
 
 David's and as also Messianic ; e. g. and rules as a Priest upon the 
 
 by our Lord Himself, Matth. xxii*. throne, and the royal and sacer- 
 
 43 sq. : cf. Hengstenberg, On the dotal offices are united in His 
 
 Psalms, III. 326 sq. person (*the counsel of peace shall 
 
 ^ See the remarkable parallel in be between them both'). 
 
lOG Christ and other Masters, [part I. 
 
 passed our defeat and ruin; yet never till the age of David 
 was the Ciiurcli invited to reflect distinctly on the picture of a 
 Christ involved in danger, suffering and humiliation. The 
 persecutions and distresses of the Israelitish monarch, and the 
 obloquy which he endured in his attempts to vindicate the true 
 religion, and promote the welfare of his country (Ps. Ixix.), had 
 prepared men for the thought that even righteous princes may 
 not claim to be exempted^ from the evils incident to our 
 condition while on earth ; and therefore had prepared them in 
 some measure for the wondrous revelations of the 22nd Psalm. 
 The servant of the Lord is there assailed by every species of 
 malicious mockery. His enemies have pierced his hands and 
 feet, and parted his garments among them ; and, unsated by 
 this foul barbarity, they feast their eyes upon the spectacle, and 
 heighten his distress by shouts of savage exultation. Now in 
 reading such a psalm as this, a thoughtful Israelite may well 
 ask his neighbour, ' Of whom speaketh the prophet 1 of himself, 
 or of some other man?' and when no adequate fulfilment of 
 that language can be traced in circumstances of the period, he 
 will naturally regard it as predictive of some future sufferer ; 
 while the closing portions^ of the Psalm compel him to identify 
 that Sufferer with the glorious King he is expecting. For 
 notwithstanding the extreme violence of persecution, the holy 
 speaker is not overwhelmed by it. He is conscious that 
 Jehovah interposes for his rescue, and he therefore registers a 
 vow that he will dedicate to God a special service of thanks- 
 giving ; that high and low, of Israel and of every nation under 
 heaven, shall be invited to a sacrificial feast, and join in cele- 
 brating his deliverance to all future ages. The truth appears 
 
 ^ The same lesson was forcibly of the deliverance of God's ser- 
 
 inculcated in the whole Book of vant, consecrating themselves to 
 
 Job. *By the side of a long line Jehovah, can only be realised in 
 
 of prophecy, as a whole outwardly Gospel times. Tovtoju yap ovd^v 
 
 gorgeous and flattering, and pro- iirl rod Aa/3t5 opw/ietf yeyevrjfxivofj 
 
 mising in the Messiah a successful ov5^ eirl tlvos tcov Ik Aa^id. Moz/os 
 
 potentate and opener of a glorious 6^ 6 AeairoTrjs Xpio-rbs, 6 ck Aa/3i5 
 
 temporal future for the Jewish /card (rdpKa, 6 ivaudpibirrja-as Qebs 
 
 nation, there rose one sad but X670S, 6 e/c Aa^lS Xa^ujv ttjv rod 
 
 faithful memento, and all that ap- ZovXov p,op<p7]v. Udcrav yap yijv kuI 
 
 pearance of approaching splendour ddXaaaau rijs Oeoyvcoaias eTrXijpojae, 
 
 was seen in qualifying connexion Kal TreireiKe rovs irdXai irXavu/jievovSy 
 
 with other truths.' Christian Re- Kal rots eiduXois irpoacpipovTas T-qv 
 
 memhrancer (1849), p. 208. trpoaKvvqffiv, avrl tCjv ovk SvTosvy rbv 
 
 * The transition takes place at tvra TrpoaKVPTJaai GeoV. Theodoret, 
 
 r. 22, and the magnificent picture in Psalm, xxi: 0pp. Tom. i. 481, 
 
 of the whole world, as one result Paris, 1642. 
 
CHAP. III.] On the Characteristics of Religion, <l;c, 107 
 
 to be that David on this and other like occasions spoke not 
 merely for himself, but in the name of his jiOBterity ; nor is it 
 difficult to trace a reason why the Psalms should bring to light 
 the bitter sufferings of the king Messiah, and why earlier ages 
 should be left comparatively ignorant of such truths. The 
 Hebrew Church was, under David, passing from a state of 
 meanness and depression, into one of ease, prosperity and 
 triumph. As a nation they began to feel their outward and 
 material strength, and therefore ran the risk of sinking down 
 into voluptuous self-security. If the idea of their Messiah had 
 not been lost entirely, they might still have learned with many 
 of their children in the days of Christ to picture Him as 
 nothing but a temporal prince, combining the military strength 
 of David with the peaceful pomp of Solomon. Checks were, 
 therefore, given to these earthly tendencies by stating promi- 
 nently how David suffered, and associating with this fact 
 another truth, that sorrow and humiliation were reserved for 
 his descendant. The unworldly visage of the Crucified was now 
 uplifted for the study of the Hebrew Church^ : the sufferings 
 of Messiah were revealed as necessary preconditions of His 
 universal empire and of the glory that should follow. 
 
 (2) Wo shall see, if I mistake not, further illustrations of 
 these characteristics, or rather of this law of prophecy, if we 
 turn to the disastrous age of the Captivity. How heavy a blow 
 was then inflicted on the house of David and the hopes of all 
 the Israelites ! The kingdom of the ten tribes had been already 
 ^ broken from being a people : ' they had fallen to the heathen 
 level of impurity and licence, and were swallowed up in the 
 Assyrian empire. In the meanwhile partial reformations of the 
 neighbouring state of Judah had in vain put off the evil day ; 
 corruption seemed incarnate in the person of Jehoiachin ; the 
 Hebrew Church was ripe for chastisement, and ready to pass 
 under an eclipse : the promises of God were on the point of 
 abrogation : the visibility of the theocracy was going to be lost; 
 
 1 * Et encore que le regne de ce garder les grandeurs humaines 
 grand Messie soit souvent pr^dit comme sa souveraine f^licit^ et 
 dans les ^critures sous des id^es «?^i^« ^^^ ."J?}<l^e recompense: 
 magnifiques, Dieu n'a point cache « est pourquoi Dieu montre de lorn 
 a David les ignominies de ce bgnit «? ?^f ^sie tant promis et tant de- 
 fruit de ses entraiUes. Cette in- f^^?'. ^^ J^odele de la perfection et 
 struction etait n^cessaire au peuple J.^^^^* ^? ^f complaisances, ablme 
 de Dieu. Si ce peuple encore in- Jf^^ la douleur. La croix paralt a 
 firme avait besoin d'etre attird par ^^^^^ comme le trdne veritable de 
 des promesses temporelles, il ne ce nouveau roi. Bossuet.Discours 
 fallait pas pourtant lui laisser re- '""^ ^ ^''^' Umverselle, Partie ii. § 4. 
 
108 Christ and other Masters. [part I. 
 
 and all the members of tlie sacred commonwealth abandoned to 
 the grasp of an imperious and blaspheming power. Yet the 
 very moment when the prophet Jeremiah was commissioned to 
 foretel this dread calamity, when he published what must have 
 appeared to many the death-warrant of his nation, was also 
 chosen as the time for granting to the Church a further glimpse 
 of blessings to be afterwards her own. The picture of recovery 
 fi'om the power of Babylon appears to break entirely through 
 the background of more gloomy visions, and the menace of 
 the stern reformer ultimately softens down into an evangelic 
 benediction \ Although the royalty of such a ruler as Jehoia- 
 chin must perish, and although his house shall never prosper, 
 ^ behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto 
 David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper;' 
 like his prototype the ancient David (2 Sam. viii. 15), 'he 
 shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.' The tribes 
 who constituted the ideal Church of God shall be hereafter 
 reinstated in their lost possessions ; the sacred family shall 
 inherit every blessing that was then associated with residence 
 in Canaan, and proximity to God Himself ; and so great will 
 be this restoration that the old deliverance from the land of 
 Egypt will cease to be the turning-point of Hebrew history. 
 Its memories will be all absorbed by those of the Messiah, and 
 the consciousness of true redemption. After a second passage 
 through the wilderness, a moral isolation in the desert of the 
 nations (Ezek. xx. 35, 36), there will be a glorious coming back 
 to Zion, and a fresh incorporation in the family of God. 
 
 But in addition to this general fitness of the shape assumed 
 by the Messianic promise, its republication at the time of the 
 Captivity had one peculiar feature. In the leading prophets of 
 the age (in Jeremiah and Ezekiel), there are plain allusions to 
 a new ceconomy^, different and distinct from that originally 
 confirmed with Israel on their exodus from Egypt. In this 
 new covenant God no longer writes His law externally, so as 
 to render it a cold series of mandates and requirements, but 
 imparting first of all the remission of sins, imparts therewith 
 
 ^ Cf. Jerem. xxii. 30 with xxiii. follow a time of restoration when 
 5 s(i. In Ezek. xxi. 25 — 27 we the mitre and the crown are trans- 
 have the same kind of contrast; f erred to Him in all their glory: cf. 
 the period of suffering and deso- above, p. 105, n. 2. 
 lation was to continue only till 2 jerem. xxxi. 31 — 34, Ezek. 
 the age of the Messiah, * until he xxxvi. 22— 33, on the latter of which 
 comes to whom the judgment, or passages see Fairbairn's Ezekiel, 
 the right, belongs,' and then would pp. 342 sq. 
 
CHAP, iil] On the Characteristics of Beligion, dx. 109 
 
 fresh impulses in aid of man's obedience, and exalts the 
 character of his worship by making it spontaneous, the out- 
 pouring of a warm and renovated heart. Nay, such a change 
 was shewn to be essential in all Israelites who wished for 
 reinstatement in the favour of Jehovah, and the visible tokens 
 of His goodness. 
 
 Kow what period in the history of the Jews was more 
 propitious for the inculcation of these truths i So long as they 
 remained in Palestine, so long as the continuity of their 
 national existence w^as unbroken, and so long as all the ordi- 
 nances of the Law were celebrated with their former regularity, 
 the worshipper might seldom realise the possibility of funda- 
 mental changes in the system under which he lived. But 
 when the sanctuary itself was levelled with the ground, when 
 sacrifices were no longer offered, when the priest and people had 
 been left to mourn the desolation of theii* country, some while 
 clinging to its wretched ruins, others in their lonely musings by 
 the streams of Babylon, how much was there in an emergency 
 like this to lift their thoughts above the legal institutions, and 
 constrain them to reflect on better things to come ! How local 
 and how limited those institutions would appear to men, whom 
 change of place prevented from complying with them ! How 
 full of deep suggestions on the differences between the real and 
 symbolical, the moral and the ceremonial, the perfect and the 
 partial, the future and the past ! And if we glance at the 
 predictions of Daniel, and still more at those of Zechariah, we 
 discover how entirely both these prophets were enabled to 
 detach themselves from old associations, how the earthly and 
 material temple is replaced by one not made with hands ; and, 
 in a word, how Christian subjects stand completely out, and till 
 the vision of the seer. 
 
 Thus in spite of ail the sternness of the legal institute ; in 
 spite of all the trials, troubles, and reverses which befel the 
 race on whom that yoke had been * imposed until the time of 
 reformation,' no feeling of despondence was ever generated in 
 the bosom of the Israelites. On the contrary, the elder system 
 died in hope ; or rather its development was closed by giving 
 })irth to Christianity. Those innumerable threads of golden 
 light, that run through all the annals of the Hebrew nation, 
 went on increasing both in number and variety, until they met 
 harmoniously in Him, from whose abundance they had issued, 
 by whose Spirit they were scattered in the ancient world, at 
 sundry times, in divers manners. The grand Subject of 
 prediction came at last. He took our human nature, died that 
 
110 Christ and other Masters. [part i. 
 
 we miglit live, and reigns that we may triumph. He is * the 
 Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright and morning 
 Star.* The Christian, therefore, can appropriate every word of 
 the exalted song which gushed originally from the heart of one 
 that stood upon the very confines of the new ceconomy, and 
 that spoke in sight of him whose ministry was destined to 
 become the living link connecting Law and Prophets with the 
 Gospel : ' Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for He hath visited 
 and redeemed His people, and hath raised up an horn of 
 salvation for us in the house of His servant David; as He 
 spake by the mouth of His holy prophets, which have been 
 since the world began.' 
 
 If it be found hereafter on a strict examination of their 
 sacred books and other ancient documents that nearly all the 
 heathen systems were defective in those very points which form 
 the leading characteristics of Revealed Religion ; if the general 
 tendency of pagan thought was in philosophers to pantheism, or 
 the worship of nature as a whole, and in the many to poly- 
 theism, or the deification of particular energies of nature ; if sin 
 was there regarded as eternal and as necessary, or in other 
 cases as unreal, notwithstanding those frequent reclamations of 
 the moral consciousness that drove men to devise new rites of 
 worship, and to rear new altars in honour of the * unknown' 
 divinity : if being thus ' without God in the world,' the heathen 
 were also 'without hope,' the victims in their thoughtful 
 moments of distracting doubts, of abject terror, and of wither- 
 ing desperation, we may thence derive not only a fresh stock of 
 motives for disseminating truths that we possess, but special 
 reasons for abstaining from all heathenish speculations, and for 
 listening with more docile spirit to 'the oracles of God.' 
 
APPENDIX I. 
 
 The Absolute Religion. 
 
 The following extracts will give the reader a complete view of the 
 'reforms' demanded by the advocates of what they term 'the absolute 
 rehgion,' or, 'the religion of humanity.' Mr. Parker has the credit of 
 being, if not their most cultivated, certainly their most intelligible 
 exponent, and we therefore draw our first quotations from liis works. 
 In his biscourse of Matters pertaining to Religion (cheap reprint, 
 London, 1850, pp. j8o, 181), he tells us: 
 
 * Christianity agrees generally with all other forms in this, that it is a 
 religion. Its peculiarity is not in its doctrine of one Infinite God, of 
 the immortality of man, nor of future retribution. It is not in particular 
 rules of morality; for precepts as true and beautiful may be found in 
 heathen writers, who give us the same view of man's nature, duty and 
 destination. The great doctrines of Christianity were known long before 
 Christ ; for God did not leave man four thousand years unable to find 
 
 out his plainest duty Every imperfect form of Eeligion was, more or 
 
 less, an anticipation of Christianity. So far as a man has real Eeligion, 
 so far he has Christianity. This is as old as the human race. By 
 its' light Zoroaster, Confucius, Socrates, with many millions of holy 
 souls, walked in the early times of the w^orld.' 
 
 In an earlier chapter of the same work (pp. 71, 72), Mr. Parker gives 
 us further insight into the 'paradise' of his religion : 
 
 'In passing judgment on these different religious states \yiz. Fetichism, 
 Polytheism, and Monotheism], we are never to forget that there is no 
 monopoly of Eeligion by any nation or any age. Eeligion itself is one 
 and the same. He that worships truly, by whatever form, worships the 
 Only God. He hears the prayer, w^hether called Brahma, Jehovah, Pan, 
 or Lord; or called by no name at all. Each people has its prophets and 
 its saints; and many a swarthy Indian, who bowed down to wood and 
 stone — many a grim-faced Calmuck, who worshipped the great God of 
 storms — many a Grecian peasant, who did homage 'to Phoebus- Apollo 
 when the Sun rose, or went down — yes, many a savage, his hands 
 smeared all over with human sacrifice, shall come forth from the east 
 and west, and sit down in the Kingdom of God, with Moses and Zo- 
 roaster, with Socrates and Jesus,' &c. 
 
 A later work by the same author, entitled Theism^ Atheism, and the 
 Popular Theology, Lond. 1853, Introd. p. xxvi, contains a fuller develop- 
 ment of his eclectic principles : 
 
112 Appendix. 
 
 * Luther,' lie says, * endeavoured to make new ecclesiastical raiment 
 for mankind, tired of attempting to mend and wear the old and ill- 
 fitting clothes of the church, which became only the worse for botching. 
 In the present time there is the same problem: to gather from the past, 
 from the Bible, from the Catholic and Protestant Churches, from Jew 
 and Gentile, Buddhist, Brahman, and Mahometan, every old truth which 
 they have got embalmed in their precious treasures ; and then to reach 
 out and upwards towards God and get every new truth that we can, and 
 join all these together into a whole of theological truth — then to deepen 
 the consciousness of God in our own soul, and make the Absolute 
 Eeligion the daily life of men.* 
 
 Again (pp. 132, 133); 
 
 *As '* Christian Theology" professes to be derived from a verbal 
 revelation of God, — represented, by the Church, as the Catholics say; 
 by the Scripture, as the Protestants teach,— so the Absolute Eeligion is 
 derived from the real revelation of God, which is contained in the 
 Universe; this outward universe of matter, this inward universe of 
 man ; and I take it we do not require the learned and conscientious 
 labours of a Lardner, a Paley, or a Newton, to convince us that the 
 Universe is genuine and authentic, and is the work of God, without 
 interpolation. We all know that. I call this the Absolute Eeligion, 
 because it is drawn from the absolute and ultimate source; because it 
 gives us the Absolute Idea of God, — God as Infinite; and because it 
 guarantees to man his natural rights, and demands the performance of 
 the absolute duties of human nature :' cf. pp. 263, -264, where Mr. Parker 
 throws additional light upon his theory by telling us what he does not 
 believe. The residuum, it appears from that passage, is slight indeed 
 (quoted above, p. 17). 
 
 Mr. W. J. Fox {The Ixellgions IdeaSy Lond. 1849) evinces that he too 
 has departed from the older 'Unitarian' views, and set up what he calls 
 a 'religion of humanity.' It is substantially the same as Mr. Parker's. 
 He informs us that the source of all revelation is the * moral constitution 
 of human nature, the human mind and heart ' (p. 66) ; that religions 
 are not revealers by virtue of what is pecuHar to them, but 'in what is 
 common to them with other religions' (p. 49); adding that 'what they 
 have as a peculiarity is something which will ill bear the test of time, 
 as compared with what is essential.' We are afterwards told that his 
 religion of humanity is not subordinated to the influences of climate, 
 but is always the same, is found wherever man is found, 'common iu 
 sense, and reason, thought and feeling, mind and heart:' that 'it is 
 free from the collisions which ever attend specific theologies,' &c. (pp. 
 i66, 167). 
 
 The same general principles pervade the different writings of Mr. 
 E. W. Mackay, being enunciated in the most startling form at the com- 
 mencement of his Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Christianity, Lond. 
 1854. He tells us, for example, that 'to the truths already uttered in 
 the Athenian prison, Christianity added little or nothing, except a few 
 symbols, which though perhaps well calculated for popular acceptance, 
 are more likely to perplex than to instruct, and offer the best opportunity 
 for priestly mystification ' (pp. 19, 20). 
 
 Again (p. 2 1 ) : 
 
 'If Christianity so much resembles its antecedents, containing posi- 
 tively nothing which naay not be satisfactorily accounted for as a spon- 
 taneous development of thought or natural requirement of the mind and 
 heart, why unfairly divorce it from historical analogies; why need w« 
 
be astonished, or allow our astonishment to represent as marvellous or 
 miraculous a modification rendered inevitable, and which indeed was 
 already pre-established in the mind before Christianity supplied a symbol 
 for expressing it/ 
 
 But the very ablest organ by which the principles of the Absolute 
 Eeligion are advocated in this country is the Westminster Review, A 
 favourable specimen is subjoined : 
 
 *It is not the presence of God in antiquity, but his presence only 
 there, — not his inspiration in Palestine, but his withdrawal from every 
 spot besides, — not his supreme and unique expression in Jesus of Naza- 
 reth, but his absence from every other human medium,— against which 
 these writers protest. They feel that the usual Christian advocate has 
 adopted a narrow and even irreUgious ground ; that he has not found a 
 satisfactory place in the Divine scheme of human affairs for the great 
 Pagan world; that he has presumptuously branded all history but one 
 as "profane;" that he has not only read it without sympathy and 
 reverence, but has used it chiefly as a foil to shew off the beauty of 
 evangelic truth and holiness, and so has dwelt only on the inadequacy 
 of its philosophy, the deformity of its morals, the degenerate features of 
 its social life; that he has forgotten the Divine infinitude when he 
 assumes that Christ's plenitude of the Spirit implies the emptiness of 
 Socrates. In their view, he has rashly undertaken to prove, not one 
 positive fact, — a revelation of Divine truth in Galilee ; — but an infinite 
 negative; — no inspiration anywhere else. To this negation and to this 
 alone is their remonstrance addressed. They do not deny a theophany 
 in the gift of Christianity ; but they deny two very different things, 
 viz. I, That this is the only theophany; and 2, That this is theophany 
 alone; that is, they look for 807ne divine elements elsewhere, and they 
 look for some human here. It is not therefore a smaller, but a larger, 
 religious obligation to history, which they are anxious to establish ; and 
 they remain in company with the Christian advocate so long as his 
 devout and gentle mood continues ; and only quit him when he enters 
 on his sceptical antipathies.' (July, 1852, pp. 203, 204.) 
 
 It is instructive to place in contrast with these views of Christianity 
 the main positions of one of its more learned assailants before the birth 
 of Spiritualism and the discovery of the Absolute Eeligion. 
 
 Dupuis, Ori^rine de tons les Cultes (new ed. Paris, 1822, pp. i8r, 182), 
 after citing examples of correspondency between the doctrines and cere- 
 monies of Hebraism and those of the Persian religion, as represented 
 by Hyde, proceeds as follows : ' II nous suffit des traits que nous avons 
 rassembl^s pour faire voir qu'il n'y a rien de nouveau dans la secte des 
 Chretiens, rien qui soit a elle, et qu'elle a absolument le caractere de 
 toutes les religions orientales et en particulier de celle des Perses, a 
 laquelle nous la rapportons comme a sa source. Nous i^ous sommes 
 attaches a saisir le caractere ou le genie original des religions des grands 
 peuples de I'Asie et de I'Afrique, des Egyptiens, Phdniciens, Arabes, 
 Phrygiens et Perses, parceque c'est du sein de ces peuples qu'est sortie 
 la religion de Christ, dont le berceau est en Orient et presque au centre 
 des nations ci-dessus nomm^es.' 
 
 ' Nous avons vu que la grande divinite de ces pays 6tait le soleil adore 
 sous differens noms, Osiris en Egypte, Bacchus en Arable, Adonis en 
 Phenicie, Atys en Phrygie, Mithra en Perse, etc. Nous avons observe 
 que, dans toutes ces religions, le Dieu-soleil etait personnifie,' &c. 
 
 He afterwards undertakes to establish the agreement between the 
 
 H. 8 
 
114 Appendix. 
 
 Christian and other 'mythologies' in point of doctrine, not ascribing 
 it to any other necessary evolution of human thought, but rather to 
 external derivation : 
 
 'Nous ferons voir egalement que la theologie des Chretiens est fondee 
 sur les memes principes que celles des paiens, Egyptiens, Grecs, Chal- 
 deens, Indiens, et qu'elle renferme les memes idees que celles qui fai- 
 saient partie de la m^taphysique universellement re^ue quand le chris- 
 tianisme a paru. On reconnaitra que leurs docteurs parlent le memo 
 langage qu'on parlait dans les ecoles les plus fameuses de ce siecle-la, 
 en sorte que la religion des Chretiens, dans sa partie theologique comma 
 dans sa partie cosmologique, n*a rien que n'appartienne aux autres 
 religions, et qui ne s'y retrouve bien des sieeles avant I'etablissement du 
 christianisme, et cela de I'aveu des auteurs Chretiens, de leurs p^res 
 qui nous fournissent presque toutes les autorites sur lesquelles est 
 appuyee notre demonstration. Ainsi, nous pouvans dire a juste titre: 
 Nil sub sole novum/ (p. 192.) 
 
PAKT 11. 
 HELIGIONS OF INDIA. 
 
 3—2 
 
RELIGIONS OF INDIA. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Varieties of Religious Thought among the Hind'ds. 
 
 ^Ev Trj <70(pLg. Tov Qeov ovk ^yvw 6 KoafJLOs dta ttjs cro^las top Qeev. 
 
 Alexanders expedition to India. Unhistorical character of the Hindu 
 mind. Date of HindU civilisation. § i. Vedaism. The chief gods of 
 the Vedas. How far the idea of unity was retained. Growth of 
 polytheism. How far pantheistic. Moral tone. Imperfect conscious- 
 ness of sin. Early date of the Vedas. Argument from the language : 
 from the picture of society: from the theology. § ii. Brdhmanism. 
 Character of the new theology. Occasional marks of progress. Organ- 
 ization of the system. The twice-horn. New phase of pantheism. 
 Maya. The Hindu triad. Hindu theory of man; and of the world. 
 Transmigration. Popular religion. Philosophical religion. Probable 
 age of Brdhmanism. § iii. Schools of philosophy — (a) The Sdnlchya 
 school. Its materialism. Practical aim of Kapila and his followers. — 
 (6) Buddhism. Early biography of Gautama. Foundation and, 
 propagation of Buddhism. Points of contact loith Brdhmanism. Doc- 
 trine of sin: of Caste-system: of causation. Nirvana. Buddhist ethics. 
 — (c) The Eclectic school. Asceticism. The Bhagavad-Gitd. Theo- 
 logical and ethical system. Re-assertion of the law of caste. New 
 theory of genuine devotion. 
 
 The European who first fought his way across the passes 
 leading to the north of India was Alexander the Great. As 
 early as the summer of 327 B.C. his veterans rested one whole 
 month upon the banks of the Hydaspes. But although an 
 opportunity was thus afforded to the band of scientific Greeks, 
 who joined his expedition, for investigating the religions of the 
 Panjab and for studying the peculiar genius of the vanquished, 
 the reports which they have left us on these questions are 
 extremely meagre and uncritical. The honour of unlocking 
 
118 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 that mysterious treasure-house in which the literary wealth of 
 India had been hoarded up from prehistoric ages was reserved 
 for other conquerors. 
 
 Nor, if Aristotle had himself attended his heroic pupil, is it 
 likely that our knowledge of the primitive history of Hindustan 
 would be materially augmented. Doubtless an experienced 
 eye, like the Stageirite's, would have noted with especial 
 interest and intelligence the aspects of the physical world thus 
 opened to the eager gaze of the Hellenes. The grandeur of the 
 mountain-scenery, culminating in the snow-crowned summits of 
 the Hindti-Kush, the richness of the foliage, the fertility of the 
 soil, the mighty forests, the luxuriant rivers, the prodigious 
 size and the grotesque ]Droportions of the animals and plants, 
 would all in turn have furnished topics for reflection and com- 
 parison to the mind of such a traveller. He would have 
 j)robably assisted also in determining the physiological charac- 
 teristics of the native population, and while remarking, as did 
 others, the dyed beard, the tunic of white linen, the ornaments 
 of gold and ivory, the timid air and almost feminine softness 
 of the men, their passionate love of music, juggling, and 
 gymnastics, have enabled us to speak more definitely in reference 
 to their moral elevation and the nature of their intellectual 
 training. He might further have investigated more at length 
 the contrasts which already marked the different orders ot 
 Hindu society, — such, for instance, as the distribution into 
 castes, or the specific points of difierence then observable 
 between the courtly and accomplished 'Brachman,' and the 
 anchoret who mortified the flesh amid the silence and discom- 
 forts of the jungle. Nay, it is conceivable that a mind which 
 mastered the whole compass of Hellenic wisdom might have 
 been able to anticipate some triumphs of the modern ethno- 
 logist ; he might have traced those common elements of thought 
 and feeling, language and mythology, which, binding Greek 
 and Persian and Hindu together, pointed backwards to the 
 early dawn of civilisation and the cradle of the human family. 
 
 Yet, high as were the expectations not unnaturally raised 
 by Alexander's expedition, one peculiarity in the mental 
 constitution of Hindus prevented both the ancients and our- 
 selves from gaining any accurate knowledge of their aboriginal 
 condition. Rich as their literature is found to be in other 
 products, it has never given birth to formal histories^; and 
 
 ^ The only exception is Bdja according to Prof. Wilson [Asiatic 
 Taringinif a quasi-historical ac- Researches, xv. i sq.), dates no 
 count of Kashmir; and even this, higher than the xiith century ^iter 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu JReligious Thought. 119 
 
 what is even more remarkable, the Hindu scholar is deficient in 
 those very qualities which indicate the presence of historic 
 consciousness. He gazes with a cold, if not contemptuous, 
 spirit on the vanities of sense and time, and therefore is disposed 
 to treat all questions of chronology with arrogant indifference. 
 He lives, or rather dreams away his lifetime, in the midst of 
 intellectual problems, labouring hard to measure the immeasur- 
 able, to circumscribe the absolute. Compared with such 
 recondite speculations, every incident of- life is a mere ripple on 
 the boundless ocean, as fleeting, as phenomenal. What now 
 is, may, for ought he cares, have been a thousand times already, 
 and may frequently come round afresh. The object of his 
 interest is reimion with Divinity, a reabsorption of the finite 
 soul into the primal source of being ; and that destiny, accord- 
 ing to the various creeds of Hindustan, implies obliviousness in 
 reference to all earthly knowledge, and entire abstraction from 
 all shadows and illusions of the past. 
 
 Now, whether it is exclusively owing to the operation of 
 such feelings that the literary monuments of Hindustan are 
 seldom found to be available for historical purposes, I do not 
 venture to determine. But this may be affirmed with certainty, 
 that if the annals of India were less blank and barren, modern 
 Europe would have been far less bewildered than it is by 
 theories and counter-theories. Here, as in like cases, where the 
 evidence is dim and fragmentary at the best, imagination is too 
 often suffered to take wing, and even to usurp the throne of 
 history. 
 
 On one side we have seen a race of orientalists so dazzled 
 by the brilliance of their own discoveries, so intoxicated by the 
 novelty and beauty of the region into which they were the 
 first to penetrate, that India is for them the fountain of all 
 wisdom and the mother of all civilisation. Glowing with this 
 fancy, they are anxious to persuade us that in ages long before 
 the birth of Moses or Sesostris, a religious system, which has 
 since remained well-nigh immutable, was fabricated by the 
 genius of some Hindu rishi on the banks of the Yamuna, or in 
 
 Christ. \Ye are elsewhere told by Greek writers. The reign of the 
 
 the same authority, that the an- latter monareh began about 312 
 
 cient (Brahmanical) records of b.c. ; whereas if any credit were 
 
 India have scarcely enabled us to conceded to the list of dynasties 
 
 determine more than one impor- preserved in the Purahas, this 
 
 tant historical fact, viz. the iden- event would have to be placed 1200 
 
 tity of Chandragupta, one of the years earlier (Lassen, Indische 
 
 kings of Magadha, with the San- Alter thumskunde, i« 501, Bonn, 
 
 dracottus, or Sandracoptus, of the 1847). 
 
120 
 
 Christ and other Masters. 
 
 [part II 
 
 the plain of the Ganges ; and that thither we must go if we 
 desire to find the master-key which can alone explain the 
 mysteries of later systems, which alone can solve the problems 
 of our spiritual nature, and give back to western states the 
 uncorrupted form of Christianity \ 
 
 On the other side it has been vigorously contended, for ex- 
 ample in the school of Niebuhr", that the civilisation of India 
 is both modern and derived — a thing of yesterday, if we com- 
 pare it with the mental history of some other nations. The 
 Hindus, when vanquished by the troops of Alexander, and 
 described by Megasthenes, had (so these writers argue) recently 
 emerged from utter barbarism; they were kinsmen of the 
 ' black and savage Indians,' whom we meet with in the pages 
 of Herodotus ; while Sanskrit literature, for which the opposite 
 school asserted an unfathomable antiquity, had borrowed all its 
 choicer portions from Greek treatises imported by the Arabs in 
 the middle ages. 
 
 But truth, we now are justified in stating, was equidistant 
 from these two extreme positions. When the first intoxication 
 of the orientalist was over ; when the monuments of ancient 
 India were decyphered by a race of scholars more sagacious 
 
 ^ See, for instance, Holwell's 
 Original Principles of the ancient 
 Bramins, &g. (Loncl. 1779). This 
 writer glories in the name of 'or- 
 thodox Christian Deist' (p. 91), 
 and claims direct affioity with the 
 Hindus, who 'from the earliest 
 times have been an ornament to 
 the creation,' on the gromid that 
 both he and they are strict mono- 
 theists. He deems the Brjihman- 
 ical religion the first and purest 
 product of a supernatural revela- 
 tion. The Hindu scriptures, he 
 supposes, contain, 'to a moral cer- 
 tainty, the original doctrines and 
 terms of restoration, delivered from 
 God himself, by the mouth of his 
 first-created Birmah, to mankind, 
 at his first creation in the form of 
 man' (p. 71). According to Hol- 
 well's theory, our blessed Lord was 
 a reappearance of 'Birmah,' but 
 the exact substance of His teaching 
 can be no longer ascertained, owing 
 to grievous corruptions and dis- 
 liguiemonts which it was made to 
 
 undergo at the hands of the apo- 
 stles and their followers. 
 
 2 'This opinion concerning the 
 antiquity of Indian civilisation, 
 which has sprung up especially 
 within the last forty years [Nie- 
 buhr wrote as far back as 1830], 
 is, indeed, spreading farther and 
 gaining stability. I cannot decide 
 nijon it, and cannot say what it is 
 founded upon; but from the as- 
 surance of a very competent Eng- 
 lishman, I believe that people 
 will soon come to the conviction, 
 as some highly competent persons 
 have already done, that all the 
 alleged knowledge of the Indians 
 does not by any means belong to 
 the centuries of Moses and Sesos- 
 tris, to which it has been assigned, 
 but that the greater part of their 
 literature belongs to the middle 
 ages; that for the most part it is 
 borrowed from the Greek, through 
 the medium of Arabic translations,' 
 &c.: Lectures on Ancient Histonj^ 
 I. 138- 
 
CHAP. I.J Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought 121 
 
 than a Holwell and less credulous than a Yoltaire ; when fresh 
 materials had been disinterred m various quarters, and a flood 
 of light had broken unexpectedly into this field of literature from 
 China and Nepal on one side, and Ceylon upon the other; 
 random guesses were exchanged for logical deductions, and 
 philosophizing tamed or bafiled by the stubborn strength of 
 facts. It was now obvious, that if Hindus were not historians 
 their religion had a history ; that this religion, far from being 
 uniform and stationary in its character, had undergone a series 
 of important changes, not to say of revolutions ; that instead of 
 being a spontaneous product of the soil of Hindustan, and there- 
 fore unconnected in its growth with other ancient systems, the 
 original Hinduism bore in every feature the most legible indi- 
 cations of a northern parentage, and indications which connect 
 the elements of its mythology, as well as of its speech, with 
 other sections of the ' Indo-European' family. 
 
 The phases of religious thought which the immediate object 
 of the present work has made it necessary for me to examine, 
 are reducible under three descriptions : 
 
 1. Vedaism, or the Yaidic religion. 
 
 2. Brahmanism. 
 
 3. Schools of Hindu philosophy, including Buddhism. 
 
 § 1. Vedaism. 
 
 It is now almost universally admitted that to ascertain the 
 basis of Hindu civilisation, or, rather, to become acquainted with 
 the earliest utterances of the Hindi! religion, we must have re- 
 course directly to the class of sacred books entitled Yedas^ 
 
 ^ See Colebrooke's Essay On the with invocations and other sacri- 
 
 Vedas, or Sacred Writings of the ficial formulas. The Sanskrit text 
 
 Hindus^ first published in the of the Eig-Veda is being edited by 
 
 Asiatic Researches, viii. 377—497. Brof. Max Muller: it has also been 
 
 They are four in number, and are translated in part by Prof. Wilson, 
 
 denominated the Kig-V^da, the and entirely by M. Langlois. The 
 
 Yajur-Veda, the Sama-V^da, and White YajurVdda is edited with a 
 
 - the Athai'va-Veda. The Kig-V^da translation, by Prof. Weber of Ber- 
 
 (Vdda of Praise) is the one genuine lin. The S^ma-Veda is edited, 
 
 collection. The S^ma-Veda is only with a translation, first by Mr. 
 
 a short extract from the Eig-Veda, Stevenson, and secondly by Prof, 
 
 containing such hymns as had to Benfey of Gottingen. The fourth 
 
 be chanted during the sacrifice. Vdda, though some of its materials 
 
 The Yajur-V^da is a similar man- are more recent, is regarded by the 
 
 ual intended for another class of Hindtis themselves as of co-ordi- 
 
 priests, who had to mutter certain nate authority. It has just been 
 
 hymns of the Eig-Yeda, together edited by Prof. Eoth and Mr. 
 
122 Christ and other Masters. [part il. 
 
 Here I take mj stand, and without entering very far into 
 particulars either as to the theology which they contain, or the 
 precise date of their composition, I shall try to giv^e the reader 
 such a general view of both as for the present purpose will be 
 found sufficiently approximate. 
 
 Two remarks are necessary at the outset. 
 
 First, I shall exclude from this inquiry all reference to the 
 aboriginal {i. e. non- Aryan) tribes of India. The Yedas have 
 been ever the possession of one dominant race^, — a race which, 
 having crossed the Indian Alps' at some remote period, was 
 gradually diffused into the Panjab, and ultimately over a large 
 portion of the whole Peninsula. Who and what was the 
 * barbarian' (mlechchha) they drove out before them ; who and 
 what the abject serf, or Stidra, they had forcibly converted to 
 their own religion, are extraneous questions, interesting in them- 
 selves, but not admissible within the limits of the present 
 survey ^ 
 
 Secondly, I ought to mention that in forming an estimate of 
 the Yedas, my materials have been gathered from the oldest por- 
 tion of those treatises, the Yedas proper, and not from Brah- 
 mahas and Upanishads, in which the Yaidic doctrines are 
 idealised and systematically developed by later hands ^ Por 
 
 Whitney. Supplementary works The Science of Language, pp. 240 
 
 in illustration of the texts of the sq. Lond. 1862.] See further illus- 
 
 V^das have also been published. trations in Lassen, i. 6 sq., andDr. 
 
 Especially valuable is the NiruktUj Donaldson's Neiu Cratylas, pp. 118, 
 
 an original glossary and commen- 119, 2nd ed. The former of these 
 
 tary, which has been also edited by authorities asserts (p. 511) that we 
 
 Prof. Eoth: Gottingen, 1852. find no traces of their foreign ex- 
 
 ^ On the origin of the Hindus traction in the ancient literature 
 
 and their gradual occupation of of the Hindtis themselves ; but he 
 
 India, see Lassen, Ind. Alterth, i. is here not quite accurate, as 
 
 511 sq. They distinguished them- Weber pointed out in his Indische 
 
 selves from other ancient tribes by Studien, 2tes Heft, 1850, p. 165. 
 
 the name Arya =* noble, ' 'well- ^ See Appendix I. at the end of 
 
 born,' a designation originally be- "this Part. 
 
 longing also to the Modes {"Aptoi, ^ These treatises are (i) the Br^h- 
 
 Herod. vii. 62), and afterwards manas, commentaries partly htur- 
 
 preserved in the district Ariana, gical and partly theological in their 
 
 and in the modern Ari and Arikh, character, contammg, it would 
 
 apphed by the Armenians to the seem, a much fuller development 
 
 natives of Media. Is ^rya derived of the Br^hmanical system, and 
 
 from arya *a householder,' origin- (2) ^^he Upanishads, a kind of sup- 
 
 aUy used as the name of the third plement to other sacred books, 
 
 caste or the Vaisyas, who formed Speaking generally, each V^da may 
 
 the great bulk of the immigrants be said to consist of two parts, 
 
 or new settlers. [Cf. Max MiOler, the Mantras, or prayers, and the 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hind'w Religious Thought 123 
 
 although many of these productions are said to breathe the 
 spirit of the Yedas, and although some of them may fairly 
 claim, on philological and other grounds, a very high antiquity, 
 it is impossible with our present knowledge to determine their 
 exact position in reference to the sacred texts which they 
 interpret. 
 
 Of the documents which Hindus have always held in special 
 veneration, the Rig-Yeda is the first and foremost. It contains 
 as many as 1017 ^mantras,' i.e. canticles and prayers. These, 
 with slight exceptions, are religious in their character. About 
 one half of them are found to be addressed either to Indra, the 
 god of light ^, or Agni, the god of fire^; who therefore occupy 
 the foremost place in the mythology of the Yedas. The next 
 divinity to which a certain prominence appears to be awarded 
 is Yaruna, the god of water; but none of these can be dis- 
 tinguished absolutely from a multitude of other gods, which 
 
 Br^hmanas, or treatises: Cole- 
 brooke, as above, pp. 387, 388 (cf. 
 also Bes Vedas, par M. J. B. Saint- 
 Hilaire, pp. 10, 11, Paris, 1854). 
 All the Br^hmanas are believed in 
 point of time to lie between the 
 Vedas on the one side, and the 
 heroic poems on the other; and 
 Professor Wilson, arguing from in- 
 ternal evidence, seems to have 
 made it not improbable that one 
 of the number, the Aitardya Br^h- 
 mana (which, however, is not, he 
 maintains, an integral part of the 
 Ilig-V6da) was written as far back 
 as the sixth century before the 
 Christian era: see Journal of the 
 Asiatic Society, xiii. 105. The 
 V^da alone is called srutif or reve- 
 lation; everything else, however 
 sacred, can only claim the title of 
 smriti, or tradition. The revela- 
 tion was supposed to be handed 
 down by inspired rishis, till at 
 last it reached the minds of com- 
 mon believers, and was accepted 
 by them as absolute truth. Few 
 Brdihmans at the present day can 
 read and understand the V6da. 
 They know little more of it than 
 a few hymns and prayers. Instead 
 of the Yeda, they read the Laws 
 of Manu, the six systems of philo- 
 
 sophy, the Pur^nas and the Tan- 
 tras. 
 
 ^ Indra, the Hindti Jupiter, is not 
 unfrequently styled 'lord of heaven,' 
 (divaspati = diespiter). The name 
 * Indra' is itself of doubtful origin, 
 meaning either (i) 'blue' (an epi- 
 thet of the firmament), or (2) 'the 
 illuminator,' or (3) 'the giver of 
 rain:' Wuttke, Gesch. des Heiden- 
 thums, II. 242, Breslau, 1853. His 
 attributes, though for the most part 
 terrible in their manifestation, are 
 essentially creative or productive^ 
 aiid sometimes absolutely bene- 
 jicent ; as when he is said to chase 
 away evil spirits from the clouds, 
 or send refreshing showers upon 
 the earth, in spite of the malevo- 
 lence of Vritra or Ahi, the demon 
 who withholds them. 
 
 2 The Agni (= Ignis) of the V^das 
 is not so much the god presiding 
 over the element of fire, as the 
 element of fire itself, considered 
 partly as the vivifying principle of 
 vegetation, and partly as a destruc- 
 tive agent, 'Agni ist die dem 
 Indra gegeniiberstehende Natur- 
 macht; Indra erzeugt das Leben, 
 Agni verzehrt es.' Wuttke, Ibid. 
 p. 241 : cf. however, Prof. Wilson, 
 Big-Veda, Vol. i. 'Introd.' p. xxvii. 
 
124 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 either act as representatives of the chief divinities, and so are 
 Indra, Agni, and Yaruna with different names, or else appear as 
 deifications of some single aspect in the powers and processes of 
 nature. Trinity or triad there is none\ Much less can we 
 observe among the ancient hymns of India a complete and 
 systematic theogony. The Yaidic gods are for the most pai*t 
 isolated beings, shadowy and impersonal energies, as multiform 
 in character and manifestation as the elements with which they 
 are connected, not to say identified. The earliest grouping of 
 them into a system must be dated from the subsequent period^, 
 when the image of one, holy, personal Creator being broken 
 more and more, and fading more and more completely from the 
 Hindu mind, it was attempted to regain the thought of unity, 
 which man was sadly conscious he had lost, by calling to his 
 aid the light of metaphysics and the generalisations of natural 
 philosophy. 
 
 The doctrine of one great First-Cause was not indeed, as we 
 shall see hereafter, absolutely banished from the heart of bards 
 and rishis; yet their extant hymns should satisfy the most 
 incredulous that the idea of Grod as one, supreme, and spiritual, 
 never formed a prominent article in the early creeds of India. 
 It retired far-off into the background. It seldom operated as a 
 principle of life. It was the feeble and expiring echo of an 
 older and a purer revelation; and even where it shewed its 
 power at all, where Indra for the moment was absorbed com- 
 pletely by some brighter and more spiritual being, the God of 
 whom such visions preached was not a thinking, willing, loving 
 Spirit, personal and self-conscious, ruling over nature as His 
 work and as the Father of the spirits of all flesh, but rather a 
 great That^ a neuter abstract, separable from the world of 
 
 1 Those writers who labour to own special energy: Indranl, Va- 
 
 establish that the Hindiis have ruri^ni, Agnilyl. 
 
 worshipped a triad of divinities ^ 'Iii der Vedischen Gotterlehre 
 
 from the very earliest period, give fi^idet sich kem System, obwohl 
 
 the second or third place in it to Indra schon der machtigste der 
 
 Varuna (Ovpavos): Wuttke, lUd. <^otter ist:' Lassen, i. 768. He 
 
 p. 243. He is, in their view, the ^^^^ sketches the oldest systematic 
 
 preserving and directing agent of representations as we find them in 
 
 the Vaidic system, the sphere of the Nirukta, 
 
 his operation lying between those ^ The Sanskrit word (Tad) is 
 
 of Indra and Agni. It deserves to literally That. And the same idea 
 
 be further noted, that as far back was in all probabihty expressed by 
 
 as the V6das, sexual distinctions the mystic monosyllable 6m (aum), 
 
 were attributed to the gods. Each by which the hymns of the V6das 
 
 of the three leading divinities is were uniformly prefaced. Some 
 
 attended by a wife, who reflects his writers, referring the three letters 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought 125 
 
 matter in idea, but not in essence; spiritualised indeed, but 
 spiritualised, ennobled, deified by the poetic faculty of the wor- 
 shipper. He was a nature-god, and not the God of nature. 
 
 1. Accordingly if we proceed to analyse the psychological 
 peculiarities which tended to protect that early creed of the 
 Hindu, the point which strikes us most is the profound devotion 
 he had always paid to natural phenomena. This tendency he 
 manifested in common with all nations of remote antiquity; for 
 though we cannot trace the Aryan backward to his haunts in 
 central Asia, nor speak positively of the effect produced upon 
 him by the savage scenery of those regions he had traversed in 
 the course of his migrations, it is certain that on crossing the 
 Hindu Alps he bowed at once in adoration of the new and 
 beauteous world to which he was transplanted. The earthly 
 bias of the spirit had received fresh impulses; the witchery 
 exercised upon the senses was entire and irresistible. How 
 potent were such impulses, how absolute such fascination in the 
 other tribes of Western Asia, may be gathered from the noble 
 protest of the patriarch: Mf I beheld the sun when it shined, or 
 the moon walking in brightness, and my heart hath been secretly 
 enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand ; this also were an 
 iniquity to be punished by the judge; for I should have denied 
 the God that is above' (Job xxxi. 2Q — 2^). And like the 
 patriarch in sensibility, though not in fear and reverence, were 
 the authors of the sacred books of Hindustan. The * golden- 
 handed' sun, dispensing as the lord of heaven his gifts of 
 radiance and fertility; the starry firmament, inspiring awe and 
 deepening wonder; the freshness of the morning and the calm 
 of evening twilight, whispering in man's heart of supernatural 
 genii; season following season, and one element commingling 
 with another; the scorching wind, the lightnings flashing forth 
 in majesty and armed with speedy vengeance, rain and dew and 
 drought, — these all excited in their turn the sentiments of pain 
 or pleasure, joy or sadness, confidence or apprehension. All 
 were felt to indicate the presence of invisible powers, at peace 
 or else at enmity with man, and therefore recognised as objects 
 worthy of his prayers \ Such veneration of the elements may 
 
 to a triad of the elements, explaia the Indian mythology to combine 
 
 a of Agni (fire), u of Varuha (water), a gigantic wildness of phantasy, and 
 
 and m of Marut (wind) : but the a boundless enthusiasm for nature, 
 
 true etymology of the word appears with a deep mystical import, and a 
 
 to be suggested by the old Persian profound philosophic sense.' F. von 
 
 *avam ' ( =aum), meaning * That': Schlegel, Phil, of Hist. p. 154, Lend. 
 
 see Lassen, i. 775, n. 3. 1847- 
 ^ *It is the peculiar character of 
 
126 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 not indeed have consciously involved the worshipper at first 
 in a denial of God's sovereignty. He may have read in them the 
 tokens, symbols, agents of a spiritual Intelligence. The har- 
 mony of natural laws, the wondrous and majestic revolution of 
 the stars and planets, most of all the glorious element of light 
 from which the Aryan borrowed the generic name^ of his 
 divinities, may have, at least to elevated minds, suggested other 
 and far higher spheres, of which the present world is only a 
 distorted copy and a feeble adumbration. Yet ere long a 
 change came over men's ideas; the golden thread was broken 
 which connected Hhe invisible things of God,' His power, His 
 righteousness, His personality. His fatherhood, with objects that 
 solicit and bewitch the senses. Popular imagination ultimately 
 believed its own allegories, and not only so, but construed them 
 according to the letter. The my the became an object not of 
 fancy but of faith; and the relations of natural and supernatural 
 being thus inverted and obscured, the law was substituted for 
 the Legislator, and the Giver hidden from men's eyes by the 
 effulgence and the multiplicity of His gifts. 
 
 In other words, the Vedas, taken as a whole^ reveal to us 
 an aspect of religious feeling, always bordering upon pantheism, 
 often passing quite across the border. Wheresoever in the 
 world around him the Hindu observed extraordinary manifesta- 
 tions of the brilliant or the beautiful, the barren or prolific, the 
 sombre or the terrible; wherever the action of the elements 
 was such as to produce extraordinary effects upon himself, his 
 
 ^ D^va, nom. devas { = deus, 6e6i, searches, viii. 400: cf. Wuttke, 11. 
 Goth, tius, A. S. tiw), is derived 260 — 262, where other evidence is 
 from the Sansk. deva, 'luminous,' adduced to shew that the sun was 
 'resplendent' (cf. sub divo) ; — an at first regarded as an image in the 
 etymology which of itself suggests visible world of what the supreme 
 the leading feature of Hindii poly- Essence is in the world invisible, 
 theism. Light, accordingly^ became 'Perhaps,' says Bitter {Hist, of 
 the aptest symbol of the Divine Ancient Philosophy, i. 92, Oxf. 
 Being. Thus the Ga^/aM, or holiest 1838), 'there is nothing more in- 
 verse of the Vedas, is addressed to structive in Indian archaeology 
 the sun-god, and contains the fol- than (so to express ourselves) the 
 lowing passage among others: 'Let transparency of their mythology, 
 us meditate on the adorable light which permits us to perceive how, 
 of the divine sun (Savitri): may it with a general sense of the divine, 
 guide our intellects. Desirous of the coexistence of a special recog- 
 food, we solicit the gift of the splen- nition thereof in the separate phe- 
 did sun (Savitri), who should be nomena of nature was possible, and 
 studiously worshipped. Venerable how out of the conception of the 
 men, guided by the understanding, one God a belief in a plurality of 
 salute the divine sun (Savitri) with gods could arise.* 
 oblations and praise.' Asiat, Be- 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindii Religious Thought 127 
 
 children, or Ms property, he betrayed the consciousness of his 
 dependence by some special act of homage. He acknowledged 
 in such powers the presence of divinity ; he called the influence 
 which affected him or his a deva (^deus'); it was pregnant for 
 the time with a divine or diabolic efficacy, and therefore it 
 became a fitting object of desire or dread, of adoration or of 
 deprecation, according to the aspects it assumed in reference to 
 the worshipper. Hence, also, every province of creation was 
 soon peopled by spiritual energies, all varying in their character 
 with human hopes and fears, with human interests and passions. 
 Nay, so far was the Hindu impelled in this direction that he 
 deified the sacrifice itself^, from which he hoped to profit; he 
 worshipped his own offering, he worshipped the solemn form of 
 words by which his offering was accompanied. 
 
 But although these objects had been each invested by 
 imagination with a kind of personality, the devas of the Hindu 
 populace, throughout the Yaidic period, were little more than 
 formless powers and colourless abstractions. Human properties, 
 it is true, were frequently ascribed to them: it was believed 
 that even gods are ultimately mortal, and can only purchase an 
 exemption from the common lot by drinking of the potent 
 amritd^ , the draught of immortality; yet how vague was the 
 impression made by this or that particular god we gather from 
 the fact that the same element is connected at different 
 times with different divinities; the names are interchanged, the 
 powers confounded with each other; and thus, owing to the 
 want of individuality, the veneration of the ancient gods grew 
 obsolete; their memory vanished with the phases of society 
 from which they had emerged, or with the momentary gushings 
 of religious sentiment in some peculiar locality. Even Indra, 
 occupying as he did the foremost place among the group of 
 Yaidic gods, and wielding powers, as it would seem, identical 
 with those of the Supreme Being, is, nevertheless, presented in 
 
 ^ For example, the hymns com- nons ; personne ne peut lutter con- 
 prising one whole section of the tre toi. Tu es le maitre de la force, 
 Kig-V4da are addressed to Soma, et regnes sur les deux partis : donne- 
 the milky juice of the moon-plant nous la superiority dans la ba- 
 (asclepias acida), which the wor- taille.' This deification of the Soma 
 shipper had learnt to deify. Thus, is still more prominent in the Sama- 
 in Langlois's translation (Tome i. Veda. 
 
 p. 174) the following is the last ^ ^g early as the Eig-Yeda, the 
 
 petition of such a prayer: *Dieu Soma sacrifice is called amrita 
 
 fort, 6 Soma, que ta divine prudence ( = ' immortal ' ) ; and in a secondary 
 
 nous accorde la part de richesses sense the liquor which communi- 
 
 (que nous desirons) ! Combats pour cates immortality {Ibid. p. 173). 
 
128 Christ and other Masters. [part. ir. 
 
 the Eig-Yeda as the oiSspring of Aditi\ the mother of the 
 universe; the dignities with which he is invested are equally 
 ascribed to Agni, Rudra, and the rest; while, in the next period 
 of Hindu mythology, the same Indra is depressed into a deity 
 of the second order; his heaven (or ^swarga') is only fourth in 
 rank among the bright localities, entitled superhuman, and even 
 his throne itself is rendered insecure. He has to tremble at 
 the prospect of still further humiliation, if, peradventure, some 
 daring mortal shall complete the horse-sacrifice, or qualify him- 
 self for ruling in the place of Indra by extraordinary acts of 
 penance. Such are the indefinite forms and such the varying 
 aspects of Hindu polytheism at the early stage of its develop- 
 ment. 
 
 2. But if the Yedas thus abound with indications that the 
 worshipper in ancient times was gifted only with a superficial 
 consciousness of one Almighty God, and if the texture of his 
 hymns and prayers were such as to obscure that consciousness 
 still further by interposing an innumerable crowd of fresh 
 divinities, we are prepared to find a corresponding deterioration 
 in his moral and religious sentiments. And such is really the 
 case. The physical attributes of God and of superior genii are 
 confessed and venerated ; but the traces of belief in His moral 
 government are only few and indistinct^. The worshipper, for 
 instance, moved by some good fortune has prepared his eucha- 
 ristic ofiering, the oiled butter or the juices of a sacred plant; 
 he bends in supplication; he invites his favourite god to come 
 and taste of his abundance. Winds and fire and sunlight, these 
 are all profusely welcomed to the banquet; but the God of 
 nature, He who framed the world and reigns supreme above 
 the elements, appears to have been utterly overlooked; He has 
 no part in the oblation, except, perhaps, allusion to Him be 
 intended in that solemn muttering (Cm), by which the cere- 
 mony is preceded. Or, again, the worshipper is overwhelmed 
 by sorrow and perplexity; his hopes are blasted or his fortune 
 wrecked, and with the spirit of a famished menial he deter- 
 mines to apply for aid and compensation to some fresh divinity. 
 His voice, which quivers with emotion, has at length found 
 utterance in a passionate prayer; yet what that prayer in 
 almost every case solicits is exemption from the physical ills 
 of life, a fuller and more sparkling cup of temporal prosperity. 
 Large and healthy families, cows and horses, fertile pastures, 
 
 ^ Langlois,ii. 238; cf.iii. 42,492. pp. 172, 173, who corroborates this 
 '^ See Saint-Hilaire, Des V6das, inference. 
 
J v.. 
 
 CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought. ^ 129 
 
 bounteous harvests, victory over public and domestic foes, are 
 found to be the leading, not to say the solitary topics in the 
 supplications of the Yedas. We shall look in vain for peni- 
 tential psalms, or hymns commemorating the descent of spiritual 
 benefits. 
 
 This want of moral sensibility, this slowness to admit the 
 presence and malignity of moral evil, and the holiness of Him 
 with whom we have to do, is not by any means peculiar to the 
 creed of Hindustan. If prayers suggested in the Vedas differed 
 in some points from those of the adjacent countries, all such 
 differences were only matters of degree. If Persia, for example, 
 soon discovered that the greatest struggles which affect hu- 
 manity are not the struggles of the sun and clouds, the waters 
 and the winds, but struggles raging in the breast of living men 
 between the elements of light and darkness, and the powers of / 
 good and evil, it is not withstanding an indisputable fact that/ 
 even in the brighter spots of ancient heathendom the supplica- 
 tions offered to the gods are nearly always prompted by the 
 wish for temporal prosperity^ Exceptions there would doubt- 
 less be, since the conviction of man's moral bondage is insepar- 
 able from himself, and cannot be obliterated in the lowest 
 depths of sensuality. Accordingly we may discover here and 
 there examples bearing witness to the glimmerings of such 
 consciousness as far back as the earliest prayers of the^ Y^das. 
 ' O Yaruna, by our invocations, by our sacrifices, by our holo- 
 causts, we desire to turn away thine anger. Come, thou giver 
 of life; relieve us, prudent king, from our offences^.' *Soma 
 
 1 ' They are supplicated to confer zer's SymholiJcy iv. 629, Leipzig, 
 
 temporal blessings upon the wor- 1842. 
 
 shipper, riches, life, posterity; the - Rig-Veda^ ed. Langlois, i. 41. 
 
 short-sighted vanities of human In a subsequent hymn {Ihid. i. 79) 
 
 desire, which constituted the sum there are also allusions to moral 
 
 of heathen prayer in all heathen turpitude ; but the last verse is dif- 
 
 countries.' Prof. Wilson, Lectures^ ferently rendered by Saint-Hilaire 
 
 pp. 9, 10, Oxf. 1840. Stuhr, Die Re- {Des Vedas, p. 56). I am very glad 
 
 ligions-Systeme der heidnischenVol' to find myself again supported in 
 
 ker des Orients, Berlin, 1836, 'Ein- the view here taken of the V6daa 
 
 leitung,' p. xii, has pointed out the by the high authority of Prof. Wil- 
 
 strong contrast in this particular son, who, after mentioning some 
 
 between the worship of the heathen other peculiarities, remarks : ' There 
 
 and the Ghristia^n ; and indeed of is little demand for moral bene- 
 
 all the extant heathen prayers a factions, although, in some few 
 
 very small fraction only are offered instances, hatred of untruth and 
 
 in the hope of calling down moral abhorrence of sin are expressed ; a 
 
 or spuitual benefits. An example hope is uttered that the latter may 
 
 of the latter may be seen in Creu- be repented of or expiated ; and the 
 
 H. 9 
 
ISO Christ and oilier Masters. [part ii. 
 
 [the personified libation] has declared to me that in the waters 
 are all medicines \or, medicinal plants]. Agni works the 
 happiness of all : the waters cure all evils. Salutary waters, 
 guard my body from disease [or, perfect all medicines for the 
 good of my body], that I may long behold the sun. Purifying 
 waters, cleanse away from me whatever is impure or criminal, 
 every evil I have done by violence, by imprecations, by in- 
 justice \' It should also be remembered that the same convic- 
 tion of impurity might not unfrequently suggest the offering of 
 material sacrifice, to which allusion has been made above. Of 
 human ^ victims no example is preserved in any of the Yedas; 
 nor in that early age did man so frequently evince his conscious- 
 ness of imperfection by inordinate displays of animal sacrifices ^ 
 What the Hindu mainly offered was clarified butter poured 
 upon the fire, or else the fermenting juice of the soma-plant^, 
 which he presented in ladles to the deity whom he invoked. 
 In this, which may at first have been commended to him by its 
 potent and exhilarating properties, he afterwards beheld an 
 emblem of the vital sap whereby the universe itself is made 
 productive; but in bringing such oblation he was actuated 
 chiefly by the hope of gratifying the animal wants of his di- 
 vinity, not by the idea of deepening his own sense of guilt, 
 or compensating for his own demerit. Still, as we have seen, 
 he was at times oppressed by a misgiving that the gods were 
 hostile to him ; that the Itakshasas (or evil spirits) interfered to 
 vitiate his offerings, and that Yama, the sovereign of the dead, 
 Avas planning his destruction. He grew anxious therefore to 
 disarm their vengeance, and to replace himself if possible upon 
 the moral elevation which he felt that he had forfeited. Iniquity 
 had left its deadl}^ poison in the spirit of the sinner; yet through 
 lack of some unerring guidance he could only dream about the 
 cause of his disorder, and could only guess at the appropriate 
 remedy. 
 
 gods are in one hymn solicited to Yajur-Veda, to the sacrifice of a 
 
 extricate the worshipper from sin of horse ('aswamedha'), which after- 
 
 every kind.' 'Introd.' to his trans- wards obtained a new importance 
 
 lation of the i^zrjf-FecZrt, I. p. xxvi. in the Hindu worship. Still as 
 
 ^ Rig-Veda, ed. Langlois, i. 38, offered in the Eig-Veda, its object 
 
 and, as repeated, iv. 143. is simply to acquire additional 
 
 2 They can, however, be plainly wealth and prosperity, not, as in 
 
 traced as far back as the Aitarcya the Puranas and in Southey's Curse 
 
 Br^hmana: see Prof. Wilson's paper ^j Keliama, to assist in dethroning 
 
 in the Jour, of the Asiat. Soc. xiii. j^dra and exalting the sacrificer to 
 
 105- his place: see Wilson's Rig-Veda, 
 
 ^ There is allusion, however, m y^i ^j^ * Introd.' pp. xii. sq. 
 the Eig-Veda, as well as in the 4 Wuttke, 11. 344 sq. 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought. 131 
 
 3. If we now pass forward from this sketcli of early Hinclii 
 worship to the questions touching the antiquity of the Yedas. it 
 must be conceded that one class of arguments adduced by 
 Indian scholars will hardly stand the test of rigorous criticism. 
 Sir William Jones ^ endeavoured, for example, to fix the precise 
 date of the Yajur-Yeda by calculating backwards through the 
 lives of two-and-forty sages by whom the document is said 
 to have been handed down to us. But the point of departure 
 in this calculation is the age of Parasara, which in its tuin 
 depends upon the accuracy of astronomical observations. By 
 the aid of such a process, Jones had placed the composition 
 of the Yajur-Yeda as far back as 1580 B.C. Colebrooke, in 
 like manner, having satisfied himself that a Yaidic calendar 
 which he examined ought to be referred to the 14th century 
 B.C., obtained a very similar conclusion. But it seems that this 
 great scholar subsequently staggered under the enormous diffi- 
 culties of the problem, and was finally disposed to treat his 
 chronological statements as precarious and conjectural^. The 
 same opinion must be formed of other calculations resting on 
 the astronomical works of India; nor can vague disclosures 
 of the Cashmir chronicle be entitled to a higher place ^. Con- 
 verging as they do, however, these various testimonies must be 
 held to have created a presumption in favour of the early 
 dating of the Yedas, and such presumption is again supported 
 if we estimate the worth of the internal evidence. 
 
 (1) The language of the Yedas, when compared with later 
 writings of the Indo-Aryan race, is characterised by a profusion 
 of archaisms. The grammatical forms are less developed, the 
 diction far more rustic, and the style more rugged, primitive 
 and elliptical. To use the illustration of Sir William Jones, ' 
 the Sanskrit of the Yedas differed from the Sanskrit of the 
 classic age, as did the Latin of the age of Numa from the Latin 
 of the age of Cicero. Or, in other words, if we might reason 
 from one member of the family of nations to a second, the 
 
 ^ See the Preface to his transla- searches into the Physical Historij 
 
 lion of the Laws of Manu. of Mankind, iv. 102), attaches great 
 
 - Cf. Saint-Hilaire, Bes Vedas^ importance to the agreement of the 
 
 p. 140. Prof. Wilson, in like manner, results obtained by these different 
 
 Big-Veda, ^Introd.' Vol. i. p. xlviii., modes of computation. He is, ac- 
 
 observes that in proposing dates on cordingly, prepared to place the 
 
 this subject, nothing more than Great War, which separates the 
 
 conjecture is intended. historic from the pre-historic period 
 
 2 Prichard, who appears to be of Indian antiquities, in the 14th 
 
 satisfied with Davis's treatise on century before the Christian era. 
 
 the astronomy of the Hindus [Re- Ibid. p. 104. 
 
 9—2 
 
132 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 peculiarities of the Yeda-dialect imply an interv^al as wide as 
 that which parts the English of the venerable Csedmon from 
 the English of the Caroline divines. Those scholars who devote 
 particular attention to the study of the Yedas, have moreover 
 noticed great diversities in the language of the several volumes \ 
 implying that as the hymns which they contain were gradually 
 indited, the language of the Aryan tribes had passed through 
 several stages of development ; while on comparing the ^Mantras,' 
 or Yedas proper, with the Brahmanas, which were intended for 
 their illustration, the existence of fresh intervals between the com- 
 position of the text and commentaries is thoroughly ascertained. 
 (2) But other proofs, more generally appreciable, and to 
 certain minds more cogent and conclusive, are derived from the 
 peculiar pictures there presented of Hindu society. As the 
 Vaidic hymns were, notwithstanding the extravagant claim? 
 advanced in their behalf, composed at various times by different 
 poets, and only strung together in the time of the half-mythical 
 Tyasa (* the Arranger'), they reflect the life and feelings of the 
 Aryan under very different circumstances. At first we see a 
 man of patriarchal simplicity, a hunter or a cowherd. His ideas 
 are circumscribed within the narrow limits of his clan, the chief 
 of which, surrounded by a multitude of cattle, is the father and 
 perhaps the priest^ of all his followers. In some points these 
 primitive chieftains are not much unlike the petty kings of the 
 Homeric age^ ; but apter parallels are found in Hebrew patri- 
 archs, or in modern Arabs of the desert. According to this 
 version of his life, the Aryan colonist was originally nomadic in 
 his habits : he was led from plain to plain, or from one lofty 
 plateau to another, in quest of milder skies and richer pasturage. 
 At length, indeed, a mighty change comes over his ideas : the 
 shepherd is transformed into a warrior, and we see him on the 
 other side of the great alpine frontier, permanently settled in 
 the north of Hindustan. Yet even there no manifest traces are 
 discerned of a political or religious organization ; we look in 
 vain for cities, temples, images and the like. One section of the 
 colonists appears to be engaged in agi-iculture : groups of them 
 have been collected and arranged in villages : they are planting, 
 sowing, building ; on the one side anxious to propitiate the un- 
 genial powers of nature, on the other actively engaged in warring 
 
 1 Saint-Hilaire, p. 152, who ap- Veda the power of the priestly order 
 
 peals to the authority of Eoth, Ben- (Purohiti) is established, 
 
 fey aud Weber. ^ Cf. Langlois, Rig-Veda, 'Intro- 
 
 - In the later hymns of the Rig- duction,' p. x. 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought. 133 
 
 with the dark-complexioned *Das3ais/ or, in different words, 
 expelling the old tenants of the soil\ 
 
 But rude and simple though he be, the Aryan of the Y6da 
 is no savage. He begins to manifest his aptitude for intellec- 
 tual culture^ : he is earnest, thoughtful, enterprising: he learns 
 to speak of ships and commerce : he is not entirely ignorant of 
 astronomical science. A worker in the precious metals, and a 
 manufacturer of musical instruments, he has already given 
 proofs of his perception both of the conveniences and the ameni- 
 ties of social life. He has moreover learned in some degree the 
 power, the richness and the flexibility of his native language, 
 and from time to time there rises up a bard, or rishi, whose 
 poetic genius gives expression to the varied feelings that are 
 working in the breast of the community. This rishi is the 
 oracle of his village : in the songs and prayers which he com- 
 poses lie the elements of common worship, and the germs of that 
 far mightier system, which on its development is destined to 
 unite all Indo- Aryan tribes together, and diffuse its humanizing 
 influence to the southernmost point of Hindustan. Such grand 
 ideas, however, were not present to the fancy of the ancient 
 bards : and he who is desirous of realizing in some measure the 
 imfportant changes afterwards wrought in Hindu life, has only 
 to transfer his thoughts from the original aspects of society, as 
 pictured in the Yedas, to that stage when the ambassador of 
 Seleucus found a welcome at the Court of Chandragupta, or 
 when Kalidasa, in the century before the Christian era, charmed 
 his audience by the elegant drama of the Fatal Ring. 
 
 (3) There is one more criterion which enables us to judge 
 of the remote antiquity of the Yedas. It may be entitled 
 theological. We find it, partly, in the fact that some divinities 
 
 ^ We catch occasional glimpses ^ pj^of. Wilson has drawn atten- 
 
 of this contest in the hymns of the tion to some of the points here 
 
 Vedas: e.g. Rig-Veda Sanhitd, i. specified : but he seems to overstate 
 
 1.375 1 38* ed. Wilson, — a passage his case when he adds {Rig-Veda, 
 
 which also proves that the invaders Vol. 11. p. xvii. ) : ' These particulars, 
 
 thought themselves the champions although they are only briefly and 
 
 of true religion: 'Discriminate,' is incidentally thrown out, chiefly by 
 
 the prayer to Indra, 'between the way of comparison, or illustration, 
 
 Aryas and they [? them] that are render it indisputable, that the 
 
 Dasyus [enemies] : restraining those Hindtis of the Vaidik era even had 
 
 who perform no religious rites, com- attained to an advanced stage of 
 
 pel them to submit to the performer civilisation, httle if at all differing 
 
 of sacrifices:' and iii. 34,9: *I>e- from that in which they were found 
 
 stroyingtheDasyus, Indra protected ^7 the Greeks at Alexander's in- 
 
 the .Ajryan colour ' (varna = caste). vasion. 
 
Christ and other Masters. 
 
 [part ir. 
 
 wlio stand conspicuous in these books have either undergone 
 I most serious transformations, or else have vanished altogether 
 from the literature of the next period^ : partly, in the absence 
 from the Yedas of some doctrines which had afterwards become 
 the cardinal points of the Hindu system. Such, for instance, 
 are the doctrines of caste ^ of transmigration and of incarna- 
 tion^; none of which have hitherto been discovered in the 
 oldest records of Hinduism. 
 
 * The following extract from 
 Prof. Wilson's 'Introd.,' as above, 
 pp. xxvi, xxvii, is valuable on more 
 accounts than one, and especially 
 as shewing how very inexact some 
 modern writers are in their philo- 
 sophisings on these subjects: 'The 
 di\^nities worshipped [in the Rig- 
 Vedd\ are not unknown to later 
 systems, but they there perform 
 very subordinate parts, whilst those 
 deities, who are the great gods — the 
 Dii major es — of the subsequent 
 period, are either wholly unnamed 
 in the Veda, or are noticed in an 
 inferior and different capacity. The 
 names of Siva, of Mah^deva, of 
 Purga, of Kdli, of Rama, of Krish- 
 na, never occur, as far as we are 
 yet aware : we have a Rudra, who, 
 in after-times, is identified with 
 Siva, but who, even in ih.Q Fur anas, 
 is of very doubtful origin and iden- 
 tification ; whilst in the Veda he is 
 described as the father of the winds, 
 and is evidently a form of either 
 Agni or Indra. The epithet Ka- 
 pardin, which is applied to him, 
 appears, indeed, to have some rela- 
 tion to a characteristic attribute 
 of Siva, — the wearing of his hair in 
 a peculiar braid ; but the term has 
 probably in the Veda a different 
 signification... at any rate, no other 
 epithet applicable to Siva occurs, 
 and there is not the slightest allu- 
 sion to the form in which, for the 
 last ten centuries at least, he seems 
 to have been almost exclusively 
 worshipped in India, — that of the 
 Linga or Phallus. Neither is there 
 the sUghtest hint of another im- 
 portant feature of later Hindtiism, 
 
 the Trimlirtti, or Tri-une combina- 
 tion of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, 
 as typified by the mystical syllable 
 Om, although, according to high 
 authority on the religions of an- 
 tiquity [viz. Creuzer's], the Tri- 
 murtti was the first element in the 
 faith of the Hindtis, and the second 
 was the Lingam.' 
 
 ^ 'The existence of but one caste 
 in the age of purity, however in- 
 compatible with the legend which 
 ascribes the origin of the four tribes 
 to Brahma, is everywhere admitted. * 
 Wilson, Vishnu Furdna, p. 406, n. 
 8. Lond. 1840. This admission is 
 strengthened by the fact that other 
 races kindred to the Aryans were 
 unacquainted with the distinction 
 of caste. It should, however, be 
 remarked that one single hymn in 
 the Fig -Veda favours a contrary 
 hypothesis : *Le Brahman a et6 sa 
 bouche; le prince (Rajanya) &es 
 bras ; le Vesya, ses cuisses : le Sou- 
 dra est ne de ses pieds' (Langlois, 
 IV. 341). But this hymn is allowed 
 on all hands to be of later date [Ihid. 
 pp. 498, 499; Lassen, i. 794). There 
 is also in the Fig -Veda (see Lang- 
 lois, IV. 489, n. 62) an instance of 
 the early use of dioijas {i. e. 'twice- 
 born'), which is afterwards applied 
 to members of the three superior 
 castes, who as such imderwent a 
 special form of initiation; but in 
 that remote period the expression 
 seems to have been used merely for 
 the priests ('les premiers-n6s de 
 Rita'). 
 
 3 'Dieses Dogma ist den Veda 
 fremd, und die wenigen Anspielun- 
 gen, die in ihnen auf My then vor- 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought 135 
 
 What length of interval was necessary for producing all these 
 changes, social, mental, and linguistic, it is now impossible to 
 state with anything like confidence or precision. The develop- 
 ment of cognate languages, the culture and expansion of the 
 human intellect, as well as the formation of the framework of 
 society, may all have varied much in different climates and in 
 different periods of man's history. But, what is most essential 
 to our purpose, no eminent critic of tlie present day will venture 
 to maintain that Hindu civilisation, as represented by its literature, 
 is capable of being carried backwards to a period more remote 
 than that of Joshua and the Exodus, — the age when Hebrew 
 literature began to flourish, and, in contrast to the Aryan, 
 manifest a thoroughly historic character, — the age, moreover, 
 when the literature, if such it can be called, of other ancient 
 nations can present to the inquirer little more than monstrous 
 legends, or fantastic mythes, or barren lists of dynasties. 
 
 § 2. Brdhmanism, 
 
 It seems that when the Aryans had secured their conquests 
 in the country of the Five Rivers, and, as some conjecture, 
 offshoots following the course of the Indus had been planted as 
 far south as Cutch and Guzerat, the chief attention of the 
 invaders was directed to the spread of civilisation in the other 
 parts of the Peninsula. The centre of their earliest operations 
 was a narrow strip of territory, watered on one side by the 
 Saraswati, from whence new colonies were propagated year by 
 year, until the plain of the Ganges was entirely rescued from 
 the grasp of the * barbarian.' 
 
 On proceeding to inspect the institutions now completed, we 
 approach another epoch in the histoiy of Hindustan. The 
 twilight of intelligence is passed. The age when elements and 
 processes of nature had by man's poetic faculty been converted, 
 first, into the symbols of religious feeling, and then into the 
 objects of religious worship, is succeeded^ by an age entitled * the 
 
 kommen, die spater in die Avatara ^ The divinities of the Vaidic 
 
 des Vischnu aufgenommen worden period, who most resemble the 
 
 sind, zeigen, dass in der altesten heroes of the next age, are the 
 
 Zeit die Lebre von der periodischen two demigods Aswins, Aswinau 
 
 Menschwerdung des erhaltenden (dual), children of the sun, endowed 
 
 Gottes zur Vertilgung des Uebels with youth and beauty, travelling 
 
 noch nicht gebildet worden war:' in a three-wheeled and triangular 
 
 Lassen, i. 488. . car, physicians of the gods and 
 
136 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 heroic age of India/ when the gods are more completely 
 humanized, assume a definite shape in the imagination of the 
 worshipper, and exhibit all the ordinary signs of individuality. 
 
 Philosophers are not unfrequently disposed to welcome this 
 new species of polytheism, on the ground that it contains a 
 germ of something more exalted and more ethical. They think 
 that the idea of God as one, as personal, as righteous, an idea 
 which in the former period was extruded from the popular 
 belief, was far more likely to be rescued and restored to its 
 supremacy when the inquirer started from the notion of man- 
 like gods, than when he bowed in adoration to a host of 
 shadowy genii or impersonal abstractions. On the other hand, 
 it should be recollected that the Hindu populace would also be 
 more prone to acquiesce in a polytheism of its own creation, 
 and lose sight of spiritual facts which had their symbols in the 
 primitive mythology. In the worship of the elements, the veil 
 between the seen and unseen had remained comparatively 
 slender ; in the worship of anthropomorphic gods in whom all 
 human excellencies found their utmost limit, the new object 
 Avas more satisfying because it was more human, but on that 
 account was far less calculated to suggest a higher class of 
 truths. 
 
 We must allow, indeed, that intellectually the Aryans 
 gained a more exalted point of civilisation in the second period 
 of their history. The field of knowledge had been everywhere 
 enlarged : the power of abstract thinking and the tendency to 
 metaphysical speculation, scarcely traceable in the Yedas, were 
 now rapidly developed in all quarters : the refinement of men's 
 taste had shewn itself, if not in graceful and voluptuous works 
 of art, at least in the unrivalled majesty and music of their 
 language as employed in the heroic poems. It is also true that 
 in proportion as they grew familiar with antagonisms in nature, 
 they betrayed a somewhat deeper consciousness of discord in 
 themselves; and that with keener sense of moral turpitude, 
 there came the habit of self-loathing and the aspiration after 
 some deliverance from the fetters of the fiesh. Such yearnings 
 might be often silenced by the thought that purity, attractive 
 though it be, is for the present unattainable, that the character 
 
 benefactors of the human race. (Sindhu), many wiiters identify 
 
 Their name if. derived from a^wa them simply with the sun and 
 
 (equus), since they are said to have moon, which appear to rise out of 
 
 been begotten by the sun during his the ocean: cf. Prof. Wilson, 'Introd. 
 
 metamorphosis as a horse; but as to Rig-Veda^ Vol. i. p. xxxvi. and 
 
 their mother is once called the sea Vol. ii. p. 179. 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought. 137 
 
 of gods themselves is full of grievous stains and blemishes, that 
 the obligation to a holy life is seldom if ever urged in the most 
 sacred institutions of their forefathers; yet notwithstanding 
 eveiy drawback and abatement, the existence of a higher tone 
 of moral sensibility appears unquestionable ; and therefore we 
 may gladly acquiesce in Ritter's verdict ^, that * the retrogression 
 in the second period of Indian religion was not unattended with 
 an element of progress.' 
 
 Special features of this new system will be more fully 
 noticed when we come to trace the jDarallelisms which they 
 exhibit to the facts and verities of Christianity. At present 
 suffice it to enumerate a few of the more prominent charac- 
 teristics. The Divine has been distinctly apprehended under 
 the form of the human ; and thus the pantheon is inhabited by 
 beings of godlike grace or power or dignity, conspicuous alike in 
 counsel and in action, and especially enlisted in diffusing the 
 Aryan faith among the old possessors of the soil. The system 
 also of which these are the most popular divinities is made to 
 undergo extensive modifications. It has now a far more 
 definite creed, a cumbrous and elaborate ritual, a code of laws, 
 a dominant order of religious teachers. The Vedas, we have 
 noticed, bear no marks of a distinction such as that which forms 
 the basis of the Hindu castes ; indeed the royal and the 
 sacerdotal offices are there at times united in one eminent 
 person; but in all the commentaries on the Y^das, and still 
 more throughout the Laws of Manu^, the social system of the 
 Indo-Aryans is completely organized. The whole population, 
 as we there see them, are distributed into four hereditary 
 classes. One of these embraces, it would seem, the conquered 
 natives^, whose position is accordingly most abject. The 
 
 ^ Hist, of Ancient Philosophy, i. rise of Buddhism, and earlier than 
 
 94* the great epic poems). 
 
 2 These were edited and trans- ^ Lassen, i. 799. So impure and 
 
 lated under the title Mdnava Dhar- abject were the members of this 
 
 ma-Sdstra bv Sir G. C. Haughton, fourth class, that Brahmans might 
 
 who based his labours on the older ^^t read the Vedas, even to them- 
 
 version of Sir W. Jones. Scholars selves, in the presence of a siidra; 
 
 are, however, still divided as to the while tc teach him the law, or 
 
 antiquity of this compilation : cf. instruct him in the mode of expiat- 
 
 Eitter, i. 72 sq. with Elphinstone, ing sin, was sure to sink a Brahman 
 
 Hist, of India, pp. 226 sq. 3rd ed. iuto the hell called Asamvrita (El* 
 
 Of course many of the materials phinstone, pp. 16, 17). Yet the 
 
 were far more ancient : but the most chand^la, or offspring of intercourse 
 
 probable date of the appearance of which violated the law of caste, was 
 
 the code in its present form is about held to be even more contemptible, 
 
 the fifth century b.c. (later than the He was classed with 'dogs andcrows.' 
 
 k 
 
138 Christ and other Masters, [part ii. 
 
 remainder, who form the Aryan part of the community, are 
 (1) Brahmans, or religious teachers, (2) Kshatriyas, or knights, 
 and (3) Yaisyas, or tradesmen. But in social rank the Brahman 
 always rises very high above his fellows. He is the depository 
 of Divine wisdom and authority. A belief in his exalted 
 origin^ secures him the profoundest reverence even of the royal 
 family. His duties are indeed so rigorously defined, his life is 
 so divided between study, labour, and austerities, that he is 
 precluded from intermeddling in aflairs of state or from other- 
 wise exceeding the bounds of his position; yet in all that 
 appertains to knowledge, secular or sacred, he is absolute and 
 unimpeachable. 
 
 The steps by which the Brahman gained this vast ascendency 
 are matters only of conjecture. Traces may be found of some 
 mighty conflict between him and the Kshatriya, between the 
 champion of intelligence and the champion of physical prowess ; 
 and even after the Brahman was victorious, the distinction he 
 had won was far less absolute than that which separated all 
 the three superior classes from the wretched sudras they had 
 crushed. Each individual of those three classes was dwija, 
 'twice-born:' on arriving at maturity, they all received a 
 special tonsure, and were all invested with a thread that 
 syilibolised their elevation far above the multitude, that gave 
 them access to the Yedas, and, it may be, intimated a belief 
 that souls of a superior order had in recompense of previous 
 merits been permitted to spend another life in tenements so 
 honourable ^. 
 
 But the Hindu doctrine of caste is intimately connected 
 with other central verities of their religion. The Brahman 
 occupied the highest place in the gradations of society, because 
 he was believed to stand in the most intimate relation to the 
 Supreme Being, because the Spirit of the Universe had been 
 most clearly imaged forth in him. For during all this second 
 period of Hinduism we shall find the various species of existence 
 ultimately traced to unity, on the ground that each is a 
 constituent part of God, and that its special character depends 
 upon its distance, or the measure of its aberration, from the 
 primal source of being. In the creed of Brahmanism, as 
 methodised by * orthodox' philosophy, God alone is truly said to 
 be : all other forms of life are, as to their material properties, 
 but empty and illusive ; while, as to their spiritual properties, 
 
 1 See above, p. 134, n. 2. Hist. pp. 156, 157 ; Wuttke, 11. 318. 
 
 2 Cf. Fred, von Schlegel, Phil, of 
 
CHAP. I.] Vaiieties of Hindu Religious Thought 189 
 
 they are but transient scintillations of His glory. Alone, 
 supreme, and unapproachable, a feeling of dissatisfaction with 
 Himself had crossed the mind of the Great Solitary. He 
 longed for offspring, and at length determined to resolve the 
 primitive simplicity of Plis essence, and transform Himself into 
 a world which might contrast with His eternal quietude. 
 From this desire of God has sprung whatever is, or is to be : 
 the earth, the sky, the rock, the flower, the forest, the innumer- 
 able tribes of gods and men, of beasts and demons, — these, so 
 far as they possess a true existence, are all consubstantial with 
 divinity. The basis underlying all the forms which they 
 assume is the Ineffable, the Uncreated. God may be regarded 
 as the undeveloped world, the world as the development of 
 God. He is both the fountain and the stream, the cause and 
 the effect, the one Creator and the one creation. * As the spider 
 spins and gathers back [its thread] ; as plants sprout on the 
 earth ; as hairs grow on a living person ; so is this universe, 
 here, produced from the imperishable nature. By contempla- 
 tion the vast one germinates ; from him food [or, body] is 
 produced ; and thence, successively, breath, mind, real [elements], 
 -worlds and immortality arising from [good] deeds \' Expressions 
 of this kind had not unnaturally suggested to some minds the 
 inference that the pantheism of ancient India was simple and 
 materialistic : but a further insight into the philosophy, at least 
 so far as it appears in monuments of the Brahmanic age^, will 
 prove such inferences to be erroneous. We may not indeed, be 
 able to decide with confidence respecting the complexion of the 
 earliest Hindu metaphysics, since the Vedas, notwithstanding 
 the ingenuity of their commentators^, will be found to have 
 contained a very slender metaphysical element : but as soon as 
 ever an attempt was made to bring the ruder superstitions of 
 their forefathers into harmony with more refined conceptions of 
 the Godhead, the whole tone of Hindu, pantheism is subtilized, 
 
 ^ An extract given by Colebrooke shone forth in person. He, having 
 
 {Asiat. Researches y viii. 475) from willed to produce various beings 
 
 a upanishad of the fourth Veda. from His own divine substance, first 
 
 - A specimen is subjoined from with a thought created the waters, 
 
 the first chapter of the Laws of and placed in them a productive 
 
 Manu (Jones' Works, iii. 66, 4to. seed,' &c. 
 
 ed.): 'He, whom the mind alone ^ For instance, they have tried 
 
 can perceive, whose essence eludes to evolve the principal dogmas of 
 
 the external organs, who has no the Ved^nta philosophy, on the 
 
 visible parts, who exists from eter- unity and universality of spirit, 
 
 nity, even He, the soul of all beings, from a long hymn of the Rig-Veda^ 
 
 whom no being can comprehend, 11. 1-25 sq., ed. Wilson, 
 
140 Christ and oilier Master's. [part ii. 
 
 to the extent of questioning the reality of the material world 
 itself. All forms assumed by matter are then held to be not 
 only transient but illusive. The semblance of reality which 
 they possess is due to Maya^, — the personification of God's 
 fruitless longing for some being other than His own, — the 
 power, by which, in different words, the Absolute had been 
 Himself beguiled from His original quietude. But while 
 matter is thus held to be essentially non-existent, that which 
 underlies and animates the whole of the phenomenal universe 
 is one with the Divinity, who, by a species of self-analysis, has 
 brought Himself under the conditions of the finite and the 
 temporal, and must in future so continue till the visible is 
 ultimately reabsorbed by the invisible, and multij^licity reduced 
 afresh to simple unity. 
 
 It must not, however, be supposed that this idea of one 
 original and all-pervading spirit (Mahan-Atma) was irrecon- 
 cileable with the old polytheism. On the contrary, the pantheon 
 of the Indo- Aryans was enlarged instead of narrowed in the 
 progress of this second period, till, as seen in the Puraiias, it 
 has reached a most appalling magnitude. I shall hereafter 
 have occasion to refer specifically to the sacred triad of the 
 Brahmans, and shall therefore only touch upon it here, as one 
 example of a law by which the mind of the Hindu was con- 
 stantly disposed to view all forms of being under triune aspects ^ 
 
 1 On this peculiar feature of Gottliche, dessen Glanz dem Kiys- 
 
 Brahmanism, see Wuttke, ii. 282 talle gleicht, der niemals sich ver- 
 
 sq., who shews that in the Yaidic andert, ward durch sie, die Unehr- 
 
 period, mdyd meant no more than bare, in heftige Unruhe versetzt. 
 
 the desire of evolution. However, Er, der Wissende, hing unldaren 
 
 the idea of mdyd, as fully developed, Phantasien nach, und da er in dien 
 
 always implies 'illusion,' 'unreal- von der Maja bereiteten Schlummer 
 
 ity:' it means that God, who in fiel, erblickte er betaubt vielgestal- 
 
 himself had no attributes, was be- tige Traume : ich bin, diess ist mein 
 
 guiled into a belief that He pos- Vater, diess meine Mutter, diess 
 
 sessed them by his union with mdyd, mein Feld, mein Reichthum u. s. iv> 
 
 or his own longing ; and so appeared . . . Wie ein See in den Truggebilden 
 
 to create, preserve, and destroy. der Mittagssonne erscheint, so ent- 
 
 The following illustration from the faltete sich das fleckenlose Licht 
 
 Prohodha-Chandrodaya, as trans- aus unrichtiger Erkenntniss als 
 
 lated by Goldstiicker (Ibid. p. 284), Ather, Luft, Feuer, Wasser, Erde.' 
 
 will throw further Hght upon tbis 2 Wuttke, with a truly Germanic 
 
 subject: 'Maja [i.e. Mdyd] ist un- passion for symmetrical arrange- 
 
 begreiflich. Gleich einer unziich- ^^gj^t, and well-rounded theories, 
 
 tigen Dime lasst sie den hochsten j^^s represented this tendency in a 
 
 Geist Dinge sehen, die gar nicht genealogical form : 
 cxistiren, und tauscht ihn so. Der 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought. 141 
 
 Addicted from the first to tlie examination of natural phenomena, 
 he could not fail to witness year by year the rise, the growth, 
 the death (in order to the reproduction) of vegetable matter. 
 The concentration of his thoughts on such a process had induced 
 the habit of generalizing his conceptions, and finally of picturing 
 all the changes of the universe as an effect of generating, pre- 
 ser\T[ng, and dissolving forces. It was by this process also that 
 the properties of creation, of preservation, of destruction (as the 
 medium of regeneration) were personified and worshipped as 
 Brahm^, Yishiiu, and Siva. The absolute and self-existent, the 
 impersonal That, by which the universe was first projected into 
 being, whose creative energies still operate in never-ending 
 cycles, had been thus presented to the Hindu mind as * three 
 only^ :' while some elevated spirits, searching after the one 
 supreme God, ^if haply they might find Him,' laboured to 
 identify the object of their search with the first member of the 
 sacred triad. As he was called Brahma (masculine), they 
 named it Brahma (neuter). But results which we have noticed 
 in the Vaidic age were no less visible in this. The lofty 
 product of man's generalizing faculty was too ethereal and 
 transcendent for the cognizance of ordinary spirits. So remote 
 was Brahma from the sphere of sinful finite beings, so unloving 
 and impersonal his character, that no temple was erected and no 
 victim offered in his honour : and even his more concrete image, 
 the personified Brahma, has never, in historic times, conciliated 
 to himself a share of popular veneration". 
 
 Das sich entfaltende Brahma 
 
 Entstehen Bestehen 
 
 Vergehen 
 
 Geburt Leben 
 
 Tod 
 
 Satva Eadschas 
 
 Tamas 
 
 Licht Luft 
 
 Feuer 
 
 Himmel Oberwelt 
 
 Unterwelt 
 
 Indra Yaruna 
 
 Agni 
 
 Brahm^ Vischnu 
 
 Oiva 
 
 Gutter Menschen 
 
 Thiere 
 
 Geist Seele 
 
 Korper 
 
 (Seele:) Selbstheit Gemtith 
 
 Verstand 
 
 (Korper:) Kopf Brust 
 
 Bauch 
 
 Brahmanen Xatrija 
 
 VaiQJa. 
 
 ^ See Asiatic Besearches^ viii. 
 395 — 39 7j where Colebrooke quotes 
 a remarkable passage from the Ni- 
 rukta, afi&rming that the gods are 
 
 *only three' in number. It will be 
 
 noticed more at length in Chap. ii. 
 
 2 See Stuhr, Religions- systeme 
 
 des Orients f i. 97, 98. He is still 
 
142 Christ and other blasters. [part ii. 
 
 "No apter illustration can be furnished of tlie shifting and 
 capricious genius of Hindu mythology, than the fact that of 
 those three divinities who rank foremost in the system of the 
 Brahmans, Siva had been previously unhonoured and unknown. 
 The other two had, in like manner, held subordinate positions, 
 Vishnu figuring in the Y6das as an elemental god like Yaruna, 
 and Brahma, if there identical with Brahman \ being merely an 
 equivalent for Agni. And in strict accordance wdth these facts, 
 the highest tenants of the Hindu pantheon are still viewed as 
 finite beings, liable, when certain revolutions are completed, to 
 dethronement and extinction. They partake of the phenomenal 
 character of the universe; and therefore the eventual winding 
 up of all things will necessitate their reabsorption. 
 
 It is thus apparent that the fundamental dogma of the 
 Brahmans is the dogma of e7nanation. The Divinity is believed 
 to be resolved, difiused, discerpted, and so weakened. All 
 things are imperfect, because all are in a state of flux and 
 reflux; their intrinsic character depending on their ever-varying 
 distance from the centre of unity, or on the number of the in- 
 termediate links by which they are removed from the original 
 essence. 
 
 And the same idea wdll help us more than any other to 
 elucidate the Hindu theory of man. The ^ orthodox' philosopher 
 uniformly started, in his speculations on this subject, from the 
 Divine side of things, because with him spirit is all-important, 
 and the human spirit con substantial with the Spirit of the 
 universe. But owing to a happy inconsistency, which reappears 
 in many later speculations, Hindu pantheism could not alto- 
 gether blast those instincts of the soul which lead man to assert 
 his individuality and the inherent freedom of his choice. A 
 few who called themselves philosophers yielded, it is true, to 
 logical pressure, and adopted the degrading error of the fatalist ; 
 they argued that the foulest crimes of man are ultimately 
 wrought by Brahma, and therefore that the guilt is not attribut- 
 able to the human instrument^: but even his own distorted 
 
 worshipped by one class, the Brah- Veda Brahmanaspati = Agni, where 
 mans, at sunrise every morning: Brahman appears to mean ' priest.' 
 but (as Mr Elphinstone remarks) he '^ The Christian missionary of the 
 *was never much worshipped, and present day is not unfrequently re- 
 has now but one temple in India' pulsed, when speaking of righteous - 
 (p. 89, 3rd ed.). ness and judgment to come, by such 
 1 See Langlois, Rig-Veda, iv. 386 : assertions as the following : * I have 
 where we find a hymn on the neither sin nor guilt, for everything 
 marriage of Brahman and Jdliu. In is wrought in me by Brahma : ' cf. 
 many other passages of the Rig- Wuttke, 11. 332. 'Adhuc enimmihi 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought 143 
 
 version of the Fall will testify that the Hindu was dimly 
 conscious all the while of his original freedom and nobility. 
 According to that tradition^ God, when he determined to pro- 
 ject the universe, gave birth at once to all particular souls. At 
 tirst, they were both free and happy, but, impelled by envy and 
 ambition, they eventually broke away still further from the 
 primal essence, and so forfeited their eminent place among 
 celestial intelligences. A world, or rather purgatory, was then 
 constructed for their habitation : it came forth already blighted 
 and disorganized ; and out of it was made the human body of 
 the same debased material, in order to supply more deadly in- 
 struments of torture, and more dismal cells for the incarceration 
 of the damned^. The Here and visible had thus become in 
 Brahmanism the dark antithesis of the Hereafter and invisible ; 
 and we learn, accordingly, how from the doctrine of emanation 
 had sprung up a second characteristic principle of this creed, — 
 the doctrine of dualism. So lost, however, is the human spirit, 
 so oppressed by the ungenial atmosphere around it, and so 
 weakened by the sinful burdens of the flesh, that though in 
 every case believed to be recoverable, many a life of pain and 
 penance will be ordinarily needed for promoting its exaltation 
 and securing its return. It may at first, for instance, be united 
 with the lowest species of organic life; and, under favourable 
 circumstances, may ascend in its successive births ^into the 
 bodies of spiders, of snakes, of chameleons' and the like, until 
 deemed worthy of inhabiting a human tenement. The trial 
 then begins which will determine all its future destiny. An 
 opportunity has been given it of achieving its own liberation; 
 and according to the present quality of its actions it will mount 
 directly upwards through the ranks of demi-gods and gods, or 
 plunge again into the lower region of existence, and commence 
 a fresh series of births. It may be that this vast idea of trans- 
 migration was suggested pai-tly by man's growing consciousness 
 of his demerit, partly by his inability to account for the existing 
 distribution of rewards and punishments, partly by observing 
 points of contact and resemblance between faculties and instincts 
 of the lower animals and those of human beings. But, however 
 ■^)rompted, the idea of transmigration became at length so deeply 
 rooted in the creed of Hindustan, that even the most rampant 
 forms of infidelity were unable to dislodge it. The first aim of 
 
 videbatur, non esse nos qui pecca- ^ See more on this subject in 
 
 mus, sed nescio quam aliam in no- Chap. iii. 
 
 bis peccare natui-am.' S. August. ^ See the picture of a human 
 
 Confess, y. lo. body in Manu, chap. yi. §§ 77, 78. 
 
144 Christ and other Masters, [part ii, 
 
 the Brahmanical system, as interpreted alike by peasant and 
 pliilosopher, was to shorten the duration of such wanderings, or 
 diminish the amount of purgatorial suffering : and the highest 
 glory of that system, in the eyes of all its votaries, was to 
 furnish rules or grant indulgences, by which they might attain 
 immediate and complete exemption from such terrible necessity \ 
 
 What, then, are the methods which the Brahman has 
 prescribed for the attainment of supreme felicity, or reabsorption 
 into God? These methods are reducible to two. The first, 
 adapted to the character and capacities of the many, consisted 
 chiefly, not to say exclusively, of outward and mechanical acts 
 of worship. Moral merit ^ was by them confounded with ritual 
 punctuality. The repetition of the sacred texts which they 
 had gathered from the teaching of the Br^hmans, though the 
 sudra-class w^as rigorously denied this scanty privilege ; the 
 invocation of a host of deities ; the deprecation of evil spirits ; 
 dutiful obedience to the priestly order, and merciful regard for 
 every class of sentient creatures^, — these were deemed the 
 fittest passport, not indeed to absolute repose, but to a loftier 
 and more hopeful stage of being on the dissolution of the present 
 body. 
 
 It was very different with the second and far smaller class, 
 the early mystics and philosophers of Hindustan. By these the 
 doctrine of God's abstract unity was more completely realized, 
 and therefore when they countenanced the worship of the devas, 
 it was only as the old Socinian worshipped Christ, or as the 
 Roman Catholic of the present age professes to adore the saints ^ 
 
 1 'This belief [in a metempsy- (or 6m, the yy^hritis, and the 
 chosis] is not to be looked upon as g^j^atri) apart [from the multitude] 
 a mere popular superstition : it is shall be released in a month even 
 the main principle of all Hindu from a great offence, as a snake 
 metaphysics; it is the foundation of from his slough.' Again (§82): 
 all Hind^ philosophy. The great 'Whosoever shall repeat day by 
 object of their philosophical re- day, for three days, without neg- 
 seafch in every system, Br^ihmani- ligence, that sacred text, shall 
 cal or Buddhist, is the discovery of [hereafter] approach the Divine 
 the means of putting a stop to essence, move freely as air, and 
 further transmigration ; the discon- assume an ethereal form.' Cf. also 
 tinuance of corporeal being; the the consentient testimony of the 
 liberation of soul from body. ' Wil- late Col. Sleeman, a very acute 
 son, 'Pref.' to the Sdnkhya Kdrikdy observer of the peculiarities of the 
 p. X. Oxf. 1837. Hindti mind, in his Rambles and 1 
 
 2 For instance, it is declared in Recollections^ 11. 18, 19. 
 the Laws of Manu (ch, 11. § 79: 3 gee 3Ianu, ch. xii. § 83. 
 Jones' Works^ iii. 94): *A twice- 4 gee the language of a Portu- 
 born man [i. e. a member of any of guese missionary in Von Bohlen, 
 the three superior castes], who shall Das alte Indien^ i. 153. 
 a thousand times repeat those three 
 
CHAP, I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought 145 
 
 They even shrank from the idea of giving attributes to God, 
 and so reducing Him within the sphere of human sympathies, 
 but laboured, on the other hand, to raise humanity at once into 
 complete equality with the Divine. Their favourite motto was, 
 *He who knows the Supreme God becomes God.' On the 
 wings of knowledge, therefore, these philosophers hoped to rise 
 indefinitely until they lost themselves in that which is alone 
 true being, — the abysses of the Absolute and Universal. They 
 did not, it may be, reject the ceremonial worship of their fore- 
 fathers ; they did not feel exonerated from the duty of restrain- 
 ing their sensual appetites, but rather would insist upon the 
 need of violent austerities in order to escape more easily from 
 every fascination of the natural life : yet, on the other hand, 
 the pinnacles on which they stood were so exalted and so 
 inaccessible to the many, that a total separation was now 
 forming between them and other classes of their fellow-country- 
 men, between the follower of the Hindu Gnosis and the herd of 
 vulgar and unlettered souls : and, as the tradesman could never 
 gain the social eminence of the soldier, nor the soldier of the 
 Brahman, none but members of the learned class were they to 
 whom immediate liberation was made possible. The rest had, 
 speaking generally, been doomed to wander on for ages, and to 
 undergo an almost endless series of new births. 
 
 The object of these pages does not make it necessary for me 
 to adjudicate respecting the antiquity of the religious system, 
 which had manifestly reached its prime on the appearance of the 
 ■ Institutes of Manu. Nearly all competent scholars are inclined 
 to place it far higher than the date of Alexander's expedition^, 
 arguing partly from allusions interspersed in Greek writers of 
 the period, and still more from evidence surviving in the two 
 great epic poems of Hindustan, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, 
 which not only testify to the continuous struggle of that system, 
 
 ^ Almost the only writer of in- when SankharaAch^rya established 
 
 telligence who now advocates the the exclusive worship of Siva in the 
 
 contrary is Col. Sykes : see AsiaL 9th century after Christ. In like 
 
 Journal, Vol. vi. He there affirms, manner Col. Sykes is of opinion 
 
 'After a careful collation of facts, I that the Pali is an older language 
 
 unhesitatingly declare, that I have than the Sanskrit, and especially 
 
 not met with evidence to satisfy my presses the point that, although we 
 
 mind that Br^hmanism was ever in have many old inscriptions and 
 
 the ascendant, until after the fall of coins of Buddhist kings (in Pali), 
 
 Buddhism' (p. 448). He believes we have none whatever of Br^h- 
 
 that Buddhism was the old religion manical kings until the fourth, nay 
 
 of the Aryans, and that Brahman- probably until the seventh century 
 
 ism first became the popular creed, after Christ. 
 
 H. 10 
 
146 Christ and other Masters, [PxVRT ii. 
 
 in the soutli of India, witli the older form of heathenism, with 
 'monsters, giants and barbarous men,' but also indicate the 
 vast predominance obtained by the Brahmanical order. Yet, 
 however this question may be finally decided, little doubt exists 
 that long before the inroads of the Macedonian hero, adversaries 
 of the * orthodox' belief were silently arising and acquiring 
 strength beneath its very shadow. As the primitive religion 
 of the Vedas was transformed from year to year, until, in spite 
 of their ingenious commentators, we are able to detect few 
 traces of its earlier characteristics, so the creed of Brahmanism 
 itself was finally assaulted by the learned artifices of the 
 sceptic, and transmuted in the crucible of the philosopher. 
 
 § 3. Schools of Philosophy, 
 
 "While the influence of the sacerdotal order was rapidly 
 increasing, while the Yaidic doctrines were recast in more ideal 
 moulds, and while the popular mind of India, vigorous and 
 creative as before, was on the one side adding to the number of 
 its niythes, and on the other forming new religious confrater- 
 nities exclusively devoted to the worship either of Siva or 
 Yishiiu, the thinking class of the community was more and 
 more estranged from the religion of their fathers. They began 
 to pry into such questions as the following : ' What is the 
 original element, or power of nature, lying at the base of all 
 phenomena? What is man, and whence? Whither is he 
 tending 1 Which of all things is the most important ? What 
 is truth ? And what must be my aim in order that I may have 
 done what is fitting to be done?'' These questions might be 
 
 ^ The two schools entitled to the with additions, by Pauthier, Paris, 
 
 name of 'orthodox,' are (i) the 1833; and the very useful edition 
 
 Furva (earlier) Mimdnsd, founded of the Aphorisms of various schools, 
 
 by Jaimini, with the design of faci- printed for the Benares Govern- 
 
 litating the interpretation of the ment College, under the care of 
 
 Yedas, and (2) the Uttara (later) Dr. Ballantyne. For a copy of the 
 
 Mimdnsd, or Veddnta, attributed to latter series I am indebted to the 
 
 the half -mythical sage Yyasa, or by courtesy of John Muir, Esq., a true 
 
 others more correctly to Vyasa, friend of India, who has himself 
 
 named Krishna Dwaipayana. The published An Examination of Re- 
 
 name Vedanta (anta = 'end') sufa- ligions,. in Sanskrit and English, 
 
 ciently denotes the spirit which Part i., Mirzapore, 1852, and Part 
 
 pervaded the latter system: al- 11., Calcutta, 1854; and a collection, 
 
 though the basis of that system with an English translation, of 
 
 must be sought not so much in the Original Sanskrit Texts on the 
 
 Vedas proper, as in the Upanishads. Origin and Progress of the Religion 
 
 See Colebrooke's Essays on the and Institutions of India, Lond. 
 
 Fhilosophy of the Hindus, as edited, 1858. 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought. 147 
 
 turned aside or deemed unanswerable by many to whom they 
 were presented ; but others, reeling under the burden they 
 imposed, would not unfrequently retire for comfort to the 
 neighbouring forest, and as followers gathered round them, 
 each might finally become the centre of a literary circle, if not 
 the founder of a school. At first, however, the contemplative 
 philosopher might be unconscious, or but slightly conscious, of 
 his opposition to the ' sacred' writings. He might even, like the 
 earliest race of Christian schoolmen, be desirous of employing 
 philosophic methods only to establish popular belief on a more 
 rational and lasting basis. To his efforts, therefore, we may be 
 indebted for the systematic moulding of Hinduism, which 
 appears in the post-Yaidic writings; since every school of 
 ' orthodox' philosophy manifests the deepest veneration both for 
 lyric and dogmatic portions of the Yedas. These are deemed, 
 the utterances of God himself; and, as partaking of His essence, 
 they are absolute, infallible, etemaP. 
 
 Yet other thoughtful spirits, who have frequent representa- 
 tives in later times and distant countries^, grew more daring in 
 their philosophical speculations. They were more disposed to 
 start afresh in their pursuit of knowledge, to devise a theory of 
 religion for themselves, and gather the materials mainly, if not 
 solely, from their observation of the world around them. It 
 was rather in the open book of nature than in the traditionary 
 hymns and legends that they hoped to find a satisfactory solution 
 of their multiplying doubts. 
 
 This bolder race of Hindu speculators we shall most con- 
 veniently study in three classes, {a) the * atheistic' Sankhya, 
 (6) Buddhism, (c) the eclectic, or intermediate school, as repre- 
 sented in the Bhagavad-Gita. 
 
 a, Sankhya Philosophy. 
 The author of the Sankhya philosophy was Kapila, who, 
 like the great majority of educated Hindus, was probably a 
 
 ^ For example, it is stoutly con- modern extraction: *En effet,' he 
 
 tended by the school of Mim^ns^ writes, 'la philosophic indienne est 
 
 {Aphorisms, Part i. pp. 32 sq. ed. tellement vaste, que tous les sys- 
 
 Ballantj^ne) that the Vedas are re- temes de philosophic s'y rencon- 
 
 trospectively eternal, notwithstand- trent, qu'elle forme tout un monde 
 
 ing the occurrence in them of names philosophique, et qu'on pent dire h. 
 
 of men, &c. la lettre que I'histoire de la phUo- 
 
 ^ Cousin, while engaged in lectur- sophie de I'lnde est un abr6g6 de 
 
 ing on the philosophy of the last I'histoire entiere de la philosophie.' 
 
 century, found himself carried back Cours de VHist. de Fhilosophie, i. 
 
 to India as the birthplace of systems 180, Paris, 1 829. 
 which are often thought to be of 
 
 10—2 
 
148 Christ and oilier Masters. [part ii. 
 
 Brahman ; tlioiigli his later followers hold that he obtained his 
 knowledge of the twenty-five categories, which formed the basis 
 of his teaching, * merely by birth;' in other words, that he was 
 himself an incarnation of the Deity \ The system which he 
 founded was entitled Sankhya^, apparently because the author 
 deemed it a result of pure reason, or deliberate judgment. It 
 j)rofessed to remedy the various ills of life, external and 
 internal, by resolving intellectual difficalties, and by revealing 
 to its votary ' the real nature of all that is.' It does not, like 
 some other systems, spend its strength in trying to discriminate 
 between existence and non-existence; it puts the further 
 question. What made things as they are? and thus, excepting 
 soul, which is a mute, inert, and passionless spectator of the 
 process, every thing is by the Sankhya represented under the 
 two aspects of 'producer' and * j)^c)duction^.' 
 
 In this creed, the plastic origin of all material things, 
 the primary productive essence "^ (prakriti), whose properties 
 come before us in sensation, is the ' undiscrete,' the inde- 
 structible, the all-embracing, or, in modern phraseology, the 
 Absolute. ' Creation' is the individualising of this universal 
 principle : yet the motive power is due in no case to a conscious 
 and designing Agent, but rather to blind impulses, evolving 
 first intelligence, or huddJii, one of the inherent properties of 
 the material essence, and then self-consciousness, the third 
 in order of the Sankhya principles^. The consciousness of 
 individual existence {ahan-kdra) is thus, according to the present 
 system, an attribute of matter'' : its organ is material : it can 
 only be connected with the soul by self-illusion : it is no proper 
 and original element of man ; and in the school of Kapila, the 
 aim is so to educate the young philosopher, that he is prepared 
 to lay aside the pronoun / entirely, to affirm that souls have 
 individually no interest either in human passions or possessions, 
 
 1 See Dr. Ballantyne's Lecture on anity in Ceylon^ p. 192. 
 
 the Sankhya Philosophy , embracing ^ Lecture, as above, p. 53. 
 
 the text of the Tattwa-Samdsa, IMir- ^ On its affinity with the vXtj of 
 
 zapore, 1850. ' Plato and Aristotle, see M. Pau- 
 
 ^ Sankhya from sankhy^ = ' num- thier's note on Coleljrooke, EssaiSf 
 
 ber,' and also 'reason.' Hence the p. 17. 
 
 * rational system.' Others find in ^ Lecture, as above, pp. •26, 54. 
 
 the name a reference to something ^ See Sankhya Kdrikd, ed. Wil- 
 
 like the Pythagorean theory of son, pp. 175, 176, where it is dis-] 
 numbers. It is worth observing * tinctly affirmed that the soal or 
 
 that the modern Buddhists of Ceylon spirit can have no attributes, and 1 
 
 frequently call their teachers *the is entirely passive, 
 clergy of reason: ' Tennent, Christi- 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Beligious Thought 149 
 
 and in this sense to declare, as the grand climax of his 
 teaching, ' IsTeither I am, nor is ought mine, nor is there any I^' 
 
 Another feature of the system is that, without impugning 
 the reality of spirit, or refusing to it some directive agency, the 
 active principle in man is always held to be a property of body, 
 and action itself regarded as material. Kapila did not wish, as 
 it would seem, to enter on elaborate discussions touching the 
 origin and destination of man's spiritual nature. Philosophy, 
 he concluded, ought to deal chiefly with phenomena, not with 
 final causes, and excepting hints to the effect that huddhi, or 
 intelligence, though itself material, is the link between the soul 
 and matter, we shall look in vain for any definite theory as to 
 the connexion and disconnexion of the visible and the invisible. 
 The Sankhya speculator had before him two distinct classes of 
 efiects, a world produced by nature, and a multitude of souls 
 proceeding from a spiritual essence. The first attracted his 
 chief interest. He did not, however, fail to recognise the fact 
 that souls are in the ordinary state of man possessed, or, he 
 would say, deluded by the consciousness of individuality, and 
 that this consgiousness will haunt them till, so far as they are 
 interested, all the processes of nature have completed their 
 development. He also held that such activity of nature has no 
 other object than the liberation of the soul : it is an instance of 
 unselfishness : the process will go on with reference to that 
 liberation, till it is no longer needed, — ^ as a man boiling rice 
 for a meal desists when it is dressed ^' * Generous nature, 
 endued with qualities, does by manifold means accomplish with- 
 out benefit [to herself] the wish of ungrateful soul, devoid of 
 qualities^ :' expressions, which, if I mistake not, were among 
 the earliest evidences that philosophic minds were rising to the 
 great conception of self-sacrifice, or rather of spontaneous action 
 in behalf of others. 
 
 How far the Sankhya system is obnoxious to the charge of 
 atheism, has been frequently disputed ^ Kapila himself afiected 
 to discern, in his peculiar theory of nature, the solution of all 
 human problems, and consequently was disposed to treat asser- 
 tions of a primal and intelligent Cause, distinct from matter 
 and surpassing nature, as extremely doubtful, or, at least, as 
 
 ^ Colebrooke, p. 44. The ori- * Cousin, who treats the Sankhya 
 
 ginal is remarkable : N^smi na me philosophy as the sensualism [sen- 
 
 naham. sationalism] of India, declares that 
 
 2 Sankhya Kdrikd, ed. "Wilson, it must always issue in 'material- 
 
 p. 168. ism, fatalism, atheism' {Cours &c. 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. 171. I. 200). 
 
loO Christ and other Masters. [part it. 
 
 pliilosopHcally superfluous. Hence opponents^ in -whose eyes 
 religion and philosophy were convertible terms, assailed him 
 chiefly on this ground, asseverated that his teaching was *un- 
 scriptural' and absurd, repudiated his attempts to shelter himself 
 beneath a figurative interpretation of the Yedas, and branded 
 all his speculations with the title 'atheistic' {niriswara, i. e. 
 * without an tswara,' or 'lord'). But his disciples might have 
 urged in mitigation of this charge that Kapila does not entirely 
 overlook the presence of spirit in the midst of the material 
 universe, — inert, indeed, and passionless, 'a bystander, a spec- 
 tator^,' but still a real entity,— and further, that he is not 
 unwilling to assign the origin of individual souls to some great 
 central essence^, gifted with volition, and as such, analogous to 
 the abstract God of the Yedantins. The truth appears to be 
 that Kapila, in recoiling from their system, rushed at once into 
 the opposite extreme. They laboured to get rid of contradic- 
 tions between visible and invisible by questioning, and finally 
 denying, the reality of the former. He, perplexed as much as 
 they by the anomalies and apparent dualism of the world, 
 allotted the first place to matter, or at least in\iested it with all 
 active properties. What was Maya, or illusion, in the ' ortho- 
 dox' creed, became reality in his : it was the true foundation of 
 the visible universe. 
 
 The Sankhya was, however, thoroughly Indian in the prac- 
 tical bent of his philosophy. He was striving, like the rest, to 
 purchase an exemption from the fatal liability to repetition of 
 birth ; he hoped to further the emancipation of the spirit from 
 the bonds of individuality. And knowledge was the single 
 recipe which he would deign to ofier in promoting these desir- 
 
 1 See the Aphorisms of the Ve- three] qualities, eternal, spectator, 
 ddnta ^hilosophy^ Bk. i. ch. i. enjoyer, not an agent, the knower 
 sect. II. (ed. Ballantyne), containiog of body, pure, not producing aught.' 
 a 'confutation of the Atheistic doc- ^ This is disputed by a writer in 
 trines of the S^nkhyas.' One argu- the Colonial Church Chronicle, xi. 
 ment is well put, viz. that man, io8; quoting Colebrooke's Essay, 
 who by the philosopher is called where it is maintained that the soul 
 upon to identify himself with the is, according to the Sankhyas, ' nei- 
 course of the world, cannot without ther produced nor productive : it is 
 absurdity be called upon to identify multitudinous ' [i. e. there is a mul- 
 himself with what is unintelligent. titude of souls, and not one only 
 
 2 Colebrooke, ed. Pauthier, pp. universal soul], 'individual, sen- 
 40, 180. In reply to the question, sitive, eternal, unalterable, imma- 
 wiiat is soul? it is answered (Lee- terial.' The view taken in the text 
 ture, as above, p. 17): 'Soul is is supplied by J. C. Thompson, 
 without beginning, subtile, omni- Introd. to the Bhagavad Gitdj p. 
 present, intelligent, without [the Ixvii. and elsewhere. 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought. 151 
 
 able results. He laid no stress whatever on tlie influences of 
 moral goodness ; while sacrifice and every form of ritual observ- 
 ance, though the merit of them was in general terms conceded, 
 could possess no charm for him, because thej only served to 
 place the worshipper upon a level with the perishable devas, 
 and secured no more than temporary liberation \ Such grovel- 
 ling aims can never satisfy the aspirations of the true jDhilosopher. 
 He, therefore, hastens to strike out a new and independent 
 pathway, free, as he maintains, from every shadow of impurity, 
 excess, or deficiency ^' 
 
 If we ask. What is the special character of the remedy to 
 which these wondrous powers may be attributed ? — the answer 
 is that it consists of a profound acquaintance with the Sankhya 
 philosophy, as digested in twenty-five categories ; or, in other 
 words, implies a perfect knowledge of the way in which man- 
 kind are constituted, and the means by which they can escape 
 from the entanglements of self No sooner have these principles 
 been mastered than the Sankhya is elevated, potentially at least, 
 to the ultimate stages of existence. Pain and pleasure, vice 
 and virtue cease to operate for him. He is no more susceptible 
 of qualities so accidental and so earthly. It is true that, owing 
 to the force of impulses already given, he must continue for a 
 while to occupy a human body, and must act like other mortals, 
 * as the potter having set his wheel whirling puts on it a lump 
 of clay, fabricates a vessel and takes it off, and leaves the wheel 
 continuing to turn round ^ ;' yet all the consequences of action 
 are prevented when the soul is once illuminated by true know- 
 ledge. Or if it be asked again. By what peculiar channels man 
 obtains this salutary illumination 1 — the answer is, By inference, 
 by perception, and, last in order, by tradition or ^ right affirma- 
 tion*.' For Kapila was driven to confess not only that some 
 truths may far exceed the range of human vision and the powers 
 of human logic, but that, on their revelation, such high verities 
 are capable of being handed down to future ages. He himself 
 
 ^ Aphorisms of the Sankhya Phi- ity' of the Vaidic method arose 
 
 losophy, Bk. i. Aph. 83 : Sankhya partly from the countenance there 
 
 Kdrikdf ed. "Wilson, p. 15. In the given to animal sacrifices, 
 
 aphorism, it is maintained, that all ^ Sankhya Kdrikd, pp. 184, 185. 
 
 liberation, supposed to be wrought * Lecture^ as above, p. 49. Some 
 
 out by ritual observances, will be of the matters not proveable by 
 
 found imperfect and temporary, just perception or by inference are said 
 
 because it was the result of act, or to be, the existence of Indra, the 
 
 was accomplished by means. northern Kurus, the golden moun- 
 
 '^Sdnkhya Kdrikd, ip. 14. It is tain M6ru, the nymphs in Para- 
 curious to observe that the • impur- dise. 
 
152 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 had, for example, been indebted to the ancients for more than 
 one ingredient of the system he had founded. 
 
 With regard to the capacities of the human subject, Kapila 
 pursued a verj independent line. He went so far as to suggest 
 ideas fatal to the vast prerogatives of the Brahmans. Human 
 souls, he argued, though personally distinct^, are alL of equal 
 worth and elevation. Present inequalities in their condition 
 he referred to the specific structure of men's bodies, or rather 
 to the distribution of the primary elements from which their 
 bodies are compounded. These elements^ together form a triad. 
 They are jDurity or goodness (sattwa) ; imperfection, pain or 
 foulness (rajas); blind indifference, stupidity or darkness (tamas). 
 In proportion to the dominance obtained by one or other of the 
 primary elements, man approaches, first, to the divine or noble; 
 secondly, to the selfish, or the barely human ; thirdly, to the 
 bestial, the inert, or the besotted. He alone who by obeying 
 the dictates of true philosophy rises high above the ordinary 
 level is exempted from the risk, or rather the necessity, of 
 emigrating step by step through various forms of bodily organ- 
 isation. Here, as we have hinted, Kapila was always true to 
 the received opinions ; nay, so deeply rooted in his mind was 
 the idea of transmigration, that he started an elaborate theory 
 for its defence. When some began to ask. How souls which 
 he believed to be inactive have the power of passing from one 
 body to another'? or secondly. How it happens that emancipa- 
 'tion is not uiiiversally effected in the act of disembodiment ? — 
 his answer was, that every soul upon its first emission and 
 association with matter, is invested also with a subtile and 
 elastic framework (linga-sariray, the reflection of the more 
 
 ^ The rival doctrine of the Ve- haps much older than Kapila (Las- 
 
 d^ntins is presented in the following sen, Ind. Alt. i. 832) : yet the guna 
 
 extract : * This soul of all worlds is of the S^nkhyas is no mere attri- 
 
 but one : by whom is it made more ? bute, but a substance discernible 
 
 Some speak of soul as several — by soul through the medium of 
 
 seeing that knowledge and other the faculties. In Prakriti, or na- 
 
 mental states are observable [si- ture absolute and unmodified, we 
 
 multaneously — some being happy have the three qualities in perfect 
 
 whilst others are sad] ; but in the equipoise : Wilson, on Sank. Kdr. 
 
 Brahman, the worm and the insect; p. 52. 
 
 in the outcaste, the dog and the ^ Colebrooke, pp. 24, 25, with 
 
 elephant ; in goats, cows, gadflies Pauthier's notes. The latter points 
 
 and gnats, the wise behold the out the close affinity of this notion 
 
 same' [single soul]: Lecture^ as to certain speculations of the Greek 
 
 above, p. 24. philosophers and early Fathers of 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 27. Such a distribu- the Church, respecting the corpore- 
 
 tion, with other objects, w^as per- ity of the soul. 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Eeligioiis TJiought 153 
 
 substantial body. This it cannot afterwards abandon till the 
 hour of ultimate emancipation ; and a vehicle is consequently 
 found in which the passive soul may be transferred from one 
 material tenement to another. 
 
 Acute, however, as the author of the Sankhya system was, 
 he failed eventually to satisfy the anxious questions of Hindus 
 respecting the Supreme Intelligence. "When they demanded by 
 whom the human spirit had been made to emanate, or wIit/ the 
 great primordial element was individualised in human bodies, 
 Kapila could only urge that such had been the necessary order 
 of development, one step of some inscrutable and eternal process. 
 The uniform vagueness of his language on these questions 
 led to the formation of another school, entitled the 'theistic' 
 Sankhya \ It ascribed no will to prakriti, or the material 
 essence ; it recognised an iswara, or lord, and therefore did not 
 hesitate to preach that God exists, that God is the intelligent 
 Source of being, that God allots those varying passions, powers 
 and faculties which men continually exhibit, and that God is 
 the great Judge who punishes or rewards according to their 
 conduct. Modified by the accession of these new and better 
 influences, the Sankhya system grew, and flourished in some 
 districts ; though at present hardly any traces of it are discern- 
 ible in the literary circles of Hindustan^. 
 
 h. Buddhism. 
 
 From the school of Kapila to that of Buddha^ the transition 
 is most obvious and direct. The close affinity between them 
 did not escape the eye of Colebrooke, and, in spite of Hitter's 
 disbelief, the truth of his remark has been continually verified*. 
 
 ^ Ihid. pp. 34 sq. Wuttke (ii. writings of this school.' Pref. to 
 
 424) is of opinion that this modifi- the Sankhya Kdrikd, p. viii. 
 
 cation is due to Christian influences: ^ See a new work by C. F. Kcep- 
 
 nor is there anything in the chro- pen, Die Religion des Buddha und 
 
 nology adverse to his view ; for when ihre Entstehung. Berhn, 1857. 
 
 Lassen (i. 833) places Patanjali, * See, for instance, Lassen, i. 
 
 with whom it is associated, in the 830, 831 : Saint-Hilaire, Des Vedas, 
 
 2nd century before Christ, he allows p. 147. The latter observes with 
 
 that the evidence for so doing is justice, that all the indianists 
 
 extremely slight. *n'hesitent pas a reconnaitre dans 
 
 2 In the present (Jay, if it survive le bouddhisme, devenu plus tard 
 
 at all, we have to search for it une religion, un developpement et 
 
 among the labyrinths of German une copie du sankhya de Kapila. 
 
 metaphysics. Prof. Wilson says: La ressemblance ne pent faire le 
 
 * During the whole of my inter- moindre doute pour qui se donnera 
 
 course with learned natives, I met la peine d'etudier les deux doc- 
 
 with but one Brahman who pro- trines : les bases de I'une et de I'au- 
 
 fessed to be acq^uainted with the tre sont identiques.' 
 
154. 
 
 Christ and oilier Masters. 
 
 [part II. 
 
 One system is indeed no more than the extension and practical 
 embodiment of the other. I am not desirous of maintaining 
 absolutely that principles allied in some degree to those of 
 Buddhism were unknown to other Asiatics in still earlier times \ 
 What I intend by Buddhism, is the system of metaphysical and 
 social philosophy, organised by Sakya-muni, or Gautama Buddha. 
 Neither am I speaking here of Buddhism in its modern de- 
 velopment, as modified by intermixtures either with the populai* 
 forms of Brahmanism, or with the older superstitions of the 
 countries where it afterwards gained a footing : for that view 
 of it will come more properly before us, when we pass from 
 Hindustan to China, and the other regions where it still pos- 
 sesses a complete ascendancy. In different words, we shall be 
 dealing now with a philosophy rather than with a religion. 
 
 Although in passing to a survey of the principles of Bud- 
 dhism, we entirely quit the region of the mythe and enter that 
 of the historic legend, and although the ground we have to 
 traverse is in general less encumbered by chronological difficul- 
 ties, the point of starting has not hithei-to been absolutely 
 determined. The narratives that wear the greatest semblance 
 of probability are the Chinese on one side, and the Sing'halese 
 on the other ; while of these conflicting authorities, the latter 
 is preferred by nearly all competent writers of the present day^ 
 
 1 *It may be,' says Mr. Hardy, 
 {Manual of Buddhism, p. 88, Lond. 
 1853) 'that G6tama presented him- 
 self to the world as the successor 
 of men, whose claims to supreme 
 authority were thus acknowledged ; 
 but I have not yet met with any 
 well-authenticated data of their 
 doctrines or deeds.' Yet even this 
 has been positively denied by W. 
 von Humboldt in his great work, 
 XJeher die Kawi-Sprache, i. 290: 
 *Sowohl die Annahme eines Vor- 
 Brahmanischen, als eines urspriing- 
 lich Ausser-Indischen Buddhismus, 
 bedarf keiner Widerlegung mehr.' 
 Cf. on the other side, Col, Sykes, 
 as above, p. 145, n. i. I may here 
 also add, that the religion of the 
 Jains, which still survives in Gu- 
 zerat and other parts of India, is 
 connected in its origin, if not ab- 
 solutely one with Buddhism: see 
 Colebrooke, Asiat. Res. ix. 279 sq. 
 
 Stuhr, Die Beligions-systeme, &c. i. 
 61 sq. 
 
 2 E. Burnouf, ^Introduction a 
 Vhistoire du Bouddhisme indien^ 
 Pref. p. iii. p. 587, Paris, 1844; 
 Lassen, 11. 51 sq. ; Elphinstone, pp, 
 III, 112, 3rd ed. ; Hardy, Manual 
 of Buddhism, p. 353. Mr. Elphin- 
 stone makes the following observa- 
 tions, in the justice of which almost 
 every one is now disposed to ac- 
 quiesce: 'These discrepancies are 
 too numerous to be removed by the 
 supposition that they refer to an 
 earlier and a later Budha ; and that 
 expedient is also precluded by the 
 identity of the name Sakya, and of 
 every circumstance in the lives of 
 the persons to whom such different 
 dates are assigned. We must, there- 
 fore, either pronounce the Indian 
 B^udhas to be ignorant of the date 
 of a religion which arose among 
 themselves, and at the same time 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Eeligious Thought 155 
 
 The death of Gautama is thus ascribable to the year 543 B.C., 
 i. e. two centuries before the date of Alexander's expedition. 
 
 When the primitive story is divested of the countless fables^ 
 in which it has been decked by later superstition, Gautama is 
 there presented not as one of many incarnations of the Deity^, 
 
 must derange the best established 
 part of the Hindti chronology; or 
 admit that an error mnst have oc- 
 curred in Cashmlr or Tibet, through 
 which places it crept into the more 
 eastern countries, when they re- 
 ceived the rehgion of Budha, many 
 centuries after the death of its 
 founder. As the latter seems by 
 much the most probable explana- 
 tion, we may safely fix the death of 
 Budha about 550 b.c' There are 
 persons who identify Buddha with 
 the prophet Daniel, and ascribe the 
 appearance of Buddhism in India to 
 the captivity and dispersion of the 
 Jews ! ! See Wilson's paper in 
 Journal of As. Soc. (1856), xvi. 233. 
 1 See the very copious legends of 
 Gotama (or, more properly, Gau- 
 tama = a descendant of Gotama) in 
 Mr. Hardy's Manual of Buddhism, 
 pp.139 — 353- These are drawn ex- 
 clusively from Sing'halese sources, 
 but are identical with accounts now 
 circulated in Birmah and Siam, and 
 have also very much in common 
 with the Tibetan traditions, as 
 previously reported by Csoma Ko- 
 rosi, and still more fully in the 
 Rgya Teh' er Bol Pa (a Tibetan 
 history of Buddha, circ. 150 B.C. ed. 
 Foucaux, Paris, 1847); with the 
 Nep^lese traditions, as reported by 
 Mr. B. H. Hodgson ; with the Mon- 
 golian. (Tataric) traditions, as re- 
 ported by M. Schmidt, and with 
 the Chinese as preserved in the Foe 
 Koue Ki, and translated by Abel 
 Remusat. Professor Wilson (as 
 above, pp. 247, 248) has suggested 
 various considerations, which in 
 his judgment throw suspicion on 
 these narratives, and 'render it 
 very problematical whether any 
 such person as S^kya Sinha, or S^- 
 kya-muni, or Sramana Gautama, 
 
 ever actually existed.' The reader 
 is also referred to an admirable 
 sketch of S^kya-muni in M. Saint- 
 Hilaire's recent work Du Boud- 
 dhisme, pp. 28 — 123, Paris, 1855, 
 where the historical and legendary 
 elements are separated with great 
 care and acumen. 
 
 '^ On the story which had reached 
 St. Jerome, and was repeated by 
 Ratramnus, respecting the birth of 
 Gautama from the side of a Virgin, 
 see Lassen, iii. 370. In the Lalita 
 Vistara (included in M. Foucaux' s 
 Tibetan history of Buddha, and 
 assigned by him, and Wilson after 
 him, to about 150 B.C.) Gautama is 
 said to have previously attained the 
 rank of B6dhisatwa (which is in- 
 ferior only to that of Buddha) in 
 the Tushita heaven, where he taught 
 the doctrine to innumerable mil- 
 lions of Bodhisatwas, &c. To rise 
 to the elevation of a perfect Buddha 
 one existence more on earth was 
 necessary, and he therefore becomes 
 incarnate as the son of the S^kya 
 prince Suddh6dana, king of Kapila- 
 vastu, and M^y^ his wife: he is 
 born miraculously from his mother's 
 side, who died seven days after his 
 birth. Wilson, in Journal of As. 
 Soe. (1856), XVI. 243. The feehng 
 which prompted this peculiar theory 
 of incarnation was subsequently 
 shared by the Valentinians, and in 
 the 1 6th century by our Joan of 
 Kent : see Hardwick's Hist, of Re- 
 formation, pp. 278, 279, and n. 6. 
 In the fabulous legend of Lao-tse, 
 composed as late as a.d. 350, he 
 also is said to have issued from 
 the left side of his mother, who 
 carried him in her womb for 72 
 years: see the 'Introd.' to S. Ju- 
 iien's edition of the Tao-te-Kingy 
 p. xxiii. 
 
156 Christ and other Masters. [part II. 
 
 nor as the sole receptacle of the divine Intelligence, but simply 
 as a man, — a man of gentle, ardent, pensive, philanthropic 
 nature. Descended from a royal house in one of the most 
 polished provinces of central India, he was nurtured in the 
 midst of luxury, and with the prospect of unbroken happiness. 
 .But ere he reached the flower of manhood Gautama grew weary 
 of the pomp and pleasures of his father's court. Presentiments 
 by which he seems to have been haunted almost from his cradle, 
 and the ever-darkening pictures which he drew of human 
 wretchedness and mutability, had filled his heart with sadness 
 bordering on despair. At last, abandoning his favourite wife, 
 he stole away entirely from the palace ; and at the age of nine- 
 and-twenty sought relief in the society of Brahmans, with 
 whom he lived six years a life of study and asceticism. It was 
 while occupied in these pursuits, resisting the temptations to 
 sensual pleasure, and mourning over the prostration of the 
 universe at large, that he awoke to the idea of standing forth 
 among his fellow-men in the capacity of liberator and informer \ 
 Hitherto he was but Sakya-muni, the ^ solitary' of the race of 
 Sakya; now he fancied himself entitled to the appellation 
 Buddha, * the awakened,' ^ the enlightened.' . He collected, in 
 the midst of spiritual ecstasies, that during the present cycle of 
 the universe he was exalted to the very highest point of being, 
 and that by renunciation of the world he had been freed from 
 all the limitations of natural existence. For the sake, however, 
 of promoting the emancipation of others, he did not pass away 
 immediately into his ultimate condition. He resolved to be the 
 founder of a school ; but instead of acting like the Brahmans, 
 he exhibited at once the deep and comprehensive basis on which 
 he thought a worthier fabric should be reared. He preached in 
 public at Benares (Varanasi), and afterwards in other parts of 
 northern and central India, fascinating a large crowd of followers, 
 by the beauty of his person, the feminine suavity of his manners, 
 his ardour, his austerities, the touching eloquence of his address, 
 
 1 He finally thought himself sans tache, sans envie, sans igno- 
 
 capable of becoming the deliverer ranee, et sans passion... la voie qui 
 
 of the whole universe. See the mfene k la possession de la science 
 
 narrative in Saint-Hilaire, pp. 55 universelle, la voie du souvenir et 
 
 sq. * II avait enfin trouve la voie du jugement, la voie qui adoucit la 
 
 forte du grande homme, la voie du vieillesse et la mort, la voie calme 
 
 sacrifice des sens, la voie inf aillible et sans trouble, exempte des craintes 
 
 et sans abattement, la voie de la du d^mon, qui conduit k la citd du 
 
 benediction et de la vertu, la voie Nirvana:' Ihid, p. 57. 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Beligious Thought 157 
 
 the mildness and philantliropy of his doctrines^, the use of the 
 vernacular language, and, according to the legends, a profuse 
 display of wonder-working powers. 
 
 When Gautama breathed his last, at the advanced age of 
 eighty, Buddhism had been firmly rooted in some parts of 
 Hindustan. The sayings of the founder were gradually col- 
 lected into Sutras^, which, on being augmented by the Yinaya 
 and Abhidharma (disciplinary and metaphysical treatises), be- 
 came the rivals of the Yaidic literature. These all were duly 
 authorised in synods^; and ere long the doctrines which they 
 
 1 *The two most successful reli- 
 gious impostures, which the world 
 has yet seen, are Buddhism and 
 Muhamm^danism. Each creed 
 owed its origin to the enthusiasm 
 of a single individual, and each 
 was rapidly propagated by numbers 
 of zealous followers. But here the 
 parallel ends : for the Kurdn of Mu- 
 hammad was addressed wholly to 
 the "passions" of mankind, by the 
 promised gratification of human de- 
 sires both in this world and in the 
 next; while the Dharma of S^kya 
 Muni was addressed wholly to the 
 "intellect," and sought to wean 
 mankind from the pleasures and 
 vanities of this life by pointing to 
 the transitoriness of all human en- 
 joyment. . . The former propagated 
 his religion by the merciless edge 
 of the sword; the latter by the 
 persuasive voice of the mission- 
 ary. The sanguinary career of the 
 Islamite was lighted by the lurid 
 flames of burning cities ; the peace- 
 ful progress of the Buddhist was 
 illuminated by the cheerful faces 
 of the sick in monastic hospitals 
 [for the crippled, the deformed, the 
 destitute], and by the happy smiles 
 of travellers reposing in Dharma- 
 s^Ms by the road-side. The one was 
 the personification of bodily ac- 
 tivity and material enjoyment ; the 
 other was the genius of corporeal 
 abstinence and intellectual contem- 
 plation.' Cunningham, Bhilsa 
 Topes, pp. 53, 54, Buddhism has 
 been defined as a 'puritan-quietist' 
 offshoot from Hindtiism. 
 
 2 'Sutra' is properly a philoso-; 
 phical aphorism; but, like other 
 Sanskrit words, it acquired a tech- 
 nical meaning from its adoption 
 by the Buddhists. The oldest of 
 their Sutras are written, for the 
 most part, in simple prose, the 
 text, as now preserved, belonging 
 to the first century after Christ. 
 The genuine Sutras, whether in 
 Sanskrit or in Pali, all begin with 
 the expression, "This has been 
 heard by me,' implying that they 
 are the ipsissima verba of S^kya. 
 'We may consider it established 
 upon the most probable evidence 
 that the chief Sanskrit authorities 
 of the Buddhists still in our pos- 
 session were written, at the latest, 
 from a century and a half before, 
 to as much after, the era of Chris- 
 tianity.' Wilson, Buddha and Bud- 
 dhism [Journ. of As. Soc. xvi. 240). 
 The Pali works of southern In- 
 dia date from the fifth century 
 after Christ. The later composi- 
 tions indicate the influence of 
 foreign admixtures, and in one the 
 parable of the Prodigal Son is said 
 to have been distinctly reproduced : 
 Wuttke, II. 522 : see also Saint- 
 Hilaire, Du Bouddhisme, p. 126. 
 One of the most interesting relics 
 of 'orthodox' Buddhism is the 
 Lotus de la honne Lni, translated 
 from the Sanskrit by Burnouf, 
 Paris, 1852. 
 
 3 See a full account of these 
 extraordinary assemblies in Cun- 
 ningham, pp. 55 sq. 
 
158 Christ and other Masters, [part ii. 
 
 recommended liad so far prevailed that they were threatening 
 to eradicate the ancient system. Of Hindu kings who mani- 
 fested an especial interest in the spread of Buddhism, none was 
 more conspicuous than Asoka\ who, on abandoning the heredi- 
 tary faith, endeavoured at the middle of the third century before 
 Christ to give the new religion a predominance in districts far 
 beyond the boundaries of Magadha. The Brahmans had in early 
 times diffused their influence, either by the agency of the sword, 
 or of religious solitaries, who, bent on self-renunciation, settled 
 in the territory of the unbeliever, and bore silent witness to the 
 creed and worship of their forefathers. Brahmanism, however, 
 could not propagate itself except by making sudras of all people 
 whom it vanquished; for to spread the higher elements of 
 religious knowledge among those who were not genuine Aryans, 
 was believed to be peculiarly profane. Buddhism, on the other 
 hand, made no distinction in the quality of the persons it 
 addressed ; and, in a synod held 246 B. c. a regular plan was 
 organised for propagating the new faith by means analogous 
 to those employed hereafter in conducting Christian missions, — • 
 by pacific and persuasive teaching, and translating Buddhist 
 writings into foreign languages. 
 
 The first-fruits of their mighty harvest were gathered in 
 Kashmir : and under Ming-Te the flexible creed of Buddhist 
 emissaries won for them admission to the court of the 
 'celestial empire,' a.d. 61, — exactly at the time when Christi- 
 anity was marching forth in all its pristine vigour to , subdue 
 the kingdoms of the western world. The Buddhists, it is true, 
 could not eventually retain their hold on India. After thriving 
 for a thousand years, and writing a triumphant history in 
 monasteries^, and enormous temples excavated from the living 
 rock, there came a vast and terrible revulsion in the feelings of 
 the populace. The younger sister was violently extruded by 
 the elder from all parts of Hindustan^, if we except one scanty 
 
 ^ See the narrative in Lassen, over Buddhist reliquiaa (between 
 
 II. 213 sq. Buddhism thus became the third and seventh centuries of 
 
 the religion, the state-religion of our era). 
 
 India, in the third century, B.C. ^ jj^ the eleventh century Bud- 
 
 The dynasties, which reigned in the dhism was limited to a few locali- 
 
 chief cities of India, were Sudras. ties; and in the 16th, Abulfazl, the 
 
 Buddhism was losing gi-ound ra- minister of Akbar, being anxious 
 
 pidly in the seventh century of our to explore the characteristics of all 
 
 era ; and was extirpated under San- religions, could find no one to assist 
 
 kara-Acharya. ^j;^ ^^^^^ enqmries respecting Bud- 
 
 2 Vih^ras = monasteries : Sthu- dhism. 
 pas ('topes') = monuments erected 
 
 I 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought. 159 
 
 remnant at the foot of the Himalaya. Yet meanwhile Buddhism 
 had evinced a property unknown to every other heathen system. 
 It was far more capable of transplantation. It flourished with 
 peculiar freshness and luxuriance in Tibet, and ultimately in 
 the Tartar tribes of central Asia. Above all, it kept possession 
 of its ancient fortress in the island of Ceylon ; and thither in 
 the early centuries of our era flocked a multitude of foreign 
 pilgrims, anxious by such visit to abridge their term of peni- 
 tential suffering, to venerate the relics of Gautama Buddha, or 
 to kiss the print of his gigantic foot. 
 
 What then were the characteristics of this marvellous sys- 
 tem as originally constituted ? Its founder, we discern at once, 
 had common ground with Brahmanism, which, notwithstanding, 
 he endeavoured to demolish. He took for granted the heredi- 
 tary doctrine of transmigration ; he argued, like his predecessors, 
 for eternal cycles of the universe, and infinite successions of 
 births and new births. It was a fundamental article of the 
 Buddhist creed that ' he who is now the most degraded of the 
 demons may one day rule the highest of the heavens j he who 
 is at present seated upon the most honourable of the celestial 
 thrones may one day writhe amidst the agonies of a place of 
 torment ; and the worm that we crush under our feet may, in 
 the course of ages, become a supreme Buddha \' It was also 
 held that liberation from this terrible necessity of repeated 
 births was the grand aim of all religions. Buddhism, in like 
 manner, recognised the wretchedness of individual being, and 
 fell in with the prevailing tendency to quietude, to mortification 
 of the flesh, to abstract and. ecstatic contemplation. 
 
 1 Hardy, Manual of Budhism^ p. which the B6dhisatwa becomes a 
 36. Saint-Hilaire, Du Bouddhisme^ perfect Buddha, he may undergo 
 p. 183, seems of opinion that in repeated births either into the 
 the possible extent to which trans- world of devas or of men. In this 
 migration may be Garried,Buddhism case he is represented as a saviour, 
 is even more exacting than Br^h- whose mission is to rouse men from 
 manism. According to the Bud- their slumbers, and incite them by 
 dhist no increase is possible in the his own example to a course of self- 
 number of personal spirits, so that renunciation and philosophy. A 
 there is a constant tendency to the thousand of these B6dhisatwas 
 depopulation of the world of ap- appear in the world of men during 
 pearance (Sans^ra) ; and in the each great Kalpa (Mah^kalpa) ; all 
 long run every such spirit will pass are born in the north of India, 
 into the Buddha-world, will be- That period of the world in which 
 come a Bddhisatwa, and finally we live has already beheld four of 
 reach nirvana. *Alles, was da lebt these B6dhisatwas. The last was 
 und athmet, soil und muss Buddha S^kya-muni, whose successor is ex- 
 werden:' Bchott, p. 3; cf. p. 10. pected at the end of 5000 years. 
 Before the final step is taken by lUd. p. 1 3. 
 
160 Clirist and other Masters. [part ih 
 
 In many otlier points, where it diverged entirely from the 
 old religion, it was following, consciously or unconsciously, tlie 
 path marked out by Kapila, and trodden by his disciples. The 
 founder of the Sankhya philosophy had taught that Brahma 
 himself was only at the head of the elemental creation, and, as 
 such, was finite, mortal, subject to contingencies like pain and 
 ignominy. The supreme authority of the Yedas might accord- 
 ingly be questioned ; their tenets might be all subordinated to 
 other forms of knowledge. Gautama intensified this feeling, 
 and completed the Sankhya innovation by rejecting the 
 Vedas altogether. As the * enlightened' one, and as believing 
 in the infinite capacity of his own intellect, he placed his tripod 
 far above' the throne of beings like Brahma, or Maheswara; 
 he was himself the ^ lord and teacher,' not of one section of the 
 universe, but of all * the three worlds.' 
 
 Another blow inflicted by him on the old religion, and 
 especially on the power of the Brahmanical order, v»^as the 
 absolute rejection of animal sacrifice. Some indication of a 
 like repugnance is traceable to early times ^, and in the creed of 
 Kapila, the shedding of blood was openly denounced as one 
 example of * impurity ^' But in Buddhism the rejection rests 
 on deeper and more subtle grounds. The Buddhist has no 
 consciousness of guilt, because he utterly denies the freedom of 
 the creature. Sin is in his view a necessary thing : it is a 
 cosmical and not a personal evil : its vitiation is inherent in 
 the world of matter, and inseparable from all forms of transient 
 being. If the Buddhist sins, the punishment which nature has 
 attached to his demerit will inevitably take effect : the law 
 must have its course. He therefore manifests no wish for re- 
 concilement : he has no idea of mediation, of satisfaction, of 
 propitiation \ On the other hand, a keener insight into all 
 
 ^ This affinity between Kai^ila ^ See above, p. 151, n. 1. 
 
 and Gautama is pointed out in Las- ^ Cf . Mr. Thomson's Bampton 
 
 sen, I. 831. In the Sing'halese Bud- Lectures, -p^. 44, 45. In speaking 
 
 dhism of the present day, vfhich is of Sing'halese Buddhism at the pre- 
 
 largely intermixed with Brahmani- sent day, Sir E. Tennent observes 
 
 cal elements, the Mah^-Brahma that 'neither in heaven nor on 
 
 is notwithstanding only the ruler earth can man (according to the 
 
 of a 'brdhma-16ka': Hardy, p. 41. Buddhist doctors) escape from the 
 
 This idea of the gods being made consequences of his acts ; that 
 
 subject to the will of a mortal by morals are in their essence pro- 
 
 his performance of superhuman ductive causes, without the aid or 
 
 austerities was not entirely new in intervention of any higher autho- 
 
 Hindiist^n. rity; and hence forgiveness and 
 
 - See Both, Niruhta, 'Einl.' p. atonement are ideas utterly un- 
 
 xxxiii. known.' 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought. 161 
 
 the possible consequences of tlie Hindu doctrine of transmigra- 
 tion would naturally serve to deepen his repugnance to tradi- 
 tionary usages involving the destruction of animal life^ : from 
 both which causes it results that Buddhism stands conspicuous in 
 the midst of heathendom as a religion without sacrificial cultus. 
 The very name of sacrifice {yajna) has been discarded, and the 
 simple worship of the Buddhists almost universally restricted 
 to the offering up of prayers and flowers and perfumes, in 
 memory of their founder. It is true that orders of religious 
 teachers^, corresponding to the Christian clergy, were instituted 
 as early as the reign of Asoka; but excepting in the Lama- 
 hierarchy of Tibet, which may hereafter call^ for more particular 
 notice, Buddhist priests perform no functions that are strictly 
 sacerdotal ; they are rather confraternities of mendicants, who 
 act as patterns of the sternest form of self-renunciation, or as 
 mere teachers of the populace. 
 
 It was contended in the class-rooms of the Sankhya philo- 
 sophy that human spirits, in whatever bodies they may dwell, 
 are all intrinsically equal*. Gautama was also a believer in 
 this doctrine, and went so far as to reduce it into practice. He 
 could not shut his eyes, indeed, to the existence of the caste- 
 system; and, accepting it as an established fact, attributed 
 distinctions in the various orders of society to differences of 
 conduct in a former life : but notwithstanding such admission, 
 men of every caste were equally invited to his lectures, and 
 arranged according to their age and worth ; and, as he taught 
 that all, whatever be their natural gifts or opportunities or 
 condition, are entitled to the same spiritual advantages, and 
 have access to the means of liberation, he prepared his hearers 
 for the ultimate dissolution of the caste -system^, and the over- 
 throw of Brahmanism. Indeed the universe itself, and not the 
 
 ^ *The Baudha religionists carry even the priests may eat it, if no 
 
 their respect for animal life much animal is killed on their account.' 
 
 further than the Bramins : their ^ Burnouf , Hist, du Bouddhisme^ 
 
 priests do not eat after noon, nor pp. 293 sq. ; Wuttke, 11. 557. 
 
 drink after dark, for fear of swal- ^ See Appendix II. 
 
 lowing minute insects; and they "* 'The Brahman is born of a 
 
 carry a brush on all occasions, with woman, so is the chand^la ' (ont- 
 
 which they carefully sweep every caste). 'My law is a law of grace 
 
 place before they sit down, lest they for all.* ' My doctrine is like the 
 
 should inadvertently crush any liv- sky. There is room for all with- 
 
 ing creature.' Elphinstone, p. 107. out exception — men, women, boys. 
 
 Still, at the present day, as the girls, poor and rich.' 
 
 same writer adds in a note, * the laity ^ It is retained, however, in 
 
 eat animal food without restraint ; Ceylon: Hardy, pp. 71, 78. 
 
 H. 11 
 
162 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 narrow confines of the Aryan tribes, was chosen as the theatre 
 on which the new religion sought to operate : the Buddha, 
 though he taught in northern Hindustan, was anxious to deliver 
 and enlighten all things. 
 
 (1) But besides these general principles, there were, in 
 Buddhism, other characteristics which deserve particular con- 
 sideration. Some of them may be regarded as speculative, or 
 metaphysical; the rest as practical, or moral. In Kapila's 
 system, we already noticed, the idea of God was never promi- 
 nent : it was in danger of evaporating altogether in the midst 
 of philosophical refinements. But Gautama went further still : 
 the system which he founded is more openly atheistic. It not 
 only disregarded, but denied the one eternal God, the Maker 
 and the Ruler of all other forms of being. Whatever symptoms 
 of intelligence and design, whatever powers of organisation it 
 might recognise, they all were held to be inherent properties of 
 matter. The world and all things in it rise into existence, are 
 transformed, and ultimately vanish in obedience to some natural 
 order, some inscrutable necessity : they are like regular undula- 
 tions of the ocean flowing one into another ; they are links in 
 some eternal chain of causes and effects. To Brahmans God is 
 everything ; to Buddliists God is nothing. Brahmanism, when 
 fully and minutely analysed, is found to be all centre; Buddhism 
 all circumference. The first contended, that because the abstract 
 Brahma is one only and immutable, all things subject to muta- 
 tion are unreal ; they merely seem to be. The second argued, 
 that because all things are now multiform and mutable, they 
 cannot have a single and immutable basis. In the one, the spirit 
 underlying every form of matter is an efiiiux of the Godhead; in 
 the other, while the world appears to be undeified, the only God 
 is not confessed. The Buddhist breaks entirely loose from the 
 ideal pantheism of the Brahman, but he finds no refuge in the 
 sanctuary of truth ; his creed is purely negative and nihilistic \ 
 
 1 The following statement of Pro- Gogerly, is there the slightest allu- 
 
 fessor Wilson entirely corroborates sion to such a First Cause, the ex- 
 
 the inferences I had drawn respect- istence of whom is incompatible 
 
 ing the atheistic character of primi- with the fundamental Buddhist 
 
 tive Buddhism : ' Belief in a su- dogma of the eternity of all exist- 
 
 preme God, the Creator and Euler ence. The doctrine of an Adi- 
 
 of the universe, is unquestionably Buddha, a first Buddha, in the 
 
 amoderngraft upon the unqualified character of a supreme Creator, 
 
 atheism of S^kya Muni: it is still which has found its way into Nepal, 
 
 of very limited recognition. In and perhaps into western Tibet, is 
 
 none of the standard authorities entirely local, as is that of the 
 
 translated by M. Burnouf, or Mr. Dhyc^ni Buddhas, and the B6dhi- 
 
CHAP. I.J Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought 163 
 
 Exception^ may perhaps be made in favour of one school or 
 sect, the Buddhists of Nepal and western Tibet, who, owing 
 to their close proximity to Brahmanism, or other causes, seem 
 to have inherited a loftier and more spiritual faith, transfer- 
 ring their idea of God to one supreme Intelligence, whom 
 they designate Adi-Buddha^ : but of Buddhism, as it stands 
 depicted in the oldest class of monuments, we need not hesi- 
 tate to affirm, that no single trace survives^ in it of a Supreme 
 
 satwas, their sons and agents in 
 creation, as described by Mr. Hodg- 
 son. They are not recognised in 
 the Buddhist mythology of any 
 other people, and have no doubt 
 been borrowed from the Hindus. 
 There can be no First Buddha, for 
 it is of. the essence of the system 
 that Buddhas are of progressive 
 development : any one may become 
 a Buddha by passing through a 
 series of existences in the practice 
 of virtue and benevolence, and there 
 have been accordingly an infini- 
 tude of Buddhas in all ages and in 
 all regions.' Journal of Asiat Soc. 
 ( 1856), XVI.255, 256. Weber (I/i6iisc/ie 
 Skizzen, Berlin, 1857, p. 67, note) 
 takes substantially the same view. 
 
 ^ See Elphinstone, pp. 104, 105. 
 Wuttke, following Burnouf , is, how- 
 ever, of opinion that the sect is 
 comparatively modern (11. 529), 
 especially as no trace of it is found 
 in China, and as the nearest ap- 
 proximation to such theism in the 
 speculative philosophy of the Bud- 
 dhists (see Hodgson, in Asiat. Re- 
 searches, XVI. 435 sq.) does not go 
 beyond the S^nkhya doctrine of a 
 spiritual essence. 
 
 2 Cunningham [BMlsa Topes, p. 
 39) seems to be of opinion that the 
 earliest race of Buddhists differed 
 most materially from the Sinkhyas, 
 and instead of holding the eternity 
 of matter, contended that every- 
 thing was the creation of the self- 
 existent Adi-Buddha, who willed it, 
 and it was. 
 
 ^ ^ * In den Sutra und den wich- 
 tigsten andern Eeligionsschriften 
 ist keine Spur eines hochsten welt- 
 
 bildenden Wesens:' Wuttke, ir. 
 527. In this verdict concur Bur- 
 nouf, Schmidt (as there cited, p. 
 529) ; Tennent (Christianity in Cey- 
 lon, p. 208, note); Hardy, Manual 
 of Budhism, p. 399 ; Saint-Hilaire, 
 Bu Bouddhisme, p. 245. It should, 
 however, be stated on the other 
 side, that Col. Sykes {Journal of 
 Asiat. Soc, VI. 377) endeavours to 
 screen the Buddhists from the 
 charge of atheism. His chief ap- 
 peal is to a curious hymn, com- 
 posed, as many think, by Gautama 
 himself, at the moment when he 
 became Buddha. It is printed, 
 with three versions somewhat dif- 
 fering, in Mr. Hardy's Manual, pp. 
 180, 181 : but there is nothing in it 
 to militate against the view here 
 adopted. It merely states that Gau- 
 tama had found the 'artificer' (Ge- 
 hakdraka=^ the House-builder') of 
 the human frame, i.e. the key ex- 
 plaining the true doctrine of exist- 
 ence, and had thus secured exemp- 
 tion from all future wanderings. 
 Major Cunningham {Bhilsa Topes, 
 p. 36, and elsewhere) maintains 
 that the primitive Buddhism was 
 'theistic,' in the sense that Gau- 
 tama admitted the bare existence 
 of a Supreme Being, but denied 
 His providence. On the contrary, 
 Schott, a very great authority, in 
 his treatise fiber den Buddhaismus 
 in Hochasien und in China (Berlin, 
 1846) declares: 'Die urspriingliche, 
 ungefalschte Buddha-Lehre weiss 
 von keiner ewigen Individualitat, 
 und somit verdankt auch das Welt- 
 gebaude keiner solchen sein Dasein ' 
 (p. 2). Speaking of the present 
 
 11—2 
 
X 
 
 164 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 Being, either like the Om of the Yaidic period, or the Brahma 
 of the Laws of Manu. Buddhism even went so far as to 
 reject the SanklSya theory of an active material essence, on 
 the ground that all such arguments are contradicted by the 
 mutable phenomena of the universe. * Beings are not created,' 
 says a writing of high authority among the Buddhists, *by one 
 God, or lord (isioara), neither by one spirit (purusha), neither 
 by matter (pradhdna). If there were indeed a single cause of 
 all things, as God, or spirit, or matter, then, by the simple fact 
 of the existence of this cause, must the world at once have been 
 created in its entirety, since a cause cannot exist without pro- 
 ducing its due effect. But all things may be seen to come into 
 the world, according to a law of succession, some issuing from 
 the parent- womb, others from the germ. It must accordingly 
 be concluded that there is a series of causes, and that God is 
 not the single caused' 
 
 To elucidate this doctrine of causation was indeed one prin- 
 / cipal object in the teaching of Hhe sons of Sakya.' They 
 ^ believed that theoretically the first approach to liberation in- 
 volves a knowledge of the way in which all life has been pro- 
 uced. Starting, therefore, with the old hypothesis, that the 
 cycles of the universe had no beginning, individual life, with 
 all its ills and accidents, its faculties of mind and body, is 
 traceable backwards through twelve stages^ to the first term in 
 the circle of generation, which is * ignorance' {avidyd), and 
 consists in mistaking for durable that which is but evanescent 
 and precarious ; or, in other words, assigning to the universe a . 
 
 state of Buddhism in China, Gutz- that tendency? Where do tiiey 
 
 laff declares: 'It is heresy to talk finally go? into vacuity, — sunyatd: 
 
 of a causation, or a primary Author, Wilson, in Journ. of As. Soc. xvi. 
 
 for all things have existed since 256. 
 
 numberless Kalpas, and by their ^ Quoted from the Yasomitray in 
 natural tendency return to annihi- Burnouf, p. 572. J 
 lation.' Journ. of As. Soc. xvi. 80. '^ See Saint-Hilaire, pp. 188 — 190. I 
 * It is a grand machinery, without This 'ignorance' is an abstract^ 
 an intellectual propelling power : ' quality producing another abstract 
 Ibid. p. 81. The most ancient and quality', merit and demerit, karma; 
 genuine school of Buddhism is that which karma gives birth to a third 
 of the Swabh^vikas, whose doctrine abstraction, consciousness; and this 
 is thus summarily indicated in a being endowed with physical power, 
 Buddhist Pdli book : ' Whence come produces body and mind, and so 
 existiag things? from their own on: Hardy, p. 392. Yet the Bud- 
 nature, — swabhdvdt. Where do they dhist does not profess to en- 
 go to after life? into other forms, lighten us either respecting the 
 through the same inherent tend- origin of avidyd, or the manner in 
 .ency. How do they escape from which karma operates. 
 
 K 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought 165 
 
 reality which it does not actually possess. For Buddhism, in 
 this matter, went beyond the elder system ; it regarded all Hhe 
 three worlds ' as ' empty V as no better than a shadowy and 
 illusive phantom. Having lost all faith in God the Author of 
 the universe, the Buddhist was propelled to the conclusion, that 
 the sensible forms around him ought not to exist : they had no 
 right to be, and therefore since they are, they must be evil,; 
 and the object was accordingly to liberate all sentient creatures 
 from their bondage to the non-existent. So entirely was the 
 mind of Gautama possessed by this idea, that of the elementary 
 lessons which he taught men in conjunction with his doctrine 
 of the twelve-fold chain of causes, nearly all had reference to the 
 rise and remedy of human suffering. The universality of that 
 suffering, its bii'th from passion and desire, the possibility of 
 escaping from it, and the method of escape, these constitute the 
 ^four grand verities^' impressed in early youth upon the memory 
 of Buddhists. 
 
 And if the special character of this deliverance be investi- 
 gated, we find it summed up in the word nirvana, ' extinction,' 
 ' blowing out.' Such was the supreme felicity of the Buddha : 
 such the goal to which he ever pointed the aspirations of his 
 followers. It was formerly disputed whether more is meant 
 by the expression nirvana than ' eternal quietude,' * unbroken 
 sleep,' ^impenetrable apathy:' but the oldest literature of Bud- 
 dhism will scarcely suffer us to doubt that Gautama intended 
 by it nothing short of absolute ' annihilation^/ the destruction 
 of all elements which constitute existence*. 
 
 ^ Schmidt has pointed out [Me- Uebel.'* Prof. Wilson {Journ. of 
 
 moires deVAcademiede Saint Peters- As. Soc. xvi. -256, 257) adopts the 
 
 hourg, i. 98 sq.) that the two main same view as that which I have 
 
 principles of Buddhism are (i) that stated in the text. Life is the 
 
 the three worlds are empty, and (2) cause of evil, from which there is 
 
 that there is no difference between no escape but by ceasing to be. In 
 
 being and non-being. Buddhism there is no recipient for 
 
 2 Saint-Hilaire, p. 127. the liberated soul. 
 
 ^ Ibid. pp. 195 sq.; Burnouf, ^Nirvana is sometimes used to 
 
 Hist, du Bouddhlsme, p. 589: signiiy the Buddha-world, the world 
 
 "Wuttke, II. 570. The last writer inhabited by Bodhisatwas (candi- 
 
 (p. 571) cites the following passage dates for Buddhaship); but the 
 
 from a Mongolian catechism: 'Der more abstract meaning is the true 
 
 Sansara [i.e. the world of appear- one. 'In NirwjCna aber fliesst aUes 
 
 ance]ist seiner Wesenheit nach leer, befreite Geistige zu einer absoluten 
 
 seiner Form nach trugerisch, seinen Monas zusammen ; aus den unzah- 
 
 Wirkungen nach verderblich : Nir- ligen Buddha's wirdunpersonliches 
 
 v^na ist auch seiner Wesenheit Buddha:' Schott, p. 10. Nirvana 
 
 nach leer, aber er vernichtet jede is aptly defined as *ein von allem 
 
 Tauschung und befreit von allem Etwas ewig befreites Nichts : ' p. 11. 
 
166 Christ and other Masters, [part ii. 
 
 Neither Brahmanism nor Buddhism could feel happj in the 
 present world : to both it was a prison-house, a place of torture 
 and of ignominy. But the gulf between the two rival systems 
 was in this respect immeasurable. Brahmanism contended 
 that true being does exist beyond the world of phenomena 
 (Sansara) ; Buddhism, that being is the same in all the ' three 
 worlds/ but nowhere is possessed of more than the appearance 
 of reality. The Brahman, writhing under the calamities of life, 
 was anxious to emancipate himself as soon as possible from the 
 world of phantoms, that he might revert to his original oneness 
 with divinity : the Buddhist, driven to desperation by witness- 
 ing the same calamities, was no less anxious to escape, but was 
 content if he could ultimately pass beyond the verge of that 
 enchanted circle Avhich was fatal to his peace, and so attain to 
 non-existence. Both alike gave utterance to the grief which 
 preyed upon their inmost being ; but the Buddhist sorrowed as 
 the man who has no hope, and his philosophy is therefore the 
 philosophy of despair. 
 
 (2) But while we charge the creed of Gautama with atheism 
 and nihilism, we must acknowledge that it rose in one respect 
 superior to all other heathen systems, — in the loftier tone of its 
 morality. It was a practical, and not a speculative philosophy, 
 concerning itself not with God and the invisible, but with the 
 charities and duties of the present life. Here indeed we find 
 the secret of its mightiness, the key to its majestic progress in 
 the whole of eastern Asia. The grand picture of a royal youth, 
 abandoning his home and honours to become the gentle, apt, 
 and sympathetic teacher of the people, was alone sufficient to 
 evoke a class of sentiments forgotten by the old religions. And 
 in course of time fresh arguments were found to strengthen the 
 devotion which this picture of philanthropy excited. ^ A great 
 part of the respect paid to Gotama Budha arises from the sup- 
 position that he voluntarily endured, throughout myriads of 
 ages, and in numberless births, the most severe deprivations 
 and afflictions, that he might thereby gain the power to free 
 sentient beings from the misery to which they are exposed 
 imder every possible form of existence. It is thought that 
 
 ♦Existence is a tree : the merit or ing faculty, so that when the tree 
 
 demerit of the actions of men is dies there is no reproduction. This 
 
 the fruit of that tree and the seed is Nirvana.' From iheBrahma-jdla, 
 
 of future trees ; death is the wither- a Pali Sutra, where Sdkya-muni is 
 
 ing away of the old tree from which made to confute sixty-two Brdh- 
 
 the others have sprung; wisdom manical heresies : Wilson, as above, 
 
 and virtue take away the germinat- p. 257. 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought, 167 
 
 myriads of ages previous to his reception of the Budhaship, he 
 might have become a rahat [one who is entirely rescued from 
 all evil desire], and therefore ceased to exist ; but that of his 
 own free-will he forewent the privilege, and threw himself into 
 fche stream of successive existence, for the benefit of the three 
 worlds \' Nor was the founder of Buddhism merely anxious to 
 exhibit his commiseration for the calamities of other men. He 
 laid unwonted stress on social and domestic duties, while the 
 Brahmans, in their teaching, i-ather aimed at the production of 
 ceremonial punctuality^. 
 
 Believing that, in spite of some paramount necessity, the 
 individual has the power of punishing himself by an illicit 
 course of action, every Buddhist, whether lay or cleric, was 
 enjoined^ to kill no living thing, to be honest in his dealings, 
 to indulge no sensual appetites, to abstain from lying, and in- 
 toxicating liquors; while a further series of more rigorous 
 injunctions was provided for the guidance of the monks, the 
 celibates, the devotees*. In carrying out these regulations it is 
 easy to perceive that the most exemplary Buddhists had no 
 true idea of the distinctive properties of soul and body, and of 
 their reciprocal relations. On the one side, they identified 
 intelligence with sensibility^ : on the other, they regarded the 
 external organs as the only seat of evil and the single enemy of 
 mankind. The body was even treated by them as consubstan- 
 tial with brute matter ; and to curb its wayward passions, to 
 seal up the various inlets of temptation, to mortify and extirpate 
 the sensual appetites, and by dhydna^ ' contemplation,' rivet 
 the desires exclusively upon the ultimate destination of the 
 
 ^ Hardy, Manual of Budhism, ^ The list of commandments 
 p. 98: cf. Prof. Max MtQler, in Mr. varies somewhat in different writ- 
 Thomson's Bampton Lectures, p. ings: see Stuhr, i. 180, Prichard, 
 36. One of the reflections ascribed iv. 124. Upham [Historical and 
 to the youthful Gautama in a Ti- sacred Books of Ceylon, 111. 12, 158; 
 betan biography is to the same effect cf. pp. 162, 163) gives a list, ten in 
 (inSaint-Hilaire,p. 39):'Enfaisant number, more closely resembling 
 voir la clart6 de la loi aux creatures the second table of the Decalogue, 
 obscurcies par les t^nebres d'une * The Bhikshus and Bhikshunis 
 ignorance pr of onde,jeleurdonnerai are all separated from the world, 
 I'oeil qui voit clairement les choses ; and engage to lead a life of self - 
 je leur donnerai le beau rayon de denial, celibacy and mendicancy, 
 la pure sagesse, I'oeil de la loi, sans and to estrange themselves from all 
 tache et sans corruption.' domestic and social obligations. 
 
 2 See the drama called Mricli- ViotWilson {Journ. of As. Soc,x\i. 
 
 chhakati, which is said to repre- 255) animadverts on the rigour and 
 
 sent Buddhist institutions with sin- inhumanity of these regulations, 
 
 gular fidehty. s gee Saint-Hilaire, p. 226. 
 
168 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 human subject, was the highest aim of ethical philosophy. The 
 conviction of present wretchedness, which throws a shade of 
 melancholy over the whole life of the Buddhist devotee and 
 furnishes a clue to most of his speculations, is thus deepened by 
 a course of self-inflicted torture. So far indeed was he bent on 
 carrying his renunciation of the sensible world and its enjoy- 
 ments, that he stigmatised his Brahman rival as a man who 
 lived in bondage to the present and the visible \ 
 
 Nor was passive self- control the only point to which import- 
 ance was attached in Buddhist ethics. Man was there exhorted 
 to promote his extrication from the bonds of individuality by 
 sharing the calamities of others : he was to facilitate his own 
 escape by making others rise superior to the fatal law of trans- 
 migration. It is probable that here and there a Buddhist might 
 be influenced by the same generous self-devotion which had 
 characterised the framer of his creed : but generally his eye 
 was fastened on the prospect of remuneration ; he believed that 
 by assisting others he should be smoothing his own pathway to 
 nirvdna. Merit, with demerit the correlative, is the power by 
 which, according to Buddhism, the destiny of all sentient beings 
 is controlled^ ; and when this principle was fully apprehended 
 the acquisition of a stock of merits became the great concern of 
 life : religion was converted into a regular system of profits and 
 
 Still we must not overlook the emphasis which Buddhism 
 uniformly placed upon a class of gentle and retiring virtues, 
 which were well-nigh banished from the rest of heathendom, — 
 meekness, resignation, equanimity under suffering, forgiveness of 
 injuries. Much as these are found to differ from the corre- 
 sponding virtues of the Christian, and symptomatic as they 
 often are of womanly, instead of manly and heroic qualities, 
 
 ^ Stuhr, I. 187. * Chose etrange, ' hensible n6ant : c'est done I'art de 
 
 says M. Pavie, referring to some mourir une fois pour toutes, que 
 
 moral maxims of the Buddhists, le novice vient etudier dans le mo- 
 
 'ceux qui meditent sur ces belles nastere:' Bevue des Deux Mondes, 
 
 pages, au lieu de conclure qu'il y a 1854, Tome v. p. 133. 
 
 une autre vie oii Tame humaine ^ Hardy, p. 445. Karma is 
 
 doit trouver la satisfaction de ses properly Hhat which is to be 
 
 immenses d^sirs, se retirent dans done.' 
 
 une ne'gation d^sesper^e. lis de- ^ Ihid. p. 507, where reference is 
 
 daignent tous les biens de la vie made to the Chinese practice of 
 
 comme une illusion, comme un keeping a debtor and creditor ac- 
 
 leurrequiseduitl'espritetrentralne count of the acts of each day, and 
 
 dans le tourbillon des naissances a transferring the balance from one 
 
 venir. Mieux vaut pour eux cesser year to another : see also Saint- 
 
 d'etre, s'abimer dans un incompre- Hilaire, pp. 215 sq. 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Eeligious Thought 169 
 
 thej could scarcely fail to benefit a multitude of savage tribes 
 to which they were propounded. For example, when the Bud- 
 dhist finds himself assailed by calumny or open violence, he 
 restrains his animosity by reflecting that the blow has been 
 necessitated by misdemeanors committed in some previous exist- 
 ence. He is thankful that no heavier penance has fallen to his 
 lot ; and even at the last extremity, when death itself must be 
 confronted, he can welcome it as the appointed means of libera- 
 tion from 'this unclean body\' 
 
 Truth, however, calls for the addition, that fair and lovely 
 as might be the outward forms of Buddhism, its inherent prin- 
 ciples were such as made it well-nigh powerless in the training 
 of society, and therefore it has left the countries which it over- 
 ran the prey of superstition and of demon-worship, of political 
 misrule and spiritual lethargy. Confessing no supreme God, 
 who is at once the Legislator and the Judge, its moral code was 
 ultimately void of all authority. Denying also the true dignity 
 and freedom of the human agent, it invested moral sentiments 
 and relations with a kind of physical outsidedness ; they were 
 all parts of a great system with which the fortunes of the Bud- 
 dhist, why he knew not, were mechanically connected. He 
 spoke indeed of ' laws,' but these were only common rules of 
 action, according to which all things are found to happen^ : vice 
 had no intrinsic hideousness, and virtue was another name for 
 calculating prudence ; while love itself was in the creed of Bud- 
 dhism little more than animal sympathy, or the condolence of 
 one sufferer with his fellow. Buddhism also could discourse of 
 *duty;' but such duty, as it had no object and no standard, was 
 devoid of moral motive : it shrank into a lifeless acquiescence 
 in some stern necessity, a blind submission to some iron law. 
 The Buddhist's principle of action was 'I must;' he could not 
 say ^ I ought.' 
 
 c. The Eclectic School of India. 
 
 To understand the origin of .this eclectic school we must 
 remember that, in addition to the systems of philosophy already 
 noticed, there had been from early times a strong and passionate 
 bias in favour of asceticism^. Partly owing to the climate, 
 
 1 Wuttke, II. 579. old Br^hmanical ascetic was first 
 
 2 See Mr. E. A. Thompson's known as Sramana (cf . the ^apfxavac 
 Christian Theism, i. 187 sq. on the of Megasthenes) ; but after the time 
 ethics of Spinosa. of Asoka, the word seems to have 
 
 3 See Wuttke, 11. 362 sq. The been exclusively assigned to the 
 
170 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 which induced inertness and disposed to contemplation, man 
 had at the close of the Vaidic age begun to muse profoundly on 
 the paradoxes of the world around him. He sighed for peace 
 and unity, and everything that thwarted this desire and made 
 him conscious of his isolation and estrangement from the primal 
 source of being, he was anxious to repudiate and uproot. He 
 also mused upon the conflicts which he felt among the moral 
 elements of his nature, and ere long arrived at the conclusion 
 that the seat of all disorder is the region of the senses. By 
 indulging these he was persuaded that the soul is lured from 
 the pursuit of spiritual and heavenly things, and therefore drew 
 up special rules of discipline by which the downward tendency 
 might be corrected and reversed. By ^ exercise and dispassion,' 
 by ^ asceticism and mortification,' the mind was thought to be 
 capable of reaching a state of absolute calm in which one single 
 object may be contemplated to the exclusion of all others. This 
 object was at first to be the liord (iswara) : 'but as the prac- 
 tised swimmer parts with his last cork or bladder, so the soul 
 of the ascetic must in due course part with every object, and at 
 length meditate without an object at all\' His principles, as 
 wrought into a system, constitute the Yoga school of Hindii 
 philosophy, in which the yogin, or devotee, aspires to perfect 
 union (' yoking') with the Divine Being. 
 
 At lasc, perhaps when many centuries^ had been allowed for 
 the development of these tendencies, there rose in northern 
 Hindustan a poet and philosopher, who, while faithful to tho 
 main positions of the ancient Brahman, sought to reconcile his 
 metaphysical tenets with the speculations of the Sankbya school ; 
 
 Buddhist devotees (Lassen, ii. 449, ^ See Aphorisms of the Yoga, Bk. 
 
 700, n. 3). Cf., however, Wilson, i. §§ 17, 18, ed. Ballantyne. 
 in Journ. of As. Soc. xvi. 230. It ^ It is now generally conceded 
 
 still exists in the P^li form Samana, that the date of the Bhagavad-Gitji 
 
 and is sometimes used by the Chi- is post-Christian. Even Lassen, 
 
 nese Buddhists as equivalent to who contends for the antiquity of 
 
 * priest,' but must not in that con- Krishna-worship, places this poem 
 
 nexion be confounded with the sha- in a later period of Hindti history, 
 
 man of demon-worship. See Schott, * in welcher die Vischnuiten in Sec- 
 
 p. 18, n. I, who points out that the ten zerfielen und ihre Eeligions- 
 
 word sawa7i = shaman is Tungusic. lehre mit philosophischen Lehren 
 
 Weber on the contrary {Indische in Einklang zu bringen versuch- 
 
 Skizzen, p. 66, Berlin, 1857) thinks ten:' 11. 494. Mr. J. C. Thomson, 
 
 that the shaman of the devil-wor- its recent editor and translator 
 
 shippers was a corruption of sm- (Hertford, 1855), is disposed to 
 
 mana; and so Caldwell, Grammar place it between 100 B.C. and 300 
 
 of the Drdvidian Languages , p. 5 1 9, a. d. 
 note, Lond. 1856. 
 
CHAP. I.] Varieties of Hindu Religious Thought 171 
 
 and while confessing the advantages to be derived from the 
 contemplative mode of life, contended that principles of self- 
 renunciation were reconcileable with devotion to all active 
 duties. This writer was himself a Brahman and a Yaishnava, 
 i. e. a member of the sect which had invested Yishnu ^ with the 
 attributes of the Supreme Being, and which worshipped him in 
 preference to the rival Siva. The work which he composed, 
 the Bhagavad-Gita^, was dexterously inlaid by him in one of 
 the great literary monuments of his forefathers, where * it reads 
 like a noble fragment of Empedocles or Lucretius introduced 
 into the midst of an Homeric epic^' The later portions of it 
 are chiefly occupied with philosophical theories which were 
 already glanced at in our survey of the Sankhya system ; and 
 indeed the only novel feature of speculative value is the effort 
 made to harmonise the varying elements of that system by 
 supposing the material and spiritual essences to be alike eternal, 
 'by uniting them in one Supreme Being, and thus making 
 nature, or. the material essence, a portion of the great eternal 
 Deity*.' Here indeed the teaching of the Bhagavad-Gita seems 
 to have approximated to the theism of revealed religion^ j but 
 
 ^ See, for instance, ch. xviii. (p. 
 121 of Mr. Thomson's translation), 
 where Arjuna is charged by his 
 divine instructor not to reveal his 
 knowledge to misbehevers or re- 
 vilers of Krishna, the incarnate 
 form of Vishnu. 
 
 2 This poem is, for the most part, 
 a colloquy between Arjuna and 
 Krishna. Arjuna is one of the 
 sons of Pandu, and after being in 
 banishment for years, is making a 
 grand effort to dethrone his uncle 
 and cousin by whom he had been 
 iniquitously expelled. His suffer- 
 ings moved the pity of Yishnu 
 (Krishna), who had become his 
 bosom-friend, his councillor and 
 charioteer. When the dialogue 
 opens, the two hostile armies are 
 drawn up in battle-array, but Ar- 
 juna recoils from the encounter on 
 reflecting that it must lead to the 
 slaughter of his near relations. The 
 object of Krishna is to overrule this 
 feeling. 
 
 3 Quarterly Review ^ Vol. xlv. pp. 
 6,7. 
 
 * See Mr. Thomson's *Introd.' 
 pp. xcv. xcvi. 
 
 ^ The following extract from a 
 rapturous prayer of Arjuna, on dis- 
 covering the real greatness and 
 supreme divinity of his companion, 
 should be cited here, because it has 
 few parallels in the whole area of 
 Hindti literature : 'The universe, 
 Krishna! is justly delighted with 
 thy glory, and devoted to thee. 
 The Eakshasas [evil spirits] flee, 
 affrighted, to the divers quarters of 
 heaven, and all the multitudes of 
 the Siddhas [demi-gods] salute thee. 
 And, indeed, why should they not 
 adore thee, great one ! thee, the 
 first creator, more important even 
 than Brahm^ himself? O infinite 
 king of gods ! habitation of the uni- 
 verse ! thou art the one indivisible, 
 the existing and not existing [spirit 
 and matter], that which is supreme. 
 Thou art the first of the gods, the 
 most ancient person. Thou art the 
 supreme receptacle of this universe. 
 Thou knowest all, and mayest be 
 known, and art the supremo man- 
 
172 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 a closer survey will convince ns that tlie two ideas are really 
 incompatible. For since matter in the Hindu system remains 
 an independent substance, coessential with divinity, or since 
 God is there supposed to fashion all things by changing Himself 
 into the material universe, His own supremacy is so far ques- 
 tioned and invaded ; while by attributing to every individual a 
 portion of the Supreme Being, which, according to that later 
 system, exists in him together with his own individual soul, 
 each form of animated nature is said to have within it particles 
 of divinity ; and on this ground polytheism, hero-worship, and 
 even animal- worship, are reasserted and defended'. 
 
 It is, however, to the ethical portions^ of the poem that I 
 draw attention more particularly, as enabling us to trace the 
 highest flight of philosophical Hinduism, in its efforts to deter- 
 mine the right course of human conduct. 
 
 (1) A primary object of the writer was to vindicate the 
 institution of caste, which had been sorely shaken by the Bud- 
 dhist revolutions, and perhaps we may infer impugned by 
 members of the Kshatriya-class, who were beginning to exceed 
 their own province. So absolute and so inviolable, it is taught, 
 are duties which the law of caste imposes, that these transcend 
 and overpower all earthly considerations. For example, it was 
 the intention of the poet to establish that love of kindred, 
 though a virtue in itself, must be sacrificed Avhenever it is 
 generating in the wanior's breast a feeling of compassion for 
 his enemies. His province is to fight, and fight he must on all 
 occasions, and at any cost whatever. ' It is better to do one's 
 own duty, even though it be devoid of excellence, than to 
 perform another's duty welP.' 
 
 sion. By thee is this universe father of the animate and inanimate 
 caused to emanate, thou of end- world.' ch. xi. (transl. pp. 79, 80). 
 less forms.... Thou All! Of infinite Krishna had already (ch. vii. pp. 5 1 
 power and immense might, thou sq.) prepared his companion for 
 comprehendest all; therefore thou this outburst of adoration, by de- 
 art All. As I took thee merely for daring, *I am the 'cause of the pro- 
 a friend, I beseech thee without duction and dissolution of the whole 
 measure to pardon whatever I may, universe. There exists no other 
 in ignorance of this thy greatness, thing superior to me... On me is all 
 have said from negligence or affec- the universe suspended, as numbers 
 tion, such as, O Krishna! son of of pearls on a string;' adding also, 
 Yadu ! friend ! and everything that he was the mystic syllable 6m 
 in which I may have treated thee in all the Vedas. 
 in a joking manner, in recreation, 1 Of. 'Introd.' as before, p. cii. 
 repose, sitting, or meals, whether 2 qj^^ j^ — ^h. vi., ch. xii., ch. xviii. 
 in private, or in the presence of 3 gee p. 26, and, more fully, pp. 
 these, eternal One! Thou art the 118 sq. In pp. 66, 6;, there is a 
 
CHAP, I.] Varieties of Hindu Eeligious Thought 173 
 
 (2) Tlie second object is to modify the Yoga-doctrines in 
 such a manner that devout persons may feel under no pressing 
 obligation to consume their lives in violent austerities and 
 maceration of the body. The author does not, it is true, deny 
 the efficacy and numerous excellences of that older system j but 
 he argues^ that when transformed into the Karma-Yoga, by 
 adapting principles of renunciation (sannyd^sa) to all the duties 
 of common-life, it is still worthier of acceptance, and of greater 
 efficacy in forwarding the process of emancipation. In the 
 earlier system men s surrender of the world was outward, local, 
 physical ; in the later it was to become more inward, spiritual, 
 and complete. The one, persuaded that evil always enters 
 through the inlet of the senses, laboured to impair and so 
 destroy the sinful medium ; the other, acquiescing in this doc- 
 trine as to the peculiar province of temptation, urged the duty 
 of subjugating the heart in such a manner that sensual impres- 
 sions were disarmed and made inoperative. In other words, 
 the way to overcome the world, was not to leave it^ and seek 
 out asylums in the jungle, but to extirpate all wishes and affec- 
 tions that produced attachment to it. Action was the proper 
 element in which the devotee should undergo his training ; yet 
 action was at last to be entirely free from passion or emotion, 
 and entirely irrespective of all consequences. ^ Let the motive 
 for action be always in the action itself, never in its reward^/ 
 * He into whom all desires enter in the same manner as rivers 
 enter the ocean, which is [always] full, yet does not move its 
 bed, can obtain tranquillity; but not he who loves desires^.' 
 The author did not, it is true, deny that adequate reward is 
 always given to acts of ritual worship. On the contrary, he 
 maintained that whenever actions are performed with interested 
 motives they involve* the agent in a series of necessary bonds 
 or consequences {karma-handha) ; sometimes purchasing admis- 
 sion for him to the heaven of Indra ; sometimes, where he is 
 the victim of base fear, and sacrifices to the demons, entailing 
 on him an abode in less exalted spheres of being. Yet the one 
 reward, and that which to the Hindu is alone desirable, was 
 
 passage which intimates that mem- page there is a remarkable pas- 
 
 bers of the vaisya-class had now sage reflecting on those who were 
 
 fallen, rather than risen in the misled by 'flowery' sentences to 
 
 scale of religious privileges, for assign the chief importance to the 
 
 they are ranked with 'women and letter of precepts quoted from the 
 
 Siidras.' Vddas. 
 
 1 'Introd.' as before, p. cviii. ^ C^- i"- (P- 19)- 
 
 2 Ch. II. (p. i6j. In the previous * Ch. iv. (pp. 31 sq.). 
 
174j Christ and other Masters, [part ii. 
 
 allotted to a different class of devotees. Where true devotion, 
 action without passion, filled the spirit of the worshipper, he 
 soared directly upwards to his ultimate condition. Having 
 learned to concentrate his thoughts entirely on the Supreme 
 Being, he obtained a perfect mastery over his whole nature : he 
 subdued not only the irregular appetites, but every movement 
 of the natural affections ; he was ' of the same mind to friends, 
 acquaintances, and enemies, to the indifferent and the neutral, 
 to aliens and relatives, to the good and bad\' As ^candles 
 placed in shelter from the wind do not flicker,' so this perfect 
 devotee has been translated far above the sphere of earthly 
 perturbations : he is utterly unmanned. 
 
 Such may be regarded as the last development of Hindu 
 philosophy; for the monuments of the succeeding, or Puranic 
 period, notwithstanding all the rich profusion of mythological 
 novelties, give few if any indications of mental progress. Here 
 and there the surface of religious thought may have been 
 lippled, for a while, by the attempts of earnest individuals^ 
 to remodel the ancestral creed and lead men back to primitive 
 institutions. The Kuran also, borne along the bloody stream 
 of Arab conquest, was for ages dominant in various parts of 
 India, but infused no higher life into the native population. 
 Excepting the religious movements headed by Nanuk in the 
 fifteenth century, and by Akbar in the sixteenth, both advanc- 
 ing from eclectic principles in the direction of a purer form 
 of deism, the historian of Hindu philosophy will have little 
 to record of universal interest till the master-minds of the 
 Peninsula shall start from their lethargic slumber, and shall 
 learn to vibrate once again beneath the potent touch of Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 ^ Ch. VI. (p. 44). general belief in one only God. 
 
 2 One of the most remarkable Since his death a society, calling 
 
 was the learned Brahman, Earn- itseli Tatica-hodhiniSahhd{^Truth- 
 
 mohun-Roy, who laboured in the expounding Society'), and meditat- 
 
 first quarter of the present century ing the same object, has continued 
 
 to expound the V^d^nta philosophy to exist at Calcutta : see Journal of 
 
 among his fellow-countrymen, with the As. Soc. xiii. 210. 
 the hope of establishing a more 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 Apparent Correspondencies between Hind'&ism and 
 Revealed Religion* 
 
 *So werden wir es unmoglicli finden, in der indischen Eeligion eine 
 
 Quelle Oder eine Eivalin in Beziehung auf die Grundidee des Christen- 
 thums zu finden.' Dorner. 
 
 Relations of Hinduism to Christianity. Theory of primeval prophecies : 
 of diabolic counterfeits: of natural coincidences. External communica- 
 tion. Probable allusion to Christianity in the Mahdbhdrata. 
 
 § I. Hindu monotheism. Practical polytheism. God in relation to matter : 
 no real object of trust and worship. Source of this debased theology. 
 
 § 2. Hindu trinities, or triads. Real nature of the Brdhmanical triad. 
 Hoiu it excluded the truth of the Divine unity ; and substituted the 
 worship of created beings. Christian doctrine of the Trinity in Unity. 
 Sdnkhya triad. Buddhist triad. 
 
 § 3. Hindil avatdras, or incarnations, especially that of Krishna. Their 
 origin. Their general forms and characteristics. The Krishna-legend. 
 Resemblances to sacred history. Heathen parallels. Krishnaism, 
 properly so called, subsequent to Christianity. Influence of the spurious 
 Gospels. Fundamental differences between Krisknaism and ChriUianity. 
 
 Two inferences are commonly drawn by the opponents of Chris- 
 tianity from the remarkable series of phenomena exhibited in 
 the foregoing chapter. It has been alleged (1) that those 
 exalted products of man's theorising faculty will prove how 
 very much of truth may be discovered without invoking the 
 assistance of particular revelations ; and that consequently we 
 are justified in treating the Gospel as one of many signs of 
 spiritual activity, as a further egress and embodiment of *the 
 religion of nature,' as a novel way of working out ideas and 
 instincts latent in the breast of all the human species. Or 
 else it is objected (2) that both Hinduism and Christianity 
 are for the most part vestiges of some primeval and barbaric 
 superstition, from which it is reserved for true philosophy and 
 the doctors of the Absolute Religion to emancipate alike the 
 churches and the world. 
 
176 Christ and other Masters, [part ii. 
 
 As my present object is chiefly historical, I shall say nothing 
 of the contradictions involved in these two different pleas of 
 modern scepticism. Both of them I hope to answer most effec- 
 tually by ascertaining how far alleged resemblances between 
 the Christian and heathen systems really extend, and then 
 suggesting in each case what seems the obvious medium of 
 communication or the natural ground of correspondence. 
 
 Some general observations, bearing both on this and on the 
 following chapter, will be necessary by way of preface. 
 
 1. It must be pleaded that the cogency of many arguments 
 which unbelief has urged against the supernatural character 
 of Christianity is due to indiscreet assertions of the Christian 
 apologist. Exaggerating the amount of light possessed in pri- 
 mitive times by the adherents of revealed religion; exaggerating 
 also the antiquity of many Gentile systems which were made 
 almost coeval with the lirst dispersion of mankind, he fre- 
 quently approached the study of such systems with a confident 
 expectation of detecting in them fresh analogies to truths which 
 have been only brought to light by the announcements of the 
 Gospel. When, for instance, a new world of intellectual enter- 
 prise was opened through the cultivation of Sanskrit literature, 
 it was presumed by numbers of our fellow-countrymen w^ho 
 led the way in those researches, that the harvest to be reaped 
 in India would not only confirm the older portions of Mosaic 
 history, but also rescue from oblivion many a clear and pointed 
 prophecy of the Incarnation and the Cross. If man had always, 
 from the infancy of time, been fully conscious of these central 
 facts of our religion, why not search for remnants of such 
 knowledge and expressions of such consciousness in all parts 
 of heathendom ? That dim traditions of the Fall of man, that 
 distant echoes of some promise of redemption do in fact survive 
 Avherever human steps have wandered, will be shewn hereafter 
 when we come to real parallelisms between the Christian and 
 other systems : but the sanguine expectations of mythologists 
 w^ere doomed to disappointment, when, assuming that the old 
 deposit of traditionary knowledge had been well-nigh coexten- 
 sive with the field of revelation, they attempted to translate 
 familiar mythes of Hindustan into the language of the Old 
 and New Testament. Nor did the evil consequences of the 
 theory cease with its explosion. Works, in which it was de- 
 veloped, are still found to operate injuriously upon the cause 
 of true religion, by supplying scoffs and cavils to that class 
 of misbelievers who would fain reduce the Gospels to a level 
 with the sacred books of India. 'Zeal,' says a thoughtful 
 
CHAP. II.] Hind'Ojism and Revealed Religion, 177 
 
 writer on the Hindu pantheon, * sometimes has in its results 
 the same effect as infidelity, and one cannot help lamenting 
 that a superstructure requiring so little support should be 
 encumbered by awkward buttresses, so ill applied, that they 
 would, if it were possible, diminish the stability of' the building 
 that they were intended to uphold. Of this description Avere 
 the zealous researches of some missionaries, who, in Brahma 
 and Saraswati, easily found Abraham and Sarah; and the 
 Christian Trinity is as readily discovered in the monstrous 
 triad of the Hindus. Of this description also, I am disposed 
 to think, are the attempts at bending so many of the events 
 of Krishna's life to tallv v/ith those, real or typical, of Jesus 
 Christ \' 
 
 2. There is another mode of contemplating such pheno- 
 mena which deserves a passing notice, chiefly from the fact 
 that it was sanctioned by those venerable writers, who first 
 struggled, hand to hand, with pagans in defence of Christianity. 
 It rests, however, on a vague presumption rather than on 
 tangible and valid evidence. Its authors argue that heathen- 
 dom, in regions where the light of genuine prophecy was 
 quenched, had been occasionally misled by * diabolic mimicries' 
 of Christianity, projected by malignant demons, v/ho, in order 
 to preoccupy the spirit of their votaries and indispose men 
 to accept the Gospel, coined a number of those base equivalents 
 which still pass current in the Gentile world. Accordingly it 
 is believed that, in addition to the series of primeval facts, 
 which, under somewhat different versions, were preserved in 
 most heathen countries, certain rites and dogmas, which are 
 commonly held to be of Christian origin, had been already 
 counterfeited and caricatured in far older creeds : and hence 
 
 1 Moor, Hindu Pantheon, p. 200, erklarte sich von nun an fiir die 
 
 Lond. 1 8 10. In Maurice's Hist, of sogennante alte Weisheit der Chi- 
 
 Hindustdn, 11. 225, Lond. 1824, and nesen, die sie aus irgend einer an- 
 
 in Mr. Haslam's more recent work, tediluvianischen Yerbindung mit 
 
 The Cross and the Serpent, pp. 149 den biblischen Erzvatern errettet 
 
 sq. Lond. 1849, the legend of hatten. Andere stiegen nun bis 
 
 Krishna is coniidently regarded as zur Siindfiuth empor und meinten, 
 
 a remnant of some primeval tradi- Noa's Kinder seyen die erstenWeisen 
 
 tion concerning the future Hfe of des Landes gewesen; noch Andere 
 
 the Eedeemer. The Jesuits were at wollten zwischen Jao, Noa oder gar 
 
 first divided as to the wisdom of Jehova eine ganz besondere Aehn- 
 
 the ancient Chinese, but eventually Uchkeit finden. So leicht Jindet 
 
 agreed in attributing to them a man, was man sucbt und wtinscht.' 
 
 knowledge of the True God, and Prof. Neumann, in Illgen's Zeit- 
 
 connecting them with the patriarchs schrift (1837), Band vii. pp. 13, 
 
 of the Holy Scripture. 'DerOrden 14. 
 
 H. 12 
 
178 Clivist and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 a living writer has not scrupled to contend that 'no external 
 resemblances to any part whatever of the catholic system form 
 any kind of presumption against that system, seeing that such 
 anticipations oi parts of it are, upon this theory, to be expected^' 
 
 3. It was perhaps in the recoil from theories of this 
 nature, overstrained and made incredible, that other writers 
 have been since propelled into an opposite conclusion. In their 
 eyes, the correspondencies between the heathen and Christian 
 systems, where not purely casual and external, may be almost 
 universally referred to some internal affinity, to principles in- 
 herent in the constitution of man, and stimulated by necessities 
 of his moral nature ; the grand merit of Christianity, so they 
 think, consisting in the fact, that it has spoken with authority 
 on the character and bearing of those fundamental principles, 
 and taught men how to regulate the course of their develop- 
 ment. But while granting, as I do, that sucl\ assumptions 
 will account for several of the points in question, there are 
 many other indications of affinity so minute and so specific, 
 that we cannot fairly pass them over with this short and sum- 
 mary explanation. By so acting, the opponent of Christianity 
 incurs the charge of sheltering his objections under words that 
 may hereafter prove no more than empty generalities. In 
 any case it were unreasonable to call for our assent to his 
 hypothesis till further questions have been asked and answered. 
 'What is the amount of probability that some outward channel 
 of communication existed at, or prior to, the birth of Christ, 
 between Hindu philosophers and the doctors of the western, 
 world 1 And if so, is it further probable; from the character 
 and circumstances of the age, that any inteixjhange or fusion 
 would take place between the various and conflicting doctrines 
 then in course of circulation? These inquiries are, I think, 
 deserving of more notice than they have commonly received 
 from modern speculators : for exactly in pr«)portion as the 
 answer is affirmative will natural media be discovered for ex- 
 plaining some of the more close resemblances which I have 
 undertaken to investigate. 
 
 Now with reference to the former question, it is certain 
 
 1 See Mr. Morris's 'Essay toicards worship, I have no desire to call in 
 
 the conversion of learned and philo- question the great truth that evil 
 
 sophical Hindus, pp. 20 r sq. Lond. spirits were concerned in instigating 
 
 1843, where the opinions of the and appropriating such worship, 
 
 Fathers on this subject are recited and that the Gentiles, therefore sa- 
 
 at length. In declining to accept crificed 5at/Aowois, Kal ov Gey (1 Cor. 
 
 the view there taken of heathen x. 20). 
 
CHAP. II.] Ilindilism and Bevealed Religion, 17& 
 
 that a lively intercourse subsisted in the earliest age of Chris- 
 tianity between the western marts of Hindustan, and those of 
 Persia and Egypt. Thoughtful minds were also actively employed 
 in tracing the divergencies and points of contact in the different 
 systems of philosophy, and in searching for some common 
 ground on which they all could meet together. This eclectic 
 tendency is manifest on one side in the schools of Alexandria, 
 which, after it absorbed the commerce both of Tyre and Car- 
 thage, was the centre and emporium of all forms of philosophic 
 speculation; and on the other side in many schools of India 
 where the publication of a treatise, like the Bhagavad-Gitd, 
 beai*s witness to the ruling wish for peace, for union, for 
 amalgamation. We might, therefore, be prepared to find that 
 in the traffic carried on between the east and west, regard was 
 sometimes had to higher interests than those of merchandise. 
 But further it is argued to the satisfaction^, not to say delight, 
 of adversaries of the Gospel, that many rampant heresies, by 
 which the primitive Church was torn and weakened, had been 
 generated in attempts to blend the truths of Christianity with 
 notions borrowed from the heathen creeds of Hindustan and 
 Persia. The riddle which the founders of the Gnostic sects 
 were all struggling to interpret had reference to the origin of 
 physical and moral evil^; and the various guesses which these 
 sects propounded have betrayed, in almost every case, their 
 eastern origin. If it be doubtful whether Buddhist emissaries, 
 panting for fresh fields of action, penetrated through the towns 
 and villages of Parthia, and even reached the shores of the 
 Mediterranean, there is no lack of evidence enabling us to 
 specify some individual links by which the interchange of arti- 
 cles of faith might be most naturally effected. Bardesanes^, 
 for example, one of the more brilliant spirits of the latter 
 half of the second century, had himself travelled from Edessa 
 
 ^ See Von Bohlen, Das alte Indien, iii. 3 79 sq. 
 I. 571 sq. He concurs in many of ^ ^^ g^ Euseb. Hist. Eccl. v. 27: 
 the views adopted by J. J. Schmidt, rd Ma^lfjiov irepl rod noXvepvWtjTov 
 in his treatise, Uber die Verivand- Trapd tols aipeo-ci^rais ^rrr-Zj/xaTos, tov 
 schaft der gnostisch-theosophischen frodev tj KaKca, Kai irepl tov yejnj- 
 Lehren mit den Religionen des ^"0" vTrdpxeif rrju vXrjv. 
 Orients, vorzuglich dem Buddhais- ^ ^^^ Bohlen, as above, p. 572. 
 mus, Leipzig, 1828; and after- According to Lassen (iii. 404), Bar- 
 wards, in the main, by Neander, Ch, desanes did not actually travel to 
 Hist. II. 159 sq. Bohn's ed. See India, but derived his knowledge of 
 also Prof. Wilson's Preface to the Br^hmanism from intercourse with 
 Vishnu Purdna, p. viii. ; and the ambassadors^ sent from India to 
 more recent investigation in Lassen, Antoninus Pius. 
 
 12—2 
 
180 Christ and other Masters, [part II. 
 
 to some part of Hindustan, expressly with the purpose of there 
 studying the religion of the Brahmans : while Mani^, who en- 
 deavoured to construct a composite religion, of which Chris- 
 tianity was made a leading element, had wandered far and 
 near in quest of knowledge, and contracted in his wanderings 
 ail especial fondness for the creed of Gautama, which he studied 
 under the roof of some Buddhist grotto iii Turkistan. 
 
 If the above considerations make it probable that inter- 
 course did actually exist between the early misbelievers and 
 the speculative minds of Hindustan, I hold myself at liberty 
 to argue, on the other side, that Christian influences might 
 be as readily made to operate through corresponding channels, 
 and assist, to some degree, in modifying the old principles of 
 Hinduism. But the question is not one of plausibilities and 
 bare presumptions. Many circumstances raise it higher in the 
 scale of probability. I shall not insist upon the fact that copies 
 of the Gospels, both in their genuine and corrupted form, ob- 
 taiaed a very wide circulation in all regions of the east. I 
 shall not exaggerate the value of the evidence which traces 
 the extant community of 'Christians of St. Thomas'^ to the 
 apostolic age. Eusebius^ has distinctly mentioned, that when 
 a learned doctor of Alexandria, at the close of the second 
 century, was impelled by missionary zeal as far east as India, 
 he found the seeds of Christianity already scattered, and already 
 bearing fruit. The same diffusion of the Gospel at this early 
 period is attested by the Arian writer, Philostorgius. He 
 informs* us of a missionary with the surname Indicus (o 'IvSos), 
 
 ^ Keander, ii. 1 70. This wiiter himself in favour of the old tradi- 
 
 guards himself, however, against tions on this subject: 'Die An- 
 
 the construction that he means to nahme, dass der Apostel Thomas 
 
 explain a ZZ the parallelisnQLS between in India Asiatica, seu Orientali die 
 
 true and false religions on the christliche Kirche gegrundet babe, 
 
 theory of external influences. He ist fast allgemein, und wenn je eine 
 
 accordingly adds (p. 164): 'Ana- Nachricht der Kirchen-Historiker 
 
 logies of this sort, having a perfectly verdient geglanbt zu werden, so ist 
 
 internal origin, often recur in the es diese.' 
 
 historical development of Christian- ^ Hist, Eccl, v. 10, where in 
 
 ity, wherever corruptions of purely speaking of Pantsenus, he writes : 
 
 Christian truth have sprung up.' ws koI K-npvKO. rod Kara Xpto-rbv 
 
 Cf. Lassen, iii. 407, 408. Major evayyeXiov tols eir dvaroXijs idvecriv 
 
 Cunningham (J5MZsrt Top(?s, pp. 133 dvadeLx&w°-h f^^XP'- '<^'^ "^^^ 'IvhQv 
 
 sq.) is of opinion that Porphyry, crretXd/xei/oj/ 7^5 : cf . Neander, i. 113. 
 'the learned Pagan, was in fact a * Hist. Eccl. iii. 4. The native 
 
 European Buddhist.' place of Theophilus (c. 5) was Dvlpa 
 
 2 ^QQB.ou^^Hist. of Christianity Sukhatara, the modern Diu Soko- 
 
 in India, i. 32 sq. Wiltsch [Kirchl. tora: Lassen, 11. iioi. 
 Geographies i. 18, n. 8) declares 
 
CHAP. II.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 181 
 
 who, on visiting his native land and other parts of the Hindu 
 Peninsula, was not surprised to meet with fellow-Christians, 
 whose peculiar rites attested their antiquity, as well as their 
 comparative isolation from Christendom at large. The date 
 of this testimony is about the year 350, and two centuries 
 later every doubt as to the permanent presence of Christianity 
 is dissipated by accurate reports of an Egyptian writer^ whose 
 extensive travels gained for him the title ^Indicopleustes.' 
 Among other places where Christian bodies had been organised 
 he mentions Taprobane (Ceylon), Male or Mangalor on the 
 coast of Malabar, and Calliana, a settlement near Bombay^ 
 
 And if it be alleged that nearly all this evidence points 
 to southern rather than to northern Hindustan, the answer is 
 that we have frequent traces of Christianity in that quarter 
 also. The prolific missions^ of the old Chaldsean or ' Nestorian' 
 Church, diffused with marvellous rapidity over regions far 
 beyond the Tigris, had ere long their offshoots in the heart of 
 Bactriana and the northern provinces of India. There a know- 
 ledge of the Gospel lingered through the Middle Ages ; for as 
 late as 1503* we find the Nestorian patriarch ordaining a 
 metropolitan and three bishops for the regulation of the Church 
 of India; while in 1666, owing partly to these influences and 
 partly to the rival missions of the Latin Church, the Christian 
 population in the north-western provinces was roughly estimated 
 at 25,000 families'. 
 
 It is not then so improbable that while India on the one 
 hand stimulated the formation of the early Christian heresies, 
 genuine Christianity may in turn have imported some of its 
 distinctive elements into the speculations of Brahmanical and 
 Buddhist doctors. One of the most able Hindu scholars of the 
 present day^ has even found allusion to such modifications in 
 
 1 See Neander's remarks on this ^ Weber, Ind. Studien, i. 400, 
 account of Cosmas, Ch. Hist. iii. note. His deductions from the 
 165, 166, and Lassen, 11. iioi. passage in the Mahdhhdrata are as 
 
 2 Cf. Kenan (in Journal ^siatique follows : 'Dass Brjihmanen iiber das 
 (1856, p. 251) for some account of Meer nach Alexandrien oder gar 
 a Buddhist monk who in the sixth Kleinasien gekommen seien zur 
 century became a Christian. Zeit der Bliithe des ersten Christen- 
 
 3 A ' Notitia ' of the very numer- thums, und dass sie, heimgekehrt 
 ous sees founded by Nestorian in- nach Indien, die monotheistische 
 fluence is given in Assemani, Bibl, Lehre und einige Legenden dessel- 
 Orient. iii. pt. ii. pp. 705 sq. ben auf den einheimischen, durch 
 
 ^ Wiltsch, II. 361. seinen Namen an Christus den 
 
 ^ Sleeman, Bambles and Recol- Sohn der gbttlichen Jungfrau erin- 
 
 lectionSy 1. 15, quoting Thevenot, nernden, und vielleicht schon vor- 
 
 the traveller. her gottlioh verehrten Weisen oder 
 
182 ^ Christ and other Masters, [part li. 
 
 the ancient literature of India, and pointed out particular links 
 of intercourse through which the Christian influence may have 
 been conveyed. His chief authority is a passage of the Mahd- 
 hhdrata^ allowed on all hands to be one of the last additions^ 
 made to that gigantic poem ; and as such it may have been no 
 earlier than the second century of the Christian era. According 
 to it, three Brahmans crossed the sea upon a visit to some 
 neighbouring region (Svetadvipa), whose peculiarities, if the 
 story be divested of poetic adjuncts and embellishments, con- 
 sisted mainly in the fact that the inhabitants were light com- 
 plexioned, and also in religion were monotheists (ekdntinas). 
 During this visit of the Brahmans they acquired a stock of 
 knowledge which enabled them on their return to introduce 
 improvements into the hereditary creed, and more especially to 
 make the worship of Krishna (Yasudeva) the most prominent 
 feature of their system. The foreigners from whom they bor- 
 rowed these ideas are said to have also worshipped the one God 
 without the intervention of images, to have been gifted with 
 superior faith (hhalcti), to have assigned peculiar efficacy to 
 prayer when offered up in spirit, and to have confi.dently hoped 
 that their specific doctrines would ere long attract to them a 
 larger circle of adherents. Without entering on the contro- 
 versies touching the precise date or the locality of this inter- 
 view, or claiming any knowledge of the more immediate eflfects 
 which it produced on one party or the other, I am surely 
 justified in drawing from it the conclusion that as intercourse 
 may thus be shewn to have subsisted between the Christian 
 and the Bnihman, it is not impossible that some ideas and 
 traditions of the latter were subjected to the transforming 
 influences of Christianity. 
 
 Heros Krishna Devakiputra [Sohn in Col. Ch. Chron. (xi. 146 sq.) is 
 der Devaki *^ Gottlichen^'] iiheTge- of opinion that the Brahmans were 
 tragen haben, im iibrigen die christ- not Ukely to borrow religious ideas 
 lichen Lehren durch S^nkhya- und from foreign sources. He trans- 
 Yoga -Philosophemata ersetzend, lates the whole passage from the 
 wie sie umgekehrt ihrerseits viel- Mahdhhdrata (Bk. xii. ss. 337 — 
 leicht auf die Bildung gnostischer 341), and is inclined to think that 
 Sekten hingewirkt hatten." Lassen, Lassen has expressed himself with 
 who controverts some portions of too great certainty in regard to the 
 Weber's theory {Ind, Alterthum. 11. origin of the legend. Weber (I?i^ 
 1096 sq.) believes, notwithstanding, dische Skizzen, Berlin, 1857) has 
 that the people visited by the Briih- one essay entitled, *Die "Verbin- 
 mans were really Christians (p. dungen Indiens mit den Landern 
 1099), and conjectures that the in- im Westen.' He resumes the dis- 
 terviews took place in Parthia. cussion of Krishiia-worship (pp. 
 1 Lassen. 11. 1096, n. i. A writer 92 sq.). 
 
CHAP. II.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion, 183 
 
 Placing, therefore, all these facts and inferences before the 
 leader to guide him in his judgment of what follows, I shall 
 now proceed to the investigation of particular points in which 
 the two religions have been thought to touch, if not entirely 
 coincide. These have reference to — 
 
 1. Hindu monotheism. 
 
 2. Hindu triads, or trinities. 
 
 3. Hindu avatdras, or incarnations, especially that of 
 Krishna. 
 
 § I. Hindu Monotheism, 
 
 The observation is now current that whatever else the old 
 inhabitants of India may have gradually forgotten or distorted, 
 their idea of God has always been the same, and always far 
 superior to conceptions that prevailed in other parts of heathen- 
 dom. * The Gospels themselves,' wrote Belsham, ^ teach not a 
 purer monotheism than do the sacred writings of the Hindoos \' 
 Voltaire, in his endeavours to destroy the supernatural character 
 of Christianity by pointing out its close resemblance to other 
 systems, had paraded the same boast in many of his ^vritings ; 
 but when he sought to j ustify his language by appealing to the 
 Ezour-Veidam^, which he took an active part in rescuing from 
 oblivion, he betrayed at once the weakness of his cause and 
 his own blind credulity. The production was in fact no genuine 
 monument of ancient India ; it was the fabrication of a Jesuit 
 missionary, who had put it forth in order to facilitate the con- 
 version of the more learned class of Hindus by shewing that 
 some truths of Christianity were not unknown to their fore- 
 fathers. This fact alone should have suggested to mythologists 
 that belief in one Supreme Being was less prominently stated 
 in the genuine Vedas than the * patriarch of infidelity' was 
 willing to suppose. And if we turn from vague assertions or 
 disjointed extracts, and examine the documents themselves, it 
 is quite obvious (1) that current statements on the purity and 
 sublimity of early Hindu worship are very much exaggerated, 
 and (2) that where traces of monotheism exist at all, they indi- 
 cate a tenet far inferior to the lofty theism of Christianity. 
 
 My own belief is that no absolutely true idea can be 
 
 ^ Quoted in W. J. Fox's Religious imagined that the work was com- 
 
 Ideas, p. 1 1. posed before the date of Alexander's 
 
 2 See the account in Saint-Hilaire, expedition: but the real author, it 
 
 Des Vedas, pp. 15 sq. , and Ade- is said, was Roberto de' Nobili, a 
 
 lung's Sketch of Sanskrit Litera- nephew of Bellarmine, who went 
 
 ture, pp. 75, 76, Oxf. 1832. Voltaire on a mission to India about 1640. 
 
184 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 obtained with reference to these subjects till a deeper study ol 
 Hindu literature shall have enabled us to discriminate more 
 accurately between the lyric and dogmatic portions of the 
 Yedas, i. e, between those portions which are manifestly ancient, 
 but in which there is a general absence of the metaphysical 
 element, and those of later growth in which that element is 
 active, and preponderates. It is also most desirable to separate 
 as far as may be the prse-Clmstian treatises from those which 
 are allowedly post-Christian ; since suspicions are fast gaining 
 ground^ that even the Brahmanical ideas of God were somewhat 
 modified and exalted by intercourse with Christianity. 
 
 If we lay aside expressions in the Yaidic hymns which have 
 occasionally transferred the attributes of power and omnipre- 
 sence to some one elemental deity, as Indra for example, and by 
 so doing intimated that even in the depths of nature-worship 
 intuitions pointing to one great and all-embracing Spirit could 
 not be extinguished, there are scarcely a dozen ^ mantras' in 
 the whole collection where the unity of God is stated with an 
 adequate amount of firmness and consistency. The great mass 
 of those productions either invoke the aid, or deprecate the 
 wrath, of multitudinous deities, who elsewhere are regarded as 
 no more than finite emanations from the ' Lord of the creatures' ^ 
 {Prajdjjati) ; and therefore in the sacred books themselves poly- 
 theism was the feature ever prominent, and, what is more 
 remarkable, was never openly repudiated. In other words, 
 where a belief in the supremacy of God is manifest at all, it 
 looks as though it were unable to assert itself in practice, owing 
 to the uncongenial atmosphere by which it was surrounded. 
 
 ^ See above, p. 153, n. i. Weber den entsprechenden Lehren des 
 
 also has pronounced distinctly in Christenthums influenzirt worden 
 
 favour of this view: 'Wenn ich nun ist :' Ind. Stud. i. 423, and, as re- 
 
 schon oben, p. 400, aus einer be- iterated, 11. 169. 
 stimmten Sage des MBh. speciell ^ Thus in the remarkable hymn 
 
 die Verehrung Krishna's als Ein- entitled *Au Dieu Crdateur' {Rig- 
 
 gottes, als durch das Bekanntwer- Veda, ed. Langlois, iv. 4C9, 410) 
 
 den der Br^hmana mit dem Chris- the last cla.use runs as follows: 'O 
 
 tenthum veranlasst gemuthmasst Pradgapati, ce n'est point un autre 
 
 liabe so kann ich nicht umhin hier que toi qui a donn^ naissance k 
 
 es auch welter als mehie Vermu- tons ces etres. Accorde-nous les 
 
 thung auszusprechen, dass liber- biens pour lesquels nous t'offrons 
 
 haupt die spatere exclusiv mono- le sacrifice. Puissions-nous etre 
 
 theistische Eichtung der indischen les maitres de la richesse ! ' And 
 
 Sekten, welche elnen hestlmmten just before the supremacy of One 
 
 personlichen Goii verehren, um seine Godis distinctly recognised : ' Parmi 
 
 Gnade flehen und an ihn glauben les dieuxil est le Dieu incomparable. 
 
 {bhakti und graddhd) ehen durch A quel (autre) dieu offririons-nous 
 
 das Bekanntwerden der luder mit rholocauste?* 
 
CHAP. II.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion, 185 
 
 Still, we must allow, that of those hymns in which monotheism 
 is predominant, some exhibit true conceptions of the power, the 
 spirituality, and the unrivalled majesty of God. The following 
 is a specimen ; it is taken from the last division of the Rig- 
 Y6da, and entitled by a commentator, the Supreme Spirit^ 
 (Fara7ndtmd) ; — 
 
 "Nothing then existed, neither being (sat), nor non -being (asat); no 
 world, no air, no firmament. Where was then the covering of the uni- 
 verse ? where the receptacle of the water ? where the impenetrable depths 
 of air? Death was not, nor immortality, nor anything that marked the 
 boimdaries of day and night. But That (Tad) breathed in solitude 
 without afflation, absorbed in His own thought {swadhd). Besides That 
 nought existed. The darkness was at first enveloped in darkness; the 
 water was devoid of movement; and everything was gathered up and 
 blended together in That. The Being reposed on the bosom of this void; 
 and the universe was at last produced by the strength of His devotion 
 {tapas). In the beginning desire {kdma) was formed in His spirit (manas): 
 and this was the first productive principle. It is thus that the wise men, 
 pondering in their heart, have explained the union of being and non- 
 being. 
 
 "But who can know such things exactly? Or who can declare them? 
 These beings, whence come they? This creation, whence did it originate? 
 The devas were themselves created or produced. But That, who knows 
 His nature and His origin? Who can tell how all this varied world has 
 issued into being? Can it, or can it not, support itself? He who, from 
 the heights of heaven, is gazing on the universe, He alone can tell whether 
 it exists, or only seems to exist," 
 
 It is obvious from the character of this exalted hymn and 
 the position which it occupies in the Rig-Yeda, that it was the 
 product of an age in which the speculations of India were 
 assuming the peculiar forms presented to our view in the 
 Br^hmanic period. And, we saw already, a belief in the com- 
 mon origin of the phenomenal universe was, in this second 
 stage of the Hindu religion, lying at the root of all men's theo- 
 risings. Unity became the central, though it might be esoteric^, 
 doctrine of the * orthodox' philosopher. Everything that is, 
 
 ^ Langlois, iv. 421. I have fol- sations with a Brithman, he was 
 
 lowed his translation in the main, • told confidentially that the learned 
 
 comparing it with Colebrooke's Hindtis all believe^ in the unity of 
 
 (Asiat, Researches^ viii. 404) and God; and further, that it was re- 
 
 Saint-Hilaire's [Des Vedas, p. 60). vealed in their ancient writings, 
 
 ^ It is remarkable that this doc- ' que toutes les fausses religions 
 
 trina arcani, on which Cudworth cesseroient un jour, et qu'un temps 
 
 and others have insisted as a fun- viendroit oii tout le monde garderoit 
 
 damental characteristic of ancient une m^me loi:' Bouhours, Vie de 
 
 systems of philosophy, was recog- S. Frangois Xavier, pp. 95, 96, 
 
 nised as late as the sixteenth cen- Louvain, 1822. 
 tury. In one of Xavier's conver- 
 
] SQ Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 and every tiling that seems to be, comes forth originally from 
 God, who is the primal source of being, and eventually is 
 gathered up afresh in Him, the all-pervading Soul or Spirit. 
 The devas, worshipped by the undiscerning multitude, are held 
 to be no more than scintillations of His majesty : they emanate 
 from Him, who, when the worlds were brought into existence, 
 had proceeded to create the * guardians of the worlds.' Hence 
 Grod is, ultimately, every thing, and every thing is God. He 
 *is Brahma; he is Indra; he is Prajapati : these gods are he, 
 and so are the five primary elements, earth, air, the etherial 
 fluid, water, and lights' 
 
 The attributes and operations of this one great Spirit arc 
 nowhere brought before us with such fervour and sublimity, as 
 in the Isa-Upanishad, a kind of pendant to the second Yeda : 
 for not only is He there exhibited as the All-glorious and 
 Supreme, but also as the proper object of man's worship, the 
 restorer of the fallen spirit, and the author of eternal happiness. 
 The following passage^ will give the reader a just idea of the 
 whole : 
 
 "One sovereign ruler pervades this world of worlds. Nurture thyself 
 with that single thought, abandoning all others, and covet not the joys of 
 any creature. He who in this life performs his religious duties may 
 desire to live a hundred years ; but even to the end thou shouldest have 
 no other occupation. It is to regions, left a prey for evil spirits and 
 covered with eternal darkness, that those men go after death, who have 
 corrupted their own soul. This one single Spirit, which nothing can 
 disturb, is swifter than the thought of man. This primal Mover the devas 
 even cannot overtake. Unmoved itself, it infinitely transcends all others, 
 however rapid be their course. It moves the universe at its pleasure : it 
 is distant from us, and yet very near to all things: it pervades this 
 entire universe, and yet is infinitely beyond it. The man who has learned 
 to recognise all beings in this supreme Spirit and this supreme Spirit in 
 all beings, can henceforth look upon no creature with contempt. The 
 man who understands that all beings only exist in this single being ; the 
 man who is made conscious of such profound identity, what trouble or 
 what pain can touch him? He then arrives at Brahma himself: he is 
 luminous, apart from body, apart from evil, apart from matter, pure, and 
 rescued from all taint: he knows, he foreknows, he rules every thing: he 
 sees only by himself alone, and things appear to him such as they were 
 
 from all eternity, always like themselves Let the wind, the breath 
 
 immortal, carry off this body of mine, which is mere ashes; but, O 
 
 ^ See Colebrooke's translation Eoy, Translation of several princi- 
 
 f r om the Aitarey air any a, in As iat. Jpal hooks, c&c. of the Veds, pp. 
 
 Res. VIII. 421, 422. ^o^ ^^' I^oiid. 1832; and still more 
 
 2 It is* translated with the title exactly from a somewhat different • 
 
 Isdvdsy am, inSiiW. Joneses Works, ^^^\'^y Saint-Hilaire, Des Vedas, 
 
 VI. 423 sq. 4to. ed., by Bammohun PP' ^^ ^^' 
 
CHAP. II.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 187 
 
 Brahma, remember my intentions, remember my efforts, remember my 
 deeds. Agni (spirit of fire), conduct us by sure pathways to eternal 
 happiness. God, who knowest all beings, purify us from every sin, 
 and we shall be enabled to consecrate to thee our holiest adorations. My 
 mouth is seeking truth only in this golden cup. It is I, Brahma! I who 
 adore thee under the form of the resplendent sun. Sun eternal, 
 hearken to my prayer. " 
 
 The striking similarity in tone and sentiment between this 
 prayer and the more lofty passages ^ of the Bhagavad-Gitd has 
 not unnaturally induced a modern writer to assign their com- 
 position to the same period of Hindu literature ; and at the 
 same time hinted that, as the date of the latter was subsequent 
 to the diffusion of Christianity, the former may be possibly 
 indebted for some of its more ethical properties to the superior 
 light of revelation. But, however all such points may be event- 
 ually decided, it is certain that no higher specimen of heathen 
 worship has been hitherto found in the surviving monuments 
 of Brahmanism. *One is tempted to ask,' writes^ a learned 
 translator of it, * whether the Himalaya or Mount Sinai was 
 the first to listen to these sacred verses.' But he adds immedi- 
 ately afterwards : * That grand idea of the unity of God was 
 lost in India, instead of being developed : it was swallowed up 
 in pantheism ; and these precious germs have therefore perished 
 under a mass of most deplorable superstitions.' 
 
 Here indeed is one of the peculiarities to which I would 
 direct the special notice of the reader. The Hindus have been, 
 from first to last, a tribe of creature-worshippers, a nation of 
 polytheists. Belief in one supreme Intelligence, so far from 
 elevating the character of their institutions and obtaining an 
 exclusive utterance in their sacred poetry, has been an heir- 
 loom only of the favoured few. It was so, in the Yaidic 
 period, when the young imagination of the Aryan, intoxicated 
 by the beauties of external nature and led astray from God, 
 sought refuge in the deification of the elements. It was so, 
 when his descendants had been taught to clothe the genii of 
 that earlier period with the attributes of human heroes and 
 of god-like sages. It is so at present, when a Hindu writer 
 has been heard deploring the incurable idolatry of his country- 
 men, and affirming that *the allegorical adoration of the true 
 Deity ^/ which anti-Christian scholars had professed to recog- 
 
 ^ See a specimen above, p. 1 7 1, n. 5. declares that the Hindlis of the 
 
 2 Saint-Hilaire, p. 89. present day *have no such views 
 
 ^ In the * Introduction' to his of the subject, but firmly believe in 
 
 Translation^ &c., . Rammohun Eoy the real existence of innumerable 
 
188 Christ and oilier Masters, [part ii. 
 
 nise in the existing forms of worship, is totally unknown 
 among themselves. 
 
 But I shall go yet further. Passing by the question as 
 to whether any changes were, in this particular, effected through 
 the agency of the Gospel and Kuran, I feel justified in asserting 
 that the best conceptions formed of the supreme Being, in the 
 highest systems of Hindu philosophy, are all imperfect and one- 
 sided ; they fall short of those which have impressed themselves 
 on almost every chapter in the records of the true religion. 
 
 1. The Jehovah of the Hebrews and the God of Christians 
 is so purely spiritual and so entirely supramundane, that His wor- 
 shippers could never run the risk of identifying their Divinity 
 either with the forms of matter, or with powers and processes 
 of the material universe. He is in essence totally distinct 
 from each and all of these. The world of matter is objective 
 to Him, and so far from thwarting His divine omnipotence, 
 it is one single product of His legislative will, an instrument, 
 a vassal. On the other hand, the Brahma of Hindustan is 
 evermore confounded with the vital properties of nature, or 
 is only made coordinate and coequal with them. Creation 
 itself is there preceded by a something^ that restrains and 
 fetters the sovereignty of the Creator; or else, as in the Sankhya 
 system, where it was attempted to establish a peculiar principle 
 of causality by extruding the revealed idea of God, creation 
 is no more than the spontaneous evolution of a primary essence^ 
 iri-espectively of any conscious and designing Agent. God, in 
 other words, is not supreme according to the doctrine of Hindu 
 philosophers. Some of them indeed allow us to regard Him 
 as the everpresent basis and the sole substratum of the uni- 
 verse, the life and starting-point of all its varied operations : 
 but in no case do the energies inherent in His being enable 
 Him to rise superior to mysterious laws which regulate the 
 course of nature. Even where the Sankhyas had, in later 
 times, so modified^ their tenets that volition was ascribed to 
 the Almighty and His moral attributes more fully recognised, 
 this virtual limitation of His freedom, this entrenchment on 
 His absolute supremacy, continues to be visible. 
 
 And since Hindus were rarely able to conceive of God 
 as altogether separable from the world of phenomena without 
 
 gods and goddesses, who possess, performed:' p. 5; cf. above, pp. 
 
 in their own departments, full and 141, 142. 
 
 independent power; and to pro- ^ See Prof. Wilson's Lectures, 
 
 pitiate them, and not the true God, p. 53. 
 
 are temples erected and ceremonies * Above, p. 153. 
 
CHAP. II J Hinduism and Revealed Religion, 189 
 
 plunging into utter atheism, so their noblest thoughts of Him 
 are in the same proportion leavened and debased by pantheistic 
 elements, of which the logical issue is denial of His proper 
 personality. 'This whole,' it had been taught in schools of 
 'orthodox' philosophy, Hhis whole is Brahma, from Brahma 
 to a clod of earth. Brahma is both the efficient and the 
 material cause of the world. He is the potter by whom the 
 fictile vase is formed : He is the clay of which it is fabricated \' 
 Nor, as other phases in the history of Brahmanism present them- 
 selves for our investigation, are evils of this kind corrected and 
 removed. The system in which the freedom of God appeared 
 to be entirely compromised was followed by a subtler form 
 of pantheism, which contended that whatever is resulted from 
 the internal necessities of the Divine nature; so that the idea 
 of God, as known • to Christendom, instead of gaining clearness 
 with the growth of metaphysical acumen, had remained as 
 evanescent and impersonal as before. Men argued that all 
 essences, which underlie the various grades of being and im- 
 part to the material world whatever of reality it may possess, 
 originate in one great Spirit, who is subjected to periodic reso- 
 lution and is periodically reabsorbed in simple unity. Crea- 
 tion, therefore, must be construed still more nakedly as another 
 name for emanation. God Himself is one, because the uni- 
 verse is one m'ighty organism, and all the forms of animated 
 nature, being consubstantial with divinity, or containing in 
 themselves a particle of the all-pervading Spirit, are thereby 
 shielded from the violence of man, or made the fitting objects 
 of his worship. Such is even the theology of portions of the 
 Isa-Upanishad, from which an extract has been given above : 
 and such is also one main tenet of the Bhagavad-Gitd, where, 
 in the midst of efforts to establish the universality of God, the 
 language put into the mouth of the divine interlocutor breathes 
 the sternest kind of pantheism, and pursues the principle of 
 absolute necessity to its furthest and most fearful consequences. 
 2. But granting that relations between God and matter 
 are not always so far misinterpreted ; granting that some higher 
 
 ^ "Wilson, Ibid. p. 49 ; and above, bears true existence excepting God ; ' 
 
 p. 139; although, as Prof. Wilson and the phrase * Whatever we smell 
 
 justly remarks, the full extent of or taste is the Supreme Being' 
 
 these materialistic illustrations may as equivalent to *The existence 
 
 not have been intended. Eammo- of whatever thing appears to us 
 
 hun Eoy, as before, p. 12, explains relies on the existence of God.' 
 
 the phrase *A11 that exists is in- But surely this refinement is exces- 
 
 deed God ' as equivalent to ' Nothing sive. 
 
190 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 thoughts than such as we have just reviewed were struggling 
 here and there for utterance through the pantheistic terminology 
 of Brahmanism ; granting that the unity of which it speaks 
 is something more than I^ature^, as traced backwards to its 
 primary germ and basis by a generalising process of the in- 
 tellect, or Nature, as idealised and deified by the poetic faculty 
 of the worshipper; granting, also, that tbe current dogmas, 
 with regard to the great Spirit of the universe, are sometimes 
 capable of interpretations which do not of necessity exclude 
 the thought of His self-consciousness and independent person- 
 ality ; how poor are, notwithstanding, the most elevated of 
 Hindu conceptions as compared with that which has, in every 
 age, been printed on the heart of Christians and of Hebrews ! 
 There the Author of the universe, as represented by philo- 
 sophy, is so unknown, so abstract, so incapable of definition, 
 so devoid of everything that constitutes a bond of sympathy 
 with created beings, as to exercise no power on the direction 
 of the human will or the formation of the human character. 
 ISTo man is able to hold converse with the Absolute; no deva, 
 can describe the being or mark out the path of the Ineffable. 
 The thought of Him inspires not confidence and hope, but 
 awe, distrust, and apprehension. He has no paternal cha- 
 racter^. The world and the affairs of men may all indeed be 
 subject to fixed laws which had their origin in Him, but no 
 account is taken by this doctrine of the providence by which 
 He regulates the course of individuals and the destinies of 
 nations. Much less are men regarded as the objects of His 
 love and pity, as the wanderers He would fain recover from 
 their blind infatuation, as the prodigals whom He is ever 
 yearning to reclaim and elevate, to pardon and renew. Belief 
 in the Supreme God is therefore with such persons barely 
 speculative : it does not warm the heart ; it does not quicken 
 the religious sentiment ; it does not foster gratitude ; it is not 
 perfected by love. The Brahma of the Hindu schoolman still 
 
 1 Yet Wuttke (ii. 262) is indis- of * Christian monotheism* and 
 
 posed to grant more than this : * Hindti naturalism. ' 
 
 'Das Brahma, 'he writes, 'istnichts ^ ^ee CiewzeT'^ Symholih,!. 171, 
 
 als die auf ihre Eiaheit zuriickge- 172, Leipzig, 1836, on the difference 
 
 fuhrte Natur, das Natur-Eins, die between the Christian and heathen 
 
 einheitliche Grundlage aller natur- use of the word 'Father 'as applied 
 
 lichen Dinge, ist nicht mehr und to God. 'Wenn der Christ seinen 
 
 nicht weniger.' When Christianity, Gott Vater nennt so ist es unge- 
 
 as he contends, was brought into theiltes Vertrauen, was ihm dieses 
 
 communication with Hinduism, the Wort eingiebt. Der Christ kennt 
 
 resulting idea of God was a mixture seinen Gott.' 
 
CHAP. II.] Hinduism and Revealed Eeligion, 191 
 
 continues a great It, a vast but cold abstraction, shewing little 
 or no interest in the world and in the fortunes of his human 
 progeny, or at the best receding far beyond the cognizance 
 of ordinary spirits. Hence it has resulted that the great ma- 
 jority of Hindus have always, during the historic period, sub- 
 stituted for the one true God a host of demi-gods and other 
 parasitical divinities, like those which crowd their pantheon 
 at the present day. Each group they have invested with some 
 one or other of the attributes of God, and made supreme in 
 some one province of creation. These are held to exei-cise on 
 man the personal government which seemed unworthy of the 
 abstract Brahma, or entirely foreign to His nature. These, 
 it is maintained, are still accessible to mortals ; these can listen 
 to the prayer and quaff the grateful sacrifice ; these punish or 
 reward according to the quality of actions ; and whatever there- 
 fore of religious sentiment is now evoked in the great mass 
 of Hindu worshippers, is not so much the issue of half-con- 
 scious gropings after the Unknown God, whose image is not 
 utterly obliterated from the human spirit, as a tribute con- 
 sciously and freely paid to those who are 'no gods.' 
 
 Before passing to another division of the subject, I cannot 
 help remarking how completely the internal character of the 
 doctrines here compared unites itself with different kinds of 
 evidence in shewing that if Brahmanism and Christianity have 
 borrowed from each other, the obligation is upon the side of 
 India, not of Palestine : for while many traits of the scriptural 
 ideal of God can never be explained by reference to Brahmanic 
 speculations, nothing pure or noble is distinguishable in the 
 latter, which might not have been derived from more explicit 
 statements of the former. I incline, however, to the inter- 
 mediate view already urged by St. Augustine in his contro- 
 versy with the Manichseans of his day : 'Be it known,' he 
 writes, Ho Faustus, or those rather who are charmed by his 
 productions, that our doctrine of divine Monarchy is not bor- 
 rowed from the heathen, but that, on the other hand, the 
 heathen themselves had not so wholly lapsed into the worship 
 of false gods as to relinquish all belief in the one True God, 
 from whom is every order of created being \' 
 
 § 2. Hindu Trinities, or Triads. 
 
 It is difficult to understand how any one, w^hose judgment 
 was not clouded by some theory of his own respecting the 
 
 ^ Contra Faustum, lib. xx. c. 19: 0pp. vm. 345, ed. Bened. 
 
192 Christ and other Masters. [part IL 
 
 extent of the primeval revelation, or who on the other hand 
 was not desirous at all hazards to impair the sacred character of 
 Christianity, could ever have adduced the Hindu triad as the 
 parallel of that transcendant mystery which forms the basis of 
 the Catholic faith. Sir William Jones, who commonly shewed 
 himself as eager- as the rest of his contemporaries to detect the 
 slighest shadows of affinity between the Bible and the sacred 
 books of India, was in this case strenuous in denying the reality 
 of the alleged resemblances \ And fresh investigations have 
 completely justified the verdict of that eminent critic. The 
 trimilTrti of India, which eventually is represented under the 
 symbol of a body with three heads, has no foundation in the 
 Vedas^, nor have any traces of it been discovered in the Laws 
 of Manu. It was clearly the production of a later age, — an 
 age when thoughtful persons, anxious to regain their hold on 
 the idea of unity, began to study all the various processes of 
 physical life, and to reduce them into three kinds or phases, 
 generation, preservation, and destruction^. Each of these was 
 deemed the efflux of a special energy, and Brahma, Yishiiu, and 
 Siva were selected as the verbal representatives of natural 
 causes contemplated in their three-fold character. So long as 
 the idea of God as one, supreme, and personal was consciously 
 preserved, those titles would not necessarily issue in impiety. 
 Men felt that Brahma, the Ineffable, whose proper dwelling is 
 in gloom and silence, had notwithstanding made a revelation of 
 Himself in nature, and that under three ideal forms expressing 
 His distinctive operations in that province, men were able to 
 conceive of Him and pay Him adoration. 
 
 But however this may be, it is quite certain that ere long 
 the physical attributes of God, as the Creator, the Preserver, 
 
 1 Asiatic Researches^ i. 273. He rites de notre religion, et les tradi- 
 
 complained that missionaries, in tions de I'ecriture.' On the con- 
 
 tiieir zeal for the conversion of the trary, a learned Jewish "writer, 
 
 natives, had been foolish enough to Philippsohn, Development of the 
 
 urge that ' the Hindtis were even Beligious Idea, p. 1 56, has pointed 
 
 now almost Christians, because out that the 'trinitarian Godhead 
 
 their Brahma, Vishnu and Mah^sa of Christianity' differs from all other 
 
 rSiva] were no other than the Chris- triads in being 'exclusively and 
 
 tian Trinity.' One of these mis- wholly good; whereas m heathen- 
 
 sionaries was the Jesuit Bouchet, ism one of the three divme powers 
 
 who in the words of Chateaubriand was conceived to be opposed to 
 
 {Genie du Christianisme, v. 10) sent the ^other two, the prmciple of 
 
 home a number of most curious evil.' 
 
 details *sur le rapport des fables ^ See above, p. 134, n. i. 
 
 indiennes avec les principales vc- ^ Above, pp. 140, 141. 
 
CHAP. II.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 193 
 
 the Destroyer, were so rigorously personified, that they not only 
 superseded the more elemental of the Yaidic deities, but prac- 
 tically excluded from men's thoughts the personality of God 
 Himself. Brahm£, for instance, who in theory constituted the 
 first link of some grand chain of emanations, was eventually 
 saluted^ as the 'great creator,' the * father of the universe,' the 
 * founder and the governor of all things : ' while other epithets, 
 no less exalted and as plainly inconsistent with belief in unity, 
 were gradually transferred by similar processes to Siva and 
 Yishilu. These three together represented everything that was 
 divine ; all other objects in the pantheon were reducible to 
 these, and were held to be new phases of the three superior 
 gods. 'The deities are only three,' says a high authority^ of 
 Brahmanism, 'whose places are the earth, the intermediate 
 region, and heaven ; viz. fire, air, and the sun. They are pro- 
 nounced to be [the deities] of the mysterious names severally ; 
 and Prajdpati, the Lord of the creatures, is [the deity] of them 
 collectively. The syllable Om intends every deity. It belongs 
 to Parameshthi, him, who dwells in the supreme abode ; it 
 appertains to Brahma, the vast one ; to Deva, God ; to Ad- 
 hydtmd, the superintending soul. Other deities belonging to 
 these several regions are portions of the [three] Gods ; for they 
 are variously named and described, on account of their diflferent 
 operations : but [in fact] there is only one Deity, the Great 
 Soul (Mahdn-Atmdy This passage, interesting on other ac- 
 counts, will more especially enable us to realise the thought 
 which underlies all seeming inconsistencies in statements of 
 difierent Hindu writers respecting the essential character of the 
 members of their sacred tiiad. Brahma, Yishiiu, and Siva are 
 deemed worthy of the highest honour, and in act have been so 
 worshipped, because they gather up and place before the wor- 
 shipper everything that he can possibly know of God ; yet all 
 the while they are, as to their essence, creatures^ separable from 
 
 ^ Wuttk«, II. 269 sq. is without beginning or end, un- 
 
 2 Quoted by Colebrooke in^siaf. I'ormed, and uncreated; worship 
 Res. viii. 395 sq. and adore Him.' The writer then 
 
 3 The following passage is very explains that worship is paid to 
 explicit : ' You are not to consider inferior deities in order that men's 
 Vishnu, Brahm^, and Mah^deva ' minds may be composed, and con- 
 (Siva), and other incorporate beings ducted, by degrees, to the essential 
 as the Deity, although they have Unity.' Quoted in Lord Teign- 
 each of them the denomination of mouth's Life of Sir Win. Jones, 11. 
 Deva, or divine. They are all 284, 8vo. ed. 
 
 created ; while the Supreme Being 
 
 k 
 
194 Christ and other Masters. [part lu 
 
 Brahma, differing iii degree but not in nature from the members 
 of the human species, and all destined to eventual reabsorption 
 like other finite beings. Hence also, as the consequence of this 
 conception, each of them is represented in the ancient books of 
 India accompanied by a wife (sakti), who forms the counterpart 
 of his own energies^ ; Saras wati reflecting the peculiar powers 
 of Brahma, Lakshml of Vishnu, and Parvati of Siva. 
 
 It were needless to point out in detail how this Hindu triad 
 differs from the Catholic doctrine of the Holy Trinity, — that, 
 I mean, for which the primitive Church had never ceased to 
 struggle with the utmost jealousy^ when assaulted by a host of 
 l^agan theories on the right hand and the left. The opposition 
 between such doctrines is entire and fundamental. The germ 
 of the Christian Trinity is not discoverable in any or in all the 
 processes of physical nature. The actual development of the 
 idea is neither tritheistic nor Sabellian. Christians have indeed 
 been ever constant in maintaining the grand principle of the 
 divine Monarchy. They believe in one only True God, one 
 starting-point, one Head, one dpxVy one original, supreme and 
 indivisible Essence. They believe, accordingly, that while the 
 Godhead of the Father is entirely independent, and of none, the 
 God ead of the Second Person in the blessed Trinity is derived, 
 — derived from all eternity, by the communication to Him of 
 the Godhead of the Father : and a similar remark is applicable 
 to the mode in which the Third Person has eternally coexisted 
 in that infinite Being. They believe, in other words, that the 
 Divine essence, though incapable of multiplication, was not 
 absolutely sterile, yea rather, that in virtue of its communi- 
 cability, those three transcendent and profound relations have 
 arisen which justify the titles Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 
 
 On the other hand, all Catholic Christians have maintained 
 with equal firmness that as each of the Three Personalities is 
 properly Divine, so each must be regarded as the subject of 
 attributes, as one distinct and personal Agent. The Word of 
 God, for instance, is no simple quality, constituting one person 
 with the Father ; as a man together with his faculties is said 
 to form one human subject. Neither is the Son of God a 
 
 ^ See Stuhr, i. loo, Wuttke, ii. sent the Persons of the Holy 
 
 270: and cf. above, p. 124, n. I. Trinity as created intelligences: 
 
 2 Thus St. Athanasius, Contra 'AXX' ovk av dvaaxoiT^ tlz Xpicmavoii' 
 
 Arianos, Oratio 11. (0pp. i. 325, twu tolovtwv alpeTLKWv' 'EW-jvup 
 
 Colon. 1686) protests with his yap tdia ravra, ware yevTp-rjv eladyeLr 
 
 wonted vehemence against the ten- TpLci^a, /cat tois yevrjTOis airijv ffutfe^- 
 
 dency of the pagan mind to repre- icrdj^Lv, k. r. X, 
 
CHAP. II.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion, 195 
 
 deified intelligence, exalted far above the level of his fellows, 
 and entrusted with the joint administration of the universe. 
 However much these views of Christ and of His Person may 
 be advocated here and there by the professing Christian, they 
 differ toto codo from the principles inherited by early saints and 
 martyrs ; for otherwise the opposition offered to the Gospel by 
 the pagan scoffer and half-pagan heretic would be utterly inex- 
 pKcable. 
 
 No greater resemblance will again be found between the 
 Christian Trinity and some ideal combinations which arise from 
 time to time in systems of Hindu philosophy. One of these 
 appears to have been prompted by a wish of later Sankhyas to 
 get rid of the Brahmanical triad, and replace it by a something 
 more in harmony with their own peculiar speculations. They 
 accordingly affirmed^ that buddhi, or intelligence, the second in 
 order of their ^principles,' became distinctly known as three 
 gods, by the agency of the three Equalities;' and was thus to 
 be esteemed ' one person' (murrti) distributed in * three devas,' 
 or, in other words, Brahma, Yishriu, and Siva. 
 
 Buddhism, in like manner, had in later times put forth its 
 own peculiar triad. Intelligence, the first principle, was in the 
 monasteries of Nep^l associated with Dharma, th6 principle of 
 matter; while a mediating power, or Sangga, was combined 
 with the two others in order to secure their union and har- 
 monious co-operation^. But this latter class of triads will more 
 fitly come before us, on proceeding to examine^ what is called 
 
 ^ Colebrooke,Essais,ed.Pauthier, times in the habit of grouping 
 
 pp. 17, 18. three objects of worship together; 
 
 2 Cf. Cunningham {Bhilsa Topes, e.<7.S^kya-muni,his next predecessor, 
 
 PP- 35> 36; p. 35^; Lond. 1854), and his next successor (IM^. p. 40), 
 
 who traces back this triad as far On Egyptian and other triads, see 
 
 asB. c. 247. Schott Vher den Bud- Wilkinson, 2nd series, i. 185 sq. ; 
 
 dhaismus in Hochasien, pp. 39, 40) and Bunsen's protest *in the name 
 
 has some interesting revelations of philosophy' against the abuse of 
 
 on this subject. The three most the word; Egypt's jplacein Universal 
 
 precious things in the estimation History, i. 365. 
 of Buddhists are Sakya-muni, his ^ In the meantime I refer the 
 
 religion {DJiarma), and the com- reader to C. Morgan's able Investi- 
 
 munity of religious men (Sangga). gation of the Trinity of Plato, d:c.y 
 
 *Unter Dharma und Sangga ver- who, in treating of the Cathohc 
 
 steht man im ganzen buddhaisti- doctrine of the Holy Trinity, re- 
 
 schen Hochasien und eben so in marks (pp. 154, 155, Camb. 1853): 
 
 China heine mit Buddha eins aus- *But the cultivators of human 
 
 machenden Personen oder seinem wisdom appear to have been total 
 
 Wesen emanirten Krafte.* Still the strangers to it, till it was disclosed 
 
 Buddhists of those regions are some- to them by a teacher of philosophy, 
 
 13—2 
 
196 Christ and other Masters, [part u. 
 
 the * Platonic trinity/ a doctrine which has often since the days 
 of Plotirms been put forward as subversive of the loftier claims 
 of Christianity. 
 
 § 3. Hindu avataras, or incarnations, especially that of 
 Krishna. 
 
 A remark which I have made already in allusion to the 
 Hindu triads may as safely be extended to the Hindu theory 
 of incarnations. That theory again has no existence either in 
 the Yedas\ or the Laws of Manu^. It is, therefore, a develop- 
 ment, or rather I should say, an aftergrowth, of which no 
 trace appears until we reach a later stage in the religious 
 history of Hindustan. There was, however, a clear tendency 
 in the direction of this dogma, when philosophers had once 
 begun to realize the principle of emanation ; for if all created 
 beings had within them particles of Divinity, it was easy to 
 believe that heroes, v/hether physical or moral, had been gifted 
 with so large a share of the divine, that God might, without 
 impropriety, be said to dwell in them, to speak in them, to 
 use them as material instruments whereby His purposes were 
 carried out. 
 
 The name of avatdra, or descent, has been, however, for 
 the most part limited to certain manifestations of Yishnu, 
 the second member of the mythological triad, who is made 
 to vindicate his character as god and guardian of humanity, 
 or as a middle-term between the powers of generation and de- 
 struction, by stepping down from his celestial dwelling-place 
 for the deliverance of the earth at large, or for the special 
 benefit of his worshippers. The avatdixis of this class are ten 
 in number. First of all Yishnu is represented as inhabiting 
 the shape of an enormous fish, by which a remnant of the 
 human family was rescued from a general deluge ; secondly, 
 as incarnate in a tortoise, by whose help the devas were enabled 
 to manufacture for themselves a new elixir, or ambrosia, which 
 imparted immortality; thirdly, in a boar, which, when the 
 earth was carried by a demon to the bottom of the sea, dived 
 
 [Plotinns], who had been educated fables of Pagan mythology.' 
 
 ill the bosom of Christianity. Then, ^ Above, p. 134, n. 3. 
 
 and not till then, they used it as a ^ Vishnu is only once noticed in 
 
 key to unlock the abstract subtilties this ancient code (Bk. xii. § 121), 
 
 of Plato, and to throw a decent veil and then as a divinity of inferior 
 
 over the extravagant and Ucentious rank. 
 
CHAP. II.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 197 
 
 down and rescucid it ; and then advancing, in tlie fourth place, 
 to the highest order of animal life, and clothing himself with 
 attributes more terrible and avenging, he appears as Nara- 
 singha, the 'Man- Lion/ The fifth incarnation, that of Yamana, 
 the Dwarf, exhibits him rather in the light of a diplomatist, 
 who had recovered for the devas the possession of the Hhree 
 worlds' when they were conquered by the demon Bali. 
 
 We shall see hereafter that the earliest of these legends 
 was not destitute of all historic basis, and others, as the second, 
 tliird, and fourth, and possibly the fifth, are equally susceptible 
 of such an explanation. The tenth, or Kalki avatdra \ is be- 
 lieved to be still future, pointing to some fearful crisis, when 
 Vishnu, in human form, and seated on a 'white horse,' shall 
 give the signal for extinguishing this visible universe. The 
 four remaining avatar as (the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth) 
 are all so far historical, that a real basis for them is discover- 
 able in the annals of the Aryan conflicts, either with the 
 savage aborigines of the Peninsula, or with other foes of the 
 Brahmanical religion ^ Vishnu, in every case, is thought to 
 be incarnate in the person of some sage or hero ; he struggles 
 with malignant spirits, whether men or demons, and having 
 rescued his own followers from their grasp, recedes again into 
 the sphere of absolute divinity. 
 
 But one of these remarkable incarnations, that of Krishna, 
 or the eighth of the foregoing series, will demand a fuller in- 
 vestigation, not only as the leading member of a group, but 
 also as peculiar in its characteristics^, and presenting many 
 ob^dous points of similarity to incidents recorded in our 
 Gospels. 
 
 In the earlier avaidras, Vishnu is said to have emitted only 
 
 1 Cf. Kev. vi. 8, which intimates Wilson, pp. 336 sq. 
 
 the Christian origin of this legend. ^ Krishna- worship, according to 
 
 It will be considered again in Chap. M. Pavie, Bhagavat Dasam Askand, 
 
 III. ^ Pref. p. xi. (Paris 1852) is *le plus 
 
 2 For instance, the startling phe- mod erne de tons les systemes phi- 
 nomena of Buddhism were finally losophiques et religieux qui ont 
 explained by some of its Br^hmani- partagd I'lnde en sectes rivales. 
 cal opponents on the supposition Bas^ sur la theorie des incarnations 
 that Gautama Buddha was an illu- successives que n'admettaient ni le 
 Bory form emitted from the sub- V^da, ni les legislateurs de la pre- 
 stance of Vishnu (the ninth in mi^reepoquebrahmanique,lekrich- 
 the series), and that his mission naisme differe sur taut de points 
 really was to deceive and so destroy des croyances particulieres k I'lnde, 
 the Daityas, or lower classes, who qu'on a dte tentd de le consid6rer 
 from their ascetic habits had grown comme un emprunt fait aux philoso- 
 too powerful : see Vishnu Fur, ed. phies et aux religions ^trangdres.* 
 
198 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 a portion (ansa) of his godhead, and so to have established an 
 imperfect relation with the forms of animal and human life ; 
 bat Krishna, on the contrary, reflected the most glorious image 
 of the god of preservation. The god himself was actually in- 
 carnate ; he descended as a real man upon the theatre of human- 
 ity, while claiming for himself the attributes of the Supreme 
 Being, with whom he is identified. The first example of this 
 great conception meets us in the pages of the Bhagavad-Gitd, in 
 which the poet makes him speak as follows^ : ^Even though I 
 am unborn, of changeless essence, and the lord also of all which 
 exist, yet, in presiding over nature {prakriti), which is mine, I 
 am born by my own mystic power {may a). For whenever there 
 is a relaxation of duty, O son of Bharata ! and an increase of 
 impiety, I then reproduce myself for the protection of the good, 
 and the destruction of evildoers. I am produced in every age 
 for the purpose of establishing duty.' But although the name 
 of Krishna and the groundwork of his legend were thus fully 
 apprehended at an early period, it was only in the course of 
 ages that Krishnaism was able to embody itself into a sect^, 
 and only after further intervals that the legend was invested 
 with the fulness and luxuriance which it manifests in the 
 Puranas,^ — documents belonging to what is termed the * re- 
 naissance of Brahmanism,' i. e. a period not earlier than the 
 eighth, nor later than the twelfth century of the Christian era. 
 I subjoin an extract of the legend'* as derived from these 
 
 ^ Chap. IV. (p, 30, ed. Thomson). balancingthe influence of Buddhism 
 
 Elsewhere Krishna is represented at the time when it was threatening 
 
 as the Lord of the world, the to become universal in the Penin- 
 
 Creator, the 'Lord of Brahm^, sula. 
 Vishnu and Siva : ' Wuttke, 11. 339. ^ See the Vishnu Purdna as edited 
 
 2 Elphinstone, Hist, of India, p. by Prof. Wilson, and the Bhdgavat- 
 
 102, 3rd ed., places the formation Pourdha, as edited by M. Burnouf. 
 
 of all the sects, which are founded As all this class of writings are 
 
 on the worship of particular incar- thoroughly sectarian in their cha- 
 
 nations, later than the beginning racter, they must have originated 
 
 of the 8th century of the Christian after the growth of the rival sects 
 
 era: and Colebrooke {As. Res. viii. into which Brahmanism was at 
 
 495) believes, that the 'worship of length divided; and the general 
 
 Eama and of Crishna by the Vaish- opinion now is that no Pur^h, as 
 
 navas, and that of Mahadeva and it now exists, can claim the high 
 
 Bhavani by the Saivas and Sactas, antiquity which was formerly as- 
 
 have been generally introduced since signed to it (Lassen, i. 479 sq.). 
 the persecution of the Bauddhas ^ In Mr. Thomson's edition of 
 
 andJainas.' Lassen, in like manner the Bhagavad-Gitd, pp. 134 sq. A 
 
 {Ind. Alt. II. 446), considers that longer summary will be found in 
 
 prominence was given to Krishna- M. Pavie's edition of the Bhagavat 
 
 worship in the hope of counter- Dasam Askand, Pref. pp. xxxiv. sq. 
 
CHAP. II.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion, 199 
 
 sources by a recent hand with no unfriendly or polemical 
 object : 
 
 "The king of the Daityas or aborigines, Ahuka, had two sons, 
 Devaka and Ugrasena. The former had a daughter named Devakl, the 
 latter a son called Kansa. Devakl [the divine) was married to a nobleman 
 of ihe Aryan race named Yasudeva (or Anakadundubhi), the son of Sfira, 
 a descendant of Yadu, and by him had eight sons. Vasudeva had also 
 another wife named Eohinf. Kansa, the cousin of Devaki, was informed 
 by the saint and prophet N^rada, that his cousin would bear a son, w^ho 
 would kill him and overthrow his kingdom. Kansa was king of Mathura, 
 and he captured Vasudeva and his wife Devakl, imprisoned them in his 
 own palace, set guards over them, and slew the six children whom Devakl 
 had already borne. She was now about to give birth to the seventh, 
 who was Balar^ma, the playfellow of Krishna, and, like him, supposed 
 to be an incarnation of Vishnu; but by divine agency, the child was 
 transferred before birth to the womb of Vasudeva' s other wife, Eohinl, 
 who was still at liberty, and was thus saved. Her eighth child was 
 Krishna, who was born at midnight, with a very black skin\ and a 
 peculiar curl of the hair called the Srivatsa, resembling a Saint Andrew's 
 cross, on his breast. The gods now interposed to preserve the life of 
 this favoured baby from Kansa's vigilance, and accordingly lulled the 
 guards of the palace to sleep with the Yoga-nidra, or mysterious slumbei. 
 Taking the infant, its father Vasudeva stole out undiscovered as far as 
 the Yamun^ or Jumna, river, which seems to have been the boundary 
 between the Aryans and the aborigines. This he crossed, and on the 
 other side found the cart and team of a nomad Aryan cowherd, called 
 Nanda, whose wife, Yashod^, had by strange coincidence just been 
 delivered of a female child. Vasudeva, warned of this by divine admo- 
 nition, stole to her bedside, and placing Krishna by her, re-crossed 
 the river, and re-entered the palace, with the female baby of Yashod^ 
 in his arms, and thus substituted it for his own son. When Kansa 
 discovered the cheat, he for a while gave up the affair, and set the 
 prisoners at liberty, but ordered all male children to be put to death. 
 Vasudeva then entrusted Krishna to the care of Nanda, the cowherd, 
 who took him to the village of Gokula, or Vraja, and there brought 
 him up. Here Krishna, and his elder brother Balar^ma, who joined 
 him, wandered about together as children, and evinced their divine 
 character by many unruly pranks of surprising strength, such as 
 kicking over the cart, which served as conveyance and domicile to Nanda 
 and his family. The female Daitya Ptitan^ was sent to suckle him, but 
 the refractory baby, discovering the trick, showed his gratitude by 
 slaying her. Later in life he vanquished the serpent Kaliya in the 
 middle of the Yamun^ (Jumna) river. A demon, Arishta, assuming 
 the form of a bull; another, Keshin, that of a horse; and a third, 
 K^lanemi, all undertook to destroy the boy, but each fell victims to his 
 superhuman strength. Krishna now incited Nanda and the cowherds 
 to abandon the worship of Indra, and to adopt that of the cows, which 
 
 ^ Krishna, as an adjective, means guised. Each word grows naturally 
 
 simply black, which ought at once out of the character of the personage 
 
 to dispose of the vulgar cavil that with whom it is associated. 
 XPI'<tt6s is Krishna slightly dis- 
 
200 Christ and other Masters, [part II. 
 
 supported them, and the mountains, which afforded them pasturage. 
 Indra, incensed at the loss of his offerings, opened the gates of heaven 
 upon the whole race, and would have deluged them, had not our hero 
 plucked up the mountain Govarddhana, and held it as a substantial 
 umbrella above the land. He soon took to repose from his labours, 
 End amused himself with the Gopis, or shepherdesses, of whom he 
 married seven or eight, among whom Kadhd, was the favourite, and 
 to whom he taught the round dance called Rdsa-y or Mandala-nrityam. 
 Meanwhile Kansa had not forgotten the prophecies of N^rada. He 
 invited the two boys, Krishna and Balardma, to stay with him at 
 Mathura; they accepted, and went. At the gates, Kansa's washerman 
 insulted Krishna, who slew him, and dressed himself in his yellow clothes. 
 He afterwards slew Kansa himself, and placed his father Ugrasena on the 
 throne. A foreign king of the K^layavana (Indo- Scythian) race soon 
 invaded the Yadu, or Aryan, territory, whereupon Krishna built and fortified 
 the town of Dw^raka, in Guzerat, and thither transferred the inhabitants 
 of Mathur^. He afterwards married Satyabhdma, daughter of Satr^jit, 
 and carried off Eukmini, daughter of Bhlshmaka. His harem numbered 
 sixty thousand wives, but his progeny was limited to eighteen thousand 
 sons. When afterwards on a visit to Indra's heaven, he behaved, at 
 the persuasion of his wife, Satyabham^, in a manner very unbecoming a 
 guest, by stealing the famous Parijata tree, which had been produced 
 at the churning of the ocean, and was then thriving in Indra's garden. 
 A contest ensued, in which KJrishna defeated the gods, and carried off 
 the sacred tree. At another time, a female Daitya, Ush^, daughter of 
 Bana, carried off Krishna's grandson, Aniruddha. His grandfather, 
 accompanied by E^ma, went to the rescue, and though B^na was 
 defended by Siva and Skanda, proved victorious. Paundraka, one of 
 Vasudeva's family, afterwards assumed his title and insignia, supported 
 by the king of Benares. Krishna hurled his flaming discus (chakra) at 
 this city, and thus destroyed it. He afterwards exterminated his own 
 tribe, the Yadavas. He himself was killed by a chance shot from a 
 hunter. He is described as having curly black hair, as wearing a club 
 or mace, a sword, a flaming discus, a jewel, a conch, and a garland. 
 His charioteer is Satyaki, his city, Dwaraka; his heaven, Goloka." 
 
 The reader will not fail to notice in this legend more than 
 one exact coincidence with circumstances in the human history 
 of our blessed Lord. Remote as are the main ideas which it 
 embodies from the principles of Holy Writ, there is sufficient 
 also of external correspondence to account for the alacrity with 
 which the modern infidel has seized upon the tale of Krishna, 
 • and has tortured it into an argument against the truth of 
 Christianity. Nor has the abstract I have just been quotiug 
 brought before us every minor point ^ in which the incidents of 
 the Gospel are supposed to be as clearly visible. Other versions 
 of the Krishna-legend tell us how, in addition to the marvellous 
 birth at midnight, choirs of devatas, resembliug the angelic host 
 
 1 See a pointed summary of these in Maurice's Hist, of HindHstdn^ 
 
 11. 222, 223, Lond. 1820. 
 
CiHAP. II.] Hinduism; and Revealed Religion. 201 
 
 of Bethlehem, saluted the divine infant as soon as he was born. 
 They give still greater prominence to the massacre of the inno- 
 cents by Kansa, and his failing to secure possession of the child 
 by whom he was at last to be supplanted. They narrate how, 
 in the train of miracles that follow this deliverance, the young 
 hero, to the great amazement of his parents and a troop of 
 cowherds by whom he was attended, overcame the serpent 
 Kaliya, and trampled on its head ; while of particular acts 
 ascribed to him in after-years by the compilers of the more 
 expanded version of the story, the cleansing of lepers, the 
 raising of the dead, his own descending to the world invisible 
 and reascending to the proper paradise of Yishnu, are not the 
 least conspicuous. 
 
 It is true indeed that not a few of these minute resemblances 
 to sacred history, if taken one by one, have also parallels in 
 other realms of heathendom, and therefore may be possibly 
 explained as merely outward and fortuitous, or else as borrow- 
 ing their chief force from arbitrary combinations and the spe- 
 cious and deceptive colouring under which we are accustomed 
 to present them. Two or three examples from Greek writers 
 will best illustrate my meaning. If Krishna was violently per-, 
 secuted in his infancy, it might be answered, so was Hercules 
 exposed to the implacable rage of Juno. If Krishna, in his 
 triumphs, comes before us crowned with flowers and at the 
 head of dancing milkmaids and intoxicated satyrs, the descrip- 
 tion will apply to Bacchus also. If Krishna, veiling his divin- 
 ity, is said to have been concealed beneath the roof of Nanda, 
 the cowherd, Apollo, in like manner, acted like an ordinary 
 mortal when he sought a shelter in the household of Admetus. 
 Or again, if Krishna is to be regarded as a purely human and 
 historical hero, doomed to death in childliood from forebodings 
 that his life would prove the ruin of another, we can find his 
 parallel in the elder Cyrus, who had also been entrusted to the 
 care of herdsmen, to preserve him from the vengeance of his 
 royal grandfather, whose death it was foretold he should even- 
 tually accomplish. 
 
 Yet in placing these analogies before the reader, as suggest- 
 ing to one class of minds a possible medium for explaining the 
 resemblances which form the subject of our investigation, I am 
 willing to admit that such a method does not give what seems 
 to me a satisfactory account of all the parallels in question, 
 more especially when we include the minor topics furnished by 
 more ample versions of the Krishna-legend. Many of these, I 
 grant, might have been accidental ; but all can scarcely be so 
 
202 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 treated, without violence to probability and ordinary experience. 
 If then we adopt the theory of external intercourse as furnishing 
 the simplest and most adequate explanation of the present phe- 
 nomena, it must follow either that Christianity has borrowed 
 from Hinduism or Hinduism from Christianity. 
 
 Now the former supposition is at once repudiated by the 
 fact that our doctrine of the Incarnation and Messiahship of 
 Christ is perfectly original in itself and perfectly consistent with 
 the language of the Hebrew prophets. Even the astounding 
 incidents of the Saviour's childhood, which are thought to be 
 most nearly related to the Krishna-legend, are proved, in our 
 own Gospels, to have been foretold by men who flourished long 
 before the Brahman had begun to dream of avatdras: and with 
 reference to the Promise generally, its form was thoroughly 
 Hebrew, interwoven from first to last with the exalted destinies 
 of Abraham and David, pointing ever with a firmer hand and 
 larger measure of illumination to the wondrous facts of Nazareth 
 and Bethlehem, foreshadowing the persecutions which befel the 
 Man of Sorrows as the necessary precondition of the ' glory that 
 should follow;' and in all the course of this mysterious evolu- 
 tion, blending with itself no heterogeneous or extrinsic element, 
 much less an element originating on the far-off borders of the 
 Yamuna, and in the cloister of some Brahman devotee. 
 
 But if the character of our Messianic doctrine be thus singu- 
 lar and self-consistent, and if all attempts to draw it out of 
 foreign sources are discovered to be futile, what are we to think 
 of the other hypothesis, according to which the Krishna-legend 
 is indebted for at least a portion of its richness and embellish- 
 ment to influences difliised by Christianity 1 Can we ofier any 
 adequate explanation of the Christian elements in Krishnaism, 
 by supposing that there was an actual intercourse of some kind 
 or other between the two religions ^ 
 
 To answer this question, we must distinguish, in the first place, 
 between Krishna considered as an ancient hero, and the Krishna 
 who is ultimately said to be identical with the Supreme Being, 
 and the leading member in a system of religion and philosophy. 
 Now that Krishna, though unnoticed in the very oldest 
 literature of India, may have already figured as a local hero in 
 the period preceding the Great War, and subsequently, as the 
 Hercules of the Panjab, may have attracted to himself the 
 reverence of his fellow-countrymen, are suppositions by no 
 means imi^robable. The allusion of Megasthenes^ to some such 
 
 1 Megasthenis/AicZica,ed.Schwan- drj-iujv y-rjv re koI edXarrav: cf. 
 beck, p. 290: KaOapdy iroi-qaai, twv Lassen, i. 647, 648. 
 
CHAP. II.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 203 
 
 hero, far surpassing ofclier men in strength of mind and body, 
 and especially distinguished by his zeal in purifying land and 
 water and destroying every form of noxious animal, will bear to 
 be interpreted of Krishna, as well as Balar^ma and the rest, 
 whom popular superstition had exalted far above the rank of 
 ordinary mortals. Yet this reference of the language has not 
 been suffered to pass on without a challenge^; and other argu- 
 ments, alleged in favour of the high antiquity of Krishna, have 
 been weakened more and more by modern criticism. When, 
 for instance, he was represented as the central object^ of the 
 Mahdhhdrata^ the statement was devoid of all solid basis. The 
 real heroes of that poem are the Panda vas ; and if it be remem- 
 bered that of the 100,000 distichs in the poem only 24,000^ 
 can be shewn to have entered into the original composition ; 
 and further, that the tales relating to Krishna's boyhood, his 
 frolics at Yrindavan, and even his destruction of the Asuras, 
 *have all a modern complexion^' we may fairly doubt if the 
 author of the poem, as it stood at first, knew anything of 
 Krishna beyond his character of hero, prince, or chieftain. 
 This, at least, may be regarded as extremely probable, viz. that 
 the splendid episode (the Bhagavad-Gitd) which made us first 
 acquainted with his claims to superhuman power and dignity, 
 which first identified his being with that of the Supreme, and 
 first brought out distinctly the idea of sympathy with the human 
 species and of periodic births in order to promote their welfare, 
 was composed as late as the third century of the Christian era. 
 It may be inferred accordingly, that all our certaia knowledge 
 respecting Krishna, in the times preceding the diffusion of the 
 
 1 Lassen, in replying to some and was very different from the 
 
 of "Weber's observations (cf. above, Krishna of later times. In the 
 
 p. 1 8 1, n. 6) on the peculiarities of Avat^ra- system the grand peculiar- 
 
 Krishnaism, investigates the origin ity consisted not in the fact that 
 
 of the Avat^ra-system (ii. i io6 sq.), some divinity assumed a human or 
 
 and concludes that the doctrine of animal form, and in it protected 
 
 Vishnu's incarnations was formed and purified the earth, but rather 
 
 at least three centuries before the *dass der Gott aus Mitleid mit der 
 
 Christian era, although the number leidenden, aus Zorn gegen die siin- 
 
 and order of such incarnations dige Menschheit selhst als Mensch 
 
 were first settled at a later period. geboren wird und ein menschhches 
 
 To these arguments Weber has re- Dasein ftihrt.' (p. 411.) 
 
 plied in detail {Ind. Stud. 11. 409 sq. ), 2 gg^^ f^j. instance, Elpbinstone's 
 
 questioning, among other things, India, p. 93, 3rd ed. ; and a rectifi- 
 
 the identity of Krishna with the cation of the statement in Lassen, 
 
 Indian Hercules of Greek writers. i. 488. 
 
 In any case, he argues, this hero ^ Lassen, i. 484, 489. 
 
 or demi-god was no incarnation, in * Wilson, Pre/, to Vishnu Purdna, 
 
 the proper sense of the language, p. Ixxi. and p. 492, note. 
 
204< Clirist and other Masters, [part ii. 
 
 Gospel, is confined to very few particulars. He was, first of all, 
 a man possessed of more than ordinary virtue and intelligence ; 
 and secondly, a hero acting as the leader of the shepherd-chief- 
 tains in his own immediate neighbourhood : and thirdly, a demi- 
 god or emanation, it may be, especially connected with Vishnu, 
 and zealous for the purity and permanence of physical creation. 
 As to the development of this idea and its amalgamation with 
 the higher thoughts propounded in the Bhagavad-GUd, I think 
 them products of external agencies connected with the spread of 
 Christianity. It has been shewn elsewhere how numerous, in 
 the early ages of the Gospel, were the causes predisposing men 
 to interchange religious speculations, and how numerous also 
 were the channels by which intercourse might have been readily 
 effected. I have also quoted ^ the opinion of a critic conspicuous 
 in this field of ancient literature, who maintains that in one of 
 the latest additions to the Mahdhhdrata allusion to such inter- 
 course is clearly traceable, as well as hints of the effect produced 
 by it, in modifying men's ideas of God, and also in impax'ting a 
 fresh form and colour to the Hindu theory of incarnations. Nor 
 is this opinion, in so far as Krishna is concerned, of recent 
 origin. Sir William Jones, whose interest was excited by 
 minute resemblances between the legend of Krishna in its 
 newest form and certain narratives of Holy Writ, attempted to 
 explain the ^ motley story' on the supposition that ' spurious 
 Gospels, which abounded in the first age of Christianity, had 
 been brought to India, and the wildest part of tjiem repeated to 
 the Hindus, who engrafted them on the old fable of Cesava, the 
 Apollo of Greece^.' The same view has, in substance, been 
 adopted by many other scholars^, who have also pointed out 
 that one of the chief media by which Hindu mythographers 
 obtained their knowledge of the early history of our Lord, and 
 the peculiar source from which they borrowed hints for the em- 
 bellishment of their story, was the Evangelium Infantice^, an 
 apocr3rphal writing known originally by the title of ^ Gospel of 
 St. Thomas, ' and, perhaps from a supposed connexion with him, 
 circulated at an early period on the coast of Malabar. It is 
 significant also that this gospel was already current® among 
 heretics, but reprobated by the Church herself, as early as the 
 time of Irenaeus, and was subsequently held in special honour 
 
 1 Above, p. 184, n. i. * Printed in the Codex Apocry* 
 
 2 Asiat, Reser. i. 274. phus^ ed. J. A. Fabricius, i. 127 sq. 
 
 3 e.g. Maurice, Hist, of Hindu- ^ Adversus Hares, lib. i. c. 20, ed. 
 Stan, II. 218 sq. Lond. 1820. Stieren. 
 
CHAP. II.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 205 
 
 by the followers of Mani\ and by other misbelievers like him; 
 their object being, as we know, to blend the creed, the legends, 
 and the institutes of paganism with some of the distinctive 
 elements of supernatural religion. 
 
 But leaving all these questions, as we must do, in compara- 
 tive obscurity, it is important to observe that Krishiiaism, 
 when purged from all the lewd and Bacchanalian adjuncts 
 which disfigure and debase it, comes indefinitely short of Chris- 
 tianity. Regarded in its brighter aspect, it will prove that 
 man is far from satisfied with the prevailing forms of nature- 
 worship, and is struggling to become more conscious of the 
 personality of God, and panting for complete communion with 
 Him. It recognises the idea of God descending to the level of 
 the fallen creature and becoming man^ It welcomes Krishna 
 as one realisation of this great idea, as the hero who was sent to 
 lighten many a burden of pain and misery under which the uni- 
 verse was groaning, as the teacher who alone could save man- 
 kind by pointing out a method of escape from the necessity of 
 repeated births. These yearnings after something higher, purer, 
 and more heavenly, are discernible at intervals amid the very 
 sternest forms of pantheism ; they bear witness, notwithstand- 
 ing all the flagrant contradictions in the system with which 
 they are connected, to a consciousness of moral guilt, as well as 
 to a sense of physical evil ; they give rise to the anticipation, 
 that mankind will ultimately burst the trammels of their adver- 
 sary and be reconciled to God. 
 
 Yet, on the other hand, the dogma of Hindus, when measured 
 by a Christian standard, is but shadowy and unsatisfying. The 
 most perfect incarnation of Yishnu, as found in Krishna, is 
 docetic merely; it rather seems to be than is^. According to 
 the theory of matter, which prevailed among his followers, the 
 Divine and human could not truly come together, and could not 
 pennanently coexist. The one essentially excludes the other. 
 Krishna, therefore, on going back to his celestial home, or, in 
 
 ^ See the 'Testimonia' collected sdvatdra) of the supreme Brahma, 
 
 byFabricius, pp. 133, 136, 138, 140. yet he was in reality 'the very 
 
 In the decree of Pope Gelasius, supreme Brahma.' The comment- 
 
 De lihris apocryphiSj it is called ator adds an observation acknow- 
 
 *Eyangelium nomine Tliomce apos- ledging it to be 'a mystery how the 
 
 toli, quo utuntur Manichaei.' supreme should assume the form 
 
 2 See Wilson's Vishr'm Purdna, of a man.' 
 p. 492, n. 3, where it is explained ^ Dorner (Lehre von der Person 
 
 that although Krishna as to his Christi, i. 7 sq., Stuttgart, 1845) 
 
 human properties and condition has some excellent remarks on this 
 
 was only 'a part of a part' [ansdn- point. 
 
206 Christ and other Masters, [part rr. 
 
 the language of philosophy, on his reabsorption into the Great 
 Spirit of the universe, entirely lays aside the perishable flesh, 
 which he had once inhabited. He quits his human body ; he 
 abandons *the condition of the three-fold qualities;' he unites 
 himself with *his own pure, spiritual, inexhaustible, inconceiv- 
 able, unborn, undecaying, imperishable and universal spirit, 
 which is one with Yasudeva^' In this respect he diJSers alto- 
 gether from the God-man of the Christian Church, — the 
 Mediator in whom Divine and human are completely reconciled, 
 the Meeting-point where earth and heaven, the finite and the 
 Infinite, the personal and Absolute, have coalesced for ever, and 
 are wedded in the bonds of an indissoluble union. And as one 
 result of such imperfect and confused idea, it followed that the 
 blessings said to have been brought by Krishna were not real 
 and abiding : they could only last until the close of one particu- 
 lar age, or period, when the powers of evil, softened and re- 
 pressed, but still, according to this view, incapable of subjuga- 
 tion, would break forth again with irresistible violence, and be 
 everywhere triumphant. It is written in one of the Purdnas : 
 * The day that Krishna shall have departed from the earth will 
 be the first of the Kali age^.' 
 
 ^ Vishnu Fur. ed. Wilson, p. 612. ^ Ibid. p. 487. In like manner 
 
 The death of Krishna is here as- it is stated (p. 486), 'As long as 
 
 cribed to a random shot of the the earth was touched by his sacred 
 
 hunter Jar^ (i. e. infirmity, old age, feet, the Kali age could not affect 
 
 decay). it.' 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 Real Correspondencies between Hinduism and Eevealed 
 Religion. 
 
 * Nulla porro falsa doctrina est, quae non aliqua vera intermisceat.' 
 
 St. Augustinb. 
 
 Unity of the human race. Transmission of religious "knoioledge, Hindu 
 reverence for tradition. Points most likely to he transmitted. 
 
 § I. The 'primitive state of Man. The original pair. Innocence of 
 primeval men. Buddhist legend. Brdhmanical and Buddhist remi- 
 niscences of Paradise, 
 
 § 2. The Fall of Man. General form of the Hindil doctrine. Chrono- 
 logical cycles. More precise traditions of the Brdhmans. Buddhist 
 traditions, Brdhmanical doctrine of the Tempter. The serpent con- 
 sidered as an image of matter generally; as an image of the devil. 
 
 § 3. The Hindu version of the Deluge, Modern form of the legend. 
 Version of the SatapaVha Brdhmana. 
 
 § 4. Hindu rite of sacrifice. Moral insensibility of the Hindus. Brdh- 
 manical sacrifices. Remote antiquity of sacrificial rites. Design of 
 Hindu sacrifices. Propitiatory sacrifices. Hindu conviction of un- 
 worthiness. Sacrifice according to the philosophers. 
 
 § 5. The Hindu hope of restoration. How far an historical Saviour 
 was expected. The Kalki avatar a; its probable origin. 
 
 It has been shewn ' how various but converging arguments, for 
 which we are indebted mainlj to the light of modem science, 
 have all tended to corroborate the scriptural narrative with 
 reference to the common origin of men. Exactly therefore in 
 proportion as this point has been established, it is likely that 
 the different sections of the human family will preserve in their 
 dispersion many an interesting fragment of primeval knowledge, 
 and contribute to the reconstruction of primeval history. If all 
 have radiated from one centre ; if all inherit the same human 
 faculties, and have been actuated by the same peculiar instincts, 
 
 1 Part I. ch. II. 
 
208 Christ and other Masters, [part it. 
 
 we shall be prepared to find, with local variations, and at dif- 
 ferent depths below the surface, many a link of that great chain 
 which girdles the whole globe, and binds humanity together. 
 
 Proofs of common parentage may all indeed have been ob- 
 sciu^ed and weakened by a multitude of disuniting agencies, as 
 climate, isolation, force of character, and the like. Two stories 
 of the ancient world may in the process of transmission have 
 been blended into one. The names of persons may have been 
 entirely lost or hopelessly corrupted. The scene of this or that 
 catastrophe may have been altered for the gratification of indi- 
 vidual caprice or national vanity. A race of simple shepherds, 
 with none of the explicit guidance which is furnished by a 
 written document, may have so magnified, embellished, and 
 confused the stories and traditions of their ancestors, that all 
 the ingenuity of modern criticism will prove unequal to the 
 work of disentangling the historic from the mythic, and of 
 weeding out the genuine from the false. Yet, notwithstanding 
 these formidable obstructions, we are warranted, on the hypo- 
 thesis of unity, in searching every wherCj as far as human steps 
 have wandered, for remains of a substratum of primeval know- 
 ledge ; confident that such remains had once extended on all 
 sides with the extension of the human species, however much 
 they are at present buried and corrupted, broken and displaced. 
 And the tenacity with which the popular mind has ever clung 
 to what is ancient and established, will further justify us in pre- 
 dicting that the many would retain their hold on the original 
 traditions of the Indo- Aryan race, long after the philosopher 
 had ceased to care about them, or provide a place for them in 
 his new system of ethics and religion. 
 
 Let us, then, inquire, as far as may be, whether such hints 
 can be derived from any of the extant documents of India, and 
 more particularly from one class of writings, the Puranic\ 
 which, as meant for the instruction of the people, may be 
 naturally expected to embody and reflect the popular traditions. 
 We are not a little strengthened in these expectations by the 
 fact that nearly all the ancient writings of Hindus, so far from 
 advocating the notion that truth is self-evolved, or a discovery 
 of the human reason^, recognise in God the only Source of 
 
 ^ It is true, as I have raore than there can be no doubt that very 
 
 once observed, that the Purjlnas in old materials were extensively em- 
 
 their present form are thoroughly ployed. See Prof. ^Wilson's Pref. 
 
 sectarian, and therefore must have to the Vishnu Piirdna, p. Ixiii. 
 been all modernized ; but whenever ^ Thus, for example, it is ex- 
 
 the remodelling of them took place pressly said by a philosopher, {San- 
 
CHxiP. III.] Hinduism o,nd Revealed Eeligion. 209 
 
 supernatural teaching ; and so far from urging tliat the present 
 age alone is in possession of such teaching, they proclaim their 
 frequent obligation to the purer wisdom of antiquity, and to the 
 guidance of the * sages who have delivered it to us^' * Truth,' 
 they say, ^was originally deposited with men, but gradually 
 slumbered and was forgotten : the knowledge of it returns like 
 a recollection ^' 
 
 Now the points that were most likely to be cherished in the 
 memory of the ancient world were not so much the details of 
 primeval history, as those marvellous and momentous facts, 
 which, happening in the infancy of time, and prior to the date 
 of the original dispersion, were supposed to bear directly on the 
 hopes, and fears, and general fortunes of the human species, or 
 were fitted by the startling or attractive shape which they 
 assumed in primitive lays and legends to excite the cravings of 
 the earnest heart, and fire the popular imagination. 
 
 Such points are : 
 
 1. The primitive state of man. 
 
 2. His fall. 
 
 3. His punishment in the deluge. 
 
 4. The rite of sacrifice. 
 
 5. The primitive hope of restoration. 
 
 § 1. The Primitive State of Man. 
 
 Inconsistent as may be the various Hindu stories touching 
 the creation of this visible universe, and the original innocence 
 and dignity of men, 4t is not dij9S.cult,' writes a high authority', 
 * to detect through all their embellishments and corruptions, the 
 tradition of the descent of mankind froKn a single pair^, however 
 much they have disguised it, by the misemployment of the 
 figru^es of allegory and personification.' 
 
 caray ed. Fr. Windischmann, p. of the world is *by natuire itself,' 
 
 io6), 'dass man nicht durch Ver- rejected the idea of an original 
 
 mittelung von Vernunftgriinden, pair. * There was no such thing 
 
 sondern durch Hiilfe der von jeher as that of the creation of the first 
 
 iiberlieferten Lehren Brahma errei- man and woman.' Upham, Sacred 
 
 chen konne.' Books of Ceylon^ iii. i, 2, Lond. 
 
 ^ Yajur-Veda,-Kl. lo, 13, as quoted 1833. Yet this statement is some- 
 
 by Morris, Essay ^ p. 60. what modified, p. 17. 
 
 ^ See Humboldt's Cosmos, II, 112, ^ 'There was formerly only one 
 
 113, Sabine's ed. Veda, only one God, one fire, and 
 
 ^ Prof. Wilson, Lectures, p. 56. one caste. From Purtiravas came 
 
 Buddhism, on the contrary, having the triple V6da in the beginning of 
 
 lost all faith in a Creator, and con- the Treta age.' From the Bh^ga- 
 
 tending that the rise and perishing vata Purina. 
 
 H. U 
 
210 Christ and other Masters, [part ir. 
 
 According to one view, Brahma, the god of creation, had 
 converted himself into two persons, the first man, or the Manu 
 Swayambhuva, and the first woman, or Satarupa^: this division 
 into halves expressing, it would seem, the general distinction of 
 corporeal substance into two sexes, and Satarupa, as hinted by 
 the etymology of the word itself, denoting the great universal 
 mother, the one parent of a ' hundred forms.' A second repre- 
 sentation is that, in the opening of the present kalpa, Brahma 
 created out of his own substance as many as a * thousand pairs ^' 
 of each of the four classes, into which mankind has been dis- 
 tributed. But since these statements are both found at no gi'eat 
 distance from each other in the same Fur ana, they are probably 
 intended to be reconciled by supposing that in the former case 
 we have a Hindu reminiscence of the history of creation, and 
 in the second an ideal picture of the primitive race of human 
 beings. Be this, however, as it may, the Hindu legends are 
 agreed in representing man as one of the last products of crea- 
 tive wisdom, as the master-work of God, and also in extolling 
 the first race of men as pure and upright, innocent and happy. 
 * The beings who were thus created by Brahma are all said to 
 have been endowed with righteousness and perfect faith ; they 
 abode wherever they pleased, unchecked by any impediment ; 
 their hearts were free from guile ; they were pure, made free 
 from soil by observance of sacred institutes. In their sanctified 
 minds Hari dwelt ; and they were filled with perfect wisdom 
 by which they contemplated the glory of Vishnu^.' 
 
 The first men were accordingly the best. The Krita age, 
 ' the age of truth,' the reign of purity, in which mankind, as it 
 came forth from the Creator, was not divided into numerous 
 conflicting orders, and in which the difierent faculties of man 
 all worked harmoniously together, was a thought that lay too 
 near the human heart to be uprooted by the ills and inequalities 
 of actual life. In this the Hindu sided altogether with the 
 Hebrew, and as flatly contradicted the unworthy speculations 
 of the modern philosopher, who would fain persuade us that 
 human beings have not issued from one single pair, and also 
 that the primitive type of men is scarcely separable from that 
 
 ^ Vishnu Pur. pp. 51, 52. In tively from his mouth, his arm, his 
 
 the Laivs of Manu {1. ^2) the same thigh and his foot, it is added: 
 
 notion is expressed in a somewhat * Having divided his own substance, 
 
 different form. After stating (§31) the mighty power Brahmc^ became 
 
 that for the multiplication of the half male and half female.* 
 
 human race, the Creator caused ^ Vishnu Fur. p. 45 and n. 4. 
 
 the four castes to proceed respec- ^ ii)id. 
 
CHAP. III.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion, 211 
 
 of ordinary animals. In the former of these conclusions it is 
 true he may appeal on his behalf to theorisings of the Bud- 
 dhists ; but with reference to the latter, they also were equally 
 unable to cast off the tenets of their forefathers. It is hekl 
 that a distinguished group of beings (hrahmas) whose merit was 
 insufficient to support them any longer in superior worlds^, took 
 refuge on the earth, and as the lustre of their ancient greatness 
 lingered round about them, they retained one class of super- 
 human attributes ; they were able to subsist without food, and 
 gifted with the power of passing through the air at will. ISTo 
 change of seasons, and no alternation of night and day could 
 be experienced in their neighbourhood ; and free from all the 
 present accidents of humanity, they lived for ages in unbroken 
 peace and inexhaustible felicity. Whether this legend of the 
 brahmas be regarded as an echo of some old tradition pointing 
 to the first estate of men, or to the fall of angels, is compara- 
 tively immaterial : it evinces a belief that primitive inhabitants 
 of the earth ranked higher than the beasts that perish, and 
 were strangers to the guilt and darkness which have pressed so 
 heavily on their descendants. 
 
 The Brahman and the Buddhist, in like manner, have pre- 
 served some recollections of the nature of the spot in which 
 those first inhabitants were planted. According to legends of 
 the former^, the abode of man in his primeval innocence was 
 the fabled mount Meru the ' centre' of the globe. ^ It is a high 
 and beauteous mountain. From the glittering surface of its 
 peaks the sun diffuses light into the far-off regions. Arrayed in 
 gold it forms a worthy habitation for the devas and gandharvas. 
 Hideous dragons guard this mountain ; they frighten back the 
 sinner who ventures to approach it. The sides are covered over 
 with plants of heavenly origin ; and no finite thought can soar 
 as high as the cloud-piercing summit. It is adorned with 
 graceful trees and limpid waters ; and on every side resounds 
 the music of the birds.' To this description of the Mahdhhdrata, 
 some other features may be added from different sources. The 
 position of Meru is in the centre of a region called Ilavrita^; it 
 is said to be enclosed by the river Ganges, ' which, issuing from 
 
 ^ Hardy, Manual of Buddhism^ Mosaischen Cultus, i. i68. Heidel- 
 
 P- 64. berg, 1837. 
 
 2 See Luken's Tradltionen des 3 ]v[r. Faber attempts, but un- 
 
 Menschengeschlechts, pp. 65, 66, successfully, to connect this name 
 
 Miinster, 1856; Faber's Origin of Jldvrita, which, lae also -writea Ida* 
 
 Pagan Idolatry, i. 314 sq. Lond. Vratta, with Eden. (i. 326.) 
 18 16, and Bahr's Symbolik des 
 
 U— 2 
 
212 Christ and other Masters. [part il 
 
 the foot of Vishnu, and washing the lunar orb, falls here from 
 the skies, and, after encircling the city, divides into four mighty 
 rivers, flowing in opposite directions \' On the summit of the 
 mountain is the dwelling-place of Siva, as well as the capital of 
 Brahma. There also is the home of blessed spirits; there is 
 Nandana, the grove of Indra^, and there the Jambu-tree^, whose 
 apples, large as elephants, feed the Jambu-river with their juices, 
 and secure to all who drink of it unvarying health and happi- 
 ness, and exemption from all physical decay. It is manifest 
 that the scene of all this blessedness was placed by the Hindu 
 mythographers among the lofty peaks of the Himalaya. In 
 sight of them the Aryan had originally settled when he crossed 
 the alpine frontier ; and as time went over, and his children 
 were still further severed from the primitive haunts of man, the 
 glorious high-lands of the north were peopled by his ever active 
 imagination with groups of mythic beings. There was the 
 locality from which the founders of the Indo- Aryan race had 
 issued : and there the theatre on which, according to his dreams, 
 had been enacted all the mysteries of the ancient world. Those 
 legends, therefore, notwithstanding a huge mass of v/ild ex- 
 aggerations, will bear witness to primeval verities. They inti- 
 mate how in the background of man's visions lay a Paradise of 
 holy joy, — a Paradise secured from every kind of profanation, 
 and made inaccessible to the guilty ; a Paradise full of objects 
 that were calculated to delight the senses and to elevate the 
 mind ; a Paradise that granted to its tenant rich and rare 
 immunities, and that fed with its perennial streams the tree of 
 life and immortality. The waters also of Ilavrita, divided as 
 they were into four channels, and flowing towards the cardinal 
 points, may not unnaturally suggest comparison with the primi- 
 tive river that Svent out of Eden to water the garden; and from 
 thence was parted, and became into four heads' (Gen. ii. 10) : 
 although in course of time, when mount Meru was commonly 
 identified with the summits of the Hindu Alps, we might expect 
 that those four streams would in like manner be discovered in 
 the principal rivers that descend from the Himalaya^. 
 
 ^ Vishnu Fur. ed. Wilson, pp. Ganges), the Chakshn (? the Oxus), 
 169, 1 70, . and the Bhadr^ (the Oby of Siberia) : 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. 169. see Prof. Wilson's note, p. 171. 
 
 3 Ibid. p. 168. The Buddhists also have their four 
 
 * The names of the rivers in the holy rivers, and place the sacred 
 
 Vishnu Furdna are the Slt^ (the garden at the foot of mount M^ru, 
 
 river of China, or Hoangho), the towards the south-west, and at the 
 
 Alakanand^ (a main branch of the source of the Ganges: Faber, i-S^S* 
 
CHAP. III.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 213 
 
 This legend of the Brahmans in the hands of Buddhist 
 rivals has been subjected to fresh embellishment. The latter in 
 depicting Maha-Meru, informs us^ of * square-faced inhabitants/ 
 who are exempted from all kinds of sickness, and from other 
 evils incident to humanity. * They do not perform any kind of 
 work, as they receive all they want, whether as to ornaments, 
 clothes, or food, from a tree called halpa-wurlcsha. This tree is 
 100 yojanas high, and when the people require anything, it is 
 not necessary that they should go to it to receive it, as the tree 
 extends its branches, and gives whatever is desired. When 
 they wish to eat, food is at that instant presented ; and when 
 they wish to lie down, couches at once appear. There is no 
 relationship, as to father, mother, or brother. The women are 
 more beautiful than the devas. There is no rain, and no houses 
 are required. In the whole region there is no low place or 
 valley. It is like a wilderness of pearls ; and always free from 
 all impurities, like the court' of a temple or a wall of crystal. 
 The inhabitants live to be a thousand years old ; and all this 
 time they enjoy themselves like the devas, by means of their 
 own merit and with the assistance of the kalpa-tree.' 
 
 § 2. The Fall of Man. 
 
 But while so many legends of the ancient Aryan intimate 
 with singular unanimity that man as he came forth from his 
 Creator was both innocent and happy ; while they point us to 
 an age of truth, of light, of perfectness, and lead, us backward 
 to a spot, whose j^rimal beauties were unsullied, by the breath 
 of physical and moral evil, they have spoken as distinctly of 
 some fearful retrogression, of degeneracy without us and within 
 us, of bodily decay, of mental obscuration, of estrangement from 
 the Source of Life, and of expulsion from our first inheritance. 
 *The deep sense of this fact,' writes Coleridge^, 'and the doc- 
 trines grounded on obscure traditions of the promised remedy, 
 are seen struggling, and now gleaming, now flashing, through 
 the mist of pantheism, and producing the incongruities and 
 gross contradictions of the Brahman mythology : while in the 
 rival sect, — in that most strange phenomenon, the religious 
 atheism of the Buddhists, with whom God is only universal 
 matter considered abstractedly from all particular forms — tho 
 fact is placed among the delusions natural to man.' 
 
 ^ Hardy's Manual of Buddhism, ^ Aids to ReflectioUy i. 225, 226, 
 
 pp. 14, 15. , Pickering's ed. 
 
214 Christ and other Masters. [part li. 
 
 If we consider only the more popular doctrine of tlie Brah- 
 mans, it is found to be in substance that which has impressed 
 itself on all religions of antiquity, and forms the basis of all 
 creeds whatever : viz. that sufferings were entailed upon the 
 world at large by the disordered will or appetite of individuals, 
 impelling them to seek for gratification by eating of some in- 
 terdicted products of the soil. This vivid consciousness of 
 retrogression, in its moral aspect, was obscured, indeed, from 
 time to time by the Hindu philosopher, who, advancing from 
 pantheistic premises, adopted the well-known hypothesis of 
 chronological cycles. In his teaching every perfect revolution 
 in the fortunes of the universe {mahd-yuga) is divided into four 
 shorter periods^, which are each in turn invested with specific 
 qualities corresponding to assumed distinctions in the general 
 history of man. Thus, after the Krita or Satya-age, when 
 everything is true and perfect, comes the Treta-yuga, or age of 
 sacrifice, when virtue having *lost one foot* and the divine 
 ingredient in our spirit^ waxing feeble, Hhe innate perfectness 
 of human nature is no more evolved.' After this appears the 
 Dwapara-age, the age of doubt, of scepticism, of infidelity ; and 
 last of all the Kali-age, through which the world is said to be 
 at present passing, when the powers of darkness and disorder 
 have become predominant in the soul of man, and when ex- 
 ternal nature groans beneath the burden of iniquity. 
 
 Yet side by side with such elaborate theories on the origin 
 of evil and the probable course of its development from genera- 
 tion to generation, there lingered in the memory of Hindus a 
 far more definite knowledge of primeval history, and of the 
 agencies through which the present lot of man was rendered so 
 abnormal. They had learned that human misery is the fruit of 
 
 ^ Vishnu Pur, Book i. chap. iii. Basolldsdy the spontaneous or 
 
 As Professor Wilson remarks, 'It prompt evolution of the juices of 
 
 does not seem necessary to refer the body, independently of nutri- 
 
 the invention [of these cycles] to ment from without: (2) Triptij 
 
 any astronomical computations, or mental satisfaction, or freedom 
 
 to any attempt to represent actual from sensual desire: (3) Sdmya^ 
 
 chronology.' sameness of degree: (4) Tulyatdj 
 
 2 Vishnu on becoming subject to similarity of life, form and feature : 
 
 the conditions of time (Kdla) is (5) Visokd, exemption alike from 
 
 said to have himself 'infused into infirmity or grief: (6) Consumma- 
 
 created beings sin, as yet feeble tion of penance and meditation, by 
 
 though formidable, or passion and attainment of true knowledge : (7) 
 
 the Hke.' (Ibid. p. 45.) This led The power of going everywhere at 
 
 directly to the loss of the eight will: (8) The faculty of reposing 
 
 kinds of perfection, which the hu« at any time and in any place. 
 man race had once enjoyed: (i). 
 
CHAP. III.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 215 
 
 disobedience; that the physical ills of life originate in moral 
 delinquency, and that of parent sins, by which the world at 
 large was ultimately overrun, the chief are pride and self-com- 
 placency, ambition, and self-worship. One legend out of many 
 shall be cited in illustration of this topic. As the old traditions 
 of their ancestors were gradually distorted, the Hindus appear 
 to have identified the first man (Manu Swayambhuva) with 
 Brahma himself, of whom, as of the primary cause, he was the 
 brightest emanation; while Satarupa, the wife and counterpart 
 of Manu, was similarly converted into the bride of the creative 
 principle itself. Brahma, in other words, was ^ confounded 
 with the male half of his individuality V so that the narratives 
 which in sacred history relate to Adam and Eve, were not un- 
 frequently transferred to Brahma and to his female counterpart, 
 — Satarupa, or, according to a difierent form, Saraswati. 
 Brahma thus humanized is said to have become the subject of 
 temptation ^ To try him, Siva, wlio is, in the present story, 
 identified with the Supreme Beings drops from heaven a blos- 
 som of the sacred vata, or Indian ^g, — a tree which has been 
 always venerated by the natives on account of its gigantic sizo 
 and grateful shadow, and invested alike by Brahman and by 
 Buddhist with mysterious significations^, as ^the tree of know- 
 ledge or intelligence' (bodhidruma). Captivated by the beauty 
 , of this blossom, the first man (Brahma) is determined to possess 
 it. He imagines that it will entitle him to occupy the place of 
 the Immortal and hold converse with the Infinite : and on 
 gathering up the blossom, he at once becomes intoxicated by- 
 this fancy, and believes himself immortal and divine. But ere 
 the flush of exultation has subsided, God Himself appears to 
 him in terrible majesty, and the astonished culprit, stricken by 
 the curse of heaven, is banished far from Brahmapattana and 
 consigned to an abyss of misery and degradation. From this, 
 however, adds the story, an escape is rendered possible on the 
 expiration of some weary term of sufiering and of penance. And 
 the parallelism which it presents to sacred history is well-nigh 
 completed when the legend tells us further that woman, his ov/n 
 wife, whose being was derived from his, had instigated the am- 
 bitious hopes which led to their expulsion, and entailed so many 
 ills on their posterity. 
 
 It is also worthy of remark, that Buddhism, in spito of deep 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. 53, note. geschleckts, pp. 83, 84. 
 
 2 The story is thus extracted in ^ Lassen, i. 255 — 260. 
 
 Liiken's Traditionen des Menschen- 
 
216 Christ and other Masters. [pakt ii. 
 
 and fundamental misconceptions^, has retained at least a glim- 
 mering of primeval truth in reference to the fall of man as well 
 as to his origin and loftier destinies. The Buddhists of Ceylon, 
 for instance, have been taught that a class of spirits, who sur- 
 vived the wi^eck of previous worlds and systems, had, on their 
 migration to the human sphere of being, lost another portion of 
 their primal dignity. They were deprived of their perfections, 
 we are told, by reason of * their covetousness and by eating of 
 all sorts of food, which lust effected in them. Thus they be- 
 came man and woman, according to their fate, from whom we 
 have all proceeded ^' 
 
 But while some Hindu philosophers attributed the fall of 
 man to a necessity inherent in the very nature of all finite 
 emanations ; while others saw in it the consequence of our asso- 
 ciation with time and matter ; and while a third division, more 
 alive to the realities of life and to the moral bearings of the fall, 
 were willing to regard it as a penalty incurred by guilty spirits 
 in a previous stage of their existence, the majority of the peo- 
 ple clung more closely to traditions of their ancestors. The 
 Buddhist, it is true, denied emphatically that the origin of evil 
 is ascribable to any cause except 'the mischievous and corrupted 
 temper of man^:' but in the creed of popular Brahmanism, the 
 sin of our first parents was traced up directly to the guile and 
 malice of a tempter, not within us but without us. The tempter 
 was, in form at least, a serpent. * Almost all the nations of 
 Asia,' is the forced confession of a modern rationalist*, 'assume 
 the serpent to be a wicked being, which has brought evil into 
 the world.' 'How strangely,' writes a second^, 'is the serpent 
 everywhere mixed up with the development of the religious 
 sentiment in man.' As such it had become, in almost every 
 part of heathendom, an object of religious worship^, or, to speak 
 more properly, a symbol of those deadly and terrific powers, 
 which, present (as men thought) in serpents, were the objects 
 of continual dread, and therefore, of religious deprecation. 
 
 ^ See above, p. i6o; and Hardy's i. 248: cf. Havernick, Intr. i. to the 
 
 Manual, pp. 65, 66. Pentateuch, p. 101 (Edinb. 1850), 
 
 2 Sacred Books of Ceylon, ed. where the fact that local pecu- 
 
 Upham, III. 17. liarities are wanting in the Hebrew 
 
 ^ Ibid.ip. 157. When the further narrative is referred to as a proof 
 
 question is asked, ' Is the devil, or of its originality, 
 any other powerful spirit, the cause ^ Priaulx, Quastiones Mosaiccs, 
 
 of sin?' — the Buddhist is taught to p. 85, Lond. 1842. 
 answer, * by no means.' ^ See Deane's Worship of the 
 
 * Von Bohlen, Das alte Indien, Serpent, pp. 65 sq. Lond. 1830. 
 
CHAP. III.] Hinduism and Bevealed Religion. 217 
 
 Serpents may indeed have been occasionally welcomed by the 
 ancient Aryan as the bringers or restorers of good fortune, just 
 as they are sometimes fed in our day with reluctant intere^ at 
 the doors of Hindu cottages and temples ; but the common atti- 
 tude which they assume in all descriptions both of ancient and 
 modern writers is one of absolute antagonism to man. The 
 Hindu serpent is the type and emblem of the evil principle in 
 nature; and as such, we see it wrestling with the goddess 
 Parvati, or writhing under the victorious foot of Krishna when 
 he saves from its corrupting breath the herds that pasture near 
 the waters of the Yamuna. And as a further illustration of 
 this view, it is contended, that many Hindus who feel them- 
 selves constrained to pay religious worship to the serpent, re- 
 gard it, notwithstanding, as a hideous reptile, whose approach 
 inspires them with a secret awe and insurmountable horror. 
 
 But it may be necessary to investigate these questions some- 
 what more particularly, for the purpose of discriminating, if 
 possible, between the character of the serpent when it forms the 
 subject of a Hindu mythe, and when the subject of a Hindu 
 legend. According to the first view, it is believed to be a 
 symbol of primitive matter generally ; according to the second, 
 it is an image of the evil spirit, the seducer and arch-enemy of 
 man. We are reminded^ that anterior to the human epoch, 
 when Brahma is still sleeping on the waters and preparing to 
 diffuse himself through all the various orders of creation, the 
 devas already brought into existence are anxious to ascertain 
 what part has been reserved for them in the ensuing process. 
 They petition the Great Father of beings (Mahdpitri), and are 
 made at his suggestion to precipitate themselves upon the earth 
 in the shape of material elements, fire, air, water, and the like, 
 with Indra as their head and leader. At this epoch also comes 
 into the world the chief of the serpents (Kuliketu)^, who has 
 soon occasion to complain most bitterly to the Lord of the uni- 
 verse, that, for no fault of his, he was continually tormented by 
 the Suras, — or inferior gods inhabiting Swarga and composing 
 the great army led by Indra in his conflict with the Asuras. In 
 answer to the prayer of Kuliketu, Brahma is said to have en- 
 joined that he should henceforth receive adoration like the devas 
 from each human being, and that mortals who refused to pay 
 such worship to him, should be cut off by some unnatural death 
 
 ^ See an interesting paper Sur ^ The same as Kulika, one of tho 
 
 U Mythe du Serpent chez les Ilin- chiefs of the N^gas, or serpents: 
 
 douSy in the Journal Asiatique, Mai- Ibid. p. 481. 
 Juin, 1855, pp. 469—529. 
 
^18 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 and made incapable of rising higher in the scale of created 
 beings. 
 
 I think it not improbable that the right interpretation of 
 this my the is one which has already been suggested. It directs 
 us to behold in Kuliketu an emblem of the earth before it had 
 been subjected to human culture, when it felt itself tormented 
 by the Sui-as, or, in other words, assaulted by the armies of the 
 firmament, — the rain, the lightning, and the tempest. In the 
 midst of this disorder, man, who had been hitherto regardless of 
 the soil on which his lot is cast, and the material out of which 
 his body is constructed, was bidden by the Lord of creation to 
 render homage to the powers and processes of nature, to pro- 
 pitiate the ungenial elements, and welcome in all forms around 
 him the immediate presence of Divinity. 
 
 According therefore to this mythe the serpent was not ab- 
 solutely and directly charged with the origination of all evils ; 
 yet suspicions of such agency were nevertheless implied from 
 first to last in the conception of the story. There was lurking 
 under its fantastic imagery an idea that matter in the whole 
 compass and duration of it was intrinsically evil; and might 
 therefore be identified with that which was the recognised em- 
 bodiment of the evil principle. And other tales of ancient India 
 bring this truth before us in the greatest prominence. Side by 
 side with representations of the serpent as a type of primitive 
 matter was unfolded the analogous conception of him as the 
 enemy of the human race ^ For instance, at the opening of the 
 Mahdblutrata itself, we find a touching illustration of this sub- 
 ject. The young and beautiful Pramadvara had been afiianced 
 to the Brahman Ruru, but just before the celebration of their 
 nuptials she is bitten by a deadly serpent and expires in agony. 
 As tidings of her death are carried round the neighbourhood, 
 the Brahmans and aged hermits fiock together ; and encii'cling 
 the corpse of the departed mingle their tears with those of her 
 disconsolate lover. Ruru is himself made eloquent by grief; 
 he pleads the gentleness of his nature, and his dutiful obser- 
 vance of the laws of God : and finally, as the reward of his 
 superior merits, Pramadvara is given back to him; yet only 
 with the sad condition that he must suiTender for her sake the 
 half of his remaining lifetime. If this legend will not altogether 
 justify the supposition^ that a reference is intended by it to the • 
 
 ^ Ihid. p. 488. vie courte et precaire k cause de 
 
 2 *N'y a-t-il point, dans cette la femme surprise par le serpent? 
 
 donn^e, comme un ressouvenir du .. .Danslalegendeindienne,comme 
 
 couple primitif condamne h une dans la fable grecque [i.e. of Oi- 
 
CHAP. III.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion, 219 
 
 primitive pair of human beings, whose existence was cut short 
 by a disaster inflicted on the woman by the serpent, it may 
 serv^e at least to shew us how familiar was the Hindu mind 
 with such a representation, and how visions of the fall of man 
 had never ceased to flit with more or less confusion across the 
 memory of the ancient bards. 
 
 § 3. The Hindu version of the Deluge, 
 
 I shall not ask the reader to investigate a series of those 
 minor points in which attempts are made to institute a clear 
 connexion between the earliest Hindu legends and correspond- 
 ing pages in the Scriptural history of man. But there is one 
 catastrophe which, if the record of it in the Book of Genesis be 
 accepted, could not fail to make a most profound impression in 
 all quarters of the globe which had been visited by human foot- 
 steps. That catastrophe is the Deluge. The annals of the 
 world begin afresh in Noah. The ark in which he rode securely 
 to his destination is the second bii-th-place of the human family. 
 
 Now here again it is important to observe, that the Hindu 
 traditions, notwithstanding the grotesque embellishments they 
 underwent, from time to time, at the hands of the mytho- 
 graphers, were all in close accordance with the principal facts of 
 revelation. They inform us how, amid an age of deep corrup- 
 tion, when the world was drowned by the avenging waters of a 
 deluge, the Deity Himself came down to earth, in order to en- 
 sure the preservation of a righteous king, Manu, and to deposit 
 with him in a ship the seeds of all created beings. Like other 
 legends of antiquity, the present one has varied greatly with the 
 lapse of ages, and been coloured by the varying conceptions of 
 the people among whom it was diflused. I shall first extract^ 
 the popular, or Puranic, version which, as might have been an- 
 ticipated, is the most exuberant of the forms transmitted to us : 
 
 *' Desiring the preservation of herds, and of Br^hmans, of genii 
 and of virtuous men, of the Vddas, of law, and of precious things, the 
 Lord of the universe assumes many bodily shapes : but, though he 
 pervades, Hke the air, a variety of beings, yet he is himself unvaried, 
 
 pheus and Eurydice], comme dans quelles circonstances encore ? Lors- 
 
 le rdcit biblique, c'est k la femme que le bonheur sourit aux jeunes 
 
 que le serpent s'adresse;il la choisit couples, et qu'aucun malheur ne 
 
 pour premiere victime, parce qu'elle semble les menacer de prds ni do 
 
 est moins prudente, moins ferme loin.' Ibid. pp. 490, 491. 
 
 en ses pensees que I'homme, son ^ Asiat. Researches^ i. 230 sq. 
 maitre et son appui. Et dans 
 
220 Christ and other Masters. [part il. 
 
 since lie has no quality subject to change. At the close of the last 
 Kalpa, there was a general destruction occasioned by the sleep of 
 Brahm^; whence his creatures in different worlds were drowned in a 
 vast ocean. Brahm^, being inclined to slumber, desiring repose after 
 a lapse of ages, the strong demon Hayagrlva came near him, and stolo 
 the V6das which had flowed from his lips. When Hari, the preserver 
 of the universe, discovered this deed of the prince of Ddnavas, he took 
 the shape of a minute fish called Sap'hari. A holy king, named Satya- 
 vrata, then reigned ; a servant of the spirit which moved on the waves, 
 and so devout that water was his only sustenance. He was the child 
 of the Sun ; and, in the present Kalpa, is invested by Narayana in the 
 office of Manu, by the name of Sr^ddhadeva, or the god of obsequies. 
 One day, as he was making a libation in the river Kritam^la, and held 
 water in the palm of his hand, he perceived a small fish moving in it. 
 The king of Dravira immediately dropped the fish into the river together 
 with the water, which he had taken from it; when the Sap'hari thus 
 pathetically addressed the benevolent monarch: 'How canst thou, 
 king, who shewest affection to the oppressed, leave me in this river-water, 
 where I am too weak to resist the monsters of the stream, who fill me 
 with dread?' He, not knowing who had assumed the form of a fish, 
 applied his mind to the preservation of the Sap'hari, both from good 
 nature, and from regard to his own soul; and, having heard its very 
 suppliant address, he kindly placed it under his protection in a small 
 vase full of water ; but, in a single night, its bulk was so increased, that 
 it could not be contained in the jar, and thus again addressed the 
 illustrious prince: *I am not pleased with living miserably in this little 
 vase ; make me a large mansion, where I may dwell in comfort.' The 
 king, removing it thence, placed it in the water of a cistern ; but it grew 
 three cubits in less than fifty minutes, and said: '0 king, it pleases me 
 not to stay vainly in this narrow cistern ; since thou hast granted me 
 an asylum, give me a spacious habitation.' He then removed it, and 
 placed it in a pool; where, having ample space around its body, it 
 became a fish of considerable size. *This abode, king, is not con- 
 venient for me, who must swim at large in the waters: exert thyself 
 for my safety, and remove me to a deep lake.' Thus addressed, the 
 pious monarch threw the suppliant into a lake; and, when it grew of 
 equal bulk with that piece of water, he cast the vast fish into the sea. 
 When the fish was thrown into the waves, he thus again spoke to 
 Satyavrata: 'Here the homed sharks, and other monsters of great 
 strength, will devour me; thou shouldest not, valiant man, leave 
 me in this ocean.' Thus repeatedly deluded by the fish who had ad- 
 dressed him with gentle words, the king said: 'Who art thou, that 
 beguHest me in that assumed shape ? Never before have I seen or heard 
 of so prodigious an inhabitant of the waters, who like thee, hast filled 
 up in a single day a lake of a hundred leagues in circumference. Surely 
 thou art Bhagavat, who appearest before me; the great Hari, whose 
 dwelUng was on the waves, and who now, in compassion to thy servants, 
 bearest the form of the natives of the deep. Salutation and praise 
 to thee, first male; the lord of creation, of preservation, of destruc- 
 tion ! Thou art the highest object, supreme ruler, of us thy adorers 
 who piously seek thee. All thy delusive descents in this world give 
 existence to various beings; yet I am anxious to know for what cause 
 that shape has been assumed by thee. Let me not, lotus-eyed, approach 
 in vain the feet of a deity, whose perfect benevolence has been extended 
 to aU; when thou hast shewn, to our amazement, the appearance of 
 
CHAP. III.] Hinduism and Bevealcd Eeligion, 221 
 
 other bodies, not in reality existing but successively exhibited/ The 
 lord of the universe, loving the pious man who thus implored him, and 
 intending to preserve him from the sea of destruction caused by the 
 depravity of the age, thus told him how he was to act. *In seven days 
 from the present time, thou tamer of enemies, the three worlds will be 
 plunged in an ocean of death; but, in the midst of the destroying waters, 
 a large vessel, sent by me for thy use, shall stand before thee. Then 
 shalt thou take all medicinal herbs, all the variety of seeds; and, ac- 
 companied by seven saints, encircled by pairs of all brute animals, 
 thou shalt enter the spacious ark, and continue in it, secure from the 
 flood, on one immense ocean, without light, except the radiance of thy 
 holy companions. When the ship shall be agitated by an impetuous 
 wind, thou shalt fasten it with a large sea-serpent on my horn ; for I will 
 be near thee: drawing the vessel with thee and thy attendants, I will 
 remain on the ocean, O chief of men, until a night of Brahm^ shall be 
 completely ended. Thou shalt then know my true greatness, rightly 
 named the supreme godhead. By my favour all thy questions shall be 
 answered, and thy mind abundantly instructed.' Hari, having thus 
 directed the monarch, disappeared; and Satyavrata humbly waited for 
 the time, which the ruler of our senses had appointed. The pious king, 
 having scattered towards the east the pointed blades of the grass darhha^ 
 and turning his face towards the north, sat meditating on the feet of 
 the god who had borne the form of a fish. The sea, overwhelming its 
 shores, deluged the whole earth; and it was soon perceived to be 
 augmented by showers from immense clouds. He, still meditating on 
 the command of Bhagavat, saw the vessel advancing, and entered it 
 with the chiefs of Brd)hmans, having carried into it the medicinal 
 creepers and conformed to the directions of Hari. The saints thus 
 addressed him: '0 king, meditate on K^sava; who will surely deliver 
 us from this danger, and grant us prosperity.' The god, being invoked 
 by the monarch, appeared again distinctly on the vast ocean in the 
 form of a fish, blazing like gold, extending a million of leagues, with 
 one stupendous horn: on which the king, as he had been before com- 
 manded by Hari, tied the ship with a cable made of a vast serpent, and, 
 happy in his preservation, stood praising the destroyer of Madhu. When 
 the monarch had finished his hymn, the primeval male, Bhagavat, who 
 watched for his safety on the great expanse of water, spoke aloud to 
 his own divine essence, pronouncing a sacred Purana, which contained 
 the rules of the S^nkhya philosophy: but it was an infinite mystery 
 to be concealed within the breast of Satyavrata ; who, sitting in the 
 vessel with the saints, heard the principle of the soul, the Eternal 
 Being, proclaimed by the preserving power. Then Hari, rising together 
 with Brahm^ from the destructive deluge which was abated, slew the 
 demon Hayagriva, and recovered the sacred books. Satyavrata, in- 
 structed in all divine and human knowledge, was appointed in the 
 present Kalpa, by the favour of Vishnu, the seventh Manu, surnamed 
 Vaivaswata: but the appearance of a homed fish to the religious 
 monarch was Mdiyd or delusion ; and he, who shall devoutly hear thia 
 important allegorical narrative, will be delivered from the bondage 
 of sin.'* 
 
 This Puranic version of tlie Deluge (for to that catastrophe 
 alone has any of our modern scholars ventured to refer it) is, 
 according to its own admission, coloured and disguised by 
 
222 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 allegorical imageiy. It avows, for instance, that one prominent 
 object in the picture, the phenomenon of the horned Fish, is 
 mdyd, or is based upon illusory ideas ; while other features of it 
 have an air of gloom and mysticism peculiar to productions of 
 the Hindu mind in the ascetical, or Yoga, period of its history. 
 There is, however, a different version^ of the legend, shorter 
 and far less ornate, in one of the great epic poems of India. 
 That version contains no reference either to the sleep of Brahma, 
 the pilfering of the Vedas, or the systems of Hindu chronology, 
 which, as resting on the thought of a succession of similar 
 worlds, may have themselves been primarily suggested by the 
 story of the Deluge^. It is further silent with regard to the 
 specific power by which Manu was able to collect together seeds 
 of all existing things : nor was the author of it acquainted with 
 those mighty serpents, who, in the Puranic version, are said to 
 have approached Manu and acted as the cords by which his ark 
 was fastcDcd to the horns of the enormous Fish. In one case 
 also, it is Yishnu that becomes incarnate, mainly with the pur- 
 pose of preserving the integrity of the Yedas; in the other, it is 
 Brahma, or the ' Lord of all things, ' who is mercifully stooping 
 to the level of the creatures for the rescue of his uncorrupted 
 servant. 
 
 Still the outlines of the legend are precisely the same in 
 both versions; and their close resemblance to each other, and 
 also to the scriptural narrative of the Deluge, has induced a 
 recent critic^ to conclude that all the knowledge of this subject 
 which Hindus have ever manifested was originally derived from 
 a Semitic source. He has not, however, specified a channel, by 
 which the transfer was likely to be efiected ; and if his meaning 
 be that some account of the Deluge was first transmitted to the 
 Panjab in comparatively modern times, the conjecture is not 
 only in itself improbable, but adverse to Hindu traditions. 
 Another of these was happily brought to light a few years ago 
 
 ^ Edited by Bopp, Berlin, 1829, Menschengeschleclits, pp. 187, 188. 
 
 with the title, Die Sundfluthj nebst ^ Burnouf, Bhdgavata-Poiirdna, 
 
 drei anderen der icichtigsten Epi- Tome iii. Pref. pp. xxiii. sq., where 
 
 soden des Mahd-Bhdrata. The the points of divergence between 
 
 writer of this version, as it now the Purilhic and the Epic legends 
 
 stands, is made to refer, as his are fully pointed out. *In the 
 
 authority, to the account of the ancient historical fragments [pre- 
 
 Matsya avat^ra, which has been served in Josephus] of the Assyrian 
 
 given above ; but Prof. Wilson or Babylonian history belonging to 
 
 argues (Pref. to Vishnu Purdna, the Semitic race, the Hindu fable 
 
 p. li.) that the story in the ^la- has a close parallel in the story of 
 
 hdhhdrata is really more ancient. Xisuthrus and his flood, and the 
 
 2 Cf. Liiken, Traditionen des fish-god Cannes.' Prichard, in, 198. 
 
CHAP. IIX.] Hindilism and Revealed Religion. 223 
 
 by the publication of the Yajur-Yeda. Appended to it is an 
 ancient commentary, the Satapafha-Brdhmaha^ in which the 
 Hindu story of the Dehige is again presented to us in a still 
 simpler dress, and, what is worthy of especial notice, accom- 
 panied by allusions which imply that Aryans had themselves 
 referred the Deluge to a high antiquity, and also had retained a 
 glimmering consciousness of some connexion between it and 
 their migrations from the northern side of the Himalaya. 
 
 I am induced to give this legend also in its entirety, that 
 ample means may be afforded for ascertaining what the Aryan 
 of an early day had handed down to his posterity in reference to 
 the marvel^ of the Flood, its nature and its consequences : 
 
 " One morning the servants of Manu brought him water for ablutions, 
 as the custom is to bring it in our day when men's hands have to be 
 washed. As he proceeded to wash himself he found a fish in the 
 water, which spoke to him, saying, 'Protect me and I will be thy 
 Saviour.' 'From what wilt thou save me?' 'A deluge will ere long 
 destroy all living creatures, but I can save thee from it.' 'What pro- 
 tection, then, dost thou ask of me?' 'So long as we are little,' replied 
 the Fish, 'a great danger threatens us, for one fish will not scruple 
 to devour another. At first, then, thou canst protect me by keeping 
 me in a vase. When I grow bigger, and the vase will no longer hold 
 me, dig me a pond, and protect me by keeping me in it; and when I 
 shall have become too large for the pond, then throw me into the sea ; 
 for henceforward I shall be strong enough to protect myself against all 
 evils.' The Fish ere long became enormous (jhasha), for it grew very 
 fast, and one day it said to Manu, ' In such a year will come the deluge ; 
 call to mind the counsel I have given thee; build a ship, and when 
 the deluge comes, embark on the vessel thou hast built, and I will 
 preserve thee.* Manu, after feeding and watching the Fish, at last 
 threw it into the sea, and in the very year the Fish had indicated, he 
 prepared a ship and had recourse [in spirit] to his benefactor. When 
 the flood came, Manu went on board the ship. The Fish then reap- 
 peared and swam up to him, and Manu passed the cable of his vessel 
 round its horn, by means of which he was transferred across yon 
 Northern Mountain. * I have saved thee,' said the Fish, 'now lash thy 
 vessel to a tree, else the water may still carry thee away, though thy 
 vessel be moored upon the mountain. When the water has receded, 
 then also mayest thou disembark.' Manu implicitly obeyed the order, 
 and hence that northern mountain still bears the name of Manu's 
 descent 2' {Manor avasarpanam). The deluge swept away all living 
 creatures ; Manu alone survived it. His hfe was then devoted to prayer 
 
 ^ Weber's I?i(Z. Stud. i. i5i sq. by it as far as Mount Himavat; 
 
 2 In the Mahdbhdrata the name whereas in this version of the story, 
 
 of the mountain is Naubandhana it is implied that his original seat 
 
 ( = ' ship -bond'); and, what is very was on the north of the Himalaya 
 
 remarkable, Manu is there sup- range, and that he crossed over 
 
 posed to be resident in India when from thence into India, (atidudrdva): 
 
 the deluge comes, and to be carried see Web$r, p. 165. , 
 
224* Christ and other Masters, [part ii. 
 
 and fasting in order to obtain posterity. He made tlie Paka-sacrifice^; 
 he offered to the Waters the clarified butter, cream, whey, and cm-died 
 milk. His offerings were continued, and at the end of a year he thereby 
 fashioned for himself a wife^: she came dripping out of the butter; it 
 trickled on her footsteps. Mitra and Varuha approached her and asked 
 'Who art thou?' She answered, *The daughter of Manu.' 'Wilt thou 
 be our daughter?' 'No,' the answer was: 'My owner is the author of 
 my being.' Their solicitations were all vain; for she moved directly 
 onward till she came to Manu. On seeing her, he also asked her, ' Who 
 art thou?' And she answered, * Thine own daughter.' 'How so, beloved, 
 art thou really my daughter?' 'Yes; the offerings thou hast made to 
 the Waters, the clarified butter, the cream, the whey, and the curdled 
 milk have brought me into being. I am the completion of thy vows. 
 Approach me during the sacrifice. If so, thou shalt be rich in posterity 
 and in flocks. The desire which thou art cherishing shall be entirely 
 accomplished.' Thus was Manu wedded to her in the midst of the 
 sacrifice, that is, between the ceremonies that denote the opening and 
 the close of it. With her he lived in prayer and fasting, ever-anxious 
 to obtain posterity: and she became the mother of the present race of 
 men, which even now is called the race of Manu. The vows which he 
 had breathed in concert with her were all perfectly accomplished.'* 
 
 Here again it would be quite superfluous to enlarge upon 
 the shifting and capricious chax-acter of the Hindu legend, and 
 still more to specify the points of contact which exist between it 
 and the narrative preserved to us in Holy Scripture. Both 
 these observations v.^ill immediately suggest themselves to every 
 reader. But there is another point which, if it be less obvious, 
 is certainly no less deserving of attention. The simplicity of the 
 account in Genesis ; the truthful and historic air of every part 
 of it ; its close coherence with all other facts of revelation, as 
 well as with the scriptural theory of man and of the universe ; 
 the absence from it of those manifest depravations, which axQ 
 only capable of being rectified and made intelligible when 
 brought into the light which it diffuses, give additional weight 
 to the authority on which it is received by Christians, and 
 vindicate its claim to be regarded as a genuine copy of the old 
 
 1 *The Pdkayajna, or eacrifice which he was able to bring about the 
 in which food is offered, implies creation of new orders of being, 
 either the worship of the Viswa- In this manner the present legend 
 de'vas, the rites of hospitality, or is made to harmonize with that in 
 occasional oblations, or building a the Mahdbhdrata, where the new 
 house, the birth of a child, or any creation is said to be achieved by 
 occasion of rejoicing." Wilson, F^s/i. the extraordinary penance of Ma- 
 Fur. p. '292, n. 3. nu. But the birth of Id^ from the 
 
 2 The following passage of the Waters, and the overtures of Mitra 
 legend is, perhaps, an allegorical and Varuha (? Day and Night), 
 embellishment, the idea being that are still involved in mystery. Cf. 
 praise (Ida), the daughter of Manu, Weber, i. 169. 
 
 is the medium and accomplice by 
 
CHAP. III.] HindiXism and Revealed Religion. 225 
 
 tradition that descended, age by age, from Noah to all members 
 of the saered family. 
 
 § 4. Hindu Rite of Sacrifice. 
 
 Attention has been dra^\^l already^ to some characteristics 
 of the Vedas, intimating how very low was the degree of moral 
 sensibility once prevalent in the Aryan tribes of Hindustan. 
 And this remark is further illustrated by the versions of the 
 Deluge we have just been criticising. Although the human 
 race, according to Hindu legends, was so utterly overwhelmed 
 that Manu had become the second head and parent of our 
 species, it is obvious, and especially obvious in the oldest form 
 of the tradition, that the moral bearings of the Deluge were 
 comparatively forgotten. It was rather treated as a dire cata- 
 strophe, originating in some physical necessities, than as the 
 fruit and punishment of human sin. So far indeed the Bud- 
 dhist^ rose superior to the Brahman. He was clearly conscious 
 that although there must be periodic revolutions of the universe, 
 their consequences may be all averted from the individual, who 
 is open to the terrible warnings by which they are preceded. 
 When a deva issues forth, according to the legends of Ceylon, 
 arrayed in mourning and with trembling voice and streaming 
 eyes announces, through the various regions doomed to desola- 
 tion, that in a hundred thousand years the present halpa will be 
 finished, he is also commissioned to declare how every man is 
 able to escape the dread calamity : * Let him assist his parents, 
 respect his superiors, avoid the five sins, and observe the five 
 obligations.' 
 
 The Brahman, however, notwithstanding the dulness of his 
 moral intuitions, had always differed from the Buddhist in the 
 care which he bestowed on the performance of sacrificial rites. 
 There was no period in the lifetime of the Indo- Aryan people 
 when altars were not reared and sacrifices offered ^ For exam- 
 
 ^ Above, pp. 129, 130. affection, from the fear that comes 
 
 2 See the whole passage in upon them ; by which merit is ^xo- 
 
 Hardy's ilfanwaZ, pp. 29, 30. 'The duced, and they are born in a 
 
 beings in the world in great fear brahma-loka.' 
 
 approach the deva, and ask him ^ Lassen, i. 789. He urges among 
 
 whether he has learnt this by his other points the existence of the 
 
 own wisdom, or has been taught three words hu [dhu)^ 6vu, and Lat. 
 
 it by another; when he replies, Jio, which shew that sacrificial 
 
 that he was sent by Mah^-Brahm^ rites, and even offerings made by 
 
 the deva of many ages. On hearing fire, were older than the original 
 
 this declaration the men and devas dispersion of the Indo-Europeau 
 
 of the earth regard each other with family. 
 
 H. 15 
 
226 Christ and other Masters. [part il. 
 
 pie, as early as the liymiis of the E.ig-Y6da, men appealed to the 
 abundant blessings which were granted to their forefathers in 
 virtue of the soiiia-sacrifice. ^ O Soma [thus personifying the 
 libation], thy bounties have been all remembered. Thou con- 
 ductest us along the best of pathways. Under thy protection, 
 O thou whose surname is Indu [liquor], our holy and wise an- 
 cestors have won the favour of the devas^.^ And, in harmony 
 with this tradition, we noticed how the Hindu legend of the 
 Deluge not only testified to the existence of primeval sacrifices, 
 but extolled their wondrous merit. As Noah, on issuing from 
 the Ark, is said to have built an altar unto the Lord, the Self- 
 existent, that he might propitiate His anger by * burnt-offerings' 
 (Gen. viii. 20 — 22) ; so the first anxiety of Manu was to people 
 the earth afresh, by means of prayer and mortification, and still 
 more by what was held to be the grand ' accomplisher of all 
 desires,' by various forms of sacrifice. But though the early 
 prevalence of this rite among the Indo- Aryans must in future 
 be regarded as indisputable, there remains no small confusion in 
 some quarters with regard to the precise direction and design of 
 the oblations thus presented. 
 
 1. First, then, it should be remembered, that during the 
 historic period, oblations were seldom or never made to God, 
 the abstract Brahma, exceptiug where the worshipper had half- 
 unconsciously identified Him with one or other of the elemental 
 deities, with Indra, Agni, Soma, and the like, or else with some 
 illustrious demi-god, the special organ of divinity. In other 
 words, the Hindu offered his material sacrifices not to God, but 
 to the gods^ As we behold him pictured in the sacred books 
 of his religion, the objects of his worship differ only in degree, 
 and not in nature, from the worshipper himself. They too are 
 creatures, and as such are ultimately doomed to perish in the 
 winding-up of all things. And the prevalent ideas of sacrifice 
 entirely corresponded with this low conception of the nature of 
 the beings to whom it was referred. ^ By sacrifices the gods are 
 nourished^.' Rain and fire and sunlight were believed to 
 gather strength and potency proportioned to the size of the obla- 
 tion, and the fervour of the human spirit. It was, therefore, 
 not so much the feeling of unworthiness, or the intention to 
 deny one's self, that prompted a large class of the Hindu obla- 
 
 ^ Rig -Veda, Tome i. p. 171, ed. steigt das GebetundderOpferrauch 
 
 Langlois. empor, sondern nur zu den dem 
 
 ^ Above, pp. 141, 190 — 191. Mensclien ebenbtirtigen creatiir- 
 
 Wuttke corroborates the view there lichen Gottern:' 11. 353. 
 
 taken: 'iNicht zu dem Ur-Brahma ^ Vishfm Pur. p. 44. 
 
CHAP. III.] Hinduism and Bevealed Religion, 227 
 
 tions. Man was thoroughly persuaded^ that the gods were 
 capable of receiving benefit from his services, that they were fed 
 by the abundant products of his field or garden, were exhila- 
 rated by the juices of the holy soma-plant, were nerved by his 
 impassioned prayers, were solaced by the music of his hymns, 
 and that in recompence for all such acts of piety, the gods be- 
 came propitious to him : his pastures grew more fertile ; his 
 flocks and herds were multiplied ; a numerous family gathered 
 round his table, and the foe that threatened to destroy or vex 
 him w^s more readily circumvented and despatched. 
 
 2. But while such feelings were most prominent in many 
 of the oblations of the ancient Aryan, he also proved that he 
 was never destitute of those convictions which form the proper 
 basis of the rite of sacrifice ; he shewed a sense of personal un- 
 worthiness, and a desire of making good his imperfections by 
 offering to God the choicest of his hopes, and sacrificing the 
 best of his possessions. Hence the offerings which he brought 
 were sometimes far more costly and more obviously piacular. 
 As early as the composition of the third Yeda, they were all 
 reduced under five heads ^: (1) Agnihotra, burnt offerings, or 
 libations of clarified butter on sacred fire; (2) Dersapaurnamqisa, 
 sacrifices at new and full moon ; (3) Chdturmdsya, sacrifices 
 every four months : (4) Pa'suyajna or Aswamedha, sacrifice of a 
 horse or other animals; (5) Soma-yajna^ offerings and libations 
 of the juice of the acid asclepias, or moon-plant. A peculiar 
 virtue was, however, generally ascribed to that one class of sa- 
 crifices which, as it involved the strangulation of the subject 
 offered, would run counter to the prejudices of the later Aryan, 
 who had mastered the ideas arising out of his belief in transmi- 
 gration. While the other offerings were all mainly eucharistic, 
 these were held to be propitiatory. While in other cases the 
 god worshipped was invited to come down and share the offer- 
 ing with his suppliant, these were all religiously committed to 
 the flames. While others had but little reference to the moral 
 standing of the worshipper, these all derived their meaning 
 from his felt antagonism to powers above him, and his dread of 
 their impending vengeance. While the rest were, for the most 
 
 ^ See the passages collected from ^ yishnu Pur. p. 275, n. i: of. 
 
 theVedasinWuttke, 11.342, 349, and Bahr, Symbolik des Mosaischen 
 
 contrast with them Psalm L. 7 — 15. Cultus^ 11. 222, 223, who points 
 
 That worthier views were however out, that, generally speaking, the 
 
 subsequently far more common is unbloody sacrifices were naturally 
 
 evident from passages quoted in presented to Vishnu, and the bloody 
 
 Bahr, as below, 11. 273, 274. sacrifices to Siva, 
 
 15— -2 
 
228 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 part, offered to some individual member of tlie Hindu pantheon, 
 a sin-offering contemplated the whole group of devaSj and in 
 them, it may be, recognised the majesty of the Supreme Intelli- 
 gence. ^The worshipper,' it was taught, ^who offers up an 
 animal duly consecrated by Agni and by Soma, is therewith 
 able to buy off all deities at once\' 
 
 In this conception of the Hindu rite of sacrifice, ascending 
 step by step through various orders of animals, and culminating 
 in the grand oblation of the horse ^, the ^ king of sacrifices, ' we 
 are able to detect the clearest parallelism to some of the pro- 
 visions of the Mosaic economy^. Animal sacrifice was uniformly 
 prompted by a deep conviction of personal unworthiness, and 
 the necessity in every worshipper to compensate for his short- 
 comings and imperfect consecration of himself to God. His life 
 was felt to have been placed in peril, or rather it was wholly 
 forfeited to the Divine Proprietor, whose will he had resisted, 
 and whose laws he had transgres^sed. He laboured, therefore, 
 by renouncing some of his chief goods, to symbolise and make 
 apparent both to the Divinity and to himself his consciousness 
 of guilt and misery, and, if possible, to clear away the barriers 
 that obstructed his approach to God. Hence also, by a terrible 
 distortion of the rite of sacrifice, had grown the custom of devot- 
 ing human life itself to the offended devas ; for although there 
 is no public trace of such oblations^ in the very earliest period 
 of Hindu religion, the revolting spectacle was seen at last, and 
 
 1 See the remarkable extract of human sacrifices at an early 
 from the Aitareya, Brdhmana in period. * Als Mittelpunkt der Sage 
 Eoth's 'Einlsitung' to his edition in dieser Form erscheint offenbar 
 of the Nirukta^ p. xxxiii. In the die Eettung Cunah^epa's vom Op- 
 same passage the editor points out fertode, ihre nacbste Beziehung 
 the close resemblances between the ist also die religios-sittliche, ge- 
 customs of the early Hindlis in richtet gegen den Grauel des Men- 
 slaying their sin- offerings, and the schenopfers. So mag denn diese 
 corresponding customs of the Greeks Legende, die einzige indische der 
 and Eomans. Art, fiir das brahmanische Volk 
 
 '^ See above, p. 1 30, n. 3 ; Manu, dieselbe Bedeutung gehabt haben, 
 
 ch. V. § 39, § 53, ch. XI. § 261; wie die Sage von Iphigenia Oder von 
 
 JRchndyana, i. 13, ed. Schlegel. Phrixos ftir die Hellenen, die von 
 
 3 Above, pp. 83, 84. Abraham und Isaak fiir das hebra- 
 
 4 Above, p. 130, and n. 1. It ische Alterthum. Die Aehnlich- 
 may be mentioned, in addition to keiten in einzelnen Ziigen liessen 
 the paper of Prof. Wilson's there sich manche namhaft machen : es 
 referred to, that Both has also miige geniigen darauf hinzuweisen, 
 examined the remarkable legend dass die indische Erzahlung fiir 
 of Sunahsepa (Weber's Ind. Stud, den dem Tode entzogenen Menschen 
 I. 457 sq., II. 112 sq.), and that he keinen Ersatz auf dem Altare selbst 
 regards it as proving the existence eintreten lasst: dieBitte um Gnade 
 
CHAP. III.] Hinduism and Revealed Beligion. 229 
 
 was repeated by some barbarous and fanatic spirits from tbat 
 daj to our own. 
 
 3. On the other hand, the teaching of the earnest and en- 
 lightened Aryans had been deflecting more and more from the 
 revealed idea of substitutive suffering. They laboured to effect 
 their own recovery without the intervention of a Mediator. 
 Sacrifices might, indeed, be offered, and might possibly appease 
 the wrath of some inferior deva, but the only offering which 
 philosophy could stamp with its approval, was the conscious 
 dedication of the individual spirit to the Spirit of the universe. 
 According, therefore, to these doctors, the whole life of man 
 must be a great oblation of himself, intended to promote his 
 absolute deliverance from the fetters of the selfish and the natu- 
 ral. Exactly in proportion as he continues to possess an indi- 
 vidual being \ he is broken off from God, he is encompassed 
 with infirmities, he is the victim of his appetites, the slave of 
 his affections, and as such, abandoned to the powers of evil. 
 Hence wherever this conception was fully realised, the form of 
 man's devotion was most rigorous and ascetical. Though ^ suit- 
 able acts of expiation had been enjoined by the great sages for 
 every kind of crimes V they all were far from satisfying the 
 rules of penance which the ardent devotee was willing to impose 
 upon himself. The proper sacrifice, he urged, is that which, 
 springing from an utter abnegation of the individual, aims at 
 nothing short of God and self-annihilation. 
 
 § 5. The Hindu hope of Restoration, 
 
 The grand idea of an historic Saviour, entering once for all 
 into the line of humanity, and once for all achieving its redemp- 
 tion by the offering of Himself to God, was utterly unknown to 
 
 geniigt um das Grauliche schlecht- werde ich eine Busse voUbringen, 
 
 hin aufzuheben.' In later times die dem Leben dieser Brahmatheiler 
 
 the offering of human victims was ein Ende macht und ihn wieder zu 
 
 generally confined to the worship- seiner Einheit fiihrt.' 
 pers of Siva, and his wife K^li or ^ Vishnu Pur. p. iio. Yet in 
 
 Durga. accordance with the laxer principles 
 
 ^ The following extract from the of the Puranic age, and of the 
 
 Prohodha-Chandrodaya (ed. Gold- Hindu sectaries, it was finallj' 
 
 stiicker, p. 55) will serve to illus- maintained that 'reliance upon 
 
 trate the whole subject : 'Wenn sie Krishna is far better than any 
 
 den Hochsten in Banden legten, such expiatory acts as religious 
 
 den Einigen zur Vielheit theilten austerity and the like.^' Eemem- 
 
 und den ewigen Herrscher in kor- brance of Hari (Vishnu) is said 
 
 perliches Dasein warfen und zu der to be the * best of all expiations. * 
 
 Stufe der Sterblichkeit brachten, so lb. 
 
230 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 every class of ancient Aryans. Sacrifices may have taught men 
 the imperative need of some such intervention, and may further 
 have suggested the conception of some Victim higher than the 
 cows and horses which they strangled, and more holy than the 
 holiest yogin who consumed his life in penance and austerities ; 
 but the actual course of Hindu thought was rather tending to 
 diminish than increase the keenness of these cravings and the 
 force of these suggestions. While the many had been more and 
 more disposed to acquiesce in a routine of ceremonial obser- 
 vances, relying for the rest on some particular deva, whom they 
 specially selected for their patron ; the philosopher had grown 
 more confident of his resources, and more daring in his efforts to 
 mount upward on the wings of knowledge and asceticism, and 
 consummate his fellowship with God. Yet notwithstanding all 
 these wayward tendencies, diverging, each in opposite ways, 
 from principles of true religion, there was always in the heart of 
 man a yearning after some external Saviour ; there was always 
 a presentiment that such a Saviour would eventually stoop down 
 from heaven, and by an act of grace and condescension master 
 all our deadliest foes, and reinstate us in our lost inheritance. 
 
 This dim and elementary idea, pointing to a future religatio 
 of the human and Divine, and so pervading all systems of 
 religion, was especially manifest in the traditions of Hindus 
 respecting the descent of God to earth in various forms of 
 creaturely existence. I have already drawn attention to the 
 legend of the Deluge, where, according to one version of it, 
 Brahma, and, according to another, Yishiiu, is said to have 
 appeared as an enormous Fish, in order to promote the welfare 
 of his righteous follower, and preserve the continuity of the 
 human species. Other legends bring before us different kinds 
 of avatdras, where the rescue of mankind from the dominion of 
 malignant spirits is no less conspicuous. Earth herself com- 
 plains^ how she is i-eeling under the vast load of guilt and 
 wretchedness, yet her complaints are all eventually carried to 
 Vishnu, who comforts her by the assurance that her wrongs 
 shall be redressed and all her enemies brought to shame and 
 silence. The hope of such emancipation is, we saw, most for- 
 mally expressed in recent versions of the Krishna-legend. There 
 a series of periodic interventions in behalf of man is definitely 
 asserted, while the object contemplated by them is no less dis- 
 tinctly said to be a moral object, — the suppression of impiety, 
 the protection of the good, and the establishment of duty^. 
 
 1 Asiatic Res, x. 27. ^ Above, p. 198. 
 
CHAP. III.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 231 
 
 But, as if to satisfy us that the faith of the Hindu in cham- 
 pions of his own devising was extremely feeble at the best, we 
 see him ready to abandon them and willing to accept a no^el 
 incarnation of Yishnu, whose advent is still future. For ex- 
 ample, in the close of the Kali-yuga, when the world, relapsing 
 more and more into impiety, has reached the brink of annihila- 
 tion, the Hindu expects a fresh deliverer, human both in form 
 and aspect, seated on a white horse, and armed with a destruc- 
 tive scythe. To him will be awarded the eight faculties ^ which 
 constituted man's original perfection : he will also be a genuine 
 * portion of Brahma,' Hhe Beginning and the End^' ^By his 
 irresistible might he will destroy all the mlechchas and thieves, 
 and all whose minds are devoted to iniquity. He will then re- 
 establish righteousness upon earth; and the minds of those who 
 live at the end of the Kali-age shall be awakened, and shall be 
 pellucid as crystal. The men who are thus changed by virtue 
 of that peculiar time shall be as the seeds of human beings, and 
 shall give birth to a race who shall follow the laws of the Krita- 
 age, or age of purity^.' Yet the modern origin of documents in 
 which this legend is preserved, as well as its position in the 
 series of Hindu avatdras^ and the glaring contradiction which it 
 offers to older representations of the sacred books in reference to 
 the yuga-system, all require us to place it in an age far subse- 
 quent to the diffusion of the Gospel. On the other hand, the 
 manifest resemblances which it exhibits to some visions of the 
 Apocalypse will as clearly justify us in imputing its origin to 
 Gnostic, if not Christian, influence*; an identification fatal to 
 the cavils of a modern rationalist, who, after citing the Kalki- 
 legend with an air of triumph, goes on to tell us that * the Jews 
 have the same belief,' but that 'with them it is an after-thought.' 
 The truth is that, so far from being either secondary or derived, 
 the expectation of a Christ, all-righteous and all-merciful, a 
 Christ in whom all nations of the earth may find a blessing, was 
 imprinted on the heart and memory of the Hebrew people from 
 the time of Abraham : it was the pivot of their firmest hopes, 
 it was the key to all their Scriptures. 
 
 ^ Above, p. •214, n. 2, dem Yugasystem, welches am Ende 
 
 ^ Vishnu Pur. p. 484. jedes Kaliyuga eine Zerstorung der 
 
 ^ Ihid. Cf. Liiken Traditionen, Welt verlangt oder wenigstens ver- 
 
 p. 320. langen sollte, direkt widerspricht, 
 
 * * Der Kalkin insbesondere mit erklart sich dagegen vortrefflich aus 
 
 seinem weissen Rosse ist schwer- den ahnlichen Vorstellungen der 
 
 lich eine indiscJie Erfindung, da er Gnostiker.' Weher^Ind, Stud. 11.41 1, 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Contrasts in the general development of Ilind'&ism and 
 Revealed Eeligion, 
 
 *In the present impure age, the bud of wisdom being bhghted by 
 iniquity, men are unable to apprehend pure unity.' 
 
 Hindu Philosopher. 
 
 *^iuv d^ 6LTr€Kd\v^ev 6 Geos hioL rod Uped/JLaTOS avrov. — St. Paul. 
 
 Abraham contrasted icith an ancient Aryan. His faith: Ms moral 
 superiority: his hopeful spirit. Continuity of true religion. Brdh- 
 manisTriy how far analogous to Hebraism. Hereditary priesthood. 
 Narrowness of range. Buddhism, how far analogous to Christianity. 
 Real coincidences between India and the West. Boot of such resem- 
 blances: Essenism: early Christian heresies: Monasticism. Hinduism 
 and Christianity in their ultimate consequences. Buddhism, as a 
 popular religion. Hindu ideas of God and the universe; how opposed 
 to Christianity. Degeneracy inherent in Brdhmanism. The remedy 
 supplied in Christianity, 
 
 1. If one were asked to single out the main criterion by which 
 patriarchs, like Abraham, may be distinguished from the Aryan 
 chief, whose portrait is preserved among the oldest hymns of 
 the Rig-Yeda, it would turn far less upon the difference in their 
 mental organisation and their outward forms of worship, than 
 on sentiments by which that organisation was directed and 
 those forms of worship were upheld. The men to be contrasted 
 are both primitive and simple-hearted. Both are nomades, far 
 inferior, it may be, to their descendants in the strength and 
 clearness of their intellectual powers, though more than equal 
 in poetic sensibility ; collecting wisdom as they move from spot 
 to spot in search of regular modes of life and permanent habita- 
 tions. The wealth of each is in his flocks and herds; his 
 strength in the devotion of his clansmen and posterity. Both 
 are also conscious of their moral wants, and their dependence on 
 
CHAP. IV.] IIindiLlism and Eevealed Religion. 233 
 
 superior genii; both are men of praise, of prayer, of sacrifice. 
 And yet how very different are the aspects of their inner life, 
 the real character of their religious worship, their relations to 
 the world invisible. 
 
 The father of the Hebrew race, as we behold him in the 
 Book of Genesis, abandoning his paternal roof, and then en- 
 camping, year by year, beneath a foreign sky, is ever influenced 
 by the consciousness of supernatural guidance. The arm on 
 which he leans is that of the Omnipotent. The Lord Himself 
 is with him in the course of his migrations : his misgivings are 
 all hushed when he reflects that God, the Self-Existent, is his 
 shield, and his exceeding great reward (Gen. xv. 1). The patri- 
 arch, in other words, has such a faith in God as justifies his 
 claim to be a Christian by anticipation, ^ the father of the faith- 
 ful. ' That organ of the soul by which we realise as present 
 what is actually beyond the range of human vision, was in him 
 directed to the obj ect where alone it can be satisfied. The God 
 of Abraham was living, personal, ever-present, irresistible, no 
 cold Abstraction of the logical faculty, no distant Something 
 which could only be defined by negatives, but a willing Friend, 
 a righteous Judge, a sympathetic Father. Abraham's road may 
 lie along the trackless plain or the inhospitable mountain-side, 
 and yet he fears no evil : his trust is in a living God and 
 Guardian, who will never fail His own. He may be called to 
 suffer, but he suffers at the hands of One who will convert the 
 scourge itself into an instrument of blessing. He may have to 
 sacrifice the fairest of his earthly prospects, yet he knows to 
 whom the sacrifice is made. He wanders childless in the land 
 of promise, yet as often as he gazes up to heaven, he welcomes 
 in the stars that spangle the unclouded firmament, an image of 
 his own posterity. Abraham * beJieved in the Lord ; and He 
 counted it to him for righteousness' (Gen. xv. 6). 
 
 The Indo- Aryan, on the other hand, had no such faith in 
 God, and no such trust in Plis protection. Indisposed to love 
 God, he was equally unwilling to retain God in his knowledge. 
 In proportion as he left his Father's house to wander forth in 
 quest of this or that debasing pleasure, faith was dimmed and 
 })aralysed within him, till the thought of a supreme Intelligence, 
 distinct from matter and transcending all material processes, had 
 well-nigh vanished from his soul. Instead of finding peace in 
 God, he vainly sought it in the adoration or deprecation of the 
 elements ; and having abandoned himself to this inferior kind 
 of worship, he oscillated from one deva to another, but had real 
 faith in none. 
 
 k 
 
234 Christ and other Masters. [part it. 
 
 It is indeed remarkable, that the efficacy of a principle 
 analogous to Christian faith was never plainly recognised in 
 India till after the propagation of the GospeP. Then it was 
 that the idea began to shew itself in one particular Hindu sect, 
 where men adopted phraseology which might have been mis- 
 taken almost for the language of the early Church. They spoke 
 of worshipping God in spirit : they ascribed a wonderful signifi- 
 cance to faith (hhakti) ; yet even this new verity was in the end 
 so much distorted, that the spurious ^ faith' of India had become 
 no better than a cloke for heartless apathy or gross licentious- 
 ness. Belief in one particular deva, or a firm reliance on the 
 merit of some special avatdra, would, according to this system, . 
 obviate the need of virtue, and would sanctify all kinds of vice^ 
 
 How different was the faith of Abraham ! It did not ter- 
 minate in devas like Yishnu or Siva, Krishna or Gaii^sa : and 
 the object being raised indefinitely higher, and invested with 
 distinctly moral attributes, the principle of faith had also gained 
 a corresponding elevation. ' I am the Almighty God : walk 
 before me, and be thou perfect' (Gen. xvii. 1). Such was the 
 original basis of the covenant which brought the patriarch into 
 a new relationship with God. The Being whom he worshipped 
 was not only righteous, but was righteousness itself. He was 
 no local deity with, limited jurisdiction or with human partiali- 
 ties. He was the Judge of all the earth (Gen. xviii. 2b) \ and 
 to impress this grand idea on Abraham and his posterity was 
 the uniform design of all the elder revelation. The satisfying 
 of men's intellectual cravings was but secondary and subordi- 
 nate, compared with, the enlivening of their conscience, the 
 rectifying of their wishes, and the purification of their heart. 
 The will of man, as one essential organ needed for the due ap- 
 propriation of Divine knowledge, as one leading element in the 
 spiritual constitution of our race, was made in Hebraism the 
 
 ^ See Lassen, ii. 1096, 1099, and with certain sectarial marks; or, 
 
 above, p. 182. which is better, if he brands his 
 
 2 Elphinstone, pp. 98, 121, and skin permanently with them with 
 
 Wilson, Lectures, p. 3 r . The latter a hot iron stamp ; if he is constantly 
 
 of these authorities, who has en- chanting hymns in honour of Yish- 
 
 larged upon the question in his nu ; or, what is equally efficacious, 
 
 History of the Hindd Sects, remsLxliH if he spends hours in the simple 
 
 that by teaching the doctrine of reiteration of his name or names ; 
 
 * faith alone,' the Hindii sectarian if he die with the word Hari, or 
 
 has rendered conduct ' wholly im- E^ma, or Kj-ishna, on his lips, and 
 
 material.' *It matters not how the thought of him in his mind, he 
 
 atrocious a sinner may be, if he may have lived a monster of ini- 
 
 paints his face, his breast, his arms, quity,— he is certain of heaven.' 
 
CHAP. IV.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion, 235 
 
 subject of a special education : it was moulded step by step into 
 conformity with the will of God. He asked the patriarch and 
 his descendants whether, with the knowledge of Him which 
 they had already, they would still believe in Him, and follow 
 Him as their supreme Director, even though His path might 
 sometimes be mysterious, and the truths He taught them might 
 sound harsh and paradoxical. And the effect of this divine ceco- 
 nomy is clearly seen from day to day in Abraham himself The 
 patriarch can never be indifferent, for example, to his earthly 
 prospects and position ; for the present world to him is not a 
 'vast mirage' of unsubstantial phantoms, but is full of deep 
 realities. He longs for offspring, he aspires to see his family 
 in possession of the land of Canaan ; yet whenever God appears 
 to be rescinding the original promise, Abraham as often bows to 
 the decision, and resigns his own will to the will of God : and 
 wlien at last old age is creeping over him and he is still like one 
 who sojourns in a strange country, and must buy himself a 
 sepulchre, his walk with God continues to uphold and purify 
 him ; he can look more clearly through the temporal promise to 
 the principles which underlie it; the postponement first, and 
 then the partial realisation of it, teach him to reflect more 
 deeply on some brighter and enduring heritage ; and his spirit 
 being thus exalted to a closer converse with the things invisible, 
 he dies, as he has lived, — in faith. 
 
 On the other hand, it seems as though the Indo- Aryan were 
 far less susceptible of moral culture, and that culture far more 
 seriously retarded by the rank luxuriance of his other powers, 
 the vividness of his imagination, and the acuteness of his specu- 
 lative faculty. ' In the hymns of the Yeda, we see man left to 
 himself to solve the riddle of the world \ ' As soon as he 
 relinquishes the primary faith in God, he dooms himself to 
 wander without light or guidance in the midst of endless mazes, 
 and to struggle with gigantic and insoluble enigmas. Nay, 
 the obscuration has extended far and deep into the spiritual 
 province of his nature. He is ' alienated from the life of God 
 through the ignorance that is in him, because of the blindness 
 of his heart. ' The oracle of conscience may still speak indeed, 
 but its decisions are continually disputed and rejected. The 
 monitor within him, his own inmost self, may raise its frequent 
 protest in behalf of righteousness, and drive him to invoke the 
 help of Indra, or the mercy of the purifying Waters ; yet he 
 finds in them no real and abiding comfort; he is tempted to 
 
 1 Prof. Max Milller, in Bunsen's Phil, of Univ, Hist. i. 134. 
 
236 Christ and other Masters, [part ii. 
 
 resign himself afresh to the dominion of the power of darkness, 
 and to give up the battle of humanity for lost. 
 
 Abraham, * believing Him faithful that promised,' was con- 
 spicuous also as a man of hope, of large ideas, of glowing aspira- 
 tions. He shewed himself most conscious of his noble destiny; 
 he realised, as few had done before, the glories which had been 
 reserved for all adherents of the true religion. He saw the day 
 of the Messiah ; he saw it, and was glad. Directed by the light 
 of the prophetic spirit, he beheld not only the detention of his 
 children's children in a land that was not theirs, and their even- 
 tual recovery from bondage after a definite term of years (Gen. 
 XV. 13, 14), but also their migration to the land of promise, the 
 commencement of some Hebrew dynasty, and last of all the 
 advent of the Son of Abraham, in whom all nations of the earth 
 are blessed. We ought not, doubtless, to exaggerate the area 
 of his field of vision, nor represent him as possessed. of all those 
 truths which, after the diffusion of a perfect light, we may dis- 
 cover in the oldest version of the Gospel-promise. The reality 
 itself may be as different in degree from aught which Abraham 
 anticipated, as the future glory of the Christian may transcend 
 the imagery by means of which he now approximates to some 
 idea of it. Still Abraham was in his day the champion of the 
 ancient faith ; and as he wandered far and near and saw the 
 nations lapsing one by one into idolatry and creature-worship, 
 he could hardly fail to understand that the election of his family, 
 as the family of God, was for some high and holy purpose, that 
 the basis of the covenant was a moral basis, and that He, in 
 whom the stock of Abraham would finally put forth its choicest 
 branch and reach its highest glory, was to spread the blessings 
 of this covenant in all the scattered tribes of man. 
 
 But where in any of the Vedas can we find a parallel to 
 this patient trust in God, this glowing hope of an imperishable 
 kingdom *? There were echoes, it may be, confused, and often 
 contradictory echoes of the primitive condemnation of man's 
 tempter ; and as evil seemed to propagate itself from age to age, 
 and as the malice of the demons gi-ew still more intolerable, 
 earnest hearts would grope, despairing of all human saviours, 
 for a God of truth, of holiness, of mercy : yet oft as heathendom 
 put forth these dim presentiments, and fondly as it clung to 
 these half-conscious prophecies of redemption, it was never able 
 to decipher^ them until the promise was in fact fulfilled, and 
 
 * *The universal heart of man- though it would not read its own 
 kind, from out of the depths, in- involuntary prophecy.' Archer But- 
 voked the presence of theBestorer, ler, Sermons, ist series, p. 241. 
 
CHAP. IV.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 237 
 
 meaning was imported into them by tlie announcements of the 
 Gospel. The heart had always striven in the direction of Chris- 
 tianity, but never till the advent of the Saviour was that striv- 
 ing made intelligible even to itself. 
 
 Now the contrast here exhibited between the father of the 
 faithful and the more elevated of those Aryan colonists who 
 chanted in their first migrations the impassioned hymns of the 
 Rig-Yeda, is in general true of the religious systems under which 
 the Hebrew and Hindu were being educated. In the one we 
 have stability, in the other, fluctuation ; in the one, develop 
 ment, in the other, discontinuity ; in the one, progress, in the 
 other, retrogression. In the first, the Object of belief entirely 
 fills the spirit of the worshipper, He is the same yesterday, to- 
 day, and for ever ; in the second, the divinities all change, or 
 vanish in the lapse of ages; they are 'old' and ' young ^ are 
 less and greater, this . supplanting or eclipsing that, and all ex- 
 tinguishable by the very law of their existence. Moreover, out 
 of Abraham there grew a family which proved itself the cham- 
 pion of monotheism, and which acted as the shelter of the purest 
 forms of worship and the guardian of the oracles of God. That 
 family in spite of all adverse influences was one and indestructi- 
 ble : it stood in reference to the world at large as stood the 
 sacred ark of Noah in the midst of the avenging waters. It 
 surmounted all the storms and fluctuations of all ages; it carried 
 in its bosom the beginnings of a new creation, and the germs of 
 supernatural life that should hereafter leaven all the mass of 
 humanity. 
 
 As centuries revolved, the creed of that sacred family had 
 doubtless grown more definite and luminous; the measure of 
 man's light was greater, and his knowledge of his future destiny 
 more certain and explicit ; but the several steps by which these 
 vast accessions were produced are all apparent in the marvellous 
 annals of the Hebrew people. So far from standing in a line 
 with heathenism, so far from borrowing its distinctive properties 
 from any or from all the Gentile systems, the religion of the 
 Old Testament, if we believe its own assertions and denuncia- 
 tions, was from first to last in diametric opposition to them. 
 They were from beneath; it was from above. They all were 
 issuing from the brain and heart of man ; they varied wdth the 
 variations of his temperament and with the growth of intellec- 
 tual culture : it was the result of an objective revelation, which, 
 
 1 The Yedas themselves distin- less, between the young gods and 
 guish between the great gods and the the old. Wilson, Rig- Veda^ i. 7 1. 
 
238 Christ and oilier Masters, [part ii. 
 
 coming down immediately from God, was radiant with the light 
 of His perfection, and was based upon relations between God 
 and man which neither time nor space can modify. As early as 
 the patriarchal period it was taught how every ethnic system 
 would be finally superseded ; how the * Shiloh' would inherit all 
 the royalty of Judah, and how Gentiles would all flock to Him 
 for light, for shelter, for nutrition. And when Christianity was 
 actually established it was far from disappointing these antici- 
 pations of the ancient world. It grew out of that anterior 
 system, as the ripening flower unfolds itself organically from the 
 bud, or as the daylight is the natural sequence of the dawn. The 
 Church of God has not been planted on the ruins of the old 
 theocracy, but is its proper consummation. The Son of Abra- 
 ham is now the Prince of Peace and King of Glory, and all 
 ' who are Christ's are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the 
 promise. ' 
 
 2. Nor if special features of the Hebrew and Hindu 
 systems be compared in chronological order, shall we often find 
 that the alleged resemblances between them are more than 
 superficial ; provided only that our estimate of revealed religion 
 is based entirely on original and authentic documents. This 
 proviso is the more important, since analogies far deeper do 
 exist, as we shall see hereafter, between the genuine ci*eeds of 
 Hindustan and certain depravations of revealed truth as it was 
 first communicated. It might be urged, for instance, with con- 
 siderable plausibility that Brahmanism, in reference to the 
 general course of its development, will stand to Buddhism in 
 the same relation that Mosaism stands to Christianity; or, in 
 other words, that if we place the principles enunciated in the 
 Yedas and the Laws of Manu side by side with those con- 
 tained in the Old Testament, and if we place the principles of 
 Gautama side by side with those of Christ and the Apostles, 
 the comparison will lead us to infer some iuward, if not out- 
 ward and historical affinity, between the diflerent systems 
 of belief. These questions both demand a more particular exa- 
 mination. 
 
 (1) First, then, Brahmanism was but a secondary stage in 
 the formation of the Indo- Aryan institutions. It appears to 
 have adapted to the wants of nations what before had been re- 
 stricted to the family, the clan, the disconnected tribe. In this 
 respect the office of Mosaism was not only analogous, but iden- 
 tical. Both, in order to eflect such purpose, had engrafted new- 
 elements upon the worship of the previous period ; both had 
 multiplied the number of sacrificial rites, and, while reviving 
 
CHAP. IV.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 239 
 
 many of the ordinances which had the sanction of the former 
 generations \ fresh importance seems to have been given to 
 ritual uniformity, as though, in that peculiar phase of human 
 progress, the language of symbolic action was peculiarly expres- 
 sive and intelligible. But while I grant the perfect truth of all 
 such representations, the objector needs to be reminded that 
 the moral system of the Hebrews was meanwhile indefinitely 
 superior to that of popular Hinduism. The institutes of Moses 
 added, it may be, to what had formerly prevailed ; they autho- 
 rised a far more solemn and elaborate liturgy ; but, unlike the 
 institutes of Manu, they insisted at the same time more em- 
 phatically on the need of spirituality in the worshipper : the 
 tone of every interdict and admonition grew more penetrating 
 and severe. * Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood 
 of goats'? Ofier unto God thanksgiving ; and pay thy vows unto 
 the Most High ; and call upon Me in the day of trouble : I will 
 deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me. But unto the wicked 
 God saith, What hast thou to do, to declare My statutes, or 
 that thou shouldest take My covenant in thy mouth?' (Ps. L. 
 13 — 16). The symbols of the Hebrew law were thus far more 
 than barren and unmeaning ceremonies : they suggested to the 
 worshipper a multitude of deep and spiritual relations. Man 
 was taught to separate the visible imagery under which divine 
 things were brought down more fully to his present understand- 
 ing from ideas and principles enveloped in them, and especially 
 to hear the doctrine of the unity, the placability, the holiness, 
 and the supremacy of God, proclaimed in every chapter of their 
 ritual institute. 
 
 Again, the system, re-enacted under Moses, like that which 
 owed its birth to Manu, had a powerful and hereditary priest- 
 hood, whose prerogatives were guarded by a list of stringent 
 j)rohibitions. None but they could minister in holy things. 
 Yet here, in spite of all apparent similarities, the difference is 
 essential and extreme. The Hebrew legislator had most plainly 
 recognised the unity of the human race : he gave no sanction to 
 the law of caste, by which the Brahman had been lifted far 
 above his fellows, not in office only but extraction and inherent 
 worth. The son of Aaron was an ordinary Israelite ; he was 
 descended from an ordinary member of the patriarchal family, 
 — no emanation from the head or reason of Brahma, while 
 others were the offspring of the feet. And, as the consequence 
 of this original equality, the high-priest of the Hebrews, though 
 
 ^Cf. Bluut's Undesigned Coincidences^ pp. 8, 9. Lond. 1847. 
 
240 Christ and other Masters, [part ii. 
 
 invested with superior rank and ministering before God, not 
 only for himself, but also in behalf of other men, had never 
 shewn a disposition to invade the privileges of his brethren. 
 His official dignity was felt to be compatible with the sacerdotal 
 character of every Israelite, who, owing to his moral elevation 
 and particularly to his knowledge of the one True God, had 
 always been a member of a ^ royal priesthood,' and a * prophet for 
 all mankind \ ' Accordingly the insight into heavenly mysteiies, 
 and access to 'the oracles of God,' had never been confined, 
 among the Hebrews, to one narrow circle, or one favoured class. 
 The many were not left to gather up such crumbs and frag- 
 ments of religious truth as chanced to fall from the abundant 
 table of some haughty doctor like the Brahman. The provisions 
 of the Law had rendered it possible for every one to know the 
 will of God, and make it known to others ; and each father, in 
 pursuance of this principle, was urged to teach his children, ^ to 
 the intent that when they came up they might shew their chil- 
 dren the same.' 
 
 The point, however, which is more especially insisted on by 
 those who institute comparisons between the Hebrew and 
 Brahmanic systems is the partial and exclusive spirit manifest 
 in both. That narrowness, indeed, may fairly be ascribed to 
 every aspect of the latter system, no one has yet ventured to 
 dispute. Its very constitution was harsh and inelastic. It 
 knew of no expansion beyond the members of the three superior 
 (Hwice-born') classes; for the siidra, though reduced by the 
 victorious arm of the invader and associated with the rest in the 
 capacity of a serf, was held to be excluded, by impurity of 
 descent, from all acquaintance with the Yedas^ and from other 
 like advantages. But can the same exclusiveness be fairly 
 charged against the Hebrews and their system ? Doubtless one 
 great object of it was to fence them in from the contamination 
 of the neighbouring heathen, and by educating them apart to 
 render them a single and peculiar people ; yet there never was 
 a period in their history when they were treated as a higher 
 and distinct *race' of beings, or the proselyte rejected from 
 communion with the genuine Hebrew. Men, for instance, like 
 the Kenites or the Bechabites, retaining the ancestral faith in 
 one True God without conforming to the ritual law of Moses, 
 lived for centuries on terms of amity with Israel and were shel- 
 tered near the sanctuary of God. The psalmist and the prophet 
 are both heard exulting in the thought that Zion was the home 
 
 ^ See above, p. 79, n. i. ^ See above, p. 137, n. 3. 
 
CHAP. IV.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion, 241 
 
 and mother-city not of Israel only, but of gentile nations also. 
 At the dedication of the temple Solomon did not forget the 
 * strangers' coming out of far countries to worship in Jerusalem. 
 They also were embraced within the circle of the prayer; * That 
 all people of the earth may know Thy name, to fear Thee, as do 
 Thy people Israel' (1 Kings viii. 43). And as the number of 
 such proselytes went on increasing, the energy of Hebraism it- 
 self would be recruited by admixtures from the heathen world. 
 The single difference in point of expansibility between the 
 Christian and Hebrew systems lay in this ; — that under the 
 more perfect institution converts are relieved from the necessity 
 of compliance with the ancient ritual, on the ground that man, 
 exalted by incorporation into Christ, is now attaining his 
 majority, — is capable of higher and more spiritual forms of 
 education. Still it should not be forgotten that nothing would 
 at first conduce more largely to the spread of Christian influ- 
 ences than the existence of those Jewish proselytes in every dis- 
 trict both of east and west. They served as starting-points for 
 missions to the heathen; they were links, or rather living 
 stones, made ready in the providence of God for binding all the 
 world together, and for building up a Catholic Church. 
 
 (2) But, secondly, do other and more obvious points of 
 similarity exist between the general aspects of Buddhism and 
 those of Christianity? Was Buddhism, for example, in its 
 main particulars the offspring of an older system ? Christianity 
 was also this, but with the grand distinction that it never for 
 one moment ceased to venerate the holy writings and traditions 
 of its predecessor ; whereas Buddhism entered on the work of 
 revolution by rejecting or contemning the authority of the 
 Yedas. Or, did Buddhism labour to emancipate the ancient 
 world from the dominion of an irksome and elaborate ritual ? 
 Christianity has in turn effected this emancipation ; not, how- 
 ever, by the violent uprooting of the older forms of service, but 
 by placing in the very centre of its dogmatic system the reality 
 which they foreshadowed, and thus elevating and refining the 
 whole character of worship. Or, again, did Buddhism venture 
 to repudiate every species of animal sacrifice] The Gospel did 
 the same, but in obedience to a very different theoiy both of 
 God and man. So far from questioning the truth of instincts 
 which had found expression in the ancient sacrifices, it was ever 
 pointing to * the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the 
 world : ' it taught men how the offering of all other victims was 
 eclipsed and superseded not by the development of human 
 reason or the riper dictates of philosophy, but * through the 
 
 H. IG 
 
242 Christ and other Masters. [part li.^ 
 
 offering of tlie body of Jesus Christ once for all. ^ Did Bud- 
 dhism lay unwonted stress on ethics? Christianity did the 
 same, but building on a true foundation, all the lessons which it 
 inculcated were sustained by deep and heavenly motives ; they 
 grew directly out of its theology, deriving thence their highest 
 virtue and most touching illustration. To be good is, in the 
 moral system of the Christian, to be God-like : while in Bud- 
 dhism, where the thought of the Creator and the Judge is vir- 
 tually rejected, the moral code itself is stripped of its supreme 
 authority. Or was Buddhism from the first distinguished by the 
 feminine mildness of its tone, the gentleness of its demeanour, 
 the diffusiveness of its philanthropy ? These crowning excellen- 
 cies of the heathen system were again transcended by the genial 
 spirit of Christianity; for though it has distinctly recognised 
 the freedom of the human agent, and so carried its appeal 
 directly to the manlier province of our being, it has taught men 
 with unequalled emphasis to put away 'all bitterness and wrath 
 and anger and clamour and evil speaking, with all malice, ' and 
 has charged them to be ' kind one to another, tender-hearted, 
 forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath for*- 
 given them.' Or, lastly, did the followers of the Buddha rise 
 at length to the conception of an ever-widening empire, and 
 embark on the conversion of far-distant nations? Have their 
 tenets been in fact accepted, not by Hindus only, but by count- 
 less multitudes in China and Tibet, and still more recently by 
 Japanese and Burman, Mongol and Malay ? The Gospel in like 
 manner claims to be a ' world religion. ' It has never faltered 
 in that claim since He, whose errand was to rescue and restore 
 humanity, commissioned the small band of Galilsean peasants to 
 go forth into the world and 'preach the Gospel to every creature/ 
 By the majesty and life inherent in the Gospel it has subju- 
 gated, step by step, the first, the mightiest, the most highly- 
 gifted nations ; and although, in some localities, the tide of con- 
 quest has receded and the vantage-ground been lost, the course 
 of Christianity was on the whole triumphant and progressive. 
 Every year is adding largely to the proofs already given of 
 supernatural vigour, and indefinite expansibility : and thus the 
 Gospel is, in fact, what Buddhism vainly strove to be, — the 
 agent in the hands of God for working the regeneration of the 
 human family \ 
 
 1 It is melancholy to hear a (Lond. 1856), complain of 'the par- 
 weak and half -infatuated writer of tial littleness, the narrowness of 
 the present day, in discussing the conception, and circumscribed ap- 
 great question, What is Truth} plication of our Christian invention, 
 
CHAP. IV.] Hinduism and Revealed Beligion, 243 
 
 Yet, while I would contend that most of the alleged resem- 
 blances between the spirit which pervades the Bible on the one 
 side, and the Hindu sutras on the other, are but slight and 
 superficial, I am far from saying that no analogies whatever can 
 be traced in the historical development of the religions we are 
 now comparing. What, then, is the general nature of these 
 points of contact *? I answer : they are, for the most part, not 
 discoverable in the genuine dogmas of revealed religion, but in 
 later depravations of it, — not in Hebraism as founded on the 
 ancient Scriptures, and embodied in the temple-service, not in 
 Christianity as once for all delivered by the Lord and His 
 Apostles to the keeping of the early Church, but in some 
 schools and systems, drawing their original life from these, yet 
 leavened and corrupted by other elements of foreign or extrinsic 
 growth. 
 
 Nor will the bare existence of such resemblances be matter 
 of surprise to him who soberly reflects upon the way in which 
 they are produced. As soon as ever the mind of man is anxious 
 to break loose from what is supernaturally revealed; as soon as 
 ever the authority within him is suffered to resist and overrule 
 the authority without him, he at once relapses, in the same pro- 
 portion, to a state of nature : the religious system he constructs 
 is so far standing on a level with heathenism; and whenever 
 such internal affinity has been established^ there is reason to 
 expect, in cases even where no outward agents are at work, a 
 general similarity between tenets of two independent doctors, 
 and, it may be, in the structure of their sacred institutions. 
 
 I shall notice one or two examples. Of the three great sects 
 who figured in Judsea at the close of the Old-Testament ceconomy, 
 
 and the isolated instances of bene- institutions, des moeurs, des singu- 
 
 ficence exhibited in the ministry of larites, si parfaitement semblables 
 
 Christ,' as compared with the qu'on croirait I'Orient et TOccident 
 
 Buddhist's *subHme picture of an plagiaires Tun de I'autre. Dans les 
 
 exulting universe,' &c. p. 1 56. legendes des bouddhistes de Ceylan, 
 
 ^ Seeabove, p. iSojn. I. Quinet comme dans les chroniques des 
 
 {Le Genie des ReligionSy pp. 215, monastferes de Citeaux et de Saint- 
 
 216, Paris, 185 1) appears to have Gall, ce ne sont que fondations de 
 
 been startled by the discovery of convents d'hommes ou de femmes, 
 
 some of the resemblances between missions chez les peuples strangers, 
 
 Buddhism and the Eomanism of pelerinages, benedictions de reli- 
 
 the Middle Ages : — * On reste d'ail- ques, indulgences, predications, 
 
 leurs confondu en voyant comment, conciles oecum6niques pour com- 
 
 a travers toutes les differences de battre les schismes, extirper Therd- 
 
 temps et de lieu, la memo empreinte sie, maintenir I'orthodoxie.' On 
 
 spirituelle a produit, dans le catho- some of the points here cited, see 
 
 licisme du moyen age et dans le Appendix 11. 
 bouddhisme de la haute Asie, des 
 
 16—2 
 
244 Christ and other Masters, [part ii. 
 
 one of the most remarkable was tlie confraternity of the Essenes; 
 which, though entirely Jewish in its main complexion, may. re- 
 mind us here and there not only of Pythagoras and the ' Polistse/ 
 but of Gautama Buddha and his schooP. There is the same 
 mystic glow upon the spiritual life of the Essene. Repelled and 
 wearied by the frigid ritualism of the Pharisee, and disgusted 
 by the selfishness and scepticism of the Sadducee, his feelings 
 had impelled him to withdraw entirely from the town ; he lost 
 his reverence for the temple-service, he endeavoured to arrive at 
 fuller knowledge of the things of God by analysing his own 
 emotions. Meanwhile, however, he was not a mere recluse, in- 
 active, meditative, and unpractical. He saw in every human 
 being the image of the one Creator ; he abhorred all forms of 
 slavery ; he was ardently desirous to promote the moral and 
 material interests of his fallen countrymen. But here, as in 
 the case of Buddhism, while attempting to remodel and regene- 
 rate, the Essene abandoned his belief not only in the errors and 
 extravagances of other sects, but in some vital principles of true 
 religion. He estranged himself from the divine society where 
 God was more immediately present. The spirit which he more 
 and more betrayed was, in the language of Neander, ^ monkish 
 and schismatic' Like the Buddhist he believed in some arbi- 
 trary and irrevocable fate^, necessitating human action. Like 
 the Buddhist also he repudiated the ancient doctrine of media- 
 tion, propitiation, and redemption, by disparaging, if not ab- 
 juring, the rite of sacrifice, in which that doctrine was embodied; 
 and thus, in spite of all the amiability and gentleness of his 
 nature, we hear of no Essenes among the little company of 
 Hebrews * who first trusted in Christ. ' 
 
 Or, take again the swarm of heresies that soon invaded 
 
 1 A late writer (Mr. J. H. Gould- objection, has admitted {Life of 
 hawke), in his extravagant produc- Christ, p. 40, London, 1851) that 
 Hon, The Solar AllegorieSj GsilGntta, the sect of the Essenes, though 
 1855, attempts to prove that 'the strictly Jewish in its origin, con- 
 greater number of personages men- tained within it some infusion of 
 tioned in the Old and New Testa- Oriental theosophy, but is at the 
 ments are allegorical beings. He same time very careful to point 
 has also laboured to connect the out the fundamental contradiction 
 philosophy of the Essenes with that between the special principles of 
 of the Pythagoreans and Hindti Essenism and those of Christianity, 
 philosophers (p. 20) ; and in parti- ^ Tb d^ riSu 'Eo-o-tjvujv yiifoSy irdv- 
 cular traces back the growth of rtcy t^v el/xapfjLivrjv Kvpiav dirocpalve- 
 Christian monasticism to influences rat, koX jjl7]8^p fir] kolt eKclvnt 
 diffused by them and their asso- \prj(f)ov avdpdiiroLS dnavT^. Joseph, 
 ciates in the schools of Alexandria. Antiq, xiii. v. 9. 
 Neander, in considering a similar 
 
CHAP. IV.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 245 
 
 almost every province of the early Church. Abandoning, as 
 they did, the more essential of the supernatural truths of revela- 
 tion, they were virtually and in efiect revivals of paganism; 
 and family-likeness may accordingly be traced among the older 
 speculations current in the schools of heathen philosophy. In 
 discussing, for example, the nature of the Divine Sonship, 
 Sabellius and his party taught a doctrine very similar to that 
 already noticed in the trimilrrti of India; while Docetism, 
 starting from a notion that the spiritual and material cannot 
 permanently coexist, had merely reproduced the Hindu doctrine 
 of avatdras. The inward correspondence in the texture of ideas 
 had issued in a similar depravation of revealed truth. 
 
 Or if, penetrating below the surface, we investigate the 
 elementary thoughts and feelings that hereafter found an utter- 
 ance in monastic institutions of the Church, we find that on the 
 one side those ideas are alien from the spirit of primitive Chris- 
 tianity, and on the other that they had been long familiar in the 
 east before they were appropriated or unconsciously reproduced 
 among one class of Christians in Syria and Egypt. India was 
 the real birthplace of monasticism^, its cradle being in the 
 haunts of earnest yogins and self-torturing devotees, who were 
 convinced that evil is inherent not in man only but in all the 
 various forms of matter, and accordingly withdrew as far as pos- 
 sible from contact with the outer world ^. At first indeed the 
 Christian hermit like the earliest of his Hindu prototypes had 
 dwelt alone upon the outskirts of his native town or village, 
 supporting himself by manual labour and devoting all the sur- 
 plus of his earnings to religious purposes. But during the 
 fourth century of the present era many such hermits began to 
 llock together in the forest or the wilderness, where regular con- 
 fraternities were organised upon a model more or less derived 
 from the Egyptian Therapeutse and the old Essenes of Pales- 
 tine ; the members, in their dress and habits, most of all resem- 
 bling^ those of the religious orders who still swarm in Tibet and 
 Ceylon. When Christianity was suffered to ally itself with the 
 monastic tendencies so characteristic of the eastern mind, some 
 justification would be doubtless found in the ungenial aspect of 
 
 1 Prof. Wilson, in ^siaf. i^es. XVI. {Tibet, p. 150, Lond. 1852), 'who 
 
 38. See also Mr. Hardy's Eastern practised penances and sat on pil- 
 
 Monachism, and M. Pavie's critique lars, like Simeon Stylites/ are still 
 
 on it in the Revue des Deux Mondes, found at Koon-boom and in Tibet, 
 
 1854, Tome V. 'The type of those ^ See above, pp. 169, 170. 
 
 devotees,' writes Mr. H. T. Prinsep ^ gee Elphinstone's India, "p, 107. 
 
246 Christ and other Masters. [part il. 
 
 the age and in the feelings which might naturallj impel an 
 earnest sjDirit to recoil from the great centres of corruption, and 
 erect itself a shelter from the inroads of barbarians and the 
 storms of public life. It is indisputable also that, in spite of 
 morbid symptoms^ pointing to a different conclusion, a new 
 character was at once imparted to this foreign mode of life by- 
 contact with the principles of the Gospel ; and that, being thus 
 ennobled, the monastic institute was frequently converted by 
 the gracious providence of God into an apt and salutary agent 
 for the training of the Christian scholar and the propagation of 
 the Christian faith. Yet after all such benefits are estimated at 
 their very highest worth, monasticism remains in its idea and 
 essence inconsistent with the proper genius of revealed religion. 
 It can draw no sanctions from the writings of the Old Testa- 
 ment^ ; ib is repugnant to the spirit of the New. Though 
 Christianity is found to be unsparing in its condemnation of all 
 forms of worldliness, and though it teaches as was never taught 
 before * a total separation from all bonds considered as merely 
 earthly,' it has nevertheless repudiated the heathenish idea^ 
 that any creature of God is evil in itself, or is, in other words, 
 the product of ungodlike beings like the Gnostic demiurgus. 
 Christianity so far from doing violence to any of our natural 
 duties and relationships has consecrated all of them afresh ; so 
 far from labouring to pluck uj) the instincts and affections 
 proper to humanity, it renders them more true and sensitive, 
 because it renders them more Christ-like ; purifying and re- . 
 fining and ennobling. Christianity, again, forbids the spiritual 
 warrior to throw down his arms and quit the post of danger and 
 of duty. His vocation is to benefit the world by his example, 
 
 ^ The histories and legends of . Samuel, he felt himself constrained 
 
 the fourth and following century to use the allegorical method of 
 
 abound in illustrations of the la- interpretation, because, as he re- 
 
 mentable errors and extravagances marked, the literal would no more 
 
 resulting from the prevalent passion apply to persons who alone were in 
 
 in favour of monasticism. Some a condition to profit by his labours ; 
 
 examples are collected by Neander, 'quibus ecclesiasticoe vitie consue- 
 
 Ch. Hist. III. 337 sq. He particu- tudine longe fieri ab uxoris com- 
 
 larly draws attention to the sect of plexu et coelibes manere i)ropositum 
 
 Euchites, w^ho, as he reminds us, est.' Works, ed. Giles, vii. 369. 
 
 constituted the first order of ' men- ^ Dr. Kay, Principal of Bishop's 
 
 dicant friars' {p. 342) within the College, Calcutta, has recently dis- 
 
 pale of Christianity. cussed this subject, with special 
 
 ^ It is worthy of notice that when reference to Hindi! theories, in his 
 
 Beda was requested by his^ friend, excellent essay on The Promises of 
 
 the bishop of Hexham, to compile Christianity ^ Oxf. 1855. 
 • an exposition of the first book of 
 
CHAP. IV.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 247 
 
 to be in it, but not of it, and, himself made luminous by fellow- 
 ship with Christ, to ^ let his light so shine before men, that they 
 may see his good works, and glorify his Father who is in heaven.' 
 And such was also the conviction of the early Christians. When 
 the heathen were disposed to charge them with indifference to 
 the practical business of society and the requirements of the 
 state, the accusation was indignantly rejected by their ardent 
 and severe apologist^: 'We are no Brachmans,' he could add, 
 * nor Indian Gymnosophists, dwellers in woods, estranged from 
 the affairs of life. We know that our duty is to give thanks 
 for every thing to God, the Lord and the Creator. We are far 
 from wishing to repudiate any one of His works. We are tem- 
 perate, it is true, and learn to use without abusing.' 
 
 (3) But granting, for the sake of argument, that real and 
 profound resemblances did often come to light in the develop- 
 ment of the religions we have just considered; granting that 
 some points of contact can be shewn to have existed in the 
 growth of Brahmanism and Hebraism on one side, and of 
 Buddhism and Christianity on the other ; granting even, as one 
 writer has of late contended, that there is as much in the records 
 of Hindu systems ' of what was parallel, as of what was antago- 
 nistic to the Gospel^;' let us test these suppositions in a dif- 
 ferent way, and measure the alleged affinities by following out 
 the principles from which they are believed to flow into their 
 logical consequences and their practical results. Now Brah- 
 manism, as understood by all philosophers, was uniformly 
 striving to obtain exemption from the liability to repeated 
 births : its ultimate effort was to give such kinds of knowledge 
 to its votary as enabled him to say, ' I am Brahma,' * I am All 
 that is.' As soon as ever this exalted standing has been gained, 
 the transmigration of the spirit ceases ; but exactly at the point 
 where the resemblances to Christianity might be expected to 
 
 ^ Tertullian Ajpologet. c. xlii. operum ejus repudiamus: plane 
 
 The whole passage is remarkable: temperamus ne ultra modum aut 
 
 'Sedalio quoque injuriarum titulo perperam utamur.' 
 postulamur, et infructuosi in ne- ^ Prof. Jowett, Epistles of St, 
 
 gotiis dicimur : quo pacto homines Paul, &c. ii. 385, 386. Lond. 1855. 
 
 vobiscum degentes, ejusdem victus, * The Hving, perfect truth has points 
 
 habitus, instructus, ejusdem ad of tangency for the one-sided forms 
 
 vitam necessitatis? Neque enim of error; though we may not be 
 
 Brachmanae, aut Indorum gymno- thereby enabled to put together the 
 
 sophistae sumus, sylvicolae et exules perfect whole from the scattered 
 
 vitse. Meminimus gratiam nos de- and repellent fragments.' Neandcr, 
 
 here Domino Deo Creator! [cf. Life of Christy ?• 41- 
 I Tim. iv. 3, 4]; nullum fructum 
 
248 Christ and other Masters. [part ii. 
 
 attain their fulness, the divergence is most fundamental and 
 entire. The act of reabsorption, every Brahman argues, will 
 destroy the personality of the human subject ; his mental and 
 moral organisation is utterly subverted, superseded, and dis- 
 solved. 'Annihilation, therefore, as regards the individual 
 being is in Brahmanism as much the ultimate destiny of the 
 soul as it is of the body, and '' Not to be " is the melancholy 
 result of the religion and philosophy of the Hindus \' And if 
 the end of all their mighty speculations be thus cold and deso- 
 lating, what shall be our judgment of the younger system of 
 philosophy, which, affecting to restore and purify the ancient 
 creed, reduced it to more dismal blanks, and lengthened out the 
 awful series of negations ? The common cry of Buddhism was : 
 ' It is transient ; it is wretched ; it is void.' With these reflec- 
 tions on the emptiness of all around him, the philosopher was 
 labouring to appease the hunger of the human spirit ; or if he 
 ventured to discourse of future recompence and liberation from 
 the evil of our present lot, the goal to which he ever pointed is 
 the state where all the elements that enter into our idea of being 
 will be utterly exhausted and burnt out. The heaven of philoso- 
 phic Buddhism is mrvdna, ' The mighty efforts of science in the 
 ancient world have only issued in the forming of a vast and 
 universal abstraction. They gave birth to Buddhism, a system 
 in which there is no longer more than one sole existence, the 
 Absolute, and in which this same existence is the infinite Yoid 
 resembling non-existence. Here, then, is the furthest bound 
 that could be reached by science, when applied to spiritual and 
 divine things ; it is the deification of Nothing^.' 
 
 On the other hand, we cannot fail to notice how revealed 
 religion, with each phase of its development, had grown more 
 positive in its form, and brought men better tidings. It was 
 eminently hopeful and constructive. It unfolded the great 
 truth, that man is in the present life preparing for his ultimate 
 condition ; that he now begins to be what he will be for ever. 
 It preaches more and more distinctly of the sacredness of human 
 nature, as restored and glorified in Christ ; it lays new stress on 
 the material part of man, as wedded to his individual spirit, and 
 as destined with that spirit to live on for ever ; and thus, while 
 Buddhism plants us in a sepulchre and extols it as our place of 
 refuge from all human sorrows and all burdens of the flesh, the 
 Gospel rolls away the stone from the door of the sepulchre ; it 
 
 ^ Prof. "Wilson, Lectures^ p. 65. 
 
 8 Gabriel, TModicee Pratique^ p. 84. Paris, 1855. 
 
CHAP. IV.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion. 249 
 
 makes us free indeed, and points us to the ultimate ' redemption 
 of the body' and the glorification of our whole humanity. 
 
 It is far, however, from my wish, in charging Buddhism with 
 those fearful consequences, to deny or question the amount of 
 social benefit resulting from its propagation in some parts of 
 central and eastern Asia. Popular Buddhism, intermingled, as 
 it is, with older maxims and more positive traditions, is far 
 better than the nihilistic Buddhism of philosophy : and, ac- 
 cordingly, in this, as in some other cases where the territory 
 invaded by the new religion was before in the possession of a 
 ruder and more sanguinary creed, it may have doubtless proved 
 an engine for exalting the character of millions who embrace it, 
 and, to some extent, may have prepared a way for Christianity \ 
 But that far more powerful agencies are still required among 
 them is apparent, from the utter inability of Buddhism^, even 
 where it most predominates, to satisfy the reclamation of man's 
 conscience, and to banish the hereditary demon-worship and the 
 vulgar deprecation of the serpent^. 
 
 (4) There is one more special point of view in which the 
 truths of Christianity may be most forcibly contrasted with the 
 best and brightest products of eastern speculation. All these 
 varied products, estimated at their highest value, were but faint 
 approximations to the sum of living and life-giving verities 
 transmitted to us from the Founder of the Christian Church. 
 When brought into comparison with the Gospel, they are poor 
 and meagre, partial and one-sided. He who watches some of 
 the more mighty fluctuations of the Hindu spirit, in its efibrt 
 to escape from speculative difficulties and solve the awful riddles 
 
 ^ Upham has the following note rejoices to record the humanising 
 on a passage in the Sacred Books influence of Buddhism when intro- 
 of CeyloUy ii. 54, which inculcates duced, in connexion with other 
 the greatest tenderness in treating creeds, among the brutal hordes of 
 animals: * Although the present Chingiskhan (i. 248). Tennent 
 state of Buddhism properly excites makes the same admission in re- 
 our strongest interest and exertions ference to all the countries of 
 to turn its followers from the blind- eastern and central Asia. He says 
 ness and selfishness of its modern [Christianity in Ceylon, pp. 203, 
 tenets to the brightness of the 204) that it was *an active agent 
 Christian revelation : yet, in this in the promotion of whatever civil- 
 passage, as well as in the simple isation afterwards enlightened those 
 offerings of fragrant perfumes and races by whom its doctrines were 
 flowers, contrasted with the can- embraced.' 
 
 nibalism and serpent and demon- ^ 'Die Hulle ist geblieben, der 
 
 rites it supplanted, the Buddhist Geist gewichen: der Buddhismus 
 
 doctrine must be esteemed to have ist jetzt eine Mumie,' Wuttke, 11. 
 
 been a great blessing and ameliora- 590. 
 
 tion.' Wuttke, in Uke manner, ^ g,^, Tennent, as above, p. 232. 
 
250 Christ and other Masters, [part ii. 
 
 by whicli it is oppressed, will see it here and there approaching, 
 if not touching, a great line of thought, which, when pursued, 
 might possibly have issued in the scriptural solution ; yet ere 
 long the cheering hopes which progress of this kind might foster 
 are all doomed to disappointment. The speculator seems to be 
 diverted from his proper object by the intervention of some 
 fresh chimera or some puerile conceit; he loses his mental 
 balance, and the fruit of all his metaphysics is a maimed or 
 transcendental theory of the universe repugnant to his moral 
 instincts. Thus, how much soever we may be disposed to chafe 
 at these phenomena of heathenism, the fact remains indisputable, 
 that if we add together and combine all single truths elicited by 
 the profoundest thinkers in the various schools of Brahmanic 
 philosophy, such contributions are all very far from making up 
 the circle of Christian theism ; they cover only some few corners 
 of the field of revelation \ 
 
 For example. He whom Christians worship is a Being 
 higher far, and far more truly Cod-like, than the worthiest of 
 Hindu conceptions. These, indeed, are not unwilling to recog- 
 nise the main distinction drawn in Holy Scripture between the 
 subject and the object, — the finite and the infinite. They all 
 regard the perfect extrication of material from immaterial as 
 the end and aim of true philosophy. While rejecting or ignor- 
 ing the idea of created spirits^, as distinct from emanations, 
 they are all in favour of the doctrine of a great and universal 
 Soul, — the substance, the reality. Some, moreover, have con- 
 tended that this Creat Soul is one, or simple ; others, that it is 
 resolvable into parts, and therefore multiform and manifold; 
 yet all of them agree in treating it as the original and self- 
 dependent Something, over and beyond which is no other 
 entity ; they are alike desirous to exalt it far above the 
 possibility of future contact with the transient and phenomenal. 
 To this supreme and all-embracing Spirit the Yedantins assign 
 not only an eternal subsistence, but also many of the specific 
 properties which enter into our idea of personality, as intelli- 
 gence, volition, and the like. 
 
 1 Cf. Dean Trench's Hulsean tion, was maimed and imperfect. 
 Lectures (1846), p. 58: 'And thus These systems, so far from pro- 
 each of the great divisions of the viding what men needed, had not 
 Gentile world had but a fragment, satisfactorily and on every side 
 even in thought, of the truth : the even contemplated what he needed ; 
 Greek world, the exaltation of man- much less had they given it.* 
 hood ; the Oriental, the glorious ^ ggg Aphomms of the Yoga, ed, 
 humiliation of Godhead: and thus, Ballantyne, Part i. p. 6^. 
 each of these, even as a specula- 
 
CHAP. IV.] Hinduism and Revealed Religion, 251 
 
 Yet here the many points of similarity between their system 
 and the Christian are exhausted, and we enter on a startling 
 contra,st. The Y6dantins^, on the one hand, labour to iden- 
 tify the glorious Spirit of the universe with His own pro- 
 duction, and, in order to effect this, question the reality of the 
 external world, and treat it as illusive ; on the other hand, they 
 totally repudiate the idea of individual existence, or of person- 
 ality attaching to all rational creatures, and securing to each 
 man the power of self-determination. A second school, or the 
 Nyaya, recognises the personal character of God more fully ; it 
 ascribes to Him such attributes as will, activity, and intelligence ; 
 but no account whatever is taken by it of His moral govern- 
 ment, His fatherhood, His providence, His justice, or His 
 mercy. In this school, again, where true subsistency is granted 
 to the world of matter, and where finite souls are recognised, 
 the origin of both is carried backward to eternity, while all the 
 mental and corporeal faculties possessed by human beings in 
 one stage of their existence are in no case held to be essential 
 parts of them, and, as such, infinite in duration. The Sankhya 
 system, as we saw already, occupied, in some particulars, a 
 middle place among the jarring tenets of Hindu philosophers. It 
 regarded matter as a real aggregate of qualities ; it recognised a 
 spiritual essence gifted with a species of volition ; it pleaded 
 even for the personal distinctness of all human souls ; yet, on 
 the other hand, it went so far as to attribute the government of 
 the world entirely to the operation of physical agents, and made 
 Spirit, whether human or Divine, a mere spectator in some 
 gorgeous and gigantic drama. Indeed, the one school of Hindu 
 philosophy among whose tenets the idea of a Divine providence 
 was clearly and consistently developed, is the latest modifica- 
 tion^ of the Sankhya system; and even this, I should again 
 remark, might be indebted for its higher characteristics to some 
 intercourse with Christianity. 
 
 Another instance of the general inability of Hinduism to 
 contemplate religious truth under more than one of its manifold 
 aspects was furnished by the Bhagavad-GUd ; which, when its 
 large and comprehensive spirit is remembered, might be deemed 
 the least of all amenable to this censure. I have before alluded 
 to the stern and naked Pantheism which it preaches ; but the 
 want of balance in its author is no less strikingly apparent in 
 discussing moral questions. So long as he is aiming merely to 
 
 ^ See a recent article in the North British Review^ No. 49, p. 224. 
 s Above, p. 153. 
 
252 Christ and other Masters, [part ii, 
 
 destroy tlie errors of an older creed, — so long as lie exposes the 
 narrowness, the spiritual pride, the dreamy indolence, and 
 inefficiency of the Yoga-system, his criticism is often most acute, 
 his logic overwhelming ; but as soon as ever he attempts to cure 
 the evil he complains of, it is manifest that the remedy is 
 utterly inadequate : it is a tissue of self-contradictions, a huge 
 mass of unrealities. The genuine devotee, the Karmayogin, is 
 to suffer and to act in every case without emotion and without 
 regard to consequences. He must pluck up all within him that 
 may serve to foster the illusions of the human and that interferes 
 with the development of the divine : affections, be they pure or 
 impure; instincts, whether high and noble or unworthy and 
 corrupted ; sympathies, inwoven though they be with all the 
 innermost fibres of his being ; and when at last he yields assent 
 to the unnatural conclusion that the real dignity of man consists 
 in utter abnegation of self-consciousness, he rises to the fulness 
 of his ultimate condition, — absorbed in breathless calm and 
 frigid apathy, a stranger to the impulses of nature, dead to all 
 the duties and enjoyments of religion. 
 
 But, further, it is prominently brought before us in the 
 annals of Hinduism, that the highest minds have always been 
 most prone to drift away from the positions of their own ac- 
 quiring, and have gradually relaxed their hold on the more 
 spiritual portions of the ancient creed. For instance, all the 
 loftier thoughts of God were once connected with a special 
 veneration of the first member of the Hindu triad. Sacerdotal 
 Aryans stood in a peculiarly close relation to Brahma ; they 
 were esteemed the privileged offspring of his head ; and, there- 
 fore, if the great idea of unity was ever to be vindicated from 
 the ravages of Polytheism, the natural way to such a restoration 
 was by passing upward from the Brahman to Brahma, and 
 thence to Brahma, the pure Spirit of the universe ; the lower 
 emanation serving as an index to the higher, and this again 
 directly guiding to the Source of all created being and the 
 simple Origin of all things. But so far were Brahmans, as an 
 order, from desiring such recovery, that they gradually aban- 
 doned their belief in one divine Administrator of the world ^ ; 
 and, instead of seeking refuge in the worship of Yishnu, whose 
 
 ^ Elphinstone's India, pp. 90, deity who is the particular object 
 
 loi. 'The opinion of the vulgar,' of their adoration, and suppose 
 
 he remarks, ' is more rational than him to watch over the actions of 
 
 that of their teachers: they [the men, and to reward the good and 
 
 vulgar] mix up the idea of the punish the wicked.' 
 Supreme Being with that of the 
 
CHAP. IV.] Hinduism and Eevealed Beligion, 253 
 
 milder incarnations were attracting to his altars the more 
 gentle souls of the community, the members of the sacerdotal 
 class selected for their patron-god that very inmate of the 
 pantheon who had long been dreaded as the primary cause of 
 desolation, and is worshipped as the animaP divinity of modem 
 Hindustan. The Brahman is, in other words, the special votary 
 of Siva, — of him who is invested by popular imagination with 
 most hideous and appalling attributes, — of him who is described 
 in their Puranas^, 'wandering about, surrounded by ghosts and 
 goblins, inebriated, naked, and with dishevelled hair, covered 
 with the ashes of a funeral pile, ornamented with human skulls 
 and bones, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying. I should 
 also add, for the completion of this melancholy picture, that the 
 votaries of Siva, and still more of Devi, his consort, who is 
 singly venerated by a large proportion of the people in Bengal, 
 are ready to undergo excruciating tortures in honour of their 
 divinity. * Some stab their limbs and pierce their tongues with 
 knives, and walk in procession with swords, arrows, and even 
 living serpents, thrust through the wounds ; while others are 
 raised into the air by a hook fixed in the flesh of their backs, 
 and are whirled round by a moveable lever, at a height which 
 would make their destruction inevitable, if the skin were to 
 give way^' 
 
 (5) But, turning from these dark and ghastly spectacles, 
 which seem to be among the ripest products of the pagan 
 mind of India, it is most consolatory to reflect that there is 
 still within our reach the grand corrective and the sovereign 
 antidote. 
 
 While heathen systems are unequal to the work of rectify- 
 ing the infatuations of the human spirit and of cancelling 
 human guilt, — while, even at the best, the authors of those 
 systems can only here and there find out some fragmentary 
 truth, but are all powerless in determining its precise relation 
 to other verities or binding them together in one definite body 
 of belief, the Gospel has at length successfully encountered 
 the great problem; it has furnished what must ever be regarded, 
 
 ^ This peculiarity is sufficiently ture reproduction, 
 indicated by the fact that Siva, ^ Elphinstone, p. 85. It is also 
 since the 8th or 9th century of our very remarkable that Siva-worship, 
 era (cf. above, p. 134, n. i), has notwithstanding the apparent in- 
 been worshipped under the symbol compatibility, has in later times 
 of the phallus (or Zmgfa), intimating been found in close alliance with 
 perhaps that his destructive powers Buddhism: Stuhr, i. 209. 
 have always reference to some fu- ^ md, p. 9©. 
 
254 Christ and other Masters, [part it.. 
 
 even from a * rational" point of view, tlie only fitting and pro- 
 found solution. 
 
 It does not, indeed, profess to clear away all shades of in- 
 tellectual difficulty: the imparting of a merely speculative satis- 
 faction was never made a primary object in the plan of its great 
 Author. It is exen ready to acknowledge, by the lips of an 
 Apostle, that, if measured not by present, but ulterior standards 
 of illumination, we see only * through a glass,' while that which 
 we behold is still encompassed with ^enigmas' (1 Cor. xiii, 12). 
 Yet, compared with all the previous legacies of God, the Grospcl 
 is a boon immeasurably vast, incalculably precious. On the one 
 side, it has clearly taken into its account of man, not some, but 
 all the factors of his complex being, a.nd, in harmony with this 
 conception, it asserts, as no anterior system had been able to 
 assert, the primal dignity of human nature, and, still more, the 
 permanence of human personality. On the other side, the Gos- 
 pel harmonizes and collects together in one focus all the scattered 
 and enfeebled rays of truth concerning God and His relation to 
 the creature. It produces them in their original unity and ful- 
 ness, not as fragments isolated from the other truths which are 
 essential to their rightful action and their just interpretation, 
 but as one coherent, living, and organic whole. In this, indeed, 
 we recognise a leading aim. and characteristic of the Gospel. It 
 is far from seeking to establish the reality of spirit by denying 
 the reality of matter. It is far from elevating human souls in 
 such a way as to annihilate the human body. In the world of 
 thought it does not so insist on the objective as to question or 
 deny the subjective. It does not so discover God in nature as 
 to miss Him in the province of the supernatural or exclude Him 
 from His temple in the mind and heart of man. It does not so 
 maintain the power and privileges of the corporate as to cripple 
 or suppress the action of the individual. It never so proclaims 
 the monarchy of God as to deprive the human agent of his self- 
 determination, and thus make him irresponsible. It never so 
 expatiates on the details of the future kingdom as to dazzle our 
 imperfect understanding or blind us to the duties of our present 
 lot. There is, in other words, a marvellous and majestic balance 
 in the doctrines which the Gospel has been authorised to bring 
 before us ; and the point round which that balance is effected, 
 or as. seen from which all other elements in the Christian system 
 
 ^ That this view of Christianity losophic missionary of the 13th 
 
 is neither novel nor unworthy, may century ; on whom see Keander, 
 
 be seen in the Ars Gmeralis of the Ch. Hist. vii. 83 sq. 
 excellent Eaymund Lull, the phi- 
 
GHAP. IV.] Hinduism and Revealed Beligion, 255 
 
 have derived their mutual fitness, is the glorious truth ^, an-, 
 nouncing how the Word, who is with God and is God, has 
 verily assumed our human nature, and how God in Him is 
 * reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing unto them 
 their trespasses.' The Incarnation, while it forms the turning-' 
 point of universal history, is more especially the life and marrow 
 of all Christian dogmas. Wheresoever it has been distinctly 
 apprehended by the reason and digested in the soul of man, 
 there is an end of creature-worship. Those ineradicable instincts 
 of our nature which had driven so many of the pensive spirits 
 of the ancient world to fashion for themselves elaborate theories 
 of transmigration, and, through consciousness of their demerit, 
 to persist in torturing out the remnants of their evil passions, 
 find in Christ their proper object and their permanent satisfac- 
 tion. He whose life is *hid with Christ in God' is able to 
 approach the throne of grace with holy confidence ; he looks 
 forward to the world invisible with awe indeed, but with no 
 abject shrinking, and no slavish terror ; his unswerving hope is 
 to be there ' accepted in the Beloved,' who has gone as our Fore- 
 runner to the inmost glories of the sanctuary; 'who ever liveth 
 to make intercession for us.' ' Taking to Himself our flesh, and 
 by His incarnation making it His own flesh, He hath now of 
 His own, although from us, what to ofler unto God for us".' 
 
 ' In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily ; 
 and ye are filled up in Him.' Thus argued the great Doctor of 
 the Gentiles, who, in writing to the Phrygian Church (Col. ii.), 
 was under the necessity of checking one of the most early mani- 
 festations of that ethnic spirit which ere long expanded into 
 Gnosticism, and threatened to degrade the Gospel of his heavenly 
 Master into one of the effete philosophies. The object of the 
 misbeliever at Colossse was not, perhaps, so definite as this ; he 
 may have merely sought to blend with Christianity a number of 
 Judaical observances, whose meaning had been swallowed up in 
 evangelic institutions. Yet his aim was also to resuscitate the 
 past and reinaugurate the reign of shadows. He was anxious, 
 in a spirit of assumed humility, and as the fruit of visions 
 claimed especially for himself, to introduce the worship of the 
 angels and of other finite emanations, like the Indian devas ; 
 
 1 *"W"e say that the divine ideas nation of the Son of God. In His 
 
 ■which had wandered up and down life and person, the idea and the 
 
 the world, till oftentimes they had fact at length kissed each other, and 
 
 well-nigh forgotten themselves and were henceforward wedded for ever- 
 
 their origin, did at length clothe more.' Dean Trench, Hulsean Lee- 
 
 themselves in flesh and blood: they tw'es (1846), p. 20. 
 
 became incarnate with the Incar- ^ Hooker, Eccl. Pol. v. li. 3. 
 
256 Christ and other Masters, [part ii,. 
 
 wliile, to finish the incongruous compound, he was pleading for 
 a class of disciplinary tenets which, in the rigour of their asceti- 
 cism, would lift him almost to a level with the self-destroying 
 yogin of the East. 
 
 But how, in such a case, did the Apostle combat the pre- 
 tensions of * philosophy and vain deceit'] He reasoned with 
 still greater urgency for the transcendent Headship of the Word 
 Incarnate — for that 'truth of truths' which, lying at the very 
 core of Christianity, was the first to suffer from attacks of the 
 confirmed believer in a spurious Gnosis \ So it was at Ephesus, 
 where, not many years after, a denial of the Incarnation was 
 more openly united with unchristian dread of all material forms 
 of being, and commended to the undiscerning by extreme asceti- 
 cism of life (1 Tim. iii. 16 — iv. 5). The fautors of that early 
 error were, accordingly, warned by the Apostle of the conse- 
 quences that were sure to flow from their attempted intermix- 
 tures. They were taught how every project for combining with 
 a supernatural revelation the theosophy of the Essene, or the 
 self-torture of the Hindu hermit, was derogatory to the honour 
 of our blessed Lord, was utterly at variance with the genius of 
 the perfect system He had planted. They were taught how 
 Christians had been raised, by fellowship with Christ, far higher 
 than the shadowy ordinances of the old oeconomy, and, still 
 more, could have no need of supplementary illumination from 
 extraneous sources. They were taught how Christians, cleaving 
 to the Head, could never be dependent on the intercession of 
 created spirits, nor on aught so secondary and so intermediate. 
 They were taught how the ascetical extravagances to which they 
 had been tempted were but ' elements of the world' ; traditions 
 emanating not from heaven, but from the breast of unregenerate 
 man, and, therefore, alien to the Law of Christ. They were ad- 
 monished, most of all, (and would that such an admonition may 
 be echoed on to every period of the Church beset by like temp- 
 tations !) that, as Christ, and Christ alone, is the Fulfilment of 
 all ancient hopes, the Substance of all ancient shadows, so all 
 Christian progress, whether in the apprehension by the Church 
 of things revealed to us already, or in wider publication of good 
 tidings to the heart-sick millions still * without,' must have its 
 origin, its root, and its sustaining principle in Him 'from whom 
 all the body, having nourishment ministered and knit together 
 by the joints and bands, increaseth with the increase of God.' 
 
 i Thiersch, Ch. Hist j. 139. 
 
APPENDIX I. 
 
 The Nishadau or non- Aryan Tribes of HindHstdn, and some account of 
 their Religion. 
 
 It is now admitted on all hands that certain primary strata of 
 population, by whatever name they may be called, had long extended 
 over all parts of India, when they were attacked and gradually dispersed 
 by the incursions of the Aryan settlers. Eemnants of such original 
 population are still found in all the various mountain-tribes, and more 
 especially among the natives of the Dekhan, to the south of the great 
 Vindhya-chain. In the age of Manu, or rather at the time when laws and 
 institutes which bear his name were promulgated, the Aryan had not been 
 able to push further southward than the 22nd degree of north latitude, 
 and beyond him lay a mass of human beings, who are there described as 
 * barbarians living in forests, and speaking an unknown tongue.' (See 
 Journal of the Asiatic Society, xiii. 277, 278.) Abundant traces of their 
 presence have been also brought to light by the publication of the Vedas. 
 In these ancient documents, one ordinary name for all who ventured to 
 resist the onward march of the invaders, or the men of * Aryan colour,' is 
 that of *Dasyus' (cf. above, p. 133, n. i). The same uncouth and * irre- 
 ligious' tribes are also characterized as anagnitra: * those who do not 
 tend the fire,' or 'fail to worship Agni.' Another appellation of a similar 
 import, is kravydd, or * flesh-eaters,' (Kpeocpdyot). In the following period, 
 as represented in the literature of the Br^hmanas, the aboriginal popu- 
 lation are thrown into the ' same category with thieves and criminals, 
 who attack men in forests, throw them into wells, and run away with 
 their goods' (Prof. Max Miiller in Bunsen's Univ. Hist. i. 346). In the 
 Puranas *the inhabitants of the Yindhya mountain,' called Nishadas, are 
 said to be 'characterized by the exterior tokens of depravity' {Vishnu 
 Pur. ed. Wilson, p. 100). 'The Matsya says, there were born outcast or 
 barbarous races, Mlechchas, as black as coUyrium. The Bhagavata 
 describes an individual of dwarfish stature, with short arms and legs, 
 of a complexion as black as a crow, with projecting chin, broad flat nose, 
 red eyes, and tawny hair; whose descendants were mountaineers and 
 foresters. The Padma has a similar description, adding to the dwarfish 
 stature and black complexion a wide mouth, large ears, and a protuberant 
 belly. It also particularizes his posterity as Nish^das, Kir^tas, Bhillas, 
 Bahanakas, Bhramaras, Pulindas, and other barbarians, or Mldchchas, 
 living in woods and on mountains.' 'These passages intend,' continues 
 Prof. Wilson {Ibid. p. 101,11.), 'and do not much exaggerate, the uncouth 
 appearance of the Goands, Koles, Bhils, and other uncivilized tribes, 
 
 H. 17 
 
258 Appendix. 
 
 scattered along the forests and mountains of central India, from Beliar to 
 Kandesh, and who are not improbably the predecessors of the present 
 occupants of the cultivated portions of the country. They are always 
 very black, ill-shapen and dwarfish, and have countenances of a very 
 African character.' To these must also be applied the language of Hero- 
 dotus, where he speaks of black and savage Indians (cf. Lassen, i. 389). 
 
 As the Aryans by the force of conquest gradually extended their 
 original frontiers, they would either subjugate the old inhabitants en- 
 tirely and reduce them to the state of SMras, serfs and menials, or 
 else would push them all into the mountain-fastnesses, or lastly drive 
 them forward to the southern part of the Peninsula. 
 
 I. In the first case, the position of the rude Nish^das would become 
 most wretched and humiliating. As early as the laws of Manu (ch. x.) it 
 was ordained that — 
 
 Their abode must be outside the towns. 
 Their property must be restricted to dogs and asses. 
 Their clothes should be those left by the dead. 
 Their ornaments, rusty iron. 
 They must roam from place to place. 
 No respectable person must hold intercourse with them. 
 They are to aid as public executioners, retaining the clothes, &c. 
 of the criminals. 
 
 A class of serfs, who answer in the main to this description, still exist 
 in almost every province of Hindustan : and the following contrasts, for 
 which we are indebted to the pen of General Briggs (Journal of the 
 Asiatic Society, xiii. 282, 283), may serve to indicate how widely the* 
 aborigines had always differed from the Aryan conquerors. 
 
 I. Hindtis are divided into castes. 
 
 The aborigines have no such distinctions. 
 1. Hindti widows are forbidden to marry. 
 
 The widows of the aborigines not only do so, but usually with 
 
 the younger brother of the late husband — a practice they follow 
 
 in common with the Scythian tribes. 
 
 3. The Hindtis venerate the cow and abstain from eating beef. 
 The aborigines feed alike on all flesh. 
 
 4. The Hindiis abstain from the use of fermented liquors. 
 
 The aborigines drink to excess ; and conceive no ceremony, civil 
 or religious, complete without. 
 
 5. The Hindtis partake of food prepared only by those of their own 
 caste. 
 
 The aborigines partake of food prepared by any one. 
 
 6. The Hindtis abhor the spilling of blood. 
 
 The aborigines conceive no religious or domestic ceremony 
 complete without the spilling of blood and offering up a live 
 victim. 
 
 7. The Hindtis have a Br^hmanical priesthood. 
 
 The indigenes do not venerate Brahmans. Their own priests 
 (who are self-created) are respected according to their mode of 
 life and their skill in magic and sorcery, in divining future events 
 and in curing diseases: these are the qualifications which au- 
 thorise their employment in slaying sacrificial victims and in 
 distributing them. 
 
Appendix. 259 
 
 8. The Hindlis burn tlieir dead. 
 
 The aborigines bury tlieir dead, and with them their arms, 
 sometimes their cattle, as among the Scythians. On such 
 occasions a victim ought to be sacrificed to atone for the sins 
 of the deceased. 
 
 9. The Hindti civil institutions are all municipal. 
 The aboriginal institutions are all patriarchal. 
 
 10. The Hindtis have their courts of justice composed of equals. 
 The aborigines have theirs composed of heads of tribes or 
 families, and chosen for life. 
 
 11. The Hindus brought with ihem. (more than three thousand years 
 ago) the art of writing and science. 
 
 The indigenes are not only illiterate, but it is forbidden for the 
 Hindtis to teach them. 
 
 2. But although a great majority of aborigines in northern India had 
 been thus imperfectly blended with the Aryan strangers who subdued 
 them, others have retained a large amount of savage independence in the 
 mountain-fastnesses to which they had retreated {e.g. the Bhils,the Mirs, 
 the Khulis, the Goands : cf. Prichard, ResearcheSy iv. 166 sq.). Every 
 year is adding to our knowledge of their general habits as well as of their 
 language and religion: and it is gratifying to notice that the best in- 
 formed of modern writers on the subject are more and more agreed as to 
 the oneness of the stamp impressed on all the aborigines of India, how- 
 ever multiform and scattered at the present day. That general stamp is 
 said to be 'Mongolian' (Prof. Max Miiller, as above, p. 348). The various 
 tribes appear to have issued, like their Aryan successors, from the 
 northern parts of Hindtist^n, and to have all spoken a language be- 
 longing to the Tamil (or Turanian) as distinguished from the Sanskrit 
 (or Indo-European) stock. Eeceut occurrences have brought the English 
 government into collision with one of these hill-tribes, the Sont^ls, who 
 are scattered over the country in considerable numbers from Cattack to 
 Bhagalpur (see Journal of the Asiatic Society, as above, p. 285) : but the 
 most copious and interesting account of the religious character and con- 
 dition of the whole group, is furnished in a memoir by Captain (now 
 Major) S. C. Macpherson {Ihid. pp. '216—274). The title of his paper is 
 An Account of the Religion of the Khonds in Orissa {i. e, Uria-desa, 'land 
 of the Urias,' lying between the eastern mountains of the Dekhan and 
 the sea-coast). After citing numerous legends in illustration of the 
 doctrines there current. Major Macpherson has exhibited the main 
 features of the Khond religion in the following summary (p. 273): 
 'The Supreme Being and sole source of good, who is styled the God 
 of Light [Boora Pennu or Bella Pennu], created for himself a consort, who 
 became the Earth-Goddess [Tari Pennu or Bera Pennu] and the source of 
 evil: and thereafter, he created the earth, with all it contains, and man. 
 The Earth- Goddess, prompted by jealousy of the love borne to man by 
 his Creator, rebelled against the God of Light, and introduced moral and 
 physical evil into the world. The God of Light arrested the action of 
 physical evil, while he left man perfectly free to receive or to reject moral 
 evil, — defined to be "disobedience towards God, and strife amongst men." 
 A few of mankind entirely rejected moral evil, the remainder received it. 
 The former portion were immediately deified; the latter were condemned 
 to endure every form of physical suffering, with death, deprivation of the 
 immediate care of the Creator, and the deepest moral degradation. Mean- 
 
 17—2 
 
260 Appendix. 
 
 while, tlie God of Light and his rebel consort contended for superiority, 
 until the elements of good and evil became thoroughly commingled in 
 man and throughout nature. 
 
 *XJp to this period the Khonds hold the same general belief, but from 
 it they divide into two sects, directly opposed upon the question of the 
 issue of the contest between the two antagonist powers. 
 
 * One sect holds that the God of Light completely conquered the Earth- 
 Goddess, and employs her, still the active principle of evil, as the in- 
 strument of his moral rule. That he resolved to provide a partial remedy 
 for the consequences of the introduction of evil, by enabling man to 
 attain to a state of moderate enjoyment upon earth, and to partial 
 restoration to communion with the Creator after death. And that, to 
 effect this purpose, he created those classes of subordinate deities, and 
 assigned to them the office — first, of instructing man in the arts of life, 
 and regulating the powers of nature for his use, upon the condition of his 
 paying to them due worship; secondly, of administering a system of 
 retributive justice through subjection to which, and through the practice 
 of virtue during successive lives upon earth, the soul of man might attain 
 to beatification. The other sect hold, upon the other hand, that the 
 Earth-Goddess remains unconquered; that the God of Light could not, 
 in opposition to her will, carry out his purpose with respect to man's 
 temporal lot ; and that man, therefore, owes his elevation from the state 
 of physical suffering into which he fell through the reception of evil, to 
 the direct exercise of her power to confer blessings, or to her permitting 
 him to receive the good which flows from the God of Light, through the 
 inferior gods, to all who worship them. With respect to man's destiny 
 after death, they believe that the God of Light carried out his purpose. 
 And they believe that the worship of the Earth- Goddess by human sacri- 
 fice, is the indispensable condition on which these blessings have been 
 granted, and their continuance may be hoped for ; the virtue of the rite 
 availing not only for those who practise it, but for all mankind.' 
 
 In addition to these human sacrifices, which still continue to be 
 offered annually, in order to appease the wrath of Tari and propitiate 
 her in favour of agriculture, there is a fearful amount of infanticide 
 among the Khond people. ' It exists in some of the tribes of the sect of 
 Boora to such an extent, that no female infant is spared, except when a 
 woman's first child is female; and that villages containing a hundred 
 houses may be seen without a female child' {Ibid. p. 270). 
 
 3. But, in addition to the wild and barbarous mountaineers whose 
 creed is sketched in the foregoing extract, there was always a large body 
 of Nish^dan, or non-Aryan, tribes of India who retained their former 
 hold on nearly all the southern part of the Peninsula, and ultimately, 
 with the aid of Aryan influence, reached a high degree of civilization. 
 'We find the Dekhan occupied entirely by aboriginal races, with only a 
 small and late sprinkling of Brahmanic blood. Civilization there is 
 Brahmanic, and the native languages are full of Sanskrit vocables; but 
 the grammar has resisted, and language has thus retained its inde- 
 pendence' (Prof. Max Miiller, as above, p. 432). Mr. Caldwell, in his able 
 work entitled A Comparative Grammar of the Drdvidian [Tamil], or 
 South-Indian Family of Languages, Lond. 1856, has disputed some of 
 the current theories respecting this section of the non-Aryan races of 
 India. He doubts whether the Dr^vidians were in origin identical with 
 the Aryanised SMras of Northern Hindtist^n (p. 70), and is inclined to 
 
Appendix, 261 
 
 argue, from *the difference which appears to exist between the Dr^vidian 
 languages and the Scythian under-stratum of the northern vernaculars,' 
 that *the Dravidian idioms belong to an older period of the Scythian 
 speech — the period of the predominance of the Ugro-Finnish languages in 
 Central and Higher Asia, anterior to the westward migration of the Turks 
 and Mongolians.' He is also convinced that the 'Dravidians never had 
 any relations with the primitive Aryans but those of a peaceable and 
 friendly character ; and that, if they were expelled from Northern India, 
 and forced to take refuge in Gondwana and D^nda-Karnaya, the great 
 Dravidian forest, prior to the dawn of their civilization, the tribes that 
 subdued and thrust them southwards must have been Pre- Aryans.* 
 
 Mr. Caldwell, however, does not wish to disguise the fact, that even if 
 the Dr^vidians had not sunk as low as the Pur^nas seem to intimate, 
 when branding them with the name of rakshasas, or monkeys, or vile 
 sinners who ate raw meat and human flesh, they were for a long time 
 * destitute of letters and unacquainted with the higher arts of life' (p. 77). 
 In their religious worship, also, these Dravidians differed widely from the 
 creed and usages of the Br^hmans : and, what is especially worthy of our 
 notice, Mr. Caldwell has distinctly shewn the similarity between the 
 former and the practices observed for ages among the Scythian tribes 
 of Northern Asia. 
 
 'The system which prevails in the forests and mountain-fastnesses 
 throughout the Providian territories, and also in the extreme south of the 
 Peninsula amongst the low caste tribes, and which appears to have been 
 still more widely prevalent at an early period, is a system of demonolatry, 
 or the worship of evil spirits by means of bloody sacrifices and frantic 
 dances. This system was introduced within the historical period from 
 the Tamil country into Ceylon, where it is now mixed up with Buddhism. 
 On comparing this Drilvidian system of demonolatry and sorcery with 
 'Shamanism' — the superstition which prevails amongst the Ugrian races 
 of Siberia and the hill-tribes ^ on the south-western frontier of China, 
 which is still mixed up with the Buddhism of the Mongols, and which was 
 the old religion of the whole Tartar race before Buddhism and Moham- 
 medanism w^ere disseminated amongst them — we cannot avoid the conclu- 
 sion that those two superstitions, though practised by races so widely 
 separated, are not only similar but identical. 
 
 'I shall here point out the principal features of resemblance between 
 the Shamanism of High Asia and the demonolatry of the Dravidians, as 
 still practised in many districts in Southern India. - 
 
 '(i) The Shamanites are destitute of a regular priesthood. Ordi- 
 narily the father of the family is the priest and magician ; but the office 
 may be undertaken by any one who pleases, and at any time laid aside. 
 
 'Precisely similar is the practice existing amongst the Sh^nars and 
 other rude tribes of Southern India. Ordinarily it is the head of the 
 family, or the head-man of the hamlet or community, w^ho performs the 
 priestly office : but any worshipper, male or female, who feels so disposed, 
 may volunteer to officiate, and becomes for the time being the represen- 
 tative and interpreter of the demon. 
 
 1 In R T. Turnerelli's work on Kazan, ii. worship, and rarely receiving any, the evil 
 
 116 sq., we have some account of the Tchou Genius (Keremet) being constantly appeased 
 
 vash and other aboriginal tribes of the neigh- by sacrifice (p. 133). Their chief priest 
 
 bourhood. They were said to be of Finnish (Jomza) unites in his own person the offices 
 
 origin. They recognise two principles, of of priest, soothsayer, sorcerer, and physician, 
 good and evil ; the good Genitis requiring no 
 
 k 
 
262 Appendix, 
 
 * (2) The Shamanites acknowledge the existence of a supreme God ; 
 but they do not offer him any worship. The same acknowledgment of 
 God's existence and the same neglect of his worship characterize the 
 rehgion of the Dr^vidian demonolaters. 
 
 *(3) Neither amongst the Shamanites nor amongst the primitive 
 im-brahmanized demonolaters of India is there any trace of belief in the 
 metempsychosis, 
 
 *(4) The objects of Shamanite worship are not gods or heroes, but 
 demons, which are supposed to be cruel, revengeful, and capricious, and 
 are worshipped by bloody sacrifices and wild dances. The officiating 
 magician or priest excites himself to frenzy, and then pretends, or 
 supposes himself, to be possessed by the demon to which worship is 
 being offered; and after the rites are over he communicates, to those who 
 consult him, the information he has received. 
 
 * The demonolatry practised in India by the more primitive Dravidian 
 tribes is not only similar to this, but the same. Every word used in the 
 foregoing description of the Shamanite worship would apply equally well 
 to the Dravidian demonolatry; and in depicting the ceremonies of the 
 one race we depict those of the other also.' 
 
APPENDIX II. 
 
 Coincidences hetiveen Lamaism and Mediaval Christianity. 
 
 Mr. H. T. Prinsep, in his recent work on Tihet^ Tartary, and Mongolia^ 
 2nd ed. Lond. 1852, has, with the aid of MM. Hue and Gabet's Voyages 
 dans la Tartarie^ &c., revived a question of some importance touching 
 the origin of various parallehsms between Buddhism, as organized in 
 those districts, and certain forms or usages of Mediaeval Christianity. 
 Some, at least, of these phenomena had excited the astonishment of 
 Latin missionaries as far back as the middle of the thirteenth century, 
 who explained them on the supposition that Lamaism was not so much 
 one phase of Buddhism as a remnant of the influence exercised in those 
 remote districts by the missions of the *Nestorian' Church^. In 1661, 
 two Jesuits, Grueber and Dorville, on their return from China, penetrated 
 far into Tibet and brought accounts of extraordinary resemblances 
 between the faith of Lassa and of Eome. Mr. Davis still more recently 
 drew attention to them in his Remarks on the Religion and Social Insti- 
 tutions of the Bouteas (Koy. Asiat. Soc. 11. 491 sq.), selecting for particular 
 comment *The celibacy of the clergy and the monastic life of the societies 
 of both sexes; to which might be added, their strings of beads, their 
 manner of chanting prayers, their incense, and their candles.' Other 
 writers have again insisted on the strong resemblance between the 
 hierarchy of the Lamas and that of western Christendom, particularly 
 as we find it in the Middle Ages; the resemblance extending even to 
 minor points of discipline and articles of dress. But such topics appear 
 to have assumed no great importance in the eyes of Europe until Volney, 
 and others like him, resolved to find in them a novel engine for sub- 
 verting Christianity. 
 
 The question was then asked. By what hypothesis can we explain 
 the striking correspondence between two systems which appear to be in 
 other respects so totally independent? Is it the result of actual inter- 
 course, or is it merely an extensive specimen of the way in which 
 internal affinities of thought and sentiment will often clothe themselves 
 in forms analogous if not identical? When the number, the variety, and 
 
 1 The resemblances were afterwards ex- which the devil has not invented a copy of in 
 
 plained on the hypothesis of diabolical this country.' Kesson, The Cross and the 
 
 counterfeits. 'Father Bury, a Portuguese Dragon, p. 185, Lond. 1854. Medhurst 
 
 missionary, when he beheld the [Chinese] (China, p. 217, Lond. 185T) points out the 
 
 bonzes tonsured, using rosaries, praying in coincidences between Romamsm and Chinese 
 
 an unknown tongue, and kneehng before Buddhism in respect of ceremonial. He also 
 
 images, exclaims in astonishment, There is mentions the image of a virgin ('queen of 
 
 not a piece of dress, not a sacerdotal fimction, heaven'), having a cliild in her arms and 
 
 not a ceremony of the Church of Rome, holding a cross. 
 
264 Appendix. 
 
 the minuteness^ of the parallelisms in question are duly weighed, the 
 latter hypothesis will hardly commend itself to the acceptance of historical 
 critics; and accordingly I shall adopt the former. But here again, it 
 must be asked : Did Buddhism, in this matter, borrow from Christianity 
 or Christianity from Buddhism? Let us first hear Mr. Prinsep's answer. 
 Starting from the fact, that Gautama Buddha flourished long anterior to 
 the propagation of the Gospel, and asserting further, on what authority I 
 know not, that the principles of Buddhism were quite familiar in some 
 parts of western Asia, not to say of Europe, under the guise of Pytha- 
 goreanism or Mithraism ; this writer is prepared to argue that the early 
 Christians were indebted to Buddhist converts for no small part of their 
 ecclesiastical organisation. 
 
 'To a mind,' he says, 'already impressed with Boodhistic belief and 
 Boodhistic doctrines, the birth of a Saviour and Eedeemer for the western 
 world, recognised as a new Boodh by wdse men of the east, that is, by 
 Magi, Sramanas, or Lamas, who had obtained the Arhat sanctification, 
 was an event expected, and therefore readily accepted, when declared and 
 announced. It was no abjuration of an old faith [!] that the teacher of 
 Christianity asked of the Boodhists, but a mere qualification of an 
 existing belief by the incorporation into it of the Mosaic account of 
 the creation, and of original sin and the fall of man. The Boodhists 
 of the west, accepting Christianity on its first announcement, at once 
 introduced the rites and observances which for centuries had already 
 existed in India. From that country Christianity derived its monastic 
 institutions, its forms of ritual and of Church-service, its councils or 
 convocations to settle schisms on xooints of faith, its worship of relics, and 
 working of miracles through them, and much of the discipline, and of the 
 dress of the clergy, even to the shaven heads of the monks and friars.' 
 Now if Christianity were thus fused with Buddhism ' on its first announce- 
 ment,' we might surely have expected to find some definite notice, in the 
 early Christian writers, of so marvellous an amalgamation; but instead 
 of any single whisper on the subject, the tone in which these writers 
 reprehend all forms of heathenism, is rigorous and uncompromising, and 
 St. Paul (as we have seen) had warned the Phrygian converts in par- 
 ticular against the least indulgence of a spirit such as that here contem- 
 plated. 
 
 The present view is also strengthened by our survey of the funda- 
 mental principles involved in Buddhism and in Christianity. Those 
 principles are quite incapable of intermixture: they are mutually re- 
 pulsive and annihilative. I am accordingly disposed to think that 
 during all the time that Christianity was warring against Gnostic 
 errors, or in pther words until the doctrines taught by the Apostles 
 were completely vindicated and established, it was totally impossible 
 for a system such as Buddhism to affect in any sensible degree the 
 institutions of the primitive Chm-ch. The jealousy with which she 
 guarded the deposit of the faith would surely have impelled her to 
 resist all compromise with heathenish observances, associated as they 
 must have been at first with heathen doctrines. That such jealousy, 
 however, vfas relaxing in the fomrth century of our era is too plainly 
 
 1 The points of resemblance specified by on the head of the faithful, the rosary, celi- 
 
 the French missionaries are, the use of the bacy of the clergy, spiritual retirement, the 
 
 cross the mitre, the dalmatic, the hood, the worship of saints, fasts, processions, litanies, 
 
 office' of two choirs, the psalmody, the exor- and holy water. Prof. Wilson in Journal of 
 
 cisms, the censer of five chains, the benedic- As. iSoc. xvi, 263. 
 tion of the lamas by placing the right hand 
 
Appendix, 265 
 
 manifest in the writings of the period ; and I think it therefore not im- 
 probable, that together with the rapid growth of the ascetic and monastic 
 spirit may have come a disposition to accept some portions of the rites 
 and ceremonies which pre-existed in the heathen monasteries of the East^ 
 The same remark may possibly be extended to some other usages, as 
 processions of images, worship of relics, pilgrimages, indulgences, and the 
 like, which always have their root in ethnic rather than in Christian 
 modes of thought. But whatever may be ultimately determined with 
 regard to the precise development of these conceptions in the bosom of 
 the Christian Church, it is, I think, extremely probable that some at least 
 of the minute resemblances between the Buddhism of Tibet and Mediaeval 
 Christianity are directly traceable to the effect of Christian missions. Al- 
 though the rise of Buddhism was very long anterior to the earliest of 
 those missions, and although many of its peculiarities are far more 
 ancient than the origin of Christianity itself, that form which we en- 
 title Lamaism^is found to be comparatively modern, — not older than the 
 13th century of the present era. Buddhism, it is true, had been propa- 
 gated in Tibet six hundred years before (Wuttke, ii. 559) ; but it was only 
 under Kublai-Klian (a. d. 1260) that the adherents of that system were 
 reduced under the dominion of a regular hierarchy by the appointment of 
 the first Grand Lama, and the transfer of the spiritual government of 
 Buddhism to his hands {Ibid. i. 215 sq., 11. 591 : Abel-E^musat, Melanges 
 Asiatiques, i. 136, 137, Paris, 1825). At this juncture, when the ancient 
 forms and usages might naturally be made to undergo extensive altera- 
 tions and be invested with a pomp befitting the inauguration of the new 
 hierarchy, we know for certain that Tibet had been brought into im- 
 mediate communication with teachers of Christianity and also with the 
 ritual system of the Western Church. The Khans had at their court not 
 only Jews, Muhammadans, and Buddhists, but Latin and Nestorian 
 missionaries (see, for example, the graphic account in the Travels of 
 Marco Polo, ed. Wright, pp. 167, 168, Lend, 1854; and other evidences 
 in Neander, Ch. Hist. vii. 70 sq.) : and in the fourteenth century of our 
 era, the arrival of a strange Lama, who eame 'from the far west,' is said 
 to have actually wrought such changes in the aspect of religious worship 
 in Tibet ^. Wuttke (11. 559) conjecturing, after Hue and Gabet, that this 
 very Lama was himself a Christian, remarks with reference to him: 'Er 
 anderte an den Grundlehren des Buddhismus nichts, verscharfte aber die 
 Disciplin, anderte den Kultus und fiihrte neue Liturgien ein; und die 
 katholischen Missionare Hue und Gabet fanden die Ahnlichkeit mit dem 
 katholischen Kult hochst auffallend.' The special processes by which 
 these innovations might have been in almost every case effected are 
 admirably sketched by Abel-Eemusat as above, pp. 138, 139 : 'A I'epoque 
 oii les patriarches bouddhistes s'^tablirent dans le Tibet, les parties de la 
 Tartarie qui avoisinent cette contree etaient remplies de chr^tiens. Les 
 Nestoriens y avaient fonde' des metropoles et converti des nations entieres. 
 
 ^ Lassen, in the third volume of his Indi- ten Kranze bedienten.' 
 
 sche. Alter t. -pp. 441, 442 (Leipzig, 1857), ex- 2 Lama = *a superior,' from la (bla) 'a- 
 
 presses himself in favour of this view. He hove.' The more accurate form would 't^ 
 
 concludes : ' Ein Einfluss des Buddhismus llama. Schott, p. 32, n. 2. 
 
 ist ferner nicht zu verkennen in der bei den 3 This Lama was the preceptor of Tsong 
 
 christlichen Priestern gebrauchlichen Ton- Kaba, who founded the monastery of Khal- 
 
 sur, so wie in dem Gebrauche der Glocken, dan, near Lhassa, in 1409, and introduced the 
 
 welcher bei den Buddhisten viel alter ist, als new ritual, after he had overcome the scru- 
 
 bei den Christen und in dem Gebrauche von pics of the Grand Lama. See Wilson, Journ. 
 
 Rosenkranzen, da es feststeht, dass die Inder of the As. Soc. xvi. 2G3. 
 bei ihren Gebeten sich der axamdld gennan- 
 
266 Appendix. 
 
 Plus tard les conquetes des enfans de Tchingkis y appelerent des strangers 
 de tons les pays ; des G^orgiens, des Armeniens, des Kusses, des Franpals, 
 des musulmans, envoy6s par le khalife de Bagdad; des moines catlioli- 
 ques, charges de missions importantes par le souverain pontife et par St. 
 Louis. Ces demiers portaient avec eux des ornemens d'^glise, des autels, 
 des reliques pour veoir, dit Joinville, se Us pourraient attraire ces gens a 
 nostre creance. lis c^lebrerent les ceremonies de la religion devant les 
 princes tartares. Ceux-ci leur donnerent un asile dans leur tentes, et 
 permirent qu'on dlevat des chapelles jusque dans I'enceinte de leurs 
 palais. Un archeveque italien, etabli dans la ville impdriale par ordre 
 de Clement V., y avait bati une eglise, o^ trois cloches appelaient les 
 fideles aux offices, et il avait convert les murailles de peintures repr6- 
 sentant des sujets pieux. Chretiens de Syrie, romains, schismatiques, 
 musulmans, idolatres, tons vivaient mel^s et confondus k la cour des 
 empereurs mongols, toujours empresses d'accueillir de nouveaux cultes, et 
 meme de les adopter, pourvu qu'on n'exigeat de leur part aucune convic- 
 tion, et surtout qu'on ne leur imposat aucune contrainte. On sait que 
 les Tartares passaient volontiers d'une secte a I'autre, embrassaient 
 aisement la foi, et y renon(?aient de meme pour retomber dans I'idol^trie. 
 C'est au milieu de ces variations que fut fonde au Tibet le nouveau siege 
 des patriarclies bouddhistes. Doit-on s'etonner qu'int^ress6s a multipKer 
 le nombre de leurs sectateurs, occupes a donner plus de magnificence au 
 culte, ils se soient approprid quelques usages liturgiques, quelques-unes 
 de ces pompes ^trangeres qui attiraient la foule; qu'ils aient introduit 
 memo quelque chose de ces institutions de 1' Occident que les ambassa- 
 deurs du khalife et du souverain pontife leur vantaient ^galement, et qui 
 les circonstances les disposaient a imiter? La coincidence des lieux, celle 
 des ^poques autorisent cette conjecture, et mille particularit^s, que je ne 
 puis indiquer ici, la convertiraient en demonstration.' 
 
 These observations of Abel-Bemusat, it will be noticed, are all intended 
 to apply especially to points of ritual; and so far we may agree with him 
 in thinking that an imitative people were at such an epoch not unlikely 
 to adopt the usages of western missionaries: but when other writers, 
 following in his footsteps, argue on this ground that all external resem- 
 blances whatever between the pagan East and Christian West are similarly 
 due to Latin and Nestorian missions of the Middle Ages, they enter, as it 
 seems to me, upon a hopeless undertaking. 
 
PAET III. 
 RELIGIONS OF CHINA. 
 
EELIGIONS OF CHINA. 
 
 ^Behold, these shall come from far; and lo, these from the north and 
 from the west; and these from the land of Sinim.' 
 
 A REVIEWER of the second Part of 'Christ and other 
 Masters' put on record his conviction that Hhe very centre of 
 the controversy' now waging between the Christian faith and 
 its assailants is the point I have been hitherto attempting to 
 elucidate. * Discussions of particular doctrines are,' he argues, 
 * secondary to this deeper question,' touching the main relations 
 of the Gospel to other ancient systems, and the cogency of 
 claims, which it advances, not as a philosophy among philo- 
 sophies, but rather as the living and life-giving ' Word of God, ' 
 which offers a continuous attestation of its supernatural origin 
 by working mightily in them that believe (1 Thess. ii. 13). 
 Assured that all solutions of this problem, which, deserve the 
 name of rational and philosophic, must materially depend upon 
 the clearness of our insight into the distinctive genius of each 
 system, or, in other words, involve an accurate knowledge both 
 of what it really was and what it actually achieved, I shall en- 
 deavour in the following pages to conduct the reader through a 
 fresh department of heathendom, selecting for review those wild 
 and multifarious creeds which flourished in localities remote 
 from the original haunts of man, and in all likelihood completely 
 foreign to the sphere of Hebrew influence. When the mind 
 is once familiarized with characteristic principles of such out- 
 lying systems, we shall find ourselves more able to discuss the 
 several points of correspondence which are said to have resulted 
 from long years of intercourse between the earlier Hebrews and 
 Egyptians on the one side, or the later Hebrews and the Medes 
 and Persians on the other. 
 
 As I cannot hope to furnish satisfactory reports from all the 
 single provinces of ancient heathendom, my plan is to devote 
 
270 Christ and other Masters. [pakt hi. 
 
 one special chapter of this Part to China, a second to Mexico, 
 and a third to some of the more dominant islands of the Eastern 
 and Southern Oceans, in the hope that by so doing the import- 
 ant phases of religious sentiment will each in turn have been 
 submitted to the reader for reflection and comparison. 
 
 If ever it be possible to ascertain the independent workings 
 of the natural heart of man, such knowledge may especially be 
 sought in regions now before us. There whatever forms of 
 civilisation have existed seem the native and, as one might 
 think, spontaneous products of the soil. The glimmerings of 
 tradition are more faint and more unsteady. They who know- 
 ing God refuse to glorify Him as God, are eventually abandoned 
 to their own devices; and amid the anxious gropings after truth 
 which follow that terrific obscuration of the moral consciousness, 
 we see a fresh exemplification of the sacred story, where the 
 younger son, having gathered all together, takes his journey 
 into a far country ; yet too often when the land of his adoption 
 has been stricken by some * mighty famine,' none is found to 
 answer his despairing cry for bread, nor fill the aching void 
 within him. 
 
 There are still, indeed, sufficient indications in the darkest 
 depths of heathendom, that man is everywhere the self-same 
 being, open to the same appeals, and giving utterance to the 
 same emotions, conscious of incurable discord in the elements of 
 his moral nature, lifting up his heart to heaven, and yearning 
 after some emancipation from the iron yoke of evil. Hence it 
 is that in all creeds whatever certain points emerge where 
 natural and revealed religion seem to touch, and where they 
 almost promise to embrace each other. Yet on close examina- 
 tion nearly all the chief suggestions which they ofier in the 
 hope of healing and exalting our depraved humanity are found 
 to be divergent, not to say antagonistic. They proceed from 
 very difierent thoughts of God, of man, and of the universe; 
 and therefore differ both as to the meaning and the method of 
 redemption. If I here abstain from dwelling largely on these 
 numerous contrasts and divergencies, the reader who possesses 
 any adequate knowledge of Christianity will hardly fail, in 
 passing, to remedy the defect. For such a class of persons, it 
 should be remembered, I am now engaged in writing. It is 
 not my leading object to conciliate the more thoughtful minds 
 of heathendom in favour of the Christian faith. However 
 laudable that task may be, however fitly it may occupy the 
 highest and the keenest intellect of persons who desire to fur- 
 ther the advance of truth and holiness amon<? our heathen 
 
INTROB.] Religions of China. 271 
 
 fellow-subjects, there are difficulties nearer Lome, wMch may in 
 fairness be regarded as possessing prior claims on the attention 
 of a Christian advocate. My aim, accordingly, will be to shew 
 by strict analysis of ancient systems that as none of these could 
 possibly have given birth to Christianity, so neither does the 
 knowledge thence derivable of what has been attained by man's 
 unaided efforts warrant a presumption that any merely human 
 agent could originate that system of harmonious mysteries, 
 whose life and centre is the Crucifixion of the *Lord from 
 heaven/ 
 
 I may also be allowed to add, that in the present chapters 
 the more thoughtful reader will not fail to recognise the proper 
 tendency of certain current speculations, which are recom- 
 mended to us on the ground that they accord entirely with the 
 last discoveries of science, and embody the deliberate verdicts of 
 the oracle within us. Notwithstanding all that has been urged 
 in their behalf, those theories are little more than a return to 
 long-exploded errors, a resuscitation of extinct volcanoes ; or at 
 best they merely offer to introduce among ns an array of civi- 
 lizing agencies, which after trial in other countries have been ail 
 found wanting. The governing class of China, for example, 
 have been long familiar with the metaphysics of Spinosa\ 
 They have also carried out the social principles of M. Comte 
 upon the largest possible scale. For ages they have been ' what 
 people of the present day are wishing to become in Europe^,' — 
 with this difference only, that the heathen legislator who had 
 lost all faith in God attempted to redress the wrongs and elevate 
 the moral status of his subjects, by the study of political science 
 or devising some new scheme of general sociology : while the 
 ^ positive' philosopher of the present day who has relapsed into 
 the same positions is in every case rejecting a religious system 
 which has proved itself the mightiest of all civilisers, and the 
 constant champion of the rights and dignity of man. He offers 
 in the stead of Christianity a specious phase of neo-paganism, 
 by which the nineteenth century after Christ may be assimilated 
 to the golden age of Mencius and Confucius ; or, in other words, 
 may consummate its intellectual freedom, and attain the highest 
 pinnacle of human progress, by reverting to a state of childhood 
 and of moral imbecility. 
 
 ^ Cf. Hegel, Fhil. of Hist. p. 69, ^ Jiuc, Le Christianisme en Chine, 
 
 Lond. 1857. &c. I. 358, Paris, 1857. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 Religions of China, 
 
 *Die Chinesische Beligion ist eine schlechterdings selbstgemaclite des 
 natiirlichen Menschen, so ungestort von fremden Einfliissen, wie 
 keine andere. Wir diirfen uns daher auch nicht wundern, wenn wir 
 in ihr merkwiirdige Bertlhrungs-punkte mit den Lehren eines modernen 
 Heidenthums unter christlichen Volkern finden.' 
 
 Antiquity of Chinese civilization: its permanence and diffusion. Isolation 
 of the Chinese: their characteristics: contrast ivith the Hindu. Their 
 traditions : religious phases. 
 
 § I. Confucianism. The sacred looks : Yih-king; Shoe-king; She-king: 
 Le-ke. Intellectual activity. Influence of Choo-he. The Emperor: 
 king J priest, and penitent. Worship of heaven, and of earth: of genii 
 and demons : hero-ioorship : goddess-ivorship : worship of ancestors. 
 Idea of God. Was the oldest creed of China theistic. or worship of 
 Nature'} Ethics and politics. Philosophy of the Absolute. Dualism: 
 Le and Ke; Yang and Yin. Theory of man. Antagonism to Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 § 2. Tao-ism, or School of the Fixed Way. Lao-tse: supernatural at- 
 tributes ascribed to him: primitive account of him: his travels. The 
 Tao-te-king. Beal meaning of the Tao. How far resembling the God 
 of Christians. Alleged doctrine of the Trinity. Moral system. Book 
 of Rewards and Punishments. Actual condition of the Sect. 
 
 § 3. Fo-ism, or Chinese Buddhism. Introduction of Buddhism into China. 
 Varieties of Buddhism. Fo-ism, and Lama-ism, How far Buddhism 
 prevails in China. Why the primitive Buddhism loas unacceptable. 
 Monasticism in Tibet. Fo-ism without a regular hierarchy. Hierarchy 
 of Tibet. Lama-ism and Mediceval Christianity. Doctrine of hereditary 
 incarnations. Divergence of Fo-ism and Lama-ism from primitive 
 Buddhism.- New theology in Nepal and Tibet. Fo-ist objects of wor- 
 ship: Manju-sri: Kican-shi-in: 0-me-to. Apparent resemblance to Chris- 
 tianity. Civilizing power of primitive Buddhism: its ethical character. 
 The last hours of Hiuan-Thsang ; contrasted with the last hours of 
 Bede. 
 
 If China were regarded simply as one spacious hive of human 
 beings, all proceeding with instinctive ai't and order to fulfil the 
 various tasks prescribed by the superior powers, the investiga- 
 
CHAP. I.] Beligions of China. 273 
 
 tion of successive phases in its mental history might well attract 
 the interest j\nd excite the musings both of statesmen and phi- 
 lanthropists. They see unrolled before them the eventful 
 annals of an empire whose prodigious population far outnumbers 
 that of all the Indo-European family. 
 
 But inquiries such as we are prosecuting in these chapters 
 will have stronger and more sacred claims upon the sympathies 
 of every philosophic Christian. China, he remembers, is the 
 birthplace of the oldest institutions known to history, the centre 
 of the most enduring civilisation in the world. However much 
 of wild pretension has in course of time been pruned away by 
 critics from the semi-legendary archives of most other countries, 
 those of China, it is still conceded even by the more sagacious 
 of our modern scholars, have not suffered in their passage 
 through the literary ordeal. There is reason to believe that 
 portions of her present territory were the seat of thriving and 
 of fully organised communities not less than two thousand years 
 before the Christian era\ It is true, indeed, that of surviving 
 records none may in their extant form be much anterior to the 
 birth of Herodotus. It may be questioned also whether the 
 Chinese have ever had a series of regular annals stretching to a 
 more remote antiquity than the commencement of the Greek 
 Olympiads or the first Assyrian conquests in the Holy Land ; 
 but inasmuch as all accounts which have been left us, from that 
 epoch downwards, bear a perfectly historic impress, it is pro- 
 bable that fragmentary notices of ancient China which profess to 
 have come orally from very primitive ages, are, at least in all 
 their broader outlines, worthy of the credit which has been 
 awarded to them by the modern Sinologue. Before the name 
 of the Middle Kingdom had been ever uttered in the learned 
 halls and avenues of the Athenian Academy ; before the eagle 
 of the Boman legions, thirsting after universal sway, had tried 
 its earliest flight across the Central Apennines ; before the 
 English of that ancient world, the colonising merchants of 
 Phoenicia, had unfurled their sail upon the waves of the 
 Atlantic, and trafficked in the j^recious metals on the coasts of 
 Albion and lerne, — large communities of settlers stretching far 
 across the plateau of Upper Asia were already living under the 
 patriarchal rule of great and powerful princes. Chinese ports 
 
 * See, for instance, Prof, Neu- elates the commencement of the 
 
 mann's paper in the Journal Asiati- historical period from the accession 
 
 que (1834), tome xiv. pp. 50 sq.; of the Hea dynasty b.c. 2207: 
 
 and Prichard's Researches, iv. 476 Chinese History y i. 75. 
 
 -480. Gutzlaff, in like manner, 
 
 IS 
 
274? Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 were even then frequented by adventurous traders from Ceylon, 
 from India, from the Persian Gulf. A knowledge of Chinese 
 astronomy found its way beyond the mountains and took root 
 in northern Hindustani The products of the almost fabulous 
 industry of China had established their reputation in countries 
 lying farther to the west ; nay, cups of Chinese porcelain, in- 
 scribed with her peculiar symbols, had been buried in the 
 ancient sepulchres of Egypt ^. Or, looking from our modem 
 point of view, we find that ages after the distinctive nationality 
 alike of EgyjDt and Phoenicia is obliterated, or absorbed in that 
 of their oppressors ; when both Nineveh and Babylon are swept 
 away, and other races strange in tongue and stranger still in 
 spirit are exploring the vast pile of ruins and are bent on dis- 
 interring one by one the trophies of the former masters of the 
 eastern world, few changes have come over the ideas, the habits, 
 or the institutions of the Middle Kingdom. China is China 
 still. Her arts, her laws, her customs, the more sacred and 
 more classic portion of her writings, most of all her marvellously 
 characteristic language in its various dialects, continue to be 
 everywhere diffused^ ; while far beyond the proper limits of her 
 empire she im]Dresses the peculiar genius of her policy and civi- 
 lisation, from the borders of Siberia to the snowy chain of 
 Shang-gan-Alin and the easternmost extremity of Japan. It is 
 computed that the circle of Chinese influence at the present day 
 embraces a population of not less than four hundred millions of 
 human beings. 
 
 We cannot urge, indeed, that China has been utterly 
 exempted from all foreign perturbations. The great wave of 
 Huns, which propagating itself beyond the Don and Danube, 
 had ultimately, under Attila, produced confusion in the capital 
 of the Roman world, originated in the upper valley of the 
 Hoangho, from whence it had been forced in new directions by 
 the vigorous unity of Chinese rulers; and at last, when their 
 dominions were invaded, and in part subdued, by hordes of 
 
 ^ Lassen, Ind. Alterth. i. 742. still continue to hold out against 
 
 2 Gfrorer, Urgesch. des mensch- the civilisation of the great mass 
 
 lichen Geschlechts, p. 214, Schaff- of the Chinese: Prichard, iv. 487 
 
 hausen, 1855, in his allusion to sq. According to Duhalde,^ there 
 
 this fact, exclaims most naturally, cited, the unconquered Miao-sse 
 
 ' Welcher Blick in die gr^ue Urzeit ' have not adopted the religion of 
 
 offnet sich uns hier!' The subject the Lama, but still remain devoted 
 
 is discussed at length in Sir John to the superstition which appears 
 
 F. Davis's China, 11. 72 sq. Lond. to have been the primitive one in 
 
 1841. all eastern Asia, namely, that termed 
 
 -^ A few mountaineers, however, Shamanism:' see above, pp. 261, sq. 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China, 275 
 
 Mongols and Mandshurs, it is remarkable that like the Visi- 
 goths and Lombards, who ravaged all the fairest plains of 
 southern Europe, the invader found the reigning civilisation far 
 too strong for him; he was himself led captive; he bowed before 
 the ancient language and majestic institutions of the very 
 nation he had spoiled. The Chinese empire has moreover ex- 
 perienced the disturbing influence of religious controversy, and 
 a large proportion of the people have been fascinated by a creed 
 whose birthplace was in central India : yet here again the 
 genius of the Chinese state-religion proved itself so dominant 
 that no sensible changes have been thus effected in any part of 
 the political or social machinery. 
 
 And corresponding to the wide extent of China, to the per- 
 manence of her institutions, and the consciousness of her 
 superior rank among the Asiatic tribes, has been her tendency 
 to look on others with indifference or contempt, and her un- 
 conquerable isolation. Long before the inroads of the Tatars 
 made it necessary to protect her people by building the Great 
 Wall, a spiritual barrier was in process of erection. China 
 grew into a kind of homogeneous world within herself: the 
 China-man was virtually cut off in sympathy from every other 
 nation, just as much as if his lot were cast in some distant 
 planet. The Middle Kingdom was and is to him the centre of 
 the universe ; all others, they of the ' Great Western Ocean ^ ' 
 not excepted, being mere extremities or pendants. Hence had 
 sprung not only the distinct and thoroughly national character 
 of almost everything which called itself Chinese, but also the 
 monotonous air pervading every single feature of that national- 
 ity. Arts, manners, and religion in so far as it is really in- 
 digenous, appear to have been cast in precisely the same mould. 
 As in the physical characteristics of the nation, the old traits 
 almost universally recur, the same dark eye with its oblique 
 expression, the same black hair, the same tawny skin, so in 
 their mental temperament and moral qualities the uniformity is 
 no less manifest. As a people the Chinese are shrewd and 
 clever, calculating, sordid, plodding, and prosaic'^, enterprising, 
 
 ^ A specimen of Chinese impres- Pirates, pp. xxii. sq. 
 sions respecting Europeans (who ^ <^ partir de I'epoque histori- 
 
 are called the people of *Ta-se- que, on ne rencontre jjIus que ce 
 
 yang,* = ' the Great "Western qu'on pourrait appeler de la prose, 
 
 Ocean,') may be seen in Prof. et du sens commun/ Pauthier, 
 
 Neumann's Preface to his version Chine, p. 43, Paris, 1839. 
 of the Chinese History of the 
 
 IS— 2 
 
276 
 
 Christ and other Masters. 
 
 [part III. 
 
 fraudulent, and gambling, strong in woi'ldly wisdom, wanting 
 in religious fervour and in moral sensibility ; while, in spite of 
 the unparalleled extent of popular education, all the higher 
 intellectual faculties, with very rare exceptions, have remained 
 from age to age imbecile and inert. 
 
 These properties of the China-man are best appreciated on 
 contrasting him for a moment with his Hindu neighbour \ In 
 the Aryan race, as early as their first descent on northern 
 India, the imagination is ever asserting its predominance. . 
 Their favourite mythes are all of a peculiar wildness and 
 exuberance ; they revel in the vague, the vast, the allegorical, 
 the shadowy, the mysterious. In China, on the contrary, imagi- 
 nation exercises very little influence. Kelics of the early poetry, 
 in which, if ever, we might hope to trace the operation of this 
 class of faculties, are seldom more than tame and frigid repre- 
 sentations of ordinary life. Excepting one important school^ 
 
 ^ We have a cnrious account of 
 the Chinese and their ancient civi- 
 lisation, written by one of them- 
 selves (in the Vie et Voyages de 
 Iliouen-Thsang, pp. 230, 231 ; ed. 
 JuHen, Paris, 1853): 
 
 The Buddhists of India wished 
 to detain this pilgrim, m'ging that 
 the Buddha Avas not born in China, 
 and that the Chinese were Mie-li- 
 tcWe (Mlech-chhas, 'barbarians'). 
 It was also added, that 'les vues 
 des habitants sont etroites et leurs 
 souillures profondes.' Then comes 
 the answer of the China-man : 
 
 'Le roi de la loi [i.e. the Bud- 
 dha] a fonde sa doctrine pour 
 qu'elle se r^pandit en tons lienx; 
 quel est I'homme qui voudrait s'en 
 abreuver tout seul et d«^laisser ceux 
 qui ne I'ont pas encore re(?ue? Or, 
 dans ce royaume (en Chine), les 
 magistrats sont graves et les lois 
 sont observces avec respect. Le 
 prince se distingue par sa haute 
 vertu et ses sujets par leur loy- 
 autd ; les peres par leur, affection , 
 les fils par leur pieuse obeissance. 
 On y estime Phumanitd et la jus- 
 tice, et Ton place au premier rang 
 les vieillards et les sages. Ce n'est 
 pas tout: la science n'a pas de 
 
 mysteres pour eux; leur penetra- 
 tion egale celle des esprits ; le ciel 
 leur sert de module et ils savent 
 calculer les mouvements des sept 
 chart^s (du soleil, de la lune et des 
 cinq plandtes). lis ont invente 
 (toutes sortes) d'instrumens, divis^ 
 les saisons de I'ann^e et d6couvert 
 les proprietes cachees des six tons 
 do la musique. C'est pour cela 
 qu'ils ont pu expulser ou soumet- 
 tre les animaux sauvages, toucher 
 et faire descendre les demons et 
 les esprits, calmer (les influences 
 contraires du) In et du Yang [the 
 male and female principles in 
 nature, the harmony of which is 
 essential to the well-being of cre- 
 ation], et procurer la paix et le 
 bonheur k tons les etres.' In the 
 Laws of Manu (x. 43, 44) the 
 Chinas are reckoned among those 
 Kshatriyas, who had been de- 
 based through their neglect of sa- 
 cred rites and through their want 
 of intercourse with Br^hmans. 
 
 2 This school, the Tao-sse (re- 
 specting whom, see below, § 2) had 
 a mythology in many points re- 
 sembhng that of the Greeks and 
 Romans. A judicious writer on 
 Chinese institutions in the Nou- 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 277 
 
 whose Indian tastes and predilections are continually betrayed, 
 the Chinese have no primitive mythus, corresponding to the 
 vivid and romantic imagery in which different tribes of man 
 had veiled their worship of external nature, or idealised the 
 legends of their simple forefathers. All in China is more 
 commonplace, more tangible, more practical, more real. ^What 
 the Chinese cannot comprehend with the natural understanding 
 exists not for them, and is an object of their derision.' Hence 
 the Brahman comes to be esteemed by learned followers of 
 Confucius a mere dreamer and fanatic ; while in his opinion 
 they are abject and plebeian spirits, selfish, sordid, and ma- 
 terialistic. He disparages the world around him on the j)lea 
 that it is only an illusion, acting as the transient mirror of the 
 supernatural and enduring : they as absolutely yield themselves 
 to the dominion of the seen and temporal j they long for nothing 
 higher. 
 
 On proceeding to investigate the early history of 'these 
 utilitarians of the ancient world,' their own traditions^ uni- 
 formly point us backward to the mountains of the west, — the 
 sources of those mighty streams that fertilize the whole of 
 central China, and the spot to which the memory afterwards 
 reverted as the paradise of primitive man and as the cradle of 
 all natural and preternatural being ^. When the Chinese issued 
 from their native highlands they appear to have first occupied 
 the numerous valleys of the Kwan-lun, and most writers on the 
 subject have conjectured, from the simple genius of their lan- 
 guage, its monosyllabic forms, its want of organisation, and its 
 very limited affinities with foreign idioms^, that their isolation 
 from the rest of men was dated from a very distant period. In 
 the earliest dawn of history, we see them like the other 
 shepherd-tribes of central Asia, wandering onward with their 
 eyes directed to the pastures of the south and east ; yet in the 
 meanwhile little higher in the scale of civilisation than the 
 
 veau Journal Asiatique (1854), ^' ^^^^ ^^^ Chinese have all sprung 
 sMe, tome iv. p. 314, says that from a Turanian stock, 
 he has read some of the Tao-sse ^ Cf . above, pp. 211 sq. on the 
 dramas, and found in them the Mah^-Meru of the ancient Aryans, 
 fable of Epimenides, the fable of corresponding to this legend. Other 
 Niobe, the fable of Venus issuing features of the Chinese paradise 
 from the sea after Saturn had will be found in Liiken's Tradl- 
 thrown into it a magical composi- tionen, p. 67, Miinster, 1856. 
 tion, the representation of Neptune 3 Prichard, iv. 481 : cf. the * In- 
 armed with a trident, &c. troduction,' prefixed to M. Biot's 
 ^ Prichard, IV. 47«sq.; Gfrorer, edition of the Tcheou-Li, Paris, 
 pp. 217 sq. The latter is of opinion 1851, pp. v. sq. 
 
278 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 Bushmen of the present century ^ Their dress consisted of the 
 skins of animals ; their food of roots and insects. From this 
 depth of barbarism the legends tell us how they jBnally emerged 
 at the command of early emperors, — a representation savouring, 
 it is true, of ages when the state-machinery was fully organised, 
 but well adapted to convey the notion, that material progress 
 flowed in their case from administrative ability. When due 
 allowance has been also made for some of the ideal excellencies 
 ascribed to early kings and statesmen, it is obvious that the 
 march of ancient China in acquiring all the arts of settled life 
 was most extraordinarily rapid. The whole empire seems as if 
 it sprang directly from a savage to a civilised condition by one 
 mighty bound ; but, having exhausted all its elasticity in this 
 single effort, had been afterwards reduced as rapidly into a stiff 
 and spiritless automaton. The borders of the Chinese empire 
 were at first indeed comparatively naiTow. In the seventh 
 century before Christ they had extended only so far as to 
 embrace five out of the present eighteen districts ; while be- 
 yond them and around them lay a multitude of barbarous 
 people whom it was their object to subdue and humanize. As 
 early, however, as the second century of the Christian era, 
 the huge system of Chinese administration had received its 
 finishing touch. The emperor was everywhere regarded as the 
 centre and moving principle of the whole machinery : govern- 
 ment-schools, which had been planted long before, were now 
 enlarged and multiplied in every quarter : while literary merit, 
 tested by competitive examinations^ in a number of accredited 
 books, became the single passport to promotion in the public 
 service. 
 
 "With these cursory observations on the state of ancient 
 China, I proceed to notice the peculiar forms and phases under 
 which religion has been there diffused among the people. 
 
 The number of such forms is three : 
 
 1. The State-religion, as re-modelled by Confucius. 
 
 2. Tao-ism, or School of the fixed Way. 
 
 3. Fo-ism, or Chinese Buddhism. 
 
 § 1. Confucianism. 
 
 The civilisation of ancient China,, as of other Eastern states®, 
 is founded mainly on one class of writings, which are held to be 
 
 1 Gutzlaff, I. 124 sq. Pauthier, their Rebellions j pp. 402 sq. Lond. 
 pp. .^3 sq. 1856. 
 
 2 Meadows, The Chinese and ^ Differing, in this respect, from 
 
CHAP, l] Religions of China, 279' 
 
 deserving of especial honour. These the China-man entitles 
 king, or, with peculiar emphasis, 'the books.' As might perhaps 
 have been predicted from the general texture and constitution 
 of his mind, he never thinks of God as of a Being who reveals 
 Himself objectively to man, and therefore manifests no faith in 
 any kind of supernatural religion. Yet the Chinese seldom 
 fail to draw distinctions between the authority of the king and 
 every other class of ancient writings. The 'holy man ^ ' (shing-jin) 
 is said to have possessed instinctively the power of diving to the 
 bottom of metaphysical discussions, and of yielding a spontaneous 
 obedience to the promptings of the pure and perfect nature he 
 inherited in common with the rest of men. His teachings 
 therefore on their first enunciation are all absolutely true : they 
 rank far higher than the works of those who are entitled 'sages' 
 {heen-jin), but who only rise to full perception of religious truth, 
 and practise all the higher virtues, after painful and assiduous 
 cultivation. 
 
 In this chain of 'holy men' the foremost link was Fuh-he, the 
 reputed founder of Chinese civilisation and author of the oldest 
 of the 'sacred' books, — the Yih-king^. It is not my purpose to 
 insist at present on the legend where Fuh-he, escaping from the 
 waters of a deluge, re-appears as the first man at the pro- 
 duction of a renovated world, nor on the fact that he is there 
 attended by seven companions, his wife, his three sons, and three 
 daughters^, by whose intermarriage the whole circle of the 
 universe is finally completed. His work is even more mys- 
 terious than his personal history. ' The wisest among the 
 Chinese have entered this labyrinth, but only to come out of it 
 
 Greece and Borne, where, in the founder of the Chow dynasty, who 
 
 absence of 'sacred' books, there during his imprisonment (b.c. 1 144 
 
 was a much freer development of — 1142) arranged the diagrams of 
 
 human thought. Pauthier seems Fuh-he on different principles. His 
 
 to be of opinion that the king bear rearrangement and expositions, as 
 
 a strong resemblance to the Vedas completed by his son, Chow-kung, 
 
 in the general character of their became the text of the earliest of 
 
 contents (*non pour le contenu the Chinese sacred, or canonical, 
 
 mais pour I'espece du contenu'); books. 
 
 and adds that this conformity ^ g^e Mr. M*' Clatchie's paper in 
 
 *n'est peut-etre pas purement due the Journal of the Asiatic Society 
 
 auhasard.' (1856), xvi. 403, 404, where it is 
 
 ^ Meadows, as above, pp. 347, contended that in Puh-he and his 
 
 348. family we may recognise Noah and 
 
 2 The best edition * ex interpret. the second parents of the human 
 
 Regis' is that of MohljStuttg. 1834 race: cf. Gutzlaff, i. 129, 130, 
 
 ^1839. This annotator was Wan- Wuttke, ii. loo, loi. 
 wang, *the literary prince' and 
 
280 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 more bewildered.' It may be described as an expanded form of 
 ancient and recondite speculations on the nature of the universe 
 in general, the harmonious action of the elements and periodic 
 changes of creation. These ideas were primarily expressed by 
 means of eight peculiar diagrams {kwa), which constitute the 
 basis of natural philosophy as well as of religion. Yet the 
 work professing to unriddle all the mysteries which are be- 
 lieved to have been latent in those venerable signs, was treated 
 as a series of enigmas in the classic age of Chinese literature ; 
 and so capricious were the expositions to which the Yih-king 
 was submitted, that instead of being as at first a cosmological 
 essay it became eventually a standard treatise on ethical philo- 
 sophy. 
 
 The second of the Chinese * sacred' books is called the Shoo- 
 hing^, which, as more historic and intelligible than its prede- 
 cessor, has been everywhere esteemed the chief authority in 
 tracing out the spiritual development of the Middle Kingdom. 
 It commences with the reign of Yaou, one of the very earliest 
 emperors, and stretches onward to the life- time of Confucius : 
 while the moral and political maxims it contains have formed 
 the text on which the ingenuity and erudition of the native 
 commentators have been exercised for ages. The vast import- 
 ance of the Shoo-hing in directing the national mind of China 
 was never more evinced than in the desperate efforts to suppress 
 it during the reign of Che-hwan^-te, the scourge of the barbaric 
 Huns and the projector of the Great Wall (about 240 B.C.). 
 This able tyrant, anxious to uproot the old traditions and to 
 render everything Chinese dependent on his beck, had spared 
 xhe copies of the enigmatical Yih-king; but all other books, both 
 secular and sacred^ had, with very rare exceptions, been com- 
 mitted to the flames^. 
 
 The She-king^ is the third authoritative document that 
 serves to illustrate the general course of Chinese civilisation. 
 It comprises 311 odes and other lyrics, for the most part moral 
 in their tone, and sometimes breathing in the midst of tender 
 sentiments and deep regrets a freshness and simplicity entirely 
 characteristic of the earliest ages of mankind. The ancient 
 bard appears more conscious than the modern China-man of 
 
 1 See Le Chou-king, ed. De all Chinese literati have expatiated:' 
 
 Guignes, Paris, 1770; and Livres (i. 127). 
 
 Sacres de V Orient, par Pauthier, 2 (j^tzlaff, i. 223, 224: Meadows, 
 
 Paris, 1842. Gutzlaff, speaking of pp. 333, 334. 
 
 the Shoo-kbif), says that 'it forms '^ See Chi-king, sive Liher Car- 
 
 the great text-book, upon which minum, ed. Mohl, Stuttg. 1 830. . 
 
CHAP. I.] Eeligions of China. 281 
 
 some corruption cleaving to the human family as a whole ; and 
 here and there we trace an ardent aspiration after some more 
 lofty stage of being, which, as time went over, was completely 
 stifled by the growing love of pelf, and the incurable self 
 sufiiciency engendered in the heart of the Chinese. 
 
 Inferior only in authority to works already mentioned, is 
 the Chinese book of rites and manners, Le-ke^, which, prescrib- 
 ing as it did for all relationships of life and all the various 
 orders of society, established everywhere unnatural stiffness and 
 fastidious decorum. Other writings^, nearly if not altogether 
 standing on the same superior level, might be added to this 
 series ; but in it we have the principal monuments of the older 
 i*ace of * holy men,' and therefore the great bases of all Chinese 
 history and ethics, politics, philosophy, and religion. 
 
 It appears, however, highly probable that several changes 
 were effected in the ancient creed of China during the fifth and 
 sixth centuries before the promulgation of the Gospel. In 
 Kong-fu-tse (a name which missionaries from the west have 
 Latinized into Confucius), we behold the ^prince' of Chinese 
 ^ wisdom,' or the second founder of the state-religion ; and as all 
 the ancient documents were then submitted to inspection and 
 revision^, it is rather to Confucius than to Fuh-he, or to other 
 ancient worthies, that the ruling forms of civilisation in the 
 Middle Kingdom must be ultimately referred. 
 
 The labours of Confucius constituted a fresh epoch in the 
 mental progress of the Indo-Chinese world. He comes upon 
 the theatre of history soon after the demise of a reformer, who 
 in various points is most unlike him. Sakya-muni died, as we 
 saw reason to belie ve'^, in 543 B.C.: Confucius was born in 551 
 
 ^ See Le Li-Ki, ou Memorial des religion. Next in order stand the 
 
 Bites, ed. Gallery, Turin, 1853. works of Mencius (Meng-tse), who 
 
 2 It is usual to speak of the four died about 317 B.C. His various 
 
 works above noticed, together with treatises are edited by M. Stanislas 
 
 the Tsun-tsew, (an historical com- Julien, Paris, 1824. 
 
 position of Confucius), as the Five ^ Meadows, p. 332, who remarks: 
 
 Sacred writings (Woo-king) : see * It is well known that he expressly 
 
 Mohl's Pref. to the Yih-king, pp. repudiated portions of the ancient 
 
 •79 sq. But the Ta-heo (or 'great literature, as containing doctrines 
 
 doctrine,' ed. Pauthier, Paris, 1837), adverse to the views which he held 
 
 the Chung-Yung (ed. Abel-Kemu- and strove to diffuse. The names 
 
 sat), the Lun-yu (ed. Schott), and only of some celebrated ancient 
 
 the Hi-tse, all emanating directly books, one dating from the times 
 
 from the school of Confucius, of Fuh-he himself, have been pre- 
 
 though not always written by him- served.' 
 
 self, are held to be co-ordinate au- * Above, pp. 154, 155. 
 thorities in favour of the state- 
 
282 Christ and other Masters, [part hi. 
 
 B. c. Addicted in his early bojliood to the study of the ancient 
 records^ he acquired a habit of contrasting the disorders and 
 demoralisation of his age with the ideal pictures they presented 
 of the primitive line of Chinese kings. The heavenly maxims 
 of a Yaou, the stern and simple virtues of a Shun, the perfect 
 system of administration that had characterised the golden age 
 of Yu, these all excited the unbounded admiration of Confucius ; 
 and at the early age of three-and-twenty he conceived the 
 thought of leading back his fellow-subjects to the ancient 
 models. It was the predominant force of this idea that after- 
 wards impelled Confucius during his long life to visit several 
 courts of Chinese princes, among whom the country had been 
 subdivided, and in some few cases he was actually allowed to 
 try his grand experiment as a political and social reformer. 
 But his course as he advanced was very far from prosperous. 
 The importance given to virtue as the proper basis of good 
 government exposed him to the scorn of some and the malig- 
 nity of othei-s. The last words he uttered savour not of hope 
 and exultation, but of bitter disappointment. During his life, 
 however, an enthusiastic band of followers had begun to cluster 
 round him ; and after rearing his modest tomb upon the banks 
 of the Soo river, they proceeded with untiring industry to 
 methodise his principles and circulate his writings. *My doc- 
 trine' he had constantly declared^ 'is that which all men ought 
 to follow. It is the doctrine of Yaou and of Shun. As for my 
 way of teaching, it is perfectly simple. I cite the patterns left 
 us by the ancients. I counsel men to read the sacred books 
 {king), and I require them to form the habit of reflecting on 
 the various maxims there preserved.' Accordingly the principal 
 ground on which Confucianism has ever rested its appeal is 
 narrow, and the ruling spirit of the system cautious and con- 
 servative. It promised that the old traditions of the country 
 should be sacredly collected and as sacredly embalmed; and 
 very much of the success it ultimately won is due to its profes- 
 sion of respect for social and political precepts current in the 
 governing class, and the effectual aids it thereby rendered in 
 maturing and consolidating the nationality of China. 
 
 But although the fashion was to eulogize the founder of this 
 system as the last and brightest of the Chinese 'holy men,' and 
 
 1 See the ample sketch of his lation, by Marshman at Serampore, 
 
 life and writings in Pauthier's in 1 809 ; and with a German trans- 
 
 Chine, pp. 121— 1&6. The col- lation at Berlin (1826-1832), under 
 
 lected works of Confucius were the editorship of Dr Schott. 
 published, with an EngHsh trans- 2 In Pauthier, p. 134. 
 
CHAP. i.J Religions of China. 283 
 
 though an obvious tendency of all the ^reformations' he pro- 
 moted was to deaden the activity of the human intellect, and 
 make the future ages a mere reproduction of the past, we are 
 not justified in arguing that the mind of the Chinese did 
 actually subside at once into a state of apathy and torpor \ On 
 the contrary it seems as if the fluctuations of religious thought 
 were not less numerous in Peking than in the eastern capital of 
 the Csesars. 
 
 Taking no account of those great movements which ran 
 counter to the state-religion, and as such will be considered 
 separately, we find that under the nineteenth or Sung dynasty 
 (extending from a.d. 960 to a.d. 1279), the general tone of 
 Chinese 'orthodoxy' had experienced an important modification. 
 As the earlier changes synchronized with various tokens of 
 activity in the western world, Confucius being the contempo- 
 rary of Pythagoras and his greatest follower Mencius the con- 
 temporary of Aristotle, so the epoch that beheld the first 
 advances of the Christian schoolmen and the growth of specula- 
 tive Judaism in writers like Maimonides, was also that in 
 which the doctors of the Middle Kingdom laboured to evolve a 
 definite and coherent system of philosophy from the writings of 
 their ancient sages. Whether traceable, as some conjecture^, to 
 the agency of printing which had been invented and established 
 with imperial sanction as early as the middle of the tenth cen- 
 tury; or whether, as might also be conjectured, some at least of 
 the new impulse was communicated to the governing classes by 
 the rapid growth of Buddhism and the consequent infusion of a 
 Hindu spirit, there can be no doubt that China was producing 
 a new race of scholars marked by greater aptitude for meta- 
 physical speculations. Their philosophizings, it is true, were 
 based on the received traditions of the ancient writers, with 
 whom at every turn they claim a spiritual fellowship ^; yet all 
 
 ^ Prof. Neumann's remark is of many minds, which would other- 
 
 perhaps exaggerated, but there is wise have lain dormant in unletter- 
 
 no reason for doubting its substan- edignorance,must have been brought 
 
 tial truth: 'Das Mittelreich zeigt [by the cheapening of books] into 
 
 nicht weniger geistige und poU- fruitful action in the fields of phi- 
 
 tische Kevolutionen als andere losophical speculation and histori- 
 
 Thoile der Welt.* See his valu- cal inquiry.' 
 
 able contribution on 'Die Natur- ^ The following clear testimony 
 
 und Keligions - philosophie der is from the philosopher, Choo-he 
 
 Chinesen,' in Illgen's Zeitschrift (Tschu-hi), translated by.Neumanu, 
 
 filr die historische Theologie (1837), as above, p. 21 : 'Kong [Confucius], 
 
 VII. 19. Meng [Mencius], Tsching und 
 
 2 e. g. Meadows p. 334, who re- Tschang [both of whom flourished 
 
 marks: 'The originative capacities 1000 years after Christ] sind die 
 
284 Christ and other Mastoids. [part hi. 
 
 had grown more conscious that in order for the state-religion to 
 retain its old supremacy and crush or counteract the innova- 
 tions now rampant in all quarters, it must coin a more scholastic 
 terminology, must grapple with a liarder class of questions, and 
 must speak out far more plainly not on matters of finance, 
 economy, and etiquette, but on the nature of the world and its 
 inhabitants, and the true relation of the seen and temporal to 
 the Absolute and All-embracing. 
 
 The philosopher who guided this great movement to a 
 prosperous close was Choo-he, termed by European scholars the 
 Aristotle of the Middle Kingdom, and revered by all the 
 governing class of China as Hhe prince of sciences.* The com- 
 mentaries he has left behind on all the Chinese classics are a 
 fraction only of his multitudinous writings; yet in them especi- 
 ally it was that Choo-he shaped the course which Chinese 
 thought has very generally followed from his day to our own\ 
 All statements on religious subjects which are not supported by 
 appeals to his authority are branded as injurious and heretical; 
 and since the millions who present themselves as candidates for 
 office under government are constantly employed in learning his 
 works by heart, it is most obvious that the influence he still 
 exercises, whether as a guiding or a cramping agent, is incalcu- 
 lably vast. If the intelligence of China only reached its prime 
 when first awakened by Confucius, it was passing through the 
 phase of manhood, if not verging to a state of absolute seni- 
 lity, when Choo-he breathed his last in A. d. 1200. 
 
 What, then, may be deemed the leading features in the 
 practical working of Confucianism, a system planted, there is 
 reason for believing, in the twilight of the world's history but 
 perfected as late as the concession of our Magna Charta 1 
 
 In that system, as administered in every age, the emperor 
 of China is the foremost object. Mounted on the ^ dragon 
 throne,' as it is called, he is the mainspring of the whole 
 machinery, whethei* his empire be regarded as a civil or reli- 
 gious institution. The laws indeed distinguish very clearly 
 between the private and official status of the emperors; for as 
 
 vier beruhmten Stiitzen unserer der Zeit] von Fohi [Fuli-he] will 
 
 Lehre. Die Weisheit und die Un- wenig sagen : sie verbindet das glei- 
 
 tersuchung des Gnindes aller Dinge che Frincip.' 
 
 ruht auf diesem festen Fundament : ^ See Neumann, as above, pp. 22 
 
 alle jene andern Lehrer haben si- sq., Meadows, pp. 335 sq., and Mc 
 
 cherlich geirrt. Nur diese vier Clatchie in Journal of As. Soc. 
 
 verehrt man als die Grundpfeiler (1856), xvi. 433. 
 
 der Weisheit ; ihre Entfernung [in . . 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 285 
 
 individuals they enjoy a privilege, granted also, with conditions, 
 to their subjects, of choosing for themselves a second or subordi- 
 nate creed, and emperors have at different times made very 
 different choicest But as every father of a Chinese family is 
 constrained to recognize the state-religion by some special acts 
 of homage, so the emperor himself, officially considered, must 
 be always ^orthodox,' devoted to the maintenance of the sacred 
 books, as well as to the vindication of all ancient usages. These 
 jointly form the rule according to which the various functions 
 of the government must be directed; and so long as any 
 emperor abstains from innovations in performing his public 
 duties, he is honoured as the ' Son of Heaven,' the source and 
 champion of established order, the exponent of mysterious 
 principles which underlie the course of nature, and the organ of 
 some powerful but impersonal energy that lingers round about 
 us and above us. Heaven itself is present in him : he becomes 
 in virtue of that presence a celestial potentate, not only the 
 great chieftain of the Middle Kingdom, but a pattern of ideal 
 excellence for every member of the human family. 
 
 It should also be observed that ever since the patriarchal 
 times of Yu^, the emperor has been invested with a twofold 
 character. He is king and also priest of China : standing in 
 the latter capacity at the head of a peculiar cultus, and declaring 
 of himself in that relation, * I am one man, ' i. e. the only being 
 of my kind^. As such he only has the privilege of uttering 
 some hereditary form of prayer, and offering a more costly and 
 more potent sacrifice than any other mortal ^ The large group 
 of mandarins, who form his agents in the task of government, 
 have also, it is true, been each invested with a quasi-sacerdotal 
 power; yet the objects whom they have the right to worship 
 are esteemed of lower dignity, — as genii of the soil, the streams, 
 the mountains; or malignant dem^ons, haunting this or that 
 
 ^ Thus, at the present day, the volume entitled Who is God in 
 
 emperor as a private person adheres China} pp. i86, 187. 
 
 to Buddhism, which (so to speak) ^ 'L'empereur a le droit de sa- 
 
 had mounted the imperial throne crifier au Ciel et a la Terre: les 
 
 of China, as far back as the Ming seigneurs sacrifient aux dieux tu- 
 
 dynasty : while under the Sung t^laires de I'empire,' &c.' Li-ki, ed. 
 
 monarchs, the Tao-ists were equally Gallery, p. 16. It also would ap- 
 
 in the ascendant. See an interest- pear as though fresh solemnity 
 
 ing article on Chinese institutions \vere given to the imperial sacri- 
 
 in the Nouveau Journal Asiatique fice by offering on some occasions 
 
 (1854), IV. 292 sq. in the open country. IMd. pp. 47, 
 
 2 Gutzlaff, I. 142, 143. 60, 62, 119. 
 
 3 See Mr. S. C. Malan's recent 
 
286 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 locality; or elements and atmospheric agencies regarded in 
 their nudest form, of wind, of drought, of rain, of lightning or 
 of tempest. Accessories of the mandarinic worship also corre- 
 spond to this idea of fundamental subordination and derived 
 authority. The emperor, for example, sacrifices at the seat of 
 government in temples which have been devoted to that special 
 use : the mandarins officiate, on the contrary, in the provincial 
 temples. The emperor is attired in sacerdotal vestments of 
 peculiar hue and texture, and embroidered with numerous 
 symbols of the sun, the moon, the planets, to betoken his 
 exalted mission as the Heaven-born pontiff; while the man- 
 darins in acts of public worship still preserve their ordinary 
 dress. To sacrifice aright it is contended that the emperor 
 must undergo a special course of training : he must fast on three 
 consecutive days; he must abstain from every kind of sensual 
 gratification, and in order, as it seems, to check the least intru- 
 sion of a secular spirit, he must during those days take no part 
 in the administration of public justice. On the contrary, the 
 mandarins are bound by no such stringent regulations: they 
 appear to act as civil rather than as sacerdotal functionaries. 
 The disparity again is noticeable in the different kinds of 
 sacrifices they are authorised to offer. When the emperor once 
 a year, or in some grand emergency, comes forth to sacrifice, 
 the victim chosen is a goodly ox, and not this merely, but an 
 ox submitted to a searching process of purification', with a 
 view, it is believed, of marking more distinctly tlie exalted 
 nature of the rite and the superior dignity of the object in 
 whose honour it is consumed: while in the various branches of 
 the mandarinic cultus, incense and libations are the common 
 offerings, or if otherwise, anxiety is seldom felt to offer up the 
 costliest victim of its kind. 
 
 Yet even where the rites of China are most solemn and 
 most obviously religious in their purport, it is difficult to trace 
 in them a particle of zeal or fervour, least of all the conscious- 
 ness of personal demerit^. The heart-broken ejaculations of 
 
 ^ '11 est assez curieux' says M. denschuld die Menschheit von 
 Gallery {Li-ki, p. 63, n. 2) 'que les Gott; das menscliliclie Geschleoht 
 anciens Chinois aient admis, dans ist nur in vereinzelten Erscheia- 
 cette circonstance, lanecessite d'une ungen abgewichen ; und der Mensch 
 purification, eux qui n'ont jamais ist ja seinem Wesen nach mit Gott 
 attache a rien aucune de ces idees eins, hat kein selbststandiges Da- 
 de souillure legale si communes chez sein Gott gegeniiber, ist noch nicht 
 les peuples semitiques et chez les wahrhaft personlicher Geist, der als 
 Hindous.^ solcher auch siindigend von Gott 
 
 ^ 'In China trennt keine Siin- sich losen konnte.' — Wuttke, 11. 63. 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 287 
 
 the Hebrew penitent, gazing through his tears on symbols of 
 the temple- worship which announce the unapproachable holiness 
 of God and whisper also of His love and placability; the 
 spectral gloom of the ascetic, pining year by year beneath the 
 shadow of some Indian fig-tree, in the hope of torturing out the 
 remnant of his earthly passions, and so hastening the hour of 
 ultimate reabsorption ; — these are things entirely foreign to the 
 cold and callous nature of the Chinese. Whenever their great 
 model, the imperial pontiff, offers up the yearly sacrifice to 
 Heaven, it savoui's less of awe and adoration than of prido and 
 self-complacency : it publishes the fact that harmony continues 
 to subsist as heretofore between celestial and terrestrial powers : 
 it certifies the oneness of the emperor in act and interest with 
 the unseen spirit which pervades the universe and is directing 
 all the fortunes of the Middle Kingdom. An exception to this 
 general statement does exist, however: for, on one or more 
 occasions in the lifetime of an emperor, we see him driven to 
 adopt the lowly posture of the suppliant, and offer a more 
 genuine sacrifice to Heaven. An army of barbarians, for 
 example, hover on the frontiers; or an earthquake threatens to 
 engulf some fertile district; or a pestilence is raging in the 
 capital; or famine rouses and inflames the angry passions of 
 the populace ; rivers overflow their margin, crops are blasted, 
 heaven and earth appear at enmity; or, worst of all, some 
 brilliant comet, the precursor of dynastic changes, sheds a bale- 
 ful light across the firmament. Excited and dismayed by these 
 portentous incidents, the ruler of the Middle Kingdom seems 
 to hesitate for once respecting the validity of his claim- to be 
 entitled * Son of Heaven : ' he fears lest, owing to some former 
 negligence or present incapacity, his high commission is about 
 to be withdrawn \ Tlie only refuge open to him is in bowing 
 to the terrible scourge by which he is chastised: 'he humbles 
 himself before Heaven and his subjects, by publishing those 
 self-accusatory and repentant documents, which Europeans per- 
 use with surprise and ridicule, but which are wrung from his 
 pride by his fears, and are earnest, trembxing efforts to avert 
 the execution of Divine justice^' 
 
 But the sacrifices offered up to Heaven were not the only 
 rites in which the Chinese emperor was seen invested with 
 pontifical authority. A second temple where he had been long 
 accustomed to ofliciate was dedicated in honour of the Earth, 
 
 1 Meadows, p. i8. 
 
 2 Ihid. p. 19: cf. Chou-kingf ed. De Guignes, pp. 141, 142. 
 
288 Christ and other Masters, [part hi. 
 
 the gi-eat correlative divinity of ancient China. Hope, and 
 J07, and gratitude, were periodically awakened in all quarters 
 by the contemplation of the genial processes of nature. * Earth,' 
 men felt, *is bearing in her lap whatever is found needful to 
 our life : as Heaven suspends the luminaries overhead. From 
 Earth we gather riches ; to Heaven we look for good examples. 
 It is fitting therefore to evince respect for Heaven, and pay a 
 tribute of gratitude to Earth \' In other Avords, as we shall see 
 hereafter, the Chinese have learned to worship two great Powers 
 or Principles, the former ruling in the active and paternal 
 province of creation, the second in the passive and maternal ; 
 and thus constituting, in popular phraseology, the Father and 
 the Mother of all things. 
 
 Passing by the manifold objects of religious worship which 
 originated in the non-official creeds of China, we discover that 
 Confucianists have also been accustomed from very early times 
 to offer prayers and sacrifices to a multitude of minor deities. 
 The parent-gods, or Heaven and Earth, were, so to speak, 
 resolved into their various elements, in such a manner that the 
 populace, who felt no inclination to adore them as a whole, 
 might choose some favourite aspect or some special energy of 
 nature, and so concentrate on it the principal share of their 
 devotion. 
 
 In this pantheon it would seem as though the highest place, 
 in theory at least, had been allotted to a class of spiritual or 
 quasi- spiritual intelligences, like the genii and the demons of 
 other heathen systems : but the period v*^hen such modes of 
 worship took their rise it is impossible to determine. The 
 Shoo-king, as edited by Confucius, is not wanting in examples 
 where the early emjDerors^ of China sacrificed to spirits of the 
 hills, and rivers, as well as to the shining host of heaven; — 
 thus intimating that the usage may have been a remnant of the 
 old * Turanian' creed which lingers still as devil-worship, under 
 many of its most appalling aspects, on the plains of upper Asia 
 and apparently among a handful of the Chinese mountaineers. 
 So deeply rooted was it in the heart of the people that Confucius 
 was unable, or unwilling, to dislodge it^. 
 
 But popular as every kind of spirit-worship is in China, she 
 
 ^ Li'ki.Ch. X. ed. Gallery, p. 16. serve spiritual beings, he replied: 
 
 2 Gfrorer, pp. 277 sq. Gutzlaff, * Not being able to serve men, how 
 
 I. 134. can you serve spirits?'" In other 
 
 ^ Medhurst's China, pp. 103, 194, \Yords, he chose to speak exclusively 
 
 Lpnd. 1857 : "When one of his dis- on different subjects. 
 
 ciples asked him how he was to 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 289 
 
 is even more addicted to the worship of departed men. This 
 superstition forms a very prominent article in the creed of the 
 Confucianist. Originally suggested by the feelings of respect, 
 of admiration and of gratitude, it issued in the deification of 
 each man who had stood foremost in promoting the diffusion of 
 some useful art, or who communicated some extraordinary* im- 
 pulse to the intellect of China by the fruitful produce of his pen. 
 Confucius was himself an instance of the latter kind of deifica- 
 tion. *His fame,' writes one of his devoted followers \ * over- 
 flowed all China like a deluge, and extended to the barbarians. 
 Wherever ships or carriages reach, wherever human strength 
 penetrates, wherever the heavens cover and the earth sustains, 
 wherever the sun and moon shed their light, wherever frost or 
 dew falls, wherever there is blood and breath, there were none 
 who did not approach and honour him : therefoi'e, he is equal 
 to Heaven :' i. e, co-ordinate and on a level with the very loftiest 
 form of being. The whole empire is at present dotted over 
 with temples sacred to the memory of Confucius, and a very 
 large number of animal sacrifices (more than sixty thousand) 
 are provided annually by the government for immolation to his 
 manes, in addition to the multitudinous offerings brought by 
 earnest individuals. Similar feelings are betrayed in the devo- 
 tions which the more accomplished China-man perpetually ad- 
 dresses to Kwan-yu, the model of fidelity, of courage, and of 
 magnanimity : and every age contributes a fresh stock of in- 
 mates to the crowded pantheon^, or displaces this or that 
 divinity whose worship had been general in the age preceding. 
 
 Another feature of Chinese mythology, if such it can be 
 called, is the comparative absence from it of licentious stories 
 and revolting rites, like those already noticed^ in the old religion 
 of Phoenicia, and in fact pervading, more or less, all other 
 dualistic creeds. The goddess-worship of modern China (for to 
 
 1 Medhnrst's China, p. 192. Dr. was killed a. d. 1809, while engaged 
 Medhurst adds: *Thus have these in defending the citadel of Lan- 
 atheistical people deified the man shih: *The villagers were greatly 
 who taught them that matter was moved by his excellent behaviour; 
 eternal, and that all existences they erected him a temple, and said 
 originated in a mere principle.' prayers before his effigy. It was 
 
 2 See LUki, ed. Gallery, p. 1 14. then known what he meant [when 
 A very remarkable instance, shew- he said] that he should be glorified 
 ing that this kind of apotheosis in the course of the year. Now 
 still goes on among them, will be that twenty years are passed, they 
 found in the native History of the even honour him by exhibiting fire* 
 Chinese Pirates, translated by Neu- works.' 
 
 mann. We there read (pp. 43, 44) ^ Above, pp. 69, 70. 
 
 of a brave man, Shaou-yuen, who 
 
 H. 19 
 
290 Christ and other Masters. [pakt iir. 
 
 this alone our evidence refers) lias mainly found expression 
 either in the deification of chaste wives or else in that of virgins. 
 It is stated^ even that the worship of one particular virgin, 
 who is made the tutelary goddess both of women and of sailors, 
 is the dominant superstition into which the heathenism of China 
 is subsiding at the present day. How far such modification of 
 religious thought may be connected with some slender know- 
 ledge of the Koman-catholic version of Christianity, I do not 
 pause to determine. 
 
 But the phase of creature-worship, which from very ancient 
 times has constituted the special characteristic of heathenism in 
 China, is the worship of departed ancestors. According, it 
 would seem, with those ideas of clanship and those strong 
 domestic instincts which have ever operated with peculiar force 
 upon the spirit of the China-man, the custom of preserving some 
 memorial of his forefathers grew at last into the custom of pay- 
 ing them religious honours. It was felt that ^as all created 
 beings owe their origin to Heaven,' which is accordingly an ob- 
 ject of the deepest veneration, ' so man owes his existence to his 
 ancestors,' and ought to give them worship for this reason ^ 
 To restore and justify the practice, which had previously been 
 falling to decay, was one of the earliest reformations^ attempted 
 hj Confucius : and at present it has been so universally recog- 
 nised in China, by the learned and unlearned, by adherents of 
 the state-religion and of non-official creeds*, that we may point 
 to it as to a common principle which more than any other pene- 
 trates the moral life of all Chinese society. ' Building a tomb 
 
 1 The French writer in Noiiveau the Roman-catholic Church], that 
 
 'Journal Asiatique, as above, p. 295, the Chinese at Macao call her Santa 
 
 is of opinion that this worship of Maria de China. The sailors make 
 
 the virgin, Kwan-yin, is more po- her especially an object of adora- 
 
 pular than any other. A myste- tion; and there are very few junks 
 
 rious reverence attaches to her that have not an image of her on 
 
 name, and she is said to be the board. She is also accompanied by 
 
 tutelary goddess of women. Her very dismal satellites, the executors 
 
 'nativity^ and 'assumption' are of her behests. ' 
 
 both celebrated. Gutzlaff (in the 2 Journal Asiatique, as above, p. 
 
 Journal of the Asiatic Society^ xvi. 298. 
 
 79, 80) distinguishes between Kwan- ^ Pauthier, C/fciwe, p. 127. The 
 
 yin, the goddess of mercy, who is same practice, we may have occa- 
 
 thought to be of Hindti origin, and sion to remark hereafter, is also 
 
 Ma-tsoo-poo, 'the holy Mother,' of found in records of ancient Egypt. 
 
 Chinese origin. The worship of * 'The Buddhists have taken ad- 
 
 the latter was introduced, he writes, vantage of this prevailing sentiment, 
 
 ' some centuries ago. She is so and have grounded on it a variety 
 
 strikingly akin, in her whole cha- of superstitious services.' — Med- 
 
 racter and figure, to the Virgin [of hurst, p. 212. 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 291 
 
 in the form of a horse-shoe, they inscribe thereon the name of 
 the deceased, erect a tablet to his memory in the hall of hia 
 ancestors, and repair annually to the graves, in order to pros- 
 trate themselves before the manes and to offer victuals to those 
 hungry spirits \' The precise intention of the sacrificer has 
 been differently estimated by different writers. All agree, 
 however, that no reference is made by him to moral guilt or to 
 the reinstatement of departed souls in a position of primeval 
 innocence. On the contrary, they are addressed as beings 
 capable of giving aid and counsel to the meritorious of their 
 progeny, and also of inflicting vengeance on the fallen and un- 
 worthy ^ To their own they occupy the place and wield the 
 high prerogatives of the Supreme Being. The vulgar seem, 
 indeed, to fancy that the appetite of the deceased is really grati- 
 fied by feeding on the subtler portions of the food presented at 
 his grave ; and notions equally absurd appear, in later times at 
 least, to be profusely indicated by the offering of a species of 
 gilt-paper, covered with figures of houses and utensils, which 
 becomes, on passing through the fire, available as the currency 
 of the unseen world ^. But other and more philosophic minds 
 have uniformly repudiated this debased interpretation of their 
 ancient customs. For example in the Le-ke, or authorised ritual 
 of Confucianism, it is declared that the oblations to the manes 
 should be understood symholically, as meaning, ' That we ought 
 to keep the dead before our eyes, and honour them as if they 
 were still living^.' On earth the father and mother were re- 
 
 1 Gutzlaff, I. 60, 61. On the into the abodes of spirits.' 
 ancient ceremonial, see the Li-ki, ^ Li-ki, ed. Gallery, p. 121. 
 ed. Gallery, p. 42. Wuttke (11. 6^,^ 66) has the fol- 
 
 2 Chou-king, ed. De Guignes, pp. lowing remarks on the rationale of 
 fo6, 179. At other times, however, this strange custom of offering gold 
 nothing is said of their immortality and silver paper: 'Falsch ist es, 
 and present influence : they are dass diese Sitte an die Stelle frii- 
 commemorated or deplored as be- herer Menschenopfer getreten ware, 
 ings altogether of the past. oder dass man den Seelen der Ge- 
 
 '^ e.g. Medhurst, pp. 213, 214, storbenen durch das Verbrennen die 
 
 who adds : ♦ Besides transmitting auf dem Papier gezeichneten Dinge 
 
 money to the distressed and indi- zum Gebrauch im Jenseits ver- 
 
 gent spirits, the Ghinese think it schaffen wolle, wenn auch zur Zeit 
 
 necessary to provide their ghostly der Mongolen, welche den Todten 
 
 friends with clothes, and other ar- Menschen und Thiere nachsandten, 
 
 tides, adapted for their use in the solche fUr das chinesische Bewusst- 
 
 shades below. With this view, they sein ungereimte Dinge vorgekom- 
 
 cause coats and garments to be men sein mogen Das Gold- und 
 
 delineated on paper, which pass Silber- papier mit seinen Bildern 
 
 ihrough the fire, as certainly and bedeutet dann den Keichthum, und 
 
 as regularly as the paper-money, das Verbrennen des Papiers ist dann 
 
 19—2 
 
292 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 vered by all tlie members of their family, who saw in them an 
 image of the two divine Principles in nature ; and similarly on 
 their removal hence they were regarded as the chosen deputies 
 and ministers of Heaven, as watching with affectionate interest 
 all the varied fortunes of their progeny, and urging them along 
 the beaten road of duty to a liigher and a happier stage of 
 being. These relations with the world invisible were not un- 
 naturally held to be most real in the case of the emperor him- 
 self, who as the Son of Heaven and father of his people had 
 become an object of especial favour and solicitude to all his 
 royal predecessors ; yet the humblest China-man believes, and 
 has believed from ages out of memory, that his welfare both in 
 this world and the next is made to hinge almost entirely on 
 the due discharge of filial obligations, and the offering up of 
 periodic sacrifices to the manes of his ancestors. 
 
 From this account of the external aspects of Confucianism as 
 a religious system, I pass forward to a more minute investiga- 
 tion of the primary article of faith and of ideas which had been 
 silently moulding the established forms of worship. Ever since 
 the western missionaries came in contact with the literati of 
 the Middle Kingdom, two important questions have been agi- 
 tated in reference to these subjects. It was asked, in the first 
 place. Do Confucianists believe in the existence of a Supreme 
 Being "? and, secondly, What words or phrases in the Chinese 
 language form an adequate rendering of the ^Grod' of Chris- 
 tianity'? Upon the latter question^, though hardly separable 
 
 freilich die verdiinnteste und ahge- converts in the empire. Among the 
 
 Jiachteste Weise des Opfers, welcbe Chinese missionaries of other com- 
 
 ein prosaisches, den Besitz leiden- munions who rejected Teen, the 
 
 schaftlich Hebendes Volk ersinnen general practice was to render the 
 
 kann.' biblical name of God either (i) by 
 
 ^ The principal word selected by Shin, or (2) by Shang-te, both of 
 
 the early Boman- catholic mission- which have found a number of de- 
 
 aries as equivalent to tfnW and termined advocates especially Bince 
 
 ^ • •••: the missionary conference held at 
 
 Ge6s, was the Chinese Teen, which Shanghae,in 1847. It is contended 
 
 means, however, nothing more than on the one side that Shin is not a 
 
 ' Heaven,' the visible and invisible faithful rendering of Qeds, because 
 
 * Heaven,' as construed in its broad it is really a collective noun, is 
 
 indefinite sense. To give a greater never used with a numerical affix, 
 
 personality to the idea intended by and therefore cannot possibly mean 
 
 it,thewordC/ioo(=*Lord') wassub- one Shin. (See Mr. S. C. Malan's 
 
 sequently added by authority of the recent volume, entitled Who is God 
 
 Inquisition; and the phrase 'Teen- in China? He pleads- earnestly and 
 
 Choo,' 'Heavenly Lord,' or 'Lord learnedly in favour of the phrase 
 
 of Heaven,' became the recognised Shang-te.) On the other hand it is 
 
 appellative of God for all Bomish maintained with equal earnestness 
 
CHAP. I.] Eeligions of China, 293 
 
 from the first, I shall decline to enter; feeling that the only 
 persons who can claim to speak about it with any semblance of 
 authority are those who have acquired a competent knowledge 
 of Chinese. It is somewhat different with regard to the moro 
 general subject of inquiry, 'Are the governing class of China 
 atheistic ? ' for the right solution of that problem is derivable 
 not so much from the discussion of particular terms, as from 
 the main complexion of her history and sacred literature. Yet 
 rich as the materials are for such investigation, and accessible 
 as they have now become to ordinary scholars, the difficulties 
 experienced in turning them to good account are of no common 
 magnitude. The ardour of the Christian missionary, who in 
 this case as in others proved himself the pioneer of art and 
 science and philosophy as well as of the Gospel, not unfre- 
 quently propelled him into serious errors and exaggerations; 
 and owing to the way in which he has misread the monuments 
 of eastern paganism and overcoloured both its truths and un- 
 truths, the first duty of dispassionate students is to subject his 
 reports to close and rigorous criticism, by going back, wherever 
 it is possible, to the original authorities. 
 
 When Ricci headed the first regular mission of the Jesuits 
 in China, opening his great campaign at Nanking in 1590, it 
 became a leading feature of his project to disarm the opposition 
 of the governing class ^ by making common cause with them 
 against the popular forms of misbelief. To justify this ques- 
 tionable measure, and so facilitate the arduous work of the 
 
 that Shang-te is an ethereal ^vxh mode d'etre son partisan et son 
 Kda-fiov, ' not a personal Being dis- apologiste. Les lettres en particu- 
 tinct from matter;* and warnings Her n'h^sitbrent pas a se declarer 
 are accordingly held out to the pour lui, parce que, dans ses dis- 
 effect that by sanctioning the wor- cours, il attaquait avec un succ^s 
 ship of Shang • te, we should be complet les doctrines des bonzes 
 virtually dethroning the Great Self- [i. e. of the Buddhist monks] et des 
 existent Spirit, whom the Hebrew docteurs de la Raison (Tao-Sse), et 
 and Christian have equally wor- que, d'autre part, il professait tou- 
 shipped under the adorable name jours un profond respect et una 
 Jehovah. (See, for instance, Mr. grande admiration pour les ensei- 
 McClatchie's paper on Chinese Theo- gnements de Confucius. Le docteur 
 logy, in the Journal of the Asiatic europeen etait a leurs yeux un. vrai 
 Society, xvi. 427 sq.) As far as I membre de la corporation des let- 
 can judge, the verbal controversy is tr^s, un Confuc6en, un partisan do 
 at last resolvable into a question of leur doctrine, un ennemi dea super- 
 metaphysics, *Have the Chinese stitions des bouddhisteg et des re- 
 any conception of a pure spirit, or veries des sectateurs de Lao-Tze,* 
 of incorporeality in the Christian Hue, Le Chris tianisme en Chine, &c, 
 sense?' 11. 154, 155. 
 ^ *I1 etait en quelque sorte de 
 
294 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 evangelist, lie uniformly pleaded that Confucius was the bright- 
 est luminary of the ancient world, — a genuine philosopher, 
 whose tenets harmonised in almost every point with those 
 transmitted in the sacred family from antediluvian times, and 
 consequently that the Gospel, so far from advocating any kind 
 of novelty, was in substance a revival of the primitive faith of 
 China. The missionary at the same time ventured to take part 
 in sacrifices offered to Confucius, on the ground that honours 
 thus awarded to the great philosopher of China were all purely 
 civil \ It was felt indeed by Ricci, as by many of his coadju- 
 tors, that a meeting-place might be established between the 
 Gospel and the authorised religion of the Middle Kingdom by 
 laying stress upon the doctrine of one infinite, all-embracing 
 Spirit^, whom the China-man appeared to worship as Teen, or 
 Shang-te. The two great temples at Peking, in which, as we 
 have noticed, the emperor himself was in the habit of sacrificing 
 to Heaven and Earth respectively, were held to be alike the 
 sanctuaries of this one eternal Spirit : the Creator and Conser- 
 vator of the universe was merely worshipped under different 
 titles^. On the contrary it was alleged with equal firmness by 
 a learned member^ of the same fraternity (the Jesuit Longo- 
 bardi), that many statements of his predecessors on this subject 
 were devoid of all foundation. According to his view the 
 Chinese literati had never during the historic period worshipped 
 one supreme and spiritual Intelligence, — a God whose being is 
 entirely independent of the visible and sensible universe : and 
 notwithstanding all the fervid eulogies which, half in ignorance 
 and half in malice, have attempted to exalt the ^wisdom' of the 
 Middle Kingdom to equality with that of Palestine, the verdict 
 of Longobardi is continually corroborated by the disquisitions 
 
 1 Le Christianisme en Chine, ii. even pretended in some quarters 
 p. 155. Other missionaries of a that the Christian doctrine of the 
 kindred spirit, and professing the Holy Trinity had been anticipated 
 same admiration for Confucius, by three horizontal lines, made use 
 travelled about the country in the of in the kiua of Fuh-he (above, p. 
 disguise of watchmakers, astrono- 280), to represent Heaven; or else 
 mers, artists, and engineers. by the triplication of Shang-te into 
 
 2 We are told of Eicci in par- Heaven, Earth, and man. 
 ticular: *Negabat religionem, quas ^ Bee Nouveau Journal Asiatique 
 unum sine consorte Deum doceret, (1854), tome iv. p. 300. 
 peregrinam esse. Hanc probabat "* His essay, first printed at Ma- 
 fuisse a Sinensibus philosophis et drid in 1676, was translated into 
 eorum principe Confucio traditam, French, in 1 701, with the title 
 sed obliteratam paulatim temporum Traite sur quelqiies points de la 
 vitio.* H&rdvfick^s History of the Be- religion des ChinoiSj par le E. Pbre 
 formation, 3rded.,p. 408, n. 3. It was Longobardi. 
 
CHAP. I.] Eeligions of China. 295 
 
 of oui- modern sinologues. They liold that, theoretically at 
 least, the followers of the Chinese' state-religion are all atheists 
 to a man^ However much the instincts of their moral nature 
 must rebel against this blank and desolating creed; however 
 much they are impelled when bending under some disastrous 
 visitation to take refuge in the thought of a superior Teen, or 
 
 * heaven,' and recognise in him tha attributes of justice and of 
 mercy, of fatherhood and special providence, the highest efforts 
 of their reasoning faculties all stop at the conception of an 
 
 * unintelligent and will-less principle,' from which the universe, 
 its laws and its inhabitants, have been eternally projected or 
 evolved. 
 
 How long these modes of thought and feeling have been 
 prevalent in China; whether as one class of writers are disposed 
 to argue they may be regarded as the earliest product of a 
 national mind absorbed entirely in the love of pelf, or whether 
 they resulted gradually from the adoption by the learned orders 
 of a system of philosophy akin to that which we entitle 
 
 * naturalism,' it is not easy to determine. In the Shoo-Jcing, 
 which Confucius (we have seen) remodelled out of older docu- 
 ments, allusion is made as many as eight-and- thirty times ^ to 
 some great Power or Being, called Shang-te. The name itself 
 imports ^august' or 'sovereign Kuler.' As there depicted he 
 
 ^ See, for instance, Meadows, p. die gliicldiche Ordnnng der Ele- 
 
 361. Prof. Neumann, whose opinion mente, er bringt Unheil tiber die 
 
 as a very accomplished Chinese Gesellschaft und ist ihr desshalb 
 
 scholar is peculiarly valuable, had verantwortlich. So innig ist dieser 
 
 already expressed himself with even Ideengang mit der Sprache selbst 
 
 greater emphasis: 'Nie und nim- verwachsen, dass es unmoglich ist, 
 
 mermehr ist dem Chinesischen den ersten Vers der Genesis ohne 
 
 Volke ein Gott erschienen; von weitlduftige Vmschreibung ins Chi- 
 
 einer Oft'enbarung ist keine Spur nesische so zu Hbersetzen, dass er 
 
 bei dieser prosaischen Nation. Die ivirklich Chinesisch ist. Denn hoa, 
 
 Worter Gott, Seele, Geist, als etwas das Wort fiir schajfen, bedeutet ei- 
 
 von der Materie ganz Unabhangiges gentlich auf eine spontane, unbe- 
 
 und sie willkiirlich Beherrschendes, wusste Weise vom Nichtseyn zum 
 
 kennt die Chinesische Sprache gar Seyn iibergehen ; und tsdo, welches 
 
 nicht. Ein einziges Band um- in der Bibeliibersetzung von D 
 
 schlingt, nach den Ansichten der Morrison vorkommt, wird von den 
 
 Weisen dieses Landes, alles Sey- Chinesen bloss in der Bedeutung 
 
 ende, das Reich der Natur und das von anders machen aus einem Et- 
 
 ReichdesGeistes;derBruch, dieSto- was, nie aber in dem Sinne von 
 
 rung der angemessenen Thatigkeit schaffen, dem Machen aus einem 
 
 eip.es Gliedes bringt Unordnung in Nichts, gebraucht.' Natur philoso- 
 
 die ganze Kette des Seyenden. Die phie der Chinesen, as before, pp. 1 1, 
 
 geistigen und moralischen Krafte 12. 
 
 gebieten aber den physischen; wer 2 Malan, Who is God in China f 
 
 Tugend und Sitte beleidigt, stort p. 167. 
 
296 Christ and other Masters, [part hi. 
 
 possesses a higli measure of intelligence, and exercises some 
 degree of moral government : lie punishes tlie evil, he rewards 
 the good. To him especially is offered the sacrifice Lode; while 
 other ceremonies are performed in honour of 'the six Tseng, the 
 mountains, the rivers, and the spirits generally \' These beings 
 of inferior rank appear to constitute the court, or retinue, of 
 the celestial Kuler; and elsewhere he is attended by ^five 
 heavenly chiefs, members also of his council, who are set over 
 the presidents of heaven, of the earth, and of the sea. These, in 
 turn, range in the world of shin (or spirits of the air), of kwei 
 (souls of the deceased), and ke (spirits of, or from below, the 
 earth) ^.' It is again expressly stated in the Shoo-hing, and 
 perhaps with reference also to the nature of Shang-te: * Heaven 
 is supremely intelligent : the perfect man imitates him (or it) : 
 the ministers obey him (or it) with respect : the people follow 
 the orders of the government ^' And, finally, it is enjoijied^ by 
 fresh authorities that, on these sacred grounds, the 'people 
 shall not hesitate to contribute with all their power to the wor- 
 ship of the sovereign Lord of Heaven, Shang-te, to that of 
 celebrated mountains, great rivers, and of the shin of the four 
 quarters.' 
 
 On the other hand, a second class of writers have contended, 
 that in the very oldest products of the Chinese mind no proper 
 personality has ever been ascribed to this supreme and all- 
 embi-acing Power. Heaven is called the Father of the Uni- 
 verse, but only in tbe same way as Earth is called the Mother^. 
 
 ^ Le Chou-king, ed. De Guignes, there cited (n. 3) says that *Hea- 
 
 pp. 13, 14. The editor is unable ven is simple, intelligent, just, 
 
 to determine accurately what is spiritual and all-seeing.^ And 
 
 meant by the six Tsor/Y? (= 'worthy another adds: "To be able to 
 
 of respect'). They seem to be dif- chastise the bad, to recompense 
 
 ferent kinds of spirits. As for the the good, to be truth itself, to be 
 
 sacrifice Looey it is explained by a spirit incomprehensible, immu- 
 
 Choo-he (in Neumann, as above, p. table, permanent, just, devoid of 
 
 64) to mean the sacrifice of the in- passion, — all this is contained in 
 
 exorable death, 'because Heaven the two Chinese characters [Tsong- 
 
 and Earth feel no pity.' ming), which in this passage signify 
 
 '^ Malan, as before, p. 166. On 'supremely intelligent.'" 
 the five chiefs here alluded to, as ^ Le-ke, ch. vi. (qvioted by Mr. 
 
 relieving Shang-te in his adminis- Malan, p. 185). Mention is also 
 
 tration of the world, see the Notice made of sacrifices to ancestors and 
 
 de L'y-kiiig, appended to the Chou- to the tutelary gods of the empire 
 
 king, as before, p. 432. May they (p. 28, ed. Gallery), 
 not correspond to the five planets ^ Le Chou-king, -p. 1^1. * Heaven, 
 
 of ancient China? See above, p. therefore, has no higher meaning 
 
 ^76, n. I. ihan Nature.' Kegel, Fhil. of Hist. 
 
 ^ Le Chou-king, pp. 124, 125. p. 138. 
 Que of the native commentators 
 
CHAP. I.] Eeligions of China. 297 
 
 Both of them are said to live, to generate, to quicken : yet 
 neither to have life inherent in itself. They both are made the 
 objects of solemn prayers and sacrifices. Both may also be 
 described as * spiritual'; yet only in so far as spirits^ of which 
 they are in some sort the aggregate expression are diffused 
 in every form of animated nature. * Heaven' is in particular 
 (these writers argue) a personification of the ever-present Law, 
 and Order, and Intelligence, which seem to breathe amid the 
 wonderful activities of physical creation, in the measured circuit 
 of the seasons, in the alternation of light and darkness, in the 
 ebb and flow of tides, in the harmonious and majestic revolu- 
 tions of the planetary bodies. * Heaven,' in other words, so far 
 from being personal, or spiritual, or self-conscious, is a blind 
 necessity inherent in all forms of life, a Law and not a Legis- 
 lator, a Power without volition, and a Guide without intelli- 
 gence^. Nay, many of these writers have gone so far as to 
 contend that Shang-te himself, of whom the highest and most 
 god-like qualities are predicable, is really no more than a great 
 *Anima mundi^,' energising everywhere in all the processes 
 of nature, and binding all the parts together in one mighty 
 organism, exactly as the soul of man pervades and animates the 
 body : and in accordance with this notion they remind us how 
 the Le-ke"^ had decided, that 'if we speak of all the shin (or 
 spirits) collectively, we call them Shang-teJ 
 
 After threading my way as far as possible among this 
 tangled, and in many points conflicting, evidence, I am led to 
 the conclusion that in China as elsewhere had lingered from 
 primeval ages the conception of one living, bounteous, and 
 paternal providence, whose earthly shadow^ was believed to 
 sit exalted far above his fellows on the throne of the Middle 
 
 ^ *Wenn man sagt: Himmel male principles in nature, or, in 
 
 nnd Erde haben keinen Geist, so other words, the Godhead of an- 
 
 heisst diess so viel: Himmel und cient China. The action of these 
 
 Erde hahen nur in so weit Geist, results from forces inherent in 
 
 als daraus die vier Jahreszeiten und their very being, 
 
 alls Dinge hervorgehen.' Tschu-hi ^ See the passages collected by 
 
 (Choo-he), translated by Neumann, Mr. McClatchie, as before, pp. 390 
 
 as before, p. 61, The whole of the sq. 
 
 dialogue on 'Heaven and Earth' * Ibid. p. 401. 
 
 is well worth perusal. ^ Le Chou-king, p. 151 : *Le Ciel 
 
 2 Thus in the Hi-tse ascribed to a 6tabli un Boi pour conserver les 
 
 Confucius (iv. 4, appended to Yih- peuples et pour les instruire. Ce 
 
 kingj ed. Mohl) the author avows Boi est le Ministre du Souverain 
 
 that while the sages act freely, it is Seigneur (Chang-ti), pour gouver- 
 
 different with the primary elements ner paisiblement et avec douceur 
 
 of the universe, the male and fe- I'Empire.' 
 
2.98 Christ and other Masters, [part hi. 
 
 Kingdom ; but that ultimately this conception was broken and 
 obscured, until the unity of God no longer formed the basis of 
 the Chinese creed. Philosophy then came forward as in other 
 countries, and attempted to recover the idea of unity. * Heaven' 
 was made by the more thoughtful of philosophers a verbal 
 representative of all the energies in nature: all were said to 
 flow originally from it, as from the common source of life, and 
 common principle of order : all were said to have been recapitu- 
 lated and embraced in it as in the animating soul and ruling 
 spirit of the universe : while, in the worship of the many, 
 * Heaven' was ordinarily confounded with the firmament itself, 
 the blue ethereal canopy above our heads, the shining and the 
 burning heavens \ 
 
 But whatever may be thought of the preceding summary, 
 no one will deny that the absence of distinct allusion in the 
 wi'itings of Confucius to a God at all resembling the God of 
 Christianity is very strange and startling. The few scanty 
 notices which they afford are barely recognitions of some power- 
 ful and indefinite Heaven {Teen\ — a cold abstraction of the 
 logical faculty, whom the philosopher does not dream of clothing 
 with moral and spiritual attributes, or of propounding as an 
 object of man's love and adoration. He seems, in fact, to have 
 been wavering more than once respecting the existence of this 
 great abstraction; for when questioned on the subject by his 
 followers, he either evaded the inquiry or else reprimanded 
 them for prying into matters unconnected with their duties to 
 society and lying far beyond their depths To him a personal 
 Deity, the Maker, the Redeemer, and the Sanctifier, was 
 theoretically superfluous. '^ You find yourself." he argued, " in 
 the midst of a stupendous, yet most orderly piece of mechanism. 
 That mechanism, so far as we can tell, is self-originating, self- 
 sustaining. Change there is, but no creation : all things from 
 eternity existed and were subject to a flux and reflux, in obedi- 
 
 1 *"Whom do yon worship?" s A;?/ up there?" ** Of course," said 
 
 I asked. "I worship Heaven just he, "that is Shang-te, the same as 
 
 as you foreigners do," he replied, your JesxisT^ I have never yet 
 
 "Who is the Heaven you wor- asked the above questions without 
 
 ship ? " "Why, Shang-te, of course," receiving precise^?/ the same answers; 
 
 said he. "Can you see Shang-te for all classes of Confucianists in 
 
 ornot?" I inquired. "Why," re- China consider Shang-te to be the 
 
 plied he, looking at me with sur- animated material heaven.' M° 
 
 prise at my ignorance, and leading Clatchie, as before, p. 397. 
 
 me to the door while he pointed up ^ Qf^ Journal Asiatiqice (1834), 
 
 to the sky, "there he is!" "What!" xiv. 57. 
 said I, **do you mean that blue 
 
CHAP. I.] Beligions of China, 299 
 
 ence to initial laws impressed upon them, liow and why we 
 know not, by some stern necessity. Be warned and guided by 
 this principle : devote yourself no longer to the fruitless study 
 of theology : it brings, and can bring, with it no practical advan- 
 tage. Seek not to explore the doctrine of final causes : rather, 
 if you speculate at all, confine your thoughts to the discussion 
 of phenomena and the laws of phenomena. Such alone are 
 useful and legitimate subjects of inquiry. It is possible indeed 
 that laws may be connected somehow with the demons of the 
 air, or else with other forms of spiritual agency : we cannot 
 absolutely say that they are not. You may continue, therefore, 
 on this ground, to follow the established ritual of your ancestors. 
 * Sacrifice as if your sacrifice were a reality : worship Shin as if 
 Bhin were really present \' But meanwhile your chief concern 
 is with the visible and palpable universe, and with the homely 
 tasks of life. You constitute one little member in some mighty 
 organism ; you stand as part of some great moral order : strive 
 to act on all occasions as such a being should act. Far from 
 pausing to bemoan your weakness or unworthiness, remember 
 that *he who offends against Heaven has no one to whom he 
 can pray^.' The past is gone and is irrevocable. Be more 
 vigilant in time to come. Endeavour so to rule yourself, ac- 
 cording to the sacred maxims, that you may be fitted first tc 
 iTile a family, and lastly may attain the highest point of your 
 ambition, — an office under government. To practical men the 
 theatre of this present life gives ample scope for enterprise : it 
 teems with stern realities and all-engrossing cares : perhaps^, too, 
 it may prove your last, your sole possession. Be thoughtful, 
 therefore, be industrious : make the most of what you have : be 
 modest, sober, grave, decorous ; cultivate the qualities which 
 mark the men of 'the due medium^;' more particularly aim at 
 that which forms the crowning excellence of all, be scrupulous 
 in your devotion to the emperor, the Son and representative of 
 Heaven. For is not he in very truth the father of his people % 
 
 ^ See above, p. 292, n. i; and kindred to serve, and will only 
 
 Malan, Wlio is God in China? p. 14. assist virtue.' 
 
 Abel-E^musat, Chung-Yung^ c. xvi. ^ gee Wuttke's investigation of 
 
 § 3, compares the language of Con- this article in the Confucian creed, 
 
 fucius on these subjects with the 11. 40 sq. 
 
 corresponding language of Spinosa, * This is the meaning of Chung- 
 
 of whom he thinks the Chinese a Yung, the title of the Confucian 
 
 worthy precursor. treatise on the duties and trans- 
 
 2 Medhurst, p. 186. In another cendant dignity of the 'holy man,' 
 
 passage there cited, Confucius de- who identifies himself completely 
 
 clares; * Imperial Heaven has no with the fixed order of Heaven. 
 
300 Christ and other Masters, " [part hi. 
 
 and as filial piety has ever been tlie source of joy and blessing 
 to the single household, and as reverence for the memory of 
 departed kinsmen is the glory, hope, and safeguard of survivors, 
 so to venerate the emperor of the Middle Kingdom is to aid in 
 regulating the whole course of nature ; every comfort which you 
 prize or long for is involved in it, — domestic peace and social 
 order and the safety of the commonwealth. And if," Confucius 
 seems to have concluded, "if you wish to place your institutions 
 on the very surest basis, educate the young, diflfuse intelligence 
 in every quarter; most of all insist upon the study of that 
 science which surpasses every other, as enabling you to turn all 
 other kinds of knowledge to a practical account, — I mean, the 
 science of political economy \" 
 
 Yast, however, as the influence of Confucius was in moulding 
 the institutions of his country and imparting that distinctive air 
 of regular animation which pervades the social life of China at 
 the present day, he could not draw men off entirely from the 
 deeper questions touching their connexion with supernatural 
 powers and their relation to the world invisible. The human 
 heart must muse and speculate on these momentous questions; 
 for the plodding and prosaic China-man himself was not entirely 
 dead to their importance. What then was the drift of 'ortho- 
 dox' philosophy in reference to the subjects which Confucius 
 had comparatively disregarded*? The answer is furnished in the 
 numerous works of Choo-he^, whom we saw abundant reason for 
 esteeming the approved expositor of Chinese metaphysics and 
 theology. According to the views propounded by him, and in 
 part at least transmitted from preceding ages, there is under- 
 lying all phenomena, however mixed and manifold they seem, a 
 fundamental unity, of which the common name is Tae-keih, the 
 Absolute, or literally the * Great Extreme.' Beyond it, as the 
 highest 'pinnacle of heaven,' the one ultimate power, the entity 
 without an opposite, no human thought whatever is capable of 
 soaring. Itself incomprehensible, it 'girdles' the whole frame of 
 
 ^ * It is rather extraordinary that ^ y^j knowledge of his writings 
 
 political economy constitutes the is derived chiefly from Prof. Neu- 
 
 lirst science which all Chinese boys mann's translations, above cited, 
 
 are taught.' Gutzlaff, i. 198. It I have also profited by the recent 
 
 xms. the wish of Confucius himself work of Mr. T. T. Meadows, who 
 
 that his disciples should all become devotes a chapter (ch. xviii.) to the 
 
 state officials, and therefore, as in subject of Chinese philosophy; and 
 
 the Lun-Yu, *he confined his in- also by the paper of Mr. M^Clat- 
 
 structions to political economy, to chie, as before cited, on 'Chinese 
 
 which he reduces all the duties of Theology.' 
 life.' Ibid. p. 196. 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 301 
 
 nature, animate and inanimate. From it alone as from tlie 
 fountain-head of being issued every thing that is\ * Creation' 
 is the periodic flowing forth of it. *The Absolute is like a stem 
 shooting upwards : it is parted into twigs, it puts out leaves and 
 blossoms: forth it springs incessantly, until its fruit is fully 
 ripe : yet even then the power of reproduction never ceases to 
 be latent in ifc. The vital juice is there; and so the Absolute 
 still works and works indefinitely. Nothing hinders or can 
 hinder its activity, until the fruits have all been duly ripened, 
 and activity gives place to rest^.* 
 
 It is, meanwhile, acknowledged by the great philosophers 
 of China that this thought of one efiicient Cause, or rather of 
 one causative power and principle, was quite unable to retain 
 its true ascendancy in opposition to the seeming contradictions 
 of the outer and the inner world. The vision of the soul, the 
 eye of faith, was gradually bedimmed, and hence those higher 
 intuitions which had prompted Hebrew patriarchs to hold 
 communion with the Self-existent, who converts all agencies 
 whatever into means for carrying on His moral government, 
 were lacking in the ordinary China-man. The God whom he 
 adored was rather an ideal being than the living God of nature. 
 *A11 things in the world,' says Choo-he^, ^seem as to their 
 primary tendencies to issue from the One : the One, however, is 
 not really in a condition to bring them forth;' the meaning of 
 
 1 Tschu-hi (Choo-he), as above, 
 pp. 46, 47. In reply to the ques- 
 tion *What is the Absolute?' it is 
 there answered (p. 46) : 'Das Ab- 
 solute ist die hochste, erhabenste, 
 ausserste, grosste Fundamental- 
 Normalurkraft ; alle Menschen sind 
 durch das Absolute und alle Dinge 
 sind durch das Absolute.' In an- 
 other passage (p. 72) it is said that 
 Tae-heih itself springs out of some- 
 thing higher, out of Wu-keih *the 
 lUimitable.' 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 50. The following 
 passage (also quoted from Choo-he, 
 by Mr. McClatchie, p. 381) forms a 
 good illustration of the Chinese 
 theory respecting a succession of 
 similar worlds: "Being asked, 
 'From the opening and spreading 
 out (of the world from chaos) to 
 the present time, is not 10,000 
 years; how was it before that 
 time?' He (the philosopher) re- 
 
 plied, 'Before that there was an- 
 other (world) similar to the pre- 
 sent one.' Being asked, whether 
 Heaven and Earth are capable of 
 being annihilated, he replied *No, 
 but it is my opinion that tvhen men 
 completely depart from correct prin- 
 ciples, then the whole will become 
 chaos, and men and things will 
 cease to exist, and then there will 
 be a neiu commencement.^'^ 
 
 3 Ibid. p. 71. The question had 
 been asked, '1st die Einheit Grund 
 {causa efficiens) des Lebens?' To 
 which it was replied, quoting Hong- 
 Khiu: *Das Eins bleibt...immerdar 
 das Fundament, auf dieselbe Weise, 
 wie der Zehner in 100, 1000, und 
 10,000; das Zwei kann durchaus 
 nicht als dasjenige betrachtet wer- 
 den, wodurch ein Ding wird ; es ist 
 bloss der Gnmd des Hervortre- 
 tens.* Choo-he then adds further 
 explanations of his own. 
 
802 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 which is probably that while our reason points us back to the 
 hypothesis of unity, our senses are too apt to lead us in a dif- 
 ferent direction: multiplicity is everywhere apparent and so 
 constitutes for us the law of the phenomenal universe. In 
 other words, the Chinese speculator found himself impelled to 
 the conclusion that although the proper basis of all life is one, 
 and though such unity may still by some mysterious process 
 form the ultimate principle of rest and motion, yet duality is 
 the active visible cause of all advancement, the foundation of 
 the present order of the worlds It thus resulted that in spite 
 of the idea of abstract unity which lingered as an echo of some 
 old tradition in the background of their metaphysical system, 
 the Chinese philosophers were all addicted to the theory of two 
 principles. Their ordinary speech was dualistic. They rested 
 on two entities or essences, the one a power or cause, the other 
 a more passive something where that power or cause could 
 operate^. The former may be styled the ultimate immaterial 
 element of the universe {Le) ; the second (^e). consisting as it 
 does of matter most ethereal in its texture, may be styled the 
 ultimate material element of the universe. Le is, therefore, 
 only another name for l^ae-keih; it is the Absolute regarded in 
 association with material essences, and manifesting itself in 
 virtue of such association as the cause of organisation and of 
 order. Both these elements as to their essence are held to be 
 eternal; and so inseparably united that one is necessary to the 
 true subsistence of the other. ^ If there were no Ke, then Le 
 would not have anything to rest upon^.' The predicates of 
 first and second are inapplicable to all such cases: but if we 
 must speak of order and priority, the immaterial element is 
 worthy of the foremost place ^: particularly since this element 
 is the basis of all things viewed abstractedly, as destitute of 
 form and figure; while Ke, the primary matter, acts as the sub- 
 sti-atum on which things endued with form and other qualities 
 all take their stand, or out of which they have been gradually 
 evolved. 
 
 1 *Tschi-hiang sagt: Das Eins ^ Meadows, p. 68. 
 
 ist der Lebensgrund, so wie es die ^ See this and other extracts in 
 
 Ursache ist der Bewegung und der McQlatchie, p. 384. The thought 
 
 Euhe ; seine Grenze ist deren of necessary interdependence be- 
 
 Grenze; das Zwei ist die Ursache tween Le and Ke had sometimes 
 
 des Werdens, so wie der vollendeten led men to speak of the primary 
 
 Bewegung und der darauf folgenden matter as identical with the Abso- 
 
 Ruhe, eben so der vollendeten Ruhe lute : ibid. p. 383. 
 
 und der darauf folgenden Bewe- * Choo-he, as before, pp. 32, 33. 
 gung.' Ibid. p. 72. 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 803 
 
 But Ke, again, if duly analysed, is found to be not singular 
 but dual, not simple but compounded. The resolution of this 
 primary matter into its constituent elements^ gives birth to 
 two opposite essences, to Yang and Yin, which therefore may 
 be treated as the phases under which the Ultimate Principle^ of 
 the universe displays itself in the phenomenal world. As early 
 as the kwa, or diagrams of Fuh-he, the symbolic mode of repre- 
 senting them was a broken and black line for Yin, a white and 
 continuous line for Yang. The popular account of this duality, 
 in which it was intended to express the parting asunder of the 
 one chaotic Ke and the production of Heaven and Earth, is all 
 the more remarkable, because it reappears not only in the story- 
 books of other Chinese sects ^, but also, we shall see hereafter, 
 in the ancient my thus of New Zealand. Yang and Yin, thus 
 generated by the 'Great Extreme' of the Chinese theology 
 when separating himself from unformed matter, are called the 
 two Ke, and may be represented either by the names of 
 positive and negative essences, or else in a more concrete form, 
 as the paternal and maternal principles of nature. Erom the 
 constant evolution and interaction of these opposite essences'* 
 resulted every species of formal matter and the mixed phe- 
 nomena of the world. According to the different proportions 
 in which Yang and Yin are blended is the character of every 
 grade of creaturely existence. Every thing is Yang and Yin 
 together. Eor the highest actual manifestation in which Yang 
 preponderates we look to Heaven itself, which is accordingly to 
 be esteemed the aptest image cognisable by the senses of the 
 ultimate and all-embracing Principle. Earth is, on the con- 
 trary, the highest form of Yin. The same duality where one 
 or other of the factors operated, either for the purpose of trans- 
 forming or uniting, issued in the first production of the innate 
 
 essences, which constitute the Five Elements of water, fire, 
 \ 
 
 ^ 'In. und Yang gehen aus der and human beings were born:' in 
 
 XJrmaterie hervor ; sie sind bestan- Medhurst, p. 198. Mr. McClatchie 
 
 dig in gegenseitigem Kampfe, und also notices (Journal of As. Soc. 
 
 sie miissen immer im Kampfe xvi. 386) the affinity between this 
 
 seyn ; daraus entsteht das Gute und representation and that of the 
 
 das Bose, daraus der Ursprung des Chaldean Bel, who was said to 
 
 Verschiedenen:' iftifZ. p. 78.- form light and darkness, &c. by 
 
 2 'Der Ausdruck: das Absolute cutting himself in tiuo. 
 (Tai-Ky), ist gleichbedeutend mit ^ 'It is here,' as Mr. Meadows 
 dem Worte Urkraft (Ly) : ' ibid. p. well remarks, ' that Chinese philo- 
 42. Bophy slips over the much dis- 
 
 3 E.g. of the followers of Tao- cussed, hitherto unsolved, and ap- 
 ism, who say that 'after chaos was parently unsolvable question of the 
 settled, heaven and earth divided, existence of matter :' p. 344. 
 
304« Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 wood, metal, and earths 'A transcendental union and coagu- 
 lation now takes place of the Ultimate Principle, the Two 
 Essences and the Five Elements. The Positive Essence be- 
 comes the masculine power, the Negative Essence the feminine 
 power — conceived in which character the former constitutes the 
 Heavenly Mode or Principle, the latter the Earthly Mode or 
 Principle : by a mutual influencing, the two produce all things 
 in the visible, palpable world; and the double work of evolu- 
 tion and dissolution goes on without end^:' — Yang evincing its 
 peculiar force in every kind of progress, Yin in every kind of 
 retrogression: Yang determining commencement, Yi7i comple- 
 tion : Yang predominant in spring and summer, and the author 
 of all movement and activity, Yin more visible in the autumn 
 and the winter, passive, drooping, and inert. 
 
 These dualistic speculations on the constitution of the uni- 
 yerse in general are consistently adopted in the framing of the 
 /tihinese theory of man. In popular phrase it was the marriage 
 Y/ of Heaven and Earth, the male and female principles in nature, 
 that give rise to the production of the human species : or in 
 other words, since Yang and Yin must always coexist as the 
 material ground on which the Ultimate Principle takes effect, 
 they enter into the composition of rational as well as of irra- 
 tional beings. Man, however, in addition to his physical 
 framework, is endowed with Eive qualities or Virtues, corre- 
 sponding to the Five Elements of the Chinese cosmogony. These 
 constitute his mental and moral nature^. They unite him to 
 the Absolute, the Le, from which proceeded all ingredients 
 both of rationality and order, and with which the spirit of man 
 
 1 Choo-he, as before, p. 43, pp. logues will perceive that as the 
 82 sq. Five Tih embrace the ivhole of 
 
 2 Meadows, p. 345. what we consider the better side of 
 
 3 They are ^Jin, E, Le, Che, and man's nature, it is not certain that 
 Sin, which are called the Five Tih, these five English words are ex- 
 or Five Virtues: tih being a word haustive.' Ibid. p. 346. 
 
 that, like our English virtue, sig- In the Li-ki, ed. Gallery, p. 45, 
 
 nifies first, qualities or characteris- the question is stated differently: 
 
 tics generally, whether of man or 'L'homme 6mane (pour le moral) 
 
 of things; and then, collectively, de la vertu du Ciel et de la Terre; 
 
 the best qualities of man, or Virtue (pour le physique, il emane) de la 
 
 as opposed to Vice. In accordance combinaison des (deux principes) 
 
 with the dictionaries, Jm is usually In et Jan; (pour la partie spiri- 
 
 rendered by Benevolence (or Cha- tuelle, il dmane) de la reunion des 
 
 rity in its widest sense); Ej by esprits et des dieux; et (pour la 
 
 Bighteousness [Uprightness] ; Le, forme qui lui est propre, il ^mane) 
 
 by Propriety; Che, by Wisdom; de I'essence la plus subtile des cinq 
 
 and Sin, by Sincerity. But sino- elements.* 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 805 
 
 is strictly one and consubstantial. As the Chinese speculator 
 had evaded the great problem touching the origin of primary 
 matter, so he offers no intelligible explanation of the rise and 
 growth of evil. He affirms indeed that every man is at his birth j 
 
 in the possession of a nature radically good. Itself an efflux yO^"^ 
 from the source of Order, it gives proof of this celestial origin ^'^^ 
 by moving in obedience to the general laws on which all other 
 things are founded. ^ Human nature,' says a great Confucian 
 authority^, *is good, just as water has a tendency to flow down- 
 wards; men are universally inclined to virtue, just as water 
 invariably jQows downwards.' And the only qualification which 
 the author offered of this startling language is appended in the 
 following extract : ' Water, by beating, may be made to splash 
 over your head, and by forcing may be made to pass over a 
 mountain \ but who would ever say that this is the natural 
 tendency of water? It is because violence is applied to it. 
 Thus men can be made vicious : but it is by no means their 
 nature.' Yice, in other words, is in the system of the China- 
 man a rare and casual deviation from the path of rectitude, 
 produced by strong solicitations of the outer sensible world, to 
 which the culprit, for some cause or other, finds himself attracted. 
 And in manifest accordance with this pantheistic principle, evil 
 is there said to punish itself, or rather it is punished by the 
 necessary operation of the order which it dares to violate. 
 With sin, as it involves a painful consciousness of guilt, or evil 
 in the biblical sense of the expression, we very seldom meet ; 
 for in the Chinese system, evil- workers are not viewed as persons 
 gifted with moral freedom, and sin is never represented as in- 
 gratitude, or even as rebellion against a personal and holy God. 
 We cannot say of evil that it ought not to be j it is a something 
 that must be. It enters, and must enter, into a concatenation 
 of causes and effects originating from eternity : it is the shadow 
 which gives harmony and contrast to the picture of the uni- 
 verse : it is the Yin of the moral world, as good is the Yang^. 
 The root of both is in the primary material essence. They are 
 both the necessary modes in which the Absolute comes forward 
 
 ^ Mencius, quoted in Medhurst, denn aus der aufrecht stehenden 
 
 p. 196. absoluten Urkraft erfolgen die zwei 
 
 2 Choo-he says expressly, as be- Entgegengesetzten, gegenseitig in 
 
 fore, p. 76: *Das bewegende Prin- nothwendiger Beziehung Steheu- 
 
 cip [Yang'] ist das Gute und das den, und daraus erfolgt nun Jeg- 
 
 ndiende Princip \Yin] ist das Bose, liches, das einem Jeden Eigen- 
 
 wie diess oft genug die Vollkom- thumliche.* 
 menen und Weisen gesagt haben; 
 
 H. 20 
 
306 Chnst and other Masters. [part iii. 
 
 into being, and conducts his operations in the region of pheno- 
 mena. And as moral guilt is thus unknown to the Confucianist, 
 so neither does he manifest a wish or craving after spiritual 
 regeneration. He has no 'word of prophecy that shineth in a 
 dark place until the day break and the day-star arise in the 
 heart.' He offers up no sacrifice for sin, in order to restore 
 relations between man and God, which are subverted by ini- 
 quity. He lives exclusively within the sphere of nature : his 
 home is there, and he is wholly satisfied with his condition and his 
 prospect. He believes in no futurity, excepting, it may be, some 
 reproduction of the present forms of life and matter. What he 
 worships are the tutelary gods of China, or creation contemplated 
 in its twofold character of Earth and Heaven, or else, succumb- 
 ing more completely under the dominion of the seen and tan- 
 gible, his worship is degraded into hero-worship ; he deifies 
 humanity itself \ 
 
 How many are the points in which Confucian tenets are 
 opposed to Christianity it were superfluous to enumerate. The 
 opposition in respect of doctrines is entire and fundamental. 
 It is the opposition of nature and of grace, of unregenerate and 
 regenerate principles, of sight and faith, of earthy and of heavenly. 
 And how vast will therefore be the revolution in the moral 
 nature of the China-man if he shall ever learn to practise the 
 unworldly lessons of the Gospel, or to echo those heroic senti- 
 ments which more than once have been propounded in his hear- 
 ing by the ardent and devoted missionary ! ^I have had no 
 home,' exclaimed Capillas to tlie implacable mandarins, when 
 they consigned him to the executioner in 1647, *I have had no 
 home but the world, no bed but the ground, no food but what 
 Providence has sent me day by day, and no other object but to 
 do and sufifer for the glory of Jesus Christ, and for the eternal 
 happiness of those who believe in His Na.me".' 
 
 1 According to Benan {Etudes gulf between Theism and Atheism. 
 d'Histoire Pieligieuse, p. 200, Paris, The title of the tract is Culte 
 1857) ^^^ Chinese were of all peo- Systematique de VHuvianite^ Paris, 
 pie the least supernaturalist, which 1 850. All the benefactors of man- 
 may (he thinks) explain ' the secret kind are to be the objects of this 
 of their mediocrity.' It is not un- cultus: Moses, Solomon, St. John, 
 worthy of notice that M. Comte, of St. Paul, Buddha, Confucius, Mu- 
 whom we are continually reminded hammad; but, strange to say, the 
 in our study of Confucianism, has name of our blessed Lord does not 
 recently anixounced a new scheme appear in the catalogue ! 
 of man- worship, which he ventures ^ See the narrative in Mr. Kes- 
 to predict will supersede Christian- son's work entitled The Cross and 
 ity, and form a kind of bridge to the Dragon, p. 112. 
 persons who are passing across the 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 307 
 
 § 2. Tao-ism, or School of the Fixed Way. 
 
 Although the tenets of the governing class appear to have ac- 
 corded with the calculating and materialistic genius of the Chinese 
 nation, individuals were never wanting in whose spirit the 
 religious sentiment was ineradicably fixed. If the adherents of 
 the state-religion frequently remind us of the sceptical and self- 
 complacent Sadducee, we find existing side by side with them 
 another Chinese sect whose mystic creed and fervid tempera- 
 ment especially resemble those of the Essene. The Chinese spi- 
 ritualists had learned to recognise a head and champion many 
 years before the origin of the Confucian movement : for Lao-tse, 
 the founder of Tao-ism, seeiits to have been born as early as 
 604 B.C., and therefore was abeady hastening to the close of his 
 career when the reformer of the state-religion entered on his 
 first appointment as inspector of the corn-marts of his native 
 province. Confucius shewed himself at every turn a politician 
 and a sociologist, proceeding, it is true, on strictly moral grounds, 
 yet hoping to recover and cement the unity of China most of 
 all by the assiduous cultivation of political economy and by 
 proficiency in general state-craft. Lao-tse, however, manifested 
 an entirely different bias. He had always been a scholar and 
 recluse, alive to the reality of the world invisible and to the 
 presence of superior powers ; of ardent and imaginative temper, 
 subtle, penetrating, spiritual, unambitious; the unwavering 
 preacher of inaction and retirement \ and as such exposed to the 
 reproach of inculcating apathy and moroseness, and of cherish- 
 ing among his followers a dislike of human kind, and a contempt 
 for the well-ordering of Chinese society. In other words, the 
 genius of Confucianism was cold and worldly, that of the Tao- 
 ists was more earnest, soaring, and contemplative : the first 
 inclined to scepticism, the second to superstition : in the judg- 
 
 ^ The Chinese themselves were cism: 'Ceux qui 6tudient la doc- 
 
 not slow in perceiving the real bent trine de Lao-tseu la mettent aii- 
 
 of his philosophy. Thus Choo-he, dessus de celle des lettrds; de leur 
 
 as before, p. 27, declares: 'Die cote, les lettres preferent Confucius 
 
 Satzungen des Lao-tse zielen durcli- a Lao-tseu. Les principes des deux 
 
 aus auf das Leere; auf die Kuhe ecoles ^tant diff^rents, il est im- 
 
 und Untbatigkeit. Die Aufgabe possible qu'elles puissent s'accor- 
 
 des Lebens besteht (nach ihm) in der entre elles. Suivant Lao-tseu, 
 
 einer tiefen Selbstbeschauung.' si le roi pratique le nonagir^ le 
 
 And in the 'Notice Historique,' peuple se convertit ; s'il reste dans 
 
 supplied by M. Stanislas Julien'a une quietude absolue, le peuple se 
 
 edition of the Tao-te-king, p. xxi., rectifie de lui-meme.' 
 we have the following native criti- 
 
 20—2 
 
808 
 
 Christ and other Masters. 
 
 [part III. 
 
 ment of the former, man is bound to make the most of the 
 present life, while in the latter the chief aim was to subdue all 
 earthly a^ppetites, and deepen a desire for the unfading and 
 immortal. 
 
 As we saw already in the case of Sakya-muni, the oldest nar- 
 ratives^ respecting Lao-tse agree in representing him as a man 
 and a philosopher : exalted, it is true, but all the while a being 
 subject to the ordinary conditions of humanity, and therefore 
 such as men might hope to imitate. His ignorant disciples 
 have, however, added large embellishments to the original story. 
 Anxious to place their master high above the rank of mortals, 
 and so gain themselves the power of competing with a host of 
 foreign emissaries, who deitied the founder of the Buddhist 
 system, the Tao-ists had begun as early as the fourth century of 
 the Christian era to assert for Lao-tse a supernatural origin. 
 They celebrated the stupendous marvels of his birth ^ : they 
 worshipped him as later Brahmans worshipped the mysterious 
 
 1 This subject has, for the first 
 time, been critically discussed by 
 M. JuHen, as above. Even the 
 Legende Fahuleuse de Lao-tseu de- 
 nies (p. XXV.) that he was 'a divine 
 and extraordinary being. ' It adds, 
 however: 'Des le moment de sa 
 naissance, il re^ut une penetration 
 divine et fut dou^ d'une intuition 
 profonde. La vie dont le ciel I'ani- 
 ma ne ressemblait point a celle 
 des hommes ordinaires; il dtait 
 destine a devenir le maitre et le 
 propagateur du Tao : c'est pourquoi 
 il put etre protege par les esprits 
 du ciel et commander a la multi- 
 tude des immortels.' (p. xxvii.) 
 
 2 'Quelques auteurs disent que 
 LaO'tseu est n^ avant le ciel et la 
 terre; suivant d'autres, il posse- 
 dait une ame pure ^manee du ciel. 
 II appartient a la classe des esprits 
 et des dieux. Certains dcrivains 
 racontent que sa mere ne le mit au 
 monde qu'aprfes I'avoir porte dans 
 son sein pendant soixante et douze 
 ans [others say, 8i years]. II sor- 
 tit par le cote gauche de sa mere. 
 En naissant il avait la tete blanche 
 (les cheveux blancs) : c'est pourquoi 
 on I'appela Lao-tseu (I'enfant-vieil- 
 lard). Quelques autres disent que 
 
 sa mere I'avait congu sans le se- 
 cours d'un e^oux.\... Legende Fa- 
 huleuse, as above, p. xxiii. This 
 legend is extracted by M. Julien 
 from a Chinese * History of the 
 gods and the immortals,' by Ko- 
 hong, who wrote about a.d. 350. It 
 is most remarkable that the same 
 story is in substance told of S^kya- 
 muni by his later followers. St.. 
 Jerome, and after him Eatramnus, 
 mention the story as current in 
 their day (cf. Lassen, Ind. Altert. 
 III. 370, 406, 411), and as early as 
 the Lalita Vistara (assigned by M. 
 Foucaux and Prof. Wilson to about 
 150 B.C.), Sakya-muni is said to 
 have been miraculously born from 
 the side of his mother, Mdji, who 
 died seven days after his birth ; see 
 Journal of the As. Soc. (1856), xvi. 
 243. The feeling which gave rise 
 to this peculiar theory of incarna- 
 tions, — a wish to represent the 
 incarnate one as free from all here- 
 ditary taint of matter and of evil, — 
 was shared by Valentinian heretics, 
 and in the i6th century by our 
 Joan of Kent: see Hardwick'sHis^ 
 of the ReformatioUj 3rd ed. p. 257, 
 and n. 2. 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of Cliina. 309 
 
 Krishna, on the ground that he was one of many avatdras, the 
 ^exalted, precious, and most venerable Prince,* identical Avith 
 him, who under different aspects is the incomprehensible Non- 
 being.' * Lao-tse inhabited,' according to a popular legend, Hhe 
 abode of matchless purity ; he was, in other words, the great 
 progenitor of the subtle and primordial elements (of creation) : 
 he was the basis of the earth and of the shining heaven. Before 
 the dawn of the great beginning, he had taken root in the 
 bosom of supreme repose and in the deepest void. It was he, 
 and he alone, who from the height of his imperial throne dis- 
 tributed the subtle elements of air and gave transparency to 
 ether. He extended and transformed both heaven and earth, to 
 bring about, in cycles of incalculable period, the production and 
 the death of all created forms. His person was transfigured (by 
 assuming a mortal body); he submitted to the various condi- 
 tions of this soiled and dusty world; yet meanwhile bearing 
 small resemblance to the crowd with whom he came to sojourn. 
 He appeared to men as an illustrious sage. The good and evil 
 of successive generations were all noted by him: and his doc- 
 trine had been shaped according to the times. He was the great 
 instructor of the generations : he inculcated his principles with 
 due measure. He attained unto the nine heavens : he stretched 
 himself as far as the four seas. Since the period of the three 
 kings, the emperors and potentates of all successive generations 
 have bowed down before him and embraced his teaching \' As 
 the story runs, however, in the oldest version, disengaged from 
 wild and fabulous after-growths which thickened with the lapse 
 of ages, Lao-tse is found to be an eminent Chinese sage, of whom 
 it was recorded that he 4oved obscurity,' and who by dint of 
 self-renunciation was believed to have attained the highest point 
 of moral and religious eminence (or, in a word, to have acquired 
 the Tao). His early studies lay among the royal archives of his 
 native province, which were placed under his immediate cus- 
 tody : but as the troubles of the age increased and deepened his 
 dissatisfaction with the men and things around him, he appears 
 to have at last retreated altogether to *the passage of Han-ku^,' 
 in order that he might devote the evening of his days exclusively 
 to philosophic speculations. 
 
 Owing to the mystery in which that period of his life has 
 
 ^ Translated in Pauthier's Me- prefixed to M. Julian's edition of 
 
 moire sur Vorigine et la propagation the Tao-te-king, p. xx. The dis- 
 
 cle la Doctrine du Tao, Paris, 1831, trict to which he retreated was in 
 
 pp. 20, 21. ^ his native province of Ho-nan. 
 
 ^ Notice Historique sur Lao-tseu, 
 
310 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 boen enveloped, Lao-tse is thought by many wiiters to have 
 travelled out of China into countries lying westward, and either 
 to have learned or taught in them the leading articles of his 
 creeds The chief authority in favour of this statement speci- 
 fies^ not only Hindustan and Parthia, but also districts border- 
 ing on the western or Caspian sea, and even kingdoms of 
 Ta-thsin (the Roman empire), as alike included in the regions . 
 then explored by the Chinese philosopher. It is doubtless true 
 that such external intercourse would best enable us to account 
 for some points of contact which exist between the doctrines 
 commonly ascribed to Lao-tse. and those which in the same 
 eventful era occupied the thoughtful spirits of India and of 
 Greece^. We also find in it a ])ossible explanation of some 
 Aryan and Hellenic mythes^ which reappear in various dramas 
 of this Chinese sect, but are unknown to others. We may 
 further trace with some degree of probability the origin of 
 contradictions which are said to have existed from early 
 times between historic legends of Confucianists and of Tao- 
 ists, w^th reference to the founding of the Chinese empire 
 and its ancient civilisation^. If Lao-tse had actually braved 
 the perils of a journey to the far-off borders of the Mediter- 
 ranean, and had really drawn his knowledge from a channel 
 which was also open to the other doctors of the ancient world, 
 we are prepared at once to recognise in such community of 
 origin the ground of all the family-likeness which has been de- 
 tected in the speculations of the East and West. But, on the 
 other hand, the evidence in favour of this connexion is exceed- 
 ingly precarious, and will never stand the test of rigorous criti- 
 cism. The legend where the story first appears^, so far as we 
 
 ^ Abel-R^musat, Melanges Asia- far as to determine that the Chi- 
 
 tiques, i. 92, Paris, 1825. nese philosophy is to be connected 
 
 2 See the Legende Fahuleuse^ as with the Sd.nkhya and Vedantine 
 
 before, pp. xxx. xxxi. schools [Memoire, as above, p. 49), 
 
 y Abel-K^musat {ibid. p. 95) says, and even (as he elsewhere argued) 
 
 in speaking of the * sublime reve- with the tbeorisings of the Gnostics 
 
 ries' of Lao-tseu, that they present and Neoplatonists, and last of all 
 
 * une conformite frappante et in- wdth those of Schelling. 
 contestable avec la doctrine que * Above, p. 276, n. 2, 
 
 professerent un peu plus tard les ^ See Prichar.d, iv. 486. Ac- 
 
 ecoles de Pythagore et de Platon.' cording also to Prof. Neumann (as 
 
 Pauthier in like manner concludes, there quoted) the Tao-ists frequent- 
 
 *avec*une espece de certitude,' that ly charge Confucius with rejecting 
 
 *les doctrines, les croyances des usages and ignoring facts that told 
 
 sectateurs de Lao-tseu sont des against his own system. 
 doctrines, des croyances emprun- ^ See M. Julien's 'Introduction* 
 
 Ues de Vlnde: He then goes so to the Tao-te-king, p. ix. 
 
CPiAP. I.] Religions of China. 311 
 
 have any present means of judging, is taken from a mythological 
 account of Chinese gods and heroes, not earlier than the fourth 
 century after Christ; i.e. eight hundred years, and more, after 
 the demise of Lao-tse. It also makes the great philosopher 
 allude to his intention of visiting the Koman empire^, long 
 before the deposition of the Tarquins and the planting of the 
 first republic : and what is still more noticeable as bearing on 
 the foreign derivation of Tao-ism, it is said expressly that Lao-tse 
 composed his principal work, ^ consisting of something more than 
 5000 words,' not after hi& return from western countries, but 
 upon the eve of the departure for his unknown resting-place. 
 
 That work, however, still remains (the Tao-te-king) the 
 monument of his extraordinary power and penetration: for 
 even if we hesitate to echo all the praises of an able sino- 
 logue, who finds in Lao-tse ^a genuine philosopher, a judicious 
 moralist, an eloquent divine, and a subtle metaphysician V there 
 is ample reason for assigning him a place indefinitely higher 
 than the mass of his contemporaries, and superior also to the 
 greatest of his disciples. 
 
 What, then, was the substance of his teaching on the central 
 truth of all religion, — the nature and the attributes of God 1 In 
 other words, what is the meaning of the Tao, which among 
 Tao-ists very soon supplanted both the Teen and Shang-te of the 
 previous period? It were idle to insist on the resemblance of 
 this appellation either to the deva of the Brahmans, or the ^cos 
 of other countries. The primary meaning of the word, as given 
 by Morrison and others, is * a way,' or * the fixed Way.' Its 
 secondary meaning is ^a principle; the Principle from which 
 heaven, earth, man, and all nature emanates.' Among Con- 
 fucianists the word was chiefly used in its untechnical sense, 
 but still with indirect allusion to the orderly course of human 
 conduct. ' The way (Tao),^ said Confucius himself, 4s not fre- 
 quented : I know why. Intelligent persons go beyond it, while 
 the ignorant fall short of it^.' As soon, however, as the term 
 
 ^ Perhaps one of the earhest in- the Persians he changed his mind : 
 
 stances in which China manifested Humboldt's Cosmos ^ ii. 185, 186, 
 
 her acquaintance with the Eoman Sabine's ed. 
 empire, occurred in the time of Ves- ^ Abel-E^musat, ibid. p. 93. 
 
 pasian and Domitian, when a Chi- ^ Quoted in M. JuHen's *Intro- 
 
 nese army marched victoriously as duction' to the Tao-te-king^ p. x. 
 
 far as the eastern coast of the Cas- I am indebted largely to the work 
 
 pian. Their own writers say that of this distinguished scholar for the 
 
 the leader of this expedition medi- views here advocated on the subject 
 
 tated an attack on the Ta-thsin of Tao-ism. 
 (Romans), but that on the advice of 
 
312 
 
 Christ and other Masters. 
 
 [part III. 
 
 had been adopted Ly Lao-tse and his disciples, many writers 
 have supposed that Tao at once became a synonym of 'the pri- 
 mordial Reason, the Intelligence, which having formed the 
 world, still rules it as the spirit rules the body*:' and accord- 
 ingly such writers are accustomed to describe Tao-ism as the 
 'rationalism' of China. But the recent publication of the sacred 
 book on which the whole of that religion is believed to hinge 
 goes very far to modify the old hypothesis. The Tao of Lao-tse 
 in its exalted meaning is declared to be entirely void of thought, 
 of consciousness, of judgment, of activity, of intelligence ^ It is 
 the deification of that one transcendant Way by which all beings 
 came at first into existence : it is fixed, impassible, eternal ; and 
 in proportion as mankind are more devoted to the doctrines of 
 apathy and inaction, they are said to walk directly in the Tao, 
 to approach the Tao, and eventually to gain the Tao^. * This 
 Way,' writes a native commentator^, ' whose level is high above 
 the world, has neither colour, form, nor appellation. If you 
 seek it with the eyes, you do not find it : if you listen, you do 
 not hear it. The reason is, that it is not susceptible of utterance 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. xii. *Ce mot me sem- 
 ble,' wrote Abel-E(^musat, 'ne pas 
 pouvoir etre bien traduit si ce 
 n'est par le mot X670S, dans le 
 triple sens de souverain Hre, de 
 raison et de parole. C'est evidem- 
 ment le \6yos de Platon, qui a dis- 
 pose Tunivers, la raison universelle 
 de Z^non, de Cl^anthe et des au- 
 tres stoiciens,' etc. Pauthier goes 
 stni further, and connects the doc- 
 trine of Christianity itself with 
 Tao-ism {Chine, page 114). He 
 says that the attributes given to 
 the Tao are those 'qu'ont donnas 
 a I'Etre supreme toutes les doc- 
 trines spiritualistes de 1' Orient, 
 transmises a 1' Occident par une 
 voie juLve et grecque; par les the- 
 rapeutes et les esseniens, dont Jd- 
 sus, le fils de I'homme, fut le rSve- 
 Lateur et le representant ; doctrine 
 dont les gnostiques furent aussi 
 les repr^sentants h, I'^tat philoso- 
 phique.' He then continues, in a 
 passage full of misrepresentations 
 as to the real genius of Christiani- 
 ty: 'Tons ces theosophes, les esse- 
 niens, qui ^taient en quelque sorte 
 les stoiciens de la Judee, comma 
 
 Lao-tseu et ses premiers secta- 
 teurs I'etaient de la Chine; les 
 th^rapeutes, qui menaient en se- 
 cret une vie contemplative et r6- 
 glee sur une morale austere; les 
 gnostiques, qui furent les revela- 
 teurs et les continuateurs de la 
 philosophie orientale, au dire de 
 Clement d'Alexandrie [!]; tons, ou 
 presque tous, partaient du principe 
 "qu'il faut d^gager I'ame des en- 
 traves et des influences de la ma- 
 ti^re;" principe apjoele zoroastrien 
 par les ^crivains des premiers sie- 
 cles de notre ere, parceque ce fu- 
 rent les ecrits de Zoroastre qui le 
 transmirent de I'Asie orientale et 
 centrale dans I'Asie occidentale, ou, 
 apres avoir ete interprete et appli- 
 qp.6 de mille manieres, il devint le 
 principe chretien en Europe* [!]. 
 
 ^ Tao-te-king, ed. Julien, *In- 
 trod.,' p. xiii. 
 
 3 Ibid. p. XV. 
 
 * Ibid. p. 121, where a distinc- 
 tion is clearly drawn between the 
 ordinary Tao, 'the way of justice, 
 of rites and of prudence,' and the 
 sublime Tao of Lao-tse. 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China, 313 
 
 by the liuman voice, nor of being designated by the help of 
 names.' The 'nameless' being is, however, styled by Lao-tse 
 Hhe origin of Heaven and Earth V since all things are the fruit 
 of its self-manifestation. *0 how profound the Tao is! It seems 
 to be the patriarch of all existences...! cannot tell whose son it 
 is: it seems to have preceded the master of the Heaven^' 'Be- 
 hold the nature of the Tao: it is vague, it is in visible... Inside 
 it, lies a spiritual essence. This spiritual essence is profoundly 
 true... It gives birth to all beings ^' 'Man imitates the Earth: 
 the Earth imitates the Heaven : the Heaven imitates the Tao : 
 the Tao imitates his own nature*.' Yet the Tao, in a certain 
 sense, is represented as the fitting guide and model for all 
 human beings. 'He that imitates not the Tao will die pre- 
 maturely*.' 'A prince that rules his empire by the Tao is 
 exempted from the malice of the demons^.' 'The Tao is the 
 refuge of all creatures: (being universally diffused) it is the 
 treasure of the virtuous man, the ultimate resource and resting- 
 point of the unholy^.' In a word, the Tao is the most exalted 
 and most estimable being in the universe. 
 
 I feel disposed to argue from these various passages and 
 others like them, that the centre of the system founded by 
 Lao-tse had been awarded to some energy or Power resembling 
 the ' Nature ' of modern speculators. The indefinite expression 
 Tao was adopted to denominate an abstract Cause, or the initial 
 Principle of life and order, to which worshippers were able to 
 assign the attributes of immateriality, eternity, immensity, in- 
 visibility. They also felt that human happiness was in some 
 way or other connected with assimilation to its likeness : with- 
 out, however, rising to a clear conception of its personality, 
 
 1 Ihid. p. I, p. T22. oneself in opposition to the Tao' 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 7. (p. 187). 
 
 ^ Ibid. pp. 29, 30, 165. In p. ^ Ibid. p. 89. The gloss upon 
 174 we have the supplementary this passage (pp. 246, 247) gives us 
 idea of preservation. *I1 nourrit,' some of the chief characteristics of 
 says a commentator, 'tons lesetres the perfect prince who governs by 
 comme une mere nourrit ses en- the Tao : ' Le Saint emploie le vide 
 fans.' Elsewhere it is Virtue that et la lumibre (c'est-a-dire se de- 
 nourishes what the Tao has pro- pouille de ses passions et dissipe 
 duced (p. 75). leurs t^nfebres) pour nourrir sa na- 
 ** Ibid. p. 37. ture, la modc^ration et I'economie 
 5^ Ibid. pp. 45, 83, in both of pour subvenir aux besoins de son 
 which passages, however, the non- corps, la purete et 1' attention la 
 imitation of the Tao is explained plus severe pour fortifier sa volon- 
 by the context to mean no more t^, le calme et la quietude pour 
 than 'waxing old and impotent,' gouverner son royaume.' 
 and by the commentators, 'placmg ^ Ibid. pp. 93, 251. 
 
314 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 volition, or intelligence, mucli less of tliose peculiarly moral 
 attributes, as goodness, mercy, justice, which the sacred family 
 were uniformly taught to predicate of the Supreme Being \ The 
 will-less, unintelligent Tao of ancient China was thus something 
 very different^ from the personal God of revelation, very differ- 
 ent also fvom the Logos of St. John, and from the Living 'Way* 
 of Christians. 
 
 Not content with offering violence to the words of Lao-tse, 
 in order at all hazards to establisli such affinity, some writers 
 have gone further still, and have discovered in the 'doctrine of 
 Heason' (as they term it) the anticipation of one high and cen- 
 tral mystery of the Gospel, — the doctrine of the Holy Trinity 
 in Unity. ' The principal object of the Tao-te-hing,^ a modern 
 Chinese scholar has declared, 'is to establish a particular know- 
 ledge of one Supreme Being in Three Persons. Numerous pas- 
 sages so clearly speak of a Triune God, that no one who reads 
 this book can any longer doubt that the mystery of the Most 
 Holy Trinity was revealed to the Chinese more than five cen- 
 turies before the advent of Jesus Christ ^' It was expected that 
 a deeper knowledge of this singular resemblance would, as fur- 
 nishing points of contact with the heathen mind, contribute 
 largely to the spread of Christianity in China, and accordingly 
 the triad of Lao-tse continues to assume importance in the pub- 
 lications of the present day^ One writer even goes so far as to 
 discover in the Chinese triad the three principal characters 
 which enter into the formation of the ineffable name of God, — 
 or the Jehovah of the ancient Hebrews ; and from hence he has 
 
 1 M. Gallery (Li-ki, pp. 142, 143) nicht durch blosse Verneinungen 
 has some judicious annotations on errungen : ' Wuttke, 11. 79. 
 
 the same subject. While conced- ^ Montucci, De Studiis Sinicis, 
 
 ing that the Tao of Lao-tse is pro- p. 19, Berolini, 1808 (quoted by 
 
 perly rendered the 'Way,' and is Juhen, Tao-te-king, p. iv.). The 
 
 sometimes described as actually motive of this writer may be ga- 
 
 possessing the qualities of a way, thered from what follows : * Studium 
 
 he thinks that the philosopher was ergo et vulgatio hujus singularissi- 
 
 led to the adoption of this term mi textus, missionariis utilissima, 
 
 chiefly because it was general and evaderent ad messis apostolicse per- 
 
 obscure, in order to bring out more optatam coacervationem feliciter 
 
 clearly the difficulties he experi- provehendam.' 
 
 enced in giving any denomination ^ e.g. Wiseman's Lectures on 
 
 to the Ultimate Principle of all Science arid Revealed Religion, p. 
 
 things. 402, Grant's Bampton Lectures, p. 
 
 2 ' Die Idee des christlicbenGottes 268, Lond. 1844. The former says 
 ist das reine Gegentheil jener lee- with great confidence: 'The doc- 
 ren Einheit, ist die lebendige Fiille trine of a Trinity is too clearly 
 alles Lebens selbst ; und diese posi- expounded in his (Lao-tse's) writ- 
 tivste aller Ideen wird wahrlich ings to be misunderstood.' 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 315 
 
 not only argued for some actual intercourse between pM^osopliers 
 of Eastern and Western Asia, but has also found in the supposed • 
 transcription of the Hebrew name 'indisputable trices of the 
 route which the ideas we call Pythagorean and Platonic had 
 pursued on their migration into China ^' 
 
 The only passage of the Tao-te-king which supplies a warrant 
 for these grave conclusions is the following: 'You look for the 
 TaOy and you see it not : its name is /. You listen for it, and 
 you hear it not: its name is Hi, You wish to toach it, and 
 you feel it not : its name is Wei. These three are inscrutable, 
 and inexpressible by the aid of language; we are therefore in 
 the habit of combining (or confounding) them into one (the 
 three all seem to meet in one single quality, — voidness or in- 
 corporeity). Its upper part is not enlightened: its lower part is 
 not obscure {i.e. the properties of this entity are the same 
 
 throughout) It is called a form without form, an image 
 
 without image. It is vague and undefinable. Go before it, and 
 you see not its face; follow after, and you see not its back^.' 
 
 I give this memorable passage exactly as it stands in the 
 translation of one of the most illustrious living sinologues; but 
 the reader will have scarcely failed to notice that, when so trans- 
 lated, there is little left in it to justify phantastic theories of 
 which it was the strongest and the most explicit basis. I should 
 also add, that so far from the three syllables (7, Hi, Wei) en- 
 shrouding any special mystery, like that ascribed to them by 
 this hypothesis, they all are terms well known to China, and 
 were all expounded by disciples of Lao-tse before the Christian 
 era. The first imports the absence of colour; the second, the 
 
 ^ Abel-E^musat, Melanges Asiat. ticulars. For instance, one passage 
 
 I. 95, 96, and more fully in his is made to say: * These three are 
 
 Memoire sur la vie et les ouvrages inscrutable, and, being united, form 
 
 de Lao-tseii, pp. 43 sq. He affirms only one. Of them the superior is 
 
 that the essential, or articulated, not more bright, nor the inferior 
 
 letters of m^ are I, H, V, and ^^^^ f'^^'^S;' J^? "^f^^J F^"" 
 
 •^ ' > ' > gage of the Tao-te-kmg (p. 65) we 
 
 that these were combined into a read : * The Tao produced one ; one 
 
 Chinese trigram I-Hi-Wei, of which, produced two ; two produced three : 
 
 he thinks, the several characters three produced all beings:'— which 
 
 liave no meaning in the Chinese is explained by the native com- 
 
 language, and therefore a meaning mentators to mean, first, the self- 
 
 for them must be sought elsewhere. manifestation of the Tao as unity, 
 
 This he readily finds in JudsBa. then, the separation of this unity 
 
 2 Tao-te-king, p. 19, ed. Julien, into the male and female principles 
 
 and notes, p. 147. The version of {Yang and Yin), and thirdly, the 
 
 Dr. Wiseman, who follows Abel- production of harmony between 
 
 Ee'musat, is different in some par- these two (p. 211). 
 
816 Christ and other Masters, [part ill. 
 
 absence of sound or voice; the third, the absence of form or 
 body ^ ; they are, therefore, all most fitly used to characterise the 
 great ' Unnamed,' who is the ultimate Principle of Tao-ists. 
 
 But the moral teaching of this school is even more remark- 
 able than the stress which it has laid upon the thought of some 
 ti-anscendant unity in nature. The genuine convert or ^holy 
 man,' as he is called, was ever anxious to conserve his primitive 
 simplicity. He shrank from every kind of luxury, of bustle, 
 and of competition. His leading aim was to ' make void the 
 human heart;' to drain away from it whatever ministered to 
 passion, to cast off the bondage of ^particular affections,' and 
 convert his principal occupations into virtual inactivity^. He 
 was anxious also to perform good deeds without the slightest 
 sense of satisfaction or even with entire unconsciousness^. Each 
 holy man who thus preserved the Tao, by destroying or ignor- 
 ing self, was finally exalted into a model, and perennial source of 
 blessing, for other members of the human family*. The man of 
 a superior virtue is like water, of which one excellency is that 
 it does good to all creatures. Water also does not strive (it 
 flows into the empty spaces and avoids the full). Its home is 
 in localities which have no charm for crowds (a proof of self- 
 abasement). Therefore does the sage approach still nearer to 
 the Tao. He is content with the lowliest positions. His heart 
 is struggling to become as deep (and tranquil) as an abyss. If 
 he distribute favours, his aim is to excel in humanity (his 
 tenderness is not confined to individual favourites). If he 
 speak, his actions do not afterwards belie his promise. If he 
 govern, his desire is to establish peace. If he work, he shews 
 capacity and aptitude. If he change his calling, he adapts him- 
 self completely to the times. He strives with no one : hence it 
 is that he incurs no blamed' ^ I possess three precious things/ 
 is the assertion of Lao-tse himself : ' these I hold and guard as 
 I would guard a treasure. The first is called affection (tender- 
 ness for living creatures) ; the second is called economy (fruga- 
 lity and moderation) ; the third is called humility, which 
 prevents me from wishing to become the first man of the 
 empire. I have affection, and hence it is I am courageous. I 
 have economy, and hence it is that my expenditure is large. I 
 
 1 Tao-te-kinffy * Introd.' pp. vii. were capable of understanding and 
 
 viii. appreciating the doctrine of the 
 
 '■^ Ibid. pp. 5, 7, 9. Tao : some would of necessity 
 
 '^ Ibid. p. 58. deride it as enveloped in darkness 
 
 * Ibid. p. 31. It was not, how- (p. 63). 
 ever, contemplated that all persons ^ Ibid. p. 11, and notes, p. 136. 
 
CHAP. I.] Eeligions of China, 817 
 
 dare not be the first man of the empire ; hence it is that I have 
 power to become the chief of all men^' 
 
 But besides the moral truths occasionally enunciated in the 
 ^Book of the Way and of Yirtue' (the Tao-te-king), we have 
 other and more copious means of • understanding the ethical 
 system of Tao-ism. The members of that sect have long been 
 in the habit of printing by subscription, and circulating as a 
 matter of religious duty, the collection of moral maxims known 
 as the Book of Rewards and Punishments ^. Each maxim is 
 followed by a gloss or commentary, and in almost every case 
 elucidated by appropriate tales and anecdotes. The high repute 
 in which this volume stands is further indicated by the circum- 
 stance that the authorship has been in modern times attributed 
 to Lao-tse himself, in his capacity of deified and Venerable 
 Prince' or incarnation of the Tao^. * Every wise man,' writes 
 a commentator^, ^ ought to be full of respect for this book : he 
 ought to believe sincerely all the maxims it delivers, and ought 
 to practise them faithfully, regardless of all obstacles, and 
 without sufiering the zeal he had evinced at the commencement 
 to diminish at the close of his career. He ought every morning 
 to read it aloud, and to meditate on every j^hrase with serious 
 attention. Let him redouble his efforts to perform good works, 
 and his anxiety and ardour to correct past failings. Then will 
 happiness spring up within himself to recompense his merits ; 
 and his end will be advancement to the rank of the immortals.' 
 While the general tone of this production harmonises with the 
 older treatise, it bears frequent witness also to the presence of a 
 more eclectic and accommodating spirit. There was no sympathy 
 whatever between Confucius and the founder of Tao-ism. The 
 contemplative philosopher was in the eyes of the more practical 
 and bustling sociologist a very 'dragon*, who rises high above 
 the clouds and floats in ether :' and Confucius had no wish to 
 understand him or to follow his example. But this work of the 
 disciples of Lao-tse, while it condemned some other forms of 
 misbelief and of malpractice, recognised as true the doctrine 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. loi. the king of the Confucianists, the 
 
 2 Le Livre des Recompenses et Tao-<e-^'^w^ and other philosophical 
 des Peines, ed. Juliet, Paris, 1835. and moral treatises : cf. M. Julien's 
 
 3 See above, p. 308. The Livre ' Avertissement,' p. x. 
 
 des Recompenses itself attributes ^ Livre des Recompenses^ &c. 
 
 the composition to Thai-Shang, p. 5x9. 
 
 another name for Lao-tse. It is, ^ See the version of this well- 
 however, in reality a compilation known story in the Tao-te-king, 
 (how modem we cannot say) of ' Introd.' p. xxix. 
 sentences drawn or imitated from 
 
318 Christ and other Masters, [part hi. 
 
 tauglit by all the Hhree religions V — that which had been long 
 in the ascendancy, and those which had been simply tolerated 
 at the date of its compilation. And in one single passage a 
 commentator actually makes the author of Tao-ism add the 
 worship of the god Fo (or Buddha) to a list of other meritorious 
 actions^. The original conception of the Tao had now indeed 
 been gradually obscured, and ran the risk of being quite oblite- 
 rated. In this later treatise, the great business of man's life is 
 not to master his affections and escape from everything that 
 tends to agitate his soiil, or binds his spirit to the earth, but 
 rather, as we saw in Buddhism^, to accumulate the largest 
 possible stock of merits. It is the daty of the Hhree coun- 
 sellors^,' or, elsewhere, of the ^god presiding over life,' Hhe 
 prince of spirits V to register the bad actions of all men; and 
 according to the measure of their turpitude, as grave or venial, 
 ^ to cut off twelve years or else a hundred days from the dura- 
 tion of human life. When the allotted period is exhausted the 
 man dies ; but if, at the hour of death, a crime remains unex- 
 piated (or, in other words, if no sufficient compensation has 
 been made), it causes the transmission of unhappiness to his 
 children and his grandchildren^.' Urged by this regard to the 
 well-being of himself and his posterity, every genuine Tao-ist 
 labours hard to regulate his wishes and to purify his intentions''. 
 He must set his own heart right and then attempt to influence 
 others ^ He must be humane, abstaining even from all cruelty 
 to the minutest animals^. He must practise filial piety, must 
 be affectionate as a brother, and respect his seniors'^. He must 
 pity the orphan and the widow ^^; he must sympathise with the 
 afflicted ^^, and rejoice with all who prosper^^. He must help the 
 needy, and take part in rescuing those who are in periP^. He 
 
 ^ Livre des Becompenses, p. 422. rhomme peut rectifier son coeur 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 517. lorsqu'il est seul et desoeuvre, 11 
 
 3 Above, p. 168. pourra le conserver pur et intact 
 * Livre des Recompenses, p. 13. au moment dii danger.' 
 
 ' These are names given by the . ^ Ihid. p. 6^. 
 
 Chinese to six stars, placed two ^ Ibid. pp. 51, 73. In the latter 
 
 and two, which correspond to lk — passage, it is added : * Si vous les 
 
 X^—j/^ of the Great Bear. ' blessez, vous n'imitez point la 
 
 ^ Ibid. pp. 13, 502. bonte du Ciel et de la Terre, qui 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. 502. The possibility aiment a donner la vie aux cr^a- 
 
 of repentance and its efficacy, as tures.' 
 
 here glanced at, are both recognised ^^ Ibid. p. 56. 
 
 more fully in p. 514. ^^ Ibid. p. 68. 
 
 7 Ibid. pp. 328, 512. *Nous ^2 xbid. p. 74. 
 
 devenons coupables dbs le moment '^ Ibid. p. 77. 
 
 que nous avons formd ce desir. Si ^^ Ibid. pp. 79, 83. • 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 319 
 
 is not to boast of his superiority, nor divulge the imperfections 
 of other men^ He is to act from kindly motives without 
 waiting for a recompence; and, finally, he must not murmur 
 against Heaven^ ', while they who fail to act according to these 
 noble principles, are said to 'violate the duties which society 
 imposes on them, dishonour their ancestors, stifle the germs of 
 virtue which Heaven has planted in them, and corrupt public 
 manners^.' 
 
 In the system of Confucius we are seldom able to detect the 
 slightest reference to a pure and righteous God whose moral ' 
 law is broken by iniquity. The same remark must be extended 
 also to Tao-ism. Once or twice indeed the doctors of the 
 'Way' incite us to the imitation of Heaven and Earth, who 
 manifest their gentle nature in dispensing life to all the crea- 
 tures ; but the check imposed on evil thoughts and evil actions 
 is more commonly the fear of giving umbrage not to God, but 
 to the spirits of earth or heaven, who are affected, it is urged, 
 by all the works of men, and have the power to punish or re- 
 ward according to their quality^. The good man's pathway is 
 encompassed by a host of these invisible agents, who are all 
 continually engaged for his protection^; and in one remarkable 
 passage, where a Chinese scholar had been strongly tempted to 
 unchastity, the tempter iled, confounded by his reference to 
 the supersensuous world, and the proximity of purer beings : 
 'the spirits of heaven and earth,' he argued, 'encircle us 
 on every side ; how then could one think of sinning in their 
 presence^?' 
 
 We have scarcely any means of ascertaining the amount of 
 influence exercised by this religion in the centuries immediately 
 succeeding the death of Lao-tse. In later ages many of his 
 opinions were disseminated far and wide, not only in China 
 proper, but in Cochin-China, in Tonquin, and in Japan^. As 
 early, however, as the reign of Woo-te, the sixth of the Han 
 
 ^ IZ^icZ. pp. 91, 93. to the Tao-te-king (p. xi.) has 
 
 2 Ibid. pp. 107, 372. pointed out a serious error in some 
 
 ^ Ihid. p. 328. current statements on this subject, 
 
 * Ihid. p. I. according to which Tao-ism was 
 
 ^ Ihid. p. 126. On the contrary said to have been once extensively 
 
 the demons are said to stand aloof propagated in Tibet and northern 
 
 from him through terror and re- Hindustan. The mistake arose 
 
 spect (p. 124). from confounding Tao-sse, followers 
 
 ^ Ihid. p. 331 : of. pp. 489, 490. of Lao-tse, and Tao-jin, followers 
 
 7 Julien's * Avertissement ' to the of Sakya-muni — a name given to 
 
 Livre des Recompenses, p. viii. The the Chinese Buddhists before they 
 
 same writer in his 'Introduction' were called /Sew <; or * Doctors.' 
 
320 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 dynasty who mounted the imperial throne, 140 B.C., a very 
 large accession is recorded to the ranks of the Tao-ists\ The 
 fear of death had fallen with unwonted power on many who 
 were filling high positions in the Chinese empire, and unable to 
 find peace or comfort in the tenets of Confucius, crowds of them 
 resorted to the schools of his more spiritual opponent. But 
 Tao-ism, as presented to us in this later stage of its development, 
 had passed into a very different phase. Proceeding, it appears, 
 on the hypothesis that 'holy men' are so completely identified 
 with the Tao as to have acquired a perfect mastery over . 
 natural forces, which are still, however, fettering ordinary 
 mortals, the Tao4sts grew most ardent in their cultivation of 
 theurgy and various forms of magic ^. They became, in some 
 degree, the Neoplatonists of China. Their talk was now of 
 spells, of amulets, of gifts of second sight, of charms, of incanta- 
 tions, of specifics in the very handwriting of the prince of 
 demons j and affecting most of all to tranquillise the apprehen- 
 sions of their votaries, they sought to manufacture an elixir of 
 such potency, that all who drank it would be rescued from the 
 grasp of death himself^. 
 
 Henceforth the school of Lao-tse, in spite of all its early 
 promise, occupied itself far too exclusively in the pursuit of 
 these phantastic and debasing superstitions. To the Christian 
 missionaries of the seventeenth century, the Tao-ists seemed the 
 most 'abominable' sect of China, living only to corrupt and 
 fascinate the populace by magical performances, in which they 
 still are said to figure, at one time as mere jugglers, at another 
 as physicians, at a third as fortune-tellers, at a fourth as gifted 
 
 ^ Gutzlaff (i. 235) attributes this poses, 'toutes les ddesses du Cielet 
 
 accession to the influence of the celles du mont Wouchan.' 
 empress, who was addicted to the ^ No traces of this 'elixir vitse' 
 
 creed of Lao-tse, *and considered are found in the Tao-te-king. It 
 
 the heartless doctrines of the is said, however, that as early as 
 
 Chinese sage [Confucius], as the 209 b.c. a Chinese expedition was 
 
 greatest enemy to the mystical sent across the Eastern sea into 
 
 system of her beloved master.' Japan to seek for such a medicine 
 
 2 Thus in the Livre des Recom- (Prichard, iv. 493). The idea may 
 
 2)enses, &c., where magic is con- possibly have been derived from 
 
 demned whenever it is used for the amrita ( = ambrosia) of ancient 
 
 exciting social tumults (p. 422), India (see above, p. 127, n. 2). 
 
 there is no doubt expressed as to From the East it travelled into 
 
 the 'supernatural powers' of some Egypt, where Ptolemy Philadelphus, 
 
 Tao-ists : see, for instance, the in possession of the secret, could 
 
 *Histoire' in p. 423, where a ma- declare 6'rt fxovo^ evpoi rijv ddava- 
 
 gician of the sect was said to have mav : Athenasus, Lib. xii. c. ix. (p. 
 
 brought down, for immoral pur- 536 e, ed. Casaubon). 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 321 
 
 with the power of drawing secrets from the world invisible, 
 through intercourse with those who are possessed by demons. 
 They are notwithstanding held in high repute by nearly every 
 class of the Chinese : the ordinary appellation of their chiefs is 
 that of ^ heavenly doctors/ and the arch-chief of the sect, resem- 
 bling in consideration and magnificence the Grand Lama of 
 Tibet, is commonly believed to exercise, as the incarnate Tao, 
 absolute dominion in the sphere of the invisible. * He appoints 
 and removes the deities of various districts, just as the emperor 
 does his officers; and no tutelary divinity can be worshipped, 
 or is supposed capable of protecting his votaries, until the 
 warrant goes forth under the hand and seal of this demon- 
 ruler, authorising him to exercise his functions in a given 
 region \' 
 
 How remote are all such representations from the glorious 
 facts of Christianity, and from the cheering visions of the 
 Christian Apocalypse ! ' Fear not : I am the first and the last : 
 I am He that liveth and was dead, and, behold, I am alive for 
 evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hades and of death' 
 (Rev. i. 17, 18). 
 
 § 3. Fo-ism^, or Chinese Buddhism, 
 
 The sad experience of five centuries had gradually suggested 
 to reflecting China-men, that neither of the two religious systems 
 heretofore exposed could extricate the human spirit from per- 
 plexities in which she found herself involved, nor satisfy the 
 wants and longings of our moral nature. One of these religions 
 had succeeded doubtless in imparting form and animation to 
 Chinese society, but meanwhile pushed into the background 
 every question which afiected our relationship to God and to the 
 world invisible. Its chief concern was with the present life. 
 The other, mystic and imaginative in its whole complexion, had 
 run wild as it grew older; it was rapidly transforming the 
 ideas of Lao-tse into a system of most abject demonology, — 
 little if at all distinguishable from the ancient superstitions, 
 whose main object was the deprecation and disarming of malig- 
 nant principles. 
 
 While brooding over these momentous topics, and it may 
 be, half despairing for himself as well as for his people, an 
 intelligent emperor, Ming-te, about the sixtieth year of the 
 Christian era, is reported to have had a most remarkable vision. 
 
 ^ Medhurst, pp. 200 sq. 
 
 8 Fo or Foe is the first syllable of Foe-Va or Fu-f a =^ Buddha. 
 
 21 
 
322 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 According to one account^ there stood before him a resplendent 
 figure, of gigantic size, and with a glorious nimbus round the 
 head; and when his ministers of state were all consulted as to 
 the most probable meaning of this dream or apparition, one of 
 them replied that the description of it corresponded to a story 
 he had heard of some great genius in the western country, who 
 might therefore be intending to solicit the notice of the emperor. 
 Another version of the legend is, that in the maxims of Con- 
 fucius himself, was one affirming that the ' Holy Man' is in the 
 west^, or will hereafter issue from the west ] and that impres- 
 sions which this oft-repeated sentence left on the imperial mind 
 could never be obliterated. In either case the sequel of the 
 story is precisely the same. A deputation of mandarins pro- 
 ceed across the western mountains in the hope of learning fresh 
 particulars respecting this mysterious personage ; and on re- 
 turning home they are accompanied by a Hindu teacher, 
 bringing with him a large stock of books, and, as a present to 
 the emperor himself, the portrait of Sakya-muni. 
 
 Thus the Buddhism of the Middle Kingdom rose at once 
 into the rank of a ^religio licita;' its formal recognition occur- 
 ring in the very year when the Apostle to the Gentiles passed 
 in chains to the prsetorium of the Caesars, * thanking God and 
 taking courage' (Acts xxviii. 15). Buddhism, it is true, has 
 never been allowed to interfere with the administration of the 
 Chinese empire, nor been able to dethrone the old religion of 
 the country. It was more or less contemned by the Con- 
 
 1 Pautliier's Chine, p. 256. did this phantasmagoria of hell 
 
 2 Gutzlaff, I. 250. Some of the intercept the light of the Gospel.' 
 early missionaries in China, who No one has, however, been able to 
 gave currency to this legend, {e.g. detect the saying here ascribed to 
 Duhalde, De la Chine, &c. i. 360 Confucius in any of his extant 
 sq. Paris, 1735), were of opinion writings. The passage most likely 
 that Confucius actually intended to have suggested the current story 
 to point out the birth of Christ, is one in the Chung-Yung, c. xxix. 
 and that the Chinese envoys actu- §§ 3, 4 : yet there even no allusion 
 ally started on a journey into whatever is made to a country in 
 Palestine to hail the advent of the the west. It is only declared with 
 Great Eedeemer. On their way reference to the true sage: • II con- 
 they encountered certain Buddhist forme ses actions aux lois du Ciel 
 missionaries coming from India, et de la Terre, et il n'dprouve aucun 
 w^hom mistaking for true disciples trouble ; il se regie sur les intelli- 
 of Christ they carried back as gences superieures k I'homme, et 
 teachers of their fellow-country- son esprit n'^prouve aucun doute: 
 men. ' Thus,' says the translator il est cent generations a attendre le 
 of Schlegel, Philosophy of Religion, saint homme, et il ne se dement 
 p. 156, note, *was this religion jamais.' 
 
 introduced into China, and thus 
 
CHAP. I.] 
 
 Religions of China, 
 
 32S 
 
 fucianists, as foreign, innovating, and seditious. Patronised by- 
 one prince, it was sometimes roughly handled by another^; 
 and in the century after that which witnessed the esta- 
 blishment of Christianity in the great metropolis of the west, 
 the Chinese Buddhists, now attaining some numerical impor- 
 tance, were exposed to very bitter persecutions. Edicts from 
 the prince of Wei not only authorised the demolition of their 
 temples and the burning of their sacred books, but also insti- 
 gated a general massacre of the Buddhist monks ^ In the 
 succeeding reign, however, dating from A. d. 452, the triumphs 
 of their cause grew visible in almost every part of China. 
 Cloisters rose again with marvellous facility, and multiplied so 
 fast, that at the end of the next fifty years the total number of 
 such buildings had been swollen, it is said, to thirteen thousand^. 
 At the same time frequent intercoiirse with India, some account 
 of which is happily preserved to us in records of the pilgrimages 
 of Fa-hian"^ in the fourth, and of Hiuan-Thsang^ in the seventh 
 century after Christ, resulted in the importation into China of 
 Buddhist pictures, books, and relics, and in the enlistment of a 
 host of fresh auxiliaries, all burning to difiuse a knowledge of 
 the law, or Dharnia ; till, won over by the zeal of Hindu 
 
 ^ Pauthier, p. 257. 
 
 2 Gutzlaff, I. 291 : Schott, XJhcr 
 den Buddhaismus in Hochaslen und 
 in China, p. 19, BerHn, 1846. 
 Until this period it seems as if the 
 new religion had made very little 
 progress in China: cf. Tao-te-king, 
 *Introd.' p. X. 
 
 ^ Schott, as before, p. 20. The 
 same kind of activity is just now- 
 visible in Birmah, where new tem- 
 ples and monasteries ('kyums') are 
 daily springing up, even in the 
 districts under British authority: 
 Wilson, in Journal of As. Soc. xvi. 
 260. 
 
 * Translated by Abel-Eemusat, 
 Paris, 1836. 
 
 * Translated by M. Julien, Paris, 
 1853. This latter pilgrim spent 
 seventeen years (a. d. 629— a. d. 
 645) in countries situated to the 
 west of China. In one passage 
 (p. 26), he thus describes the object 
 of his travels: 'J'etais vivement 
 afilige de voir que les livres sacr6s 
 ^talent incomplets, et que leur 
 
 interpretation offrait de facheuses 
 lacunes. Oubliant alors le soin de 
 ma vie et bravant les obstacles et 
 les dangers, j'ai fait serment d'aller 
 chercher dans Toccident la XjOi 
 [Dharma] que le Bouddha a legume 
 au monde:' cf. p. 44, where he 
 says that on his return to China he 
 will translate and circulate the 
 sacred books, and ' beat down the 
 thick forest of errors.' 'Ensuite 
 j'interrogerai la multitude des mai- 
 tres, et de leur bouche je rece- 
 vrai I'enseignement de la droite 
 Loi. line fois de retour (en Chine), 
 je traduirai les livres, je repandrai 
 auloin des vdrites inconnues; j'a- 
 battrai la foret dpaisse des erreurs, 
 je d^truirai les artifices des fausses 
 doctrines, jer^parerailes lacunes de 
 la doctrine de Velephant [the trans- 
 lator (p. 467) corrects this into ' la 
 doctrine des images'] ^a doctrine 
 bouddhique) , et je fixerai la boussole 
 delsi portenujsterieuse {deVensei^e- 
 ment religieux).' 
 
 21—2 
 
824 Christ and other Masters. [part ill. 
 
 doctors (Fan-sengY and ascetics (shamans)^, a large portion 
 of tlie Chinese populace were numbered with the followers of 
 this foreign creed ; nav, emperors themselves, the sons of Heaven, 
 were not unwilling to lay down their sceptres, if they might 
 but pass the evening of their lives beneath the shadow of a 
 Buddhist monastery^. The culminating point of these successes 
 was the fall of the Mongol dynasty in 1368. 
 
 I may have hitherto appeared to speak of Buddhism as of 
 one organic system, animated by a definite creed, directed by a 
 common hope and purpose, and binding all its converts to one 
 centre of administration. But such inference is unquestionably 
 incorrect. What Buddhism Avas when it put forth its earliest 
 aphorisms, the ^undeveloped' sutras, we have seen* already, 
 while engaged in tracing the career of Gautama and analysing 
 the first principles of his philosophy. Yet exactly in proportion 
 to the wondrous elasticity of the system he had founded, and its 
 marked superiority to those distinctions which had long been 
 severing man from man and one people from another, is the 
 freedom and the ease with which it commonly allied itself to 
 pre-existing forms of heathenism, until the thoughts and sym- 
 bols proper to it have been well-nigh buried in a motley crowd 
 of foreign and conflicting elements. Buddhism once prevailed, 
 or is prevailing, not only in Hindustan^ the birthplace, and 
 Ceylon the sacred island of the creed, but also in Tibet and 
 Tatary, in China and Japan, in Cochin-China and Tonquin, in 
 Siam and the Birman empire, to say nothing of its ancient rule 
 in Java, and the remnant of it now surviving in Bali, an islet 
 of the Indian archipelago, and possibly in regions still more 
 distant and diverse^. Of all these heterogeneous populations 
 none so truly represent the genuine forms of Buddhism, none so 
 cordially agree together, as the natives of Ceylon, of Birmah'', and 
 
 1 F<27i-seng ( = ' doctors out of produce effects at a far later date ; 
 India^) has been represented in for instance, modifying the ethical 
 other languages under the form of spirit of the Tamil literature : see 
 Bonzen or Bonzes. Caldwell, as above, pp. 86 sq. 
 
 2 See above, p. 169, n. 3, ^ 'Ob noch weitere Yerbreitung 
 ^ Schott, p. 20. des Buddhaismus nach Polynesien 
 
 4 See above, p. 157. oder gar nach Sild-Amerika hin 
 
 5 Even after the general expul- stattgefunden habe, wie man ver- 
 sion from India small bands of muthet hat, dar liber fehlt vor der 
 Buddhists were still found in par- Hand noch jeder sichere Anhalts- 
 ticular localities as late as the 12th punkt: jedenfalls hat sich daselbst 
 century : and Jainism, which may nichts davon direkt erhalten.' — 
 be regarded as the surviving twin- Weber, as above, p. 66. 
 
 sister of Buddhism, continued to ^ in Sangermano's Burmese Em' 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. Z26 
 
 Siam, wliose sacred books almost entirely correspond, because 
 translated not as in the other cases from Sanskrit, but from 
 Pali. In those countries also images are numerous, yet with 
 the exception of subsidiary figures, which are never worshipped, 
 such as dragons and lions, they are *all of the same character, 
 representing Grautama or his disciples, generally in a sitting pos- 
 ture with the legs crossed, and the hands in the act of prayer or 
 benediction \' On the contrary, as one result of the accommo- 
 dating character of this creed, amalgamations are elsewhere so 
 numerous that in spite of the original identity of the books dis- 
 seminated, it requires no ordinary effort to understand wherein 
 consists the family-likeness of the different sects ^ They all, in 
 general terms, are Buddhist; but the main conceptions of their 
 votaries are divergent, nay, in many points are fundamentally 
 opposed. 
 
 Perhaps there is no readier and more profitable way of re- 
 presenting this vast disparity than by contrasting some of the 
 chief features of two neighbouring and related systems — the 
 Fo-ism of China., and the Lama-ism of Tibet : for in so doing I 
 may dissipate objections to the Gospel which have long been 
 drawn from the alleged consistency of Buddhism, its compact- 
 ness and numerical predominance. The new religion was ex- 
 tensively adopted in both those countries at nearly the same 
 date ; they both together inherited the sacred texts according to 
 the same recension; yet so very inefficient was Buddhism in 
 curbing and subduing the more wayward nationalities with 
 which it came in contact, that, except in isolated cases, the 
 Chinese, who have adopted what they call Hhe customs of 
 India ^/ are scarcely in their general character to be distin- 
 
 jpire, ed. Tandy (Or. Tr. Fund, equally distinct from the meta- 
 
 1833), P' 83, it is stated that the physical abstractions propounded 
 
 only Buddhists recognised as or- by the monks of Nep^l. Its ob- 
 
 thodox by the inhabitants of that servances in Japan have undergone 
 
 empire are the Buddhists of Ceylon. a still more striking alteration 
 
 ^ Prof. Wilson, in Journal of As, from their vicinity to the Syntoos ; 
 
 Soc. XVI. -253. and in China they have been simi- 
 
 2 ' In its migrations to other larly modified in their contact with 
 countries, since its dispersion by the rationalism of Lao-tseu and the 
 the Brahmans, Buddhism has as- social demonology (?) of the Con- 
 sumed and exhibited itself in a fucians...But in each and in all 
 variety of shapes. At the present the distinction is rather in degree 
 day, its doctrines, as cherished than in essence.' Tennent's C/trnti- 
 among the Jainas of Guzerat and anity in Ceylon, pp. 206, 207. 
 Eajpootana, differ widely from its ^ Catechism of the Shamans, ed. 
 mysteries as administered by the Neumann, p. 117. 
 Lama of Tibet; and both are 
 
S26 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 guisLed from the vulgar followers of Confucius and Lao-tse. 
 The only genuine Buddhists^ are the monks and mendicants. 
 They only can be said to recognise a common symbol, or con- 
 fession of faith ; they only have initiatory rites ; they only form 
 a separate and sacred corporation. Others who are known as 
 worshippers of Fo, and constitute one half, or possibly two- 
 thirds^, of the enormous population of the Middle Kingdom, 
 are rather tolerated than approved by the authorities of the sect. 
 They are expected to confess the general excellence of their reli- 
 gion, to conlide in some particular Buddha, or to worship one or 
 other of the numerous Pusas (Bodhisatwas) ; to abstain from all 
 the grosser forms of vice, to venerate the sacred writings of 
 their predecessors, and the topes, or sthupas, in which some 
 reliquiae of a departed Buddha are interred; and finally, to aid 
 by contributions from their substance in supporting the sha- 
 mans, monks, ascetics, and devotees^. The strict fulfilment of 
 conditions such as these entitles them, it is believed, to higher 
 spheres of being after death, but does not raise them to the dig- 
 nity of the ' enlightened,' nor facilitate their passage to nirvana^ 
 the goal of genuine Buddhism. In Tibet this utter laxity of 
 principle has never been so fully and so openly avowed; yet 
 even there the old divinities are not dethroned entirely, and the 
 poorer classes make their ofiei'ings, with the public sanction 
 of the Lamas, to genii of the hills, the woods, the rivers, and 
 the valleys*. 
 
 The difference in the measure of amalgamation which took 
 place in these two countries, is attributable to the different 
 
 ^ Gutzlaff, in Journal of As. stroying animal life (cf. above, p. 
 
 Soc, XVI. 89. 161). They are said to be 'an om- 
 
 2 The same writer {Ibid.) con- nivorous race; few living beings 
 jectures that two-thirds of all the escape being made food for men, 
 religious edifices in China are and are slaughtered and eaten with- 
 uominally Buddhist: but as Schott out the least scruple. But to shew 
 observes (Uber den Buddhaismus, some regard for life, notwithstand- 
 &c. p. 2^, and 'Zusatze,' p. 127), ^^S» they now and then dedicate 
 statements of this kind are only ^ome pigs to Buddha, which are 
 true in a certain sense, viz. as im- permitted to live their natural 
 plving that the eclectic polytheism space of life, and are never killed 
 of" the Chinese populace extends {Journal of As. Soc. xvi. 84). The 
 itself so far as to include Buddhas Shamans, on the contrary (Ca^g- 
 and Bodhisatwas among the objects c/iisw, as above p. 1 24), are directed 
 of common worship. *« ^^ extremely careful m this 
 
 3 Schott, Ibid. p. 17. The ex- matter: they are not even to use 
 treme laxity of Fo-ism is never ^^^V wood m cooking, lest they 
 shewn more vividly than in the should destroy insects init 
 
 fact, that the Chinese have little ' ^^^jor Cunningham's Ladah, 
 
 or no scruple on the subject of de- P- 3o6, Lond. 1854. 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China, 327 
 
 tempers of tlie people, and the circumstances under which the 
 new religion had been introduced. It is recorded' of Sakya- 
 muni himself, that on observing no immediate prospect of suc- 
 cess among a nation like the China-men, so long at least as the 
 missionaries attempted to communicate his metaphysical doc- 
 trines, he suggested the employment of some other means more 
 calculated to effect his purpose. The Dharma was to follow 
 gradually upon the track of secular propagandists, who were 
 smoothing the approaches to the Chinese mind, by giving lessons 
 in arithmetic and astronomy. Others might be won by an appeal 
 to the emotional province of their nature; but the China-man 
 by working on his reason and self-interest. Whatever degree 
 of credit we assign to statements of this kind, they are most 
 useful as implying the strong repugnance which the China-man 
 would always feel to a religious system like that of unadult- 
 erated Buddhism. His social instincts were opposed to its 
 monastic rigour, his active habits to the indolence in which it 
 seemed to thrive and revel. More than other men, he proved 
 himself a firm believer in the reality and permanence of the 
 present universe. The Buddhist sutras, on the contrary, pro- 
 claim^ the absolute nothingness of all within us and around us: 
 all is treated as an empty show: its origin is from nothing; its 
 destination is to nothing; nay, the very core and essence of 
 creation is declared to be non-being. Human life itself, so pre- 
 cious to the China-man, is in the creed of Gautama compared to 
 single * dew-drops, trembling on the leaf of the lotus.' Hence, 
 indeed, arose the ardour of the primitive Buddhist in discoursing 
 about the emptiness of human joys, and calling men to a com- 
 plete renunciation of themselves and of the world. So far from 
 meddling with the common business of society, they were each 
 to seek a quiet refuge in the cloister, or attired in a peculiar 
 dress, the cowl upon their head, the rosary suspended from their 
 girdle^, to go forth and urge their fellow-men to bow before the 
 majesty of the Dharma. 
 
 ^ Schott, p. 42. The parallel pursued in the i6th century, with 
 in modern times is unmistakeable : a view to counteract the Eef orma- 
 * Es sind hier offenbar Arithmetik tion in Bohemia, 
 und Sternenkunde (nebst Sternen- ^ Above, pp. 162 sq. 
 deutkunst) gemeint, also gerade ' See Appendix 11. above, p. 263; 
 diejenigen Zweige des Wissens, for in these and other points the 
 welche auch den romischen Glau- monasticism of China resembles 
 bensbotenim i^jtenund iStenJahrh. that of Tatary and Tibet. In the 
 bis ins Innerste des kaiserlichen Catechism of the Shamans, as edited 
 Palastes Eingang verschafften.' by Neumann, the second Part con- 
 Precisely the same course had been sists of the * Regulations,' or direo- 
 
328 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 In Tibet, where Buddhism was appealing to an ignorant, a 
 pastoral, a simple-hearted race, it seems to have at once pro- 
 duced a very deep impression. Its actual development is far 
 more nearly that which might have been predicted from a know- 
 ledge of its general principles. Disgusted with the ^epicurean 
 atheism^' which heretofore prevailed throughout the districts on 
 the Indian frontier, the Tibetians of Ladak had eagerly em- 
 braced the offers of the Buddhist missionaries at an early 
 period; and since the middle of the seventh century after 
 Christ, with only one important interruption^, Buddhism under 
 somewhat different aspects was enthroned as the religion of 
 the whole country. Hence resulted the distinctive character of 
 its dogmas, the apparent fervour of its moral tone, and the 
 severity of its discipline. The mild Tibetians have for centuries 
 been threatening to become a nation of religious mendicants. 
 At the present day, the traveller is amazed by the ascendency 
 of the lamas, — monks, or literally ' superiors,' carrying each one 
 in his hand the 'prayer-cylinder^' or * precious and religious 
 wheel,' a revolution of which is held to be equivalent to the 
 recitation of a roll of prayers. In every family one at least of 
 several children is devoted to the service of the cloister, so that 
 the assemblages of monks and nuns, who flock to the vihdras in 
 hundreds and in thousands, constitute no inconsiderable part of 
 the entire population. Owing probably to this enormous in- 
 crease in the number of the lamas, the common law of Bud- 
 dhism, by which mendicants are sternly interdicted from the 
 exercise of all mechanical arts, is totally rescinded, and the lainas 
 both of Tibet and of Tatary are permitted to support themselves 
 by various handicrafts, while living in the convents. 
 
 But another point in which the Fo-ism of the Middle King- 
 dom has diverged still more considerably from the Lama-ism 
 of the adjacent regions is the absence from it of a regular and 
 
 tions touching the manners and = 'pure.* Hence 'Pons' = Puritans, 
 
 customs of priests (or rather monks) or Cathari. 
 
 after initiation. The editor remarks ^ jj^i^^ p, -^^^^ 
 
 (p. 138) : 'They so much resemble ^ Major Cunningham has shewn 
 
 the monastic rules (Eegula Monas- [Ihid. pp. 375 sq.) the very high 
 
 tica) of the Middle Ages, that one antiquity of this device. So effi- 
 
 might be supposed to be copied cacious is it thought to be, that 
 
 from the other:' cf. Medhurst, p. ' cylinders, about one foot in height, 
 
 217. are placed in rows around the tem- 
 
 ^ This, according to Major Cun- pies, and are turned by the votaries 
 
 ningham, Laddk, p. 357, was the before entering. Larger ones are 
 
 rehgiou of the ' Bons ' or ' Pons,' turned by water, which keeps them 
 
 connected with the Sanskrit Funya perpetually revolving day and night.* 
 
CHAP. I.] Beligiom of China. 329 
 
 graduated hierarchy. When the creed of Sakya-muni finally 
 won its way into the palaces of China, it was only raised to the 
 position of a secondary (non-official) creed. As such the advo- 
 cates of Buddhism were content to see it left. They urged that 
 it was merely the completion ^, not the contradiction, of anterior 
 systems. In their teaching, they adhered as closely as possible 
 to the language of the sacred writings (king) ; they left the 
 education of the masses in the hands of the imperial govern- 
 ment ; they recognised the excellence of the Confucian morality, 
 although Confucius "was himself esteemed inferior to Sakya- 
 muni, and no fitting object of men's worship^; but in order 
 most directly to secure their hold on the affections of the 
 Chinese populace, they cordially accepted current maxims on 
 the duty of sacrificing to departed ancestors^, nay, freely ac- 
 quiesced in the established worship both of good and evil 
 spirits^. Thus, the continuity of old traditions remaining un- 
 disturbed, the ^ Son of Heaven' was under no immediate appre- 
 hension of losing his supremacy by the admission of the foreign 
 creed. His vast authority, exceeding in religious matters the 
 prerogatives enjoyed by many an autocratic emperor of Byzan- 
 tium, enabled him to regulate and curb all classes of his subjects, 
 the compliant Buddhists not excepted. The Grand Lamas of 
 Tibet were, on the contrary, the sole depositories both of 
 temporal and spiritual power. Until comparatively recent 
 times they were the masters of large tracts of country, which 
 they governed in the spirit of the JRoman Pontiff during the 
 palmy days of Innocent III. They corresponded with the 'Sons 
 of Heaven' on terms of brotherhood and of equality ; and even 
 now, when China has by force of arms obtained possession of 
 Tibet, their claim to jurisdiction, as lords spiritual, continues to 
 be freely recognised, as well in their own neighbourhood as in 
 the hordes of barbarous Calmucks roving from the marshes of 
 the Yolga to the ruins of Samarcand. In some respects, indeed, 
 these powerful Lamas and their agents are unlike the lordly 
 pontiffs of western Christendom. Their theory of toleration^ is 
 
 ^ Schott, as before, p. 22. is ordered to pray and say: *0 ye 
 
 2 Thus, in the Catechism of the bad and good spirits, I now offer 
 
 Shamans, it is directed (p. 92): you this. May this meat be spread 
 
 *You shall not stay in a temple out for all bad and good spirits 
 
 of the followers of Confucius and unto all the ten quarters [?] of the 
 
 Lao-tse.' world.' 
 
 ^ See above, p. 290. ^ When a Franciscan missionary 
 
 * In the Catechism, as above, of the xivth century was describ- 
 
 p. 102, the priest (or monk), taking ing the state of religion in China, 
 
 the food at dinner in his left hand, he adverted to this characteristic 
 
830 
 
 Christ and other Masters, 
 
 [part III. 
 
 most compreliensive. As examples of a system of belief wMch 
 thrives wherever men are lapsing into pantheism or utter 
 atheism, they hold that each religion of the world has in it all 
 the elements of necessary truth, and consequently that every 
 one ^ shall be saved by the law or sect which he professeth.' 
 
 Yet meanwhile outward forms of Lama-ism are often strik- 
 ingly akin to rites and customs of Mediaeval Christianity. ' The 
 use of the cross, the mitre, the dalmatic, the hood, the office of 
 two choirs, the psalmody, the exorcisms, the censer of five 
 chains, the benediction of the lamas by placing the right hand 
 on the head of the faithful, the rosary, celibacy of the clergy, 
 spiritual retirement, the worship of saints, fasts, processions, 
 litanies, and holy water ^;' such are specimens of the minute 
 coincidences still adduced by Roman-catholic missionaries in 
 proof of the amalgamation which Buddhism had effected in 
 some districts with the ritual system of the Christian Church^. 
 In what way soever the liturgical affinities in question are most 
 satisfactorily explained; whether we regard them as genuine 
 imitations rising out of some actual intercourse, or whether 
 they exhibit no more of real sympathy than is implied in the 
 fortuitous resemblance of the ape to man^, — it is remarkable 
 
 laxity in the following terms: *In 
 isto vasto imperio sunt gentes de 
 omni natione qujB sub coelo est, et 
 de omni secta ; et conceditur omni- 
 bus et singulis vivere secundum 
 sectam suam. Est enim hcec opinio 
 apud eos, seu potius error, quod 
 unusqidsque in sua secta salvatur.^ 
 Eaynald. Annal. Eccl. ad an. 1326, 
 § 31. Marco Polo, in like manner, 
 ascribes a similar declaration to 
 Kublai-Khan (Bk. 11. ch. ii.) : 
 * There are four great Prophets, 
 who are reverenced and worshipped 
 by the different classes of mankind. 
 The Christians regard Jesus Christ 
 as their divinity; the Saracens, 
 Mahomet; the Jews, Moses; and 
 the idolaters, Sogomom-har-kan, the 
 most eminent among their idols. 
 I do honour and shew respect to 
 all the four.' Instead of the cor- 
 rupt expression here italicized, 
 read Sdkya-muni Burchan ('Bur- 
 chan' being the Mongolian word 
 for 'Buddha'). 
 
 ^ See Journal of As, Soc. xvi. 263. 
 
 2 Cf. above, pp. 265 sq., where 
 this subject is considered in detail. 
 
 2 • The enemies of Christianity, 
 since the time of Voltaire, have 
 not failed, at the name of Bonzes, 
 to throw out many maUcious epi- 
 grams against religion. The simi- 
 larity here observed is not real, 
 but is that caricature resemblance 
 the ape bears to man, and which 
 has led many naturalists into error ; 
 for the ape has with man no real 
 affinity, no true internal sympathy 
 in his organic conformation, but 
 merely the likeness of a spiteful 
 
 parody We may lay it down as 
 
 a general principle that the greater 
 the apparent resemblance which a 
 false religion, utterly and funda- 
 mentally different in its spiritual 
 character and moral tendency, ex- 
 ternally bears to the true, the more 
 reprehensible will it be in itself, 
 and the greater its hostility to the 
 truth.' F. von Schlegel, Fhil. of 
 Hist. p. 134. 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 881 
 
 that only a few of them exist beyond the confines of Tatary 
 and Tibet; while in respect of general organisation, passing 
 downwards step by step from the Grand Lama to inferior orders 
 of the hierarchy, China can as yet present us with no parallels 
 whatever. The communities of Fo-ists in that empire seem to 
 be all virtually independent ; they are barely held together by 
 the recognition of common precepts, and the bond which keeps 
 them all in due subordination to the officers of the state-religion. 
 Again, the Lama-system differs fundamentally from that of 
 Chinese Buddhism in the doctrine of hereditary incarnations. 
 The great thought of some intelligence, issuing from the Buddha- 
 world, assuming the conditions of our frail humanity, and for 
 a time presiding over some one favoured group of Buddhist 
 monasteries, had been long familiar to the natives of Tibet. 
 The founder of the confraternity of red Lamas \ dating as far 
 back as the eighth century after Christ, is said to be an instance 
 of this self-humiliation. In the following centuries the practice 
 was for monks or mendicants of particular tribes to choose 
 a kind of 'chief-abbot^,' in the hope of thus preserving the 
 continuity of their order for successive generations. Of such 
 distinguished potentates we have examples in men like Tsong 
 Kaba^, who founded the great monastery of Khal-dan near 
 Lhassa, in 1409, and by whose influence, it is said, a multitude 
 of changes were eflected both in the administration and the 
 ritual system of Tibetian Buddhism. Still no progress seems to 
 have been made, until the latter half of the same century, in 
 ripening the idea of perpetual incarnations. Then it was that 
 one chief-abbot, the 'perfect Lama,' instead of passing, as he 
 was entitled, to his ultimate condition, determined for the 
 benefit of mankind to sojourn longer on the earth and be con- 
 tinuously new-born^. As soon as he was carried to his grave 
 in 1473, a search was instituted for the personage who had 
 been destined to succeed him. This was found to be an infant, 
 who established its title to the honour by appearing to remember 
 various articles which were the property of the Lama just de- 
 ceased, or rather were the infant's own property in earlier stages 
 
 ^ Cunningham's Laddk, p. 367. He is viewed as an incarnation 
 
 This Lama (Urgyan Binpoche), either of Amit^bha or of Manjusrf, 
 
 who was invited into Tibet, is His tutor was the strange Lama 
 
 said to have been an incarnation 'from the far west,' who may possi- 
 
 of the Buddha Amit^bha, the fourth bly have imported Christian ideas: 
 
 of the celestial Buddhas of that above, p. 265 ; and Journal of As. 
 
 region. Soc. xvi. 263. 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. 369. 4 Cunningham, as before, pp. 
 
 3 Also written Tsong Khapa. 368, 369. 
 
332 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 of existence. When the proofs of such identity were deemed 
 irrefragable, the new candidate was formally promoted to the 
 vacant chair : and in the fifth abbot of this series originated the 
 famous hierarchy of the Dalai-Lamas (in 1640). So fascinating 
 grew the theory of perpetual incarnation, that a fresh succession 
 of rival Lamas (also of the yellow order) afterwards took its rise 
 at Teshu-lambu, while the Dalai-Lamas were enthroned in 
 Lhassaj and at present^ every convent of importance, not in 
 Tibet only, but in distant parts of Tatary, is claiming for itself 
 a like prerogative. Each confraternity believes that the de- 
 parted abbot is still actually present with his subjects though 
 enshrouded in a difierent body. Conscious of the dark malignity 
 of demons, quivering at the thought of men who practise demon- 
 iacal arts and lead astray by their enchantments, these Tibet- 
 ians are ^ in bondage to fear ;' their only refuge is the presence 
 and superior holiness of one who, by his mastery over all the 
 adverse forces'^ of creation, is believed to rescue his true fol- 
 lowers from the rage of their oppressor. The religion of Tibet 
 is thus from day to day assuming all the characteristics of man- 
 worship^. Anxious cravings after some invincible protector 
 there impel the human spirit to fashion for itself a novel theory 
 of salvation ; and the sight of one who styles himself incarnate 
 deity excludes all living faith in God and in the things invisible. 
 From these remarks on characteristic differences between 
 the Fo-ism of China and the Lama-ism of other regions, I pass 
 forward to examine some fresh points which serve no less 
 directly to evince the fluctuating and elastic genius of the creed 
 we are reviewing. Buddhism then, as extant both in China 
 and Tibet, is not the Buddhism of Sakya-muni, nor the Bud- 
 dhism of the earliest race of his disciples. Primitive Buddhism, 
 there is little or no cause for doubting, was entirely atheistic'*. 
 
 ^ Journal of As. Soc. xvi. 254. olatry, &c. 
 
 2 ' The Lamas in Tatary are ^ * Durch diese vielen leibhaften 
 
 constantly exorcists and magicians, Gegenstande der Andacht ist die 
 
 sharing no doubt very often the buddhaistische Keligion in Tibet 
 
 creduhty of the people, but fre- ein wahrer Menschen-Cultus ge- 
 
 quently assisting faith in their worden, indem besonders ihre 
 
 superhuman faculties by jugglery geistlichen Ober-haupter wahrhaft 
 
 and fraud :' Ibid. p. 264. This gottlicher Verehrung sich erfreuen. 
 
 use of magic seems, howeyer,^ dis- Auch werden die irdischen Uber- 
 
 allowed in some other districts : reste jedes Ober-Lama's als Be- 
 
 for the Catechism of the Shamans, Uquien aufbewahrt und angebetet:' 
 
 ed. Neumann, p. 11 1, prohibits the Schott, as before, p. 33. 
 
 Buddhist monks from studying 4 Qf, above, pp. 162 sq. 
 *the works of Lao-tse' on demon- 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China, 333 
 
 As such its primary tenet led directly to the thought of ultimate 
 annihilation. There was nothing to receive the spirit of man 
 on her eventual extrication from sansdra, the world of appear- 
 ance ; and therefore instead of being absorbed as in the old 
 Brahmanical theology, and so escaping through absorption from 
 the fatal liability to repeated births, the elements of life were 
 all declared by early Buddhist doctors to be literally 'burnt 
 out,' — the spirit passed at length into extinction, or nirvana^. 
 Atheism was thus attaining its most dismal consummation in 
 proclaiming an abyss of universal void. 
 
 On the contrary, there often lingered in the mind of northern 
 Buddhists the idea of some great Being separable from this frail 
 and shadowy world, superior also to the highest of created en- 
 tities, and constituting in himself the only source of ultimate 
 felicity. The very Buddha who persisted in ignoring the Creator 
 and the Judge of men was sometimes elevated to this dignity ; 
 while the nirvana of his early followers, far too cold, too dreary, 
 and too abstract, was ere long invested by the popular imagina- 
 tion with a different class of attributes, nay, changed into a 
 paradise of inexhaustible enjoyment. In Nepal, and portions 
 also of Tibet, we find the traces of a still more definite and 
 systematic theology, yet there it had been borrowed, we have 
 reason to believe, from the adjacent Brahmanism^. By ^yq 
 spontaneous acts of wisdom and reflection, the self-existent Adi- 
 Buddha has projected from his own essence five intelligences of 
 the first order ('The celestial Buddhas') ; which in tvirn, by 
 their exertion of corresponding energies, give birth to other five 
 intelligences of the second order ('the Bodhisatwas')^ These 
 become creative agents in the hands of God, or serve as links 
 uniting him with all the lower grades of creaturely existence. 
 But to other countries lying within the circle of Buddhist 
 witchery this doctrine of spontaneous emanations is utterly un- 
 known, The Buddhas are, in every case, 'enlightened' men, 
 advancing upwards by the natural force of merit from one stage 
 of greatness to another, till at last they are exempted altogether 
 
 ^ This point has also been re- Nepal and of Tibet from the mys- 
 
 cently discussed by Mr. Max Miiller, tical system of the Hindd Tan- 
 
 Buddhism and Buddhist Pilgrims^ trists. Thence, for example, came 
 
 pp. 45 sq. Lend, 1857. See above, the 'filthy theory of the Buddhist 
 
 p. 165, and n. 4. Saktis,' or the female energies of 
 
 2 Prof. Wilsqn, in Journal of the Dhy^ni Buddhas: Cunnings 
 
 the Asiat. Soc. (1856), xvi. 255, ham's Laddk, pp, 366, 384. 
 
 256. The intermixture is still ^ ^ee Abel-E^musat, Melange* 
 
 further illustrated in the numerous Posthumes, p. 48, Paris, 1843. 
 elements derived by Buddhists of 
 
334 Christ and other Masters. [part III. 
 
 from tlie sad contingencies of human life. Tlie Bodhisatwas 
 (or, in Chinese, Fusas)^ are, again, incipient Buddhas; they 
 are all accredited competitors, approaching the possession of like 
 immunities and like distinctions ; they are rising by self-sacrifice 
 and through the salutary influence they exert upon their fellow- 
 men to that which forms the summit of all human efforts. Yet 
 this very goal which Buddhas have attained, and Bodhisatwas 
 are attaining, is to be the final destination of all sentient beings. 
 Every age produces an array of Bodhisatwas, and hereafter at 
 the winding up of universal nature, when its mighty revolutions 
 are complete, sansdra will have been utterly depopulated by the 
 gradual drafting of its tenants to the Buddha-sphere, i. e. by 
 their annihilation, in the language of philosophy, or by their 
 deification, in the language of the simple and unlettered. In 
 this system, therefore, it is plain that the idea of God, though 
 not expressly and in terms excluded, has been robbed of all its 
 force, its meaning, and its vitality; and hence, in spite of 
 rapturous invocations now and then addressed to a superior 
 Buddha, as identical with a supreme Intelligence, the Fo-ists of 
 the Middle Kingdom can be hardly said with any measure of 
 propriety to know or fear, to love or worship God. Their 
 ethical writings^ are devoid of reference to His being: they 
 contain no single precept on the duties which men owe to Him. 
 But is it then to be concluded that the Chinese Buddhists 
 are without a definite object of religious worship *? On the con- 
 trary, the empire is now thickly studded with their temples: 
 'they combine irreconcilable principles of atheism an<l polythe- 
 ism,' insomuch that it is easier Ho find a god than a man in 
 China^.' Towering high above the other images are three 
 colossal forms which re-appear in almost every temple. These are 
 either representations^ of a Buddha and two of his chief dis- 
 
 1 'Bodhisatwas' =P«-ii -s<x- fa, The most that we can say of the 
 then Pii-ti-sa and finally Fu-sa. 'God-like nature' is, that it dwells 
 In the estimation of the ordinary 'in an atmosphere of eternal com- 
 Fo-ist a Pma is a god, one inmate placency and repose ; no greater 
 in the crowded pantheon : Schott, sympathy [being shewn] with good 
 p. 23. than with evil, no displeasure 
 
 2 e. g. the Catechism of the Sha- against sin, no manifestation of 
 manSj passim. The Buddhist monk approval of virtue.' Sir J. Bowring, 
 when called to his devotions by Kingdom and People of Siam,i. 2 g 4, 
 the sound of the wooden bell is Lond. 1857. 
 
 to utter a wish that it may 'glorify ^ Medhurst, p. 219. 
 
 the religion,' and that 'all living * Wilson, as before, p. 25^. 
 
 creatures may become enlightened' Abel-R^musat {Melanges Posthu- 
 
 (p. 101): but there is no mention mesj p. 26) has cited a prayer 
 
 of any duty which men owe to God. where he thinks that worship is 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 335 
 
 ciples; or else of three Buddhas past, present, and future; or in 
 other cases they are meant to symbolise the primitive Buddha, 
 S£kya-muni, as allied with Dharma, the religion he had founded, 
 and with Sangga, the community or confraternity of religious 
 men. It is, however, most remarkable, as again exemplifying 
 the multiformity of Buddhism, that the * Three Precious Ones' 
 of modern China are not identical with the ^ Three Supremacies' 
 of somewhat earlier generations. Sakya-muni has indeed his 
 constant votaries not only as the Shakya-Thubba of Ladak, and 
 as the Kodom or Gautama of other regions, but also as the She- 
 kia and the Fo of Chinese Buddhism. Yet his fame appears to 
 have been long declining even where the solemn sacrifice of 
 flowers and perfumes still continues to be offered; and here- 
 after, on the expiration of five-and-twenty centuries from the 
 present time^, he is expected to be absolutely superseded by a 
 fresh and more benignant Buddha, called Maitreya or Mi-le. 
 It was probably a consequence of this foreboding as to his 
 eventual deposition that led in China and in some .adjacent 
 districts to the worship of three other objects, scarcely inferior to 
 Gautama himself, yet all of them unknown to the original 
 Buddhists^ Such are Amitabha (0-me-to^), Avalokiteswara 
 (Kwan-shi-in*" or Padma-pani), and Manju-sri^ (Jamya or Jam- 
 rendered to Buddha as the first pure Sanskrit (= * lotus in his 
 member of a triad. The form is hand,' or 'lotusbearer'), and is said 
 this: * Adoration k Bouddha^ ado- to accord in signification with the 
 ration h. Dharma, adoration a Tibetian name Chakna-padma : 
 Sangga^^ to which is annexed the Schott, p. 30, n. i. Major Cunning- 
 Brahmanical Owi. See above, p. 195. ham, on the contrary, identifies 
 
 ^ Schott, p. 13; Bowring's Siam, Avalokiteswara with the Tibetian 
 I. 305 ; Sangermano's Burmese Chanrazik, and Regards Padma- 
 Empire, p. 85. P^i^i as a different and still later 
 
 2 Wilson, as before, pp. 241, 242. B6dhisatwa: Laddk, pp. 362, 363, 
 Two out of the three are first 3^3- 
 
 noticed in the account of the pil- ^ Another form, also of Sanskrit 
 
 grimage of Fa-hian (at the close of origin, is Manju-gosha. The first 
 the 4th century): Cunningham's seems to indicate a being of 'mild 
 Laddk, pp. 362, 363. or gentle majesty;' the second a 
 
 ^ The Chinese modification of being of *mild or gentle voice:' 
 the Sanskrit Amitabha ( = *un- Schott, p. 40, n. i. The Chinese 
 measured, infinite Light'). corruption of Manju-sri is Wen- 
 
 * Kwan-shi-in = * world-inspect- choo; while the Tibetian form is 
 ing Sound,' a mistaken rendering Jam-pal. According to one ver- 
 of the Sanskrit avalokita-wwara^ sion (Lassen, iii. 777) Manju-sri 
 'world-inspecting Lord.' The mis- was a veritable man, by whom 
 take arose from not perceiving the tbe conversion of Nep^l to Bud- 
 fusion of a -f * into e, and so read- dhism had been originally attempt- 
 ing siiJara' sound' for is2£?ara 'lord.' ed, in the tenth century after 
 The other title Padma-pdni is also Christ. 
 
336 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 pal). The last, though chiefly occupied, as men believe, in the 
 diffusion of religious truth, and in such of6.ce bearing in his 
 hand a naked sword, the symbol of his power and his acumen, 
 has not hitherto absorbed so large a share of popular devotion^ 
 as the two with whom he is immediately associated. His 
 province is the world of intellect; while Kwan-shi-in, the 
 second of these three divinities, is the author of all joy and 
 happiness in the family-circle, and has even been deputed to 
 administer the government of the whole earth. In many 
 districts of Tibet, which seems to claim his more indulgent 
 patronage, he is incarnate, under the name of Padma-pani, in 
 the person of the Dalai-Lama : and perhaps no cry so often 
 strikes the ear of travellers in that country as Om I Mani- 
 padme I Hum, ^ Glory to the Lotus-bearer, Hum^!' Both there 
 and in Mongolia, this far-stretching potentate is represented 
 sometimes with innumerable eyes and hands, and sometimes with 
 as many as ten heads, all bearing crowns and rising conically one 
 above another'' : but in every part of China the imagery em- 
 ployed is far less cumbrous and ornate ; and what is more re- 
 markable, this single tenant of the Buddha-world, in violation of 
 a law by which distinctions as to sex are not perpetuated in the 
 most exalted stage of being, is invested with a female figure, 
 and with feminine decorations*. 
 
 High above the head or heads of Padma-pani, and so 
 forming the very apex of that sacred cone or pyramid, is seen 
 the visage of his great superior, Amitabha, who, radiant with 
 the glories of a perfect Buddha^, is perhaps the most revered of 
 all the objects worshipped in the Fo-ist temples. It is probable 
 
 ^ Schott, p. 41. dem Laien eben so gelaufig als 
 
 2 Mani-padme is a misreading dem Geistlichen, und behauptet 
 
 or corruption of the Sanskrit Fad- sich neben seinen anderen vor- 
 
 ma-pdni. The whole of this invo- schriftsmassigen Gebeten.' Schott, 
 
 cation, alluding to the way in p. 61. 
 
 which Padma-p^ni was first re- ^ Schott, p. 45 ; Wilson, as be- 
 
 vealed, is said to have been sug- fore, p. 242. 
 
 gested directly from heaven, as ^ Ibid. Perhaps this notion 
 
 the bearer of innumerable bless- may be borrowed from the theory 
 
 ings to the human family: Abel- of Buddha- saktls, or female ener- 
 
 Eemusat, Melanges Posthumes, gies, which is, and has been for 
 
 p. 403: *Neubekehrte Fursten der some ages, current both in Nepal 
 
 Mongolei lernten vor Allem diese and in Tibet : see Cunningham's 
 
 Formel beten, vermuthlich damit Laddk, p. 364. 
 
 der heilige Schauer, den sie ihnen ^ ' Den Chinesen ist nun A-mi- 
 
 einflossen soUte, das Feld ihres ta, (0-me-to) ein voUendeter Bud- 
 
 Glaubens desto fruchtbarer machte ; dha, wie Sakjamuni, aber von 
 
 und noch heutzutage ist sie in bei- diescm bestimmt geschieden ;' 
 
 den Landern [Tibet and Mongolia] Schott, p. 49. 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 337 
 
 that lie was once regarded only as an image of the absent 
 Sakya-muni, who on finishing his salutary work is thought to 
 have retreated for a while into some deep abstraction, without 
 absolutely ceasing to exist. Amitabha may thus have been to 
 the originator of the Buddhist creed exactly what his offspring 
 and co-regent, Padma-pani, will in course of ages be to him. 
 So great, however, is the present dignity of Amitabha, that all 
 the other gods of China are apparently outstripped by him, and 
 well-nigh thrown into the shaded 
 
 To him the Fo-ist looks for grace, for mercy, for deliverance 
 from all kinds of evil. Starting like the previous Buddhas 
 from a low position, he has worked his way, it is believed, 
 through a succession of new births into the loftiest sphere of the 
 invisible regions. There he sits enthroned for ever on a lotus, 
 his celestial court comprising an array of Pusas (or advanced 
 competitors for Buddha-ship), and closer still in place and 
 honour to his own unrivalled majesty, appearing his chief- 
 minister and disciple, the co-regent Padma-pani '*. 
 
 The main features of this paradise of Amitabha are deserving 
 of a more extended notice, partly on the ground that they are 
 altogether irreconcilable with the early creed of Buddhism^, and 
 partly as suggesting a comi)arison with images that sometimes 
 meet us on the page of sacred prophecy. ^ This paradise includes 
 within it every thing most noble and most sumptuous ; and the 
 city of the gods is all constructed of gold and precious stones, 
 arranged with perfect art. The atmosphere is ever redolent of 
 spices, and resounds with blissful harmonies. The streams 
 again move forward like a tender strain of music. Round about 
 are stately trees of silver with branches of pure gold, all covered 
 by a rich variety of precious stones and the most gorgeous fruits. 
 The spaces also are occupied by trees of eight different sorts, 
 
 ^ ^Mii &&mem. unendlichenLicUte * Amitabha soil ein vollendeter 
 
 [the meaning of Amitabha] hat er Buddha sein, obschon ein Solcher 
 
 Sakjamuni selber fas ganz verdun- nicht einmal vom Himmel aus an 
 
 kelt.' Ihid, dem Erlosungswerke ferneren An- 
 
 2 Ibid. p. 50. theil nimmt. Er und die seligen 
 
 3 Schott, who hag translated Bewohner seines Keiches sollen 
 largely from a Chinese work in- ewig leben, obschon dies einem 
 tended to excite men's faith in Axiome des Buddhaismus geradezu 
 the Tsing-fu (or paradise of Ami- widerspricht. Die im Tsing-t'u 
 tflbha), says with perfect truth Wiedergebornen leben dort. ..mit 
 that very much of the description, Pusa's zusammen, siud im Besitz 
 and the whole theory respecting derselben Gaben, im Genusse der- 
 this Buddha, is in direct contra- selben Vortheile, und doch keine 
 diction to the creed of Gautama. eigentlichen Pusa's.' (p. 57.) 
 
 H. 22 
 
338 Christ and other Masters. [paut hi. 
 
 consisting each of two different jewels_, on whose leaves and on 
 the lotus-flowers there growing in the midst, innumerable seats 
 have been provided for the Buddhas. A golden vault respond- 
 ing to the breath of every zephyr in celestial harmonies extends 
 its shadow over all the trees, and at their feet flows forth in 
 gentle murmurs man/ a copious stream of water, holy, living, 
 wonder-working. The tenants of this paradise are all without 
 distinction of rank or sex^j they all are equal, glorious in form 
 and aspect, and exempted from the possibility of future births 
 into a world of misery. In the centre of the region is a grove 
 consisting of the goodliest trees ; where peerless in his beauty 
 and resplendent as the evening sky reposes the great Buddha 
 Amitabha, a peacock and a lion forming the supporters of his 
 throne. His right hand, the dispenser of his grace, is white, 
 and rests upon his lap : while in his left hand, he is holding a 
 dark vase of holy water. E-ound about him sit the Bodhisat- 
 was, his elect, who offer up their prayers for the well-being and 
 conversion of all creatures ^' 
 
 The possession of this supreme felicity is said to have 
 resulted in all cases, not as in the primitive Buddhism^ from 
 ascetic habits painfully acquired by free submission to an almost 
 endless series of new births, but simply from unbounded trust 
 in Amitabha, and unceasing prayer to him in his capacity of 
 champion and re warder. He swore, it is believed in China, 
 that * if any being in all the ten worlds should, after repeating 
 his name, fail to attain life in his kingdom, he would cease to be 
 a god'^.' The process of salvation was now represented, in ac- 
 cordance with the earth-ward tendency of men addressed, as 
 something far more easy and indulgent than was commonly 
 imagined. * It requires no whole day, but only a few instants 
 every morning. Yv^hat it asks for is, one prayer \0-me-to Foe, 
 or * Amitabha Buddha'], ten times repeated. It is, therefore, 
 burdensome to no man: it will interfere with no man's social 
 
 1 In a different description of without vexation,' &c. 
 
 the paradise of 0-me-to (Amit^b- '^ Translated from a Mongolian ; 
 
 ha) communicated in Medhurst's source in Schott, pp. 52, 53. The , 
 
 China, p. 207, it is said that ♦ there Chinese legends on the subject, 
 
 are no women; for the women which, as he observes, are very 
 
 who live in that country are first numerous, preserve the same 
 
 changed into men.' The legend general outlines, but, as might 
 
 then continues : ' The inhabitants hav3 been anticipated from the 
 
 are produced from the lotus-flower, genius of the people, all the details 
 
 and have pure and fragrant bodies, are less florid and grotesque, 
 
 fair and well-formed countenances, ^ Cf, Schott, pp. 57, 58^ 
 
 with hearts full of wisdom, and * Medhurst. Ihid. 
 
CHAP. I.] Eeligiom of China. 339 
 
 duties, nor his worldly business Yes ! it is tfie work of an 
 
 instant every morning, and nevertheless it brings advantages 
 that are to last for all eternity \' Faith, however, is impera- 
 tively needed in the human subject ere this saving work can be 
 achieved. Without it there ensues no movement in the right 
 direction, just as when the will refuses to exert its force upon 
 the bodily organism. *A Buddha can deliver all creation, yet 
 is powerless in respect of men who have no faith ^. ' The vilest 
 sinner, on the contrary, who is possessed of this most efficacious 
 principle, will rise at once superior to the fear of death, and will 
 be rescued from the pains of hell. If at the hour of dissolution 
 he have strength enough to supplicate the mercy of 0-ifne-tOy 
 and can repeat the supplication ten times, Hhe images of hell 
 are sure to be transformed into a lotus ; and the sinner, snatched 
 from ruin, will obtain admission into paradise. The Buddha,' 
 it is added, ^can efiect all this, because his mercy and his 
 wonder-working power are both indefinitely great ^.' 
 
 The reader may be tempted to infer, on meeting with this 
 very remarkable language, that the authors of the documents in 
 question were not altogether strangers to Christianity itself, 
 whose tenets they appear to be adopting and distorting. And 
 in favour of such interpretation is the fact, that their idea of 
 absolute faith in one divinity as tJie condition of deliverance 
 from all forms of evil, was unknown to every other creed of 
 heathendom, until, in times comparatively recent, it was also 
 manifested in the Krishna worship of the Brahmans, and per- 
 verted by them into pretexts for unbounded laxity and self- 
 indulgence'*. Every one, moreover, is disposed to grant that 
 the Chinese conception, as here indicated, is quite foreign to the 
 ethics and religion of Sakyar-muni, and in truth was a production 
 of far later ages ^. 
 
 ^ Translated by Scbott from the hei seinen Lehzeiten that, das 
 
 Tsing-fu-uen, as before, p. 6=). wird ihm tausendfaltig vergolten." 
 
 2 IhicL p. 8 1. Warum also wartet man bis an 
 
 3 Ibid. p. 94. A discussion seinen Tod, mid bittet Andere, 
 follows as to whether the inter- statt seiner zu beten ? ' 
 
 cession of the living is available * See above, pp. 182, 234; and 
 
 for the comfort or recovery of the the more recent consideration of 
 
 dead. *In den SiUras steht ge- the subject in Weber's Indische 
 
 schrieben: "Die verdienstlichen Skizzen, pp. 92 sq. He is now 
 
 Handlungen, welche Andere nach even more persuaded that Christ- 
 
 seinem Tode fur den Menschen ianity was at the bottom of those 
 
 thun, erwerben nur eins von thorough changes in the-old beliefs 
 
 sieben [7. e. the harvest is dispro- of India (p. 94). 
 
 portionate to the seed sown] ; was ^ Schott, p. 58, who refers these 
 
 aber der Mensch fur sich selbst modifications to a period, 'in 
 
 99 -2 
 
340 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 Possibly, when some adventurous heralds of the Gospel, in 
 the seventh and following centuries after Christ, began Ho turn 
 their faces towards heaven, and, travelling with the Book of 
 Truth ^,' surmounted the vast obstacles that severed China from 
 the western world, the influence they exerted in the presence of 
 a creed so flexible as Eo-ism, was more deep and lasting than is 
 generally believed. Or it may be that in still later ages, when 
 the courts of the Great Khan were thronged by ardent repre- 
 sentatives of all known religions ; when the Christian preachers 
 in particular were ^commanded to attend him and bring with 
 them their Book^ ;' and when, as the result of this indulgence, 
 both the Latins and Nestorians dared to plant their missions 
 even in Peking itself, the eastern capital of the empire, some of 
 the vibrations thus excited in the Chinese mind had led to an 
 occasional adoption of Christian phraseology, analogous to what 
 is happening in the Tae-piiig rebels of the present day. 
 
 But whatever be the true account of the phenomena to 
 which I have adverted, it is obvious that the actual changes in 
 the Fo-ist system did not penetrate below the surface. Faith 
 in Amitabha bears the slightest possible relation to faith in 
 Christ the Righteous. The phantastic paradise of Amitabha 
 has no common ground with that which Christians see pre- 
 figured on the glowing page of the Apocalypse. In both those 
 heathen parallels the most essential element is one that has re- 
 ceded most of all into the background. Holiness of heart and 
 life is not proclaimed in them as the concomitant of genuine 
 faith, nor as the one condition of eventual blessedness ; but, on 
 the contrary, the novel tenet has been there adopted with the 
 plain avowal that by it mankind will be exonerated altogether 
 
 welcher man selbst den Geist- detail) M. Hue, Le Christianisme 
 
 lichen keine grossartige Selbst- en Chine, i. 48 — 93, have reviewed 
 
 verlaugnung nnd keine ange- the whole question. But, how- 
 
 strengte Meditation mehr zutrauen ever that particular controversy 
 
 konnte.' may be settled, there is no doubt 
 
 ^ This phrase occurs in the fa- that soon after a.d. 782 (the date 
 
 mous Syro- Chinese inscription, of the inscription) Christianity 
 
 the genuineness of which has did find its way as far as China 
 
 been disputed for more than two through the wide- spread influence 
 
 centuries : see, on the one side, of ' Nestorian,' or Syrian, mission- 
 
 Abel-Eemusat, Nouveaux Melan- aries (Hue, i, 98 sq.). 
 ges Asiat. 11. 189 sq., and on the ^ gee the narrative in Marco 
 
 other. Prof. Neumann, in the Polo, Bk. 11. eh. ii. (p. 167, ed. 
 
 JahrMchcr filr wissenschaft. Kri- Wright) and Hue, i. 367 sq. The 
 
 «i/c (i829),pp. 592 sq. Mr. Kesson, title of M. Hue's chapter is 'Le 
 
 The Cross and the Dragon, pp. 16 Catholicisme a Peking pendant le 
 
 sq. Lond. 1854, and (more in treizibme si^cle.' 
 
CHAP. I.] Religions of China. 841 
 
 from tlie stern injunctions of the moral law. On sifting all 
 such specious but entirely hollow approximations to the doc- 
 trine of our blessed Lord, one is continually reminded of the 
 daring counterfeits disseminated far and wide by the abettors of 
 the earliest heresies. The solifidianism of Hindustan and China 
 is the solifidianism dissected and denounced by the believing 
 Irenseus^ It is alien from the spirit of pure and Catholic 
 Christianity. Attempts to mix what is incapable of admixture, 
 were accordingly resisted and defeated here and there upon the 
 very threshold. Men discovered that they could not ^sew a 
 piece of new cloth on an old garment :' concord or consistency 
 was felt to be impossible : ^the new piece taketh away from the 
 old, and the rent is made worse.' 
 
 It is, indeed, the clear opinion of those modern writers who 
 have had the largest opportunity of tracing out the principles of 
 Buddhism to their practical results, that while it has appeared 
 10 flourish most in Birmah and Siam, its course in China has 
 for centuries been one of retrogression and decay. The very 
 monks of Fo-ism, who are nominally bound by far more stringent 
 regulations than the rest of the community, are said to go beyond 
 their pupils in the puerility of their superstitions and the im- 
 morality of their lives. ^The ignorance, selfishness, chicanery, 
 mendacity, mendicancy, and idleness of the bonzes cannot be 
 exaggerated,' — such is the deliberate judgment of one^ who 
 spent his days in China, chiefly in the hope of elevating the 
 moral and religious status of the Chinese people. And even if 
 
 ^ 'Quapropter nee ulterius cu- to Buddhism is its selfishness.... 
 
 rarent eos \i.e. prophetas] hi, qui A bonze seems to care nothing 
 
 in eum [Simonem] et in Helenam about the condition of those who 
 
 ejus spem habeant, et ut liberos surround him : he makes no effort 
 
 agere qusB velint : secundum enim for their elevation or improve- 
 
 ipsius gratiam salvari homines, sed ment. He scarcely reproves their 
 
 non aecundum operas justas.' Iren. sins, or encourages their virtues. 
 
 Contra Hcereses^ Lib. i. c. xxiii. § 3 He is self-satisfied with his own 
 
 (ed. tStieren). superior holiness, and would not 
 
 ^ Bee Gutzlaff's communication, move his finger to remove any 
 
 which he sent to Europe not long mass of human misery.' Wuttke, 
 
 before his death, in the Journal of by a different process, comes to a 
 
 the As. Soc. XVI. 73 sq. His tes- result substantially the same : 
 
 timony is echoed on the whole by * Thatsachhch hat der Buddhismus 
 
 that of Sir John Bowring, who in China alien Geist verloren, ist 
 
 cannot be charged with disparag- faul und dumpf geworden : ein 
 
 ing Buddhism in order to exagge- ganz mechanisches Formel-wesen, 
 
 rate the importance of Christian- dem Chine sen so natiirlich, hat die 
 
 ity. He writes [Kingdom and Stelle der gewaltigen Ideen einge- 
 
 People of Siam, i. 297, Lond. 1857): nommen.' (11. 84.) 
 *The real and invincible objection 
 
84j2 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 it be contended tliat the Christian zeal of men like Gutzlaff 
 caused them here and there to overcolour their descriptions of 
 the blindness and the inefficiency of Fo-ism, no one will deny 
 that its material strength has long been rapidly declining, and 
 the outward glory of the system vanishing from day to day. 
 The Fo-ist temples *are now mostly deserted, and in a state of 
 ruins ; the votaries fewer and fewer, and the offerings very 
 sparing \' What may be the future of this mighty empire, 
 what the changes that may supervene hereafter on the agitation 
 of the present times, it were not easy to conjecture. The 
 Christian missionary may have still occasion to sit down and 
 cry despairing on the frontier, *0 that the everlasting gates of 
 rock would open f but one fact appears to have been well esta- 
 blished, that in this particular 'China during the last twenty 
 or forty years has undergone a very great change, and is still 
 verging to a more impoi-tant crisis^.' 
 
 I am far, however, from contending, with some Christian 
 writers, that the vast dissemination of Buddhist tenets was 
 in former days so utterly adverse to the higher interests of 
 humanity. To say of this religion that its votaries are people 
 * whose business is to do nothing, to think on nothing, and to 
 live as much as possible on nothing^,' is a representation meagre, 
 hasty, and one-sided. When Buddhism started on its northern 
 missions, full of youthful hope and unextinguishable ardour, we 
 behold it shaping many a savage horde into a peaceful con- 
 fraternity ; it quenched the violence of domestic strife ; it 
 sheathed the scimitars of the bloodthirsty Mongols, who were 
 bent on carrying desolation to the very heart of Europe; it 
 planted convents, and therewith conventual schools and libraries 
 in regions heretofore oppressed by every kind of demonolatry 
 and darkness; it carried some imperfect elements of Hindu 
 civilisation far across the sandy wastes of Tatary, and shed some 
 glimmerings of a higher light within the borders of Siberia; and 
 even if the proselytes it made have far too frequently relapsed 
 into their old condition, and so proved the utter impotence of 
 Buddhism to effect a permanent and radical change"^, the partial 
 
 ^ Gutzlaff, as above, p. 91. have invariably betrayed a most 
 
 2 Ibid. How far the struggles decided hostility to Fo-ism, its 
 
 now proceeding may affect the doctors, and its images. 
 
 ultimate position of Chinese Bud- ^ Neumann, Pref. to the Cate- 
 
 dhism is also matter of deep in- chism of the Shamans, pp. xxiii, 
 
 terest to those who watch the xxiv. 
 
 fortunes of the Middle Kingdom: * See above, pp. 168, 249. 
 
 for it is well known that the rebels 
 
CHAP. I.] Eeligions of Chin%. 843 
 
 benefit resulting from its propagation ought on no account to 
 be forgotten. Buddhism should in fact be measured, not by 
 Christian, but by heathen standards ; and when so regarded, it 
 will, in its palmier days, appear almost to justify the startling 
 eulogy bestowed upon it by a modern writer, Avhen he speaks of 
 Buddhism as the * Christianity of the East^' The stress which 
 it originally placed on ethics in their social and political aspect ; 
 its contempt for j)i*inciples which long created an impassable 
 gulf between the different ordei's of Hindu society; its fuller 
 recognition of the rights of woman; its mild and inoffensive 
 spirit, its equanimity under suffering, its forgiveness of injuries, 
 are some of the peculiar features which adorn its moral code. 
 Instead of ministering" to all the grosser passions, like the 
 theories of Islam, it carried its appeal directly to the intellectual 
 and contemplative j^rovince of man's nature ; instead of finding 
 its chief stimulus in struggles after fame and in the offer of 
 material prosperity, it preached the vanity of earthly goods, the 
 hollowness of human approbation ; instead of teaching man to 
 hoard the produce of his industry, it not unfrequently suggested 
 the devotion of superfluous treasure to the founding of a refuge 
 for the blind, the destitute, the crippled, the diseased. Some 
 kings are mentioned^, who, starting from the worship of the 
 
 ^ *0n a designe le bouddhisme Trois Precieux [the Buddha^ the 
 
 par le nom de Ghristianisme de Sang g a, or assembly of religious, 
 
 VOrientf et, k la convenance prfes, and the J)harma, or Law]. De- 
 
 cette exageration exprime assez puis son av^nement au trone 
 
 bien I'importanee des services jusqu'au moment de sa mort, nulle 
 
 qu'il a rendus k I'humanite : ' Abel- parole inconvenante ne s'eehappa 
 
 E^musat, Melanges Posthumes, p. de sa bouche, et la colere ne 
 
 237. rougit point son visage. Jamais 
 
 ^ See the Dharma contrasted in 11 n'eut I'idee de faire du mal a 
 
 this particular with the Kurdn by ses sujets ni de tuer une mouche 
 
 Major Cunningham, Bhilsa Topes, ou une fourmi. Dans la crainte 
 
 pp. 53, 54. de causer la mort aux insectes 
 
 ^ The following picture of a qui vivent dans I'eau, il ne per- 
 
 model Buddhist king is well worth mettait pas d'en donner a boire 
 
 transcription. It is taken from aux elephants ou aux chevaux 
 
 the Vie et Voyages de Hiouen- avant de I'avoir soigneusement 
 
 Thsang, ed. Julien, pp. 204, 205 : filtree. Quant aux hommes du 
 
 * Suivant la tradition, le trone royaume, il leur defendait sdvere- 
 
 6tait occupe, il y a soixante ans, ment de tuer des animaux. De 
 
 par un roi nomme Kiai-ji {Gild- la vient que les betes fe'roces 
 
 ditya): il etait done de grands s'attachaient aux hommes, les 
 
 talents et possedait de vastes con- loups oubliaient leur fureur; la 
 
 naissances. II etait humain, af- paix regnait dans I'interieur des 
 
 fectueux, bienfaisant et devout frontiferes, et des presages de 
 
 pour le bonheur du peuple. II bonheur 6clataient chaque jour.' 
 
 etait pleiQ de respect pour les Another king of the same name, 
 
S44 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 * Three Precious Ones,' had carried their philanthropy and 
 tenderness for every kind of animal life to most absurd ex- 
 tremes, and even were accustomed to dole out in alms not only 
 the immense accumulations in the royal coffers, but the whole 
 of their personal ornaments. 
 
 It would, perhaps, be difficult to single out a Buddhist of 
 any period in the range of history who manifested such a high 
 and generous nature as the pilgrim, Hiuan-Thsang, to whom I 
 have before alluded. The best j)ortion of his life was all con- 
 sumed in perilous wanderings, undertaken with the aim of 
 rescuing the Dharma from the errors which had overgrown it, 
 and of recommending it on every side to the affections of his 
 fellow-men. In these researches he was able to collect a multi- 
 tude of sacred writings, which on his return to China he 
 translated, in concert with a band of his disciples, into the 
 language of his native country. When the hour of death was 
 fast approaching, he commanded all his -worldly goods to be 
 distributed among the poor ; he caused the votive statues to be 
 fashioned; he required the brethren of his convent to recite the 
 usual prayers. At last his friends are all invited to assemble 
 round his couch and take a joyous leave of his impure and 
 despicable body,' which, after having played its part, is lost to 
 him for ever. ^I hope,' he adds, Hhat all the merits I have 
 gained by my good works may now accrue to the advantage of 
 other people. My wish is to be born with them into the heaven 
 of the Touchitas (the blessed), to be admitted into the family of 
 Mi-le (Maitreya), and to serve this Buddha of the future, who 
 is full of tenderness and of affection. When my fate is to 
 descend afresh into the world, and undergo another series of 
 existences, I hope at every new birth to do my duty towards 
 the Buddha with unwearying zeal, and ultimately to arrive in 
 turn at the supreme Intelligence.' He then gave utterance to 
 his deep regrets on feeling that the world was fast receding 
 from his grasp ; but at the very moment of dissolution, when 
 his pupils asked him, * Master, have you really obtained the 
 
 and contemporaneous with the le champ du bonheur, je les regarde 
 
 traveller himself, was in the comme conservees a jamais. Je 
 
 habit of convoking general as- desire, dans toutes mes existences 
 
 semblies, and there distributing futures, amasser ainsi d'immenses 
 
 all bis wealth among his subjects. richesses pour faire I'aumdne aux 
 
 On one occasion he gave away in hommes, et obtenir les dix facultes 
 
 alms the whole of His royal orna- divines dans toute leur pldnitudo. 
 
 ments. 'Maitenant que j'ai pu (p. 256.) 
 (par Taumdne) les deposer dans 
 
CHAP. I.] 
 
 Beligions of China. 
 
 345 
 
 right of being born into the assembly of Mi-le T his quivering 
 lips responded *Yes;' and so he yielded up the ghost ^ 
 
 A spectacle resembling this in many of the outward circum- 
 stances, yet presenting also many a deep and touching contrast, 
 was beheld soon afterwards within the walls of a secluded 
 convent in our own Northumbria. It was the death-scene of 
 the Venerable Bede. He also was the brightest luminary of 
 the sphere in which he moved; for though his creed may in 
 some few particulars have been alloyed by elements of thought 
 and feeling at variance with the genius of primitive Christianity, 
 his heart was ever true in its allegiance to our heavenly Father, 
 and he died receiving as the end of his faith the crown of glory 
 that fadeth not away. The days and years of Bede, like those 
 of Hiuan-Thsang, had been devoted mainly to the spread of 
 sacred literature, and when his strength was failing and his 
 peaceable career was gliding to its close, we see him in a crowded 
 
 ^ *Puis il leur dit: **Le mo- 
 ment de ma mort approche; d^j^ 
 mon esprit s'afaisse et semble me 
 quitter. II faut promptement dis- 
 tribuer en aumones mes vetements 
 et mes richesses, faire fabriquer 
 des statues et charger des religieux 
 de reciter des prieres." Le vingt- 
 troisieme jour, on donna un repas 
 aux pauvres et Ton distribua des 
 anm6nes. . Le meme jour, il or- 
 donna h. un mouleur nomme Song- 
 kia-tchi. d'elever, dans le palais 
 Kia-cheoU'tien, une statue de VIn- 
 telligence (B6dhi); apres quoi, il 
 invita la multitude du convent, 
 les traducteurs adjoints et ses dis- 
 ciples "a dire joyeusement adieu 
 a ce corps impur et m^prisable 
 de Hioiien-Thsang qui, ay ant fini 
 son r61e, ne m^ritait plus de sub- 
 sister longtemps. Je desire, ajou- 
 ta-t-il, voir reverser sur les autres 
 hommes les merites que j'ai acquis 
 par mes bonnes oeuvres ; naitre, 
 avec eux, dans le ciel des Touchi- 
 tas; ^tre admis dans la famille 
 de Mi-le (Maitreya) et servir ce 
 Bouddha plein de tendresse et d' 
 affection. Quand je redescendrai 
 sur la terre pour parcourir d'autres 
 existences, je desire, a chaque 
 naissanoe uouvelle, remplir avec 
 
 un zele sans bornes mes devoirs 
 envers le Bouddha, et arriver enfin 
 a V Intelligence transcendante {An- 
 outtara samyak sombodhi)." Apres 
 avoir fait ces adieux, il se tut et 
 entra en meditation; puis, de sa 
 languemourante, il laissa dchapper 
 d'amers regrets, en sentant qu'il 
 ne jouissait plus du monde des 
 yeux (de la facu]te de voir), du 
 monde de la pensee (de la faculty 
 de penser), du monde de la connaiS' 
 sauce qui nait de la vue (de la con- 
 naissance des objets sensibles), du 
 monde de la connaissance qui nait 
 de Vesprit (de le perception des 
 choses spirituelles), et qu'il ne 
 poss^dait point la plenitude de 1' 
 Intelligence.^ The 'Master of the 
 Law' then uttered two gdthds, as- 
 pirations to Maitreya tathdgata. 
 For some time he continued mo- 
 tionless and took no food. At 
 last, 'au milieu de la nuit, ses 
 disciples lui demanderent: "Mal- 
 tre, avez vous enfin obtenu de 
 naitre au milieu de I'assemblee 
 de Maitreya?" *'Oui," repondit- 
 il, d'une voix defaillante. A ce 
 mot sa respiration s'affaiblit de 
 plus en plus, et, au bout de quel- 
 ques instants, son dme s'^vanuit.' 
 Ibid. pp. 344 sq. 
 
o4G Christ and other Masters. [part ill. 
 
 circle of affectionate pupils, eager to imbibe the treasures that 
 continued to pour forth from his capacious memory. Among 
 his brother-presbyters he also parted the small remnant of his 
 worldly substance, * giving with much love and joy what he 
 had previously received from God.' The tears of the bystanders 
 were at length beginning to flow fast; for each of them perceived 
 that Bede, the master-spirit of their thriving confraternity, had 
 girded up his loins to die; yet sorrow was in their case all 
 transmuted into joy, when they remembered that the spirits of 
 the just are in the hands of the Omnipotent, and Christ the 
 risen Lord of dead as well as living. ^ They rejoiced,' is the 
 account of an eye-witness, Svhen he said, "It is time that I re- 
 turned to Him who made me, who created me, and formed me 
 out of nothing. I have had a long life upon the earth; the 
 merciful Judge has also been pleased to order for me a happy life. 
 The time of my departure is at hand, for I have a desire to depart 
 and to be with Christ. " And with many such like remarks he 
 passed the day until eventide. Then the boy, whom we have 
 already mentioned, said to him, ** Still one sentence, dear master, 
 remains unwritten." He replied, "Write quickly." After a 
 little while, the boy said, "Now the sentence is finished." He 
 answered, "You have spoken the truth — it is indeed finished. 
 Raise my head in your hands, for it pleases me much to recline 
 opposite to that holy place of mine, on which I used to pray, 
 so that, while resting there, I may call upon God my Father." 
 And being placed upon the pavement of his cell, he said, "Glory 
 be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost" — and 
 as soon as he had named the name of the Holy Spirit, he breathed 
 out his own spirit, and so departed to the kingdom of heaven ^' 
 
 ^ Beda died a.d. 735, about will be found in Mr. Stevenson's 
 
 seventy years later than Hiuan- * Preface to Beda,' pp. xv. sq. 
 
 Thsang. The most accurate ver- Lond. 1853. 
 sion of this narrative of Cuthbert 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 Religions of Avierioa, particularly the Mexican, 
 
 •Darin besteht eben die Bedeutung der Amerikanisclien Eeligionen, 
 dass sie mehr als andere, wenigstens mehr als andere Eeligionen 
 von Kultnrvolkern, das primitive und unabgeschwachte Heidenthum 
 darstellen/ 
 
 Vagueness of American traditions. Languages. Origin of the Tribes. 
 
 Proofs of foreign influences. Two classes. 
 § 1. The wild Tribes. Fetishism. Worship of the heavenly bodies. 
 
 Pantheism. Doctrine of a Great Spirit. The system really dualistic. 
 
 The worship chiefly deprecative. Its gloomy aspect. Doctrine of 
 
 Manitoes. 
 § 2. The demi-civilised Tribes ^ especially the Mexican. Ancient 
 
 civilisation. General character of Mexican influence. Monotheism. 
 
 Teo-tl. Traces of a Supreme Spirit. Tezcatlipoca. Iluitzilopochtli. 
 
 Meanings of the Serpent-symbol. Terrible aspect of Aztec worship. 
 
 Human sacriflces. Alleged resemblance to Hebraism. Sacred Triad. 
 
 Quetzalcoatl. Symbol of the cross. Traditions of a Deluge. 
 
 It is now established that the eastern promontories of the New 
 "World were sighted by the storm-tost Greenlander, and trodden 
 by the sturdy foot of the adventurous Northman long before^ 
 the last * discovery' of that continent in 1497. Yet little or no 
 definite information resulted from such voyages beyond the fact 
 that certain media really existed for connecting the barbarians 
 of Labrador, of Nova Scotia, and of Massachusetts, with the 
 people on the coasts of Scandinavia, and the consequent possi- 
 bility of transporting thither some vague knowledge of white 
 
 ^ See the interesting revelations with thirty-five companions on a 
 
 in Eafn's Antiquitates Americance, point which he called Helluland, 
 
 HafniaB, 1845, and Humboldt's identified with Labrador. From 
 
 Cosmos, II. -234 sq. Sabine's ed. thence one of the party penetrated 
 
 The first recorded view of the further south to what they called 
 
 American coast was obtained in Vinland (from the wild vines grow- 
 
 986. In 1000, Leif actually landed ing there). 
 
848 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 men and some few germs of Christianity \ JSTor do any of the 
 frequent narratives sent home to Europe by the first * Conquis- 
 tadores' throw much light upon the primitive traditions of the 
 various tribes whom they subdued. Intoxicated by their lust of 
 gold, devoting all their wondrous energies to the extension and 
 consolidation of their empire, many of them were deaf not only 
 to the pleas put forward by the native in behalf of his heredi- 
 tary freedom, but also to the war-songs and the legends that 
 continued to give utterance to his baneful superstitions. Other 
 Spaniards in a frenzy of fanaticism were instigated to destroy^ 
 the only archives, by the light of which we could have hoped to 
 track with any certainty the course pursued in the migrations 
 of the * civilised' families of America; while in reference to the 
 Indians proper, the historical materials then as now surviving 
 are no better than a mass of wild hyperboles; they tell of 
 * nations creeping out of the ground — a world growing out of a 
 tortoise's back — the globe reconstructed from the earth clutched 
 in a musk-rat's paw, after a deluge ^.' Hence the difficult nature 
 of the problems which confronted the ethnologist when he pro- 
 ceeded by more scientific methods to determine the mutual 
 relations of the tribes and peoples of America, to penetrate still 
 further into mysteries connected with their past condition, and 
 educe some elements of light and order from the midst of that 
 far-spreading chaos, which had, in the judgment of the super- 
 ficial writer, hopelessly enveloped the history of the New World. 
 The first great generalisation thus obtained had reference to 
 the physical characteristics of the native population. It was 
 found that, on eliminating a subordinate class of 'singular and 
 inexplicable diversities*,' the people of that continent, in all 
 their geographical distribution, from the Arctic Ocean to Cape 
 Horn, may be described as homogeneous, or the scions of one 
 parent stock. The squalid Esquimaux, at one extremity of the 
 
 ^ Some white men appear to a pestilent superstition, that must 
 
 have remained in America at an be extirpated : ' Prescott, Conquest 
 
 early period, and in 1121 we find of Mexico ^ p. 32, Lond. 1854. 
 a Greenland bishop making a ^ See History, Condition and 
 
 voyage to Vinland : cf. Miinter, Prospects of the Indian Tribes, ed. 
 
 Kirchengesch. von Ddneinark, &c. Schoolcraft (recently compiled for 
 
 I. 561, Leipzig, 1833, the Government of the United 
 
 ^ 'The strange, unknown cha- States), Part i. p. 13. 
 racters inscribed on them [the pic- ■* There is still some difference 
 
 ture manuscripts] excited suspi- of opinion among ethnologists re- 
 
 cion. They were looked on as specting the extent and value of 
 
 magic scrolls; and were regarded these 'diversities;' see Prichard, 
 
 in the same light with the idols v. 290 sq. 
 and temples, as the symbols of . 
 
CHAP. II.] Religions of America. 349 
 
 chain, the polished Aztec, or Peruvian, at the otherj agricul- 
 turists, and hunters, and canoe-men; tribes frequenting the 
 shores of the great northern lakes, or scattered in the dense 
 savannahs of the South; the stunted Chajma, the athletic 
 Caraib, and the half-clad native of the Land of Fire, exhibit the 
 same general lineaments, and constitute together one distinct 
 variety of the human species. They * possess alike the long, 
 lank, black hair, the brown or cinnamon-coloured skin, the 
 heavy brow, the dull and sleepy eye, the full and compressed 
 lips, and the salient and dilated nose\' But in the course of 
 wide and patient investigations which have issued in this grand 
 result, another class of facts were sometimes felt to wear a very 
 different aspect and to point in very different directions. So 
 far was the explorer of American antiquities from meeting with 
 a common language, or one group of kindred dialects, that 
 varieties of human speech were found to be almost innumerable; 
 each narrow tract of country being occupied by tribes continually 
 at war with each other, esteeming every stranger an enemy, and 
 possessing few, if any, of the ordinary means of intercommuni- 
 cation. 
 
 Here again, however, science has contributed her timely aid 
 in filling up the blanks of primitive history. It has been shewn, 
 entirely to the satisfaction of all competent philologers, that if, 
 as in the former case, we make a few exceptions, capable of 
 being explained on the hypothesis of accidental or colonial inter- 
 course with foreign countries, the discordant languages of 
 America are all held together by common and peculiar principles 
 of construction, pointing to a primitive centre, and acknowledg- 
 ing the plastic influence of one mother-tongue. These languages 
 are neither monosyllabic, like the Chinese, the primitive Malay, 
 and other kindred idioms ; nor dissyllabic, like a second class of 
 ancient languages related to the Hebrew; nor analytical, like 
 the tongues of modern Europe, which are substituting, or have 
 substituted, for the old inflections a vast number of auxiliary 
 particles. The proper description of the American dialects, as 
 spoken for the last three hundred and fifty years, is polysyn- 
 thetic^, meaning that their organisation is so flexible, so ai-ti- 
 
 ^ Morton's Crania Americana, see Prichard, v. 305 sq., who has 
 
 quoted with other testimonies to added (pp. 313 sq.) some judicious 
 
 the same effect in Squier's Ameri- observations on the probable causes 
 
 can ArchcEoIogical Researches, liio. I. of the vast dissimilarity in the 
 
 pp. 23, 24, New York, 185 1. words themselves. This may be 
 
 2 The credit of working out this referred, partly to the isolation of 
 
 idea belongs to Mr. du Ponceau: the various tribes, partly to the 
 
350 Glirist and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 ficial, and so liighly complex, as to make them far more capable 
 than any other dialects of combining a large assortment of ideas 
 and various shades of meaning into one polysyllabic term. In 
 other words, however manifold those languages may be as to 
 their vocabulary, their structure and grammatical forms are all 
 peculiarly related, — so peculiarly, that traits of family-likeness 
 and the same distinctive physiognomy are seen pervading the 
 whole group. 
 
 But harder questions in the meantime have been agitated 
 by American archoeologists, with reference to the ultimate 
 affinities of the native population; and while one school are 
 persuaded that nothing whatever has transpired which can be 
 fairly thought to militate against received ideas of aboriginal 
 unity j a second, in proportion it would seem to their belief in 
 the specific oneness of the ^ American race,' have manifested a 
 desire to disconnect the Old and New Continents entirely. 
 They assert not only that the measure of civilisation attained 
 by some of the American tribes is altogether underived, but 
 (which is a distinct and totally independent theory) that the 
 race itself is strictly autochthonic, and is therefore a new species 
 of human beings \ As writers of the last century were some- 
 times ready to contend that every thing American had been 
 imported from the shores of the Old World, these champions of 
 the autochthonic theory must needs assume an attitude no less 
 defiant, and a phraseology no less emphatic: they affirm ac- 
 cordingly that nothing has been so derived. 
 
 Now difficult, or even, with our extant means, impossible as 
 it may be to single out the parent stock, in which the fathers of 
 the New World had their origin, I hold the multiplication of 
 productive centres, both in this and other cases, to be absolutely 
 unnecessary, and, in the present state of ethnological science, to 
 be utterly unjustifiable^. If no ray of light whatever could be 
 
 wonderful richness of their first ^ Pott, who seems to be himself 
 
 vocabulary, partly to the feverish influenced more especially by philo- 
 
 activity of their imagination and logical reasons, has collected (in 
 
 rhetorical faculty, which are ever his Die Ungleichheit menschlicher 
 
 coining new expressions; but re- Rassen, Lemgo, 1856, pp. 242 sq.) 
 
 semblance is perhaps most of all the main arguments of those who 
 
 destroyed by certain current princi- are led by the perplexing pheno- 
 
 ples of truncation and agglutination, mena of the New World to deny 
 
 impelling the American Indians to the derivation of the human family 
 
 cut off the beginning and the end of from a single pair, 
 polysyllables almost without limit, ^ g^e Part i. ch. 11. On the 
 
 and to form other words by merely Unity of the Human Eace^ above, 
 
 aggregating a number of such frag- pp. 34 sq. 
 ments into new compounds. 
 
CHAP. II.] Religions of America, 851 
 
 thown upon tlio questions wMcL. concern the primitive popula- 
 tion of America; if no analogy to their case had existed in the 
 spread of the Malajo-Polynesian tribes across the islands of the 
 Eastern Archipelago and the Pacific Ocean ; if the speech of the 
 Americans had absolutely no affinities with any other human 
 dialects; if their traditions, meagre as these are, had hinted 
 nothing of a distant home and of a perilous migration ; if in- 
 soluble enigmas were presented by the physical structure of 
 Americans, or if their moral powers and mental capabilities 
 were such as to exclude them from a place in the great brother- 
 hood of men; if, lastly, no resemblances were found, I will not 
 say, in primary articles of belief, but in the memory of specific 
 incidents and in those minor forms of human thought and 
 culture which will hardly bear to be explained on the hypothesis 
 of 'natural evolution,' we might then, perhaps, have cause to 
 hesitate in our decision, or to treat the peopling of America 
 as something more exceptional than had been hitherto supposed. 
 But no necessity whatever has been shewn for the adoption 
 of such theories. There is literally nothing, say our ablest 
 writers, either in the bodily structure or psychology of the 
 American tribes to prove an independent origin, or even to 
 beget suspicions touching a plurality of human * races ^' In 
 the limits of the American family, and notwithstanding the 
 mutual resemblances which it unquestionably offers, we can find 
 varieties of human beings, passing, there as elsewhere, one into 
 another by gi-aduated shades of difference ; while the Esqui- 
 maux, who are as genuine members of that family as the Aztecs 
 or Algonquins, link it on, by speech as well as by traditions, 
 to the natives of the sister-continent. Again, if the diversities 
 of language could be fairly cited as conclusive of the absolute 
 distinctness of the whole American people, they would prove 
 with equal force that every single tribe is also autochthonic. 
 The loss of primitive vocables in one case would remain as 
 wondrous and inexplicable as in the other. The development 
 of any primitive speech into the finished and elaborate forms 
 presented by the living dialects of America is antecedently not 
 less improbable than the first deflection of the polysynthetic 
 family from one original type of language. JSTeither is the want 
 of correspondency between the speech of the Old and New 
 Continent so absolutely universal as had once been represented. 
 Without affecting to pronounce a judgment on the merits of 
 particular controversies, — as, for instance, that relating to the 
 
 ^ Pilchard, v. 541. 
 
852 
 
 Christ and other Masters. 
 
 [part iil 
 
 Othomi of Central America, whose language i has been held to 
 be monosyllabic and akin to the Chinese, — I may remark that 
 writers adverse to the theory of unity are sometimes driven to 
 admit the known existence of as many as one hundred and 
 eighty-seven words ^, which are the common property of the Old 
 World and the New. But more convincing proofs of some 
 great exodus from Asia to America are furnished by the vague 
 traditions of the early emigrants. The tide of population in the 
 New Continent is always said to have been propagated from the 
 west and north-west. If credit be conceded to the stories of the 
 Mexicans and others, they all issued from that very region; in 
 one case they had crossed the water, in a second they had 
 marched along some frozen pathway. They were previously 
 acquainted with white men; they were accustomed to the 
 representations of animals familiar to Asiatics^ but unheard of, 
 during the historic period, in America itself^. The picture or 
 mnemonic writing^ of the Old World reappears in different 
 latitudes of the New. The practice of erecting huge pyramidal 
 temples, corresponding not in general structure only, but also in 
 minute and arbitrary details, has been common to the demi- 
 civilised tribes alike of Asia and America^. Arguing therefore 
 
 1 Cf. Pott, as above, pp. 252 
 sq., and Ampere, in the Revue des 
 Deux Mondes, 1853, Tome iv. pp. 
 93, 94. 
 
 '■^ Squier, as above, p. 26. Of 
 these words, it is remarked, *one 
 hundred and four coincide with 
 words found in the languages of 
 Asia and Australia, forty-three 
 with those of Europe, and forty 
 with those of Africa. ' 
 
 3 These and many other points 
 are dwelt upon by Wuttke, whose 
 chief conclusion is as follows (i. 
 346) : *Alle diese Erscheinungen 
 lassen uns an der asiatischen Ab* 
 stammung der halbgebildeten Vol- 
 ker von West-Amerika nicht mehr 
 zweifeln. Die bestimmten bei den 
 verschiedenen Indianerstammen 
 sich wiederholenden Sagen von 
 einer Einwanderung aus Westen 
 liber ein Meer oder eine Strasse, 
 die nachher zugefroren, — Sagen, 
 welche mit den erwahnten sibir- 
 ischen von einer Auswanderung 
 nach Osten iibereinstimmen [p. 
 
 157], verstarken das Gewicht der 
 mexikanischen Ijberlieferung noch 
 mehr.' 
 
 * See above, p. 50, n. 2. Niebuhr 
 {Led. on Ancient Hist. i. 49, 50) 
 points out the approximation made 
 in some districts of Central 
 America to the 'hieratic' mode of 
 writing practised by the Egyptians. 
 The use of Knotenschniire (knot- 
 strings) as an aid to the memory 
 was common, both in America and 
 in almost every other part of the 
 ancient world (Miiller, p. 359), 
 anterior to the introduction of the 
 art of writing. 
 
 ^ Squier, as above, p. 83. *What 
 striking analogies exist,' crie? 
 Humboldt (as there quoted), 'be- 
 tween the monuments of the old 
 continents and those of the Toltecs, 
 who, arriving on Mexican soil, 
 built several of these colossal struc- 
 tures, truncated pyramids, divided 
 by layers, like the temple of Belus 
 at Babylon. Whence did they take 
 the model of these edifices? Were 
 
CHAP. II.] Religions of America. 358 
 
 from coincidences sucli as these, which are in every case more 
 likelj to have been the fruit of some external intercourse than 
 of mere accident or of spontaneous growth in disconnected 
 regions, I incline to the opinion that the old inhabitants of 
 America had either crossed by Behring's Strait, or else along 
 the way of the Aleutian islands, which in fact supply a bridge 
 between the two continents. Such primitive colonists might be 
 an early offshoot from the stock of nations which was rapidly 
 propelled across the steppes of central Asia, and who, lapsing 
 more and more completely into barbarism, had finally escaped 
 through various channels into islands of the Eastern and 
 Southern Seas. Regarded thus, the primitive people of America 
 belong to a great section of the human family which is entitled 
 the 'Turanian:' they are ultimately one with the Malays; they 
 are a part. of that mighty stream of population which under the 
 name of Tshud and Turk and Scythian was diffused throughout 
 the whole of upper Asia, was pushed forward by the growing 
 vigour of the Chinese empire, was displaced by the triumphant 
 progress of the Aryans in the vast peninsula of Hindustan. Or 
 it may be, that tlie peopling of America resulted from a long 
 succession of such movements, and that ruder tribes were sub- 
 sequently intermixed with others ^ more advanced in civilisation 
 and more capable of gaining that ascendency which some of 
 them had finally enjoyed. Objections, I am quite aware, have 
 been directed against both of these hypotheses, and in the 
 present state of knowledge it may be impossible to give a satis- 
 factory answer to every one of such objections. Yet on looking 
 at the problem as a whole, I am persuaded that the vast pre- 
 ponderance of testimony is favourable to the idea of Asiatic 
 immigration, not only as accounting for the presence of materials 
 out of which the ' civilised ' communities were framed, but also 
 
 they of the Mongol race? Did they They point decidedly to a foreign, 
 
 descend from a common stock with to an oriental, if not a Shemitic, 
 
 the Chinese, the Hiong-nu, and the origin. Such an origin has from 
 
 Japanese?' the first been inferred. At what- 
 
 ^ This is the conclusion of Mr. ever point the investigation has 
 
 Schoolcraft, who closes his careful been made, the eastern hemisphere 
 
 summary of the ante-Columbian has been found to contain the 
 
 traditions (Part i. pp. 19 sq.) in physical and mental prototypes of 
 
 the following passage (p. 26): the race. Language, mythology, 
 
 ' Thus we have traditionary gleams religious dogmas, — the very style 
 
 of a foreign origin of the race of of architecture, and their calendar, 
 
 the North American Indians, from as far as it is developed, point to 
 
 separate stocks of nations, extend- that fruitful and central source of 
 
 ing at intervals from the Arctic human dispersion and nationality.' 
 Circle to the Valley of Mexico. . 
 
 H. 23 
 
354 Christ and other Masters, [part hi. 
 
 as affording the best clue to many a mystery connected witli 
 tlie barbarous tribes themselves. 
 
 As soon as we approach the subject of American religions, 
 It is most essential on the very threshold that we realise the 
 force of a distinction here indicated between the ^civilised' and 
 savage populations who occupied the New World when it was 
 first explored by Europeans. The former class comprise^ the 
 Mexicans and Peruvians, together with the intermediate families 
 of Mayans, and Muyscas of Bogota, who, planted on that side of 
 the continent which looks directly towards Asia, were each an 
 independent centre of civilisation in the midst of wild and bar- 
 barous hordes ^ The second class may be distributed into (1) the 
 Red Indians of North America, (2) the Indians of the Great 
 Antilles, (3) the Caraibs or Carribees, (4) the Indians on the 
 Eastern coast of South America. These two varieties of men, 
 though generally like each other in physical conformation, and 
 though speaking similar and cognate tongues, were intellectually 
 in almost opposite conditions. The half-civilised American had 
 even worked his way above one group of tribes and nations on 
 the Old Continent; he was superior to the Finn, who repre- 
 sented the best phase of culture in the ^ Scythian' family ', he 
 took precedence also of the Mongol, who at nearly the same 
 period flashed from time to time across the theatre of general 
 history, and then relapsed into the darkness of his native 
 steppes. The barbarous American was, on the contrary, as 
 destitute of all the higher forms of culture as the wild man 
 of New Zealand or Kaffraria: his delight was to retard the 
 intellectual progress of his fellows, and intent on what is called 
 ' a nameless principle of tribality,' to foster habits which could 
 hardly fail to issue in the utter disintegration of society. 
 
 § 1. The wild Tribes of America. 
 
 My observations on this class of men will be restricted 
 within very narrow limits, partly because the members of it are 
 seldom or never likely to provoke comparison with Christians, 
 
 ^ In this distribution, I follow rican civilisation had once been far 
 
 Dr. J. G. Miiller, whose Geschichte more extensive than it was in the 
 
 der Amerikanischen Urreligionen age of Columbus ; as may be infcr- 
 
 (Basel, 1855), though far from red from the ruins which are being J 
 
 satisfactory in some respects, has constantly brought to Hght, for] 
 
 the great merit of being well ar- instance, in the valley of the ] 
 
 ranged. Mississippi : Ibid. pp. 45 si 
 
 2 It should, however, be remem- Schoolcraft, Part 11. pp. 84 sq. 
 bered that the area of North Ame- 
 
CHAP. II.] Religions of America. 355 
 
 and partly because the leading principles of their religion are 
 the same as will be found in tribes of every age and climate, so 
 long as they continue standing on the same moral level. In 
 the old * Turanian ' creed of China we observed how prominent 
 was the place awarded, first, to spirit-worship, — understanding 
 by that term not only adoration or deprecation of local genii 
 and demons, but commemorative offerings made in honour of 
 departed ancestors ; and secondly, to worship of the powers or 
 laws of nature, and especially the element of light itself as 
 centred in the host of heaven. Now both these forms of 
 primitive heathenism recur at every turn among the Indians of 
 North and South America. Their religion, speaking generally, 
 consists of two great factors ; spirit-worship, which is found to 
 be more deeply rooted in the higher latitudes, and element- 
 worship, which appears to have exerted a peculiar witchery in 
 countries lying nearer, the equator. In America, however, as in 
 China, the two phases of belief are seen existing side by side, 
 and not unfrequently are made to touch and interpenetrate 
 each other. Excepting the manes of departed ancestors^, which 
 ought perhaps to constitute an independent class, the sjDirits 
 worshipped by the heathen of America are not unfrequently 
 embodied in specific forms or objects, corresponding to the 
 fetishes^ alike of Greenland, Africa, Australia, and Siberia. 
 Some particles of true divinity are thus believed to tenant the 
 thing worshipped, which accordingly ceases to be regarded as 
 the beast or brute matter it really is, and rising far above the 
 character of a type, or emblem, is identified completely Avith 
 the thing it represents ^ One object of this kind becomes the 
 
 ^ Compare the following account of their earliest observed traits.' 
 
 of Mr. Schoolcraft, Part i. pp. 38, The same remark is applicable to 
 
 39, with the remarks already made the Caraibs and Brasilians : Miiller, 
 
 (above, p. 289) on the similar p. 73. The same superstitious 
 
 custom of the Chinese : * The ideas prevail through the whole of 
 
 periodical offering of cakes, liba- the country north of the Zambesi: 
 
 tious, flesh, or viands at the grave see Livingstone's ResearcTies in 
 
 to ancestors is seen to be an South Africa, p. 434. 
 
 idea incorporated into the practice 2 ^j^e word 'Fetishism,' which 
 
 of the American, at least the has now obtained general currency 
 
 Algonic Indians. These Indians, as descriptive of one early stage 
 
 believing in the duality of the soul, in the religions of heathendom, 
 
 and that the soul sensorial abides is derived from the Portuguese 
 
 for a time with the body in the /r^itsso, 'a magical charm' or * spell.' 
 
 grave, requiring food for its ghostly It was adopted from thence by the 
 
 existence and journeyings, deposit Negroes of Western Africa : cf. the 
 
 meats and other aliment, at and Chinese joss and the Portuguese 
 
 after the time of interment. TJds dios. 
 custom is universal, and was one ^ Miiller, p. 52. The same 
 
 23—2 
 
856 Christ and other blasters. [part ill. 
 
 god, the patron-spirit of tlie fascinated savage: it lie carries 
 constantly abont with him, or treasures as the glory and the 
 safeguard of his wigwam; so that, notwithstanding the very 
 partial exercise of the imagination and reflective faculty which 
 seems to be implied in every form of spirit-worship, the wor- 
 shipper is always under the necessity of localising the object of 
 his special adoration and of bringing it directly under the cog- 
 nisance of the senses. On the other hand, the more conspicuous 
 and commanding objects of external nature, as the sun, the 
 moon, the planets, are not worshipped barely as material and 
 inanimate substances. The wild man of America, like other 
 heathen, both of civilised and barbarous races, has been long 
 accustomed to the thought that all the heavenly bodies are 
 j^ossessed of animation, and even gifted with some measure of 
 intelligence. To each, accordingly, has been ascribed one in- 
 dependent, vitalising soul. The sun-god, for example, is the 
 living sun itself, and worship is never paid to it symbolically, 
 as though it were the representative of some invisible or absent 
 spirit, but because it is an actual depository of the super- 
 sensuous, an embodiment of the Divine. 
 
 The two main lines of thought exemplified in spirit-worship, 
 and in deification of the elements and heavenly bodies, may 
 have thus been gradually blended into one. The subtle spirit 
 is corporealised ; the higher forms of matter are each tenanted 
 and consecrated by the energy of some appropriate spirit. If 
 the term 'God' be chosen to express the aggregate of all such 
 spirits, it may be affirmed with equal truth that ultimately God 
 is every thing, and every thing is ultimately God. The wild man 
 of America is in fact a worshipper of all above him and around 
 him. As the skies, the woods, the waters are his books, they 
 also form his oracles and his divinities. Pervaded by some 
 spiritual essence, every leaf that rustles in the forest, quite as 
 much as the great orbs that move in silent majesty across 
 the firmament, conveys to him a message from the unseen 
 world. The threatening cloud, the genial shower, the lightning, 
 thunder, and aurora borealis, flowers of every hue and animals 
 of every shape and species, are alike regarded as instinct 
 with supernatural virtue, and as fitted to enkindle in the 
 
 wTiter says truly (p. 75): *Das Theodore Parker is, therefore, in 
 
 Thier, das als Fetisch verehrt error when he talks of the visible 
 
 "wird, ist nicht Symbol dieser oder object being in Fetishism a type 
 
 jener gottlichen Naturkraffc, son- of the Infinite Spirit : Discourse, 
 
 dern iiberhaupt ein gottliches pp. 32 sq. Lond. 1850. 
 Wesen wie jedes andere.* Mr. 
 
CHAP. II.] Religions of America. S57 
 
 human heart the sentiments of awe or love, of adoration or of 
 deprecation. 
 
 In systems where it is admitted bv all writers that principles 
 like these are ever active and predominant, we naturally fail in 
 the attempt to vindicate a proper standing-ground for any 
 doctrine bearing close resemblance to Christian theism. Pas- 
 sages exist, indeed, in which the wild man of America ex- 
 presses a belief in some Great Spirit^, manifesting itself not 
 only as the root and basis of all being, but at one time in the 
 light of a beneficent Creator, at a second as the sun-god, at a 
 third as the great God of heaven, and not unfrequently in more 
 appalling aspects as the god of battle and of death. At first 
 the European missionaries^, in their zeal to seize all possible 
 points of contact with the old beliefs of those whom they were 
 seeking to recover, had unconsciously diverged into the track 
 of infidels, who represented the natural religion of the wild 
 man as almost on a level with the highest truths of Christianity, 
 and, after labouring to explain away his human sacrifices, 
 anthropophagy and the like, waxed eloquent in praising the 
 unrivalled purity and spirituality of his worship. In the 
 present day, however, when inquiries of this kind are prosecuted 
 is a far more critical temper, it is generally agreed that all 
 approximations to monotheism observed among the tribes of 
 the New World axe little more than verbal. Their Great 
 Spirit is at best the highest member of a group ^, the brightest 
 inmate of a crowded pantheon; as the sun-god of their system, 
 quickening, gladdening, fructifying; a personification of the 
 mightiest of all natural energies, but not a personality distinct 
 from nature, and controlling all things by his sovereign will. 
 
 ^ Thus, Mr. Schoolcraft (passim) these elevated ideas 'do not seem 
 
 thinks this doctrine *at the base to have led to the practical con- 
 
 of their theology,' although he sequences that might have been 
 
 argues that in practice they were expected.' On the ideas current 
 
 polytheists to a man. Mr. Pres- in South Africa, respecting a 
 
 cott [Conquest of Peru) begins his Supreme Being, see Livingstone, 
 
 third chapter with a similar state- pp. 641, 642. 
 
 ment: 'It is a remarkable fact, ^ Muller, who adduces many 
 
 that many, if not most, of the proofs of this position (pp. 99 sq.), 
 
 rude tribes inhabiting the vast affirms: 'Diese Ansicht ist nicht 
 
 American continent, however dis- bloss bei Englischen und Franzos- 
 
 figured their creeds may have been ischen Deisten und Popularphilo- 
 
 in other respects by a childish sophen, sondern auch bei Keisen- 
 
 superstition, had attained to the den und JMissioniiren sehr ver- 
 
 sublime conception of one Great breitet.' 
 
 Sphit, the Creator of the universe,' ^ cf. Wuttke, i. 91, 92, Muller, 
 
 &c. He also adds, however, that p. 102, pp. 114 sq. 
 
358 Christ and other Masters. [part iil 
 
 The gi^eatest Spirit of tlie Indian is accordingly declared to be 
 the offspring of an evil mother \ subordinate to some inexorable 
 Fate, the victim of some ^yill-less and unchanging Principle 
 by which his rule is ever liable to interruption and reverse. 
 But, what is more observable, that Spirit is devoid of every- 
 thing which constitutes the glor j of the God of revelation. In 
 spite of all his grandeur, goodness, and ubiquity, he exercises 
 no control upon the lives of individuals, or the government of 
 the world. * There is no attempt by the hunter, priesthood, 
 jugglers or powwows, which can be gathered from their oral 
 traditions, to impute to the gi-eat merciful Spirit the attributes 
 of justice, or to make man accountable to him, here and here- 
 after, for aberrations from virtue, good-will, truth, or any form 
 of moral rights' 
 
 The passing illustrations thus afforded of the old American 
 theology enable us to understand some other of its characteristic 
 principles. With tlie idea of one inscrutable necessity ever 
 present in the background, the more prominent features of the 
 system were all rigorously dualistic^. 
 
 Minor gods, whose operation was regarded as beneficent, 
 were ranked in one special series, with the sun-god as their 
 glorious chief. In him, the great dispenser of all radiance and 
 fertility, Hhe being by whose light and heat all living creatures 
 were generated and sustained,' the various tribes of the New 
 World had uniformly recognised the highest jDitch of excellence; 
 and even where, transformed into a god of battle, he was 
 worshipped with horrid and incongruous rites, or fed by human 
 hecatombs*, the sun-god never ceased to occupy the foremost 
 rank among the good divinities. His titles were the 'father,' 
 the 'sustainer,' the 'revivifier;' and to be at last translated to 
 the sun, or his attendant stars, was deemed the summit of 
 felicity. On the other hand, the rude American was haunted 
 by the thought of some coequal and coordinate array of hostile 
 deities, who manifested their malignant nature by creating 
 discord, sickness, death, and every possible form of evil. These 
 
 ^ Miiller, p. 149. This writer developments of subordinate poly- 
 shews, in discussing the religion of theisms.'" Ihid. iii. 60. The same 
 the Caraibs, the identity of their antagonism was even more strong- 
 supreme Mother with Fate and the ly manifested among the Caraibs, 
 Principle of evil (p. 230). and on the eastern coast of South 
 
 2 Schoolcraft, i. 35. America : Miiller, pp. 260, 261. 
 
 3 'Everywhere our Indians have ^ See Miiller, pp. 14 1 sq., and 
 upheld this idea of a duality of below, on the human sacrifices 
 gods, giving one good, and the offered to the great Mexican divin- 
 other evil, powers, with its ancient ities. 
 
CHAP. II.] Religions of America. 859 
 
 were held in numerous cases to obey the leadership of the moon^, 
 which, owing to its changeful aspects, had become identical 
 with the capricious evil-minded Spirit of Am.erican Indians. 
 It especially, as in their creed the parent of misfortune, many 
 of them were ever anxious to propitiate and disarm. In it is 
 found the chief divinity of all the warlike races, more especially 
 the Caraibs^; and everywhere the worship of the Indian was 
 mainly occupied in deprecating powerful and malevolent spirits, 
 demons, spectres, fiends, hobgoblins, whose errand was to poison 
 human joys and aggravate the load of human wretchedness. If 
 only the American could turn away their anger, and evade 
 or disappoint their malice, he had realised the principal aim of 
 his religion. Hence his constant dread of some unearthly 
 apparition. Hence the meaning of his fetishes, his amulets, 
 his charms, his exorcisms, his trembling and convulsive efforts 
 to explore the secrets of the past or future, his wild cries, and 
 frantic dances. Hence again the vast ascendency obtained by 
 seers and witches, payes, jossakeeds, aud medicine-men, with 
 other dark and nameless instruments of heathen sorcery. 
 
 It is true the wild man of America was not entirely lost to 
 his original destination. He dreamed of having once been 
 master of some purer language, of a world divided from the 
 present by some dire catastrophe, of service rendered by his 
 ancestors to milder and more powerful chieftains ^ Whether 
 pushing his rude canoe across the waters, or chasing the 
 buffalo amid the depths of his primeval forests, he would muse 
 at times, as did the Aztec in his massive temples, on the advent 
 of a gracious Spirit, condescending, under various shapes of 
 man or animal, to battle with a legion of hideous monsters*, 
 who were said to have delighted most in the enslaving of the 
 human species. Yet in spite of all such happy memories, and 
 such vague presentiments of something higher and more satis- 
 fying, the wild tribes of America were commonly overwhelmed 
 
 ^ MiiUer, p. 53, p. 170, p. 272. ^ Schoolcraft, i. t6. The cur- 
 Livingstone (p. 235) found moon- rent story of some mighty deluge 
 worship prevalent among some will be considered in discussing the 
 tribes of South-Central Africa. religion of Mexico. 
 
 ^ 'Wahrend indessen anderswo * The mythe or legend of Ma- 
 
 gewohnlich der Sonnendienst an nabozho (MiiUer, pp. 126 sq., 
 
 der Spitze dieser hohern Natur- Schoolcraft, i. 317 — 319), as held 
 
 verehrung steht, herrscht bei den among the Algonquins, has its 
 
 Karaiben der Mond vor, ahnlich parallel in many other tribes, 
 
 wie bei einzelnen nordischen most of all, perhaps, in the Mexi- 
 
 Wilden und Gronlandern,' etc. can account of Quetzalcoatl. 
 p. 218. 
 
360 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 by gloom, anxiety, and terror. Their habitual ^notions of the 
 spirit- world exceed all belief; and the Indian mind is thus 
 made the victim of wild mystery, unending suspicion and 
 
 paralysing fear Not to be in misery from these unnumbered 
 
 hosts is to be blessed'.' The whole religion, writes another 
 high authority, 4s the religion of fear, which even among 
 cultivated nations so predominates in the religious character of 
 the heathen, that Lucretius (vi. 23) could describe Epicurus, 
 the subverter of religion, as one who had also made an end of 
 fear. Daring as the Indian is at other times, in facing visible 
 dangers under the impulses of passion ; firm and self-collected 
 as he shews himself in bearing the most poignant tortures, he is 
 notwithstanding always full of awe, of fear, of horror, at the 
 thought of the invisible spirits who hold rule in nature ; and as 
 soon as he is once mastered by this feeling, he becomes the 
 most timid creature upon earth ^' 
 
 We seldom see the darker traits of his religion so distinctly, 
 as when brought together in the doctrine of Manitoes, which 
 constitutes, it has been thought, the nearest approximation he 
 has ever made to some originality of conception ^ The word 
 Manito, or Manedo, itself appears to signify 'a spirit:' hence 
 the foremost member in the series of good divinities, the Great 
 Spirit of the old American, is called in various tribes Kitchi or 
 Gezha Manito*; the name of the evil-minded Spirit being 
 
 ^ Schoolcraft, i. i6. Compare that, if they are appeased, there is 
 Livingstone's account of the Afri- no other cause of death but witch- 
 can tribes : ' Their religion, if such craft, which may be averted by 
 it may be called, is one of dread. charms.' (p. 440.) 
 Numbers of charms are employed ^ Miiller, p. 83. The same con- 
 to avert the evils with which they viction is repeated (p. 260) with 
 feel themselves to be encompassed. reference to the Indians of South 
 Occasionally you meet a man, America: 'Man sieht, dass auch 
 more cautious or more timid than hier das Schauerliche und Furcht- 
 the rest, with twenty or thirty erregende vorherrscht ; Furcht 
 charms round his neck:' p. 435. ist ja das Grundgefiihl, das durch 
 • There is nothing more heartrend- das Yernehmen des Gotthchen 
 ing than their death-wails. When auch bei diesen Naturmenschen 
 the natives turn their eyes to the erregt wird ; die ganze Natur ist 
 future world, they have a view von einer XJnzahl von Geistern 
 cheerless enough of their own erfullt, die bei Tag und bei Nacht, 
 utter helplessness and hopeless- beim Schlafen und beim Wachen, 
 ness. They fancy themselves com- Welt und Seele mit Angst und 
 pletely in the power of the disem- Schauder erf iillen.' 
 bodied spirits, and look upon the ^ Schoolcraft, i. 34, 35. 
 prospect of following them as the ^ These names vary consider- 
 greatest of misfortunes. Hence ably: see a collection of them, 
 they are constantly deprecating the Miiller, pp. 104 sq. 
 wrath of departed souls, believing 
 
CHAP. II.] Religions of America. 361 
 
 Matclii Manito. But, when employed without such epithets, 
 this title is restricted to a minor emanation from the Great 
 Spirit, which, revealing itself in dreams to the excited fancy of 
 the youthful Indian, and inviting him to seek its efficacy in 
 some well-known bird or beast, or other object, is selected by 
 him for his guardian deity, his friend in council, and his cham- 
 pion in the hour of peril. He believes, however, that other 
 Manitoes may j)rove far mightier and more terrible than his 
 own, and consequently he is always full of apprehensions lest 
 the influence granted preternaturally to his neighbour should 
 issue in his own confusion. Add to this the prevalent idea, 
 that Manitoes intrinsically evil are ever exercised in counter- 
 working the beneficent, and that the actual administration of 
 the woridj abandoned to these great antagonistic powers,, is the 
 result of their interminable conflicts, and we cease to wonder 
 at the moral perturbations which mark the character of the 
 wild man. The fever of intense anxiety is never suflered to 
 die out; until at length he either passes to another world, the 
 simple reproduction of the present, or migrates into viler forms 
 of animal existence, or, as in the case of the most highly 
 favoured, is emancipated altogther from an earthly prison-house, 
 and rescued from the malice of his demoniacal oppressors. 
 
 § 2. The demi- civilised Tribes, especially the Mexican. 
 
 Although the barbarous popula-tion of the New World had 
 always far outnumbered those who in the age preceding the 
 discoveries of Columbus were struggling up the lower slopes of 
 intellectual culture, it is rather in the creed of the minority, as 
 indicating more of genius and reflection, that we seek for any 
 definite resemblance to the facts and institutions of the Bible. 
 There is reason to believe that some of these advances towards 
 civilisation should be dated from a very high antiquity, especi- 
 ally in Yucatan and other parts of Central America, in which 
 the Mayan family^ had risen far above the intellectual level of 
 their neighbours; but the Mexicans, who settled in a savage 
 state upon theii* northern border, will at present be selected as 
 the type of demi-civilised heathenism in tlie New World, partly 
 because our fund of information respecting Mexico is com- 
 paratively copious and exact, and i)ai^tly because an opportunity 
 is there presented of watching a late phase in Hhe religion of 
 humanity' associated in the end with no small progress in 
 
 1 Prichard, v. 339 sq., Miiller, of Yucatan^ pp. 114 sc^, Lond. 
 pp. 452 sq., and Faucourt's Hist. 1854. 
 
862 Christ and other Masters, [part iir. 
 
 political organisation and in many of tlie liigher ai-ts of life. 
 That Mexicans had borrowed largely from the Mayan builders, 
 who, already in the dawn of history, erected towns and palaces 
 and pyramid-temples, rivalling those of Egypt in area and 
 magnificence, is now conceded both by European and American 
 archseologists. That numerous elements of faith and worship 
 had been also gradually derived from the more cultivated 
 Mayans, whom th-ey conquered or displaced, as well as from 
 the Toltecs^, their own kinsmen and immediate predecessors on 
 the soil of Anahuac, is a statement likely to receive continuous 
 illustration from researches of the present day. But much as 
 Mexico might profit by the early dissemination of intelligence 
 and the creations of artistic skill upon the confines of her 
 empire, it is certain that when studied by the Spanish con- 
 querors, the various factors in her social and religious liie 
 had all been moulded into one harmonious system: veils of 
 allegory, woven partly if not altogether by her own imagina- 
 tion, were thrown over many a wild tradition of her simple 
 ancestors; her creed, her laws, her ritual, and administrative 
 principles, had all assumed a very definite and distinctive 
 character. The Aztec, in his general policy, became the Koman 
 of the New World; and, after crushing and absorbing minor 
 states, in virtue of his martial prowess and fanaticism, had 
 suceeded in building up an absolute monarchy upon the basis 
 of a terrible superstition, which reminds us, in its dark and 
 sanguinary spirit, of the Siva-ism of Hindustan, and of the 
 Baal or the Moloch-worship of western Asia. 
 
 ^ It is in tracing the fortunes of race of colonists as far as North 
 
 the Toltecs that we first obtain a America (cf. Wuttke, i. 349). The 
 
 tolerably close approximation to Me^dcans proper, issuing from the 
 
 historical exactness. The tradi- far north, did not reach the borders 
 
 tions of them handed down by the of Anahuac till the beginning of 
 
 Aztecs, or Mexicans proper, inform the 13th century, and only fixed 
 
 us that they migrated from an un- their habitation near the principal 
 
 kno'wn country called the primitive lake in 1325. 'At the beginning of 
 
 Tlapallan about 544 of the Chris- the sixteenth century, just before 
 
 tian era, and, advancing south- the arrival of the Spaniards, the 
 
 wards, settled in Mexico about 648 Aztec dominion reached across the 
 
 (see Prichard, v. 328; Prescott's continent from the Atlantic to the 
 
 Conquest of Mexico, ch. i). It is Pacific; and under the bold and 
 
 also worthy of notice that the epoch bloody Ahuitzotl, its arms had 
 
 544 corresponds with the ruin of been carried far over the limits 
 
 the Tsin dynasty in China, which already noticed as defining its per- 
 
 occasioned many violent commo- manent territory, unto the farthest 
 
 tions beyond the limits of the comers of Guatemala and Nica- 
 
 Chinese empire, and may have been ragua. ' 
 instrumental in propelling a new 
 
 i 
 
CHAP. II.] Religions of America. 363 
 
 On proceeding to discuss the central tenets of the ancient 
 Mexicans we are confronted by a question which deserves to 
 rank the foremost in this species of investigation — ^What 
 v/ere their ideas respecting a Supreme Intelligence, the one, 
 true, living God]' In Mexico, as in most heathen countries, 
 very different answers have been given to such inquiry; some 
 writers declaring that the Mexicans, in spite of their two 
 hundred objects of worship, were ultimately and in truth 
 monotheists; while others, who regard the term monotheism as 
 importing no less that Christian theism, have repudiated the 
 interpretations put on Mexican phraseology, and .ranked the 
 ancient Aztec with the nature-worshippers of other parts of 
 heathendom. It is worthy of notice that the Mexican name 
 for god^ is teo-tl, which, on separating the termination from the 
 root, approaches nearly to t^edg, deva, deus, tius, and other 
 kindred forms, as well as to the tao^ of China and the tua^ of 
 the South-sea islanders. It is deserving also of consideration 
 that the term teo-tl was not inherited from the Toltecs, and was 
 not imported into the land of Anahuac by the Mexicans them- 
 selves, but gradually adopted from the aboriginal population 
 skirting them upon the southern frontier of their new domi- 
 nions ^ If it should eventually be established that the Mayan 
 race who occupied this frontier were an Asiatic colony, forming 
 the centre and the nucleus of American civilisation, the presence 
 of a word like teo-tl will undoubtedly assume a higher import- 
 ance than has hitherto belonged to it. But until historical 
 media have been fully ascertained, it is presumptuous to advance 
 a theory on the strength of merely verbal resemblances, which 
 in some other cases can be shewn to have been altogether 
 accidental. 
 
 1 This word was accordingly em- the original identity of Votan, the 
 ployed by the early missionaries as serpent-god of the Mayans, with 
 the equivalent of Dios, not, how- the Odin and Woden of Teutonic 
 ever, without exciting disputes like heathenism, and even with the 
 those already noticed in reference Buddha of eastern Asia. But all 
 to the Chinese Shin and Shang-te. such attempts at identification are 
 
 2 See above, pp. 311 sq. merely fanciful, or at the best ex- 
 ^ Russell's Polynesia, p. 6^, ceedingly precarious. 
 
 Lond. 1852.^ The fullest form of * Miiller, p. 472. In Nicaragua, 
 
 this Polynesian word is, however, which received the names of its 
 
 not tua but atua, the a being, it divinities neither from the Toltecs 
 
 would seem, a component part of nor the Aztecs, the word Teot (pL 
 
 the title. (Shortland's Traditions, Teotes) was in common use, and 
 
 &c. of the New Zealanders, p. 61. was applied equally to the superior 
 
 Lond. 1854.) Other persons, on gods and to the Spaniards, 
 similar grounds, have maintained 
 
364 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 The word teo-tl was, however, used with epithets and 
 adjuncts that forbid us to dispute the grandeur of the object it 
 was meant to designate. The Mexicans beheld in him the 
 being ^ 'by whom we live,' 'omnipresent, that knoweth all 
 thoughts and giveth all gifts,' 'without whom man is as nothing,' 
 'invisible, incorporeal, one God, of perfect perfection and purity,' 
 'under whose wings we find repose and a sure defence.' This 
 Being also had been worshipped by some elevated spirits, with- 
 out image, sacrifice, or temple. He was called the 'Cause of 
 causes,' and the 'Father of all things.' He was reverenced as 
 the parent and productive principle in nature ; he was actually 
 identified with the sun-god, which on this account was de- 
 sign ated the Teo-tl. In proportion also as the Aztecs had 
 invested the chief powers and spirits of their ruder ancestors 
 with human shapes and attributes, the reigning tendency to 
 anthropomorphism might have led them to ascribe a human will 
 and personality to the supreme Spirit. On the other hand, it is 
 more probable that this only God of Central America was a 
 conception far too vast and glorious for the ordinary intellect. 
 To such he was a vague, impersonal abstraction : he was never 
 worshipped by the many^j no attempt was made to circulate a 
 knowledge either of his being or his character; and practically 
 the administration of the world was not referred to Him, but to 
 inferior spirits, good and evil, ruling each in his own single 
 providence, and presiding over this or that peculiar energy of 
 physical creation. In effect, the only difference to be traced 
 between the popular theology of wild and demi-civilised Ameri- 
 cans, is that which we have traced already in describing the 
 Aryan of the Yeda and the Aryan of the second, or 'heroic, 
 period of Hindu history and religion. All the beings wor- 
 shipped in the former case are spirits, demons, genii, with 
 no definite shape in the imagination of the worshipper, haunt- 
 ing every form of nature, animate and inanimate; while in the 
 second stage of natural religion, the divinities are far more 
 generally humanised, assuming forms in which, amid a number 
 of grotesque embellishments, the features of humanity are ever 
 struggling to obtain expression and predominance. The amulets 
 and fetishes of the American Indians are seldom, it is true, 
 
 1 Prescott, p. 19, Lond. 1854. standings; and they sought relief, 
 
 2 ' The idea of unity — of a being as usual, in the plurality of deities, 
 ■with whom voHtion is action, who who presided over the elements, 
 has no need of inferior ministers the changes of the seasons, and 
 to execute his purposes— was too the various occupations of man.' 
 simple, or too vast, for their under- Prescott, Ibid.; cf. Muller, p. 474. 
 
CHAP. II.] Religions of America. 865 
 
 abandoned altogether, but are moulded into human effigies 
 minute in form^ and occupying the subordinate rank of lares 
 and penates. The sacred corner of the wigwam, where the 
 ancient fetish was reposited, or the sacred mound on which the 
 wild man, writhing under some calamity, offered his best victim 
 to the sun-god, has been superseded by a group of splendid 
 temples ('houses of God,' or teo-calli)^ crowning a gigantic 
 pyramid, and glittering with the costliest decorations. Seers 
 and medicine-men have given* place to regular priests and 
 priestesses, the fountains of all popular education; the frantic 
 shrieks of former generations have been softened into measured 
 chants, their lawless rites into a pompous and elaborate liturgy; 
 while holidays, originally restricted for the most part to the 
 annual commemoration of departed ancestors, have multiplied 
 so fast that ^ every week, nay almost every day, is set down in 
 their calendar for some appropriate celebration'"^.' 
 
 Standing at the head of thirteen^ chief divinities, whom 
 ancient Mexico has learned to worship, either jointly or in 
 rotation, is Tezcatlipoca, whose rank appears to be 'inferior 
 only to that of the Supreme Being.' Several writers, who have 
 earnestly endeavoured to make out affinities between the Old 
 Testament religion and the creed of Mexico, and by this process 
 to connect the Aztec tribes with the Semitic family of western 
 Asia, go so far as to recognise the One God of the ancient 
 Hebrews in Tezcatlipoca; and in aid of their conjectures they 
 adduce a long array of epithets, investing him with every 
 species of divine perfection. According to this view he was 
 represented as the * merciful and long-suffering,' and yet *the 
 stirrer-up of strife,' a god of vengeance and of battles; the 
 * Creator of all things,' and the ^ Giver of life,' and yet requiring 
 the blood of sacrifice to flow for ever on his altars; pardoning 
 the guilty only in consideration of the blood of the innocent; 
 supreme and unapproachable, and yet enlisting numerous fellow- 
 workers in the government of the univei'se. He was Hhe 
 Holder of all things in his hand,' 'the Giver of inspiration, who 
 laughs at human wisdom;' *the Trier and Prover of hearts, who 
 
 ^ Miiller, p. 571. They are called else with the very peculiar cycles 
 
 the 'little ones' (teo/<o£o?i). of the Mexicans, which included 
 
 2 Prescott, p. 2 A. fifty-two years (13 being a quarter), 
 
 ^ The special number thirteen, years of eighteen, months, months 
 
 in reference to the greater gods of of twenty days, half decades, and 
 
 Mexico, appears to be connected half lunations of thirteen days : see 
 
 either with a monthly division of Prichard, v. 353, 355. 
 the calendar (cf. Miiller, p. 94), or 
 
3G6 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 made man in Ms own likeness,' Hhe Acceptor of vows/ *the 
 Forgiver,' 'the Enjoiner of charity \' But the force of such 
 expressions is materially abated when we view them in relation 
 to others of no less authority. These latter seem to have con- 
 nected, if not absolutely identified, Tezcatlipoca with the ancient 
 sun-god of the New World. In the remarkable address, for 
 instance, of the Mexican high-priest, the language runs as 
 follows: *We entreat that those who die in war may be 
 graciously received by thee, our Father, the Sun, and our 
 Motlier, the Earth, for thou alone reignest^;' and in a sub- 
 sequent passage, the place of happiness, reserved by him for 
 warriors slain in battle, is declared to be the sun itself. The 
 name Tezcatlipoca, being interpreted, is the 'Shining Mirror:' 
 on the monuments and in the paintings he is often represented 
 as encircled by the disc of the sun^ His proper home is in the 
 heavens*; from thence he came, descending on a spider's web, 
 to persecute Quetzalcoatl, the benignant deity of the Toltecs; 
 and in strict accordance with such representation, his choice-st 
 influence seems restricted to the world of the invisible ; his face 
 is covered with a mask; he is declared to be inpalpable as 
 * night and air;' he has the power of granting immortality, and 
 reigns supreme in all the regions of the dead. 
 
 Upon the whole, that view seems preferable w4iich makes 
 Tezcatlipoca the deified impersonation of the generative powers of 
 nature. As such, he was united to the primitive goddess and 
 first woman of the Mexicans, Gihuacohuatl, the 'female serpent ^' 
 
 ^ These and other like epithets Mother, Gihuacohuatl, always giving 
 
 are collected and expounded in birth to twins, 'bequeathing the 
 
 Lord Kingsborongh's Antiq. of sufferings of childbirth to women, 
 
 Mexico, IX. 179, who concludes his as the tribute of death,' and uni- 
 
 summary by remarking, that ' all formly accompanied by a snake, or 
 
 the attributes and powers which feather-headed serpent, — I would 
 
 were assigned to Jehovah by the suggest that there is in such resem- 
 
 HebrewSj were also bestowed upon blances abundant matter for grave 
 
 Tezcatlipoca by the Mexicans.' philosophising. 'In all this,' writes 
 
 2 Squier's American Arch^o- Mr. Prescott, 'we see much to re- 
 logical Researches ^ p. 162, New mind us of the mother of the 
 York, 1 851; Mllller, p. 620. This human family, the Eve of the He- 
 prayer contemplates him chiefly brew and Syrian nations' (p. 464). 
 in his character of 'god of death, Cf. Wuttke, i. 263, Liiken, Tradi- 
 and of the dead.' tioTien, &lq., pp. 121, 122, the latter 
 
 ^ Squier, p. 163. of whom declares, after comparing 
 
 4 See Mliller, p. 614. the legend with others: *Auf die 
 
 5 Much as Mr. Squier may merkwiirdige Uebereinstimmung 
 ridicule 'the error of the bigots,' der Sage in so vielen Theilen mit 
 who discovered an allusion to Eve der Bibel brauche ich den aufmerk- 
 and the Tempter of c-ur first parents samen Leser wohl nicht hinzu- 
 in the representation of the Great weisen. ' 
 
CHAP. II.] Eeligions of America, 367 
 
 As such, liis highest type and aptest emblem was the sun; as 
 such, he was occasionally entitled Tonacateucli ('embodied lord 
 sun')\ As such, he bore the semblance of a handsome man, 
 endowed with inexhaustible vigour, and rejoicing in the periodic 
 renewal of his youth. As such, the costliest sacrifice of all was 
 offered annually in his temple, during "the arid month of May^, 
 when vegetable nature seemed expiring, and when fears began 
 to be expressed for the well-being of the harvest. Then it was 
 that j)ontiffs singled out one human being, in the spring of life, 
 and of unblemished beauty, to personate, and suffer for and 
 with, the highest member of their pantheon. When the day of 
 this great sacrifice arrived, and the career of mirth and revelry 
 assigned to the unhappy victim was completed^ his heart, still 
 palpitating under the murderous knife, was lifted up towards 
 the sun and cast before the image of Tezcatlipoca, while the 
 crowd below were bending breathless in the act of adoration. 
 
 If ever this divinity could justly claim to be compared with 
 -the all-holy God of revelation, he had forfeited his primal glory 
 and descended altogether to the heathen level, when Mexico 
 was first explored by Europeans, and her baneful idols put to 
 flight by the advance of Christianity. 
 
 But Tezcatlipoca, though appearing to receive unbounded 
 worship from the later Mexicans, was not their national 
 divinity; recourse was never had to him as to the oracle, the 
 leader, and the special patron of the Aztec tribes. That post 
 from ages out of memory had been allotted to the still more 
 terrible Huitzilopochtli^, — a name compounded, it is said, of 
 two words, importing 'humming-bird,' and 'left,' and illustrated 
 by the fact that his gigantic image always bore some feathers of 
 the humming-bird on the left foot. The reason of this ety- 
 mology is found in certain peculiarities of the bird in question; 
 its rich and brilliant plumage serving to dazzle the imagination 
 of the Aztecs, while its frantic courage, as compared with its^ 
 minute proportions, rendered it a favourite symbol of their own 
 
 ^ Squier, p. i6i. This etymo- calledJIm^^iio?!, 'a, little huinmiug- 
 
 logy is not, however, absolutely bird,' and worshipped under that 
 
 certain. simple form, as a god of the air 
 
 2 Cf. Muller,p. 6i8, Prescott, pp. and firmament (p. 596). Prichard 
 
 24, -25. seems to prefer a different ety- 
 
 ^ Prom Huitzilin, 'a humming- mology, treating Huitzilopochtli as 
 
 bird,' and opGchtli, 'on the left an historical personage (Huitzitoc), 
 
 hand:' cf. Miiller, pp. 591, 592. raised after his death to the 'left 
 
 He is also of opinion that in earher hand' of the god Tezcatlipoca (v. 
 
 ages, before the growth of anthropo- 365). 
 morphism, this same divinity was 
 
368 Christ and other Masters. [part ill; 
 
 warlike, daring and indomitable temper. Accordingly, what- 
 ever may have been the primary idea suggested by the name 
 Huitzilopochtli, or Avhatever may turn out to be the true inter- 
 pretation of the marvellous story of his birth ^, it is indisputable 
 that he grew ere long into the Siva and the Mars of Central 
 America. Another of his titles (Mexitli) had been transferred 
 in early times to Mexico itself; and one of the first structures 
 raised by Aztec builders on the table-land of Anahuac was the 
 sanctuary of this, their guardian deity. His image was of a 
 colossal bulk, erected on a blue stone, quadrangular in form, 
 and with a snake, or serpent, issuing from each corner; the 
 chains or collars about the idol's neck were ten human hearts, 
 all made of gold; his girdle also consisted of a great golden 
 serpent. Some at least appear to have regarded this ferocious 
 war-god as the brother of Tezcatlipoca^; the largest temple of 
 the Mexican metropolis was their common property; and in the 
 costly and grotesque embellishments of both we always find the 
 symbol of the mystic serpent more or less conspicuous. 
 
 There is ample reason for believing that ideas embodied in 
 this representation were substantially the same in Europe, Asia, 
 Africa, and America^. Unable though we are to specify that 
 one interpretation of the Ophite symbol which explains and 
 harmonises all the rest, it is remarkable that many diflferent 
 views had coexisted in the same locality. The serpent was at 
 one time treated merely as a type of primitive matter; at a 
 second, it became the image of superior knowledge, cunning, 
 and sagacity. The j^eriodic casting of its skin suggested the 
 adoption of this reptile as an emblem of returning life, of 
 spring-tide, of fertility, of rejuvenescence; and, regarded in the 
 same peculiar aspect, the 'great century' of the Aztec tribes was 
 represented as encircled by a serpent grasping its own tail: 
 while other facts appear to indicate no less distinctly that, in 
 both the Old World and the New, the serpent was employed to 
 symbolise the highest forms of being, as the sun-god, the great 
 
 1 The story is as follows: 'The at once pregaant, and afterwards 
 
 mother of Huitzilopochtli was a was delivered of Mexitli, or Huit- 
 
 priestess of Tezcatlipoca (a cleanser zilopochtli, full armed, with a spear 
 
 of the temple, says Gama), named in one hand, a shield in the other, 
 
 Coatlicue. She was extremely de- and a crest of green feathers on 
 
 voted to the gods, and one day, his head.' Squier, p. 195, Miiller, 
 
 when walking in the temple, she pp. 601, 608. 
 beheld descending in the air a ball, ^ Miiller, p. 615. 
 
 made of variously coloured feathers. ^ IMcl. pp. 484 sq., 611 sq., and 
 
 She placed it in her girdle, became authorities cited above, pp. 216 sq. 
 
CHAP. II.] Eeligions of America, 369 
 
 mother of the human family, and even the First Principle of all 
 things \ 
 
 But though serpents were for reasons of this kind exalted 
 into objects of religious worship, and venerated both in heathen 
 countries and by various sects of Christian misbelievers as the 
 primary source of intellectual illumination, it is also true that 
 many primitive nations looked upon those reptiles with re- 
 ligious awe and horror, recognising in them a personification of 
 the Evil Principle, or emblems of malignant energies, in both 
 the physical and moral world ^. The victory gained by Krishna 
 in his arduous struggle with Kaliya was held to have been 
 frequently repeated in the wilder tribes of North America, — for 
 instance, where the arrow of the pliilanthropic Manabozho had 
 been guided to the heart of the Great Serpent, Meshekenabek, 
 at the same time striking terror into an enormous brood of 
 demons by which he was attended; and in Mexican paintings a 
 huge serpent is sometimes exhibited in the act of being cut in 
 pieces by the great divinity, Tezcatlipoca. 
 
 If I mistake not, the predominant idea, connected with the 
 serpent-symbol, in the worship more especially paid by Aztecs 
 to their national divinity, was the idea of a terrific and destruc- 
 tive agent. This at least is certain, that the modern world is 
 unacquainted with a system of religious thought whose whole 
 complexion was so dark, so ghastly, so funereal. Everywhere 
 it seemed to breathe of suffering and of death. The numerous 
 altars of Huitzilopochtli reeked continually with the blood of 
 human hecatombs^, and that in cities where, amid some cheer- 
 ing gleams of moral sensibility, the Conquerers found no lack of 
 goodly structures and of graceful ornaments, to indicate the 
 progress made by the ferocious Aztec in the arts of social life. 
 These desperate efforts to secure the favour of the gods by 
 offering human victims were indeed by no means limited to 
 ancient Mexico; for all the wild tribes of America'* had been 
 wont from ages immemorial to sacrifice both children of their 
 
 ^ This is the view adopted by tion, of which the serpent was the ' 
 
 the rationalistic Mr. Squier, one of emblem, — in either case the anti- 
 
 the most recent inquirers, in his quity of the symbol is equally 
 
 Serpent Symbol (American Archa3ol. established.' 
 Besearches, Part i.). He concludes ^ Ibid. pp. 227, 244. 
 
 (p. 243): 'Whether we accept the ^ Prescott, p. 19. Southey is 
 
 scriptural tradition of "the fall" also quite correct when he speaks 
 
 in a literal sense, or as an allegory of Mexican temples 
 
 referring to man's departure from * Whose black and putrid walls were 
 the original religion, under the scaled with blood.' 
 
 seductions of an unholy supersti- * MuUer, pp. 142 sq. 
 
 H. 24: 
 
•^70 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 own and prisoners taken in their savage conflicts with some 
 neighbouring people. Acting also on the rude belief, that such 
 oblations would conduce to gratify the animal wants of their 
 divinity, as well as to appease his wrath, they had contracted 
 the vile habit of feasting on the remnant of these human 
 sacrifices, and at other times proceeded to indulge in the most 
 brutish forms of cannibalism. But when the Aztec rule eventu- 
 ally prevailed in every part of Anahuac, the sacrificing of all 
 foreign enemies became a still more solemn duty. We are told 
 that 'the amount of victims immolated on its accursed altars 
 would stagger the faith of the least scrupulous believer^;* 
 while cannibalism, that dark accompaniment of human sacrifice 
 in almost every country, was in Mexico peculiarly rife, and 
 from, the partial efibrts to disguise it, had become peculiarly 
 revolting^. 
 
 The character of the national god, to whom each Mexican 
 had solemnly devoted all his strength, reflected, and in turn 
 contributed to fix, the moral characteristics of the nation. Their 
 ruling spirit was severe and sanguinary. Their familiarity with 
 blood begat in them a brutal thirst for carnage. The great 
 drum, composed of serpent-skins, was ever and anon emitting 
 its disastrous challenge from the temples of Huitzilopochtli, 
 and so calling men to arms. Their very wars were undertaken 
 not so much from pride of conquest as in order to bring home 
 fresh victims for the solemn festivals; and imitation of their 
 bloody rites was always rigorously demanded as an indispensable 
 condition of their friendship and alliance. 
 
 Of minor points connected with the worship of Huitzilo- 
 pochtli one appears to be deserving of especial notice. It is 
 recorded how, in all the long migrations of the Aztec tribes, 
 four priests had been accustomed to bear aloft a wooden image 
 of this great divinity^; the vehicle on which it rested being 
 called the 'chair of god,' and serving, like the sacred chest of 
 other ancient nations, to remind them of his special favour and 
 his present personality. Some writers have moreover dwelt on 
 these arrangements as supplying what they deem a close resem- 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. 502. The numbers companions of Cortes within the 
 
 vary considerably, and some ac- precincts of the temple of Huitzilo- 
 
 coiints are doubtless much exagge- pochtli (Prichard, v. 365 ; Prescott, 
 
 rated (pp. 637, 638); but there is p. 26). 
 
 every reason to believe that not ^ pj-escott, pp. 27, 28, 49; Miiller, 
 
 fewer than 2500 human beings pp. 628 sq. 
 
 were offered annually in the Aztec ^ Mtiller, p. 594; Winer, Real- 
 
 dominions. As many as 136,000 worterhuch^ under 'Bundeslade.' 
 human skulls were fuund by the 
 
CHAP. II.] Religions of America. 371 
 
 blance to the sacred chest, or ark, of Israel, wliich was carried 
 by the Levites on their shoulders through the wilderness and 
 even to the field of battle. But the fancied parallelism, like 
 many others of the same description, will be found to vanish on 
 a close analysis. Apart from contradictions which are eveiy- 
 where discernible in the religious dogmas of the Hebrew and 
 the Aztec, it is obvious that the purpose of the two sacred 
 vehicles in question, and consequently all the main ideas there- 
 by suggested to the people, were completely different \ The 
 'ark of the covenant' had always been the centre and palladium 
 of the Hebrew system, not because it bore within it or without 
 it a material representation of the Unapproachable and only 
 God, or was contributing in any way to bring Him more 
 directly under the cognizance of the senses, but because it was 
 ordained at first as the repository of His Holy Law. Its 
 prominent position ever intimated to the Hebrew that the 
 covenant, in virtue of which he stood so very near to God, was 
 ultimately and entirely moral; that the term of his election de- 
 pended altogether on his keeping of the commandments; that 
 his mission to the world at large was to assert the unity and 
 vindicate the holiness of God against the mass of errors and 
 corruptions under which those precious truths were ever liable 
 to be lost. 
 
 I am unable to discover any proof that Aztecs had arrived 
 at the conception of a sacred trinity, or triad; though attempts 
 have not been wanting^ to establish such a theory in Mexico as 
 well as in most other parts of ancient heathendom. The object 
 commonly chosen to fill up the third place, thus uniting on 
 a level with Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli, is the water-god 
 of Central America, entitled Tlaloc^ In accordance with this 
 
 ^ Bahr, SymhoUk des Mosaischen from the angry water-god. His 
 
 Cultus, I. 399—407. wife, or female counterpart, was 
 
 ^ e.g. in Lord Kingsborough's called Cbalchiucueje, and to her, 
 
 Antiq. o/ill^a^ico, VI.. 410 sq., where the water-goddess, all infants im- 
 
 Acosta declares that * Satan, in mediately after birth were brought 
 
 order to increase the majesty of for purification ; the rite then prac- 
 
 his own worship, has wished, by tised bearing some vague resem- 
 
 cunniugly introducing the doctrine blance to Christian baptism, (Ibid. 
 
 of the Holy Trinity among the pp. 503, 652.) But, as Mr. Prescott 
 
 Indians, to abuse it' (p. 411). well remarks, with reference both 
 
 2 Mliller, pp. 500 sq. Children to this and many more affinities, the 
 
 were among the victims offered at first race of missionaries 'fastened 
 
 his altar ; and it is worthy of re- their eyes exclusively on the points 
 
 mark that they were immolated of resemblance,' taking small ac* 
 
 daring the dry season, in order, count of other and essential con- 
 
 if possible, to draw down blessings trarieties. *In their amazement 
 
 24—2 
 
872' Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 theory, lie lias been converted into the Preserver, while the 
 gods already noticed were believed to act respectively as the 
 Creator and Destroyer. The truth appears to be, that if the 
 number three must be completed, the divinity whose character 
 and influence best entitle him to rank with the chief tenants of 
 the Aztec pantheon is Quetzalcoatl. 
 
 As the story of this god is in itself remarkable, and may be 
 found hereafter to involve a series of important questions, 
 bearing more or less directly on our general subject, I propose to 
 give the chief particulars of it somewhat more in detail. Whether 
 we regard the whole as purely mythical, or as belonging rather 
 to the family of historic legends, it is probable that when the 
 Toltecs entered Mexico^ in the seventh century of the Christian 
 era, Quetzalcoatl was enthroned already as their patron deity. 
 From them it was that all the knowledge of him which is 
 traceable in Anahuac had passed over to the Aztec tribes by 
 whom they were succeeded. The current version of the story 
 is as follows : 
 
 Quetzalcoatl (or the * Feathered Serpent') had been destined 
 to become the high-priest of Tula, the metropolis founded by 
 the Toltecs on their immigration into Mexico. His birth, 
 some writers have asserted, was miraculous^; and in proportion 
 as he ripened into manhood it was obvious in how many points 
 he differed from the multitude by whom he was surrounded. 
 His complexion was not red, but fair, his eyes large, his 
 forehead open, his beard thick and flowing. liaised ere long 
 to' the position which had been allotted to him by the gods, 
 
 they not only magnified what they gods and men, sent a message to a 
 
 saw, but were perpetually cheated virgin of Tulan [Tula], telling her 
 
 by the illusions of their own heated that it was the will of the gods 
 
 imaginations. In this they were that she should conceive a son, 
 
 admirably assisted by their Mexican which she did without knowing 
 
 converts, proud to establish — and any man' (cf. above, p. 308, n. 2). 
 
 half believing it themselves — a cor- According to Mr. Squier, Quetz- 
 
 respondence between their own alcoatl was an intermediate demi- 
 
 faith and that of their conquerors' god, or rather a reputed incarnation 
 
 (P- 465). of the highest god, Tezcatlipoca, 
 
 1 See above, p. 362, n. i. and was thus analogous (he thinks) 
 
 2 This view is strongly espoused to Buddha, Zoroaster, Osiris, Taut 
 by Mr. Squier, but I confess myself in Phoenicia, Hermes or Cadmus 
 unable to verify some of his state- in Greece, Eomulus in Eome, Odin 
 ments (pp. 185 sq.). His descrip- in Scandinavia, Votan in Guate- 
 tion of the birth of Quetzalcoatl is mala, Bochica among the Muyscas, 
 as follows : ' The god of the Milky &c. But how is such a theory to 
 Way, in other words, of Heaven, be reconciled with facts which Mr. 
 the principal deity of the Aztec Squier, in spite of all his archsBO- 
 pantheon, and the Great Father of logical erudition, appears to have 
 
CHAP. II.] Beligions of America, 873 
 
 Quetzalcoatl underwent a course of voluntary penance^ ; substi- 
 tuting, it is said, for human sacrifices of the olden times the 
 drawing forth of blood from his own body. He then proceeded, 
 with the help of Huemac^, the temporal prince of Tula, to 
 instruct and civilise the people round about him. He compiled 
 an equitable code of laws ] he introduced a milder and a purer 
 ritual ; he arranged the calendar ; he set his face against all 
 forms of violence and bloodshed ; he encouraged arts of peace, 
 as agriculture, metallurgy, and the like. Beneath his genial 
 influences the Toltecs rose at once into a thriving principality. 
 It was the golden age of Anahuac, when the corn sprang up 
 with such luxuriance that one ear became a burden for a man ; 
 when cotton grew of all colours so as to supersede the art of 
 dyeing ; and when other products of the soil were so abundant 
 that the life of the community might be described as one 
 perpetual feast. The palaces of Quetzalcoatl were constructed 
 of gold, of silver, and of precious stones ; the air was laden 
 with rich perfumes, while the birds in brilliant plumage glad- 
 dened every heart with their enchanting music. 
 
 But the reign of order and prosperity was not of long 
 duration. The god Tezcatlipoca ca,st an envious eye upon this 
 earthly paradise ; and calling to his aid the powers of magic 
 undertook in various garbs to mar and ruin the great work of 
 Toltec civilisation. He seduced the daughter of king Huemac ; 
 from which event was dated the decline of moral purity and 
 the diffusion of a lax and revolutionary spirit. The high-priest 
 himself ere long succumbed beneath the same malignant 
 opposition. He was tempted to purchase immortality by 
 drinking a renowned elixir which the chief divinity presented 
 
 completely overlooked? For in- the body, — but were partial obla- 
 
 stance, how would he explain the tions of human blood intended as 
 
 deadly feud between Tezcatlipoca substitutes for the human sacrifices 
 
 and Quetzalcoatl, which led to the of earlier times. The same writer 
 
 ejection of the latter and the abso- has justly remarked (pp. 582, 590) 
 
 lute ruin of the principality ? that when the worship of Quetz- 
 
 ^ See Kiagsborough's Antiq. of alcoatl was adopted by the Aztecs, 
 
 Mexico^ VI. 177, where these pe- they forgot bis own strong abhor- 
 
 nances are regarded as a species rence of human sacrifices, and of- 
 
 of * self-sacrifice' (cf. Southey's fered such to him as well as to the 
 
 MadoCy Part ii. No. x.). Miiller, other gods. 
 
 on the other hand, maintains (p. 2 Miiller, p. 587, who tries to 
 
 582) that the self -chastisements of make out that Huemac and Quetz- 
 
 Quetzalcoatl were not penances, alcoatl are really the same per- 
 
 properly so called, — arising neither son, or at least are different names 
 
 from a consciousness of guilt nor applied to the same personification 
 
 from a mystic wish to extricate in different stages of the mythe. 
 himself entirely from the fetters of 
 
374 Christ and other Masters, [part iit. 
 
 to him in the guise of an old man ; but no sooner was the cup 
 exhausted than Quetzalcoatl felt himself impelled to quit the 
 scene of all his former labours and to visit Old Tlapallan, the 
 great cradle of the Toltec race. Upon the eve of his departure 
 he destroyed the costly palaces ; the fruit-trees were all smitten 
 with a curse of barrenness ; the singing-birds were ordered to 
 accompany him and entertain him on the journey. His path, 
 of which the general tendency was eastward, brought him after 
 some deflections to Choliila, where halting for a term of years 
 he was permitted once again to carry out his great reformatory 
 project, and even to diffuse a knowledge of his principles in 
 countries lying farther to the souths Ifc was in Cholula that 
 some of his enthusiastic followers first proceeded to invest him 
 with divine prerogatives. A temple was there dedicated in his 
 honour, and the ruins, bearing witness to his primitive 
 grandeur, are still classed among the noblest monuments of 
 Mexican heathenism. The final flight or disappearance of 
 Quetzalcoatl is narrated differently in different versions of the 
 story. All, however, represent it as both sudden and mys- 
 terious. The received account is, that on his last endeavour to 
 reach Tlapallan he descended to the shores of the Mexican 
 gulf ; and as he entered the unearthly bark, composed of 
 serpent-skins, that was to carry him across the ocean, he con- 
 soled his followers with the promise that he would eventually 
 return among them and establish his benignant rule in every 
 part of Anahuac. A belief in this return^ was lingering in the 
 heart of many a Mexican as late as the arrival of the Spaniards. 
 Cortes was himself identified at first with the expected deity ; 
 his white and bearded followers were esteemed the progeny of 
 Quetzalcoatl, or revered as 'children of the sun;' and the 
 locality from which they sprang was still believed to be none 
 other than the fabled region of Tlapallan. 
 
 Now it is obvious that a narrative like this may be inter- 
 preted from very different points of view. We may consider it, 
 for instance, as a genuine my the, — embodying, under allegorical 
 forms, the rude conceptions that prevailed respecting G-od and 
 nature at some early period in the annals of mankind; or, 
 
 ^ * Seine Herrschaft dehnte sich in Chiapas Nachkommen Votans. ' 
 
 aber hier sehr aus, von Cholula Ibid. p. 579. 
 
 aus sandte er Kolonien nach ^ On these and other strange 
 
 Huaxayacac, Tabasco und Cam- prognostics of the coming of the 
 
 pdche, spater riihmte sich der Adel Spaniards, see Prescott, pp. 104, 
 
 in Yucatan von ihm abzustammen, 105, and Fancourt's History of 
 
 und in der neuesten Zeit /and man Yucatan, pp. 57 — 59. 
 dart noch Leute seines Namens, wie 
 
CHAP. II.] Religions of America, 875 
 
 secondly, it may be taken as a legend, more or less historic in 
 its subject-matter, setting forth in brilliant colours the achieve- 
 ments of some true philanthropist, whom love and gratitude at 
 length exalted to a place among the gods. According to one 
 method of interpretation \ the Toltec tribes, long after they 
 emerged from barbarism, had formed the habit of ascribing all 
 their progress as a nation to the work of some ideal hero, whom 
 they designated Quetzalcoatl. He was thus in their eyes a 
 personification of the whole community : its qualities had been 
 transferred to him : whatever it had done was said to have 
 been done by him. For instance, as the principal seats of 
 Toltec civilisation were Tula and Cholula, these were made the 
 theatre on which he acted, and from which his principles had 
 been transmitted to adjacent districts. As the Toltec tribes all 
 vanished, or were driven onward to the south and east, in 
 many cases owing to their dissolute habits, and in others to the 
 violence of some encroaching and more warlike neighbour, the 
 reverses of the nation are all vividly repeated in the life of 
 Quetzalcoatl. 
 
 It is felt, however, by the authors of this quasi-mythic 
 theory that the deification of the Toltec people, under the disguise 
 of an ideal hero, is inadequately explained on their hypothesis 
 as to the origin and import of the story. They accordingly 
 attempt to trace it farther back into the region of pure my thus. 
 They affirm that long before the age when Quetzalcoatl became 
 the representative of Toltec nationality, a god with whom he 
 was eventually confounded had been worshipped in the cycle of 
 divinities who were supposed to tenaut each one his own 
 province in the realm, of nature. Quetzalcoatl, as to the 
 original conception, was, in other words, a nature-god, devoid 
 of human form or human properties ; and even after a prevail- 
 ing tendency to anthropomorphism led men to devise for him a 
 novel story, and invest him with exalted attributes befitting 
 the ideal founder of Toltec civilisation, it is urged that frequent 
 glimpses of his genuine character continue to be visible ; they 
 witness to the fact that even by the later votaries of Quetzal- 
 coatl he was known to be a mere personification of natural 
 energies. The sphere of action which, according to this view, 
 the primitive world assigned to him had always been the 
 
 ^ This is Mailer's theory, who zeigt uns zunachst, dass Quetzal- 
 remarks (p. 5^0): 'Eine genauere coatl die euhemerisirte Idee des 
 Ansicht und Kritik dieser Erzah- Toltekischen Kultiirvolks in Hirer 
 lung, die sich auf die . Analogie religiosen Fassung ist.* 
 mythologischer Gesetze griindet, 
 
S76 Christ and other Masters, [part hi. 
 
 region of tlie air. The symbols commonly connected with his 
 worship were the sparrow, the fire-stone, and the serpent ; all 
 of which the author of the present theory does not hesitate to 
 claim as justifying his peculiar method of interpretation \ The 
 god who forms and regulates the currents of the air is welcomed 
 as the god of health and joy, of affluence and fertility. The 
 struggle waging between him and the divinity Tezcatlipoca is 
 resolved into the action of conflicting elements : the breeze of 
 heaven, opposed and vanquished by the fiery sun-god, is 
 compelled to seek a refuge in some distant clime to which the 
 singing-birds all follow him. The ultimate return of the 
 benignant Quetzalcoatl from the east is similarly identified with 
 the recurrence of the trade- winds blowing from that quarter ; 
 the idea of him as the great national benefactor having been 
 suggested by the plenteous showers which then descend in 
 periodic blessings on the table-land of Anahuac. 
 
 Yet how plausible soever this interpretation of the story 
 may seem at the first glance, it cannot stand the test of 
 thoughtful criticism. Its author seems to have forgotten that 
 Toltec civilisation, rising as it does alone like some oasis in the 
 desert, is a fact demanding an historical explanation ; and we 
 naturally ask what better explanation can be given than that 
 which traces known improvements to their ordinary sources, — 
 to the genial impulse first communicated to a multitude by 
 some one master-spirit? He assumes that after a nation has 
 grown weary and ashamed of its barbaric usages, there is a 
 general disposition felt not only to personify itself, but also to 
 bow down and worship such personification, as though it were 
 reality. He assumes still further that a nation at this period 
 of its growth is likely to engraft the worship of ideal heroes on 
 some primitive worship of the elements, thus combining in the 
 process two incongruous mythes, entirely different in their 
 texture, and resting on a different basis. 
 
 On the other hand, if we approach the tale of Quetzalcoatl, 
 unencumbered by mythic theories of our own, we cannot fail to 
 be impressed by the remarkable semblance of reality pervading 
 almost every part of it. Embellishments there doubtless are 
 in that, as in most other stories, which have been transmitted 
 
 1 Ihid. pp. 593 sq. The employ- times black, sometimes green) is 
 
 ment of a bird to symbolise the supposed to have been originally 
 
 air-god is all natural enough; but an aerolith ; while the serpent is 
 
 there is greater difficulty in tracing here viewed under its benignant 
 
 the fitness of the two remaining aspects, as an emblem of rejuven- 
 
 gymbols. The fire-stone (some- escence and fertility. 
 
CHAP. II.] Religions of America. 377 
 
 through the same precarious media; but the argument which 
 prompts us to reject it as unworthy of all credit, on the ground 
 that we can never wholly disentangle the historic from the 
 non-historic elements in its composition, Avould require us also 
 to resolve the brightest worthies of the Middle Age into a 
 series of mythic beings, because some dreamers of the school of 
 Simeon Metaphrastes have, in ministering to the unhealthy 
 cravings of the period, garnished all their ^ Lives of Saints' 
 with fables and absurdities. Affected by considerations of this 
 kind, the ablest writers on American heathenism contend for 
 the reality of several of the leading acts ascribed to Quetzalcoatl. 
 He is viewed as an historic persona.ge : historic as Confucius, 
 notwithstanding all the myriad temples now devoted to his 
 worship ; historic as the Rajah Brooke in Borneo, notwith- 
 standing all the wondrous tales which may, and probably 
 will, be circulated in the Eastern Archipelago by the Dyaks 
 of some future age. 
 
 One class of writers^ have discovered in the Toltec worthy 
 an illustrious priest or prince of Tula, who on the decline of 
 power and civilisation in his own locality had fled in search of 
 his mysterious fatherland ; but rallying his attendants for a 
 while had been intrusted with the government of Cholula, and 
 had planted there a sacerdotal principality which long survived 
 as the metropolis of some new system of religion. This method 
 of accounting for the story fails, however, in what seems to me 
 a most essential point. No circumstance has been more uni- 
 formly mentioned than the foreign air of Quetzalcoatl. Pie 
 was a white man, wearing a long beard ^. Such testimony to 
 his strange appearance is remarkably corroborated by the 
 language of the Mexican king^ as handed down by Cortes. 
 The story is there lifted altogether from the region of pure 
 my thus. Quetzalcoatl is an ordinary foreigner, retiring hostile 
 and indignant far across the waters and expected to return and 
 conquer Mexico in the most literal sense. Nor is it unworthy 
 
 ^ Prichard, for example, acqui- Wuttke, on the contrary, is so 
 
 esces in this view (v. 364, 365). influenced by these special features 
 
 2 MuUer's only resource in get- in the narrative as to pronounce 
 
 ting rid of these peculiarities is to absolutely on the foreign extraction 
 
 urge (i) that Quetzalcoatl was said of Quetzalcoatl: 'Dass die bildende 
 
 to be of fair complexion, because Wirksamkeit eines Mannes von 
 
 his vestments were white, and (2) fremdem und iveissem Stamme die 
 
 that he was said to have a thick Veranlassung zu der Vorstellung 
 
 and flowing beard, because the dieses Gottes wurde, ist nicht zu 
 
 Toltec priests were in the habit bezweifeln' (i. 262). 
 
 of wearing their hair very long! ** Ibid. p. 261. 
 
 k 
 
378 Christ and other Masters, [partiii, 
 
 of remark that stories of white men were current in some 
 other districts of America. The arrival of mysterious strangers 
 in the highlands of Peru ^ had given birth to all the civilisation 
 which it finally attained ; and this commencement, a great 
 writer has suggested, coincides in point of time with the 
 original ^discovery' of the middle and southern parts of the 
 United States by mariners from the north of Europe ^. 
 
 We are not, perhaps, at liberty to gather any definite 
 inference, touching the origin of Quetzalcoatl, from the circular 
 shape of temples dedicated to his worship : yet the presence of 
 the symbol of the cross, embroidered on the long white mantle 
 of his priest and planted here and there upon the shrines of 
 Yucatan, has not unnaturally given rise to the idea that he 
 possessed some meagre knowledge of the Christian faith. The 
 Spaniards all grew confident^ on witnessing these strange 
 phenomena that the Gospel had been propagated in America 
 long before their own arrival ; some appealing for an explana- 
 tion to the labours of St. Thomas, others clinging to the 
 thought that they had been preceded by the Spanish fugitives 
 who left their country when King Roderic was defeated by the 
 Moors ; but all agreeing that the presence of their venerated 
 symbol, in the midst of a revolting form of paganism, arose 
 from the unhallowed commerce of Americans with the prince 
 of darkness. It might far more plausibly have been contended 
 that this hollow approximation to the ceremonies of the Latin 
 Church, if not in every case fortuitous, was due to some 
 extiinsic influence which is known to have been exercised by 
 Quetzalcoatl. We are told, indeed, that in the Toltec districts 
 he himself had introduced the symbol of the cross, and also 
 
 ^ The two * children of the sun ' symbol of the cross on their abom- 
 
 (brother and sister, husband and inable ritual. Thus Peter Martyr 
 
 wife) to whom the Peruvians as- (of Anghiera, living at the court of 
 
 cribed their knowledge of civilised Madrid) declares in his Decades of 
 
 life, were called Manco Capac, and the Newe Worlde, Lond. 1555 (Dec. 
 
 Mama Oelle (IftiiZ. p. 305 ; Prescott, in. fol. 157): *Owre men gaue 
 
 Conquest of Peru, pp. 3 sq. Lond. them a painted picture of the 
 
 1854) : cf. Squier, as above, pp. blessed vyrgiue, which they placed 
 
 187 — 192, on other parallels, real reuerently in their temple, and 
 
 or imaginary. above it a crosse, to be honoured 
 
 ^ Humboldt, Cosmos, 11. 298, in the remembrance of God and 
 
 Sabine's ed. man, and the saluation of man- 
 
 3 See Kingsborough's Jntiq. of kynde. 'I hey erected also an other 
 
 Mexico, Yi.^i 8. On the other hand great crosse of wood in the toppe 
 
 it must be borne in mind that of the temple, whyther they often- 
 
 the Spanish conqueror occasionally tymes resorte togither to honour 
 
 taught the natives to engraft the the image of the vyrgine.' 
 
CHAP. II.] Religions of America. 379 
 
 recommended the practice of adoring it\ We learn again that 
 his peculiar principles, whatever these might be, were rapidly- 
 diffused beyond the city of Cholula, and survived long after in 
 the sacred colonies which he had placed in Yucatan ^ Yet, on 
 the other hand, it should be stated that the use of crosses in 
 religious worship might have been at first entirely independent 
 of Christian agencies^. The passion for symbolic representa- 
 tions, deeply rooted in the human breast, prepares us to expect 
 that any simple figure like the cross would almost certainly be 
 appropriated in one or other of the heathen rituals of antiquity ; 
 and with regard to many parts of Central America, there is 
 reason for believing that this emblem was religiously employed 
 from early and prse-Christian times. Its office there had been 
 to symbolise the^ god of rain"^ ; and, consequently, as a form 
 embodying the ideas of health, of joy, of plenty, it had grown 
 into a common object of popular adoration. 
 
 But whatever be the real import of particular features in 
 the legends of Quetzalcoatl, I am satisfied that he presents to 
 us one clear example, shewing the existence of some intercourse 
 in very distant ages between the Old and New continents. 
 Nor is this the only kind of evidence adducible in proof of such 
 (^.onnexion. Many a tenet in the general creed of Anahuac 
 bears no small resemblance to the dreams of Eastern Asia, and 
 ih.^ cosmogonic theories of other ancient nations. It was held, 
 for instance, quite as firmly in the New World as the Old, that 
 the material universe had passed through a limited number of 
 chronological cycles, each concluded by a grand catastrophe, of 
 which the agent was some one or other of the physical 
 elements. To quote the language of a high authority, we shall 
 find the same traditions in their substance ^reaching from 
 Etruria to Tibet," and forward to the ridge of the Mexican 
 Cordilleras ^' The system of the Aztecs and Tibetians is 
 
 ^ Milller. pp. 499, 500. of Palenque, while a figure bearing 
 
 2 Above, p. 374, n. i. pome resemblance to that of a 
 
 ^ So Mr. Prescott seems to think child is held up to it, as if in 
 
 (pp. 464, 465). In speaking of the adoration.' The style in which 
 
 early missionaries he remarks : the whole of this work is executed 
 
 'They could not suppress their appears to leave no doubt as to 
 
 wonder, as they beheld the cross, its heathen origin, 
 the sacred emblem of their own ^ Mtiller, pp. 496 — 500. 
 
 faith, raised as an object of worship ^ A. von Humboldt, in Prichard, 
 
 in the temples of Anahuac. They v. 360. See the whole discussion, 
 
 met with it m various places ; and pp! 357—361. The first age of the 
 
 the image of a cross may be seen Mexicans (the Age of the Earth, or 
 
 at this day, sculptured in bas-relief , the Age of Giants), corresponding 
 
 on the walls of one of the buildings to the Krita or Satya - yuga of 
 
380 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 perhaps in one respect at variance with ideas prevailing in the 
 different branches of the Indo-European family ^ ; for it is said 
 to recognise as many as five such periods in the lifetime of the 
 universe, while they give only four: yet even in the case of 
 Mexico, we are assured, there is some want of uniformity as to 
 the number and the order of the different ages. ■ 
 
 What appears to be of most importance is the fact, attested 
 by the hieroglyphic paintings of the Mexican as well as by the 
 tales now current in all quarters from the Arctic Ocean to 
 Cape Horn^, that one of these great periods called Hhe Age of 
 Water' closed with a convulsion, the account of which, in all 
 its broader outlines, is remarkably akin to the Mosaic record 
 of the Deluge. It was not, of course, to be expected that 
 discoveries of this kind, eliciting, as they did, from long- 
 forgotten races of the human family a corroboration of the 
 truths of Holy Writ, would be allowed to circulate without a 
 challenge; and accordingly attempts were made in different 
 quarters, either to explain away American legends of a deluge, 
 or resolve them all into a series of ' cosmogonic mythes^* 
 They were considered at the very most to indicate a po[)ular 
 belief in some * creation out of the water and in spite of the 
 water.' Yet so numerous, so minute, and so extremely arbi- 
 trary, are the points in which those legends are now found to 
 have approached the sacred story, that some species of affinity 
 between the two is far more generally recognised; excepting 
 
 Hindtist^n, was held to be 5206 at the close of the Age of Water, 
 
 years in duration. The human Some reflections on these subjects, 
 
 race of this age was destroyed hy as regarded from a geological point 
 
 famine. The second period was of view, will be found in Mr. Hugh 
 
 the Age of Fire, in which birds Miller's Testimony of the Bocks, 
 
 only escaped the final conflagration, Lect. vii. viii. 
 except one man and one woman, 1 See, for instance, above, pp. 214 
 
 who saved themselves in the re- sq. 
 
 cesses of a cavern. The third period ^ Luken's Traditionen, &c. pp. 
 
 was the Age of Wind or Tempests, 216—235 : Faber's Origin of Idol- 
 
 which two men only had survived. atry, 11. 141 sq. 
 The fourth period was the Age of ^ MuUer, p. 112. On returning 
 
 Water, the duration of which is to the subject (pp. 515, 516) he 
 
 said to have been 4008 years. The pronounces even more dogmati- 
 
 earth was inhabited by men, whose cally : 'In solchen Analogien mit 
 
 mother was the 'Female Serpent' der bibhschen Flutherzahlung ist 
 
 (above, p. 366, n. 5). Then came weder eine historische Abhangigkeit 
 
 the period in the midst of which der Urvolker von einander, noch 
 
 the world now is: its human popu- ein christlicher Einfluss auf die 
 
 lation being all descended from amerikanischen Erzahlungen anzu- 
 
 one man and one woman, who were nehmen, sondern selbststandige 
 
 rescued from the general calamity Gestaltungen.' 
 
CHAP. II.] Eeligions of America. 381 
 
 where an archseologist or schoolinan is incorrigibly blinded by 
 his love of system-building. Even the divines of Germany^, 
 beneath whose shadow every kind of mythic theory has sprung 
 up with rank luxuriance, seem to have been almost reconciled 
 to a belief, that the traditions now and formerly current in 
 America respecting some great deluge, must have all been 
 carried over from the Old Continent. 
 
 Instead of dwelling on this subject, I shall ask the reader to 
 examine for himself the following specimens selected almost at 
 random, partly from the Avilder tribes, and partly from the 
 more refined communities of North America. The first ^ is 
 still in actual circulation among the Cherokees ; yet so peculiar 
 is its form, that efibrts have been made in vain to represent it 
 as a recollection of some Christian teaching. In the gifts of 
 speech and prophecy there attributed to the Dog, we are 
 reminded rather of the service rendered to Manu, according to 
 the Aryan legend^, by the mighty and mysterious Fish. The 
 story of the American Indians has been thus reported from 
 their own lips by an intelligent explorer of every thing con- 
 nected either with their present or their past condition : 
 
 'The water once prevailed over the land, until every person was 
 drowned but a single family. The coming of this calamity was revealed 
 by a dog to his master. This dog was very pertinacious in visiting the 
 banks of a river, for several days, where he stood gazing at the water 
 and howling piteously. Being sharply spoken to, by his master, and 
 ordered home, he revealed to him the coming evil. He concluded his 
 prediction by saving, that the escape of his master and family from 
 
 1 Thus Ewald, in Gotting. Ge- world' (Prichard, v. 361). 
 lehr. Anzeigen, 1855, No. 69, p. ^ Schoolcraft, Notes on the Iro- 
 
 688, shews a leaning in favour q;mis, pp. 358, 359, Albany, 1847. 
 of the common view, which, on ^ Above,* p. 223. The difference 
 
 this ground especially, refers the is, however, no less remarkable, 
 
 peopling of America to immigra- In the Hindti story, the Fish who 
 
 tion from Eastern Asia. With acts as an incarnation of the Deity, 
 
 regard to the minute coincidences is moving in his own proper ele- 
 
 between the Mexican and Hebrew ment, and simply rescues the small 
 
 versions of the Deluge, he de- remnant he has taken under his 
 
 Clares: 'In solchen wesentlichen especial patronage; while in the 
 
 Gleichheiten konnen wir kein zu- case before us, the Dog, according 
 
 f alliges sich Begegnen finden. ' One to his true character, is made to 
 
 of the best-informed, and at the die for his master's family in the 
 
 same time most dispassionate of deluge which he had predicted. 
 
 American writers on these subjects Muller, it may be noted, suggests 
 
 (Mr. Gallatin) has, in like manner, (p. 515) that "^Coxcox in the Mex- 
 
 conae to the conclusion that the ican story of the deluge is him- 
 
 native legends originated 'in a real self a humanized representation 
 
 historical recollection of an uni- of some ancient Fish-god, corre- 
 
 versal deluge, which overwhelmed spending to the Dagon of Syria, 
 
 all mankind in early ages of the &c. 
 
882 Christ and other Masters. [part III. 
 
 drowning depended upon their throwing Mm into the water; that to 
 escape drowning himself, he must make a boat, and put in it all he wished 
 to save ; that it would then rain hard a long time, and a great overflowing 
 of the land would take place. 
 
 The dog then told his master to look for a sign of the truth of what 
 he had said, to the back of his neck. On turning round and doing so, 
 the dog's neck was raw and bare, the bone and flesh appearing. By 
 obeying this prediction, the man and his family were saved, and from 
 these rescued persons the earth, they believe, was again peopled.' 
 
 The other legends hereunto appended are both silent as to 
 any warning which prepared the human race for the outburst- 
 ing of the Deluge ; but some of the minutiae there preserved 
 are most remarkable. The account is furnished by A. von 
 Humboldt \ one of the chief authorities respecting the picture- 
 writings of ancient Mexico. 
 
 * Of the different nations that inhabit Mexico, the following had paint- 
 ings representing the deluge of Coxcox, viz. the Aztecs, the Mixtecs, the 
 Zapotecs, the Tlascaltecs, and the Mechoacans. The Noah, Xisuthrus, 
 or Manu of these nations, is termed Coxcox, Teo-Cipactli, or Tezpi. He 
 saved himself, with his wife Xochiquetzatl, in a bark, or, according to 
 other traditions, on a raft. The painting represents Coxcox in the midst 
 of the water waiting for a bark. The mountain, the summit of which 
 rises above the waters, is the peak of Colhuacan, the Ararat of the 
 Mexicans. At the foot of the mountain are the heads of Coxcox and his 
 wife. The latter is known by two tresses in the form of horns, denoting 
 the female sex. The men born after the deluge are dumb. The dove 
 from the top of a tree distributes among them tongues represented under 
 the form of small commas.' 
 
 Again : 
 
 * The people of Mechoacan preserved a tradition that Coxcox, whom 
 they called Tezpi, embarked in a spacious acalli with his wdfe, his chil- 
 dren, several animals and grain. When the Great Spirit, Tezcatlipoca, 
 ordered the waters to withdraw, Tezpi sent out from his bark a vulture, 
 the zopilote, or vultur aura. This bird did not return on account of the 
 carcases with which the earth was strewed. Tezpi sent out other birds, 
 one of which, the humming-bird, alone returned, holding in its beak 
 a branch clad with leaves. Tezpi, seeing that fresh verdure covered the 
 soil, quitted his bark near the mountain of Colhuacan.' 
 
 •^ A. von Hum^boldt, Vues des in Ellis, Polynesian Researches, i. 
 
 CordilUres et Monumens de VAme- 387 sq. A very striking instance 
 
 rlque, pp. 226, 227. This great has been brought to light in the 
 
 writer very justly asks: 'Nedoit- Mission Field (July, 1859): it is 
 
 on pas reconnoitre les traces d'une the Dyak version of the Deluge, 
 
 origine commune partout ou les ' They say that long ago there was 
 
 idees cosmogoniques et les premie- a great overflow of the sea, which 
 
 res traditions des peuples oflrent drowned the world, and that only 
 
 des analogies frappantes j usque one human pair of each of the four 
 
 dans les moindres circonstances ? ' races, *Orang Puteh,' Malays, Chi- 
 
 That the South Sea islands are no nese, and Dyaks, were saved from 
 
 exception to this rule may be seen destruction, each in their prahus.' 
 
CHAPTER III 
 Eeligions of Oceanica. 
 
 ' I believe that the ignorance which has prevailed regarding the mytho- 
 logical systems of barbarous or semi-barbarous races has too generally 
 led to their being considered far grander and morjB reasonable than 
 they really were.' 
 
 Discovery and general character of the region. Original unity of the 
 population. Two existing varieties. Probable course of migration^ 
 
 § I. The Papuan Family. Low state of religious sensibility. Idea of 
 God. Worship of the dead. Veneration of the Waringin-tree. 
 
 § 2. The Malay o-Polynesian Family. Ethnological affinities of the 
 Vitians. Their sanguinary spirit. Serpent-symbol. Ndengei. tradi- 
 tions. — The Neiv Zealanders. Character of the Maori. Religious 
 sensibility. Ideas of God. Mythe of Heaven and Earth. New race of 
 divinities. Nature of worship. Worship of ancestors. The ariki. 
 The tohunga. Form, of baptism. Institution of tapu. Story of Mani, 
 Fitness of Christianity : its progress in Polynesia. 
 
 The name of * Oceanica' is here employed in its extended 
 signification, as embracing the whole group of human beings 
 who are scattered through the myriad islands of the Eastern 
 and Southern Seas, from Madagascar on the eastern coast of 
 Africa to the western shores of the New World. It seems to 
 have been ordered in the plans of the Almighty, that the 
 natives of this Archipelago should remain almost entirely 
 strangers to the other sections of the human family, until, upon 
 the dawn of that eventful epoch which divides the Modern 
 from tlie Mediaeval life of Europe, all the bearings of the grand 
 discovery could be adequately perceived. The Spaniard had 
 secured his empire in America, and was introducing there some 
 feeble germs of Christian civilisation, when the pride of 
 conquest once again impelled him onward into other spheres of 
 enterprise. A fleet, despatched from Mexico itself, in the 
 third quarter of the sixteenth century, enabled him to plant 
 the Spanish flag on many of the Philippines. The Portuguese, 
 
384 Christ and other Masters, [part III. 
 
 and after them the Dutch, approaching from the opposite side, 
 extended the horizon of man's thoughts and stimulated the new 
 spirit of adventure ; while England, now advancing proudly to 
 her place among the maritime powers of Europe, whs importing 
 from the Farther East not only the choice products of a tropical 
 soil, but stories tending to beget compassion for ^ poor infidels 
 captived by the devil.' The first of her great mariners returned 
 in 1580 from his perilous voyage round the globe. 
 
 Henceforward almost every year was serving to lift up the 
 veil that covered some remoter province of the Eastern 
 Archipelago. Another world, as new^ to Europe as the 
 continent discovered by Columbus, and affording not a few 
 distinct analogies to that remarkable region, was now gradually 
 laid open to the skilful navigator, and explored by men of 
 science, and by heralds of the Christian faith. It stretched on 
 every side in groups of islands, differing in soil and structure, 
 as in geogi'aphical distribution; here presenting to the eye a 
 mass of savage and volcanic mountains, towering high into the 
 clouds ; there a cluster of low coral reefs that scarcely peer 
 above the surface of the water ; here abounding in luxuriant 
 pastures and sparkling like so many 'gems under the sunny 
 sky of the Great Ocean;' there a long succession of untrodden 
 wilderness and sombre forest ; here suggesting the idea of an 
 old continent dismembered and in part submerged, and there of 
 one that seems at present only in course of formation. 
 
 The inhabitants of this region are at first sight no less 
 various in their aspect than the island-groups on which they 
 have been severally planted ; and accordingly the first impres- 
 sions of the European mariner who touched at several of these 
 groups in succession were commonly adverse to the thought of 
 primitive unity. 
 
 He found the natives of different islands and different parts 
 of the same island varying widely from each other in tempera- 
 ment, in physical structure, in habits, and in speech. Yet 
 here, as we have seen already in America, it was rather to a 
 superficial and unscientific gaze that local variations had 
 presented insurmountable difficulties. Fresh inquiry brought 
 to light fresh points of contact between tribes where such 
 affinity was not at first suspected; and so numerous are the 
 common elements of thought and feeling, language and 
 mythology, which after a minute analysis are seen to underlie 
 the stai-tling discrepancies in physical organisation, that 
 ethnologists on merely scientific grounds are more and more 
 disposed to hesitate before pronouncing against the ultimate 
 
CHAP. III.] Religions of Oceanica. - 885 
 
 derivation of the Oceanic islanders from one parent stock. It 
 is remarkable that within the last few years, the speech of the 
 Malays, itself originally monosyllabic, has been grammatically 
 connected^ with idioms spoken as far northward as the confines 
 of eastern India and western China ; thus directing us again to 
 the conclusion, that morally as well as geographically the 
 Indian Archipelago is only a prolongation of the Indo-Chinese 
 world, and Asia the great centre out of which the population of 
 the whole had radiated long anterior to the birth of pagan 
 history. This clear approximation in two languages, of which 
 the seat of one is on the mainland, of the other on the islands, 
 furnishes a fresh and still more definite link of union between 
 Asia and Polynesia, — a link, ' which, even by itself, is strong 
 enough to hold two of the mightiest chains of languages 
 together ; the ^Nomads of the sea extending from the east coast 
 of Africa to the west coast of America ; the Nomads of the 
 continent swarming from the south-east to the north-west of 
 Asia.' 
 
 Neglecting, for the present, some few tribes of Oceanica^, 
 whose ethnological affinities are still undetermined, we shall 
 find that all the rest are capable of classification under two 
 great varieties. 
 
 The members of the first, and probably the elder of the 
 groups, have very much in common with the Khonds and other 
 primitive people scattered in the mountains and forests of 
 Central India ^, and in some adjacent regions ; but they most of 
 
 1 See Mr. Max Mtiller's 'Last Earl (Lond. 1S40), pp. 156 sq. Mr. 
 
 BesTllts of the Turanian Researches,' Earl's own account [^Ihe Native 
 
 in Bunsen's Phil, of Univ. Hist. i. Eaces of the Indian Archipelago, 
 
 403 sq. or, Papuans, pp. 61 sq., Lond. 1853) 
 
 ^ e. g. the people known by is probably the most correct. He 
 
 the various titles of *Arafuras,' thinks that *Alforias' is not a 
 
 •Alfoers' and 'Alforians' (? Arabic generic term for a particular race 
 
 « .!i\ T , . , ^ . , , of people; 'but was generally ap- 
 
 ^j\ysi\)' 'Nothing,' says Pnchard pUed to the inland inhabitants of 
 
 (V. 25s), 'can be more puzzling these islands to distinguish them 
 
 than the contradictory accounts from the coast tribes.' He derives 
 
 which are given of their physical ^^^,, "^^^^ f^^^, the Portuguese 
 
 characters and manners. The only ' AKonas ' = ' f reedmen ' or 'manu- 
 
 point of agreement between dif- mitted slaves;' but it would rather 
 
 ferent writers respecting them is, seem to have beeii imported di- 
 
 the circumstance that all represent ^^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^.' ^^^ ^^* through 
 
 them as very low in civilisation, ^ European medium, so that its 
 
 and of fierce and sanguinary habits.' P^^P^^ s^?^® ^^"^1 ^®. 'outsiders,' 
 
 Yet even this representation is dis- * persons beyond the influence of 
 
 puted by D. .H. Kolff, Voyages, d:c., ^^t ^^^^^ settlements, 
 
 translated from the Dutch by Mr. ^^^ ^^°^^> PP- ^57 sq., where 
 
386 Christ and other Masters, [part lit 
 
 all resemble tlie African negroes in tlie sooty blackness of their 
 skin, tbeir crisped and woolly hair, their broad noses, thick 
 and prominent lips, receding chins and foreheads, and even in 
 their general build \ These Oceanic negroes, also termed 
 Negritos, and more properly Papuans^, have now their strong- 
 hold in New Guinea, where indeed they are enabled to retain 
 their old supremacy, as absolute masters of the sea-coast. In 
 other islands, they are found at some distance only from the 
 shore, among the woods and mountain-fastnesses, maintaining 
 their unequal struggles with a different race of settlers, and in 
 spite, as it would seem, of all their physical prowess, destined 
 in the end to melt away. Their utter extirpation in particular 
 islands is matter of authentic history. 
 
 The second group of Oceanic-^ tribes and nations, by which 
 indeed those great disjDlacements were effected, is best known 
 as the Malayo-Polynesian family, the brown or copper-coloured 
 race. It seems that long after the Papuans were diffused in 
 nearly all the intertropical islands, a fresh current of emigra- 
 tion had begun to set in that direction from the eastern 
 continent of Asia. . Lively, graceful, and in general structure 
 not unfrequently reminding ns of Arabs, these new settlers 
 form a pointed contrast to their sullen, savage, and ill-favoured 
 predecessors. Instead of shunning the society of white men, 
 and thus resisting all endeavours to promote their intellectual 
 and religious elevation, few of them have ever yet relapsed 
 entirely to a state of barbarism. They constitute the demi- 
 civilised population^ of the Oceanic world. It seems most 
 
 the earliest or pre-Aryan population i W. von Humboldt, JJher die 
 
 of Hindustan are said to be 'very Kaici-Sprachey i. p. iv. Berlin, 1836. 
 
 black, ill-shapen, and dwarfish, and Some of the full-blooded Papuans 
 
 to have countenances of a very have spiral and twisted hair grow- 
 
 African character. ' The Papuans ing in large tufts to a considerable 
 
 were certainly of the same race length: others have hair growing 
 
 wdth the Semangs of the Malay in short and closely-frizzled curls: 
 
 Peninsula (Earl, as above, ch. ix.), Prichard, v. 4. 
 
 and with the natives of the Anda- ^ 'Pua-pua,' or 'Papua,' means 
 
 man islands in the Bay of Bengal < crisped,' and as referring to the 
 
 (ch. X.). Other woolly-haired tribes quality of the hair, has come to 
 
 are also said to exist at present in be apphed to the entire race: Earl, 
 
 the mountain range which traverses Paxmans, p. 3. 
 
 the eastern side of the Indo-Chinese 3 ' Alle diese Yolkerstamme nun 
 
 Peninsula {Ibid, p. 158). To the besitzen solche gesellschaftlichen 
 
 early influence of this family may Einrichtungen, dass man sie mit 
 
 be perhaps attributed the fact that Unrecht von dem Kreise civilisirter 
 
 many of the ancient idols of the Nationen ganzlich ausschliessen 
 
 Hindtis 'have negro characteristics* wtirde. Sie haben eine fest ge- 
 
 (p. 160). grundete, und gar nicht durchaus 
 
CHAP, iil.j Religions of Oceanica. 387 
 
 probable^ that after entering tbe Indian Archipelago, upon 
 their work of conquest or extermination, they alighted first of 
 all in Sumatra and next in Java ; thence, like genuine Tatars 
 of the Ocean, they roved onward in their swarming prahus to 
 the different coasts of Borneo, to the Coelebes, and northward 
 to the Philippines, — a group of islands where the traces of 
 them are especially manifested by the regularity and richness of 
 the native speech. 
 
 Advancing now beyond the zone of what are termed the 
 pure Malay dialects^, one section of this copper-coloured family 
 appears to have wandered eastward in search of other territories, 
 and, avoiding for a time all fresh collisions with the powerful 
 Papuans of IS'ew Gruinea and the neighbouring groups, had 
 found their way to the Ladrones, to the Carolines, and ulti- 
 mately to the Sandwich Islands on the northern border of the 
 Tropics. From this centre^ it is not unusual to derive the 
 kindred streams of population, which proceeding southward 
 occupied the clustering islands commonly known as Polynesia 
 Proper, and penetrated even to New Zealand: so that, in the 
 widest meaning of the term, Malayo-Polynesian tribes have 
 been diffused across the whole of Oceanica, and have now 
 become the dominant race, excepting in one narrow circle, 
 where the elder family, as we have seen, with more or less 
 admixture, still continue to preserve their ancient independ- 
 ence. 
 
 But before I enter on some points relating to the native 
 creeds of Oceanica, as brought especially to light by recent 
 missionary enterprise, it is important to observe, that in the 
 northern territory, or the part approaching nearest to the 
 
 einfache, politische Verfassung, and the difficulties of navigation 
 
 religiose Satzungen und Gebrauche, are fully considered, 
 
 zum Theil sogar eine Art geist- 2 "^V. von Humboldt, as above, 
 
 lichen Kegiments, zeigen Gescbick- p. ii. 
 
 licbkeitin mannigfaltigen Arbeiten, ^ ghortland, as above, pp. 32, 33. 
 
 und sind kiihne und gewandte See- The New Zealanders themselves 
 
 fahrer :' W. von Humboldt, as have preserved traditions of the 
 
 above, p. iii. On the contrary, voyage of their ancestors from Ha- 
 
 few, if any, instances exist in which waiki, which this writer identifies 
 
 the Papuans have been known to with the largest of the Sandwich 
 
 manifest like quahties; cf. Earl, Islands: cf. the full discussions 
 
 pp. 94, III. respecting the original 'Migrations 
 
 1 See Shortland's Traditions, d-c. of the Oceanic tribes' in Mr. Hale's 
 
 of the New Zealanders, pp. 30 sq. , Ethnography and Philology of the 
 
 Lond. 1854, and Eussell's Poly- United States Exploring Expedi- 
 
 nesia, pp. 37 sq., Lond. 1852 : where tion, pp. 117—196, Philadelphia, 
 
 objections on the score of distance 1846. 
 
 25—2 
 
388 Christ and other Masters. [part iil 
 
 ancient seats of Asiatic culture, there were islands whicli had 
 been indebted largely for the rudiments of civilisation to other 
 and non-Chiistian powers, in ancient times to Brahmanism and 
 Buddhism^, and in modem times to indefatigable preachers of 
 Islam^ 
 
 The island first and principally affected by these foreign 
 influences was Java, which in turn, as the 'Phoenicia of the 
 East,' became an ever-active agent for disseminating the new 
 opinions through far wider circles^, among the Batta of Sumatra, 
 in the Ccelebes, and even on the western coast of Borneo. It 
 is more particularly worthy of remark, that not a few of the 
 ideas thus propagated over so large an area had been first 
 imported from Hindustan by peaceful colonies of priests and 
 sages, who without material succours were permitted to fix 
 their residence among the natives, and had gradually instilled 
 the principles which they brought with them, till at length 
 there rose in Java a Malay community so tinctured with the 
 languages, the literature, the mythes and the philosophy of 
 India, as to furnish a most faithful copy of Hindu civilisation. 
 * Perhaps/ says a great authority^, 'no second example is to be 
 found of a nation undergoing such a complete infusion of the 
 national spirit of another race, without losing its own independ- 
 ence.' If we -^:^ our thoughts entirely on the province of 
 religion, it appears that at some time or other during the 
 interval between the Christian era and the introduction of 
 Islam in the 14th century, the Javanese had to a great extent 
 
 ^ See above, p. 324. As modified ^ ggg -^ yo^ Humboldt's invest! - 
 
 into Fo-ism this religion is still gation of this point, as above, i. 
 
 being propagated here and there 238— 254;andLassen'sI?zd.^Zferi/i. 
 
 by Chinese traders and colonists, 11. 1054. 
 
 e.g. on the coast of New Guinea •* W. von Humboldt, p. yiii. 
 
 and in Borneo. Elsewhere he writes (i. 4): 'Kama, 
 
 2 The Muharamadans entered Arjuna, die ganzen Geschlechter 
 
 the Archipelago in the 1 3th century Pandu's und Kuru's, und die ubrigen 
 
 after Christ, when their creed was Helden der Indischen Vorzeit leben 
 
 very generally accepted by the nicht nur noch jetzt im taglichen 
 
 Malays. See, for instance, Mr. Andenken des Yolks, sondern meh- 
 
 Horace St. John's Indian Archi- rere von ihnen werden als einhei- 
 
 joelago, i. 42, 274, Lond. 1853. At misch angesehen, und Java selbst 
 
 the present time this creed is again gilt fiir den Schauplatz vieler ihrer 
 
 making considerable progress, as, oft besungenen Thaten.' Additional 
 
 for instance, in the Arru islands, light has been thrown upon this 
 
 and even on the coast of New very interesting subject by inqui- 
 
 Guinea, mth which it has been ries which have been since made 
 
 connected by means of some com- into the literary remains of Bali 
 
 mercial intercourse between that see Weber's Ind. Studienj 11. 124 
 
 island and the Moluccas. sq. 
 
 i 
 
CHAP. III.] Religioiis of Oceanica, 389 
 
 appropriated one or more of the indigenous creeds of India. 
 This may be collected, partly from the numerous literary relics 
 of the island which are found to have been based on corre- 
 sponding works of the Hindus, and partly from surviving images 
 and inscriptions, or from actual ruins of magnificent temples 
 dedicated to the Hindu gods. It does not seem, however, that 
 the new belief of Java was in strict propriety of language 
 either Brahmanism or Buddhism. The highest object of men's 
 worship was Batara Guru (*the Yenerafced Teacher')^, whom 
 his followers had enthroned superior to all other members of 
 their pantheon. The best-supported of the theories respecting 
 him affirms that he was originally a creation of Brahmans^, at 
 the crisis when they had been forced into collision with the 
 Buddhists of their native province, and when consequently the 
 necessity arose of putting forth a rival object, worthy to compete 
 with Sakya-muni. The unwonted prominence ascribed to him 
 in Java led to the diffusion of his name in far more distant 
 regions. It is used, for instance, by the Batta of Sumatra to 
 denote the first of three principal divinities^, and in the Coelebes 
 Batara is said to mean the eldest son of the Supreme Being*. 
 At the time when Hindu colonists and traders first arrived in 
 Java, Buddhism, we have reason for believing, was totally un- 
 known among the native population. It had certainly obtained 
 no footing there as late as a.d. 414, — the year in which a 
 Chinese pilgrim halted on the island for the purpose of investi- 
 
 ^ Some writers have connected tributes of the Supreme Being, and 
 
 hatdra with avatdra, and so dis- had put him forward, in opposition 
 
 covered an allusion to Vishnu; but to the Buddhists, as the object of 
 
 the true etymology seems to be men's worship, 
 
 the Sanskrit bhattdra= 'worthy of ^ These were Batara Guru, Seri 
 
 veneration:' Lassen, II. 1 050, Weber, Pada and Man^ala Bulan; but: if 
 
 Ind. StudieUj 11. 126, note. we may credit the account of some 
 
 2 Very different opinions are missionaries, there stood above 
 
 entertained on this subject, some them a Supreme Father and Creator, 
 
 writers labouring to identify Batara Debata Hasi Asi. According to a 
 
 Guru with Gautama Buddha, others native composition, some of the 
 
 with a second Buddha or Bodhi- chief divinities were named, with 
 
 satwa; but I think that Lassen's obvious reference to Hinduism, 
 
 arguments are fatal to this theory Mesewara (Mah^swara = Siva), Bis- 
 
 (Ind.Altert, 11. lo^gsq.). His own nu, Brehma, Sri, Gala (W. von 
 
 view IS that the first Brdhmans, Humboldt, i. 238, 239). 
 
 who settled in Java long before the 4 jjj^, p, ^^g^ j^ Luzon, one 
 
 arrival of Buddhists, were of the of the Phihppines, the name also 
 
 Vaishnava party, i.e. members of recurs under the form Bathala, as 
 
 the Hindti sect which had invested denoting the Supreme God, or 
 
 Vishnu in particular with the at- Godhead in the abstract (p. 251). 
 
390 Christ and other Masters. [part lit 
 
 gating the religious state of tlie inhabitants \ Eventually, how- 
 ever, Buddhist doctrines seem to have been introduced in very 
 many provinces, and, what is most remarkable, had flourished 
 for a season side by side with one or more" varieties of Brah- 
 manism. To this harmonious coexistence may be traced the 
 startling intermixture of religious dogmas in the extant litera- 
 ture of Java, the confusion of symbolic representations on so 
 many of the works of art, and the uncertainty which now 
 exists, and will most probably continue to exist, respecting all 
 the details of her sacred history. 
 
 §1. The Papuan Family, 
 
 Our knowledge is more scanty still as to the character and 
 condition of the native races, anterior to the age when elements 
 of culture were thus brought among them by the colonies from 
 Hindustan. The absence of vernacular words ^, expressing the 
 idea of Godhead in the abstract, has been cited as a proof that 
 the religion of the primitive masters of the Archipelago was 
 mournfully corrupted and debased. This verdict is emphatically 
 true, as it applies to the Papuan family, — a race which consti- 
 tuted the first layer of population in the islands of the Farther 
 East. At no great distance from the tombs and other monu- 
 ments that serve to illustrate the ancient rule of Hindu civilisa- 
 tion, there are remnants also of this older race of Oceanic 
 negroes, who, retaining all their inextinguishable hatred of the 
 foreigner, have handed down the rudest possible forms of un- 
 imaginative superstition. Such, for instance, are the scattered 
 tribes of Semangs*, who still linger- in the northern forests of 
 the Malay Peninsula. They remind us not unfrequently of 
 
 1 See Lassen, ii. 1041, 1042. not appear to have had this mean' 
 Fahian remained in Java five ing in the first instance {Ibid, 1. 
 months, and speaks both of un- 102 sq.). The common term for 
 believers and of Br^hmans, but not * god-like' was hatdra, and for 
 a word of Buddhists. 'Godhead' devatd, both of Sans- 
 
 2 The worship of Siva, in par- krit origin. A similar remark, 
 ticular, seems to have been inti- touching the absence of all words 
 mately associated with Buddhism which designate the Deity, is also 
 (cf. above, p. 253, n. 2): W. von made with reference to the Marian 
 Humboldt', 1.280 sq. * The effect of Islanders : Prichard, v. 176. Among 
 this unnatural union was to dis- the Dyaks of Borneo there are two 
 countenance and displace the older names for the Supreme God, 'De- 
 worship of Vishnu (p. 288). ''^'«^^'' and 'Tuppa;' the latter is 
 
 3 Even the Javanese Ywang, thought to be the true Dyak name, 
 which was ultimately used by it- * H. St. John's Indian Archipe- 
 self to signify the Godhead, does ^«5'o, i- 74' 
 
CHAP. III.] Religions of Oceanica. 891 
 
 African negroes ; but their creed has also much in common 
 with that of wild Americans, as well as with the Shamanism 
 that now predominates in all the higher latitudes of Asia, and 
 in many of the oldest tribes of Hindustan. In these remote 
 localities, we can discern no more than feeble glimmerings of 
 the true religion. The idea of God has well-nigh vanished 
 from the human spirit ; for as often as attempts are made to 
 hold communion with him she is always under the necessity of 
 localising, or dividing, the object of her thoughts, until the 
 great mysterious Power, of which she stands in awe, has been 
 degraded into one or other of the physical elements. A moral 
 order and a moral Governor of the universe are both of them 
 conceptions too exalted for the dark and narrow faculties of the 
 savage. Hence it is that few, if any, heathen of this class are 
 ever known to pay their acts of adoration to the Being ^ whom 
 in words they will acknowledge as their chief divinity: all 
 worship is in their case nothing more than deprecation; it 
 is ever tending to propitiate hosts of angry and malignant 
 demons. 
 
 Other points, in which a family-likeness may be traced 
 between the creeds we are considering, are the periodical com- 
 memoration of the dead, and more especially the worship of 
 departed ancestors. For instance, the Ajetas, a Papuan tribe 
 surviving in the Philippines, are still accustomed to assemble 
 annually at the tombs, in order to deposit there fresh offerings 
 of betel and tobacco ^ At the time of sepulture the favourite 
 bow and arrows of the hunter are suspended over his grave, 
 from a conviction that he still enjoys the privilege of issuing 
 forth at night, and so reverting for a season to his former 
 occupations. Crude and childish as this fancy is, we may 
 discover in it germs of a belief in some futurity, or reproduction 
 of the present life^. 
 
 ^ See above, p. 262, and com- and Livingstone, p. 319, of the 
 
 pare E. T. Turnerelh's Kazan, 11. negroes of South-Central Africa. 
 
 133, respecting the rehgious ideas The Alforias, on the contrary, ap- 
 
 of the aboriginal tribes in that pear, at least in some districts, to 
 
 neighbourhood. have no conception of the immor- 
 
 2 Earl's Papuans, p. 132. To- tahty of the soul (Kolff, Voyages, 
 bacco was also offered up in sacri- &;c., translated by Earl, p. 159). 
 fice by very many of the wild tribes When a man dies, it is related that 
 of America (see Muller's Amer. XJr- his friends assemble and destroy 
 religionen, pp. 59, 86, 92, 130, and all the goods he may have col» 
 elsewhere). lected during his hfe: even the 
 
 3 See above, pp. 290 sq., p. 355, gongs are broken to pieces and 
 n. I, on the analogous idea of the thrown away. 
 
 Chinese and the American Indians ; 
 
392 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 According to the testimony of recent travellers in Oceanica, 
 the Papuans of New Guinea and elsewhere continue for the 
 most part void, not only of poetic feeling and mythology, but 
 also of those leading elements which enter into the received 
 idea of a religion. ' We could not discover the slightest trace 
 of religion among them,' such is the report of one intelligent 
 writer^, in speaking of New Guinea. 'The Ajetas,' writes a 
 second^, 'have no religion, and adore no star.' Yet, on the 
 other hand, it is apparent from the context of these passages 
 that the authors both intended by 'religion' a coherent system 
 of belief and worship governed by a regular hierarchy. Of 
 such there are no traces, either in the wild tribes of America or 
 of. the Eastern Archipelago. We ask in vain among those 
 primitive people for the shrines and temples dedicated to the 
 worship of particular deities ^ We ask in vain for any 
 sacerdotal family, or any institution bearing close resemblance 
 to the Hindu law of caste*. The right of sacrificing is there 
 held to be the common property of all, and that in cases where 
 it may be practically restricted either to the head-man of some 
 patriarchal group ^, or else to seers and medicine-men and 
 wizards, who establish their pretension to a mastery in the 
 world of spirits by the frequent use of exorcisms, of incanta- 
 tions, and of magic spells. So far indeed are the Papuans 
 from abjuring all religion that we find them everywhere 
 betraying a keen sense of their relation to invisible agents and 
 led captive by a number of most abject superstitions. They 
 believe that the mysterious Power above them is discerpted and 
 difiused in almost every part of nature, animate and inanimate; 
 
 ^ Modera's Beize naar de zidd- reverence, and fee] so little con- 
 loest Kust van Nieuw Guinea, as nexion with either, that it is not 
 quoted by Earl^ Papuans, pp. 49, surprising that some have sup- 
 50. It is worthy of remark that posed them entirely ignorant on 
 the same statement had been pre- the subject:' Livingstone, pp. 158, 
 viously made by Kolff, Voijages, 159. A Portuguese account, trans- 
 fee, p. 158, with reference to the lated by Purchas, declares that the 
 *Alforias' of the Arru islands. 'Caphar nation is the most brutal 
 
 2 De la Gironibre, Souvenirs de and barbarous in the world, neither 
 Jala Jala, quoted in Earl as above, worshipping God nor any idol, nor 
 p. 132. having image, church, or sacrifice,' 
 
 3 ' The want of any form of pubHc &c. 
 
 worship, or of idols, or of formal ^ This is the more noticeable, 
 
 prayers or sacrifice, makes both because a species of caste- system 
 
 Caffres and Bechuanas appear as does prevail in many parts of Poly- 
 
 among the most godless races of nesia proper. 
 
 mortals... Though they all possess ^ Earl, p. 85, speaking of the 
 
 a distinct knowledge of a deity and natives of Dory, in New Guinea: 
 
 of a future state, they shew so"^ little of. above, p. 261. 
 
CHAP. III.] Religions of Oceanica. 393 
 
 and selecting some one form in whicli this power is thought to 
 be especially active, they embrace it as their fetish and their 
 guardian deity. Such fetish is at one time a rude piece of 
 sculpture, as a snake, a lizard, or some other reptile; at a 
 second time it is a bit of bone or mineral ; at a third it rises to 
 the dignity of a human figure, small in size and absolutely 
 hideous in expression. This third variety indeed, which in 
 New Guinea is entitled harwar (a mean figure carved in wood 
 and holding up a shield), may be regarded as their highest 
 mode of representing or embodying the divine. It occupies a 
 prominent place in every cottage, serving there the two-fold 
 purpose of an oracle and an idol. The persons who consult it 
 are said to ' squat before it, clasp the hands over the forehead, 
 and bow repeatedly, at the same time stating their intentions. 
 If they are seized with any nervous feeling during this process 
 it is considered as a bad sign, and the project is abandoned for 
 a time; if otherwise — that is to say, if they really wish to 
 carry out the proposed object — the idol is supposed to approve. 
 It is considered necessary that the harwar should be present 
 on all important occasions, such as births, marriages, or 
 deaths \' 
 
 Among the few minute peculiarities, which recent enter- 
 prise has brought to light, in aid of the endeavour to connect 
 religious thoughts and customs of Papuans with those of 
 continental Asia, there is none perhaps more striking than the 
 veneration paid to the waringin-tree^, a species of banyan or 
 Indian ^g. So strong is their devotion to it that the wilder 
 tribes of Ceram lodge and almost live among its branches ; and 
 throughout the aboriginal family of the Archipelago^, this tree 
 has been no less invested with, sacred and mysterious 
 characteristics. A similar kind of veneration, we have seen^, 
 prevailed in every part of India from a high antiquity. The 
 'catd was there absolutely worshipped by the superstitious 
 multitude ; beneath its sacred shadow 'the ascetic wasted his 
 I'emaining strength in the attempt to consummate his reabsorp- 
 tion into Brahma; and thither, as their favourite haunt, 
 resorted poets and philosophers, all eager to bestow on it their 
 choicest appellations, and rejoicing to behold in its majestic 
 form the ' tree of knowledge and intelligence.' If these coin- 
 
 ^ /6i(f. pp. 84, 85. ideas, even where they are *un- 
 2 J})id. p. J 16: cf. p. 160. tainted with Buddhism.' 
 ^ Ibid, where Mr. Earl adds that * See above, p. 215, and the ra- 
 the lower classes, at least, of China ferences there, 
 have imbibed precisely the same 
 
S94i Christ and other Masters, [part hi. 
 
 cidences do not actually warrant a belief that in the intertropical 
 islands, as elsewhere, the veneration paid to the waringin-tree 
 is a distorted reminiscence of events recorded in the opening 
 chapters of Holy Writ, the general circulation of such a story 
 both in Eastern Asia and in Oceanica will at least supply us 
 with additional hints as to the ultimate and generic unity of 
 the populations there located. 
 
 § 2. T/ie Malay o-Polynesian Family, 
 
 In passing from the older to the younger family of Oceanic 
 islanders, attention is arrested by one special group, which 
 either from a geographical or ethnological point of view may 
 be regarded as transition-links between the black and copper- 
 coloured races \ These are the Fijians or Yitians", lying 
 midway between the shores of India and America, and on the 
 very confines of the zone of population where Papuans are still 
 intermixed with Polynesians proper. To what extent such 
 intermixture has actually taken place in the Yiti islands, may 
 be very difficult to determine, either from the physical structure 
 of the people, or the genius of their native language : but all 
 writers on the subject now agree, that notwithstanding theii* 
 generally dark complexion, they exhibit much of the plasticity, 
 the animation, and the intellectual power which characterise 
 their graceful neighbours in the Tonga or Friendly islands. 
 With regard, however, to the spiritual condition of the former, 
 the reports of recent missionaries and explorers are both 
 absolutely appalling. Those Yitians who continue strangers 
 to the Gospel, are the Aztecs of the Oceanic world. Their 
 
 1 M. Dumont d'Urville (quoted nativesof Madagascar at the western 
 
 in Pilchard, v. 243, 244) was the extremity of Oceanica {Ihid. p. 253), 
 
 first to draw attention to this point, who, although belonging to the 
 
 having observed that in many of Malayo - Polynesian family, have 
 
 their characteristic habits the Fl- numerous points in common with 
 
 jlans resembled the Malayo-Poly- Papuans. 
 
 nesians more than the Papuans : ^ ^^ interesting account of the 
 
 ' La circoncision,' he continues, present state of these people will be 
 
 *se pratique gdn^ralement parmi found in Dr. Berthold Seemann's 
 
 les peuples de Viti: le kava est Viti: an Account of a Government 
 
 usite chez eux, et le betel ne Test Mission to the Vitian or Fijian Is- 
 
 point, bien que la noiz d'arek se lands in the years i860 — 61 : Cam- 
 
 trouve sur leur sol. Ces lies sont bridge, 1862. The natives term 
 
 done la limite commune de la race their islands collectively 'Viti;' 
 
 cuivr^e ou Polynesienne, et de la the common designation 'Fiji^'' or 
 
 race noire Oc^anienne ou Melane- 'Feejee,' comes from the Tonguese, 
 
 sienne.' This intermediate charac- who cannot pronounce the vi p. 
 
 ter is said to find a parallel in the 404. 
 
CHAP. III.] 
 
 Religions of Oceanica. 
 
 395 
 
 vigour is expended cliieflj on the field of battle, and familiarity 
 with bloodshed, while creating a fanatical depreciation of 
 human life, appears in the majority of cases to be drying up 
 the springs of natural affection. We behold in them, as in the 
 Mexicans, a dark exemplification of the way in which some 
 knowledge of the useful arts may co-exist with almost every 
 species of atrocity^, — with infanticide, with human sacrifices, 
 with the strangulation of whole families in honour of some 
 fallen chief, with brutish feasts upon the bodies of their foes 
 and even of their fellow-subjects. It may be that very many 
 of these horrible usages were first of all adopted under the 
 influence of the devil-worship, which prevailed, and is prevail- 
 ing, in every part of heathendom ; but the Yitians of the 
 present day are instigated to commit such deeds of darkness, 
 rather by a false idea of immortality than by eagerness to 
 pacify a host of angry and vindictive spirits. Arguing, for 
 example, that the state of man after death ^ will be at first 
 identical in every way with that in which he died, they 
 generally destroy a friend or relative, long before the natural 
 close of his existence. They are guilty also, here and there, of 
 self-immolation ; in the hope of thus securing an escape from 
 
 ^ The best, and indeed the only 
 full, authority respecting the sa- 
 vage customs of these islanders is 
 Wilkes's Narrative of the United 
 States Exploring Expedition, Vol. 
 III. Lend. 1845. The practice of 
 putting widows to death at the 
 funerals of their husbands seemed 
 to W. von Humboldt a proof of 
 Indo- Malayan influence; and, he 
 might have added, that in both 
 cases the future happiness of the 
 victim was thought to be involved 
 in this act of devotion ; but among 
 the Vitians, widows are not the 
 only persons so immolated; slaves 
 and even children of the deceased 
 sometimes sharing the same fate. 
 Speaking of the negroes of South- 
 Central Africa, Dr. Livingstone 
 says, that *when a chief dies, a 
 number of servants are slaughter- 
 ed with him to form his company 
 in the other world' (p. 318). He 
 then adds, *As we go north, the 
 people become more bloodily su- 
 perstitious.' Captain "Wilkes's de- 
 
 scription of the cannibalism of the 
 Vitians is inexpressibly revolting 
 (hi. 97, 102): cf. Eussell's Poly- 
 nesia, -pip. 265, 266; and Seemann's 
 Viti, pp. 173 sq. The same horrid 
 usages prevail as extensively among 
 the savage natives of the New Heb- 
 rides and New Caledonia (Eussell, 
 
 p. 427). 
 
 2 Wilkes, Exploring Expedition, 
 III. 96. He had previously re- 
 marked (p. 94): 'This belief in 
 a future state, guided by no just 
 notions of rehgious or moral obli- 
 gation, is the source of many ab- 
 horrent practices.' The report, 
 however, of Mr. Hale, philologist 
 to the United States Expedition 
 (p. 54, Philadelphia, 1846), is, that 
 according to the general belief of 
 those islanders *the soul passes 
 through two states or conditions 
 of future existence [the first, of 
 happiness; the second, of misery] 
 before it undergoes its final destiny 
 — annihilation.' 
 
896 
 
 Christ and other Masters, 
 
 [part III. 
 
 misery and decrepitude in this life and from permanent 
 dishonour in the next. So rife indeed has grown the practice 
 of strangulation or of burying men alive, from one cause or 
 other^ that only a single instance of natural death came under 
 the observation of Europeans during a protracted stay in one of 
 those islands. 
 
 If we now proceed to question the same authorities with 
 reference to specific tenets there prevailing, we discover, as in 
 Mexico and other regions, that the symbol of the mystic serpent 
 has been always made to play a very prominent part. The 
 highest member of the Yiti pantheon, and the ruler (as men 
 think) of all the island- world, is Ndengei^, who, though mani- 
 festing himself, it is believed, from age to age in a variety of 
 human forms, is actually worshipped as a mighty serpent ; the 
 figure of that reptile being dominant in all the representations, 
 even where it has not been exclusively adopted. Some few 
 glimmerings of moral consciousness are visible in the wide- 
 spread notion that one class of disembodied spirits, who would 
 fain revert to the immediate presence of the highest god, are 
 constantly repulsed by an enormous giant wielding a large axe^ 
 
 1 The cause may be, and often 
 is, a real wish to benefit the person 
 immolated ; and it constantly hap- 
 pens therefore that a son strangles 
 his parents at their own request. 
 *Mr. Hunt did all in his power to 
 prevent so diabolical an act; but 
 the only reply he received was, that 
 she was their mother, and they were 
 her children, and they ought to put 
 her to death. On reaching the grave, 
 the mother sat down, when they 
 all, including children, grandchil- 
 dren, relations, and friends, took- an 
 affectionate leave of her. A rope, 
 made of twisted tapa, was then 
 passed twice around her neck by 
 her sons, who took hold of it, and 
 strangled her ; after which she was 
 put into her grave, with the usual 
 ceremonies. They returned to feast 
 and mourn, after which she was en- 
 tirely forgotten as though she had 
 not existed' (p. 95). See also See- 
 mann, Fifi, pp. 192 sq. 
 
 2 ' The word Ndengei is supposed 
 by some to be a corruption of the 
 iirst part of the name Tanga-loa 
 
 (great Tanga), the chief divinity of 
 Polynesia' (Hale, as above, p. 184) ; 
 which seems to fall in with the re- 
 ceived opinion that the Vitians, if 
 not originally Polynesian, adopted 
 some of the religious tenets, as w^ell 
 as some of the arts, of their Poly- 
 nesian neighbours. 
 
 3 Wilkes, III. 83. * Those who 
 are wounded dare not present 
 themselves, to Ndengei, and are 
 obliged to wander about in the 
 mountains.' But, as Captain Wilkes 
 continues, 'whether the spirit be 
 wounded or not, depends not upon 
 the conduct in life, but they ascribe 
 an escape from the blow wholly to 
 good luck.' A singular coincidence 
 is found in some districts between 
 opinions of the natives and those 
 prophecies of Holy Writ which 
 carry on our thoughts to the great 
 winding up of all things. They 
 hold, ' that all the souls of the de- 
 parted will remain in their ap- 
 pointed place, until the world is 
 destroyed by fire, and a new one 
 created' (p. 94), 
 
CHAP. III.] Religions of Oceanica. 397 
 
 *Witli this weapon he endeavours to wound all who pass him.' 
 The approach to Ndengei is, however, much facilitated by the 
 mediation of two other Yiti deities, the sons of Ndengei, who 
 connect the highest god with a descending series of minor 
 spirits, each the tutelary genius of a single island or a separate 
 tribe \ But here, as elsewhere, the benignant spirits are con- 
 tinually thwarted by the arbitrary powers of mischief and 
 misrule, who constitute the gods of the infernal regions^. One 
 of these, it is contended, sits upon the brink of ^a huge fiery 
 cavern, into whicli he precipitates departed spirits.' Another 
 ('the one-toothed lord') is pictured to the warm imagination. of 
 the trembling native as inhabiting the figure of a man, with 
 wings instead of arms, and claws to snatch his victims. * His 
 tooth is large enough to reach above the top of his head : it is 
 alleged that he flies through the air emitting sparks of fire.' 
 The dread of such malevolent beings far outbalances the hope 
 inspired among these tribes by vague ideas respecting the 
 beneficence of other spirits; and as happiness itself is seldom 
 there associated with the presence of moral qualities, either in 
 the judge or in the human subject, but is treated merely as the 
 fruit of chance or of caprice^, the sentiment of fear is still more 
 terribly awakened whensoever the Yitian, in the hours of 
 silence or of sickness, listens to the beating of his inmost heart, 
 and communes more directly with the world invisible. To the 
 consternation thus excited we may trace the number of the 
 mhure ('spiritrhouses'), where he stops to, deprecate the powers 
 of darkness and present his horrible oblations. On this feeling 
 had been grounded the despotic sway'' long exercised by the 
 ambati, or members of the sacerdotal order, each of whom was 
 venerated as the mouthpiece of a spirit ruling in one single 
 district, and as able by his frantic gestures to ward ofi" impend- 
 ing evils, or extort a favourable answer to the cry of the op- 
 pressed. 
 
 We may perhaps discover some faint echo gf a primitive 
 tradition in the story circulated far and wide among the Yiti 
 islands as to the extraction of all human beings from one single 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. 84. remain until an appointed day, after 
 
 2 Ibid. pp. 84, 85. which they are all doomed to an^ 
 
 2 'At Eewa, it is believed that nihilation. The judgments thus 
 
 the spirits first repair to the resi- passed by Ndengei seem to be 
 
 dence of Ndengei, who allots some ascribed rather to his caprice than 
 
 of them to the devils for food, and to any desert of the departed soul;' 
 
 sends the rest away to Mukalou, a p. 85. 
 
 small island off Rewa, where they * Ibid. pp. 87 sq. 
 
398 Christ and other Masters. [part hi/ 
 
 pair\ The first-born of mankind, according to this story, 
 shewed himself unfaithful to his Maker and grew blacks The 
 second-born, less biassed on the side of wickedness, was fairer 
 and was better clad. The last in order of production, but the 
 first in virtue and intelligence, were members of the white race. 
 But a more remarkable coincidence is furnished by the legend 
 of some mighty deluge, which, however startling from its close 
 affinity to the sacred narrative, can hardly have been coloured 
 in late years through intercourse with Europeans, since it is 
 alleged that the precedence of one island (Mbenga) is derived 
 entirely from the general currency which this tradition has 
 obtained among the rest. 
 
 The story is thus reported to us by a recent hand^: 
 
 * After the islands had been peopled by the first man and woman, a 
 great rain took place, by which they were finally submerged ; but, before 
 the highest places were covered by the waters, two large double canoes 
 made their appearance. In one of these was Eokora, the god of carpen- 
 ters ; in the other, Eokola, his head workman, who picked up some of 
 the people, and kept them on board until the waters had subsided ; after 
 which they were again landed on the island. It is reported that in former 
 times canoes were always kept in readiness against another inundation. 
 The persons thus saved, eight in number, were landed at Mbenga, where 
 the highest of their gods is said to have made his first appearance. By 
 vu'tue of this tradition, the chiefs of Mbenga take rank before all others, 
 and have always acted a conspicuous part among the Fijis. They style 
 themselves Ngali-duva-ki-langi (subject to heaven alone).' 
 
 It is refreshing to narmte that, in addition to such intima- 
 tions of original oneness vfith the rest of men, a nobler proof of 
 the humanity of the Yitian has been found, during the last 
 twenty years, in his religious susceptibility. Those very islands, 
 which were stained from age to age by every species of licence 
 and atrocity, have now become the starting-point of vigorous 
 efforts* to disseminate a knowledge of the Gospel on the farthest 
 
 ^ Ihid. p. 82 : of. Hale's Ethno- ment, and conjectures (in a note) 
 graphy, &c. of the Exploring Ex- that the whole alluvial plain on the 
 pedition, pp. 177, 178, where a east side of the group of islands 
 similar tradition, long prevalent might be easily submerged by one 
 in the Tonga islands, is explained of the immense waves that sweep 
 as 'an ancient mythos, under which across the Pacific. See also See- 
 the early history of the islanders is mann, Viti, pp. 395 sq. 
 veiled, though in the passage of ^ See Eussell's Polynesia, pp. 
 centuries the real parts have been 264 sq. pp. 420 — 424 ; and Events 
 forgotten, and the story has received in Feejee, narrated in recent letters 
 of late a new application,' owing to from several Wesleyan Missionaries, 
 the intercourse with Europeans. Lond. 1855. Until 1841 the pro- 
 '^ Cf. Livingstone's Travels, p. 24. gress of the Gospel was very slow, 
 ^ Wilkes, pp. 82, 83. Mr. Hale, but in 1846 nine of this group of 
 as above (p. 55) confirms this state- islands were wholly or mainly 
 
CHAP. III.] 
 
 Eeligions of Oceanica, 
 
 ^^9 
 
 shores of Oceanica. The mariner who touches now at spots 
 where until recently no symptom, had been shewn of spiritual 
 improvement, is amazed on finding how the fiercest wolves of 
 heathendom are tamed by Christian agencies, how cannibals 
 have lost their relish for the blood of others, and how brutal 
 and barbaric clans are being fast converted into peaceful confra- 
 ternities. * Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wast- 
 ing nor destruction within thy borders.' 
 
 But the Gospel has been also propagated in some other 
 islands of the Archipelago, and has taken root especially in one 
 distant group, of which the natives seem, with slight admixture, 
 to be genuine Polynesians \ If the Yiti islanders were made 
 to furnish the best type of mixed or intermediate families, 
 uniting the Papuan to the younger stock of Oceanic nations, an 
 example of these latter, scarcely altered from their primitive 
 condition, might be studied some few years ago among the 
 people of New Zealand. ^The Maori of New Zealand,' we ai-e 
 told^, 'are one of the branches of the Polynesian family, who 
 seem to have been preserved, to the greatest extent, unmixed 
 
 Christian, and twentj^-four, includ- 
 ing the two large ones, were par- 
 tially illuminated. The following 
 extract from a letter printed in the 
 Wesley an -Methodist Magazine for 
 1856, p. 460, is a very remarkable 
 testimony to the further progress 
 of the same great undertaking. 
 This letter is dated Viwa, Feejee, 
 August 23, 1855 : * Thousands,' says 
 the writer of it, 'have within the 
 last few weeks abandoned heathen- 
 ism, and made a profession of 
 Christianity; and their conduct 
 now presents a delightful contrast 
 to their proceedings during the 
 former part of this year. The 
 first eight months of our resi- 
 dence in Feejee contributed some 
 of the darkest records to the pages 
 of Feejeean history; the most ex- 
 perienced missionaries confessing 
 them to have no parallel. Now 
 a glorious change is effected, by 
 the power of the Spirit, in many 
 towns which a few months ago a mis- 
 sionary or teacher durst not enter, 
 the prevailing practice being war 
 and cannibalism. The people then 
 trusted to their gods and reverenced 
 
 them, strictly prohibiting admission 
 into their temples : now they crave 
 teachers and books, and are endea- 
 vouring to sing the praise of God, 
 and learning to read the Bible.' 
 
 ^ Some writers have suspected 
 (Prichard, v. 126 sq.) from the di- 
 versities of physical character that 
 the Maori ought not to be con- 
 sidered one race of people . but 
 are in reality a mixed nation, con- 
 sisting (1) of the remains of an ab- 
 original population (Papuan), and 
 (2) of a Polynesian, race who con- 
 quered them, and became gradually 
 blended with them by intermar- 
 riages. Yet similar varieties exist 
 in all the other Polynesian islands, 
 and as the natives of New Zealand 
 are themselves unconscious of any 
 radical distinction between the 
 various classes of their own com- 
 munity, it is most probable 'that 
 the existing variations of type re- 
 sult from certain differences' of 
 caste, which are extensively re- 
 cognised among all the islands of 
 the Great Ocean. 
 
 2 Shortland, Traditions, &c. of 
 the New Zealanders, pp. 79, 8a 
 
400 Christ and other Masters. [part III. 
 
 with foreign alloy;' and as the principal superstitions, until 
 lately dominant in those parts, are said to represent with 
 singular fidelity the state of religious feeling which has long 
 obtained throughout the great mass of the islands of the 
 Pacific Ocean V the Maori have on this account been here 
 selected for a more particular notice. 
 
 It appears to be established that the colonisation of the group 
 of islands called JSTew Zealand is comparatively modern, stretch- 
 ing backwards at the furthest to a period of five or six hundred 
 years ^. When Cook approached that region in 1769, the 
 natives had already earned a very bad pre-eminence; they were 
 noted for their lack of conscientiousness, as well as for their 
 gross and murderous ferocity; and the recej)tion given to all 
 succeeding visitors, of whom no small proportion fell into the 
 snare of the infuriated savage, only added to the prevalent con- 
 viction that the people of New Zealand had become incorrigibly 
 vile, and must in future be entirely abandoned^. The low tone, 
 however, of the moral system there prevailing, the weakness of 
 domestic instincts, the decay of parental authority, the desecra- 
 tion of the marriage-tie, the general disregard of human suffer- 
 ing, the perpetuation of a cannibalism, as rife and horrid as in 
 other parts of heathendom, — these all were superadded to an 
 eminent measure of spiritual susceptibility. Like the men of 
 Athens, whom St. Paul attempted to impress with the idea of 
 one almighty and illimitable God, as well as of the common 
 origin and consanguinity of the human species, it was found 
 
 ^ Sir G. Grey, Pohjnesian My- great distance from the coast of 
 tliology, p. xii. Lond. 1855; where South America, 
 the resemblance is thought to ex- ^ Shortland, p. 19; Grey, pp. 132 
 tend in some measure as far as the sq. Hale, Ethnography ^ as above, 
 'religious system of ancient Mexico.' pp. 146 sq. This last writer, while 
 It may be definitely asserted that agreeing that the New Zealanders 
 the same general ideas, and very are 'evidently of the pure Poly- 
 many of the same minuti£8, are, or nesian stock' (p. 11), cannot help 
 were till recently, extant in (i) the noticing how, in complexion, form 
 Navigator Islands, (2) the Friendly and profile they 'come very near to . 
 Islands, (3) the Society Islands, (4) North American Indians. ' Mr. Earl 
 the Hervey Islands, (5) the Austral (Eastern SeaSy p. 277) is similarly 
 Islands, (6) the Gambler Islands, struck by *the extraordinary and 
 (7) the Low or Dangerous Archi- almost perfect resemblance' which 
 pelago, (8) the Marquesas, (9) the the Dyaks (a variety of the copper- 
 Sandwich Islands, the most north- coloured race) bear to 'those ab- 
 erly group of Pol^Tiesia; together original tribes of South America, 
 with a multitude of smaller clus- which occupy a similar description 
 ters, and, as the most remote of of country.' 
 all the Polynesian settlements, ^ Ilussell, Polynesia, p. 347. 
 Easter Island, which is at no 
 
CHAP. III.] Eeligiom of Oceanica. 401 
 
 that Polynesians proper carried their habitual manifestations of 
 religious feeling to a more than ordinarj pitch (SetortSat/Aovccrrepot). 
 *When we compare them/ says an accurate writer^, 'with the 
 natives of Australia, who, though not altogether without the 
 idea of a God, hardly allow this idea to influence their conduct, 
 we are especially struck with the earnest devotional tendencies 
 of this people, among whom the whole system of public polity, 
 and the regulation of their daily actions, have reference to the 
 supposed sanction of a supernatural power; who not only have 
 a pantheon, surpassing, in the number of divinities and the 
 variety of their attributes, those of India and Greece, but to 
 whom every striking natural phenomenon, every appearance 
 calculated to inspire wonder and fear, — nay, often the most 
 minute, harmless, and insignificant objects, seem invested with 
 supernatural attributes, and worthy of adoration. It is not,' 
 he continues, Hhe mere grossness of idolatry, for many of them 
 have no images, and those who have, look upon them simply 
 as representations of their deities, but it is a constant, profound, 
 absorbing sense of the ever-present activity of divine agency, 
 which constitutes the peculiarity of this element in the moral 
 organisation of this people.' 
 
 What, then, was the general state of feeling in the heathen 
 of New Zealand, with respect to a most vital point of all re- 
 ligions, — that of one supreme Creator? The reply is, such 
 conceptions of the Godhead were unknown to them, and when 
 at first presented to their notice by the Christian missionary, 
 were received with no small measure of repugnance and con- 
 tempt ^ According to the Maori creed the ultimate origin of 
 all things, even of the higher gods themselves, is Night and 
 Nothingness. The wild traditions of that people, dating as 
 they constantly profess^ from ages long anterior to their settle- 
 ment in New Zealand, all ' begin with nothing, which produced 
 something, and that brought forth something more, and gene- 
 rated a power of increasing'*.* And as night, in their philo- 
 sophy, preceded day, the oldest order of the Maori gods are also 
 
 ^ Mr. Hale, as before, pp. i6, 17. things amongst you Europeans? is 
 
 2 Thus Mr. Taylor, in his Te not one a carpenter, another a 
 
 Ika a Maui, or New Zealand and blacksmith, another a shipbuilder?' 
 
 its Inhabitants (p. 13, note; Lond. &c. *And so was it in the begin- 
 
 1855), t^Us us that * speaking to Te ning; one made this, another that: 
 
 Heuheu, the powerful Chief of Tau- Tane made trees, Ru mountains, 
 
 po, of God, as being the Creator of Tanga-roa fish,' &c. 
 
 all things, he ridiculed the idea, * Shortland, p. 42. 
 
 and said, Is there one maker of all * Taylor, p. 14, Shortland, p. 39. 
 
 H. 26 
 
402 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 gods of darkness ; one who lias been deemed the prototype of 
 all the rest is there entitled the * Great daughter of Night/ 
 the goddess of gloom, of solitude, of hades, and of deaths 
 There seems, however, to have always lingered in the mind a 
 glimmering of some purer and more noble class of verities; men 
 felt that spirit in its essence is superior to all forms of matter, 
 and that thought must therefore have been pre-existent, plan- 
 ning and directing the formation of the visible world^. In this 
 particular, indeed, we recognise a faint approximation in New 
 Zealand to the cosmogonic theories that long absorbed the 
 interest of the speculative China-man. The Absolute of the 
 one^ is only a more philosophic method of expressing the First 
 Thought of the other. But resemblance is more clearly traceable 
 in the texture of the ancient mythe, in which the moulding of 
 the universe into its present shape has been referred to an 
 abrupt division between Heaven and Earth '^, — the two great 
 l^owers, or principles of nature, which heretofore were blended 
 into one, or held together by some potent and indissoluble 
 bond. Their names, according to the Maori creed, were Rangi 
 (Heaven) and Papa (Earth) ^. Till this divulsion, says a native 
 story, the six children born to them were ever musing within 
 themselves as to the difference between light and darkness. 
 Wearied by the long continuance of impenetrable void, they 
 rose eventually into an attitude of wild rebellion ; and mutter- 
 ing to each other, asked what should be done with Rangi and 
 Papa. * Shall we slay them, or shall we .separate them V Tu- 
 mata-uenga^ said, * Yes, let us kill them.' Tane Mahuta'' re- 
 
 1 Her Maori name is Hine-nui- thinking, a Chinese or Japanese 
 
 a-te-po, which under slight modi- origin: pp. 184, 185. 
 
 fieations is also found in other ^ Above, p. 303. 
 
 islands, as in Tonga, Tahiti, and ^ G-rey, Polynesian Mythology^ 
 
 Hawaii: Taylor, p. 41. pp. i sq. ; Taylor, pp. 19, 20. 
 
 ^ Taylor, p. 14, who styles the ® Sir G. Grey explains this word 
 
 first period in their mythological as meaning 'man,' or 'fierce man'; 
 
 system the 'epoch of thought,' and and Mr. Taylor identifies Tu-mata- 
 
 observes with reference to this uenga with Tute-nga-nahau, the 
 
 branch of their traditions, that third son of Eangi and Papa, and 
 
 they 'mark a far more advanced the grand author of evil, who, ac- 
 
 state ' of intelligence than is dis- cording to the same story, * cut the 
 
 cernible among the heathen of the sinews' that united Heaven and 
 
 present day. Earth. 
 
 3 See above, pp. 300 sq. Mr. ^ Tane is the first of living crea- 
 
 Taylor, without making any allu- tures or emanations, and to him 
 
 sion to these coincidences, points has been assigned the work of 
 
 out some particulars of dress and 'propping up' the heavens. This 
 
 manufacture which betoken, to his was his first great duty ; afterwards 
 
CHAP. III.] Religions of Oceanica. * 403 
 
 plied, 'No, by no means, rather let us separate tliem ; let one be 
 placed above and let the other remain below ; let the one be 
 like a stranger far removed from us, let the other be near as a 
 father or mother to us.' Five of their unnatural offspring 
 hearkened to this counsel ; one alone was strongly opposed to 
 the idea of separation ; five decided that their parents should be 
 riven asunder ; one only loved them. This affectionate son was 
 Tawhiri-matea, the father of the winds, who, at the close of the 
 catastrophe, determined to chastise his brothers for their foul 
 impiety. Tane, who is viewed as the progenitor of trees, or 
 rather as a tree himself, was shaken and uprooted ; Tanga-roa, 
 in like manner, the presiding spirit of the ocean, foamed and 
 quivered under the avenging tempest ; and accordingly the uni- 
 verse, as now existing, had been cradled in the midst of elemental 
 wars, of furious conj9icts and convulsions. 
 
 One result of the great severance between Earth and Heaven 
 was the projection of a second order of divinities, — the rebel 
 sons of E-angi and Papa, who are thus distinguished from the 
 members of the older series as the gods of light. They constitute 
 at present the chief divinities of heathen Polynesia ; their place 
 is in the highest and most glorious of the ten heavens \ Con- 
 jectures have been made to the effect that long before the first 
 migrations of the Polynesian tribes, they were accustomed, as a 
 people, to adore one principal divinity^, who was, eventually, 
 
 we hear of him giving birth to trees ^ Hale, p. 22. In the mythology 
 and every kind of birds. The other of the Tongans, this divinity (Tan- 
 sons of Kangi and Papa, were Tiki galoa) is made to fish up their group 
 or Tii, a (male ?) divinity from of islands and to cover it with fruits 
 whom proceeded man (cf. Taylor, and animals, like those of Bulotu 
 p. 23; Hale, Ethnography, &c. pp. (his own special paradise), but 
 23, 24) ; Tahu, the author of good, perishable and of inferior quaUty. 
 but never prominent in this system *He sent his two sons, Toobo and 
 of mythology ; and Tanga-roa, the V^ca-^cow-ooli, with their wives, to 
 father of all fish, and the great people it. V^ca-^cow-ooli was wise 
 god of ocean. This last name vary- and virtuous ; Toobo idle and de- 
 ing in different parts of Oceanica praved. Envying the prosperity of 
 (as Tangaloa, Tanaloa, Taaroa) is his brother, Toob6 at length killed 
 thought by some to indicate a him [? Cain and Abel]. Tangaloa, 
 self-existent God, 'the creator of enraged at this, sent Vaca-^cow- 
 the earth, or at least of the is- ooli and his family with pros- 
 lands of the sea, and of the hu- perous gales to an eastern land, 
 man race' (Hale, p. 22). *At the where they became ancestors of 
 little newly -discovered island of the Papalangi, or White People. 
 Fakaofo, the natives spoke of him The descendants of Toob6 were 
 with great awe as Tangaloa i lunga condemned to be black, because 
 i te langi (Tangaloa above in titie their hearts were bad [cf. the VI- 
 heavens):' Ibid. tlan legend, above, p. 398]: they 
 ^ Taylor, p. 17. remained at Tonga, and are the 
 
 26—2 
 
404« Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 on the formation of the my the respecting the divorce of Earth 
 and Heaven, confounded with a son of Kangi and Papa, the 
 marine god Tanga-roa. It has also been suggested, but with 
 far less probability, that these islanders had originally confined 
 their worship to three leading aspects in the character^ of the 
 Supreme Being, and had thus arrived at the conception of three 
 grand personifications, — the Creator, the Sustainer, the Kevealer. 
 Still, whatever may be thought of these suggestions, it is clearly 
 ascertained that the New Zealander of modern times, in common 
 with all other natives of Oceanica, was in principle as well as 
 practice an avowed polytheist. His pantheon, we have seen, 
 outnumbered that of India or of Hellas. Everything that came 
 within the cognizance of the senses was believed to be the organ 
 of one special god, the ofispring of one present and peculiar 
 energy, which the Maori called its * father^.' This diiFused, 
 discerpted Power was sometimes represented as devoid of form 
 or personality ; its mode of manifestation being absolutely iden- 
 tified with startling and mysterious processes of nature, as 
 displayed in meteors, rainbows, whirlwinds, and the like. At 
 other times, such manifestation was restricted to the form of a 
 particular beast, or bird, or reptile, as the dog, the shark, the. 
 woodpecker, the rat, the ant, the lizard. Or in cases when the 
 gods^ assumed distinctly human shapes in the imagination of 
 the Maori, and were consciously invested with human attri- 
 butes, they always bore, as in the rest of heathendom, a close 
 
 present race of inhabitants: * Pri- ^ *0n nearly, if not quite, all the 
 
 chard, v. 107, 108. I am disposed groups [of Polynesia] there have 
 
 to think that the Orongo, Orono, been, at a very late period, men 
 
 and Eono of the Sandwich Is- who have been regarded by the 
 
 landers are only debased forms of natives as partaking of the divine 
 
 Tangaroa; and it is curious to re- nature, — in short, as earthly gods:' 
 
 mark, that traditions were there Hale, p. 20. At the Marquesas the 
 
 also prevalent respecting visits of common title of these persons is 
 
 White Men as somehow connected ^atua, or gods, who receive the 
 
 with this divinity, insomuch that same adoration, and are believed 
 
 Captain Cook, like Cortes in Ame- to possess the same powers aa 
 
 rica, was actually taken for their other deities' (p. 21). 'At Depey- 
 
 favourite god, and reverenced on ster's Group, the westernmost clus- 
 
 that account. ter of Polynesia, we were visited by 
 
 ^ e.g. Hale, as above, p. 24; a chief, who announced himself as 
 who adds, however, that the mean- the atua or god of the islands, and 
 ing and application of the three was acknowledged as such by the 
 names which he proposes, *have other natives' [Ibid.). These re- 
 been much confused.' markable phenomena remind us 
 
 2 See Mr. Taylor's catalogue of very forcibly of the modern man- 
 some of these 'creative fathers,' worship of Tibet (above, p. 332). 
 PP- 32, 33> iiote. 
 
CHAP. III.] Religions of Oceanica. 405 
 
 resemblance to their ordinary worshippers; and hence the 
 brightest heaven of this mythology does little more than repro- 
 duce the various ills and conflicts of the present life. The 
 history of a god, in other words, is that of some great chief or 
 warrior, frequently disfigured by the grossest of all human 
 vices, and too seldom calculated to suggest one noble wish or 
 stir one generous emotion. These gods ^ were cannibals ; they 
 were influenced by like feelings and passions with men, and 
 they were uniformly bad. To them were ascribed all the evils 
 to which the human race is subject ; each disease was supposed 
 to be occasioned by a different god, who resided in the part 
 affected \' 
 
 The generic name of a divinity, in the language of New 
 Zealand, is atua^, varied in the other districts of Polynesia to 
 Jwtua and etua ; but, as might have been anticipated from the 
 character imputed to such beings, they are seldom or never 
 made the objects of religious worship in the Christian meaning 
 of the term. The constant purpose of their votaries was to 
 pacify, to vanquish, to disarm them. In the vast majority 
 of cases, the atua was a powerful adversary skilled in super- 
 natural arts, and rendered proof against all ordinary weapons. 
 Hence arose the multitude of charms and rites of divination 
 (karakias^), forming the chief element in the Maori w^orship. 
 Every act of grave importance, hunting, fishing, war, the plant- 
 ing or the reaping of the kumara (sv/eet potatoe), was preceded 
 by a multitude of solemn incantations, uttered with the hope of 
 throwing obstacles in the way of some antagonistic power, of 
 binding him by potent and unearthly spells, and so constrain- 
 ing him to waver in his purpose or withdraw his opposition. 
 The same feeling was again predominant whenever the Maori 
 brought his scanty sacrifice to one or other of the gods : he 
 laboured to avert by offerings the displeasure he had previously 
 awakened by the repetition of some mystic formula. 
 
 It seems, however, that a closer approximation to our ideas 
 of worship was occasionally manifested in the tribute paid by 
 Maori to the souls of their departed ancestors*. These, also, 
 
 ^ Taylor, p. 34. circumstances — to conquer enemies, 
 
 2 Cf . above, p. 363 : to which re- catch fish, trap rats, and snare birds, 
 marks it may be added, that tita, to make their kumara grow, and 
 so far from being equivalent to atua, even to bind the obstinate will of 
 means in Polynesia 'back' or 'be- woman; to find any thing lost, to 
 hind,' and hence a member of the discover a strayed dog, a concealed 
 lowest class, a peasant (Hale, pp. enemy ; in fact, for all their wants : ' 
 3'» 3^' 335). Taylor, p. 72. 
 
 3 'They have spells suited for all ■* Hegel (Phil, of History, Lend. 
 
406 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 were included in the multitude of the atuas ; and on them, in- 
 deed, as genii intimately connected with the present race of 
 men\ the hopes and fears of their posterity were principally 
 fixed. Each tribe, and single family of a tribe, rejoiced in the 
 protection, or was trembling under the disapprobation, of its 
 own atua. To that narrow circle he became the chief of the 
 divinities. He issued forth to battle with his kinsmen ; he was 
 hovering near them in the hours of gloom, of peril, of privation ; 
 and so loDg as they were true to their ancestral courage, he was 
 ever struggling at their side against an army of invisible assail- 
 ants. When consulted by the Maori, on occasions of extra- 
 ordinary moment, the atua was believed to give his answer by 
 appearing personally in the sacred house to which his presence 
 was invited, and discoursing there in a mysterious sound, ' half 
 whistle, half whisper^' At ordinary times a powerful link 
 between the natural and supernatural was furnished by the 
 head-chief^ of the tribe (ariki, whether male or female)*, who, 
 as standing in a blood-relation with their patron-deity, was 
 thought to be admitted more than others to a secret knowledge 
 of his will. But, in addition to this higher class of mediators, 
 very many of the principal households of New Zealand had 
 their own tohunga^ (family-priest or * speaker'), occupied in 
 littering charms and offering sacrifice on their behalf Him 
 
 1857, p. 99) seems to think this ^ Shortland, p. 100, pp. 64 sq. 
 
 worship of the dead a special cha- ^ In many of the tribes visited 
 
 racteristic of the African negroes. by Dr. Livingstone in South Africa, 
 
 * Their idea in the matter is that there was nothing like a priest- 
 
 these ancestors exercise vengeance, hood. He remarks, however, on 
 
 and inflict upon man various in- approaching the mouths of the 
 
 juries — exactly in the sense in Zambesi, *The chiefs in these 
 
 which this was supposed of witches parts take upon themselves an 
 
 in the Middle Ages.' office somewhat like the priest- 
 
 ^ Mr. Shortland (p. 61) seems to hood, and the people imagine that 
 
 think that these were the only they can propitiate the Deity 
 
 atuas, who produced any sensible through them:' (p. 581). 
 
 effect on the religious character of * Shortland, p. 84, Taylor, pp. 
 
 the New Zealanders. Mr. Taylor 42, 43. The Ariki of New Zealand 
 
 writes in like manner: 'Their an- was identical with the Aliki and 
 
 cestors were addressed as powerful Arii of other islands, 
 
 familiar friends; they gave them ^ Mr. Hale, however (p. 20), is 
 
 offerings, and if it can be said that disposed to consider the tufunga^ 
 
 any prayers were offered up, it was tohunga, tahuna, tahua, &c. 'mere- 
 
 to them that they were made' (p. ly as persons appointed by the real 
 
 72). The same has been already priests, — i. e. the aliki, or chiefs, — 
 
 observed in speaking of the Chinese to go through the drudgeries of 
 
 (above, pp. 290 sq.): cf. RusseU's their office, with which they are 
 
 Polynesia, p. 69. unwilling to be troubled,' 
 
CHAP. III.] Religions of Oceanica, 407 
 
 also a divinity was in the habit of possessing \ and arousing to 
 so great a pitch of fury, that the multitude who gathered awe- 
 struck round about him were all eager to detect the will of 
 Heaven amid the cries and horrible contortions of the seer. 
 
 In some few districts of New Zealand it was thought again 
 that intercourse with the invisible world might be secured or 
 furthered by the use of wooden images^, resembling the fetishes 
 of the Papuan family. Here, however^ the amount of reve- 
 rence paid to the material object can scarcely be regarded as 
 idolatrous, in the proper meaning of the phrase. * The natives 
 declare they did not worship the image itself, but only the atua 
 it represented, and that the image was merely used as a way of 
 approaching him. ' 
 
 It is still more worthy of remark, as tending to elucidate 
 our special subject of inquiry, that one sacred ordinance, which 
 seems to have been practised by the Maori long before their 
 intercourse with Europeans, bears at first sight a distinct ana- 
 logy to Christian baptism^. Soon after the birth of a child, the 
 custom was to carry it to the priest, who, at the close of some 
 preliminary forms recited a long list of names belonging to the 
 ancestors of the child, and ended by selecting one of them for it. 
 As he pronounced this name he solemnly sprinkled the child 
 
 ^ Taylor, p. 41. The same kind *it is not regarded in the South 
 of frenzy has been noted in the Sea as a religious ceremony, but 
 wild tribes of America (above, p. perpetuated merely as an ancient 
 
 ^'2\ 
 
 custom of which no account can 
 
 Taylor, p. 73: cf. Hale, p. 26, be given, and for the use of which 
 
 Bussell, p. 69, whose accounts are no reason is assigned.' Examples 
 
 somewhat different; but these wri- of the same, or of a similar, usage 
 
 ters seem to agree that there was are recorded in the New World, 
 
 less image-worship in New Zealand Thus, the South Americans, in some 
 
 than in most other districts of Poly- districts, used to crop the ears of 
 
 nesia. The absence of regular tern- their children soon after birth 
 
 pies in New Zealand is equally re- (Miiller, Amer. XJrrelig, p. 285). 
 
 markable, although the Maori have Various parts of the body (the 
 
 a singular tradition respecting some ears, the tongue, the breast, &c.) 
 
 great Ked House {Whare-kura), were circumcised among the natives 
 
 which they fancy had once exist- of Central America (Ibid. pp. 479, 
 
 ed among them, and which 'the 480), and still more among the 
 
 Christian natives compare to Babel' Aztecs, where the ceremony was 
 
 (Taylor, p. 68). connected with some dedication to 
 
 ^ The practice of circumcision, Huitzilopochtli (p. 640), and as 
 
 in the Friendly, the Viti and the such might be esteemed equiva- 
 
 Society Islands, has also been ad- lent to an oblation of human 
 
 duced as furnishing some possible blood. In the Friendly Islands it 
 
 link of connexion with the Asiatic was not unusual for the natives 
 
 continent {e.g, Russell, Polynesia, to cut off a finger, in the hope of 
 
 p. 36) : yet, as this writer observes, appeasing the gods. 
 
408 Christ and other Masters, [part hi. 
 
 with a small branch of the haratnu (coprosiDa lucida) : while in 
 other districts of the island, where a somewhat different rite 
 prevailed, the ceremony was always conducted near a running 
 stream, in which the child, when it received its name, was not 
 tinfrequently immersed \ Yet, notwithstanding this apparent 
 affinity between the heathen and the Christian ordinances, it is 
 not difficult to trace in them a fundamental contradiction. The 
 infant of the Maori was regarded from the moment of its birth 
 as * an exceedingly sacred object V and as such was to be 
 handled in the first instance only by the sacred few. The 
 Gospel, on the contrary, has taught with emphasis that every 
 one ^ natui'ally engendered of the offspring of Adam' brings into 
 the world a tainted, vitiated, fallen nature, and that baptism 
 Avas itself appointed by the New Man from heaven, with special 
 reference to the counteraction of that taint and the removal of 
 that moral disability. Hence, while there is not the slightest 
 recognition in the Maori ' baptism' either of sin or guilt or the 
 remissibility of guilt, the Christian sacrament derives its charac- 
 ter entirely from the recognition of such doctrines. While the 
 Maori charm was contemplating the dedication of the boy to 
 nothing higher than 'I\i^, the god of war, and was invoking on 
 him, as the greatest of all excellencies, that he might ' flame 
 with anger, ' and have ' strength to wield a weapon, ' the young 
 Christian, on the contrary, has been enrolled under a very dif- 
 ferent Captain ; he is sworn as the soldier of the Cross, to fight 
 manfully against sin, the world, and the devil, and daily to 
 proceed ^ in all vii^tue and godliness of living. ' 
 
 There is another usage common to the Maori, and to all the 
 Polynesian tribes^, however distant from New Zealand, which 
 is often thought to be among their most essential peculiarities. 
 
 1 Taylor, pp. 74 sq.; cf. Short- Zealand; Maru, still more Satanic, 
 land, p. 121. Sir G. Grey {Poly- fills that office in the south. 
 7iesian Mythology, p. 32) makes ^ "Whatever may turn out to be 
 use of language calculated to sug- the ethnological position of the 
 gest. still closer affinities between Vltlans, it is noticeable that they 
 the heathen and Christian rites ; also have the usage of tapu, which 
 e.g. * hurriedly skipped over part they call tambu (Hale, p. 51). Per- 
 of the prayers of the baptismal haps they have adopted it from 
 service.' On the Mexican cus- their Tonga neighbours, just as the 
 tom of dedicating infants to the Muslim was induced to borrow the 
 water-goddess, see above, p. 371, Hindu theory of caste from the 
 n. 3. people he invaded. The name for 
 
 2 Shortland, p. 122. tapu in the island of Madagascar 
 ^ Taylor, p. 75, where the kara- isfady, but the usage is there also 
 
 Ha is given at length. Tu is the substantially the same ; Prichard, 
 god of war in the north of New v. 208. 
 
CHAP. III.] Eeligions of Oceanica. 409 
 
 This is the institution of tapu (taboo), a word employed like 
 many others of the Oceanic dialects, either as a noun, an 
 adjective, or a verb. According to one etymology, it means no 
 more than thoroughly marked V and hence may have arisen 
 its ordinary application to sacred things and persons, and 
 restrictive or prohibitory laws. Tapus, however, in this latter 
 sense must not be ranked with arbitrary regulations instituted 
 by some ancient legislator for political or social objects. They 
 were uniformly made to rest upon religious ideas; all their 
 sanctions were derived immediately from precepts of religion, 
 8,nd in this respect we may compare them with enactments of 
 the Jewish law, — for instance, that on clean and unclean 
 meats, or that in virtue of which the Hebrew might contract 
 uncleanness by touching a dead body, or most of all, perhaps, 
 with the sabbatical institutions, which under pain of God's 
 displeasure periodically rescued a space of time from secular 
 and common purposes. One principle which forms a character- 
 istic of the Maori system was, Hhat if any thing tapu [sacred] 
 is permitted to come in contact with food, or with any vessel 
 or place, where food is ordinarily kept, such food must not 
 afterwards be eaten by any one, and such vessel or place must 
 no longer be devoted to its ordinary use^.' This law, pervading 
 though it did all classes of society, and modifying their most 
 common thoughts and occupations^, was especially manifested 
 in the case of the ariki, or head-chief, whose sacredness in their 
 minds bordered very close on absolute divinity. His hcuse, 
 his garments, everything relating to him was tapu. The spot 
 on which he trod, external to his own domain, was consecrated 
 and appropriated by that act*. It was believed that persons 
 who partook by accident of any food which had been cooked 
 for the ariki, did so at the peril of their life^; and though a 
 ceremonial was provided by means of which restrictions of this 
 kind were softened or entirely taken off^', the Maori was per- 
 
 1 Shortland, p. 8i, who says that the tajpu was for a time thrown 
 it *only came to signify sacred or over workmen, employed in some 
 prohibited in a secondary sense, task of great importance to the 
 because sacred things and places community at large: e.g. *No one 
 were commonly marked in a pecu- but the priest could pause in front 
 liar manner.' In Mr. Hale's PoZ?/- of the party engaged in gathering 
 nesian Lexicon, as before, p. 331, the A;2r?7iara; those who presumed to 
 we have the following entry : ' Tapu, do so, would be either killed or 
 tabu, ubiq., sacred, and hence, for- stripped for their temerity.' 
 bidden,' while tapui, in the Samoan, * Shortland, p. 84. 
 
 is *tojnake sacred,' &c. ^ Taylor, p. 56. 
 
 2 Shortland, I6id. 6 Shortland, p. 83. When the 
 
 3 Taylor, p. 57. In these cases tapu was taken off, the object be- 
 
410 Clirist and other Masters, [part hi. 
 
 petually haunted by the dread of violating the appointed ordi- 
 nance, and trespassing on sacred ground. 
 
 I am disposed to think with one who has bestowed con- 
 siderable pains on this investigation, that the tapu-system had 
 arisen gradually in Polynesia, in proportion as the theory of 
 religion there prevailing was more fully mastered and deve- 
 loped ^ When the many were familiarized with the idea that 
 an atua, or divinity, resided in some principal chief or priest, 
 it followed that a portion of his spiritual essence was communi- 
 cated of necessity to all the objects he might touch. It followed 
 also, *that the spiritual essence so communicated to any object 
 was afterwards more or less retransmitted to any thing else 
 brought into contact with it.' Hence accordingly arose the 
 duty of protecting aught in which that spiritual essence was 
 inherent, or over which its virtue had been temporarily diffused, 
 from every risk of being polluted by contact with articles of 
 food ; since the act of eating what had touched a thing tapu 
 must carry with it the necessity of eating particles of the sacred 
 essence of the atua, from which its own sacredness was all de- 
 rived^. In this way had been formed the mightiest of political 
 engines for exalting the importance of the priest-king of New 
 Zealand, for strengthening his iron arm, and thus investing 
 him with almost supernatural powers for good or for evil. 
 
 It were difficult to single out a legend that more fully serves 
 to illustrate the modes of thought and feeling once predominant 
 in Polynesia, than the cluster of wild fables which from time 
 to time have gathered round the primitive story of Maui the 
 Young (potiki). He has not unjustly been regarded as the 
 mythic hero of the Maori ; in some particulars he well deserves 
 to be entitled the Oceanic Baldur ; in others, the Prometheus 
 of the Southern Seas. There is no group of islands where he 
 was not held in constant reverence under one or other of his 
 numerous appellations^; but New Zealand he was made to 
 
 came noa, *free,' or 'common;' i.e. is Mafui, current in the Navigator 
 
 was deprived of all the sacredness (Samoan) Islands. This with a 
 
 with which it was before invested. suffix becomes Mafuike (? a mem- 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. 82, Hale, pp. 19, 20. ber of the Mafui family), by means 
 
 2 Mr. Shortland adds (but less of which we are enabled to arrive 
 
 conclusively): *If to eat an enemy at the form MafuVe or Mafu'e, and 
 
 was the greatest insult to be offer- finally at ilfaui. It has been thought 
 
 ed him, how horrible to eat any indeed that Maui is the primitive 
 
 thing containing a particle of the form, and was intended to describe 
 
 divine essence.' the person who first sighted land 
 
 ^ Perhaps the oldest, certainly {Ma-u-i; Taylor, p. 29); but, on 
 
 the fullest, form which it assumes this hypothesis, what explanation 
 
CHAP. III.] Religions of Oceanica. 411 
 
 claim for Lis own property, the native title of that region im- 
 porting *The Fish of Maui/ and so bearing witness to the 
 popular belief that all the island had emerged originally from 
 the depths of ocean through the exercise of his transcendent 
 power. 
 
 The stories tell that Maui was the last-born child of Tara- 
 hunga or Taranga^, being descended also, after many generations, 
 from Tu-mata-uenga, one of the unnatural sons of Heaven and 
 Earth ^, Though finally admitted to the number of the gods, 
 and though at times confounded even with the highest members 
 of the ancient pantheon^, he is not unfrequently declared to 
 be of purely human origin. His youthful pranks, betokening 
 always an exuberance of life and vigour, and occasionally in- 
 termingled with proceedings of more than dubious morality, 
 remind us of the early feats ascribed to the heroic Krishna*; 
 while his struggles with a huge sea-monster (Tunurua) furnish 
 some additional points of contact or comparison with the Her- 
 cules alike of India and of Greece. On this account it was 
 that he acquired a lasting hold on the affections of the ancient 
 Maori, and was scrupulously invoked by them as their own 
 tutelary genius on many grand occasions, and especially when 
 they were setting out upon some fishing expedition. 
 
 Very many of the strange adventures which are told of 
 Maui indicate his vast superiority over his five elder brothers 
 in strength, in cunning, in good fortune. To astonish or to 
 overreach them he would voluntarily assume the form and other 
 qualities of a bird ; and once, in this disguise, appears to have 
 succeeded in gaining admittance to the subterranean world, in 
 which his parents were detained. Ere long, however, it was 
 found that the mysterious visitor was a man, or rather was ^ a 
 god,' and when his mother finally beheld in him her own little 
 Maui (*Maui possessed of the top-knot, or power, of Taranga'), 
 her delight at the discovery was rapturous and unbounded. 
 
 can be offered of Mafui? Besides, ^ Above, p. 402, n. 6. 
 
 it must be borne in mind that Maui ^ ^ g^ jj^ the Tonga islands, it is 
 
 was in all probability the offspring he who supports the earth itself, 
 
 of an age long anterior to the first and causes earthquakes (Prichard, 
 
 discovery of New Zealand. v. 105, 152), just as Tane props up 
 
 ^ See the legend in Sir G. Grey's the heavens ; and in the same dis- 
 
 Polynesian Mythology, pp. 31 sq., trict Maui, and not Tangaloa, was 
 
 and in Mr. Taylor's Te Ika a Mauij said to have fished up those islands 
 
 pp. 23 sq. The New Zealand Ta- out of the sea with a hook and line. 
 
 ranga explsims the TV iW i-a-tala- {Ibid, p. io5, note; of. Hale, p. 
 
 nga of other islands, and the Maui- 23.) 
 
 a-talana of Hawaii. ■* See above, pp. 199 sq. 
 
412 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 'This,' she exclaimed, 4s indeed mj child. By the winds and 
 storms and wave- uplifting gales he was fashioned and became a 
 human being. Welcome, O my child, welcome ! by thee shall 
 hereafter be climbed the threshold of the house of thy great 
 ancestor, Hine-nui-te-po (the goddess of the world invisible), 
 and death itself shall thenceforth have no power over man.* 
 With the express intention of achieving the fulfilment of this 
 hopeful prophecy, the hero of New Zealand entered on the last 
 and greatest of his labours. He had noticed how the sun and 
 moon, which he was instigated to extinguish, were immortalised, 
 because it was their wont to bathe in some living fountain : 
 * he determined, therefore, to do the same, and to enter the 
 womb of Hine-nui-te-po, that is. Hades, where the living water 
 — the life-giving stream — was situated. Hine-nui-te-po draws 
 all into her womb, but permits none to return. Maui deter- 
 mined to try, trusting to his great |)owers ; but before he made 
 the attempt, he strictly charged the birds, his friends, not to 
 laugh. He then allowed Great Mother Night to draw him into 
 her womb. His head and shoulders had already entered, when 
 that forgetful bird, the Piwaka-waka, began to laugh. Night 
 closed her portals : Maui was cut in two, and died. Thus 
 death came into the world, [or rather, in accordance with a 
 second and more congruous version, kept its hold upon the 
 world]. Had not the Piwaka-waka laughed, Maui would have 
 drunk of the living stream, and man would never [more] have 
 died. Such was the end of Maui^ !' 
 
 In the main complexion of this fable, notwithstanding all 
 its wildness and monstrosity, is found the aptest illustration 
 which the mythes of Oceanica will furnish of the spirit there 
 and everywhere engendered by the loss of real faith in God. 
 Religion was debased into a hopeless, loveless dread of physical 
 suffering and disaster. Old presentiments of some exalted 
 Champion, who might silence or suppress the agencies of evil 
 and so glorify together all the members of the Maori household, 
 were eventually abandoned in despair as treacherous and illu- 
 sive ; death, they felt, had triumphed over Maui, and not Maui 
 over death. How cheering, therefore, to a people, prostrate, 
 powerless, terror-stricken, were the tidings of great joy which 
 circulate in every land with the diffusion of the holy Gospel ! 
 
 1 Taylor, p. 31, Grey, p. 57. The abortive attempt to deceive the 
 
 versions of the story are consider- great goddess of Night (Grey, p. 
 
 ably different in different writers. 10); in the other, he is only un- 
 
 In one case Maui is made the successful in his vigorous struggle 
 
 bringer-in of death, through his to subdue it. 
 
CHAP. III.] Religions of Oceanica. ff^'ilS'"' "' 
 
 Here liad been revealed the one, all-glorious and all-merciful 
 Atiuiy 'manifest in the flesh/ yea, wedded by the bands of an 
 eternal love to the humanity which He adopted. Hence arose 
 new principles of life and health and blessedness, which, per- 
 meating through the various members of the Christian or- 
 ganism, united each to each by reconciling all to Christ, the 
 Head and Saviour of the Body. 'He tasted death for every 
 man.' 'Forasmuch as the children are partakers of flesh and 
 blood. He also Himself took part of the same, that through 
 death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that 
 is, the devil ; and deliver them who through fear of death were 
 all their life-time subject to bondage.' 
 
 And already there is cause enough for gratitude, as we 
 count up those precious harvests which the messengers of 
 Christ are reaping on the blood-stained shores of Oceanica. 
 The wizards of New Zealand bow at length before the majesty 
 of the Gospel ; the expiring voice of every oracle proclaims that 
 Christ, the Son of Mary, is verily Divine \ Of Polynesia, as a 
 whole, it may be urged with equal confidence, that she is 
 waking from the death of sin, and stretching out her hands to 
 God, her Refuge and Redeemer. Island after island has been 
 touched, rebuked and quickened by the ministrations of His 
 grace ; and with a promptness and expansive ardour that shone 
 forth so brightly in our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, as soon as 
 ever they were folded in the Christian Church, those Poly- 
 nesians are in turn transmitting onward all the blessings they 
 receive from us. ' Now,' exclaims a chief of Paratonga^, plead- 
 ing with his pagan neighbours and extolling the incalculable 
 good that has resulted to himself and to his tiibe from a sincere 
 adoption of the Gospel, ' Now we enjoy happiness, to which our 
 ancestors were strangers ; our ferocious wars have ceased ; our 
 houses are the abodes of comfort ; we have European property ; 
 we possess books in our own language ; our children can read ; 
 and, above all, we know the true God and the way of salvation 
 by His Son, Jesus Christ. This alone can make you a peaceable 
 and happy people. I should have died a savage, had it not been 
 for the Gospel.' 
 
 ^ When the first missionaries the inquiry was made, the answer 
 
 preached the Gospel in New Zea- invariably given declared Jesus 
 
 land, the natives consulted their Christ to be the true God;' — an 
 
 atua, as to whether the teaching answer which in part accounts for 
 
 of the Europeans was true or false. the rapid growth of Christianity in 
 
 * It is a remarkable fact,' adds Mr. those regions. 
 
 Shortland (p. loo), 'that wherever ^ Bussell's Polynesia, p. 274. 
 
414 Christ and other Masters. [part hi. 
 
 May the bright and blissful era be approaching, when all 
 Christendom, incited by the proofs of fresh vitality and vigour 
 which come back to us from the antipodes, shall count it her 
 chief glory to assist in adding weight to these grand impulses, 
 and forwarding the consummation of the Gospel-triumph; when 
 the Church of God, no more restricted to particular tribes and 
 nations, but embracing in her bosom all varieties of man, — ^the 
 white, the red, the black, the copper-coloured, — shall be eager 
 to advance into her ultimate condition, a thrice glorious Church, 
 unblemished, indefectible ; when island shall no longer cry to 
 island, ^ Come over and help us,' but, *all shall know the Lord, 
 from the least unto the greatest.' 
 
 I conclude this portion of my present task in words more 
 forcible than any of my own, because they are the words of one 
 now toiling at his post amid the far-off isles of Oceanica, and 
 there exhibiting from day to day how zeal and prudence, faith 
 and charity, tenderness and manly vigour may exist in graceful 
 combination, and contribute now, as in the age of Apostolic 
 missions, to enlighten and evangelise the world : *It is indeed,' 
 writes Bishop Selwyn, ^ a great and glorious work, appalling in 
 its vastness, and yet sustained by the fulness of the promise 
 that the prayers of the Son of God will never fail, till the 
 Father has given to Him the heathen for his inheritance, and 
 the utmost parts of the earth for His possession.' 
 
PART IV. 
 
 RELIGIONS OF EGYPT AND 
 MEDO-PERSIA. 
 
EELIGIONS OF EGYPT AND 
 MEDO-PERSIA. 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 
 
 Ov fidpov Be rovTOV ['Offlpidos] ol lepeh X^yovatv, dWd Kal tuji/ dXXcxjv decuv, 
 6(T0L ixij ayivvTjToi, /lltjB' d(p6apT0i, ret /J,h aJjiiara Trap avrots Ketadac 
 Kdixbvra Kal depaireOeadaij rds dk \pvxds ev ovpav(^ Xd/JLTreiu dcrrpa, Kal 
 KaXeladai Kdva p.kv rr}v "la-cdos u^' 'E\Xr]V(*}v, vir' AlyvTrriiav 5^ l^uidiv^ 
 ^Q,pl(ava Zh rrjv "Q,pov, rrju d^ Tu^covos, dpKTOV. els be rds rpocpds tCov 
 TLfiw/Jieucou ^dj(x)v, Toijs pL^v dXXovs cvvTer ay jxeva reXeXv, fxbvovs bk ixt] 
 didduaL roi)s Qri[3atda KaroLKOvpras, ws dv-qrbv deov ovbeua vopLL^ovras, dXXd 
 df KaXovcnv avrol Kvrjcp, dyivvr}TOV 'ovra Kal dOdvarov, 
 
 EuDOxus in Pliitarcli. De Iside et Osiride^ c. xxi. 
 
 Importance of ancient Egypt. Its connexion with the neighbouring coun- 
 tries. Variety of monuments. Discoveries. Small assistance to the 
 theological student. Civilisation. Parallel case of India and China. 
 Mobility of Egyptian art, language and religion. Difficulties con- 
 nected with the Biblical chronology. Untrustworthy character of some 
 Egyptian traditions. Manetho's list of Kings. The chronological 
 problem still unsolved. Primitive state of Egypt. Chami and Miz- 
 raim. Earliest seat of its civilisation. Discrimination of the early 
 from the Hellenised Egyptians, Neo-Platonist theories respecting the 
 early mythology. Sacred boohs. Extant sources of information. How 
 far the older heathenism of Egypt was monotheistic. Parallel case of 
 India. Practical polytheism of the system. Its pantheistic basis. 
 Orders of divinities. Ptah. Neith. Pasht. Ra or Phra. Early pre- 
 valence of sun-worship. The Pharaohs children of the sun, Kneph. 
 Ammon. Isis and Osiris. Hymns in honour of Osiris. Main ideas in 
 the worship. Parallel in the Adonis ■ worship of Phoenicia, The 
 Cabeiri: an example of planet-worship. General resemblances be- 
 tween the religions of Egypt and Phoenicia. Animal-worship. Apis. 
 Serapis. Mythology localised in connexion with the Nile, Set, or 
 Typhon. Latest form of the Osiris-mythe. 
 
 Ethical aspects of the religion of Egypt. Ignorance and abject supersti- 
 tions of the many. Poioer and privileges of the sacerdotal order. 
 Temples, Festivals. Oracles. 
 
 li. 27 
 
418 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 Doctrine of sacrifice. Ty phonic victims; sometimes human. Worship of 
 ancestors. Doctrine of a future life: its peculiar characteristics: its 
 antiquity. Hindu and Egyptian theories of Transmigration. Interest 
 in the fortunes of the body. Mummification. Judgment after death. 
 Formula of self-exculpation. Fate of the condemned. Privileges of 
 the acquitted. 
 
 On resuming this investigation into the distinctive phases of 
 religious thought among the dominant nations of antiquity, the 
 reader will be next invited to a sphere whose influence on the 
 early march of civilisation it were difficult to overstate. The 
 Valley of the Nile had ever since the oldest Pharaohs been the 
 Oorder-land, or point of confluence, where the African was 
 brought into direct communication with his Asiatic brother, 
 and the East was intermingling with the West. As one of the 
 succession of luminous centres, which, emerging here and there 
 amid the dimness of primeval history, are traceable from the 
 Mediterranean to the utmost bounds of Eastern Asia, Egypt, in 
 some branches of her sacred institutions, will be found to have 
 remarkable traits in common with the Aryan conquerors^ of the 
 Panjab ; while her monuments, alike in area and in massive 
 grandeur, will remind us also of those primitive ages when the 
 Mayan architect was rearing kindred structures^ near the rivers 
 of the New World. 
 
 But full as such analogies may be of interesting speculation, 
 in reference to the ultimate extraction of the human family 
 from one common stock, our present business is to mark the 
 place and character of Egypt during the historic period, and as 
 standing in more intimate relations to the people of her own 
 immediate neighbourhood. The reputation for superior know- 
 ledge once enjoyed by all Hhe children of the East country' 
 was believed to be the special heritage of the Egyptian priests 
 (cf. 1 Kings, iv. 30). Their cloisters were the recognised abode 
 of art, of science, of religious mystery. Assyrian sculptors 
 learned at Memphis what with greater or with less precision 
 
 ^ See Mr. Kenrick's Ancient Egyptians ^ Pref. pp. ix, x. Lond. 
 
 Egypt, I. 105 sq., Lond. 1850, iS^y. B&Yon Bunsen, Phil, of Univ. 
 
 where, after handling the subject Hist. i. 191, is far less guarded in 
 
 very fairly, he concludes 'that his phraseology: 'The exploded 
 
 there has been some connexion notion as to an original connexion 
 
 between the civilisation of Egypt between India (the youngest child 
 
 and India, while the nations them- of Asia) and Egypt (the deposit 
 
 rselves have as much claim to be of primitive undivided Asia) is as 
 
 considered distinct as any others groundless as it is absurd.' 
 of antiquity : * cf. Sir J. Gr. Wil- ^ Above, p. 362. 
 
 kinson's last publication, The 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism, 419 
 
 they have reproduced at Mneveh. The sons of Abraham, who 
 like himself went down in search of shelter from a grievous 
 famine, were constrained by closer contact with Egyptian modes 
 of life to throw aside their old nomadic habits ; and at length 
 when they returned victorious to the land of promise, the great 
 host was marshalled by a captain, who had grown to manhood 
 in the court of Pharaoh, and was ^ learned in all the wisdom of 
 the Egyptians' (Acts vii. 22). Thither also in the dawn of 
 western civilisation came the young philosophers of Hellas', 
 panting for some deep and transcendental lore, or listening 
 with the eagerness and awe of children to the stories which had 
 long been whispered in the learned circles of On, of Thebes, of 
 Memphis ; so that he who is desirous of under standing, the pre- 
 cise development of human thought, alike in Western Asia and 
 in Europe, in Athens, Kome, or even (some would tell us) in 
 Jerusalem itself, must take up his position at this fountain- 
 head of wisdom, and from thence survey the parting of the 
 mighty stream as it flows forth into contiguous regions'''. 
 
 Now the scholar of the present age has many fresh facilities''' 
 for the successful carrying out of such investigations. The 
 recovery of the hieroglyphic character has given, and is still 
 giving every year, a new complexion to the ancient history of 
 the Yalley of the Nile. We can no longer speak of Egypt 
 barely as the 'land of ruins,' or the birthplace of insoluble 
 enigmas ; her true title is the land of sculptured monuments, — 
 of monuments again made vocal to the ear of science, and from 
 which their secret must ere long be wrested more completely by 
 the ardent pupils of ChampoUion. Favoured by the excellence 
 of the material, and the singular purity and dryness of the 
 climate, the colossal tombs and temples, to say nothing of those 
 minor works of ai-t dag out of the sepulchral chambers, have 
 preserved a rich variety of inscriptions, more or less decypher- 
 
 ^ The evidence on this point is und anderen von denselben abhan- 
 
 all collected in Lepsius, Chronol. gigen Volkern bewundert und an- 
 
 der Aegypter J 'EinV -p^. 41 sc^. gestaunt wird; ohne eine griind- 
 
 '■^ Uhlemann scarcely overrates liche Kenntniss dieses Urquells 
 
 the influence of Egypt, when, after kann Keins von beiden richtig 
 
 sketching its position in the ancient erkannt, beurtheilt und gewiirdigt 
 
 world, and its relation both to Greeks werden.' 
 
 and Hebrews, he adds {Thoth, oder ^ 'Egyptian archaBology and his- 
 
 die Wissenschaften der alien Aegyp- tory have undergone a complete re- 
 
 ftr, p. 6, Gottingen, 1855): *Aegyp- volution since the commencement 
 
 ten muss als urspriingliche Quelle of the present century.' Kenrick's 
 
 alles dessen betrachtet werden, was Preface, 
 in spaterer Zeit an diesen beiden 
 
 27—2 
 
420 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 able, and more or less conducing to an accurate knowledge of 
 the past. * There was not a wall, a platform, a pillar, an 
 architrave, a frieze, or even a doorpost, in an Egyptian temple, 
 which was not covered within, without, and on every available 
 surface, with pictures in relief, and with hieroglyphic texts 
 explaining those reliefs. There is not one of these reliefs that 
 is not history : some of them actually representing the conquests 
 of foreign nations ; others, the offerings and devotional exercises 
 of the monarch by whom the temple or the portion of the 
 
 temple on which the relief stood, had been constructed There 
 
 was no colossus too great, and no amulet too small, to be 
 inscribed with the name of its owner, and some account of the 
 occasion on which it w^as executed \' We can easily under- 
 stand that when the power of reading these inscriptions began 
 to be recovered, men would turn with fresh enthusiasm to the 
 study of Egyptian antiquities. Here, at least, they seemed to 
 argue, we are building on a definite and stable basis. Our 
 materials are no more of doubtful age and questionable reputa- 
 tion. The mind and spirit of that ancient world, with which 
 we long to hold communion, left its impress deeply graven on 
 the face of pyramids which tower, as they have towered for 
 ages, high above the sandy flats of the adjoining desert. There, 
 accordingly, if ever, we may hope to find the master-clue which 
 is to guide us through the intricacies of primeval history, 
 reveal afresh the hopes and fears which then were struggling 
 in the human bosom, and resolve for us, it may be, many an 
 arduous problem which concerns the origin, the early wander- 
 ings, and the final destiny of man. 
 
 Kor can we say that expectations of this kind have been 
 entirely disappointed. Very large accessions to our knowledge 
 of the ancient East have flowed, and are still flowing, from 
 investigations of the learned Egyptologer. As we gaze for 
 instance on the long array of monumental paintings in our 
 great Museums; as we listen to interjDretations of the hiero- 
 glyphic texts by which those paintings are accompanied; the 
 daily life of men who were perhaps contemporary with Moses 
 has again been vividly depicted on the dullest imagination. 
 We behold as well the toils, the sufferings, and the pastimes of 
 the many, as the power and luxury of the few. The peasant 
 labours at the plough or tends his cattle, while the lordly owner 
 of the soil is near him in a two- horse chariot. The goldsmith 
 
 ^ OBhuxn, Monumental History of Lepsius, as above, pp. 36, 37. 
 i^Oypfy !• 1 95 J substantially from 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 421 
 
 and the scribe, the potter and the glass-blower, the boat-builder, 
 the weaver, and the dyer, each is occupied in his appropriate 
 calling. Here we see a group of idlers watching the caprices 
 of a game of ball, or listening in the midst of flowers and 
 perfumes to the music of the seven-stringed harp : while there 
 a countless multitude are shaping the materials of some stately 
 edifice, or pressing a beleagured town, or marching home 
 victorious with a lengthened train of captives. 
 
 It seems to be confessed, however, by the great majority of 
 Egyptologers, that notwithstanding the number and minuteness 
 of these revelations, our familiarity with monuments of ancient 
 Egypt has contributed in no proportionate degree to our 
 acquaintance with the inner being of the people. The manners 
 of the Old Egyptian we may thoroughly appreciate : his mental 
 and moral life is still obscurely apprehended. Means are now 
 at hand for studying the grotesque configuration of his gods, 
 and tracing oat the smallest details in his pompous ritual ; yet 
 the thoughts which underlay those symbols, and found utterance 
 in those sacrifices \ must be learned, if ever, from a difierent 
 source and by a difierent process. 
 
 If I venture, therefore, on a fresh discussion of such 
 problems, it is not from any wish to speak with confidence 
 where confidence is really unattainable. I do not purpose to 
 invade the province of the Egyptologer, whose main conclusions 
 are no longer open to dispute ; but rather, taking those 
 conclusions for a guide, wherever they are held in common by 
 the learned in each special study, my aim will be to estimate 
 the leading characteristics of Egyptian heathenism, as one of 
 many forms in which the moral wants and instincts of our 
 nature found expression during the first ages of the world. In 
 doing this, however, exception will be freely taken to the crude 
 and arbitrary theories of some modern writers^, who, not 
 
 ^ 'When we endeavour to pene- *Bunsen's Untersuchungen sind 
 
 trate into the conceptions which unbezweifelt mid unbestritten ein 
 
 this splendid ritual expressed, we geistreiches Werk, aber in der 
 
 encounter insuperable difficulties : ' Chronologie enthalten auch sie, 
 
 Kenrick, I. 349: cf. I. 437. wie die aller iibrigen Forscher, 
 
 2 That English critics are not nur Muthmaassungen und uner- 
 
 alone in their misgivings with weisbare Annahmen, die jedoch 
 
 respect to some of Baron Bunsen's durch die Zuversichtlichkeit, mit 
 
 generalisations may be gathered der sie auftreten, dem unaufmerk- 
 
 from an extract hke the following. samen Leser als unzweifelhaft 
 
 The author, Dr. Max Uhlemann, erscheinen durften, da durch Zah- 
 
 is also an Egyptologer of no mean lenveranderungen, durch willkiir- 
 
 reputation {Aegyptisch. Alterth- liche Textverbesserungen, durch 
 
 umskunde, iii. 12, Leipzig, 1858): Hinzuthun oder Hinwegnehmen 
 
422 Christ and other Masters. [part IV. 
 
 content with ^reconstructing' almost every text which militates 
 against their favourite dream of a society * existing many 
 thousand years before the date usually assigned to the Creation,' 
 are further bent on sacrificing to a spirit of conjectural criticism 
 the highest of all Christian teachings and the best convictions of 
 the human heart. 
 
 The great antiquity which is now commonly attributed to 
 Egyptian culture has in several cases been connected with the 
 thought, that in the Yalley of the Nile, the prominent forms of 
 social and religious life had been completely stereotyped at once, 
 and so distinguished in all future ages by an air of absolute 
 immobility. 
 
 Now the same conclusion, we must bear in mind, was 
 formerly adopted with respect to India and the regions of the 
 Further East. So meagre was our knowledge of the subject, 
 when presented to us by the earliest race of Oriental scholars, 
 that the Yedas and Puranas, for example, were regarded as not 
 only products of the same age, but also as reflecting the same 
 modes of thought, the same archaic aspects of Hindu society. 
 There, however, the unanimous verdict of a riper criticism, 
 while fatal to pretensions of unfathomable antiquity, has 
 certified us that the national spirit both of India and of China 
 had been subject, in the lapse of ages, to extensive fluctuations \ 
 
 And a like remark is equally true of Egypt, even while she 
 bowed beneath the sceptre of the Pharaohs. Her supposed 
 exemption from the law of human mutability is vanishing with 
 every fresh accession to our knowledge. The minute inspection 
 and decyphering of her monumental archives have disclosed to 
 us a series of important transformations, have established the 
 existence of successive strata of development, and thus con- 
 tributed to make us conscious of distinctive epochs in the life- 
 time of the whole community^. It may be, indeed, that all the 
 principal characteristics of Egyptian culture, had, as in the 
 
 von Jahresangaben der Alien schli- tions, dans le culte et les arts cles 
 
 esslich AUes auf wunderbare "Weise Egyptiens, on se figurait que tout 
 
 vortrefflich zu stimmen und sich avait et6 immuable parmi eux. 
 
 wechselseitig zu bestatigen scheint.' Qn prenait la vieille ifegypte en 
 
 1 Above, pp. 134 sq., pp. 283 sq. bloc comme un monolithe histo- 
 
 2 <Avant que les dernieres de- ^ique qu'il fallait tirer du sable 
 couvertes des ^gyptologues eussent dans lequel il ^tait enfoui, et Ton 
 jet^ un jour precieux sur la chro- ^e distinguait ni les loealites ni 
 nologie des premieres dynasties, les 6poques.' Maury, in the i^evwe 
 sur les transformations et les ^^g Deux Mondes (1855), Tom. xi. 
 alterations qui se sont op^rdes p^ 1053. 
 
 dans la langue, dans les institu- 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism, 423 
 
 case of China, been projected with so much rapidity at first, 
 that we can never hope to understand the origin and real 
 infancy of the people \ It may further be contended, that the 
 nationality of Egypt, or the genius which distinguished her 
 from African and Asiatic neighbours, was ^very much the same' 
 in earlier and in later times. All statements of this kind if 
 not unduly pressed convey a large amount of truth ; they serve 
 to represent the general fixity of corporate as of personal 
 idiosyncrasies; and yet we can no longer doubt that after 
 Egypt had begun to print her records on the pyramids of 
 Ghizeh and Sakkarah, she passed through numerous and 
 important changes, — changes which affected not only her politi- 
 cal institutions, but the character of art, of language, of 
 religion. 
 
 The second province, tha-t of language, where some modify- 
 ing agency had been at work, I leave for the discussion of the 
 competent Egyptologer"^. The third will come more properly 
 before us at a future stage of our inquiry; but the point 
 relating to the gradual changes in the quality of Egyptian art it 
 is expedient to consider now, because the epochs thus obtained 
 are thought by some who are most eminently learned in such 
 matters, to agree with main divisions of Egyptian history in the 
 I^haraonic era. 
 
 It is commonly admitted that the finest specimens of 
 Egyptian art^ are those which have the fairest claims to be 
 regarded as the oldest, — those which fall within the period of 
 the * first twelve dynasties.' The bloom of youth is ever trace- 
 able on the productions of the early race of artists ; all the 
 statues and bas-reliefs are executed with surprising truthfulness 
 and vigour ; and although we must allow that both in purity 
 and finish several works belonging to the close of this great 
 period indicate considerable progress, it is no less certain that 
 
 1 Wilkinson, The Egyptians ^ See The British Museum (Egypi- 
 
 (Lond. 1857), Pref. p. vii. who ian Antiquities), two volumes in the 
 
 adds (p. viii.) that *the general * Library of Entertaining Know- 
 
 character of the people, as of their ledge.' Mr. Osburn, Monumental 
 
 architecture, had been long estab- History of Egypt, i. 260 sq. (Lond. 
 
 lished when we first become ac- 1854), infers from the absence of 
 
 quainted with them from their all crude and 'imperfect' works of 
 
 monuments, and continued to be art in Egypt that the skill of the 
 
 the same till the decline of Egypt- primitive artists was a * portion of 
 
 ian power.' that civilisation which its first 
 
 s See the Revue des Deux Mon- settlers brought with them when 
 
 des, as above, pp. 1055 sq. on the they located themselves in the 
 
 recent labours of M. de Eougd in valley of the Nile.' 
 this special province. 
 
424 Christ and other Masters, [part IV. 
 
 the character of the whole is so distinctive as to mark it off 
 completely from the period next ensiling. 
 
 In the second stage of art, embracing monuments of Hhe 
 eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties,' the fervour and simplicity 
 of earlier times have been succeeded by a large amount of stiff- 
 ness and conventionality. It is the Middle Age of Egypt; 
 during which the symptoms of deterioration are constantly 
 apparent, even where the vast proportions of the works con- 
 structed must excite our deepest admiration of the power and 
 energy of the builders. 
 
 With the twentieth dynasty' commences a fresh era, the 
 age of revival, when the artists of the Valley of the Nile, 
 reverting to the ancient models, executed their works with far 
 greater freedom ; yet this period also was of short duration, and 
 when Egypt was absorbed into the empire of the Ptolemies, 
 and finally of the Caesars, she retained but little of the old 
 artistic spirit : all attempts to mingle Greek with native 
 methods issued in comparative failure, and hastened the 
 extinction of her pristine glory. 
 
 If, however, it be now established to the satisfaction of 
 most wiiters that transitions of this kind are really visible on 
 Egyptian monuments, far less has been effected in determining 
 the point of primary departure, or the length of time to be 
 assigned to each successive period of Egyptian history. I 
 shrink from a minute investigation of the chronological 
 difficulties by which the present subject is confessedly embar- 
 rassed. While discussing the religions of ancient India, it 
 appeared to be sufficient for my purpose if I pointed out the 
 general order of the changes which had supervened upon the 
 old mythology and habits of the people ; and a similar course 
 would be adopted now, if statements were not hazarded in 
 various quarters with the object of discreditrug the Bible ^ as a 
 whole, by ridiculing what is called the ' Mosaic chronology.' 
 
 ^ See above, pp. 46, 47, where must have been 'ante-Noachian,' 
 two American champions of human and indeed many thousand years 
 inequahty adopt this hne of argu- before the date ascribed by them to 
 ment. In like manner, the account the 'Caucasian' deluge. But the 
 of the Deluge, which was prevalent silence which has been alleged in- 
 both in the Old and New World, is justification of their statement is 
 said by M. Bunsen and others to apparently a mere invention of de- 
 have left no echo whatever in the termined theorizers. Osbum, for 
 hieroglyphic legends of Egypt. example (i. 239, 240), says with 
 Their avowed object in reiterating reference to objections on this very 
 this statement is to shew that the subject: 'We have no hesitation 
 emigration of the Old Egyptians whatever in stating our conviction, 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 425 
 
 How far, indeed, the Books of Moses, in their present state, 
 supply materials for constructing any definite system of 
 chronology has long been questioned by the ablest and most 
 i-everential of our sacred critics. The important variations of 
 the Hebrew and Samaritan texts on one side, and the 
 Septuagint and certain passages of Joseph us on the other, have 
 involved the period reaching from the Deluge to the seventieth 
 year of Terah in comparative obscurity. The whole duration 
 of that period in the Hebrew is no more than 352 years ; while 
 in the Vatican manuscript of the Seventy it extends as far as 
 1172 years'. 
 
 But the indefiniteness arising from this cause will never 
 justify the random guesses of some modern Egyptologers, who, 
 dazzled it would seem by the occasional brilliance of their own 
 discoveries, are carrying back the civilisation of the Valley of 
 the Nile to ages long anterior to the earliest glimpse of history 
 in other regions of the world. Those writers should remember, 
 while demanding our entire belief in catalogues of kings and 
 
 * j^alace-registers,' that in the North of India, where the course 
 of civilisation was most parallel to that of Egypt, we have 
 means of proving the untruthfulness of similar documents, and 
 are able to convict their authors of antedating one event of 
 great importance by as many as twelve hundred years ^. Those 
 writers should again remember, that the testimony of Egyptian 
 priests is not above suspicion ; that Herodotus and Diodorus 
 both derived their information from the same authorities, and 
 yet that while Herodotus extends the number of obscure 
 descendants of Menes to 330, Diodorus limits them to 52 ; and 
 while the former makes the native monarchy of Egypt to have 
 lasted in all 11,340 years, the calculation of the latter stops 
 short at 4,700 ^ These, and other discrepancies, are so 
 
 * enormous and so fundamental as to preclude the idea that they 
 can have been superinduced by lapse of time, and a variety of 
 narrators, on a history originally authentic' 
 
 that Lepsius is mistaken ; ' and ac- siindige Menschengeschlecht ver- 
 
 cordingly proceeds to demolish the nichtet wurde,' &c. 
 
 * stupendous pile of inferences which ^ The sum total for this period, 
 are built on this single assumption.' according to the various authorities, 
 And Uhlemann, in like manner, is is Heh. 352; Samar. 942; Septuag. 
 completely at variance on thif? point (Vat.) 11 72; Septuag, (Alexand.) 
 with Lepsius and Bunsen. He de- 1072; Josepjius, 1002. 
 
 clares (Aegypt. Altert. in. 10) : 'Die ^ Lassen, Ind. Alterth. i. 501. 
 
 agyptischen Priester loussten selir ^ Kenrick, Ancient Egypty 11. 84, 
 
 wohl von einer Zeit, in welcher 85. 
 nach gottlichen Bathschiusse das 
 
426 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 And on turning to the works of Manetho, the earliest^ of 
 native historians, who died in the third century before the 
 Christian era, we find that such of his remains as have descended 
 to us must be taken at third hand. His famous lists of kings 
 commence with gods, with manes and with heroes, who are 
 said to have held sway in Egypt for a period of more than 
 thirty thousand years; and even if it were conceded that a 
 writer of his age, the first Egyptian priest who had been 
 gifted with ^historic consciousness,' was equal to the task of 
 carrying back the annals of his country for three or five thou- 
 sand years, an obstacle was lying in his way which must have 
 stubbornly resisted all real progress. Yast as may have been 
 the astronomical knowledge of the Old Egyptians, great as was 
 their aptitude in framing chronological cycles^, they *do not 
 appear at any time to have reckoned in their public monuments 
 by an era, like that of the Olympiads, but only to have dated 
 events, as we date acts of parliament, by the years of the king's 
 reign ^' If Egypt, therefore, was in early times divided into 
 several petty kingdoms; or if the names of co-regents, of pre- 
 tenders, of provincial governors, assuming to themselves the 
 royal style, were entered on the lists of dynasties, the sum of 
 all the regnal years obtained by this process would very far 
 exceed the true number. A large exaggeration is, indeed, 
 acknowledged now by all our Egyptologers. It is believed 
 that rulers in the primitive nomes, or cantons, may at first 
 have been entitled kings, and also that the starting-point of 
 calculation coincided in particular cases not with the accession 
 
 1 *"We hear of no historical work rious author of the Ordo Sceclorum, 
 of that people before Manetho : ' has, however, called in question al- 
 Bunsen, Egypt's Place, 1-23. Yet most every one of the results ob- 
 the History of this native writer, as tained by German Egyptologers (see 
 distinguished from his Dynasties, his able papers in Arnold's Theo- 
 is now lost : while the latter work logical Critic, i. 529 sq., 11. 125 sq.). 
 (edited afresh in Bunsen, i. 605 Mr. Browne contends that all the 
 sq.) is known to us only through native lists of kings are based on 
 Julius Africanus, and Eusebius, cyclical relations, the different cy- 
 and from them through George cles being referred to different 
 the Syncellus, a Byzantine monk epochs. According to his view, 
 of the ninth century; of whom it the regular chronology of ancient 
 should be added that he places the Egypt is reducible to one cycle, 
 Creation 5500 B.C. and arranges all dating from 1805 b. c. (the reign 
 his dates accordingly. of Joseph's Pharaoh). The *re- 
 
 2 Cl.Vh\evci&rm,Aegypt.Alt.iii. duced chronology' has also found 
 2, 9. Both he and Lepsius are of another learned advocate in Mr. 
 opinion that the Sothis-period con- Nolan, The ^Egyptian Chronology 
 ducts us back to at least 2782 b.c. Analysed, Lond. 1848. 
 
 Mr. Browne, the learned and labo- ^ Kenrick, 11. 95. 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 427 
 
 to an undivided sovereignty, but with the time at which some 
 ruler was admitted to the rank of a co-regent : for although the 
 sum of regnal years, commencing from the earliest of the 
 human rulers, and ending with the last of Manetho's dynasties, 
 amounted to at least 5000, the number actually assigned upon 
 the same authority as the duration of the whole period was not 
 more than 3555 years \ 
 
 But if despairing^ of results which rest on this precarious 
 basis, we commence our exploration from the age when Egypt 
 is first drawn distinctly into the general history of the world, 
 and so endeavour to trace out her course in the reverse order, 
 we arrive at early points of synchronism about 972 B.C., when 
 Shishak^ (Sesonch) of the *22nd dynasty' invaded Palestine, 
 and in the fifth year of E-ehoboam 'took away the treasures of 
 the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house' 
 (1 Kings xiv. 25). And as Shishak was the first member of 
 a new dynasty, it follows that a Pharaoh of the previous series 
 was father-in-law of Solomon (1 Kings ix. 16), and that 
 Tahpenes, the sister of the Egyptian queen, had been espoused 
 to Hadad, the Idumsean, as early as the reign of David 
 (1 Kings xi. 19 sq.). On these points, indeed, there is no 
 longer any difierence of opinion; but the placing of the Exodus 
 itself, the next event where contact with the annals of the 
 Hebrew nation is undoubted, still continues to present some 
 formidable difficulties; inasmuch as it is found to be entangled^ 
 
 1 Lepsius is disposed to take his between the reigns that are known, 
 stand on this number, which comes is hopeless.' Engl. Review (1846), 
 down to us through George the Syn- p. 114; an article on The Pyramids 
 cellus (cf. Kritik der Quellen, p. and their Builders, attributed to 
 499). See, however, Quarterly Be- Dr. Hincks. 
 
 view, No. 210 (April, 1859), pp. 39^ ^ Browne, Ordo Sceclorum, § 513, 
 
 sq., where it is pointed out that * See one of the best discussions 
 
 this number 3555 may have come of this point in Kurtz, Gesch. des 
 
 from the 'Old Chronicle' merely, Alten Bundes, 11. 173 — 203, Berlin, 
 
 and not from the genuine Manetho. 1855. He advocates the old and 
 
 The Egyptian years being reduced very plausible theory that the * Phoe- 
 
 would give 3553 Julian years for nician' shepherds had invaded 
 
 the duration of the thirty dynasties Lower Egypt in the period be- 
 
 of Manetho ; and this, added to 339 tween Abraham and Joseph ; and 
 
 (the year b. c. when the last dynasty that the new dynasty (correspond- 
 
 exprred) would also give 3892 B.C. ing to the i8th of Manetho), who 
 
 for the foundation of the monarchy, persecuted and enslaved the Is- 
 
 Uhlemann, on the contrary, persists raelites, were princes of Egyptian 
 
 in dating the reign of Menes, the blood who had eventually regained 
 
 first king of Egypt, 2782 B.C. the sovereign power. The only 
 
 2 * The recovery of Egyptian chro- serious objection to this view arises 
 nology, except by slow degrees, and from the thoroughly Egyptian as- 
 with intervals of unknown lengths pect of the court in the time of 
 
428 
 
 ChiHst and other Masters. 
 
 [part IV. 
 
 with a further question touching the expulsion of the Shepherd- 
 Kings, or Hyk-sos, and their previous rule in Lower Egypt. 
 
 Nor in passing upwards, from the origin of what is called 
 the New Kingdom, or the first reign of the ^18th dynasty,' has 
 greater concord been established among writers who profess 
 to be our guides through the confusion of the period next 
 preceding. 
 
 The duration of the three dynasties ascribed to it by Manetho 
 is found to vary in the different systems of Egyptian chronology 
 from 511 to 953 years; while other writers, arguing from the 
 total want of monuments which bear the dates of kings later 
 than the 12th dynasty, and earlier than the 18th, have begun to 
 ask with some show of reason, ^ Is the Middle Monarchy a real 
 thing or not^l' Whatever be the true answer to this question, 
 it is plain that till far more is known with certainty respecting 
 such important intervals, we have but little hope of framing any 
 rational hypothesis, or of inditing a coherent narrative. 
 
 And the same perplexity must haunt ns on ascending to 
 the ^Okr division of the Pharaonic monarchy. The names of 
 kings belonging to that era are now extant, it is true, in very 
 great profusion^. Monuments commencing with the time of 
 Chufu (Suphis, Cheops)^, the builder of the Great Pja^amid, 
 
 Joseph; but Dr. Kurtz has also 
 done very much towards the re- 
 moval of this difficulty (pp. 199,200). 
 ^ Dr. Hincks in Engl. Review, 
 as above, p. 117. Mr. Kenrick 
 also admits the fact that 'not a 
 single contemporaneous work of 
 art has been found, from the 13th 
 to the 1 8th dynasty.' He adds, 
 however, (11. 194): 'These things 
 are not sufficient to make us doubt 
 the fact of the invasion and expul- 
 sion of the Hyk-sos; but they may 
 excite a suspicion that the chrono- 
 logy of this period of oppression 
 and confusion is not to be relied 
 on, and that as usual it has been 
 unduly extended.' I ought also to 
 remind the- reader at this point 
 that M. de Eouge thinks he has at 
 last discovered an allusion to the 
 Hyk-sos rule on a papyrus relating 
 to a war undertaken by a king of 
 the Thebaid against the shepherd- 
 Idng Apepi (Aphobis). The shep- 
 herds are 'there treated as enemies 
 
 of the gods of Egypt. Revue des 
 Deux MondeSj as before, p. 1063 * 
 cf. Brugsch, Die Geographie des 
 alien AegyptenSy i. 50 sq. Leipzig, 
 
 18.57. 
 
 2 Especially in the famous Turin 
 papyrus, which before mutilation 
 must have contained 3 or 400 royal 
 names (cf. Herod. 11. 142), with the 
 precise lengths of reign attached to 
 each: see Sir J. G. Wilkinson's 
 Fragments of the Hieratic Papyoms 
 at Turin (privately printed, 185 1). 
 The same author in his last work 
 The Egyptians, &c. (1857), while 
 granting that the high antiquity 
 once assigned to some of the monu- 
 ments is now ' brought within more 
 reasonable limits ' is clearly of opi- 
 nion that those of the fourth dy- 
 nasty (the earliest of all) were 
 executed not less than 2400 years 
 B.C. (p. 3). 
 
 3 Kenrick, 11. 133. On the iden- 
 tification of the names, see Dr. 
 Hincks, as above, p. 102. 
 
CHAP, l] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 429 
 
 continue to bear witness to the fact that even at the opening 
 of the *4:th dynasty' the lower valley of the Nile was tenanted 
 by an ambitious and accomplished people, organised into a 
 regular community, as in the age of Abraham and Joseph, and 
 already in possession of the hieroglyphic character, as well as 
 of the reed-pen and the ink-stand. 
 
 Yet in sj^ite of all these interesting revelations, Egyptology 
 contributes very little towards the unriddling of the old ques- 
 tion, namely, as to which of the primeval dynasties were con- 
 temporaneous, and which of them successive. One distinguished 
 writer (as Bunsen) searches for the missing key among the 
 chronological fragments of Eratosthenes, corrected, however, 
 by his own hand; a second (as Lepsius) manifests no confidence 
 in this auxiliary, and gropes his way alone to very different 
 results ; a third (as Mr. Browne, or Mr. Nolan, or Mr. Osburn) 
 would curtail the length of early dynasties far more than either 
 of the previous explorers; so that on arriving at the first event 
 distinctly traceable in the archives of the infant colony, — the 
 founding of Memphis, by the oldest of their mortal kings \ the 
 ^E/Omulus of Egypt,' — nearly all our certain knowledge of the 
 epoch when some mighty change was supervening on the popu- 
 lation of the Nile- Valley, may be gathered up into the vague 
 conclusion of Josephus; who informs us that 'Menes, who 
 built Memphis, preceded Abraham by many years ^.' 
 
 But what, in siich a case, may be conjectured of the 
 primitive or -pre-historic age anterior to the reign of Menes, and 
 the first migrations of the tribe from which he was descended ? 
 
 This inquiry is again of vast importance to the proper 
 conduct of the enterprise immediately before us ; since the 
 ethnological affinities of heathen nations may justly be expected 
 to throw light on the formation of their mythology. 
 
 Some Christian writers have attempted to identify the 
 founder of Egyptian civilisation with Ham (or Cham), the son 
 of Noah ; others with Mizraim, one of Ham's descendants : and 
 
 ^ The author of the article ever, explains Mrjvqs as equivalent 
 
 jEgyptus in Smith's Diet, of Greek to AIuvloSj which is said to be jus- 
 
 and Roman Geography, think^i ih&t tified by the Old Egyptian and 
 
 the word Menes is itself suspicious : Coptic use of men {ixtjv) in the 
 
 it ' too nearly resembles Manu^ the sense of ' to persevere ' : Uhle- 
 
 Minyas and Minos of the Greeks, mann, Aegypt. Alt. iii. 82. On 
 
 the Menerfa of the Etruscans, and the occurrence of the name upon 
 
 the Mannus of the Germans [cf. Egyptian monuments, see Osburn, 
 
 Sansk. man *'to think"] to be ac- i. 226 sq. 
 
 cepted implicitly as a personal ^ j^ntiq. viii. 6, 2, ed. Haver- 
 designation.' Eratosthenes, how- camp. 
 
430 Chnst and other Masters. [part iv; 
 
 although the efforts of those writers seem to me extremely 
 infelicitous, the words on which their arguments are principally 
 based will prove, I think, suggestive of more tenable con- 
 clusions. 
 
 One native name of Egypt is ChamV (x^/^O? connected with 
 the Coptic x^/^^ ^ black ' ; while the appellation almost 
 universally current in Semitic countries is Mizraim^, Misr, or 
 Mezren, the fullest of these forms, we should remember, being 
 itself a Hebrew dual noun. And on reverting to the genea- 
 logical table transmitted in the family of Abraham (Gen. x. 16), 
 it will appear that in the series of Ham's descendants the first 
 place is there allotted to Cush (a common name for 'Ethiopians') ; 
 and the second place to Mizraim (or the Old Egyptians, 
 occupying the two divisions of the Nile-valley). Attention 
 seems to have been thus directed to the fact that all the 
 earliest layers of population, as well below the frontier-island of 
 Elephantine as throughout the present Nubia and Ethiopia, 
 were originally homogeneous, — a result which is corroborated 
 by Egyptian history and in no wise inconsistent with modem 
 discoveries. 
 
 Yet some of these discoveries have, I think, necessitated a 
 ftesh hypothesis with reference to the dominant race of Egypt 
 in the period of the early Pharaohs. Like the Aryan con- 
 querors of the Panjab, they do not appear to be the primitive 
 masters of the soil, but rather a deposit of new-comers, dating 
 from some later epoch. The numerous paintings on the 
 monuments, as well as osteological investigations in the tombs, 
 will hardly suffer us to doubt that the Egyptians proper, even 
 of the earlier dynasties, exhibit few decided characteristics of 
 the woollyhaired or negro race, but constitute in some respects 
 
 1 See above, p. 48, n. i. Plu- could hardly have been the case, 
 
 tarch, D6 Iside et Osiride, c. xxxiii. if the Hebrews used Mizraim as 
 
 gives the following account of the equivalent to feo^/i divisions. Knobel 
 
 word : In rrjv AtyvTrrov ev rois has accordingly suggested a fresh 
 
 /uLdXtaTa fieXdyyeiov ovaap, iLcnrep origin for the term: 'Dieser Dual 
 
 ro ^4\av Tov 6<pda\fxov, Xyjfiiav Xa- gehort zu einem nicht vorkom- 
 
 Xovai. menden Singular I^D er be- 
 
 ^ Knobel (Die Volkertafel der deutet also eine doppelte oder 
 
 Genesis^ p. 273) is disposed to zweiseitige Einschliessung und 
 
 question the ordinary derivation bezeichnet Aegypten ganz passend 
 
 of this term D^VP i^oxa the bi- als ein von 2 Seiten eingesch- 
 
 partite character of Ancient Egypt lossenes Land' (p. 274). But the 
 
 (Upper and Lower). He urges that analogy of other duals (such as 
 
 Isaiah (xi. 1 1) distinguishes Pathros, Jerusalem = 7] Kdro) + 7} Kadv-rrepdev^ 
 
 or Upper Egypt, from Mizraim, the Joseph. Ant. v. 2, 2) is in favour of 
 
 remainder of the country, which the ordinary derivation. 
 
CHAP, I.J Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 431 
 
 aD independent people \ — of a type which, ethnologically speak- 
 ing, is described as intermediate between the Syro- Arabian and 
 the Ethiopic. There is very great uncertainty^ again as to the 
 point at which the leaders of the second colony effected their 
 original settlement in the Yalley of the Nile. If we might 
 argue from the fact that monuments adjudged the very oldest 
 are all found in Lower Egypt, not far from On (or Heliopolis), 
 the city which became in after-times one special centre of 
 religious worship, it would seem most probable that the new 
 race of immigrants crossed over by the isthmus of Suez, or the 
 natural bridge connecting Africa with Asia ; yet a contrary 
 hypothesis, which represents the civilisers of the Nile-valley as 
 a band of priests descending from the Ethiopian frontier, has 
 been also able to attract a number of influential supporters. 
 
 Whatever be the ultimate decision of that controversy, a 
 belief in some great secondary immigration, such as I have just 
 indicated, is now current in all schools of Egyptology^, not 
 
 1 Uhlemann (Aegypt. Alt. iii. 57) 
 is very emphatic on this point : 
 *Nicht von der Geschichte dieses 
 dunklen Stammes hangt die Ges- 
 chichte der poHtischen Entwicke- 
 lung und Cultur der alten Aegypter 
 ab, sondern vielmebr, wie alle noch 
 erhali,enen Denkmaler beweisen, 
 von oinem Stamme ganz anderer 
 AbkunftundFarbe...' Of. Prichard, 
 III. 227 sq., who infers that not- 
 withstanding considerable diver- 
 sity in figure and complexion, the 
 Old Egyptians as a body ' had some- 
 thing in their physical character 
 approximating to that of the negro ' 
 (p. 230). 
 
 2 This uncertainty is connected 
 with the vexed question as to the 
 course pursued by the early civil- 
 isers of the Nile-valley. Did they 
 advance northwards from the The- 
 baid to Lower Egypt ? Such is said 
 to be the general verdict of anti- 
 quity (Knobel, as above, p. 275); 
 and Ezekiel in particular (xxix. 14), 
 seems to speak of Pathros (Upper 
 Egypt) as 'the land of their birth^ 
 (DnnOP), the cradle of the whole 
 Egyptian people. Thebes was in 
 like manner taken for the oldest of 
 Egyptian cities: whereas it seems 
 
 to be the general opinion of living 
 Egyptologers that the southern 
 monuments at least (whatever may 
 be said of the people) are far more 
 modern than those of Lower Egypt 
 (Osburn, 3Ion. Hist. i. 211); and 
 that Thebes was really the metro- 
 polis of the first dynasties, not of 
 the Old but of the Neio kingdom. 
 Other accounts, however, tend to 
 reconcile these two conflicting theo- 
 ries by pointing out that although 
 historical Thebes is younger than 
 Memphis, the course of civilisation 
 did at first flow northwards ; Mem- 
 phis being itself built by an ac- 
 complished prince of Abydos in 
 Upper Egypt. In connexion with 
 this point arises the old inquiry re- 
 specting the possible influence of 
 Hindtis in shaping the original in- 
 stitutions of Egypt (above, p. 418, 
 n. i); and also the tradition re- 
 specting sacerdotal colonies from 
 Meroe in Ethiopia (Diodor. i. 33; 
 III. 3—6). 
 
 3 e.g. Bunsen declares, Fgypfs 
 Place, I. 443, that the facts estab- 
 lished by modem researches into 
 language and mythology give us 
 precisely the same result. 'Both 
 carry us historically back to Asia.' 
 
432 
 
 Christ and other Masters. 
 
 [part IV. 
 
 excepting writei'S who are driven to ascribe the act itself to an 
 unfathomable antiquity. At first, it may be, while the power- 
 ful chieftains, such as Menes, were all struggling to consolidate 
 the primitive tribes or cantons^ into a regular monarchy, the 
 old inhabitants continued to preponderate as largely as the 
 Gauls in France, who, though succumbing everywhere beneath 
 the arms of Clovis, had been able to preserve the language^ of 
 their former masters and communicate both it and their religion 
 to the great majority of the Franks. A like amalgamation 
 may have followed in the early centuries of the Pharaonic 
 empire ; and subsequently when the Hyk-sos gained possession 
 of all Lower Egypt, and the seat of native power had been 
 transferred to Thebes and to a neighbourhood in which the 
 Cushite spirit still predominated, the great fusion may have 
 been again' more rapidly promoted, till at length historians had 
 to deal with a community, consisting, as before, of diverse 
 elements, imperfectly attempered to each other, yet so mixed as 
 to produce what we entitle the specific nationality of Egypt. 
 
 ^ These voiiol (thirty- six in num- 
 ber?) into which the valley of the 
 Nile was parcelled out are carried 
 back by Diodorus (i. 54) to the time 
 of Sesostris or Sesoosis (Eamses 
 II. ?) : yet, as is well remarked, 
 'they did not originate with that 
 monarch, but emanated probably 
 from the distinctions of animal 
 w^orship; and the extent of the 
 local worship probably determined 
 the boundary of the nome : ' cf. 
 Herod. 11. 42. 
 
 2 The most opposite views are 
 still entertained respecting the affi- 
 nities of the Coptic, or, with slight 
 corrections, of the Old Egyptian 
 language. On the one side, it is 
 argued that the syntax of that lan- 
 guage, and not a little of the voca- 
 bulary also, are related closely to 
 the Hebrew and other members of 
 the great Semitic family. A second 
 class of writers look upon the Old 
 Egyptians as intermediate between 
 the Semitic and Indo-European fa- 
 mihes. ('The roots of the Egyptian 
 language are, in the majority of 
 cases, monosyllabic, and, on the 
 whole, identical with the corre- 
 sponding roots in Sanskrit and 
 
 Hebrew. This is said advisedly:' 
 Bunsen, Phil, of Hist. i. 185). A 
 third class utterly deny the alleged 
 connexion between Coptic and He- 
 brew : e.g. " Auch die alteste Sprache 
 der alten Aegypter stand mit den 
 sogenannten semitischen in gar 
 keiner Verbindung; erst spatere 
 Verkehrsberiihrungen haben einige 
 Ausdriicke, besonders von Kleidern, 
 Gaf assen, Maassen und Gewichten, 
 aus der agyptischen Sprache in die 
 orientalischen oder umgekehrt liber- 
 gehen lassen:' Uhlemann, Aegypt. 
 Alt. III. 58. In this opinion of an 
 eminent Coptic scholar acquiesces 
 the present Kegius Professor of 
 Hebrew, at Cambridge, who has 
 kindly aided me in the examina- 
 tion of the string of words adduced 
 as parallel by Mr. Birch, Egyptian 
 Hieroglyphics (appended to Sir J. 
 G. Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians)^ 
 p. 251. Professor Jarrett is of opi- 
 nion that it is impossible to es- 
 tablish any relationship between 
 the Coptic and the Hebrew of a 
 closer kind than that which, ethno- 
 logically speaking, may be said to 
 exist between * a Greek and a Negro.' 
 See Appendix i. 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 433 
 
 Now of these two factors, one, as in the somewhat parallel 
 case of India, will be here comparatively disregarded. I am 
 not attempting to investigate the characteristics of primeval 
 heathenism in the Nile- valley, except so far as it has left its 
 impress on ideas and institutions which belong as properly to 
 the historic period. The remarks already made in sketching 
 the religions of barbaric tribes, wherever scattered on the 
 surface of Asia, of America, of Oceanica, would frequently 
 apply with equal justice to the continent whose people we are 
 now considering, — not to provinces alone in which the black 
 or negro type of man evinced his true humanity by emerging 
 here and there into historical importance, but also in that vast 
 expanse of moral barrenness, which stretches southward from 
 the Mediterranean to the Cape, and eastward from the burning 
 cliffs of Guinea to the pestilent mouths of the Zambesi ^ 
 
 Yet even when the sphere of study is thus definitely 
 narrowed, it becomes important to discriminate afresh between 
 the earlier and the later periods of Egyptian history. Our 
 judgment, with respect to the development of religion in that 
 country, should be formed apart from clashing theories which 
 come down to us through Greek writers ; for although 
 Herodotus, in spite of the absurd misrepresentations of his 
 dragoman, has furnished a large mass of information which is 
 proved to be trustworthy by according in the main with extant 
 monuments, the other tourists and philosophers who handled 
 the same topics, when the Delta was in part Hellenised, and 
 society most deeply tinctured by the foreign modes of thought, 
 can seldom challenge our assent in the same proportion. The 
 Thebaid, it is true, was still comparatively isolated, and as 
 such continued firm in its profession of the hereditary faith, 
 until the sweeping edict of Theodosius, in a.d. 379 ; but on the 
 founding of the Hellenic capital of Egypt by Alexander the 
 Great, the country as a whole had witnessed the commencement 
 of a new era, in philosophy as well as in political relations. 
 The adornment of the great Museum of Alexandria with the 
 obelisks and sphinxes of the Pharaonic cities, was itself an 
 emblem of the fresh eclectic spirit, then and there imported into 
 all discussions of the old mythology^. 
 
 One result of such eclecticism has been, that ^vriters (native 
 
 ^ See Appendix ii. raoniqne du polytheisme grec sys- 
 
 2 'Alexandrie et la conr des tematise paries philosophes.' Revue 
 
 Ptolemees 6taient surtout le thejl- des Deux Mondes, as before, p. 
 
 tre de ce mouvement syncretique T072. 
 
 qui rapprochait la theogonie pha- 
 
 n. 28 
 
434 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 and Hellenic) of this later period, and especially the "I^reo- 
 Platonist champions of expiring heathenism, as Porphyry, or 
 lamblichus, or Proclus, have at times so spiritualized or 
 sublimated the religion of the Old Egyptian, and assigned such 
 arbitrary meaning to the symbols of his ritual, that the primary 
 ideas which it embodied will as seldom be derivable from their 
 writings, as the first mythology of India can be ascertained 
 from speculations of the school of Kapila, or from the aphorisms 
 of the Vedanta. Each of the opjjosing theories started long 
 ago by this class of writers is reflected in the kindred contradic- 
 tions of modern philosophers. One, for instance, may be heard 
 contending that the basis of Egyptian mythology was altogether 
 materialistic ' ', another, on the contrary, that it was always an 
 exalted system of pure idealism^, which taught men to enshrine 
 the highest and most abstract truths beneath the guise of 
 earthly symbols, and to recognise a master-spirit guiding the 
 whole mechanism of physical creation. But there is reason to 
 believe, as we shall see hereafter, that neither of these theories 
 have done justice to the rude conceptions of the old my- 
 th ographer^. He looked at nature with a deep but thoroughly 
 childlike interest, seldom, conscious of the metaphysical anti- 
 theses which enter into all our modern speculations ; and 
 accordingly his power of separating between the natural and 
 the spiritual was very different from our own, or even from the 
 
 ^ This was the position actually be the First Cause, — whether an in- 
 maintained by Chseremon, the Stoic telhgent principle {vovv) or some- 
 iepoypafMjmaTe^s who was chief libra- thing inr^p vovv (cf. a criticism of 
 rian of the Serapeum in the former this passage in Creuzer, Symbolik, 
 half of the first century after Christ. ii. 269) ; and is answered by lam- 
 According to his view the chief di- blichus who assumes the name of 
 vinities of ancient Eg;y'pt were the an Egyptian priest, Abammon {De 
 seven planets and the twelve signs Mysteriis, viii. 4, ed. Gale, 1678). 
 of the zodiac (cf.Uhlemann'sT/io^/i, His solution is that the Egyptians 
 p. 250). In their mythology he re- by no means affirm the physical 
 cognises no incorporeal Principle, origin of all things; but 'distin- 
 or unseen Intelligence. Prichard's guish both the animal life and 
 general leaning is in the same di- principle of intelligence from na- 
 rection {Egyptian Mythology, Lond. ture itself, not only in the universe 
 1819); for, following in the steps of but also in man ' (cf . Creuzer, as 
 Eusebius {Evangel. Prwparat. lib. above, p. 270). 
 III. c. 4j, he concludes that the ^ This judgment which accords 
 * worship of the Old Egyptians was substantially with Creuzer's (p. 276) 
 directed towards physical objects; will be also found in Hegel's Lec- 
 or the departments and powers of tares on the Philosophy of History, 
 natui-e' (p. 34). p. 217 (Lond. 1857). He argues 
 
 2 Thus Porphyry addressing a that in 'Egypt natural and spi- 
 
 priest named Anebo inquires as to ritual powers were regarded as 
 
 what the Egyptians really held to most intimately united.' 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 435 
 
 corresponding faculty of his descendant, who might strive to 
 systematise his notions, when the mythic age of heathendom 
 was drawing to a close. 
 
 In seeking therefore to unite ourselves afresh with that 
 remoter period in the history of Egyptian thought, the natural 
 course is to inquire if any written monuments are extant 
 corresponding to the Hindu Yedas and the ' sacred ' books of 
 the Chinese. Now Egypt also had a class of writings which 
 may fairly be regarded in this very light. The ancient melodies, 
 which Plato tells us were preserved from age to age as the 
 productions of the goddess Isis^, point to the existence and 
 diffusion of a 'sacred' literature. The common name applied to 
 all such writings by the Greeks was ' Books of Hermes' (their 
 reputed author being scribe of the gods, or the ^Mercurius' of 
 the old mythology). From Clement of Alexandria^ we can 
 also ascertain the general character of these Hermetic books ; 
 for when he wrote the custom was to have them carried in 
 procession through the temple of Isis by the heathen priests 
 of the metropolis. The whole number (two and forty), com- 
 prehending various treatises on secular suV/jects, as on medicine, 
 astronomy, and the chorography of Egypt, consisted of extensive 
 disquisitions on religion and philosophy^, and also of minute 
 directions for the ' sealing of victims,' the due oblation of the 
 appointed sacrifices, the observance of solemn feasts, the train- 
 ing of the young, and more especially of members of the sacer- 
 dotal class, together with the full routine of duties daily 
 claimed from the Egyptian either by the laws of his country, or 
 by gods whom he believed to exercise especial sway in his own 
 neighbourhood. 
 
 These works, however, with perhaps one sole exception, 
 have been long unknown to Egyptologers, and are probably 
 beyond the reach of modern exploration. The exception 
 which there seems at least some valid reason for acknowledging 
 
 ^ Be Legibus, ii. 4 {0pp. vii. 516, Astronomical Books of the Horos- 
 
 Bekk.) : cf. Diodor. i. 53, 72 ; xvii. copus, (3) Ten Books of the Hiero- 
 
 50* Grammatist, (4) Ten Ceremonial 
 
 2 Strom, lib. vi. c. 4 (0pp. 11. 756, Books of the Stolistes, (5) Ten 
 ed. Potter) ; cf. Lepsius, Chron. Books of the Prophets (Priests), — 
 Einleitung, pp. 45 sq., and Mr. has summed up his inquiry by ad- 
 Birch, Egypt. Hieroglyph, (as be- mitting that they 'contained no 
 fore), p. 1 86, where several titles of single section of pure history' (i. 
 Hermetic Books are brought toge- 23). 
 
 ther. Bunsen, who considers the ^ (^v rds iJ.h Xr' rT)v vdaav At- 
 
 36 books (excluding the last six on yvmCwv irepiexovaas (pikoao(piav oi 
 
 medicine) in five classes — (i) Two trpoeiprniivoi eKixxvOdvovdi. Ibid. 
 Books of the Chanter, (2) Four 
 
 k 
 
436 Christ and other Masters, [part IV. 
 
 is tlie famous Book of the Dead, or RituaV -, portions of it 
 dating backwards, we are told, as far as the ^ 1 2th dynasty,' 
 and thus preserving to us a considerable fragment of the older 
 Pharaonic times. In one department of our subject, — the 
 supposed condition of the human soul after death, and the 
 religious service rendered by her in the world invisible, — I 
 hope to profit largely by suggestions borrowed from this 
 quarter. With regard, however, to the leading characteristics 
 of the old mythology, all other data now accessible to ordinary 
 scholars are less copious and explicit. They consist of hiero- 
 glyphic names, or titles, or genealogies of gods, survi^dng with 
 appropriate emblems on the various tablets, tombs, and 
 obelisks ; of colloquies between the gods and kings ; of sacred 
 formulae, as chants in honour of some divinity, or prayers for 
 the deceased, or exhortations to survivors, each transmitted to 
 us on rolls of papyri, and most of them deriving fresh elucida- 
 tion from reports of Herodotus, or else from statements drawn 
 by Plutarch out of theological works of Manetho. 
 
 The question which, as heretofore, excites our special 
 interest at the very outset of our task has reference to the 
 old Egyptian theories on the central truth of all religion, — the 
 being and attributes of God. Now in replying to this question 
 it is commonly admitted that Egyptians had no single word in 
 use by which to indicate the grand idea of a Supreme 
 Intelligence. It may be that such term had nevier been 
 unknown to the initiated few, though treated as -unutterable in 
 all ordinary circles^; yet the statement thus suggested carries 
 with it also the admission that belief in one only God was far 
 from being the established creed of the Egyptian people. And 
 in strict accordance with this fact is the exceeding paucity ^ of 
 
 ^ Edited, in hieroglyphs, by Lep- Aegypter. 
 
 sius, with the title Todtenbuch der ^ Wilkinson, wha leans to the 
 
 Aegypter {heiipzig, 18^2). Mr. Birch, idea of some original monotheism, 
 
 who is at present engaged upon an has suggested this account of the 
 
 English translation of the whole, matter. The points, however, which 
 
 has given a short epitome of this Herodotus declines to publish {e.g. 
 
 curious volume in Egypt. Hierogl. 11. 62) were of a somewhat different 
 
 pp. 271 sq. Portions of the work kind. On the reputed airoppriTa of 
 
 in extenso have moreover seen the the 'greater mysteries' in Egypt 
 
 light through other channels. I and elsewhere, see Warburton, 
 
 may also remark that the follow- Div. Leg. Bk. 11. sect. 4. 
 
 ers of the Seyffarth (anti-Cham- ^ ^jt ig worthy of remark that 
 
 poUion) school of interpretation the worship of the supreme God 
 
 liave already access to a German is scarcely mentioned in the his- 
 
 verslon of the Todtenbuch in Seyf- tory of the Egyptians.' Prichard, 
 
 farth's Thcolog, Schriftcn der alt. E. Mythol. p. 297. 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism, 437 
 
 statements and allusions wliicli imply exclusive worship in one 
 district of one sole divinity'. The aptest parallel is found, if I 
 mistake not, in the history of Hindu religions. With a vague 
 idea of unity which lingered in the background of his meta- 
 physical system ages after it exerted any practical effect, the 
 Old Egyptian had been fascinated more and more by the 
 mysterious powers and processes of nature, till abandoning the 
 ancient faith in God, he bowed in adoration of the world above, 
 beneath, around him. He was still indeed possessed of phrase- 
 ology which betokened some original conception of a Power 
 superior to the physical elements, and even was accustomed to 
 transfer to it the properties of spirit, as volition and in- 
 telligence, which in himself he felt to be inseparable from the 
 true idea of power. He spoke at times of * a great builder,' * a 
 creator of the universe,' ' a creator self-created,' ^ a soul of the 
 sun,' ^ a lord of the two horizons,' a chief ^ father of the gods,' 
 ' a mother ' also ' of the gods,' a god who was ' the husband of 
 his mother,' ' a goddess-mother of the highest god,' whose glory 
 was that she 'proceeded from herself; nay, so completely had 
 these forms of speech been tinctured with monotheism as to 
 lead in many writers to a firm belief that all the various gods 
 and goddesses of ancient Egypt are personifications only of 
 Divine omnipotence, or rather are the issue of an intellectual 
 struggle, which was bent on forming the most worthy thoughts 
 of God, and paying homage in the vast profusion of its titles to 
 one personal Deity. 
 
 But strict analysis^ of all such titles, when conducted in the 
 light which we derive from a comparison of other ancient 
 
 1 See the motto at the head of recognised as the only true God:' 
 this chapter, which is the passage Kenrick, i. 437. The great Cud- 
 generally adduced as evidence of a worth, who took his ideas of Egypt- 
 belief in one supreme God, Kneph, ian theology from lamblichus and 
 the ram-headed god of the Thebaid, other writers of that school, con- 
 * unbegotten and immortal.' The tended, not unnaturally, that the 
 assertion of Plutarch was not true, invisible gods of the pagans are the 
 however, of any early period known Divine attributes deified {Intel. 
 to history; and subsequently Am- Sijst. 11. 237 sq. Lond. 1845). He 
 mon or Ammon-Ra was far more then proceeds as follows (p. 245): 
 generally worshipped in that re- *The pagan theology went some- 
 gion,if we except the island of Ele- times yet a strain higher, they not 
 phantine : see below, p. 444. only thus supposing God to per- 
 
 2 ' We can find no sufficient evi- vade the whole world, and to be 
 
 dence for the opinion that the vari- diffused through all things but 
 
 ous gods of Egypt are but symbols also Himself to be in a manner all 
 
 and personifications of the attri- things. That the ancient Egyptian 
 
 butes and powers of one Being, theology, from whence the theolo- 
 
 whom the priests, if not the people, gies of other nations were derived, 
 
438 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 systems \ will be sure to make us hesitate before s-ubscribing to 
 this grand conclusion. Here, as there, it is discovered that so 
 far from such personifications carrying up the mind to a 
 transcendent unity, in which ^all the gods of the Egyptian 
 mythology met and became one,' the opposite result has been 
 more generally apparent. The bright memory of one only God 
 has faded from the human spirit ; His functions have been all 
 assigned to a succession of subordinate divinities, who constitute 
 the objects of Egyptian worship; and the want of fixity or 
 depth in man's religious conceptions is again betrayed at every 
 turn, by the facility with which he can attribute the same 
 glorious titles to different divinities. 
 
 The simplest key to all this vagueness and apparent vacilla- 
 tion is contained in the hypothesis, now frequently adopted, 
 that the primitive form of paganism in Egypt was really 
 pantheistic. Till the process, by which single powers of nature 
 were gradually personified, had issued there as elsewhere, in tlie 
 humanising of the earlier race of elemental gods, it was impossi- 
 ble to fix the line of demarcation by which one was distinguished 
 from the other. The attributes were interchanged, the powers 
 themselves were seemingly confounded, because they all at 
 first were viewed as finite emanations of some all-pervading 
 energy. * Nature' thus became the highest god of the Egyptian 
 priesthood ; while the people brought their offerings to some 
 one or other of the manifold powers of nature. Their divinities 
 in general corresponded to the functions of the different sexes ; 
 they were either paternal or maternal, active or passive, 
 generative or productive ; now believed to be exerting their 
 specific influence from the loftiest spheres of being; now in 
 beasts that minister to our convenience, or in hideous reptiles 
 that are crawling at our feet; at one time challenging the 
 homage of the Old Egyptian in their simplest form of light or 
 fire, of earth or water; at a second stooping down from his 
 unclouded sky on gracious or malignant missions; at a third 
 descending more completely to the region of the senses, or 
 identified with local objects, and especially with that pheno- 
 menon which was and is the cro^vning wonder of his native 
 valley, — the rise, the overflow, the retrogression of the waters 
 of the Nile. 
 
 Tliis rapid survey of the old Egyptian theology receives, 
 
 ran so high as this, is evident all that was, is, and shall be :'" see 
 
 i'rom that excellent monnment of below, p. 442. 
 
 Egyptian antiquity, the Saitic in- ^ Of. above, pp. 127 sq. ; p. 288. 
 scription often mentioned: ''lam 
 
CHAP. I.J Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 439 
 
 indeed, most ample illustration as a fuller insight is obtained 
 into the meaning of the ancient monuments. As early as the 
 visit of Herodotus \ and probably for ages long anterior, the 
 Egyptians were accustomed to distribute all their chief divinities 
 into three special classes, the first consisting of eight, the second 
 of twelve members, and the third, perhaps, of an indefinite 
 number, all of whom were said to have been generated by gods 
 of the previous class, as these owed their existence to the first. 
 Some difficulty, it is true, has been experienced in determining 
 which gods should be admitted to a place in the first of the three 
 orders; and it seems most likely that Egyptians of different 
 provinces^ would, even in the age of Herodotus, have stated 
 their belief respecting this great ogdoad with considerable 
 variation. 
 
 Still if we may argue from the order in the list where Mane- 
 tho professes to arrange the several gods ^, who v^^ere believed to 
 have held sway in Egypt, long before all human dynasties, the 
 foremost rank should be assigned to Ftah, the Vulcan of the 
 Latins *, and Hephsestus of the Greeks. If not the God of all 
 Egypt, he was cei-tainly regarded as supreme within the cycle of 
 divinities who were especially adored at Memphis. One desig- 
 nation of the whole country had moreover been derived in early 
 times from this alleged supremacy : for Egypt [klyviTTo^) seems 
 to be not only identical with Kopt, but also a Greek form of 
 Kah-Ptah * * land of Ptah,' the land which recognised in Ptah 
 
 1 II. 145. He is pointing out in {Be Nat. Deorum, iii. 55) 'in Nilo 
 
 this passage that the order of the natus, Phthas, ut iEgyptii appel- 
 
 gods, according to the Egyptians, lant, quern custodem esse ^gypti 
 
 was very different from the liellenic vokmt.' 
 
 \dew: 'Ev'EWrjcn ix^v wv pcibraroL ^ XJhlemann, Aegypt. Alt. ii. ii, 
 
 Tojv deOiv vofjLi^ovTai eTvai 'HpaKXrjs re 12, who instances the similar word 
 
 Ktti Al6vv<tos Kal UcLp' Trap Aiyvir- 'RcpaicTTLa, which Greek writers ap- 
 
 TioLo-L d^ llau fi€u cLpxat-oraros, Kal plied to Egypt, and also mentions 
 
 tQv ofcrcb tCop rrpdmop Xeyo/M^vcov that the Ethiopic name of the coun- 
 
 Oeusv 'HpaKXijs d^ rCov bevrepuiv, tCjv try is Gohzo. The prefix at may 
 
 SucoSe/ca Xeyoixevwv eXvac Al6vv<tos de, perhaps be illustrated by such 
 
 rCou rplruiv, ot €k tCov dvibdeKa 6e(ajf forms as aiyvirtos which was used 
 
 eyevovro. by Homer for yi\f/. Bunsen finds 
 
 ^ Cf. Lepsias, Chronol. Einl. p. the derivation, or at least the sister- 
 
 253, note. form, of Ptah itself in HnSJ *to 
 
 •* 'Primus iEgyptiorum deus F?t^ open' {Egypt's Place, i. 383, n. 
 
 conns fuit, qui etiam ignis repertor 252), so that Ptah (he thinks) was 
 
 apud eos celebratur. Ex eo Sol,' primarily the * great Revealer.' Mr. 
 
 etc. Manethon. Dynast, (printed Osburn, again {Mon. Hist. i. 263), 
 
 in Bunsen's ' Appendix of Autho- discovers Ptah in Phut, the fourth 
 
 rities,' No. II.). son of Ham. 
 
 ^ He is Cicero's second Vulcanus 
 
440 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 her chief divinity. The special functions of this god are indi- 
 cated by liis title of ^creator of the sun and moon.' He is not 
 only, like the Greek Hephaestus, eminent for plastic skill, but 
 also is the proper demiurgus of the universe, the shaper of prim- 
 eval matter, the deader of the mundane artisans V or, in the 
 highest and most abstract form of the conception, Ptah is the 
 original force of nature and the world-begetting fire^. 
 
 The oldest representation of him was a child or bandy-legged 
 dwarf, reminding us at once of pigmy statues sacred to Hephaes- 
 tus, and also of the idols (the Pataikoiy carried by Phcenician 
 mariners on the prows of their triremes. But in other, and it 
 seems more recent, representations, Ptah is worshipped under a 
 more perfectly human form. He is entitled 'lord of the gracious 
 countenance' and also 'lord of truth.' As such he is accompani- 
 ed by a female figure (Truth or Justice) with the ostrich feather 
 on her head^ He holds before him in botli hands an emblem of 
 stability or duration, the so-called Nilometer^, which is combined 
 with the symbols of life and the kukufa-sceptre. On his head he 
 wears a skull-cap like the pilos of Yulcan; while the body is 
 completely swathed, in mummy-fashion, so that the hands alone 
 are seen protruding outside the envelope. ' Perhaps the swathed 
 body and protruded hands may symbolise the first putting forth 
 of a creative power in action, which had been previously hidden 
 and quiescent ^' The same functions are suggested more dis- 
 tinctly by a living emblem, which was specially sacred to the 
 great Egyptian demiurgus, viz. the beetle of the Nile (or scara- 
 hceus). Some indeed have traced the ground of this connexion 
 to different causes^; but the instinct which directs the beetle to 
 deposit her egg on the soft wet mud of the Nile, and the astonish- 
 
 ^ This is the expression of lam- ^ Bunsen, Ihid. 
 
 blichus; cf. Wilkinson, yl?ic. ^<7?/2>t, ^ Kenrick, i. 380. 
 
 2nd ser. I. 249 sq. 7 e. g. It was believed that the 
 
 2 * Die erste als Urfeuer gedachte Nile beetles were all males, or else 
 
 zeugende Kraft : ' Dollinger, Hei- were altogether without distinction 
 
 denthum und Judenthum, p. 412, of sex, and therefore fit emblems of 
 
 Eegensburg, 1857. Similarly Ec- creative power, * self -acting and 
 
 kermann, Mythologies i. 74, Halle, self-sufficient.' M. de Eouge (Re- 
 
 1848: 'Er ist das Lebensprincip vue Archeologique^ viii* annee, p. 
 
 im Universum, die zeugende Ur- 53) has given his sanction to this 
 
 kraft.^ view of the scarabsBus-symbol. He 
 
 ^ Herod, iii. 37: see Mr. Blakes- also adds (p. 54) that the idea of 
 
 ley's note. The derivation which divine generation as dwelt upon by 
 
 he seeks is probably to be found in lamblichus 'n'est pas un produit 
 
 the Egyptian Pta/i ; whence narai- de I'esprit philosophique des der- 
 
 Koi. niers temps, mais qu'elle appartient 
 
 * "Wilkinson, as above, p. 2 50 ; a la portion antique et traditionelle 
 
 Bunsen, Egypt's Flace^ i. 382. des mysteres.' 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian' Heathenism. 441 
 
 ing skill with which she frames and finally rolls away Hhe ball 
 which is the nidus of her future offspring V are such vivid ima- 
 ges of functions everywhere ascribed to Ptah, that I prefer this 
 exposition of the symbol to all others which have been suggested. 
 
 It is one of the prerogatives of Ptah in the Memphitic sys- 
 tem of mythology, that he combines within himself the proper- 
 ties of both the sexes. He is one of two androgynal divinities. 
 The second member of this class is Neith^, the Greek Athene ^ 
 Ptah in his exalted rank becoming to the male what Neith is to 
 the female deities : and yet so closel}^ are the functions of the two 
 commingled or confounded in some representations that J^eith 
 is really the female counterpart of the great demiurgus. He 
 is the primary paternal element in nature, she the primary 
 conceptive element. He is the father of the sun, she is the 
 mother of the same luminary (Hhe great cow, engenderer of the 
 sun')^. He is the primordial fire, while she is the primordial 
 space or chaos, self-producing*, coeternal with him, and coequal, 
 or in other words the ^feminine ether' everywhere diffused as 
 the material basis of all forms of created being ^. 
 
 In proportion, however, as the old Egyptians learned to 
 humanise their chief divinity, they seem to have assigned him a 
 more human consort. The ' beloved of Ptah' was Pasht (Bubas- 
 tis, or ^ Diana'), commonly depicted as the lioness- or rather the 
 cat-headed goddess. Like Neith she was occasionally styled the 
 
 ^ See Mr. Osburn's minute de- presented as waging a quasi-reli- 
 
 scription, Monum. Hist. i. 204, gious war in Egypt, was neverthe- 
 
 205 . less extremely scrupulous in making 
 
 *^ In Plato's time Neith (whom the due offerings 'to Neitb, the di- 
 
 he identifies with 'Adrjvrj) was spe- vine mother of the principal gods 
 
 cially worshipped at Sais in the of Sais:' see M. de Eouge's paper 
 
 Delta; and Cicero {De Nat. Deor. in the Revue ArcMologiquey viii* 
 
 III. 59) speaking of his second Mi- annee, p. 40. 
 
 nerva adds: 'orta Nilo, quam ^ Bunsen, i. 386: Kenrick, i. 
 iEgyptii Saitse colunt;' but, as 390. . 
 Mr. Kenrick remarks, it is plain ^ Plutarch found this property 
 from Herod. 11. 59, that her wor- in her very name, which he inter- 
 ship also extended through the preted, rightly or wrongly, '^B.XOov 
 who]e country. Mr. Blakesley, on air e/zaur^s. 
 
 Herod. 11. 100, argues in favour of ^ Cf. the following language of 
 
 the old notion respecting the verbal De Koug6, as above, p. 59: 'Dans 
 
 identity of Neith and Athene. Im- la generation des dieux celestes ou 
 
 probable as this may be (Kenrick, secondaires, identifies avec les as- 
 
 I. 387, n. i), there is no doubt that tres, je comprends encore le role 
 
 we discover an early trace of the maternel du ciel comme espace, 
 
 Egyptian name in queen Nitocris x^P^i ®* meme comme matiere, 
 
 (Neitokr = 'A^rJ^i7 'NIkt)). It is also vXt}, foumissant une portion de 
 
 interesting to remark that even Vether celeste au demiurge pour 
 
 Cambyses, who is commonly re- nourrir ses germes divine,^ 
 
442 Christ and other Masters. [part IV. 
 
 Great Mother, and as such was represented carrying the emblems 
 of life in her hands. She also was esteemed a great fire- 
 goddess \ which explains the real ground of her alliance with 
 Ptahj but, notwithstanding, her precise relation to the older 
 series of Memphitic gods is very difficult to determine. 
 
 The next divinity, whose claims to be connected with that 
 series are indisputable, is the sun-god of Lower Egypt, Ea^ (or 
 with the definite article Phra) ; the centre of whose worship was 
 at On (the Heliopolis of the Greeks). By some he is promoted 
 to the foremost place ^ in the Egyptian pantheon. He alone in the 
 succession of the highest gods is not accompanied by a female 
 counterpart. He only is invested with a plenary jurisdiction. 
 To his honour it was chanted that, while he, and he alone, is the 
 chief ' source of life in heaven and on the earth, he is himself the 
 unbegotten*.' We have seen, however, that the luminary thus 
 adored by the Egyptians, is described in other places as the ofi*- 
 spring of Ptah ; whom he succeeds accordingly in the administra- 
 tion of the world. We also heard him called the offspring of 
 the goddess Neith, of her who, notwithstanding, had been made 
 to publish almost in the same breath : * I am the things that have 
 been, that are, and that will be; no one has uncovered my skirts^.' 
 
 A simple key to all such enigmatical language will be found, 
 if we remember only that Ptah and Neith are the two great 
 parent principles of the universe, and therefore the creation of 
 the sun, the disentangling of primordial light from darkness, 
 would be naturally regarded as the work of one or both of them, 
 according to the fancy of the different worshippers. The sun, it 
 
 ^ See the passage from Brugsch's Princip des agyptischen Gotter- 
 
 Tra2;eZs, quotedby Dollinger, p. 412. glaubens war, welcher vor alien 
 
 That eminent Egyptologer is of opi- Lokalkulten vorhanden, in alien 
 
 nion that Pasht was again super- einen wesentlichen Theil bildete, 
 
 seded in later times by Neith. und iiberhaupt nie, bis in die 
 
 2 Qppt. pt) 'sun;' (pp-q 'the sun.' spatesten Zeiten, aufhorte als die 
 
 ^ Lepsius has of late years ausserliche Spitze des gesammten 
 
 warmly advocated this hypothesis Keligionssystems angesehen zu 
 
 in a paper XJeher den ersten Aegyp- werden.' 
 
 tischen Gottcrkreis &g. read before ^ See various passages to this 
 
 the Akademie der Wissenschaften effect excerpted by De Eouge, as 
 
 (1851), and published among their before, pp. 54, 55. 
 
 Transactions. His main principle ^ Mr. Kenrick is undoubtedly 
 
 is thus stated (p. 193): 'Es bleibt correct (i. 389, n. 5) in referring 
 
 folglich nur die umgekehrte An- to Deut. xxii. 30 for the explana- 
 
 nahme tlbrig, und diese bestatigt tion of this language. It does not 
 
 sich meiner Meinung nach auf imply the mystery of Keith's being 
 
 das Bestimmteste von alien Seiten, (as De Eouge even seems to think, 
 
 dass der Sonnenkult selbst der Ibid. p. 59), but the fact of her vir- 
 
 fruhste Kern und das allgemeinste ginity. 
 
CHAP. T.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 443 
 
 was concluded, like the other objects of external nature, had be- 
 gun to be, and therefore owed his being to the Ultimate Prin- 
 ciples of all things. This consideration will again enable us to 
 understand the mythological language of some ancient hymns \ 
 in which the worshipper, excluding from his view the functions 
 of the demiurgus, and no longer dwelling on the old relation 
 between Neith and Ra, has pictured the diurnal motion of the 
 sun-god, as a species of relapse into his native element. ' Thou 
 sheddest thy beams upon the back of thj mother.' * Thv mo- 
 ther, the sky, is stretching out her arms for thee.' *0 father of 
 the gods, thou reunitest thyself with thy mother on the western 
 mountain. She receives thee daily into her arms.' ^ When thou 
 shinest in the dwelling of Night, thou revisitest the sky, thy 
 Mother.' 
 
 It is not indeed unlikely that in very primitive times as well 
 as through the period when such hymns as these were graven on 
 the tombs of Lower Egypt, Ra had been exalted to the highest 
 place in the affections both of king and people. Ramses the 
 Great already sacrificed to him as to Hhe lord of the two 
 worlds, who is enthroned on the sun's disk, who moves his egg, 
 who appears in the abyss of the heaven^.' Ra was thus emphat- 
 ically A;m^^ of the gods: and mortals who had been entrusted 
 with the government of Egypt were esteemed in some mysterious 
 way his progeny, his favourites, his vicegerents. His own title 
 (Ra or Phra) has reappeared in the official name of Pharaoh'^. 
 None of the Egyptian kings ^, indeed, could be admitted to his 
 office till instructed in the secret learning of the priests, and, 
 where such transfer might be necessary, incorporated with the 
 sacerdotal order : yet as soon as his initiation was completed he 
 assumed a power analogous to that enjoyed of old time by the 
 Incas of Peru and now by Emperors of the Middle Kingdom; 
 he was 'president of the assemblies;' he regulated the whole 
 cycle of religious worship as well as the machinery of the Egypt- 
 ian state; he was himself the object of one kind of adoration^; 
 
 1 De Koug^, as before, p. 56. pherah, priest of Heliopolis, (Gen. 
 
 2 Bunsen, i. 387. xli. 45) has been explained by 
 ^ Lepsius, as before, p. 194. Phont-Phra, 'priest of the Sun.* 
 
 * Dr. Hincks [Engl. Rev. as be- ^ Wilkinson, 1st ser. i. 245, 246, 
 
 fore, p. 10 1 ) has also pointed out 2nd ed. 
 
 that the names of the earlier Egypt- <^ Diodorus (i. 90) speaks even 
 
 ian kings consisted in almost every more strongly : Atd hk ras aiiras al- 
 
 instance of the name of the sun, rias doKOvaiu AlyiJirrLOL rods eavrCov 
 
 and a simple or compound epithet ^aaiXels irpo<TKvveiv re koI ri/ugivj ws 
 
 or qualification : cf. MuUer, ^mm/i:. irpbs dXrjdeLav 6vTas Oeovs. 
 Vrrelig. p. 305. Similarly Poti- 
 
 k 
 
444 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 for in liim the gods, or more especially the kings of gods and 
 highest of all potentates, had condescended to exert a more than 
 human energy. 
 
 But on passing to the upper province of the old Mizraim, 
 there is far less certainty respecting the true character of her chief 
 divinities. Kneph, or Chnubis, who was once regarded as the 
 master-spirit of the system, as in some degree the fountain of 
 vitality for Ptah himself, and the iminortal, self-begotten deity 
 of the Thebaid\ is adjudged by Lepsius to be one of the most 
 modern products of the Grseco-Egyptian theorising ^ Only as 
 conjoined with Ra could Kneph be styled Hhe highest god,' and 
 worshipped as the formative or spiritual principle. The glorious 
 Ammon, also, who had been invested with a like pre-eminence, 
 inasmuch as the Hellenic writers were accustomed to entitle 
 him the *Zeus of Egypt,' has been similarly disparaged and 
 dethroned by modern criticism^. It is contended that until the 
 seat of native empire was transferred to Thebes, and some 
 amalgamation of the pantheons of Upper and Lower Egypt 
 had resulted there in the projection of a great compound divinity, 
 who bore the title Ammon-Ea, the primitive god of Thebes was 
 strictly local in his character, and so upon a level with the vast 
 majority of deities. 
 
 The greater gods of UjDper Egypt whom Lepsius places at 
 the head of his new series, immediately after Ammon-E-a, are 
 
 ^ See the motto prefixed to this Erhebung Thebens wo er als Lo- 
 
 chapter. The story of Ptah spring- kalgott verehrt wurde, ein unter- 
 
 ing from an egg, which issued out geordneter wenig genannter Gott.' 
 
 of the mouth of Kneph (? Copt, nef^ Bunsen on the contrary maintains 
 
 'to blow or breathe'), is no older that 'he stands iucontestably at 
 
 than Porphyry; and although we the head of a great cosmogonic 
 
 may allow that the peculiar symbol development.' (1.371.) However 
 
 of the mundane egg is very ancient, this may be, it is now generally 
 
 the use made of it by the Neo- conceded that many of the earliest 
 
 Platonists, in its relation to Kneph, attributes of Ammon were identical 
 
 was obviously directed to the es- with those of Khem, the ithyphallic 
 
 tablishmentof their favourite theory god, or Pan of Herodotus (cf. Revue 
 
 as to the priority of some Intel- Archeol. xiv° annee, p. 211). Both 
 
 lectual Principle in the old Egypt- have the title * husband of his mo- 
 
 ian system: see above, p. 434- then' both wear the same badge, 
 
 Bollinger says of him with appa- or head-dress, of long straight fea- 
 
 rent justice : ' Seine AufEassung als thers ; and both are viewed as more 
 
 gottUcher Lebensgeist oder Welt- especially giftedwith generative and 
 
 eeele scheint erst der spatesten productive power. Mr. Osburn, in 
 
 Zeit kurz vor oder nach Christus accordance with his theory, finds 
 
 anzugehoren:' p. 411. the son of Noah Cham (Ham) in 
 
 2 As before, p. 164, n. i. the Egyptian Ammon (Amun); and 
 
 3 iiid^ p. 173: 'war bis zur Noah himself in Kneph. 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 445 
 
 Mentu (Month) and Atmu (Tum)\ Yet these again, he thinks, 
 are both to be regarded as derivatives from the sun-god : they 
 conjointly fill the place ascribed to Ha in the mythology of 
 Lower Egypt; they are ^children of E-a,' the one an emblem of 
 his superterranean, and the other of his subterranean power; the 
 one associated with the rising, and the other with the setting or 
 nocturnal sun^. In this connexion only is it true that Mentu- 
 Ra became the *god of both the Egypts'; or that Atmu could be 
 called Hhe author of all fecundity.' Another of the Theban 
 gods was Mue (or Light), who is depicted here and there not 
 only as a son of Ea, but also as the ofispring of the solar deities, 
 whose lineage we have just considered. In like manner Tefnet, 
 the companion or feminine counterpart of Mue, whom Lepsius 
 wishes to include among the greater gods of the Thebaid, is 
 entitled with a similar import, ^daughter of the Sun.' 
 
 It must, however, be acknowledged by all candid minds that 
 .no small measure of uncertainty continues to hang over this 
 attempted distribution of the primitive gods of Egypt. We are 
 barely able to discern the outlines of a systematic classification. 
 The fabric of the old theology, if such it may be termed, was 
 built up gradually into a whole by Hhe agglutination of parts 
 having a separate origin ^' At first, as men relinquished the 
 idea of one great Personal Spirit, ruling all things by His 
 sovereign will, they yielded to the witchery of external nature 
 and bowed down before a concourse of provincial deities: the 
 varying phases of religious thought gave birth to corresponding 
 variations of this first mythology; yet everywhere the felt 
 necessity of relying on a god superior to the many, led afresh 
 to the investment of some member of the pantheon with a rela- 
 tive supremacy; until, upon the union of the several nomes, the 
 greater gods were all more fully merged in two large classes, corre- 
 sponding to political divisions of the Nile- valley. Such a fusion 
 had moreover been promoted from within by the existence of relig- 
 ious sympathy. A link connecting the mythologies of Upper 
 and Lower Egypt was supplied in all the early stages of their 
 formation by the glorious sun-god, Ea, — the ofispring of the 
 oldest gods of Memphis, and identified, as we have seen, with 
 one or more divinities whose native sphere is the Thebaid. Ea 
 was, in like manner, the chief medium for advancing that more 
 
 ^ Cf. DoUinger, p. 410. A learned ^ Lepsius, as before, p. 187. On 
 
 friend suggests the Copt. ar-^tou= this principle he explains the name 
 
 'immortar as explanatory of Atmu. ' Sun of Night' applied to Atmu. 
 
 In Copt, ^ou signifies 'death;' /xoi'e ^ Kenrick, i. 363; Bollinger, p. 
 
 •light.' 407. 
 
446 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 perfect amalgamation, which, begins to be distinctly visible at a 
 later period : for how grave soever be the faults committed by 
 Herodotus in classifying the old mythology of Egypt, the account 
 is unimpeachable where he tells us, that in spite of all existing 
 variations, the common worship of two deities prevailed in every 
 canton of the great community \ 
 
 These potentates were Isis and Osiris, who, as overlying 
 or eclipsing all the rest, stand forth conspicuous, from the 
 mouths of the Nile to Elephantine, and supply a centre both of 
 worship for the multitude and speculation for the priestly order. 
 It is probable that certain compound names, like Ptah-Sokari- 
 Osiris^, will turn out to be examples of transition from an 
 earlier to a later way of thinking. They may also have borne 
 witness to religious struggles^ and to compromises effected in 
 particular districts. But the fact itself remains indisputable, 
 that in the whole of what is properly entitled the historic 
 period, Isis and Osiris, with a family-circle of inferior deities, 
 are made to play the principal part in the mythology of ancient 
 Egypt. 
 
 What, then, is the true relation of these deities to gods who 
 were confessedly members of the ' first order ' ? Did they consti- 
 tute an independent and contemporaneous group ^ Or did they 
 actually succeed the others in the manner intimated by Hero- 
 dotus, and so commence, by their ascendancy alike in Thebes 
 and Memphis, a new period of Egyptian history? Now in 
 answering such inquiries it is most important to remember 
 that the name, the emblems, and a few at least of the specific 
 functions of Osiris, have been actually traced on monuments of 
 high antiquity; for instance, on the coffin of Menkeres (or 
 Mycerinus) belonging to the ^ 4th dynasty. ' Commencing there- 
 fore from such facts as this we soon arrive at the conclusion 
 that Osiris had for ages coexisted^ with Ptah himself in some 
 departments of the Delta ; as Brahma, the younger god of 
 Hindustan, eventually supplanted Indra, the most prominent of 
 Vaidic deities. The solemn worship of Osiris was at first, 
 
 ^ deoi)S yap di') ov rods avrovs struggle between pure sun-worship 
 airavres ofioioji AlyrjTTTLOL ffi^ovTat, and Ammon- worship in the reign 
 ttXV "lo-ios re koL 'OaipLOSy rov drj of Amenophis IV. of the i8fch dy- 
 Acovucrov cTvaL X^yovai, II. 42. nasty. The 'reformatory' labours 
 2 Wilkinson, 2nd ser. i. 253. of that monarch were, however, all 
 ^ It is well to keep in mind this undone by the reaction * of the old 
 possible source of change in the re- national hierarchy.' 
 ligious symbolism of Egypt. Lep- * Such is also Mr, Kenrick's cou- 
 sins, as before, pp. iq6 sq., has elusion, i. 358, 359. 
 given a detailed account of one 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 447 
 
 however, circumscribed in somewhat narrow limits. In allusion 
 to that fact he is entitled 'lord of This' and 4ord of Abydos^' 
 in Upper Egypt; though for centuries anterior^ to the visits of 
 Hellenic tourists, it is plain that he was raised to a position of 
 unrivalled majesty, approaching far more nearly than the other 
 members of the pantheon to the rank of one almighty and 
 illimitable God. He gathers up into himself the choicer and 
 more god-like attributes of all the male divinities; while Isis 
 may be taken as the general representative of functions belong- 
 ing to the opposite sex. The two together form a dyad. Osiris 
 is the active, plastic, generative principle; and as such he is 
 most naturally connected with a female counterpart, who, con- 
 templated under different aspects, will be found to have assumed 
 to him the manifold relations of sister and of spouse, of daughter 
 and of mother^. 
 
 There is also reason for concluding that Osiris of Abydos 
 had been gradually identified with Ra, the sun-god of Heliopolis; 
 for such amalgamation is not only implied in the new formula 
 Osiris-Ba, but is expressly mentioned in the works of Egyptolo- 
 gers both ancient and modern*. Like E.a, Osiris, though 
 occasionally described as * self-begotten,' had a mythological 
 pedigree assigned to him: he was the eldest son of Seb, (Kpovos) 
 and of Nut or Nutpe (*Pea)^, to both of whom he is declared 
 superior ('greater than his father and more powerful than his 
 mother'). In one respect alone he differs widely from the older 
 sun-god, — in requiring for the exercise of his specific powers the 
 
 ^ Lepsius, as before, pp. igo, where Osiris and Isis are plainly 
 
 191. identified with the sun and moon 
 
 2 The same writer has offered a respectively. Plutarch {De Isid. et 
 very probable explanation of the Osirid. c. lii.) has given us sub- 
 mistake of Herodotus in placing stantially the same account; and 
 Osiris among the tertiary, instead in the monuments we have a fur- 
 of primary, gods of Egypt. [Chronol. ther confirmation of this theory: 
 p. 253.) Wilkinson had long before *ils nous apprennent en effet que 
 observed: 'If Osiris was not nomi- la divinitd qui remplit le premier 
 nally one of the eight great gods, role est le Soleil, et qu' Osiris, 
 he in reality held a rank equal to comme la plupart des personnages 
 any:' 2nd ser. i. 158, note. divins dont I'Olympe ^gyptien est 
 
 ^ Dollinger, p. 413. si malheureusement encombre, 
 
 * Lepsius, Ueber den ersten n'est qu'une forme particuliere de 
 
 Aegypt. Gotterk. p. 194. This cette divinite:' Revue Archeol. xiv* 
 
 writer denies, however, very posi- annee, p. 193. 
 
 tively that there was any genea- ^ This filiation is authorised in 
 
 logical connexion between the the Book of the Dead itself {Rev. 
 
 Osiris-group and other old divi- Arch, as before, p. 202): yet the 
 
 nities, either in the Memphitic or Copt, rovre seems to mean 'god,* 
 
 the Theban series: cf. Diod. i. 11, and vovreve 'god of heaven.' 
 
448 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 aid of some divinity like Isis, who inherits therefore the 
 peculiar properties of the Great Mother, Neith, while he in 
 virtue of some corresponding interchange with the old fire-god of 
 Memphis reappears on more than one inscription as Osiris-Ptah, 
 
 Combining thus the several functions of creator, of en- 
 lightener, of fructifier, Osiris, in that ancient system of mytho- 
 logy, attracted to himself the homage, love, and adoration of the 
 whole community ^ Osirian hymns which are at length ac- 
 cessible to almost every student, will bear ample witness to 
 this fact; for most of them are outbursts of religious feeling, 
 stimulated by the thought of his transcendent qualities. Osiris 
 is the 4ord of life,' the 'king of heaven,' 'the prince of gods,' 
 ' the lord of ages,' 'the light of the world,' 'the dispenser of nu- 
 trition,' 'the quickener of the dead,' 'the guide,' 'the judge,' 'the 
 leveller,' and 'the avenger.' 
 
 But instead of swelling this long catalogue of names, which 
 separately taken have an obvious tendency to misinform the 
 reader by suggesting parallels that have no true foundation, I 
 prefer to give one single hymn, as nearly as I may, in its 
 original completeness. It will further serve to introduce us to 
 some other members of the great Osiris-family, and acquaint us 
 with some other aspects of their mjrthological character. The 
 text of this remarkable hymn is found inscribed upon a stele, 
 which the French translator^ places in the seventeenth century 
 before the Christian era. 
 
 HYMN TO OSIRIS. 
 
 *' Hail, Osiris! lord of the length of times, king of the gods, of names 
 exceeding many 3j conspicuous for thy holy transformations and myste- 
 
 ^ Cf. Uhiemann, Thoth, pp. 27 Neith, Osiris and Isis? see above, 
 sq., who remarks with more es- pp. 441, 447. It is surely far more 
 pecial reference to his view of the probable that the dualistic cos- 
 Egyptian cosmogony whichhe elicits mogony of the Greeks to which 
 from the Book of the Dead, that it Uhiemann here refers was itself 
 has 'viele Aehnlichkeit mit der of Egyptian origin. Such a sup- 
 mosaischen, die ohne Zweifel [!] position, I may add, is entirely 
 aus ihr hervorgegangen ; es findet borne out by the narrative of Dio- 
 sich in derselben Nichts von einem dorus (i. 7), who speaks of the sun 
 ungeordneten Chaos wie bei Grie- as being itself a product of the ele- 
 chen und Romern ; auch bei Aegyp- ment of fire {to vvpoides) ; just as 
 tern ist die Welt aus Nichts ge- the Memphitic Ra was the child of 
 schaffen, Alles Vorhandene aus der the fire-god Ptah. 
 allmachtigen Hand der schaffenden ^ M. Chabas,in the Revue Archeo- 
 Gottheit Osiris hervorgegangen.' logique, 14* annde (1857), pp. 65 
 But how, on this hypothesis, can sq., pp. 193 sq. 
 we explain the co-existence of two ^ As the translator remarks (p. 
 cosmogonic principles, Ptah and 195), one chapter of the Ritual (or 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 449 
 
 rioTis emblems in the temples: exalted dweller in Tattu^; chief inclosed 
 in Sokhem; master of invocations in Oer-ti; enjoying happiness in Hon; 
 whose right it is to rule in the place of double justice; mysterious soul of 
 him, who is the lord of the sphere; the holy one of the White Wall; soul 
 of the sun; his body itself reposing in Suten-si-nen ; author of invoca- 
 tions in the region of the tree Ner; whose soul is made for watching; 
 lord of the vast abode in Sesennu; greatest of the beings in Shas-hotep; 
 lord in Abydos of the length of times. The way of his dwelling is in the 
 To-sar-; his name is constant in the mouth of mortal-s. He is a god of 
 the earth, an Atiim^ who in the midst of gods is showering happiness on 
 the creatures; a beneficent spirit in the place of spirits. 
 
 "From him descend the waters of the heavenly Nile. From him 
 proceeds the wind. The air we breathe is (also) in his nostrils for his 
 own contentment and the gladdening of his heart: he airs (or purifies) 
 the realms of space, which taste of his felicity, because the stars that 
 move therein obey him in the height of heaven. 
 
 "He opens the grand doors; he is the master of invocations in the 
 southern sky and adorations in the northern ; the constellations whicii 
 move onward are all under his immediate gaze ; they form his dwelling- 
 place, as well as constellations which remain at rest*. To him, by the 
 command of Seb [his father] sacrifice is offered : gods in the firmament 
 adore him with respect, divine chiefs with reverence, all with supplica- 
 tions. Those who rank among the venerable ones all recognise his high 
 authority; the whole earth gives glory to him, when his hohness engages 
 in a conflict : he is an illustrious Sahu among Sahus, exalted in position, - 
 permanent in empire. He is the excellent master of the gods, beautiful 
 and lovely. All who see him of whatever country respect and love him. 
 All who have enjoyed his condescension exalt his name to the highest 
 rank. He has the power of command alike in heaven and earth. Abun- 
 dant acclamations are addressed to him on the festival of Uk; consentient 
 acclamations from the two worlds. 
 
 "He is the elder, the first-born of his brothers, the chief of the gods. 
 He it is that executes justice in the two worlds, and plants the son upon 
 the father's seat. He is the praise of his father Seb, the darling of his 
 mother Nu [Nut]. Of mighty arm, he overthrows the impure; in- 
 vincible, he crushes every foe; he strikes terror into all that hate 
 him; he breaks down the barriers of the wicked; ever fearless, he is 
 ever on the alert ; he is the son of Seb, commanding both the worlds. 
 He (Seb) has seen his virtues and directed him to guide the nations by 
 the hand to larger measures of prosperity. He (Osiris) fabricated this 
 world with his hand, the waters and the air, the vegetables, all fowls and 
 winged creatures, all fish, all reptiles and four-footed beasts. The earth 
 pays rightful homage to the son of Nft [Nut]; the world rejoices onqe 
 
 Book of the Dead) enumerates as tien.' Chabas, p. 70, n. i. 
 
 many as a hundred appellations ^ i.e. like y^imw, the solar deity; 
 
 under which Osiris was adored. see above, p. 445. 
 
 1 This and the following proper * *Nous voyons par notre texte 
 names appear to denote locaUties que les Egyptiens se figuraient les 
 especially connected with Osiris- khimou places en face du Soleil, 
 worship. ^ qui y faisait ses residences, c'est-a- 
 
 2 'Un lieu que les manes de- dire qui y stationnait tour a toiTr.' 
 vaient traverser avant d'arriver a p. 71, n. i. 
 
 la demeure d' Osiris, I'Hades 6g}^- 
 
450 Christ and other Masters. [part iy. 
 
 again, when like tlie Sun he mounts upon his father's seat; he shines on 
 the horizon, he diffuses dawn upon the face of darkness ; he irradiates 
 the hght by his double plume; he inundates the world, like the Sun 
 (which shines) from the highest empyrean. His diadem is conspicuous 
 in the summit of the heavens ; and is allied (united) with the stars : he is 
 -the leader of all gods. In will and word he is benignant, the praise of 
 the greater gods and the delight of the less. 
 
 "His sister [Isis] has taken care of him in driving away her enemies 
 by a triple rout ; she sends forth her voice in the brilliance of her mouth ^ ; 
 wise of tongue, her word is sure to prosper. In will and word she (also) 
 is benignant. Isis is her name, the illustrious, the avenger of her bro- 
 ther's wrong. She sought him without resting; she walked the circuit of 
 this world, lamenting him ; she rested not until she found him ; light was 
 given out from her 2; a wind was produced by [the motion of] her wings: 
 she made the invocation at the funeral of her brother : she carried off the 
 elements [elementary particles] of the god of the tranquil heart : she ex- 
 tracted his essence : she made a child [of it] : she gave the foster-child 
 her arm to suck-^. The place where that occurred is unknown [to mor- 
 tals]. 
 
 *'His arm (the child's arm) is become strong in the great dwelling- 
 place of Seb. The gods are overjoyed on the arrival of Osiris, son of 
 Horus, fearless, justified, son of Isis, son of Osiris. The divine chiefs 
 collect around him : the gods recognise in him the universal lord. The 
 lords of justice who are met together to correct iniquity are delighted to 
 pay their homage in the great dwellingplace of Seb to the lord of justice. 
 The reign of justice in that region appertains to him. Horus has found 
 his justification (word of justice): he comes forward crowned with the 
 royal wreath by order of Seb. He has received the royalty of the two 
 worlds : the crown of the upper region is planted on his head. By him 
 the world is judged in that which it contains : heaven and earth are under 
 his immediate presence ('le lieu de sa face'). He rules all human beings, 
 the pure, the race of the inhabitants of Egypt and the foreign (barbarous) 
 people. The sun goes round according to his purpose, who also directs 
 the wind, the river, the fluids, the wood of living plants and all vegetable 
 nature. As the god of seeds, he is the giver of all vegetation, and of the 
 precious hufi : he brings forth abundance and dispenses it to all the earth. 
 Mankind are all in raptures, their feelings (bowels) are delighted, their 
 hearts are full of joy, because of the lord of supplications. Every one 
 adores his bounty : sweet is his love in us ; his tenderness surrounds the 
 heart ; great is his love in all the feelings (bowels). 
 
 "We render justice to the son of Isis: his enemy falls beneath his 
 fury, and the f autor of iniquity at the sound of his voice : the violent is 
 hastening to his end: the eon of Isis, the avenger of his father, is close 
 by him. 
 
 "Sacred and beneficent are his titles: fear (or veneration) finds his 
 place : his laws command immutable respect : the way is open : the foot- 
 paths are open : the worlds are both contented : evil flies before him : 
 and with him as her lord the peaceful earth is waxing fruitful. Justice is 
 established by its lord, who menaces iniquity. 
 
 ^ 'Le sensestqueladeesseavaitle renders: * elle a fait de la lumiere 
 
 don de I'dloquence.' Ibid. p. 75, n. 4. avec ses plumes.' 
 
 2 The meaning of this clause is -^ See Plutarch, De Isid. et Osirid. 
 
 said to be doubtful. M. Chabas c. xvi. 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 451 
 
 ** Delicious is thy heart, Unnefer (revealer of good), son of Isis! He 
 has assumed the crown of the upper region: the title of, his father is re- 
 cognised for him in the great dwelling-place of Seb. He is Phra when he 
 speaks, he is Thoth in his writings. The divine chiefs are satisfied. 
 
 "That which thy father Seb ordained for thee, let it be done according 
 to his word." 
 
 Reserving the more ethical aspects both of this and other 
 kindred hymns for independent consideration, it is first of some 
 importance to remark, that the Osiris-group, as here depicted, 
 consisting of Seb and Nut, of Isis and Osiris, together with the 
 offspring of the latter pair, ('Horus, the child ), can scarcely 
 have originated in the deification of purely Egyptian nature. 
 In the present stage of the great mythe, there is no disposition, 
 for example, to identify Osiris with the river Nile. His throne 
 is still exalted high above the heavens: the sun itself is the 
 majestic symbol of his universal sovereignty; from thence he 
 looks resplendent and complacent like the monarch of this 
 sublunary world. He dies indeed, as in the later version of the 
 story, and Isis^, sorrowing and indignant, searches for him in 
 the double character of spouse and sister, and on finding him 
 conducts his funeral obsequies. Here also he comes forth resus- 
 citated on the mundane theatre of being, in the person of his 
 royal son and representative, who therefore bears the sacred 
 name Osiris. Yet in all such highly coloured pictures there 
 are w^anting not a few of those distinctive touches, which had 
 afterwards, as we shall see, connected the Osirian myth us with 
 the empire of the Pharaohs and localised it more completely in 
 the Valley of the Nile. 
 
 The primitive worship of all objects like Osiris may be con- 
 templated under two aspects, differing somewhat from eacli 
 other, but incapable of any rigorous or formal separation. That 
 worship seems to be in some localities directly solar. Fortunes 
 of Osiris have been interwoven or identified with those of the 
 great orb of day. His votaries have an eye exclusively to 
 
 ^ 1 'Demeter was naturally iden- her worship, one who has borne 
 
 tified with the Egyptian goddess the like afflictions, and is prompt 
 
 [Isis]. As Isis be\Yailed the lost to pity and to redress. Thus, if 
 
 Osiris, so Demeter bewailed the the comparison may be made with- 
 
 lost Persephone. The sorrows of out irreverence and without offence, 
 
 the bereaved mother and the the Isis and Demeter of Paganism 
 
 widowed wife are, of all human were shadows which suffering hu- 
 
 sorrows, the deepest and the most manity created for its comfort, in 
 
 hopeless. Unable to find consola- anticipation of the perfect type 
 
 tion on earth, the sufferer yearns which it afterwards found in the 
 
 after heavenly sympathy, seeks and Mater Dolorosa.' Clark's Pelopon- 
 
 surely finds, among the objects of nesus, p. 37. 
 
452 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 periodic motions of the sun and the vicissitudes of the seasons ; 
 not so much in reference to the increase or the decrease of his 
 luminous functions, as to seeming changes in his fructifying, 
 fertilising power. In winter he appears to the imagination of the 
 worshipper as languishing and dying; and all nature, ceasing to 
 j)ut forth her buds and blossoms, is believed to suffer with him : 
 while at other seasons of the year the majesty of this great king 
 of heaven is reasserted in the vivifying of creation and the 
 gladdening of the human heart. There is an annual resurrec- 
 tion of all nature ; for the sun-god is himself returning from the 
 under-world, — the region of the dead. Or if we study the same 
 representation in its more telluric aspect, what is there depicted 
 as a mourning for Osiris is no longer emblematic merely of 
 prostration in the sun-god: it imports more frequently the loss 
 of vital forces in the vegetable kingdom, as the consequence of 
 the solstitial heat. The earth herself becomes the principal 
 sufferer; and the cause of all her passionate and despairing 
 lamentations is the influence that dries up the fountains of her 
 own vitality. 
 
 Now whichever be adjudged the primitive form, or the 
 correct interpretation, of this old Osiiian mythe, we must re- 
 member that, historically speaking, the substance of the mythe 
 itself is not by any means peculiar to the Yalley of the Nile. 
 It recurs in nearly all countries bordering on the Mediterranean. 
 It can often be directly traced to Asia, and as often to the agency 
 of those Phoenician colonists, who, scattered thickly in the islands 
 to the west of Syria, were importing to far distant havens, not 
 their amber only but their civilisation and religious knowledge \ 
 In the mother-country of Phoenicia^, the Osirian worship had 
 its ancient counterpart in mysteries of Adonis^ and the annual 
 
 ^ Movers, Die Religion und die Bekker. In the hymn to Osiris 
 
 Gottheiten der Fhonizier, pp. 12, given above, the translator has 
 
 sq. Bonn, 1841. conjectured, independently of all 
 
 ^ See especially Lncian, De Dea discussions like the present, that 
 
 Syria, c. 6 sqq. Among other cu- Byblus was 'the region of the tree 
 
 rious particulars he informs us Ner,' there mentioned (p. 449) as 
 
 that some of the people of Byblus, one residence of Osiris. Since the 
 
 at the foot of Lebanon, where the above was written, I find that 
 
 mysteries of Adonis were celebrated Brugsch, in his interesting paper 
 
 every year, and into which Lucian Die Adonisklage und das Linoslied 
 
 was himself initiated, were of opi- (Berlin, 1852), agrees in tracing the 
 
 nion that those ceremonies had Adonis-mythe to Asia (p. 27), andin 
 
 been really instituted for Osiris, identifyingAdonisandOsiris(p.3i). 
 and that he was buried in their ^ Adonis, there can be no doubt, 
 
 countrjs not in Egypt: cf. Photius, fg identical with ^jh^ 'my lord': 
 
 Biblioth. cod. 242, p. 343, ed. ^^^ ^^^^ equivalent '"'to Tammuz, 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 453" 
 
 * weeping for Tammuz/ (Ezek. viii. 14). There, again, the fate 
 of the divinity was rigorously identified with periodic changes in 
 the aspect of external nature. The idea of an Adonis in the 
 prime of life was the most vivid image which the Syrian mind 
 could fashion of all fertilising and benignant powers. At length, 
 however, the divinity sinks down oppressed and overwhelmed; 
 his heart is pierced by some mysterious arrow : he dies, and in 
 the sacred month, *the month of Tammuz,' when the scorching 
 blasts of summer are well-nigh exhausted, a large crowd of Syrian 
 maids and matrons flock together from all quarters; they bemoan 
 the loss of Tammuz; but their vehement ejaculations are all 
 quickly followed by a series of impure and diabolic orgies: 
 symptoms of returning life in nature are to them a signal for 
 festivity as frantic as their former grief Yitality is coming 
 back to earth: and in its advent they perceive another ^finding' 
 of their lost Adonis (evpco-ts 'ASwVtSo?). 
 
 Nor is this the only instance of some close affinity between 
 the old mythographers of Egypt and Phoenicia. Mingling with 
 the other progeny of Ptah, or the Egjrptian Yulcan, stand the 
 great Cabeirian brothers ^, whose repute and worship were ex- 
 tensively diffused in various provinces of the west. The word 
 Gabeiri is itself immediately explainable, if we resort to the 
 Semitic languages: for there it means the 'Great' or * Mighty 
 Ones;' and thus is pointing in the same direction as the ancient 
 dwarf-gods, which were also sacred images of Cabeiri, and were 
 venerated with a kindred fervour by the rude Phoenician pilot 
 and the polished priest of Memphis. The Cabeiri seem to have 
 been eight in number; or, excluding EsmHn ('literally eight'), 
 that one of the fraternity who was regarded as the chief or 
 aggregate expression for the whole, we limit them to seven; 
 which strongly indicates, in the opinion of some writers, an 
 original identity of the Cabeiri with the more conspicuous of the 
 heavenly bodies^. In the sacred books of China the 'seven 
 
 Ezek. viii. 14, in which passage his wonder that any one should 
 
 the Vulg. renders 'ecce ibi mu- have doubted the identity of ko.- 
 
 lieres sedebant plangentes Adoni- peipoi and D^'T'^D ( = ^eot fiiyaKoi): 
 
 dem:* see Gesen. Monum. Phcen. for this identity was well known to 
 
 II. 400. Among the Greeks the the ancients. 
 
 close connexion with Aphrodite- ^ Thus Xenocrates, a Carthagi- 
 
 worship was still more apparent. nian writer (quoted by Clemens 
 
 1 Herod. II. 51,111. 37, and above, Alexand. Cohortat. ad GenteSf c. V. 
 
 p. 440. Their father was also called § 66) ^ declares expressly irr^ jxkv 
 
 Sadyk or Sydyk, which is possibly deoiis eXvat toi)5 TrXaz^i^raj; and then 
 
 akin to pHV. Movers (as before, adds in reference to Esmun (the 
 
 p. 652) has very naturally expressed *eighth' of the Cabeiri, Movers, p. 
 
454 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 brilliant ones, ' deemed worthy of peculiar homage, are the sun, 
 the moon, and the five planets; while the planets, when regarded 
 singly, have been made to bear the corresponding title of the 'five 
 heavenly chiefs \' The Greek had similarly his seven Oeoi /AeyaXot, 
 and the Persian his 'seven ministers of the highest:' examples, 
 which appear to be suggestive of the early spread of planet- 
 worship, if they do not absolutely prove that astronomical prin- 
 ciples had entered largely into the construction of all mythic 
 systems, — that of Egypt not excepted^. 
 
 Be this however as it may, there is no longer any doubt that 
 in Phoenicia, more than the adjoining nations, we discover proofs 
 of correspondency and contact with the Eygpt of the Pharaohs. 
 In both .countries^ the foundation of mythology is completely 
 ditheistic. The superior gods are ranked in pairs according to 
 the functions of the difierent sexes : while the votaries of both 
 those systems were familiar with the notion of androgynal, or 
 compound, deities. The Baal of the Old Phcenician found the 
 highest symbol of his vitalising powei; in the great monarch of 
 the heavenly bodies; and corresponding with this fact, the sun- 
 god, born of chaos and elemental fire, was the most glorious 
 deity of the Old Egyptian. Both had also kept their hold with 
 equal firmness on a mythe in which the changing aspects of the 
 vegetable kingdom were set forth as periodic deaths and resur- 
 rections of the highest member of their pantheon. In both coun- 
 tries the ascription of benignant or of other properties to stars 
 and planets, issued first of all in the idea of some inflexible 
 Fate, some necessary Order, and then was culminating in the 
 theory of a magnus annus, at the close of which it was expected 
 that the whole creation would be reabsorbed, or would revert at 
 least to its original elements. 
 
 These points of contact are indeed so many and so obvious, 
 that explorers, setting out with different objects and as different 
 
 651) 6y^oov U Tov i^ atrCov ewe- finds an astronomical reason for 
 
 (TTi^ra k6(t^ov: cf. CiGero, De Natur a fixing the number of the primary 
 
 Deorum, lib. i. § 34, who also quotes gods at eight and of the secondary 
 
 Xenocrates, to the same general gods at twelve. Mr. Kenrick, (i. 
 
 eJffect. 367, 368), with less desire of syste- 
 
 ^ See above, p. -296, and n. 2. matizing, concedes the general 
 
 2 XJhlemann (Aegypt. Alter. 11. truth of this theory, but 
 
 162 sq., Thoth, pp. 33 sq.) is a that *it is not Hkely that the 
 
 strong supporter of the * astrono- whole ^ system originated in any 
 
 mical principle' as applied to the one principle.' 
 
 unriddling of Egyptian mythology : ^ On this characteristic of the 
 
 but now and then his arguments Phoenician theology, see above, pp. 
 
 appear to me unconvincing. He 68 sq. 
 
CPIAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 455 
 
 preconceptions, can hardly fail to meet together in the same 
 conclusion, — a belief that the mythologies of Egypt and Phoeni- 
 cia were pervaded by the same ideas and radiated from a common 
 centre. Which of them was actually the older system : what 
 had been the links of intercourse by which the two were held 
 together, we are still unable to affirm with absolute certainty or 
 precision. If, for instance, the historical character of the * Old 
 Monarchy' of Egypt have been fully vindicated by recent explor- 
 ations, it will follow of necessity that interchanges of religious 
 thought were long anterior^ to the earliest inroads of the Hyk- 
 sos or Phoenician shepherds; and the meeting-place will conse- 
 quently have to be determined by following two great lines of 
 civilisation farther backward, to that cradle of all art and lan- 
 guage, of all science, letters and mythology — Hhe primitive land 
 of Aram and the primitive empire in Babel ^' 
 
 But before I pass to a minute consideration of the latest 
 phase assumed in Egypt by the mythe of Isis and Osiris, or in 
 other words the fullest evolution of the national belief in what 
 may fairly be entitled the historic period, it is most important to 
 recal attention to the creed of other and still earlier settlers in 
 the Nile-valley. When the secondary race of colonists from 
 Asia found their way to Egypt, they encountered there a form 
 of superstition so thoroughly rooted in the heart of the people, 
 that in spite of the political and social changes which passed 
 over them, it always held its ground, and went on flourishing 
 until the overthrow of paganism in Egypt. I am adverting to 
 the anhnal-worship of that country; which deserves to be re- 
 garded as at once the most repulsive and most universal of its 
 manifold superstitions. We must not suppose indeed that this 
 idolatrous devotion to brute animals had always been unknown 
 in other countries. Traces of it are detected in the primitive 
 paganism of the Hellenic and Germanic tribes: it seems to have 
 Dre vailed in every district of America^, where gods and other 
 spirits were believed on some occasions to * possess' not only all 
 varieties of living creatures, but the very plants and stones; it 
 had existed, and exists at present, in all negro races, and indeed 
 wherever man continues to be awed by a belief that the divinity 
 he worships is impersonal Power, diffused throughout the uni- 
 verse, and manifested in all possible types of creaturely existence. 
 
 1 Movers, as before, p. 41, is in worship of the Egyptians, 
 
 favour of this hypothesis, consider- ^ Bunsen, Egypt's Place, 1. 444. 
 
 ing that the solar and stellar wor- ^ gee for instance, Miiller's Ame- 
 
 ship was engrafted by the influence rik, Urrelig, pp. 60 sq., 256 sq., 
 
 of the Hyk-sos on the old animal- 420. 
 
456 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 Yet in Egypt this zoolatry appears in such exaggerated 
 shapes and with such monstrous adjuncts, that to trace at length 
 the stages of its progress and the secret of its perpetuity would 
 fill a most remarkable chapter in the history of civilisation. 
 The contemptuous exclamations of the later Greeks and Romans, 
 on witnessing the coexistence of abstruse philosophy and artistic 
 beauty with the worship of brute creatures, are familiar to all 
 persons interested in this study. An admirer and apologist of 
 the Egyptian creed was fully conscious of the reasons which 
 had given birth to such opprobrious criticisms ; for he confesses 
 plainly that the multitude did not stop short at merely relative 
 worship, but adored the animals themselves^ (avrct ra t^a). I 
 must not, however, leave unquoted the remarkable passage of 
 Clement of Alexandria, with reference to this question, because 
 it shews as well the sanctity with which tb.e animals were all 
 invested by Egyptians, as the feelings which zoolatry was then 
 exciting in the minds of most spectators whether Christian or 
 heathen. After dwelling on the costliness and splendour of 
 Egyptian temples and directing our attention to the veil in- 
 wrought with gold by which the adytum was curtained off from 
 the rest of the building, he continues^: *But if you pass beyond 
 into the remotest part of the enclosure, hastening to behold 
 something more worthy of your search, and seek for the image 
 which dwells in the temple, 3, pasto2:)horus [shrine-bearer], or some 
 one else of those who minister in sacred things, with a grave air 
 singing a Paean in the Egyptian tongue, draws aside a small 
 portion of the veil, as if about to shew us the god; and makes us 
 burst into a loud laugh. For the god you sought is not there, 
 but a cat, or a crocodile, or a serpent sprung from the soil, or 
 some such brute animal, which is more suited to a cave than a 
 temple. The Egyptian deity appears, — a beast rolling himself 
 on a purple coverlet!' 
 
 We might deduce the very high antiquity of this practice 
 from the fact that many of the animals so worshipped had been 
 always sacred only in particular nomes^j and though the final 
 consolidation of the monarchy and the comparative fusion of 
 religious tenets which resulted from it, had secured a universal 
 reverence for the ox, the dog, the cat, the hawk, the ibis and 
 two kinds of fish, there was no period when, with these excep- 
 
 1 Plutarch. De Is. et Osir. c. particular birds and reptiles to par- 
 
 Lxxi. As contrasted with the ticular divinities. 
 
 Egyptian notions he considered * Pcedagog. lib. in. c. 2 : cf. Ju- 
 
 the Greeks entirely orthodox (X.^- venal, Sat. xv. 7. 
 
 jovaiv opdQs) in their dedication of ^ Cf. above, p. 432, n. r. 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 457 
 
 tions, sacred animals of one nome were not treated as a common 
 article of food in others, and not liable, on every outbiifst of 
 fanaticism, to be assailed with open violence or contempt \ 
 
 Conspicuous at the head of the zoolatry of Egypt stands the 
 worship of the great Memphitic bull, Apis (Hapi)", which is 
 carried back, in its more elementary condition, as far as the 
 *2nd dynasty^.' In the reign of Kamses II., the great bull is 
 made to bear the title ^second life of Ptah^,' — a fact which 
 intimates that he was then regarded as the living shrine, or in- 
 carnation, of the chief god of Memphis; and a similar exaltation 
 is suggested in the title * image of the soul of Osiris V which has 
 elsewhere been awarded to him. Viewed in this light Apis 
 was to the Egyptian worshipper a present or incarnate deity. 
 The luxuries deemed appropriate to the highest earthly monarch 
 were all lavished on his service. He was fed with a religious 
 scrupulosity. He was anointed with the choicest unguents. 
 Mates of spotless beauty were provided for him^. At death he 
 was embalmed and swathed : his funeral was performed with a 
 magnificence unrivalled in the case of men : a sumptuous monu- 
 ment which still attracts the admiration of all artists was 
 erected in his honour. And since mortals after death were 
 thought to be in some mysterious way united with Osiris, the 
 dead Apis also was entitled for this cause Osiris-Apis (*Ocropa7rts), 
 or Serapis"^; and as such was worshipped with supreme devotion 
 
 1 On the various theories re- *» Wilkinson and others have de- 
 specting the rationale of this kind nied that still worse abominations 
 of worship, see Kenrick, ii. i sq., were connected with the animal- 
 Uhlemann, Aegypt. Alt. iii. -210 sq. worship of the Egyptians (see Diod. 
 
 2 According to Uhlemann (p. i. 85 ; Herod. 11. 46) ; but allusions 
 -208), the Coptic hap means *the like that in Lev. xviii. 23 agree too 
 judge' [or rather, 'judgment']; per- closely with the statements of the 
 haps with reference to the functions Greek historians: cf. DolHnger, pp. 
 of Osiris in the under-world. Of 226, 227. 
 
 three other bulls admitted to the ^ That this is the true account 
 
 foremost rank of animal-worship of Serapis has been lately proved 
 
 one was Mnevis of Heliopolis, who by M. Mariette, Memoire sw le 
 
 bore the title ' the resuscitated sun.' Serapeum, to whose labours Lep- 
 
 The worship both of Apis and Mnevis sius was looking hopefully when he 
 
 extended far beyond the cities where wrote his own Appendix on ' Serapis' 
 
 they were especially honoured. in the Gotterkreis &c. p. 213. Ee- 
 
 * Osburn, Mon. Hist. i. 247. specting the Greek version of the 
 
 * Revue des Deux Mondes, as be- fetching of the god Serapis from 
 fore, p. 1074. On the alleged pre- Sinope by order of Ptolemy Soter, 
 tematuralness of the birth of Apis, and the consequence of identifying 
 through the agency of a generific Serapis with the Greek Dionysus, 
 beam of light, see Herod, in. 28, see Bunsen, Egypt's Place, i. 431, 
 and Mr. Blakesley's note. and Maury, Revue des Deux Mondes^ 
 
 ^ Plut. De Is. et Osir. c. xx. as before, p. 1073. 
 
458 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 in the interval whicli elapsed before the birth or 'manifestation 
 of a new calf, — the vehicle to which the soul of the departed 
 Apis was believed to be immediately transferred. 
 
 While animal-worship had been thus amalgamated more and 
 more with adoration of the elements and of spirits ruling in tlie 
 heavenly bodies, the important change to which I have before 
 alluded had been also passing over the complexion of the mythe 
 which centred in the greatest pair of national divinities. There 
 might indeed be no express intention either on the part of priest 
 or people to relinquish the conclusions of the old mythology. In 
 Osii'is they might recognise, as heretofore, the ultimate source 
 of all vitality, and as such might find the highest and most 
 adequate symbol of his functions in the great orb of day. The^ 
 might continue also to associate Isis with him as the counter 
 part of his productive powers, and discerning an appropriate 
 emblem of that goddess in the moon or in the earth, miglit still, 
 in words, attribute all the higher phenomena of life to the har- 
 monious action of these two divinities. But such is far from 
 being a true account of the religion of the many, or the popular 
 theology^ of Egypt, in the later Pharaonic period. Owing to a 
 general want of fixity in men's religious tenets, the ingredients 
 of the mythe had been so altered, its area so contracted, its con- 
 nexion with the world at large so broken and obscured as to 
 have rendered it an almost novel version of the primitive story. 
 The Egyptian mind is seen descending more and more entirely 
 from the worship of the heavenly bodies to the contemplation 
 of the marvellous agencies at work in its immediate neighbour- 
 hood. In earlier times Osiris was enthroned upon the sun; 
 but now the Nile itself is substituted for that glorious luminary. 
 Then the spouse of the great sun-god was the mother and the 
 nurse of universal vegetation ; now she is the single land of 
 Egypt fructified and gladdened by the Nile. Then Osiris was 
 a nature-god, a verbal representative of forces active in the 
 varied processes of nature : now he has been moulded into the 
 great civilising hero of Mizraim, binding men together in a 
 fixed society, teaching agriculture, and subduing nations not by 
 force alone but by the charms of eloquence and music. Then 
 his death was the suspension of all vital power without the 
 least distinction of locality; now it coincides precisely with 
 
 ^ Thus Plutarch {Dp Is. et Osir. 'N€i\ov''0(7Lpip Ka\ova-ip...d\\a''0(npLP 
 
 c. xxxiii) carefully distinguishes /j,^p awXcos airaaav tt]v vypoiroiov &p- 
 
 between the people and the more x^" /^^^ bvvaixiv, alriav yeviaews Kai 
 
 enlightened of the priests: 01 8e (nripixaro^ oixrlav vofii^ovres. 
 
 ffO(pd0T€pOL tQv lepiwv, OV llbvOV TOP 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 459 
 
 that season of the year in Egypt when decay and barrenness 
 are everywhere ascendant through the Yalley of the Nile. 
 
 The reason of this gradvial localising of the story, — this 
 confusion, one might call it, of the sun with the Egyptian 
 river, — is hardly to be sought in the prevailing fancy that the 
 ISTile and sun w^ere wont to meet together at the western 
 liorizon, and after plunging down into the under- world came 
 forth again together from the caverns of the east\ An ex- 
 planation, simple in itself and serving also to account for other 
 kindred stories, is suggested by the fact that the Egyptian had 
 been gradually tempted to associate every genial, fertilising 
 power in nature with the annual overflow of his great river. 
 In one meaning of the phrase Herodotus was right, when he 
 declared that Egypt is Hhe gift of the ISTile^' ^My river is 
 mine own' was the ungodly boast ascribed to Egypt in the 
 vision of the Hebrew prophet (Ezek. xxix. 3, 9), ' my river is 
 mine own, and I have made it for myself.' ^Turn the course 
 of the Nile,' it has been said, ^and not one blade of vegeta- 
 tion would ever arise in Egypt.' And the more intelligent of 
 modern travellers, no longer open to the potent witcheries 
 which nature once exerted on mankind, but recognising the 
 almighty hand of God Himself throughout this ^ annual miracle 
 of mercy,' are still awestruck by the grand phenomena pre- 
 sented to them as the river bursts afresh into its ancient 
 channels. ' All nature shouts for joy. The men, the chil- 
 dren, the bufialoes, gambol in its refreshing waters ; the broad 
 waves sparkle with shoals of fish, and fowl of every wing 
 flutter over them in clouds. Nor is this jubilee of nature 
 confined to the higher orders of creation. The moment the 
 sand becomes moistened by the approach of the fertilising 
 waters, it is literally alive with insects innumerable ^ ' 
 
 Nor are these the only changes introduced into the primi- 
 tive mythe of Isis and Osiris. Though the mother of both is 
 still Rhea (Nut or Nutpe), doubts have been suggested touching 
 the true name of their father ; while the chief progenitors of 
 the gods are now distinctly represented as giving birth to a 
 second pair, which rank in some respects upon a level with the 
 former. Set, or Typhon, is the brother of Osiris*; and, ac- 
 companied by his spouse and sister Nephthys, he is placed in 
 a position of direct antagonism to the benevolent divinities, to 
 
 ^ Osbnrn, i. 420. Plutarch says (c. xii) ; ^it^ Kcupif, 
 
 '^ Herod. 11. 5. fxrjhk Kara x^P^^* ^^^' cLvapprj^apra 
 
 ^ Osburn, i. 13. TrXfjy^ dta ttjs TrXevpds i^aX\(i<T6ai : 
 
 * Pretematurally born, however, cf. above, p. 308, n. 2. 
 
460 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 Isis and Osiris, and especially to the younger Horus, their 
 child and champion; while a definite character has also been 
 attributed to Thoth', the ibis-headed Hermes of Egyptian 
 worship, the inventor of letters, the depository of primeval 
 wisdom, ^the president of the reasoning faculty,' the teacher, 
 counsellor, and secretary of Osiris himself. 
 
 The greatest of the difficulties experienced as we analyse 
 these fresh developments of the Egyptian mythology is con- 
 nected with the origin and import of the evil-minded Typhon. 
 Some of the chief names by which he was at first distinguished 
 are Set, Seti, Sutech; but in the course of modern explorations, 
 it has come to light that he was also identified^ at least on one 
 inscription with the great Phoenician Bel or Baal : and in con- 
 firmation of this interesting fact we are enabled to establish 
 that when the Hyk-sos made their grand descent on Egypt, 
 they had recognised in Typhon their own national divinity, 
 had chosen him for their sole leader, and had fought and con- 
 quered always under his immediate patronage^. With their 
 ascendancy in Egypt, Typhon also had become supreme. 
 
 It is quite possible, indeed, that in far earlier times* he 
 held a high position in some districts as the elemental god who 
 
 1 The place of this ibis-headed verschiedenen Auffassung darbie- 
 
 god, *lordof Shmun' (Hermopolis), ten.' This inquiry has since been 
 
 appears to be in what is called the ably followed out in the Revue 
 
 secondary series of Egyptian divini- Archeologique, xii® annee, pp. 257 
 
 ties. Bunsen styles him (i. 393) sq. The original connexion be- 
 
 the *most important of all the tween Baal and Typhon may, I 
 
 Cabeiri' (corresponding to EsmuHj think, be also traceable in the 
 
 above, p. 453). As connected with compound Baal-Zephon (flDV) of 
 
 the Osiris-group he is sometimes ^xod. xiv. 2, 9, Numb, xxxiii. 7; 
 
 entitled 'begotten of Osiris' him- ^^-^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ •^^^_ 
 
 self; but the relation indicated m ^^^^^ with the Ai^apcs or "A^apcs of 
 
 the text is that which he sustains Manetho and Josephus; for this 
 
 far more frequently Mr. Kenrick fcorder-city of the Hyk-sos, iden- 
 
 observes of Thoth {Anc, Egypt 1. ^ified by Lepsius with Pelusium 
 
 428), that 'with a name nearly (? p^z^,m^, city of the Philistines), 
 
 similar, Taut, he appears also m ^^ described by them as '^6\l9 /cara 
 
 the Ph^mcian history, and m the ^, ^ eeoXoyiaudLdevTvcpd^pcos. There 
 
 same character of the inventor of j^^ however, some difficulty in as- 
 
 letters. ^ , . , certaining the original relation of 
 
 ' See Lepsms Gotterkreis (as typhon to the hideous monsters of 
 
 before), p. 206, who adds: ^Dieser ^^^^ primitive world, whom Greek 
 
 BegnSdes Set Oder Sutech slides ^^^ f^^^ jj^^^^ downwards, 
 
 ausseragyptischen Gottes durfte designated Tv<pdcop, Ti;0a;6i)5, Tv<pd^s. 
 
 rSeZ ten'Ltuf ^^^^^^^^^ ^l ' ^^^^^^^' ^^'''^ ^^ ^^^^^^^ 
 
 seiner zu verschiedenen Zeiten 4 lepsius,* p. 204, Bunsen, i. 426. 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 461 
 
 struggled periodically with the elder Horns, in the conflict ever 
 waged by different atmospheric agencies, as light and darkness, 
 rain and drought, production and decomposition \ Studied 
 under this peculiar aspect, Typhon may have seemed to the 
 Egyptian of the older period a terrific but not always a male- 
 volent divinity; just as Nephthys, 'mistress of the house,' and 
 female counterpai-t of Typhon, was at first almost identical 
 with I sis, and to some extent associated with kindly and 
 maternal properties. But after the expulsion of the hated 
 Hyk-sos, Typhon was no longer tolerated in a single canton of 
 the Nile-valley : his name was chiselled out of all the monu- 
 ments^, where it had previously been ranked with those of 
 kings and of superior gods : and in the future period of 
 Egyptian history, Typhon was the synonym for 'evil genius;' 
 he became the great personification of corrupting and dis- 
 organising forces, the autht^r of disease, of impotence, of death 
 itself. His symbol was a human form, surmounted by the 
 head of some fabulous animals; while the brutes especially 
 'possessed' by him were those which the Egyptian either 
 feared or hated, as the incarnations of stupidity, of malice, or 
 of violence — the ass, the crocodile, the hippopotamus, and the 
 bear. 
 
 1 think, however, that the latest form assumed by this 
 Typhonic mythe admits of easy explanation, as soon as we 
 have learned to see distinctly imaged forth in it the main 
 peculiarities of Egyptian nature. While Osiris was the ferti- 
 lising river, the fruitful land of Egypt was his spouse. But 
 Typhon his malignant brother, born like him of Bhea, was the 
 enemy of Egypt, and as such allied with its mischances whether 
 physical or political^. At one time he is nothing but the sea, 
 which swallows up the waters of the Nile and circumscribes the 
 empire of the Pharaohs ; but more commonly the Typhon whom 
 they dreaded was the glowing, scorching, and mephitic blast, 
 the south-wind from the desert. Eor this reason Nephthys, 
 who had once been merely a personification of the world un- 
 seen, as Isis of the visible hemisphere, is now transmuted into 
 the desert itself, the birthplace of all joylessness and utter de- 
 stitution; thus completing the dark series of antagonisms which 
 
 ■^ Bevue ArcheoL as before. pelled from Egypt wag believed to 
 
 2 Ibid. pp. -267, 268: cf. above, have fled on the back of an ass for 
 
 p. 446, n. 3, for a similar attempt seven days, Kal (TwOivra 7ewwat 
 
 to suppress Ammon- worship. iraL^as^lepoabXvixov Kal'lovbaTov 
 
 /* In this connexion it is worth (Plutarch, De Is. et Osir. c. xxxi): 
 
 remarking that Typhon when ex- cf. Lepsius, as before, p. 210. 
 
462 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 parted Egypt from surrounding nations, and wHcli formed the 
 very essence of the popular theology. 
 
 The reader will be now in a position to appreciate the full- 
 blown story of Osiris, which I give with some occasional con- 
 densation in the words of Plutarch's treatise^ ; written, it should 
 be remembered, to the chief of the Thyades at Delphi, who her- 
 self had been initiated by her parents into the Egyptian 
 mysteries : 
 
 "Rhea [Nut] having secretly united herself with Cronos [Seb], the 
 Sun, who was indignant, hiid upon her a curse, that she should not bring 
 forth in any year or month. Hermes [Thoth], however, who was also a 
 lover of Rhea, playing at dice with the moon, took away the seventieth^ 
 part of each period of dayhght, and from these made five new days, which 
 are the iTrayojuLepai, or intercalary days. On each of these five days Rhea 
 bore a child. On the first was born Osiris, the son of the Sun, at whose 
 birth a voice was heard proclaiming that the Lord of all was coming to 
 light : or, according to another version, a certain Pamyles drawing water, 
 at Thebes, heard a voice from the temple of Jupiter, which charged him 
 to proclaim that a great and beneficent king Osiris Vvas born. On this 
 account Pamyles was intrusted by Cronos with the nursing of Osiris, and 
 hence the festival of the Pamylia, and a kind of j^hallephoria [as in the 
 Bacchic orgies]. On the second day was born Arueris, son of the Sun, 
 whom they call Apollo and the Elder Horus. On the third was born 
 Typhon, not in the usual course, but bursting out with a sudden stroke 
 from the side of Rhea. On the fourth day was born Isis ^ ; on the fifth 
 Nephthys, who was called Teleute and Aphrodite**, and according to 
 some, Nike. Osiris and Arueris were sprung from the Sun, but Isis from 
 
 Hermes, and Typhon and Nephthys from Cronos This last pair were 
 
 married to each other. Isis and Osiris united themselves even before 
 their birth, and their son was called, according to some^, Arueris, the 
 Elder Horus, and the Apollo of the Greeks. 
 
 "Osiris being king at once proceeded to civilise the Egyptians; he 
 taught them agriculture; he enacted laws for them; he taught them to 
 worship the gods, and afterwards traversed the world on the same civilis- 
 ing errand, subduing the nations not by force but by persuasion, and 
 especially the charms of music and poetry: on which account the Grreeks 
 concluded that he was identical' with Dionysus^. In his absence Isis 
 
 1 De Iside et Osiride, c. xii — c. ^ The common story was, how- 
 
 XIX. ever, that the child of Isis and 
 
 - A round number for 72, the Osiris was the Younger Horus, or 
 
 fifth part of 360 : cf. lxx as applied else Harpocrates. 
 
 to the Seventy- Two translators of ^ The conception of Osiris has 
 
 the Hebrew Bible. probably an historical basis in the 
 
 ^ The text of Plutarch adds iu conquests ascribed to Sesostris; 
 
 TravvypoLs ('in very damp places'); just as the Mexican my the of Quet- 
 
 but the reading is doubtful. zalcoatl (above, pp. 372 sq.) had 
 
 ■* This title brings Nephthys into embodied the traditions of the 
 
 parallelism with Astarte, the female populace respecting the labours of 
 
 counterpart of Baal, and the Aphro- some true philanthropist. InDiodor. 
 
 dite of Semitic tribes : see above, i. 19, it is affirmed that the civiUs- 
 
 p. 70. ing expeditions of Osiris extended 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 463 
 
 administered the regency so wisely, that T3^plion was unable to create 
 any disturbance; but on his return he conspired against Osiris with 
 seventy-two men and the Ethiopian queen Aso^; and haviug secretly ob- 
 tained the measure of Osiris, caused a coffer splendidly adorned to be 
 brought into the banqueting-room, promising to give it to the guest whom 
 it should fit. Osiris put himself into it to make the trial; and Typhon 
 and his associates immediately pegged and soldered down the case, and 
 set it afloat on the river. It floated into the sea through the Tanitio 
 mouth, which on that account Eg}^ptians of later days regarded with ab- 
 horrence. These things were done on the seventeenth of the month 
 Athyr, in which the Sun enters Scorpion 2, and in the twenty-eighth year 
 of the reign, or as some said of the age, of Osiris. The Pans and Satyrs 
 who lived about Chemmis hearing of this tragedy and being agitated by 
 it, sudden terrors of the multitude acquired the name of panics; while 
 Isis cut off one lock of her hair and put on mourning, at the place where 
 she first heard the news, which accordingly obtained the name Coptos'^ 
 
 Wandering to and fro disconsolate she finally met with some children 
 
 who told her whither the coffin had floated, and hence the Egyptians 
 
 deem the words of children to carry with them a prophetic power She 
 
 also learned that Osiris had inadvertently united himself with her sister 
 
 Nephthys and went in search of the child which had been put away 
 
 as soon as it was born through fear of Typhon. This she found after 
 great trouble by the guidance of a dog, who afterwards became her cham- 
 pion and attendant, with the name Anubis 
 
 "She now ascertained that the chest had been floated as far as Byblus 
 [in Phoenicia] and cast ashore, and that the plant erica had grown up 
 about it and entirely enclosed it in the trunk, so that the king of the 
 country, amazed at the vast proportions of the tree, gave orders for it to 
 be cut down, and made of it a pillar* to support the roof of his palace. 
 Isis guided, as they say, by a divine monitor came to Byblus*^, and sitting 
 
 eojs *lv86}v Kot rov triparos ttjs oIkov- proceeding on its triumph through 
 
 fxivTjs : and it is further worthy of the months of winter, 
 
 remark, as intimating a certain affi- ^ The modern Keft, the principal 
 
 nity between the mythe of Osiris city of the nome Coptites in the 
 
 and the history of Sesostris, that Upper Thebaid. It is noticeable 
 
 the latter on his return from his that the same Greek word Kbirre- 
 
 foreign conquests narrowly escaped cr^at 'to lament for the dead,' was of 
 
 death by fire at the hands of his such ill omen in the mind of a 
 
 brother (Herod. 11. 107). Greek, that Herodotus (11. 132, 171) 
 
 ^ 'The co-operation of a queen shrank from naming Osiris, a deity 
 
 of Ethiopia in the plot against his analogous to the Apollo of his own 
 
 life is significant of the national traditions and a deity of the upper 
 
 hostility of that people against regions, in connexion with it or 
 
 the Egyptians, and the prevalence with a ceremony that indicated 
 
 of female dominion:' Kenrick, i. woe. 
 
 413. ■* Here again, as Mr. Kenrick 
 
 ^ The 17th of Athyr would cor- observes (i. 413), we have an his- 
 
 respond with the middle of No- torical allusion, viz. to the use of 
 
 vember (ist Athyr = Oct. 28); and Osiride pillars in Egyptian archi- 
 
 therefore the disappearance of Osiris tecture. 
 
 took place in autumn, just before ^ On the mythological affinities 
 
 the sowing-season of the Egyptians, here implied, see above, p. 452, 
 
 and at the time when darkness was n. 2. 
 
464 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 down at a -well, wretched and in tears, was there accosted by the queen's 
 maidens, and on giving proofs of supernatural virtue, was entrusted with 
 the nursing of the infant prince. She fed this child by giving it her 
 linger to suck : she likewise put him every night into the fire to consume 
 those portions of him which were mortal, and transforming herself into a 
 swallow, hovered round the pillar and bemoaned her widowhood. At 
 length, on making herself known, she was allowed to carry off the pillar, 
 and taking out the enclosed sarcophagus of Osiris, she set sail for Egypt. 
 Arriving at a desert place she opened the coffin and embraced the corpse 
 
 of her husband with bitter tears She brought it now to Egypt, and 
 
 while going on a visit to her son Horus, who was being nursed at Butos, 
 she deposited the corpse in secrecy. But Typhon, hunting by moonlight, 
 happened to meet with it, and recognising the body of Osiris, he divided 
 it into fourteen pieces, which he scattered about the country i. Isis, on 
 learning this set out in quest of the remains, sailing over the marshy 
 districts in a haris, made of papyrus, and as soon as she found one of the 
 members she buried it there. All were ultimately recovered but one (to 
 aldoiov) ; for it had been thrown into the river and devoured by the fishes, 
 lepidotus, jphagrus, and oxyrhynclms ; which were afterwards held in 
 abomination. In the room of it, she made an emblem, to which the 
 Egyptians still pay honour (in the (paW7](p6pLa^). Osiris afterwards came 
 back from the under-world, and Horus, aided by the presence of his 
 father, carried out the plan for vanquishing Typhon, and after a fight of 
 many days took him prisoner. Isis, however, loosed his fetters and let 
 him go ; at which Horus was so enraged that he tore off his mother's 
 diadem ; but Hermes [Thoth] supplied its place by a helmet in the shape 
 
 of a cow's head In two more battles Typhon was completely mastered. 
 
 Harpocrates, being sprung from the union of Isis and Osiris after the 
 death of the latter, his birth was untimely and he had a weakness in his 
 lower limbs ^." 
 
 We should form however an imperfect judgment of the Old 
 Egyptian theory of religion, if we failed to contemplate it also 
 from a different point of view. As hitherto regarded, the chief 
 god Osiris was either confounded with the elemental processes of 
 nature, or, according to the best appreciation of him, was en- 
 
 1 This story of the discerption This tendency in Egypt was per- 
 
 of the body was meant to explain haps most fully manifested in 
 
 t3ie circumstance 'that the honour Khem (the Pan of Herodotus, ii. 
 
 of his interment was claimed by so 46), who became a kind of Pria- 
 
 many different places.' (Kenrick, peian Osiris. 
 
 I. 413.) " ^ Plutarch's observation at the 
 
 '-^ In this feature of the mjihe end of the mythe implies that a 
 
 we easily discover the same desire kind of reverence for the great 
 
 to give a quasi-historical account Egyptian divinities induced him 
 
 of an existing usage. Phallic em- to suppress other particulars still 
 
 blems are very common in the more revolting : Tavra ax^^ov ian 
 
 earlier mythology of Egypt, as in rov fx^'Oov ra KecpaXaia t(2v dv(r(p7}/xo- 
 
 the later Siva-worship of Hindu- rdrcav ^^aipedivTwv oUv iari. to irepl 
 
 stdn: the object being in both tov "^pov dLaf^eXtafMOu Kal tov "laidos 
 
 cases to symbolise the generative dTroK€(pa\i.a/.i6y. (c. xx.) 
 and reproductive power of nature. 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism, 465 
 
 gaged in regulating natural agencies for tlie peculiar benefit of 
 the land of Egypt. But existing side by side witli this concep- 
 tion of Osiris was another, more exalted and more etliical; 
 implying in its tura a larger measure of religious sensibility. 
 The foremost member of the pantheon was to many of the 
 Egyptians a personification of the good principle. As such, in 
 his own person, or by means of the invincible spear of Horus, he 
 had pierced and crushed the serpent Apap * . He was worshipped, 
 therefore, as the friend of right, the enemy and vanquisher of 
 wrong, the author of the blessings which now circulate among 
 the living, and the judge and sovereign of the dead. Osiris was 
 the ^ sun-god ' in the very loftiest meaning of such phraseology. 
 Exalted far above this sublunary sphere, his piercing vision, as 
 he rode majestic through the heavens, had made him cognisant 
 of human actions ; and returning to the under- world in which he 
 was believed to join his mother, and to reign supreme, the Pluto 
 of Mizraim, with no further dread ^ of the malignant breath of 
 Typhon, he presided over a judicial process which should fix the 
 lot of all Egyptians in the world beyond the grave. 
 
 It is desirable to consider this more ethical aspect of the 
 creed of Egypt in two separate divisions, as affecting human 
 conduct, (1) in the present, and (2) in the future lifetime of each 
 individual member. 
 
 1. jSTow it is certain that in spite of the monstrosity per- 
 vading the whole structure of his mythological system, the 
 Egyptian, as compared with some of his more western neigh- 
 bours, was preeminently religious. He had ever borne the yoke 
 of a most irksome superstition with alacrity befitting a far 
 worthier cause. The time, the zeal, the treasure he would 
 lavish on the building of his multitudinous temples, or the sus- 
 tentation and the sepulture of sacred animals, was constant 
 
 ^ See Revue Archeol. xiy* annee, Jerem. yiii. 1 7 : and although in 
 
 p. 194; Kenrick, I. 421. The letting the Egyptian mythology the ill 
 
 loose of Typhon by the woman, Isis effects produced by Typhon were 
 
 (Plutarch, c. xix. where also it is mainly viewed as pMjsical, there 
 
 noticeable that an 6(pis appears), was certainly no absolute limita- 
 
 might not unnaturally be construed tion to that class of evils, (cf. Plu- 
 
 as giving free scope to the powers tarch, c. l.). 
 
 of evil, and might so have a re- 2 tjj^ ^qj^ Todtenkulte trat Set 
 
 mote relation to the sacred narra- erklarlicher Weise mehr zuriick. 
 
 tive of the Fall. Movers (pp. 522 Daher fehlt er in den Gotterlisten 
 
 sq.) distinctly connects the Typhon der Konigsgraber ; im Reiche den 
 
 both of Phoenicia and Egypt with unteren Osiris hatte er keine Macht.' 
 
 the Hebrew ''^IV^V, 'a basilisk,' Lepsius, Gotterkreis, &c. p. 207. 
 or *viper,' e.g. Isai. xi. 8; lix. 5; 
 
 H. 
 
 30 
 
466 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 proof of his intense devotion to the service of his gods; nay, 
 rather than devour or damage one such animal he was content to 
 suffer all the worst extremities of destitution or disgrace. He 
 seemed again to be continually oppressed by a conviction that 
 divine or supernatural powers were everywhere diffused around 
 him. Nothing is more clearly traceable on papyri which accom- 
 pany the mummies of the Old Egyptian than his firm belief in 
 the reality of the world invisible, — belief which generating awe 
 and dread became in him the ruling sentiment that hourly cast 
 its shadow on his pathway and that haunted him at every turn^ 
 The warmth of his religious feelings was betrayed, and may have 
 also been augmented and embittered, by diversities of worship in 
 the different nomes and by collisions more or less fanatic ^, which 
 arose from such diversities. It has been urged indeed that the 
 Egyj)tian was not always of a temper so morose and gloomy as 
 some writers had formerly imputed to him ; and perhaps there is 
 sufficient ground for this correction; but in reference to the 
 dominant genius of the popular religion, nothing in the ancient 
 world can be regarded as more sombre and dejected. The one 
 national air of Egypt was the Maneros^, — a threnody upon the 
 death of Osiris. While the tourist could remark that the Hel- 
 lenic gods were fond of gaiety and dances, those of Egypt were 
 most gratified by demonstrations of an opposite kind, by dirges 
 and a flood of tears. At banquets even it was not unusual to 
 
 ^ Osburn, Moii. Hist. i. 41 1. birth to the wildest Lives of Saints. 
 
 Herodotus (11. 37) begins his de- Whereas Sir J. G. Wilkinson in his 
 
 scription of the ritual observances last work {Ancient Egyptians, pp. 
 
 with the statement: Geocre^Sees 5k 7 sq. p. 13) affirms the very con- 
 
 ir€pi(T(T(^s ioures [xaXLaTa iravrwv av- trary : ' They were the reverse of 
 
 epijirujv: cf. DoUinger (p. 406), who a serious people; and while their 
 
 affirms *Ihre religiosen Gefiihle philosophers gave their attention 
 
 waren warmer, zaher zugleich und to grave abstruse studies, the rest 
 
 leidenschafthcher als die der Grie- of the community appreciated a 
 
 chen und Eomer. ' On this question merry life, and were remarkable 
 
 as to the general temperament of for a love of excitement, quite 
 
 the Egyptians, it is curious to ob- consistent with the scenes of buf- 
 
 serve that modern writers differ foouery and the talent for carica- 
 
 from each other toto ccslo. Thus, ture so often displayed in the 
 
 the author of the article uEgyptus paintings.' 
 in Smith's Dictionary considers ^ Kenrick, 11. 26. 
 
 the old Eg;yi)tians a serious people, ^ Explained by Brugsch {Die 
 
 of a gloomy, meditative genius: AdonisklagCy p. 24) a,s = mdd-ne' 
 
 and finds in this circumstance an hra, 'come to the house,' 'come 
 
 explanation of the fact that the home again,'— the passionate cry 
 
 whole of Egypt, after the intro- of the 'sister,' 'spouse,' and mo- 
 
 duction of the Gospel, was dotted ther' of Osiris, 
 over with convents which gave 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 467 
 
 send round a small model of a mummy, to remind the guest in 
 his more joyous moments that his tenure of the present life was 
 fleeting and precarious \ 
 
 Whether this peculiar state of feeling was a product of pecu- 
 liar ignorance on sacred subjects we may still be unable to 
 determine with absolute precision; but there seems good reason 
 for concluding that in no country of the ancient world, with the 
 exception of India ^, were the chasms so numerous and so wide 
 between the different orders of society. Egypt was the land of 
 esoteric dogmas and exclusive institutions. Egypt was the home 
 and nursery of that spirit of eclecticism which had promoted the 
 formation of the early Gnostic sects ; and Egypt was accordingly 
 a stronghold of the stoutest opposition which was offered to the 
 primitive heralds of the Gospel by the cold and haughty advocates 
 of human inequality. The natural consequence had been that 
 in no country were the masses kept in greater darkness or more 
 intellectually degraded^. Much as Plutarch wished to prove 
 that the original aim of their mythology was high and elevating*, 
 he was driven to acknowledge the failure of the system when his 
 eye was fixed on some of its more popular developments. *The 
 Egyptians/ he wrote ^, ^at least, the greater part of them, by 
 adoring the animals themselves, and caring for them as for gods, 
 have crammed their ritual full with subjects of laughter and 
 opprobrium. Nor is this the least evil which results from their 
 stupidity. A dangerous notion is implanted, which drives the 
 weak and simple-minded into the worst forms of superstition, 
 and the shrewder and more daring into atheism and beast-like 
 speculations.' 
 
 So exclusively was any higher knowledge which they might 
 possess confined to one special order, that the Pharaoh, as we 
 saw already, was esteemed but little more than a divine admin- 
 istrator of the kingdom in the service of the other priests^. He 
 ruled as the chief member of the sacerdotal college; while to 
 them had been committed not a few of the most onerous 
 functions of the state. They were the legislators, and the judges, 
 as well as the physicians, the astronomers, the architects, and 
 
 1 See other examples collected their religion/ (ziid ser. i. 164); 
 in Dollinger, p. 444. and that * every one was not only 
 
 2 See above, pp. 144 sq. permitted, but encom-aged, to be- 
 
 3 Wilkinson, who may be fairly lieve the real sanctity of the idol, 
 reckoned among the numerous and the actual existence of the god 
 apologists of Egyptian heathenism, whose figure he beheld,' (p. 175). 
 avows, notwithstanding, that 'the ^ Be Isid. et Osir. c. viii. 
 people were left in utter ignorance ^ Ihid. c. lxxi. 
 
 of the fundamental doctrines of ^^ Cf. TJhlemanu, T/wf/i, p. 11. 
 
 30—2 
 
468 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 the instructors of the youth; and only through their instrument- 
 ality as organs of the gods, or as exponents of the will of holy 
 animals, could secrets be extracted from the world invisible, or 
 answers be returned to the inquiries of the doubting and 
 desponding. 
 
 We are no longer, it is true, at liberty to urge, like many of 
 our predecessors, that Egyptians were all rigorously distributed 
 into a series of hereditary classes^, corresponding to the per- 
 manent castes of India after she had been completely Brahman- 
 ised. No absolute division of this kind appears to have been 
 taught in reference even to the present life; while in the future 
 it was held that all, on passing to the grand tribunal of Osiris, 
 would be placed in a position of complete equality. The fact, 
 however, still remains indisputable that class-distinctions did 
 exist with more than usual tenacity, and that the power of the 
 Egyptian 2")riest had always been enormous. There was no 
 period in the history of Egypt, as inscribed upon her monu- 
 mental records, when such priesthood was not duly organised^, 
 and when the hopes and fears of the remaining classes were not 
 vitally connected with its absolute ascendency. The system 
 thus compacted and administered was full of gorgeous and 
 punctilious rites; the temples, glittering with a vast pro- 
 fusion of gold and foreign marbles and distributed into holy and 
 more holy places (as the Trpovaos, the (xrjKo?, and the aSiTov), 
 were thickly planted^ in all cantons of the Nile- valley ; fes- 
 
 1 Wilkinson has abandoned his once by the enormous gifts and re- 
 former views on this subject (see venues conferred upon them by 
 Ancient Egyptians, p. 129), chiefly, some of the more powerful mon- 
 it would seem, in consequence of archs. Thus the Annals of Thoth- 
 M. Ami^fere's paper in the Pevue mes III. (of the i8th dynasty), 
 Archeologique, v^ annee, pp. 405 translated by Mr. Birch, in the 
 sq., where the monuments are Archccologia (1853), Vol. xxxv. pp. 
 shewn to indicate that there was 116 sq., are full of instances in 
 no invariable custom nor any which the bounty of the prince 
 rigorous law, prescribing that the was lavished on the great temple 
 religious, military, or civil func- of Ammon-Ka, at Thebes, as the 
 tions should in Egypt always be result of aid afforded to him by 
 assumed as the result of family- his tutelar deity during a successful 
 inheritance. attack on certain places in Pales- 
 
 2 See Uhlemann, Aegypt, Alt. 11. tine. ' Slaves, probably negroes, to 
 183 sq. ; Thoth, pp. 89 sq. open the doors; three fortresses of 
 
 ^ Ibid. II. 188 sq., where atten- the Euten [the Canaanitish enemy], 
 
 tion is drawn to some resemblances — just as the Lake Moeris and the 
 
 between the arrangements of Egyp- town of Anthylla supplied the pin- 
 
 tian temples and the Hebrew ta- money of the queens of Egyp* 5 
 
 bernacle : but see Bahr, Symbolik, linen of various sorts, gold, silver, 
 
 I. 218. The magnificence of the lapis lazuli, copper, brass, iron, 
 
 Egyptian temples is explained at lead, colours for the monuments, 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 469 
 
 tivals^, arranged througjiout the year according to a systematic 
 calendar, gave rise to frequent pilgrimages and processions; 
 while the oracles^ of Egypt long enjoyed the highest reputation, 
 and, like 'mysteries' of which she was acknowledged the in- 
 ventor, furnished models to the imitative genius of her western 
 neighbours. 
 
 It is always in the sacrificial rites of a religious system that 
 we trace the consciousness in man of his dependence on the 
 powers above him, or of his estrangement from the source of life 
 and blessedness. And Egypt, as we might anticipate, is no 
 exception to this universal law. There, also, to omit the merely 
 eucharistic^ class of sacrifices, man had ever indicated his per- 
 suasion that he was no longer what he ought to be, nor what he 
 knew he might eventually become. He felt that one or all the 
 gods were standing to him in the posture of hostility, and therefore 
 trusted by piacular ofierings to avert the outburst of their indig- 
 nation and alleviate the burden of his sin. With this conception, 
 animal sacrifices seem to have been offered on Egyptian altars 
 during tlie whole of the historic period. 'Without shedding of 
 blood there is no remission.' Here had culminated the idea of 
 heathen as of other sacrifices*: and in the case of Egypt it was 
 put on record that the ofierer sometimes manifested more than 
 common sensibility as to the thoughts which underlie this branch 
 of his symbolic ritual. He was accustomed to bewail the suffer- 
 ings of the victim he had stretched upon the altar; and when it 
 sank beneath the sacrificial knife he turned and smote himself*. 
 
 bread, loaves of various kinds of rodotus (ii. 57, 58) we also learn 
 
 food, cattle, geese, gazelles of that the method of divining from 
 
 different kinds, incense, wine, victims {tCjv Ipujv ij fxapTiK-q) was of 
 
 frankincense, offerings to the sta- Egyptian origin, 
 
 tues, to the obelisks; fields, mea- ^ Cf. above, pp. 226 sq. Such 
 
 dows, and ponds, stocked with offerings as wine, oil, or other 
 
 cattle, water-fowl, and pigeons, liquid, or any single gift, as a 
 
 complete the long list of dona- necklace, a bouquet of flowers, a 
 
 tions' (p. 154). Many of these bunch of vegetables, and the like 
 
 provisions went for the daily ban- (Wilkinson, 2nd ser. 11. 338) come 
 
 quet of the god and of his priests, under this description. They were 
 
 which took place at sunset. generally the expressions of grati- 
 
 ^ Herodotus, who thinks that tude for benefits received, or, as in 
 
 all religious pilgrimages and pro- India, may have sometimes been 
 
 cessions were devised in Egypt, connected with a fancy that the 
 
 describes six of the principal feasts minor gods at least were actually 
 
 (II. 59 sq.) ; but these were a small delighted by human articles of food 
 
 portion only of such public celebra- and dress. 
 
 tions: see Uhlemann, Aegijpt. Alt.. * Wikinson, 2nd ser. i. 146, 147. 
 
 II. 200 sq. ^ Lucian, De Sacrijiciis (0pp. p. 
 
 2 Ibid. pp. 216 sq. From He- 187, b, Paris, 1615): at d^ Ovalai 
 
470 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 A prayer^ was also offered on more critical occasions that 4f any 
 calamity were about to befall either the sacrificer or the land of 
 Egypt, it might all be concentrated on the victim's head;' which 
 was accordingly not eaten by the worshipper but thrown as a 
 devoted thing into the Kile, or else was sold to foreign traders. 
 The oblation of such sacrifices was the more remarkable in 
 Egypt, owing to the number of the sacred animals there wor- 
 shipped and the depth of the reluctance which was felt to the 
 effusion of their blood. It must indeed have been the memory 
 of some older teaching, and the force of irresistible imjDulse 
 thus communicated, which constrained the worshipper to sacri- 
 fice not merely geese and other birds, but also his choice oxen 
 and the male calves of the herd. We trace, again, the conse- 
 quence of struggles which had long been waged between the 
 i>bligation to ofler animal victims, and the obligation to preserve 
 those brutes which he had deemed especially sacred, in the fact 
 that cows and heifers were at length excluded altogether from 
 the list of offerings, and that consequently to offer them was 
 *to sacrifice the abomination of the Egyptians^.' It is further 
 noticeable, as supporting this conjecture, that a large proportion 
 of Egyptian sacrifices were selected from the class of animals, 
 which men had learned to call Typhonic, so that the thing 
 offered was no more the choicest property of the sacrificer, but 
 a creature hostile both to him and all the tutelar gods of 
 Egypt ^ An exemplification of such offering is presented in 
 the custom of choosing red"^ oxen for oblations, on the ground 
 that Typhon was himself entirely of that colour. And the 
 same idea is also still more closely intimated in the ancient 
 practice of sacrificing what were called Typhonic men, or red- 
 haired strangers^, at the tomb of Osiris. Attempts, indeed, 
 
 KoX Trap iKeivois at avrai' irXrjv on sacrifice. 
 
 Treudovcrc rb lepeiop, /cat KoiTTovrai ^ Diodor. I. 88. Porphyry, De 
 
 Tr€pi(TT(ivT€s 7J8r] 7r€<pov€VfX€Pov, Ahstinentia, ii. 55, and Plutarch, 
 
 ■^ Herod. 11. 39. De Is. et Os. c. lxxiii., both quote 
 
 2 See Exod. viii. 26, 27, and Manetho as the authority for this 
 
 Wilkinson, 2nd ser. 11. 347, 348. inhuman practice, which, he says, 
 
 ■* Plutarch, De Is. et Os. c. xxxi. : was abandoned by a king named 
 
 0v(Ti/j,oj' yap ov (plXov etmi Bedts, dXXd Amosis, who substituted a waxen 
 
 TOvvavTLov, oaa \^uxas avoalcjov avOpdo- image for the live victim. Hero- 
 
 TTwv /cat aUKOiv els irepa pLerafiop^ou- dotus, however, denies (11. 45) that 
 
 fiivoju awjxaTwv ffvveiXrjKpe. this practice, which had been abo- 
 
 * Herod. 11. 38; Diodor. i. 18. lished long before his time, had 
 
 If a single black hair was found on ever existed; asking, if the Egypt- 
 
 the ox, it was sacred to Epaphus ians were so scrupulous about offer- 
 
 (Apis), and as such was accounted ing animals, kQs dv ovtol dudpiOTrovs 
 
 'unclean,' or no proper subject for dijoiev; 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism, 471 
 
 are made continually by some writers to discredit the account, 
 which comes to us from Manetho, in reference to this horrible 
 distortion of the rite of sacrifice ; but the existence of such 
 usages appears to be unquestionable, attested as it is distinctly 
 by a native priest, and illustrated by the constant practice of 
 most other demi-civilised communities in both the Old World 
 and the iNew. The very seal made use of in historic ages to 
 denote the fitness of a given victim bore the figure of a man 
 kneeling, with his hands bound behind him, and a sword 
 pointed at his throat \ In this unnatural act of bringing to 
 the altar of the gods a victim capable of perfect sympathy with 
 the sacrificer, there is always visible, amid the glare of selfish 
 and vindictive passions, the stern truth that nothing short of 
 human blood was deemed an adequate offering to the highest 
 gods of Egypt, or sufficient for the liquidation of the penalty 
 entailed from time to time by human disobedience. 
 
 But the sacrifice which the Egyptian ofiered to his gods was 
 followed, as in other parts of heathendom^, by sacrifices for and 
 to the spirits of departed ancestors. His dedication of himself 
 to Ptah, to Ammon-Ra, or to Osiris, was the first and principal 
 act of homage ; but the next^ consisted in the dedication of his 
 own heart to his buried mother, and included a long series of 
 funereal rites by means of which he strove to pay due honour to 
 the ^authors of his body.' OflTerings of this class appear to 
 have especially evoked the better feelings of the Old Egyptian ; 
 and the prayers which he addressed to his departed ancestors, 
 as well as to Osiris in their favour, prove, if not the moral 
 elevation of his creed, at least the freshness and the strength of 
 his domestic instincts. 
 
 2. It is, however, in the views presented of the Old 
 Egyptian in the world beyond the grave that we discover the 
 foundation of his ethical system. Principles of action which 
 had guided him in this life are reflected with peculiar vividness 
 and fulness in the judgment-scenes belonging to the next. The 
 chief authorities for statements on the fortunes of the soul 
 in hades are derived from extant Rituals of the Dead, rolled 
 up in a cylindrical form and not unfrequently discovered in 
 sarcophagi of difierent periods. As this class of documents, in 
 one shape or other, may be carried back into the earlier 
 
 ^ Kenrick, i. 442; Dollinger, p. ^ gee, for example, above, pp. 290, 
 
 442; Uhlemann, 11. 191. This 355, 391, 405, and Appendix 11. at 
 
 scene, however, may possibly al- the end of this Part, 
 
 lude to the vicarious nature of the ^ Eevue ArcMol. xiv* ann^e, p. 
 
 sacrifice. 194. 
 
472 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 dynasties, — supplying to the disembodied soul of every age a 
 kind of guide-book for lier pilgrimages in the train of Osiris 
 through the regions of the under- world, — it is indisputable that 
 the Old Egyptian was no stranger to the cardinal truths con- 
 nected with the prolongation of man's being after death, his 
 conscious and unwearying exercise of functions proper to 
 humanity, and his exposure to the scrutiny of supernatural 
 agents on account of 'things done in the body^' Of the 
 hundred and sixty-five chapters which fill up the most remark- 
 able of these Rituals, one is entitled, ' On the life after death;' 
 and the volume, notwithstanding all its mystic names and 
 undecypherable images, is found to be pervaded by the same 
 idea of individual immortality. The vividness of such concep- 
 tions is pai-ticularly manifested in the fact that nearly all 
 conditions of the present life, in their most earthy and 
 unspiritual shape, had been transferred into man's theory of the 
 life which is to come. At an Egyptian funeral, common articles 
 of food and dress, and certain implements of war, of business 
 and of pleasure, were deposited with or near the corpse : the 
 scenes of daily life were pictured on the mummy-cases, not so 
 much in order to express the piety of survivors, as to gratify 
 and stimulate the dead : a string of prayers and other formula; 
 were also buried with him for his constant a'] monition, and as 
 )>assports through the unknown world to which he had been 
 destined ; and at length, when he was entering the ' dark place' 
 itself, the popular belief assigned him 'bread and drink, and 
 slices of flesh off the table of the Sun ; when he peregrinates 
 the fields of the blessed, corn and barley are given to him, for 
 he is as provided as he was upon earth ^.' 
 
 It has been held indeed, on the authority of Herodotus, 
 that the Egyptians were th^fii^st people of the ancient world to 
 inculcate this doctrine of the immortality of the human soul ; 
 
 ^ Mr. Osbum is at one with all quasi -materiality of the human 
 
 Egyptologers when he says (Mon. soul. It was not regarded as a 
 
 Hist. I. 424) : 'The truth that man purely spiritual essence, 'sondern 
 
 will be judged after death was als eine korperliche, nur feinere 
 
 brought into Egypt by the first Substanz, welche im jenseitigen 
 
 settlers, and universally received Leben durch mancherlei Wande- 
 
 by their posterity. ' rungen hindurchgehe, bis sie ge- 
 
 '^ Todtenbuch in Birch's Egypt. lautert — als solche dargestellt in 
 
 Hierog. p. 272: cf. D(5llinger, p. der Form eines Sperbers mit 
 
 432, who traces the origin of this Menschenkopf zur voUen An- 
 
 kind of phraseology to a principle schauung des gottlichen Sonnen- 
 
 ^vhich recurs in almost every hea- lichts sich emporschwingt.' 
 then system, viz. a belief in the 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egy^ptian Heathenism. 473 
 
 and doubtless the habitual and unfaltering affirmation of it was 
 to some extent Egyptian, and was that which gave their highest 
 charm to the Osirian tenets in the eye of other nations : but 
 the language of the Greek historian, properly expounded, 
 means ^ no more than that Egyptians were the first people, who, 
 cherishing the thought of some ulterior existence, had impai-ted 
 to it novel characteristics by presenting it in the form of a 
 theory of transmigration. In thus embracing the idea of 
 changes from the human to the bestial and the meanest even 
 of all reptile forms, the Old Egyptians occupied the same 
 position as Hindus throughout the second, or Brahmanic, period 
 of their history. In both those countries we have seen how 
 the religion of the choicer few, as well as of the populace itself, 
 was ultimately pantheistic ; and in both accordingly the dogma 
 of transmigration had been strengthened, if not first of all 
 suggested, by the reverence men were taught to feel for each of 
 the innumerable varieties of animated nature. Transmigration 
 was, however, viewed in both these systems as a dire calamity ; 
 and therefore to obtain exemption from its fatal law became 
 in both the foremost duty of their genuine votaries. Each 
 pursued this object in a different spirit and by methods of his 
 own devising. The Hindus of every school, the Brahman and 
 the Buddhist also, shrinking as far as possible from contact 
 with material forms, and casting off as evil all that ministered 
 to the idea of personal immortality, contended that emancipa- 
 tion could be only found amid the loftiest peaks of human 
 knowledge ; and accordingly pushed forward, in the one case to 
 complete identification with Divinity itself, and in the other, to 
 the dismal void of utter non-existence. 
 
 The Egyptian, on the contrary, had no such fundamental 
 dread of matter and experienced no temptation to accept a 
 theory fatal to the prolongation of his individual being. He 
 was rather prone to speculations which distrusted or depressed 
 the spiritual part of man. The conservation of the body, he 
 imagined, was essential to the vigour and felicity of the soul. 
 Attempts were, therefore, made in Egypt from an early period 
 to exalt, and in one sense immortalise^, the body by the well- 
 
 1 After telling us (ii. 123) that fievov eahierac iTeav hk TrepiiXSri 
 
 the Egyptians look upon Dionysus irdpra tcl xe/ocaTa koI tcl daXdaaia 
 
 and Demeter (Osiris and Isis) as Kal rd TrereLvd, avris is dvdpomov. 
 
 the rulers of hades, lie continues : d-w^ta yivoixevov iad^veip : the term of 
 
 JlpccroL d^ Kal rbvbe rbv \6yov Alyrjir- these transmigrations being 3000 
 
 TLoi elcFL ol elirovTes' ws dvOpuj-rrov years, i.e. one Sothis-period. 
 
 ^pvxr) dOdvaros idTt, rod orw/xaros dk ^ This interpretation of the cns- 
 
 KaracpdlvovTos is dWo ^coov aiel yivd- tom of embalming has come down 
 
474j Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 known system of embalming. Let the bodily organs, it was 
 felt, be sayed from putrefaction, and the spirit also will have 
 something left on which to lean for help as her companion and 
 receptacle. In virtue of the strength afforded to her by this 
 union with the former cause of her vitality, she will continue 
 to subsist in some analogous condition ; disembodied, it is true, 
 but still associating with her previous tenement, and still in 
 some mysterious fashion living by its life. 
 
 The vast importance of such interaction had impelled the 
 Old Egyptian worthy to lavish his chief skill and treasure on 
 the building and adornment of his tomb. He made it capable 
 of defying the malignity of Typhon and the wildest fury of the 
 elements : he covered it with pleasant pictures, the mementos 
 of a happy life on earth; he called the sepulchre itself, his 
 dwelling-place and ^everlasting home^' His mummy, in like 
 manner, was entitled * habitation of Osiris^;' on the type 
 supplied by the arch-mummy of that god, all others had from 
 age to age been scrupulously moulded; prayers were also 
 offered to Osiris for the purpose of securing their incorrupti- 
 bility^; and as the principal organs of the body were all 
 deemed essential to the rightful actings of the spirit, every 
 limb was now consigned to the protection of one single deity ; 
 while Seb, the father of Osiris, was himself entrusted with the 
 guardianship of edifices where the mummy was enshrined. 
 
 But while conceding that some minor difficulties continue to 
 embarrass the solution of this problem with respect to the, 
 precise intention of embalming, as well as to the limits placed 
 by the Egyptian creed upon the metensomatosis of one class of 
 
 to us through Servius {ad JUneid. die Glieder des grossen Horus. ' 
 III. 67) ; and has certainly the ad- ^ Diodor. i. 5 1 : di'Cdiovs oXkovs Trpocr- 
 vantage of accounting for many ayopevovaiv, Cos ev q.8ov diareXowrwv 
 practices connected with the burial rbv direipov alQi^a. Wilkinson (2nd 
 of the dead. But we have now ser. 11. 445) seems to think that 
 abundant reason for concluding this care of the dead body inti- 
 that the perfect purification of the mated a belief in its eventual re- 
 body, and not its conservation suscitation; but, as Prichard long 
 merely, was at the root of the ago remarked {E. Mythol. p. 198), 
 ideas expressed in every act of if this doctrine 'was really preva- 
 mummification. Thus in Brugsch's lent among the Egyptians, we must 
 edition of the Sai An Sinsin (p. suppose that they took extraordi- 
 25), it is said, 'Dein Leib ist mm nary care to conceal it, since not 
 rein durch Wasser und Laugen- the slightest hint respecting it has 
 salz, kein Glied an dir ist unrein; reached our times:' cf. Miilier, 
 gelautert von allem XJebel und Amerikan. Urrelig. p. 402. 
 allem Schmutz kommst du zum ^ Osburn, i. 427. 
 Eichterstuhle...dein Herz ist nun ^ g^g examples in Bollinger, p. 
 das Herz des Ba, deine Glieder sind 432. 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 475 
 
 disembodied spirits and their wanderings through ' the cycle of 
 necessity,' it is impossible to doubt that, in the later periods 
 of Egyptian independence, every spirit was believed to pass at 
 once from this life to Amenthe, the dim region of the under- 
 world, in which account was solemnly taken by Osiris of its 
 actions and its words. In this belief, so universally diffused, 
 we see the clearest and most urgent motive to a course of 
 upright living which the Old Egyptian had been made to feel. 
 The duties which he recognised as proper to the gods, his 
 neighbour and himself, may all be gathered from the judgment- 
 scenes enacted at the great tribunal of Osiris. 
 
 On examining the pictures thus transmitted to us, we 
 discover that not a few of the more heinous sins remaining to 
 be expiated in a future life consisted of deflections from a long 
 array of merely ceremonial precepts. Every thing in ancient 
 Egypt, not excluding the most ordinary avocations and most 
 trivial pastimes of the people, had been thrust beneath the iron 
 yoke of arbitrary legislation. As the Nile, for instance, was a 
 sacred river, and as such invoked in the Egyptian hymns ^ 
 among the foremost of the national gods, whatever bore 
 directly on the culture of the soil and the succession of the 
 crops in every district of the Nile-valley was enforced among 
 the duties claimed from husbandmen by that divinity. 'To 
 brush its sacred surface with the balance-bucket at a forbidden 
 time was a crime equal in atrocity to that of reviling the face of 
 a king or of a father^.' • The spirit, therefore, which presided 
 over all the social institutions of the Pharaonic empire was 
 akin to that which we have watched already shaping the 
 national character of the Chinese ; it was exclusive^, cramping, 
 isolating, stern, prohibitive, despotic. And corresponding to 
 this general estimate is the discovery that the virtues there 
 imputed to the Old Egyptians are nearly always of a negative 
 kind. The spirit at the bar of judgment ever struggles to 
 evince her own integrity, — 'to justify herself — and is accord- 
 ingly most earnest in proclaiming her habitual abstinence from 
 open vice and from all possible breaches of the ceremonial 
 institute. She can declare, indeed, on some occasions, that she 
 
 1 A stanza of one such hymn is ther have I enacted foreign abomi- 
 given by Mr. Birch, as before, p. 268. nations.' {Ibid. p. 432.) Hence 
 
 2 Osburn, i. 435. the violent hatred of all strangers 
 
 3 Thus in the deprecations of a which was highly characteristic of 
 spirit on approaching the judicial the Old Egyptians : see Hengsten- 
 balance, she is made to protest ' I berg, Dissertations on the Penta- 
 have not changed the customs, nei- teucht 11. 458, Edinb. 1847. 
 
476 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 has ' given bi-ead to the hungry, water to the thirsty, garments 
 to the naked, and asykim to the wretched outcast V as well as 
 proper victims to the gods and the funereal olSerings to the 
 manes; but her language in the great majority of recorded 
 judgment-scenes is rather that of contident disavowal ; while 
 confessions of innate depravity, or appeals to the forgiving mercy 
 of the judge, appear to find no echo in Egyptian Rituals. 
 
 The deceased is, in those Rituals, pictured, first of all, as 
 undergoing a long series of preliminary transformations in order 
 to evade the malice of infernal demons, and ' obtain his heart/ 
 He enters the bark of the Egyptian Charon^, and crosses over 
 to the ' Hall of the Two Truths;' the title of which is borrowed 
 from the goddesses of Truth and Justice, who assist in all 
 determinations of Osiris. Ever since the mythic death ascribed 
 to this divinity, it is believed that he has sat in judgment on 
 the souls of men ; and every spirit on admission finds him 
 ready at his post, attended by Anubis, Hhe director of the 
 balance,' by Horus waiting to conduct acquitted mortals to the 
 nearer presence of Osiris, and by Thoth, the great recorder, 
 with a tablet in his hand. The heart of the deceased, which 
 after various struggles has been rescued from the demons of the 
 under-world, is now submitted to the fatal balance. Formulae 
 of exculpation^ are presented to him ; and although he is 
 supposed to meet the reckoning solely in his own strength and 
 to escape the crisis only when assured of personal innocence, 
 some friendly guidance is upon his own petition administered 
 by Thoth, the Mercury of the Egyptian hades. Of the 
 formulae^ here mentioned one consists of deprecatory addresses 
 to the gods of the Hall of Judgment, the divine assessors of 
 Osiris. In the second a long catalogue of sins are, one by one, 
 denied or disavowed, before the ' two-and-forty avengers,' who 
 as the personifications of the sins themselves are represented 
 waiting for the adverse inclination of the balance, in order to 
 inflict their torments on the soul of the condemned. 
 
 I give the former series at full length, because it tends far 
 more than any others to exhibit the religion of the Old 
 
 1 Revue Archeol. xiv« annee, p. the protests of the Old Egyptian 
 jg^^ as. recorded in his Ritual with those 
 
 2 According to Diodor. i. 96, the contained in the 3i.st chapter of 
 word Charon is itself Egyptian the Book of Job. The pomts of 
 (xa/)w=' silence'): cf. Uhlemann, similarity and of contrast are 
 Thoth, p. 62. Ehadamanthus, in equally instructive. 
 
 like manner, is by some connected * They are translated from the 
 
 with the Egyptian Amenthe. Todtenbuch by Mr. Osburn, i. 430 
 
 3 It is worth while to compare sq. 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 477 
 
 Egyptians in a favourable light, and illustrates the nature of 
 that secret and self-judging law, which everywhere in spite of 
 intellectual aberrations is still active, in the cause of truth and 
 righteousness, among the inmost fibres of the human heart : 
 
 1. I have neither done any sin, nor omitted any duty to any man. 
 
 2. I have committed no uncleanness. 
 
 3. I have not prevaricated at the seat of justice. 
 
 4. I have not spoken lightly. 
 
 5. I have done no shameful thing. 
 
 6. I have not omitted [certain] ceremonies. 
 
 7. I have not blasphemed with my mouth. 
 
 8. I have not perverted justice. 
 
 9. I have not acted perversely. 
 10. I have not shortened the cubit. 
 
 n. I have not done that which is abominable to the gods. 
 
 12. I have not sullied my own purity. 
 
 13. I have not made men to hunger. 
 
 14. I have not made men to weep. 
 
 15. I have done no act of rapine ^ 
 
 16. I have not accused of rapine falsely. 
 
 17. I have not revived an ancient falsehood before the face of man. 
 
 18. I have not forged the deeds of sluices, houses, or lands. 
 
 19. I have not forged any of the divine images. 
 
 20. I have not withheld the seven linen garments due to the priests. 
 
 21. I have not committed adultery. 
 
 22. I have not polluted the purity of my divine land (/. e. my tomb). 
 
 23. I have not been avaricious. 
 
 24. I have not forged signet-rings. 
 
 25. I have not cut down on my mother's land {i.e, my maternal in- 
 
 heritance) the timber that grows thereon. 
 
 26. I have not falsified the weights of the balance. 
 
 27. I have not withheld milk from the mouths of the infanta. 
 
 28. I have not driven away the flocks from their pasturage. 
 
 29. I have not netted [the] ducks [of the Nile] illegally. 
 
 30. I have not caught [the] fishes [of the Nile] illegally. 
 
 31. I have not [unlawfully] pierced the bank of the river when it was 
 
 increasing. 
 
 32. I have not separated for myself [clandestinely] a channel [lit. arm) 
 
 from the river when it was subsiding. 
 
 33. I have not extinguished the perpetual lamp {lit. hourly lamp). 
 
 34. I have not added anything to any of the sacred books. 
 
 35 . I have not driven off any of the sacred cattle. 
 
 36. I have not stabbed the god {i. e. sacred animal), when he comes 
 
 forth [from his shrine]. 
 
 Wherever the Egyptian failed to pass this ordeal, and the 
 second not unlike it, he incurred a dark succession of 
 
 ^ The besetting sin of the Old would seem, a kind of legal in- 
 Egyptian appears to have been dulgence (Herod. 11. 121 ; Aulus 
 theft, for which he had obtained Gellius, xi. 18; Diodor. i. 80). 
 a special notoriety, as well as, it 
 
478 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 tremendous penalties. The hapless spirit, banished from the 
 presence of Osiris, who inclines his sceptre in token of disappro- 
 bation, is now hurried back to earth by ministers of vengeance 
 in the hideous form of apes. She migrates from the human to 
 the bestial sphere of being, and commencing with some animal 
 shape ^ to which indeed she had contracted an affinity by former 
 habits, she proceeds from year to year, from century to century, 
 now rising and now sinking in the scale of creaturely existence, 
 till at last the destined cycle is completed by the winding up 
 of all things. The most abject stage in this rotation seems to 
 be the lowest region of Kar-Neter, the Phlegethon of the 
 Greeks. * None of the dead can endure it ; the waters being 
 of flame and waves of fire of the most intense and unconquer- 
 able heat ; while the thirst of the dead in it is unquenchable ; 
 and they have no peace in it, because it is filled with weeds and 
 filth^' 
 
 But on the contrary the human spirit who has stood the 
 various tests applied to her at the tribunal of Osiris, passes on 
 with the permission of the demons, and moves freely through 
 the joyous halls of Aahlu (Elysium). Her body also purified 
 at length, by its evisceration^, from all properties which 
 rendered it offensive to the gods, has been assimilated by the 
 mummifying process to the actual form of Osiris. The whole 
 man, according to the later representations, has become 
 Osirianised ; the name of the great sun-god is combined, without 
 distinction of age or calling, with the name of the departed 
 
 ^ Wilkinson, as above, p. 447. It ing or drinking, it has not been 
 is rarely, however, as Mr. Kenrick done on my own account, but on 
 remarks (1. 480), that we find 'among account of these;' pointing to the 
 the funereal monuments of Egypt chest containing the viscera. Such 
 anything which relates to the me- passages (of. above, p. 142) remind 
 tempsychosis ;' the reason, per- one of St. Augustine's statement 
 haps, being that every embalmed respecting himself while he con- 
 corpse, duly interred, wns presumed tinued a Manichaean: *Adhuc enim 
 by the survivors to have passed mihi videbatur, non esse nos qui 
 the scrutiny of the infernal judge, peccamus, sed nescio quam aliam 
 and so was in a state of permanent in nobis peccare naturam,' (Confess. 
 felicity. v. 10). It is also worthy of remark 
 ^ Birch, as above, p. 275. that while expressions such as those 
 3 See the remarkable passage in just cited ha,Y q a Manichce an asj^ect, 
 Porphyry [De Ahstlnentia, iv. 10), overlooking or denying the freedom 
 where is preserved the invocation of the creature, the general tend- 
 addressed by the embalmers to the ency of the religions of Egypt, of 
 sun in the name of the deceased; Phoenicia and of Babylonia, was 
 at the end of which he is made to rather towards a Pelagian esti- 
 say, 'If I have committed any other mate of human sinfulness, 
 fault during my Ufe, either in eat- 
 
CHAP. I.] Characteristics of Egyptian Heathenism. 479 
 
 mortal; he attains to a subordinate stage of deification; he 
 acquires a faculty of self-translation and self-transformation \ 
 just as the condemned are driven onward bj some irresistible 
 fate into the forms of animal life ; he issues forth at will into 
 the upper regions ; he soars high above the earth with- the 
 alei-tness of the hawk or ibis; he revisits the sepulchre in 
 which his body is preserved, and thence derives a fresh 
 accession to his vital powers. He inherits the two-fold life of 
 the divine Osiris ; all his happiness consists in tracking that 
 illustrious sun-god, in addressing adorations to him, and in 
 sailing with him through his daily circuits, in the barge 
 employed by him to circumnavigate the firmament, or ^ waters 
 of the heavenly Nile.* 
 
 In other words, the Sun which to Egyptians had for ages 
 been the grandest symbol of their deities, and not unfrequently 
 the glorious home or vehicle of Deity itself, was also the most 
 lofty image .they could form of pure and ultimate enjoyment. 
 The reward of all acquitted spirits was translation from the 
 sacred Yalley of the Nile, its joys and sorrows and mutations, 
 to the one unchanging source of brilliance and fertility. ' This 
 great god speaks to them and they speak to him; his glory 
 illuminates them in the splendour of his disc, while he is shining 
 in their sphere^.' 
 
 1 Dollinger, p. 434 : cf. above, p. Hindti conception of original 'per- 
 714, n. 2; where a similar faculty fectness.' 
 is said to have entered into the ^ KoseUini, in Kenrick, i. 487. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 Alleged Affinities between the Hebrew and 
 Egyptian Systems. 
 
 Ka7-d rd iTTLTTjdevfiaTci AlyvTrrov, ev fj Kari^K-^aare iir avry, ov iroiTjcreTe, koX 
 Kara rd iiriTTjdeu/maTa yijs Kavadv, els rjv eyCj eladyuj vfids e/cei, ov ttoi- 
 yjcrere, Kai rocs vojxlixols avroov ov iropevcreade. rd Kpiuard /jlov iroiTyfrere, 
 Kal rd irpoardyfjiaTd ixov (pvXd^ecrde, Kal iropeijecrOe kv avroTs. ETQ 
 KTPI02 GEOS TMim. Levit. xviii. 3, 4. (LXX). 
 
 Injluence of Egijpt on the Hebrews. Improhahility that heathenish ideas 
 were adopted in Hebraism. 
 
 § I. Ritual resemblances. General nature of ancient symbolism. Cha- 
 racter of the Mosaic institute, (i) Circumcision existed in distant 
 countries: how related to the Abrahamic institution. Sj)ecijic differ- 
 ences between the Hebrew and all other rites. (2) Cherubim. Com- 
 pound symbols in other countries. Real nature of the Cherubim. How 
 connected ivith man's redemption. Relation to the Sphinx. (3) Holy 
 and most holy places. Real import of the Hebrew sanctuary. Egyptian 
 contrasts. (4) Urim and Thummim. Alleged parallelism. Thummim 
 and Thmei. Probable meaning of the Hebrew symbol. (5) The Red 
 Heifer. (6) The Scape-goat. Minor points of resemblance. Who or 
 what ivas Azazel? 
 
 § 2. Doctrinal contrasts. Hebrew monotheism and Egyptian polytheism. 
 Ethical character of Hebrew monotheism. 
 
 The moral sensibility of the Hebrew contrasted with the moral dulness of 
 the Egyptian. Man's relationship to God not recognised in Egypt. 
 Bestial incarnations. Doctrine of a future life, universally diffused; 
 not necessarily connected ivith sublime ideas of God. The Egyptian 
 dogma. The Christian doctrine. How treated in the Old Testament. 
 The Babylonish exile the penalty of indulging heathenish notions. 
 
 That some examples of external correspondency, more marked 
 and less fortuitous than any we have hitherto detected, can be 
 traced between the ritual codes of the Egyptian and the 
 Hebrew, is no longer questioned even by the warmest advocate 
 of supernatural religion \ These affinities, however, as we 
 
 1 Thus Witsius, in his JSgijpt- negotio veteres inter ^gyptios at- 
 
 iaca, p. 4, Basil, 1739^ declares ex- que Hebrasos esse,' and adds : 'Qum 
 
 pressly 'magnam atque mirandam cum fortuita esse non possit, ne- 
 
 plane convenientiam in religionis cesse est ut vel iEgyptii sua ab 
 
CHAP. II,] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems, 481 
 
 miglit at once anticipate from the absorbing interest of the 
 points involved, give birth to a variety of conflicting interpreta- 
 tions. Some, for instance, have contended that as early as 
 the age of Abraham, the priests of Lower Egypt were induced 
 to borrow from him certain portions of the patriarchal creed, as 
 well as to accept instruction at his hands in secular and useful 
 learning. Others, on the contrary, affirm that Abraham him- 
 self and his descendants in the time of Moses had not scrupled 
 in particular cases to incorporate the riper wisdom of the land 
 of Egypt with their own hereditary laws and their most 
 cherished institutions. While a third class, arguing from the 
 fact that both these peoples radiated from a common centre, 
 would refer the numerous points of similarity which they 
 exhibit to the influence of a purer and more primitive genera- 
 tion, when the fathers of the Hebrew race stilP recognised the 
 sacred character of worthies like Melchisedek, and communed 
 with them as with ' priests of the most high God.' 
 
 The feelings also which suggest the different theories on this 
 subject are as widely different as the theories themselves. On 
 the one side stand the writers both of earlier and later ages, who 
 are actuated by a strong conviction that we had almost * as well 
 not worship God at all as worship Him by rites which have 
 been employed in paganism ^' The presence in the Bible of 
 some element of faith or worship, known to have been actually 
 borrowed frOm the primitive faith or worship of the circum- 
 jacent heathen would in their view silence or invalidate all 
 arguments in favour of a special Revelation ; and accordingly 
 they feel concerned to demonstrate that ^images of truth,' 
 wherever such exist in Gentilism, were merely due to the 
 refracted rays of supernatural light whose proper sphere was in 
 the bosom of the sacred family. Others, unrestrained by 
 
 Hebrseis, vel ex adverso Hebrsei ^ This is Warbnrton's charac- 
 
 sua ab JEgyptiis habeant.' And teristic way of putting the case of 
 
 Hengstenberg, in our own day, his opponents: cf. Div. Leg. ii. 
 
 makes a similar admission: 'He 312 sq. Lond. 1846. A similar 
 
 [Spencer] sets out with an asser- class of scruples have occasionally 
 
 tion — in the main correct, but peeped out in discussions of the 
 
 pushed by him to an extreme — post-Keformation period on the 
 
 that many parts of the Mosaic subject of ecclesiastical vestments 
 
 ceremonial law present a striking and other ceremonies: e.g. at the 
 
 agreement with the religious usages Hampton Court Conference, v/here 
 
 of heathen nations, particularly of objections were urged against the 
 
 the Egyptians.' Dissertations on surplice, on the ground that such 
 
 the Genuineness of the Pentateuch^ ?. dress was worn of old time by 
 
 I. 4, Edinb. 1847. priests of Isis. 
 ^ See above, p. 69, n. 2. 
 
 II. 31 
 
482 Christ and other Masters. [part iVi 
 
 feelingb* of this kind, nay, anxious even, it would seem, at all 
 hazards to multiply the points of sympathy between the 
 Hebrew and the heathen systems, find their only possible 
 justification of the ceremonial law of Moses in assuming its 
 profound dependence on the institutes of the Egyptian law- 
 givers. While particular branches of that ritual were (say 
 they) intended to condemn or counteract the grosser vices of 
 polytheism, the general object was to gratify a multitude of 
 childish prejudices \ which the Hebrew had contracted in the 
 course of his long residence in Egypt. Customs and ideas of 
 heathenish extraction were engrafted on the Law, and that by 
 the express authority of God Himself, in order to amuse the 
 fancy, and preoccupy the spirit of the Israelitish people, who 
 might else, through their incorrigible love of superstitious 
 imagery and impatience of all purely spiritual tru.th, have been 
 seduced into apostasy. One school of modern writers has, 
 however, accepted this position so far only as to grant that 
 several usages commanded in the Law of Moses were in fact 
 adapted from the ritual code of the Egyptians ; but instead of 
 finding in that circumstance a reason for disparaging the 
 ceremonial system of the Hebrews, they proceed to build on 
 their admission a fresh argument in favour of the early date 
 and high authority of the Pentateuch ~. 
 
 ^ Spencer's work, De Legihus in it nothing more than a huge 
 
 Ilebrceorum ritualibus, is pervaded 'apparatus of ceremonies,' having 
 
 by this strange idea. As Biihr *no agreement with the nature of 
 
 expresses it [Symholilz des Mosa- God.' Perhaps the closest of pa- 
 
 ischen Cultus, i. 41, Heidelberg, tristic approximations to his stand- 
 
 1837), God appears in his theory ing-ground occurs in one of the 
 
 'as a Jesuit who makes use of bad letters of Gregory the Great (Bed. 
 
 means [Spencer himself says in- Hist. Eccl. 1. 30) : with which may 
 
 eptice tolerabiles] to bring about a be compared the startling assertions 
 
 good result.' In some respects the of Mr. D. I. Heath, Exodus Fapyrij 
 
 legal institute might justly be re- pp. 103 &q. Lond. 1855. 
 garded by the Christian Fathers ^ This, for example, appears to 
 
 as a kind of condescension to the be the moving principle of Dr. 
 
 wants and weaknesses of man, and Hengstenberg in his I)ie BUcher 
 
 consequently as a c-vyKard^aais or Mose's und Aegypten, Berlin, 1841, 
 
 accommodation to the actual status where the points of outward simi- 
 
 of its Jewish subjects (of. Acts xiii. larity are unduly multiplied. His 
 
 18); but Spencer's theory is a own avowal is: ' Je urspriinglicher, 
 
 coarse and violent perversion of selbststandigerundeinzigartigerdie 
 
 this philosophic principle. In- israelitische Eeligion in Bezug auf 
 
 stead of looking on the law of den Geist war, desto weniger hatte 
 
 Moses as a lower and symbolic sie es nothig, mit scheuer Aengst- 
 
 form of true religion, possessing lichkeit jede aussere Beriihrung 
 
 therefore an internal fitness, and mit den Religionen anderer Volker 
 
 a definite place in the grand scheme zu vermeiden' (p. 153). 
 of man's redemption, he could see 
 
CHAP. 11.] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems, 483 
 
 Now, if we try to disembarrass oar minds as far as possible 
 from any mere presumptions, it is evident that contradictory 
 theories in vogue with reference to alleged resemblances 
 between the Hebrew and Egyptian systems are in almost every 
 case extravagant or superficial or one-sided. We are bound, 
 for instance, to acknowledge on the threshold, that some very 
 deep impressions had been made upon the sons of Abraham by 
 their continued sojourn in the empire of the Pharaohs. From 
 the nature of the case the Hebrews must have been disciples 
 and not doctors. Going down a handful of mere nomades to 
 that country of the ancient world whose institutions had been 
 longest organised, they could not fail to have experienced the 
 transforming influence everywhere implied in such an altered 
 mode of life. We know, indeed, for certain that the land of 
 Goshen proved the nursery of their national spirit, and the 
 training-school in which they gradually imbibed some elements 
 of art, of agriculture, and of civil polity. We know, again, 
 that during their abode in Egypt, the majority of Hebrews 
 proper, — to say nothing of the ' great mixed multitude,' who 
 having learnt to share their fortunes were blended with them 
 at the Exodus, — contracted more and more a fondness for 
 Egyptian thoughts and customs, utterly at variance with the 
 creed inherited from their fathers \ The same vicious predilec- 
 tion had moreover gained such stubborn hold upon them that in 
 after-ages it was constantly evincing its importance, and could 
 scarcely ever be eradicated. 
 
 ISTor have these considerations been sufiiciently answered by 
 the plea that all the popular bias on the side of Egypt, active 
 as it was before the promulgation of the Law, had constituted 
 an additional reason why the Lawgiver should abstain from 
 every thing which countenanced or confirmed it : since, accord- 
 ing to the framers of the theory of accommodation, it was 
 politic in Moses to recognise and so to consecrate, as far as 
 might be, what the present temper of the Hebrew people 
 rendered him unable to displace. Nay, ask these writers, 
 might not Moses be induced to grant some measure of 
 indulgence to his weak and sense-bound followers by his own 
 experience of the real strength of their temptations, or the real 
 good which might have been deducible from heathen customs ? 
 Educated from his earliest childhood in the court of the' 
 Egyptian monarch, and, it may be, actually initiated^ into the 
 
 ^ On their religious condition ii, 38 — 42. 
 while in Egypt, see Kurtz, Gesch. - Cf. Uhlemann's Tlioth, p. 6. 
 
 31—2 
 
484 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 sacred circles of the priestliood, was lie not (say they) both 
 skilled in the symbolic ordinances of Egyptian worship and 
 enabled to discern the hidden truths which lay enveloped in the 
 midst of it? If many of the oldest Greek philosophers, as 
 Thales or Pythagoras^ or Plato, who had sojourned there a 
 shorter period, could return exulting from the land of Egypt 
 laden with a rich variety of intellectual spoils ; if through their 
 visits many a germ of mathematical science and the outlines of 
 a purer system of ethics and theology were rescued from 
 comparative oblivion; if the principle of distributing their 
 pupils into outer and inner classes, an enlarged conception of 
 the grandeur of the universe, or a more fascinating list of 
 dogmas, such as that of transmigration and the like, had all 
 been widely spread along the shores of the Mediterranean, why 
 should not the foster-child of Pharaoh's daughter have been 
 equally imbued with reverence for ideas and institutions of his 
 adopted country^, or at least inclined to tolerate in others what 
 to lofty spirits like his own may have been radiant with the 
 light of true philosophy *? 
 
 ISTow let it be conceded, in reply to these surmises, that the 
 * human learning' of the Hebrew legislator was from first to 
 last Egyptian. Let it also be conceded that the fondness of his 
 subjects for Egyptian ritualism was such as to have baffled all 
 the wisest schemes designed to counteract it ; and enough will 
 yet remain to make us hesitate before subscribing to this novel 
 phase of the accommodation-theory. If the Books of Moses be 
 accepted as our guide (and other guidance in this region we 
 have none), is it consistent either with their letter or their 
 spirit that the Law, as authorised at such a crisis by God 
 Himself, could carry with it any sanction of things purely 
 heathenish in their nature 1 Was it not pervaded by indignant 
 
 1 The prohibition by Pythagoras Semitic, if not Biblical, traditions; 
 of all animal food and all animal while many of his ascetic princi- 
 sacrifices (adduced by Uhlemann, pies are clearly traceable among 
 Thoth, p. 12, as an illustration of the Palestinian Essenes. 
 his Egyptising) has rather a Hindti ^ j^jgg Martineau, Eastern Life, 
 aspect; and of later years, indeed, p. 104, tells us that Plato came to 
 it has grown fashionable to speak Egypt, 'and sat, where Moses had 
 of the founder of Pythagoreanism sat, at the feet of the priests, gain- 
 as a kind of Buddhist missionary; ing, as Moses had gained, an_ im- 
 hi4 name or title (Pythagoras = mortal wisdom from their lips:' 
 'Buddha -guru') being quoted as but when she adds that Moses 
 confirmatory of such hypotheses. learned to become *a redeem-legis- 
 Others, however, dwell upon his later,' as Plato a 'spiritual philo- 
 supposed Phoenician origin, and sopher,' I confess my utter inabi- 
 Bo make him the depository of lity to understand her meaning. 
 
CHAP. II.] The Hehrew and Egyptian Systems. 485 
 
 protests against heathenism as such? The call of Moses, the 
 appointed legislator, was as critical and peremptory as the call 
 of the Apostle of the Gentiles : it was also followed by a like 
 inversion and revulsion in the spirit of the * chosen vessel.' 
 He too had been sent to ^bear the name of God before the 
 Gentiles and kings and the children of Israel/ and to suffer for 
 that Name's sake (cf Acts ix. 15, 16). He learned at starting 
 on his mission, and he kept engraven ever on his mind, a clear 
 idea of the * complete and absolute distinction of the Jewish 
 faith from that of any other ancient nation \' This distinctness 
 of position and belief, proclaimed no more through hieroglyphs 
 intelligible only to the few, but in the ordinary writing of the 
 Hebrew people, was exactly in accordance with the destiny 
 marked out for them as conservators of the true religion. The 
 whole genius therefore of their institutions was distinctive, 
 separative, incapable of compromise, impatient of amalgama- 
 tion ; so distinctive, so peculiar, that the wonderful vitality of 
 Hebraism in after-times can only be explained on the hypothesis 
 that men's devotion to it had been supernaturally produced, 
 and ever since the childhood of the nation had been growing 
 upward with their growth. Or if advancing from these general 
 probabilities we study some of the first chapters in the national 
 records of the Israelites, we shall again perceive at every turn 
 the traces of antagonism between their own and the Egyptian 
 system. In the Exodus itself, which led the way to the forma; 
 tion of the legal institute, we have to witness no mere secular 
 emancipation from the yoke of a new line of Pharaohs, but the 
 mightiest of religious victories which the ancient world had 
 seen. Designed to vindicate the personality and holiness of 
 God, as well as the distinctness of His chosen people, it was 
 Ushered in by a succession of stupendous acts which tended to 
 rebuke and stultify the nature- worship of Mizraim : it was 
 consummated in that moment, when the Hebrews, flushed with 
 hope and exultation, were all forward in responding to the 
 grateful anthem of their leader : ' I will sing unto the Lord, for 
 he hath triumphed gloriously.... The Lord is my strength and 
 song, and He is become my salvation' (Ex. xv. 1, 2). As, 
 therefore, in the parallel case where Christianity is struggling 
 hand to hand with some bewitching or besotting form of 
 heathenism, it is most needful to protect her neophyte against' 
 all risk of fresh contamination by decrying or discountenancing 
 customs which may serve, remotely even, to perpetuate modes 
 
 1 Cf. Dr. Donaldson's Christian Orthodoxy,^. 117, Lond. 185;. 
 
486 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 of thouglit and feeling adverse to tlie rightful exercise of her 
 transforming influence ; so the Pentateuch evinces a continual 
 jealousy lest peradventure the old thirst for heathenish vices 
 should be stimulated through the medium of unhallowed 
 associations. Intermarriage, for example, with the neighbour- 
 ing heathen is most sternly interdicted both by Moses and by 
 Joshua whenever it is likely to involve among its fruits the 
 imitation or adoption of heathen customs. The redeemed 
 community have ample warrant for believing that they are no 
 more a friendless band of foreign shepherds, mingled and well- 
 nigh confounded with the meanest subjects of the Pharaohs, 
 but *a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a peculiar treasure 
 unto God above all people' (Ex. xix. 5, 6); and because the 
 ground of such election, owing to the nature of God Himself, is 
 ultimately and entirely moral, the elected race is under a 
 proportionate obligation to exhibit in the sight of the surround- 
 ing world its moral superiority : * After the doings of the land 
 of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do : and after the 
 doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not 
 do ; neither shall ye walk in their ordinances. Ye shall do 
 My judgments, and keep Mine ordinances, to walk therein: I 
 am the Lord your God.' (Lev. xviii. 3, 4.) 
 
 The question, therefore, as to the transmission of religious 
 thoughts and usages from the Egyptian to the Hebrew is 
 discovered to be far more complicated than at first sight may 
 appear. It is a question little likely to be solved, as many 
 writers have of late attempted, by adducing an array of bare 
 presumptions on the one side or the other. To discuss it we 
 must enter on a rigorous examination of the facts themselves ; 
 and with a view to such investigation, I shall here arrange all 
 jDOSsible affinities in two separate classes^: (1) the minor points 
 of ritualism which may have been inherited in common, or 
 externally derived from one system to the other, without 
 implying any true internal sympathy; and (2) the cardinal 
 points of doctrine which must ever have determined the 
 character of those systems, and have proved the real secret of 
 their weakness or their Strength. 
 
 § 1. Ritual Resemblances, 
 
 Before entering on the criticism of any particular instances, 
 it is important to recall attention to remarks already^ made in 
 
 ^ All inquiries into merely civil on the present subject, 
 and political arrangements are ^ Above, pp. 74 sq. 
 
 passed over as not directly bearing 
 
CHAP. Ti.] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems. 487 
 
 reference to the offices discliarged bj symbolism in the religions 
 of antiquity. The lack of any clear ideas on this point has 
 tended more than other causes to becloud the whole of the dis- 
 cussions opened in the present chapter. I have urged that 
 since the ancient Hebrew was in temperament, as also in the 
 measure of his intellectual training, not unlike the native of 
 surrounding countries, symbolism of some kind or other was most 
 needful in that early period to the planting of religious truth 
 and its development within him. He was far less capable than 
 his remote descendants of all abstract and unearthly contempla- 
 tion ; he was living more than they in the impressions made 
 upon the eyesight ; and accordingly it was the part of wisdom 
 in obtaining from him the acceptance of a supersensuous truth 
 to represent, or, one might say, embody it in concrete shapes, to 
 clothe it in more visible and sensuous drapery, and enforce it by 
 suggestive actions and symbolical institutions. Here, as in the 
 case of teaching by parable or allegory, a pure thought has been 
 invested in expressive forms which bring it more directly under 
 the cognisance of every human mind endowed with the most 
 elementary of religious intuitions. Symbol was, in other words, 
 a species of primeval language : the symbolic institutions were 
 the illustrated and illuminated books, in which the early genera- 
 tions of the human family might learn the rudiments of true 
 religion : and, aided as it was among the Hebrews by a series of 
 collateral expositions ever guarding it from misconstruction and 
 reverting to the spiritual principles on which it had been framed, 
 the ritual law was one of God's chief agents in the education of 
 the elder Church. It deepened in man's heart the consciousness 
 of his dependence and degeneracy ; it taught the need of a 
 redemption and foreshadowed the Kedeemer ; while by it the 
 grand conception of one holy God had been associated with the 
 homeliest of man's actions, and diftused 4nto the very midst of 
 the popular life.' Compared with Christianity, indeed, that 
 ritual system of the Hebrew was unripe and rudimentary; it 
 was made up of *weak and beggarly elements;' it proved itself 
 a Psedagogue and not the Teacher ; the result to which it ever 
 pointed the aspirations of its worthier subjects was not actually 
 achieved until Hhe fulness of the times had come,' until the 
 Incarnation of the Son of God and the effusion of the quickening 
 Spirit : yet in reference to the stage of progress then attainable 
 by man, it offered an effectual apparatus for evoking and con- 
 serving the religious principle ; and when at last the sentence 
 of abrogation was pronounced, the law of ordinances fell, as 
 scaffolding falls off, because the edifice it served to rear had 
 
488 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 reached the full proportions, and because a system not inglorious 
 in itself has *no glory in this respect by reason of the glory that 
 excelleth.' 
 
 If, then, sacred emblems of the ancient world were thus 
 peculiarly significant ; if symbolic institutions were a species of 
 necessity arising out of the capacities and condition of the 
 human mind, and so were common to the rituals both of Jew 
 and heathen, all objections to the Bible which depend upon the 
 mere existence of resemblances between these rituals, irrespec- 
 tively, that is, of the ideas therein embodied, fall entirely to the 
 ground. It would be equally presumptuous to disparage or re- 
 ject the doctrines of the Gospel, prior to all scrutiny of its con- 
 tents, because these doctrines are transmitted to us in the 
 ordinary characters made use of in the printing of the other 
 Avritings of antiquity, or else because particular forms of speech 
 are found to be employed alike by the Apostle of the Gentiles, 
 and the orators, the poets or the moralists of ancient Greece. 
 The same outward act or emblem might continue to embody the 
 same primitive truth and so be equally innocuous in both 
 systems, which are made the subjects of comparison. Or, upon 
 the other hand, it might be gradually connected in the lapse of 
 ages with divergent if not opposite and contradictory ideas\ 
 But wherever any emblem had been consciously transferred 
 from one ancient people to another, care would doubtless be 
 employed to rescue it from all supposed perversions then at- 
 taching to it, so that in its fresh position it might harmonise 
 instead of jarring with the other members of the ritual system. 
 Let this only be effected, and a symbol used extensively in heathen 
 countries for the representation of a thing reputed holy might 
 
 ^ The following observations of fach bereichert werden, und in der 
 
 Kurtz (Gesch. des Alien Bundes^ Symbolik des agyptischen Cultus 
 
 I. 310), though not expressing the fand es schon eine voUig ausge- 
 
 exact view here advocated, are bildete Form des religiosen Lebens 
 
 well worthy of attention: *In der vor, die, vfeil aus nothivendigen 'and 
 
 hohen Bliithe agyptischer Weis- allgemein gilltigen Anschauungs- 
 
 heit, Cultur und Industrie hatte imd Denkgesetzea des menschlichen 
 
 Israel die beste Schule naensch- Geistes hervorgegangen, nicht aus- 
 
 licher Bildung, deren es fur seine schliesslich nur zum Trager des 
 
 kiinftige Bestimmung bedurfte; agyptischen Pantheismus anwend- 
 
 durch die Bekanntschaft mit der bar war, sondern, von dem speci- 
 
 tiefen Anschauung der Aegypter, fisch-israelitischen Princip beseelt, 
 
 die das ganze Leben mit alien verklart und umgestaltet, auch dem 
 
 seinen Aeusserungen und Yer- Cultus des israelitischen Theismus 
 
 zweigungen unter religiosen Ge- zum willkommnen Trager dienen 
 
 sichtspunkt stellte, konnte selbst konnte.' 
 Israels religiose Anschauung mehr- 
 
cnAP. II.] The^ Hehreiu and Egyptian Systems, 489 
 
 be also chosen as an apt exponent of a thing more lofty and more 
 holy still ; the freedom of the symbol from profane associations 
 facilitating the adoption of it, and imparting to it an especial 
 fitness for its new office. 
 
 It is, therefore, highly probable that if the Hebrew legislator, 
 acting here as always under the supreme direction of Jehovah, 
 were induced to sanction rites and ceremonies current in the 
 land of Egypt, or in other nations of antiquity, he was influenced 
 by no wish to gratify the merely 'puerile superstitions' of his 
 followers, but by reasons more exalted in themselves and more 
 befitting his exalted character. He engrafted them into the 
 legal institutions either because they were the uncorrupted 
 heirloom of the patriarchal age, or else because, from their inhe- 
 rent fitness and expressiveness, they were commended to him as 
 at once convertible in aid of the great project he was called to 
 carry out. 
 
 The number of these ritual correspondencies is stated with 
 considerable variety by different writers. Some^, however, I 
 shall scarcely glance at ; first, because the facts on which it is 
 attempted to support them are extremely vague and problemati- 
 cal, and, secondly, because those facts, when fully ascertained, 
 admit of a more simple and more rational explanation. In 
 selecting the examples here subjoined for more minute analysis, 
 I take the points which have been universally esteemed the 
 most important of the series, and which century after century 
 have furnished his main arguments to the impugner of the Books 
 of Moses. 
 
 ^ Thus, the division of the He- Egyptian priests ; yet most impor- 
 brews into twelve tribes, alleged tant differences are also traceable ; 
 by some writers as analogous to for instance, in the perpetual ex- 
 the territorial divisions of Egypt, elusion of the Hebrew priesthood 
 naturally resulted from the num- from all grants of territory. (Cf. 
 ber of Jacob's children. The dis- Pricbard, Egypt. Mythol. pp. 409 
 tinction between clean and un- sq.) In this class of merely acci- 
 clean meats, was pre-Mosaic and dental correspondencies I am in- 
 patriarchal, reaching backward to clined to place the 'holy women' 
 the Deluge. Hence may also be of the Israelites, a kind of nuns or 
 explained the strong repugnance female Nazarites, distinct from 
 felt to swine among the Israelites priestesses, but nevertheless de- 
 as well as the Egyptians, and the voted to ascetic modes of life (Ex. 
 feeling of contempt with which xxxviii. 8; i Sam. ii. 22): with 
 they both regarded swineherds. whom may be compared the holy 
 The Levitical hierarchy had, more- women of Egypt and Phoenicia 
 over, several points of close resem- (Herod. 11. 54, 56). 
 blance to the various orders of 
 
490 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 CIRCUMCISION. 
 
 (1) The rite of circumcision, thougli practised by tlie He- 
 brews from an earlier epoch, was perpetuated in the ritual sys- 
 tem of their legislator, and, as raised by him into a national 
 institution, takes its place among the subjects handled in this 
 chapter. Now that some such rite was also common in the 
 land of Egypt, where Abraham himself had sojourned prior to its 
 introduction into his own family, is definitely stated in a well- 
 known passage of Herodotus^ He there informs us that the 
 custom was native with Egyptians and Ethiopians, as also with 
 the Colchians, who, according to his version of the matter, were 
 an old deposit of Egyptians reaching backward to the conquests 
 of Sesostris. He then adds that circumcision was derived from 
 Egypt by the Syrians of Palestine and the Phoenicians. In the 
 absence of all mention of the Jews, as well as of the Ishmaelites 
 who, Abrahamic also in their origin, had practised the same 
 rite, we may conjecture^ that the information of Herodotus, which 
 may have been derived exclusively from traders, was restricted 
 to the coast of Syria. Still there is no reason for suspecting 
 the general truth of the account, that centuries before the date 
 of his travels some conformity in this respect existed between 
 the Hebrews and Egyptians. The ^reproach of Egypt,' as ad- 
 verted to by Joshua (v. 9), is capable of two or more interpreta- 
 tions ; but if taken to mean 'that which Egypt would herself 
 have stigmatised^,' the phrase will intimate that as early as the 
 
 ^ II. 104; see Diodor. i. -28, and been introduced.* 
 the abundant literature on the ^ See Rosenmuller, in loc.f who 
 
 whole subject in Winer, Reahvort. refers to Ezek. xvi. 57; xxxvi. 15; 
 
 s. V. 'Beschneidung.' Sir G. Wil- Ps. xxxix. 9, in illustration of the 
 
 kinson affirms (Rawlinson's Herod, Hebrew phraseology. Yet other 
 
 Vol. II. p. 171) that the rite was texts appear to justify the passive 
 
 common in Egypt itself 'at least rendering, 'that which exposes 
 
 as early as the 4th dynasty, and Egypt to reproach;' viz. uncir- 
 
 probably earlier, long before the cumcision (cf. r Sam. xvii. 26), 
 
 birth of Abraham.' or else idolatry (cf. Ezek. xx. 7), 
 
 2 See Mr. Blakesley's note on with which the Hebrews had been 
 Herodotus, as above. The diffi- previously infected. New difficul- 
 culty connected with i Sam. xviii. ties arise from the examination of 
 25; 2 Sam. i. 20, etc., where 'Phihs- Jer. ix. 25, 26, where both the He- 
 tines' are distinguished as the 'un- brew and Vulgate (as expounded 
 circumcised,' Mr. Blakesley meets by St. Jerome, in loc.) are quoted 
 by remarking that 'subsequently to prove that many persons in 
 to the time of Saul a great change Egypt and Edom, as well as Am- 
 took place in the population of the monites and Moabites, did, practise 
 Philistine cities, and that a con- circumcision, though strangers to 
 siderable Egyptian element [prac- the true faith: cf. Ezek. xxxi. 18 j 
 tising circumcision] had probably xxxii. 24, 29, 30, 32. 
 
CHAP. II.] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems, 
 
 491 
 
 period of the Exodus the lack of circumcision^ had been held 
 disreputable in Egypt ; and although it may be now successfully 
 contended, more especially from a profusion of extant mummies", 
 that the practice had been far from universal, its prevalence in 
 the age of Moses may be urged with some show of reason. 
 
 The remote antiquity of the practice is again suggested 
 strongly, if not absolutely proved, by its existence far beyond 
 the area both of Hebrew and Egyptian influence. Traces of it 
 have been found not only in the Cushite race of Ethiopians 
 proper, and in Troglodytes^ whose haunts were chiefly on the 
 confines of the Ked Sea, but far away at the extremity of the 
 African continent*, among the distant isles of Oceanica^, and 
 even, there is reason for supposing, in the very heart of the 
 New World". Yet if phenomena like these transport us 
 backward to a period long before the call of Abraham or the 
 adoption of the usage iii his household, there is nothing in the 
 language of the sacred penman which can fairly be regarded as 
 at variance with such a supposition. The peculiar terms, 
 indeed, in which the ordinance of circumcision was prescribed 
 to him at first (Gen. xvii. 10) would rather indicate that the 
 
 ^ Cf. Ex. iv. 24 sq., which im- 
 plies that, for some cause or other, 
 the rite had been at first omitted, 
 even in the household of Moses, 
 although the obhgation to ad- 
 minister it was known to Zippbrah, 
 his wife. Its subsequent suspen- 
 sion in the wiilderness appears to 
 have rested altogether upon moral 
 grounds; the people 'who obeyed 
 not the voice of the Lord' were 
 for a season placed in the condition 
 of the excommunicated, and there- 
 fore were thrust back into the 
 standing -ground of the unclean 
 (cf. Josh. V. 5 — 7j. 
 
 2 'From the examination of the 
 mummies it appears that the prac- 
 tice was very limited, not extend- 
 ing to one in fifty ; but it must be 
 remembered that a large propor- 
 tion of these are not of very high 
 antiquity.' Kenrick, i. 450. 
 
 ^ Diodor. in. 32, who remarks 
 that they acted irapaTrXTja-iojs tois 
 AlyvirTLois, though it is not alto- 
 gether improbable that the Tro- 
 glodytes were of Arabian lineage, 
 
 and might thus derive the practice 
 from Ishmael. It is still not un- 
 common in Abyssinia (cf. Uhle- 
 mann, Aegypt. Alt. 11. 257), but 
 whether adopted from the heathen 
 natives or the Judaizers of the 
 Early Church is matter of dispute. 
 
 * e.g. Dr. Livingstone writes (pp. 
 146, 147): 'AH the Bechuana and 
 Caffre tribes south of the Zambesi 
 practise circumcision {boguera), but 
 the rites observed are carefully con- 
 cealed.' He thinks, as there prac- 
 tised, it was 'only a sanitary and 
 political measure,' and further sug- 
 gests that, owing to the want of ' a 
 continuous chain of tribes practis- 
 ing the rite,' it 'can scarcely be 
 traced, as is often done, to a Maho- 
 metan source' (p. 149). Prichard 
 [Researches, in. 287) believes it 'a 
 relic of ancient African customs, of 
 which the Egyptians, as it is well 
 known, partook in remote ages.' 
 The practice is still common in 
 Ethiopia. 
 
 5 Above, p. 407, n. 3. 
 
 c Ibid. 
 
492 Clirist and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 idea itself was older and was not unknown to Mm. The 
 elevation of an ancient symbol to the rank of a Divine ordinance 
 exactly corresponded to the change effected in a second ancient 
 rite, — the practice of lustration, where the element of water, 
 naturally associable with ideas of purity, was chosen by our 
 blessed Lord in His initiatory sacrament, to symbolise, and by 
 the working of His Spiiit to convey, the highest form of 
 purification,— the remission of sins. 
 
 What then may be said to constitute the special and dis- 
 tinctive differences between the heathen and the Hebrew rite of 
 circumcision 1 It is not, I think, unlikely that this usage was 
 connected first of all with the idea of generative purity, and so 
 of a transcendent fitness for religious service, and the higher 
 culture of the intellect. As such it had continued to be prized 
 in Egypt by the members of the hierarchy', even though 
 neglected or disparaged by the bulk of the people ; among 
 whom, indeed, on losing its original significance, it came to be 
 regarded merely as an ancient custom or a sanitary and 
 prudential regulation*. It might also in some districts be 
 corrupted, with corruptions of religious thought, into a species . 
 of bloody offiering^, or might even as a substitute for human 
 sacrifices be administered in every case with the intention of 
 propitiating an angry god, like Moloch or Huitzilopochtli. 
 But whatever had become the heathen version of this symbol, 
 no one will deny that when the Hebrew father circumcised the 
 members of his household, he both acted with a definite purpose 
 and was animated by a spirit thoroughly religious. There the 
 lite was not to be administered, as once it was in Egypt, at the 
 age of fourteen and upwards * when reasons of health or purity 
 might prompt it,' but as soon almost as the recipient of it was a 
 sharer in the blessings of existence, — ^^on the eighth day after 
 birth. As such it formed a strictly national solemnity, 
 embracing not the favoured classes of society to whom it gave 
 
 1 Origen distinctly affirms this {Heidenthum und Judenthurrif p. 
 {in Ep, ad Roman, lib. ii. c. 13; 790) appears to have adopted this 
 0pp. v. 138, 139, ed. Lommatzsch), theory: 'Erinnert man sich, dass 
 adding that men of science were auch in Kom und bei den Galliem 
 subjected to the rite of circum- friihere Menschenopfer durch einfe 
 cision, and that no persons un- leichte Wunde, ein Kitzen der Haut 
 circumcised were allowed to study und Vergiessen einiger Blutstropfen 
 the sacerdotal or hieroglyphic cba- ersetzt wurden, so ist es wohl denk- 
 racters. bar, dass auch die Beschneidung 
 
 2 Cf. Herod. 11. 37, and above, ein solcher stellvertretender Opfer- 
 p. 491, n. 4. Eitus gewesen sei:' cf. Kurtz, 
 
 ^ Above, p. 407, n. 3. Dollinger Gesch. des Alt. Bund. i. 185. 
 
CHAP. II.] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems. 493 
 
 admission to the higher fomis of intellectual greatness, but 
 extending always to the lowliest member of the Hebrew 
 commonwealth. And corresponding to the freedom of its 
 spirit and its equal operation was the grandeur of the end for 
 which it was appointed. Like the rest of the Mosaic institute, 
 that symbol was profoundly ethical. Translated into words, 
 the meaning of it was ' Be ye holy, for I am holy.' * The Lord 
 appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty 
 God ; walk before Me, and be thou perfect ; and I will make 
 my covenant between Me and thee, and will multiply thee 
 exceedingly' (Gen. xvii. 1,2). The rite of circumcision, as the 
 narrative proceeds to tell us, was the seal and * token' of this 
 covenant (ver. 11). Outward in the flesh, and so according 
 with the sterner genius of the old economy, it imprinted on the 
 mind of every Hebrew the peculiar closeness of his own 
 relations to the pure and perfect God, and the necessity therein 
 implied of fearing and of loving Him, and circumcising more 
 and more Hhe foreskin of the heart' (Deut. x. 12 — 16). 
 
 CHERUBIM. 
 
 (2) Another instance where it is imagined that the sym- 
 bolism of heathen countries has been reproduced among the 
 legal institutions is the figure of the cherubim, compared with 
 the Egyptian sphinxes of the Pharaonic times. No question of 
 this kind has been more frequently discussed, and few, it might 
 be added, to so little profit. There is now indeed far less 
 uncertainty than heretofore about the shape and meaning of the 
 ancient sphinx. It was in Egypt of three kinds : ' the andro- 
 sphinx, with the head of a man and the body of a lion ; the 
 crio-sphinx, with the head of a ram and the body of a lion ; and 
 the hieraco-sphinx, with the same body and the head of a 
 hawk\' The first of these, which from the nature of its 
 composition is most capable of being brought into comparison 
 with the Hebrew cherub, is now regarded as a symbol of the 
 union, in a fabulous shape, of mental and of physical energy^; 
 the wisdom and intelligence of the man, combining with the 
 courage and the brute force of the lion. Where a sphinx was 
 planted by the Old Egyptian in the neighbourhood of the 
 
 1 Wilkinson, 2nd. ser. 11. 200. holik, i. 358) has incorrectly reas- 
 
 This writer justly observes that serted. 
 
 the head of the human being in ^ Willdnson, Ifeici. Hengstenberg, 
 
 the first division is never feminine, Die Bucher Moseys und Aegypten, 
 
 much less virginal, as Bahr {Sym- p. 159. 
 
494 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 throne, the special properties which it was meant to symbolise 
 were all attributed to the king himself; but where, as still 
 more frequently happened, the position was in front of some 
 Egyptian temple, it was rather meant to celebrate a union, in 
 the deity ^ there worshipped, of the same exalted and command- 
 ing powers. 
 
 When we turn, however, to the Hebrew symbols which are 
 often deemed in close analogy to this, and strive to ascertain 
 their real form and meaning, it is most important to observe 
 that such compounded representations had never during the 
 historic period been exclusively Egyptian^. On the contrary, 
 they seem to have abounded in all regions of the ancient world, 
 in which the monuments of sacred art have been transmitted to 
 our times. It has been stated, for example, that 'in the 
 earliest Assyrian monuments, one of the most frequently met 
 with is the eagle-headed human figure. Not only is it found in 
 colossal proportions as sculptured upon the walls or guarding 
 the portals of the chambers, but it is also constantly represented 
 among the groups on the embroidered robes. In other cases, 
 the head of the bird occurs united with the body of a lion, 
 under which form it is the same as the Egyptian hieraco- 
 sphinx^.' 
 
 One definite parallel to representations of this kind has been 
 suggested in the griffin of the Greek mythographers, which was 
 avowedly an importation from some eastern system; but the 
 specious theory, framed by Herder^ for connecting griffins by a 
 
 1 This reference to a deity is actual resemblance, viz. a combi- 
 denied by Wilkinson, who thinks nation consisting of the heads of 
 that all sphinxes, wherever placed, four creatures (a lion, a man, an 
 were 'types or representatives of ox, and an eagle), seems to be 
 the king : ' but the theological im- among the emblems of Hinduism 
 port of such at least as were placed (p. 352). Wilkinson, 2nd ser. 11. 
 before temples was known to Plu- 275, was most reminded of the He- 
 tarch [Be Is. et Osir. c. ix.), and is brew cherubs and their position in 
 maintainable on other grounds : cf . the tabernacle, by two figures of 
 Bawlinson's Herodotus, Vol. i. p. the goddess Thmei (or Truth) over- 
 633, on the Man-Lion and the shadowing by their wings the sacred 
 Man-Bull, as symbols of two Baby- beetle of the Sun. 
 
 Ionian divinities. ^ Vaux, Nineveh and PersepoUs, 
 
 2 See the numerous examples of p. 32, Lond. 1850: cf. pp. 293, 
 the contrary collected in Biihr, i. 294. 
 
 357) 358, who declares with refer- "* See the ample refutation of it 
 
 ence to the compound figures of in Bahr, i. 350 sq. Dr. Donaldson, 
 
 ancient Egypt, that he cannot find Christian Orthodoxy, p. 354, has 
 
 a singLe instance possessing any somewhat extended the dimensions 
 
 true affinity to the Hebrew che- of this theory by connecting the 
 
 rubs. The nearest approach to any Greek harpies, ' which Homer de- 
 
CHAP. II.] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems. 495 
 
 second link with cherubim of Holj Scripture, though revived 
 from time to time by the more daring of philologers, is 
 destitute of all internal probability as well as of historic basis. 
 Cherubim, as they occur in representations of the Bible from 
 its earliest chapters to the closing visions of St. John, are not 
 mere guards, or watchers, blocking the approach to some 
 forbidden object. In the text (Gen. iii. 24), which more than 
 others will at first sight favour such interpretation of their 
 functions, it is not asserted that the cherubim were placed 
 outside the garden ; neither is it said that they were planted on 
 that sacred soil to ^ watch' it merely ; for if ^watching' was in 
 any sense ascribed to them, as well as to the sword-like flame, 
 the word employed will shew that they vqtq watchers only as 
 the first man was a watcher ; they were doing there what he 
 had signally failed to do (ii. 15). And in like manner the 
 position of those emblems in the Hebrew tabernacle had never 
 been upon the threshold of the holiest place, nor even before 
 the mercy-seat, but in immediate contact and connexion with 
 the throne of God Himself (Exod. xxv. 18). A careful survey 
 of these facts will be sufficient to repel the notion that the 
 cherubim were emblems only of exclusive and prohibitory- 
 power ; and if we seek, as v/e are bound, the fuller illustration 
 of their form and import in the copious visions of Ezekiel, and 
 especially among the wonders of the great Apocalypse, it is 
 evident that, whatever may turn out to be their true relation to 
 the sphinx, they difiered from the griflin absolutely and entirely. 
 Both indeed were composite in structure, though the figures 
 which make up the symbol were unlike in the two cases : and with 
 this mere shadow of approximation ceases all affinity whatever. 
 How then, following in the steps of Holy Scripture, may 
 we characterise the Hebrew cherubim? Each cherub was a 
 group of figures, or was rather one compounded figure, consist- 
 ing of four parts. The leading or most prominent shape 
 resembled a human being, while the rest were like some portions 
 
 signates as stormy winds,' and rash or profane approach to the 
 
 the Greek Kcrb-erus, 'which barred shrine of inaccessible sanctity' (p. 
 
 the entrance to Hades,' with the 355). It may seem presumptuous 
 
 sphinx of Egypt, which, he says, to disbeheve or controvert the ety- 
 
 *watched over the sepulchres,' and mology of cherub, here suggested; 
 
 the 1-1"I3 of Holy Scripture, which but Dr. Donaldson knows, as well 
 
 he characterises, first, as 'the harpy as I do, that a multitude of other 
 
 or seizer,' and, then, by a trans- guesses, quite as plausible, have 
 
 ition hard to follow, as 'sym- been in turn examiued and rejected 
 
 bolical of the Divine presence,' by Hebrew lexicographers, 
 and a 'sign of warning to forbid a 
 
496 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 of the ox, the lion, and the eagle. The whole emblem, it is 
 true, might have been somewhat diiSerent at the different points 
 of Hebrew history^; but two or more of these distinctive 
 elements had always been the recognised members of cherubic 
 combinations. Now we gather from Ezekiel that the funda- 
 mental thought embodied in such emblems was the property of 
 life: they were emphatically the 'living ones^;' they represented, 
 therefore, several of the noblest forms of creaturely existence, 
 each excelling in its province, each contributing to the produc- 
 tion of a group, in which the human form^ predominated, and 
 the four together constituting an ideal image of all animated 
 nature. 
 
 So interpreted we readily understand not only their position 
 in the sacred garden, but their office in the sanctuary of God 
 on earth and also their proximity to God Himself in visions of 
 the blessed. The planting of the cherub on the ground, which 
 man had once inherited but failed ere long to cherish for his 
 best possession, was suggestive of the truth that he and all 
 whose fortunes had been linked with his had still, in virtue of 
 some gracious mystery, a part and interest in Eden. The 
 appearance of the cherub in the holiest of all was further proof 
 of such an interest; it prolonged the hopeful pledge afforded 
 to the Hebrew by traditions of his forefathers ; it told him 
 that the representatives of man and of creation generally had 
 still their place allotted to them on the mercy-seat of the Most 
 High; and in the glowing scenes of the Apocalypse when 
 Adam's family have re-assembled round the throne of God to 
 sing the praises of the great Redeemer, the same mystic 
 creatures shew the ardour which that anthem has excited in 
 their bosoms, by a rapturous 'Amen' (Rev. v. 14). 
 
 Whatever, therefore, may be urged in proof of some 
 external correspondency in the Mosaic age between the cheinib 
 as already known to members of the sacred family and the 
 
 1 Bahr, i. 314. Hengstenberg urges also, from Exod. xxv. 20, 
 
 (as before, p. 162), who, differing that the Mosaic cherub had only 
 
 from Bahr, argues in favour of the one aspect. , 
 
 original connexion between the '^ Ezek. i. 5, 13 sq. ; x. 17. The 
 
 sphinx and cherub, is of opinion LXX render fwa, which is also the 
 
 that in the time of Moses the word made use of in the Apocalypse, 
 
 cherubic emblem consisted of two iv. 6, and generally, 
 
 members only, the man and the ^ < Out of the midst thereof came 
 
 lion, and refers, in proof that such the likeness of four living crea- 
 
 a double representation was oc- tures. And this was their appear- 
 
 casionally continued in far later ance: they had the likeness of a 
 
 times, to Ezek. xli. 18—20. He man.' Ezek. i. 5. 
 
CHAP. II.] The Hebrew and Egyptian Si/stems. 497 
 
 sphinx as sculptured in approaches to Egyptian temples, there 
 can be no doubt that the two emblems were associated in those 
 two systems with very different thoughts. The one might 
 serve to symbolise the best conceptions which a pagan mind 
 could form of properties possessed by favourite kings or by 
 some nobler inmates of his crowded pantheon ; while the other 
 was designed to be a complex image of created nature in its 
 highest, most ideal form, yet always bowing in distinct sub- 
 ordination to the great Creator, and as such ascribing ^ glory 
 and honour and thanks to Him that sat on the throne, who 
 liveth for ever and ever' (Rev. iv. 9). 
 
 HOLY AND MOST HOLY PLACES. 
 
 (3) It has again been frequently remarked that the division 
 of the Hebrew sanctuary into a holy and most holy place was 
 made to follow tlie Egyptian model; the idea in both those 
 cases being that the special residence of the Divinity should 
 form a kind of inner shrine, or adytum, secreted from the 
 popular gaze by some mysterious curtain. Now the fact that 
 the Egyptian temples did contain what was entitled a 'most 
 holy region V as well as various courts conducting to it, is no 
 longer open to dispute ; yet with this solitary mark of outward 
 correspondency, possessed in common by most other nations of 
 the ancient world ^, the parallelism in question seems to be 
 exhausted ^ As the Hebrew sanctuary was one, in order to 
 symbolise the absolute unity of God, so all arrangements there 
 established had an eye to the surpassing purity and spirituality 
 of His nature. There, as everywhere, the genius of the 
 Hebrew system vindicated its true honour, as entirely and 
 profoundly ethical. The migratory tent as well as the elaborate 
 temple on Mount Moriah was a pledge to Israelites that God 
 Himself, no mere abstraction, but a present, living, reigning 
 God, had entered into fellowship with His elect, and though 
 the heaven and the heaven of heavens were his (Deut. x. 14), 
 
 1 XJhlemann, Thoth, p. 7, and marks may be applied at once to 
 
 above, p. 468. the Egyptian ceremony entitled 
 
 - Bahr, i. 219. 'the procession of shrines,' and 
 
 '•^ I have already called attention described at length by Wilkinson, 
 
 to the seeming parallelism between 2nd ser. 11. 271 sq. The few ex- 
 
 the 'ark of the covenant' and the ternal resemblances will only serve 
 
 sacred chests, or boats, of heathen to bring out more clearly the in- 
 
 nations, while discussing a ritual ternal contradictions. Cf. Orcurti, 
 
 peculiarity of the Mexicans (above, Catalogo Illustrato dei Monumenti 
 
 pp. 370, 371); and the same re- Egizii {Toiino, 1852), pp. 91, 92, 
 
 H. 32 
 
498 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 had condescended to develope their religious sentiment by 
 tabernacling in the midst of them. ' I will dwell among the 
 children of Israel^ and will be their G-od ; and they shall know 
 that I am the Lord their God, that brought them forth out of 
 the land of Egypt, that I may dwell among them : I am the 
 Lord their God' (Exod. xxix. 45, 46). The sanctuary had 
 thus for them the kind of meaning which the Incarnation now 
 possesses for the sfeorm-tost spirit of the Christian ; it presented 
 to them one fixed point amid the fluctuations of the universe ', 
 it was the index of God's kingdom upon earth ; it brought the 
 infinite within the limits of the finite, it was raised into the 
 meeting-place of human and Divine, and so became the feeble 
 prelude to the mightiest of all facts. And as the holy-place 
 was that to which the Israelite had access by his sacerdotal 
 representatives, and where through them he could perform his 
 ministry in the sight of God, so in the holy of holies, whence 
 they all were equally excluded, thore was imaged out* the truth 
 that even for the best of Israelites the way into the inmost 
 presence of Jehovah * was not yet made manifest.' Veils and 
 barriers intercepted their approach to Him, whose glory, 
 shining forth between the cherubim, was high above the mystic 
 covering of the Ark ; yet the admission of one single priest 
 with the appointed ofiferings on the Day of Atonement was 
 suflicient indication to the Hebrew who was truly bent on 
 finding out ' the wondei*s of the Law,' that the condemnatory 
 witness there deposited in the Ark might still be silenced and 
 averted altogether by some absolute propitiation, symbolised in 
 the arrangements of that annual solemnity. 
 
 It were superfluous to point out in detail how completely 
 such ideas were absent from the goodliest temple of Mizraim, 
 where the grovelling inmate of the holiest place was one or 
 other of the sacred animals ; and where the worship rendered 
 by fanatic swarms of votaries was often no less gross and bestial 
 than the object ! 
 
 URIM AND THUMMIM. 
 
 (4) Greater confidence has sometimes been expressed by 
 theorisers on this subject as to the Egyptian origin of the 
 mysterious symbol which the Hebrew commonly entitled the 
 Urim and Thummim. We collect from Diodorus and other 
 writers* that in Egypt the chief judge engaged in listening to 
 
 1 See Wilkinson, 2nd ser. 11. 28, (1850) pp. 80 sq. Hengstenberg 
 and a fuller discussion of this point argues for the identity of the two 
 in Mr. Tomkins's Hulsean Essay, customs, while Mr. Kenrick (11. 53, 
 
CHAP. II. J The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems. 499 
 
 the cases brought before him wore about his neck a chain of 
 gold and precious stones to which had been attached a small 
 image of Thmeij the goddess of truth or justice, and that when 
 the depositions of the litigants were heard, his practice was to 
 touch the successful person with the image in token of the 
 truth or justness of his cause. The drift of this Egyptian 
 symbol is immediately apparent. It impressed on the adminis- 
 trator of public justice^ that impartiality ought always to 
 preside at his decisions, and the same idea of strict integrity 
 was further hinted by the fact that Truth herself was pictured 
 with closed eyes, and that the judges, in funereal rituals found 
 at Thebes, were also represented ^without hands.' There is, 
 howevei?, far greater difficulty in ascertaining the precise 
 complexion of the Hebrew usage which is frequently compared 
 with this. The narrative respecting the institution of it will 
 be found in Exod. xxviii. 30 : ^ And thou shalt put in the 
 breast-plate^' of judgment [or, righteousness] the Urim and the 
 Thummim ; and they shall be upon Aaron's heart, when he 
 goeth in before the Lord : and Aaron shall bear the. judgment 
 of Israel upon his heart before the Lord continually.' We 
 read again (Numb, xxvii. 21) that on the designation of Joshua 
 to the leadership which had been previously enjoyed by Moses : 
 'He shall stand before Eleazar the priest, who shall ask 
 [counsel] for him, after the judgment of Urim before the Lord/ 
 implying that the wonderful emblems here connected with the 
 
 n. i) seems to take the opposite missible rendering of the Hebrew 
 
 ^^^V^- :, , nN X. ♦^y^-^5< nn:i that 'these two mys- 
 
 1 Diodorus (I. 48) mentions as a , * . • "^ ■ ^ : i mi 
 
 common interpretation tliat the Ap- ^^'.'T '""^^' '^"^ ""'^ ^T' 
 
 XiScKa^rvs, who appeared on the Z"^K'''^'\ no vtsibe part of zt 
 
 tomb of Osymandyas with closed f?^ breast-plate) at all, but at- 
 
 eyes and with the figure of truth tpbutes assigned to i emblema- 
 
 suspended from his neck, was tical of high moral qualities.' Yet 
 
 bound ^pb, p^ovv §\iiruv r^v aX,'- ^ Precisely the same phrase occurs 
 
 #«a.: cf. ^lian, xiv. 34. Heng- ^" ^^°'^-. ^f • '6' V ^^^'% J?** 
 
 stenberg, Die Bucher Mose's und f'''''°\^'^ *°*v^^^ ^^'""T "^ *^* 
 
 •• ^ ■ -, ^ ■> ^"^^ lables withm the ark, we can 
 
 Agypten, p._ 156, is almost alone hardly doubt that the Authorised 
 
 m mamtammg that the primitive Version is here correct, and that 
 
 signification of this emblem was the Urim and Thummim were 
 
 rather 'promissory' than didactic, something superadded, and ma- 
 
 pomtmg to some special presence terially separable from the breast- 
 
 and inspn-ation ot the goddess of piate: cf. Bahr, 11. 108, 109. In ' 
 
 iruth m the Egyptian courts of Lev. viii. 8, it is said expressly, 
 
 justice. He refers in illustration ' And he put the breast-place upon 
 
 to Deut. xxxiu. 8, 9. y.^^. ^ho he put in the breast- 
 
 t. J m® ^^^^ ^^^®^ ^^^^ example, piate the Urim and the Thum- 
 
 hj Mr. Tomldns, p. 83), as an ad- mim.' 
 
 32—2 
 
500 Christ and other Masters. . [part iv. 
 
 breast-plate of the high-priest were meant, as being one with it, 
 to serve the purpose of an oracle, whatever be the right 
 interpretation of the method in which responses were detected 
 and delivered (cf. 1 Sam. xxviii. 6). 
 
 The intimations, therefore, of a common parentage for the 
 Egyptian and the Hebrew symbols, are restricted chiefly to the 
 circumstance that both may be described as solemn badges, and 
 that some judicial characteristics are attributed to their 
 possessors in the two cases respectively. The chief judge, 
 among his other decorations, v/ore about his neck the chain of 
 office, with a precious seal, or Q^gj of truth, suspended from 
 it : the chief priest, in asking guidance from Jehovah, wore the 
 breast-plate of righteousness, containing in the precious stones 
 of which it was composed an emblem of collective Israel ; and 
 armed with it he was directed to ^go in unto the holy place 
 for a memorial before the Lord continually.' But the state- 
 ment of this semblance of external approximation, or rather of 
 remote affinity in the uses of the two solemn symbols, is enough 
 to make us thoroughly conscious of their general dissimilitude. 
 The Aaronic breast-plate, for example, was not worn in any 
 court of human judicature ; it had no reference to the ordinary 
 business of the individual Hebrew, but to special difficulties 
 connected with the fortunes of the whole sacred corporation; 
 neither was it meant to quicken in the spirit of the wearer a 
 conviction of his personal frailty, or his need of more than 
 ordinary watchfulness in executing his high office. 
 
 Whence, then, grew the prevalent notion that some very 
 close affinity existed between the emblems now in question *? 
 . It is clearly traceable to the rendering, which had been adopted 
 in the Septuagint^, of the expression Thum,mim. That 
 Hebrew word has there been made equivalent to ^ Truth ' 
 (d\7]0eLa), and as the great Egyptian goddess, who presided over 
 
 * Urim (DH-I^) is rendered dtj- that the *dual or plural word' 
 \(^(ris ill LXX', and (more literally) (Thummim) corresponds to the 
 <pu}TL(Tfiol in Aquila. The plural Egyptian notion of the ' two truths,' 
 form is best explained as a plur. (cf. above, p. 476), or two similar 
 majest., so that it points to the figures, marking a double capacity 
 idea of Divine illumination. The of the goddess (2nd ser. 11. 28, 29). 
 same account must be given of the He also gives a drawing of abreast- 
 plural form in Thummim (D^JSH) P^^te, where both Ea (the Sun) and 
 which the LXX and Philo^ ^J. l^t^,:2l^::t'l\m'''^Ji 
 them have rendered aX,9«a and ^^^jj^j j^ .Rights' and 'Perfeo- 
 Aquila (more literally) reXeLuxreLS. fiojis ' 
 Wilkinson, who seems to accept 
 the rendering of the LXX, thinks 
 
CHAP. II.] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems. 501 
 
 the courts of law, and aided the decisions of Osiris in the 
 under-world, had also borne the name of Truth {Thmei)^ it was 
 conjectured that the traces of a radical connexion between 
 Thmei and Thummim, or in other words between the Hebrew 
 and Egyptian customs, had been half-unconsciously attested by 
 the Alexandrine version of the Pentateuch. But this con- 
 jecture has been seriously weakened, if not overthrown entirely, 
 by other considerations: first, that ^Thummim' is a regular 
 Hebrew form, grammatically unconnected with the Coptic 
 Thmei; secondly, that in rendering *Thummim' into Greek, 
 the Seventy have departed from the letter of the Hebrew text 
 and so confounded qualities which really differ; and thirdly, 
 that the error introduced by them may probably have had its. 
 origin, like others of the same description, in their strong 
 Egyptian bias. 
 
 I may add that when the glorious properties of light and of 
 perfection had been thus ascribed emphatically to the Hebrew 
 breast-plate by afiixing to it the significant symbols of the 
 Urim and Thummim, the high-priest was made to bear the 
 whole of the * oracular apparatus' with him as *a memorial 
 before the Lord.' If, therefore, in accordance with some other 
 texts of Holy Scripture tlie inserted emblems may be construed* 
 as uniting into one the highest moral qualities ascribable to 
 God Himself, it is no idle fancy to conclude that Aaron, so 
 adorned and bearing on his heart the names of the children of 
 Israel, was to them a vivid image of the law of mediation (cf. 
 Numb. xvi. 47, 48), and to us a luminous shadow of ^ the 
 Mediator between God and man,' who having in the fulness of 
 the times obtained a more excellent ministry, has gathered 
 up into Himself the various functions of the mediatorial 
 office. 
 
 THE EED HEIFEE. 
 
 (5) In the law prescribed through Moses (Numb, xix.) for 
 the cleansing of those Hebrews who had been defiled by touch- 
 ing a dead body, there is special mention of the colour of the 
 victim to be oftered up on such occasion ; that its ashes, mingled 
 with the lustral water, might conduce to the removal of the 
 disability contracted, and so ' sanctify to the purifying of the 
 flesh' (Heb. ix. 13). The victim was to be a red cow or 
 heifer, without spot ; and as no other valid reason seemed to be 
 
 ^ See this point well drawn out in Mr. Tomkins's Essay (as above) 
 pp. 84 sq. 
 
502 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 suggested^ for the naming of one definite colour, fresh recourse 
 was had by certain writers to the ancient usages of Egypt in 
 the hope of thence extracting the desired elucidation. We 
 have noted in the last chapter^ that red was the Typhonic 
 colour, and therefore, if full credit may be given to the account 
 of Plutarch, the Egyptians ' never sacrificed any but perfectly 
 red cattle.' It is plain, however, that if any foreign reference 
 was intended, the idea of counteracting^, not of copying the 
 Egyptian custom is involved in the selection by the Hebrews 
 of a cow or heifer in the place of the more usual ox (Lev. iv. 
 14); since both those animals, as we have seen already*, were 
 invested with peculiar sacredness throughout the Yalley of the 
 Nile. The truth will probably turn out to be, that the 
 adoption of the red colour in both cases corresponded only 
 because of its inherent fitness to express the thought which it 
 was made to symbolise in each community. It was the colour 
 of hlood^; and while in Egypt this idea was readily connected 
 with the deadly, scathing, sanguinary powers of Typhon, it 
 became in the more ethical system of the Hebrews a remem- 
 brancer of moral evil flowing out into its penal consequences, 
 or an image of unpardoned sin (cf. Isa. i. 15, 18). 
 
 THE SCAPE-GOAT. . 
 
 (6) A further instance of supposed affinity to the Egyptian 
 ritual is discovered in the ceremonies appointed for the Hebrew 
 nation on the greatest of their annual celebrations, — the Day 
 of Atonement (Lev. xvi). It is there provided that the high- 
 priest of Israel, after making atonement for himself and for his 
 house, shall take two goats, and when they had been solemnly 
 presented shall cast lots upon them ; ^ one lot for the Lord and 
 
 1 Maimonides wrote a special nine to make it accord more fully 
 
 treatise De Vacca rufa, and the with the common Hebrew word for 
 
 subject has been handled with sin, which is also of the feminine 
 
 singular frequency in all ages; gender, 
 
 yet the Hebrew doctors admit ^ Above, p. 470. 
 
 that even Solomon, who knew ^ Hengstenberg, Ibid. p. 188. 
 
 most other things, was in igno- Bahr adopts a different view : *Das 
 
 ranee respecting the red heifer. Thier war..,Antidotum gegen den 
 
 *^ Above, p. 470. Tod und die Todesgemeinschaft, 
 
 3 This view is strongly urged by und musste eben darum auf den 
 
 Spencer, whose work contains a Begriff Leben hinweisen; das ges- 
 
 very full discussion De Vitula rufa chah nun schon durch sein Ges- 
 
 Deo immolanda ; but Hengstenberg, chlecht, noch mehr und bcstimmter 
 
 as before, p. 182, while conceding aber durch sein Aussehen, es trug 
 
 the partial truth involved in it, has die Lebensfarbe' (11. 500). 
 suggested that the offering was f emi- 
 
CHAP. II.] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems. 503 
 
 the other lot for the scape-goat [or, Azazel]. And Aaron shall 
 bring the goat upon which the Lord's lot fell, and offer him for 
 a sin-offering : but the goat, on which the lot fell to be the 
 scape-goat [or, on which Azazel's lot fell], shall be presented 
 alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to 
 let him go for a scape-goat [or, to Azazel] into the wilderness.' 
 And in the following verses of the same chapter, where the 
 ceremony in question is minutely sketched, we gather the 
 additional information, that the high-priest was to *lay both 
 his hands upon the head of the live goai; and confess over him 
 all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their 
 transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of 
 the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man 
 into the wilderness.' 
 
 The practice of transferring, emblematically, the sins of the 
 offerer to the innocent victim chosen by him as their representa- 
 tive had doubtless its analogy^ among the Old Egyptians, who, 
 in some at least of their oblations, prayed over the head of the 
 victim that evils then impending might be all averted upon 
 it ; but there is no necessity whatever for supposing that a 
 practice so graphic and so natural in itself was specially 
 Egyptian, and not rather as primeval as the earliest dawn of 
 the idea which prompted substitutionary offerings. 
 
 It is urged, however, that apart from any minor proofs of 
 correspondency, the whole conception of the two goats as there 
 appointed, and the seeming dualism connected with their mode 
 of treatment, indicate still deeper tinges of Egyptian influence*. 
 On minute inquiry this interpretation of the Hebrew ceremonial 
 will be found to rest on the assumption that Azazel in the 
 passage just recited is another name for Satan, and therefore 
 that the final driving of the goat into the desert is, in Hebrew 
 phraseology, a solemn renunciation of the powers of darkness, 
 in the name of the whole reconciled community of Israel ; or, 
 in accordance with Egyptian forms of speech, a sending back of 
 evil to the favourite haunts of its Typhonic author. 
 
 ^ Herod, it. 39 ; Kenrick, i. 443, the second goat partly recognised 
 
 444. Wilkinson, referring to this the heathen theory of sacrifice, the 
 
 practice, argues from the negative "whole rite was calculated to im- 
 
 evidence of the sculptures that it press the truth that sin-offerings 
 
 was no more than occasional and are due to God only, while the 
 
 exceptional. evil spirit, which he found in 
 
 2 Spencer, 11. 450 sq., has ad- Azazel, was to be regarded as un- 
 
 vocated this view in his usual clean, and as an object of abhor- 
 
 manner, contending that while the rence : cf. Bahr's criticism of these 
 
 Hebrew practice of sending away ideas, 11. 693 — 695. 
 
504 
 
 Christ and other Masters. 
 
 [part iy. 
 
 Now the meaning of the word Azazel is confessedly involved 
 in very great obscurity ^ One ancient derivation, as attested by 
 the version of the Seventy (aTroTro/ATrato?), makes the name 
 equivalent to scape-goat (^hircus emissarius'); but how, it was 
 demanded, passing by some other disputable matters, could the 
 goat as mentioned in v. 10 be sent to or /or Azazel, if Azazel 
 were the goat itself] The force of this consideration led 
 directly to the notion that Azazel meant either a person or a 
 place; and as the parallelisms between some incidents, relating 
 to Jehovah and to it, appeared in favour of the personal 
 rendering, the alleged connexion of the word with evil spirits, 
 or with Satan, came at length to be more generally accepted. 
 Azazel was explained^ as equal to Hhe segregated,' Hhe 
 apostate,' Hhe unclean;' and although the title is not found 
 elsewhere in Holy Scripture^, nor the doctrine thus suggested 
 capable at first sight of reduction into harmony'* Avith its 
 severe monotheism, this bold interpretation of the chapter of 
 Leviticus is on the whole perhaps more justifiable than any 
 other which has been proposed. 
 
 1 See the different interpreta- 
 tions of it in Winer, Beahvort. 
 s. V. 
 
 2 Thus Hengstenberg, as before, 
 p. 1 66, note; who revives the deri- 
 vation of Bochart, according to 
 
 whom the root of Azazel is PTy = 
 
 t > = ' semovit, ' * dimovit, ' &c. 
 
 Ewald, who formerly espoused the 
 Satanic theory in reference to Aza- 
 zel, has of late years explained the 
 word to mean 'das Unreine, Un- 
 heilige (eigentlich das Getrennte, 
 Verabscheute), die Sunde' {Ibid. p. 
 176); but is there not something 
 very harsh and unintelligible in 
 saying, as v. 10 would then he 
 made to say, that the second 
 goat was sent forth as its desti- 
 nation to sin, or unholiness? On 
 the contrary, the relation in which 
 Satan here stands to the desert has 
 some analogies in Matt. xii. 43, 
 Luke viii. 29, Eev. xviii. 2. 
 
 ^ Azalzel and Azael were, how- 
 ever, quite familiar to the later 
 Jews in the sense of *evil spirit' 
 or * fallen angel' (see Eisenmenger, 
 Entdecktes Judenthum, 11. 155); 
 and from them, perhaps, the word 
 
 was handed over to Muhamma- 
 dans. 
 
 * Bahr, it must he acknowledged, 
 has stated his objections to this 
 view with very great ability. After 
 urging that the vindication of the 
 Divine Unity was the leading, ever- 
 prominent aim of the Mosaic sys- 
 tem, he adds : * Ofienbar wiirde aber 
 der so strenge Mos. Monotheismus 
 ganzlich aus seiner Konsequenz 
 fallen, wenn er an dem heihgsten 
 und wichtigsten Festtag, bei einer 
 religiosen Feierlichkeit, in der dei 
 ganze Cultus kulminirt, den Teufel 
 so neben Jehova gestellt hatte, wie 
 es nach dieser Deutung v. 8 — 10 
 der Fall ware' (11. 687). He for- 
 gets, however, such revelations as 
 those contained in Gen. iii., and 
 still more in Zech. iii., which latter 
 passage also brings together, in 
 the closest juxtaposition, Jehovah, 
 Satan, and the high-priest. Bahr's 
 own solution of the difficulty is to 
 
 derive Azazel, as above, from ?Ty, 
 and to render 'zu voUiger Hinwegs- 
 chaffung'.(ii. 668), but in attempt- 
 ing to construe the entire passage 
 on this hypothesis, the difficulties 
 appear to be only multiplied. 
 
CHAP, II,] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems, 505 
 
 If therefore, tlie identity of Satan and Azazel be conceded, 
 what is here revealed as to the true relation of Satan to 
 Jehovah 1 How shall we explain the casting of lots upon the 
 two goats, and the devotion of the second to the powers of 
 darkness "l That no actual sacrifice to Satan could have been 
 intended by the HebreAv ceremony, we may gather most 
 conclusively from the next chapter of Leviticus (xvii. 7), 
 where all ofierings made to demons are strongly interdicted. 
 IS^or will such a startling version of this incident be needed 
 when the passage has been duly weighed. The two goats, it 
 will be seen, were equally chosen to assist in the performance 
 of the one sin-ofiering ; and as both were solemnly presented to 
 Jehovah at the door of the tabernacle, both were recognised by 
 priest and people for His special property. He it was who 
 guided the lot by which the one was destined to be offered, and 
 the other sent unoffered and alive into the dreary desert. It is 
 also most observable that the goat which was symbolically 
 destined to bear away the pardoned sins of Israel, and so to 
 bury them out of sight, had been already * presented alive 
 before the Lord,' and in idea had been offered like the other 
 goat Ho make atonement with him' (v. 10) ; so that the duality 
 of the offering was most probably ordained to represent two 
 different aspects, or to carry on two separate stages, of the 
 same remedial process^; one of the twin victims dying in the 
 usual manner, and the second being spared to shew the 
 Hebrews in a striking figure, that iniquities remitted by 
 Jehovah on the Day of Atonement were for ever hidden from 
 their eyes, — remanded to the sphere of the unclean Azazel, or 
 the * land not inhabited' (v. 22). The most important truths, 
 however, which the vivid ritual of that grand solemnity had 
 served to inculcate, were first and chiefly the remissibility of 
 human sin, and secondly the consequent call for its entire 
 renunciation : and as truths like these were lying at the core of 
 the Mosaic system, it alone of all religions had its Day of 
 Atonement. 
 
 § 2. Doctrinal Contrasts, 
 
 On passing forward from this necessarily brief examination 
 of particular features, which are said to characterise alike the 
 Hebrew and Egyptian rituals, we shall find that the alleged 
 resemblances which meet us on the surface are succeeded by a 
 contrast far more absolute and unmistakeable. * With respect 
 
 ^ Hengstenberg, as before, p. 171. 
 
506 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 to theology/ it is remarked by one^ who proved himself as 
 quick as others in discovering indications of ritual sympathy, 
 ' with respect to theology, no two systems can be more directly 
 opposed to each other than the Mosaic doctrine was to that of 
 the Egyptians.' If resemblance to the latter must be sought 
 among contiguous nations of the ancient world, there is no 
 question, after what has been advanced in the preceding 
 chapter, that the country whither we should bend our footsteps 
 is Phoenicia^, or the primitive land of Canaan. Yet as every 
 fundamental tenet of the Hebrew had been always diametrically 
 at variance* with the tenets of his Canaanitish neighbours, it 
 will follow that so long as he was true to his own principles, 
 he stood in no more friendly attitude to the theology of Egypt. 
 I shall make this point more clearly manifest by choosing one 
 or two examples, where it might have been presumed that we 
 should trace, if not the positive marks of friendly interchange, 
 at least the general vestiges of common ancestry. 
 
 (1) Now both in Egypt and Phoenicia, during the historic 
 period, we shall look almost in vain for recognitions* of the 
 power and presence of one only God, the spiritual Principle of 
 the universe, distinct from all material forms, and guiding by 
 His legislative will the life and final destiny of all creation. 
 Both countries, it is true, had long retained some glimj)ses of 
 this grand idea in their knowledge, and some echoes of it, 
 broken and confused by human passions, are still audible amid 
 their wild ejaculations to Baal and Osiris, or are lurking here 
 and there in epithets, by which they thought to honour their 
 great female gods, as Neith or Astarte ; but practically a belief 
 in the Supreme Intelligence was disappearing from the earth, 
 when Abraham received his summons from Hhe God of glory' 
 to set forth upon the wondrous pilgrimage which brought him 
 as a witness for the truth delivered to his fathers from the 
 eastern bank of the Euphrates. There his family were lapsing 
 with the multitude and * serving other gods' (Josh. xxiv. 2). 
 They also, peradventure, learned to gaze upon the sun when it 
 shined, or the moon walking in brightness, and their heart was 
 secretly enticed and their mouth kissed their hand (cf. Job 
 xxxi. 2Q, 27). And when descendants of the patriarch were 
 
 ^ Prichard, Egypt, Mythol, p. while admitting that the highest 
 
 406. order of monotheism was *the 
 
 ^ Above, pp. 452 — 455. clear doctrine of the Hebrew Scrip- 
 
 ^ Above, pp. 68 sq. tures,' urges that it cannot be traced 
 
 * Kenricl^ speaking on this point in any pagan speculations older 
 
 (i. 438), goes further still, and than the school of Anaxagoras. 
 
CHAP. II.] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems. 507 
 
 similarly * called' out of Egypt, their high mission was 
 connected with the spread and conservation of the same great 
 verity. The challenge which struck terror into their idolatrous 
 enslavers was a proclamation of the sovereignty of God : 
 * Against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment : I am 
 the Lord :' exactly as in later ages, one of the most haughty of 
 the Pharaohs, glorying in the vast profusion of his foreign 
 conquests and presuming on his godlike^ strength, was doomed, 
 by the chastising breath of the Omnipotent, to utter and 
 immediate ruin : ^ The land of Egypt shall be desolate and 
 waste, and they shall know that I am the Lord ; because 
 he hath said, The river is mine and I have made it' (Ezek. 
 xxix. 9). 
 
 No account can here be taken of the ^esoteric' doctrines, 
 which are said to have been handed down in Egypt by the 
 help of her more sacred * mysteries.' I speak of the religious 
 creed of the Egyptian, either as inscribed upon his public 
 monuments, or as recorded in funereal papyri of the many, or 
 expounded by the treatise of an honest advocate like Plutarch ; 
 not as it was represented to us in the transcendental specula- 
 tions of the Neo-Platonists, who breathing the fresh atmosphere 
 of Christianity had often borrowed all their choicer and more 
 spiritual ideas from the Gospel they were striving to uproot. 
 That popular creed of Egypt, we have seen already, was in 
 substance nothing higher than a deification of the various 
 energies of nature ; and in form was one of the least spiritual 
 of the old polytheisms. * Worship was paid in its turn to 
 almost every object that revolves in the heavens, and to every 
 creature which is possessed of locomotive powers on the earth ^.' 
 
 What contrast, therefore, could be greater than the pure 
 and absolute monotheism instilled into the mind of all the 
 Hebrews? Far from being a mere sublimation of the pagan 
 system, it was based throughout on the most opposite concep- 
 tions; it was penetrated by another spirit. God in it was 
 everywhere revealed and worshipped as the one invisible 
 Creator and Sustainer, as the only supramundane spirituality. 
 I subjoin a single passage from the Pentateuch, in proof of this 
 assertion ; and the passage, beautiful and touching in itself, is 
 worthy of particular notice here, because it furnishes the most 
 explicit condemnation not of stellar worship merely, which was 
 shared by other Gentile nations both of East and West, but also 
 of the vile zoolatry which flourished with portentous rankness 
 on the soil of ancient Egypt : 
 
 ^ Cf. Herod, ii. 169. 2 prichard, as before, p. 407. 
 
508 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 'Take ye, therefore, good heed unto yourselves (for ye saw no manner 
 of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of 
 the midst of the fire) lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven 
 image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the 
 likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl 
 that flieth in the air, the likeness of any thing that creepeth on the 
 ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth: 
 and lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun 
 and the moon and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be 
 driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath 
 divided unto all nations under the whole heaven. Bat the Lord hath 
 taken you, and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, even out of 
 Egypt, to be unto Him a people of inheritance, as ye are this day' (Deut. 
 iv. 15 — 20). 
 
 But God as represented to us in the Hebrew Scriptures has 
 not only been invested with an absolute mastery in all the 
 realms of physical creation, which is therefore said to constitute 
 *His robe of glory' and to be ^expended in His service.' The 
 few verses just recited lead at once to the idea of still more 
 God-like characteristics. The Jehovah of the Hebrews is 
 holiness itself. He is no expression fabricated by philosophy 
 to denote the aggregate of all mechanical forces, active in the 
 different provinces of nature ; but the living, personal, holy 
 God : and with a view to the diffusion of His holiness on 
 earth. He chooses a peculiar peoj)le, who become the favoured 
 nursery of religious truth, until, endued with power from on 
 high, the germs of life and godliness deposited with them may 
 fructify in every land and issue in the universal * healing of the 
 nations.' And the soul of the Mosaic system, which was 
 meant to act as one of the more elementary exponents of God's 
 will, is eminently ethical. It ever deals with man as with a 
 free and strictly moral agent. Passing over all the speculative 
 riddles, which perplexed the intellect or charmed the fancy of 
 the Old Egyptian sages, it proclaims that God above us is our 
 very King and Father, and as such constrains us to obey Him. 
 Its grand purpose is, in other words, to cultivate the human 
 will, to draw it into harmony with the Divine ; and hence the 
 key to all the homeliest of the Hebrew symbols will be found 
 in the magnificent inscription, 'Holiness unto the Lord.' 
 Here also I extract one single passage from the Pentateuch, to 
 show that all the ethical system of the ancient Hebrews was 
 erected on their firm belief in the immaculate holiness of God, , 
 that holiness attracting to itself the homage, love, and adoration 
 of a free and grateful people : 
 
 *And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but 
 to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and 
 
CHAP. II.] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems, 509 
 
 to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul ; to 
 keep the commandments of the Lord, and His statutes, which I command 
 thee this day for thy good? Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens 
 is the Lord's thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is. Only the 
 Lord had a delight in thy fathers to love them, and He chose their seed 
 after them, even you above all people, as it is this day. Circumcise 
 therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked. For the 
 Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, 
 and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward : He doth 
 execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, 
 in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger : for ye 
 were strangers in the land of Egypt. Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God ; 
 Him shalt thou serve, and to Him shalt thou cleave, and swear by His 
 name. He is thy praise, and He is thy God, that hath done for thee 
 these great and terrible things, which thine eyes have seen. Thy fathers 
 went down into Egypt with threescore and ten persons; and now the 
 Lord thy God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude' (Deut. 
 
 X. 12 — 22). 
 
 (2) In such a system of religion, where the spotless 
 character of God Himself and the original goodness of the 
 world which He had called into existence are beheld in their 
 most perfect contrast to all that which had become evil, sin is in 
 the same proportion a profound reality \ Grounded in that 
 system on the moral freedom of the creature, it attains its true 
 importance ; it is recognised as flowing from perverted wills of 
 personal beings, or rather every act of disobedience is the 
 absolute refusal of the human will to stand in a receptive, 
 creaturely relation to the Author and the Giver of all good. 
 The fruit of this conviction had been ever manifested by the. 
 Hebrew; on the one side, in his abject self-renunciation and 
 the frequent bitterness of his repentance ; on the other, in his 
 trembling hope of ultimate forgiveness. There is no period in 
 the history of his race^, how dark soever be the clouds that 
 menace the theocracy, how keen soever his own sense of 
 personal shortcomings, when he ceases to take refuge in the 
 thought, that in some latter day * a fountain shall be opened to 
 the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem for sin 
 and for uncleanness' (Zech. iii. 1). The feeling of imperfect 
 reconciliation in the present makes him yearn more deeply for 
 the * times of refreshing' and the bringing-in of true atone- 
 ment. 
 
 But in Eo^ypt we discover few, if any, traces of a similar 
 aspiration. There the want of clear conceptions with regard to 
 the surpassing holiness of God was followed by comparative 
 
 1 Cf. Havernick, Introd. to the ^ Above, pp. loo sq. 
 
 Pentateuch^ p. ico. 
 
510 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 deaJness of the moral intuitions. Sin was losing its inherent 
 turpitude, because the standard of integrity, which should have 
 been the holy character of God Himself, was lowered with the 
 gradual obscuration of that character. Most true it is that 
 sacrifices had continued to be ofiered on the altars of the Old 
 Egyptian, and that some at least of these oblations corresponded 
 in their outward form and import to sin-offerings of the' 
 Hebrew ; but we gather no less clearly from the Kituals of the 
 Dead and from abundant disavowals of the spirits for whose 
 benefit those Rituals were compiled, t.hat the prevailing con- 
 sciousness of guilt was very superficial : man was gradually 
 arriving at the thought that while obedience on the one side 
 was no arduous or impracticable task, all disobedience would 
 inevitably issue in the transmigration of the erring spirit \ and 
 the offerings to the gods must, therefore, have degenerated into 
 mere routine, instead of quickening the perception of demerit, 
 or of leading up the soul to God in acts of genuine self-devotion. 
 The indifference of the Old Egyptian to this deeper view of 
 sacrifice as well as the unspiritual tone pervading all his moral 
 precepts, may remind us of the frigid self-complacency which 
 we have witnessed in the temper of the ancient China-man. 
 We cannot say that it was merely the outsideness of ritual 
 worship, or the legal pressure by which it was enforced, 
 wherein those nations differed so completely from the Israelite ; 
 he also, in accordance with the literal genius of the old 
 oeconomy, was required to fix his eye upon the body as well as 
 on the soul of his religion : the chief difference had consisted 
 rather in the clearness of the spiritual insight, which enabled 
 all the members of the sacred family to perceive the true 
 relation even of the poorest of their ritual actions to the holy 
 will of God, by whom they were commanded. 
 
 Their belief in such relationship to that exalted Being had 
 again been vivified by what they knew of their own lofty 
 origin. They were created in the image of God ; in that con- 
 nexion therefore they could see the basis both of present growth 
 in habits of obedience, and of restoration, through some 
 mediatorial system, to the likeness which they felt to be most 
 grievously impaired. But this conviction of man's primal 
 dignity had well-nigh faded from the sensuous spirit of the Old 
 Egyptian. He could dream of dynasties of gods who occupied 
 the earth anterior to his own creation; yet the human 
 sovereigns he believed could never spring from such ; the 
 natures of the two had no points of contact, or the fortunes of 
 the two could not be linked together; and accordingly the 
 
CHAP. II.] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems, 511 
 
 annals of the human period in Egyptian history open, it has 
 been remarked \ with kings of purely human lineage, and 
 contain no reminiscence of primeval virtues or of times when 
 God and man were fully reconciled. And corresponding to this 
 lack of faith in the harmonious meeting of the human and 
 Divine is the remarkable absence from the Old Egyptian creed 
 of the idea of incarnation. There was no reluctance, it is true, 
 to welcome the chief gods as dwelling in the bestial Apis or in 
 other sacred animals^, just as in the earlier avatdras of the 
 Brahman, Yishiiu is beheld descending to the abject level of 
 the fish, the boar, the tortoise : but in Egypt we shall find no 
 counterpart of the exalted Krishna, stooping for a season to the 
 semblance of a human body and the mean * condition of the 
 threefold qualities,' that he may help in the uplifting of man- 
 kind in general or reveal some method of escape from the 
 necessity of repeated births. The only faint approximation to 
 this thought of sympathy with human kind is traced in periodic 
 conflicts of the irresistible Horus with the scorching blasts of 
 Typhon; yet while all advantages derived to man from such 
 encounters are entirely physical, Horus also acts throughout as 
 iiii unmixed divinity ; he never stands invested with a human 
 form in order to become the champion of the human species. 
 Hence, indeed, it is that when the disembodied spirit of the 
 Old Egyptian fights her way as far as the tribunal of Osiris, 
 she has there no mediator and redeemer ; and although she has 
 the prospect of escaping and of floating with the glorious sun- 
 god in celestial regions, it is only after she makes good her 
 claim, as in some earthly court of justice, to the sentence of 
 deserved acquittal. 
 
 (3) But is there not one point, — the doctrine of a future 
 life, — in which the creed of Egypt was confessedly superior to 
 
 1 Lepsius, Chronol. pp. 26, 27, ^ Wilkinson, who mentions it as 
 
 who also urges with more or less a merit of the Old Egyptians that 
 
 propriety: ' Hier ist kein inniges they did not humanise their gods, 
 
 Wechselverhaltniss zwischen Gott has added (2nd ser. i. 176) that 
 
 und den Menschen, wie im Alien 'their fault was rather the elevation 
 
 Testaviente, kein Herabzaubern of animals and emblems to the 
 
 Olympischer Gotter durch Dichter rank of deities.' The heroes [ijfjLL- 
 
 und Kiinstler unter die Heroen deot) of the Old Egyptians were 
 
 eines jugendliches Volkes, wie das consequently not demigods in the 
 
 der Griechen, noch auch nur ein Greek sense {i. e. having one divine 
 
 zwitterhaftes Gemischvonmensch- parent) but gods of an inferior 
 
 lichen und damonischen Gestalten rank: ^''et in the age of Manetho 
 
 einer triiben Phantasie, wie bei den there was a disposition (Kenrick, i. 
 
 Babyloniern und Chinesen:' cf. 353, 11. 92) to Hellenise on these 
 
 Herod. 11. 142. points. 
 
512 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 the teaching of the Books of Moses? This has often been 
 asserted ; and instead of pausing to appropriate the admission 
 as an argument in favour of the independence of the Hebrew 
 system, I proceed to ascertain how far the excellence ascribed 
 to Egypt was possessed of real value. J^ow in seeking a true 
 answer to the question, we should bear in mind that almost 
 every tribe of man, wherever scattered or however brutal ised, 
 has had distinct conceptions of a life beyonii the present ; and 
 the vividness with which such feelings are expressed is some- 
 times in inverse proportion to the intellectual culture of the 
 people, — greatest in the savage, least in the philosopher. The 
 Chayma, or the Esquimaux, the unimaginative Papuan, or the 
 wildest rover in the forests of Central Africa, has never doubted 
 that the spirits of departed ancestors still linger near the place 
 of sepulture, retained in close connexion with the body they 
 had once enlivened, and subsisting more or less upon tlie 
 offerings made by the survivors. It need scarcely, therefore, bo 
 esteemed a matter of surprise, if the idea of an ulterior stage in 
 man's existence, stretching far beyond the term of natural 
 life, was quite familiar to the Old Egyptian. Such idea was 
 but a primary intuition which belonged to him as man. Yet, 
 as this doctrine in most regions had existed side by side with 
 every phase of devil-worship, and without involving any 
 definite notion either of a moral order or a moral Governor of 
 the world, the simple fact of its existence in the Yalley of the 
 Nile can furnish no legitimate proof of spiritual elevation ^ 
 Nor on analysing the accounts of the Egyptian dogma, as 
 presented to us by its warm admirers, are we justified in treat- 
 ing it as something either special or abnormal. The Egyptian 
 seems to have imagined, when he introduced the custom of 
 embalming, that the progress of death itself might finally be 
 arrested and the past condition of the man be closely imitated 
 in all future time ; and when with this idea of simple prolonga- 
 tion, and the offerings to the dead as prompted by it, was 
 connected the more ethical doctrine of a future judgment, for 
 the grosser crimes which man had perpetrated in his previous 
 lifetime, the acquitted spirit, freed at length from the necessity 
 
 ^ It is interesting to observe that tality where it exists only in this 
 De Wette, Vatke, and others (quoted crude, unspiritual state. Such con- 
 by Hengstenberg, Dissertations, &c. cessions undermine the cavils of 
 II. 460, 461) have begun to acknow- the older race of Deists, who at- 
 ledge that an entire silence respect- tempted to degrade the Mosaic 
 ing the doctrine of immortality religion below all forms of hea- 
 may belong to a higher point of thenism whatever, 
 view than the belief in immor- 
 
CHAP. II.] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems. 513 
 
 of migrating to other animals, attained no higher destination 
 than was commonly awarded to her by the wild tribes of 
 America'; her heaven was the resplendent sun himself, 
 conceived of, it may be, as personal, but certainly as undis- 
 tinguished from the centre of physical illumination. 
 
 Now, I grant, that these conceptions of futurity have no 
 existence in the Books of Moses. They are foreign to the 
 genius of revealed religion^, and accordingly when urged in a 
 malignant spirit by the later Hebrew sceptics they were all 
 repudiated by our blessed Lord Himself as proving ignorance 
 *of the Scriptures, and the power of God' (Matt. xxii. 29). 
 He told the captious Sadducee how some conditions and 
 relations of the present life would not be simply and at once 
 transferred into the future stage of being : just as the Apostle 
 in discussing the objections of Hellenic sophists has proceeded to 
 throw further light upon the mystery of our constitution, and has 
 taught us how the resuiTection-body will be very different from a 
 bare resuscitation of the body once committed to the ground. ^ It 
 is sown a natural, it is raised a spiritual body' (1 Cor. xv. 44). 
 
 Part, indeed, of the transcendent excellence of Christianity, 
 as compared not only with all heathen systems, but with 
 Hebraism itself, consisted in the deep reality which it alone has 
 given to both worlds. It never leads man to disparage his 
 position and neglect his duties here, by preaching that the 
 visible world is empty and illusive. Neither does it fashion 
 for him a new sphere of being, modelled on the present life and 
 reproducing all his animal enjoyments. Neither does it, in the 
 third place, so restrain the human soul within the limits 
 of the mundane as to shade off many a motive to exertion 
 which is furnished by our clearer knowledge of the things 
 invisible. The Gospel has brought life and immortality io 
 light ; and blessedness, as there revealed, is both the prolonga- 
 tion and transfiguration of our present blessedness. How just 
 soever be the statement that the germ of man's future self is 
 lying in his present self, the ripening and unfolding of that 
 germ so far exceeds our comprehension that we measure it only 
 
 ^ Above, pp. 358 sq. of Moses'! The true doctrine, ac- 
 
 - It has been reserved for Mr. cording to Mr. Heath, (and here, 
 
 D. I. Heath to discover {Exodus he avers, is 'the one really dm- 
 
 Fapyri, p. ■203) that 'with respect tinguishing feature of Christian- 
 
 to the great subject of man's futu- ity') consists in proclaiming *the 
 
 rity, our present views in Europe human resurrection of each hu- 
 
 are identical in principle, though man being to a human kingdom of 
 
 not in detail, with those which mutual human remission of sins' I 
 
 were held by the actual ojpjpojients (p. 103). 
 
 H. 33 
 
514 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 by reflecting on the way in which the Gospel has in fact 
 transcended the best visions of the old ceconomy, or by noting 
 how the Pattern-Man Himself received unspeakable accessions 
 to His human dignity when, rising from the lowliness of earth, 
 He was ^crowned with glory and honour.' But as life with 
 Christ in glory must have always for its precondition the 
 accordance and assimilation of the human will to God's, the 
 training of that will must also be the first necessity in the 
 oducation of mankind. * To walk loith God' is that which ever 
 constitutes the basis of translation to God (Gen. v. 24). The 
 true value, therefore, of belief in immortality arises from the 
 ethical spirit of the system upon which it is engrafted, and the 
 nature of the Person in whom it has subsistence. Where that 
 Person is the living, loving and Almighty God, there is 
 revealed in every glimpse of His exalted character a strong 
 assurance of continuous being ^ to His genuine worshippers. 
 As many as believe that God truly is, believe that He is also 
 * a re warder of them who diligently seek Him.' They must 
 repose their confidence in Him for present and for future. 
 Unto such He never can have been ^ the God of the dead, but 
 of the living.' 
 
 Now it was the primary aim of the religion of the Hebrews 
 to plant deeply in man's heart, and that by painful and 
 protracted discipline, the grand conception of God's perfect 
 truthfulness and the unswerving justice of His rule ; and never 
 till this object was attained could faith in immortality, as now 
 unveiled to us by Christ and the Apostles, have been fostered 
 in the Church of God to any salutary purpose. The Hebrews, 
 it is true, like other nations of antiquity, were never left in 
 total darkness with respect to the existence of the human spirit 
 after death. Some intimations of their knowledge^ on that 
 
 ^ *That the Sadducees did not people, and enters into the most 
 
 recognise this [the ahnightiness of intimate communion with them, in 
 
 God], our Lord marks as the root doing so declares that He will pre- 
 
 of their unbelief in the resurrec- serve them to eternal life. To this 
 
 tion. In the theology of the Pen* foundation of the doctrine of the 
 
 tateuch this hindrance is fully resurrection in the Pentateuch our 
 
 overcome. He who created the Lord Himself refers (Matt. xxii. 
 
 world out of nothing — for whom 31, 32).' Hengstenberg, Ihid, p. 
 
 nothing is too wonderful — death 469: cf. above, p. 71, n. r. 
 cannot obstruct Him, if He wills ^ For some valuable remarks on 
 
 to preserve the soul. But in the this point, I would refer inquirers 
 
 theology of the Pentateuch, His to a recent Essay by Mr. T. T. Pe- 
 
 will is pledged equally with His rowne, The Essential Coherence. of 
 
 power. The God of the Penta- the Old and Neio Testaments, pp. 
 
 tench is love; He who reveals 84 sq. Camb. 1858. 
 Himself so full of grace to His 
 
CHAP. II.] The Hehreiu and Egyptian Systems. 515 
 
 subject are discovered even in the earliest of their sacred 
 writings ; and accordingly the absence of allusion to a future 
 stage of being where as Christians we should have expected 
 such allusion, or the vague and joyless terms in which a future 
 life is sometimes mentioned, where as Christians we should use 
 a more explicit phraseology, can only be adduced to shew that 
 Hades was to them more shadowy than to us, or that ideas of 
 immortality had been remanded to the background in the 
 admonitions of the Hebrew doctors. And the explanation of 
 this difference, as of others like it, will be found in what has 
 been already more than once suggested, — the elementary 
 condition of the people. Their chief thoughts must all be 
 concentrated for a time upon the law of temporal, visible 
 retribution, as dispensed through the arrangements of a 
 theocratic system, in order that when this idea was deeply 
 rooted, faith in the invisible and future retribution might 
 spontaneously grow up. The Israelitish worthy, confident that 
 God was with him, had been meanwhile going forward on his 
 earthly pilgrimage, in a condition, as to intellectual certainty, 
 like that of Abraham himself, who, under the immediate eye of 
 an unfailing Benefactor, started on his journey t© the land of 
 Canaan, * not knowing whither he went/ 
 
 Before I bring these observations to a close, it may be well 
 to glance a moment down the stream of Hebrew history, and 
 ascertain the feelings of the sacred writers at the period of the 
 Babylonish exile with regard to the admissibility of foreign 
 notions into their hereditary creed. An apt example may be 
 found among the visions of Ezekiel, who more than other 
 prophets was accustomed to revert for imagery to the days of 
 the Exodus and to events which followed closely in its train. 
 He thus becomes a species of transition-link from Egypt to 
 Babylon. The flower of the two tribes who had been rescued 
 from the scourge of the Assyrian spoiler were now smitten by a 
 like calamity ; and, refusing to be comforted, had hung their 
 harps upon the trees that lined the banks of the Chebar, when 
 a prophet, the partaker of their sad mischances, was com- 
 missioned to point out the moral agencies which had pre- 
 cipitated this catastrophe. How dark the contrast to a mind 
 like his, between the coming up from Egypt and the going 
 down to Babylon ! There he saw a youthful people full ot 
 hope and ardour, marching with the Lord Jehovah at their 
 head to occupy the soil which He had promised to their fathers. 
 Here he sees them broken, joyless, and forlorn, a nation of 
 
 33—2 
 
•516 Christ and other Masters. [part i v. 
 
 mourners and of captives, driven from the homes which had 
 been long preserved to them as by a miracle of mercy, and 
 succumbing under the terrific curse which lighted on the 
 wandering Cain. As contemplated by Ezekiel, the whole 
 Hebrew race were going backward ; they were exiles in a moral 
 desert, in the * wilderness of the people;' they were forfeiting 
 the vantage-ground on which their fathers had been planted, 
 and, abandoned to the grasp of a blaspheming power, were 
 melting fast away into the heathen multitudes by whom they 
 w-ere surrounded. And the cause of this disastrous retro- 
 gression was declared to be the preference which the Israelite 
 himself had m.anifested for all heathenish modes of thought. 
 His craven wish had been to lose his sacred nationality, and so 
 to be commingled and confounded with the world. ' We will 
 be as the heathen, as the families of the countries, to serve 
 w^ood and stone' (xx. 32). 
 
 To make Ezekiel more entirely conscious of the evils that 
 were eating out the national life, he is transferred in spirit 
 to the precincts of the Hebrew sanctuary (ch. viii.), the spot 
 on which, if ever, might be found the lingering vestiges of 
 unadulterated truth. But no : in rivalry or feigned alliance 
 with the altar of Jehovah, he beholds * the image of jealousy.' 
 A nature-god of Canaan, viewed as Baal, the producer, or as 
 Moloch, the destroyer, stands enthroned upon a level with the 
 God of Abraham. *Son of man,' is the inquiry, ^seest thou 
 what they do, even the great abominations that the house of 
 Israel committeth here, that I should go far off from my 
 sanctuary'?' And then, as if to indicate the depth of the 
 corruption now contracted by the Hebrew Church, Ezekiel has 
 to witness, one by one, the other great idolatries, which, in 
 despair of God and of her own religion (v. 12), she had borrowed 
 from the heathen nations round about her. First of all he sees 
 the grovelling rites of Egypt, imaged under 'eveiy form of 
 creeping things and a^bominable beasts.' The seventy elders of 
 the house of Israel, faithless representatives of those who once 
 liad folloAved Moses to the holy mount (Ex. xxiv. 1) as wit- 
 nesses of the more secret glory of Jehovah, are now impiously 
 attempting to change that 'glory of the incorruptible God;' 
 they stand before the image of Egyptian reptiles 'every man 
 with his censer in his liand.' Another vision is unfolded to the 
 prophet ; he beholds in a fresh quarter of the sacred precincts 
 that the old Phoenician worship of Adonis, the original type of 
 the Osirian mysteries, has threatened to efface the purity of 
 eai'lier generations. Women are assembled at the temple of 
 
CHAP. II.] The Hebrew and Egyptian Systems. 517 
 
 Jehovali, to bemoan the loss of Tammuz, as the prelude to 
 licentious revelry and diabolic orgies. Last of all the prophet's 
 eye is fixed upoii the inner court of the Lord's house, to which 
 the priests alone have access, and which priests no longer blush 
 to desecrate and to deride. It does not seem enough that the 
 community at large are superadding the zoolatry of Egypt to 
 the foul abominations of Phoenicia : men of priestly rank, the 
 * princes of the sanctuary,' though kneeling on the sacred 
 threshold, have each turned his back upon the holiest of all, 
 and, like the Old Parsee, whose superstitions they are now 
 adopting, * worship the sun toward the east' (v. 16). *Then 
 He said unto me. Hast thou seen this, O son of man ? Is it a 
 light thing to the house of Judah that they commit the 
 abominations which they commit here 1 for they have filled the 
 land with violence, and have returned to provoke Me to anger ; 
 and lo, they put the branch to their nose. Therefore will I 
 also deal in fury ; Mine eye shall nob spare, neither will I have 
 pity ; and though they cry in Mine ears with a loud voice, yet 
 will I not hear them' (vv. 17, 18). 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 Characteristics of Medo-Persian Heathenism. 
 
 Ma70i 5^ /cat irav t6 "Apiov yivos, us Kai tovto ypd(p€t 6 E^jdrjiiios, ol /xev TbtroVy 
 ol Zk xP^^ov KaXoucri rb voTjrbv dirav kol rb r^voifjiivov' i^ o5 diaKpLdTjvai "^ 
 debv dyadbu kuI baifJLOva KaKov, rj (pCbs koX (Tkotos irpb tovtwv, cos evlovs 
 X^yeiv. OvTOL dk odv koI avTol pLerd tt]v ddtaKpirou ^vcnv biaKpLvopLiv-qv 
 TTOiovcTL T7]v Bltt^v (FvaTOLXt-civ tCov KpeLTrbvoiV TTjs pih rjyeiaOai tov 'Qpo" 
 fidabrjp, TTJs dk tov 'Apetpidviop. — Damascius, De Primis PrincipiiSj c. 
 cxxv. (p. 384, Kopp). 
 
 Ancient Persia : related to India. Eeligious differences one cause of the 
 separation between Indo- Aryans and Perso- Aryans. The reputed 
 founder of Zoroastrianism. Ormazd-ivorship older than the reign of 
 Darius. Magism, and its propagation. Intermixture of Ormazd-ioor- 
 ship with foreign elements. The Avesta : its relation to the original 
 sacred books of Persia: probable order of its composition. The Yasna. 
 The Vendidad. The Yeshts. Zervana-akarana. Ultimate belief in 
 some one Primal Essence. Probable connexion of Zervan with the 
 Bel of Babylonia. The Parsee belief in unity ; not traceable in the 
 Avesta. Ormazd and Ahriman. Amshaspands: their probable origin 
 in light-worship. Dualism. Iran and Turan. The homicidal serpent, 
 Devs, the antagonists of Amshaspands. Manichceism: its relation to 
 Zoroastrianism. My the connecting Zervan ivith Ormazd and Ahriman. 
 Moral import of such mythes. Largeness of spirit^ a distinguishing 
 feature of the Ormazd-religion. Ideas of purity. Practical character 
 of the old Persian. King-worship. 
 
 If the object of the present work had been to trace the early- 
 growth of heathenism, without regard to the contemporaneous 
 fortunes of the sacred family or the possible interchanges of 
 religious thought between the Hebrew and other systems, the 
 true place of the discussions opened in this chapter would have 
 doubtless been immediately after the religions of Hindustani 
 
 1 This remark appears to have page of his worls. Let it be again 
 
 been called for by complaints of an repeated that these chapters do not 
 
 intelligent and not unfriendly critic pretend to furnish a complete and 
 
 in the Colonial Church Chronicle, systematic history of ancient hea- 
 
 who, in common with some other thenism ; but rather to exhibit the 
 
 reviewers of Part iii., lost sight of chief points of correspondency or 
 
 the original intention of the pre- contrast between heathenism and 
 
 sent writer as expressed in the title- revealed religion. 
 
CH. III.] Characteristics of Medo-Persian Heathenism, 519 
 
 For though it be impossible by means of extant monuments to 
 carry back the civilisation of Persia to the same remote 
 antiquity^, much less to rank her with the great primeval 
 empires of Babylon, of Egypt, or of China, facts are now at our 
 command which will determine the exact position of the 
 Persians proper in the ancient family of man. The region 
 known as Persia [Parasa in cuneiform inscriptions) was a leading 
 province of the ^ pure Iran,' whose frontiers, reckoning eastward 
 from the Caspian gates, extended to the very foot of the Hindu 
 Alps ; and therefore, as the name^ itself will testify, the 
 population which at length predominated was an off-shoot 
 from the Aryan stock, who, after settling in the region of the 
 Five E/ivers, were the undisputed lords of Arya-vartta, and 
 diffused their influence to the southernmcat extremity of the 
 Hindu Peninsula. 
 
 The proofs of this connection have been strengthened at 
 all points by late researches and inductions of comparative 
 philology. The language of the ancient Persian, or at least 
 that one of many current languages, the Zend, in which the 
 earliest of his 'sacred' books were written, is found to be most 
 intimately related to the Sanskrit of the Y edas : it deserves to 
 be entitled second, if not eldest of the sister-tongues which 
 form the Indo-European family. So close, indeed, is the 
 affinity both in structure and in actual words, that we are 
 justified on purely philological grounds in urging the protracted 
 intercourse^ of Persians and Hindus ; who clung together as a 
 great community ages after the migrations of the Celt, the 
 Teuton, and the Slave across the bounds of eastern Europe. 
 
 Fresh and still more definite information is reflected on this 
 subject from the ancient books of the Hindus. The names of 
 certain gods and heroes, who were strangers, it would seem, to 
 the mythology of other kindred tribes, continued to be held in 
 equal reverence by the Aryan on the Sutlej and his brethren 
 on the Persian Gulf The memory, for example, of a Hindu 
 sun-god with the title Vivaswat is lingering* in the Zend 
 
 1 'The true historic period does coins of the Sassanian period, is 
 not commence till five generations undoubtedly equivalent to Ariana, 
 before Darius Hystaspis (or about Airya, and Airyana. 
 
 B.C. 680), when Achaemenes founded ^ M. Miiller's *Last Ke^alts of 
 
 a kingdom in Persia Proper.' Eaw- the Persian Kesearches,' as report - 
 
 linson, Journal of As. Soc. xv. 2^)2. ed in Bunsen's Phil, of Univ. Hist. 
 
 2 See above, p. 122, n. i, and the 1. 112 ; Spiegel, Avesta^ i. 5, Leipzig, 
 references there. The form Iran, 1852. 
 
 which has been already detected on * Lassen, Ind. Alt. i. 518, 519. 
 
520 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 Vivangkwatf whom the Persian honoured as the father of the 
 mighty Yima, first and best of human rulers ; and although in 
 stories of the Indo- Aryan, Yivaswat had two sons, Mami and 
 Yama, each invested with transcendent dignity, and so 
 inheriting a separate empire, one within the sphere of the 
 living and the other of the dead, it is impossible to doubt the 
 common parentage and ultimate identity of Yima and Yama. 
 In like manner, the mysterious soma of the Yedas, treated 
 there not only as the best of sacrificial plants, but also as a true 
 divinity^, had been refiected in the sacred homa^ whose 
 enlivening juices, first expressed by Yivanghwat, were cele- 
 brated with a kindred fervour in the earliest of the Zendic 
 hymns. 
 
 But facts, which have thus tended to authenticate the old 
 connexion of the Persians and Hindus, may also be adduced to 
 illustrate the grounds of their eventual separation. It is not 
 material for our present purpose to consider in what part of 
 Asia the divergence had originated ; whether (as some think) 
 in the locality which formed the cradle of the human race, and 
 so anterior to the first dispersion ; or whether (as is far more 
 probable) that schism was consummated at a period when the 
 Aryan character was fully formed beneath the glowing skies of 
 India. But be this as it may, we have now ample reason for 
 concluding that the final rupture in that primitive population 
 was in part^ at least connected with religious differences. 
 Bebelling, it would seem, against the Svild-grown nature- 
 worship' which had characterised the earlier period of their 
 history, or dissatisfied, perhaps, with the account there given of 
 conflicts which they felt to be proceeding in the outer and the 
 inner world, one section of the Aryans fell away from the 
 
 1 Above, p. 127, n. i; pp. 130, nal of As. Soc. xv. 251, n. i), who 
 226. mentions this example, adds : *The 
 
 2 Burnonf, Etudes, in the Journal proper names of men, too, both in 
 Asiat. (1844), p. 475, and Spiegel, the Vendidad, in the cuneiform in- 
 Avesta, i. 8. This change of a scriptions, and even in the Greek 
 Sanskrit sibilant into a Zendic as- notices of Persia, are in many cases 
 pirate is of constant occurrence : Vedic or Puranic, and can almost 
 e.g. the geographical name hayta always be referred to a Sanskrit 
 hendu of the Avesta is the sajpta etymology, thus authenticatmg the 
 .sindhu of the Veda; both referring connexion of the races.' 
 
 to the north of India, or the land ^ *Es finden sich nun auch 
 
 of the 'Seven Rivers' [i. e. the Five Spuren, welche darauf schliessen 
 
 of the Panj^b, together with the lassen, dass die Trennung der bei- 
 
 Indus and the Saras wati). The den Volker zum Theile loenigstens, 
 
 word Saraswati itself is also trace- aus religiosen Grunden erfolgt sei.' 
 
 able in Haraqaiti. Bawlinson ('Jour- Spiegel, Avesta, i. 9. 
 
CH. III.] Characteristics of Medo-Persian Heathenism. 521 
 
 society of their brethren, and in close analogy with later times 
 and distant countries left the traces of the feud engrained in 
 their religious phraseology. Thus, the Sanskrit name for god, 
 devaj bearing witness to the ancient worship of the element of 
 light ^, is plainly kindred to the Zend claeva ; and yet this 
 latter tongue had ceased to use it of divinities in general, and 
 confined it to a class of hostile genii following in the train of 
 the great Evil One. The highest also of the Yaidic gods, the 
 glorious Indra^, whom the warm imagination of the early 
 Aryan had been wont to picture as diffusing genial showers 
 upon the earth, or chasing from the clouds the various ministers 
 of evil, had become in Persia, as in later stages of Hindu 
 mythology, a spirit of inferior rank; yet with the noticeable 
 difference, that the Perso- Aryans had proceeded to invest their 
 Andra with malevolent attributes. In further proof of this 
 revulsion in men's thoughts, it is contended by some writers^ 
 that the first of good divinities among the Persians, viz. Ahura, 
 or Ahura-mazda (Ormazd), is etymologically connected with 
 Asura in the mythology of the Old Hindu ; who was accustomed 
 to employ the title as descriptive of the multitudinous demons 
 dreaded by himself, or by his household, though it seems to 
 have been treated by the earliest of the Vaidic poets as a word 
 of no ill-omen. 
 
 Every fresh investigation into the degree of these diver- 
 gences, as well as the distinct formation and consolidation of 
 the Perso- Aryan creed, is fitly prefaced by a question as to the 
 antiquity and origin of its reputed founder. Not long after 
 the Christian era'^ it was usual to ascribe the planting of the 
 sacred system of the Persians to an individual teacher, Avhom 
 they designated Zarathustra (Zoroaster) ; and the scanty 
 remnants of that people, who have found a shelter from the 
 
 ^ Above, p. 126, n. I. least distinguishes between Zara- 
 2 Above, pp. 123, 127. thustra the Perso -Aryan prophet 
 » e.g. Spiegel, i. 9, followed by and the Zoroaster, Zarades, or 
 Dr. Donaldson, Christ. Orthod. p. Zaratus of Greek writers, who was 
 128: but cf. Burnouf, Commentaire really, he thinks, a type, or mythi- 
 sur le Yagna, i. 78, Paris, 1833. cal creation, representing a totally 
 * See a list of the conflicting different (Hamitic) form of hea- 
 testimonies with respect to liis age thenism, but ultimately confound- 
 in Dr. John Wilson, The Pdrsi ed with the historic Zarathustra, 
 Religion, pp. 398—400, Bombay, when the fame of the latter had 
 1843. Dollinger, Heidcnthiim, p. extended to Western nations: cf. 
 352, staggered by these contradic- Westergaard, Zendavesta, *Pref.' 
 tions, has revived the theory of pp. 16 sq. Copenhagen, 1852—54. 
 more than one Zoroaster, or at 
 
522 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 furv of tlie Muslim, in tlie towns of western India, or the 
 wilderness of Yezd, look up with reverence to the same 
 Zartusht as the great prophet of Parseeism^ There is also 
 evidence to shew that in the judgment of at least some Persians, 
 he had flourished in the reign of king Vistdspa^, or (according 
 to a common change) Gustdsp; and other writers^, starting 
 from this incident, have not unnaturally referred the ministry 
 of Zoroaster, and the earliest publication of the Zoroastrian 
 tenets, to the lifetime of Hystaspes, father of the great 
 Darius. 
 
 Now if it be meant that Zoroaster, a contemporary of 
 Darius, was the actual author of the system of religion, in 
 which Ahura-mazda (Ormazd) became the principal object of 
 men's worship, we have reasons the most cogent and conclusive 
 for rejecting such interpretation. Ormazd had long been 
 reverenced as Hhe god of the Aryans^,' when Darius wrote the 
 history of his exploits upon the rock of Behistun : indeed 
 some passages in that magnificent inscription will not suffer us 
 to doubt that the great movement headed by Darius was 
 essentially religious^, aiming at the restoration of an ancient 
 faith which had been threatened, and in part subverted, by the 
 influence of the Magus. The first care of the victorious prince 
 
 1 Dosabhoy Framjee, The Far- (ii. 24), because he professes to 
 tees, pp. 238 sq. Lond, 1858. give the opinions of the Persians 
 
 2 See Spiegel, Avesta, i. 41 sq. themselves; yet while repeating 
 who quotes the traditional account the story that Zoroaster lived at 
 of the Bombay Parsees. A regular the court of Hystaspes, he added, 
 history of their 'legislator,' the as the view of the Persians, that it 
 Zartusht- Ndmah, written in the was very doubtful whether this 
 i3thcentury after Christ, has been Hystaspes was the father of Da- 
 translated from the Persian by Mr. rius {the koX &\\os ovtos vTrrjpxev 
 Eastwick, and is appended to Dr. 'TaTaairris.) 
 
 J. ^NHson's Pdrsi Religion. * 'The Median engravers, who 
 
 3 Ammianus MarcelHnus (Lib. executed the Scythic version of the 
 XXIII. c. 6), of the 4th cent, after P^* mscnption of Bisitun (Behis- 
 Christ, is most explicit on this tun), so well understood the differ- 
 point. He also says that Zoro- ence between Aryan Dualism and 
 aster was a Bactrian, that he made Scythic Magism, that when they 
 additions to the creed of the Magi, had to speak of Ormazd in con- 
 deriving these additions * ex Chal- nexion with other gods, they inter- 
 daorumarcauis;' and further, that polated after the name the dis- 
 he visited the north of India, and tinctive epithet of "god of the 
 reaching a secluded spot among Aryans.'" Eawlinson, Jour. Asiat. 
 forests, conferred with members Soc. xv. 249. 
 
 of the Brahmanical order. The ^ See Rawlinson's Herod. App. 
 
 testimony of Agathias (of the 6th Bk. i. Essay v. ; App. Bk. in. Es- 
 ceht. after Christ) is more valuable say 11. 
 
CH. III.] Characteristics of Medo-Persian Heathenism. 523 
 
 was * to rebuild the temples which. Gomates had destroyed, and 
 to restore to the people the sacred chants and worship, of which 
 Gomates had deprived them^j' and, as indicating both the 
 nature and extent of tho corruption, he declares expressly that 
 ^ the lie had become abounding in the land, both in Persia and 
 in Media, and in the other provinces^.' Supposing, therefore, the 
 age of Zoroaster to have been the fifth or sixth century before 
 Christ, we are reduced to the necessity of concluding that his 
 mission had been rather to restore and purify, than to initiate 
 the sacred system which was afterwards connected with his 
 name. He must have been, as he indeed is sometimes repre- 
 sented, nothing more than one important member in a series 
 of ^ ancient Persian iwojphets^.^ 
 
 But the tendency of modern criticism, with only few 
 exceptions, is to carry back the age of Zoroaster into pre- 
 historic times, or representing him as the ' Yyasa' of the 
 Perso- Aryans, to invest him with the dubious, half-impersonal 
 character, which attaches to his Hindu prototype, the so-called 
 author of the earliest Veda, While some (as Lassen '^) have 
 declared it utterly impossible to ^x. the period when he lived 
 and so abandoned the inquiry in despair. Sir H. Kawlinson has 
 lately started an hypothesis^ which finds in Zoroaster the 
 personification of an old religious system, or in other words, 
 the sacred eponym of an adjacent, but non- Aryan race. To 
 understand this view we must remember^ that three difierent 
 populations coexisted from an early date upon the plain of the 
 Tigris and Euphrates, one descended from a Scythic, Cushite or 
 Turanian stock; a second cognate with the Babylonians and 
 Assyrians, or, in other words, Semitic ; and the third consisting 
 
 ^ Behist Inscr. (as given, among i6th century, is very small indeed, 
 
 ether places, in the above work, It seems to have issued from the 
 
 Vol. II. p. 595); where Darius adds, syncretistic movement, of which 
 
 *As (it was) before, so I restored Akbar was the leading spirit: cf. 
 
 what (had been) taken away. By Spiegel, Avesta, i. 49, and Wilson, 
 
 the grace of Ormazd I did (this).' Pdrsi Religion, pp. 411, 412. 
 
 2 Ihid. p. 593. ■* 'Seine Zeit zu bestimmen wird 
 
 3 Thus in the ^Desdtir or sacred nie moglich seyn.' Ind. Alt. i. 754. 
 •writings of the ancient Persian ^ See his paper entitled Notes 
 Prophets,' translated by MuUa on the Early History of Babylonia, 
 Firuz Ibn Kaus (Bombay, 181 8), in the Journ. As. Soc. xv. 215 — 
 Zirttisht is the 13th prophet in the 259, and the still more recent dis- 
 series, and the fifth Sassan (con- cussion of the subject in Rawlin- 
 temporary with the emperor Hera- son's Herod, as referred to above, 
 cHus) the last. But the historical p. 522, n. 5. 
 
 value of this work, which seems to * Cf. above, pp. 51 eq., and Raw- 
 
 have been fabricated as late as the linson, as above. 
 
524 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 of tho Medes and Persians proper who were members of the 
 Indo-European family. Neglecting for the present the effects 
 produced by the Semitic element, it seems that Scyths, the 
 aboriginal owners of the soil, were strongly intermixed with 
 Aryans in the whole of ancient Media, and that, owing to the 
 higher civilisation of the Scyth or to the witchery exerted by 
 some features of his thaumaturgic system, the new-comers 
 almost universally adopted the religion there established ^ 
 This, according to the present view, was genuine Magism, — the 
 primeval faith associated far and wide with the time-honoured 
 name of Zoroaster, and at length erroneously ascribed to early 
 'Persians,' by Herodotus^, who represents it as 'purely and 
 entirely elemental,' or a natiu-e-worship of the simplest form, 
 expressed in adoration of ' the sun and moon, of fire, of earth, 
 of water, and of winds.' The same ideas, it might be not 
 unreasonably contended, found acceptance in some parts of 
 Persia proper; and when Cyrus was at length supreme in 
 every province of Iran, he seems to have conciliated his 
 Scytho-Median subjects by his patronage of Magi, and by 
 placing Magism^ on a level with the worship of the great 
 Ormazd and other Aryan deities. This statement rests, indeed, 
 on the authority of the Gyropcedia ; yet whatever value be 
 assigned to it, there is now ample reason for concluding that 
 such lenient measures were at once reversed on the accession of 
 Cambyses, who, impelled by a fanatic spirit bordering upon 
 frenzy, had extended his religious warfare into the Yalley of 
 the Nile. It is accordingly narrated that the old adherents of 
 the Magian faith, emboldened by the absence* of the despot in 
 the west, attempted to recover their importance by intriguing 
 in behalf of the Pseudo-Smerdis ; and as soon as the pretender 
 had been planted on the throne proceeded to the extirpation of 
 
 ^ 'The Medes not only adopted what Herodotus states respecting 
 
 the religion of their subjects, but Xerxes, who, departing from the 
 
 to a great extent blended with policy of Cambyses, and to some 
 
 them, admitting whole Scythic extent of his own father, did not 
 
 tribes into their nation. Magism scruple to consult the Magian 
 
 entirely superseded among the soothsayers (vii. 19, 37). It was 
 
 Medes the former Aryan faith,' probably much later when the 
 
 &c. Kawlinson's Herod. Vol. i. p. ^agi as a body were installed as 
 
 430. priests of Ormazd; for 'their name 
 
 3 I. 1 21. Magu occurs only twice in all the 
 
 3 Xenoph. Gyrop. viii. i, § 23, extant Zend texts.' Westergaard, 
 
 and Creuzer, Symbol, i. 189, n. i. *Pref.' p. 17. 
 
 ' The conduct here ascribed to Cyrus * Behist. Inscr. (Rawlinson's Ile- 
 
 will receive some illustration from rod. Vol. 11. p. 593). 
 
CH. III.] Characteristics of Medo-Persian Heathenism, 525 
 
 established forms of worship. The avenging of this impious 
 wrong became, as we have seen, a leading object in the policy 
 of Darius. He declares repeatedly that ' by the help of 
 Ormazd' he had confounded all the schemes of the insurgents, 
 had abolished the reign of lies, had reared afresh the temples 
 that were ruined by the Magians, had restored the several 
 branches of the ancient liturgy. To this indeed we may ascribe 
 the. fact that king Darius was regarded by succeeding ages in 
 the light of a religious reformer ; hence the honourable mention 
 of Gustasp (Hystaspis) in the sacred books of Persia ; hence 
 the feeling of respect with which his memory was long cherished 
 by all classes of the Old Parsees. 
 
 Tt must be granted that the difficulties attaching to this 
 theory of Zoroastrianism are neither few nor inconsiderable ; 
 and yet some theory of the kind appears to be almost neces- 
 sitated by the force of modern evidence, especially of that dis- 
 covered on the cuneiform inscriptions. In favour of it is the 
 circumstance that the religion of early * Persia,' as described by 
 Herodotus, has scarcely aught in common either with the 
 religion of Persian monuments or Persian sacred books ; and 
 therefore we are driven to suppose that his remarks apply to 
 Magism, which may still have flourished in the western 
 provinces, and not to the religion of Ormazd as patronised and 
 practised at the court. In favour, also, of this theory, is the 
 argument, that if the creed of the Magi had been merely a 
 provincial variation of Ormazd-worship, no intelligible account 
 is given of the religious movement strangled by Darius, and his 
 own abhorrence of the Magian faith. 
 
 Yet, on the other hand, we have an almost equal difficulty 
 in understanding how the Perso-Aryan people could in after- 
 times have been induced to reverence the memory of Zoroaster^ 
 to accept a mere personification of Magism as the favoured 
 organ of their own beneficent deity, and elevate what has been 
 called the * old heresionym of the Scyths' into the teacher of 
 Gustasp, whose son became a champion of the Aryan gods\ 
 This difficulty is relieved perhaps by taking into account the 
 
 ^ 'Under the disguise of Zara- xv. 254. This learned writer has 
 
 thushtra, which was the nearest elsewhere (p. ■246) sought to justify 
 
 practicable Aryan form, Zirauhtar his explanation of the word Zara- 
 
 (or the seed of Venus) became a thushtra; but does not seem to 
 
 prophet and lawgiver, receiving in- have noticed the verbal affinity of 
 
 spiration from Ahuramazda. and Ishtar, Asteria, and Astarte (this 
 
 reforming the national religion.' l^«t representing the Aphrodite of 
 
 Bir H. Eawlinson, Joum. As. Soc. Semitic tribes). 
 
526 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 flexible and imitative genius of the ancient Persians, which 
 extended also to religious matters^; and as positive proof will 
 be adduced of minor amalgamations between the creed of 
 Persia and other systems, it is possible that some such fusion 
 was gradually effected on a larger scale, and that on the 
 subsiding of the storm in which the festival of the Magophonia 
 had originated, ^a mongrel religion grew up, wherein the 
 Magian and the Aryan creeds were blended together^.' 
 
 But whatever might be the precise complexion of that older 
 system it received its death-blow^ at the period of the Mace- 
 donian occupation, or at least amid the sanguinary struggles 
 of the Parthian conquest. From the former, we must date a 
 large infusion of Hellenic thoughts and customs ; while the 
 latter was a fresh uprising of the Scythic population, banished 
 or held down in bondage from the time of Cyi-us. 
 
 Owing to the strong persistence of these foreign agencies, 
 the sacred language of the Perso- Aryan was depressed, neglected, 
 and well-nigh extinguished ; the old worship of Ormazd gave 
 place again to Magism*, tinctured, it may be, with some 
 Hellenic speculations ; nor when Scyths were finally ejected by 
 the daring of the native or Sassanian monarchs, and hurled 
 back on one side into Georgia, and on the other to Afghanistan, 
 could the religion of Cambyses and Darius be restored to its 
 original purity. Henceforth it bore the frequent traces of its 
 intercourse with foreign creeds. Its sacred writings were 
 indeed recovered, but no evidence survives to tell us, whether 
 they were then collected and restored from extant manuscripts 
 or from oral tradition. A new tongue (the Pehlevi or 
 
 ^ Herod, i. 131, 135. own sacred books is pure theism, 
 
 ^ Eawlinson's Herod. Vol. i. p. 'repels -with indignation' the idea 
 
 431. The vitality of Magism was of w^orshipping any of the material 
 
 evinced for ages after, in a form elements. A Parsee, he says, while 
 
 analogous to that already noticed engaged in prayer, is merely *di- 
 
 (above, p. 455) in discussing the rected to stand before the fire, or 
 
 animal- worship of the Old Egyp- to direct his face towards the sun, 
 
 tian, viz. by transfusing one of its as the most proper symbols of the 
 
 more cardinal doctrines into the Almighty.' But disclaimers of this 
 
 very soul of the new creed. This kind are not easily reconciled with 
 
 peculiarity consisted in the adora- the express assertions of Parsee au- 
 
 tion of the element of fire. Hence thorities ; as indeed may be seen at 
 
 the name 'fire-temples' and the length in Dr. Wilson's Pdrsi Eeli- 
 
 title 'fii'e-v/orshippers.* I may men- gion, pp. 194 sq. 
 
 tion that Mr. Dosabhoy Framjee ^ Spiegel, Avesta, i. 16, 17. 
 
 {The Parsees, pp. 256 sq.), affecting * Sir H. Bawlinson, as before, 
 
 to believe, like other Anglicised p. "ZSS^ 
 Parsees, that the religion of their 
 
CH. III.] Characteristics of Medo-Persian Heathenism. 527 
 
 Huzviiresh) was adopted as tlie vehicle of public worship, and 
 the badge of the new dynasty ; and since the Greek, the Jew, 
 the Buddhist, and the Christian had all from various quarters 
 penetrated to the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, it is 
 not so difficult to understand how the * reformers, teachers, 
 I^rophets' who sprang up with this fresh outburst of Persian 
 nationality, should have all departed widely from the older 
 standards, or should, speaking generally, have * formed their 
 language and the whole train of their ideas on a Semitic 
 modeP.* 
 
 And if the general history of the Medo-Persian were thus 
 chequered and eventful, we shall be prepared to find no small 
 variety in the tone of his religion and the texture of his sacred 
 books. The whole collection of such writings, or at least of 
 parts which have come down to us, is known as the Avesta, 
 literally the ^Textl' • 
 
 One chief result of modern exploration in this region of 
 philology has been to demonstrate, that whether as preserved 
 in the original, or as translated by Parsees, the treatises of the 
 Avesta in their present shape can date no farther back than the 
 Sassanian revival, in the time of Artaxerxes, or the third 
 century of the Christian era (a.d. 226). Another of those 
 results has tended to confirm and justify suspicions with regard 
 to the antiquity of several writings which are commonly ad- 
 duced as high authorities by modern Parsees. Of one impor- 
 tant work (the Bundehesh) we may afiGlrm with certainty that 
 it had never existed in the Zend, or older dialect of Persia, 
 but was first compiled in the court-language of the restoration- 
 period ; while some others (as the Dahistdn and Desdtir) may 
 be rejected absolutely as fabrications of far later centuries. 
 Such criticisms axe not, of course, intended to deny that many 
 chapters of the Persian sacred books are capable of being 
 carried back to a most venerable antiquity. Whole works may 
 have been actually committed to writing as early as 400 B.C., 
 for 'books of Zoroastrians' are related^ to have perished at the 
 time of Alexander's expedition. Many also of the sacred 
 chants and ceremonial precepts may, as now existing, have 
 originated at the epoch of the first migrations. Yet, while 
 
 ^ Max Miiller, as before, p. ii8; Schriften.* Zand or Zend ^roi^Qrlj 
 
 Eenan, Hist, des Langues S6miti- means 'commentary' or *transla- 
 
 quesy 1, 77, 78, Paris, 1858. tion' [i.e. of ancient texts): see 
 
 2 Spiegel, p. 45 : 'bei den spa- Westergaard, Zendavesta, *Pref.' 
 
 teren Parsen stets gebranchte Be- p. i. 
 zeichnungfur den Text der heiligen ^ Cf. Westergaard's Pref. p. 18. 
 
528 ► Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 granting this, our ablest scholars seem to be persuaded more 
 and more that works which have been brought together in the 
 Avesta, are not only the productions of different ages, but have 
 all been modified and modernised by the intrusion of fresh 
 matter. They stand, in other words, to primitive documents of 
 the Ormazd-religion in substantially the same relation as the 
 Prayer-Book to the Use of Sarum. 
 
 In attempting to refer the several parts of the Avesta to 
 the different epochs which produced them, Spiegel, the most 
 competent of living writers on this subject \ draws attention to 
 three separate stages of jDrogression or development. The 
 earliest stage, he thinks, is represented by the second part of 
 the Yasna, — the liturgy or sacrificial service of the Persians, 
 consisting of invocations to the ^ pure' Ormazd, to elements and 
 energies of nature, to the spirit of the worshipper himself, and 
 also to beneficent genii whose abodes are in the world invisible. 
 The mode of handling theological topics is there characterised 
 by a remarkable absence both of order and precision : every 
 thing accounted pure and brilliant, beautiful and salutary, is 
 the object of half-conscious homage and unreasoning worship, 
 so that early invocations of the Yasna may be justly brought 
 into comparison with the oldest hymns of the Pig-Yeda. The 
 next stage of that religion, according to the same authority, is 
 represented by the Yendidad, or ^Law Given,' in which, 
 besides a most incongruous list of remedies for earthly ills, has 
 been narrated the creation of the * sixteen holy places,' the 
 origin and growth of evil and its partial overthrow as the 
 result of Zoroaster's mission ; all communicated in the form of 
 a dialogue between that prophet and the great Ormazd. As 
 the theology of Persia has become at this stage far more 
 definite and distinctive, bearing witness to the presence of the 
 main ingredients which compose the ^ Zoroastrian ' system, the 
 transition may perhaps be illustrated from the course pursued 
 by Hindu thought in passing from the simplest form of nature- 
 worship to the cultivated Brahmanism of the heroic age. The 
 third and most important step in the development here indicated 
 led to the production of the first part of the Yasna, and the 
 multifarious hymns and prayers collected in the Yeshts. The 
 gods and genii of the Persian creed have now been classified 
 in parallel ranks, according to their different properties : the 
 
 1 Spiegel's first notice of these has since extended the inquirv' in 
 points was published in Weber's his edition of the Avesta and else- 
 Jnd. Studien (1850), i. 31 3 sq., and he where, arriving at the same result. 
 
CH. III.] Characteristics of Medo-Fersian Heathenism. 529 
 
 attributes of eacli are clearly separated and dogmatically fixed : 
 the system known as Zoroaster's has attained its full propor- 
 tions ; its whole * character is unmistakeable : ' while the 
 martial and intolerant spirit of Sassanian princes breathing in 
 their sacred books will frequently remind us of the terrible 
 Siva-ism of later Hindustan, which, after scourging and 
 extruding the disciples of the Buddha, left its dark and bloody 
 trace on the Brahmanical religion. 
 
 No sooner have we entered on a more minute investigation 
 of the Perso- Aryan dogmas than allusions meet us, here and 
 there, to a mysterious Being of transcendent dignity, yet one 
 whose place in the construction of that system is most difficult 
 to ascertain; enveloped as it is in clouds and controversies, 
 which have long continued to obscure the character and 
 parentage of Zarathustra himself. I am referring to a deity 
 entitled Zervan or Zervdna-akarana, who, strange to say, had 
 sometimes been not only associated but identified^ with 
 Zoroaster, and described as both 'the origin of the Medians 
 and the father of the gods.' The old opinion was, that in this 
 member of the Persian system proofs might be discerned of a 
 conception bordering on the pure and spiritual monotheism 
 inherited by members of the sacred family. Zervdna-almrana 
 was held to designate a personal god, to whom was given the 
 appellation, *Time without Bounds,' or * Uncreated Time^' 
 
 ^ As, for instance, by Moses of by reference to the Sanskrit aka- 
 
 Chorene, a writer of the 5th cen- rana, 'uncaused,' 'uncreated' (from 
 
 tury (Wilson's Pdrsis, p. 128). Ac- karana 'cause'). That the Perso- 
 
 cording also to this Armenian Aryans were not only familiar with 
 
 authority, the people of the East such epithets, but were in the habit 
 
 identified Zervan with Sim or Shem of applying them to the heavenly 
 
 (cf. Kawlinson, in Journ. As. Soc. bodies, "^is obvious from a remark- 
 
 XV. 245, n. 2). able hymn of the Yasna, which 
 
 2 While there is considerable Burnouf translates as follows (Corn- 
 unanimity in rendering Zervan ment. sur le Yagna, p. 559): 'J'in- 
 either 'Old' or 'Time' { = Kp6vos), voque, je celebre et ces lieux et ces 
 the precise meaning of the adjec- pays, et les pares des bestiaux, et 
 tive akarana is still matter of dis- les^ maisons, et les lieux ou se gar- 
 pute. Anquetil Duperron, the first dent les grains, et les eaux, et les 
 translator of the Avesta, rendered terres, et les arbres, et cette terre 
 the word by 'sans bornes;' but, et ce ciel, et le vent pur, les astres, 
 as ^ Schlottmann observes, against la lune et le soleil, lumieres qui sont 
 Spiegel (Weber's Ind. Stud. i. sans commencement, increees, et 
 378), it is not derivable from the toutes les creations de I'etre saint 
 Pehlevi root^ "l^^P, which gave rise et celeste, ceux et celles qui sont 
 to the old interpretation 'bound- purs, (genies) maitres de puret6.* 
 less.' It is rather (he thinks with It has been suggested to me that 
 Roth and others) to be explained as one meaning of the Sanskrit 
 
 11. 34 
 
530 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 Philosopliy had also learned to speak of him as * universal 
 Being/ as the grand personification of eternity, as the primor- 
 dial and illimitable void from which creation in its varying 
 aspects is successively evolved. He was the basis of all other 
 forms of being, whence conflicting powers of tlie phenomenal 
 world had each derived its origin, and whither it was destined 
 to revert on the expiring of the present strife, and the com- 
 pletion of the present cycle of existence. Zervan was, in other 
 words, the Absolute, or primal essence, like the Tae-keih of the 
 Confucianist, the Bythos of the early Gnostic, or the "Ov of 
 !N^eo-Platonism. Like them he was believed to have existed 
 long before the contrariety of good and evil had been 
 manifested in creation ; and accordingly the practice was to 
 represent him rather as a * metaphysical abstraction"'' dwelling 
 in impenetrable void, than as an active and presiding deity ; he 
 was said to have been neither * endowed with self-consciousness' 
 nor 'possessed of moral perfections.' But here, as in some 
 other cases ^, a more critical Icnowledge of the language, and a 
 j lister estimate of the antiquity, of saci'ed documents has 
 modified the first conclusions of speculative philosophy. It is 
 found, for instance, that so far from Zervan standing out 
 conspicuous in the creed of ancient Persia, the allusions to him 
 in her sacred writings are extremely few, as well as cursory 
 and indistinct. Thus, in the principal passage cited from the 
 Vendiddd^ in reference to this subject, Zarathustra, when the 
 words are accurately rendered, has been merely made to say : 
 'What the holy-minded One [i.e. Ormazd) created, he created 
 in the boundless (or, the uncaused) Time.'' And in a subsequent 
 verse, which forms the second important passage bearing on the 
 character of Zervan, the favoured servant of Ormazd is bidden 
 to *■ invoke the self-created firmament, the boundless (or, the 
 uncaused) Time, and the breeze that works in the high places^.' 
 On a careful scrutiny of these and other like ex[)ressions, it 
 appears that only one of two inferences is really justifiable, 
 either, that some elementary substratum was here said to have 
 existed from eternity, and so to have preceded the formation of 
 
 karana is 'the time occupied by ^ Farg. xix. § 33 {Avesta, 1. 245, 
 
 the moon in passing through a ed. Spiegel). The original here is : 
 
 small part of her orbit,' a-karana *(lathat. <?pent6. mainyus. dathat. 
 
 might possibly have meant *un- zrvane. akarane.' 
 
 divided.' ^ Ibid. § 44: of. § 55, and Spie- 
 
 ^ e.g. Gibbon, ch. viii. gel's essay in the ZeUschrift der 
 
 2 See above, pp. 311 sq., on the Deutsehen morgenldnd, Geselhch» 
 
 nature of the Chinese Tao, (1851), v. 228, 229. 
 
CH. III.] Characteristics of Medo-Persian Heathenism. 531 
 
 the visible universe, or else, that ^uncreated Time' had been 
 regarded as a species of material, in and out of which was 
 formed that definite period of duration, which, according to the 
 Perso- Aryans, was allotted for the lifetime of the present world. 
 Such language does not, therefore, warrant the hypothesis that 
 Zervan was the ^principal god of Persia, in the judgment of those 
 writers who compiled her sacred books. 
 
 It is again remarkable that the name of Zervan is never 
 found upon the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius Hystaspis. 
 Everything beneficent is there ascribed distinctly to the grace 
 and succour of Ormazd, — a circumstance which, owing to the 
 constant repetition of the formula, could hardly fail to have im- 
 pressed on the explorer his belief in the * radical and irreconci- 
 lable' divergence between Zervan- worship and the genuine 
 system of the Perso- Aryans. Still there is no reasonable ground 
 for doubting that in subsequent centuries, when the feeling after 
 unity was re-awakened in the human spirit, and when men 
 were anxious to revert, in thought at least, to something per- 
 manent, illimitable, uncreated, — some existence underlying 
 and reducing into harmony the painful contradictions of the 
 visible universe, — a string of texts like those surviving in the 
 Vendiddd were eagerly appropriated by more philosophic 
 thinkers, till with such the name of Zervan was the recognised 
 expression of belief in some great Primal Essence. I subjoin 
 one extract from a later Parsee writing^ of considerable repute, 
 in which this theory of Zervan has been formally developed. 
 The opening sentence strikes me as containing an allusion to 
 the passage of the Vendiddd above recited : 
 
 *In the religion of Zoroaster, it is to this effect declared, 
 that God [Khudd) created every thing from time ; and that the 
 Creator is Time. And for Time no limit has been made, and 
 no height has been made, and no root has been made. And it 
 always has been, and it will always be. He who has intelli- 
 gence even will not be able to tell whence it has been made. 
 So great is its glory that there is no other being who can be 
 called Creator, because the creation was not then made. After- 
 wards, fire and earth were created; and from their union 
 Hormuzd (Ormazd) was created. Time was the Creator, and 
 this Lord has guarded the creation he has made.' 
 
 Nor is the theory of Zervan, as here advocated, inconsistent 
 
 ^ The work entitled I7m<:^-MsZaw doctor to a Muslim inquirer: see 
 was composed about A. D. 1 1 26, and the original in Wilson's PdrsUy 
 contains the replies of a Parsee pp. 135, 136. 
 
 34—2 
 
532 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 with a second, which has recently proceeded from a different 
 quarter, viz, that this god. whose worship had in later times 
 been made to rest on rare d^d dubious texts of the A vesta, was 
 in fact an early importation from some foreign and non- Aryan 
 system. We have reason for supposing that the name of Zervan 
 is related to the ziru-hanit of Assyrian monuments \ The title 
 there comes forward as an ordinary epithet of Bel, the /Srjko^ 
 dpxoiio<; of Babylonian mythology, and therefore intimately con- 
 nected with the thought of time^. It is accordingly conjectured, 
 that the knowledge of this great divinity, who, under the de- 
 scriptive name Bel-itan, or ^Old Bel,' was once supreme in 
 ancient Babylonia, had passed over to the Scythic magi, at a 
 period when the different populations of that region were exten- 
 sively intermingled. Thence the Zervan-dogma may have pene- 
 trated into Media, so that the divinity, connected by Herodo- 
 tus^ wdth Hhe cycle of the heavens,' and incorrectly represented 
 by him as of ^Persian' origin, might really correspond with the 
 great Bel of ancient Babylonia; and at length, when the amal- 
 gamation was completed in the Magian and Persian creeds, and 
 it was necessary to adjust the relative functions and positions 
 of such gods as Zervan and Ormazd, a further precedent might 
 be ilerived from the traditions of the Babylonian Semites, who 
 had learned to venerate not only a supreme divinity (the Bt^Xos 
 dpxoLos), but also a reflection of him, called the BiyAos Sevrepos, 
 or the * Assyrian Hercules ^' 
 
 In any case we are at liberty to argue that faint glimmerings 
 of one only God, — inert, indeed, if not impersonal, but still 
 the Primal Cause of all things — are discernible here and there 
 in the remains of Medo- Persian heathenism; and certainly such 
 a dogma, whether viewed as the reanimation of some patriarchal 
 
 1 See Sir H. Kawlinson's paper the Babylonian mythology. 
 
 in the Journ. As. Soc. xv. 245, n. 2. ^ i. 131, where Mr. Blakesley 
 
 2 The word Zervdna, according suspects that the historian is fol- 
 to Spiegel, i. 271, signifies old (not lowing the 'account of some person 
 'time' merely), and so would be who confused the genuine Persian 
 a fair translation of the Semitic with a Median [i. e, Magian] ri- 
 
 irr^^^, which is found distinctly in tual.' 
 
 5el-itan, or Old Bel. Spiegel in * 'Beide, der erste und zweite 
 
 this matter has arrived at very Bel, eben so wie Zarvan und Or- 
 
 much the same result as Eawlin- muzd, werden in einer Beziehung 
 
 son, but by a different process. identificirt und in der andem im- 
 
 He contends especially for the terschieden. Ahuramazda als der 
 
 Semitic origin of the Zervan-dogma, Absolute, Ewige, Ueberweltliche 
 
 from the fact that the name Zero- gedacht...ist der Zarvan-akarana.' 
 
 vanes itself has been preserved in Schlottman, in Weber's Ind. Stud. 
 
 Berosus among the fragments of^ i. 378, 379. 
 
CH. III.] Characteristics of Medo-Persian Heathenism, 533 
 
 tenet, or as due to interclianges of religious thought with 
 Scythic and Semitic tribes, or as the product of a speculative 
 yearning to resolve all contrarieties of the visible world into 
 an ultimate and higher unity, is often traceable in the literature 
 of modern Parsees \ 
 
 Yet, on the other hand, so long as our chief guides into 
 this region are the sacred books of ancient Persia, and the 
 monuments belonging to the age of Darius Hystaspis, we are no 
 less under the necessity of urging in reference to Zervdna-akar- 
 ana^, that his worship was unknown to all the early generations 
 of the Aryan settlers. He must therefore be eliminated from 
 discussions of the Perso- Aryan theology ; and the rather, since 
 his name, whenever first admitted in that system, had produced 
 in it no sensible effect. Zervdna was from first to last a 
 colourless abstraction, which Parsees are even now accustomed 
 to esteem the mere equivalent of ^ eternity. ' 
 
 If we, accordingly, neglect this foreign and intrusive ele- 
 ment, we find that the theology derivable from the pages of the 
 Avesta^ is, in form at least, completely dualistic. A belief in two 
 great principles, of rival power and contradictory functions, is 
 
 ^ The following extract from Mr. 
 Dosabhoy Framjee's work The Par- 
 sees, pp. 250, 251, will remind some 
 readers of the strong assertions 
 made by Kam-mohun Eoy and 
 other half -Christianized Hindus 
 as to the primitive theology of 
 the Vedas: 'The religion pro- 
 pounded by him [Zoroaster] is a 
 simple form of theism, recognising 
 but one God, the Creator, Kuler, 
 and Preserver of the universe, 
 without form, invisible. To Him 
 is assigned a place above all, and 
 to Him every praise is to be given 
 for all the good in this world, and 
 all the blessings we enjoy. Zoro- 
 astrianism does not require any 
 image of God to be made for the 
 purpose of worship, as to Him is 
 attributed no form, shape, or colour. 
 He is an immense light, from which 
 all glory, bounty, and goodness flow. 
 He is represented as the mightiest, 
 the most just, and the most bene- 
 volent. His mercies are as bound- 
 less as His being. The adoration 
 or worship of any other object is 
 
 blasphemous.' The author of such 
 language would most probably ex- 
 plain the countless 'invocations' 
 addressed in the Yasna to the 
 various forms of created nature 
 as no more than pious remem- 
 brances of high and noble objects: 
 cf. Wilson, Pdrsi Religion^ pp. 265 
 sq. 
 
 ^ Kawlinson and Spiegel are quite 
 at one on this point. The latter 
 writes [Avesta, Exc. i. 271) : 'In 
 dem ganzen persischen ursj^riing- 
 lichen Eeligionssysteme ist diese 
 Lehre ein Misston.' 
 
 ^ The monuments are not in- 
 cluded in this statement, because, 
 with one exception where the ' god 
 of lies' is glanced at, they contain 
 no traces of the Persian dualism. 
 Their silence, however, with regard 
 to Ahriman is well explained in 
 Eawlinson's Herodotus, Vol. i. p. 
 427, n. 4, where we are reminded 
 that 'the public documents of mo- 
 dern countries make no mention of 
 Satan.' 
 
5S4 Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 conspiciiously set forth in every portion of those writings, or at 
 least in all the portions where the language of the worshipper 
 does not betray the influence of incurable polytheism. The 
 rival principles of Medo-Persia are Ahura-mazda^ (Ormazd), the 
 good divinity, and Agra-mainyus (Ahriman), the * Evil-minded.' 
 
 Now with reference to Ormazd, it must be granted that he 
 is not only, in accordance with his title, *god of the Aryans,' 
 but has also been at times invested with high honours and prero- 
 gatives which suffice almost to lift him to the rank of the Supreme 
 Intelligence. He is the sovereign Judge, the sovereiga excel- 
 lence, the sovereign knowledge : 'greatest, best, most beautiful, 
 the strongest, most intelligent, most graceful, and most holy^.' 
 Everything, so far as it is elevated in its aim and noble in its 
 nature, was the product of his hand : he is the 'Maker of the 
 pure creation ;' more exalted than tlie brilliant, fertilising 
 Mithra, ruler of a spacious province and gifted with ten thousand 
 eyes ; superior also to the holy Sraosha, the author of abundance, 
 bearing in his hand the instruments of vengeance to chastise a 
 multitude of evil spirits ^ One example taken from the Yasna* 
 will exhibit all these varied characteristics in a single group : 
 ^I invoke and celebrate the creator Ahura-mazda, luminous, re- 
 splendent, best and greatest, excellent in strength and in perfec- 
 tion, most intelligent, most lovely, eminent in purity, possess- 
 ing the good knowledge, source of pleasure, who created us, 
 who fashioned us, who feeds us, most accomplished of intelli- 
 gent beings.' 
 
 In the train of this divinity, or at times associating with 
 him as possessors of the same exalted nature, are six other 
 spiritual beings, genii of the world of light. The common 
 name 'amshaspand' {ctmesha-spenta, or the 'immortal holy one') 
 is equally applied to all these seven intelligences ; each has 
 special days in every month devoted to his honour; though 
 
 ^ On the various etymologies of there translated from the Mlnok- 
 
 this word, see Burnouf, Commen- hired (a work of the Sassanian age) 
 
 taire snr le Yagna, pp. 70 sq. ; we notice an endeavour to establish 
 
 Wilson, Pdrsi Religion, p. no. some original co-operation between 
 
 Another name or title of Ormazd, Ormazd and Zerv^na-akarana: *Der 
 
 viz. Spento-mainyus, *the Holy- Schopfer Ormazd erschuf diese 
 
 minded,' brings him into more Welt und Creaturen und Ams- 
 
 direct antagonism with the 'Evil- chaspande und den himmlischen 
 
 minded.' Verstand aus seinem eigenen Lichte 
 
 2 Vendiddd, Farg. xix, § 47. und mit dem Jubelrufe dei' unend- 
 
 ^ Ibid. §§ 51 — 53: cf. Spiegel's lichen Zeit.' 
 
 Studien, in Zeitsch. Deiitsch. morg. * Burnouf, Comment, p. 146. 
 Gesell. v. 223, 224. In a passage 
 
CH. III.] Characteristics of Medo'Persian Heathenism. 535 
 
 expressions, we must also grant, are never wanting where 
 Ormazd is ranked indefinitely above the others, and regarded as 
 the luminous chief and *lord of the amshaspaiids'.' It is proba- 
 ble, as hinted in a previous chapter^, that this frequent limita- 
 tion of the 'holy ones' to seven has reference to the primitive 
 worship of the heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon, and the five 
 planets. Light, in its most elemental form, had fascinated the 
 imagination of the early Aryan, and at first, perhaps as the 
 appropriate symbol of the Godhead, had suggested the generic 
 name of his divinities ■'^. The sun-god (Savitri) was celebrated 
 by the Hindu poet in the oldest of the Yaidic hymns ; and con- 
 sequently, when his kinsmen paid their homage to the gorgeous 
 sky of Persia, it was not unlikely that they all continued to as- 
 sociate some ideas of the invisible world with the more brilliant 
 of the heavenly bodies. The great lord of light, proceeding on 
 his course in peerless dignity and beauty, was the 'eye' of Ormazd 
 himself; the lesser lights were his attendants, shining by his 
 splendour and executing his behests ; and thus, in spite of all 
 the systematising of the first mythology which resulted in the 
 formal 'dualism of Zoroaster,' the old practice* of ascribing ];)er- 
 sonality to sun and moon and stars, and so exalting them* to 
 objects of religious worship, was perpetuated in the Persian sys- 
 tem to the close of its existence. 
 
 But as physical light appears to be involved in deadly strife 
 with physical darkness, so the glory of Ormazd was ever liable 
 to diminution and eclipse beneath the shade of Ahriman, his 
 lying, 'evil-minded,' and corrupting adversary. In the strength 
 imparted to such contrasts by the Medo-Persian creed consists 
 its grand peculiarity^. 
 
 We must not suppose, indeed, with some living writers, 
 that dualism was utterly unknown in all other heathen coun- 
 tries. Typhon's place in reference to Osiris was in many 
 points analogous to that of Ahriman, the rival of Ormazd". 
 
 ^ Wilson, as above, p. 129. On splendissant ; et la lune, qui garde 
 
 the names of the amshaspands , see le germs du taureau; et le soleil, 
 
 Burnouf, as before, pp. 147 — 174. souverain, coursier rapide, ceil cV 
 
 ^ Above, pp. 453 sq. Ahura-mazda; Mithra, chef des 
 
 •' Above, p. 126. provinces.' 
 
 * The following is M. Burnouf's ^ Sir H. Kawlinson has gone so 
 
 version of a hymn in the Yasna far as to conjecture that it was the 
 
 {Comment, p. 375): 'Je celebre, rise of this * dualistic heresy ' which 
 
 j'invoque Ahura et Mithra, elevcs, led to the original disruption of 
 
 immortels, purs; et les astres, crea- the Aryan tribes. 
 
 tiom saintes et celestes; et I'astre 6 p'lutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 
 
 Taschter (Tistrya), lumineux, re- after describing the malignity of 
 
536 ' Christ and other Masters, [part iv. 
 
 The Brahman, also, could discourse of deep and irremediable 
 antagonisms between the laws of matter and of spirit ; and in 
 some of the non- Aryan tribes of India \ to say nothing of 
 American and other distant parallels, the two great members 
 of the pantheon are the Sun, or light-god, and his wife, the 
 Earth ; the latter being adverse to the former as evil to good, 
 yet both of them esteemed the fitting objects of religious wor- 
 ship. Still the shape assumed by Persian dualism is so pecu- 
 liar, the antagonistic forces are so nearly balanced, and the 
 contrast has been carried out so rigorously in its details, that 
 we are justified in treating this as a distinctive feature in the 
 history of religious thought. 
 
 In Persia also, even more than Egypt ^, the relations of the 
 two chief gods reflect the physical circumstances of the country 
 and the struggles of the early population. "While their brethren 
 on tlie Sutlej were invoking Indra and his host to aid in the ex- 
 • pulsion of the dark-complexioned ' Dasyus,' the first settlers in 
 Iran were waging a like contest with the 'hostile ones,' the 
 Tuiryas^ (Turanians). Every inch they rescued from the na- 
 tives was a triumph won from Ahriman by timely succours of 
 Ormazd ; while in the lengthened fluctuations of that contest 
 they beheld an image of the warfare ever raging in the spirit- 
 world, where powers of good and evil, moral light and moral 
 darkness, had alternate mastery. As from the fiat of Ormazd 
 proceeded all the good things of creation, Ahriman had the 
 terrific privilege of creating and transmitting evil^. Every 
 thing that tended to impede the propagation of life and purity 
 and light, or interrupted the benignant flow of order and pros- 
 
 Typhon, proceeds (c. xlvi.) to of the Vendiddd, as soon as it is 
 speak of Zoroastrian dualism as mentioned that Ormazd had cre- 
 something akin to that of Egypt : ated any pure locality, the addition 
 but Mr. Kenrick {Anc, Egijpt, i. uniformly follows: 'Dann schuf 
 419) argues that the contrast was eine Opposition desselben Agra- 
 less definitely established in the mainyus, der voll Tod ist.' After 
 Egyptian system; for if not 'we statements such as this, continu- 
 should find other gods whose at- ally repeated in his own sacred 
 tributes are beneficent assailed by books, it is difficult to understand 
 other Typhous.' how an intelligent writer like Mr. 
 
 1 See the extracts from Major Dosabhoy Framjee {Parsees, p. 255) 
 Macpherson's paper on the reli- can argue that Ahriman ' should be 
 gionof the Khonds, above, pp. 259 sq. taken in an allegorical sense, to de- 
 
 2 Above, pp. 460 sq. note the cause of the temptation 
 2 Spiegel, in Zeitsch. Deittsch. under which man often falls into 
 
 morg. Gesell. v. 223. The Vaidio evil.' The personality of Ahriman 
 equivalent is tunja, 'hostile.* is quite as clearly stated as the per- 
 
 * Thus in the opening Fargard sonality of Ormazd. 
 
CH. III.] Characteristics of Medo^Persian Heathenism, o37 
 
 perity, was imputed to the envious rage of the arch-demon, ever 
 battling from a species of necessity within the borders of his 
 rival. One of these co-ordinate powers was thus an object of 
 desire and reverence, and as such received the willing homage 
 of all worshippers, the frequent prayer, the grateful offering ; 
 while, on turning towards Ahriman, the object of men's dread 
 and horror, prayer itself was changed to abject deprecation, and 
 sacrifice became no better than a weapon or a charm for ward- 
 ing off calamity ^ To illustrate the old ideas on this subject, I 
 may mention that a hideous serpent, which in Egypt was con- 
 nected with Typhonic malice^, was in Persia also the peculiar 
 agent of the Evil-minded. Hence, indeed, arose the fancy that 
 of salutary effects believed to flow in primitive times from the 
 great homa-sacrifice the foremost was the generation of a warrior 
 who might slay ' the homicidal serpent, with three necks, with 
 three heads, with six eyes, and with a thousand forces, — that 
 remorseless god, who destroys purity, that sinner who ravages 
 the worlds, whom Ahriman created the chief foe of purity, in 
 the existing world, for the annihilation of the purity of the 
 worlds ^' 
 
 Exactly as the projects of Ormazd were carried out by six 
 immediate ministers or colleagues, Ahriman ere long was made 
 the centre of a circle of malignant spirits, sons of darkness ; six 
 of whom, the devs (daevas), stand arrayed in deadly strife 
 against the luminous anishaspands. The two orders had thus 
 formed so many pairs of strong antitheses : they personated in 
 the one case high and salutary properties, as life and goodness, 
 
 ^ Plutarch, as before, c. xlvi. angels and good genii, are more 
 Among the other multitudinous properly considered as ideal pro- 
 objects invoked in the Yasna, fre- totypes of actual intelligences (cf. 
 quent mention is made of the Jzeds, Wilson, Pdrsi Religion, pp. 130, 
 a class of gods or genii which at 131). Every thing in nature, up 
 times are scarcely distinguishable to Ormazd himself (Vendiddd, xix. 
 from the Amshasjmnds. They are 46), has its own special Fewer: 
 saluted as ' the most worthy of the and occasionally such model beings 
 jaasters of purity, the most praise- were supposed to form a vast spiri- 
 worthy, the most pervading, the tual army fighting on the side of 
 delight of the master, the pure the good Principle, passing also be- 
 master of purity.' The highest tween'earth and heaven, and carry- 
 member of this order would ap- ing the devotions of 'pure' men to 
 pear to have been Mithra. We the feet of Ormazd (Dollinger, Hei- 
 have again considerable difficulty denthum, p. 362). 
 in determining the precise nature ^ Above, p. 465, n. i. 
 and functions of another class of 3 Translated by Bumouf, EiwtZe*, 
 spirits mentioned in the Yasna, viz, 'Le Dieu Homa,' in Journal Asiat. 
 the Fervers or Fravashis, which, (1844), rv. 493. 
 although reminding us of guardian 
 
538 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 tnitL and plenty, and the element of fire itself considered as a 
 source of happiness ; they personated in the other case destruc- 
 tion, malice, lying, penury, and elemental fire that shrivels and 
 devours. 
 
 The question now is. Are we justified in speaking of the 
 Persian form of dualism as absolute and eternal? Were the 
 powers in conflict so equipotent, the elements of good so hope- 
 lessly and so inextricably blended with the elements of evil, that 
 mankind must ever groan between the terrible contrariety i 
 
 Such is often said to be the character of genuine * Zoroas- 
 trianism;' and little or nothing, I am bound to mention, is 
 detected in the ancient books of Persia that necessitates an 
 opposite conclusion. In those writings, the two kingdoms 
 almost imiformly stand in harsh and absolute antagonism ; on 
 one side there is primal Good producing and reviving good, and 
 on the other, primal evil, which, possessed of a co-ordinate 
 power, is working, and must ever work, disorder and decompo- 
 sition. It appears, moreover, that belief in this most rigorous 
 form of dualism had been perpetuated in a Persian sect entitled 
 Magusseans, while the influence which it once exerted is perhaps 
 still more distinctly to be traced in the projection of the Mani- 
 chiean heresy. 
 
 Mani, we should here remember, lived and taught at Baby- 
 lon in the third century after Christ, and in the mythic names 
 attributed to his pupils (Buddas^, Thomas, Hermas) may be 
 found not only proof of his reputed influence, but allusion to 
 particular systems of belief which he attempted, not long after 
 the Sassanian revival, to amalgamate with the Ormazd-religion. 
 
 It is foreign to our purpose to inquire in what degree the 
 Buddhist, Christian, and Hellenic elements were intermixed^ by 
 him with genuine ' Zoroastrianism ;' but as none of those foreign 
 systems can be charged with teaching the dogma of two opposite 
 and co-eternal principles, we may conclude that in the view of 
 Mani, who insisted ever on such dogma, it was held to be a 
 genuine heirloom of the ancient Persian worthies. On the 
 other hand, as Mani himself is said to have been barbarously 
 put to death upon the charge of falsifying the pure religion of 
 
 ^ The old reading Addas is now trine of Zoroaster,' it came nearer 
 
 corrected into Buddas (Lassen's IncZ. to Hindti systems and especially to 
 
 Alt. III. 406). Buddhism. On the strange way in 
 
 2 F. C. Bauer, Das Manichdische which Zoroaster (ZapdS?;?), Buddha, 
 
 Religionssystem, followed, in the Christ, and M^ni were associated 
 
 main, by Lassen, contends that in on a level by some of the Medi- 
 
 those particulars where Manichse- aeval Manichseans, see above, p. 25, 
 
 ism separated itself from the *doc- n. 2. 
 
CH. III.] Characteristics of Medo- Persian Heathenism. 539 
 
 Zoroaster, we are not at once entitled to draw positive inferences 
 as to the early character of that religion, from accounts which 
 have descended to us of the Manicheean heresy. 
 
 It must, indeed, be granted that so far as our particular 
 question is concerned, the language used by Persians in the 
 fifth century after Christ again implied a prevalent disposition 
 to reduce all contrarieties of the physical and moral world into 
 an abstract unity. For that Zervanism was then at least a 
 primary article of their faith, the following extract from the 
 proclamation^ of a Persian general (a.d. 450) will abundantly 
 establish : 
 
 " Before the heavens and the earth were, the great god 
 Zruan (Zervan) prayed a thousand years, and said, * If I, per- 
 haps, should have a son named Vormist (Ormazd), who will 
 make the heavens and the earth.' And he conceived two in 
 his body, one by reason of his prayer, and the other because 
 he said Ferhaps. When he knew that there were two in his 
 body, he said, * Whichever shall come first, to him wiil I give 
 over my sovereignty.' He who had been conceived in doubt 
 passed through his body and went forth. To him spake Zruan : 
 ^ Who art thou 1 ' He said, ^ I am thy son Yormist.' To him 
 said Zruan : * My son is light and fragrant breathing ; thou art 
 dark and of evil disposition.' As this appeared to his son 
 exceedingly harsh, he (Zruan) gave him the empire^ for a thou- 
 sand years. When the other son was born to him, he called 
 him Yormist. He then took the empire from Ahriman, gave 
 it to Yormist, and said to him, *Till now I have prayed to thee, 
 now thou must pray to me.' And Yormist made heaven and 
 earth ; AJiiiman on the contrary brought forth evil." 
 
 1 The author of it was Mihr sions to the same mythe in Tbeo- 
 
 Nerseh, grand vizier of Iran. It dore of Mopsuestia, who says, in 
 
 was addressed to the Armenians, speaking of Zervan {dpxvyo^ Trdv- 
 
 and has been preserved in the His- rcou), that while making a libation 
 
 tory of Vartan by an Armenian (? of the homa-plant), lua t^kyi top 
 
 bishop Elisaeus (pp. ii, 12, trans- 'Op/Jil(rdav, ^tckcv cKeivov koI top Sa- 
 
 lated by Neumann, Lond. 1830). r(i.vS.v. 
 
 The account respecting Zervan aDd ^ ^Y)oi& priority of birth and em- 
 the two derived intelligences (Or- pire here attributed to the Evil 
 mazd and Ahriman) agrees sub- One has a most striking parallel 
 stantially with that transmitted in the dualistic system of the Bo- 
 by another Armenian writer of gomiles (of the 12th century after 
 the 5th century after Christ : see Christ) : see Hardwick's Middle 
 the Refutation des Sectes, par Ez- Age, pp. 303 sq. There also Sa- 
 ^ig» PP* 75 ^^' (translated into tanael is the first-born, and is en- 
 French by De Florival, Paris, trusted for a season with the chief 
 1853). Dollinger (p. 360, note) administration of the world, 
 has also pointed out distinct allu- 
 
540 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 In accordance with the hopeful spirit that gave being, both 
 to this and other kindred mythes, the reign of the good Prin- 
 ciple, though subsequent in point of time, was represented as far 
 mightier and more lasting than the reign of evil. Ahriman, 
 the child of doubt, shall be hereafter superseded \ On the 
 expiration of some dark millennium, he shall cease to be the 
 terror of all pure and upright beings, while his rival, raised 
 to the administration of the kingdom, shall create a second 
 order of superior spirits, or at least initiate some remedial 
 process, by which all things now existing may revert to their 
 original condition. In other words, the ancient Persian could 
 descry beneath the manifold contradictions of the actual world 
 an aboriginal unity, nay, could hear amid them all the promise 
 of some blessed restoration. 
 
 Faint, indeed, and broken were the whispers of that promise. 
 Often the mere echo of instinctive longings under which tha 
 heart of man had ached in every region of the ancient world, 
 it was devoid of all historic basis, and was pointing onward to 
 no definite fulfilment ; yet in spite of its intrinsic weakness, 
 and in spite of all the clouds in which it was involved by de- 
 sperate speculations on the origin of evil, a belief in some such 
 promise, — a belief in the superior majesty of truth and her 
 eventual triumph, — had been always lingering in the Persian 
 mind. We may hereafter have occasion to observe that under 
 the Sassanian monarchs, some at least of the more popular tra- 
 ditions on this subject bore no slight resemblance to the 
 Messianic prophecies transmitted in the Hebrew Church. 
 
 As special virtue had been constantly ascribed to words of 
 Ormazd, it was by these, as parts of his ofiensive armour, that 
 the good man was commissioned to do battle with the swarming 
 hosts of darkness. For examjDle, when the Evil One demanded"^ 
 of Zarathustra ^ By whose word wilt thou smite, by whose word 
 wilt thou destroy V the ^holy man' is said to have replied : *A 
 
 ^ These peculiarities of the later (eine Zeit), da er nicht war in 
 
 Persian creed are fully established diesen Geschopfen, und es wird 
 
 in passages brought to light by J. sein (eine Zeit), da er nicht sein 
 
 Miiller, in 1843, and subsequently wird in den Geschopfen.' The same 
 
 considered by Spiegel, in the Zeit- idea of Ahriman's eventual over- 
 
 schrift der Deutsch. morgenldnd. throw occurs in Plutarch, De Isid. 
 
 Gesellschaft (1851), v. 225. One et Osir. c. xlvii. 
 of such passages affirms in refe- ^ yendiddd, xix. 28—32, where 
 
 rence to Ahriman: *Aber es wird I follow Spiegel's version: cf. x. 
 
 eine Zeit sein, wo sein Schlagen 25, sq. In § 28 we are told 'Dies 
 
 aufhort.' And in a second, after sind die Worte, welche alle Daevas 
 
 describing the effects of the Evil schlagen.' 
 Principle, it is added: *Es war 
 
CH. III.] Characteristics of Medo-Persian Heathenism. 541 
 
 mortar and a bowl, the homa and the words which Ormazd has 
 spoken, these are my best weapons.' Nor did victory over 
 Ahriman consist in mere escape from present physical suffering, 
 and in larger and more sparkling cups of temporal prosperity ^ 
 Here the Persian, of historic times at least, was far superior to 
 his kinsman whose importunate prayer for cows and horses and 
 the like was heard pervading all the oldest invocations of the 
 Yeda. In the measure of her moral sensibility, Persia may be 
 fairly ranked among the brightest spots of ancient heathendom. 
 
 The 'holy man,' indeed, of the Avesta, is often a mere 
 synonym for * worshipper of Ormazd,' yet excellence, it should 
 not be forgotten, is confined no longer to descendants of a 
 priestly class dissevered by impassable gulphs from all below 
 them : not to the possessor of recondite knowledge, and the 
 lordly founder of some philosophic school ; not even to the 
 ardent devotee recoiling from the din and business of the world, 
 and seeking in the silence of the jungle a sure refuge from its 
 perils and seductions. Purity is there made possible for all : in 
 all it is connected with incessant warfare, and in all dependent 
 on exact conformity to the Ormazd-religion, 'in thought, in word, 
 in deed.' Deflection from its precepts is the only cause of per- 
 manent disaster. Servants of Ormazd, unfortified by prayer 
 and sacrifice, may yield to the temptations of the Evil One, and 
 as the fruit of their misdeeds may undergo a lengthened term of 
 penance. The body also must in every case eventually succumb 
 beneath the iron yoke of death, the ruthless minister of Ahri- 
 man, and then communicate a portion of its own 'impurity' to 
 all who come in contact with it. Still so long as any man was 
 held to have continued in the number of the 'pure,' it was 
 believed that saving efficacy issued to his spirit from the law of 
 Ormazd; that law 'taking away all the evil thoughts, words 
 and actions of a pure man, as the strong fleet wind purifies 
 the heaven^. 
 
 A cursory glance at precepts and prescriptions of the Vendi- 
 dad will serve, however, to convince us that in Persia, as in 
 Egypt, the idea of 'purity' had always been extremely super- 
 ficial and unspiritual. It involved but little more than a puncti- 
 lious compliance with established rites and ceremonies. Starting 
 from the thought that every thing in nature was intrinsically 
 either 'clean' or 'unclean,' — a production either of Ormazd 
 the good divinity, or else of the impure arch-demon, — the Old 
 Persian was at least as anxious to escape from bodily defilement', 
 
 1 Cf. above, p. 128. , 3 Qn this subject, see, for in- 
 
 ^ Vendidddf in. 149. stance, Vendiddd, vii. 193—196. , 
 
542 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 or from contact with material things possessed by Ahriman, as 
 to exemplify the higher moral qualities of which that Evil One 
 had introduced the hideous negations. On the other hand, it is 
 apparent that the consciousness of an unceasing conflict in the 
 spirit-world had kept alive the habit of discriminating between 
 moral light and moral darkness, and produced in many hearts a 
 deep abhorrence of the evil, and a resolute yearning after good. 
 The Persian had been commonly one of the least compromising, 
 if not also the most active and most truthful, nations of an- 
 tiquity \ Accustomed to regard the universe in general as one 
 mighty battle-field, the genuine worshipper of Ormazd had also 
 tenanted his own immediate sphere with foes innumerable : his 
 mission was to aid in counteracting the unwearied malice of the 
 devs, to vindicate the cause of rig] it and truth against the advo- 
 cates of wrong and falsehood ; and the stern intolerant spirit 
 breathed by despots like Cambyses indicates the natural pro- 
 duct of that system of religion, when directed by unflinching 
 hands. 
 
 Indeed the Persian monarchs may be fitly taken as at once 
 the visible centres aud the highest practical illustrations of the 
 Medo-Persian theology. Unchecked alike by the intrigues and 
 admonitions of a dominant priesthood, such as that which flour- 
 ished at the ancient court of Oude, or Thebes, or Memphis, they 
 stood forward the supreme reflections, if not actual incarnations, 
 of the glory of Ormazd"^. The warm and flexible polytheism of 
 their subjects had been earnestly directed towards them^ They 
 seemed to be entrusted with the sole administration of the light- 
 kingdom, as the Pharaohs of an earlier period were the children 
 
 Bhode {Bie heilige Sage des Zend- 'Zoroastrianism.' 
 
 volks, pp. 453 sq., Frankfurt, 1820) ^ Thus, when Themistocles (Plu- 
 
 in discussing such passages at- tarch, T/iem. c. xxvii) wished to be 
 
 tempts to establish an absolute presented to the king, he was told 
 
 identity of view in the Avesta by the Persian Artabanus that he 
 
 and the Old Testament : but what- must first submit to offer worship 
 
 ever may be urged with regard to ' to the image of god the preserver 
 
 some particulars, there is certainly of all things' {i.e. of Ormazd). 
 
 not a word in the Books of Moses Curtius (viii. 5) in like manner 
 
 to justify the supposition that any says expressly, 'Persas reges suos 
 
 creature is essentially unclean, or inter deos colere:' see Hengsten- 
 
 that certain animals are produced berg, Genuineness of Daniel, pp. 
 
 by the creative energy of an Evil 103 sq., Edinb. 1847. 
 
 Principle. ^ Arrian, Alex. iv. 11, mentions 
 
 1 Burnouf, Etudes, in the Journ. «- report that this TrpoaK^prjais began 
 
 Asiat. (1840), p. 324, regards the with Cyrus: A^7erat top irpCiTov 
 
 importance assigned to the 'sen- TrpoaKvi^yjdrjvaL avdpihirwv Kvpou koX 
 
 timent of human personality and f^' -^ySe e/ifxelvai Uipaats re K<d 
 
 morality' as the best feature of Mi^dois Ti^vde rrju TaTrcworTjra. 
 
CH. III.] Characteristics of Medo-Persian Heathenism. 543 
 
 of the Suii\ Their court was an inferior copy of the court of 
 Ormazd : on grand or critical occasions they convoked a solemn 
 council, the idea of which, in form and number, had Vjeen 
 borrowed from the brilliant circle of divine amshaspands ; and 
 as 'words of Ormazd' himself were deemed most sacred and 
 oracular, the law of ancient Persia had been taken from the lips 
 of her great despot, who by placing his own signet on the 
 harshest of decrees could render them irrevocable. 
 
 ^ Above, p. 443. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Alleged Affinities of the Medo-Persian Greed to 
 Hebraism and Christianity, 
 
 Ourw X^^et Kupios 6 Geos T(p XP^^'^^ A^o^ Kupy, oi; iKpdT7)(ra rrjs 8e^ids... 
 'E7(j KJp'.os 6 Geos, /cat ou/c ^crrij/ ^t: ttXt;*/ euou 6e6s. ivtaxvcrd (re, Kal 
 ovK fideis fie. Xva. yvuaiv oi air dvaroXuiv ^Xiou Kal oi ciTro dvajULUJv^ on 
 ovK ^(TTi BeOS vXtjv ifjLov. €y<h Kvpios 6 Geoy, Kal ovk ^<ttiu in. eyoj 6 
 Karaa-Kevdaa^ 0ws, /cat TroLTjcas aKOTOS, 6 ttolQv elprjpTjv, Kal ktl^iou Aca/ca. 
 iyu} Kvpios 6 Geos, 6 ttoiujp TraVra ravra. Isa. xlv. i — 7. (LXX.) 
 
 The Great Captivity: its causes, and effects. With what form of 
 heathenism were the Hebreivs brought in contact? General character of 
 Babylonian mythology. Resemblances between the Hebrew and Persian 
 systems. State of religious feeling in the early Christian centuries. 
 Influence in Persia of Jeics, of Christians, and of early heretics. 
 Were the Hebrews guilty of corrupting their old religion ? 
 
 § I. The Fall of Man. The primitive Bull. Meshia and Meshiane; 
 their temptation, and fall. The form of the Tempter. 
 
 § 2. Doctrine of the Evil One, Satan and Ahriman; how differing. 
 Scriptiiral notices of the Tempter; how understood by Jews, and 
 Christians. Heathen testimony. 
 
 § 3. Doctrine of Holy Angels. Attributed to heathen influence. The 
 Sadducees. Rabbinical testimony. Early traces of angelic orders. 
 Amshaspands and archangels. Number of archangels. 
 
 § 4. Doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body. Not traced in the 
 Avesta. Two theories of the Body. The Hebrew doctrine ante- 
 Baby Ionic. 
 
 § 5. Doctrine of a Benefactor and Mediator. Sosiosh. Persian escha- 
 tology. Early place and character of Mithra : a Mediator. Substitu- 
 tion of Mithra for Ormazd. Post-Christian representations of Mithra. 
 Mithraic mysteries. Opposition between Mithraism and Christianity. 
 
 The second period in her lifetime when the Hebrew Church 
 was forced into more lasting and direct communication with the 
 heathen of surrounding countries must be dated from the middle 
 of the eighth century before the Christian era. As the prelude to 
 a general deportation of the Ten Tribes, the settlers in the Trans- 
 Jordanic province had been carried captive to Assyria under 
 Tiglath-Pileser (2 Kings xv. 29) ; and at length, about the year 
 600, a large portion of the feeble remnant, stricken by a like 
 
CHAP. IV.] The Medo-Persian Creed, 545 
 
 calamity, had run the risk of being quite extinguished under 
 the tremendous despotism, which formed in every age a vivid 
 type of the ungodlike and unchristianlike, — Babylon the Great. 
 
 The exile was itself, however, the effect^, and not the cause, 
 of cravings after * all the abominations of the heathen.' From 
 the period of the Exodus the leaders of the Hebrew nation had 
 been ever struggling with this downward, retrogressive tendency. 
 ^ The Lord God of their fathers sent to them by His messengers, 
 rising up betimes and sending... but they mocked the messengers 
 of God and despised His words and misused His prophets, until 
 the wrath of the Lord arose against His people, till there was no 
 remedy' (2 Chron. xxxvi. 15, IG). Yet penal though it was, 
 the isolation of the Hebrews in the 'wilderness of the nations' 
 had been also meant as a corrective discipline, and actually con- 
 duced by visible stages to the culture and the exaltation of the 
 Church. Henceforth, as Jew and Christian have alike acknow- 
 ledged, there was far less disposition to relapse into the bondage 
 of the old polytheism. Closer contact with the creed and insti- 
 tutions of his heathen taskmasters had wakened in the spirit of 
 the Hebrew exile a more deep and passionate longing not for 
 Salem only, bvit the worship of his fathers' God. He bowed no 
 more in adoration of the graven image, nor of elements and 
 heavenly bodies : he no longer substituted a personification of 
 recurring processes in animal or vegetable nature for the ' God 
 of the spirits of all flesh.' It is again observable that the trying- 
 period of captivity, when the Hebrew could no longer celebrate 
 the ritual worship of his fathers, was selected as the aptest time^ 
 for inculcating lessons of Divine wisdom on the subject of a new 
 ceconomy and a truer service of the heart : while prophecies of 
 the Messiah, in accordance with the law of progress and expan- 
 sion which obtains in all their earlier stages, had been now 
 detached more plainly from the thought of national triumph or 
 disaster, and invested with their fullest form and their most 
 spiritual expression. 
 
 But while sacred writers on the one hand trace that exile to 
 the heathenish temper of the chosen people, and attribute on the 
 other hand the restoration of the Hebrews to a signal act of 
 mercy following their profound repentance, the assailants of 
 revealed religion have persisted in affirming that the sojourn of 
 the Jews in Babylonia was the time when, most of all, they had 
 deflected from the creed of Abraham and David, when the 
 priest and prophet also, equally besotted by the popular love 
 
 ^ See above, pp. 515 sq. ^ Above, pp. 108 sq. 
 
 H. 35 
 
54G Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 of heathenism, had joined in the adulteration of the choicest 
 truths committed to their keeping. With the sole exception of 
 a faithful remnant, whose descendants must be sought for (it is 
 now discovered) in the sect of the Sadducees, the great com- 
 munity returned from Babylon, so infected with the supersti- 
 tions of the foreign despot, that the doctors of the subsequent 
 period (not excepting Christ and the Apostles) had been all 
 unable or unwilling to shake off the dominant delusion. As the 
 traces of Egyptian heathenism were freely pointed out, by this 
 class of critics, in the ritual institutions of the ancient Hebrew, 
 they proceed to argue that a worse corruption in respect of 
 doctrine had resulted from his long familiarity w^ith the Zendic 
 literature of Medo-Persia. 
 
 ISTow in estimating this momentous question it is doubtless 
 of the first importance to observe that any influences exerted 
 on the Hebrews by the votaries of the Ormazd-religion must 
 have always, in the period of the exile, been extremely slender 
 and indirect. The principal scene of transportation was not 
 Persia Proper ; and although the natives of some Median cities 
 where those exiles were dispersed might then have been, in part 
 at least, related ethnologically to their Perso- Aryan neighbours, 
 the religion which prevailed in Media \ before the accession of 
 Darius Hystaspis, and perhaps still later, was the element-wor- 
 ship of the Scythic Magi, — not the formal and elaborate dualism 
 connected with the name of Zoroaster and proclaimed at large 
 in the Avesta. It would further seem that actual conquerors of 
 the Hebrew nation, the Assyrians or Chaldaeo-Babylonians, not 
 the Medo-Persians, are the people to whose creed we should 
 most reasonably turn in searching for an explanation of the 
 change alleged to have passed over the theology of the conquered. 
 Is there, then, enough of general similarity in the ideas ot 
 ancient Babylonians and of Hebrews after the Captivity, to 
 warrant us in carrying this investigation far into details ? I an- 
 swer, that no contrast could have well been greater. The my- 
 thology of Babylonia from the oldest period to the Achsemenian 
 conquest^ will exhibit scarcely any trace of dualism, which forms, 
 
 1 See above, pp. 524 sq. most remarkable features of the 
 
 2 Its main identity at very dif- Babylonian mythology is the high 
 ferent periods is affirmed by Sir rank there awarded to the Moon- 
 H. Eawlinson, JoM-r/i. ^s. iS'oc. XV. god: see above, p. 359, where 
 253, n. 3. In a special Essay on moon-worship, as exemplified in 
 the subject (Rawlinson's Herod. old religions of America, is con- 
 I. 584 sq.), the absence of all nected with the thought of some 
 trace of dualism is more distinctly great evil principle. 
 
 pointed out. Perhaps one of the 
 
-V OP' TVfK 
 CHAP. IV.] The Medo-Persian Creed. (f'D'NlFsif ' '^X']^' 
 
 as we have seen, the most distinctive property c^^Sb^ JP^rsian '\ ^:«' 
 system, and which Hebrews are supposed to have eventually 't^^ 
 
 adopted. That religion, on the contrary, had ever been ^ a very 
 gross polytheism,' which is said in general grouping to have 
 borne no small resemblance to 'the mythological systems of 
 Greece and Kome ^/ and therefore must have differed toto ccelo 
 from the creed of the Old Testament, alike before and after 
 the Babylonish captivity. I shall accordingly dismiss at once 
 the oft-repeated fallacy which professes to connect the Hebrew 
 exiles with the advocates of the Ormazd-religion, or, despairing 
 of this pretext, throws together^ into one the motley tenets of 
 Magi, of Perso-Aryans and of Babylonians, gives the general 
 name of ' dualism ' to the incongruous compound, and concludes 
 by arguing that the Jews who ' spent the long years of their 
 captivity ' in the midst of it ' returned not unimbued with the 
 superstitions of their masters.' 
 
 The unfairness of such arguments must not, however, tempt 
 us to deny the fact that striking parallelisms do really exist 
 between traditions now surviving in the sacred books of Persia 
 and some doctrines of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. 
 What may be the real ground of such resemblances, the age 
 when they are first apparent, and the aspect they are calculated 
 to assume in reference to the character and claims of Chris- 
 tianity, are questions calling for minute investigation : but since 
 no competent scholar is prepared to say that the Avesta in its 
 present shape is clearly traceable further back than the third 
 century after Christ, and since the fact is growing more indis- 
 putable every year that a variety of Semitic, if nob Christian, 
 elements were intermingled with the faith as well as with the 
 language and literature of the Sassanian period, we are surely 
 not at liberty to urge, before a strict examination of particulars, 
 that traces of revealed religion which exist in sacred books of 
 Persia must be treated as in every case original, and as proving 
 the existence of an imitative spirit only in the Jewish nation. 
 It is antecedently as probable that the Persian borrowed largely 
 from the Hebrew as that the Hebrew borrowed from the 
 Persian. 
 
 If resemblances in question should be found too many or too 
 
 1 Bawlinson's Herod, i. 586. ism was the creed of the Medes, 
 
 2 This is done, for instance, in Persians, and Bahyloiiians.^ If by 
 Dr. Donaldson's Chj'istian Ortho- 'creed of the Medes' we are to 
 doxy^ p. 102, where, unconscious, understand pure 'Magism,' the 
 it would seem, of the confusion, assertion is still further incor- 
 he informs the reader that 'dual- rect. 
 
 35-2 
 
548 Christ and other Masters. [part IV. 
 
 minute to be regarded as entirely accidental, — such, that is, as 
 men might, under similar circumstances, have originated inde- 
 })endently of each other, — three suppositions can alone be urged 
 in explanation ol* the strange phenomena. We may hold that 
 the traditions common to the Persian and Hebrew (1) are 
 equally a portion of * original truth,' which both alike inherited 
 from fathers of the human family : or (2) the Persians, at the 
 period of the exile, and still more in later and post- Christian 
 times, when their own system reached its full proportions, were 
 conversant in some degree with Hebrew and Christian learning : 
 or (3) the Jewish doctors in the course of their dispersion at, and 
 after the Captivity, contracted an unnatural fondness for the 
 sacred books of Persia. 
 
 (1) The first of these three suppositions may of course be 
 held concurrently with the second -, yet by many Christian writers 
 of our own and foreign countries, it alone has been regarded as 
 the key to the affinities we are considering. When the genuine 
 works of the A vesta, and still more the Bundehesh^ itself, a 
 Pehlevi compilation, were first brought to light by the adven- 
 turous Duperron, men were startled by the suddenness and 
 brilliance of the grand disclosure. They beheld in it a series of 
 most venerable relics, each at least coeval with the Persian 
 monarchy. Nor at present,* when it is completely ascertained 
 that some of the results to which Duperron pointed with especial 
 satisfaction were due to his inaccurate version of the sacred 
 texts he had assisted in recovering, is there any lack of Christian 
 writers who affirm that the traditions of the Avesta are well- 
 nigh commensurate with those of the Old Testament. * Of the 
 King of Heaven ' it is asserted^ ' and the Father of eternal light, 
 
 ^ See above, p. 527. ranking Persia far above most 
 '^ F. von Schlegel, Phil, of His- other regions: 'Such we find in 
 tory, pp. 173, 174, where it is nations most infected with poly- 
 added : ' That with all these doc- theistic error : and much more we 
 trines much may have been, or might well conceive to exist in 
 really was, combined, which the one by which the grosser forms of 
 ancient Hebrews, and even we, idolatry were ever held in peculiar 
 would account erroneous, is very abhorrence: a nation whose great- 
 possible, and indeed may almost est Prince is signally honoured by 
 naturally be surmised ; but this Divine prophecy [cf . the motto at 
 by no means impairs that strong the head of this chapter] in being 
 historical resemblance we here named as the future restorer of 
 speak of.' Dr. Mill {Christ. Adv. God's people to their ancient seat: 
 Fubl. for 1841, p. 62), in alluding and whose sages were summoned 
 to the preservation of original from afar, before the great and 
 truth in various parts of heathen- wise of Israel, to adore the infant 
 dom, agi'ees with Schlegel in Redeemer.' 
 
CHAP. IV.] The MedO'Persian Creed. 549 
 
 and of the pure world of light, of the eternal Word by which all 
 things were created, of the seven mighty spirits that stand next 
 to the throne of Light and Omnipotence, and of the glory of 
 those heavenly hosts which encompass that throne ; next, of the 
 origin of evil and of the Prince of darkness, the monarch of 
 those rebellious spirits — the enemies of all good ; they [the Per- 
 sians] in a great measure entertained completely similar, or at 
 least very kindred, tenets to those of the Hebrews.' We may see 
 hereafter that all statements of this kind are both exaggerated 
 and overcoloured ; yet no student of the question who consi- 
 ders the proximity of Persia to the cradle of the human race 
 and the existence of a similar cluster of traditions^ in the kin- 
 dred tribe of Indo- Aryans, will be likely to relinquish the belief 
 that there, as well as in the darker depths of gentilism, the 
 echoes of primeval truths had lingered ages after they had lost 
 all practical effect. 
 
 (2) The next hypothesis accounting for those common ele- 
 ments of thought and worship was at first supported mainly by 
 insisting on the synchronism of Zoroaster and the Hebrew pro- 
 phets of the Captivity ; a further supposition being that if 
 Daniel and Zoroaster had not actually communicated with each 
 other, as doctor and disciple, the reputed author of the Avesta 
 had at least been versed in * sacred writings of the Jewish re- 
 ligion^.' It was felt by the adherents of this view, especially 
 when regard was had to the minute disclosures of the Bundehesh, 
 that many representations so closely resemble ' those of the He- 
 brew Scriptures, as to leave no doubt of their real origin, through 
 whatever channel ideas so analogous, or almost identical, can 
 have been derived. The analogy is not of that kind which may 
 be attributed to a similar derivation of tradition from a common 
 source. It is more precise, and evidently belongs to a period 
 not very remote^.' So long, however, as the history of Zax-athus- 
 
 1 See above, pp. 207 sq. world, that persons are not want- 
 
 2 See, for instance, Prideaux, ing who identify him with the 
 Connection, i. 216, Lond. 17 18, Hindu Buddha, and ascribe the ap- 
 who adds that the whole system pearance of Buddhism in Central 
 was extracted thence; 'only the India to the captivity and disper- 
 crafty impostor took care to dress sion of the Jews. [Journ. As. Soc. 
 it up in such a style and form, as xvi. 233.) 
 
 would make it best agree with ^ Prichard, Bcsearches, iv. 45, 
 
 that old religion of the Medes and where, however, the so-called 'my- 
 
 Persians, which he grafted it upon.' thus of the Zendavesta' is taken 
 
 It is curious to observe, in con- chiefly from Rhode's uncritical 
 
 nection with the prophet Daniel, work entitled Die heilige Sage des 
 
 and his influence on the heathen Zendvolks (Frankfurt, 1820). 
 
550 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 tra is involved in the obscurity thrown over it bj recent criticism 
 we are unable to refer the introduction of Semitic thoughts 
 among the Medo-Persians to supposed eifects of his communica- 
 tion with the Hebrew exiles. Like uncertainty is felt when we 
 compare some striking texts of the Avesta with the kindred 
 language of the Old Testament ; for owing to the numerous gaps 
 in Persian history and the changes which the Persian writings 
 have undergone, there is good reason for suspecting the antiquity 
 of certain passages on which our predecessors had implicitly 
 relied. If, on the other hand, we start from the idea that many 
 of the Persian stories which resemble Hebraism were not the 
 product of remote ages, but obtained their earliest credit in the 
 first three centuries after Christ, the history of the period will 
 be found in many different ways to favour s\ich hypothesis. 
 
 That age was characterised far more than all before it by a 
 spirit of religious syncretism, an eager thirst for compromised 
 To mould together thoughts which differed fundamentally, to 
 grasp if possible the common elements pervading all the multi- 
 farious religions of the world, was deemed the proper business 
 of philosophy both in East^ and West. It was a period, one 
 has lately said, ^of mystic incubation, when India and Egypt, 
 Babylonia and Greece, were sitting together and gossiping like 
 crazy old women, chattering with toothless gums and silly brains 
 about the dreams and joys of their youth, yet unable to recall 
 one single thought or feeling with that vigour which once gave 
 it life and truth. It was a, period of religious and metaphysical 
 delirium, when everything became everything, when Maya and 
 
 ^ Cf. above, pp. 22, 23. bis hieher, wie solche spater in 
 
 2* Speaking of Eastern Syria, Manichaismus wohl kaum be- 
 
 Uhlhorn remarks [Die Homilien zweifelt werden konnen. Auf 
 
 und Recognitionen des Clemens diesem Boden erstarkte nun das 
 
 Bomanus, Gottingen, 1854, P- 4^1)- Christenthum rasch und brachte 
 
 *Kein Land war der Religions- eine machtige Gahrung hervor. 
 
 mischung so gelegen wie dieses. Dazu kamen dann nacli dem Un- 
 
 Hier haben sich von den altesten tergange des jUdischen Staates 
 
 Zeiten an die verschiedensten die aus Palastina auswandernden 
 
 Volker gedrangt, beruhrt und ver- Juden und Judenchristen, welche 
 
 mischt. Judenthum und Parsis- die Keime der Zersetzung mit 
 
 mus, der noch in den ersten Zeiten hintiberbrachten. So schoss hier 
 
 der ehristlichen Zeitrechnung sich eine reicbe Saat von Sectenbil- 
 
 stark nach Westen zu verbreitete, dungen, die alle mehr oder minder 
 
 wie seine zahlreichen Anhanger einen Miscbcharakter an sich 
 
 selbst in Kleinasien beweisen, tragen und in denen wir uberall 
 
 beriihrten und vermischten sich wieder unsern Homilien ahnelnde 
 
 hier. Dazu war griechische Bil- Elemente erkennen, die ein na- 
 
 dung ggkommen, selbst Einfltisse heres oder ferneres Verwandt- 
 
 des Buddhaismus erstreckten sich schaftsverhaltniss bezeugen.' 
 
CHAP. IV.] The MedO'Persian Creed. 551 
 
 Sophia, Mithra and Christ, Viraf and Isaiah, Belus, Zervan and 
 Kronos were mixed up in one jumbled system of inane specula- 
 tion, from which at last the East was delivered by the positive 
 doctrines of Muhammad, the West by tlie pure Christianity of 
 the Teutonic nations \' Out of this remarkable ferment of the 
 human spirit issued both the Bundehesh and the Minokhired, 
 which, though strongly Persian in their tone, are also strongly 
 tinctured by Semitic and Hebraic notions. For Jews^ on the 
 destruction of the holy city planted some of their chief schools in 
 Babylonia, and even were at times promoted to high places in 
 the Persian court ; in learned centres, like Edessa, were discussed 
 the various tenets of all known religions, Christianity in the 
 number ; and the Gnostic Bardesanes, writing from that city in 
 the time of Marcus Aurelius, draws attention to the early pro- 
 gress of the GospeP, not in Parthia and in Media only, but iti 
 Persia Proper and in Bactria. Passing by the other traces 
 which the new religion left behind it in those far-off regions, we 
 may notice as of vast importance the long-thriving sect of Mani- 
 chseans, who accepted Christianity as the groundwork of their 
 composite belief : while stress may equally be laid upon the fact 
 that one favourite writing of the later ' Zoroastrians ' is only a 
 Parsee adaptation "* of the apocryphal or quasi-Christian work 
 entitled the Ascension of Isaiah ; where the prophet, on recover- 
 ing from his rapture, narrates a journey to the ^ seventh heaven,' 
 in which his eyes were gladdened by the vision of Christ and of 
 the Holy Spirit, and beheld inscribed upon a roll the wondrous 
 story of the birth and passion of the Saviour. 
 
 (3) In exact proportion to the strength of the hypothesis 
 just mentioned is the weakness of a third account which has been 
 rendered of resemblances between the Persian and the Biblical 
 traditions. Assuming even that the captive tribes were brought 
 into familiar intercourse with the Ormazd-religion ; assuming 
 also that the Hebrew people as a body, still un weaned from old 
 
 1 M. Miiller's 'Last Kesults of name and the 'Apa^ariKov 'Ha-aiov) 
 the Persian Eesearches,' as before, in Spiegel, as before, pp. 21 sq. 
 p. 119; although 1 cannot acqui- JBis closing remark is: 'Die Ver- 
 esce entirely in some of the ex- wandtschaft der beiden Bucher 
 pressions. wird wol Niemand ableugnen, doch 
 
 2 Spiegel, Avesta, i. 17, 25. scheint die christliche Gestaltung 
 
 3 Euseb. Prcepar. Evangel, vi. die altere zu sein. Die Lehre von 
 10 (Vol. II. pp. 92, 93, ed. Gais- sieben Himmeln ist nicht parsisch, 
 ford) : cf. Neander, Ch. Hist. i. die spatere Parsenlehre kennt bios 
 III. drei, iiber ihnen ist der Goroth- 
 
 * See the comparison between many die Wohnung Ahura-maz- 
 the two works (the Arda-virdf- das.' 
 
552 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 corruptions, had come back to Zion lusting after ' their fathers' 
 idols ;' in other words, assuming two positions which both mili- 
 tate against a long array of well-authenticated facts ; we not- 
 withstanding offer violence to all the probabilities of the question 
 by supposing that Hebrew doctors, such as Daniel or Ezekiel, in 
 whose eyes the exile was itself a penalty provoked by heathenish 
 tendencies, should slide away into the superstitions either of 
 their patrons or their taskmasters. The sentiment possessing 
 them had always been : ^ How shall we sing the Lord's song in 
 a strange land? If I forget thee, Jerusalem, let my right 
 hand forget her cunning ;' and notable instances may be adduced 
 where men of constancy like theirs could brave the fiercest rage 
 of Babylon, the lions' den, the blazing furnace, rather than 
 i-enounce their sacred nationality or ' worship any other god.' 
 
 But with the view of justifying this main inference more 
 completely, I propose to shew, by strict examination of par- 
 ticulars, that where a truly old relationship exists between the 
 Hebrew and Persian systems, it is naturally explained on the 
 hypothesis of aboriginal unity ; and that in other cases there is 
 either no true parallelism at all, or else that points of doctrine, 
 said to be imported by the later class of sacred writers, had been 
 actually current in the Hebrew Church for centuries anterior to 
 the Babylonish exile. 
 
 § 1. The Fall of Man, 
 
 According to the 'Persian Genesis' (the Bunclehesh), the 
 earliest representative of animal creation^ was the primitive 
 Bull (Goshurun), from whose right shoulder, as he fell beneath 
 the stroke of the malignant Ahriman, proceeded Kaiomorts, 
 the first of human beings. This grand prototype of men, 
 
 ^ The different passages of the absolute (cf. however, above, p. 
 Bundehesh relating to this point 539) ; then, a cycle of the same 
 are brought together in Rhode, period, when Ahriman commences 
 Die heilige Sage^ etc., pp. 383 sq. : his attack upon the light-kingdom, 
 cf. DolUnger, p. 367. It is also but, abashed by the exceeding 
 worthy of remark, that in the purity of the fervers of holy men 
 Persian story the account of man's (above, p. 537, n. i), falls back 
 fall is intimately connected with into the dark abyss, and lies quies- 
 the cosmogonic theory which per- cent during 3000 years. At the ex- 
 vaded most other countries of the piration of this time, Ahriman be- 
 ancient world both Old and New comes more bold and active ; and in 
 (see above, pp. 379 sq). In Persia thefourthperiodof 3000 years, com- 
 bat least according to one version pleting the 'magnus annus' of the 
 of the matter) we have first a cycle later Persians, Ahriman is, on the 
 of 3000 years, when Ormazd is whole, ascendant and predominant. 
 
CHAP. 17.] The Medo'Fersian Creed, 55S 
 
 including in himself the properties of both the sexes, was in 
 turn assaulted by the Evil One, and finally destroyed by 
 machinations of the devs ; but from the vital force inherent in 
 him there sprang up a plant which yielded as its fruit the true 
 progenitors of the human family (Meshia and Meshiane^), or 
 at least became the author of their bodily framework ; for the 
 soul itself was held to draw its origin directly from nothing 
 short of heaven. Endowed with noble qualities, man was 
 bidden to approve himself the lord of this lower world, by 
 cultivating 'purity' in thought, in word, in action, and by 
 keeping up a constant warfare with his enemies the devs. At 
 first the parents of mankind were humble, and, devoted to the 
 service of Ormazd, were innocent and happy ; they were 
 destined also to enjoy more perfect happiness; but Ahriman, 
 the sleepless enemy of man and * purity,' descending earthwards 
 in the fashion of a serpent, plotted their corruption, and ere 
 long by means of fruit derived from his own province of 
 creation, he seduced them from their true allegiance : they 
 declared that all they saw was Ahriman's, and therefore grew, it 
 is narrated, as wicked as himself. 
 
 Without dwelling^ on the obvious kinship which exists 
 between this story and the sacred narrative, it is worthy of 
 especial notice that one form attributed in Persia to the Evil 
 Principle, or at least one favourite organ used by him for man's 
 undoing, is the serpent, of whose guile and malice traces are 
 continually recurring in the farthest wilds of gentilism^. ISTor 
 is this representation only to be met with in chapters of the 
 Bundehesh: in genuine works of the A vesta also, the great 
 ^homicidal serpent^' is the object of men's dread and horror: 
 
 ^ With these names compare gible without the Persian com- 
 
 the Sansk. mdnusha^ the Germ. mentary, but also that the He- 
 
 mensch, and the mannus of Tacitus, brews had derived their know- 
 
 German. c. 2 ('Tuisconem deum, ledge of the whole tradition from 
 
 terra edituvi, et filium Mannum'). a Persian source. Precisely the 
 
 On the Egyptian Menes, and other same kind of hardihood was shewn 
 
 similar forms, see above, p. 429, by Holwell and other sceptics, 
 
 n. r, and Diefenbach, VergL War- when they ventured to derive 
 
 terbuch der goth. Spr. 11. 32, 33, both Hebraism and Christianity 
 
 Fraijifurt, 1851. from the 'Hindti scriptures*: see 
 
 2 I deem it quite superfluous, above, p. 120, n. i. 
 now that we can speak more posi- ^ gee, for instance, the Prose 
 
 tively about the age and origin of Edda, § 34 (Mallet's 2^or£7i. Antiq. 
 
 the Bundehesh^ to answer such p. 423, Lond. 1847), where the 
 
 objections as those of Khode and second child of Loki (the Ahriman 
 
 the older Eationalists, who used of Scandinavia) is the Midgard 
 
 to affirm not only that the Mosaic serpent, and the third Hela (Death), 
 version of the Fall was unintelli- * Above, p. 537. 
 
554 Christ and other Masters. [part ly. 
 
 wliile tlie Evil One himself is sometimes called Hhe Serpent, 
 in direct allusion to his power of counteracting the Good 
 Principle. Thus, Ormazd is heard declaring in the Vendiddd^ : 
 ' I am Ahura-mazda, I am the giver of good things. When I 
 formed this dwelling-place, the beautiful, the brilliant, the 
 note- worthy, saying, I will go forth, I will go over, then the 
 Serpent beheld me. Thereupon the Serpent Agra-mainyus, 
 who is full of death, created, with an eye to my creation, nine 
 sicknesses, and ninety, and nine hundred, and nine thousand 
 and ninety thousand.' 
 
 § 2. Doctrine of the Evil One, 
 
 This extract brings us to a question of very grave impor- 
 tance : Is the doctrine of a personal, superhuman Tempter, as 
 now current in all branches of the Christian Church, the 
 product of religious intercourse which Hebrews had maintained 
 with their enslavers at the time of the Captivity ] Is the 
 Satan of the Old and New Testament, in other words, a 
 modern copy of the Ahriman of the A vesta % In replying to 
 this question I shall not survey afresh the main historical 
 probabilities arising on the one side from the nature of the 
 Babylonic (as distinguished from the Medo-Persian) creed, and 
 on the other from the stern, uncompromising spirit of the 
 Hebrew worthies who were sharers in the exile of their 
 nation. On internal grounds alone I hold it to be far more 
 likely that the Persian dogma, as it stands conspicuous in the 
 Yendiddd, was the corruption and distortion of a primitive 
 truth bequeathed by the first parents of the human family. 
 For no one who is able to discriminate at all, will question that 
 under the more obvious features of resemblance there is lying 
 also a most vital contrariety between the Hebrew and Old 
 Persian theories on the nature of the Evil One. 
 
 As Satan in our sacred books is far from being the 
 seductive spirit of the world, or of man's lower nature, 'con- 
 ceived of in concrete personality^;' so neither is he there 
 
 ^ Farg. XXII. §§ i — 6, where which the place and power of the 
 
 Spiegel's note is: *Dass Agra- arch-fiend are accurately deter- 
 
 mainyus eine Schlange genannt mined. On the contrary, Dr. 
 
 wird, kann nicht befremden, da Donaldson's work, entitled Chris- 
 
 er ja bekanntlich auch im Bunde- tian Orthodoxy, is devoted in no 
 
 hesh unter dieser Form erscheint.' small measure to the maintenance 
 
 ^ See Dr MiU's masterly ser- of a theory, which involves our 
 
 mons *0n the Temptation' (Camb. Lord Himself, and with Him the 
 
 1844), especially Serm. iii. : in whole Christian community of 
 
CHAP. IV.] The Medo-Persian Creed. 555 
 
 esteemed an absolutely evil being, like the Ahriman of the 
 Avesta, coeternal and coequal with the Good, and like the 
 Good an independent centre of creative energy. Satan is a 
 fallen creature, his fall involved like man's fall in impenetrable 
 mystery, and yet a fall which in results which it entailed on 
 the creation has its dark analogy in the first great fall of man, 
 as well as in that fiendish satisfaction which the fallen still 
 experience in communicating their own misery to others. In 
 neither case, however, is the sovereignty of God at all im- 
 pugned by the existence of ungodlike passions in the crea- 
 ture, and the partial triumph of the powers of evil. Jew and 
 Christian, equally possessed by a belief that there is One, and 
 only one, true Principle of Existence, would alike recoil with 
 horror from the notion which exalted the arch-demon to equality 
 with the supreme and unapproachable Jehovah. The feeling of 
 them both, in later as in earlier times, has been, that Satan is a 
 * murderer' and a Miar,' not because he is the necessary anti- 
 thesis of God, but simply because 'he abides not in the truth ^' 
 of his original creation (St. John viii. 44). 
 
 A most amy)le opportunity for testing both the genuineness 
 and depth of this conviction had been offered on the rise and 
 early progress of the Manichsean heresy. No countenance was 
 given in East or West to figments of the Persian misbeliever. 
 Then it was that St. Augustine, who amid the moral and 
 intellectual tempests of his youth had learned to fathom the 
 abyss of human depravity, stood forward to unmask the 
 sophistries beneath which Mani sought to introduce into the 
 Church the dogma of Two Principles ; and worthy of our 
 special notice is it, that the arm which levelled the proud 
 system of Pelagius when he ventured to extenuate the ma- 
 lignity of moral evil, was uplifted with the same gigantic 
 
 every period, in the charge of press it, 'was merely the evil of 
 
 swerving from the old (or ante- the world hypostasised^ (precisely 
 
 Babylonic) doctrine of the Hebrew Dr. Donaldson's own position with 
 
 Church in reference both to fallen regard to Satan). 
 
 and unfallen angels (cf. above, p. i See Dean Alford on this pas- 
 
 72, n. i). The same tendency sage, who remarks that it is 'one 
 
 (strange to say) is manifested at of the most decisive testimonies 
 
 the same time by the intelligent for the objective personality of the 
 
 Parsee writer, above quoted (p. devil. It is quite impossible,' he 
 
 536, n. 4); who in the teeth of the continues, 'to suppose an accom- 
 
 most cogent evidence is able to modation to Jewish views, . or a 
 
 declare that the Ahriman of his metaphorical form of speech, in 
 
 forefathers was really impersonal, so solemn and direct an assertion 
 
 or, as^ some scholastics would ex- as this.' 
 
656 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 rigour for the overthrow of Faustus, the great champion of the 
 Manichseans^ 
 
 Turning, then, directly to the books of Holy Scripture, 
 what can we detect in it to justify the charges of its modem 
 adversaries ? Is there any discernible variation in the language 
 used at different periods with regard to the existence of diabolic 
 agents and the personality of the Tempter] Now I find no 
 difficulty whatever in admitting, just as when the elementary 
 conceptions of a future life were made the subject of discussion^, 
 that a steadier light may have been gradually thrown upon this 
 question in successive stages of the Church's growth. The 
 revelations of the Old Testament, and therefore more particu- 
 larly of the earlier portions of it, were not absolute and 
 ultimate. As centuries went over, many large accessions may 
 be clearly dated in the measure of man's sacred knowledge. It 
 is found accordingly that truths pertaining to the spirit- world 
 have also gained a greater prominence and greater clearness of 
 expression in ' the fulness of the times,' nay, even in the latest 
 writings of the New Testament^. It was our blessed Lord 
 Himself, who in delivering the grand parable of the wheat and 
 tares has singled out, for His direct antagonist, the wicked one ; 
 who told us also in His exposition that this wicked one is the 
 Devil (St. Matth. xiii. 39), and the reapers holy * angels.' In 
 like manner, one chief object of the Saviour's mission is 
 declared to be the * stripping from Himself of principalities and 
 powers,' (Col. ii. 15) — the subjugation of those more than 
 human adversaries, with which the Christian in his turn is 
 summoned to do battle (Eph. vi. 12). * The Son of God was 
 manifested that He might destroy the works of the Devil' 
 (1 St. John iii. 8), — the works of that ^old serpent, which is 
 the Devil and Satan' (Pwev. xx. 2). It is true that reasons 
 might exist alike in the prevailing tendencies of Asiatic 
 thought, and in the moral status of the Hebrew Church itself, 
 explaining the comparative absence of allusion to such topics in 
 the early writings of the Bible; *till the mightier power of 
 
 ^ See, especially, the treatise tery of the kingdom of God pro- 
 Contra Faustum, Manichceum (0pp. ceeds to unfold itself, in the last 
 X. 22 1 sq., Bassani, 1807), where book of Scripture, that which de- 
 several of the Manichsean argu- tails the fortune of the Church 
 ments are also given at length. till the end of time, we hear more 
 ^ Above, pp. 511 sq. of him [Satan], and he is brought 
 3 'In the spiritual world, where in more evidently and openly 
 the lights are brightest, the sha- working than in any other.' — 
 dows are deepest; and instead of Dean Trench, On the Parables, 
 hearing less of Satan, as the mys- p. 84, Lond. 1844* 
 
CHAP. IV.] The Medo-Persian Creed, 557 
 
 good was revealed we were in mercy not suffered to know how 
 mighty was the power of evil^:' yet to say that nothing is 
 recorded of Satanic influence till the period of the Babylonish 
 exile is the arbitrary assumption of determined theorisers, 
 aided in this matter by a rude and vulgar spirit of destructive 
 criticism, which, guiding in old time the hands of Mani, could 
 not rest till it had torn away the passages, and even books, of 
 Holy Scripture^ where resistance had been offered to his shame- 
 less innovation. 
 
 In pointing to the earlier intimations of some diabolic 
 agency, I need not touch again ^ upon the ancient passage in 
 Leviticus (xvi.), where Azazel is commonly believed to be 
 another name for ^ demon,' and is so indeed interpreted by 
 modern writers, who, as soon as the admission has been made, 
 resolve that being into * a liturgical idea.' Neither shall I urge 
 at length that he who finally bore the title of * adversary' and 
 * calumniator' of the human race is called 'the Satan,' and 
 invested with peculiar guile and malice, in the opening of the 
 Book of Job (i. ii.), no less than in the kindred vision of 
 Zechariah (iii.), which belongs, unquestionably, to the age 
 succeeding the Captivity. My present stand is rather on the 
 sacred narrative of the Fall, which few, if any, even of our 
 most daring critics, venture to bring down as low as the sixth 
 century before the Christian era. Now if the true meaning of 
 that narrative can be determined by consentient verdicts of 
 Jewish and Christian writers, in all ages, it imports that man, 
 through the extraneous solicitations of a personal seducer, and 
 not merely through the motions of inborn concupiscence, was 
 urged to the commission of the first dark sin which wrought 
 
 ^ Ibid. p. 83. Cerent, eas sibi penittis accipiendas 
 
 2 Thus St. Augustine aptly re- non putasse, quod ab his essent 
 
 marks {De Utilitate Credendi, c. 7), conscriptae, quos verum scripsisse 
 
 just after his own extrication from non arbitrarentur, esset utcumque 
 
 Manichaean errors: 'Nunc vero tergiversatio eorum rectior vel 
 
 postea quam mihi sunt exposita error humanior.' He then goes 
 
 atque enodata multa, quae me on to mention that they did reject 
 
 maxime movebant, ea scilicet in the whole of the Acts of the 
 
 quibus illorum plerumque se Apostles, not for any critical rea- 
 
 jactat, et quo sccurius sine adver- sons, but because the account there 
 
 sario eo effusius exsultat oratio, given would not square with their 
 
 nihil mihi videtur ab eis impu- notions about the descent of the 
 
 dentius did, vel (ut mitius loquar) Holy Ghost on Mani : cf. Tertull. 
 
 incnriosiiLS et imbecillius, quam De Prcescript. Hcer. c. xvii., where 
 
 Scripturas divinas esse corruptas ; allusion is made to the arbitrary ad- 
 
 cum id nullus in tam recenti me- ditions and subtractions of heresy^ 
 
 moria extantibus exemplaribus *ad dispositionem instituti sui.' 
 
 possint convincere. Si enim di- ^ See above, pp. 503 sq. 
 
558 Christ and other Masters. [part IV. 
 
 disorder in himself, his children, and his species. That the 
 visible agent of man's ruin was an agent merely in the hands of 
 the great Evil One, St Paul has plainly intimated where he 
 writes that the serpent who beguiled our first mother was the 
 subtle, self-transforming potentate who is still active in the 
 (Christian Church (2 Cor. xi. 3, 14); and when the same 
 Apostle turned with ardent hope to the eventual triumph of 
 the Woman's Seed, his comfort flowed from a conviction that 
 * the God of peace will bruise Satan (not the serpent) under our 
 ■feet shortly' (Kom. xvi. 20). 
 
 But excluding once again both these and other Christian 
 testimonies, all of which, it is pretended by the modern scep- 
 tic, have been deeply tinctured with foreign superstitions, I 
 appeal to universal heathendom itself in favour of the an- 
 cient exposition of the sacred record. There is found to be a 
 singular consent \ in East and West, in North and South, in 
 civilised and semi-barbarous countries, in the Old World and 
 the New, not only to the fact that serpents were somehow 
 associated with the ruin of the human family, but that serpents 
 so employed were vehicles of a malignant, personal spirit, by 
 whatever name he was described. 
 
 As, therefore, the Old Persian is but one of a large cluster 
 of cognate stories, it were surely far more rational to explain 
 them all on the hypothesis of common parentage anterior bo the 
 primitive migrations, than to argue, first, that Hebrews only 
 had been left without traditions on this subject till compara- 
 tively modern times ; and secondly, that the age in which 
 they finally contracted their belief in Satan and his angels, and 
 so consummated, in the view of the objector, their portentous 
 lapse into the eastern dualism, was, strange to say, the age, 
 when, as a body, they are known to have imbibed far stricter 
 tenets on the unity and monarchy of God. 
 
 § 3. Doctrine of Holy Angels. 
 
 The spirit which impelled some modern writers to explain 
 the scriptural notices of Satan, the great Tempter, by referring 
 to the influence exercised upon the Jew by Persian dualism, is 
 shev\Ti afresh in their impatience of all statements with respect 
 to the existence of the ' holy,' or unfallen, angels. These also 
 we are told ' belong to a class of conceptions no longer possible 
 in the world ^,' and therefore (such is the conclusion of 
 
 ^ See, for instance, above, pp. ^ Dr. Donal/Ison's Christ. Orthod, 
 
 2i6 sc[.; 369, 553. p. 349 (following Schleiermacher). 
 
CHAP. IV.] The MedO'Persian Creed, 559 
 
 philosophy) they must all of them be proved to have origin- 
 ated in some thoroughly pagan system. The abettors of this 
 startling argument have had recourse especially to effects 
 supposed to have been wrought upon the Hebrews by the 
 *Zend religion of the Persians^;' and they point triumphantly, 
 in confirmation of their view, to the existence of the Sadducees^, 
 a high and philosophic order, who are thought to have pre- 
 served the purer creed of earlier generations with remarkable 
 fidelity, — in so far at least as they dissented from the super- 
 stitions of the Pharisees, in confessing neither angel nor spirit. 
 Efforts have again been made in this particular instance to 
 support the theory of extensive amalgamation between Hebrews 
 and Babylonians by adverting to the fact that various forms of 
 error and exaggeration in the sphere of angelology did spring 
 up, as it would seem, spontaneously among both Jews and 
 Christians of succeeding times. 
 
 The chief reliance has been placed, however, on one definite 
 testimony of the Jerusalem Talmud. In that passage^, it is 
 written : ^ H. Simeon Ben-Lachish saith. The names of angels 
 went up by the hand of Israel out of Babylon. For before it is 
 said, ''Then flew one of the seraphim unto me:" "The 
 seraphim stood before him," Isa. vi. ; but afterward, '' the Man 
 Gabriel" [Dan. ix. 21] and "Michael your prince" [Dan. x. 
 21].' I^ow whatever else may be implied in such assertions, 
 we are doubtless pointed by them to a circumstance, which 
 cannot fail to have arrested the attention of all Biblical scholars, 
 viz. that after the great exile, personal ap2')eUations had begun 
 to be assigned in some few cases (Michael, Gabriel, Kaphael, 
 Uriel) to the ministering angels of the Hebrew Church. But 
 
 ^ Here Dr. Donaldson accepts allowed many of the fundamental 
 
 the dictum of Strauss without the doctrines of the Sadducees ' ! Such 
 
 least qualification : Christ. Orthod. language has not unnaturally ex- 
 
 p. 137. posed its author to the animad- 
 
 2 The author of Christian Or- versions of the last Bampton Lec- 
 
 thodoxy, p. 372, affirms that 'their turer (Mr. Mansel), who, after 
 
 disbelief in angels and devils is pointing out the real origin and 
 
 passed over [by New Testament affinities of Dr. Donaldson's hy- 
 
 writers] in guarded silence, as far pothesis, declares that *by this 
 
 as any censure is concerned.' He method of exposition,' according to 
 
 then adds, 'In many respects our which our Saviour lent His high 
 
 Lord seems to have approved and authority to the dissemination 
 
 recommended their views ; ' and of religious falsehood, * Christian 
 
 again (p. 373), 'It is difficult to Orthodoxy may mean anything or 
 
 resist the impression that Jesus nothing' (p. 419). 
 
 [our blessed Lord] and His brother ^ Lightfoot's Heh. and Talmud. 
 
 James, being known by the cha- Exerc. upon St. Luke (ch. i. v. 26) : 
 
 racteristic title of this sect, openly Works, xii. 24, ed. Pitman. 
 
560 
 
 Christ and other Masters. 
 
 [part VI. 
 
 equally apparent is the fact that these angelic designations are 
 in no way borrowed from the titles of gods and genii which 
 abound in writings of the Medo-Persians, as indeed of every 
 other ancient people; they have no apparent relation, etymo- 
 logical or otherwise, with the element- worshij) of the East ; in 
 thought as well as grammar they are all of them the purest 
 Hebrew ; Michael, for example, signifying ' who is as God 1 ' 
 and so protesting in its very form against approaches to 
 polytheism \ 
 
 On looking, therefore, with a critical eye upon the question 
 now before us, we discover that the chief external evidence in 
 favour of supposing that the angelology of the Hebrews was of 
 heathen parentage, is totally unconnected with the point at issue; 
 for I feel no obligation to analyse the many wild conceits, 
 which, in the dotage of the Hebrew nation, urged men to 
 * intrude into the things not seen,' and build their visionary 
 systems of 'celestial hierarchies.' The questions^ fairly brought 
 
 1 See Dr. Mill's examination of 
 this very point in his Christ. Adv. 
 Fubl. for 1841, pp. 55, 57. Heng- 
 stenberg, Genuineness of Daniel^ 
 p. 138, remarks with justice that 
 'both Gabriel and Michael [the 
 two names peculiar to Daniel] 
 occur only in such visions, as 
 from their dramatic character de- 
 mand the most exact description 
 possible of the persons concerned, 
 and the bringing of them out into 
 stronger relief.' 
 
 2 I cannot, for example, be ex- 
 pected to discuss the general ques- 
 tion, opened more than once by 
 Dr. Donaldson, as to whether 
 angels, in the Christian sense, are 
 ever mentioned in the old (or 
 ante-Babylonic) Scriptures. Dr. 
 Donaldson seems to be persuaded 
 {Christ. Orthod. p. 348) that the 
 received doctrine of good angels 
 is somehow incompatible with the 
 doctrine of the Holy Spirit. He 
 may well, on such hypothesis, be 
 anxious to get rid of what he 
 feels to be a horrible superstition; 
 but surely the argument which 
 he employs is equally fatal to be- 
 lief in all intermediate agencies 
 vthatever; for example, in the in- 
 
 stitution of a Christian ministry, 
 who, like the angels, act in God's 
 behalf, and by authority derived 
 from Him. All theories apart, 
 I cannot help expressing my 
 amazement how any person of 
 average ability can study the Old 
 Testament without discovering at 
 every turn the flattest contradic- 
 tion of Dr. Donaldson's assertions. 
 Were the two angels, for example, 
 who had been despatched to Sodom 
 other than personal beings, acting 
 as the veritable messengers of the 
 Most High God Himself? They 
 say expressly, ' The Lord hath 
 sent us to destroy it' (Gen. xix. 
 13). Dean Milman {Hist, of Christ, 
 I. 70, Lond. 1840), who also traces 
 the systematising of Hebrew an- 
 gelology to the residence in Baby- 
 lon, is notwithstanding ready to 
 admit that 'the earliest books of 
 the Old Testament fully recognized 
 the ministration of angels.' It is, 
 indeed, remarkable that the only 
 historical books of the Old Testa- 
 ment where such allusions do not 
 appear, are exactly those which 
 were written after the Babylonish 
 captivity, — the bo' ks of Ezra and 
 Nehemiah. 
 
CHAP. IV.] The Medo-Persian Creed. 561 
 
 into the present investigation will relate, (1) to a distinction 
 between higher and lower angels, i. e. the existence of orders or 
 gradations in the spirit- world ; and (2) to the specific number 
 of intelligences who occupy the loftiest rank in these angelic 
 orders. 
 
 Now that some distinction of the sort existed long before 
 the Babylonish exile can be satisfactorily evinced from the 
 magnificent passage in the sixth chapter of Isaiah. There the 
 prophet's eye is riveted upon the glory of the six- winged 
 seraphim, who constitute the * angel-princes' of that early 
 period, and as such are stationed foremost in the ministry of 
 heaven; while one of them by issuing forth (vi. 6, 7) upon a 
 message to Isaiah, and so offering proof of independent 
 personality, enables us to answer the absurd objection that the 
 primitive angels were but passive vehicles or manifestations 
 of God Himself. The vision of Micaiah, in like manner, brings 
 before us in still older times ' the Lord sitting on His throne, 
 and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right hand 
 and on His left' (1 Kings xxii. 19 — 22). Nay, traces of 
 angelic orders, such as meet us in the New Testament and later 
 writings of the Old, are pointed out as early as the age of 
 Moses and of Joshua ; for the ' prince,' or captain of the Lord's 
 host (Josh. V. 13 — 15), who then comes forward to conduct the 
 family of God into the land of promise, has been held to 
 correspond^ with the created angel (Exod. xxxiii. 2, 3), who 
 replaced the glorious Angel of the Presence (Exod. xxiii. 20 — 
 23) in administering the Sinai tic dispensation, after Israel had 
 most grievously offended in the matter of the calf. But be 
 this as it may, the close affinity that exists between the 
 language of the book of Joshua and descriptions of the prince 
 of angels, who, as Michael, reappears for the protection of the 
 Israelites in visions of the book of Daniel, may be fairly 
 pleaded as a proof that the familiarity of the Hebrew Church 
 with such conceptions is not due to her reputed intercourse with 
 the Ormazd-religion. 
 
 1 This subject also is discussed sq. Traject. 1739; ^^o» ^''^^^^ 
 
 at considerable length by Dr. Mill, many modem critics, goes farther 
 
 as above, pp. 92 — 99. The rival still, identifying Michael himself 
 
 theory is, that the Angel in Josh. v. with the uncreated Word of God ; 
 
 was none other than the Second while others add again to these 
 
 Person of the Blessed Trinity, — supposed identifications by repre- 
 
 identical, therefore, with the Angel senting the Gabriel of the prophet 
 
 of the Lord, in Exod. xxiii. 20 — Daniel as a reappearance of the 
 
 23, and other places : see Ode, created, or inferior, angel of Exod. 
 
 Commentarius de Angelis, pp. 1032 xxxii. 34. 
 
 II. 36 
 
502 
 
 Christ and other Masters, 
 
 [PAET IV. 
 
 It was easy to foresee that the amshaspands of the Persian 
 system^ would be quoted as the nearest parallel to the 
 archangels of the Holy Scriptures. Those beings, we have 
 learned already^, were six in number; or, including Ormazd 
 himself, who also is invested on some rare occasions with the 
 title of amshaspand, the whole number may be raised to seven ^. 
 We saw, moreover, that the probable origin of such specifica- 
 tion must be sought in the primeval worship of the heavenly 
 bodies, when the shining multitude above were substituted by 
 man's vain imagination for the Lord of hosts Himself: and as 
 the influence of that ancient superstition was far from being 
 peculiar to the Persians, the allusion to ^ seven' principal 
 objects of esteem and worship is continually recurring in all 
 parts of heathendom^. It is, however, a mistake to argue that 
 the later Hebrew people, and much less the Hebrew prophets 
 of the exile, manifested any disposition to deify the orbs of 
 light. There is indeed one solitary passage in the book of 
 Tobit, where the speaker, Raphael, describes himself as of the 
 number of the ' seven holy angels who enter in before the glory 
 of the Holy One' (xii. 15 ; cf. He v. viii. 2); but, according to a 
 
 1 e.g. the author of ClrUtian 
 Orthodoxy declares (p. 135) with 
 reference to the Book of Daniel: 
 ' In this book we find the celestial 
 hierarchy of amshaspands fully 
 recognised.' Other speculators of 
 the same school have sought to 
 bring the fervers of Persia into 
 connection with the ' guardian 
 angels' both of Jews and Christ- 
 ians (see St. Matth. xviii. 10 ; Acts 
 xii. 72; and Dean Alford on the 
 former passage): but the Persian 
 fei'ver, where we are not forced to 
 understand it of the spirit of the 
 individual man, was rather the 
 ideal prototype or archetype of 
 some actual being; see above, p. 
 537, n. I. With regard to the 
 conception of angels, specially al- 
 lotted to watch over the affairs of 
 particular nations, Hengstenberg 
 {Daniel, p. 140) affirms that no 
 trace of it occurs in the Avesta, 
 except that Bahman, the first of 
 the amshaspands, 'who stands in 
 about the same relation to Ormazd 
 as Gabriel here does to the angel 
 of the Lord,' is called the 'pro- 
 
 tector of all animals' who are there 
 said to constitute his people (Rhode, 
 P« 323), while Ormazd himself is 
 the patron of men. The version 
 of the LXX. in Deut. xxxii. 8, will 
 perhaps bear witness to some old 
 tradition of the Jews with respect 
 to the allotting of particular na- 
 tions to particular angels : ore 
 diefJL^pi^ev 6 vxl/taros ^dvi), cos dti- 
 (Tirupev vlovs ^AddjuL, ^arrjaev opia 
 edpcov Kara dpidixov dyyiXwv GeoO, 
 
 where the Hebrew is *>22, *lSpp/ 
 ^^"jb^J: of. Prof. Selwyn's Notce 
 CnticcBf 'Deuteron.' p. 65, Cantab. 
 1858. 
 
 2 Above, p. 534. 
 
 3 Rhode, p. 365 ; Mill, as before, 
 
 4 Above, pp. 534, 535, to which 
 examples may be added the seven 
 rlshis of Hindtistan, who, at least 
 in the Puranic period, were repre- 
 sented as 'seven primeval person- 
 ages, born of Brahma's mind and 
 presiding, under different forms, 
 over each Manwantara/ 
 
CHAP. IV.] The Medo-Persian Creed. 563 
 
 different method of enumeration, the archangels of the Hebrew 
 are more frequently reduced to four (Michael, Gabriel, 
 Kaphael, and IJriel), each presiding over one of the four armies 
 of ministry who sing praises to the Holy and the Blessed \ 
 Still if we had higher reasons for accepting the account of 
 Tobit as an illustration of the general state of knowledge on 
 this subject at the period when he wrote, it would be running 
 counter to the sacred usage, both of the Old and New 
 Testament, to argue that the number seven, as there employed, 
 contains the slightest reference to the worship of celestial 
 luminaries, or to any phase whatever of gentile superstition ^ 
 ' Seven,' alike before and after the Captivity, had its own 
 specific import for all members of the Hebrew Church. It was 
 the signature of fulness, union, manifoldness, perfection; and 
 therefore the 'seven spirits of God' in the Apocalypse (i. 4; 
 iv. 5) are imderstood as pointing us directly to the diverse 
 operations of the One all-gracious Spirit^; while the 'seven 
 stars' are the 'angels of the seven churches,' and the 'seven 
 candlesticks' a grand collective symbol of the whole Christian 
 body (i. 20). 
 
 § 4. Doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body. 
 
 To foster a belief in the awakening of man's body from the 
 sleep of death, and in the final glorification of his whole 
 humanity, was a primary object in the teaching of St. Paul and 
 of apostles generally. In their view 'the redemption of the 
 body' at the re-appearing of our Lord and Saviour, was the 
 crowning-point in a succession of stupendous acts which dated 
 from His own ineffable assumption of our weak and dying 
 flesh. Yet writers are not wanting who assure us that the 
 doctrine of the resurrection, so specifically and profoundly 
 Christian, is a relic only of primeval barbarism which passed 
 into the Hebrew creed, like others of the same description, at 
 
 1 See the passage from the Pirke bably from some confusion between 
 
 of Eabbi Eliezer (who, according the amshaspands and the seraphim 
 
 to Fiirst, Bibliotheca Judaicay i. of Isaiah on the one hand, and the 
 
 -232, flourished about a. d. 70), in four creatures of Ezekiel on the 
 
 Br. Mill's work, as before, p. 58, other'! 
 
 n. 10. Dr. Donaldson (p. 136) ^ Cf. Bahr. SymboUk, i. 189 sq. 
 
 breaks through this difficulty at ^ Hengstenberg, Die Offenbarujig 
 
 once by urging that when the Jews des h. Johan. i. 91, 92, Berlin, 
 
 limited the number of 'attendant 1849. 
 spirits' to fouTf they did so * pro- 
 
 36—2 
 
564 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 the period of the Babylonish exiled Observing, it would seem, 
 that fuller light is thrown upon the mystery of our future 
 being, in proportion as the ^mystery of godliness' itself was 
 gradually unfolded, those irreverent critics have not scrupled to 
 conjecture that instead of such ulterior light proceeding from 
 the supernatural source, it must have had an earthly origin 
 among the ancient votaries of Ormazd. 
 
 And here, as in some other cases, the supposed ^discovery' 
 of the doctrine in the Zendic books had been facilitated by the 
 mistranslations of their first editor. It is since established by 
 more competent scholars^, that in passages where Anquetil 
 Duperron rendered ^till the resurrection,' the words really 
 signify ' for ever,' — an important rectification, which, as soon as 
 it is generally made known, will silence not a few of the 
 objections borrowed from this quarter. Like results have also 
 followed from the critical examination of some other Zendic 
 texts; until at present all who are entitled to pronounce a judg- 
 ment on the question may be heard affirming that no glimpses 
 of a resurrection of the body can be traced in extant books of 
 the A vesta. 
 
 Still that Persians did not long continue strangers to the 
 thought of some ulterior re-embodying of the souls departed, 
 may be argued with great shew of reason from the testimony of 
 the historian, Theopompus^, who died about the year 300 B.C. 
 
 ^ e.g. Wegscheider does not Parsi JJeZi^fio?!, pp. 337, 338. 
 blush to affirm that this opinion un- ^ The testimony of this writer 
 
 questionably grew up *e notionibus has been examined at some length 
 
 mancis et imperfectis hominum by J. G. Miiller, Theol. Studien 
 
 incultiorum,' and that it finally und Kritiken (1835), pp. 482 sq. 
 
 passed over to the Jews from the in an article entitled ' 1st die Lehre 
 
 school of Zoroaster (quoted in Mr. von der Auferstehung des Leibes 
 
 Mansell's Bampton LectureSy 1858, wirklich nicht eine alt-persische 
 
 pp. 417, 418). Lehre?' The discussion turns in a 
 
 2 Burnouf, Etudes, in Journ. g^^eat measure on the force of 
 
 Asiat. (1840), pp. 7 sq., was the dva^iovv in the following passage: 
 
 first scholar who pointed out this Qeoirofiiros., ev ry^ bydoy ti3v ^iXltt- 
 
 mistake. His conclusions have TriKun/y kuI dva^iuo-eadaL, Kara roi)s 
 
 been since corroborated by Spiegel, Ma7oi;s, (f>r)(rl roi>s dvepd^wovs . Kcd 
 
 Zeits. Deutsch. morg. Gesell. (1847), ^(^eaSa. ddavdrovs (in Diogen. Laert. 
 
 I. 260, 261; Avesta, i. 15, 248, *Prooem.'§ 9). The other passage of 
 
 n. 2. According to the Vendid. importance is preserved in Plutarch, 
 
 Farg. XIX. 89 sq., as there trans- Delside, c. xlvii. the chief words 
 
 lated, the good or 'pure' spirits being: riXos d' dTroKelireadaL rbv 
 
 are removed on the third day 4^Wy f^^^ toius fih dv6pd)wovs evdai- 
 
 after death to a place of perfect f^oms ^crecrdaL, fiTJre rpocpTJs deofxivovs, 
 
 happiness, and the bad spirits to M^^ o-Ktdv iroiowTas. 
 a place of torment; of. Wilson's 
 
CHAP. IV.] The Medo-Persian Creed. 565 
 
 He lias declared that in accordance with the Persian creed, as 
 soon, as the great struggles of Ormazd and Ahriman are all 
 exhausted, Hades will become a void; and that mankind 
 attaining to true happiness will then ' require no nourishment 
 and will cast uo shadows/ And elsewhere his language is still 
 more explicit ; for he says that if we may believe the Magi, 
 men will come to life again and be immortal : — both which 
 statements fairly indicate that at the close of the ^ great year* 
 of Persia, every thing, it is believed, will have reverted to the 
 primitive condition, and that the human body, no exception to 
 this general law, w411 have itself experienced the refining and 
 exalting process. 
 
 There are reasons, it is true, for urging^ that two different 
 lines of thought existed in the schools of ancient Persia : one, 
 proceeding from a rigorous form of dualism^, akin to that of 
 Mani, and so, as in the convents of northern India, making 
 of the human body a mere prison-house in which the soul 
 was doing penance for her past misdeeds ; the other mourning 
 over the dissolution of the body as a victory won by Ahriman, 
 and so including the idea of re-embodiment among the blessings 
 that would ultimately flow from the subversion of his empire. 
 But the testimony of Theopompus may be viewed as an ex- 
 pression of the 'orthodox' belief, especially when we bear in 
 mind that subsequent language of the Bundehesh^ is strikingly 
 in favour of the resurrection theory. 
 
 On the other hand, assuming, as in previous instances, that 
 Hebrew prophets would have seen no difficulty in borrowing 
 novel tenets from the creed of their enslavers, it appears to 
 me indisputable that the doctrine of the resurrection of the 
 body was believed to some extent among the members of 
 the sacred family long before the period of the Babylonish exile. 
 I shall lay no stress at present on debateable texts*; of which, 
 however, it is no exaggeration to affirm that while incapable 
 of proving that the doctrine of a resurrection was fully or 
 definitely held, they nevertheless bear witness to the fact that 
 the idea of resurrection had never been repugnant to the feel- 
 ings of the ancient Israelite, but rather coincided with the 
 expectations that arose in him from a belief in God's redemp- 
 
 1 See DoUinger, Heidenthunif critical edition of the Bundehesh 
 p. 381. "will doubtless modify the old as- 
 
 2 Above, p. 538. sertions on this point also. 
 
 3 The passages are collected in 4 Cf. Fairbairn's EzeJcielj pp. 
 Rhode, as before, pp. 465 sq. ; but, 356 — 359. 
 
 as Spiegel remarks, a correct and 
 
566 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 tive and restoring mercy. It will here suffice to mention that 
 the words which Daniel is said to have indited under the inspi- 
 rations of the Medo-Persian system are in perfect unison with 
 declarations of Isaiah two centuries before. For instance, if 
 the prophet of the Captivity was pointing onward to a crisis 
 when ^many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth 
 shall awake ' (Dan. xii. 2) ; the jubilant prophet of the reign 
 of Ahaz had already comforted his audience by the promise 
 that the Lord ' will swallow up death in victory ' (Is. xxv. 8) ; 
 nay, the words which, in a second passage, are employed by 
 him have found their literal echo in the words of Daniel just re- 
 cited ; for Isaiah also has proclaimed in no ambiguous language 
 *■ Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall 
 they arise ; awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust ' (xxvi. 1 9). 
 
 § 5. Doctrine of a Benefactor and Mediator, 
 
 (1) Connected with the re-awakening of the dead, at least 
 in some of the more recent, or post- Christian, writings of the 
 Persians, there is frequent mention of a glorious hero-prophet, 
 by whose ministry, as one chief organ of Ormazd, the empire 
 of the devs shall be subverted, earth herself shall be restored 
 to something of her pristine glory, and the wrongs of man 
 redressed. The name of this expected champion of the Perso- 
 Aryan race is Sosiosh (Saoshyam^, *the Benefactor'). He is 
 first of all presented to our notice in a passage of the Ven- 
 diddd'\ which, if the new translation of it be accepted, is found 
 to run as follows : ^ Zarathustra gave warning to Agramainyus 
 (and said): ^'Base Agra-mainyus ! I will smite the creation, 
 which is fashioned by the devs : I will smite the Nasus, whom 
 the devs have fashioned. I will smite the Pari whom men 
 worship C?), until Sosiosh the Victorious is born out of the 
 water Kahsaoya, from the eastern clime, from the eastern 
 climes.' " 
 
 The meagre hint of Sosiosh, thus communicated in the 
 early part of the A vesta, was expanded and embellished in 
 the works of the Sassanian epoch and especially in the Buti- 
 
 1 Spiegel, Avesta, i. 244, n. i, marked a series or class of bene- 
 
 informs us that the root of the factors, and as such it occurs also 
 
 word is su ('to profit'), to which in the plural number, 
 
 it is related as the future parti- ^ Parg. xxi. 16 — 19 : cf. Zeits. 
 
 ciple : hence ' der niitzen werdende' Deutsch. morg. Gesell. (1847), i. 
 
 *der Heifer.' It was not, however, 261, 262, where the old transla- 
 
 a proper name nor Limited to an tion was first corrected, 
 individual worthy, but rather 
 
CHAP. IV.] The Medo-Persian Creed. 567 
 
 dehesh^. That benefactor was from first to last a man; and 
 like two other beings, his precursors, now associated with him 
 in the work of liberation and each reigning in succession for 
 a thousand years, he was distinctly held to be the offspring 
 of the holy Zoroaster ; yet the name of Sosiosh alone, as great- 
 est or as last in order of the hero-prophets, was the rallying- 
 point where Persians were accustomed to find refuge from 
 the miseries of their present lot. The time assigned for his 
 appearance (say the authors of the story) is the time^ when 
 evil and impiety of every kind have grown to an appalling 
 magnitude. Approaching with a noiseless step, he will evince 
 the greatness of his mission by destroying death itself, and 
 by recalling all the dead to life. The first to rise again will 
 be the prototype of men (or Kaiomorts), and after him the 
 earliest pair of human beings (Meshia and Meshiane); then, 
 in seven and fifty years, the long array of their descendants. 
 All of these have been appointed to receive the gift of im- 
 mortality by drinking of the sacred homa. Next will follow 
 a grand separation of the pure and impure, of the righteous 
 and unrighteous ; friend will lose the sweet companionship of 
 friend, the husband will be severed from his spouse, the sister 
 from tlie brother. They who stand the sifting of that day 
 are borne aloft to the peculiar dwelling of Ormazd : the rest 
 are driven back to the abodes of misery and torment which 
 had also been their portion from the third day after death. 
 The change, however, thus effected is not destined to be ulti- 
 mate. A blazing comet (Gurzsher), hitherto held in fetters 
 by the moon, will break away from his confinement, and, 
 rushing wildly on the earth, will be converted into the agent 
 of Ormazd for purging out the dross that now adheres to all 
 created nature ; Ahriman himself will vanish in the flames, 
 
 ^ See the passages in Bhode, die Eeligion wieder reinigt. Dass 
 pp. 465 sq. Spiegel [Avesta^ i. 32 das Keich tausend Jahre dauern 
 sq.) has also drawn attention more soil, ist uberall bestimmt ausge- 
 especially to the full-blown escha- sprochen : ' — points indeed which 
 tology of the Persians and com- may remind us • not only of the 
 pared it with that of the later Messianic tenets prevalent among 
 Jews, which, in his opinion, it the later Jews, but also of the 
 strongly resembles (p. 35). The modified Judaism which in the 
 main points, according to his re- form of Chihasm (or sensuous Mil- 
 presentation, are as follows : ' Die lenarianism) was current more or 
 Erwartung eines sowol weltlichen less in various branches of the 
 als geistlichen Herrschers, der early Christian Church, and only 
 fiowol sein Volk zum herrschenden repressed with great difficulty : 
 macht, zum Kegenten iiber alle see Neander, Ch. Hist. 11. 395 — 
 Beine Bedriicker, der aber auch 401. 
 
568 Christ and other Masters, [part IV. 
 
 and hell, tlie dark abyss of Duzakh, with its godless tenants, 
 being purified and renovated by the final conflagration, the 
 whole family of man will be assembled on the new-born earth 
 to sing the glory of Ormazd and the amshaspands. 
 
 (2) But the latter history of religious thought in Persia 
 introduces us to one more being who has not unfrequently 
 been placed in close comparison with the Founder of Chris- 
 tianity. His name is Mithra; and so paramount are claims 
 which he advances, in the estimation of some modern writers, 
 that the Gospel is itself pronounced by them a branch of Mith- 
 raism\ ISTo small confusion, it is true, exists among the older 
 notices of Mithra even in the Persian sacred books ^; yet there, 
 as elsewhere, the prevailing image represents to us a wakeful 
 and beneficent divinity^, Mord of life and head of all created 
 beings,' active, luminous, fertilizing, purifying, and invincible. 
 His place and functions in relation to the highest god ap- 
 pear to have resembled those of the Greek Apollo; and at 
 periods when Ormazd siuks back into comparative quietude, the 
 old connexion with the creature-world and the administration of 
 the light-kingdom, are dependent on the energy of Mithra, who 
 is thus the living and abiding link between the visible and the 
 invisible. Associating intimately and well-nigh upon a level 
 with Ormazd/* himself, this secondary principle of good is also 
 from his very nature the antagonist of the Evil One. He 
 
 1 This, for instance, was one ^ The same remark applies 
 
 of many self-contradictory views equally to the Greek writers : for 
 
 propounded by Dupuis in his Herodotus (i. 131), in speaking 
 
 Origine des tous les Cultes (above, of the imitative genius of the 
 
 p. 27, n. i) : and even Creuzer, Persians, is thought to be guilty 
 
 while rejecting the theory with of confusing the Venus of Assyrian 
 
 something like contempt {Symb. mythology, Mylitta, with the Per- 
 
 I. 238, n. 2; cf. p. 341), is induced sian Mithra (cf. Xenoph. Cyrop, 
 
 to look favourably upon another viii. 13, § 12). The real represen- 
 
 oft-repeated story which ascribes tative of Venus in the later Persian 
 
 the origin of some ecclesiastical system was Anahita (Anaitis) ; 
 
 usages {e.g. the institution of the Mithra and Anahita corresponding 
 
 Christmas festival) to the influence in the main to Baal and Astarte : 
 
 of Mithraism {Ibid. p. 261). see Kawlinson's iJ^^rod i. 271, 272; 
 
 Christ, according to this notion, DoUinger, Heidenthum, pp. 384, 
 
 was, in a spiritual sense, the Sol 385; Burnouf, Sur le Ya^^na, pp. 
 
 Novus, and His birth was there- 351 sq. 
 
 fore celebrated at the period of ^ For instance, in the Yasna 
 
 the year, which Mithraism as- (Burnouf, p. 222), 'J'invoque, je 
 
 signed to the new birth of the c^lebre Mithra qui multiplie les 
 
 celestial luminary. See, on the couples de boeufs qui a mille 
 
 general question of Mithra-wor- oreilles, dix milles yeux,' &c. 
 ship, Von-Hammer, Memoire sur ** See the passage from the 
 
 le culte de Mithra, Paris, 1833. Yasna, quoted above, p. 535, n. 4. 
 
CHAP. IV.] The MedO'Persian Creed, 569 
 
 marshals the bright army of beneficent genii ^ in their conflict 
 with the devs; in him the soul departed finds her best con- 
 ductor to the bridge of Chinevad; while bodies of the dead, 
 though captured by the prince of darkness, are the objects of his 
 sympathy and care. 
 
 It may have been the service rendered to the votary of 
 the Ormazd-religion in the daily war with Ahriman, that 
 made the later Greek of Plutarch's^ age assign to Mithra 
 the peculiar title 'Mediator' (/xco-trT/s) ; for although a some- 
 what similar class of functions was awarded to other beings, 
 as SraSsha and Rashne-rast^, who both were thought to super- 
 intend the great judicial process after death, in order that the 
 soul of man might then receive her fitting recompence, 'not 
 a hair too little nor too much/ it was to Mithra, most of all, 
 that subjects of the light-kingdom were instructed to address 
 their homage. Some were ev^en ready to contend that if the 
 first man had sung the praise of Mithra, or had ever named 
 that name, his soul would forthwith have ascended to the 
 mansions of ultimate felicity. 
 
 In proportion as Ormazd himself receded from the active 
 visible sphere of being, or, in different language, was abstracted 
 more and more from his connexion with the Sun, that luminary 
 w^as appropriated as the home or symbol of his younger repre- 
 sentative. Originally placed, as it would seem, midway be- 
 tween the sun and moon, and so perhaps identified on some 
 occasions with the planet Yenus*, Mithra was ere long a 
 potent and invincible sun- god ^, author of the light, dispeller 
 
 ^ Hence his rank as chief of 7}\lov t6v irepnroXoCvTa ehai vbixi^e, 
 
 the Izeds; above, p. 535, n. 4. yovi^v 6pTa toO Alos, du kclI Widpav 
 
 2 De Isid. c. xlvi. Plutarch iKdXea-av, Homil. Clem. iii. 50, ed. 
 
 himself seems to regard Mithra Dressel. It is further worth noting 
 
 as partaking of the natures both that the name does not occur on 
 
 of Ormazd and Ahriman {[xiaov the AchsBmenian inscriptions until 
 
 8' dfjicpoLv) : cf. Dr. Donaldson's the reign of Artaxerxes Mnemon 
 
 Christ. Orthod. p. 131, and Creu- (Eawlinson's Herod. Vol. i. p. 272, 
 
 zer, I. 292, the latter of whom note): yet there can be no doubt as 
 
 supposes that Mithra was a kind to its ancient usage in connection 
 
 of chemical mean or *Liebesfeuer,' with the Sun, in both the branches 
 
 Iiarmonisingtwo antagonistic Prin- of the Aryan family. To pass by 
 
 ciples. Medo-Persian names Mithradates 
 
 -Spiegel, Avesta, i. 31; Bur- (or Mtr/)a5ar^s, Her. i. 110), as 
 
 nouf, Sur le Yagna, p. 200. importing 'given by the Sun' (cf. 
 
 n of® above, p. 568, n. 2. Hormisdates 'given by Ormazd'), 
 
 5 Strabo is the first Greek writer ^e have continual examples in the 
 
 who says this expressly: Uepaac... Eig-Vdda, where Mitra is used as 
 
 ri^cQac 8^ Kal tjXlop 8p KaXomt ^he equivalent of Aditya, 'the 
 
 ML0pr]y (XV. 13). AitoWi^Pa 8^ g^j,^, or one at least of twelve per- 
 
570 Christ and other Masters. [pakt iv. 
 
 of the darkness ; and in subsequent stages of the my the, he 
 rose completely to the rank of a supreme divinity, correspond- 
 ing in the vastness and the splendour of his attributes to the 
 Osiris of the later Pharaohs. Mithra was the sun-god of the 
 Medo-Persian system. Drawing his existence no longer from 
 Ormazd, of whom in the Avesta he was ever made a creature 
 and a tributary, he is pictured to us in post-Christian writings 
 as the preternatural offspring of a rock, or of the soiP. Ac- 
 cording also to the numerous sculptures of him still surviving 
 he has been invested with distinctly human properties. He 
 is a young man, clothed with a tunic and a Persian cloke, 
 and having on his head a Persian bonnet or tiara. He kneels 
 upon a prostrate bull ; and while holding it with the left hand 
 by the nostrils, with the right he plunges into its shoulder 
 a short sword or dagger. The bull is at the same time vigor- 
 ously attacked by a dog, a serpent, and a scorpion. The ideas 
 embodied in the suffering animal are at once elucidated when 
 -we call to mind^, that in the old mythology of Persia all 
 organic life, the human and the bestial, issued from the shoulder 
 of the primitive bull ; and therefore astronomic and other sym- 
 bols here employed are probably to be expounded of the action 
 of the sun-god on created nature, his far-piercing beams awak- 
 ening all its latent energies, opening the fresh veins of life 
 and drawing thence a large supply of fructifying virtue. The 
 key, however, to Mithraic mysteries, all of which are said to 
 have been celebrated in a species of ' cave,' was not entrusted 
 to the vulgar and unlettered, but reserved, as in the other 
 kindred rites and orgies, for the few who underwent a solemn 
 initiation. Here indeed the worship of the Persian sun-god 
 lost all traces of its old resemblance to the creed of the Avesta. 
 It fell off into the whirl of mystic and ascetic faiths, wherein 
 the laxer party, such as Commodus and monsters like him, 
 reconciled the adoration of Serapis and of Mithra with the 
 foulest violations of the law of conscience ; while the genuine 
 devotee was eagerly accepting the severe prescriptions of the 
 mystagogue^, who told him that by passing through a length- 
 
 sonifications of the Sun correspond- libidinis esse generates.' 
 
 ing to the signs of the Zodiac. ^ Above, p. 552. 
 
 ^ St. Jerome, who followed a ^ 'At the time of the final 
 
 history of Mithra by Eubulus (now agonies of Paganism, the only 
 
 lost), informs us {Adv. Jovinian. portions of the old religion which 
 
 0pp. rv. col. 149, ed. Bened.) : retained any vitality, at least 
 
 *Narrant et Gentilium fabulse among those of Greek race and 
 
 Mithram et Erichthonium, vel in language, were the mysteries. 
 
 lapide, yel in terra, de solo 8B&tu Here alone persons agitated by 
 
CHAP. IV.] The Medo-Persian Creed. 571 
 
 ened ordeal of torture and privation, he was able to escape 
 from the necessity of repeated births, and consummate his union 
 with the glorious Mithra, * his god and his crown.' 
 
 There is no doubt that while the visions of the Bundehesh 
 derived their colouring, and in part their substance also, from 
 Semitic or from quasi-Christian influences, the advocates of 
 Mithra-worship in the earlier centuries of our era were engaged 
 with more or less of system in retarding the triumphant march 
 of Christianity \ At a period when the claims of our religion 
 were put forward with an irresistible charm alike in the un- 
 spotted lives and the heroic deaths of its true-hearted converts, 
 many of the heathen, still unwilling to embrace it, so far 
 yielded to vibrations it excited in all quai-ters, as to recognise 
 in it the hidden working of a supernatural virtue. We discern 
 this tendency amid the swarm of startling heresies that sprang 
 up in its track ; for most of them were anxious to embody 
 one or more dissevered doctrines of the Gospel with their wild 
 and heathenish speculations ; and others have been also charged 
 with mimicking the smaller details of its ritual system^. We 
 discern this tendency still more in one particular instance, 
 bearing on the present theme, for * almost every thing that 
 Zoroaster taught of Mithra' was perpetuated in the school of 
 Mani, with the noticeable difference that the Persian misbe- 
 liever did not scruple to transfer it all directly to his Christ^. 
 
 religious hopes and fears, distracted a quo intellectus intervertatur 
 
 by doubt, oppressed with a sense eorum, qui ad hjRreses faciant? 
 
 of sin, found pleasing excitement A diabolo scilicet, cujus sunt 
 
 in dark riddles and symbolic rites, partes intervertendi veritatem : qui 
 
 and consolation in the promised ipsas quoque res sacramentorum 
 
 immortality.' Clark, Peloponnesus, divinorum in idolorum mysteriis 
 
 p. 1 1 -2. semulatur. Tingit et ipse quosdam, 
 
 1 This is one of Yon Hammer's utique credentes et fideles suos 
 conclusions, in which Creuzer (i. [referring to the ceremony of initi- 
 329) apparently acquiesces, ex- ation when water was poured by 
 tending the remark to other heathen the mystagogue on the aspirant's 
 *orgies* and 'mysteries' of the head]: expositionem delictorum de 
 post-Christian period. Yet, as lavacro repromittit : et si adhuc 
 various writers have complained, initiat Mithra, signat illic in fronti- 
 there was occasionally a disposi- bus milites suos ; celebrat et panis 
 tion in apologists of the early oblationem ' (referring perhaps to a 
 Church to lay undue stress on some kind of Parsee communion, where 
 points of resemblance between bread was blessed by the priest 
 Mithraism and Christianity. and eaten, in conjunction with 
 
 2 e.g. TertulHan (Be Frcescript. draughts of the homa-plant: cf. 
 Hcer, c. xi) alludes to such ap- Dollinger, p. 373), 
 
 parent mimicries in spealdng of ^ Neander, Ch. Hist. 11. 177. 
 
 Mithraism itself: 'Sed quaeritur. 
 
572 Christ and other Masters. [part iv. 
 
 And, strange though, such an issue may appear, not Mani's 
 system only, but the heathen form of Mithraism as well, was 
 able, in the breaking up of old religions, to attract unto itself 
 a multitude of followers both in East and West. It flourished 
 in alliance with some kindred systems in the mother-city of 
 the Koman empire : it was planted, by the ardour of the foreign 
 legionaries, in the E-oman capital of Britain \ 
 
 Yain, however, and unfruitful was the zeal put forward 
 in transplanting these fantastic shadows of exhausted paganism. 
 The western world, excited by the general ^shaking of the 
 nations,' was now yielding to the voice of the celestial Charmer : 
 it was gazing on the silent march of that obscure yet glorious, 
 of that suffering yet majestic system, to whose birthplace the 
 inquiring Magi came of old, the first-fruits of the Gentile 
 harvest. * When they saw the young child, with Mary His 
 mother, they fell down and worshipped Him,' And Christians 
 of all future times have counted it their highest glory to pro- 
 long that wondrous act of love and adoration. They are con- 
 scious that in Christ are fully satisfied the cravings of a 
 spiritual hunger which religions of the world may stimulate 
 but have no power to appease. While Brahmans, in despair 
 of all the helpers whom their own imagination had created, 
 were still dreaming of some future and more permanent 
 avatdra ; while the Buddhist, equally in north and south, 
 abandoned the original Buddha and sought comfort now in 
 picturing to himself the distant paradise of Amitabha 'the 
 unmeasured Light,' and now in praying for the gracious in- 
 tervention of some Buddha of the future ; while the primitive 
 vision of the helper Sosiosh, dim and fluctuating at the best, 
 was blotted from the Persian mind entirely, or was fading 
 under the augmented brilliance of the younger Mithra ; — 
 Christ and Christ alone, expected in the old ceconomy and 
 made manifest in the new, the living, reigning, and historic 
 Christ, the brightness of the Father's glory and the ' first-born ' 
 of a human brotherhood, was everywhere imprinting on the 
 world an image of His love, which neither time nor space 
 
 ^.See Wellbeloved's JEftumcwm, *Druidizing Mithriacs,' referred to 
 
 pp. 80 — 86, York, 1842; and, for in this essay, are supposed to be an 
 
 some very curious matter with offshoot from *a sort of magical 
 
 regard to this and kindred sub- association' that 'had grown up 
 
 jects, An Essay on the Neo-Druidic in the eastern parts of the Koman 
 
 Heresy in Britannia (ascribed to dominions, founded upon the doc- 
 
 the late Mr. Algernon Herbert), trines and mysteries of the Persian 
 
 pp. 29 sq. Lond. 1838. The Magi.' 
 
CHAP. IV.] The Medo-Persian Creed. 573 
 
 could deaden. He * lighteth every man ' by shining down into 
 the heart. He is the true Sun, of which all heathen mediators 
 are but transient and confused parhelia -^ for while Mithra, 
 once his mighty rival and as such rejoicing in the Name of 
 * the Invincible,' has left no traces, save in monumental sculp- 
 tures, of the homage rendered to him in the early centuries 
 of our era, Christ, the sovereign Lord of all, is going forward 
 on His peaceful conquest of the nations, * the same yesterday 
 and to-day and for ever.' 
 
APPENDIX I. 
 
 Alleged connexion between Coptic and Hebrew, 
 
 (See above, p. 432, n, 2), 
 
 Through the kindness of my friend, Professor Jarrett, I am now in 
 a position to supply the following brief comparison of ordinary words 
 in Coptic and Hebrew. It seems to shew that so far as vocabulary is 
 concerned, the relationship between the two languages can hardly be 
 
 established. 
 
 Comparison of 
 
 common words in Coptic and Hehreiv 
 
 
 Numerals. 
 
 
 60 ce 
 
 U'^'\D 
 
 1 oT^. 
 
 "T^^5 
 
 *7o ajKe 
 
 uy2t> 
 
 ^2 crtA.nf 
 
 u^^^ 
 
 *so g^eJULite 
 
 u^:^Dv 
 
 3 cyOJULT 
 
 wbv 
 
 90 ^Ic^-^•OT 
 
 uywn 
 
 4 qT"o 
 
 yins^ 
 
 100 eye 
 
 n^^iD 
 
 5 TIOT 
 
 won 
 
 1000 OJO 
 
 ^bi^ 
 
 6 COOnf 
 
 wz^ 
 
 Nouns. 
 
 
 7 aj^.cgq 
 
 vn::' 
 
 Father ICJOT" 
 
 IK 
 
 *8 cyjULOTH 
 
 m^Dv 
 
 '^Mother JULA.T 
 
 D^^ 
 
 9 llflX 
 
 yiL^n 
 
 Brother COIt 
 
 ns^ 
 
 10 JULKTT 
 
 1WV 
 
 Sister COrtl 
 
 n1^^^ 
 
 20 XCOT* 
 
 nn'^V 
 
 Son a^P^ 
 
 P 
 
 30 JUL^-E. 
 
 w^^bw 
 
 Daughter Ojepi 
 
 ni 
 
 40 g^JUte 
 
 D'^yniK 
 
 Man ptJOJULI 
 
 t:^^^^, Dih? 
 
 50 T^-io-r 
 
 ri'\D!2r\ 
 
 Woman C^\SJL\ 
 
 r^t^i^ 
 
Head 
 
 Eye 
 
 Mouth 
 
 Tooth 
 
 ^"'ose 
 Beard 
 fXeck 
 J and 
 
 po 
 
 JULOpT 
 
 and and 
 
 [Shoulder JULOTI 
 Arm CL5CJ0E.CI} 
 
 Hand ITOIT, XIX 
 '•Fmger THJS., OHSl 
 
 Belly en, nexi 
 
 Heart £,KT 
 Knee H^-T" 
 
 Foot <t^T" 
 
 Ear JUL^.^,Xe 
 
 Flesh ^.q 
 
 Skin ^.nOJUL 
 
 Day eg^OO-^- 
 
 Night OTOJH 
 
 Light O-^CJOmi 
 
 Darkness Kl^Ke 
 
 tWater JULCOOT 
 
 tSea lOJUL 
 
 Appendix. 575 
 
 Fire kXcjojul, KpcjojuL ::;>? 
 
 Wind nifi.e ri)') 
 
 i^.po -^s\ nm 
 ctjcijKrt vy 
 
 xco^i n^y 
 
 ecooT n^, l^^'J 
 
 Verbs. 
 Eat O-^eJUL, O-^CJDJUL ^D^V 
 
 Drink ce nn::^ 
 
 ^^., eye 
 
 Run HHT yn 
 
 Take ^.JUtoni, 6C0m Hp^ 
 
 JULOI, TKI J ' 
 
 ep nctry 
 
 xe, xuo iDh? 
 
 juLepe nni^ 
 
 juLecTe w*^ 
 
 ai,xa?2>] y:i3 
 
 P 
 
 fRiver 
 Tree 
 Leaf 
 Ox 
 Cow 
 
 "Sheep 
 Horse 
 Ass 
 
 See 
 Hear 
 
 Go 
 
 Give 
 
 Do 
 Say 
 Love 
 Hate 
 
 Touch 
 
 ^^iisibn 
 
 (i) Of the above words those marked f are identical: "ii^^ being, 
 used of the Nile. 
 
 (2) The words marked * have considerable resemblance, which may 
 point to a common origin. 
 
 (3) The remainder, a vast majority, appear to have no connexion 
 whatever. 
 
576 
 
 Appendix. 
 
 The following is a short list of accidental resemblances which have ahn 
 occurred to Professor Jarrett {the Coptic words meaning the same as 
 the words set against them) ; '^ 
 
 C^ii 6 = sap-iens. 
 
 lOOX = Ijt Turkish; atta, 
 
 Gothic, 'father.' 
 C4LXI = sag-en. 
 OTOn: = van, Ms/ 'are,' Mar/- 
 
 yar, 
 O'yopri = werf-en. 
 
 KO ATI = Ky\.e7r-T€tV. 
 
 OJOrtTI = sentis. 
 JULOCgi = ^^, 'walked,' 
 Arab. 
 
 cJ)U3X =: fut-ni, 'to flee/ Mag- 
 yar. 
 
 CKCH = v._2j^^ 'sword/ A7^ah. 
 XCJOX = coq-uere. 
 I = t-€vat = j.re. 
 
 cyeJULHp=-nDn, 'leaven.' 
 IHC = :L»n, 'hasty.' 
 
 The use of pronominal affixes is not confined to Hebrew and Coptic, 
 but is found also in Welsh and Magyar; of which the former is an 
 Aryan language, and the latter Turanian. Of the sixteen affixes used 
 in Hebrew, the Coptic coincides exactly in only tico, the Welsh in one; 
 while in the use of n for -IJ, the Welsh agrees with the Coptic, and the 
 Magyar differs only by the addition of k, which is in that language the 
 regular affix to mark the plural in all cases. The Magyar agrees also 
 with the Hebrew in the insertion of *• =i, when the pronominal affix is 
 added to a plural noun. The Welsh uses i, and the Magyar d as the 
 characteristic of the second person. 
 
 On this latter question of pronominal affixes, as pointing to some 
 close analogy between the Coptic and the Hebrew, M. Kenan, Histoire 
 des Langues Semitiques, i. 83 sq. (Paris, 1858), has made the following 
 observations : 
 
 'II est, je le sais, des analogies plus profondes et beaucoup plus con- 
 siderables aux yeux des linguistes, qui semblent rattacher la langue copte 
 aux idiomes semitiques. L'identit6 des pronoms, et surtout de la ma- 
 nibre de les traitor dans les deux langues, est assur^ment un fait etrange. 
 Cette identity s'observe jusque dans les details qui semblent les plus 
 accessoires: plusieurs irregularites apparentes du pronom s^mitique (le 
 changement du H en *] a I'affixe, par exemple) trouvent mcme dans la 
 theorie du pronom copto une satisfaisante explication.' 
 
Appendix. 577 
 
 PKONOMS ISOLES. 
 Copte. H^breu. 
 
 1" p. sing. ^.rtOK ^^JNI 
 
 2" p. sing. KXOK et en baschmourique KXA-K . . . nOK pour nHJi^ 
 1" p. pi. ^nort et en baschmourique ^rtA.It . . . ^J^J^? 
 2' p. pi. nTtOTTit DRISt pour DWi< 
 
 PKONOMS SUFEIXES. 
 
 Copte. Hebreu. 
 
 1'" p. sing. I ^ 
 
 2' p. sing. K *?| 
 
 3'p. sing, q i) 
 
 l"p.pl. It JlJ 
 
 2^p.pi. T-ert EDD 
 
 Les analogies des noms de nombre, signalees par M. Lepsius, ne sont pas 
 moins frappantes. Exemples : CIt^-nf = tD'^J^ ; OJOJULT* = 2^7^; 
 
 CO = i^ti^ ; C^.Cl}q = V^^ > CgJUtOTtt = nJOK^, etc. L'aggluti- 
 
 nation des mots accessoires, I'assiinilation des consonnes, le r61e secon- 
 daire de la voyelle, son instability, qui la fait souvent omettre dans 
 r^criture, sont autant de traits qui rapprochent singulierement la gram- 
 maire ^gyptienne de la grammaire hebraique. — La conjugaison elle-mSme 
 n'est pas sans quelques analogies dans les deux langues : le present copte, 
 oomme le second temps des langues s6mitiques, se forme par I'agglutina- 
 tion du pronom en tete de la racine verbale ; les autres temps se forment 
 au moyen d'une composition semblable 4 celle qu'emploient les langues 
 aram6ennes. On trouve, en copte, Temploi d'une forme causative ana- 
 logue a Vhiphilj et la voix passive y est marquee, comme dans les langues 
 semitiques, par une modification de la voyelle du radical. — La thiorie 
 des particules offre aussi, de part et d'autre, quelques ressemblances ; la 
 conjonction copte, comme la conjonction arabe, est susceptible de regime ; 
 
 ^COC| = etiam ipse; ^^pOK = cur tu, Enfin, une entente analogue 
 
 de la phrase et une conception presque identique des rapports gramma- 
 ticaux 6tablissent entre les deux systemes de langues d'incontestaWes 
 affinitds. 
 
 Mais ces affinitcs suffisent-elles pour ranger dans une m^me famille 
 les langues entre lesquelles on les observe? Sont-ce de simples ressem- 
 blances comme on en remarque entre toutes les langues, ou des analogies 
 
 H. 37 
 
578 Appendix, 
 
 tenant k une commune origine? C'est ici que le probleme devient delicat 
 et, k vrai dire, presque insoluble. II implique une question de methode 
 sur laquelle, dans I'etat actuel de la linguistique, on ne pent rien dire de 
 bien prdcis. L'histoire naturelle a des signes parfaitement determines 
 pour dtablir les embranchements, les classes, les genres et les espfeces; 
 la linguistique n'en a pas : c'est une question de degr^, sur laquelle I'ap- 
 pr6ciation individuelle de chaque linguiste pourra varier. Si Ton yeut 
 attribuer a la classification des langues en families un sens positif, on 
 doit faire correspondre cette division a un fait rdel et historique. Elle 
 doit vouloir dire qu'a I'origine de I'humanit^ le langage apparut sous un 
 ou plusieurs types qui ont produit, par leur developpement, toutes les 
 diversitds actuelles. Or nous n'avons pas assez de lumieres sur les 
 temps primitifs pour aborder ce difficile probleme. Le naturaliste n'est 
 pas oblige de decider si chaque genre repr^sente une forme de creation 
 primordiale : il se contente de dire que les genres, dans I'etat actuel de 
 notre planete, sont irr^ductibles. Le linguiste, dont les hypotheses im- 
 pliquent, quoi qu'il fasse, une assertion historique, serait tenu a quelque 
 chose de plus : et pourtant il ne possbde qu'un seul crit^rium pour dtablir 
 la distinction des families, c'est I'impossibilit^ d'expliquer comment le 
 systbme de Tune a pu sortir du systeme de I'autre par des transformations 
 r^gulieres. De la au fait primitif, qui seul pourrait offrir aux classifica- 
 tions linguistiques une base solide et clairement intelligible, il y a un 
 abime qu'aucun esprit sage ne se decidera jamais k franchir. 
 
 Du moins, k la question ainsi pos6e : peut-on expliquer par un de- 
 veloppement organique comment le systeme des langues semitiques a pu 
 engendrer le systeme de la languo copte, ou reciproquement ? il faut 
 repondre sans h^siter d'une maniere negative. Des rapprochements 
 comme ceux que Ton signale sont tout a fait insuffisants pour etablir une 
 parente primitive. Un systeme grammatical va tout d'une piece, et il 
 est absurde de supposer que deux groupes de langues possedent en 
 commun une moitie de leur systeme grammatical sans se ressembler par 
 I'autre. Certes il nous est difficile d'expliquer I'identite d'elements en 
 apparence aussi accidentels que les pronoms et les noms de nombre. 
 Quelle raison a pu determiner les races diverses a prendre le t pour 
 caract^ristique de la seconde personne du singulier, Vn pour caracteristi- 
 que de la premiere personne du pluriel? II serait pueril de le rechercher. 
 Avouons pourtant que les premiers hommes ont pu se laisser guider en 
 cela par des analogies qui nous dchappent. La theorie du pronom tient 
 d'une maniere si intime a la constitution memo de I'esprit humain, qu'elle 
 appartient presque aux categories de la logique, et doit, comme ses cate- 
 gories, se retrouver partout la meme. Les noms de nombre se rattache- 
 raient de tres-pr^s aux pronoms, s'il fallait ajouter foi aux vues inge- 
 nieuses que M. Lepsius lui-meme, dans la seconde des dissertations pre- 
 citees, a emises sur ce sujet. Enfin, quelque strange que puisse paraitre 
 un emprunt portant sur des ^l^ments linguistiques ausei essentiels, on 
 n'ose regarder un tel emprunt comme impossible, quand on voit le pehlvi 
 (dont la r^alitd comme langue parlee n'est pas, il est vrai, bien certaine) 
 offrir des pronoms, des noms de nombre, des propositions, des conjonc- 
 tions sdmitiques, h, cote d'elements non moins fondamen.taux, appartenant 
 aux idiomes irauiens.' 
 
APPENDIX II. 
 
 Religions of the barbarous tribes of Africa. 
 
 (See above, p. 433.) 
 
 The special interest attaching at the present day to explorations in 
 that mighty tract of unknown country, which is vaguely termed the high- 
 lands and lowlands of Central Africa, induces me to add a few brief notes 
 on some remarkable analogies which may be traced between the aspects 
 of religion there and in the other parts of heathendom. I do so from a 
 further wish to illustrate, as far as may be, the religious condition of 
 Egypt anterior to the coming of that second race of immigrants who 
 grtamped a widely different character on many of her sacred institutions. 
 
 The great work of Dr. Livingstone has pointed here and there to some 
 lemote connexion in primeval ages between Egypt and South- Central 
 A-frica^ Thus, the animal-worship of the Old Egyptians, which had 
 ever formed their strongest and most startling peculiarity in the eyes of 
 Greece and Kome (see above, pp. 456 sq.) is traceable as far southward 
 as the Bechuana tribes. These tribes are also named after certain 
 animals. 'The term Bakatla means, "they of the monkey;" Bakuena, 
 "they of the alligator ; " Batldpi, "they of the fish," each tribe having 
 a superstitious dread of the animal after which it is called... J[ tribe 
 never eats the animal which u its namesake, using the term ila, "hate"' 
 or " dread," in reference to killing it' {Missionary Travels, p. 13 : cf. above 
 pp. 456, 466). Prichard, in like manner, has collected observations 
 bearing upon this point from earlier travellers in South Africa; 'If a 
 I^erson has been killed by an elephant, they offer a sacrifice, apparently 
 to appease the demon supposed to have actuated the animal. One who 
 kills by accident a makem, or Balearic crane, or a brom-vogel, a species of 
 tucan, must offer a calf in atonement. Sometimes they imagine that a 
 shiUuga, or spirit, resides in a particular ox [cf. the Apis of Egypt, above, 
 p. 457, and n. 2], and propitiate it by prayers when going on hunting 
 expeditions :' Researches, 11. 289. From the Eev. J. Shooter's Kafirs of 
 Natal and the Zulu country, Lond. 1857, we have learned, again, not 
 only that serpents and some other reptiles are there regarded as 'incarna- 
 tions of spirits departed* (p. 162), but also that Zulus are very scruj)ulous 
 in abstaining from the flesh of a particular group of animals (p. 215), 
 some of which, however, as in different nomes of ancient Egypt, are 
 eaten freely by their neighbours. 
 
 ^ See also Brosses (Cli. c\e), Du Ciilte des Dieux Fetiches, ou Parallile de Vancienne 
 Religion de VEgypte avcc la licligion aciuelk de Nigritie, Paris, 1760. 
 
 37-2 
 
580 Appendix. 
 
 Dr. Livingstone has further drawn attention to the fact that striking 
 coincidences exist between the customs of Egypt and Central Africa, e. g. 
 in pounding maize (p. 196), in dressing the hair (pp. 304, 443), in spinning 
 and weaving (pp. 399, 400), and other matters: but one of the most 
 important Hnks supplied by him for drawing together the first popu- 
 lations of the two districts will be found in his comparison of the African 
 dialects with the language of the Old Egyptians. He thinks it nearly 
 certain (i) that all the tongues now spoken to the South of the Equator, 
 with the exception of the Bush or Hottentot, are strictly homogeneous, 
 and (2) that the Sichuana tongue, as now elevated by the powerful 
 Bechuana chieftains, bears, in structure, very close resemblance to the 
 language of Egyptian monuments. He has handled this subject in a 
 small unpublished work, for some knowledge of which I am indebted to 
 the valuable edition of Br. Livingstone's Cambridge Lectures, by the 
 Eev. William Monk (Camb. 1858), pp. 106 — 121. 
 
 But, to my own mind, the most conclusive testimony flowing from late 
 researches of Dr. Livingstone may readily be brought to bear upon a 
 somewhat larger question, viz. the affinity in thought and feeling and 
 traditions between the natives of Central Africa and the primitive layer 
 of human population, not in Egypt only, but in other and far-distant 
 countries. As Dr. Livingstone was himself, apparently, unconscious of 
 any such relationship, his observations will of course possess the greater 
 value. I shall cite a few examples ; at the same time illustrating Dr. 
 Livingstone's account by references to the Third Part of this work, and by 
 adducing, here and there, the testimony of other writers. 
 
 The African idea of God. According to the verdict of early travellers 
 in Southern Africa, the natives of that region were esteemed 'the most 
 brutal and barbarous in the world, neither worshipping God nor any 
 idol ;' and the general absence of all forms of public worship, both among 
 the Kafirs and the Bechuanas of the present day, has caused the charge 
 of atheism to be continually repeated (Livingstone, pp. 158, 159). Such 
 also, we have seen already (p. 392), was precisely the condition of the 
 Papuan Family, exposing them to similar charges. Yet in neither case 
 are we at liberty to argue that the thought of a superior race of beings, 
 superhuman and invisible, had been quite obliterated from the native 
 mind. With reference to South Africa, Dr. Livingstone appears to be 
 at variance on this point with Mr. Moifat, his friend and predecessor 
 {Missionary Labours , p. 245) : for, writing of the people towards the 
 mouths of the Zambesi (pp. 641, 642), he affirms that they have a clear 
 idea of a Supreme Being. That being ' is named Morimo, 3Iolungo, 
 Beza, Mpdmbe, in the different dialects spoken. The Barotse name him 
 Nydmxn, and the Balonda Zdmbi. All promptly acknowledge him as the 
 ruler over all.' Dr Livingstone, however, confesses plainly in another 
 passage (pp. 158, 159), while speaking of the Kafirs and Bechuanas, that 
 this notion of the deity, though present, seems to be inoperative at the 
 best; and since the form Morimo is probably identical with Barimo, 
 and both the nouns are also used in the iilural number as equivalent to 
 * spirits, ' we are fully entitled to infer that there, as in the wild tribes 
 of America, the Morimo is only a Great Spirit, acting as the highest 
 member of a group, — in other words, ' the brightest inmate of a crowded 
 pantheon' (above, p. 357). I may observe that Morimo, as the nearest 
 possible approximation, has been hitherto adopted by missionaries in 
 rendering the name of the Supreme Being. We further ascertain that 
 in the Kafir tribes some memories are still lingering of a ' Great-Great ' 
 
Appendix. oSl 
 
 and a 'First Appearer;' and in one single district of Natal the Great- 
 Great is actually worshipped, 'though the recollection of him is very 
 dim' (Shooter, p. i6g). 
 
 Offerings to and for the dead. Hegel seems to fancy (Phil, of Hist. 
 p. 99, Lond. 1857) that this kind of worship was the special characteristic 
 of the African negroes, their idea being that departed * ancestors exercise 
 vengeance and inflict upon man various injuries.' We have seen, how- 
 ever, that the practice was all but universal in China (pp. 290 sq.), 
 among the wild tribes of America (p. 355, n. i), among the Papuans 
 p. 391), and the Maori (pp. 405 sq.) ; and was further recognised as one 
 chief part of the religion of the Old Egj^ptians (p. 471). The soul of the 
 deceased was commonly beheved, in Asia, Africa, America, and Oceanica, 
 to linger for a certain period near the place of sepulture, and also to 
 derive while there a sort of gratification from the offerings which were 
 made in her behalf. Thus, to take one striking specimen from Dr. Living- 
 stone's work (p. 434; cf. pp. 319, 641, 642): 'The same superstitious 
 ideas being prevalent through the whole of the country north of the 
 Zambesi, seems to indicate that the people must originally have been 
 one. All believe that the souls of the departed still mingle among the 
 living, and partake in some way of the food they consume. In sickness, 
 sacrifices of fowls and goats are made to appease the spirits. It is 
 imagined that they wish to take the living away from earth and all its 
 enjoyments. When one man has killed another, a sacrifice is made, as 
 if to lay the spirit of the victim. A sect is reported to exist who kill men 
 in order to take their hearts and offer them to the Barimo.'' Mr. Shooter 
 also, speaking of the Kafirs of Natal, has made a similar observation 
 (p. 161): and when he adds that the attention- of departed spirits 
 is thought to be restricted to their own relatives, — a father caring 
 for the family and a chief for the tribe, which they respectively left 
 behin-d them, — we need only turn to China or New Zealand to discover 
 a most vivid and exact resemblance (above, pp. 291, 405). 
 
 Slaughter of servants in honour of their chiefs. The horrible practice 
 of burning widows which had long prevailed in Hindtist^n, and which was 
 also found by early missionaries in the Wendic tribes of northern Europe 
 (see the letter of Boniface, 0pp. ed. Giles, i. 132 sq.), had extended south- 
 ward to the Vlti islands (above, p. 395, n. i), where slaves and even 
 children of the deceased were put to death at his funeral (cf. Herod, iv. 
 71, 72). Dr. Livingstone, while speaking of the negroes of South-Central 
 Africa (p. 318), produces the same gloomy picture : 'When a chief dies, 
 a number of servants are slaughtered with him to form his company in 
 the other world.' He then adds : 'As we go north, the people become 
 more bloodily superstitious.' 
 
 Transmigration. We have seen that both in civilised and barbarous 
 countries the idea of immortality was always prone to clothe itself in 
 more or less elaborate theories on the transmigration of the human souk 
 Such theories, we have further seen, prevailed in all the polished circles 
 of Hindfist^n and Egj^pt, but the traces of them were observable as well 
 among the wild tribes of America (above, p. 361). It is probable that in 
 almost every case the spirit was supposed to linger for a time in the 
 vicinity of her old dwelling, and then to start upon her wanderings 
 through the different animal foi-ms which she was destined to inhabit. 
 And substantially the same account is brought us by the missionary who 
 has studied the religion of the southern tribes of Africa : ' They believe 
 in the transmigration of souls; and also that while persons are still 
 
582 Appendix. 
 
 liviug they may enter into lions and alligators, and then return again 
 to their own bodies' (Livingstone, p. 642). Mr. Shooter [Kafirs of 
 Natal, p. 162) corroborates this statement also, adding that 'departed 
 spirits are believed to revisit the earth and appear to their descendants 
 in the form of certain serpents.' 
 
 Bondage to fear. The gloomy terror everywhere inspired alike by the 
 religions of the wild American and by those of Oceanica (above, pp. 359, 
 sq. ; 397), has found its counterpart again among the various tribes ox 
 Central Africa: 'Their religion, if such it may be called, is one of dread. 
 Numbers of charms are employed to avert the evils with which they 
 feel themselves to be encompassed. Occasionally you meet a man, more 
 cautious or more timid than the rest, with twenty or thirty charms hung 
 round his neck' (Livingstone, p. 435). Again: 'There is nothing more 
 heart-rending than their death-waiis. When the natives turn their eyes 
 to the future world, they have a view cheerless enough of their own utter 
 helplessness and hopelessness. They fancy themselves completely in the 
 power of the disembodied spirits, and look upon the prospect of fol- 
 lowing them, as the greatest of misfortunes. Hence they are constantly 
 deprecating the wrath of departed souls, believing that, if they are 
 appeased, there is no other cause of death but witchcraft, which may 
 be averted by charms' (p. 440). 
 
 Circumcision. I have already had occasion to notice the prevalence 
 of this rite in Southern Africa, and also pointed out some traces of it in 
 the Egypt of the Pharaohs, as well as in far distant parts of heathen- 
 dom: see above, pp. 490, 491, and the references there given. 
 
 Black and white men. The following declaration of a 'rain-doctor,' 
 as recorded by Dr. Livingstone (p. 24), is identical with a tradition already 
 noted (above, p. 398) in speaking of the Vlti islands : ' He made black 
 men first, and did not love us, as he did the white men. He made you 
 beautiful, and gave you clothing and guns, &c. ; but towards us he had 
 no heart. He gave us nothing, except the assegai and cattle and rain- 
 making: and he did not give us hearts like yours. We never lo\re each 
 other.' A legend of precisely the same import (above, p. 403, n. 2) is 
 still preserved among the Tongans (and not improbably among some 
 other of the Polynesian islanders). There too it is the elder son who 
 is depraved and idle, and his children who are destined to change colour, 
 and to pass from white to black, by reason of some moral delinquency 
 of their progenitor, — ' because the heart is bad.' 
 
 Veneration of the Ficus Indica. Attention has been drawn already 
 to the marvellous frequency with which the nations of South-Eastern 
 Asia and the wilder tribes of Oceanica have betrayed their reverence for 
 the banyan-tree or Indian fig (above, p. 393) : but, strange as this may 
 seem, the regions of Central Africa explored of late years by Dr. Living- 
 stone have yielded further testimonies of precisely the same kind. In 
 speaking of the Balonda, he says (p. 290): 'They regard this tree with 
 some sort of veneration as a medicine or charm.' And again, referring 
 to a village in the Barotse valley, he writes (p. 495): 'At this village 
 there is a real Indian banyan-tree, which has spread itself over a con- 
 siderable space by means of roots from its branches... It is curious that 
 trees of this family are looked upon with veneration, and all the way 
 from the Barotse to Loanda are thought to be preservatives from evil.' 
 
 The examples here adduced of some original tie connecting the 
 barbaric tribes of Southern and Central Africa, not only with the 
 earliest masters of the land of Egypt, but with primitive layers of 
 
Aj^pendioc. 583 
 
 population in Asia, in America, in Oceanica, will serve a highly moral 
 purpose, if they tend to silence the suspicions now again in circulation 
 with regard to the admissibility of Africans into the family of man. I 
 deem it a most cruel falsehood to maintain that any even of the lowest 
 negi'o tribes are unsusceptible of mental and moral culture ; but instead 
 of urging my own opinion, I transcribe the words of one who, by his 
 long and patient study of the question, earned a fairer claim to speak 
 about it than a multitude of philo -slavers : *The civilisation,' writes 
 Prichard, 'of many African nations is much superior to that of the 
 aborigines of Europe during the ages which preceded the conquests of 
 the Goths and Swedes in the north, and the Komans in the Southern 
 parts. The old Finnish inhabitants of Scandinavia had long, as it has 
 been proved by the learned investigations of Kiihs, the religion of fetishes, 
 and a vocabulary as scanty as that of the most barbarous Africans. 
 They had lived from inimemorial ages without laws, or government, 
 or social union ; every individual the supreme arbiter, in every thing, 
 of his own actions; and they displayed as little capability of emerging 
 from the squalid sloth of their rude and merely animal existence. When 
 conquered by people of Indo-German race, who brought with them from 
 the East the rudiments of mental culture, they emerged mo^e slowly 
 from their pristine barbarism than many of the native African nations 
 have done. Even at the present day there are hordes in various parts of 
 Northern' Asia, whose heads have the form belonging to the Tatars, 
 and to Slavonians and other Europeans, but are below many of the 
 African tribes in civilisation.' 
 
INDEX. 
 
 ApRAHAM, the call of, 88 ; his faith 
 contrasted with that of an an- 
 cient Indo- Aryan, 232. 
 
 Absolute Eeligion, the, 16, 26, in ; 
 its adherents strip the prophe- 
 cies of divine authority, 99. 
 
 Adi-Buddha, 163 ; 333. 
 
 Africa, religions of the barbarous 
 tribes of, 579. 
 
 Ages of the Earth — the four Mexi- 
 can periods, 379, n. 
 
 Agni, 123, n. 
 
 Ahriman, 535 ; evil created by, 536; 
 Ahriman and Satan, 554 ; how 
 differhag, 555 ; his end, 567. 
 
 Ahura-mazda, see Ormazd. 
 
 Alexander the Great, his expedi- 
 tion to India, 117. 
 
 Alexandria, School of, 12; allego- 
 rized the ceremonial law, 74. 
 
 America, the wild tribes of, 354 ; 
 ancient civilisation of Central 
 America, 361. 
 
 American Indians — ^vagueness of 
 their traditions, 347 ; archives 
 destroyed by the Spaniards, 348 ; 
 homogeneity of the tribes, 348 ; 
 their origin, 350; characteris- 
 tics of the languages, 349; proofs 
 of foreign influences, 352; two 
 classes of populations, 354. 
 Doctrine of a Great Spirit, 357 ; 
 their worship chiefly deprecative, 
 359 ; their gloomy creed, 360. 
 
 Amitdbha, 336. 
 
 Ammwrif 444. 
 
 AmshaspandSf 534 ; compared with 
 Archangels, 562. 
 
 Ancestors, worship of — in China, 
 290; among the Papuans, 391; 
 in New Zealand, 405 ; in Egypt, 
 471 ; among the African tribes, 
 £81. 
 
 Angels, Holy, the doctrine of, 558 ; 
 Eabbinical testimony, 559; names 
 of» 559; early traces of angelic 
 orders, 561. 
 
 Animal- worship, 455; in Egypt, 
 456 ; traceable in Africa as far 
 southward as the Bechuana 
 tribes, 579. 
 
 Apis, 457. 
 
 Archangels, 562. 
 
 Aryans, 122, n; an ancient Indo- 
 Aryan contrasted with Abraham, 
 232. 
 
 Australian natives, degradation of, 
 41. 
 
 Avatdras, 196; of Vishnu, 196; 
 the Kalki-avat^ra, 231. 
 
 Avesta, the, 527 : its relation to 
 the original sacred books of Per- 
 sia, 527 ; its different parts, 
 528; in its present shape not 
 traceable beyond the third cen- 
 tury after Christ, 547 ; dualistic 
 theology, 533; contains no trace 
 of the resurrection of the body, 
 564. 
 
 Azazel, 504. 
 
 Aztec dominion in Central Ame- 
 rica, 362 ; terrible aspect of their 
 worship, 369; alleged resem- 
 blance to Hebraism, 370. 
 
 Babylonian mythology, general 
 character of, 546. 
 
 Banyan-tree, veneration of the, 582. 
 
 Bari»esanes, travelled to India, 
 179. 
 
 Batdra-Guru, the highest object 
 of worship in Java, 389. 
 
 Bechuana tribes, named after ani- 
 mals, 579. 
 
 Bede, the Venerable, the last hours 
 of, 345- 
 
Index. 
 
 585 
 
 Bhagavad'Gitd, its object, 171; 
 
 theology, 171 ; ethical system, 
 
 172; theory of devotion, 173; 
 
 reasserts the law of caste, 172 ; 
 
 its date, 170, n. 
 Black men, first created, but not 
 
 objects of love, 582. 
 Bodisatwas, 155, w; i59> w; 326; 
 
 333. 
 Bogomiles, dualistic system of the, 
 
 539» «• 
 Bopp's classification of languages, 
 
 49. 
 
 Brahma and Brahmd, 141, 189. 
 
 Br^hmanical legend of Paradise, 
 211; doctrine of the Tempter, 
 2i6; of sacrifice, 225. 
 
 Br^hmanism, 135; its probable 
 age, 145 ; a philosophical religi- 
 on, 144 ; compared with Bud- 
 dhism, 159, 166; its pantheism, 
 185, 189 ; real nature of its triad, 
 192 ; how far analogous to He- 
 braism, 238 ; its inherent degene- 
 racy, 252. 
 
 Brahmans, the prerogatives of, op- 
 posed by Kapila, 152. 
 
 Brahmanas, commentaries on the 
 Vedas, 122, n. 
 
 Buddha, the perfect, 155, n; 156. 
 
 Buddhism, 153; its general date, 
 154 ; foundation, 156; early pro- 
 pagation, 157 ; varieties of it, 
 324 ; as a civilizing agent, 342 ; 
 its general mildness, 168 ; its 
 ethical character, 343 ; atheis- 
 tic, 162, 163, n; primitive Bud- 
 dhism was theistic, 163, w ; its 
 two main principles, 165, n; its 
 four grand verities, 165 ; as a 
 system comparatively fruitless, 
 169. 
 
 — its introduction into China, 321; 
 how far prevalent there, 326; 
 unacceptable in its primitive 
 form, 327, 332 ; diffused in 
 Kashmir and China, 158; ex- 
 pelled from India, 158; flourish- 
 ed in Tibet and Ceylon, 159, 265. 
 
 ' — compared with Brahmanism, 
 159, 166; it rejected the Vedas, 
 160; it has no sacrifice, 161; 
 contrasted with Muhammad- 
 anism, 157, n; compared with 
 
 Essenism, 244 ; how far analogous 
 to Christianity, 241; as a popu- 
 lar religion, 249. 
 
 Buddhist ethics, 166; precepts, 
 prohibitions, austerities, 167 ; 
 hospitals, 157, n; synods, 157; 
 doctrine of sin, 160; of caste, 
 161 ; of causation, 164; legend 
 of Paradise, 211, 213. 
 
 JBundehesh, the Persian Genesis, 
 554- 
 
 Cdbeiri, the, 453 ; an example of 
 planet-worship, 453. 
 
 Cannibalism in Mexico, 370. 
 
 Captivity of the Jews in JBabylon, 
 its causes and effects, 545 ; mo- 
 dern theories respecting its ef- 
 fect, 545, 546. 
 
 Caste, not recognised in the Yedas, 
 137 ; reasserted in the Bhagavad- 
 Gita, 172; Buddhist view of it, 
 161; not found among the Pa- 
 puans, 392 ; a species of it pre- 
 vailing in many parts of Poly- 
 nesia, 392, w. 
 
 Celsus, a spirituaUst, 21. 
 
 Ceylon, sacred books of, 249, n. 
 
 Circumcision, 490 ; its existence 
 in far distant countries, 491 ; dif- 
 ferences between the Hebrew and 
 all other rites, 492. 
 
 Chamij a native name of Egypt, 
 
 430- 
 
 Charms to avert evils, 582. 
 
 Cherubim, 493; not related to the 
 griffin, 494 ; real nature of, 495 ; 
 relation to the sphinx, 496. 
 
 China, disturbances in, 274 ; its 
 moral and spiritual isolation, 
 275; religious phases, 278; in- 
 , teUectual activity, 283; worship 
 of Earth and Heaven, 287; 
 worship of Genii and demons, 
 288; hero-worship, 289; god- 
 dess-worship, 289 ; worship of 
 ancestors, 289 ; sacrificial paper, 
 291; theistic or atheistic, 294. 
 
 China-man and Hindd contrasted, 
 276. 
 
 Chinese civilisation, its antiquity, 
 273; its wide diffusion, 274; its 
 culmination, 278; founded main- 
 ly On the sacred books, 278. 
 
586 
 
 Index. 
 
 Chinese, natural chamoteristics of 
 the, 275 ; their primeval tradi- 
 tions, 277 ; their philosophy of 
 the Absolute, or the 'Great Ex- 
 treme,' 300; dualism, Le and jfiCe, 
 302 : materialists, 307. 
 
 Chinese army reached the Caspian 
 circ. A.D. 80, 311, n; their inter- 
 course with India, 323. 
 
 Choo-he, and his influence, 284. 
 
 Christian and heathen systems, re- 
 semblances between, 176; theory 
 of natural coincidences, 178. 
 
 Christianity suited to be the 'world- 
 religion,' 42 ; its remedial nature, 
 253; early influences in India, 
 180; missions of the Kestorian 
 Church, 181; alluded to in the 
 Mahd-bhdrata, 182; compared 
 with Hinduism, as to the idea of 
 God, 188; as to the Trinity in 
 Unity, 194; the Krishna-legend, 
 201 ; contrasted with Fo-ism, 340. 
 
 Chronological cycles, Hindti, 214; 
 Mexican, 379. 
 
 Classes of human species, proposed 
 groups of, 48. 
 
 Classification of human languages, 
 49. 
 
 Confucianism, the State religion of 
 China, 278 ; its rise 281 ; antago- 
 nism to Christianity, 306. 
 
 Confucius, general aim of, 281 ; his 
 works, 282, n; a contemporary 
 of Pythagoras, 283; the Emperor 
 the foremost object in his system, 
 284 ; himself an object of worship, 
 289; the idea of God in his sys- 
 tem, 292; his general scope of 
 ethics and politics, 298; his 
 theory of man, 304 ; and of sin, 
 305; contrast between him and 
 Lao-tse, 307. 
 
 Colour varies with climate, 45. 
 
 CosMAS Indicopleustes, 181. 
 
 Coptic, comparison of, with He- 
 brew, 574. 
 
 Cross, the symbol found in Yucatan, 
 378. 
 
 CuDWOKTH, his System^ 30. 
 
 Darius headed a religious move- 
 ment, 522. 
 Dalai'LamaSj hierarchy of, 332. 
 
 Deists in the xviith and xviiith 
 
 centuries, 26. 
 Deluge, Hindu versions of the, 219 ; 
 
 Chinese legend, 279; Mexican 
 
 traditions, 380; Vltlan, 398. 
 Devil-worshippers in Armenia, 21, 
 
 n. 
 Devs, the antagonists of amsJias- 
 
 Xmnds, 537. 
 DharmcL of Buddhism, addressed to 
 
 the intellect, 157, n. 
 Diabolic counterfeits, theory of, 
 
 177- 
 DuaUsm in China, 302 ; of the old 
 American theology, 358 ; in the 
 Avesta, 533; not peculiar to 
 Persia, 535; absolute, or tempo- 
 rary, in Persia, 538; system of 
 the Bogomiles, 539, n. 
 
 Eclectic School of India, 169. 
 
 Egypt, ancient importance of, 418; 
 its monuments, 419; connection 
 with sacred history, 427, 430; 
 connection with Phoenicia, 452, 
 454 J connection with South-Cen- 
 tral Africa, 579 ; its popular creed, 
 507 ; its moral dulness, 509. 
 
 Egyptian sacred books, 435 ; differ- 
 ent orders of divinities, 439 ; 
 
 — heathenism, its characteristics, 
 418; how far monotheistic, 436; 
 its practical polytheism, 438 ; its 
 pantheistic basis, 438 ; 
 
 — art, at different periods, 423 ; 
 
 — civilisation, 430; 
 
 — mythology, Neo-Platoni^t theo- 
 ries, 434 ; localised in connection 
 with the Nile, 458; 
 
 • — traditions untrustworthy, 425 ; 
 
 — chronology unsolved, 429. 
 Egyptian and Hebrew systems, 
 
 480; ritual resemblances, 486; 
 doctrinal contrasts, 505. 
 Egyptians dark, but not negroes, 
 
 47. 
 
 Emanation, a dogma of the Brdh- 
 mans, 142. 
 
 Epochs remarkable, vith century 
 B.C., 4; xvth and xvith centuries 
 A.D., 5 ; the present age, 7. 
 
 Essenism, compared with Bud- 
 dhism, 244. 
 
 Evil One, doctrine of the, 554. 
 
Index. 
 
 587 
 
 Fetishism, 355; Papuan, 393. 
 
 Fervers, good genii, 537, n; 562, n. 
 
 Fiji, see Viti. 
 
 Fire-worship, modern Parsee doc- 
 trine of, 526, n. 
 
 Fo-ism, or Chinese Buddhism, 321 ; 
 compared with Lama^sm, 325; 
 its laxity with regard to animal 
 life, 326, n; has no regular hier- 
 archy, 328; its divergence from 
 Buddhism, 332; its objects of 
 worship, 334; its.present decline, 
 
 341- 
 
 Foists and Christians^ intercourse 
 between, 340; real antagonism 
 between the two systems, 340. 
 
 FuH-HE, author of the Ylh-king, 
 279. 
 
 Future life, doctrine of, among the 
 South-sea Islanders, 395, n; in 
 Egypt, 471, 512: universally dif- 
 fused, 512 ; Christian doctrine, 
 513 ; how treated in the Old Tes- 
 tament, 514. 
 
 Gautama, early biography of, 155; 
 his preaching, 156; his influence 
 as a teacher, 166. 
 
 God, Confucian idea of, 292; Chi- 
 nese word for, Shin or Shang-tCy 
 292, 7i; Maori idea, 401 ; African 
 idea, 580. 
 
 Goddess- worship, in modern China, 
 289; Ma-tsoo-poOy ' the holy .mo- 
 ther,' 290, n. 
 
 Gnosticism, its eastern origin, 179 ; 
 opposed by the Latin Fathers, 
 13. 
 
 Goslmrun, the primitive Bull, 552. 
 
 Gospels, true and spurious, circu- 
 lated in the east, 180, 204.' 
 
 Heathen theologies, gradual forma- 
 
 tion of, 54. 
 
 Herbert (Lord) of Cherbury, his 
 creed, 26. 
 
 Hebraism, its principles, 58; its 
 progressive character, 59. 
 
 Hebrew doctrine of God, 62; es- 
 sentially moral, 66 ; character of 
 Hebrew monotheism, 507; doc- 
 trine of man, 70 ; of a future life, 
 514; of the resurrection, 565. 
 
 Hebrew system, its alleged resem- 
 
 blance to Aztec worship, 370; to 
 the Persian system, 547 ; possible 
 account of such resemblances, 
 548; to the Hindu system, 238; 
 to Brahmanism, 238 ; how far the 
 symbolism might correspond in 
 Hebrev/- and heathen systems, 
 488 ; the rite of circumcision, 492 ; 
 contrasted with the Phoenician 
 theology, 68 ; with the Egyptian 
 system, 480. 
 
 Hebrews, the peculiar temperament 
 and position of the, 75 ; the Baby- 
 lonish captivity, the penalty 6l 
 indulging heathenish notions, 
 515; its ejects, 545. 
 
 Hero-worship, in China, 289. 
 
 Hindd mind, unhistorical character 
 of, 118; theories on the date of 
 Hindti civilisation, 119; schools 
 of philosophy, 146; asceticism, 
 169; reverence for tradition, 208. 
 
 Hindu monotheism, 183, 185; de- 
 fect in the idea of God, i88 ; ideas 
 of God and the universe, 250; 
 trinities or triads, 190; avatdras, 
 or incarnations, 196; popular re- 
 ligion, 144. 
 
 Hindti theory of man, 142, 152; 
 legends of the primitive state of 
 man, 209 ; of the fall, 213 ; theo- 
 ries on the origin of evil, 214; 
 legend of the Serpent, 217 ; ver- 
 sions of the Deluge, 219; rite of 
 sacrifice, 225; conviction of un- 
 worthiness, 228 ; hope of restora- 
 tion, 229. 
 
 Hinduism in Java, 388. 
 
 Hindtiism, its relations to Christi- 
 anity, 175; real correspondencies 
 with Eevealed Keligion, 207; 
 compared with Christianity in 
 their ultimate consequences, 247 ; 
 in their ideas of God and the imi- 
 verse, 250. 
 
 Hindis, origin of the, 122, n. 
 
 Hindustan, in the time of Alex- 
 ander, 117; early communica- 
 tions with Persia and Egypt, 179. 
 
 Hiouen-Thsang, Vie et Voyages de, 
 2'j6f n; a model Buddhist King, 
 343, n ; his last hours, 344. 
 
 Holy and most holy Places, 497. 
 
 Huitzilopochtli, the national di- 
 
58S 
 
 Index. 
 
 vinity of tlie Aztecs, 367; the 
 story of his bh-th, 368, n ; human 
 sacrifices to, 369. 
 
 Human languages, 49. 
 
 Human race, Scriptural proof of 
 the unity of the, 38 ; Psychologi- 
 cal proof, 40 ; Physiological Proof, 
 44 ; Philological proof, 48 ; F.W. 
 Newman's hypothesis, 39, n; 
 Mexican tradition, 379, w ; Vitlan 
 tradition, 397. 
 
 Human sacrifices, 369, 581. 
 
 Idealistic philosophy, 15. 
 
 India, Christianity in, 180; coinci- 
 dences between India and the 
 west, 243. 
 
 Indo-European family of languages, 
 37. 
 
 Infidelity, growth of, in the age be- 
 fore the Reformation, 25. 
 
 Incarnations, Hindti theory of, 196 ; 
 not known to the Vedas, 196; of 
 Vishnu, 196; of Krishna, 197; 
 hereditary, in the Lama- system, 
 331 ; bestial, in Egypt, 511. 
 
 Indra (the Hindu Jupiter), 123, n. 
 
 Iran and Turan, 536. 
 
 I sis and Osiris, 446. 
 
 Izeds, gods or genii, 537, n. 
 
 Java connected with Hindustan, 
 388. 
 
 Jesuit missions in China, -293. 
 
 Judgment after death (Egyptian 
 creed), 475; formula of self-ex- 
 culpation, 477. 
 
 Kalki-avatdra, the, 231. 
 
 Kapila, the author of the S^nkhya 
 philosophy, 147; his practical 
 aim, 150 ; his theory of man, 152. 
 
 Karwar, a fetish in New Guinea, 
 393. 
 
 King, the, Chinese sacred books, 
 278. 
 
 King-worship of the old Persians, 
 542. 
 
 Kneph, 444. 
 
 Krishna, the worship of, promi- 
 nently brought forward, 182 ; the 
 incarnation of, 197, the legend, 
 199; regarded as a remnant of 
 some primeval tradition, 177, n; 
 
 its resemblances to sacred his- 
 tory, 200 ; heathen parallels to it, 
 201. 
 
 Krishnaism, subsequent to Christi- 
 anity, 203; fundamental differ- 
 ences, 205. 
 
 Kurdn, the, addressed to the pas- 
 sions, 157, n. 
 
 Kican-shi-in, 336. 
 
 Kwan-yu, worship of, 289. 
 
 Lamas, monks, or 'superiors,' 328 ; 
 vast numbers in Tibet, 328 ; 
 red Lamas, 331. 
 
 Lamaism in Tibet, 328; compared 
 with mediaeval Christianity, 263, 
 330; its divergence from primi- 
 tive Buddhism, 332. 
 
 Languages, three groups of, 49; 
 their divergence from one com- 
 mon centre, 51. 
 
 Lao-tse, the founder of Tao-ism, 
 307; supernatural attributes a- 
 scribed to him, 308; primitive 
 account of him, 309 ; a traveller, 
 310; his theology, 311; his 
 moral system, 316; fabulous 
 legend of him, 155, n. 
 
 Law, the Mosaic, 62; its especial 
 function, 73; objections to its 
 ritual branches, 74; different 
 classes of transgressions, 80; its 
 relation to the Gospel, 85. 
 
 Le and Ke, 302. 
 
 Le-ke, the book of rites and man- 
 ners, 281; the ritual of Confu- 
 cianism, 291. 
 
 Levitical offerings, operation and 
 effects of, 82. 
 
 Light- worship, 535. 
 
 Magism, and its propagation, 524. 
 
 Malay language originally mono- 
 syllabic, 385. 
 
 Malayo-Polynesians, 386, 3^4 ; pro- 
 bable course of the migration, 
 
 387. 
 
 Man, the primitive state of, 209 ; 
 Hindti stories of, 210; Confucian 
 theory, 304. 
 
 Man, the Fall of, 213; Hindti doc- 
 trine of, 214; traditions of the 
 Brahmans, 214, the Buddhists, 
 216. 
 
Index. 
 
 589 
 
 Manetho's list of Egyptian kings, 
 426. 
 
 Mani, studied Buddhism, 180; 
 taught at Babylon, 538. 
 
 Manichffiism, 24; revived by the 
 Paulicians, Cathari, and Albi- 
 genses, 25; its relation to Zoro- 
 astrianism, 538. 
 
 Manito, 360. 
 
 Manju-sri, 335. 
 
 Manu^ the laws of, 137; 139, n. 
 
 Maori race, 399, n ; its original 
 character, 400; ideas of God 
 401; mythe of Heaven and 
 Earth, 402; polytheism, 404; 
 form of baptism, 407. 
 
 Maui, Maori legend of, 410. 
 
 Max Muller's classification of lan- 
 guages, 49. 
 
 Maya, 140, 150. 
 
 Medo-Persian heathenism, 518; 
 alleged affinities to Hebraism 
 and Christianity, 544. 
 
 Mediator, or Benefactor, doctrine 
 of, 566; the title assigned in Plu- 
 tarch's age to Mithra, 569. 
 
 Mencius (Meng-tse), his works, 
 281, n; contemporary of Aris- 
 totle, 283. 
 
 Mental activity of the present age, 
 7 ; its effect on religious enqui- 
 ries, 9. 
 
 Messiah, the first promise of, 87; 
 the Seed of Abraham, 89; Shi- 
 loh, 92, 71; Star out of Jacob, 
 ih.] a King, 104; a Priest, 105: 
 suflfering, 105. 
 
 Meshia and Meshiane, the progeni- 
 tors of the human family, 553 ; 
 their resurrection, 567. 
 
 Mexicans, ancient buildings of, 
 362 ; general character of their 
 influence, 362 ; monotheism, 
 363 ; sanguinary spirit, 370 ; four 
 chronological periods, 379, n. 
 
 Mithra, early place and character 
 of, 568; substituted for Ormazd, 
 569 ;" post-Christian representa- 
 tions, 570. 
 
 Mithraic mysteries, 570. 
 
 Mithraism, wide diffusion of, 572; 
 opposition between it and Chris- 
 tianity, 571. 
 
 Mizraim, 430. 
 
 Monasticism, India the real birth- 
 place of, 245 ; no genuine fruit of 
 Christianity, 246; predominant 
 in Tibet, 328. 
 
 Moon, worship of the, 356; evil 
 divinities subordinate to, 358 ; in 
 the Babylonian mythology, 546, 
 n. 
 
 Mormon system, 15, w. 
 
 Mosaic, difficulties of chronology, 
 connected with Egypt, 425 ; cha- 
 racter of the institute, 487. 
 
 Muhammadauism, contrasted with 
 Buddhism, 157, n. 
 
 Mummification, 474. 
 
 Neith, the Egyptian Athene, 441. 
 
 Neo-Platonism, 22. 
 
 Nestorian missions to India, 181; 
 in China, 340, n. 
 
 Newman, F. W., his hypothesis of 
 the human race, 39, n. 
 
 New Zealanders, traditions of the, 
 387, n; nature of worship, 405; 
 image-worship, 407. 
 
 Nile, the object of Egyptian wor- 
 ship, 458; invoked in hymns, 
 
 475. 
 
 Nirvana, 159, n; 165. 
 
 Nishddan tribes of Hindtistan, re- 
 ligion of, 257. 
 
 Oceanica, religions of, 383; original 
 ^ unity of the population, 384. 
 
 Om, 124, n; 128. 
 
 0-me-to, supremacy and paradise 
 of, 337; salvation by, 338; faith 
 in, 339; apparent resemblance to 
 Christianity, 339. 
 
 Ormazd, the god of the Perso- 
 Aryans, 522 ; attributes of 534 ; 
 worship of, older than the reign 
 of Darius, 522; its decline and 
 fall, 526; supplanted by Mithra, 
 569 ; distinguished by largeness of 
 spirit, 541. 
 
 Ormazd and Ahriman, 534. 
 
 Osms, 446; hymns in honour of, 
 448; latest form of the mythe, 
 462 ; as moral governor, 465 ; 
 main ideas of the worship, 451 ; 
 has a parallel in the Adonis-woi- 
 ship of Phoenicia, 452. 
 
 Osiris-group of divinities, 459. 
 
590 
 
 Index. 
 
 Pant^nus, his .mission to India in 
 the 2nd century, i8o. 
 
 Pantheism, modern spread of, i8; 
 its main features, 19; in the V^- 
 das, 126; in the creed of Brah- 
 manism, 138; among the wild 
 tribes of America, 356. 
 
 Papuans, defined, 385 ; low state 
 of religion, 390; idea of God, 
 391; worship of the dead, 391; 
 veneration of the waringin-tree, 
 
 393. 
 
 Paradise, Buddhist legend of, 211; 
 Chinese features of, 277. 
 
 Parker, Theodore, the oracle . of 
 the Absolute Eeligion, 17, iii; 
 acknowledges the identity of the 
 human race, 36, n ; on the unity 
 of God, 63. 
 
 Parsee doctrine of fire-worship, 526, 
 n. 
 
 Pasht, 441. 
 
 Persia, the holy man of, 540; ideas 
 of purity, 541; connection with 
 India, 519; king-worship, 542; 
 resemblances to the Hebrew sys- 
 tem, 547 ; influence of Jews, 
 Christians, and early heretics, 
 
 Pharaohs, children of the sun, 443. 
 
 Philippsohn, the Jewish philoso- 
 pher, 8, n; 18, n. 
 
 Philosophy of the ancients, treated 
 as a kind of 'tacit Christianity,' 
 
 30. 
 Phoenician divinities, 69. 
 Planet -worship, 453. 
 Polytheism, of Hindtis, 125, 187; 
 
 in China, 288; in Egypt, 506. 
 Priesthood, power and privileges of, 
 
 inEgjTt, 467- 
 
 Primeval prophecies, theory of, 
 176. 
 
 Promise, the, 87; its early form 
 indefinite, 88 ; as given to Abra- 
 ham, 88. 
 
 Prophecy, objections to the received 
 views of, 90; germinant accom- 
 plishments of, 9 1 ; Scriptural ac- 
 count of, 96 ; assailants of this 
 view, 98 ; based on history, and 
 intertwined with it, 100; in the 
 age of David, 103; in the age of 
 the Captivity, 107. 
 
 Ptah, the elemental god of Lower 
 
 Egypt, 439. 
 Pusas=Bddhisatwas, 334. 
 
 QuETZALCOATL, patrou deity of the 
 Toltecs in Mexico, 372 ; the legend, 
 372; probably a foreigner, 377. 
 
 Ra, or Phra, the sun-god, 442. 
 
 Ked heifer, the, 501. 
 
 Eeligion, characteristics of, under 
 the Old Testament, 57 ; symbolic 
 mode of teaching, 76; revealed 
 and unrevealed, 270. 
 
 Besurrection of the Body, doctrine 
 of the, 563 ; importance attached 
 to it in the New Testament, 563; 
 no trace of it in the Avesta, 564.; 
 statements of Theopompus, 564 ; 
 the Hebrew doctrine ante-Baby- 
 Ionic, 565; Persian eschatology, 
 
 567. 
 Rig-Veda, 129, n; 134, n. 
 Eituals of the dead (Egyptian), 471. 
 
 Sacrifice, Hindu rite of, 225; de- 
 sign of it, 226 ; propitiatory, 227 ; 
 according to the philosophers, 
 229; Eg;yi)tian doctrine, 469. 
 
 Sacrificial system, general princi- 
 ples of, 79. 
 
 Sadducees, Dr Donaldson's hypo- 
 
 ^ thesis respecting the, 559, n, 
 
 Sdkya-mu7ii, 155; said to have been 
 miraculously born from the side 
 of Mayd,, 308, ?i. 
 
 /Sa7i/i:%a philosophy, 147; how far 
 atheistic, 149; theistic, 153. 
 
 Satan, differing from Ahriman, 554 ; 
 connection with the Pali, 557. 
 
 Saviour, historical, how far expected 
 by Hindus, 229. 
 
 Scape-goat, the, 502. 
 
 Sceptics, admissions of modern, 95. 
 
 Scoius (John Erigena), adopted 
 many tenets of Neo-Platonism 
 25. 
 
 'Sensational' philosophy, 14. 
 
 Serapis, 457. 
 
 Serpent, Hindti legend of the, 217 ; 
 various meanings of the symbol, 
 368 ; an image of evil, 369 ; among 
 the Vitlaus, 396 ; *the homicidal' 
 of Ahriman, 537; in the Avesta, 
 
Index. 
 
 591 
 
 553; the heathen testimony to 
 this form of the Tempter, 558. 
 Seven, Scriptm:al use of the number, 
 
 563- 
 
 Shaman, 169, n. 
 
 Shamanism, 261. 
 
 Shamans, Catechism of the, 327,71. 
 
 She-king f the, 280. 
 
 Shiloh, 92, ri. 
 
 Shoo-king, the, 280. 
 
 3in, the character of, 71 ; its ma- 
 lignity asserted in the Bible, 73 ; 
 Buddhist doctrine, 160;, original, 
 denied by Confucius, 305. 
 
 Sing'halese Buddhism, 160, n. 
 
 Siva, 142; 145, n. 
 
 Soma J deification of the plant, 127,71. 
 
 Sosiosh, the expected deliverer of 
 the Perso- Aryan race, 566. 
 
 Soul, Hindu definition of the, 150, 
 152. 
 
 Spiritualism, 1 6; earlyiormof it, 2 r . 
 
 Spiritualists at the period of the 
 Beformation, 25. 
 
 Sphinxes, 493; compound symbols 
 not exclusively Egyptian, 494, 
 
 Spinosa (Benedict de), his view of 
 prophecy, 98. 
 
 Sun, worship of the, 356; good di- 
 vinities subordinate to the, 358 ; 
 in Egypt, 443, 458, 479 ; Parsee 
 doctrine, 526, n; Mithra the sun- 
 god of the Medo-Persian system, 
 570. 
 
 Sutras, 157. 
 
 Swabhdvikas^ an ancient school of 
 Buddhism, 164, n. 
 
 Tad (That) = the Supreme Spirit, 
 124, 185. 
 
 Tao, real meaning of the, 312; re- 
 sembles the 'nature' of modern 
 speculators, 313. 
 
 Tao-isTTif or School of the Fixed 
 Waij, 307; its theology, 311; 
 moral motives, 319; degeneracy, 
 
 319- 
 
 Tao-ist Book of Kewards and Pun- 
 ishments, 317; precepts, 318; 
 condition of the sect, 320. 
 
 Tao-sse, Chinese school, 276. 
 
 Tao-te-king, the, 311 ; supposed to 
 contain the doctrine of the Trinity, 
 3M- 
 
 Tapu (taboo), institution of, among 
 the Polynesian tribes, 409; phi- 
 losophy of the system, 410. 
 
 Tempter, Persian form of the, 553; 
 Scriptural notices of, 556; see 
 Serpent, 
 
 Teo tl, the Mexican name of God, 
 
 3<53- 
 
 Tezcatlipoca, the chief Mexican di- 
 vinity, 365. 
 
 Theism, liturgy on the principles 
 of, 27, n. 
 
 Theophilus (Indicus), 180. 
 
 Theopompus, statements regarding 
 the resurrection, 564. 
 
 Thmei, goddess of truth, 49Q; 
 
 Thummim, not connected with the 
 Coptic Thmei, 501. 
 
 Tibet, Buddhism in, 328; prayer- 
 cylinders, 328; hierarchy, 329; 
 Lama system, 330; communica- 
 tions with the West, 265. 
 
 Time, the Creator, 531. 
 
 Tradition of religious knowledge, 
 208 ; the points most likely to be 
 transmitted, 209. 
 
 Transmigration, doctrine of, 143; 
 Hindti and Egyptian theories, 
 473 ; in the tribes of southern 
 Africa, 581. 
 
 Triads, Hindti, 191; SiCnkhya, 195; 
 Buddhist, 195; of Lao-tse, 314; 
 Mexican, 371. 
 
 Trinity, or Triad, not in the V^das, 
 124; of the Brahmans, 140; sup- 
 posed to be found in the Tao-te- 
 king, 314. 
 
 Turdnian class of languages, 50. 
 
 Types, how far understood, 78, 
 
 Typhon, 459. 
 
 Typhonic victims, 470. 
 
 Unity of the Human Race, 34, ,207 ; 
 its impugners, 35 ; Scriptural 
 proof, 38; Psychological proof, 
 40 ; Physiological proof, 44. 
 
 Unity of God, how far retained in 
 the Vddas, 124; the doctrine ob- 
 scured in China, 301 : Parsee 
 belief, 532; not traced in the 
 Avesta, 533; traces of the doc- 
 trine in Persia, 539. 
 
 Upanishads, 122, n. 
 
592 
 
 Index. 
 
 llrim and Thummimf 498 ; probable 
 meaning of the Hebrew symbol, 
 501. 
 
 Vaidic hymns contain expressions 
 denoting monotheism, 184; the 
 'Supreme Spirit,' 185; the Su- 
 preme God, in the Isa-Upanis" 
 had, 186 : theology of the hymns, 
 189; contain no resemblances to 
 the Christian Trinity, 191. 
 
 Vddaism, 121. 
 
 V^das, the, 122, n; published texts 
 of, 121, n; the gods, 123; no 
 triad, 124; how far pantheistic, 
 126; the gods have no indivi- 
 duality, 127; moral tone, 128; 
 imperfect consciousness of sin, 
 129; early date, 131. 
 
 Vendiddd (division of the Avesta) 
 represents the second stage of 
 Ormazd-worship, 528. 
 
 Vishnu, 142; ten avatdras of, 196. 
 
 Vitlans (Fijians), ethnological affi- 
 nities of the, 394; their sangui- 
 nary spirit, 395 ; primeval tradi- 
 tions, 397. 
 
 Waringin*tree (Indian fig), Papuan 
 
 veneration of, 393. 
 Woolly hair, 45. 
 
 Yang and Yin, 303; 315, n. 
 Yasna, the early portion of the 
 
 Avesta, 528. 
 Yeshts, or Yashts, in the Avesta, 
 
 528. 
 Yezidis, or devil-worshippers of 
 
 Armenia, 21, n. 
 Yih-king, the, 279. 
 Yoga school of Hindti philosophy, 
 
 170. 
 
 Zarathustra, the Perso- Aryan pro- 
 phet, 521, n. 
 
 Zend, related to the Sanskrit of 
 the V^das, 519. 
 
 Zend-Avesta, see Avesta. 
 
 Zervan, or Zervdna-akarana, 529 ; 
 probable connection with Bel, 
 532; my the connecting Zervan 
 with Ormazd and Ahriman, 539. 
 
 Zoroaster, the age of, 522. 
 
 Zoroastrianism, the reputed founder 
 of, 521; in the Vendiddd, 528. 
 
 Cambridge: printed bit c. j. clay, m.a. at xhe university presb. 
 
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THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 
 
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12 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 
 
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THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 13 
 
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14 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 
 
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THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 15 
 
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 complete^ he has paid special attention to everything relating to St. PauVs 
 personal history and his intercourse with the Apostles and Church of the 
 Circumcision^ as it is this featwe in the Epistle to the Galatians which 
 has given it an overwhelming interest in recent theological controversy. 
 The Spectator says — '* There is no commentator at once of sounder judg- 
 ment and more liberal than Dr. Lightfoot. " 
 
 ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS. A 
 Revised Text, with Introduction, Notes, and Dissertations. Sixth 
 Edition, revised. 8vo. lis. 
 
i6 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 
 
 LIGHTFOOT {J^t,)— continued. 
 
 ^^No co7nmentary in the English language can be compared with it in 
 regard to fulness of information^ exact scholarships and laboured attempts 
 to settle everything about the epistle on a solid foundation. " — Athenaeum. 
 
 ST. PAUL'S EPISTLES TO THE COLOSSIANS AND 
 TO PHILEMON. A Revised Text with Introduction, Notes, etc. 
 Fifth Edition, revised. 8vo. \2s. 
 
 *' It bears 77iarks of continued and extended reading and research^ and 
 of ampler materials at cominand. Indeed^ it leaves nothing to be desired 
 by those who seek to study thoroughly the epistles contained i7t it, and to da 
 so with all knozvn advantages presented in sufficient detail and in convex 
 nient form. " — Guardian. 
 
 ST. CLEMENT OF ROME. An Appendix containing the 
 newly discovered portions of the two Epistles to the Corinthians, . 
 with Introductions and Notes, and a Translation of the whole. 
 8vo. %s. 6d. 
 
 ON A FRESH REVISION OF THE ENGLISH NEW 
 TESTAMENT. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 6^. 
 
 The Author shews in detail the necessity for a fresh revision of the 
 authoj'ized version on the following g^'ounds: — i. Ealse Readings. 2. 
 Artificial distinctions created. 3. Real distinctions obliterated. 4. Faults 
 of Grammar. 5. Faults of Lexicography. 6. Treatment of Proper 
 Names, official titles, etc. 7. Archaisms, defects in the English, errors 
 of the press, etc. " The book is marked by careful scholarship, familiarity 
 with the subject, sobriety, and circuinspection. " — Athenaeum. 
 
 Maclaren.— SERMONS PREACHED at MANCHESTER. 
 
 By Alexander Maclaren. Sixth Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 4^. dd. 
 
 These Sei'mons represent no special school, but deal with the broad prin- 
 fiples^-'of Christian truth, especially in their bearing on practical, every-day 
 life. A feiv of the titles are: — ^'' The Stone of Stumbling,''^ ^^ Love and 
 Forgiveness,''^ ^^ The Living Dead," ^^ Meniory in Another World,''* 
 " Fait,h in Christ,'''' ^^ Love and Fear," " The Choice of Wisdom," " The 
 Food Qf the World." 
 
 A SECOND SERIES OF SERMONS. Fourth Edition. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 4^". 6d. 
 
 The Spectator characterises them as ^^ vigorous in style, full of thought, 
 rich in illustration, and in an unusual degree interesting." 
 
 A THIRD SERIES OF SERMONS. Fifth Edition, 
 Fcap. 8vo. 4$-. 6d. 
 
THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, .17 
 
 MACLAREN {P^.)— continued. 
 
 " Sermons more sober and yet more forcible^ and with a certain wise and 
 practical spirituality about them it would not be easy to find.'''' — Spectator. 
 
 WEEK-DAY EVENING ADDRESSES. Delivered in 
 Manchester. Extra Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d, 
 
 Maclear. — Works by the Rev. G. F. Maclear, D.D., Warden 
 
 of St. Augustine's, Canterbury, late Head Master of King's College 
 School : 
 
 A CLASS-BOOK OF OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. 
 
 With Four Maps. New Edition. i8mo. 4;, 6d. 
 ^^ The present volume,''' says the Preface, ''^ forms a Class- Book 0/ Old 
 Testament History from the Earliest Times to those of Ezra and Nehe- 
 miah. In its preparation the most recent authorities have been consulted, 
 and wherever it has appeared useful, Notes have been subjoined illustra- 
 tive of the Text, aitd, for the sake of more advanced students, references 
 added to larger works. The Index has been so arranged as to forin a 
 concise Dictionary of the Persons and Places mentioned in the course of the 
 Narrative.''' The Maps, prepared by Stanford, materially add to the 
 value and usefulness of the book. The British Quarterly Review calls it 
 **A careful and elaborate, though brief compendium of all that modern 
 research has done for the illustration of the Old Testament. We know of 
 no work which contains so much important information in so small a 
 compass." 
 
 A CLASS-BOOK OF NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY. 
 Including the Connexion of the Old and New Testament. New 
 Edition. i8mo. Sj", 6d. 
 
 The present volu?ne forms a sequel to the Author's Class- Book of Old 
 TestameJtt History, and continues the narrative to the close of St. Pauls 
 second imprisonment at Roitie. The work is divided into three Books — 
 /. The Connexion between the Old and New Testament. II. The 
 Gospel History. III. The Apostolic History. In the Appendix are given 
 Chronological Tables. The Clerical Journal says, ^^ It is not often that 
 such an amount of useful and interesting matter on biblical subjects is 
 found in so convenient and shiall a compass as in this well-arranged 
 volume. " 
 
 A CLASS-BOOK OF THE CATECHISM OF THE 
 CHURCH OF ENGLAND. New and Cheaper Edition. iSmo. 
 IS. 6d. 
 
 The present work is intended as a sequel to the two preceding books. 
 ^^ Like them, it is jurnished with notes and refei^ences to larger works ^ 
 and it is hoped that it may be found, especially in the higher forms of our 
 
i8 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 
 
 MACLEAR (Dr. G. Y ,)— continued. 
 
 Public Schools^ to supply a suitable manual of instruction in the chief 
 doctrines of our Church, and a useful help in the preparation of Can- 
 didates for Confirmation.^^ The Literary Churchman says, ^^ It is indeed 
 the work of a scholar and divine, and as such, though extremely sifjiple, it 
 is also exti'emely instructive. There are few clergy who would not find 
 it useful in preparing Candidates for Confirmation ; and there are not a 
 few who would find it useful to themselves as well. " 
 
 A FIRST CLASS-BOOK OF THE CATECHISM OF 
 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, with Scripture Proofs for 
 Junior Classes and Schools. New Edition. i8mo. (id. 
 
 This is an epitome of the larger Class-book, meant for junior students 
 and ele7?ientary classes. The book has been carefully condensed, so as to 
 contain clearly and fully the most hnportant part of the contents of the 
 larger book. 
 
 A SHILLING-BOOK of OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY. 
 New Edition. i8mo. 
 
 This Manual bears the same relation to the larger Old Testafnent His- 
 tory, that the book just mentioned does to the larger work on the Catechism. 
 It consists of Ten Books, divided into short chapters, and subdivided into 
 sections, each section treating of a single episode in the history, the title of 
 which is given in bold type. 
 
 A SHILLING-BOOK of NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY. 
 New Edition. iSmo. 
 
 A MANUAL OF INSTRUCTION FOR CONFIRMA- 
 TION AND FIRST COMMUNION, with Prayers and Devo- 
 tions. 32mo. 2s. 
 
 This is an enlarged and imp7'oved edition of ' The Order of Confirma- 
 tion.'' To it have been added the Communion Office, with Notes and 
 Explanations, together with a bj'iefform of SelfExa7nination and De- 
 votions selected from the works of Co sin, Ken, Wilson, and others. 
 
 THE ORDER OF CONFIRMATION, with Prayers and 
 Devotions. 32mo. 6^. 
 
 THE FIRST COMMUNION, with Prayers and Devotions 
 for the Newly Confirmed. 32mo. 6^. 
 
 THE HOUR OF SORROW ; or, The Order for the Burial 
 of the Dead. With Prayers and Hymns. 32mo. 2s. 
 
THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 19 
 
 MACLEAR (Dr. G. Y .)— continued. 
 APOSTLES OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE. Cr. 8vo. 49.6^, 
 
 " J/r. Maclear will have done a great work if his admirable little volume 
 shall help to break up the dense ignorance which is still prevailing among 
 people at target — Literary Churchman. 
 
 Macmillan. — Works by the Rev. HUGH Macmillan, LL.D., 
 F. R. S. E. (For other Works by the same Author, see Catalogue 
 OF Travels and Scientific Catalogue). 
 
 TWO WORLDS ARE OURS. Globe 8vo. 6^. 
 
 THE TRUE VINE; or, the Analogies of our Lord's 
 Allegory. Fourth Edition. Globe 8vo. 6j. 
 
 The Nonconformist says — "// abounds in exquisite bits of description ^ 
 and in striking facts clearly stated. " The British Quarterly says — ' ' Readers 
 and preachers who are unscientific will find maity of his illustrations as 
 valuable as they are beautiful. " 
 
 BIBLE TEACHINGS IN NATURE. Twelfth Edition. 
 Globe 8vo. 6s. 
 
 In this volume th^ author has endeavoured to shezu that the teaching of 
 Nature and the teaching of the Bible are directed to the same great end; 
 that the Bible contains the spiritual truths which are necessary to make us 
 wise unto salvation^ and the objects and scenes of Nature are the pictures 
 by which these truths are illustrated. *^ He has made the world more 
 beautiful to us, and unsealed our ears to voices of praise and messages of 
 love that might otherwise have been unheard.'''' — British Quarterly Review. 
 *'Z>r. Macmillan has produced a book which may be fitly described as one 
 of the happiest efforts for enlisting physical science in the direct sei'vice op 
 religion. " — Guardian. 
 
 THE SABBATH OF THE FIELDS. A Sequel to ^ Bible 
 Teachings in Nature.' Third Edition. Globe 8vo. 6^-. 
 
 *' This volume, like all Dr. Macmillan' s productions, is very delight- 
 ful reading, and of a special kind. Bnagination, natural science, and 
 religious instruction are blended together in a very charming way.'''' — 
 British Quarterly Review. 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF NATURE. Fourth Edition. Globe 
 8vo. 6^. 
 
 *^ Whether the reader agree or not with his conclusions, he will ac- 
 knowledge he is in the presence of an original and thoughtful wHter." — 
 Pall Mall Gazette. " There is no class of educated men and women that 
 will not profit by these essays." — Standard. 
 
 OUR LORD'S THREE RAISINGS FROM THE DEAD. 
 Globe 8vo. 6s. 
 
20 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 
 
 Materialism : Ancient and Modern. By a late Fellow 
 
 of Trinity College, Cambridge. Crown 8vo. 2s. 
 
 Maurice. — Works by the late Rev. F. Denison Maurice, 
 M.A., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cam- 
 bridge : 
 
 The Spectator says — ^^Few of those of our own generation zuhose names 
 zvill live in English history or literature have exerted so profound and so 
 permanent an influence as Mr. Maurice.^^ 
 
 THE PATRIARCHS AND LAWGIVERS OF THE 
 OLD TESTAMENT. Third and Cheaper Edition. Crown 
 8vo. 5^. 
 
 The Nineteen Discourses contained in this volume tvere preached in the 
 chapel of Lincoln^ s Inn during the year 1851. 
 
 THE PROPHETS AND KINGS OF THE OLD TES- 
 TAMENT. New Edition. Crown Svo. loj. dd. 
 
 Mr. Maurice^ in the spirit which animated the compilers of the Church 
 lessons^ has in these Sermons regarded the Prophets 'more as preachers of 
 righteousness than as mere predictors — an aspect of their lives which, he 
 thinks, has been greatly overlooked in our day, and than which there is 
 none we have more need to contemplate. He has found that the Old 
 Testament Prophets, taken in their simple natural sense, clear up many 
 of the difficulties which beset us in the daily work op lipe ; make the past 
 intelligible, the present endurable, and the future real and hopeful. 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. 
 
 A Series of Lectures on the Gospel of St. Luke. New Edition. 
 
 Crown Svo. 9^-. 
 Mr. Maurice, in his Preface to these Twenty-eight Lectu7'es, says — 
 ''^ In these Lectures I have endeavoured to ascertain tvhat is told us respect- 
 ing the life of Jesus by one of those Evangelists who proclaim Him to be 
 the Christ, who says that He did comefo'07n a Father, that He did baptize 
 with the Holy Spirit, that He did rise from the dead. I have chosen the 
 one who is most directly co7inected with the later history oj the Church, 
 who was not an Apostle, who professedly wrote for the use of a man 
 already instructed in the faith of the Apostles. I have folloived the course 
 of the zvriter''s narrative, not changing it under any pretext. I have 
 adhered to his phraseology, striving to avoid the substitution of any other 
 for his.'''* 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. A Series of Discourses. 
 New Edition. Crown Svo. 6s. 
 
THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 21 
 
 MAURICE (Rev. F. T> .)— continued. 
 
 The Literary Churchman thus speaks of this volume: ^''Thorough 
 honesty^ reverence^ and deep thought pervade the woi'k, which is every 
 way solid and philosophiccil, as well as theological^ and abounding with 
 suggestions which the patient student may draw out more at length for 
 himself, ^^ 
 
 THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN. A Series of Lectures 
 on Christian Ethics. Second and Cheaper Edition. Cr. 8vo. ds. 
 
 These Lectures on Christian Ethics were delivered to the students of the 
 Working Men's College^ Great Ormond Street, London, on a series of 
 Sunday mornings. Mr. Maurice believes that the question in which we 
 are most interested, the question which most affects our studies and our daily 
 lives, is the question, 7vhether there is a foundation for human morality^ 
 or whether it is dependent upon the opinions and fashions of different ages 
 and countries. This important question will be found amply and fairly 
 discussed in this volume, which the National Review calls ^^ Mr. 
 Maurice's most effective and instructive work. He is peculiarly fitted 
 by the constitution of his mind, to throw light on St. John^s writings. " 
 Appended is a 7iote on ^Positivism and its Teacher.^ 
 
 EXPOSITORY SERMONS ON THE PRAYER-BOOK. 
 
 The Prayer-book considered especially in reference to the Romish 
 System ; and the Lord's Prayer. Crown 8vo. 9^-. 
 
 After an Introductoiy Sermon^ Mr. Maurice goes over the various parts 
 of the Church SeTvice, expounds in eighteen Sermons their intention and 
 significance, and shews how appropriate they are as expressions of the 
 deepest longings and wants of all classes of men. 
 
 WHAT IS REVELATION? A Series of Sermons on the 
 Epiphany; to which are added, Letters to a Theological Student 
 on the Bampton Lectures of Mr. Mansel. Crown 8vo. los. 6d. 
 
 Both Sermons and Letters were called forth by the doctrine maintained 
 by Mr. Mansel in his Bampton Lectures, that Revelation cannot be a direct 
 Manifestation of the Infinite Nature of God. Mr. Maurice maintains 
 the opposite doctrine, and in his Sermons explains why, in spite of the high 
 authorities on the other side, he 7nust still assei't the principle which he 
 discovers in the Services of the Church and throughout the Bible. 
 
 SEQUEL TO THE INQUIRY, 'WHAT IS REVELA- 
 TION?' Letters in Reply to Mr. Mansel's Examination of 
 * Strictures on the Bampton Lectures.' Crown 8vo. ds. 
 
 This, as the title indicates, was called forth by Mr. ManseVs examina- 
 tion of Mr. Maurices Strictures on his doctrine of the Infinite. 
 
22 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 
 
 MAURICE (Rev. F. T>.)— continued. 
 
 THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 
 los. 6d. 
 
 " The book,^^ says Mr. Maurice^ ^^ expresses thoughts which have been 
 working in my mind for years ; the method of it has not been adopted 
 carelessly ; even the co77iposition has unde7'gone frequent revision.^'' 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF SACRIFICE DEDUCED FROM 
 THE SCRIPTURES. New Edition. Crown 8vo. 7^. 6^. 
 
 THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD, AND THEIR 
 RELATIONS TO CHRISTIANITY. Fifth Edition. Crown 
 8vo. 5J-. 
 
 ON THE SABBATH DAY ; the Character of the Warrior, 
 and on the Interpretation of History. Fcap. 8vo. 2.s. 6d. 
 
 THE LORD'S PRAYER, THE CREED, AND THE 
 COMMANDMENTS. A Manual for Parents and Schoohnasters. 
 To which is added the Order of the Scriptures. i8mo, cloth 
 limp. is. 
 
 DIALOGUES ON FAMILY WORSHIP. Crown 8vo. 6^. 
 
 SOCIAL MORALITY. Twenty-one Lectures delivered in 
 the University of Cambridge. New and Cheaper Edition. Cr. 
 8vo. los. 6d. 
 
 ^^ Whilst reading it we are charmed by the freedom from exclusiveness 
 and prejudice^ the large charity^ the loftiness of thought^ the eagerness to 
 recogfzise and appreciate whatever there is of real zvorth extant in the 
 wo7'ld, which animates it f^om one e7id to the other. We gain nezo 
 thoughts and netv ways ofvieivi7ig things, even more, perhaps, fro7n being 
 brought for a time under the influe7ice of so noble and spiritual a inind.'*^ 
 — Athenaeum. 
 
 THE CONSCIENCE: Lectures on Casuistry, delivered in 
 the University of Cambridge. Second and Cheaper Edition. 
 Crown 8vo. 5^-. 
 
 The Saturday Review says — " We rise from- the pe7'usal of these lec- 
 tures with a detestation of all that is selfish and mean, and with a living 
 impression that there is such a thing as good7iess after all. " 
 
 LECTURES ON THE ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 
 OF THE FIRST AND SECOND CENTURIES. 8vo. loj. dd. 
 
THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 23 
 
 MAURICE (Rev. F. T> .)— continued. 
 
 LEARNING AND WORKING. Six Lectures delivered 
 in Willis's Rooms, London, in June and July, 1854. — THE 
 RELIGION OF ROME, and its Influence on Modern Civilisa- 
 tion. Four Lectures delivered in the Philosophical Institution of 
 Edinburgh, in December, 1854. Crown 8vo. 5^. 
 
 SERMONS PREACHED IN COUNTRY CHURCHES. 
 
 New Edition. Crown 8vo. los. 6d. 
 *^ Earnest, practical, and extremely sifnple." — Literary Churchman. 
 ^^ Good specimens of his simple and earnest eloquence. The Gospel inci- 
 dents are 7'ealized with a vividness which we can well believe made the 
 cofnmon people hear him gladly. Moreover, they are ser?nons which must 
 have do Tie the hearers good.^^ — John Bull. 
 
 Milligan.— THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD. 
 The Croall Lecture for 1879—80. By the Rev. Professor Milli- 
 gan, D.D., Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism in the 
 University of Aberdeen. 8vo. ^s. 
 
 Moorhouse. — Works by James Moorhouse, M.A., Bishop 
 
 of Melbourne : 
 
 SOME MODERN DIFFICULTIES RESPECTING the 
 FACTS OF NATURE AND REVELATION. Fcap. 8vo. 
 2s. 6d. 
 
 JACOB. Three Sermons preached before the University of 
 Cambridge in Lent, 1870. Extra fcap. 8vo. 3^". 6d. 
 
 O'Brien. — PRAYER. Five Sermons preached in the Chapel 
 of Trinity College, Dublin. By James Thomas O'Brien, D.D., 
 Bishop of Ossory and Ferns. 8vo. 6s. 
 
 Onesimus.— MEMOIRS OF A DISCIPLE OF ST. 
 PAUL. By the Author of "Philochristus." Demy 8vo. 10^. 6^^. 
 
 Palgrave. — HYMNS. By Francis Turner Palgrave. 
 
 Third Edition, enlarged. i8mo. is. 6d. 
 This is a collection of twenty original Hymns, which the Literary 
 Churchman speaks of as '^ so choice, so perfect, and so refined, — so tender 
 in feeling, and so scholarly in expression.''^ 
 
 Paul of Tarsus. An Inquiry into the Times and the Gospel 
 
 of the Apostle of the Gentiles. By a Graduate. 8vo. \q>s. 6d. 
 
 * ' No thoughtful reader will rise from its perusal without a real and 
 
 lasting profit to himself, and a sense of permanent addition to the cause 
 
 of truth.'''' — Standard. 
 
24 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 
 
 Philochristus.— MEMOIRS OF A DISCIPLE OF THE 
 
 LORD. Second Edition. 8vo. 12s, 
 " The winning beauty of this book and the fascinating power with 
 which the subject of it appeals to all English minds will secure for it 
 many readers. " — Contemporary Review. 
 
 Philpott.— A POCKET OF PEBBLES WITH A FEW 
 SHELLS. Being Fragments of Reflection, now and then with 
 Cadence, made up mostly by the Sea Shore. By the Rev. 
 William B. Philpott. Second Edition. Picked, Sorted, 
 PoHshed anew. With Two Illustrations by George Smith. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 5j". 
 
 Picton.— THE MYSTERY of MATTER; and other Essays. 
 By J. Allanson Picton, Author of 'New Theories and the 
 Old Faith.' Cheaper Edition. With New Preface. Crown 8vo. 6^. 
 
 Plumptre — MOVEMENTS in RELIGIOUS THOUGHT. 
 
 Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge, Lent Term, 
 1879. By E. H. Plumptre, D.D., Professor of Divinity, King's 
 College, London, Prebendary of St. Paul's, etc. Fcap. 8vo. 3^-. dd. 
 
 Prescott — THE THREEFOLD CORD. Sermons preached 
 before the University of Cambridge. By J. E. Prescott, B.D. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 3^. 6^. 
 
 Procter.— A HISTORY OF THE BOOK OF COMMON 
 PRAYER : With a Rationale of its Offices. By Francis Procter, 
 M.A. Sixteenth Edition, revised and enlarged. Cr. 8vo. \os. 6d. 
 The Athenaeum says — '* The origin of every part of the Prayer-book 
 has been diligently investigated ^ — and thei'e are feiv questions or facts con- 
 nected with it which are not either sufficiently explained^ or so o-eferred to 
 that persons interested may work out the t^'uthfor themselves, ''^ 
 
 Procter and Maclean— AN ELEMENTARY INTRO- 
 DUCTION TO THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. 
 
 Re-arranged and Supplemented by an Explanation of the Morning 
 
 and Evening Prayer and the Litany. By F. Procter, M. A., and 
 
 G. F. Maclear, D.D. New Edition. Enlarged by the addition 
 
 of the Communion Service and the Baptismal and Confirmation 
 
 Offices. i8mo. is. 6d. 
 
 The Literary Churchman characterises it as ^^ by far the completest 
 
 and most satisfactory book of its kind we knotv. We wish it were in 
 
 the hands of every schoolboy and every schoolmaster in the kingdom. " 
 
 Psalms of David CHRONOLOGICALLY ARRANGED. 
 
 An Amended Version, with Historical Introductions and Ex- 
 planatory Notes. By Four Friends. Second and Cheaper 
 Edition, much enlarged. Crown 8vo. Zs. 6d, 
 
THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 25 
 
 One of the chief designs of the Editors^ in preparing this volume^ was 
 to restore the Psalter as far as possible to the order in which the Psalms 
 were written. They give the division of each Psalm into strophes^ and 
 of each strophe into the lines which cotnposed it, and amend the errors of 
 translation. The Spectator calls it '''one of the most instritctive and 
 valuable books that have been published for many years.^^ 
 
 Psalter (Golden Treasury). — The Student's Edition. 
 
 Being an Edition of the above with briefer Notes. i8mo. 3^-. ^d. 
 The aim of this edition is simply to put the reader as far as possible in 
 possession of the plain meaning of the writer. ^^ It is a gem,^'' the Non- 
 conformist says. 
 
 Pulsford.— SERMONS PREACHED IN TRINITY 
 CHURCH, GLASGOW. By William Pulsford, D.D. 
 Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 4?. 6^. 
 
 Ramsay.— THE CATECHISER'S MANUAL; or, the 
 Church Catechism Illustrated and Explained, for the Use of 
 Clergymen, Schoolmasters, and Teachers. By Arthur Ramsay, 
 M.A. Second Edition. i8mo. is. 6d. 
 
 Rays of Sunlight for Dark Days. A Book of Selec- 
 tions for the Suffering. With a Preface by C. J. Vaughan, D.D. 
 iSmo. Ninth Edition. 3^, 6d. Also in morocco, old style. 
 Dr. Vaughan says in the Preface, after speaking of the general run oj 
 Books of Comfort for Mourners — "// is because I think that the little 
 volume now offered to the Christian sufferer is one of greater wisdom and 
 of deeper expei'ience, that I have readily consented to the request that I 
 would introduce it by a few words of Preface. ^^ The book consists of a 
 series of veiy b7'ief extracts fo'om a great variety of authors, in prose and 
 poetry, suited to the many moods of a mourning or suffering mind. 
 ^''Mostly gems of the first water. ''^ — Clerical Journal. 
 
 Reynolds.— NOTES OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE. A 
 Selection of Sermons by Henry Robert Reynolds, B.A., 
 President of Cheshunt College, and Fellow of University College, 
 London. Crown 8vo. "js. 6d. 
 
 Roberts.— DISCUSSIONS ON THE GOSPELS. By the 
 Rev. Alexander Roberts, D.D. Second Edition, revised and 
 enlarged. 8vo. 16^-. 
 
 Robinson.— MAN IN THE IMAGE OF GOD ; and other 
 Sermons preached in the Chapel of the Magdalen, Streatham, 
 1874—76. By H. G. Robinson, M.A., Prebendary of York. 
 Crown 8vo. "js. 6d. 
 
26 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 
 
 Romanes.— CHRISTIAN PRAYER AND GENERAL 
 
 LAWS, being the Burney Prize Essay for 1873. With an Ap- 
 pendix, examining the views of Messrs. Knight, Robertson, Brooke, 
 Tyndall, and Galton. By George J. Romanes, M.A. Crown 
 8vo. $3. 
 
 Rushbrooke.— SYNOPTICON : An Exposition of the 
 Common Matter of the Synoptic Gospels. By W. G. Rushbrooke, 
 M.L., Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. Printed in colours. 
 In Six Parts and Appendices. 4to. Part I. 3^-. 6d. Parts II. and 
 III. 7J-. Parts IV. V. and VI. With Indices, los. 6d. Ap- 
 pendices, los. 6d., or the complete work, in one vol. cloth, 353-. 
 
 Salmon.— NON-MIRACULOUS CHRISTIANITY, and 
 
 other Sermons, preached in the Chapel of Trinity College, Dublin. 
 By George Salmon, D.D., Chancellor of St. Patrick's Cathe- 
 dral, and Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Dublin. 
 Crown Svo. 6^. 
 
 Scotch Sermons, 1880. — By Principal Caird ; Rev. J. 
 Cunningham, D.D. ; Rev. D. J. Ferguson, B.D. ; Professor 
 Wm. Knight, LL.D. ; Rev. W. Mackintosh, D.D. ; Rev. 
 W. L. M'Farlan; Rev. Allan Menzies, B.D. ; Rev. T. 
 NicoLL; Rev. T. Rain, M.A, ; Rev. A. Semple, B.D. ; Rev. 
 J. Stevenson ; Rev. Patrick Stevenson ; Rev. R. H. Story, 
 D.D. Svo. Third Edition, los. 6d. 
 
 The Pall Mall Gazette says — " The publication of a volume of Scotch 
 Sermons^ co7itributed by members of the Established Churchy seems likely 
 to cause as much commotion in that body as ' Essays and Reviews ' did 
 in the Church of England.'^'' 
 
 Selborne.— THE BOOK OF PRAISE : From the Best 
 English Hymn Writers. Selected and arranged by Lord Selborne. 
 With Vignette by T. Woolner, R. A. i8mo. 4$-. dd. 
 
 It has been the Editor' s desire and aim to adhere strictly^ in all cases in 
 which it could be ascertained^ to the genuine uncorrupted text of the authors 
 themselves. The names of the authors and date of composition of the 
 hymns, when known, are afixed, while notes are added to the volume, 
 giving furthei" details. The Hymns are arranged according to subjects, 
 * ' There is not room for two opinions as to the value of the 'Book of Praise. 
 — Guardian. ''''Approaches as nearly as one can conceive to perfection.'*^ 
 — Nonconformist. 
 
 BOOK OF PRAISE HYMNAL. See end of this Catalogue. 
 
THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 27 
 
 Sermons oiit of Church. By the Author of "John 
 Halifax, Gentleman." New- Edition. Crown 8vo. 6j-. 
 Speaking of this volujue the Reviezvers remark: ** We. have read this 
 book with no small pleasure. The author is well entitled to speak on 
 many of the questions she has raised here. In many %uays her book is 
 timely.''^ — British Quarterly Review. *' We may fairly advise young 
 housekeepers especially diligently to study the pages devoted to the Sei'vant 
 question — but called ^ My Brother'' s Keeper^ — a simple^ practical^ wise 
 treatise on a difficult subject.''^ — Spectator. 
 
 Service. — SALVATION HERE AND HEREAFTER. 
 
 Sermons and Essays,- By the Rev. John Service, D.D., Minister 
 
 of Inch. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 * ' We have enjoyed to-day a rare pleasure^ having just closed a volume 
 of serinons which rings true metal from title page to finis, and proves that 
 another and very powerful recruit has been added to that small band of 
 ministers of the Gospel who are not only abreast of the religious thought 
 of their time, but have faith enough and courage enough to handle the 
 questions which are the most critical, and stir men^s minds most deeply, 
 with frankness and thoroughness.'''* — Spectator. 
 
 Shipley. — A THEORY ABOUT SIN, in relation to some 
 Facts of Daily Life. Lent Lectures on the Seven Deadly Sins. 
 By the Rev. Orby Shipley, M. A. Crown 8vo. 7^-. 6d. 
 
 Smith.— PROPHECY A PREPARATION FOR CHRIST. 
 
 Eight Lectures preached before the University of Oxford, being the 
 
 Bampton Lectures for 1869. By R. Payne Smith, D.D., Dean 
 
 of Canterbury. Second and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo. 6^. 
 
 The author'' s object in these Lectures is to shetv that there exists in the 
 
 Old Testament an element, 7vhich no criticism on naturalistic principles 
 
 can either account for or explain away: that element is Prophecy. The 
 
 author endeavours to prove that its force does not consist merely in its 
 
 predictions. ^'' These Lectures overflow with solid learning, " — Record. 
 
 Smith.— CHRISTIAN FAITH. Sermons preached before 
 the University of Cambridge, By W. Saumarez Smith, M, A., 
 Principal of St. Aidan's College, Birkenhead. Fcap. 8vo. 3^. 6d. 
 
 Stanley — Works by the late Very Rev. A, P. Stanley, D.D., 
 Dean of Westminster : 
 
 THE ATHANASIAN CREED, with a Preface on the 
 General Recommendations of the RiTUAL Commission. Cr. 
 8vo, 2s, 
 
28 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 
 
 STANLEY {p6z.r{)—contmued. 
 
 * ''Dr. Stanley puts with admirable force the objections which may be 
 made to the Creed ; equally admh'able, we think, is his statetnent of its 
 advantages. " — ^Spectator. 
 
 THE NATIONAL THANKSGIVING. Sermons preached 
 in Westminster Abbey. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 ADDRESSES AND SERMONS AT ST. ANDREWS 
 
 in 1872, 1875 and 1876. Crown 8vo. 5^-. 
 
 Stewart and Tait.— THE UNSEEN UNIVERSE ; or, 
 
 Physical Speculations on a Future State.* By Professors Balfour 
 
 Stewart and P. G. Tait. Tenth Edition, Revised and Enlarged. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 ''A most remarkable and most interesting volume, which, probably 
 
 more than any that has appeared in modei^n times, will affect religioics 
 
 thought on many momentous questions — insensibly it may be, but very 
 
 largely and very beneficially.''^ — Church Quarterly. " This book is one 
 
 which zvell deserves the attention of thoughtful and religious readers 
 
 It is a perfectly safe enquiry, on scientific grojinds, into the possibilities of 
 a futtire existence. " — Guardian. 
 
 Stubbs. — Works by Rev. Charles William Stubbs, M.A., 
 Vicar of Granborough, Bucks. : 
 
 VILLAGE POLITICS. Addresses and Sermons on the 
 Labour Question. Extra fcap. 8vo. 3^. 6d. 
 
 *' The se?'mons in this book ai'e all worth reading. .... They are full 
 if warm sympathy for the labourers and sound practical advice to all 
 classes concerned in the, struggle. " — Guardian. ' ' It is a most encouraging 
 sign of the times, that a clergyman of the Chi4.7xh of England can be 
 found to deliver such discourses as ^/z^j-^."— Westminster Review. 
 
 THE MYTHE OF LIFE, and other Sermons, with an 
 Introduction on the Social Mission of the Church. Extra fcap. 
 8vo. TyS. 6d. 
 
 Taylor.— THE RESTORATION OF BELIEF. New and 
 Revised Edition. By Isaac Taylor, Esq. Crown 8vo. 8^. 6d. 
 
 Temple.— SERMONS PREACHED IN THE CHAPEL 
 of RUGBY SCHOOL. . ByF. Temple, D.D., Bishop of Exeter. 
 New and Cheaper Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 4^-. 6d. 
 This volume contains Thirty-five Ser^nons on topics more or less inti- 
 mately connected with every -day life. The following are a few of the 
 subjects discoursed upon: — ''''Love and Duty •'^ ''''Coming to Christ ^^ 
 
THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 29 
 
 TEMPLE (Dr. )— continued. 
 
 ''Great Men;" ''Faith f "Doubts;"' "Scruples;" "Ori^imlSin ;'' 
 "Friendship ;'" "Helping Others;" "The Discipline of Temptation;" 
 "Strength a Duty;" " Worldliness ;" "III Temper;" "The Burial of 
 the Past ." 
 
 A SECOND SERIES OF SERMONS PREACHED IN 
 THE CHAPEL OF RUGBY SCHOOL. Second Edition. 
 Extra fcap. 8vo. 6s. 
 
 This Second Series of Forty-two brief pointed, practical Sermons, on 
 topics intimately connected with the every-day life of young and old, will be 
 acceptable to all who are acquainted with the First Series. The following 
 are a few of the subjects treated of: — "Disobedience" "Almsgiving" 
 "The Unknown Guidance of God " " Apathy one of our Trials" "High 
 Ai7ns in Leaders" "Doing our Best" " The Use of Knowledge " "Use 
 of Observances," "Martha and Mary," "John the Baptist," "Severity 
 before Mercy," "Even Mistakes Punished," "Morality and Religion," 
 "Children," "Action the Test of Spiritual Life," "Self Respect," "Too 
 Late" " The Tercentenary." 
 
 A THIRD SERIES OF SERMONS PREACHED IN 
 RUGBY SCHOOL CHAPEL in 1867— 1869. Extra fcap. 8vo. 6^. 
 
 This Thh'd Series of Bishop Templets Rugby Sermons, contains thirty -six 
 brief discourses, including the " Good-bye" sermon preached on his leaving 
 Rugby to enter on the office he now holds. 
 
 Thornely.— THE ETHICAL AND SOCIAL ASPECT 
 
 OF HABITUAL CONFESSION TO A PRIEST. By 
 
 Thomas Thornely, B.A., LL.M., Lightfoot and Whewell 
 
 Scholar in the University of Cambridge, Law Student at Trinity 
 
 Hall and Inns of Court, Student in Jurisprudence and Roman 
 
 Law. Crown 8vo. \s. 6d. 
 
 ' ' The calm and judicial spirit in which the inquiry is conducted is in 
 
 keeping with the aim of the writer, and we are heartily in synipathy with 
 
 hifn in his conclusions as far as he goes. " — London Quarterly. ' ' It is 
 
 marked by an evident desire to avoid over-statetnent, and to be strictly 
 
 impartial." — Cambridge Review. 
 
 Thring.— THOUGHTS ON LIFE-SCIENCE. By Rev. 
 Edv^ard Thring, M.A. New Edition, enlarged and revised. 
 * Crown 8vo. ^s. 6d. 
 
 Thrupp.— AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY AND 
 USE OF THE PSALMS. By the Rev. J. F. Thrupp, M. A., 
 late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. New Edition. 2 vols. 
 8vo. 25J. 
 
30 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 
 
 Trench. — Works by R. Chenevix Trench, D.D., Arch- 
 bishop of Dublin : 
 
 NOTES ON THE PARABLES OF OUR LORD. 
 
 Fourteenth Edition. 8vo. I2s. 
 This work has taken its place as a standard exposition and interpreta- 
 tion of Chris fs Parables. The book is prefaced by an Introductory Essay 
 in four chapters : — /. On the definition of the Parable. II. On Teach- 
 ing by Parables. III. On the Interpretation of the Parables. IV. On 
 other Parables besides those m the Scriptures. The author then proceeds 
 to take up the Parables one by one, and by the aid of philology, history, 
 antiquities, and the researches of travellers, shews forth the significance, 
 beauty, and applicability of each, concluding with what he deems its true 
 moral interpretatioit. In the numerous Notes are many valuable references, 
 illustrative quotations, critical and philological annotations, etc., and ap- 
 pended to the volume is a classified list of fifty -six works on the Parables. 
 
 NOTES ON THE MIRACLES OF OUR LORD. 
 
 Eleventh Edition, revised. 8vo. \2,s. 
 In the ^Preliminary Essay'' to this zvork, all the momentous and in- 
 teresting qiiestions that have been raised in connection with Miracles, are 
 discussed with considerable fulness. The Essay consists of six chapters : — 
 /. On the Natnes of Miracles, i.e. the Greek words by which they are 
 designated in the New Testament. II. The Miracles and Nature — What 
 is the difference between a Miracle and any event in the ordinary course 
 of Nature? III. The Authority of Miracles — Is the Miracle to commarid 
 absolute obedience ? IV. The Evangelical, compared with the other cycles 
 of Miracles. V. The Assaults on the Miracles — i. The Jewish. 2. The 
 Heathen (Celsus, etc.). 3. The Pantheistic (Spinosa, etc.). 4. The 
 Sceptical (Hume). 5. The Miracles only relatively miraculous (Schleier- 
 macher). 6. The Rationalistic (Paulus). 7. The Historic 0- Critical 
 ( Woolston, Strauss). VI. The Apologetic Worth of the Miracles. The 
 author then treats the separate Miracles as he does the Parables. 
 
 SYNONYMS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Ninth 
 Edition, enlarged. 8vo. \2s. 
 
 This Edition has been carefully revised, and a considerable numbei- oj 
 new Synonyms added. Appended is an Index to the Synonyms, and an 
 Index to many other words alluded to or explained thfvughout the work. 
 ^Heis,^^ the Athenaeum says, ^^ a guide in this departmejtt of knowledge 
 to whom his readers may intrust themselves with confidence. His sobe? 
 judgment and sound sense are barriers against the ?nisleading influence of 
 arbitrary hypotheses. " 
 
 ON THE AUTHORIZED VERSION OF THE NEW 
 
 TESTAMENT. Second Edition. 8vo. ^s, 
 After some Introductory Remarks, in which the propriety of a reznsion 
 is briefly discussed, the whole question of the merits of the present V£rsion 
 
THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 31 
 
 TRENCH {PLrz\i!Q\^\iQ^)— continued. 
 
 is gone into in detail, in eleven chapters. Appended is a chr^onological list 
 of zvorks bearing on the subject, an Index of the principal Texts con- 
 sidei'ed, an Index of Greek Words, and an Index of other Words re- 
 ferred to throughout the book. 
 
 STUDIES IN THE GOSPELS. Fourth Edition, revised. 
 8vo. \os. 6d. 
 
 This book is published under the conviction that the assertion often 
 made is untrue, — viz, that the Gospels are in the main plain and easy, 
 and that all the chief difficulties of the New Testament are to be found 
 in the Epistles. These ''Studies,'' sixteen in number, are the fruit of a 
 much larger scheme, and each Study deals zvith so7ne important episode 
 mentioned in the Gospels^ in a critical, philosophical, and practical man- 
 ner. Many refei^ences and quotations are added to the Notes. Among 
 the subjects treated are: — The Temptation; Christ and the Sai7iaHtan 
 Woman; The Three Aspirants ; The Transfiguration; Zacchceus; The 
 True Vine; The Penitent Malefactor; Christ and the Two Disciples on 
 the way to Emmaus. 
 
 COMMENTARY ON THE EPISTLES to the SEVEN 
 CHURCHES IN ASIA. Third Edition, revised. 8vo. %s. 6d. 
 
 The present work consists of an Introduction, being a comtnentary on 
 Rev. i. 4 — 20, a detailed examination oj each of the Seven Epistles, in all 
 its bearings, and an Excursus on the Historico- Prophetical Interpreta- 
 tion of the Epistles. 
 
 THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. An Exposition 
 drawn from the writin^^s of St. Augustine, with an Essay on his 
 merits as an Interpreter of Holy Scripture. Fourth Edition, en- 
 larged. 8vo. loj". 6^. 
 The first half of the present work consists of a dissej^ation in eight 
 chapters on ''Augustine as an Interpreter of Scripture,'' the titles of the 
 several chapters being as follow : — /. Augustine's Genei^al Views of Scrip- 
 ture and its Interpretation. II. The Exte7'nal Helps for the Interpreta- 
 tion of Sci'ipture possessed by Augustine. III. Augustine's Principles 
 and Canons of Interpretation. IV. Augustijte's Allegorical Interpretation 
 of Scripture. V. Illustrations of Augustine's Skill as an Interpreter oj 
 Scripture. VI. Augustine on John the Baptist and on St. Stephen. 
 VII. Augustine on the Epistle to the Romans. VIII. Miscellaneous 
 Examples of Augustine* s Inteipr elation of Scripture. The latter half of 
 the work consists of Augustine's Exposition of the Sermon on the Mount, 
 not however a mere series of quotations f'om Augustine, but a connected 
 account of his sentiments on the various passages of that Sermon, inter- 
 spersed with criticisms by Archbishop Trench. 
 
 SHIPWRECKS OF FAITH. Three Sermons preached 
 before the University of Cambridge in May, 1867. Fcap. 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 
32 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 
 
 TRENCH {Archbishop)— continued. 
 
 These Sermons are especially addressed to young men. The subjects 
 are *''' Balaam,^^^ ^^Saul," and ^^yudas Iscariot,^' These lives are set 
 foj'th as beacon-lights, * * to warn us off from perilous reefs and quick- 
 sands, which have been the dest^'uction of 7nany, and which might only too 
 easily be ours ^ The']o\\n Bull says — ^^ they are, like all 'he writes, af- 
 fectionate and earnest discourses, " 
 
 SERMONS Preached for the most part in Ireland. 8vo. 
 \os. 6d, 
 
 This volume consists of Thirty-two Sermons, the greater part of which 
 wei'e preached in Ireland ; the subjects are as folloiv : — Jacob, a Prince 
 with God and with Men — Agrippa — The Woman that was a Sinnej' — 
 Secret Faults — The Seve^i Worse Spirits — Freedom in the Truth — Joseph 
 and his B^'ethren — Bearing one another'' s Burdens — Chrisfs Challenge to 
 the Woild — The Love of Money — The Salt of the Earth — The Armour of 
 God^— Light in the Lo7'd — The yailer of Philippi — The Thorn in the Flesh 
 — Isaiah'' s Vision — Selfishness — Abraham interceditig for Sodo?n — Vain 
 Thoughts — Pontius Pilate — The Brazen Seipent — The Death and Burial 
 of Moses — A Word from the Cross — The Chu7'ch^s Worship in t}ie 
 Beauty of Holiness — Every Good Gift froin Above — On the Hearing of 
 Prayer — The Kingdom which cometh not with Observation — Pressing 
 tazvards the Mark — Saul — The Good Shepherd — The Valley of Dry Bones 
 — All Saiftts, 
 
 LECTURES ON MEDIEVAL CHURCH HISTORY. 
 
 Being the Substance of Lectures delivered in Queen's College, 
 
 London. Second Edition, revised. 8vo. I2s. 
 Contents: — The Middle Ages Beginning — The Conversion of Eng- 
 land — Islam — The Conversion of Germany — The Iconoclasts — The 
 Crusades — The Papacy at its Height— The Sects of the Middle Ages — 
 The Mendicant Orders — The Waldenses — The Revival of Learning — 
 ChHstian Art in the Middle Ages, &=c. dr'^r. 
 
 THE HULSEAN LECTURES, 1845-1846. Fifth Edition, 
 revised. 8vo. 7-^* ^^* 
 
 This volume consists of Sixteen Sermons, eight being on * The Fitness 
 of Holy Scripture for unfoldi7ig the Spiritual Life of Men,'' the others 
 on * Christ, the Desire of all Nations ; or, the unconscious Prophecies 
 of Heathendom. ' 
 
 Tulloch.— THE CHRIST OF THE GOSPELS AND 
 THE CHRIST OF MODERN CRITICISM. Lectures on 
 M. Renan's 'Vie de Jesus.' By John Tulloch, D.D., 
 Principal of the College of St. Mary, in the University of St. 
 Andrew's. Extra fcap. 8vo. 4J. (id. 
 
THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 33 
 
 Vaughan — Works by the very Rev. Charles John Vaughan, 
 D.D., Dean of Llandaff and Master of the Temple : 
 
 CHRIST SATISFYING THE INSTINCTS OF HU- 
 MANITY. Eight Lectures delivered in the Temple Church. 
 Second Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 3^-. 6d. 
 ** We are convinced that there are congregations, in number unmistakably 
 increasing, to who7H such Essays as these, full of thought and leai'ning, 
 are i7ifinitely more beneficial, for they are more acceptable, than the recog- 
 nised type of sermons y — ^John Bull. 
 
 THE BOOK AND THE LIFE, and other Sermons, 
 preached before the University of Cambridge. Third Edition. 
 Fcap. 8vo. AfS. 6d. 
 
 TWELVE DISCOURSES on SUBJECTS CONNECTED 
 WITH THE LITURGY and WORSHIP of the CHURCH 
 OF ENGLAND. Fourth Edition. Fcap. 8vo. 6s. 
 
 LESSONS OF LIFE AND GODLINESS. A Selection 
 
 of Sermons preached in the Parish Church of Doncaster. Fourth 
 
 and Cheaper Edition.' Fcap. Svo. 3^. 6d. 
 
 This volutne consists of Nineteen Sermons, mostly on subjects connected 
 
 with the eveiy-day walk and conversation of Ch7Hstians. The Spectator 
 
 styles them ^^ earnest and human. They are adapted to every class and 
 
 order in the social system, and will be read with wakeful interest by all 
 
 who seek to amend whatever may be amiss in their natural disposition 
 
 or in their acquired habits. " 
 
 WORDS FROM THE GOSPELS. A Second Selection 
 of Sermons preached in the Parish Church of Doncaster. Third 
 Edition. Fcap. Svo. 4^-. 6d. 
 The Nonconformist characterises these Ser^nons as * ' of practical earnest- 
 ness, of a thoughtfulness that penetrates the com?non conditions and ex- 
 periences of life, and brings the tfuths and examples of Scripture to bear 
 on them with singular force, and of a style that owes its real elegance to 
 the si7nplicity and directness which have fine culture for their roots. " 
 
 ' LIFE'S WORK AND GOD'S DISCIPLINE. Three 
 
 Sermons. Third Edition. Fcap. Svo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 THE WHOLESOME WORDS OF JESUS CHRIST. 
 
 Four Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge in 
 
 November, 1866. Second Edition. Fcap. Svo. 3^-. 6d. 
 
 Dr. Vaughan uses the word ''^ Wholesome''^ here in its literal and 
 
 original sense, the sense in which St. Paul uses it, as meaning healthy, 
 
 sound, conducing to right living ; and in these Sermons he points out 
 
 and illustrates several of the ^^ wholesome''^ characteristics of the Gospel, 
 
 — the Words of Christ. The John Bull says this volume is ^^ replete with 
 
 all the author'' s luell-known vigour of thought and richness of expression.^^ 
 
34 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 
 
 VAUGHAN (Dr. C. J .)— continued. 
 
 FOES OF FAITH. Sermons preached before the Uni- 
 versity of Cambridge in November, 1868. Second Edition. Fcap. 
 8vo. 3^". 6d. 
 The ''^ Foes of Fait h^^ preached against in these Four Sermons are: — 
 /. ^^ Unreality." II. '"^Indolence." III. '"^Irreverence." IV. ^^Incon- 
 sistency." 
 
 LECTURES ON THE EPISTLE to the PHILIPPIANS. 
 
 Fourth and Cheaper Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. 5^. 
 Each lecture is prefaced by a literal translation! from the Greek of 
 the paragraph which forms its subject, contains first a minute explaiiation 
 of the passage on which it is based, and then a practical application of 
 the verse or clause selected as its text. 
 
 LECTURES ON THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN. 
 
 Fourth Edition. Two Vols. Extra fcap. 8vo. 9^. 
 In this Edition of these Lectures, the literal translations of the passages 
 expounded will be found interwoven in the body of the Lectures themselves. 
 *' Dr. Vaughan's Sermons," the Spectator says, ^''are the most prac- 
 tical discotirses on the Apocalypse zvith which we are acquainted. " Pre- 
 fixed is a Synopsis of the Book of Revelation, and appenided is an Index 
 of passages illustrating the language of the Book. 
 
 EPIPHANY, LENT, AND EASTER. A Selection of 
 Expository Sermons. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. loj. (>d. 
 
 THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL. For English Readers. 
 Part I., containing the First Epjstle to the Thessalonians. 
 
 Second Edition. 8vo. \s. 6d. 
 It is the object of this work to enable English readers, unacquainted 
 with Greek, to enter %vith intelligence into the meaning, connexion, and 
 phraseology of the writings of the great Apostle. 
 
 ST. PAUL'S EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. The Greek 
 Text, with English Notes. Fifth Edition. Crown Svo. 'js. 6d. 
 
 7y^^ Guardian says of the work — ^^For educated young men his com- 
 mtntary seems to fill a gap hitherto unfilled. . . . As a whole. Dr. Vaughan 
 appears to us to have given to the world a valuable book of original and 
 careful and earnest thought bestowed on the accomplishment of a work 
 which will be of much service and which is much needed." 
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE FIRST DAYS. 
 
 Series I. The Church of Jerusalem. Third Edition. 
 „ IL The Church of the Gentiles. Third Edition. 
 „ III. The Church of the World. Third Edition. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 4^-. (yd. each. 
 The British Quarterly says — ** These Sermons are worthy of all praise, 
 and are models of pulpit teaching." 
 
THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 35 
 
 VAUGHAN (Dr. C. I.)— continued. 
 
 COUNSELS for YOUNG STUDENTS. Three Sermons 
 preached before the University of Cambridge at the Opening of 
 the Academical Year 1870-71. Fcap. 8vo. 2J. dd. 
 
 NOTES FOR LECTURES ON CONFIRMATION, 
 
 with suitable Prayers. Eleventh Edition. Fcap. 8vo. \s. 6d. 
 
 THE TWO GREAT TEMPTATIONS. The Tempta- 
 tion of Man, and the Temptation of Christ. Lectures delivered in 
 the Temple Church, Lent 1872. vSecond Edition. Extra fcap. 
 8vo. 3 J-. 6d. 
 
 WORDS FROM THE CROSS : Lent Lectures, 1875 ; and 
 Thoughts for these Times: University Sermons, 1874. Extra fcap. 
 8vo. 4?. 6d. 
 
 ADDRESSES TO YOUNG CLERGYMEN, delivered at 
 Salisbury in September and October, 1875. Extra fcap. 8vo. 4^. 6d. 
 
 HEROES OF FAITH : Lectures on Hebrews xi. Extra 
 fcap. 8vo. 6s. 
 
 THE YOUNG LIFE EQUIPPING ITSELF FOR GOD'S 
 SERVICE : Sermons before the University of Cambridge. Sixth 
 Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo, 3^. dd. 
 
 THE SOLIDITY OF TRUE RELIGION ; and other 
 Sermons. Second Edition. Extra fcap. 8vo. '^s. 6d. 
 
 MEMORIALS OF HARROW SUNDAYS. A Selection 
 of Sermons preached in the Chapel of Harrow School. Fifth 
 Edition. Crown 8vo. los. 6d. 
 
 SERMONS IN HARROW SCHOOL CHAPEL (1847). 
 8vo. lOi-. 6d. 
 
 NINE SERMONS IN HARROW SCHOOL CHAPEL 
 (1849). Fcap. 8vo. 5i". 
 
 «MY SON, GIVE ME THINE HEART;" Sermons 
 preached before the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 1876 
 —78. Fcap. 8vo. 5^-. 
 
 THE LORD'S PRAYER. Second Edition. Extra fcap. 
 8vo. 3J-. (>d. 
 
 REST AWHILE : Addresses to Toilers in the Ministry. 
 Extra fcap. 8vo. 5^. 
 
 TEMPLE SERMONS. Crown 8vo. los. 6d, 
 
 This volume contains a selection of the Sei'mons preached by Dr. 
 
 Vaughan in the Temple Church dunng tlie twelve years that he has held 
 
 tJie dignity of Master, 
 
36 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 
 
 Vaughan (E. T.)— SOME REASONS OF OUR CHRIST- 
 IAN HOPE. Hulsean Lectures for 1875. By E. T. Vaughan, 
 M.A., Rector of Harpenden. Crown 8vo. ds. 6d. 
 
 Vaughan (D.J.) — Works by Canon Vaughan, of Leicester: 
 
 SERMONS PREACHED IN ST. JOHN'S CHURCH, 
 
 LEICESTER, during the Years 1855 and 1856. Cr. 8vo. 5^-. 6d. 
 
 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES AND THE BIBLE. New 
 Edition, revised and enlarged. Fcap. 8vo. 5^. 6d. 
 
 THE PRESENT TRIAL OF FAITH. Sermons preached 
 in St. Martin's Church, Leicester. Crown 8vo. <)s. 
 
 Venn.— ON SOME OF THE CHARACTERISTICS OF 
 BELIEF, Scientific and Religious. Being the Hulsean Lectures 
 for 1869. By the Rev. J. Venn, M.A. 8vo. 6s. 6d. 
 These discourses are intended to illustrate^ explain^ and work out into 
 
 some of their consequences, certain characteristics by which the attainment of 
 
 religious belief is prominently distinguished from the attainjnent of belief 
 
 upon most other subjects. 
 
 Vita.— LINKS AND CLUES. By Vita. Crown Svo. 
 
 " It is a long time since we have read a book so full of the life of a true 
 spiritual mind. . . . Indeed, it is not so much a book to read through, as 
 to read and return to as you do to the Bible itself from, which its whole 
 significance is derived, in passages suited to the chief interest arid difiiculties 
 
 of the moment We cannot too cordially recommend a book which 
 
 awakens the spirit, as hardly any book of the last few years has awakened 
 it, to the real meaning of the Christian life.^^ — The Spectator. 
 
 Warington.— THE WEEK OF CREATION ; or. The 
 
 Cosmogony of Genesis considered in its Relation to Modern Sci- 
 ence. By George Warington, Author of 'The Historic 
 Character of the Pentateuch vindicated. ' Crown 8vo. 45-. 6d. 
 
 WeStCOtt. — Works by BROOKE Foss Westcott, D.D., 
 Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge; 
 Canon of Peterborough : 
 The London Quarterly, speaking of Dr. Westcott, says — **7b a learn- 
 ing a72d accuracy which com77\and respect and confidence, he unites what 
 are not always to be found in union with these qualities, the no less valuable 
 faculties of lucid arrange?nent and graceful arid facile expression." 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF THE 
 
 GOSPELS. Sixth Edition. Crown 8vo. los. 6d. 
 The author's chief object in this work has been to shew that there is 
 a true mean between the idea of a formal harmonization of the Gospels 
 and the abandonment of their absolute truth. After an Introduction on 
 
THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 37 
 
 WESTCOTT {J^T.)— continued. 
 
 the General Effects of the course of Modern PhilosopJiy on the popular 
 views of Christianity^ he proceeds to deterviine in what way the principles 
 thej'ein indicated may be applied to the study of the Gospels. 
 
 A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE HISTORY OF THE 
 CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT during the First Four 
 Centuries. Fifth Edition, revised, with a Preface on * Super- 
 natural Religion/ Crown 8vo. los. 6d. 
 The object of this treatise is to deal with the New Testament as a whole^ 
 and that on purely historical grounds. The separate books of which it is 
 composed are considered not individually, but as claiming to be parts of the 
 apostolic heritage of Christians. * * The treatise, " says the British Quarterly, 
 **w a scholarly performance^ learned, dispassionate, discriminating, 
 worthy of his subject and of the present state of Christian literature in 
 relation to it." » 
 
 THE BIBLE IN THE CHURCH. A Popular Account 
 of the Collection and Reception of the Holy Scriptures in the 
 Christian Churches. Seventh Edition. i8mo. /^. 6d. 
 
 A GENERAL VIEW OF THE HISTORY OF THE 
 
 ENGLISH BIBLE. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. ioj. 6d. 
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 great extent, an original contribution to theological literature. " 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE, MANIFOLD AND ONE. 
 Six Sermons preached in Peterborough Cathedral. Crown 8vo. 
 2.S. 6d. 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION. Thoughts 
 
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 Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 The present Essay is an endeavour to consider some of the elementary 
 
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 and Reason. The author endeavours to sheiv that a devout belief in tJie 
 
 Life of Christ is quite co7?ipatible with a broad view of the course of hu7nan 
 
 progress and a frank trust in the laws of our own minds. In the third 
 
 edition the author has carefully reconsidered the whole argument, and by 
 
 the help of several kind critics has been enabled to coi'rect some faults and 
 
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 ON THE RELIGIOUS OFFICE OF THE UNIVER- 
 SITIES. Crown 8vo. 4^. 6d. 
 
 " Thei-e is wisdom, and ti-uth, and thought enough, and a 
 
 harmony and mutual connection running through them all, which makes 
 the collection of more real value than many an ambitious treatise."- — 
 Literary Churchman. 
 
38 THEOLOGICAL BOOKS, 
 
 WESTCOTT {Tit.)— continued. 
 
 THE REVELATION OF THE RISEN LORD. Crown 
 8vo. ds. 
 
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 Cambridge. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. \os. 6d. each. 
 
 Vol. I. Text. Vol. II. Introduction and Appendix. 
 
 " The Greek Testament as printed by the two Professors must in future 
 rank as one of the highest critical authorities amongst English scholars. " 
 — Guardian. 
 
 ** // is probably the most important contribution to Biblical learning in 
 our generation. " — ^Saturday Review. 
 
 " The object in viezv is to present the original words of the New Testa- 
 ment as nearly as they can be determined at the present time, to arrive at 
 the texts of the autographs themselves so far as it is possible to obtain it by 
 
 the help of existing materials We attach much excellence to this 
 
 manual edition of the Greek Testament, because it is the best contribution 
 which England has made in modern times towards the p?'oduction of a 
 pure text. . . . It bears on its face evidences of calm judgment and com- 
 mendable candour. The student may avail himself of its aid with 7nuch 
 confidence. The Introduction and Appendix specially deserve minute 
 attention.'''' — The Athenseum. 
 
 Wilkins.— THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. An Essay, 
 by A.S. Wilkins, M.A., Professor of Latin in Owens College, 
 Manchester. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. 3J". ^d. 
 ^^ It would be difficult to praise too highly the spirit, the burden, the 
 conclusions, or the scholarly finish of this beautiful Essay. " — British Quar- 
 terly Review. 
 
 Wilson.— THE BIBLE STUDENT'S GUIDE TO THE 
 
 MORE CORRECT UNDERSTANDING of the ENGLISH 
 
 TRANSLATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, by Reference 
 
 to the Original Hebrew. By William Wilson, D.D., Canon of 
 
 Winchester. Second Edition, carefully revised. 4to. 25^. 
 
 The author believes that the present work is the nearest approach to 
 
 a complete Concordance of every word in the original that has yet been 
 
 made; and as a Concordance it may be found of great use to the Bible 
 
 student, while at the same time it serves the important object of furnishing 
 
 the means of comparing synonymous words and of eliciting their precise 
 
 and distinctive meaning. The knowledge of the Hebrew language is not 
 
 absolutely necessary to the profitable use of the work. 
 
THEOLOGICAL BOOKS. 39 
 
 Worship (The) of God and Fellowship among 
 
 Men. Sermons on Public Worship. By Professor Maurice, 
 and others. Fcap. 8vo. 3J. 6d. 
 
 Yonge (Charlotte M.)— Works by Charlotte M.Yonge, 
 Author of * The Heir of Redclyffe ': 
 
 SCRIPTURE READINGS FOR SCHOOLS AND FA- 
 MILIES. 5 vols. Globe 8vo. is. 6d. With Comments, 3^. 6d. each. 
 First Series. Genesis to Deuteronomy. 
 Second Series. From Joshua to Solomon. 
 Third Series. The Kings and Prophets. 
 Fourth Series. The Gospel Times. 
 Fifth Series. Apostolic Times. 
 Actual need has led the author to endeavour to prepare a reading book 
 convenient for study with children^ containing the very words of the 
 Bible, with only a few expedient omissions, arid arranged in Lessons of 
 such length as by experience she has found to suit with children's ordinary 
 power of accurate attentive interest. The verse for^n has been retained be- 
 cause of its convenience for children reading in class, and as more re- 
 sembling their Bibles ; but the poetical portions have been given in their 
 lines. Professor Huxley at a meeting of the London School-board, par- 
 ticularly mentioned the Selection made by Miss Yonge, as an example of 
 how selections might be made for School reading. ^^ Her Comments are 
 models of their kind. " — Literary Churchman. 
 
 THE PUPILS OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE. New 
 Edition. Crown 8vo. 6j. 
 
 " Young and old will be equally refreshed and taught by these pages, 
 in which nothing is dull, and nothing is far-fetched.^'' — Churchman. 
 
 PIONEERS AND FOUNDERS ; or, Recent Workers in 
 the Mission Field. With Frontispiece and Vignette Portrait of 
 Bishop Heber. Crown Svo. bs. 
 
 The missionaries whose biographies are here given, are — fohn Eliot, 
 the Apostle of the Red Indians; David Br ainerd, the Enthusiast; Christ- 
 tan F. Schwartz, the Councillor of Tanjore; Henry Martyn, the Scholar- 
 Missionary ; William Carey and Joshua Marshman, the Serampore Mis- 
 sionaries ; the fudson Family ; the Bishops of Calcutta — Lhomas 
 Middleton, Reginald Heber, Daniel Wilson; Samuel Marsden, the Aus- 
 tralian Chaplain and Friend of the Maori; John Williams, the Martyr 
 of Erromango; Allen Gardener, the Sailor Martyr; Charles Frede7'ick 
 Mackenzie, the Martyr of Zambesi, 
 
THE "BOOK OF PRAISE" HYMNAL, 
 
 COMPILED AND ARRANGED BY 
 
 LORD SELBORNE. 
 
 In the following four forms : — 
 
 A. Beautifully printed in Royal 32nio., limp cloth, price 6d. 
 
 B. ,, ,, SmalllSmo., larger type, cloth limp, Is. 
 
 C. Same edition on fine paper, cloth, Is. 6d. 
 
 Also an edition -with Music, selected, harmonized, and composed 
 by JOHN HTJIiLAH, in square 18mo., cloth, 3s. 6d. 
 
 The large acceptance which has been given to " The Book of Praise^'' 
 by all classes of Christian people encourages the Publishers in entertaining 
 the hope that this Hymnal^ which is mainly selected from it, may be ex- 
 tensively used i7i Congregatio7zs, and in some degree at least meet the 
 desires of those who seek unifoi'mity in cominon worship as a means 
 towards that unity which pious souls yearn aftei% and which our Lo?'d 
 prayed for in behalf of his Church. '''The office of a hyfnn is not to 
 teach controversial Theology, but to give the voice of soitg to practical 
 religion. No doubt, to do this, it must embody sound doctrme ; but it 
 ought to do so, not after the manner of the schools, but with the breadth, 
 freedom, and shnplicity of the Fountain-head.^'' On this principle has 
 Sir R. Palmer proceeded in the preparation of this book. 
 
 The arrangement adopted is the following ; — 
 Part I. consists of Hy7nns ai'ranged according to the subjects of the 
 Creed — '''God the Creator, ^^ ""Ch^dst Incarnate,^' ''Ch7'ist Crucified," 
 ''Ch7ist Rise7t,^^ ''Christ Asceftded," "Chtisfs Kingdom and jfudg- 
 ment,^^ etc. 
 
 Part II. compTHses Hy7nns arranged according to the subjects of the 
 Lo7'ds Prayer. 
 
 Part III. Hymns for natU7'-al and sacred seasons. 
 There are 320 Hy7}ins in all. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY J. PALMER. 
 
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