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WHAT IS RELIGION? 
 
WHAT IS RELIGION? 
 
 WILHELM BOUSSET 
 
 PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GoTTINGEN 
 AUTHOR OF "LIFE OF JESUS" 
 
 TRANSLATED BY F. B. LOW 
 
 G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 
 NEW YORK AND LONDON 
 
 Xlbe 1kntcfterl?oc??er press 
 
 1907 
 
(All rights reserved.) 
 
PEBFACE 
 
 -*o^ 
 
 IN an address to a body of clergy delivered 
 a short time ago, Dr. Sanday, Professor of 
 Divinity and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, 
 said that what Germany is thinking to-day 
 many circles in Europe and America will be 
 thinking to-morrow. It was with reference 
 to matters of a religious character that this 
 remark was made. As an accomplished student 
 of the religion of the New Testament, Professor 
 Sanday knows perfectly well that the Germans, 
 on the whole, are at the present time doing 
 more to promote the progress of theological 
 inquiry than any other European people. 
 
 It is quite true that German professors some- 
 times startle us with theories which are resting 
 on the tiniest basis of fact, and are more 
 ingenious than convincing. But the appearance 
 from time to time of these daring speculations 
 must not make us forget the vast amount of 
 
vi What is Religion ? 
 
 solid and conscientious work which is constantly 
 being produced by the professors of theology at 
 the various German universities. 
 
 It is probable that the people of Great Britain 
 and America take a deeper interest in religious 
 matters than is the case in Germany, and that 
 religious activity takes a more practical form 
 among the English-speaking people. But the 
 Germans have devoted more attention to the 
 nature of religious phenomena and the founda- 
 tions on which the religious consciousness of 
 mankind is based. 
 
 If we want to know what religion is, if we 
 want to learn how it arose and developed in 
 the bosom of the race, if we want a satisfactory 
 conception of the place religion occupies in the 
 general scheme of human thought and action, 
 we shall find that more has been thought and 
 said upon these matters in Germany than any- 
 where else. 
 
 Until recently one of the chief difficulties 
 confronting the spread of German learning has 
 been the form in which it was expressed. Most 
 German books dealing with religious questions 
 have been ^vritten by experts for experts ; to 
 understand them required a special training and 
 an intimate acquaintance with the developing 
 phases of religious speculation. It is only a 
 very small minority who can follow a writer 
 
Preface vii 
 
 when his works are written on the assumption 
 that the reader is almost as much at home in 
 the subject as he is himself. Literature of this 
 kind, if it can be called literature, is confined 
 within the walls of universities and pro- 
 duces little or no impression on the public as 
 a whole. 
 
 It is satisfactory to find that a new school 
 of writers has now arisen among the German 
 people who are discarding the technical and 
 elaborate methods of their predecessors and are 
 addressing themselves directly to the general 
 public. Many of the members of this new 
 school are men of wide and minute learning, 
 authorities of the first rank in their own depart- 
 ment ; they are permeated by the spirit of 
 modern democracy, and they realise that the 
 best results of scientific inquiry ought not to 
 be confined to academic circles, but should be 
 made accessible to the great body of the people. 
 This can only be accomplished by getting rid 
 of technicalities and speaking in a language 
 which can be understood by all. 
 
 One of the most striking examples of this 
 kind of work is Professor Harnack's lectures 
 on the essential characteristics of the Christian 
 religion, which have been translated into 
 English with the title, "What is Christianity?" 
 In these lectures Dr. Harnack was merely 
 
viii What is Religion ? 
 
 popularising the results of his inquiries into 
 the origin and growth of the Christian faith. 
 He had already put his ideas before the world 
 in learned and elaborate works on the " History 
 of Christian Doctrine " and the " History of 
 Ancient Christian Literature." But as long as 
 his opinions were shut up in these bulky volumes 
 they were only accessible to a few. It was 
 when he stripped off his scholar's armour and 
 appealed to the public in the ordinary language 
 of the world that his conception of Christianity 
 gained an entrance and acquired an influence in 
 every religious community. 
 
 Dr. Bousset has folloTved in Professor Har- 
 nack's steps. Professor Harnack attempted in 
 his famous lectures to answer the question, 
 What is Christianity ? Professor Bousset, in the 
 volume which is now placed before the English 
 reader, attempts to answer the still more funda- 
 mental question, What is Religion ? Christianity 
 is only one of the many forms which religion 
 has assumed, just as European culture is only 
 one of the many forms which civilisation has 
 assumed in the long history of the human race. 
 It is, no doubt, true that the essential nature of 
 religion, as well as the deepest characteristics 
 of civilisation, is best exhibited in its highest 
 forms ; and from this point of view an examina- 
 tion into the true nature of Christianity is 
 
Preface ix 
 
 incidentally an inquiry of the first importance 
 into the nature of religion itself. But a recogni- 
 tion of the supreme value of Christianity must 
 not blind us to the fact that all forms of religion 
 contribute something to our knowledge of the 
 nature of the religious consciousness, and that 
 we cannot know what religion is in all its 
 manifestations by studying the Christian religion 
 alone. 
 
 The Christian religion is religion at its highest 
 point of development. Religion passed through 
 many stages before it culminated in the 
 Christian faith. In order to understand it in 
 all its aspects we must look at it in its infancy 
 and youth as well as in its maturity. We must 
 look at it as it shows itself in the dim beginnings 
 of humanity ; w^e must look at it as we see it 
 now among the uncivilised races of mankind ; 
 Tve must note the character which it assumed 
 among the great nations of the past; Tve must 
 mark the features which it exhibits among 
 civilisations different from our own. It is only 
 when we reach the end of a great historic 
 survey such as this that we are in a position 
 to attempt to answer the question as to what 
 religion really is. It is the history of a nation 
 which gives us the deepest insight into its 
 character, and it is the history of religion in 
 all ages and among all peoples which enables 
 
What is Religion r 
 
 ? 
 
 US to compreliend the essential basis on which 
 religion stands. 
 
 One of the great attractions of Professor 
 Bousset's book is that it is written on historical 
 lines, and that his conclusions are based on the 
 great outstanding facts of religious history. It 
 is only within a comparatively recent period 
 that a book of this kind could have been 
 written. As long as the belief prevailed that 
 the Christian faith was the only true religion, 
 and that all other types of religion were base 
 and degrading superstitions, full of falsehood 
 from beginning to end, it was impossible to 
 have a history of the religious ideas of the 
 human race. This used to be the belief of 
 Christendom, and it is only in recent years 
 that it has been superseded by a higher con- 
 ception of the nature of the relations between 
 the human and the Divine. According to this 
 new and higher conception all forms of religion 
 contain phases of God's revelation of Himself 
 to man. The Christian jDhase is admitted to 
 be the highest ; but the pre-Christian and the 
 non-Christian religions are also, in a humbler 
 sense, revelations of the Divine, and the grooving 
 religious life of humanity manifests itself in 
 them as well as in Christianity itself. 
 
 With the spread of this view the religions 
 of antiquity and the non-Christian religions of 
 
Preface xi 
 
 contemporary peoples, both civilised and un- 
 civilised, acquired a new meaning, and began 
 to be studied with a fresh and more reverent 
 interest. As a result of these studies we are 
 now in possession of a vast mass of material 
 dealing with the history and characteristics of 
 religious life among ancient and contemporary 
 peoples, and we are able to trace the develop- 
 ment of religious ideas from their lowest to 
 their highest stages in the life of man. 
 
 Very few living writers are so well equipped 
 for describing the evolution and nature of the 
 religious sentiment as Professor Bousset. He 
 is the son of a German pastor, and was born 
 at Liibeck, in 1865. After completing his pre- 
 liminary studies at the gymnasium of his native 
 place, he became in succession a student at the 
 universities of Erlangen, Leipzig, and Gottingen. 
 Each of these places of learning marked a 
 stage in his mental development. Beginning 
 his university career under the dominance of 
 traditional religious conceptions, his mind 
 gradually became more liberal in tendency. 
 At Gottingen he was a pupil of one of the 
 most influential German theologians since 
 Schleiermacher, the late Albrecht Ritschl, and 
 although he belongs to a group of young 
 thinkers who have more and more liberated 
 themselves from many of the distinctive 
 
xii What is Religion ? 
 
 positions taken up by Ritschl, the spirit of his 
 master is more or less visible in all Professor 
 Bousset's literary work. 
 
 One of Dr. Bousset's first works was a volume 
 entitled " The Preaching of Jesus in Opposition 
 to Judaism." In this work he showed that the 
 teaching of Jesus was not a continuation of 
 contemporary Rabbinic teaching with its centre 
 resting on the apocalyptic hopes of Judaism ; 
 the preaching of Jesus was the immediate pro- 
 duct of His own original creative personality : 
 its points of contact with Judaism were external 
 and not essential, and it is best understood 
 by contrasting, rather than comparing, it 
 with contemporary Rabbinic views. Professor 
 Bousset's next important undertaking was a 
 Commentary on the AjDocalypse of John. In 
 this Commentary he adopted what is called in 
 Germany the religious historical method. The 
 object of this method is to compare the religious 
 ideas of one people with another, and to trace, 
 if possible, the historical or psychological con- 
 nection which exists among religious conceptions 
 as a whole. A few years ago Professor Bousset 
 published what is so far his most important 
 work, " The Religion of the Jews in New Testa- 
 ment Times." In this volume Dr. Bousset at 
 once established his reputation as a scholar of 
 wide and varied learning, with a clear and 
 
Preface xiii 
 
 comprehensive grasp of the problem with which 
 he had undertaken to deal. He had been pre- 
 ceded in this task by writers of conspicuous 
 ability like Professor Schiirer ; but, notwith- 
 standing this, Dr. Bousset's book on Judaism 
 marks a distinct step forward in our knowledge 
 of New Testament times. It is clear from 
 Dr. Bousset's investigations that Judaism at 
 this period had opened its arms to ideas from 
 foreign sources, and that it bears distinct traces 
 of Persian influence. 
 
 Dr. Bousset's more recent book consists of 
 lectures on the nature of religion which are now 
 placed before the English reader. These lectures 
 are written on the same lines as Dr. Bousset's 
 "Jesus," which was translated into English a 
 year or two ago. They are popular in form, 
 but are the result of deep and prolonged study 
 of the subject, and may safely be accepted as 
 one of the best extant introductions to the study 
 of religious phenomena. Readers of this volume 
 who still adhere to the traditional view of 
 Christianity may be startled and offended at 
 the freedom with which Dr. Bousset criticises 
 certain conspicuous elements in ecclesiastical 
 dogma. But they must remember that the 
 lectures in this volume were originally addressed 
 to an audience which was not prepared to 
 accept the ordinary conservative conception of 
 
xiv What is Religion ? 
 
 the Christian faith, and they must also consider 
 the point of view from which Professor Bousset 
 approaches the fundamental facts of the 
 Christian faith. According to Dr. Bousset all 
 the later developments of Christian dogma 
 must be tested by the teaching of Jesus Him- 
 seK. If these later developments are not con- 
 tained in the primitive teaching of the Founder 
 of Christianity, or are contrary to His teaching, 
 they must not be regarded as essential elements 
 of the Christian faith. The teaching of the 
 Founder is the supreme test of what is essen- 
 tially Christian, and all later developments must 
 be judged by this test. This is a point of view 
 which is gaining many adherents all over the 
 world, and it is desirable to have it placed 
 before us by such an able exponent as Dr. 
 Bousset. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE . . . . . . V 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 INTRODUCTION . . . . .1 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE RELIGION OF SAVAGES — TRIBAL RELIGION . 29 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 NATIONAL RELIGIONS . . . . .69 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 THE PROPHETS AND THE RELIGION OF THE PROPHETS 109 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE RELIGIONS OF THE LAW — JUDAISM, ZOROAS- 
 
 TRIANISM, ISLAMISM .... 133 
 
 XV 
 
xvi What is Religion ? 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE RELIGIONS OF REDEMPTION I BUDDHA, PLATO . 175 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE NATURE OF CHRISTIANITY . . . 213 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY . . . 260 
 
 INDEX ....... 301 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 THESE lectures are to deal with a subject of 
 the greatest importance, the knowledge 
 of the phenomenon which is known by that 
 foreign word " religion," and in dealing with this 
 we are brought face to face with the most 
 momentous, the most powerful factor that 
 affects the mental life of mankind. 
 
 Wherever we look we find that practically no 
 tribe or community of human beings is without 
 some kind of a religion, although those scholars 
 may possibly be right in thinking they have 
 discovered here and there, in some corner of the 
 world, small tribes who are entirely without it. 
 It does not, of necessity, follow that this con- 
 clusion is merely due to false and insufficient 
 investigation. It is quite true that traces of a 
 religion are but rarely met with in the excava- 
 tions and discoveries belonging to the earlier 
 Stone Age and are only found to any large 
 
 2 1 
 
What is Religion 
 
 ? 
 
 extent in the later period. Yet these excava- 
 tions throw light on a period removed from us 
 by many thousand years, a period, however, in 
 which man already possessed a religion. And 
 although, naturally, there must be some point 
 of time when religion had its beginning, it is 
 still incontestable that wherever human life 
 advanced a stage religion was evolved. 
 
 Religion has conducted man to his highest 
 point of civilisation ; and this is so in our own 
 time. To-day, it is true, we are confronted 
 by the fact that, as has usually happened in 
 periods of excessive culture, numerous sections 
 of the people are separated from religion, 
 but we are justified in considering this as 
 merely a passing phase. Modern society and 
 modern civilisation in both Europe and America 
 are still connected in a thousand ways with 
 religion. It must not be forgotten that at 
 the beginning of the twentieth century the 
 Churches are much more powerful and stable 
 than they were a hundred or a hundred and 
 fifty years ago, and that the religious bodies of 
 North America which are in no wise supported 
 by the State display great vitality. And again, 
 this fact must not be overlooked, that among 
 the most highly cultured people, among the 
 leaders of thought, even when they are not in 
 harmony with the established religion, there is 
 
Introduction 3 
 
 an interest in religious matters and a spirit of 
 inquiry concerning them. It is only, indeed, in 
 times of the greatest and most widespread intel- 
 lectual decadence that religion reaches its lowest 
 ebb, and there never has been, and never will 
 be, a civilisation which is progressive and vital 
 unaccompanied by religion. " Men," says Goethe, 
 " are only creative in Poetry and Art as long as 
 they are religious ; without religion they are 
 merely imitative, lacking in originality." 
 
 Religion has exercised the most profound 
 influence on human life ; it may truly be said 
 that all progress in human life has been evolved 
 in close connection with religion, and indeed 
 it almost seems as if religion 'were the source 
 of this progress. The use of fire, by which 
 mankind appears to have been originally dis- 
 tinguished from the animal world, owes its 
 origin, as far as we know, to the religious 
 worship of that wondrous element. Innumer- 
 able traces bear witness to the fact that the 
 kindling, the looking after, and the mainte- 
 nance of the fire were religious acts, and we 
 are justified in believing that even before man 
 understood how to use or produce fire he wor- 
 shipped it. Again, there is evidence in the 
 customs of savage nations that the breeding of 
 cattle, the taming of them, and the use of 
 domestic animals are closely connected with 
 
what is Religion 
 
 ? 
 
 the religious worship of these creatures. The 
 earliest artistic manifestations of mankind, if 
 not exclusively religious, are yet intimately 
 related to religion. The ornaments with which 
 the savage decorates his body, the marks he 
 imprints upon it, the pictures he paints upon 
 it, possess an important religious significance, 
 the significance of the magic talisman and 
 the amulet. The most ancient dances are 
 religious dances — the dance of joy at the feast, 
 the circular dance when a sacrifice Tvas offered. 
 Israel danced round the golden calf. King David 
 before the Ark of the Covenant. Side by side 
 with the religious dance was religious music. 
 The early prophets of Israel marched to the 
 sound of harp, drum, flute, and zither 
 (1 Sam. X. 5). 
 
 It is a debatable point whether the various 
 pictorial representations on stone, horn, and 
 ivory, in high or low relief, which date from 
 the very earliest period of human history — 
 the early Stone Age — are due to a religious 
 motive or to an instinct for imitation and 
 amusement, or to a purely aesthetic impulse. 
 What is certain, however, is this, that among 
 all civilised peoples the plastic art has de- 
 veloped in close connection with the repre- 
 sentation of the Divinity, just as architecture 
 owes its progress to the building of tombs, 
 
Introduction 5 
 
 pyramids, obelisks, terraces, and temples of the 
 gods. 
 
 The idea of public, inviolable right rests on a 
 religious basis, on the belief that the anger of 
 the Godhead demands from the whole com- 
 munity of worshippers expiation for the wrong 
 done, and that this anger lasts till atonement is 
 rendered. The rudiments of human knowledge 
 originated in connection with religion. The 
 ancient wise men of Babylon held in the very 
 highest reverence the starry powers which ruled 
 in the heavens, for according to their belief 
 these governed the destinies of men. And from 
 this belief arose the foundations of human know- 
 ledge : the careful observation of the heavenly 
 bodies, accurate chronology, knowledge of 
 measurements, the first attempt at mathe- 
 matics. Lastly, the connection between morals 
 and religion is so obvious and so close that it is 
 only necessary to refer to it. 
 
 In course of time Religion released from her 
 bonds the various provinces of mental activity 
 which hitherto had been under her domination. 
 This marked a great advance in the history 
 of mankind, by which Religion also benefited. 
 She was deprived of nothing. What she lost 
 in breadth she gained in depth and concen- 
 trated energy. In spite of separation from other 
 branches of human activity, religion has ever 
 
6 What is Religion ? 
 
 remained the central interest of this activity, 
 and wherever the surging roar of life has 
 been loudest, and wherever human life has 
 been most profoundly moved in struggle and 
 conflict, religion has been the cause. 
 
 The object of this little book is to understand 
 the meaning of this phenomenon which we call 
 religion. What a many-sided. Protean idea 
 is presented to us, what a confusing jangle of 
 sounds ! Here we encounter joyous confidence, 
 sure of heaven ; there frightful, soul-destroying 
 agony; egoism of the rudest type, and a joy 
 in sacrifice which, in the form of the sacrifice 
 of men, children, and sexual honour, shows 
 itself under its most terrible aspect. The 
 tenderest lyrical tones of entrancing sweetness 
 are to be met with as well as the barbaric, awful 
 cruelty of the religious war, the auto-da-fe and 
 the Inquisition ; the renunciation of the ascetic, 
 of the solitary penitent, of the monk, side by 
 side with the triumphant note of the priest 
 and the prince of the Church who subdues his 
 people and the world. It is a world in which 
 we think we hear the angels singing, and yet 
 close by distorted, demoniacal spirits and all 
 kinds of monstrosities pursue their way. Now 
 we are in the presence of sublime rest, tran- 
 quillity, simplicity, now of a witches' cauldron 
 of storm-tossed passion. 
 
Introduction 7 
 
 How can we find our way through this mass 
 of phenomena? Many people show us an 
 apparently simple way : they tell us the 
 question concerning the nature of religion is 
 merely the question of the nature of Chris- 
 tianity. Christianity alone (they say) is the 
 true religion ; all others are false, and the 
 further men progressed the more corrupt 
 did the other religions of man become, for 
 humanity had been corrupt since the fall of 
 Adam. Or they tell us the religion of the 
 Old and New Testaments is revealed religion ; 
 all others are natural religions, the product of 
 man's thought or imagination, and without 
 any guarantee of their truth and permanence. 
 
 Against this widespread opinion the follow- 
 ing points are offered for consideration : 
 
 1. The view here asserted that God allows 
 the nations that have not accepted the revela- 
 tion of the Old and New Testaments to go their 
 own way, sinking deeper and deeper into dark- 
 ness and decay, is, if we consider the whole 
 bearings of it, a narrow-minded and melancholy 
 view of the history of humanity. It is, in truth, 
 an irreligious and Godless attitude. Apart from 
 its falsity, it is a dangerous apologetic for 
 Christian theologians to attempt with great J 
 sagacity — apparently in order to maintain the 
 honour of the Christian religion — to prove 
 
 9 
 
8 What is Religion ? 
 
 that the non-Christian religions are illusions, 
 products of the imagination and the intense 
 desire of mankind. For this apologetic entirely 
 forgets that the very arts which it employs 
 can be used against itself, and the very same 
 arguments may be used to prove that the 
 Christian religion is an illusion. 
 
 2. The whole trend of human history is 
 opposed to this view. Far indeed from show- 
 ing us an evolution from a higher to a lower 
 civilisation, or the arbitrary play of forces, 
 history (in spite of many periods of stagnation 
 and retrogression) shows us very clearly great 
 and stable progress, a slowly developed but 
 firm aspiration after higher ideas and a more 
 intense life in which religion participates. The 
 theologian who traces the history of religion 
 from a higher to a lower plane does not see 
 how he is entirely opposed to our knowledge 
 of the intellectual life of mankind. 
 
 3. The whole history of religion and of free 
 inquiry concerning religion is opposed to this 
 theory. This shows us the history of the Old 
 and the New Testament so closely connected with 
 the religious history of the surrounding peoples 
 and civilisations that the distinction between 
 revealed and natural religion is impossible. 
 The history of the Old Testament religion shows 
 us a progress from a lower to a higher stage, 
 
Introduction 9 
 
 a slow growth from imperfection to perfection. 
 Ecclesiastical history also reveals in the develop- 
 ment of Christianity an ever purer conception — 
 gradual, it is true — of the religion of the spirit 
 and of truth which is displayed in the Gospels. 
 It is no question of, This religion is true, that is 
 false ; everywhere we perceive growth, evolu- 
 tion, imperfection striving towards perfection. 
 
 Thus for the reasons just stated we proceed 
 on our inquiries from a different standpoint, 
 which will be justified in the course of further 
 explanation. The whole history of the religious ] 
 life of mankind stands to us as the great handi- 
 work of God, a ceaseless aspiration and constant!, 
 intercourse of God with man, of man with his ) 
 Maker, in accordance with the sta^e to which 
 he has attained. The religion of the Old and 
 the New Testaments, however, represents, as we 
 shall see, the purest form of religion, and the 
 Gospel, to say the least, the highest and most 
 perfect form to which it has reached. But in 
 spite of this, Christianity is not the one religion, 
 the only religion, but simply the most complete 
 species of the genus. 
 
 Hence, in this book, where we are not so 
 much concerned with the practical application 
 of religion as with a clearly defined knowledge 
 of it, the question concerning the nature of 
 religion is of the first importance, that of 
 
lo What is Religion ? 
 
 Christianity being secondary. For from a 
 comparative study of the genus we learn to 
 understand thoroughly and completely the 
 most perfect of its species, just as comparative 
 anatomy reveals to us very clearly the highly 
 developed organism of man. The answer to the 
 inquiry concerning the nature of Christianity 
 is not, however, easily given. If we want to 
 separate, with clear perception, the essential 
 from the non-essential, and discover with 
 certainty, in the changing forms of temporary 
 expressions, the eternal, everlasting basis, Ave 
 cannot do better than aiDply ourselves to the 
 comparative study of religions. 
 
 In pursuing this inquiry concerning religion 
 we turn with complete confidence to the whole 
 wonderful history of religion. In studying this 
 history we must group together phenomena, 
 and arrange them in their right order ; we must 
 seize the essential and the permanent in the 
 phenomena as they pass before our eyes, recog- 
 nise the laws of evolution, and connect the past 
 with the present and the future. 
 
 But before dealing with the mass of pheno- 
 mena, it is to be recommended on pedagogical 
 grounds that some propositions of a general 
 kind should be made touching the nature of 
 religion. Not that these propositions might not 
 be obtained from history itself, or that they 
 
VV2^- 
 
 Introduction 1 1 
 
 would not be just as well obtained in the course 
 of an historical survey ; but just as before going 
 into a labyrinthine building it is as well to look 
 at the plan, so these general remarks may be 
 found useful. They will serve as the basis ; 
 observations obtained, as it were, from a bird's- 
 eye view, which will receive shape, energy, and 
 illumination from later statements. 
 
 First of all, it must be clearly noted that 
 religion is a fundamental element in the mental 
 life of mankind, of a primary and not a deri- 
 vative character. At any rate, the attempts 
 hitherto made to reduce religion to a simple 
 elementary function have failed. Attempts 
 have been made to derive religion from the 
 Kausalitdtsdrang, the instinct for knowledge ; 
 to consider it " the instinctive thought," the 
 elementary stage of true philosophic thought ; 
 to degrade it to an aesthetic illusion or to accept 
 its propositions as postulates for the basis of 
 ethics. Opposed to this is the view that in 
 religion we are dealing with a powerful primary 
 manifestation of human personality, derived 
 from nothing, not to be reduced to one of the 
 categories belonging to man's mental life, such 
 as thinking, feeling, willing, but a phenomenon 
 standing by itself. 
 
 It is indeed a correct observation, which can 
 be substantiated, that religion is a *' striving 
 
1 2 What is Religion ? 
 
 after life." History reveals to us on all sides 
 this striving after life ; on all sides we see 
 religion concerned with blessings. These bless- 
 ings are of different kinds : earthly blessings, 
 appertaining to individual life, such as rain, 
 fertility, sunshine, good hunting, health, the 
 cure of sickness. Then, again, there are the 
 blessings connected with the life of the com- 
 munity : dominion, victory in war, peace, pro- 
 tection of trade and industry, right, freedom, 
 universal prosperity ; or the nobler blessings 
 of a future life : a happy fate after death, life 
 with the gods or with one God, reconciliation, 
 forgiveness of sin and guilt, inward peace, moral 
 justice. Even the mystic — who surrenders his 
 own life, and absorbs himself in the Godhead ; 
 or the Buddhist monk, animated by a wish to 
 free himself from life and attain to absolute 
 rest — regards the perfect renunciation of his 
 being as a boon in comparison with the painful 
 torment of this worldly existence. Religion is 
 everywhere seen to be a striving after life, after 
 possessions. 
 
 The subject of religion may be clearly and 
 accurately distinguished from the other great 
 subjects with which man's mental life is con- 
 cerned. In our moral dealings the motive of 
 which we are conscious is not, in the first 
 instance, a striving after possessions, though it 
 
Introduction 1 3 
 
 is certain that our ultimate object is to obtain 
 things of priceless worth. But the moral law 
 faces man with stern demands, ignoring all his 
 desires ; it confronts him with " Thou shalt " and 
 " Thou shalt not," and oppresses his life as with 
 a strange burden. The aspiration after Truth — 
 it is universally admitted — is only of value when 
 it is completely disinterested. Science and art 
 must be entirely disinterested ; the investigator 
 must regard the highest interests of human life 
 as secondary to the interest of Truth. The love 
 of the Beautiful is of a more intense and per- 
 sonal nature, but, as a clever art critic has 
 remarked, it is, and must ever be, an abstract 
 love. It is a love springing from intense con- 
 templation, in which the object remains a 
 thing quite apart from the person interested 
 in it. The desire to have this beauty, to 
 wish to gain possession of it, is no longer 
 aesthetic, and mars the pure, intuitive vision 
 of beauty. 
 
 Now, religion stands in complete contrast to 
 all this, for everything connected with it is of 
 the keenest, deepest personal interest. Our will 
 power and our feelings are worked up to the 
 highest point of tension ; we desire to have, to 
 possess, to be something. Religion can awaken 
 in us the most intense feeling ; it unfetters our 
 mental powers, kindles our firiest passions. 
 
14 What is Religion ? 
 
 There is a fomenting, a seething, a wild surging 
 of the good and evil elements within us. 
 
 And just because religion is a striving after 
 life it is brought into a peculiarly close and yet 
 a curiously antagonistic relation to every 
 department of human activity which is con- 
 cerned with the striving after possessions. 
 This peculiar relation does not exist between 
 religion and science, art or morality. Be- 
 tween these it would be easy to establish a 
 profitable and mutually beneficial relation. 
 Antagonisms and contradictions exist but in 
 appearance ; they are due to one or the other 
 overstepping the limits of its domain, and they 
 can generally be set right, though often only 
 with time and difficulty. 
 
 Much more profound and impenetrable is the 
 problem of religion and civilisation. Religion 
 obtains the benefits which she offers to mankind 
 in a manner different from that which human 
 activity employs to obtain them. Religion 
 stands towards human activity in a peculiarly 
 friendly, yet often hostile relation ; she is 
 often, nay usually, the pioneer of new modes 
 of activity of a civilising nature which were not 
 originally due to civilisation, but were the 
 expression and outcome of man's religious life. 
 As we have already mentioned, the use of fire 
 was most probably preceded by the worship of 
 
Introduction 1 5 
 
 fire ; worship created its use. When once fire 
 was completely mastered by man, and forced 
 into his service, then (allowing for a consider- 
 able number of exceptions) fire-worship ceased. 
 From an object of religious belief fire became 
 the most powerful instrument of civilisation. 
 We have another and a nearer example which 
 can be more easily understood. The belief that 
 the Godhead would avenge the sin of the indi- 
 vidual on the whole tribe, town, or nation, 
 causes the tribe, &c., in its own interest to 
 guard against every gross infringement of the 
 law on the part of any individual ; hence the 
 idea of public rights is created. The belief 
 vanishes, but the idea of public obligation 
 becomes a powerful lever in the progress of 
 civilisation. Thus civilisation is always the 
 fortunate heiress of religion — fortunate, and 
 yet in a sense unfortunate, for she is never 
 able to enjoy her inheritance quite whole- 
 heartedly. At the very moment when religion 
 gives to civilisation a province of human life for 
 secular use it shows mankind new and higher 
 possessions beyond the horizon of all earthly 
 goods. Her constant cry to civilisation is, " The 
 life which you offer is not the highest of bless- 
 ings." She imprints on all the works of civilisa- 
 tion the stamp of the transient, the means 
 towards an end. She places the real value of 
 
1 6 What is Religion ? 
 
 life beyond : Sursum corda ! — " Lift up your 
 hearts ! " 
 
 But when we consider the relation of religion 
 to civilisation we at once clearly perceive that 
 the definition of religion as a striving after life, 
 after possessions, is inadequate. It is as if we 
 defined music as a noise. Progress, it is true, is 
 based on a striving after life, after possessions, 
 but we need a further distinguishing charac- 
 teristic of religion ; we have found one focus of 
 the ellipse, we must seek another. 
 I We ask ourselves in what way this strife 
 \ after life is accomplished by religion, and we 
 reply that this is effected in conjunction with 
 the higher powers, spirits, demons, heroes, gods, 
 the Godhead — God. For in all religion we find as 
 a second determining factor the belief in gods 
 or God. The solitary exception is the Buddhist 
 religion, in which there is no thought of a God, 
 and later an attempt will be made to under- 
 stand this exception. 
 
 This second factor in religion — belief in gods 
 — cannot be derived from the first, although 
 many attempts have been made to do so. 
 People have sought to show that this belief in 
 gods arises from the primal necessities of man's 
 life, and have brought forward evidence to 
 prove that the different types of gods clearly 
 correspond to the different wants and ideals of 
 
Introduction 1 7 
 
 humanity. Here we are dealing already with 
 an hypothesis which goes beyond the spiritual 
 phenomenon we are considering, and does 
 violence to it. For wherever we have religious 
 life the gods (or the Godhead) are regarded as 
 absolute realities, more real even than human 
 life. So that if that hypothesis of the purely 
 illusionary signij&cance of belief in gods is 
 to be accepted, how can ^we explain the 
 predominance of the feelings of fear and 
 anguish in the lowest stages of religion? If 
 the gods owe their origin merely to the 
 wishes of men, and are born of their material 
 needs, how can we explain that dominating 
 element in religion, since man as a creative 
 being can do what instinctive man cannot do ? 
 
 We therefore maintain from the outset the 
 twofold basis of religion — striving after pos- 
 sessions and belief in gods — without hastily 
 explaining it and simplifying it. Rather, we 
 proceed further Tvith these questions : What are 
 these higher powers ? what is meant by rever- 
 encing gods, worshipping a God? What is it 
 that impels men to honour some of the powers 
 which rule around them, and not to honour 
 others ? How is belief, religion, kindled ? 
 
 First of all we observe, when we consider 
 the course of religious history, that it is the 
 strange, the marvellous, the incalculable and the 
 
 3 
 
1 8 What is Religion ? 
 
 mighty forces that arouse religious veneration. 
 From the very earliest times there has ever 
 been a close connection between faith and 
 wonder. Very early does man begin to divide 
 his world into the known and the unknown. 
 Even the lowest type of savage possesses a 
 part of the known TS'orld — the cave wherein 
 he dwells, the hunting implements which he 
 uses, the animals he masters and tames, perhaps 
 even a little piece of ground which he cultivates, 
 a hut which he builds. We may therefore 
 venture on the supposition that only when from 
 the immense whole man has divided off for 
 himself a little piece of land which he calls his 
 Tv^orld does he, filled with immeasurable wonder, 
 rise to the idea of religious veneration. And 
 it is here, on the boundary line between the 
 known and the unknown, that religion 
 originates. 
 
 The forest which surrounds the savage is full 
 of spirits ; he is conscious of a rustling, a 
 crackling, a creaking, a whispering, of singing 
 and noises. In the woods the elves and kobolds, 
 the fauns and the dryads, the little men and 
 women of the woods, disport themselves. The 
 summits of the mountains are an unknown 
 world ; many a one has ascended them and 
 never returned. The avalanches crash down 
 from them, the waters roar. There dwell the 
 
Introduction 19 
 
 mischievous wood-demons, the stone-throwing 
 centaurs, " Rubezahl," Pan who frightens the 
 herdsmen, Dionysus with his wild hordes. And 
 besides all these there are the ghosts, the dead 
 whose continued existence is regarded as a 
 matter of course by the childlike mind of the 
 primitive savage. Such spirits are not regarded 
 as especially powerful ; they are indeed depen- 
 dent on the care of the li^'ing ; they are spoken 
 of as "poor souls." But they are strange, 
 inexplicable, and dwell in the mysterious un- 
 kno^vn world. In the gloom of the twilight, 
 in the darkness of the night, by the graves and 
 the cross-roads, they carry on their ghostly 
 existence — Hecate and her savage tribe, the 
 wild huntsman and his hounds. What a pro- 
 found impress this belief in spirits and ghosts 
 has left even on the mind of modern man ! 
 
 And now a wonderful and remarkable drama 
 begins : gradually man extends the limits of his 
 world, and from this world which is now known 
 to him, which he has explored and governs, 
 the spirits and gods vanish. Yet the unknown 
 world, the world of faith and religion, never 
 vanishes. The farther man penetrates the 
 more unfathomable becomes that unknoTvn 
 world ; the more he learns to rule the world, 
 the more mysterious, wonderful, and immense 
 appears that world which he does not command, 
 
20 What is Religion ? 
 
 and the more he knows about it the more 
 incomprehensible he feels it to be. For one 
 riddle that he solves ten others confront him. 
 And it is here, on the boundary-line of the 
 known and the unknown world, that religion 
 is kindled. 
 
 From the spirits which rule on the earth 
 man turns his glance to the heavenly powers 
 which blow, rustle, rage, thunder, lighten, rain, 
 shine, sparkle, and illumine, which bring life, 
 light and prosperity ; to the powers which 
 dwell beneath the earth and bring fruitfulness 
 and harvest to the fields, which rule over life 
 and death. No longer does he seek the gods 
 only in the marvellous, the unexpected, the 
 strange, the inexplicable, but also in the still 
 more wonderful, mysterious and eternal 
 ordinances of the universe. To the Greeks 
 Moira, Fate {Fatum) was the mightiest power, 
 to which even the gods bowed ; the native of 
 India expresses the idea of unalterable law 
 by the word rta, the Persian Asha. And 
 thus the gods become the spiritual powers 
 which, in accordance with eternal, inviolable 
 laws, guide the destinies of the nations in holi- 
 ness and righteousness. But still the primitive 
 idea of religion always remains the same, fear 
 of the mysterious, superior power of the gods, 
 which the Greek by his ^eo\ xp^irroveg (" the gods 
 
Introduction 2 1 
 
 are more than mortals ") has expressed with 
 absolute clearness. 
 
 Let us consider how this idea works out. 
 To us moderns it is also the basis of all religion. 
 For however greatly the known world has 
 widened for us, still larger looms the unknown 
 world. With all our great capacity we remain 
 throughout our life chained and confined to 
 our little planet. The Kopernican theory has 
 taught us that this our planet is no longer the 
 middle point of the world, as an earlier know- 
 ledge believed, but merely an atom in the 
 universe. We are all drifting along in frail 
 skiffs, and everywhere we are surrounded by 
 dizzy abysses. Whether, armed with a telescope, 
 we gaze at the infinitely great and perceive 
 one starry world revolving round another, or 
 Tvith a microscope we study the infinitely little ; 
 whether we lift our eyes to the Milky Way, or 
 cast them down towards the smallest pebbles 
 of the great universe, at the molecules and the 
 atoms, we are for ever possessed of this dizzy 
 feeling of the abysses which surround our life. 
 And amid all this wondrously great and 
 wondrously little there is a noble, mysterious 
 striving and aspiration in life in all its forms, 
 after inviolable and inflexible laws before which 
 we stand amazed. Thus, in my opinion, it is 
 just to us modern men that the basis of all 
 
22 What is Religion ? 
 
 religion is seen to be trembling fear and rever- 
 ence for the great realities amid which we live. 
 Every one who is susceptible to this feeling is, 
 and must be, susceptible to religion. 
 
 But just as when we said that religion was 
 a striving after life, after possessions, we 
 had not completely defined it, so in saying 
 that it is a timid, reverential recognition of 
 the superior powers of spirits and gods, of the 
 Godhead or God, we have also given no com- 
 plete definition. Rather is it that in these two 
 attitudes of mind we have found the true foci, 
 and now we must seek to define the circum- 
 ference of religion. 
 
 In bringing these two attitudes into closer 
 connection it may be said on the one hand that 
 religion is not merely an egoistic striving after 
 possessions, the attempt of man to assert his 
 individuality in the world around him, by which 
 means his subordinate position is brought closer 
 to the Godhead. We see that religion is, as well 
 as this, something higher, a simple feeling of 
 self -surrender to the Godhead. In all stages 
 of religion we meet with phenomena which 
 display this aspect in absolute simplicity. We 
 see the desire, often intensified to madness, to 
 sacrifice to the Godhead all possessions, even 
 life and sex honour (e.gr., asceticism, expiation, 
 human sacrifice, prostitution in the service of 
 
Introduction 23 
 
 the gods). We have the casting of the being on 
 the Godhead without any personal demand ; 
 spiritual absorption in Him, which leads to the 
 entire surrender of the Ego (as in the case of 
 the mystic) ; a striving after the very life of 
 the Godhead, a longing after God which is 
 expressed in its highest form in the saying, 
 " If I have but Thee I ask for neither heaven 
 nor earth." 
 
 On the other hand, we may say that religion, 
 if it is to remain healthy, can never be com- 
 pletely severed from the egoistic feeling ; it 
 cannot be mere reverence of the Godhead apart 
 from all desires, nor simply the feeling of 
 dependence. Healthy religion must always con- 
 tain an element of personal interest ; it must 
 be personal relationship, a desire to render but 
 likewise to receive. Religion is personal relation / 
 with the Godhead. Let us now examine a little 
 more closely this statement that we have made, 
 and the vivid contradictions to it which the life 
 of religion unfolds. 
 
 Now, in every religion there are two aspects 
 which must be considered together. On the 
 one hand there are the superior powers which 
 man worships, in their nature often hateful and 
 mysterious ; he must flee from them, hide from 
 them in horror, anguish, overwhelming fear 
 and awe. And yet, on the other hand, he 
 
24 What is Religion ? 
 
 cannot get free from them ; he does not, indeed, 
 venture to do so, he clings to them, he feels 
 himself connected with them, he belongs to 
 them and they to him. He raises his hands 
 inploringly towards them, he gives so that he 
 may receive — he sacrifices ; he believes that the 
 gods hear him and take an interest in him and 
 his doings. Only where these two beliefs are 
 found together do we get true religion. In the 
 lowest stages of rqligious life as a rule man 
 only worships the inferior beings, the tiny spirits 
 of nature, the souls of the dead, &c. He does 
 indeed know of the superior powers in the 
 heavens which storm, and rage, and shine, and 
 illuminate, but this is mere religious feeling and 
 is not religion. For he does not yet venture to 
 believe that these powers are exercised on his 
 behalf. Only very gradually have men come 
 to this thought, and have turned their attention 
 to the sun, the moon, the stars, which illumine, 
 and have said to the God of heaven who storms 
 and thunders, "Thou art our God and our 
 Father." Such a belief, indeed, lies at the 
 root of all religion, a belief which ever increases 
 until the Christ comes and says to the almighty 
 God, "Thou art My Father." All religion is— 
 and the higher we rise the more true this is — a 
 casting of the self into the abyss, a wondrous 
 miracle of human confidence. 
 
Introduction 2 5 
 
 In all forms of religious life there are two 
 dominating motive powers, and the old question 
 of whether fear and terror or love and con- 
 fidence should prevail in religion admits of 
 no simple solution. Both impetuses, centri- 
 petal and centrifugal, are a driving force in 
 all religion that is living, and act in such a 
 manner that the soul of man reaches within 
 measurable distance of the Godhead. Where 
 there is no trembling, timid fear of God, there 
 is no true religion. For man is not permitted 
 to measure himself with God, to place himself 
 side by side with Him. It is presumption — 
 the Greeks called it vPptg — the greatest of all 
 spiritual sins, if he ventures to do this. Man 
 must be conscious of the distance between him- 
 self and God. This is the first law in religion, 
 " for with the gods must no man presume to 
 stand on an equality." But, on the other hand, 
 fear and terror alone do not constitute religion ; 
 this feeling must not entirely predominate if 
 there is to be religion. Man must also feel 
 drawn towards the Godhead, and the more 
 spiritual religion becomes the stronger is the 
 impulse of confidence and love. But even in 
 the most elevated of religions the motive power 
 of fear does not vanish entirely. It is there 
 in the background, from which belief and con- 
 fidence emerge. Even in the prayer of Jesus, 
 
26 what Is Religion ? 
 
 "I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and 
 earth, that Thou didst hide these things from the 
 wise and understanding, and didst reveal them 
 unto babes," both these motives find a place. 
 With impregnable certainty Luther expressed 
 this idea when he said, " We must fear God in 
 all things, and we must love Him and trust 
 Him." Belief is a light in darkness, an attraction 
 and a repulsion, trembling fear and exultant 
 joy. This is a great paradox, but so it is. 
 
 When we consider religion from this stand- 
 point we shall then understand why in all living 
 religions, first vaguely and then gradually clearly, 
 and as the centre, there is the idea of redemp- 
 tion, the belief in a higher life. All religion, as 
 we have said, rests on the striking contrasts 
 between the known and the unknown world. 
 Man desires to emerge, to be free from the petty 
 world which surrounds him, from its power, its 
 conditions, its narrowness, its necessities. He 
 desires to be outwardly free, but also inwardly 
 free — free from the sordid daily limitations, the 
 narrow habitations and boundaries of human 
 life, the sensual bondage of which his better, 
 nobler self is conscious. 
 
 In the very lowest stage of religion this 
 instinct for redemption either does not exist 
 or is very vague indeed ; here it is the egoistic 
 instinct that predominates. Man wants some- 
 
Introduction 27 
 
 thing from the Being whom he honours ; he 
 gives in order to receive. But even in this 
 lowest form of religion there are yet traces 
 of that feeling for salvation, an absorption in 
 the Godhead, a desire for self-abnegation. And 
 the more spiritual religion becomes the more 
 these phenomena appear to which reference 
 has already been made — ascetic practices of all 
 kinds, the annihilation of the natural, sensual 
 life, ecstasy, religious " possession," the God-like 
 disposition of the religious mystic who absorbs 
 his whole soul in the Divine and turns away 
 utterly from all earthly things. Many of the 
 great religions, especially those of India — Brah- 
 minism. Buddhism — express this idea in its 
 magnificent simplicity and austerity. The long- 
 ing to be free from this life, to attain eternal 
 rest, is the central idea, and destroys all others. 
 Although this idea of redemption in its absolute 
 and exclusive form may be dangerous to religion, 
 yet it is an essential part of all higher religious 
 life. Religions have rightly been arranged 
 according as this belief in salvation was strong / 
 and powerful, and this thought of a higher life 
 occupied a prominent position ; thus in order of 
 rank Brahminism and Buddhism occupy a lower 
 position than Platonism, the religion of the 
 later, cultured Greek world, and Christianity 
 stands at the highest point of evolution. 
 
2 8 What is Religion ? 
 
 Some general ideas have here been given 
 which must now be explained more fully — they 
 must be made living and pregnant. We propose 
 to wander through the "wide world of religious 
 life ; we do this with a sense of reverence, con- 
 vinced that we are dealing with the most 
 powerful fact in man's mental life. Those who 
 reject decisively this statement of belief, who 
 believe that the religious life of man is merely 
 fantasy created by man's urgent impulse, and 
 an illusion, will have no desire to go farther 
 with me on my journey. It would require 
 an entirely separate disquisition to deal with 
 these objectors, and at present time does not 
 permit of this. But those who have had some 
 experience of the religious life, who feel within 
 themselves at least a questioning and a seeking 
 after this side of life, will accompany me on my 
 way. In doing this they can prove whether we 
 are right in saying that the whole religious life 
 of man and his history springs from the work 
 and action of God by means of which He draws 
 men individually from error to truth, from 
 imperfection to perfection, from egoism to 
 fraternity, from the sensual to the moral, from 
 the natural to the spiritual, and attracts them 
 to Himself. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE RELIGION OF SAVAGES — TRIBAL RELIGION 
 
 IT is an old matter of dispute whether in 
 investigating the beginnings of the rehgious 
 life of man we ought to start with the religious 
 condition of the uncivilised peoples of to-day. 
 It is pointed out in this connection that if we 
 cannot here show with absolute clearness a 
 decadence of human life, we are yet dealing 
 with forms of human life which have remained 
 stationary and unprogressive for thousands of 
 years. It is stagnation or distinct retrogression. 
 If we want to observe the beginnings of budding 
 religious life (they say), we must watch the 
 soul of the child as it develops. It may be at 
 once conceded that the observation of the reli- 
 gious development of the child may be of great 
 value in investigating religion, but it must 
 not be forgotten that the forms under which 
 the religious life of the child develops are 
 already firmly established forms. And further, 
 
30 What is Religion ? 
 
 it may be granted that we must regard the 
 religious life of the ancestors of progressive 
 peoples as immeasurably fresher, more vital, 
 and more capable of development than the 
 stagnant life of the present-day people who 
 have remained low in the scale of civilisation. 
 Nevertheless, the excavations, dating from pre- 
 historic times, in modern civilised countries, as 
 well as the conclusions arrived at by a study of 
 comparative folklore, show an extraordinary 
 agreement between the earliest stages of human 
 life and the mode of life among present-day 
 savages, and the view therefore seems to be 
 justified that the religious life of the latter 
 reflects the religion of mankind in the earliest 
 days. 
 
 But which nations and races shall we consider 
 as uncivilised ? Speaking in general terms, we 
 may consider as such the great mass of the 
 human race : the Malay - Polynesians, the 
 American Indians, half the Mongolian race 
 (particularly the Mongolians of Siberia), and 
 the Negro race. When we speak of all these 
 peoples as savages the term must be under- 
 stood to imply reservations. Among such 
 people various degrees of approach to civilisa- 
 tion must be distinguished. On the lowest 
 stage of civilisation we must place the Bushmen 
 of South Africa and the old dwarf population of 
 
The Religion of Savages 31 
 
 Central Africa, and also the inhabitants of 
 extreme South America, the dusky-coloured race 
 of Melanesia, and some Mongol races. Next, a 
 stage higher, come the Malay-Polynesians and 
 American Indians, who are perhaps connected; 
 on the third and highest stage may be placed 
 the Negro races, who here and there almost 
 approach to civilisation. It is not without reason 
 that an attempt has been made to compare this 
 threefold classification of the savage races with 
 the threefold division of the prehistoric civilisa- 
 tion of the ancient and modern Stone Age and 
 Bronze Age ; and in this connection it is to be 
 remarked that some negro races have even 
 risen to the use of iron. 
 
 But we are not concerned with these more 
 minute distinctions. For our purpose we may 
 regard all these races as one, and point out as 
 their common characteristic the universal in- 
 capacity to organise human life in communities 
 on the one hand, while on the other hand there 
 is the lack of all understanding of chronology, 
 and therefore there is no permanent tradition 
 and no history. In the tribal life of such people 
 there is an almost entire lack of any cultivation 
 which depends upon conscious effort and fore- 
 thought. Through the natural connections be- 
 tween families and kindred large, loosely united 
 communities are formed ; we have a tribal life 
 
32 What is Religion ? 
 
 here in its rudest beginning, communities which 
 arise in one period and disappear in the next 
 without leaving a trace. In Africa there are 
 huge tribes which disperse almost as soon as 
 they are formed. Corresponding to this we find 
 numberless languages and dialects which con- 
 stantly merge into each other. Even the negro 
 States of North Africa, which stand highest in 
 the stage of civilisation of all these peoples, have 
 this fl.uctuating and temporary character. But 
 above everything, this type of tribal life lacks 
 the characteristic which gives to human com- 
 munities such great support, namely, historical 
 tradition, which descends from grandfather to 
 father and then to son. The basis of such 
 tradition is lacking — namely, chronology. The 
 mightiest means of preserving tradition, writing, 
 does not exist in any sense ^worthy the name. 
 Thus there is no history, no past, no carefully 
 collected experience. The life of such beings is 
 as a ship driven about on the boundless ocean, a 
 boat without a rudder. It is like wandering 
 about with a dim light in profound darkness ; 
 only a tiny part round the man is lit up, all in 
 front of him and all behind liim there are 
 immeasurable depths of darkness. In the vast 
 spaces round about him, in the eternal, meaning- 
 less point of time, man lives out his little life. He 
 does not know the past, he cannot comprehend 
 
The Religion of Savages 33 
 
 the future ; he lives in the moment, entirely 
 dependent on the chances of the moment. 
 
 At this stage of civilisation therefore, man 
 lives essentially according to nature. Con- 
 sciously, he does not yet separate himself 
 from surrounding nature. It is only the com- 
 munal life, historical tradition, and the capacity 
 obtained through historical experience to 
 shape one's own life free and consciously that 
 create the individual life of man and the feeling 
 of his difference from the surrounding world. 
 To this life in accordance 'with nature belongs a 
 peculiarity found in all thought of uncivilised 
 men. The human being considers all things 
 from his point of vie^v, and projects himself and 
 his life into all things. He illustrates every- 
 thing by analogies with his own life. He 
 believes that every one experiences his feelings, 
 thinks and acts as he does. The difPerence 
 between men and the animal is not felt. At 
 this epoch the sagas, the fairy tales and fables 
 were evolved, in which man appears on a level 
 with the animals. Men are depicted as de- 
 scended from animals ; animals change into men, 
 and men into animals. Animals talk. To the 
 negroes the ass is only dumb out of idleness ; 
 the Arab speaks to his horse as to a friend ; the 
 Red Indians believe that magicians are to be 
 found among animals as well as among men. 
 
 4 
 
34 What is Religion ? 
 
 The natives of Borneo believe that tigers have a 
 sultan over them. In the fairy tales the snakes 
 have their king and their queen. This removal 
 of all barriers and distinctions between men and 
 animals is carried still farther. The trees are 
 living creatures similar to men ; they speak, 
 they sing, they bleed. Men are descended from 
 trees, they spring forth from the trees ; thus the 
 Kaffir race, the Hereros, tell us of a tree which 
 gives birth to men, and according to another 
 legend of the Kaffirs man sprang from the 
 reeds. Even the difference between animate 
 and inanimate objects disappears, especially in 
 the case of things which possess movement. 
 The rivers and streams are living, animate 
 things. We are told that the negroes round 
 Lake Tanganyika implore the white men, when a 
 storm is threatening and the lake rages, to lie 
 down in the boat, because the lake cannot bear 
 the sight of them. The savage sees and hears 
 in the currents and cataracts of a river mis- 
 chievous demons who lie in wait for their 
 victims. Men are changed into stones, and 
 stones transform themselves into men. The 
 Zulus look upon the rainbow as an evil monster 
 that kidnaps children. But what is specially to 
 be noticed above everything else is this, that 
 the savage has no understanding of the connec- 
 tion between things. He constantly confuses 
 
The Religion of Savages 35 
 
 cause and effect, and, owing to his defective 
 observation, he connects things which have 
 absolutely nothing to do with each other. A 
 curious exarople of this is seen in the reverence 
 paid by so many peoples to the harbinger of 
 spring. Thus, among the Finns the cuckoo is 
 regarded as a sacred bird ; this is quite natural, 
 for when the cuckoo calls the flowers begin to 
 bloom, the trees and bushes to put on their 
 livery of green, and spring appears in the 
 land. Man says to himself : " The cuckoo is 
 a magic bird, who with his cry brings spring 
 into the world." Similarly the Mexicans and the 
 Indian tribes reverence the kolibri because his 
 coming coincides with the coming of spring. 
 The Egyptian's worship of the ibis rests on the 
 fact that it makes its appearance at the same 
 time as the Nile rises. 
 
 This whole mode of thought in which man 
 mingles his own life with the life around 
 him without any accurate observation is des- 
 cribed by the term " animism," and this animism 
 is justly considered the spiritual foundation of 
 the religion of the savage. 
 
 What form now will his religion take, in 
 accordance with these ideas? We said before 
 that religion rests upon fear of the more or less 
 unknown powers which everywhere surround 
 the existence of man, giving life or bringing 
 
36 What is Religion ? 
 
 death, blessing, threatening dangers, friendly or 
 hostile. We also said that this unknown world 
 of strange powers begins very soon for the 
 human being. His own world is narrow and 
 limited ; the unknown world which surrounds 
 him, and threatens him at every step with 
 dangers, represents to him a world full of 
 spirits, greater, lesser, or very insignificant. 
 He has as yet no conception of uniformity, of 
 cause and effect; he sees and traces every- 
 where the workings of the lesser powers which 
 he regards as spirits possessed of capacities 
 analogous to his own, sometimes more powerful, 
 sometimes less, but even more incalculable, 
 more capricious, more wonderful, than those of 
 the human being. With the exception of the 
 comparatively few objects which the daily 
 necessities or the modest needs of the house- 
 hold bring under a commonplace consideration, 
 all things and all events are clothed in a 
 mysterious dimness, and in this false light 
 Nature appears to him as a great house of 
 spirits, and the course of Nature as an undis- 
 ciplined, mischievous and often wild and 
 horrible sport of the spirits. 
 
 To the savage the whole world seems full 
 of spirits, and their influence is to be seen in 
 small things and in large ones, in the great 
 heavenly phenomena, in the rain, the thunder 
 
The Religion of Savages 37 
 
 and the lightning, the wind and the storm. 
 Spirits dwell in the spring and in the stream, in 
 the tree and in the bush, in the rock, and even 
 in the mountain. The spirits of ancestors 
 live in animals, the snakes especially being 
 considered as their abode. Spirits may conceal 
 themselves in the most insignificant of inani- 
 mate objects — in a stone, for example, which, 
 breaking away from the cliff, kills a man. 
 This is not the work of Nature but of an evil 
 spirit that dwells therein. A negro who ran 
 a crooked nail into his foot ascribed this mis- 
 fortune, not to his carelessness or to chance, 
 but to a spiteful demon lurking in the nail. 
 Especially everything that is unusual, strange, 
 striking, and unexpected attracts the religious 
 attention of the savage. Thunder and light- 
 ning, of all the heavenly phenomena, impress 
 him most. Among nearly all savages the 
 eclipse of the moon and its ever varying light, 
 its rising and its setting, is accompanied by 
 religious ceremonies and customs. Sudden, 
 inexplicable drought and its concomitant 
 aridity, illness, and especially illness with 
 violent symptoms, sudden and violent death, 
 are all regarded as caused by the working 
 of spirits. Animals of curious and rare 
 habits and behaviour — as, for example, the 
 snake — and still more such as have extraor- 
 
3 8 What is Religion ? 
 
 dinary pcwers, stones and other inanimate 
 objects of specially striking forms, attract the 
 religious attention of the savage, and foster 
 the belief that these are the abodes of spirits. 
 We must now consider the choice which 
 the savage makes, amid these innumerable 
 spirits, of one as a special object of religious 
 veneration. For in truth this universal belief 
 in spirits, this fear of ghostly presences sur- 
 rounding life, is not really religion. Religion 
 only arises when there is choice, when man 
 enters into a definite, though unsystematic 
 and fleeting, relationship with one or several 
 of many spirits. Here it must be observed 
 that men at this stage prefer to enter into 
 relationship with the lower spirits. Most of 
 the negro races recognise a powerful heavenly 
 being, a god (there is no need to suppose that 
 this is the result of European influences), that 
 is to say, a giver of life, Heaven — not yet 
 divided into different Divine forms — which 
 gives rain and life, which storms and blows, 
 and with his eyes (sun, moon, and stars) 
 looks down upon the earth. But at the same 
 time as this religious idea is to be perceived 
 among the negroes, it must be observed 
 that there is no (or scarcely any) religious 
 veneo'ation of the God of heaven. The negro 
 is convinced that that Being does not trouble 
 
The Religion of Savages 39 
 
 about him. and that He cannot be influenced in 
 His impartial goodness by the prayers of the 
 creature. Or he thinks that He has given the 
 government of the world to the lower spirits, 
 or that this highest God is only for the white 
 men and not for the black races. The negro 
 gives his worship and his veneration to the 
 inferior, smaller spirits, to fetiches, and to 
 the spirits of ancestors. The same remark 
 applies to the Malay-Polynesian race. An 
 Almighty God is there recognised, and He is 
 honoured in myth as the Creator of the world, 
 but there is little trace of a worship of this 
 high God, the living religion being a worship 
 of spirits and ancestors. 
 
 The religious veneration which arises in 
 this way is stamped with the character of 
 chance and change. Arbitrary and haphazard is 
 the choice of the gods who are to be specially 
 venerated, who are preferred on the ground 
 of some experience or other, some naive obser- 
 vations, some caprice, or chance occurrences. 
 Tradition and custom naturally play a part 
 in this matter, but they are continually inter- 
 fered with by individual feeling. Fluctuating, 
 wavering, and constantly varied, yet in essen- 
 tials curiously uniform, and even monotonous, 
 are the forms which this worship takes. In 
 the simplest possible way gifts are offered; 
 
40 What is Religion ? 
 
 they are hung on the sacred tree, thrown into 
 the spring or into the river ; they are placed 
 on the graves of the dead, of the ancestors. 
 Again, the benefits asked of the spirits are of 
 the most elementary and material kind — life, 
 health, recovery from sickness, rain, fertility 
 of the fields, excellent hunting, many children. 
 It is at this stage that religion, if ever, is a 
 private concern of the individual. It is true 
 that there are indeed high and mighty spirits 
 which a whole community of human beings — 
 the family, the clan or the tribe — venerates as 
 protectors ; but of far greater real significance 
 are the lesser spirits, under whose protection 
 each individual or each family feels itself to 
 be. Among a large number of negro tribes 
 the belief holds that each negro has his own 
 particular protecting spirit. Further, each 
 negro has his special fetich or fetiches, and 
 he watches over his property with zealous 
 care, keeping such entirely to himself. Hence 
 at this stage religion is almost entirely lacking 
 in any moral element. The idea of co-operation 
 between human beings plays scarcely any part 
 in such a religion ; everything in it is based 
 on bare use, on the purely material needs of 
 the ego. Man gives so that he may receive ; 
 he offers sacrifices for earthly benefits, and 
 he expects that advantage and benefit will be 
 
The Religion of Savages 41 
 
 the direct result. If the worship of a spirit 
 gives no tangible advantage he transfers his 
 worship to another spirit. No moral bond 
 unites the spirit and his worshipper ; the 
 spirits themselves are never conceived as moral 
 beings. They are considered as neither good 
 nor bad, although fear often predominates 
 over reverence ; rather are they without any 
 definite character, but are capricious, wonderful, 
 strange, and favourably inclined towards those 
 who understand how to deal with their won- 
 drous ways and doings. 
 
 From this chaos, enormously rich in details, 
 and equally poor in any creative power, two or 
 three concrete phenomena emerge. We find in 
 the lowest stage of religious life fetichism and 
 magic, and in a higher stage, which makes for 
 progress, reverence for the dead and the 
 worship of ancestors. 
 
 Fetichism prevails almost entirely among the 
 majority of people and tribes belonging to the 
 negro race. Feitigio is a Portuguese word, mean- 
 ing " the thing that is made." The term 
 " fetichism " implies the worship of small, insig- 
 nificant objects which are of absolutely no value 
 in themselves ; they are worshipped by the 
 savages on the supposition that in them there is 
 a spirit which lives and works as the soul works 
 in the body of man. Fetichism is on the one 
 
42 what is Religion ? 
 
 hand to be differentiated from Nature-worship 
 {i.e., the worship of natural objects), by the in- 
 significance and snaallness of the objects, and the 
 lack of reason for worshipping them. The wor- 
 ship of a mighty tree, of a spring, of a river, is 
 not to be called fetichism because in so doing 
 man is worshipping, from a certain point of 
 view, a superior power. On the other hand, 
 fetichism must be most clearly distinguished 
 from idolatry. The objects of fetich worship may 
 be without form, or with it, and fetichism, unlike 
 idolatry, lays no stress on the image and its 
 significance. Fetichism appears as the most 
 baseless worship of presumably higher powers. 
 How does such fetich- worship originate? 
 Fetichism has as its foundation the belief in 
 spirits which has already been described. In 
 accordance with this belief spirits may dwell 
 everywhere, even in the most trifling objects. 
 The savage, owing to some experience he has 
 had, comes to the conclusion that a particular 
 object is the abode of a spirit. We have already 
 mentioned the stone which, becoming loosened 
 from a precipice, kills a man, and the nail which 
 the savage runs into his foot. The connection 
 between cause and effect may be even more 
 illusory than in these cases. The following 
 example is well known : A savage breaks off a 
 piece of an anchor belonging to a wrecked ship, 
 
The Religion of Savages 43 
 
 and dies soon after ; from this time forward the 
 dwellers in the district worship the anchor as a 
 fetich. Custom and tradition come in here ; a 
 fetich is handed down from father to son. 
 Whatever may be the reason, the savage is 
 convinced that in this particular object there 
 dwells a living, working spirit. 
 
 The savage now enters into an intercourse 
 with this spirit of a particularly simple kind. 
 He takes possession of the object ; he puts it in 
 his hut, he carries it on his body. He guards 
 this spirit — that is, this particular object — adorns 
 it, decorates it ; he offers it gifts ; he feels 
 happy, safe, and secure in his protection, 
 especially if things have gone well with him, if 
 he has been successful since he preserved this 
 object. This, then, is fetich-worship. 
 
 This close connection with the spirit, however, 
 does not generally last very long. It is based on 
 the accidental occurrences in the savage's life. 
 If he has been fortunate in his life since he 
 selected a particular fetich as his guardian 
 spirit, then his confidence in the fetich increases ; 
 if, however, this is not the case, the fetich is cast 
 on one side, and another is put in its place. 
 Often the negro has a whole crowd of fetiches 
 side by side. One brings him success in love, and 
 in bringing forth children ; another accompanies 
 him on his journeyings; a third protects him 
 
44 What is Religion ? 
 
 against illness ; a fourth and fifth, perhaps, give 
 him good luck in the chase and fruitfulness in 
 the fields. Now and again, indeed, the relation- 
 ship between a savage and his fetich may be 
 lasting, and very touching. Daudet, in his 
 " Jack," has depicted for us, in masterly fashion, 
 the fidelity and piety, the implicit trust, of a 
 negro boy for his fetich. 
 
 Even more widespread than fetich-worship, at 
 this stage of religion, is the phenomenon of the 
 u magician. When religion is universally con- 
 ceived as a belief in spirits, the teachers in 
 religious life are naturally those who specially 
 understand the nature and working of spirits, 
 and know how to influence and deal with them. 
 The fetich-men and rain-makers of the negro, 
 the medicine-men of the Red Indian, the 
 schamans of the Mongolian tribes, the dervishes 
 of the Arabs, and the fakirs of the Hindoos are 
 all similar phenomena. The magician is ever 
 one to whom the spirits are submissive and 
 obedient, whom the good spirits serve, and by 
 whose exorcism the evil spirits are driven away. 
 The means by which he works are mysterious 
 rites, magic objects, secret exorcisms. Once 
 again we are dwelling in a world of extra- 
 ordinarily varied phenomena which can scarcely 
 be grasped, which yet, carefully investigated, 
 display extraordinary uniformity and likeness. 
 
The Religion of Savages 45 
 
 These ideas develop into the belief that the 
 magician stands, not merely in a peculiarly close 
 relation to the world of spirit, but that he is in 
 the most intimate intercourse with a spirit itself. 
 If spirits may dwell in all possible and even life- 
 less objects — in stone and wood, in plants and 
 animals — it is equally possible that a spirit of 
 greater or lesser power may dwell in a human 
 being, and may displace his ego or use it entirely 
 for his own purposes. Thus the belief arises 
 that a spirit dwells permanently, or for the time 
 being, in a human being and endows him with 
 wonderful magic powers — it may be of prophecy, 
 of healing the sick, or bringing down the rain. 
 The fetich-man, among the negroes, is not only 
 in possession of a fetich that works marvels, but 
 he is actually possessed of the fetich — that is, 
 of the spirit which is in personal union with 
 him. In connection with these ideas an exten- 
 sive religious ceremonial has been evolved. The 
 most curious, but by no means foolish, methods 
 have been adopted to produce this indwelling of 
 the spirit in man. The magician wanders for 
 months and weeks in solitude ; he fasts and 
 hungers, he scourges himself and mortifies his 
 flesh. All means are employed to produce the 
 greatest exultation of the spiritual life of man 
 with its consequent reaction, evinced in convul- 
 sions, and in hypnotic somnambulistic trances. 
 
46 What is Religion ? 
 
 Music plays an important part in these things. 
 In the mad, whirling dance, to the muffled sound 
 of the drum, to the shrill note of the cymbal or 
 monotonous flute, in the evening, or at night by 
 the uncanny light of torches, enveloped in the 
 smoke of the incense, surrounded by a breathless, 
 gazing crowd, the magician gyrates and twists 
 about until he rages and remains in a state of 
 highest exaltation, or, overcome with exhaustion, 
 he foams at the mouth, and utterly collapses. 
 Whatever he may say and do in this condition is 
 not due to himself, but to the mighty spirit which 
 has taken possession of him. It is evident that 
 we are here dealing, not with entirely idle, base- 
 less fantasies and products of the imagination, 
 but with phenomena of man's abnormal life, with 
 religious mania, ecstasy, frenzy. We are dealing 
 with those mysterious, and partly incomprehen- 
 sible phenomena of hypnotism, suggestion, and 
 auto-suggestion ; with somnambulistic states, the 
 gift of clairvoyance, and with the unknown, 
 mysterious, yet fruitful side of man's mental 
 life. And we must remember that all these 
 phenomena appear much more uncanny and 
 powerful to the savages, owing to their mental 
 condition, to their lack of all logical thought, 
 to their childish credulity, and to their whole 
 condition of mind, stirred to its very depths by 
 this belief in ghosts. And because this whole 
 
The Religion of Savages 47 
 
 mode of existence rests upon the actual material 
 facts and events in man's life and co-operates 
 with them the belief that is so begotten is all 
 the more widespread, lasting, and ineradicable, 
 and has lasted down to the present time. 
 
 We now turn to another form of religion, 
 belonging to this stage, the most comprehensible 
 and the most sympathetic — I mean the worship 
 of the dead. No form of religion is more wide- 
 spread than this. Wherever we look, even 
 among the more enlightened tribes and religions, 
 we discover as the basis of their development the 
 reverence for the dead, the worship of ancestors. 
 In the religion of the great Chinese Empire the 
 worship of the dead is the really vital part, so 
 vital, indeed, that it forms an almost impreg- 
 nable barrier against European civilisation. It 
 amounts almost to a certainty that the worship 
 of the dead exists in all the religions with which 
 we are now dealing. Indeed, there are investi- 
 gators who see in this worship of the dead the 
 origin of all religion. 
 
 This form of religion rests on a conception of 
 human life and human nature that is very simple 
 and very widespread. It is regarded as a matter 
 of course that in the human body there dwells 
 an independent vital essence — the soul. It is a 
 curious little thing which beats and hammers so 
 that the blood is driven through the veins ; it is 
 
48 What is Religion ? 
 
 revealed in the face by the hot blood of anger ; 
 it is the source of our thoughts, our resolutions, 
 our acts. In dreams it works quite independently ; 
 it leaves the human body and wanders through 
 wide districts and sees wonderful things. It is 
 a tiny, delicate, tender being, scarce visible, yet 
 by no means formless, for the savage has not the 
 
 V slightest idea of a spiritual being. It has, how- 
 ever, only a gossamer, delicate corporeal form. 
 It vanishes with the last breath of the dying 
 man. It is itself a breath, a wind, a shadow, a 
 ghost. Races of the most diverse kinds describe 
 it by names which include and explain such 
 ideas. 
 
 When death comes to man the body decays, but 
 
 / — and the belief is universal — the soul never dies. 
 It merely escapes and continues its own shadowy 
 existence. Often in dreams, sometimes indeed 
 when they are awake, at the cross-road, in 
 solitary places in the darkness, people have seen 
 the dead in their original form, and what one 
 actually sees must be real. The soul is said 
 to remain near the body, it hovers round the 
 grave. It may depart thence, but it gladly 
 returns thither once more. Hence it is the 
 custom to leave in the tombs a small hole through 
 which the soul raay enter and depart. Such 
 apertures are to be found in many dolmen, 
 especially in India and the Caucasus. Often the 
 
The Religion of Savages 49 
 
 ideal prevails that the soul passes away with 
 the decay of the body, and thus the widespread 
 custom of embalming and mummifying the 
 body arose. The dead body is afforded all 
 possible means of preservation in order to 
 guarantee the preservation of the life of the 
 soul. This belief is especially strong among 
 the Egyptians. 
 
 So man surrounds the souls of the dead with 
 religious fear and veneration, for the souls are 
 now spirits. With this idea is intermingled the 
 primal feeling of religion — terror, fear of the f 
 unknown. These dead live in an unknown 
 world, invisible to the majority of men. It may 
 be that they will once again become corpore- 
 alised, and in the form of an animal, especially 
 in the form of the mysterious and wonderful 
 snake, they will meet their descendants. A 
 huntsman who was cutting his way through a 
 thicket in the wood suddenly and unexpectedly 
 encountered the form of an animal with distinc- 
 tive features who looked at him searchingly and 
 calmly. The huntsman believed from this time 
 forward that in this form he had seen his 
 ancestor. But whether the dead are only visible 
 as souls hovering round the grave at the hour 
 of spirits, or whether they assume a corporeal 
 form, they act with mysterious powers. And 
 
 5 
 
50 What is Religion ? 
 
 although they are in many ways dependent 
 on the living they are yet more powerful — or 
 at least powerful in quite another way — than 
 man in his bodily form. The dead demand their 
 rights : woe to the man who breaks his given 
 word to the dead ! With invisible, incorporeal 
 hands the dead obtain what is due to them. 
 Gerhard Hauptman in a striking manner has 
 illustrated this idea in his "Fuhrmann Hen- 
 schel." The feeling of connection and relation- 
 ship between the dead and the living is likewise 
 aroused : the dead belong to us and we to them. 
 The dead desire and demand from their descen- 
 dants pious care, in return for which they afford 
 friendly protection. 
 
 In the worship of the dead one aspect specially 
 predominates — the feeling of horror of the mys- 
 terious and the strange, fear and anguish and 
 a striving to get free of the mysterious world. 
 Many aspects of this religion of the dead, and 
 especially of the worship of tombs, indicate 
 nothing more than the perpetual guarding 
 against the dead so that they may not return 
 and do any harm. Among the negroes of South 
 Africa it is the custom when a chief dies to 
 break up the whole camp, journey farther afield, 
 and not to return till after an interval of years. 
 They fear the spirit that haunts the place. It is 
 a long time before any one ventures to enter the 
 
The Religion of Savages 51 
 
 hut of the dead man; sometimes, indeed, no 
 one dares to do this, for the hut is his property 
 and he would revenge himself on those who 
 unrighteously entered. Through Central and 
 South Africa traces are found of huge heaps 
 of stones, marking probably the journey of a 
 race (the Hottentots?) who gradually pressed 
 southwards. To this very day it remains the 
 custom for the passer-by to cast a stone on to 
 these stone heaps, and this act is interpreted 
 as a religious rite to protect oneself against the 
 dead. These heaps of stones were originally 
 burial-places ; the stone is thrown to render the 
 return of the dead difficult, or it may be sym- 
 bolic of the cessation of all relations between 
 the dead and the living. In this respect the old 
 Indian rite of burial is especially interesting. 
 Here already the custom of corpse burning pre- 
 vails ; the ashes of the burnt corpse are then 
 buried near the hut or the village. " I scatter 
 the earth upon thee ; may no harm come to me 
 who have cast this clod." Intimately connected 
 with this ceremony is a second holy act — that of 
 the removal of the dead away from the living. 
 After a certain time — it is believed that by now 
 the strength of the dead man has vanished — the 
 remains are dug up and removed to a distance. 
 The mound of burial is erected at a place where 
 the village is no longer visible, far away from 
 
5 2 What is Religion ? 
 
 the path, so that the dead may never find his 
 way back. Those who have performed this 
 ceremony return to the village, taking pre- 
 cautions of various kinds so that the return of 
 the dead man shall be rendered quite impossible, 
 " The living," so they say, " have separated 
 themselves from the dead ; to-day our appeal to 
 the gods was blessed. Forward we go to the 
 dance and the merriment, long life granted to 
 us." This widespread custom of corpse burning 
 appears originally to have been the main idea of 
 the rite of protection against the dead. By 
 burning the corpse it is hoped to drive away 
 as quickly as possible all that is horrible con- 
 nected with the decaying body, all fear of ghosts ; 
 the pure flame that ascends to heaven takes 
 everything away with it, and frees man from 
 that overwhelming terror of ghosts. Such rites 
 as the above mentioned have not yet died away. 
 With superstitious fear the survivors make 
 quite SLire that the dead man is carried out of 
 the door feet forwards, for otherwise he might 
 return. The windows, which until now were 
 open, are shut as soon as the coffin has left 
 the house. Deep down in the heart of man, and 
 ineradicable, lies this fear of spectres. 
 
 But it is not fear alone that connects the 
 living with the dead ; the feelings of kindred- 
 ship and of piety exert their influence. Gifts 
 
The Religion of Savages 53 
 
 are sacrificed to the dead because they need 
 them. They are in need of much, those poor 
 souls. They need nourishment and clothing in 
 their new life. They feel cold, they are hungry 
 and thirsty, consequently food and drink are 
 given them. The offering of something to drink 
 is especially popular, for in so doing the fiction 
 that the dead sip up the drink can be best 
 maintained. The sacrifice is offered in the 
 simplest manner : the water is poured into an 
 already prepared hole, leading into a sub- 
 terranean channel into which the liquid flows. 
 The ancient Egyptians built in their burial- 
 places in front of the actual burial-chamber, 
 and connected with it by a small opening, a 
 room in which offerings of food and drink and 
 other gifts were placed. The Red Indian, in 
 accordance with the generations which he 
 honours in his so-called ancestral sacrifice, cuts 
 three furrows in his fields, and then places 
 sacrificial lumps of food in the furrows, and 
 bowing in pious prayer, he calls upon his fathers. 
 Then he takes away the puddings, firmly con- 
 vinced that the spirits have enjoyed the food. 
 The whole tribe gathers together around the 
 grave after the burial, and also on the solemn 
 anniversaries to partake, in common with the 
 dead, of a solemn meal. Among most peoples 
 the dead have their solemn day once a year ; 
 
54 What is Religion ? 
 
 then they leave their tombs and seek the abodes 
 of the living, demanding gifts. Food is placed 
 in front of every house for them, clothes are 
 given, the tombs are adorned. Finally, a friendly 
 appeal is made to the dead that they shall now 
 depart from the living again. This corresponds 
 to the Greek ^vpaZs Kiip^g — " Out of the doors, 
 you souls of the dead " ; and the savage 
 takes a broom and cleanses the dwelling of the 
 spirits. The Persian Frawardigan Feast, the 
 Greek Anthester Feasts, the German Feast of 
 the Dead, All Souls' Day — these and many 
 other festivals bear an extraordinary likeness 
 to one another. 
 
 It is not, however, only piety that speaks in 
 these customs : the dead demand sacrifices. 
 They may show themselves revengeful and 
 spiteful if they are not treated with considera- 
 tion. And they reward those who care for 
 them with rich gifts. Yet piety, reverence, and 
 love do show themselves in all these rites and 
 ceremonies, so that the worship of the dead 
 is of high value, in spite of the chaotic mixture 
 of superstition and egoism which belongs to it. 
 Man's glance is cast over an invisible world ; 
 the fate of human life, circumscribed by birth 
 and death, is unveiled. The worship of the 
 dead links closely one generation to another ; 
 the son remembers his departed father, and in 
 
The Religion of Savages 55 
 
 turn his son will show him the same regard. 
 The whole family gathers round the grave, and 
 in honouring the common ancestor the family 
 develops into a tribe. 
 
 The organisation of the tribe stands midway 
 between the more or less unorganised life of 
 the savage and that of life on a national basis. 
 The tribal life is an ever fluctuating organisation 
 the peculiarities of which are very difficult to 
 understand and characterise. Data concerning 
 tribal life are naturally to be found on all sides, 
 especially among the so-called uncivilised peoples. 
 We find very great differences here with regard 
 to the greater or less permanence of the organi- 
 sation and to the degree of civilisation attained. 
 The history of religion now affords us many 
 definite distinguishing marks. We are only 
 right in speaking of an organised tribal life 
 when religion, conquering the lower egoistic 
 forms of belief in spirits, becomes the pre- 
 dominant interest of the community, and lends 
 to the community a firmer structure and a 
 closer co-operation. The best examples of such 
 a tribal religion are afforded to us by the 
 Semitic tribes of Upper Asia. In dealing with 
 this subject w^e must take into consideration 
 the traces of that old tribal life which we find 
 in the New Testament, with the many scattered 
 references to old Jewish civilisation. Our know- 
 
56 What is Religion ? 
 
 ledge of Arab life before Mohammed, as well 
 as the life of the majority of Arab tribes to-day 
 who have degenerated from the high degree of 
 culture of the age of Mohammed and his suc- 
 cessors to the tribal stage, must all be taken 
 into consideration. Certain similar examples of 
 a lower stage are shown us in the tribal life 
 of the North American Indians, and we must 
 not forget the stagnant, torpid civilisation of 
 the old States of Central and South America. 
 
 Genuine tribal life is to be distinguished from 
 national life, a higher stage, by its fixed central 
 idea, that of blood-relationship. Not, indeed, 
 that the large tribes consist of blood-relations, 
 or that they grew out of the family. In all 
 probability the tribe arose from the union of 
 various families. Yet, in spite of this, the 
 principle of blood-relationship is firmly held. 
 
 Admission into the tribe is admission into the 
 community of blood. This community of blood 
 is regarded as something concrete and material. 
 In the blood, according to the widespread idea, 
 is the life ; blood in common signifies life in 
 common. According to this view an artificial 
 establishment of the blood-relationship is 
 possible. All the ceremonies connected with 
 the brotherhood of blood rest on these ideas. 
 Let it be assumed that a stranger approaches 
 a tribe and requests admission into it. Sup- 
 
The Religion of Savages 57 
 
 posing this is granted him, he must swear 
 brotherhood to the chief or some other member 
 of the tribe. They open a vein in their bodies, 
 and drink of each other's blood as it streams 
 forth. Now the same blood, the same life, flows 
 in each body — they are blood-relations. And 
 in doing this act the newcomer has become 
 a blood-relation of the whole tribe ; often, 
 indeed, he actually swears brotherhood to each 
 member of the tribe. An animal sacred to the 
 tribe is then slaughtered, of which all partake 
 in common, the importance of the ceremony 
 depending on participation in the animal's blood. 
 Thus, in similar sacred meals, it is often the 
 custom to have the meat uncooked, raw, and 
 eaten in its own blood. 
 
 As this community of life rests on community 
 of blood, so the fundamental law of this 
 common life is the absolute holding sacred of 
 this common life in each individual member 
 of the tribe. The idea is all for each, each for 
 the other. The highest law of the tribe is 
 blood-revenge. It is considered the absolute 
 and unconditional duty of the tribe to answer 
 for the life of the individual, and to avenge 
 the injured and murdered man in accordance 
 with the law of "an eye for an eye, a tooth 
 for a tooth, a life for a life." The permanent 
 condition, therefore, of tribal life is one of 
 
5 8 What is Religion ? 
 
 blood-feud. If a member of a clan or of a tribe 
 is killed by some one not belonging to the tribe, 
 it is considered the bounden duty of the tribe 
 to avenge the death of its member by the 
 slaughter of the murderer or a member of his 
 family. Revenge for this murder is undertaken 
 by the adherents of the other tribe. Thus the 
 ball is set rolling until the tribes have been 
 decimated and practically killed ofP. The law 
 of blood-feud retards all development of the 
 tribes towards a national life. Wherever 
 there has been any development conflict 
 with this blood-feud and a discontinuance of 
 this horrible custom have been an absolute 
 necessity. 
 
 Very characteristic is the form that religion 
 assumes at this stage. We see at once signs 
 of decided progress. In the tribal life reverence 
 for common gods or for one universal God 
 predominates. Religion ceases to be a private 
 matter, although naturally private worship still 
 exists, to a greater or less extent, side by side 
 with this common worship. As at the earlier 
 stage, belief in spirits and fetiches, reverence 
 for magic and amulets, especially the worship 
 of ancestors in the form of the whole family, 
 still play their part. But the interest in a 
 common belief prevails more and more. The 
 choice of the objects of veneration is no longer 
 
The Religion of Savages 59 
 
 entirely left to chance, to the individual arbi- 
 trary will. 
 
 Belief becomes traditional, now and then 
 even historical, and, to a certain extent, 
 veneration is directed towards the higher 
 powers. And here we reach a definite point 
 of development. The solitary savage regards 
 the higher powers with dull astonishment and 
 shy fear. How can he possibly think that these 
 powers are for him? In the tribal life the 
 religious capacity of the human mind develops. 
 The tribe finds in the common belief in higher 
 powers the basis of its life. 
 
 Thus at this stage of civilisation we already 
 find adoration of heaven and the stars clearly 
 marked. The moon and the sun, the powers 
 of illumination, which give light and life, are 
 adored above all others, and of these the moon 
 has the preference. The moon seems the more 
 wonderful planet, for does it not pierce the 
 night with its light? Uncivilised man does 
 not yet know that the light of day proceeds 
 from the sun. To him the moon possesses 
 the most peculiar and arbitrary movements ; it 
 vanishes and reappears, it dies and lives again. 
 The oldest chronology is based on its changes 
 and on its course. Thus the moon-divinity is 
 held in greater esteem than the sun-god, and 
 in many languages, German among the number, 
 
6o What is Religion ? 
 
 to the moon is given the manly character, to 
 the sun only the feminine one. In innumerable 
 cases the god of the winds and the stars, and 
 above all, the god of the tempest, is worshipped. 
 It is believed by many that Jahwe, the God of 
 Israel, was originally a wind and storm God. 
 Most widespread of all is the worship of the 
 heavenly God — that is, of Heaven itself — which is 
 not regarded as consisting of the many powers 
 mentioned above, but as a single powerful 
 being, that thunders and lightens, rains and 
 storms, illumines and darkens. The well-known 
 similarity of names — Djaus Pitar (among the 
 Red Indians), Zeus, Ju-piter, Tins (among the 
 Germanic tribes) — is clear evidence that the 
 Indo-Germanic race before its separation into 
 difPerent tribes had a common possession in 
 the worship of the God of heaven. Reverence 
 was specially paid — at least in the religions 
 of the Semitic tribes with which we are so 
 familiar — to the gods of the earth. The worship 
 of the gods of the earth who gave fertility 
 to the land was especially strong in the nomadic 
 Syriac-Arabic tribes of the desert. Let us 
 picture to ourselves a nomadic tribe on its 
 journey. Far away to the horizon stretches 
 the sandy desert in terrible uniformity ; no 
 trace of life is to be seen. The sun casts its 
 burning rays perpendicularly ; the fine sand 
 
The Religion of Savages 6i 
 
 penetrates through the traveller's pores. Men 
 and animals are nearly exhausted. Suddenly 
 an extraordinary change takes place. Far on 
 the horizon tall trees are to be seen, the earth 
 gradually changes its appearance, and is more 
 and more clothed in green. Nearer and nearer 
 does man approach, and soon he stands beneath 
 the shadow of tall palms. Springs gush forth 
 and bubble and give the longed-for moisture, 
 everywhere a luxurious vegetation covers the 
 earth. It is a contrast as of life and death. 
 Who has created this wondrous life in the 
 middle of the desert? The wondrous powers 
 of the earth ; and, full of reverence, the nomads 
 worship the powers which have used their 
 influence on this spot. They like to think of 
 these gods as feminine, and they worship the 
 mighty Mother Earth. Baal and Astarte of 
 the Canaanitish and Phoenician tribes were 
 originally gods of fertility and of the earth. 
 Here we observe a curious combination of 
 the gods of fertility with quite other gods. 
 Under the earth there are — at least according 
 to a very widespread idea, which owing to 
 fire burial has never entirely died away — the 
 dead. These tribes with whom we are dealing 
 like to think of the community of the dead 
 as organised, having as their chiefs gods of 
 the dead, more or less to be feared. These 
 
62 What is Religion ? 
 
 divinities of the dead are often combined with 
 the gods of fruitfulness. This is clearly seen 
 in the Greek mythology. Demeter, Persephone, 
 Pluto all possess this double character of the god 
 of the lower world, and of fertility and harvest. 
 
 On the whole the tribe worships but a small 
 number of gods. The life of the tribe is 
 essentially uniform, and but few gods are 
 needed. The life of the tribe is extremely 
 simple, it has not yet been divided into various 
 departments ; and thus it is concerned with 
 just a few great necessities. A few gods are 
 sufficient for their needs. It happens, then, 
 that a tribe perhaps has only one god, but 
 naturally this is no form of monotheism. The 
 same tribe to-morrow may have two gods. 
 The gods of the other tribes are considered just 
 as much gods as the particular tribe's own 
 gods. Very frequently the divinity is differ- 
 entiated into a manly and a womanly form. 
 Baal and Astarte are worshipped side by side. 
 
 The relation of the tribe to its god is a 
 thoroughly natural one. The ruling principle 
 here is the natural relationship — blood-relation- 
 ship. The god has given life to the tribe ; it 
 is the father or mother in the literal sense. 
 Often, indeed, simple ancestor worship is the 
 basis of the tribal religion, and this appears to 
 be combined in a curious fashion with the 
 
The Religion of Savages 63 
 
 worship of the higher powers. It is said that 
 in the beginning of time the heavenly powers 
 wandered on earth in human form, and left 
 behind them descendants, the ancestors of the 
 tribe ; and we have also the manifold legends 
 of men sprung from the earth. The earliest 
 ancestors of a tribe, of a nation, are said to 
 originate from Mother Earth herself. This 
 worship of ancestors and of tribal heroes 
 assumes in a lower stage of tribal life a very 
 curious form, to which only passing reference 
 can be made here. Very often we find in this 
 connection that the belief indicates that the 
 original ancestor of the tribe was some animal 
 who had married the tribal mother who is 
 regarded as of human origin. According to 
 this we must suppose that this belief originated 
 at a period when the gulf between man and 
 animal was not considered insurmountable by 
 the universal consensus of opinion, and when 
 it was still believed that a spirit might become 
 materialised in the form of an animal (see 
 page 49). The fact that the original father 
 is represented under a strange form, w^hile the 
 mother is human, shows that the source of 
 these ideas is to be traced to the period of 
 the matriarchate, Tvhen connection with the 
 mother and not with the father constituted 
 relationship and adherence. The result of such 
 
64 What is Religion ? 
 
 a belief is that the whole class of animal in 
 whose form the original ancestor of the tribe 
 appeared is regarded as sacred and inviolable. 
 The best examples of this curious belief, which 
 is known as Totemism, are to be found among 
 the North American tribes, but it is believed 
 that Totemism is also to be found among the 
 Semitic tribes. Many well-known legends — 
 especially the legends relating to the trans- 
 formation of Zeus into an animal and his 
 marriage, as well as perhaps the Romulus- 
 Remus story — point to Totemism. 
 
 Many curious forms of worship based on the 
 idea of blood relationship are found at this 
 stage of human life. As the connection with 
 the Godhead rests on blood-relationship, so the 
 object of worship is often the renewal and 
 restoration of this relationship. For this 
 relationship may easily be broken or loosened 
 by the guilt of the tribe or the anger of the 
 god, and therefore the god and the tribe must 
 once more cement their blood-union. Perhaps 
 a sacred animal is sacrificed to the god ; a por- 
 tion of the blood is poured on to the altar, 
 and this the god drinks, the rest is drunk by 
 the tribe, and now once more the same blood 
 flows in the veins of the god and the tribe. 
 A very instructive example, lying close at hand, 
 that of the covenantal sacrifice, is given in the 
 
The Religion of Savages 65 
 
 second book of Moses (ch. xxiv. 1-8). Moses, 
 after the sacrifice of the animal, poured a 
 portion of blood on to the altar, the rest he 
 sprinkled over the people. It is due to the 
 aversion to using blood that here the blood is 
 no longer drunk, it is only sprinkled. And it is 
 explicitly stated that it is the blood of the 
 covenant. From henceforth the sacrifice comes 
 to be regarded, it may be said, as a sacra- 
 mental meal, when the tribe and the Godhead 
 are bound together in intimate, closest con- 
 nection. The Mexican religion is especially rich 
 in elaborate rites of this kind, in which human 
 sacrifice and cannibalism form an integral part. 
 It is quite natural that here human sacrifice 
 should be considered an especially sacred sacri- 
 fice. The Mexican religious observances in- 
 cluded so many of these horrible sacramental 
 meals that the Spaniards, on getting to know 
 of these practices, spoke of them as blasphemous 
 imitations of the Holy Sacrament, inspired by 
 the devil. The truth, however, seems to be 
 that the same religious impulse, that longing 
 for an intimate and, if possible, a bodily union 
 with the Godhead, which is displayed at this 
 stage in so naked a fashion, is seen later in 
 a purer form in the Catholic idea of the 
 Sacrament, which enjoys a very widespread 
 belief. 
 
 6 
 
66 What is Religion ? 
 
 The gods are now the protectors of the tribal 
 life: it is their own life which they are pro- 
 tecting, and the tribe's destruction would be 
 their destruction. Thus they are the protectors 
 and guardians of the blood-revenge and the 
 blood-feud. In the later national belief of 
 the Greeks we clearly perceive the conscious- 
 ness that the old, gloomy gods of night, whose 
 rule is broken by the Olympian gods of light, 
 were the upholders of inflexible justice and 
 the blood-feud. Readers will recollect the figures 
 of the Eumenides and the Erinyes, the revenge- 
 ful deities who pursue the murderer. "They 
 attach themselves to the soles of his feet, the 
 terrible powers of the night." 
 
 In their character of protectors of the life 
 of the tribe the gods are, above everything 
 else, gods of war. Jahwe's original sanctuary, 
 the Ark of the Covenant, shows Him as the 
 God who leads the Israelitish tribes to battles 
 and wars. Finally the tribal gods are the 
 givers of all fertility to the land. They are 
 specially remembered at the joyful harvest 
 festival, the tribute due to them is gladly 
 paid ; the tribesman feels bound body and soul 
 to his god. Among the Semitic tribes the 
 god is simply called Lord, Lady, King, Queen. 
 The phenomenon of simple absorption in the 
 Godhead now develops into horrible human 
 
The Religion of Savages 67 
 
 sacrifice, especially in the form of the sacrifice 
 of children, and of prostitution. We have 
 already spoken of human sacrifice in the Mexi- 
 can religion ; the custom of sacrificing children 
 to Moloch existed down to Jeremiah's time. 
 Among the North African Punic tribes who 
 had wandered there from PhcBnicia human 
 sacrifice played a very important part even in 
 the time of Hamilcar and Hannibal. As late 
 as the second century A.D. TertuUian mentions 
 human sacrifice in North Africa. Prostitution 
 in the service of the Canaanitish-Syrian Astarte 
 was customary. In the ancient law of Ham- 
 murabi we find both these phenomena, the 
 consecrated virgin and the consecrated prosti- 
 tute. 
 
 We have already wandered a good distance. 
 Already we see that the religious life is striving 
 after higher forms, that a cormnon faith is 
 rising above the arbitrary thoughts and fan- 
 tasies of the individual. Religion is becoming 
 a matter of the community, is indeed the basis 
 of human communities. In this common belief 
 men turn to the higher powers. The religious 
 life is no longer the scene of human egoism. 
 A moral impulse is evolved which indeed is 
 only seen as very confined and restricted in 
 the tribal life; still, the moral idea begins to 
 exist. The feeling of the one for the other 
 
68 What is Religion ? 
 
 and all for the one, of the one for the whole, 
 arouses the perception of positive obligation. 
 It is true this idea appears in horrible forms — 
 in blood-vengeance and blood-feuds, in human 
 sacrifice and prostitution. But yet, the feeling 
 of absolute worship springs into life ; the God- 
 head has power — complete, kingly power. Man 
 must obey it. 
 
 We have wandered far, but we are still very 
 far from having reached the heights. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 NATIONAL RELIGIONS 
 
 NATIONAL life is created by the union 
 of different tribes. Thus Babylon took 
 the lead of the city communities of the Baby- 
 lonian plain, and the Babylonian Empire arose. 
 In Egypt the separate districts and provinces 
 were merged into the one empire ; and under 
 the leadership of Moses the tribes of Israel 
 became a nation. Mohammed compelled the 
 Bedouin Arabs to become a national unity. In 
 the transition from the tribal life to the national 
 life the fiction of blood-relationship and blood- 
 unity, on which tribal life is based vanishes. 
 The fundamental law of blood-revenge and 
 blood-feud which has hitherto obtained is re- 
 placed by the idea of regulated justice. No 
 longer does the clan, the family, avenge the 
 murder of one of its members : those in 
 authority, acting in the interest of the whole 
 community, guard the inviolability of the law, 
 and the idea of public justice arises. 
 
yo What is Religion ? 
 
 New links in the common life are forged : 
 a great expansion of the idea of life in the 
 community takes place. The nation takes over 
 the management of a large number of matters 
 which concern the whole community. Division 
 of labour begins ; the separate occupations — 
 those of the soldier, the peasant, the artisan — 
 become now distinct. Fighting still remains a 
 most important occupation of the communal 
 life, but it is not the only important one. There 
 are also the works of peace — industry, trade, 
 mighty buildings, undertaken by the many, 
 the beginnings of art, regulations for the 
 administration of justice, social institutions. 
 The nation experiences a history in common, 
 and an attempt is made to fix this history in 
 the memory, at least in rough outline. The art 
 of chronology arises, the art of writing is de- 
 veloped in its most elementary form ; the events 
 of the past, the great deeds of ancestors handed 
 down chiefly in an oral form, mostly in song, or 
 already written, cement more firmly the common 
 life. The moral, personal, historical relation now 
 enters into the life of man in the community in 
 place of the merely natural one. 
 
 To this new stage of civilisation corresponds 
 a new kind of religion. A large number of 
 quite definite, characteristic, national religions 
 now rise before our sight. We distinguish, in 
 
National Religions 71 
 
 the first place, the religions of stagnant civili- 
 sations — those of the old States of Mexico and 
 Peru and of Egypt, and the old original religions 
 of China and Japan ; then, in the second place, 
 the religions of the progressive nations — such 
 as those belonging to the Semitic and Indo- 
 Germanic race. To the former belong the 
 religions of Babylon and Assyria, the ancient 
 Israeli tish and Phoenician religion, the religions 
 of the ancient Hindoos ; to the latter the re- 
 ligions of the Persians, of the Greeks, the 
 Romans, the Slavs, and the Germanic tribes. We 
 will endeavour, first of all, to set forth some 
 common characteristics of this religion based on 
 national life. 
 
 I. To the manifold and varied aspects of life 
 at this stage corresponds the variety of large 
 characteristic idols. The basis of national life 
 is the basis of polytheism. In various ways 
 and from various motives Polytheism is de- 
 veloped. The separate tribes and districts 
 which unite to form one nation and one country 
 bring their tribal deities with them. While in 
 the one case there is unity of national life, in 
 the other there is plurality of gods. The Baby- 
 lonian and Egyptian idols, which can almost all 
 be localised, afford excellent examples. Thus the 
 Babylonian seaport Eridu was the place of 
 worship of the idol Ea, the town of Nipur 
 
72 What is Religion ? 
 
 of Bel, the town of Ur of the Moon-god 
 Sin. The sun (Shamas) was especially wor- 
 shipped in Sippar, a Marduk in Babylon, Nebo 
 in Borsippa. The gods increased in power 
 with the increase in power of the individual 
 towns, and finally formed themselves into a 
 pantheon under the rule of Marduk, the god 
 of Babylon. In precisely the same way the 
 great Egyptian deities were originally local 
 deities. Ptah was the deity of Memphis, Ra of 
 On Heliopolis, Ammon of Thebes, Thoth of 
 Hermopolis, Osiris of Abydos, and so on. 
 The amalgamation of the tribes is often shown 
 by the fact that the gods enter into a relation- 
 ship with each other. The idea of the trinity 
 of the father, mother and son (or daughter) 
 was especially pleasing at this stage of civili- 
 sation. Thus the Egyptian Mut, the goddess 
 of a district near Thebes, becomes the spouse 
 of the great Ammon of Thebes, and Mentu, 
 the god of a neighbouring district, is their 
 son. In Babylon there is the trinity of Sin 
 (the moon), Shamas (the sun), and Ishtar, or 
 father, mother and daughter. The god of 
 the most important tribe among those that are 
 forming a union, the divinity of a town which 
 succeeds in gaining precedence, is regarded as 
 the presiding deity. Just as, one after another, 
 the towns of Memphis, Heliopolis, and Thebes 
 
National Religions 73 
 
 gained the mastery, so in the same order Ptah, 
 Ra, and Ammon obtained precedence among 
 the gods. With the rise of Babylon Marduk, 
 the hitherto entirely insignificant local divinity 
 of Babylon, rose to be the most important god 
 in the Babylonian Pantheon ; with the rise of 
 Athens, Athene became the chief goddess of 
 the Greeks, and Apollo stepped into great 
 power as the protecting deity of the Delian 
 confederations. 
 
 A second impulse to polytheism was the 
 diversity, ever growing greater, of life on a 
 national basis, and this impulse is generally 
 a somewhat later manifestation than the one 
 already mentioned. When the remembrance 
 fades away that the hierarchy of gods originated 
 in the divinities of individual tribes and towns, 
 separate provinces of the national life are 
 assigned to the separate gods according to 
 their character. The divinity of the conquering 
 tribe remains the god of war, and probably the 
 god of the conquered tribe is considered the god 
 of shepherd and peasant life. Side by side with 
 the gods of the firmly established cities which 
 are advancing in civilisation stands the divinity 
 of the subject people who pay tribute — the god 
 of herds and fields. The Greek tribes and 
 towns, most of whose gods were apparently 
 the common property of the Hellenic tribes 
 
74 What is Religion ? 
 
 before the disruption, carried this principle of 
 the division of labour among the gods into every 
 single department of life. But indeed we find 
 the same principle everywhere. Thus there are 
 deities of war, gods of the fields, of agriculture, 
 and of the herds — and even indeed special gods 
 for the different kinds of herds — gods of towns, 
 of civilisation, of industry and handiwork, of art, 
 of the council, of "svisdom, of justice, gods of 
 trade and navigation and so forth, gods who 
 protect travellers and strangers, gods of civili- 
 sation, and, above all, gods of the arts of writing 
 and speaking. Near the gods of the living stand 
 the gods of the dead, the rulers of the under- 
 world. The dead as well as the living form an 
 organised empire, though indeed a shadowy 
 one, and this kingdom of the dead has its 
 ruler. 
 
 The gods who exercise the greatest influence 
 in men's belief thus unite the most varied 
 qualities and activities and develop into com- 
 plicated individualities. I may mention the 
 Babylonian Marduk, the Indian Varuna, Ahura 
 of the Persians, the Egyptian Osiris, Zeus, 
 Apollo, Athene. 
 
 This multitude of gods forms a kingdom of 
 the gods at the head of which there is a supreme 
 god or several mighty gods. The best examples 
 of such kingdoms are afforded us by Babylon, 
 
National Religions 75 
 
 Egypt, Greece, and by the people of ancient 
 India, by the Persian and by the Germanic 
 tribes. 
 
 II. Gradually the gods develop into person- 
 alities ; they are now endowed with moral 
 worth, not, naturally, moral worth in our sense, 
 in the highest sense of the word ; nevertheless 
 it is moral worth. This is seen most clearly in 
 the fact that from this time forward a more or 
 less sharp distinction is made between gods and 
 demons. The gods may be severe, stern, horrible, 
 gloomy, but they are worthy of worship ; the 
 riOog is in them, they have a characteristic 
 demeanour, a conscious individual will. On 
 the other hand, the demons are evil spirits of a 
 lower nature, intent on mischief, on destruction 
 and annihilation. Man worships the gods, and 
 finds in them his ideals ; for example, the Indian 
 war god, delighting in battle, ever quarrel- 
 ling, often drunk, intent on love intrigues, yet 
 embodies the ideal of the Hindoo warrior caste. 
 The demons, on the other hand, are hated, and 
 man flies from them. Sacrifice is offered to 
 them, but not worship ; the sacrificial food is 
 flung to these monsters in the same way as food 
 is thrown to the dogs and the wild animals. 
 The distinction that is made between the belief 
 in spirits of a lower nature and the worship of 
 gods with some moral qualities, and the aversion 
 
76 , What is Religion ? 
 
 of evil spirits and demons marks a distinct 
 progress in the religious life of men. 
 
 Now the gods begin to be gradually released 
 from their original destiny. Originally nearly 
 all the gods stood in clear relation to the great 
 powers of Nature. But in the process of develop- 
 ment this limited relationship falls into the 
 background or is completely forgotten, and in 
 its place a manifold relation to human life 
 exists. Marduk, at first the god of light and 
 the sun, then the god of the city of Babylon, 
 becomes the god of the Babylonian empire, the 
 creative god who has created an ordered world 
 out of chaos. The Hindoo Varuna — it is not 
 known whether, originally, he was the Divinity 
 of the heavens or of the moon — becomes the 
 almighty god who with his great eyes watches 
 over morals, justice, and order. Ahura, the 
 Persian god of heaven, becomes the god of 
 civilisation, in whose service man tends the 
 herds, rises from a nomadic life to a settled life, 
 builds roads, makes bridges, founds towns, 
 wages war against barbaric hordes, destroys 
 wild and harmful animals, and i)i*actises faith- 
 fulness and truth towards his neighbours. We 
 shall see later how in the prophetic religion of 
 ancient Israel the belief in Jahwe, the War God 
 and the national God, developed, and how^ in the 
 Greek religion the figures of the heavenly gods 
 
National Religions 77 
 
 Zeus and Apollo (whose original significance 
 — was it, perhaps, the God of Light, or of the 
 herds ? — is not quite clear) rose into prominence. 
 
 III. It is in connection with this development 
 that the gods received names. In the earlier 
 stages they had no particular names, or at least 
 no individual names. Their names merely 
 expressed their original import (thus Sin the 
 moon, Shamas the sun, Urania the heavens, 
 Gaia the earth) ; or their relation to men, as we 
 see in the names of the Canaanitish-Phoenician 
 gods Baal [Adon], Baalath, which correspond 
 to Lord, and in Moloch, Milkom, Melkarth, 
 forms of "king." But now the gods receive 
 proper names. Through long use and corrup- 
 tion the names lose their obvious meaning. In 
 earlier times the natural object and the god 
 which were originally identical were described 
 by one and the same word ; now either the 
 god or the object receives another name. A 
 distinguished scholar has observed very rightly 
 that where this process of transformation takes 
 place very quickly the gods are given on this 
 account a specially distinguished place in the 
 religion. Only persons have proper names, and 
 only gods whose names are no longer intelligible, 
 and no longer reflect their original import, be- 
 come personalities. 
 
 IV. It is at this stage^of development likewise 
 
78 What is Religion ? 
 
 that the gods assume definite forms. In the 
 national religion the image plays an impor- 
 tant part ; indeed, the image represents an 
 advance in the development of religious life. 
 The right view of images has been obstructed 
 largely owing to the aversion with which the 
 Old and the New Testaments regard the worship 
 of images. People forget that the men of the 
 Old and New Testaments — Jeremiah, the second 
 Isaiah, Paul — were engaged in actual war- 
 fare with lower forms of religion, and were, 
 therefore, not capable of an impartial historic 
 judgment. We must make it perfectly clear to 
 ourselves that the image is not a fetich, 
 although for the great mass of people it may 
 have this meaning (just as the holy pictures 
 assume this significance to Catholic peasants) 
 but merely a symbol ; the image is not the god 
 who is to be worshipped, but merely its repre- 
 sentation. Wherever the image is set up there 
 the god will be present. The god is by no means 
 present everywhere ; but here in this particular 
 place man may call upon him ; here he will grant 
 help and show favour. We can trace the origin 
 of the image from its rudest beginning. In the 
 earliest ages a simple, unhewn stone, a rough 
 piece of wood which was set up, represented the 
 Godhead. The story of Jacob illustrates this 
 transition period with unmistakable clearness. 
 
National Religions 79 
 
 Jacob in a dream saw the heavens open, and 
 God and His messengers ascending and descend- 
 ing. When he awoke he cried out : " How 
 dreadful is this place ! this is none other but 
 the house of God and this is the gate of heaven." 
 Then he set up a stone and anointed it with oil 
 and called the spot Beth-el, the house of God. 
 In this way the image was evolved. These 
 stones, with the rough pieces of wood which 
 were placed near the altar to represent the 
 Godhead, played a clearly recognisable part in 
 the service of the God of Israel as depicted in 
 the Old Testament. Then a step farther in 
 advance was taken ; the stone or piece of wood 
 was provided with a face, then with very rough 
 arms and legs, and now the idol is finished. To 
 this stage of civilisation belongs the Hermes of 
 ancient Greece, whose rough, unshapely form 
 called forth the scorn of Alcibiades. 
 
 The Godhead has been represented in the 
 image in many varied forms. The image has 
 not by any means always been in the form of 
 the human figure. The more the strange and 
 the uncanny predominates in the Godhead in the 
 lower stages of religion, the more often the 
 image assumes the form of an animal. The 
 worship of the Godhead in the form of a bull, 
 derived from the Canaanitish worship of Baal, 
 penetrated even into the ancient Israelitish 
 
8o What is Religion ? 
 
 worship of Jahwe. The stage reached by 
 religions may be estimated according to the 
 form taken by the image of the Godhead. Those 
 peoples who are at a low stage of civilisation or 
 have remained stagnant represent the Godhead 
 in the form of an animal. The animal character 
 of the gods is quite clearly visible in the 
 Canaanitish-Phoenician, the Mexican, and 
 Egyptian religions. To these succeed the 
 periods of transition. There arise hybrid forms, 
 half man, half animal ; the Egyptian religion 
 affords us many examples of these forms. The 
 goddess Isis has the head of a cow, Anubis the 
 head of a jackal, Horus the head of a sparrow- 
 hawk, Typhon an ass's head, and so on. In the 
 Babylonian religion we have advanced a step 
 farther. Here the people like to represent the 
 gods as riding or driving the animals by which 
 they were once represented. In many cases, 
 indeed, the animal that so often appears by the 
 side of the Godhead, as its symbol and attribute, 
 was originally the ancient form which the God- 
 head took. The Greek religion affords many 
 examples of this. 
 
 It was long before man rose to the idea of 
 the human form in its noblest manifestation 
 as the representative of the Godhead. The 
 artistic means were lacking. In Babylon super- 
 human colossal figures were employed to express 
 
National Religions 8i 
 
 the sublimity of the Godhead. One religion 
 alone reached the highest stage : the Greek 
 religion, in union with Art, created in the course 
 of centuries of labour the figures of Greek gods — 
 human figures such as had never walked on 
 this earth ; human figures which, through their 
 luminous beauty, their inner nobility, and 
 their dignified bearing, were able to arouse 
 religious devotion. Freed from all earthly stain, 
 raised above earthly sorrow, without flaw 
 or blemish, magnificent types of strong, perfect 
 manhood, noblest womanhood, and maidenhood, 
 these gods stood before the Greek man and 
 woman, who bowed down before them. 
 
 The significance of the image cannot be 
 highly enough estimated. The human com- 
 munity was grouped around the image. In 
 the Old Testament we are told that when 
 Gideon conquered the Midianites he had an 
 image made from his share of the booty, and 
 thereby won for his house importance and 
 authority in Israel — for a few generations only, 
 it is true. When the people of Dan journeyed 
 forth to find a new home, they forced a man 
 from the mountains of Ephraim to go with 
 them, as he had possession of an image. A tribe 
 must have an image and a priest, if its common 
 life is to be firmly organised. On the other 
 hand, the image contributes enormously to 
 
 7 
 
82 what is Religion ? 
 
 the personal concrete idea of the god. When 
 from the multitude of nameless, formless, 
 inconceivable, impersonal spirits living, con- 
 crete, personal forms of gods appear, it is to 
 the image that this development is chiefly due. 
 V. As a necessary consequence the image 
 requires a temple. The period of national 
 religions is the period of temple-worship. For 
 a very long time the worship of the Godhead 
 was not connected with the temple. God was 
 worshipped in the open air. The Germans, 
 who, owing to lack of artistic capability, did 
 not cultivate the worship of images, boasted 
 that they worshipped their gods in sacred 
 groves. The worship on the hills and moun- 
 tains described in the Old Testament was 
 widely spread. There on the heights the 
 worshipper felt near to the Godhead, who was 
 thought to dwell in the heavens. If there 
 were no hills then artificial ones were made. 
 The Teocalli of the Mexicans are simply 
 terraces, artificially made hills, on the top of 
 which stands the altar to the Godhead. Again, 
 the so-called Babylonian towers are nothing 
 but artificial mounds, turreted stone terraces 
 of enormous compass. Only where the image 
 has become the prevailing custom does the 
 temple arise, at first often only a little 
 house, a chapel, perhaps only an open shrine, 
 
National Religions 83 
 
 which originally was intended for the reception 
 of the image. Thus on the Babylonian 
 terraces, at the highest point, was erected a 
 little chapel, a little tower, as the abode of the 
 god. The plans of most of the great temples 
 show very clearly that they arose from the 
 little room containing the image which was 
 preserved in nearly all of them as the holiest 
 part. Gradually the other parts of the temple 
 were developed ; a larger hall was built in 
 front of that little room, to which the wor- 
 shippers of the god — perhaps, indeed, only the 
 priests — had entrance ; forecourts with great 
 contrivances for sacrifice were joined on and 
 enclosed the room of the sanctuary. And now 
 the design for the temple, as we see it in the 
 ancient Israelitish temple with its Holiest of 
 Holies, its Holy Place, and its courts, is finished. 
 
 VI. A priesthood gathers round the image and / 
 the temple ; the service of the god becomes 
 more complicated. The care of the image, its 
 cleansing and decoration, the various kinds of 
 sacrifice, the maintenance of order in the temple, 
 the preservation of the temple buildings — 
 all these require much technical knowledge. 
 Thus the priesthood is evolved. Whilst in 
 the earlier stages of religion leadership may 
 fall to anyone who shows his capacity and is 
 able to evoke the belief that he is in intimate 
 
84 What is Religion ? 
 
 intercourse with the spirits, the priesthood 
 is not the business of every man. The priest 
 occupies an office : he is an official. It is not 
 for anyone who likes to take upon himself an 
 office ; it must be entrusted to him by the 
 community. Preparation is required for the 
 priesthood, capacity won through long years 
 of exertion. The priests form an organised 
 class, but at the same time the priest is 
 generally only the agent of the community or 
 of the temporal ruler of a community. It is 
 accepted as a matter of course that the com- 
 munity, and especially the head of it, has the 
 right of direct intercourse with the gods ; the 
 priest is only appointed as a deputy for an 
 appointed time, or for life, because such an 
 arrangement facilitates intercourse. This idea 
 appears still to have remained even when the 
 right of being a priest was restricted to certain 
 families. On the other hand, the priesthood 
 easily developed into a closed caste, a guild 
 complete in itself, which completely usurped 
 the right of intercourse with the god, and 
 laid claim to be the mediator between the 
 Godhead and the rest of the people — that is, the 
 laity. This happened more especially where 
 the life of the people was retrogressive or 
 stagnant. In Assyria and Babylon, in ancient 
 Israel, in Greece, and in Rome, the priests, on 
 
National Religions 85 
 
 the whole, with a few isolated exceptions, 
 remained the deputies of the community, the 
 nation, or the king. On the other hand, the 
 Egyptian, the ancient Hindoo, the later 
 Persian, and the later Jewish religions show 
 us examples of the contrary. History warns us, 
 how a priesthood, especially in the case of a 
 people who are no longer capable of resist- 
 ance, may absorb everything, like a sponge, and 
 deprive them of all power of freshness. 
 
 VII. The definite concrete idea of individual 
 figures of gods corresponds to the predominance 
 of the myth. What is a myth? A narrative 
 concerning the gods. When there is personal 
 knowledge of a god stories are told about him, 
 stories of his deeds and his sufferings, of his 
 relation to his believers. And thus stories about 
 the gods dominate the imagination of the wor- 
 shippers. Such myths have often become quite 
 incomprehensible, mere fables ; often they reflect 
 with absolute clearness the original nature of 
 the god, sometimes they are of the so-called 
 etiological kind. Sometimes they may explain a 
 mysterious appellation of the god, and why he 
 is worshipped precisely at this spot, and pre- 
 cisely in this form. Let us imagine for a 
 moment a Nature-myth ; one of the prettiest 
 examples takes the form of the storm-myth. 
 The people say, with simple imagination, the 
 
86 What is Religion ? 
 
 clouds are cows, heavenly cows which bestow 
 the life-giving moisture of the rain. Now it is 
 the middle of summer, and for weeks together 
 it has not rained. The earth is thirsting for rain. 
 Then man says to himself, "The cows have 
 gone away, where are they ? A demon must 
 have driven them away, he keeps them hidden 
 in prison. But the mighty God can help." 
 Already in the distance on the horizon lightning 
 is seen. God brandishes his weapons to free the 
 cows from the demon. The dull roar of the 
 demon is heard, but God conquers. The cows 
 have returned, they cover the heavens in great 
 herds, and give forth the longed for moisture of 
 the rain. This is a myth. An example of a 
 myth relating to worship is the well-known 
 story of the fight of Apollo with the dragon. 
 In Delphi the sanctuary of Apollo arose over 
 the original oracle-seat of the prophesying 
 earth-demon Python. The myth of Delphi 
 relates how the radiant God of Light, Apollo, 
 had conquered and killed the evil dragon-god, 
 from whose snares he had escaped at his birth, 
 and had erected his own sanctuary over the 
 dragon's grave. Thus the myth puts life into 
 the figures of the gods and their worship. 
 
 VIII. Parallel with this development of the 
 belief in the higher gods is the disappearance of 
 the belief in the lower spirits. The lower spirits 
 
National Religions 87 
 
 become generally demons, who are feared but 
 no longer worshipped (see p. 75). Intercourse 
 with them, magic, conjurations are regarded as 
 uncanny, not permissible, and even as a crime. 
 The loftier, stronger, and purer that the belief 
 in the gods becomes, the more does this inter- 
 course with spooks and spirits tend to disappear, 
 and the old faith in spirits becomes supersti- 
 tion. Especially is this the case with the belief 
 in the power of the dead. It is just the most 
 energetic and progressive religions which have 
 not preserved this worship of the dead, or have 
 given little thought to it. The conviction arises 
 that the dead are of no importance to the 
 living ; they do not return, these dead ; the 
 shadoTvs dwell in a distant place, they have 
 drunk of Lethe and forgotten ^what goes on in 
 the world. Very rarely, and quite as an excep- 
 tion, does any one return from the under-TVorld. 
 The fire-burial would appear to have been a 
 powerful instrument in freeing men from the 
 fear of the dead. Sacrifices are no longer made 
 to the dead, neither is there any more belief in 
 the power of spirits. Wherever the memory of 
 the dead is honoured or their graves adorned, 
 this is done out of a feeling of piety, even though 
 the majority of people have not yet ceased to 
 believe in spirits and to worship the dead. The 
 intensity of this process of enlightenment is 
 

 88 What is Religion ? 
 
 naturally different in the different religions. 
 The Greek religion had freed itself in the time 
 of Homer. In the Babylonian religion, from 
 very ancient times, there was a firm belief in 
 the ethereal nature of the dead ; the under- world 
 was regarded as a place of shadows and of dust. 
 In the prophetic religion of Israel intercourse 
 with the dead and conjurations of the dead were 
 considered a crime. And so completely was 
 this thinking about the world of the dead laid 
 aside, that for centuries the Israelite religion 
 was incapable of developing higher thoughts of 
 compensation in a future world. In other 
 religions, notably in the Egyptian, the relation 
 between religion and the grave and the future 
 life was held with great intensity. 
 
 IX. By freeing religion from a belief in spirits 
 and the worship of the dead a further specific 
 moral advance was rendered possible, at least 
 here and there. Men no longer believed, or 
 believed far less, in the influence of the dead on 
 the living and on their destiny. On the contrary, 
 the belief begins to spring up that the fate of 
 man after death depends on his own deeds in 
 this world. This advance does not take place in 
 those religions which, in their struggle against 
 the belief in spirits and the worship of the dead, 
 have reduced the dead to a shadowy and dream- 
 like existence. But it is so in the other reli- 
 
National Religions 89 
 
 gions. Imagination begins to distinguish the 
 distant places where the dead dwell. So long as 
 people thought of the dead as being in the 
 neighbourhood of the grave and connected Tvith 
 the body resting in the grave such a classifica- 
 tion could not take place. Only when people 
 imagined the dead as gathered together in 
 distant places could the idea arise that some 
 dwell in the better and best places, others in 
 the dreadful haunts of pain and torment. The 
 imagination of the Indo-Germanic races, the 
 Greeks, the Teutons, the Persians, the people of 
 India, has specially developed this idea. With 
 the Egyptians the idea of the future life is 
 bound up in the grave and the embalmed corpse. 
 But even this shows development. It must be 
 admitted that the belief that man's fate after 
 death depends on his own acts in this world 
 cannot be called really moral in our sense of the 
 word. In many instances, in accordance with 
 the prevalent ideas, it is the rich, the important 
 and the powerful, to whom the better places in 
 the future world are assigned. The brave 
 warriors who fall in battle are, in the belief of 
 the old German tribes, carried by the Walkyrie 
 to Walhalla. The cowardly, the idle, who die in 
 their beds, sink down into hell. Very often 
 the sins which are punished in the future world 
 are ceremonial offences, insults to the Godhead. 
 
Ay 
 
 »\- 
 
 go What is Religion ? 
 
 The great sinners of the Greek lower world, 
 Tantalus, Sisyphus, were offenders against the 
 Godhead. Menelaus, on account of his semi- 
 Divine origin, ^vas sent to the Isles of the Blessed. 
 Quite early there arose in the Greek religion 
 the belief, which later was to play a most im- 
 portant part, that human beings could secure 
 for themselves a favourable fate in the lower 
 world by all manner of rites, curious acts, and 
 mysterious formulae. Although the moral 
 thought is hidden and covered over by all kinds 
 of veils, yet the belief that man's fate in the 
 other world depends upon his acts in this one is 
 of very great import. It will only be seen in 
 its purity and its full significance in the higher 
 stages of religious life. 
 
 Before we form an estimate of religion based 
 on national life, we will illustrate by two con- 
 crete examples what has just been said. From 
 the large number of religions ^ve choose for our 
 purpose the Babylonian and the Greek. 
 
 It would appear that the origin of human 
 civilisation is to be found in the Babylonian 
 plain. The inscriptions and monuments of 
 this ancient civilised people permit us to look 
 back, with astonishment, into the fourth and 
 even perhaps the fifth century before the 
 Christian era. From the end of the third 
 century B.C. we have preserved for us — it ha 
 
National Religions 91 
 
 only lately been discovered — the law of 
 Hammurabi, the founder of the world-empire 
 of Babylon (about 2250). This code of laws 
 shows a very high degree of civilisation and 
 of judicial progress, and its definitions have 
 aroused the delight and astonishment of 
 modern jurists. From the middle of the second 
 century cuneiform inscriptions on seals which 
 have been found among the ruins of Tel- 
 Amarna tell us that at that period the Baby- 
 lonian speech, writing, and civilisation were 
 the speech and civilisation of the whole world. 
 
 The religion of this ancient civilised people 
 was polytheism. The Babylonian Pantheon, 
 as it had developed at the time when, accord- 
 ing to the Old Testament, Abraham lived, was 
 carefully graded and arranged. At the head 
 stood the Trinity — Anu, the god of the high 
 heavens, Bel, the god of the air and the surface of 
 the earth, Ea, the god of the sea and the depth 
 of the earth. Belief in these was already 
 beginning to wane ; a certain theological 
 speculation is already implied in comparing 
 the gods in this fashion. 
 
 The life-giving, or it may be the life- 
 destroying, heavenly powers were chiefly 
 worshipped. The majority of Babylonian gods 
 were originally sun-gods — the young, victorious, 
 life-giving spring sun, who dispersed the 
 
92 what is Religion ? 
 
 clouds and the mist. Marduk, the god of the 
 spring sun, was especially honoured, as was 
 likewise the scorching, burning sun Nergal, 
 who brought death in his wake, and was the 
 war-god and god of the lower world. By the 
 side of the sun-god stood the moon-god, Sin — 
 which in earlier times asserted its superiority 
 — also the god of the storm (Ramman). The 
 goddess of life, Ishtar, was the only 
 important goddess of the Babylonian Pan- 
 theon. We meet with her constantly in a 
 vague twofold form. In the north, in Assyria, 
 she is depicted as the austere virgin goddess, 
 the fighter and goddess of battles ; in the 
 south the wild Ishtar is worshipped, the 
 mother of all life, the unspeakably evil goddess 
 from whose bosom life springs forth, who brings 
 abundant fertility and strength ; she is the wild 
 courtesan, infatuated with man, who revenges 
 herself spitefully on those who do not obey her 
 will. She is honoured by festivals of the 
 greatest splendour ; in her service prostitution 
 is sanctified. A myth of profound significance 
 relates the story of her journey to the world 
 of the dead. Her lover Tammuz, the youthful 
 god of spring vegetation, is dead, and the 
 goddess hastens after him to the lower world. 
 She must seek the spring of life to rescue her 
 beloved. At each door of the lower world — , 
 
National Religions 93 
 
 there are seven — she casts off a garment and 
 appears naked before the powerful queen of 
 the lower world, who keeps her a prisoner. 
 Then all life fades away from the earth till 
 a messenger of the gods frees Ishtar. The 
 original meaning of the myth is clear. It is 
 an etiological myth of the year. It provides 
 an answer to the question why in winter (and 
 in the time of drought in summer) all nature 
 is dead. The answer is because the mother of 
 life has gone away. Why has she gone away ? 
 To seek her beloved, and so on. But new 
 thoughts are connected with this old myth ; 
 life springs from death, there are gods who can 
 call forth life from the dead. 
 
 The most sublime figure in the Babylonian 
 Pantheon is that of Marduk. Originally, 
 apparently, the god of the spring sun, and 
 then the divinity of the city of Babylon, he 
 becomes with the extension of the Babylonian 
 rule the mightiest god of the Babylonian world- 
 empire. As ruler of the Babylonian world-empire 
 he becomes the ruler of the world, before whom, 
 every year, the lot of man is cast over heaven 
 and earth. He is, however, more than the 
 world-ruler : he is also the world-creator. He 
 is probably the first god whom a devout 
 multitude acknowledged as "almighty god, 
 creator of heaven and earth." 
 
94 What is Religion ? 
 
 We still possess this old Babylonian myth 
 of creation. It is preserved for us in many 
 scattered fragments of cuneiform inscriptions. 
 This myth of creation in its origin and signifi- 
 cance is quite clear: it is an extended spring- 
 myth. In the spring the Babylonian of the 
 plain sees the victorious struggle of the spring 
 sun with the clouds, mist, and rain which 
 cover the land and make all activity and trade 
 impossible. He sees how the god with his 
 radiant shafts of light pierces through and 
 annihilates the mist-monster. The Babylonian, 
 who was the first to sing of the myth of 
 creation, conceived the beginning of the world 
 as the beginning of the year. As it is at the 
 beginning of the new year, so it was at the 
 beginning of the world, only on a much larger 
 scale. The story runs thus : At the beginning a 
 fearful water demon ruled in the world with 
 his accomplices. No one could withstand him ; 
 trembling, the gods stood in awe before him. 
 Then they all gathered together and determined 
 that Marduk should be their ruler. Anu, Bel, Ea, 
 the ancient gods, delivered their power into his 
 hands ; he must conquer Tiamat, the water- 
 monster. The god now arms himself with a 
 trident and a net in which he shuts up the 
 winds. In a terrible combat he overcomes the 
 monster ; he plunges his trident into his mouth, 
 
National Religions 95 
 
 drives the winds into the open jaws, and the 
 monster bursts. From the two halves of 
 Tiamat's body which he has cleft asunder 
 Marduk creates heaven and earth. We see 
 in this story clear evidence of man's observa- 
 tion of the sun, w^hich disperses the mist and 
 the clouds. 
 
 It is in this way that the idea of the creation 
 of the world arose in the Babylonian religion. 
 Although it is the result of deep reflection, 
 and therefore comparatively late in making 
 its appearance in the history of religion, this 
 belief in God as the Creator is of the highest 
 value. With special trust man obeys the God 
 from whose act and will all being and living, 
 his own life indeed, are derived. For he knows 
 of a surety that what this God has created 
 He will preserve and protect. 
 
 The relation of man to the Godhead in the 
 Babylonian religion is that of complete subjec- 
 tion. The gods are despots and lords of bound- 
 less power ; the basis of their character is 
 power, superhuman power. Their statues are 
 colossal, far greater than those of men ; their 
 servants and attendants are mighty, enormous, 
 such as the colossal figures of the winged bull 
 and the lions, and of the winged spirits which 
 were placed before the temple and the palace 
 as guardians. Mounds were raised in their 
 
96 What is Religion ? 
 
 honour, and the ruins of these quaint temples 
 convey the idea of hills of considerable heights. 
 In silent humility and subjection man bowed 
 low in the dust. The feeling of anguish, of 
 eternal fear of the gods, is clearly marked. 
 
 This feeling is strikingly expressed in a whole 
 series of literary forms. A great many hymns 
 and songs have come down to us, in which the 
 believers acknowledge their sins, and implore 
 the god to show mercy. These have been 
 collected under the name of the Babylonian 
 Penitential Psalms. These songs show very 
 clearly how that feeling of nameless terror 
 grew out of the belief in spirits which belongs 
 to a lower stage of civilisation, out of the 
 agonised consciousness that man, through his 
 deeds and his omissions, provokes the anger of 
 the known and unknown gods which surround 
 him. A whole host of spirits and gods are 
 entreated in these litanies to show mercy ; the 
 unknown god and the unknown goddess are 
 not omitted, and the believer asks pardon 
 for his hidden and unconscious sins. Com- 
 pletely downcast, the believer draws near to 
 his god : 
 
 "I, thy servant, full of sighs, call upon Thee, 
 I am a sinner, whose ardent entreaty Thou wilt accept ; 
 Like the doves do I moan, I am o'ercome with sighing. 
 With lamentation and groaning my spirit is downcast." 
 
National Religions 97 
 
 He acknowledges his sins to the God. "I 
 will tell thee of my acts which yet cannot 
 be told." "Lord, my sins are many, great are 
 my misdeeds." This idea is specially striking 
 in the following psalm : 
 
 " Oh, Lord, Thy servant, cast him not away. 
 Plunged in the flood, stretch forth Thy hand. 
 The sin which I have committed, transform by Thy 
 
 grace 1 
 The ill deeds I have done, let the winds carry away ! 
 
 " Eend my sins, like a garment ! 
 My God, my sins are unto seven times seven. 
 Forgive my iniquities I " 
 
 These psalms remind us in every way of the 
 Old Testament psalms. A connection between 
 them cannot be denied. It is quite possible 
 that the Israelitish psalmists were influenced 
 by the Babylonian penitential poetry, especi- 
 ally with regard to the whole idea of penance 
 and sin, as well as in many details. But a 
 closer consideration shows us a great differ- 
 ence. Only the very best of the Babylonian 
 penance psalms are equal to the Old Testa- 
 ment psalms. Only by such a comparison 
 does one perceive how admirably, and with 
 what originality, the genius of the religion of 
 Israel has made use of this rough material 
 furnished from a foreign source. 
 
 8 
 
9 8 What is Religion ? 
 
 By modern writers the Babylonian sense 
 of religion has been greatly exaggerated. 
 Scholars who, as a result of long, self-denying 
 labour, have from the hidden monuments ob- 
 tained some idea of this astounding kingdom, 
 and of the extent and permanence of the 
 Babylonian world-civilisation and its enormous 
 influence in the ancient East, are naturally 
 inclined to over - estimate the newly - found 
 discoveries. They assign to the Babylonian 
 nation such an important place in the develop- 
 ment of religion that, compared with it, the 
 significance of Israel and of the Old Testament 
 religion seems to grow pale. They can bring 
 forward many apparent proofs in support of 
 this view; they may say that investigation 
 of the ancient Babylonian religion has taught 
 us in many respects to recognise the original 
 source from which the religion of Israel 
 sprang. The stories in the first book of 
 Moses, the story of Creation, of the Flood, 
 the story of the Fall of the angels, perhaps 
 (or apparently) the story of Paradise, although 
 there are no actual proofs here, are trans- 
 formed versions of the Babylonian myths — 
 versions which certainly embody an entirely 
 different and a far higher religious signifi- 
 cance. The code of laws of Hammurabi from 
 the point of view of civil and legal matters 
 
National Religions 99 
 
 shows the manifold relations between Babylon 
 and Israel. Regarded in this way, the Jewish 
 legislation has in many points new light cast 
 upon it, while our knowledge of Israelitish 
 temples and temple-worship is increased by 
 the excavations of Babylonian temples. The 
 Sabbath itself may have come to Israel from 
 Babylon. 
 
 This may all be willingly granted, and yet 
 the prophetic religion of Israel remains im- 
 measurably superior. The Babylonian religion 
 does not stand on the same high plane as the 
 religion of Israel, to which reference will be 
 made in the next paragraph. Hence it is 
 really impossible to make a comparison be- 
 tween the two religions. What the religion 
 of Israel did borrow from the Babylonian was 
 the raw material which now received its con- 
 summation and form. The prophets of Israel 
 are said to be the spiritual scholars of Baby- 
 lon ; this is the same as saying that the 
 sculptor stands in a spiritual relation to the 
 quarryman. 
 
 The Babylonian religion belongs to the stage 
 of national polytheism. Whatever traces of 
 monotheistic belief are said to have been 
 found are limited to the speculative and fruit- 
 less wisdom of priests or to the learned ideas 
 of modern investigators. It may be said 
 
lOO What is Religion ? 
 
 that practically monotheism never existed in 
 Babylon, and we look in vain for any traces 
 of prophetic personalities. The last King of 
 Babylon, Nabonidus, attempted reform in the 
 direction of monotheism. He had the sanctu- 
 aries of all the gods placed together ; he tried 
 to make them entirely subject to Marduk, 
 and their places of worship offshoots of the 
 temple of Marduk. Thus at the very end of 
 this stage of civilisation we see how far 
 removed man was from real monotheism. 
 The Babylonian religion shows other limita- 
 tions and compromises. We do not refer to 
 the fact that the thought of the future world 
 and of retribution after death had scarcely 
 arisen, for this limitation it possessed in 
 common with the ancient religion of Israel. 
 But the Babylonian polytheism was never 
 able to suppress the belief in spirits, which 
 belongs to a lower civilisation, and in the 
 whole chaotic world of magic and witchcraft, 
 which belongs to the lowest stage of all. The 
 enormous mass of literature dealing with 
 magic is characteristic of the religious litera- 
 ture of Babylon. " They cover the earth like 
 grass " may be said of the spirits and demons 
 of that period. Babylon remains for later 
 ages a vast mass of beliefs in demons and 
 magic. On the other hand, priestly and 
 
National Religions loi 
 
 learned speculations spread over the Baby- 
 lonian religion. Babylon was the original 
 home of the so-called science of astrology, 
 and of all the superstitious beliefs which con- 
 nected the fate of man with the stars. 
 
 This must not, however, prevent us from 
 recognising the attractive features of this 
 religion. It possessed an enormous serious- 
 ness, a mighty power. The ruined mounds 
 of the Babylonian plain testify to this. The 
 belief in God stands forth here in its vic- 
 torious power ; in the dust man bows before 
 the God. The feeling of sin and the terror 
 of sin are displayed here in a striking and 
 almost profound form. 
 
 Let us now cast a glance at the Greek 
 religion. It stands indisputably highest among 
 the national religions, and affords the most 
 striking example of a national life permeated 
 through and through with religion. How the 
 life of religion beats through the rich, multi- 
 form body of Greek civilisation, and how 
 religion is everywhere here the art which 
 the national life expresses in its most perfect 
 form ! 
 
 To make this quite clear, we must transplant 
 ourselves for a moment to Athenian life in 
 home and city, say, in the middle of the 
 
I02 What is Religion ? 
 
 fifth century, when religious life, owing to the 
 Persian Wars, had taken a new step in advance. 
 We approach an important Greek house 
 through the courtyard, where Zeus Herkaios, 
 the protector of the court, presides. His altar 
 stands in the centre, and here the master of 
 the house slays animals. All slaughter of 
 animals is a holy act. Here the lord renders 
 justice to his subordinates. To the altar the 
 stranger approaches, and in the name of Zeus 
 Xenios, the protector of strangers, requests a 
 hospitable reception. By the door of the 
 house stands a sacrificial vessel in which are 
 placed offerings as a protection against the 
 spectral - goddess Hekate, who is not wor- 
 shipped by such sacrifices, but simply kept at 
 a distance. In the atrium is the hearth 
 where the fire ever burns, where the goddess 
 Hestia is the presiding deity. She greets who- 
 ever comes into the house. The family gathers 
 round the hearth ; " the extinction of the fire 
 is the extinction of the family." At every 
 meal the goddess Hestia is remembered by 
 pious offerings. As the stranger passes out 
 into the road again he encounters the antique, 
 hideous statue of Hermes. This god accom- 
 panies the wanderer into strange countries ; 
 he protects the lord of the house in his 
 travels, and guides him safely back to his 
 
National Religions 103 
 
 beloved home. In the market - place Zeus 
 Agoraios is the ruler, and in his name 
 decrees are made, officials chosen, and the 
 lot cast. Apollo and Athene dispose of 
 justice on the Areopagus. And over the 
 town, high on the Acropolis, gleam and 
 shimmer the dwelling-places of the gods. All 
 artistic thought and talent are employed in 
 the service of the gods ; the theatre is the 
 worship of God, and a festive yet solemn 
 multitude, after the sacrifice has been offered, 
 listen to the solemn sounds of ^schylus's pro- 
 found and deeply religious wisdom. Far into 
 the distant world Athens' ships carry the 
 glory of Pallas Athene, and over the Greek 
 city confederation watches Apollo, the god of 
 unity. 
 
 To complete this picture we must call to mind 
 the figures of two Greek gods, those of Zeus 
 and Apollo. The former has been described by 
 the hand of a master : " From Zeus spring day 
 and night ; he scatters the years. His radiant 
 eyes are full of significance ; he sees everything, 
 his eye never sleeps. He is thus the searcher, 
 the all-seeing one ; the sinner is said to bring 
 disgrace to the sacred eyes of Zeus. The sum- 
 mits of the mountains are his holy places of 
 worship ; he is enthroned on the illumined 
 Olympian height, high above the wreath of 
 
1 04 What is Religion ? 
 
 clouds. In the middle of each court his altar 
 stands ; house and farm as well as the city-state 
 are placed in his hands. He protects those who 
 go beyond the boundaries of the fatherland 
 and seek help in foreign parts ; he accompanies 
 the Tvanderer to his journey's end. He is the 
 supreme saviour and sanctifier. He establishes 
 marriages, knits and preserves the bonds of 
 relationship ; life and death are in his hands, 
 and on golden scales he weighs the mortal 
 destiny of the fighters. He bestows blessing 
 and riches, he protects the boundaries. The 
 kingly power and its symbol, the sceptre, come 
 from him. He guards and preserves oaths, 
 from him spring fidelity and belief, and where- 
 ever right is downtrodden on earth, he utters 
 once more his decrees. . . . Severely does he 
 punish unjust judgments, and he likewise sees 
 to the punishment of every crime. He enters 
 everything in his mighty account so that nothing 
 can ever be forgotten." 
 
 By the side of Zeus we may place Apollo. 
 Let us imagine ourselves once again in Athens, 
 in the fifth century B.C., in the theatre. A 
 solemn festive crowd is gathered together ; the 
 last part of the great trilogy of jEschylus, the 
 " Eumenides," is being performed. In the back- 
 ground is a representation of Apollo's temple 
 at Delphi. The great doors of the temple open, 
 
National Religions 105 
 
 disclosing in the centre the blood-stained 
 matricide Orestes, at the altar of Apollo, im- 
 ploring protection. Round him sleep and snort 
 terrible forms, more horrible than Gorgons 
 and harpies, " black and repulsive to look upon.' 
 " Their appearance is too ghastly for even gods 
 much less men, to approach their dwelling 
 Never have I seen before such creatures.' 
 They lie in wait for the murderer of his mother 
 who has fallen to them for revenge. Then 
 magnificently radiant, the pitying Apollo 
 approaches the curse-laden stranger with a 
 blessing : 
 
 " Thee will I not betray, to thee aye true ; 
 Near to protect, yet from thee far removed, 
 No grace nor favour ^vill I show to those 
 Who hate thee." 
 
 And Apollo tears his protegS from the grasp 
 of the horrible forms, which utter hoarse curses. 
 Belief in the pitying, forgiving god, in Apollo, 
 the saviour and seer, may well have been kindled 
 to the highest degree of fervour in the heart of 
 many an Athenian at such a performance. 
 
 It is a rich, many-coloured picture which we 
 have sought to paint, this domain of national 
 polytheism. We are conscious of broken rays 
 of a Divine nature which shine into the hearts 
 
io6 What is Religion ? 
 
 of men ; broken rays certainly, but rays of 
 Divine majesty and glory, of Divine goodness 
 and charity. The figures of Zeus, Apollo, 
 Athene, Marduk, the Hindoo Yaruna, and the 
 Persian Ahura, whom we shall meet again 
 when we reach a higher stage of civilisation, 
 may stand as the highest symbols of human 
 belief at this stage of religious life. Among 
 them all the Greek gods shine forth as ideals 
 of noblest humanity. Already this belief has 
 a high moral power and significance. A loftier 
 conception of human life clings around it, 
 through it man wins for himself permanent 
 human dignity. The belief in gods becomes 
 the foundation of the life in common, and 
 lends power to it. 
 
 At this point there may be an inclination to 
 make various objections ; people will point to 
 the things which are low, base, and morally 
 repulsive in the myths and worship of the 
 gods, which are to be found everywhere, side 
 by side with what is noble and splendid. Cer- 
 tainly we must not overlook these objections. 
 The morality which is unfolded in the worship 
 of the gods is not in all points — only indeed in 
 a very fe^v points — the highest morality or 
 morality at all in our sense. The same may be 
 asserted of the religion of ancient Israel before 
 the time of the prophets. What a frightful 
 
National Religions 107 
 
 morality is that of ancient Israel in many ways ! 
 Israel compelled by God's command to extir- 
 pate and slaughter a whole conquered people 
 in the most horrible manner ! King Saul 
 rejected because he would not slay his heroic 
 opponent, King Agag, at the command of the 
 prophet ! With what delight are all the tricks 
 of cunning and deceit by which Jacob harmed 
 his people described in the Old Testament! It 
 would be absolutely unreasonable to try to set 
 up here a standard of the highest morality. It 
 would be unfair not to see that the barbaric 
 slaughter of a whole tribe was a necessity in 
 order to preserve a superior people in their 
 strength and their peculiar characteristics — a 
 barbaric and horrible necessity. But if we are 
 to set up this standard of equitable judgment 
 with regard to parts of the Old Testament, and 
 to the morality and piety of ancient Israel, we 
 must also apply the same reasonable judgment 
 to other nations and their religions. 
 
 We do not see here, indeed, our morality, but 
 — setting aside, of course, corruptions and 
 blemishes, the manifold relics of a ruder time 
 and a ruder faith, as well as the signs of coming 
 decadence — it is morality, morality progressing 
 and developing. We have here the evolution 
 of life in a community, the strengthening of the 
 feeling of unconditional duty for which man 
 
io8 What is Religion? 
 
 was ready to stake his life, ascent from step 
 to step. 
 
 Let us consider likewise the limitations of 
 these national religions ; the divine forms often 
 completely disappear in human life, and they 
 lose their commanding and elevating power and 
 significance. Religion and property become 
 the same thing in the national life. Religion 
 begins to lack the progressive, critical, and 
 revolutionary elements ; its powers are re- 
 stricted, it becomes only too quickly a conser- 
 vative power, fixed in its usages and customs, 
 the best support of the ruling authorities in 
 the life of the people and the states, the enemy 
 of all progress, a tremendous force which 
 threatens to divide the nations absolutely and 
 profoundly one from the other. 
 
 A further progress in the development of the 
 religious life must now take place in which the 
 union between religion and the nation is to a 
 certain extent shattered. This disruption must 
 proceed from the individual ; the figures of the 
 great prophet-reformers are now to appear on 
 the scene. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE PROPHETS AND THE RELIGION OF 
 THE PROPHETS 
 
 ONCE more we will bring clearly forward 
 the condition of religious life at the stage 
 we have now reached. Religion is a concern 
 of the nation ; it is the centre of a nation's life. 
 The gods belong to the nation, the nation to 
 its gods. Religion has become a custom, a 
 usage, a tradition ; man is born into a religion. 
 The religion of a man is just as little a matter 
 of free will and conviction as love of his country- 
 is. It is no question of belief and disbelief, of 
 acceptance and denial. Just as traitors are put 
 to death, so those who deny religion are out- 
 lawed. Disbelief in the gods is treason, is sin 
 worthy of death. 
 
 Religion, we say, is a concern of the nation ; 
 only in a secondary degree is it the concern 
 of the individual. Attention is only indirectly 
 turned towards the individual, and that gene- 
 rally when he is the leader and chief of the 
 
 109 
 
no What is Religion? 
 
 community. The fresher and more spontaneous 
 the national life is the less important is the 
 individual. For what, indeed, is the individual? 
 A wave that vanishes, a drop in the bucket, a 
 shadow ; he would be completely abandoned 
 and powerless without his people. The indi- 
 viduals, the generations, pass away into the 
 kingdom of the shades, of the dust, of hell. 
 "The dead cannot praise thee, O Jahwe !" 
 New generations appear ; they delight in the 
 light and the air, in the sun and the spring, in 
 the blessing of children, and in riches, in 
 war, in victory, and in peace, and they wander 
 far afield. The individuals vanish, the peoples 
 remain, the gods are eternal. 
 
 There are exceptions, however; now and again 
 belief in retribution after death arises, and here 
 the individual plays an important part, but 
 there is much uncertainty and doubt concern- 
 ing this belief. There were all kinds of 
 fantastic beliefs cherished by secret sects and 
 conventicles, intermingled with extraordinary 
 rites and ceremonies. In the schools of the 
 priests in Egypt, in the curious Orphic societies 
 of Greece, this belief was held, but it was 
 seldom comprehended in its universality. It 
 was often only concerned with the noble, the 
 strong, the important, the brave ; it acted as 
 a threat for the very wicked, as a consolation to 
 
Prophets and their Religion 
 
 III 
 
 the adherents of the sects which indulged in 
 extraordinary usages and ceremonies. Thus 
 this belief was not the central point of the 
 religion, it remained on the circumference ; in 
 many religions, the Semitic especially, it hardly 
 appeared at all. It played the most important 
 part in a decaying religion, the Egyptian 
 religion. 
 
 The eye of the gods rests, as we have already 
 pointed out, here and there on the individual, 
 on the distinguished, the strong, the noble. The 
 kings of Babylon and Assyria felt themselves 
 specially connected with the Godhead ; they were 
 the favourites of the gods, their representatives 
 on earth, the administrators of God's favours. 
 The history of the people in the East is often 
 simply the history of the king. The Greek 
 religion has many stories of the favourites of 
 the gods, of the heroes who ascend to Olympus, 
 of the heroes of Divine descent. The gods 
 receive them personally and carry them after 
 their death to the Elysian fields. But these are 
 exceptions. Even the powerful and the great 
 are not safe from the anger of the gods ; human 
 greatness is the sport of the gods. This is the 
 fundamental idea of the classical Greek 
 tragedy. 
 
 One more point demands notice. National 
 religions are all religions of worship. The 
 
112 What is Religion ? 
 
 religious act is an act of worship. Piety means 
 honouring the gods in a manner sanctioned by 
 custom and usage. Religion certainly stands also 
 related to morality and to the duties of a national 
 life. In war a man sacrifices himself for his 
 fatherland and his gods. The gods watch over 
 public and private rights ; with pure heart and 
 clean hands must man draw near to the gods. 
 But still, the centre of religious life is worship. 
 Sins against the worship of the gods, ritualistic 
 and ceremonial sins, are punished most severely ; 
 and, on the other hand, the sacrifice offered in 
 the right fashion covers a multitude of sins. 
 The gods are easily propitiated by sacrifice. 
 The Babylonian epic of the Flood naively tells 
 how the terrible Bel, who intended to destroy 
 mankind, was propitiated by the sacrifice of 
 the surviving heroes of the Flood, and how the 
 gods all gathered round the smoke of the 
 sacrifice like flies round carrion. And the first 
 book of Moses relates how the scent of Noah's 
 sacrifice ascended to the nostrils of Jehovah. 
 Morality exists in the religion, but it is hidden 
 in ceremonial observances, entirely entangled 
 and enchained in the rites of worship. 
 
 Now, about this time the religious life of 
 mankind received a new impulse in very 
 different parts of the world. We have come 
 to the age of the prophets. The date of the 
 
Prophets and their Religion 113 
 
 great new moral ideas in religion may probably 
 be assigned to the eighth, seventh, and sixth 
 centuries B.C. In the eighth and seventh 
 centuries B.C. the great prophets appeared in 
 Israel ; perhaps at the same time, perhaps 
 considerably earlier, lived Zarathustra, the 
 reformer of the Persian religion. In the 
 seventh and sixth centuries B.C. a religious 
 movement began in Greece, the exponents of 
 which were the great tragedians, later Socrates, 
 and above all Plato. In the sixth century B.C., 
 again, Buddha was doing his work in India, 
 and at the same time Confucius probably in 
 China, though he can scarcely be included 
 among creative reformers. It is a remarkable 
 coincidence. It seems as if the tree of the 
 religious life of mankind had sent forth new 
 shoots at the same time in different places. 
 We will try to understand the common charac- 
 teristics of these phenomena which stand related 
 to each other. 
 
 L The first, which is common to them all, is 
 the prominent position taken by the individual 
 as a dominating power. Single great per- 
 sonalities in more or less sharply defined forms 
 appear before us. Here we see Zarathustra and 
 his friends. King Vistasp, Zarathustra's 'wife, his 
 daughter and his son-in-law, the King's minister 
 Jamasp ; there the mighty prophets Elijah, 
 
 9 
 
114 What is Religion? 
 
 Amos, Hosea, Micah, Jeremiah. In Greece 
 there are the significant figures of ^schylus 
 and Sophocles, Socrates and Plato ; in India 
 Buddha and a crowd of favourite young men 
 who are specially mentioned by name. These 
 are all concrete figures, clearly recognisable 
 even through the dimness of tradition. And 
 Tvhat figures they are ! They are of enormous, 
 gigantic size ; they still speak to us across the 
 centuries ; we delight in them as the most 
 precious inheritance of the past. 
 
 II. Everywhere we find the same thing. Each 
 individual prophet protests against the judg- 
 ment of the majority, against tradition, the 
 law, custom, popular usage. Nearly all the 
 prophets were great, solitary, tragic figures, 
 dwelling in a solitude difiicult for the boldest 
 imagination to picture. We see Zarathustra 
 in his solitary flights, in his fruitless missionary 
 journeys. On the heights his god Ahura-Mazda 
 is revealed to him, or God's angel and am- 
 bassador ; in the desert the demons surround 
 him, despise him, reject him. Indignantly he 
 drives them away with stones ; only after thirty 
 years' hard struggle does he gain any result for 
 his work. The life of Buddha, again, although 
 the calmest and most peaceful of all, was 
 full of struggles, whilst Confucius passed a 
 great part of his life in banishment. Socrates 
 
Prophets and their Religion 115 
 
 emptied the cup of poison, condemned by the 
 people as a despiser of the gods ; Plato taught a 
 few members of a society which had practically 
 no influence on the outside world. Think also 
 of the prophets of the Old Testament; Elijah 
 in conflict with the priests of Baal, Amos 
 sent into exile by the high priest, Isaiah 
 in constant opposition to the weak kings. 
 Greatest of them all was Jeremiah, concerning 
 whose life it was written : " To-day I make 
 thee a strong city and an iron pillar and a 
 brazen wall against the whole land, the kings 
 of Judah, the princes, the priests, and all the 
 people." 
 
 There is a peculiar resemblance among all 
 these men; they will accept nothing but what 
 their own conviction and their conscience 
 approve. They seek to get at the heart of 
 things. In their presence deception, triviality, 
 and nonsense vanish. They do not, indeed, 
 announce what is merely their own conviction ; 
 they talk as the elect in the name of a Power 
 far above them that has filled them and con- 
 strained them to utterance. The prophets of 
 Israel speak in the name of Jehovah ; the Word 
 of Jehovah has been revealed to them, and 
 therefore they must speak. "The lion roars, 
 who is not afraid? Jehovah speaks, who dares 
 be silent ? " They are possessed as by a strange 
 
1 1 6 What is Religion ? 
 
 power ; Jehovah's word has become theirs. It 
 is no strange, incomprehensible, oracular say- 
 ing that they utter ; it is their own conviction, 
 wonderfully given them, and firmly held. 
 Zarathustra announced the revelation which 
 he asserted he heard on the mountain-tops in 
 his struggle with the demons, in strange, 
 mysterious phrases, the form and contents of 
 which are reflected to a certain extent in the 
 Gathas, the oldest fragments of Persian re- 
 ligious literature. Buddha, under the holy tree, 
 passed through his hour of deliverance and 
 then his hour of temptation and battle with 
 the evil one ; then he preached the revelation 
 that had come to him. Socrates and Plato 
 cannot quite be classified with the prophets. 
 With them the movement against conservatism 
 was mainly intellectual ; they had the higher 
 truth which they revealed, and it seems they 
 were more anxious about this than they were 
 conscious of themselves as revealers. Yet 
 Socrates, when he asserted the legality of man's 
 moral thought and judgment, in opposition to 
 the personal, arbitrary will and ideas of the 
 sophists, invoked the spirits and the Godhead 
 that spoke within him. Plato, indeed, was a 
 religious genius in the mantle of a philosopher. 
 He w^as the god-intoxicated seer, who, " divinely 
 mad," looked into the world of the invisible, 
 
Prophets and their Religion 117 
 
 and spoke with holy enthusiasm of what he 
 had seen there, and of what he had compre- 
 hended in his inmost soul. 
 
 These prophets exercised their influence by 
 the Word^ which means, by the weight of their 
 personal conviction. They resorted to no other 
 means, to no custom, usage, act, or worship. 
 They did not stand forth as supporters of any 
 guild or any caste. " I was no prophet, neither 
 was I a prophet's son," Amos replied to the 
 high priest, and thus disclaimed all con- 
 nection with the schools. God had called him 
 from the plough and sent him forth as His 
 messenger. In the oldest records of the 
 reforms of Zarathustra the priest plays no 
 part, indeed he appears as the enemy of the 
 reformer. Buddha cast aside all privileges of 
 the priestly caste for his followers, and he 
 himself did not belong to it. They worked 
 only through spiritual means and the power 
 of their personality. As a rule they neither 
 proved nor disputed — the Greeks, of course, 
 are an exception ; they announced their beliefs 
 with unequalled certainty and demanded the 
 subjection of the will. And as they risked 
 their lives and their persons, they demanded 
 the same from their disciples. An extra- 
 ordinary kingly tragedy ! At this point the 
 word " belief " or " conviction " comes into the 
 
y 
 
 1 1 8 What is Religion ? 
 
 province of religion, which from now appears 
 based on personal conviction. It is rightly 
 asserted, on the ground of the single fact 
 that one of the kings of Medea of the seventh 
 century was called Phraortes " the confessor," 
 that the Zarathustrian reform had taken place 
 earlier. 
 
 III. The revelation vouchsafed to the prophets 
 which they announced Mvas an absolute, decisive 
 conviction concerning the meaning and nature 
 of life, its deepest foundations, its highest aims. 
 It is a very compact whole, a definite conviction 
 which can be expressed in a few sentences ; it is 
 no longer a variegated medley of custom, usage, 
 popular traditions, ceremonial and ritualistic 
 demands, ecstatic observances, moral dicta. 
 The prophets of ancient Egypt announced that 
 the God of Israel was a God of absolute justice 
 and holiness within the kingdom of Israel and 
 without, a holy God who was able to destroy and 
 annihilate His own people for righteousness' 
 sake. Zarathustra announced the almighty 
 God of heaven and earth as the God of 
 human order and civilisation, the protector 
 of all useful arts of civilisation, the enemy 
 of all barbarism, of all evil, and of all that 
 was unseemly. Plato comprehended the God- 
 head as the final highest idea, the most rational 
 root of all existence which is seen in the good, 
 
Prophets and their Religion 119 
 
 the beautiful, and the true. Buddha announced 
 that all life was misery, and the object of 
 all life was the release from misery and the 
 passing to eternal rest. 
 
 This ideal of the prophets was in its 
 deepest meaning — although the inference was 
 not immediately seen — no longer limited to 
 one nation. The laws of Divine justice and 
 holiness, according to the prophets, were 
 binding, not only on Israel, but universally. 
 The God of Holiness exercises His scourge over 
 strange nations. To Buddha the misery of 
 the world is a truth, true all the world over, 
 and to the whole world Buddha announces 
 a deliverance from misery. That the wise man 
 — like Plato and his scholars — can rise above 
 this confused world of reality to the eternal 
 world of ideas is true for Greek and barbarian 
 alike. To Zarathustra the whole world is 
 divided into the kingdom of the good and 
 the kingdom of the evil god, and truly pious 
 men may everywhere promote the good works 
 of the good god. 
 
 IV. Thus, on the above-mentioned grounds, 
 prophetical religion becomes monotheistic re- »/ 
 ligion. On this soil springs up belief in one 
 God in heaven and on earth. To Zarathustra 
 and his earliest followers all other gods but 
 the one were demons. Ahura-Mazda, the 
 
I20 What is Religion? 
 
 radiant heavenly god who dispenses light, life, 
 order, is alone God. Whatever remnant of the 
 people's belief in gods Zarathustra kept he 
 made strictly suboirdinate to the supreme God. 
 By the side of Ahura divine beings were only 
 permitted to remain as subject attendants, 
 messengers, emissaries, entirely dependent on 
 his will, radiations from his being. In oppo- 
 sition to this view people may point to the 
 dual element in the Persian religion, to the 
 belief of Parsiism, probably originated by 
 Zarathustra himself, that there is an evil spirit 
 (Angra-Mainyu = Ahriman) strongly opposed 
 to the good spirit, and a kingdom of evil 
 subject to the latter. But, in truth, this dual 
 element in no wise reflects upon the mono- 
 theistic character of the Iranian religion; it 
 belongs rather to the region of reflection and 
 speculation than to that of practical worship. 
 Religious worship is not directed towards the 
 evil spirit, the thought of whom fades into 
 the background whence ascend all the more 
 radiantly and clearly love for the supreme 
 God and trust in Him. For in the Persian 
 religion the good god is the creative, the all- 
 powerful god ; he alone creates ; the evil god 
 can only imitate, or check, or destroy. And 
 the final victory in the struggle between the 
 two kingdoms even remains with the good 
 
Prophets and their Religion 121 
 
 god. Dualism in the Iranian religion must be 
 considered in the same light as the belief in 
 the devil in the Christian religion. This dualism 
 may injure and choke monotheism, and this 
 has often happened — one recalls the piety of 
 the Christian Middle Ages — but it may also 
 simply remain on the periphery of the religious 
 life, and scarcely touch it. 
 
 To Plato and his immediate followers the 
 unity of the Divine nature is regarded as an 
 axiom, although he may often employ the 
 phraseology of the old national religion. But 
 there is here absolute variance from the poly- 
 theistic religion. Plato will not allow Homer 
 a place in his "State" because of the latter's 
 unworthy representation of God. Later an 
 attempt at a compromise was made by teaching 
 that the gods of popular belief were demons, 
 half-human, which stood mid-way between 
 the Godhead and man, and by manifold false 
 allegorical interpretations of myths, of the 
 arrangements and ceremonies employed in the 
 worship of the popular religion, a reconciliation 
 was made with the belief of the average man. 
 Later Greek philosophy lacked the religious 
 and moral power to reform and conquer the 
 polytheistic Hellenic belief of the people. No 
 one again trod the path of Socrates. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to demonstrate that 
 
122 What is Religion ? 
 
 the prophets of ancient Israel were monotheistic. 
 We shall return to this later. It is true that 
 it is only in the later prophets that the mono- 
 theistic belief is seen in its complete form. 
 In the preaching of the second Isaiah this 
 development is seen to be complete ; accord- 
 ing to him all the gods of the strange 
 nations are vain imaginings of human fancy, 
 the worship of the gods is the worship of 
 dead images, and belief in gods is heathenism, 
 religious and moral wrong. Jehovah alone is 
 the true God, the almighty Creator, and Israel 
 His servant, the herald to the whole world of 
 His majesty. 
 
 V. Bound up with the conception of religion 
 as one in its very essence is its deliverance from 
 all outward things and disturbances, the break- 
 ing of the bonds of custom, tradition, worship, 
 and ceremony. The prophets announce a 
 religion of spirit and of truth. There is no 
 manner of doubt that Plato and his disciples 
 were entirely free from all the outward observ- 
 ances of the national religion and the national 
 ceremonies, although later the Greek idealistic 
 philosophy capitulated to the popular belief. 
 In the oldest records of Zarathustrian reform 
 both sacrifice and the priesthood, as far as we 
 know, played an insignificant part. Buddha 
 denounced the sacred Hindoo religious writings, 
 
Prophets and their Religion 123 
 
 the Yedas, and all the complicated, ancient 
 Hindoo ritual of sacrifice which rested upon 
 them. And in doing this he destroyed the 
 privileges of the ruling caste of the priests. 
 The older prophets of Israel were all, or 
 nearly all, opposed to ceremonial and the 
 priesthood ; only the later prophets from the 
 time of Ezekiel were inclined to look with 
 favour upon ceremony. 
 
 Before concluding, we must try to get an 
 idea of the power and extent, the height and 
 the significance, of the prophetical religion, 
 by figuring to ourselves the most important 
 phenomenon of this stage of religious life, the 
 ancient Israelitish prophetical government in 
 its relation to the fundamental ideas which 
 have just been described. 
 
 First of all we must glance at the condition 
 of the religion of ancient Israel before the 
 ministry of the great prophets. The ancient 
 Israelitish religion arose, as we described in 
 the first chapter, from the Semitic tribal 
 religion. We saw that in this old Semitic 
 religion the number of the gods always 
 remained limited, and that very often a tribe 
 only worshipped one god, perhaps under a 
 male and a female form. The ancient Israelitish 
 religion was distinguished by its tenacious 
 
124 What is Religion? 
 
 fidelity to the worship of one God, Jehovah of 
 Mount Sinai. No differentiation into male 
 and female was made. It was apparently 
 owing to Moses that when he welded the 
 Israelitish tribes into a nation none of the 
 tribal gods was allowed to remain. Then 
 when Israel conquered Canaan no change of 
 belief, on the whole, took place. The gods of 
 Baal belonging to the conquered tribes were 
 not worshipped with Jehovah, although it is 
 true that Jehovah was often worshipped under 
 the form and name of Baal. All this did not 
 happen without struggle and opposition. King 
 Ahab attempted, in honour of his Syrian wife 
 Jezebel, to introduce the worship of Baal along- 
 side the worship of Jehovah. We see here 
 that already the power of a religious pro- 
 phetical personality of the noblest kind was 
 exercising an influence in the religious history 
 of Israel. Elijah fought the one in opposition 
 to the many — for the one God of Israel. It 
 was at this time that it was written of Jehovah, 
 " The name of Jehovah is jealousy. He is a 
 jealous God." The less important successors of 
 Elijah no longer conducted the struggle with 
 the weapons of the Spirit ; by treachery and 
 the sword they extirpated a clan cast out 
 for its strange religious leanings. In the 
 south, in Judea, after the destruction of the 
 
Prophets and their Religion 125 
 
 northern kingdom — we must here anticipate 
 events somewhat — there was once again a 
 powerful, heathen, polytheistic reaction under 
 the rule of Manasseh ; a feeling of mistrust, 
 due to events, had at this time and among 
 these people, arisen against the power of 
 Jehovah. But the final result here also was 
 the triumph of the pure worship of Jehovah. 
 
 Let us consider the boundaries of this world 
 of ideas, which even one of the greatest men in 
 the religious history of Israel scarcely over- 
 stepped. Briefly we may put it thus : What is 
 here found is not monotheism in our sense of 
 the word. We may perhaps give it a new 
 name, monolatry — the service of a God. The 
 actual worship of one God was practised by this 
 people, and the conviction existed that Israel 
 and Jehovah, Jehovah and Israel, were indis- 
 solubly connected. Israel must only serve 
 Jehovah. Even King David believed that the 
 circle of Jehovah's influence did not extend 
 beyond Israel, and that whoever drove him out 
 would force him to serve other gods (1 Sam. 
 xxvi. 19). The Old Testament chroniclers relate, 
 quite naively that Naaman the Syrian, after he 
 was healed by Elijah, took with him some 
 earth from the Holy Land, in order to erect 
 upon it an altar to Jehovah in his own country, 
 for Jehovah can only be worshipped on the 
 
126 what is Religion? 
 
 soil of Palestine. Even in Deuteronomy (the 
 fifth book of Moses) the idea is brought forward 
 quite simply that Jehovah had entrusted the 
 other nations to the remaining powers of 
 heaven, and that He Himself had chosen the 
 children of Israel alone to be His people. The 
 ever-recurring lapses of Israel into polytheism, 
 of which history informs us, will only be 
 psychologically understood when we consider 
 that no real monotheistic belief existed in the 
 people, and that Jehovah counted as one God 
 among others, although He was the mightiest, 
 and, for Israel, alone of importance. The bond 
 between Jehovah and His people was a per- 
 fectly natural one ; it was a necessity of His 
 nature for Jehovah to love His people. He 
 could, indeed, do no otherwise ; if He were to, 
 He would not be Himself. And it is perfectly 
 natural that Israel should worship the Lord 
 and Owner of the land, and should reward 
 Him with generous sacrifices for the rich gifts 
 of His favour and goodness. 
 
 It is true there are grounds for regarding 
 the belief in Jehovah as entirely spiritual. 
 Jehovah was never worshipped as the actual 
 Father of Israel ; the idea rather was that 
 He had chosen the people. The relation be- 
 tween Him and Israel rested on a union. By 
 many personal acts which have become his- 
 
Prophets and their Religion 127 
 
 torical He had bound the people to Him ; 
 He had delivered them from Egypt and had 
 led them through the desert. His power is 
 not completely confined to the land of Israel ; 
 His own dwelling is Mount Sinai, and there 
 He appears. He is a God who works wonders 
 at a distance. Above everything else a strong 
 moral impulse directs the religion of Israel. 
 Jehovah is the God of righteousness, who re- 
 wards the just and punishes the unjust. But 
 these spiritual elements in the religion of Israel 
 are still only latent ; the natural elements 
 outweigh them. 
 
 Such was the belief of ancient Israel. Grad- 
 ually the times changed ; Israel no longer 
 remained the victorious, conquering nation 
 which stood out against its neighbours in strong 
 superiority, or at least with equal power. From 
 the north-east a terrible storm-cloud was 
 gathering for Israel. A great world-empire, the 
 Assyrian empire, which was then striving for the 
 mastery of the world, was extending its power 
 farther towards the west and the south. Power- 
 less, the people fell before its destroying 
 power, which like a whirlpool drew every- 
 thing towards it. Threateningly this weather- 
 cloud hovered on the horizon of Israel. Now and 
 again it appeared to pass away, but it really 
 always stayed in the sky, announcing misfor- 
 
128 What is Religion ? 
 
 tune and filling the minds of men with name- 
 less dread. What was the attitude of Israel 
 at that time ? The majority wandered light- 
 heartedly on the edge of the abyss. It was a 
 period of apparent splendour and happiness, 
 of a high standard of civilisation. Luxury 
 and vice reigned ; the crowd kept their joyous 
 festivals with the maddest of jollities. The 
 rich oppressed the poor, the poor grumbled 
 under the oppression of the rich. The Court 
 of the king was magnificent, armies of soldiers 
 protected him. It was all as it had ever been. 
 The superior and more lofty patriots may 
 have gazed earnestly into the future. But the 
 people all lived in unshaken, natural confidence 
 in Jehovah ; He could not desert His people, 
 for then He would be denying Himself. 
 
 If no other spiritual strength had existed 
 in the people, the religion of Israel would 
 probably have vanished without a trace amid 
 the confusions of the nations. Assyria would 
 have conquered North Israel, Babylon, a cen- 
 tury and a half later. South Israel, as dozens 
 of other tribes were conquered, of which we 
 now know nothing except the names. But 
 there were higher powers at work in the 
 religious history of Israel. The great figures 
 of the prophets stand forth ; and without 
 these the religion of Israel would not have 
 
Prophets and their Religion 129 
 
 been equal to the forthcoming events ; the 
 prophets placed the people's belief on a new 
 and higher basis. They preached something 
 which was at that time absolutely unheard of 
 and unexpected. They revealed a God who 
 would destroy His people. With their clear eyes 
 they saw the truth more and more clearly. 
 They saw the inevitable downfall of Israel 
 threatened by Assyria on the north, and later, 
 by Babylon on the south. But this was in no 
 sense a religious conception. As far as the 
 history of religion is concerned the important 
 work that they did was to hold fast to the 
 belief in Jehovah. They accomplished a bold 
 reversal of all the standards of worth. They 
 did not see in the world-empires of Assyria and 
 Babylon a blind, powerful fate or the power of 
 strange gods working which destroyed Israel, 
 its God, its belief. They pronounced boldly that 
 it was Jehovah Himself who had destroyed His 
 people, and that the strange kingdom was a 
 scourge in His hand. Here we meet with in 
 religion absolute conviction in face of apparent 
 contradiction. These men were confronted with 
 an abyss : " a God who destroys His own 
 people." Yet they threw themselves into the 
 abyss, saying, "This terrible God is our God." 
 Among the people they stand terribly isolated. 
 Let us look more closely into the position. 
 
 10 
 
130 What is Religion? 
 
 In the midst of a wild festival of joy Amos 
 stepped forward with his death-lament. To 
 him the ruin had already appeared : "The 
 virgin of Israel is fallen ; she shall no more 
 rise ; she is cast down upon her land, there 
 is none to raise her up." 
 
 The people regarded him with astonishment 
 as a madman, and the high priest, Amaziah, 
 drove him forth : " O thou seer, go flee thee 
 away into the land of Judah — but prophesy 
 not again any more at Beth-el, for it is the 
 King's sanctuary, and it is a royal house." 
 
 Again, let us think of the terrible solitude 
 of Jeremiah; his relatives, his friends, revile 
 him as a madman. In his native town of 
 Anathoth he dare not be seen, for the people 
 threaten to kill him. He is thrown into prison, 
 into a damp, gloomy hole. All point their 
 finger at him : " Behold the traitor ! " 
 
 The prophets ever remained true to their 
 convictions, for they knew what they had 
 revealed ; they had not invented it. It had 
 taken possession of them, the certainty had 
 seized them from on high. They must speak. 
 " And if I say I will not make mention of him 
 . . . then there is in my heart as it were a burn- 
 ing fire." They defy the whole body of the 
 people and their convictions based on custom 
 and tradition. They stand as great, eternal, 
 
Prophets and their Religion 131 
 
 shining examples for all those who, in the hard 
 struggle with the sluggishness and the foolish- 
 ness of the majority, follow their own higher, 
 God-given conviction. " They shall return unto 
 thee, but thou shalt not return unto them." 
 
 For it was in truth a higher belief that they 
 represented, and it was through this belief that 
 the natural relation between God and His 
 people was shattered. Religion shatters the 
 fetters of the nations. The God of the prophets 
 is no longer a God of the one nation or the 
 one land. He is the God who is able to destroy 
 His people, and endures for ever in His majesty 
 and glory. His rule is world-wide ; the strange 
 nations, even the mightiest, are all in His 
 power, they are scourges in His hands. The 
 day of judgment will come for proud Assyria, 
 for Babylon, the ruler of the world. He is the 
 ruler of the whole world. He has created this 
 world. His is the earth and what lives thereon, 
 and the nations are to Him as a drop in the 
 bucket. 
 
 Thus the natural relation between God and 
 His people is destroyed, and its place is taken 
 by a spiritual bond. We have already seen how 
 in ancient Israel the thought existed that the 
 relation between God and His people did not 
 rest on an entirely natural necessity, but on 
 the free, personal choice of God, who had 
 
132 What is Religion ? 
 
 called His people out of Egypt and had formed 
 a union with them. This idea was now seriously- 
 accepted. The relation between the God of 
 Israel and His people was a purely moral 
 one ; He is a God of righteousness ; He desires 
 right and justice to flow from His people 
 as from a stream. Because that is not so He 
 rejects His people — perhaps to the very end. 
 We read, " Ye shall be holy : for I the Lord thy 
 God am holy." "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord 
 of Hosts, all the world is full of His majesty." 
 God will not commune with His people by 
 means of customary rites and usages. Outward 
 observances will wrest no favours from Him. 
 He who desires to serve Him must serve Him 
 with his conscience, with an obedient will, with 
 his whole life ; he must serve Him with his 
 whole heart and soul and being. The prophets 
 have always been powerful opponents of cere- 
 monial worship, not merely degraded forms of 
 it, but any forms. All the great prophets — 
 Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, at any rate at the 
 beginning, Jeremiah, the second Isaiah — were 
 in conflict with ceremonial worship. Only the 
 later prophets, from the time of Ezekiel, showed 
 any favour towards it. Jehovah, they an- 
 nounced, took no pleasure in bloody sacrifice 
 and burnt sacrifice, in feasts, and new moons, 
 and Sabbath solemnities. He had commanded 
 
Prophets and their Religion 133 
 
 none of these things from the fathers in the 
 desert. His favour is not confined to worship 
 in the Temple at Jerusalem. " Trust ye not 
 in lying words, saying, The Temple of the Lord, 
 the Temple of the Lord are these. For if ye 
 thoroughly amend your ways and your doings ; 
 if ye thoroughly execute judgments between 
 a man and his neighbour ; if ye oppress not 
 the stranger, the fatherless, the widow, and 
 shed not innocent blood in this place, neither 
 walk after other gods to your own hurt : then 
 will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the 
 land that I gave to your fathers." 
 
 The preaching of the prophets ends with a 
 great note of interrogation. They saw before 
 them, to the bitter end, darkness and annihila- 
 tion. Yet side by side, very faintly, hopeful 
 thoughts arise ; perhaps, who could tell, the 
 miraculous might happen ! If only a remnant 
 of Israel repented its evil ways, perhaps Jehovah 
 would incline His heart, and would pardon the 
 exiled adulterous Israel. Then perhaps the new 
 age would dawn, the age of the New Covenant, 
 when Jehovah would remove from His people 
 their stony heart, and give them a warm heart 
 instead. More and more emphatically was this 
 note struck. And when Israel and Judea lay 
 in the dust, the prophets, on the wings of the 
 Spirit, hastened to foretell the future ; they 
 
134 What is Religion? 
 
 announced freedom and redemption. In full 
 accord now they sang : 
 
 " Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith 
 your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, 
 and cry unto her, that her warfare is accom- 
 plished, that her iniquity is pardoned. . . . The 
 voice of one that crieth, Prepare ye in the 
 wilderness the way of the Lord, make straight 
 in the desert a high way for our God. Every 
 valley shall be exalted, and every mountain 
 and hill shall be made low: and the crooked 
 shall be made straight, and the rough places 
 plain: and the glory of the Lord shall be 
 revealed." 
 
 Thus the figures of the prophets of ancient 
 Israel stand before us ; solitary, mysterious, 
 tragic figures towering high above us. The 
 greatest among them could see in the future 
 only darkness, sin, and ruin ; the later ones, 
 who were once more filled with hope, did not 
 see its fruition. It was better for them that 
 they did not see it, for they would have been 
 bitterly disappointed. For whenever their 
 preaching was successful, whenever their spirit 
 touched the spirit of the people it was, one 
 might say, no longer their spirit. All was 
 again petrified into formulae, and so much dust 
 and corruption hung around the glorious revela- 
 tion that it was scarcely to be recognised 
 
Prophets and their Religion 135 
 
 again. This was the greatest tragedy of their 
 life and work. 
 
 And yet, it must be allowed, many of them 
 attained their object. They saved the religion 
 of their people, they gave it a new foundation, 
 so that it became strong enough to survive the 
 passing away of the particular form of national 
 life in which the faith had originated. 
 
 For us the prophets stand as shining summits ; 
 round about them night and darkness cover 
 the valleys and the hills. But over there glitters 
 the light of day, the golden beams of the sun 
 flame forth. It will be a long time before the 
 sun, bringing light and life, will penetrate into 
 the valleys and ravines ; but nevertheless the 
 time will come. Already the light from on high 
 has shone upon us. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE RELIGIONS OF THE LAW — JUDAISM, 
 ZOROASTRIANISM, ISLAMISM 
 
 MANY of the religions which have just 
 been considered did not remain at the 
 height which they reached in the age of the 
 prophets. In the history of religion the valleys 
 succeed the heights. The prophetical ideals 
 became the common property of a wider circle, 
 but the victory of the idea, its apprehension 
 and acceptance by the people, becomes fatal 
 to its purity. And yet a very great progress 
 was made, which must not be misinterpreted 
 nor undervalued. Although the ideals of the 
 prophets no longer remained in their absolute 
 purity, yet they exercised an ever-widening 
 influence. For even in all their backslidings 
 and corruptions and dealings with strange gods 
 it was still the prophetic ideals which exercised 
 great influence. 
 Now at this time there arose in the religious 
 
 136 
 
The Religions of the Law 137 
 
 life of men transition forms, hybrid and contra- 
 dictory forms : religions which, on the one 
 hand, show a decidedly universal tendency, and 
 yet, on the other hand, are strictly linked to the 
 nation ; monotheism, but with many polytheistic 
 elements ; religions Tvhich have advanced beyond 
 the stage of ceremonial worship and yet give 
 plenty of scope for such worship ; a piety which 
 shows a tendency towards the worship of God 
 in spirit and in truth, and yet is more and more 
 deeply steeped in outward ceremonials and tradi- 
 tions, in customs and usages. These religions 
 are often described as the religions of the law ; 
 it would be more suitable to describe them as 
 religions of observance. For custom and 
 religious ceremony play the central part in 
 them. 
 
 In studying the phenomena appertaining to 
 these religions we must first of all deal with 
 Judaism — that is, with the Jewish religion of 
 post-prophetical times, as it shaped itself in the 
 time of the Babylonian exile and after ; and above 
 all, with that form of Judaism as it appeared 
 in the century before Christ and in the time of 
 the New Testament. The literature to be con- 
 sidered is found partly in the Old Testament, 
 especially in the later parts of the five books 
 of Moses, in the so-called code of laws of the 
 priests to be found in Exodus, Leviticus, and 
 
138 What is Religion ? 
 
 Numbers, further in a large number of the 
 Psalms, although these display a broader piety 
 and an earlier spirit. Lastly, there are a con- 
 siderable number of later Jewish writings 
 known by the name of the Apocrypha and the 
 pseudo-epigraphs. These include the really 
 valuable literature of the Apocalypse, which 
 begins with the Old Testament book of Daniel, 
 and to which, in accordance with its funda- 
 mental character, the New Testament revelation 
 of St. John belongs. 
 
 Secondly we must study the Persian religion 
 after Zarathustra, to which period the greater 
 part of the Persian religious book, the Avesta, 
 belongs. Only perhaps in one chapter of the 
 book of Yasna which contains the " Gathas " do 
 we go back directly to the older reform period. 
 Another part, the Yasht, contains songs, which 
 perhaps reflect the pre-Zarathustrian period of 
 polytheism, which later was again to be prac- 
 tised. The rest of the Avesta belongs to the 
 period with which we are now dealing. The 
 Persian book of the law, the Vendidad, is 
 an historical religious pendant to the Mosaic 
 Pentateuch. 
 
 The Iranian religion has had a varied history. 
 In the time of the rise of the Persian world- 
 dominion it spread west and north into the 
 Babylonian plain, to Armenia, Cappadocia, 
 
The Religions of the Law 139 
 
 Pontus, Cilicia. Alexander the Great destroyed 
 the Persian empire but not the Persian religion. 
 At the end of the third century B.C. the Persian 
 nation had risen to a new independence under 
 the rule of the Arsacidae, and in the third cen- 
 tury A.D., under the Sarsanians, the orthodox 
 Persian State and the orthodox Persian Church 
 began. It was only then that the religious 
 books of the Avesta were collected and edited. 
 
 Thirdly, we can only partly include here the 
 religion of the Greek cultured people — based on 
 Plato — from the time of Alexander the Great to 
 the fall of Hellenic civilisation. This religion, 
 indeed, does not really belong here at all, and 
 its true nature will be considered in the next 
 chapter. Yet there is a formal relation, for we 
 can trace here a compromise between a higher 
 spiritual religion and a religion of the people. 
 
 Fourthly, we must consider the religion of a 
 far later time, Islamism — the reform of Mo- 
 hammed. On the whole, this religion must be 
 regarded as one of retrogression, a religion of 
 the law and of observance. Mohammed, a very 
 complex personality, concerning whom it is very 
 difficult to come to any definite opinion, was, in 
 any case, not an original religious genius of the 
 first rank. His life's work was eminently 
 political, the union of the Arab tribes into a 
 nation on a common religious basis, with the 
 
140 what is Religion ? 
 
 repudiation of the law of blood-revenge and 
 blood-feud. This religion is based upon much 
 that was contained in Judaism and Christianity, 
 and to Mahomet both these religions appeared 
 to have much that was corrupt. The prophetic 
 self -consciousness which Mohammed apparently 
 possessed was no self-deception. The prophetic 
 gift and significance were preserved in him in 
 their grand simplicity ; out of the wild, fantastic, 
 half-corrupt religious ideas he created for his 
 half-barbaric Bedouin tribes a religious concep- 
 tion suitable to their stage of civilisation, by 
 casting on one side a large number of unsuitable 
 ideas. Yet this religious conception marks a 
 retrograde step if we compare it with the reli- 
 gious ideas of the Old and the New Testament. 
 
 In conclusion, we must call attention to the 
 fact that much of what Tvill be brought forward 
 as characteristic of the religions of the law may 
 be applied to certain branches of the Christian 
 Church, the Greek - Catholic and the Roman 
 Church bearing marks of the legal, ceremonial, 
 and particularistic nature of the worship, and 
 even the Evangelical churches cannot be said 
 to be entirely free from this. 
 
 With these preliminary remarks we shall now 
 endeavour to state clearly the peculiar charac- 
 teristics of the religions of the law in their most 
 important aspects. 
 
The Religions of the Law 141 
 
 I. The prophets were the promulgators of 
 monotheism, and this — chief at least among, 
 perhaps, other causes — gave to their preaching 
 a universality hitherto lacking. They announced 
 a God whose power was not limited to a people, 
 an ideal of life which could hold good for all. 
 In both respects, however, the religions con- 
 nected with the prophets were not able to 
 keep to this high level. 
 
 The old prophets of Israel had announced 
 that Jehovah would annihilate His people, and 
 would destroy the union between religion and 
 nation. The later prophets firmly believed in 
 a God whose people were at the lowest ebb, 
 but they announced the restoration of these 
 people. One of the greatest among them, the 
 second Isaiah, made deductions of the widest 
 import : there was only one God, and all nations 
 were to serve Him. But Israel is the servant 
 of the Lord, who will lead the nations to 
 acknowledge God. Its sufferings are the 
 punishment which the just suffer for the benefit 
 of the unjust. 
 
 When, however, after the Exile, an inde- 
 pendent little nation arose in Jerusalem the 
 peculiar universality preached by the prophets 
 was lost. Israel itself remained inalienably 
 monotheistic ; but the Jews comforted them- 
 selves with the idea that the one Almighty 
 
142 What is Religion ? 
 
 God had chosen this one nation only, and was 
 only directing the whole world for the sake 
 of and for the benefit of this one nation — an 
 inconceivable contradiction, of course. The idea 
 that was quite natural in a national religion, 
 that God belongs to His nation, and the nation 
 to its God, becomes now naked egoism and 
 mere narrow-mindedness. In this way Jewish 
 sectarianism arose. 
 
 The Jewish religion went through a further 
 period of development, and from the second 
 century B.C. (perhaps even from the third) it 
 experienced an enormous expansion. Judaism 
 overflowed its boundaries ; it extended to 
 Babylon, Egypt, and North Africa, to Syria 
 and Asia Minor, and even as far as Greece 
 and Rome, and then towards the West. There 
 arose on all sides, especially in the larger 
 towns, the Jewish communities of the Dis- 
 persion. Statistics — not of a very reliable 
 nature, it is true — have been brought forward 
 showing that every seventh or eighth man in 
 the Roman Empire was a Jew. This Judaism 
 now began a world propaganda, with great 
 results. Caesar and the great Emperor 
 Augustus, as well as the latter's friend, 
 Agrippa, were special patrons of Judaism, and 
 later still, in the time of Nero, the supporters 
 of the synagogue exercised great influence on 
 
The Religions of the Law 143 
 
 the Roman Imperial Court. Judaism was wise 
 enough to know how to make use of circum- 
 stances ; as we know from the Gospels, it 
 gathered around the Jewish synagogues of the 
 separate towns a circle of religious-minded 
 pagans. Here we have the earliest appear- 
 ance of a great world-mission, the progress of 
 which we can trace, though, it must be at 
 once said, it was not the only one. At the 
 very same time the various religions in the 
 Greek-Roman Empire were striving after 
 universality. Generally speaking, the religions 
 which spread from the East to the West 
 had all a monotheistic tendency, or at least 
 a tendency towards a simplification of the 
 complicated world of gods ; they overstepped 
 the boundaries of nations, and welcomed 
 every one without regard to rank and 
 nationality. The time was ripe for universal 
 monotheism, and Judaism was, for the time 
 being, the most important among these parallel 
 phenomena. 
 
 But even this phenomenon of the Jewish 
 world-Church and world-mission had its clearly 
 marked boundaries and limitations, and, in- 
 deed, in spite of its world-wide expansion the 
 Jewish religion remained the religion of a 
 nation. Whoever at that time was entirely 
 converted to Judaism changed not merely his 
 
144 What is Religion ? 
 
 religion, but his nationality. He ceased to 
 be a Greek or a Roman, and became a Jew. 
 Hence the hatred with which the populace, 
 as well as the highly educated, the leaders in 
 literature, made war upon Judaism as early 
 as the first century B.C. It was not the 
 religion that was attacked, but the race, the 
 nation. A literary opponent of Judaism, no 
 less a person than the historian Tacitus, has 
 stated his view : " They arouse the hatred of 
 all; they will not mingle at bed or board, they 
 abstain from mixed marriages. Those who 
 are converted to their religion adopt the same 
 customs, and they are taught above every- 
 thing else to reject the gods, to abandon 
 their fatherland, to despise their children 
 and mothers." And yet to the Jews them- 
 selves those God-fearing worshippers at the 
 synagogue who only accepted the Jewish 
 belief and the Jewish morality (and not the 
 ceremonial laws) were regarded as pious men 
 of the second rank only. There is a great 
 difference between the kernel and the outside 
 leaf, between the born Jew and the proselyte. 
 Still, this period marks the nearest approach 
 of Judaism to universalism. Already, by the 
 end of the first century A.D., after the Romans 
 had destroyed the Jewish nation, after there 
 had arisen the Christian propaganda side by 
 
The Religions of the Law 145 
 
 side with the Jewish one, which it was begin- 
 ning to surpass, Judaism was thrown back 
 upon itself, and it has remained until the 
 present day a religious community limited to 
 one people. 
 
 Very similar, yet not precisely of the same 
 kind, w^as the historical progress of the Per- 
 sian religion. Briefly it may be said that, in 
 the long run, it remained, in spite of the 
 germ of universality which it contained, linked 
 with one nation only, and here the retro- 
 gression was even more strongly marked. 
 For although the religion of Zarathustra had 
 been originally monotheistic, into the later 
 Persian religion the variegated polytheistic 
 national belief had again found its way. A 
 permanent part of the Avesta is the Yasht, 
 the hymns to the various Iranian gods. The 
 old gods of the people once more win or 
 maintain an independent existence by the 
 side of Ahura-Mazda. The highest god of a 
 side branch of the Persian religion, which was 
 superior to it in importance for centuries, was 
 not Ahura-Mazda, but the old Arian god, 
 Mithras, common to both the Persians and 
 the Hindoos. 
 
 Yet in many periods of its history the 
 Persian religion evolved just as strong a 
 tendency towards universalism as the Jewish 
 
 11 
 
146 What is Religion ? 
 
 religion, perhaps even a stronger one. It was 
 the religion of an imperial, important nation, 
 and with this nation it spread into the West. 
 In all probability, indeed, it influenced later 
 Judaism in its development in several par- 
 ticulars — in its belief in the future life and 
 the resurrection, and in the dualistic character 
 of its religion {i.e., the belief in the devil). 
 The Persian religion, however, attained its 
 highest power of development in its offspring, 
 the religion of Mithras. We know, indeed, 
 very little really about the inner, spiritual 
 merit of this religion. It belongs to the so- 
 called mystery-religions of the later Roman- 
 Hellenic period of culture, which were surrounded 
 with secrecy. The principal god, and practi- 
 cally the only god of this religion, was Mithras, 
 originally the god of light, later the uncon- 
 querable, victorious sun-god as well as the 
 guardian of all fidelity, morality, and veracity. 
 From the end of the second century a.d. this 
 religion, always favoured by the Roman Em- 
 perors, became the most important in the 
 Roman Empire. With its sharp distinction 
 between good and evil, its fundamental prin- 
 ciple that every useful act, every act that 
 advanced morality and civilisation, was an 
 act performed for God ; with the severe dis- 
 cipline, the acts of renunciation and of penance 
 
The Religions of the Law 147 
 
 which it imposed upon its worshippers ; with 
 its worship of the victorious sun -god ; with the 
 mystical nimbus with which it surrounded 
 the person of the worldly ruler, this religion 
 was fitted, as no other was, to become the 
 religion of the Roman legions. The Roman 
 legions carried the worship of Mithras beyond 
 the Rhine ; in Baden and Hesse places where 
 the Persian god was worshipped are still to 
 be found. The religion of Mithras was the 
 last dangerous rival of Christianity. The 
 Emperor Julian, the great opponent of the 
 Galilean, was a worshipper of Mithras. Finally, 
 however, after the victory of Christianity in 
 the Roman Empire, the Persian religion was 
 entirely confined to the Persian nation. Here 
 the orthodox, intolerant Persian Church of 
 the Sassanian period, which persecuted the 
 Christians, was developed until the end was 
 prepared for it by the triumphant progress 
 of Islamism. 
 
 We have now come to the third religion 
 which is to be considered. Islamism, indeed, 
 has the characteristics of a religion which has 
 remained at the transition stage. Considered 
 superficially, it seems, of course, to have the 
 character of a monotheistic universal religion. 
 Belief in one God as the central point of 
 religion is upheld with great zeal, with fanatical 
 
 O 
 
V 
 
 148 What is Religion ? 
 
 obstinacy even. We need not discuss here the 
 lack of any sense of suitability which was dis- 
 played in retaining in a monotheistic religion, 
 a place sacred to the heathen gods — the Kaaba 
 (originally a stone fetich), in Mecca — as the 
 centre of religious worship. Islamism spread 
 over the most different nations and race and 
 kept, so it would appear, its universal character. 
 According to numbers, Islamism, with its 
 200,000,000 adherents, stands third among the 
 religions. Its proselytes to-day are numerically 
 greater than those of Christianity. But it 
 has not been successful in influencing the more 
 advanced and civilised peoples ; it has, on the 
 contrary, descended to the lower races, to the 
 Mongols and the negroes. In its native land of 
 Arabia, the population, speaking in general 
 terms, has once more sunk to the level of 
 Bedouin life before the time of Mohammed. 
 
 Yet Islamism seems to be a religion of 
 universal monotheism ; really, however, it was, 
 and remained, a national religion, or more 
 correctly, a politically restricted and limited 
 religion. Mohammed's life-work was indeed a 
 national and political one, the amalgamation 
 of the Arab tribes into a nation. The prophet, 
 during his last years, and his followers inscribed 
 on their banner, as their object, the political 
 dominion of the world. In the development of 
 
The Religions of the Law 149 
 
 Islamism the question of Mohammed's legal 
 successor — a political question of great moment 
 — played the most important part of all. Here 
 sects and parties were as much divided as 
 Christians on matters of belief. Islamism at- 
 tained its expansion by holy war and propa- 
 ganda by the sword. In its dealings with 
 Judaism and Christianity, it did not pursue the 
 proper object of a universal religion, namely, 
 conversion, but only that of political subjection. 
 It preferred, on the whole, the tribute money of 
 the unbeliever to conversion. To-day Islamism 
 is still a political power. It recognises, generally 
 speaking, only one political chief, who is, for 
 the majority of believers, the Sultan of Turkey. 
 When the Shah of Persia, who claims leadership, 
 goes to Constantinople, many ceremonial objec- 
 tions are made to the visit. And if an Islamic 
 warrior-hero were to appear upon the scene 
 with such success that the belief spread that he 
 was the longed-for redeemer, the Mahdi, the 
 whole of Islam would undertake a holy war; 
 for religion and politics are very closely bound 
 up with one another in Islamism. 
 
 If at this point we cast a glance at the 
 development of the Christian Churches, we shall 
 see how the national, political element had here 
 gained the mastery. The Christian religion of 
 the Eastern Byzantine Empire is almost as 
 
% 
 
 Ou 
 
 150 What is Religion? 
 
 absolutely national and limited as the Persian 
 Church of the Sassanian Empire. The great 
 rival of Islamism, Rome of the Middle Ages, 
 Rome of the powerful Papacy and the Crusades, 
 had generated a political piety, which, so far as 
 its essential character is concerned, stands in 
 close relationship to that of Islamism. Only 
 after long and severe struggles has religion 
 been able to burst the fetters of national and 
 political narrowness, and rise to the concep- 
 tion of a wide, free universalism. 
 
 II. We have seen how the prophets were the 
 opponents of sacrificial worship, the central 
 idea of all national religions. The religions 
 based on the law maintained a divided opinion 
 on this matter. The early prophets of Israel 
 were zealous supporters of the worship in the 
 Temple, and after the Babylonian captivity the 
 ceremonial tendency triumphed in the newly- 
 founded Jewish priest-state. Every seventh 
 man of those who returned from exile was a 
 priest. The later legislation of Israel was 
 ceremonial and priest-ridden. The majority of 
 the psalms bear witness to an unrestricted, 
 unhesitating ceremonial worship. But the 
 critical voices were loudly opposed to it ; the 
 last chapter of Isaiah displays this in most 
 powerful manner : 
 . " The heaven is My throne, the earth is My 
 
The Religions of the Law 151 
 
 footstool : what manner of house will ye build 
 unto Me? what place shall be My rest? . . . 
 He that killeth an ox is as he that slayeth a 
 man ; he that sacrificeth a lamb, as he that 
 breaketh a dog's neck; he that offereth an 
 oblation, as he that offereth swine's blood ; he 
 that burneth frankincense, as he that blesseth 
 an idol." 
 
 It is true that powerful polemical voices of 
 this kind were but seldom raised. From the 
 point of view of general characterisation, it is 
 more important to observe that, on the whole, 
 the later Jewish piety bore no natural relation 
 to the newly arisen worship. Worship no longer 
 remained the centre of piety ; this was, indeed, 
 impossible, owing to the wide expansion of 
 Judaism. The worship so intimately bound up 
 with the Temple at Jerusalem did not suffice 
 for a Judaism spread over the whole world. A 
 religious service in which the individual could 
 only take part once or twice in his life, perhaps, 
 could not very well remain the central point 
 of religion. With the third and second cen- 
 turies B.C. the deterioration and secularisation 
 of the Jewish priesthood began to set in, 
 and, above all, it is to be noted that the new 
 religious service of the synagogue was accepted, 
 the value of which we shall estimate later. 
 Thus the soul of pious Judaism was released 
 
152 What is Religion ? 
 
 from ceremonial worship. The destruction of 
 the Temple, and consequently of Divine worship 
 (in 70 A.D.), did not in any way injure Judaism. 
 
 Matters followed very much the same course 
 in the Persian religion, though they are not 
 so clearly to be distinguished. Zarathushtra 
 preached, on the whole, it would seem, a religion 
 without ceremony. The priests were the 
 enemies of the prophet. It struck the Greeks 
 as extraordinary above all else that in the 
 Persian religion there were no temples, no 
 images, and no sacrificing of animals. Still, there 
 remained a certain amount of ceremonial in the 
 religion. There was, specially, the worship of 
 fire. In numberless temples of fire the holy fire 
 was maintained, tended, and worshipped amid 
 countless ceremonies which only the members of 
 the priesthood were able to perform. Gradually 
 animal sacrifice crept into the Persian religion. 
 In the religion of Mithras sacrifice played a 
 very important part, as did the worship in the 
 subterranean temples at the altars of the god to 
 whom bulls were offered. This worship was 
 surrounded by mysterious rites of a magic 
 nature. 
 
 Islamism, the most consistent of all the three 
 religions in this respect, substituted for sacri- 
 ficial worship a spiritual form of worship. Its 
 examples were Christianity, and, above all, a 
 
The Religions of the Law 153 
 
 Judaism which no longer employed sacrifices 
 in its worship. The history of the Christian 
 religion, however, shows how very difficult it 
 is to overcome in a religion the idea of sacrifice, 
 the belief that man is not permitted to approach 
 the Godhead without sacrifice. From the time of 
 Paul onwards the central idea of the Christian 
 religion has been, more or less, that for believers 
 the necessary Sacrifice was offered once for all 
 in the death of Christ. Both branches of the 
 Catholic Church still preserve as the central 
 point of their worship the sacrificial Mass, the 
 spiritual representation of the great Sacrifice 
 that was once offered. 
 
 III. Although the religions of the law grad- 
 ually departed from Temple worship and 
 sacrificial worship, and the whole series of 
 customs, &c., bound up with these, no truly 
 spiritual religion arose in its place. For instead 
 of " worship " a powerful external means of 
 union came into existence ; this was " obser- 
 vance," or religious custom. We must endeavour 
 to understand the nature of this phenomenon. 
 
 Let us consider later Judaism. What gives 
 this religion its peculiar hall-mark? Is it not 
 religious custom — circumcision, the mainten- 
 ance of the Sabbath, the tithes, the avoidance 
 of mixed marriages, the laws concerning food, 
 directions for purifications, and not sacrifice 
 
154 What is Religion? 
 
 and worship in the temples ? Throughout the 
 world a Jew is recognised by these things. 
 
 All these customs were originally national 
 customs to which no specially religious 
 significance was attached, or at any rate only 
 in so far as all national customs are at the 
 same time religious customs when religion is 
 at the national stage. Now these customs 
 become the very centre of religion, they are 
 the first holy commands of God. Circurocision, 
 originally a national symbol — the meaning of 
 which is not quite clear — that Israel had 
 separated from the other nations, became the 
 very essence of Judaism. The union of God with 
 Abraham rested on the idea of circumcision. The 
 custom of keeping the Sabbath holy was a 
 very old religious custom, perhaps of Baby- 
 lonian origin ; its meaning was no clearer than 
 that of circumcision, but now it becomes the 
 second great religious law. On the seventh day 
 man is to cease from his labour, as God rested 
 from His work of creation. The breaking of 
 this law was punishable by death. The payment 
 of tithes, originally a simple duty appertaining 
 to worship, became now a principle of religious 
 life. Curiously enough, this payment was now 
 regarded as of much greater importance than 
 of yore, although, as a matter of fact, the service 
 in the Temple provided by it lost more and 
 
The Religions of the Law 155 
 
 more any significance for the true inner life of 
 religion. 
 
 This emphasis laid on religious custom 
 developed — in the centuries immediately preced- 
 ing the period of the New Testament — into a 
 regular system. In this way there arose the 
 party which we call Pharisaical. The leader 
 of the Pharisees pronounced his ideal to be " to 
 put a hedge round the people" — that is, to 
 surround the whole life of the people with a 
 large number of ceremonial regulations, to 
 give them an appointed task for every moment, 
 every minute, every hour, and to preserve to 
 the sacred nation of God its peculiar character 
 among all other nations. It is almost impossible 
 to conceive the way in which the lives of the 
 faithful were bound down and confined by the 
 hundreds and thousands of minute, insignificant 
 rules which surrounded them. The religion of 
 the Pharisees became the classical example of 
 a religion of observance, and at the same time 
 it marks a retrograde step. Yet it cannot be 
 denied that enormous religious energy was put 
 into this religion, but it was dissipated in trifles, 
 ensnared in outward observances. The object, 
 that of preserving to the Jews their peculiarities, 
 was attained, but at the price of contempt 
 among the other nations for the " sacred 
 people," 
 
156 What is Religion? 
 
 The Persian religion (Zoroastrianism) developed 
 in a manner analogous to that of Judaism. It 
 also became a religion of observance. The 
 Vendidad, the Persian Book of the Law, bears 
 a great likeness to the middle books of the 
 Pentateuch. The representations of the battles 
 of the Greeks and the Persians on the celebrated 
 so-called Alexander sarcophagus are well known. 
 There the Persians are everywhere recognised 
 by the great mouth-bands which half covered 
 their faces. We are confronted with one of 
 the principles of the Persian religion. The pious 
 Persian must always wear a band over his 
 mouth so that his breath may not pollute the 
 holy elements, fire and air. Besides the wearing 
 of this mouth-band it is the religious duty of 
 every adult Persian to wear the sacred girdle. 
 The whole Persian religion is penetrated with a 
 fear of dishonouring and defiling the elements. 
 Especially characteristic is the treatment of 
 corpses, which is a quite intelligible custom, 
 regarded from the above point of view. The 
 Persian may not burn the corpse, for then 
 he would defile the holy fire, and he must not 
 confide it to the earth, for that would be a crime 
 against the holy element. So the bodies are 
 put into great uncovered towers, and left to 
 the birds to devour. In preparing food it is 
 considered among the Persians a serious sin to 
 
The Religions of the Law 157 
 
 let the water boil over. The fire is defiled by- 
 water that boils over. The Vendidad is full 
 of insignificant regulations, often of a ridiculous 
 kind, and much space is devoted to minute 
 rules concerning the inviolability of certain 
 classes of animals — cattle, dogs. An extensive 
 system of penances and punishments corre- 
 sponds to these minute ceremonial regulations. 
 A deadly sin, which a man may very easily 
 commit, may be absolved by two hundred 
 scourgings. 
 
 It will be an easy task to show that the third 
 religion which is to be considered, Islamism, 
 placed religious custom in a central position. 
 We need only call to mind the so-called five 
 foundation pillars, i.e., the religious principles of 
 this religion. These, in addition to acknowledg- 
 ment of one God, were the duty of prayer five 
 times daily, the keeping of the month of the 
 fast, the giving of alms to the poor, and pil- 
 grimage to Mecca — at least once in a lifetime. 
 Regulations concerning religious observances 
 almost entirely occupy the central place in the 
 religion. 
 
 Ceremony, without doubt, is a powerful ex- 
 ternal bond of union in religion. Wherever it 
 exercises a commanding influence there is cer- 
 tainly no danger of an entirely isolated religious 
 
158 What is Religion ? 
 
 life ; by means of it the true inwardness and 
 spirituality of religion can be preserved, the 
 consciousness of a direct vital relation to God, 
 and the feeling of unconditional moral duty. 
 Yet it is clear that it may be an enormous 
 danger for the religious life. Three great 
 religions have been more or less destroyed 
 by it. What a power ceremony displayed 
 even in the Christian Churches ! At the same 
 time, ceremony kept religion firmly fixed at 
 the national stage, for, as we have already 
 seen, the national custom continues in the 
 religious observance. There is also another 
 point to be considered : the current idea of 
 right is connected with custom. Religious 
 custom is synonymous with religious right. 
 Religion and jurisprudence at this stage of 
 religion form a very close alliance. Religion 
 threatens to become merely in the nature of a 
 contract between God and man. The feeling of 
 the superiority of the Godhead tends to disap- 
 pear ; the idea of profit plays the principal part. 
 Religion becomes a business. And just as legal 
 justice, in accordance with its nature — at least 
 in practice — is outwardly casuistical and more 
 negative than positive, so religion assumes the 
 character of casuistry outwardly, and threatens 
 to fall into ruin through an excess of regula- 
 tions, and especially of prohibitions. Thus 
 
J 
 
 J 
 
 The Religions of the Law 159 
 
 custom, usage, and right put obstacles in the 
 way of a closer union betT\^een the two vital 
 forces which are really connected — ^religion and 
 morality. 
 
 IV. We must also notice some new charac- 
 teristic forms and peculiarities which are 
 common to the religions at this stage. Speak- 
 ing generally, it may be said that when religion 
 freed itself from the fetters of nationality and 
 ceased to be merely a national custom such new 
 forms were a necessity. ^ 
 
 First of all we have the creed. Religion is U^-^ 
 now no longer a matter of custom, but of per- 
 sonal conviction ; hence a new bond of union 
 came into existence which would render the 
 possession of religion which all held in common 
 quite secure. This new bond was a short sum- 
 mary of the most important points in the 
 religion, in the form of dogmatic sentences — 
 that is, the creed. Among the original docu- 
 ments of Zoroastrianism numerous creeds of 
 this kind are to be found. The oldest known 
 creed of the Ahuna-Vairya — which even to 
 the followers of this religion had become an 
 unintelligible formula (one remembers the 
 Catholic Paternoster here) — may be roughly 
 translated as "The will of the Lord is the 
 law of justice. The reward of heaven is for 
 
i6o What is Religion? 
 
 those who have worked in the world for 
 Mazda. Ahura grants the kingdom to those 
 who have helped the poor." Another interest- 
 ing formula ^vhich is used in the confession of 
 the Mazda faith runs thus : "I abjure the 
 devil. I confess myself as a worshipper of 
 Mazda, a believer in Zarathushtra, an enemy of 
 the Devas, an adorer of the Ameshas-Spentas. 
 I abjure theft and the plunder of cattle. I 
 abjure plundering and laying waste. Sincerely 
 and with raised hand do I swear all this." It is 
 noticeable how in this confession of faith the 
 religion of Zoroastrianism appears in its striving 
 after civilisation, in its struggle against the 
 barbarians. In Israel the creed is less strongly 
 developed. The prayer, however, which as early 
 as the period of the New Testament the Jew 
 had to say morning and evening, the so-called 
 Schema, is simply a creed : ' ' Hear, O Israel, 
 Jehovah is our God, Jehovah alone. Thou shalt 
 love Jehovah thy God with all thy heart, and 
 all thy soul, and all thy powers." *' Allah is 
 great, and Mohammed is his prophet," confesses 
 the follower of Mohammed. 
 
 The belief naturally corresponds to the creed. 
 In the prophetical religions, as we have already 
 seen, everything is based on personal conviction 
 of belief. The consciousness that religion was a 
 belief was already beginning to dawn, although 
 
The Religions of the Law i6i 
 
 it only developed itself freely at a higher stage. 
 We have already referred to the fact that one 
 of the first Medean kings, King Phraortes, was 
 called the Confessor. "Above all else, love 
 thy God, who created heaven and earth " ; 
 thus began a Jewish document in which was 
 shortly summarised, for the purpose of propa- 
 ganda work, the quintessence of the Jewish 
 religion and morality. And as religion became 
 more and more conviction, it follows that now 
 in one and the same people a sharp line is 
 drawn between the religious and the irreligious, 
 between believers and non-believers. As long as 
 religion remained stationary at the stage of 
 national religions, the godless were a rapidly 
 disappearing exception. The supporters of the 
 nation were naturally supporters of the religion. 
 Now religion makes a cleft in the individual 
 nation. In the early Persian documents we often 
 meet with a distinction between believers and 
 doubters, between the godless and the faithful. 
 It is well known how in the Old Testament the 
 believers in the law are contrasted with the 
 scoffers, the pious with the godless; and it is 
 likewise well known, as we see in the New 
 Testament, that hostility existed between the 
 Pharisees on the one hand and the sinners and 
 publicans on the other. 
 
 V. These religions now found for themselves 
 
 12 
 
1 62 What is Religion ? 
 
 a new bond of union in a collection of the 
 original documents appertaining to their 
 religion. Everywhere at this stage of religion, 
 we meet with the same noteworthy fact, a 
 canon of the holy writings. In Judaism we 
 have the collection of Old Testament writings 
 which was finished in the time of the New 
 Testament ; for Zoroastrianism we have the 
 religious documents, the Avestas, which did not 
 receive their final form until the period of the 
 Sassanian dynasty; Buddhism had its Tripi- 
 taka (so-called because of its contents, divided 
 into three parts), Islamism its Koran. The 
 secular, half-philosophic nature of the late 
 Hellenic, post-Platonic religion is seen in the 
 fact that no attempt was made to put together 
 a similar collection on its behalf. 
 
 These collections of writings are of very 
 varied contents ; they all, however, have this 
 characteristic in common, that they contain 
 witnesses from the classic past of religion, from 
 a period that is considered absolutely authorita- 
 tive for the present. Proverbs, sayings, writings 
 of the founder of the religion and of the great 
 men of the past who stood near him ; hymns to 
 the Godhead ; ancient sacred history ; stories from 
 the life of the founder; ceremonial, religious, 
 and moral directions — all these are to be found 
 in these books of manifold contents. 
 
The Religions of the Law 163 
 
 This canon now becomes an absolute autho- 
 rity; it gives clear, positive, and complete 
 answers to every question respecting belief, 
 morality, and worship. Its authority is binding 
 and inviolable, for the canon — this again is a 
 conviction common to all these religions — is 
 inspired. It is not the work of man, but it has 
 been given literally by the Godhead. To faith 
 the most impossible thing becomes possible. To 
 the Jews of the New Testament period not only 
 were the Old Testament writings inspired, but 
 likewise the Greek translation of these writings. 
 The law of Moses was prehistoric (in their view), 
 it existed before the creation of the world and 
 was revealed by Heaven. An almost fetich-like 
 reverence was paid to the Thora rolls, the rolls 
 on which the law was written. By the later 
 adherents of Islamism the Koran was regarded 
 as a book fallen from heaven. Every letter is 
 inspired, every letter is a witness ; the statement, 
 "It is written in the Koran," is decisive. Piety 
 consists of the most intimate familiarity with 
 the text of the writings. 
 
 Thus there arose a new order of leaders and 
 guides in the religious life ; as religion now 
 rests on a canon of holy writings, a careful, 
 systematic study of these writings is of the 
 utmost importance. The leaders of religion 
 
164 What is Religion ? 
 
 were now the learned men who had studied 
 the holy writings and knew every part of them 
 thoroughly. It is well known how important 
 was the part played by those learned in 
 the Holy Scriptures among the Jewish people 
 in the time of Christ. A saying of Hillel's, 
 a contemporary of Christ's, " No uneducated 
 man shuns sin, no common man is pious," illus- 
 trates the arrogance of this leadership based 
 on learning. We know how strongly Jesus 
 opposed this piety resting on learning. The 
 Mager played a somewhat similar part in the 
 Persian religion ; we must think of these men 
 as half-priests, and above all as learned men 
 well versed in the old sacred traditions. Parallel 
 to the phenomenon of the Jewish learned doctors 
 and the Mager were the late Hellenic philoso- 
 phers who taught religion and morality to their 
 little circles rather than secular knowledge. 
 Mohammedanism in the Middle Ages had its 
 theologians who exercised a beneficial influence 
 upon Christian theology. The theologians be- 
 came the leaders of religion. 
 
 In connection with this there arose a new 
 form of piety which might be described as 
 learned piety. Reverence for the Scriptures, 
 constant and devout reading of the Scriptures 
 were the signs of this piety. It is characteristic 
 
The Religions of tlie Law 165 
 
 of Jewish piety that the boy learnt to read 
 from the Scriptures. " The Bible became his 
 primer." In the early days of Islamism the 
 bigoted and fanatical sect of the " Koran- 
 readers " played a great part. In the beginning 
 of the struggle concerning the successor of the 
 Prophet, when two Mohammedan armies met 
 the side that had already been conquered put 
 Korans on the point of their lances, and then 
 those on the other side abstained from taking 
 advantage of their victory. True, earnest piety 
 may be and often has been combined with this 
 piety based on an absolute belief in the inspira- 
 tion of the Scriptures. But there is great, \ 
 danger attached to it. It is not only that piety / 
 tends to become mere learning: it is that this 
 constant dwelling upon the sacred past, this 
 constant neglect of the present and its duty, is 
 especially dangerous. Piety becomes an empty 
 game of memory, a game in which a crafty 
 ingenuity plays an important part. Those who 
 are best able to apply to the present and its 
 needs the half-understood texts of Scripture, 
 torn from their contexts, impress people and 
 are considered religious. 
 
 VI. We must also specially notice that now 
 an entirely new form of common worship 
 arose, that new form of worship which we 
 see most clearly in the Jewish synagogue. We 
 
1 66 What is Religion ? 
 
 have already mentioned that the real old 
 ceremonial worship of Judaism, now scattered 
 far and wide, was confined to the Temple at 
 Jerusalem. It was therefore almost a necessity 
 that a non-ritualistic worship in the synagogue 
 should arise. How was this service in the 
 synagogue instituted? A gathering together 
 of the community in a sacred building, especially 
 on the Sabbath, prayer in common, reading of 
 the Scriptures, exposition of the Scriptures — we 
 should call this preaching — blessing, these were 
 the elements of this Divine service. This new 
 form of worship spread with Judaism all over 
 the world. It was a Divine service without 
 ceremonial pomp, without a priesthood, without 
 sacrifice ; the organisation was completely 
 democratic. Truly we have here almost a 
 worship in spirit and in truth, in forms which 
 are still extraordinarily familiar to us. In the 
 Persian religion the service remained more 
 ceremonial, more ritualistic, but we possess 
 less clear information concerning the institu- 
 tions of Divine service in the Persian religion. 
 Tradition tells us that there were " reading- 
 places " in this religion. In Islamism, however, 
 we have again this same form of non-cere- 
 monial worship. One of the five dogmas of 
 Islamism is the duty of prayer five times daily. 
 What the Mohammedan calls a prayer we 
 
The Religions of the Law 167 
 
 should call a short service. Five times a day at 
 the appointed times the faithful gather together 
 in the mosques. From the graceful minarets, 
 the symbol of all Mohammedan towns, the 
 crier announces the hours of prayer. Under 
 the guidance of a leader, the pious say their 
 entirely conventional prayers. At mid-day there 
 is a solemn service with preaching. 
 
 Many other forms of religion at this stage 
 might be described ; I will only refer to the 
 lay prayers outside the synagogue, which were 
 systematic and regular, to the value which 
 was laid upon fasting in both Judaism and 
 Islamism, and to the importance of tending to 
 the poor and alms-giving in all three religions. 
 
 VII. The close connection between these three 
 religions in their main characteristics is seen 
 most clearly if we look at one fundamental 
 idea that is common to all three of them — that 
 of the Judgment, one of the most important ideas 
 in the history of religion. We have seen how 
 the thought of future retribution was already 
 present in the national religions, but nowhere — 
 with the exception of the Egyptian religion, 
 v^hich was already stagnant — was it the central 
 idea. In the religions of the law this idea now 
 gained an overmastering and dominating im- 
 portance. It seemed as if the Persian religion 
 were to take the lead here, for it was the Persian 
 
1 68 What is Religion ? 
 
 religion apparently that first developed the 
 idea of future retribution with very great 
 energy, and pushed it into the foreground. 
 " The reward of heaven is for the works which 
 are performed in this world for Mazda," runs 
 the text in the ancient Ahuna-Vairya. The 
 oldest writings of Zoroastrianism are full of mys- 
 terious references to the great day of terrible 
 judgment. The Persian religion developed 
 this idea in a twofold form ; on the one hand 
 it announced for the individual judgment 
 immediately after death, and on the other 
 hand it preached a great world-judgment by 
 Ahura-Mazda combined with the burning of 
 the world, the re-creation of the world, and 
 the resurrection of the dead. Judaism between 
 the third and second centuries, so it appears, 
 developed, under the influence of the Persian re- 
 ligion, and through the expansion of the germin- 
 ating ideas of its own religion, the thought of a 
 future retribution — also in a twofold form. And 
 finally this belief became the central point in 
 Mohammed's preaching. Wherever we open 
 the Koran we find the doctrine of the last day, 
 of eternal judgment. A few examples are suffi- 
 cient to show what power and weight this belief 
 had developed in these religions at the time 
 of which we are speaking. Here on the one 
 side we have a Jewish Apocalyptic writer at the 
 
The Religions of the Law 169 
 
 end of the first century A.D., the author of the 
 so-called Fourth Book of Ezra : 
 
 " And after seven days the world that yet 
 awaketh not shall be raised up, and that 
 shall die that is corrupt. And the earth shall 
 restore those that are asleep in her, and so 
 shall the dust those that dwell in silence, and 
 the secret places shall deliver those souls that 
 were committed unto them. 
 
 " And the Most High shall appear upon the 
 seat of judgment, and misery shall pass away, 
 and the long suffering shall have an end : 
 
 " But judgment only shall remain, truth shall 
 stand, and faith shall wax strong : 
 
 " And the work shall follow, and the reward 
 
 shall be shewed, and the good deeds shall be 
 
 of force, and wicked deeds shall bear no rule." 
 
 By the side of this may be placed Sura 101 of 
 
 the Koran : 
 
 " On that day men shall be like moths 
 scattered abroad, and the mountains shall be- 
 come like carded wool of various colours driven 
 by the wind. Moreover he whose balance shall 
 be heavy with good works, shall lead a pleasing 
 life : but as to him whose balance shall be 
 light, his dwelling shall be the pit of hell. Who 
 shall make thee to understand how frightful 
 the pit of hell is. It is a burning hell."* 
 
 * Sale's Translation. 
 
170 What is Religion ? 
 
 It is no wonder that in these religions — in 
 which all appears based on legal acts in 
 honour of God, and where right plays so 
 important a part — the idea of retribution should 
 occupy a central position. In any case these 
 religions have here developed a belief of 
 enormous importance for religious life, to 
 which it gave a concentrated, united, and 
 immense strength. The object of man's whole 
 life and action appears now to be his exami- 
 nation on the Day of Judgment before the 
 awful presence of God. Man is placed on the 
 earth for a short span of time in order to 
 prepare for eternity. Religion and morality are 
 most closely united in this belief. The whole 
 history of the world, from this aspect, becomes 
 an intimate unity, and at the end there is the 
 great Day of Judgment for the world. The life 
 of the individual becomes enormously more 
 valuable now, for by his acts and his omissions 
 he settles his eternal destiny, and in his own 
 hands he holds heaven and hell. 
 
 Here once more we perceive the limitations 
 and restrictions in the religions of the law. The 
 tendency towards external forms, the depend- 
 ^ence on the senses, the incapability of a pure 
 comprehension of any great and spiritual ideas are 
 clearly shown. The idea of judgment is every- 
 where a terribly material one, generally resolv- 
 
The Religions of the Law 171 
 
 ing itself into an entirely mechanical estimation 
 of good and bad works. The representation of 
 the judgment as scales in which the good and 
 evil deeds are weighed is widespread and popular 
 in all these religions. Life falls into a series of 
 single acts which can be added up. There is no 
 conception of religion as a spontaneous stretch- 
 ing forth towards God, or that the good life, 
 as God wishes it, is a unity, a whole. Religion 
 becomes a business, a haggling and a bargaining 
 with God. The pious perform good works, and 
 the good things of the next world are the wages 
 which God pays the pious man, just as the 
 labourer is given his wages. To the Pharisee in 
 the time of Christ life was a daily balancing and 
 reckoning with God to see whether there was 
 the necessary surplus of good works. The lack 
 of good works was compensated for by penances 
 and castigations of all kinds. The pious Persian 
 atoned for sin by a necessary number of scourg- 
 ings, and painfully but surely earned heaven 
 for himself. 
 
 Not only at this stage did the belief in future 
 retribution remain wedded to external forms, 
 but it was also steeped in materialism. In all 
 three religions heaven and hell are represented 
 in the most hateful and materialistic forms. It 
 would seem as if the sensuality, so strictly 
 repressed in the religions of the law, found relief 
 
172 What is Religion? 
 
 in these ghastly ideas of heaven and hell. Life 
 in heaven is nothing more than a continuation 
 of this life in undisturbed material satisfaction, 
 a life without sickness and trouble, a wandering 
 through luxuriant meadows and by clear streams, 
 a riot of delicious food and drink and passionate 
 love. Life in hell is extreme physical torment, 
 frost and hunger, and the pains of fire, the 
 disgusting worm and darkness. For the 
 especially wicked there are punishments which 
 only the most corrupt imagination could have 
 devised. 
 
 Very deeply rooted are these ideas concerning 
 the future life in the Zoroastrian and Moham- 
 medan religions. Judaism rose to a more 
 spiritual conception, to a really moral and 
 religious comprehension of the belief in retri- 
 bution, as we see in many of its eschatological 
 forms. But when Judaism united to the 
 thought of the eternal judgment of God its 
 own national pretensions, its hope of an earthly 
 triumph over all hostile people, it remained 
 stuck fast in its belief in a material and con- 
 crete future life. 
 
 We must now summarise and picture to 
 ourselves once again the innermost character 
 of these three religions. We see everywhere 
 a tendency from national individualism and 
 polytheism to universal monotheism ; a striving 
 
The Religions of the Law 173 
 
 after the things of the spirit ; an evolution from 
 custom to belief and conviction ; from the 
 worship in the Temple to a spiritual, Divine 
 service ; from sacrifice to prayer. But at the 
 same time there is everywhere visible a depend- 
 ence on material things. Observance and law 
 triumph, religion remains fettered to custom 
 and to the nation. The true universal mono- 
 theism does not burst forth, the bond between 
 religion and morality seems frustrated. 
 
 Man needs something united, something har- 
 monious, in religion. He demands an ideal of 
 life, a spiritual good which lies beyond the 
 ordinary life, of a higher, more moral, kind. 
 Everywhere, however, we see this striving 
 frustrated, lost in the most insignificant trifles, 
 stifled in outward observances. 
 
 But we must not be unjust towards these 
 religions of transition. Much has been attained 
 — a certain freedom from national particularism 
 and polytheism, a certain deliverance from out- 
 ward forms, from temple and sacrificial worship, 
 and new forms have been created. The thought 
 that religion is belief, conviction, is beginning 
 to dawn. At this stage of religion we have 
 confession, the Holy Scripture with its de- 
 pendent piety, theology, a new spiritual form of 
 worship, systematised lay prayers. Above all, 
 the powerful idea of future retribution has 
 
174 What is Religion ? 
 
 advanced to a central position. The elements 
 and beginnings of a higher culture are here ; 
 they lie side by side. Only a great process 
 of deliverance is now required, and a new 
 religious power which will accomplish this 
 process. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE RELIGIONS OF REDEMPTION : BUDDHA, PLATO 
 
 WE must now take into special consideration 
 two of those great reform movements 
 which were described in the fourth chapter, 
 because they led to a peculiar type of religion, 
 wholly opposed to the religions of the law. At 
 the opposite poles to the religions of the law 
 stand the religions of redemption, seen in their 
 purest expression in Buddhism (especially of the 
 later Indian religion) and Platonism. As these 
 religions, in respect to their purity, spirituality, 
 comprehensiveness, universalism, and freedom 
 from national and polytheistic elements, repre- 
 sent the highest conceptions of human religion 
 — with the exception of the Judaism of the 
 prophets and Christianity — an attempt will be 
 made to give a picture of each of these mani- 
 festations so as to obtain an idea of their 
 common characteristics. 
 
 175 
 
176 What is Religion? 
 
 ' To understand Buddhism it is necessary to 
 ^ penetrate somewhat deeply into the history 
 of the ancient religion of India. This ancient 
 religion was a national, polytheistic reHgion, the 
 religion of a conquering, magnificent, warUke 
 people, the torch-bearers of civilisation. Its 
 principal gods were Indra, the mighty god of 
 storm and battle, violent and lustful, and Varuna, 
 the god of heaven — far superior in personal 
 worth — the all-seeing, who discovered the hidden 
 things, protected the just, punished and forgave 
 sin. These early people of India already 
 possessed a collection of religious documents, 
 the Yeda, the oldest part of which, the hymns 
 of the Rig-veda, faithfully represents the fi-esh, 
 childlike faith of these people. Gradually, after 
 the conquest of Xorth India by the Arian race, 
 a great deterioration took place in the people. 
 Life in this rich country and the enervating 
 cUmate produced an evil result. The caste 
 system, now developing, by which an invincible 
 barrier was set up between, on the one hand, 
 the victorious people and the subject people, and 
 on the other hand, between the governing 
 nobility and the other ranks of the people, con- 
 tributed to this deterioration. It took from 
 the lower classes every prospect of development 
 and from the upper classes any real power of 
 government. The people of India dissipated 
 
The Religions of Redemption 177 
 
 their power in little petty States without the 
 incentive given by historical tradition of any 
 kind. On all sides we have the same picture 
 of the limitations of the petty State, of a people 
 without a history. 
 
 It is, therefore, no wonder that among such 
 a people the priesthood was exalted, and won 
 its position in the highest caste. The priests 
 were the only intermediaries between the gods 
 and men ; they usurped the sole right of reading 
 the Vedas and of offering sacrifice. The fire- 
 god Agni, originally simply fire, developed, as 
 god of the priestly sacrificial fire, into the 
 highest deity of the Hindoos, side by side with 
 Indra and Varuna. 
 
 The passivity which is apparent now in 
 Indian civilisation spread to the religion. The 
 individual figures of the gods vanish more and 
 more, and blend one into the other. At one 
 moment one particular god is endowed with all 
 god-like attributes, and the next these are trans- 
 ferred to another. No single figure of a god 
 rose to commanding eminence, as Zeus among 
 the Greeks, Ahura-Mazda among the Persians, 
 or Jehovah in ancient Israel ; rather it may be 
 said that out of the concrete world of many 
 gods rose the abstract idea of the Godhead. 
 Not only did the concrete figures of the gods 
 vanish by degrees, but there arose an extra- 
 
 13 
 
v 
 
 178 What is Religion ? 
 
 ordinary confusion in religion between cause 
 and effect, between subject and object. The 
 germs of this change are seen in the worship 
 paid to the sacerdotal fire of sacrifice. By a 
 peculiar transfusing of the material means of 
 worship and the Godhead, the sacrificial fire — 
 as well as the sacrificial w4ne, Soma — which, 
 according to the priestly conception, the gods 
 have produced, merges into the Godhead itself. 
 In the same way Brahma, the priestly prayer, 
 the prayer which compels the gods, becomes 
 later, not merely the appointed prayer of 
 worship, but meditation by means of which 
 the believer is absorbed in the Godhead, and 
 finally it becomes the Godhead itself. 
 
 In this way the later Hindoo religion of 
 Brahminism has developed. This orthodox 
 Hindoo religious system which was now in 
 the process of development had two or three 
 fundamental principles. 
 
 I. The complete blending in religion of the 
 subject and the object. The Godhead is com- 
 prehended as the highest, most complete entity, 
 immanent in human life and all other life, 
 the final reality in the vastness of life and 
 its phenomena. "The man who understands 
 that all creatures exist in God alone, and so 
 grasps the unity of existence, has no sorrow 
 and no illusion." 
 
The Religions of Redemption 179 
 
 How does the Brahman reach this highest 
 reality ? How does he attain this certainty con- 
 cerning his existence? By absorption in his 
 own ego. Man possesses a spiritual life of the 
 profoundest, the soul of his soul. The Hindoo 
 calls it Atman (breath). When the human being 
 withdraws from all contact with the other 
 world which is obtained through the senses, 
 when he abstains from all desires and wishes, 
 nay, from all speaking and thinking, absorbing 
 himself completely in himself, then he finds his 
 real, his innermost, self. The teaching of Brah- 
 minism consists in this : the highest God, the one 
 God, is identical with the innermost self of man. 
 When the human being turns aside completely 
 from the material fact of his ego, and his 
 personal life, and surrenders his ego entirely, 
 he finds within himself as the basis of his being 
 the universal being of the Godhead. Brahma is 
 Atman, Atman is Brahma. The / and the Thou 
 are extinguished in religion. Two ways lead to 
 the goal of this last and highest recognition. 
 First of all there is the way of prayer, of 
 meditation, of simple, spiritual, reflective 
 absorption ; the other way is the more violent 
 — the way of asceticism, penances, castigations. 
 Through violent means of all kinds, through 
 scourging and torments must the ego of the 
 human being be killed, until in a condition of 
 
i8o What is Religion? 
 
 dull stupor or highest exaltation man realises 
 the identity of the Divine and human existence. 
 II. The other pillar of all Indian religious 
 systems is the doctrine of re-incarnation or 
 soul-transmigration. We do not know whether 
 this w^as an element of the old Hindoo religion 
 or whether it may have originally belonged to 
 the barbaric aborigines who were conquered by 
 the Indians ; in any case it is a relic of the 
 lowest type of religious conception. In the 
 lowest stage of religious life, as we have 
 already seen, the belief was widespread that 
 the human soul after the death of the human 
 being passed into another living form, an 
 animal, a plant, another human being, or even 
 into a lifeless object. This doctrine of the 
 transmigration of souls {Samsara) now became 
 the central belief of the Hindoo religion ; it was 
 systematised, and through the addition of a 
 new thought it received a moral and teleological 
 direction. By means of it the Hindoo endeavours 
 to solve the mystery of his existence. He 
 asks himself why fortune and misfortune are 
 so unequally divided in this mortal life, and 
 why there is so much undeserved misery. Most 
 of the great religions of which we have already 
 treated answer these questions by an appeal to 
 the future, and believe in the compensation of 
 all injustice in a future life, in a Divine justice 
 
The Religions of Redemption i8i 
 
 to be revealed finally. The Hindoo religion, on 
 the contrary, casts its glance backwards. It 
 proclaims that the misfortunes and sufferings 
 of this life are due to the misdeeds and the 
 guilt of the individual in a former life. To 
 each human being is allotted the fate in life 
 which he has won for himself by his conduct 
 and his actions in an earlier life. According 
 to the Hindoo conception this chain of re-incar- 
 nation is interminable. The soul-energy can 
 never be self -extinguished, the present existence 
 is always the cause of the next one. The process 
 never ends. This teaching of the transmigration 
 of souls (Samsara) and the continued influence 
 of the deeds of the earlier life into a later one 
 (Karma) is the second principle of Brahminism. 
 III. Finally, there is a third element in the 
 Hindoo religion, which, however, can only be 
 considered as in part connected with belief in 
 Brahma. I mean pessimism. The true real life 
 is the life of the one existence ; all life apart 
 from this is necessarily incomplete, all individual 
 existence is necessarily painful. The spiritual 
 and mental condition of the people of India 
 strengthens this disposition of mind. The Indian, 
 as we have already seen, knows no future 
 and has no past. Life represents to him the 
 coming and going of the generations, a weary 
 game without any object. He feels, through 
 
1 82 What is Religion ? 
 
 this belief in re-incarnation, that he is for ever 
 chained with iron links to this miserable exist- 
 ence. Such a belief renders the misery of indi- 
 vidual existence eternal. There is no cessation, 
 no rest, no death. 
 
 Hence the Tvhole of religion and life is con- 
 centrated in one great longing for release 
 from this transmigration of souls — deliverance 
 from life, simply that, rest after eternal, painful 
 wandering. 
 
 The pre-Buddhist Vedanta philosophy had 
 already discovered this deliverance. It an- 
 nounced that deliverance from the misery of 
 life was to be found in the right recognition 
 of the unity of human nature with the one 
 God, based on the deepest foundation, and of 
 the necessary incompleteness of all mortal life. 
 This knowledge exercised a wonderful power ; 
 it took from the individual existence its sub- 
 stance, its power of re-incarnation. The wise 
 man who recognised this passed after death to 
 a state of absolute rest. 
 
 Besides the orthodox Vedanta philosophy, the 
 systematic philosophy based on the Vedas, there 
 were numerous other systems, especially the 
 system of the Sankhya philosophy. Their 
 adherents already denied the one essential 
 principle of the Hindoo religion, the existence 
 of the one Divine being. They upheld the 
 
The Religions of Redemption 183 
 
 atomic theory, and believed that the world 
 consisted of a multitude of closely connected 
 beings. We find here, however, the two other 
 pillars of the Hindoo religion, belief in re- 
 incarnation and in pessimism. Redemption is 
 accomplished by correct perception. Whoever 
 recognises that body and soul have nothing in 
 common with one another is thereby raised 
 above all earthly misery. For as all the suffer- 
 ing of life only concerns the bodily existence of 
 man, it is a mistake to believe that the inner- 
 most being of man, his soul, can be in any Tvay 
 affected by it. Thus in certain points, perhaps, 
 there may be said to be a connection between 
 Buddhism and the Sankhya philosophy, and 
 so a comprehension of this element of pre- 
 Buddhistic religious life is necessary. 
 
 I have given here the main outline of the 
 Hindoo religion before Buddha, but the outline 
 only. To complete the picture we must add 
 that these religious ideas, originally fairly 
 simple and comprehensible, were obstructed by 
 a mass of rubbish and a chaos of external 
 matters. Yet the ancient Hindoo books of 
 religion, the Vedas, are still current. In 
 its would-be learned method of exposition — 
 troubling very little about the true meaning — 
 the new doctrines apparently derived something 
 from the ancient holy book, which rested on a 
 
184 what is Religion? 
 
 quite different religious foundation ; the priest 
 caste with all its privileges remained, religion 
 still kept its old formal, unintelligible, stagnant 
 worship. The comparatively simple principles 
 of the Hindoo religion of redemption were over- 
 grown with widespread, complex speculations of 
 all kinds — speculation as to how the finite pro- 
 ceeded from the One God, speculation concerning 
 the nature of man and his attributes, specula- 
 tion concerning the laws of the transmigration 
 of souls. The belief in redemption was com- 
 bined, as has already been mentioned, with 
 strong ascetic tendencies. The human being 
 sought to extort redemption by the most ex- 
 traordinary external means, by terrible acts of 
 renunciation and penance. This endeavour was 
 already organised : the caste of the ascetics 
 stood side by side with the caste of the priests. 
 And now Buddha and the Buddhistic reforms 
 appear in the religious history of the Indian 
 people. Buddha thus became the founder of a 
 world-religion ; it was Buddhism and not Brah- 
 manism that first overstepped the boundaries of 
 the Indian people. Upon what does the mystery 
 of Buddha's success rest ? It is not easy to dis- 
 cover. People have sought to discover it in 
 various things. Buddha has been honoured as, 
 above all else, the social reformer who abolished 
 the Indian caste system. This is by no means 
 
The Religions of Redemption 185 
 
 correct. Again, people have sought to see in 
 its principle of universalism the peculiar cha- 
 racteristic of the Buddhist religion ; and lastly, 
 every attempt to find anything peculiar in his 
 doctrine and his religion has been abandoned 
 in favour of explaining the mystery by his 
 extraordinary personality. This last view is, 
 to a certain extent, the true one. In the person 
 of Buddha the religion of Buddhism was con- 
 centrated. In no other religion, with the ex- 
 ception of Christianity, has a single personality 
 won such a lasting importance as in Buddhism, 
 which to a large extent rests on this fact. 
 
 Gautama Buddha, the son of a petty Indian 
 prince in Kapilavastu (130 miles N.E. of Benares), 
 was born in the middle of the sixth century 
 before Christ. He did not belong to the priest- 
 caste, but to the Tvarrior-caste. In his twenty- 
 ninth year he was converted. He completed his 
 work of the " Great Renunciation," as it is 
 called in the Indian stories, left wife and child, 
 and went forth into the wide world. After long 
 wanderings and vain exertions, the decisive hour 
 of revelation came to him, and from that time 
 Buddha believed in his mission as redeemer of 
 the ^vorld. His first sermon was given in 
 Benares to five former schoolfellows, and soon 
 he had sixty disciples gathered around him. He 
 now organised his followers into an order of 
 
1 86 What is Religion? 
 
 wandering, begging monks. He succeeded in 
 gaining as his friend and patron one of the 
 most powerful princes, the Prince of Magadha, 
 who assigned to him and his friends a bamboo 
 grove near his chief town as a dwelHng-place in 
 the rainy season. The reformer's calling and repu- 
 tation were now secure. His life was uniformly 
 divided between travelling, preaching, and 
 begging. Every year during the rainy season 
 he gathered together his disciples for intimate 
 personal intercourse. Surrounded by his dis- 
 ciples, Buddha died in his eightieth year. His 
 order of monks spread over the whole of the 
 Eastern world. 
 
 Great indeed is the significance of the person 
 of the founder of the Buddhist religion. Stories 
 of his life, which the legends soon adorned in 
 the most wonderful manner, form a large part 
 of the sacred literature. The sacred books are 
 full of his sayings, a certain number of which 
 are probably faithfully transmitted to us. Even 
 though overladen with the dust of tradition, the 
 portrait of his personality rises clear before us. 
 From many little scenes we recognise very 
 clearly what a strong personal impression 
 Buddha made upon his disciples. Thus the 
 earliest of his disciples, Sunita, relates the 
 following : *' Of humble birth was I sprung ; I 
 was poor and needy. Mean was the work that 
 
The Religions of Redemption 187 
 
 I did, that of removing the withered flowers. 
 I was despised of men, accounted of little worth, 
 often rebuked. . . . Then one day I saw Buddha 
 with his monks, when he, the great hero, 
 entered the important town of Magadha. Then 
 I put on one side my labour, and stepped up 
 to him to bow before him in all reverence, 
 and cast myself at the Master's feet, and came 
 up to him and entreated him, the highest among 
 all beings, to accept me as a monk. Then the 
 most gracious Master spoke unto me : ' Come 
 unto me, oh monk.' This was the consecration 
 which I received." 
 
 Yet the value of Buddha's person in true 
 Buddhism has its definite limitations (we put 
 on one side the deification of Buddha at a later 
 period). The ideal of deliverance, which is the 
 peculiar characteristic of the Buddhist religion, 
 delivers the individual believer from the person 
 of the Master as from all else. The monk who 
 is penetrated through and through with the 
 ideal of eternal rest casts far behind him the 
 person and the society of the Master. Buddha 
 teaches the individual to be his own redeemer. 
 Shortly before his death Buddha himself is said 
 to have expressed his views in this matter most 
 decisively to his disciple Ananda : 
 
 " It may be that you think that the Word has 
 lost its Master, and that you have now no longer 
 
1 88 What is Religion? 
 
 a Master. But you must not feel like that, 
 Ananda. The doctrine and the system which 
 I have taught and revealed to you — these will 
 be your masters when I have passed away." 
 
 We must not, therefore, seek for the mystery 
 of his world-wide success in the person of 
 Buddha alone ; it is to some extent based on 
 the nature of his teaching. The mystery of 
 his teaching rests, as in many other cases, 
 on its simplicity. Out of the confused mass 
 of complicated phenomena a simplified whole 
 was created which was comprehended in a 
 few short sentences. 
 
 Buddha at the very first cast on one side all 
 custom and pious tradition. For him and his 
 disciples the authority of the Veda, the ancient 
 national sacred repository, and its world of 
 many gods no longer existed. And with this 
 ancient religious book there passed away the 
 whole artificial system of theology built up 
 upon the Veda, all those interpretations and 
 artificial explanations with which the sacred 
 writings were saddled. The whole sacrificial 
 worship based on the Vedas came to an end, 
 as well as the priesthood and its privileges, and, 
 so far as the Buddhist monk was concerned, the 
 caste system of the Hindoo. 
 
 And much more even than this passed away. 
 Buddha would have nothing to do with two 
 
The Religions of Redemption 189 
 
 things which characterised the last phase of the 
 Hindoo religion — learned speculative theories 
 and exaggerated asceticism. The story of 
 Buddha's conversion is extraordinarily instruc- 
 tive in connection with this. When, after the 
 renunciation of his wife and child, Gautama 
 v^ent forth into the world to find redemption, 
 he listened first of all to the discourses of two 
 wise Brahmans, but he soon perceived he had 
 nothing to learn from them, and so continued 
 his journey. With five of his companions who 
 had already joined him he applied himself to 
 the most severe penances ; but he found no 
 peace for his mind in these things, and after 
 he had on one occasion sunk down by their 
 side half dead with exhaustion, he turned away 
 from them, composed and resolute, and con- 
 tinued his pilgrimage alone, an apostate in 
 the eyes of his companions. 
 
 He did not find his stopping-place in philo- 
 sophic speculations nor in ascetic practices, 
 but simply in practical religious perception and 
 in acts corresponding to this perception. From 
 this time forward Buddha was deeply impressed 
 with a sense of the insecurity, insufficiency and 
 superfluity of all pure knowledge. He made 
 this clear to his disciples by a comparison : one 
 day in a wood he took up a few leaves in his 
 hand, and told them that whatever knowledge 
 
 s/ 
 
I go What is Religion ? 
 
 he had revealed to them was as those leaves 
 compared with the whole forest. "And why, 
 my disciples, do you think I have not revealed 
 more to you? Because, oh my disciples, know- 
 ledge brings no profit to you, because it does 
 not advance you in holiness ; it does not lead 
 to the renunciation of earthly things, to the 
 suppression of lust, to the renunciation of 
 the transitory, to peace, to understanding, to 
 enlightenment or to Nirvana. Therefore I have 
 only revealed to you but a little." 
 
 He only revealed to his disciples what was 
 of benefit to mankind, and what was of direct 
 practical interest — the doctrine of suffering and 
 the deliverance from suffering. Everything 
 outside this was superfluous and injurious. To 
 the list of unnecessary questions belonged those 
 concerning the final unity of the world, the final 
 perfected existence and its relation to the in- 
 dividual life — that is to say, all questions con- 
 cerning God, the nature of man, the concrete 
 existence of the soul, the survival of the ego 
 after death, the more positive or purely negative 
 idea of the condition of eternal rest {Nirvana). 
 
 In all these things he appears as the complete 
 sceptic. He answers questions with both yes 
 and no, he purposely admits possibilities on both 
 sides. In certain important points, indeed, he 
 was in conflict with the current dogmas, and 
 
The Religions of Redemption igi 
 
 was no longer merely a sceptic. His scepticism 
 reached to absolute denial. Thus he cate- 
 gorically denies the unity and concrete form 
 of the last stage of being, and hence Buddha 
 preached a religion unconnected with the 
 thoughts of God. He also denies the existence 
 of the unity of the soul. To him the ego is 
 a conglomeration of different conditions and 
 activities which have been thrown together by 
 chance for the sake of a common work. 
 
 The simplicity and limitations of his thought 
 are seen in the fact that he preserved the teach- 
 ing of the Samsara and Karma ; that is to say, 
 he retained, not only the doctrine of re-incarna- 
 tion, but also the belief that the individual life, 
 so far as its nature and destiny are concerned, 
 is dependent on the deeds of an earlier existence. 
 It is not to our purpose here to show with what 
 specious arguments the later Buddhist theology 
 attempted to disregard the fatal contradiction 
 that is here implied, and to solve the problem of 
 how the earlier existence can possibly influence 
 the later one if the soul has no concrete reality 
 — in short, it tries to show how a soul which has 
 no existence can be re-incarnated. We only 
 want to comprehend all this in order to under- 
 stand the peculiar characteristics of Buddha. 
 His strength does not lie in the region of specu- 
 lation ; he passes by it as much as possible. Yet 
 
192 what is Religion ? 
 
 he cannot entirely leave it on one side, for 
 his religious capacity is not sufficient for this. 
 Thus his religion has, unfortunately, remained 
 a conglomeration of profound personal religious 
 experience, and only half complete philosophic 
 speculation. 
 
 But we must follow Buddha into his true 
 province, the really practical side of his religion. 
 Here we meet with sayings of a highly simple 
 and practical nature, easily comprehended. 
 Even in his earliest preaching at Benares 
 Buddha formulated his teaching with unequalled 
 simplicity and precision. He announced the 
 four holy verities of suffering. The first saying 
 runs thus : 
 
 "This, oh ye monks, is the holy verity of 
 suffering. Birth is suffering, old age is suffer- 
 ing, illness is suffering, death is suffering ; to 
 be united with an unloved one is suffering ; to 
 be separated from the beloved one is suffering ; 
 not to obtain what one desires is suffering ; in 
 fact, the five-fold chain which binds us to the 
 earth is suffering." 
 
 The preaching of Buddha begins with the 
 great song that all life is suffering ; he fixes his 
 glance firmly on this side of life, and sees this 
 only. He, like his people, knew no future, no 
 progress, no striving upwards, no bitter conflict. 
 Very far from him was the thought that suffer- 
 
The Religions of Redemption 193 
 
 ing produces patience and engenders heroism, 
 and that suffering may signify triumph and a 
 higher life. The Buddha legend relates how, 
 after the conversion of Buddha, he met an old 
 man, a sick man, a putrefying corpse, and a 
 venerable monk. " Birth is suffering, old age is 
 suffering, death is suffering." It is noticeable 
 how little the root idea of Buddha's, " Life is 
 suffering," has spread. The division between 
 the will and the power, the struggle of the 
 senses against our better judgment, the falling 
 below the moral ideal — none of all this comes 
 within the horizon of Buddha. He sees only 
 the earthly life, and that life is suffering. Both 
 he and his followers displayed true genius in the 
 promulgation of this simple principle. The song 
 of the suffering of life appears here illumined by 
 the whole magic of its attractive, ensnaring 
 beauty. 
 
 "Man gathers flowers, he yearns after plea- 
 sure. As a flood sweeps over a village by 
 night, so death comes upon him and carries 
 him away." 
 
 "Man gathers flowers, he yearns after plea- 
 sure. The destroyer forces the insatiable seeker 
 after knowledge into his power." 
 
 " Not in the domain of pleasure, not in the 
 depth of the sea, not even in the very heart of 
 the mountain, wilt thou find on earth the place 
 
 U 
 
194 What is Religion ? 
 
 where the mighty power of death may not seize 
 you." 
 
 "Sorrow is born from joy, and from joy 
 Cometh fear. He who is delivered from joy is 
 delivered from sorrow, for whence should 
 come fear ? " 
 
 Buddha will deliver the world from this 
 universal suffering. His sermon at Benares 
 begins with the cry, "Listen, oh ye monks, 
 deKverance from death has been found." The 
 way of deliverance leads to the question con- 
 cerning the origin of suffering. The second 
 article of his creed runs : 
 
 " This, ye monks, is the sacred truth of the 
 origin of pain. It is the desire for life which 
 leads from re-incarnation to re-incarnation . . . 
 the desire for pleasures, the desire for develop- 
 ment, the desire for power." 
 
 To the question concerning the cause of suffer- 
 ing Buddhism gives a very simple answer, with 
 which we are already familiar. The cause is the 
 V desire for existence, for individual existence. 
 This longing not only penetrates into the sorrow 
 of this life, but it affects also the re-incarnation 
 in a later life. It links the individual existence 
 for ever to this existence full of sorrow. It 
 is clearly seen how this second principle of 
 Buddhism is closely connected with the doctrine 
 of re-incarnation, the origin and extent of 
 which have been already noted. 
 
The Religions of Redemption 195 
 
 The third and fourth principle follow quite 
 naturally from the first two. If the desire for 
 existence is the cause of all suffering, then there 
 can be only one way out of this suffering. The 
 third verity says : 
 
 "This, oh you monks, is the sacred verity 
 concerning the abolition of suffering. This 
 passionate longing for existence can only be 
 quenched by the absolute annihilation of all 
 desires, by casting them away, by renunciation, 
 by releasing oneself from them, by giving them 
 no quarter." 
 
 The question as to how this deliverance takes 
 place is answered by the fourth principle : " By 
 means of this holy eightfold path, which is 
 made up of right belief, right resolution, right 
 speech, right deeds, a right life, right striving, 
 right self -absorption." 
 
 In spite of all the wealth of language in 
 this description of the road the most important 
 point is not given, for it lies in what is not 
 named here. The essential thing is purely 
 inward and spiritual ; there are no sacrifice, no 
 ceremonial acts of worship, no penances, and no 
 severe ascetism, only clear perception and its 
 corresponding practical activity, which lead to 
 the desired goal. 
 
 And what then is this desired goal ? For the 
 true Buddhist this is all summed up in the word 
 
196 What is Religion ? 
 
 Nirvana^ eternal rest. When the desire for life 
 is extinguished, Karma, the strong impulse 
 which makes for re-incarnation, is also extin- 
 guished. Delivered from life, the believer 
 attains after death — sometimes, indeed, before 
 death — perfect peace. Is this Nirvana after 
 death to be regarded more as positive blessed- 
 ness than as purely negative, the mere cessation 
 of life ? Buddha avoids giving any answer to 
 this question : it belongs to the category of 
 things of little value. Be that as it may, the 
 Buddhist believer in the doctrine of Nirvana is 
 able to rise to a free, unconstrained frame of 
 mind, full of joyous confidence. 
 
 " We live most joyously, without enemies in a 
 world full of enmity ; among hostile beings we 
 tarry without hostility." 
 
 " Joyously we live healthily among the sick ; 
 among sick men we tarry without sickness." 
 
 " Joyously we who possess nothing live. Joy 
 is our food, like that of the light-giving gods ! " 
 
 " The monk who tarries in solitary places, 
 whose soul is full of peace, enjoys supreme 
 felicity and beholds the absolute truth." 
 
 The whole Buddhist religion is revealed in 
 these simple sayings and maxims. But we 
 must now more closely examine the meaning 
 of '• right activity," '* right life," to which the 
 fourth verity refers. The monastic life is 
 
The Religions of Redemption 197 
 
 the logical outcome of true Buddhist belief; 
 the devout follower of Buddha becomes a 
 monk. He forsakes his parents, his wife, his 
 child, and all his possessions. He acknow- 
 ledges the sacred trinity of Buddha, doctrine, 
 and the community, that is to say, the monastic 
 community. He takes as his symbol the yellow 
 garb of penance and the beggar's wallet, and 
 thus, without a home, he wanders from place 
 to place, modest, calm, an unobtrusive ex- 
 ample to all of true living. During the three 
 months of rain the Buddhist monks assemble 
 for intimate intercourse and pious meditation, 
 all secular work being put on one side. 
 Spiritual practices, the recitation of holy say- 
 ings, religious dogma, spiritual conversation, 
 meditations, journeyings, and begging fill 
 their lives. By the side of the organised 
 monasticism, the followers of Buddha and his 
 doctrines who could not resolve to become 
 monks or were hindered from so doing, 
 formed as it were a lay order. Remaining in 
 the world, they yet acted up to their con- 
 victions by occupying themselves in practical 
 benevolence on behalf of the monks. Yet — 
 and this is very important — the true believer 
 and pious man is according to Buddhism the 
 monk alone. He alone attains Nirvana^ eternal 
 rest. The layman is certainly on the right 
 
1 9 8 What is Religion ? 
 
 road thither ; he may hope in another life 
 to become a monk and so attain Nirvana. 
 
 It is here, in the community of monks and 
 its passionate desire for conversion, that the 
 real moral power of Buddhism lies, if we con- 
 sider the question of moral power a little more 
 closely. It is characteristic that in the legends 
 of Buddha it is related how at the decisive 
 moment when he began his work he victoriously 
 overcame in battle with the Evil One the 
 temptation offered by his suggestion that when 
 he had found deliverance in Nirvana he should 
 immediately go thither himself without announc- 
 ing it to the world. Buddha, out of love for 
 unredeemed humanity, overcame his own 
 personal need of rest and his fear of the 
 troubles and sufferings of a missionary who 
 announces a new truth. Sympathy with the 
 misery of the world was a powerful impulse 
 in him, and so sympathy forms the foundation 
 of all Buddhist morality. He impressed his 
 community of monks very thoroughly with 
 this idea, in direct opposition to the Brahman 
 priesthood. The Brahmanical priest and wise 
 man, in his utter self-sufficiency, is quite content 
 to have the higher life for himself and his 
 own caste. The scholar absorbs himself in his 
 speculations, the penitent in his deeds of virtue, 
 both quite apart from the common herd. The 
 
The Religions of Redemption 199 
 
 adherents of Buddha spread the religious life, 
 such as they possessed, far beyond the limits 
 of caste, far beyond the people of India. With 
 the joyous cry that they had found deliverance 
 they wandered over the wide world. Buddhism 
 developed into a world-mission. Far in the West, 
 even into the Greek world, did the Buddhist 
 monks wander ; in the east and north of India, 
 in Tibet, China, Japan, Further India, and 
 beyond, has Buddhism planted itself firmly. It 
 is still to-day a world-religion. 
 
 Herein lies the moral strength of Buddhism. 
 Less valuable is its practical teaching concerning 
 the morality of the world ; yet here it shows 
 in many particulars a wide and liberal compre- 
 hension of morality. It is accepted as a fact 
 that in the first centuries after the rise of 
 Buddhism the life of the people of India, as 
 a whole, made fresh progress. Once again 
 they had a history. But it has not yet been 
 clearly shown whether the rise of the Buddhist 
 religion is not merely one phenomenon of this 
 universal progress, rather than its cause and 
 origin. Nor is it quite certain how far it was 
 influenced by the Grreek culture, which was 
 beginning to have its effects in the countries 
 bordering on India and beyond. However this 
 or that may be, this advance did not last long. 
 The work of the world and the morality 
 
200 What is Religion ? 
 
 developed from it lies only on the outside 
 of Buddhism. All this is regarded, as it were, 
 as subordinate, the central idea and the final 
 object remaining "flight from the world." 
 Thus in attracting constantly the best and 
 most profound minds, in calling away from 
 the Tvork of the world those who are striving 
 upwards and aspiring to the higher life, by 
 showing them the gate of deliverance, Bud- 
 dhism has contributed at the same time to 
 stagnation ; for wherever it is the dominating 
 religion civilisation and morality have stood 
 still, have remained in a state of torpor and 
 sunk deeper and deeper into spiritual death. 
 In conclusion, it must be remembered, as has 
 been already stated, that Buddhism is monach- 
 ism, and in its essential nature only 
 monachism. Tradition says that when Buddha 
 had a son born to him he cried out : " This 
 is a new and strong link which I shall have 
 to break ! " 
 
 Before we proceed to consider the essential 
 character of the somewhat narrow religion 
 of redemption, it will be well to compare 
 with the Buddhist religion a phenomenon 
 related to it in many important points. I 
 refer to Plato and the attitude of the later 
 Hellenic cultured world, so far as it was 
 
The Religions of Redemption 201 
 
 religious, which stands in close relation to the 
 philosopher. 
 
 The period of the Persian wars signified to 
 the Greeks, not only a national revival, but a 
 religious one likewise. 
 
 Firmly believing in the old gods, the Greeks 
 had preserved their freedom and their domina- 
 tion in face of the mighty advance of Persian 
 rule. The old gods were still living, belief in 
 them underwent a rebirth, and flourished anew 
 in purified beauty. The contemporary tragedies 
 of j^schylus are penetrated by a deep religious 
 feeling. The gods are more than mortals, whose 
 arrogance they humiliate. " Zeus, in glorifying 
 thee in songs of praise there is peace for all 
 men." But, on the other hand, from this time 
 onwards the elements of disintegration more 
 and more affected the old Hellenic culture. 
 The civilisations of the various peoples came 
 in contact with one another. In the leading 
 town of Athens, during the course of the 
 Persian wars, the democratic element conquered 
 the agrarian and conservative elements. Instead 
 of a power resting on a territorial army and 
 a territorial aristocracy, Athens became a com- 
 mercial and naval town of the first rank, 
 which won the mastery at sea and in inter- 
 national trade. This marks progress. But this 
 new world-civilisation of Athens, ever striving 
 
202 What is Religion ? 
 
 upwards, cast on one side all the fetters of 
 custom and usage, even those of religious 
 custom and religious usage. Peripatetic 
 philosophers, world-wide travellers, announced 
 that all things that had hitherto been considered 
 the very foundations of common life were only 
 chance happenings, mere examples of human 
 arbitrariness and habit. We can trace the 
 decay of the old religious strength step by 
 step if we compare the dramas of ^schylus, 
 Sophocles, and Euripides. The greatness of the 
 Periclean period was followed by a swift down- 
 fall of the Athenian power. Minds of the second 
 rank more and more played a leading part 
 in the common life, now robbed of its great 
 features and inspiration. The more capable 
 men no longer found scope for their influence 
 in the conditions of life, ever becoming more 
 circumscribed and limited. It was a period of 
 sad resignation, of hesitation, and doubt. The 
 foundations of the common life began to 
 totter, new ones had not yet been found. 
 The mass of the people, as well as a con- 
 siderable number of superior minds, clung to 
 the old beliefs in the gods, in whom in their 
 innermost souls, however, they no longer 
 trusted. 
 
 Thus the best men retired from public life. 
 They carried with them the ruins of a worn-out 
 
The Religions of Redemption 203 
 
 but beautiful world, from which they hoped 
 to create a new and better one. 
 
 Socrates sought to place human life, as lived 
 in societies, once more on a firm foundation 
 by basing it on reason, the principles of which 
 are demonstrable and may be taught. We 
 have already ventured to call Plato the religious 
 reformer of Greece, although, it is true, his 
 life's work consisted of many interests. Re- 
 ligion was not to him the one and only interest, 
 but still he regarded it as the keystone and 
 crown of the whole intellectual edifice which 
 he built up. 
 
 We must examine a little more closely the 
 life and ideas of this Platonic society. A 
 little band of earnest men, who first 
 gathered round Socrates and then round Plato, 
 stood in sharp and ever-growing opposition 
 to the public life of the majority. They could 
 find no place for themselves in public life, with 
 its narrowness, limitations, and restricted 
 conditions, and so they withdrew into private 
 life. For them the whole of the outside world — 
 happily only in theory — with its rules and 
 regulations had lost all validity, and they 
 constructed for themselves, with bold and 
 fantastic idealism, a State as it ought to be. 
 
 Here we find the main characteristic of the 
 Platonic view of the world. This is the most 
 
204 what is Religion ? 
 
 profound pessimism and the deepest resigna- 
 tion towards the concrete world of experience, 
 the absolute conviction of the necessary 
 imperfection and slight value of the whole 
 world subject to this experience of the senses. 
 But where is this better world by which this 
 empirical world may be measured ? " It is 
 here," answered Plato and his followers, " here, 
 in the thought of the wise man ; not in the 
 irrational, arbitrary, fantastic imagination, but 
 in the thought conformable to reason and law, 
 in the thought of the idea. The thought of 
 the wise man is a faithful reflection of the 
 real, true world, the world which alone exists, 
 which is not to be seen with the bodily eye, but 
 with the eye of the spirit." 
 
 True and noble existence belongs to this 
 world of ideas alone. The world of sensual 
 experience is only a weak, imperfect picture 
 of the perfect ideal world, a combination of 
 light and darkness, a representation of the 
 pure idea in an incomplete material form. 
 
 This, the main idea of Plato's philosophy, 
 is also his religious conviction. For the exalta- 
 tion of the wise man into the world of ideas is, 
 in accordance with its deepest meaning, a 
 religious act ; the idea which lifts the wise man 
 into this higher and true world is religious 
 inspiration. It is Divine madness, holy en- 
 
The Religions of Redemption 205 
 
 thusiasm, so called by Plato, who was inclined to 
 the purified and refined form o£ Orphic ecstatic 
 piety, then very widespread. It is heavenly 
 love, the heavenly Eros, the beautiful mother 
 of earthly love, which lifts the wise man up 
 into the higher, more beautiful, world. Only 
 these powers could give to human reason wings 
 to soar into the luminous world of ideas. 
 And this world of ideas is the world of the 
 gods, of the Godhead. The highest idea is 
 the idea of the good, perfect, Divine Being. 
 
 How does it happen that the earthly being, 
 man, bound by his earthly fetters, can yet 
 strive upwards, far beyond his earthly existence, 
 and reach a heavenly world? Man is a being 
 of a dual, nay, a threefold or even a fourfold, 
 nature. He consists of body and soul, and 
 the soul, again, consists of two or three parts — 
 the sensual side of his inner life, clearly 
 defined, and falling into a higher and a lower 
 (willing and desiring), and the higher life of 
 pure clear reason, in no wise circumscribed 
 by earthly limitations. Equipped with this 
 highest, most spiritual part of his nature, man 
 comes from the higher, true, and real life of 
 ideas ; he has sunk into the material world. 
 Was it his own guilt, or was it a higher neces- 
 sity? Opinions vary on this subject. In any 
 case, man now dwells on this earth as in a 
 
2o6 What is Religion ? 
 
 prison. He finds himself, half dreaming and 
 half waking, in a dark cavern through a 
 crevice in which a dim light from afar pene- 
 trates, and in this feeble light he sees vague, 
 gigantic, shadowy figures hovering around. 
 This is life. 
 
 There has remained to man — who, having 
 drunk of the waters of Lethe (forgetfulness), 
 has quite forgotten his heavenly origin — re- 
 membrance, gradually evolving into conscious- 
 ness. All learning is remembrance. The holy 
 longing after the lost heaven has also remained. 
 But the imprisonment is bitter, and of long 
 duration, and strong are the fetters of the 
 material world. In Platonism, as in Buddhism, 
 ^ the idea of the transmigration of souls and 
 of re-incarnation derived from the popular belief, 
 and directly taken from the Orphic worship, 
 plays an important part. The souls that have 
 fallen from their higher estate pass upwards 
 and downwards in painful, confused wanderings, 
 so that here also the deeds of an earlier life 
 condition the existence of the following one. 
 The whole idea, it is true, is not nearly so clear 
 as in the Indian religion, but confusedly inter- 
 mingled with the thought of compensation in 
 a future life. Yet it is here as it is there. 
 
 But there does exist a means of freedom, 
 a way upwards out of this painful cycle of life. 
 
The Religions of Redemption 207 
 
 and it is the wise man who finds this way. If 
 he turns away from this world of the senses, 
 and does not permit it to gain access to his 
 innermost being, if he keeps his inward and 
 spiritual eye ever directed to the world of the 
 eternal idea, and thus allows his higher and 
 reasonable self to be gradually strengthened, 
 then even in this life he will be, to a certain 
 extent, freed from the bonds of materialism ; 
 and after death his released spirit will mount 
 upwards to higher and higher worlds, and will 
 at last find freedom from the painful law of 
 re-incarnation, and a return to the home of 
 eternal light. 
 
 In considering now what Buddhism and 
 Platonism (which have been very briefly 
 described) have in common, we shall easily 
 discern the general characteristics of the one- 
 sided, clearly marked religions of redemption. 
 We summarise these characteristics as follows : 
 
 1. In the religions of redemption the con- 
 sciousness becomes clearly aware that in religion, 
 besides the empirical daily life, conditioned by 
 the facts of nature, there is another and a higher 
 life. An earnest attempt is made to believe in 
 this higher life, and to strive after it. In the 
 national religions this perception is not ex- 
 pressed. Judaism and Islamism, contrasted 
 
2o8 What is Religion ? 
 
 with the higher aspirations of the prophetic 
 period, represent a relapse from spiritual 
 heights to material conditions. In the reli- 
 gions of redemption all external things, so far 
 as a large circle of men is concerned, are 
 abolished, and disappear ; all supports, all out- 
 ward means, all crutches, are no longer of any 
 value. Religion rises to the height of pure 
 spirituality and inwardness, to the idea of 
 unity and entity. Thus it breaks down and 
 oversteps the limits of nationality. Platonism 
 and Buddhism are in their very nature inter- 
 national. 
 
 2. This thought of a higher life which faith 
 gives is presented to us in both religions in 
 a one-sided and distorted form. The highest 
 good of Buddhism is Nirvana — that is, absolute 
 negation of this life ; its highest object is 
 "freedom from life." Platonism, in the same 
 way, denies all life which is conformable to 
 experience, and, above all, any practical dealing 
 with it ; the only thing of real value which 
 it finds in life is the intellectual element. Its 
 highest aim is a life of undisturbed reason, 
 of untroubled perception, of the pure idea. 
 The ideal of life in the one case is that of the 
 monk, in the other the philosopher, far removed 
 from all matters of daily life. 
 
 3. With this complete or half-complete nega- 
 
The Religions of Redemption 209 
 
 tion of human life there vanishes the vital 
 thought of a God. When the human ego dis- 
 appears, the Divine Being also disappears, or 
 grows dim. In Platonism the idea of the 
 Godhead is highly abstract and mystical ; in 
 Brahminism the Godhead is the universal being, 
 not to be closely defined, in opposition to the 
 individual existence, which is necessarily pain- 
 ful ; in Buddhism the thought of God is entirely 
 abandoned, the object of belief vanishing when 
 the personality vanishes. 
 
 4. The natural consequence of this is that 
 in both religions the specially moral element 
 is relegated to an inferior position. We have 
 seen how in Buddhism the doctrine of suffering 
 rests entirely on the consideration of life on 
 earth and all its limitations ; how the idea of 
 moral deficiency and imperfection, of the agony 
 of sin and the need for redemption from sin, 
 is quite unknown. In Platonism, also, the 
 highest faculty of the human being is not the 
 will towards the good, but the clear reason 
 which lasts for ever. What hinders and fetters 
 mankind is not moral evil, but the material 
 world. Of course it must not be imagined that 
 in both these great and universal phenomena 
 (Buddhism and Platonism) the moral element 
 has not reached a high degree of culture, but 
 there is lacking any real union of religion and 
 
 15 
 
2IO What is Religion ? 
 
 morality. The essential thing and the highest 
 thing which that religion offers and promises 
 to mankind lies quite apart from good and 
 evil. 
 
 5. Connected with this one-sided attitude 
 of the religions of redemption towards life 
 and moral acts is the peculiar relation they 
 assume towards the people who are their 
 believers. Buddhism conquered a whole series 
 of nations of a very different kind, and it still 
 rules them to a certain extent. On all sides 
 the same phenomenon is apparent. We see 
 everywhere that the Buddhist religion has 
 only intermingled with the life of the people 
 in an entirely superficial manner, just as oil 
 rests on the surface of the water. Buddhism, 
 apart from slight changes, has everywhere 
 remained the same with a wearisome monotony; 
 it has remained the religion of the monk. By 
 its side it has permitted to remain, uninter- 
 rupted and unpurified, the existing condition 
 of affairs, with its customs and habits, its 
 morality and even its belief. With the excep- 
 tion of Tibet, perhaps, Buddhism has nowhere 
 become the religion which penetrated the life 
 of the people through and through. The Greek 
 philosophic religion of the cultured likewise 
 never had the strength to become the religion 
 of the people ; it remained the possession of 
 
The Religions of Redemption 211 
 
 a small and narrow circle, and had not the 
 courage to reform the belief of the Greek 
 people. It made weak compromises, by which 
 it justified itself in its own sight when, in the 
 practical conduct of life, it once more bowed 
 to custom and usage and to a belief which 
 it inwardly regarded as inferior. Buddhism 
 met with a very similar fate ; wherever it 
 became the religion of the people it generally 
 sank into complete pagan superstition, especially 
 into a superstitious and fetich-like worship of 
 relics. The exaggerated spirituality of the 
 religions changes into its exact opposite ; move- 
 ments which began with the rejection of all 
 that was considered of value in the people's 
 belief bow finally to its power. 
 
 Thus we see how from the age of the prophets 
 the history of religion follows two lines — the 
 religions of the law and the religions of redemp- 
 tion. In the former there exists a close con- 
 nection between morality and religiousness, and 
 the conviction that piety is synonymous with 
 acts in accordance with God's will. But this 
 close connection is destroyed by the power of 
 custom, right, observance which steps in and 
 causes religion to be brought down to the level 
 of everyday life, and entangled in the things 
 of the material world. Thus the perception that 
 the higher life is chiefly developed by piety is 
 
212 What is Religion ? 
 
 almost lost sight of. The religions of redemp- 
 tion established very clearly the idea of a higher 
 life, but as they conceived this higher life in 
 its narrowness and in its sharp contrast to the 
 actual life, the moral element lost its decisive 
 significance, and religious good came to exist 
 apart from good and evil. 
 
 Wherever these two lines meet ; where a 
 religion can avoid the narrowness which 
 characterises both types of religion, and combine 
 their good points ; where the idea of redemption 
 is united with the moral element — there we shall 
 have the perfect form of a religion. We will 
 now see whether the Christian religion satisfies 
 these postulates. 
 
CHAPTER YII 
 
 THE NATURE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 MORE than half a century was to elapse 
 from the period of the prophets before 
 religion experienced a new and higher develop- 
 ment which was for the time being definitive. 
 This development did not come without 
 preparation. The nations along the Mediter- 
 ranean and beyond in the East had already 
 entered upon a life in common. Alexander 
 the Great had ruled and had carried Greek 
 culture far into the East. If the East was 
 influenced by the West, it must be remembered 
 the East opened its treasures to the West. In 
 the interchange which took place between East 
 and West there began a new life of inconceivable 
 plenitude and richness. A common language, 
 the Hellenic, united the nations ; an Hellenic 
 culture, intermingled with many foreign 
 elements, began to dominate the world. The 
 heritage of the Greeks took the place of the 
 
 * 213 
 
214 what is Religion? 
 
 world-empire of the Romans. The work of 
 Caesar, and more especially of Augustus, a new 
 and secure order of things arose from the 
 threatened chaos. There ensued once again 
 a great and universal revival in the intellectual 
 life of man. Secure social conditions, extreme 
 outward order and harmony, a marvellously 
 facilitated and regulated international inter- 
 course, a flourishing world-commerce, a revival 
 in art, literature, science — it was into such 
 a world that Christianity came. In the pro- 
 vinces especially Augustus was glorified as the 
 deliverer and the saviour. 
 
 The religious life of mankind at this time 
 was also a life in common. We are confronted 
 with many great and influential religions. 
 There is the later Greek religion, due to Plato, 
 of the cultured men of the Grseco-Roman 
 empire, with its contrast between the ideal 
 and the real world, and its lofty psean of the 
 eternal home of the soul ; the Babylonian 
 religion, with its astrological fatalism and its 
 mantik, which influenced the West ; the half- 
 stagnant Egyptian religion, with its belief in 
 magic, significant of a lower stage of civilisa- 
 tion, as well as its worship of Isis-Osiris 
 (Serapis), the judge in a future life. Then 
 we have the Persian religion which began to 
 penetrate into the West as the religion of 
 
The Nature of Christianity 215 
 
 Mithra, and, most important of all the reli- 
 gions in its significance and results, the Jewish 
 religion, which with the extension of the 
 Jewish nation was established in almost all 
 the larger towns of the Grseco-Roman empire, 
 and carried on an extended and successful pro- 
 paganda. Finally, there were hybrid religions 
 of all kinds. 
 
 These religions overstepped the boundaries 
 of nationalities mostly in the curious form of 
 secret societies — severe religious sects which 
 encompassed themselves with mystery similar 
 in some ways to the familiar, yet unfamiliar, 
 phenomenon of freemasonry. Everywhere 
 there is displayed a tendency towards both 
 universalism and individualism. The individual 
 searches for and strives after things for him- 
 self, quite apart from the things appertaining to 
 his nation ; he accepts whatever comes. Reli- 
 gion is a matter for the individual, a matter 
 of conviction. In most of these religions the 
 extremely personal belief in a future retri- 
 bution becomes the central idea, and with it 
 is united a most pessimistic attitude towards 
 this life. The thought of redemption, of belief 
 in a redeeming God, now begins to play 
 the most important part in these religions. 
 On all sides the connection between these 
 tendencies is seen. The national, polytheistic 
 
2 1 6 What is Religion ? 
 
 elements are not finally overcome ; religion 
 still remains fettered by customs and cere- 
 monies. Curious secret rites, mysterious 
 consecrations, sacramental acts, senseless prac- 
 tices and penances, deeds of magic, and 
 spiritism are the widespread characteristics of 
 the religious life. 
 
 In this development of the common religious 
 life, Judaism, the religion which has already 
 been referred to as the most significant of all 
 religions, Judaism, which gave birth to Chris- 
 tianity, participated. In spite of its par- 
 ticularistic aloofness, the Jewish religion was 
 swept along by the universal, spiritual currents, 
 and, indeed, the advance here was especially 
 vital and clear. The tendency towards uni- 
 versalism, the process of freeing religion from 
 the nation and the national sacrificial worship, 
 the emphasis laid upon individualism, the 
 thought of judgment, the pessimistic attitude 
 towards the world, now and then amounting to 
 dualism (belief in the devil), were especially 
 strongly displayed in Judaism. Here, also, 
 the narrowness of these tendencies is clearly 
 seen. Although Judaism now spread all over 
 the world, and began to carry on a world-pro- 
 paganda, the religion still remained chained to 
 the Jewish nation. It freed itself gradually 
 from the national worship, only to become all 
 
The Nature of Christianity 217 
 
 the more entangled in ceremony and legal 
 casuistry. It was on tlie way to becoming a 
 matter for the individual, a personal conviction, 
 but once more it falls into a blind obedience 
 to the letter of the law. The idea of a per- 
 sonal judgment is evolved, but the national 
 hope, w^ith its passionate fanaticism, prevails. 
 New expressions of the religious life arise : 
 a collection of sacred writings, a spiritual 
 worship of God without ceremonial observ- 
 ances, an appointed order of prayer, and, at 
 the same time, new fetters and burdens, the 
 domination of erudition in piety, the domina- 
 tion of the letter and of the external in the 
 innermost recesses of the religious life. 
 
 Into this world was delivered the Gospel : 
 Jesus and His preaching appeared on the 
 horizon. At the first glance it is not easy to 
 estimate the relation of this new phenomenon 
 to the past. Everything that is to be found 
 in the Gospel is to be found somewhere or 
 other in the past religious history of the 
 Jewish people, though only in a primitive form. 
 Learned Jews are accustomed to point with 
 pride to this " dependence " of the Gospel on 
 Judaism. With justice the retort has been 
 made that the Jewish Rabbis had indeed said 
 all that Jesus said ; but, unfortunately, they 
 said so much else besides. It is in its simplicity 
 
,/ 
 
 /Ti 
 
 V 
 
 2i8 What is Religion ? 
 
 j that the nature of the higher religion is 
 ' revealed ; the classic is always the simple. 
 Simplification means, at the same time, the 
 deliverance from the burdens of the past. We 
 must now consider more closely this great 
 process of deliverance. 
 
 First of all, Jesus freed religion from 
 nationality : Judaism spells fetters, Chris- 
 tianity freedom. At the first glance, this 
 statement may appear extraordinary, for 
 throughout His life and work Jesus appears 
 united to His own people. He refuses to heal 
 the Canaanitish woman because he has only 
 been sent to the lost sheep of Israel. The 
 immediate disciples of Jesus were opposed to 
 heathen missions, which were the work of the 
 Apostle Paul. Yet, in spite of this, deliverance 
 from nationalities is to be found in the Gospel 
 of Jesus. But it was an inward redemption ; 
 Jesus ever remained a faithful son of His 
 nation, but He delivered His faith from merely 
 national interests. This sprang from the very 
 centre of His religion. We can best compre- 
 hend this if we realise the essential idea of 
 the preaching of Jesus, the idea of the 
 kingdom of God. What did this hope of 
 the kingdom of God signify to the Judaism 
 of His time ? Above all, it signified hope in 
 a time when the people of Israel should be 
 
The Nature of Christianity 219 
 
 victorious and should succeed to world-wide 
 domination ; when it should trample upon the 
 hated Roman empire ; when a king from the 
 race of David should rule over Palestine, over 
 Jerusalem, and far over the wide world ; when 
 the heathen should pay tribute, the prisoners 
 of Israel be freed, Jerusalem built up gloriously 
 again — a period in which God should rule over 
 His people on earth and dwell with the faithful. 
 What became of this belief in the preaching 
 of Jesus ? It was glorified and transfigured 
 The kingdom which Jesus looked forward to 
 was indeed the reign of God, a condition of 
 affairs in which God's will was done in heaven 
 and on earth, when the pious should see God, 
 should experience mercy, and should live in 
 eternal joy — Jesus speaks quite calmly of 
 material joys — in community with God. All 
 the other elements of the Jewish national 
 hope fall completely into the background. And 
 if these notes are now and again struck, they 
 are, as it were, the last sounds of an old song 
 that is dying away. Thus Jesus freed the 
 belief in the future life, and with this belief 
 piety, from any thought of the Jewish nation. 
 A generation later Paul accomplished the 
 external deliverance from nationality. He was 
 the first to utter exultingly the saying that 
 brought freedom : " There can be neither Jew 
 
2 20 What is Religion ? 
 
 nor Greek, bond nor free." But this world- 
 propaganda of Paul was not an absolutely 
 new thing, it was only an organised extension, 
 an external development of what existed in 
 the preaching of Jesus. Since the days of 
 Paul the international character of Christianity 
 has remained unassailable. 
 
 In place of the nation the individual now 
 entered exclusively into his rights. Judaism 
 was, and remained, above everything else, a 
 national religion, even though it was often 
 intermingled with individualistic elements. 
 
 IThe Gospel is primarily pure, intense individ- 
 ualism. The great Danish writer Eaerkegaarde 
 once expressed the thought, certainly somewhat 
 exaggerated, that the Gospel thinks in the 
 "category of the individual." Aloof from all 
 sects, from " good society," Jesus went among 
 the despised, the rejected, and the solitary, the 
 sinners and the publicans. He told the worthy 
 rehgious people that there was more joy in 
 heaven over one sinner who repented than 
 over ninety-nine pious men. Jesus brings the 
 individual face to face with his choice, with 
 the idea of judgment ; He places him under 
 the great eye of God, who may condemn him, 
 body and soul, to hell. He tells the individual 
 that he carries his fate in his own hands, and 
 that his life is worth more than all the 
 
The Nature of Christianity 221 
 
 treasures of the world. In the Gospel the 
 redemption of the individual is accomplished. 
 
 The second great deliverance which Jesus 
 effected was the freeing of religion from cere- 
 monial observances. This assertion may at 
 first seem extraordinary, for Jesus Himself said 
 He had not come to dispense with the law but 
 to fulfil it, and that the smallest letter of the 
 law must be obeyed. Yet, if we examine 
 into the matter more closely, we see that 
 He accomplished an inner deliverance. There 
 is no revolutionary attack, no destruction of 
 forms — it is a question of doing this thing and 
 not omitting that. Yet these forms were no 
 longer of any value to Him and His real life ; 
 He filled His own soul and His disciples' souls 
 with higher things. He could quietly wait 
 until all the burdens of the law and the use- 
 less accumulations which had gathered round 
 it had, so far as His followers were concerned, 
 sunk into darkness and dimness. Only on one 
 point was He inexorable ; in one point His 
 kingly, warlike nature showed itself. When 
 the lower and unessential things which wanted 
 to make themselves prominent threatened the 
 higher life with injury, then He fought in the 
 manner of the old prophets. He destroyed 
 the law in favour of love and mercy. Duty 
 to parents was of more value than sacrifice, 
 
(D 
 
 v5) 
 
 222 What is Religion ? 
 
 reconciliation than worship at the altar ; faith- 
 fulness, mercy, and upright judgment are more 
 than the giving of tithes. 
 
 With the deliverance from ceremonial man 
 was delivered from the_lett er of the law . 
 Here, also, Jesus showed Himself the devout 
 Son of His race. To Him the Old Testament 
 is the Holy Scripture ; He trusts it absolutely ; 
 He proves many things from it. But in His 
 soul He was free. To Him religion is a whole, 
 a unity, not a series of definitions depending 
 on the letter of the law. And wherever the 
 Scriptures and tradition run counter to His 
 ideas He argues in a new and incredibly bold 
 manner. From a command of Moses He 
 appeals to the eternal laws created by God. 
 He ventures to say : " You have heard that it 
 
 was said of old But I tell you." In His sight 
 
 there is no piety of the letter, no command 
 from the past. Side by side with the Scriptures 
 stands experience which He gains Himself, with 
 clear eyes, in the life of nature and of men. 
 
 At the same time He delivered religion from 
 erudition. His bitterest opponents were those 
 learned in the law, the theologians. To Jesus 
 religion, theoretical and practical, was some- 
 thing infinitely simple, not in the least anything 
 that was studied. He dethroned the learned 
 men. " I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven 
 
The Nature of Christianity 223 
 
 and earth, that Thou didst hide these things 
 from the wise and understanding and didst 
 reveal them unto babes." On the simple people 
 He made the impression which is summarised 
 in the saying : " He preaches as one inspired, 
 and not as the doctors." 
 
 Reference has already been made to the 
 fact that the process of deliverance begun by 
 Jesus was completed by Paul. Paul drew the 
 deduction, Christ is the end of the law. He 
 expresses this in the marvellous saying, the 
 magic saying with "which he comprehends the 
 innermost nature of Christianity : " With free- 
 dom did Christ set us free." But when we 
 compare the freedom of Jesus and Paul, 
 Jesus appears as more free. He was truly 
 free, so free that He continued to bear great 
 burdens Tvithout thinking of getting rid of 
 them, so filled with living fire that His 
 life was not stifled by the mass of rubbish 
 which He did not clear away. The fetters 
 had eaten deep into the soul of Paul before 
 he cast them on one side. The freedom of 
 the Gospel works from within outwards ; it 
 is not a breaking away, and a violent breach 
 with the external, but a quiet germinating and 
 growing within, slow but absolutely certain. 
 
 Thus Jes us is the D eliverer. Jesus delivered ^/ 
 religion from all national claims, from all 
 
2 24 What is Religion ? 
 
 national fetters, from ceremonial, from the 
 letter of the law, and from the domination 
 of erudition. ' 
 
 With simplicity and purity the true inward 
 meaning of the Gospel is now revealed : in 
 unfettered strength faith in God flows onward 
 freely and powerfully. Judaism had compre- 
 hended God as the strong, supernatural, awe- 
 inspiring God to whom mankind must bow in 
 absolute obedience, and this terrible, sublime 
 God still serves as the background for Jesus's 
 faith and piety. He knows personally this 
 terrible, almighty God through His own per- 
 sonal experience. His God had given Him no 
 success in His life ; mystery beyond all other 
 mystery. He had endured in His life misunder- 
 standing and enmity, anguish and neglect, 
 persecution and dark forebodings of death, 
 faithlessness and treachery from His own dis- 
 ciples. Yet here arises, in unquenchable power, 
 the victorious cry of faith : "And yet I believe" ; 
 here takes place " the casting into the abyss." 
 To this mysterious God, high in the heavens, 
 Jesus was ever able to say, " My Father," and 
 He taught His disciples to pray, " Our Father, 
 who art in heaven " ; with a childlike, bold 
 confidence He submitted to the guidance of 
 the heavenly Father, and accepted life with 
 all its enigmas and sufferings, which He had 
 
The Nature of Christianity 225 
 
 experienced as no other ever had. And in 
 imitation of Hini His greatest disciple ex- 
 ultingly pronounced the defiantly bold saying, 
 " We glory in our sufferings." 
 
 And just as Jesus vanquished and trans- 
 figured the belief of the religion of the law 
 in a remote, harsh, incomprehensible God, so 
 the belief in God which He preached was im- 
 measurably superior to that held by the 
 religions of redemption. Let us, for a moment, 
 for the purpose of comparison, cast our glance 
 back at the Brahminical belief in God, Bud- 
 dhistic belief not being apposite here. Brah- 
 manism, as a religion, rests on the weakening 
 of the consciousness of the dignity of the 
 spiritual life and personality. The Hindoo 
 feels, especially in his religion, that he is 
 merely a living being, closely connected with 
 all nature around him ; hence God appears to 
 him as the one indefinable existence, and his 
 chief religious idea is the conviction that the 
 individual life is necessarily one of suffering, 
 and so he longs after union with this universal, 
 indefinable Being. The teaching of the Gospel, 
 on the contrary, rests on the most profound 
 sense of the dignity and individuality of 
 human life, though this belief is not always 
 pronounced in so many words. In truth, for 
 Jesus, there exists man only, although He casts 
 
 16 
 
2 26 What is Religion ? 
 
 on Nature a clear and comprehending glance, 
 far superior to that of the Hindoo. Nature, the 
 life of the lower beings, is chiefly of interest to 
 Him because He sees in it symbols of human 
 life and its laws. He does not reduce human 
 life to the level of the life of Nature. He 
 elevates the natural, in the form of parables, 
 to the height of the spiritual. Belief in God 
 is expressed in the same symbolical manner. 
 When He constantly calls God " Father," and 
 contrasts God as a personal Being with 
 the human being, this is only meant as a 
 hesitating, incomplete description of the mys- 
 terious, all-powerful, all-comprehensive nature 
 of God, merely a symbol. But the Gospel 
 expresses in unsurpassed fashion the idea that 
 the nature of God is not that of a universal, 
 impersonal existence ; and that, although His 
 deepest nature is beyond our comprehension, 
 we approach nearest to the truth when we 
 understand God as personal energy infused with 
 spirituality. His nature conforming more to this 
 idea than to that of natural existence. In com- 
 prehending God as the Creator, the Doer, the 
 Preserver, as the Father of our spiritual and 
 higher nature, the Gospel at the same time 
 carries the personal energy of the human being 
 to its highest development. Thus the belief 
 taught in the Gospel has superseded the 
 
The Nature of Christianity 227 
 
 belief of the religions of the law and of 
 redemption. 
 
 And now, at last, in this belief of the Gospel 
 we have that close and wonderful connection 
 between religion and morality to which the 
 higher religions strove to attain, yet failed to 
 reach in its entirety. To Jesus there was only 
 one true connecting link between the spiritual 
 and the moral — right doing. God is good, and 
 no one but God alone is good ; he who will find 
 God must seek Him in good. To the woman 
 who with spiritual enthusiasm presses towards 
 Him, and calls the mother of such a son blessed, 
 Jesus answered, " Blessed are they that hear 
 the word of God and keep it." 
 
 Jesus drew many connecting lines between 
 rehgion and morality. First of all He took over 
 from Judaism the mighty idea of judgment : 
 "I will warn you whom ye shall fear. Fear 
 him which after he hath killed hath power to 
 cast into hell." And He liberated this thought 
 of judgment from all connection -u^ith nations, 
 from all antagonisms between nations, and sects, 
 and parties. Xaked and alone Jesus placed the 
 individual before the eternal judgment of God. 
 He liberated the idea from the pharisaical casu- 
 istical setting which belonged to it in Judaism. 
 The judgment did not depend on works but 
 on the motive : a good tree brings forth 
 
22 8 What is Religion ? 
 
 good fruit. He freed it also from all idea of 
 external rewards, from bargaining and haggling 
 with God. With unsurpassed simplicity and 
 convincing power Jesus taught His disciples : 
 " When ye have done all the things that are 
 commanded you, say. We are servants ; we 
 have done that which it was our duty to 
 do." 
 
 Jesus gives a still deeper basis to this con- 
 nection between religion and morality. The 
 belief in God the Father is not only a gift of 
 God through which man is freed from the 
 anguish and burden of life, but it is also an 
 obligation. Belief in the Fatherhood of God 
 implies the relationship of father and child. 
 Noblesse oblige. The children are to be perfect 
 as the heavenly Father is perfect ; this is the 
 will of the good God. To fulfil the will of the 
 heavenly Father is the very quintessence and 
 substance of the belief in the Fatherhood of God. 
 
 A morality purified and free from all cere- 
 monial, from all insignificant legal and casuistical 
 rules and regulations, from all subordinate and 
 external details, is, in the Gospel, closely con- 
 nected with a pure religion cleansed of all 
 subordinate matters. 
 
 At this point an objection may be raised. 
 This is directed against what is called the purely 
 spiritual, ascetic morality of the Gospel. It is 
 
The Nature of Christianity 229 
 
 pointed out that the Gospel assumes a hostile 
 attitude towards human life and the work of 
 civilisation. It is quite true that Jesus and His 
 disciples lived with their thoughts and their 
 hopes turned towards another world. Jesus in 
 clear language preached the doctrine of Sursum 
 corda. Treasure was not to be laid up on earth, 
 but only in heaven. The Gospel paid little 
 attention to the various forms of human life as 
 it is lived in common — in the family, in pro- 
 fessions, in the nation, in the State. Jesus freed 
 Himself and His disciples from all ties of the 
 family, the home, and daily life for the sake of 
 greater and higher objects. He forbade all 
 care — all, be it noted, and not merely the 
 superfluous care — for the morrow. The riches 
 of this world were, in His eyes, a danger to 
 man's soul ; on no account must a moral value 
 be attached to them. Law and authority 
 were natural necessities, but of no moral value. 
 He stood in sharp opposition to the degenerate 
 civilisation of His time. He lived, it must be 
 remembered, in a period of complete decay, and 
 the idea of secular work on behalf of His 
 people and His fatherland must have neces- 
 sarily been remote from His mind. All effort 
 in that direction would have been in vain. 
 Once more, to state the matter shortly, Jesus, 
 in the Gospel, did not direct His thoughts 
 
>l 
 
 230 What is Religion? 
 
 towards the value of this world, although His 
 immeasurably rich nature scattered many a 
 germinating seed. He pointed man to eternity. 
 [AH human things, the finest possessions, are 
 simply regarded as the material by means of 
 which God's will may be done. It is on this 
 concentration of view and this austerity that 
 the peculiarity, the power, and the greatness of 
 Christ's teaching rest. 
 
 But we must also look at the matter from 
 another point of view. A comparison with the 
 somewhat narrow religions of redemption is 
 particularly valuable in this connection. Jesus, 
 . unlike Buddha, never declared that life was an 
 I evil, nor, like Plato, did He ever preach that the 
 pious wise man must above all avoid the ordi- 
 nary, every-day life. Jesus founded no order of 
 monks. This is all the more remarkable as there 
 was in His lifetime something in the nature of an 
 order of monks in the Jewish religion, the sect 
 of the Essenes. Nothing is more clear than the 
 difference between Jesus and His disciples and 
 these curious, ascetic, holy men, who were 
 obliged to cleanse themselves in water if they 
 came in contact with any one who did not 
 belong to their sect. Jesus established no 
 school. He did not go, like John the Baptist, 
 into the desert. He led His life and worked 
 among the ordinary circumstances of everyday 
 
The Nature of Christianity 231 
 
 life. His parables show how well he understood 
 the common life, and with what loving eyes He 
 regarded it. With the same energy as He 
 employed in directing His disciples towards 
 God, He taught them their duties in a moral 
 life lived among others : " Thou shalt love thy 
 God and thy neighbour as thyself." And thus, 
 because in the Gospel the established order of 
 things is not abolished, but rather, through its 
 direct relation with religious things, brought to 
 its highest power and capacity for expression, 
 the Gospel really and truly evinces no hostile 
 tendency whatever toward this earthly life and 
 its work. 
 
 This view is confirmed by a study of the 
 history of Christianity, The Gospel, in the 
 beginning, knew and recognised only the essence 
 of all established modes of life, the simple, 
 direct relations between man and man. It 
 cared nothing for the forms in which custom 
 revealed itself. Early Christianity, in conflict 
 with an opposing world, showed itself hostile 
 to culture. But the world and its work pressed 
 powerfully against Christianity. Christianity 
 split into two divisions — a secular Church which 
 made peace with human culture, and an ascetic 
 monasticism. After fifteen hundred years a 
 step forward was made by means of the German 
 Reformation, which abolished both monasticism 
 
232 What is Religion? 
 
 and a Church striving for worldly rule. The 
 Reformation taught that man may serve God 
 in doing the work of the world. Christianity 
 was able to bear all these changes, and the 
 Reformation marks no step backward, but a 
 healthy progress. Thus, in considering this 
 part of history, we venture confidently to pro- 
 nounce the judgment that the morality of the 
 Gospel is not ascetic and inimical to culture. 
 It accepts, in principle, human life and all the 
 work appertaining to it because it accepts the 
 morality revealed by it. 
 
 But this does not by any means exhaust the 
 wealth of the Gospel. Morality is only one 
 focus in its ellipse ; the other is the idea of 
 ^ Vv- redemption. Jesus did not merely strengthen 
 to the highest point His disciples' moral courage 
 and moral determination. He did not merely 
 cry out to them : " You must be perfect." He 
 put before them the problem of how to be 
 perfect. He stepped forth with the cry of " Do 
 penance ; repent." He knew that morality was 
 conflict ; He knew that as soon as the Divine 
 "Thou shalt" began to stream through the 
 consciousness of man, earth - born man would 
 oppose this voice, and then a mortal combat 
 would arise. He knew that in this conflict we 
 should never reach the goal appointed for us. 
 And because He knew this Jesus revealed to 
 
The Nature of Christianity 233 
 
 His people a God of forgiveness, a God who 
 does not look to the performances but is con- 
 tent with the disposition that begets goodwill, 
 and daily He forgives sins. Here the Gospel of 
 Jesus reaches its supreme height. On this high 
 level stands the parable of the prodigal son. 
 On the one hand the sin-laden human being in 
 utter abandonment and degradation, who has 
 wandered far from his home, and on the other the 
 strong Divine love, which once again receives 
 the lost, ruined son without reproaches or condi- 
 tions, without accepting the self-reproaches of 
 the son. He receives him with cordial, heart- 
 felt joy, with a feeling of thankfulness. It 
 is this love which the worthy self-righteous 
 elder son regards as a paradox, almost as an 
 injustice : " Oh ! love, love, thou art mighty ! " 
 
 It is not only in parables that Jesus revealed 
 this Divine love which can make the impossible 
 possible ; He lets it influence Him in His own 
 life. Wherever the faintest spark is still 
 glimmering, wherever there exists in an utterly 
 ruined life a hidden longing and seeking, and 
 a last despairing cry rises upward, Christ 
 kindles the glimmering spark. He transforms 
 the fading evening glow into the dawn of a 
 new life. Jesus, the friend of publicans and 
 sinners, scorned by the superior people ! 
 
 Thus in the very centre of the Christian 
 
2 34 What is Religion? 
 
 religion stands the thought of redemption, the 
 belief that when man aspires to God the old 
 passes away, and a new life is born. In the 
 religion of the law this thought had only- 
 been vital as a hope of the actual political 
 deliverance of the people. In this respect 
 Christianity stands side by side with the 
 religions of redemption. Yet its belief in re- 
 demption is peculiar. It is not here a matter 
 of " Get rid of life," nor of " Get rid of the 
 material experience of the senses " ; it is " Get 
 free from sin." God in His fatherly goodness 
 forgives sins. Christianity as a moral religion of 
 redemption stands at the head of all religions. 
 
 The idea of redemption appears to be com- 
 pleted by the idea of a future life. Redemption 
 will be accomplished in another and a higher 
 life in which the pure in heart shall see God, 
 and shall be entirely relieved from the burden 
 of care and misery and from all moral imper- 
 fection. It is true that on the threshold of that 
 life stands the judgment, but Jesus taught His 
 disciples not to be frightened at that. He 
 taught them to think of the future life as a 
 better, higher home, for which indeed they 
 must not forget this earthly life, nor neglect 
 to do this world's work as long as it is 
 day. 
 
 Now all this is not laid down in the Gospel 
 
The Nature of Christianity 235 
 
 as a doctrine, but is concentrated in a portrait 
 of extraordinary power and significance. 
 
 When we consider the figure of Jesus from 
 this point of view, we shall see that He Him- 
 self was perfectly aware of the significance 
 of His personality to His disciples. However 
 uncertain may be the sources of our know- 
 ledge concerning Christ's consciousness of His 
 work, and however controversial the question 
 may still be as to whether Jesus regarded 
 Himself as the Messiah of His nation — and 
 even if we answer this question in the affirma- 
 tive, it is very difficult to say in what way 
 Jesus regarded Himself as the Messiah of 
 His people — yet all the more brightly shines 
 forth from the Gospels the immense and 
 authoritative consciousness of Christ's person- 
 ality. He feels He is infinitely superior to all 
 those who have arisen among His own people ; 
 He is conscious that in Him the voice of God 
 speaks finally and decisively to the heart of 
 His people, and that after that there is the 
 Judgment Day. In kingly fashion He disposes 
 of the holy tradition come down from Moses. He 
 is greater than Jonah and Solomon, greater 
 than prophets and kings or the Temple of 
 Jerusalem. He knew how to rule over His 
 own; He called to them and they came; He 
 snatched the disciples from the chains riveted 
 
236 What is Religion ? 
 
 by family or calling, and cried, " Let the dead 
 bury their dead." He ventured, in spite of the 
 opposition of those in good society, into the 
 company of the sinners, the despised and 
 the rejected ; He dared to do this, for He stood 
 above all calumny. He possessed a spiritual 
 power which affected the very physical life of 
 man, and when He was at the height of His 
 influence, surrounded by those who trusted Him 
 utterly, He said to the lame man, " Arise and 
 walk ! " and he did walk. He called all those 
 who were weary and heavy-laden to Himself, 
 for He felt possessed of power and healing. 
 He turned to the assembled multitude and said, 
 " If any man cometh unto Me and hateth not 
 his own father and mother, he cannot be My 
 disciple." He dared to say such a thing ! 
 With certain death before Him He gathered 
 together His disciples, and united their life to 
 His in the Last Supper and its symbolism. He 
 suffered the death of the criminal, but His 
 spiritual and moral glory consecrated even the 
 shameful death on the cross as the holiest 
 symbol of humanity. The very nature of His 
 subjection lifted Him high above the greatest 
 leaders of men in the domain of the spiritual 
 life. In the presence of the incomparable glory 
 of His cross the glory of all others fades away. 
 And in no other religion has a personality 
 
The Nature of Christianity 237 
 
 ever won a significance in any way approaching 
 that of Christ's in the Christian religion. He 
 maintained His power over His disciples' souls 
 beyond death and the grave. After a brief 
 period of the deepest despondency, the disciples, 
 with the eyes of faith, saw Him in their midst ; 
 with illuminating power His picture rose before 
 their minds, visible and actual, as only some- 
 thing actual can appear. Then came Easter 
 and Whitsuntide. And there where Jesus had 
 apparently been subjected to a shameful death 
 they planted the flag of victory, and the cross 
 became the symbol of honour, the crucifixion 
 the most powerful of God's miracles. 
 
 How many changes and alterations has not 
 Christianity experienced since then, and how 
 many wrappings and coverings has she not put 
 on and taken off again ! And in the plenitude 
 of forms in which this Religion has revealed 
 herself, the one idea common to them all was 
 the reverence paid to the personality of Jesus, 
 or at any rate the hearty desire to cling to it. 
 Although it was often concealed by worthless 
 coverings, often disfigured and distorted, 
 Christianity was yet powerful enough again 
 and again to cast on one side the rubbish of 
 tradition ; and wherever Christianity has struck 
 out a new path in her journey it has been 
 because the personality of Jesus had again 
 
238 What is Religion ? 
 
 become living, and a ray from its Being had 
 once more illumined the world. And we 
 children of an historic age, to whom God 
 through long and constant care has given 
 knowledge and the ability to see, so that we 
 perceive the figures of the past more clearly and 
 distinctly than the people of any previous age — 
 we stand overjoyed and delighted with the 
 fulness of life in that Being, and we trace in 
 this personality a power which is still able to 
 influence our lives vitally, powerfully, intensely. 
 All this lies deep in the very nature of 
 the Gospel. The Gospel everywhere directs us 
 towards community of social life, community 
 of spiritual life, which survives the centuries. 
 Buddhism, Platonism, cast the individual — 
 whether he be monk or philosopher — back on 
 himself. In Christianity, with all its individu- 
 ality, everything rests on the community. 
 Jesus proclaims the kingdom of God, Paul the 
 Church. The community is the holy building 
 of the temple in which the Spirit of God dwells. 
 Christ during the centuries has walked through 
 the world with His people. 
 
 In our investigations concerning the nature of 
 Christianity we have hitherto confined our 
 attentions mainly to its beginnings. But these 
 do not embody the whole of Christianity. 
 
The Nature of Christianity 239 
 
 Christianity has had a history, corresponding 
 to the greatness of its power to form and 
 organise communities, such as no other religion 
 has ever had. Judaism since the period of the 
 New Testament has only had a history of 
 stagnation ; the Hellenic religion one of annihi- 
 lation, of absorption into Christianity ; the 
 Parsee religion has continued to exist with 
 some ten thousand adherents. Buddhism only 
 had a genuine history of spiritual might during 
 the first centuries of its existence. Islamism 
 experienced in the Middle Ages almost a more 
 powerful development than the Christianity 
 of the day, but since then stagnation appears 
 to have overtaken it. Christianity alone has 
 had a great and mighty history up till our 
 own day. 
 
 Now, this history shows us how Christianity 
 has been able to amalgamate with the life of 
 the nations as no other religion has ever done. 
 No other religion has ever possessed this 
 power. Buddhism, in the monotonous form of 
 monasticism, established itself as part of the 
 life of the people without really influencing 
 it. Islamism assumed among the separate 
 nations such different forms that it can scarcely 
 be said to have formed a spiritual unity. 
 Christianity unfolded itself in an abundance of 
 forms, varied, vital, yet all connected. The 
 
240 What is Religion ? 
 
 Gospel, or at any rate the largest part of it, is 
 purely subjective ; whenever it assumed the 
 form conditioned by the age this was merely 
 a transparent veil. And its spiritual force 
 was always so strong and powerful that again 
 and again it was able to create from the con- 
 temporary world around it the outer covering, 
 the body, which — in spite of all the changes 
 it went through — preserved its true nature 
 and its productive power. Thus the teaching 
 of the Gospel has permeated the life of the 
 people, and in manifold ways has expanded 
 into a great number of religions, which, never- 
 theless, all spring from the same root. 
 
 An attempt will now be made to sketch the 
 main outlines of this further development 
 of Christianity. The Gospel passed through 
 its period of greatest expansion at the begin- 
 ning ; it is linked to the person of Christ's 
 greatest disciple, to Paul, the great Apostle of 
 the heathen. 
 
 Paul before all else was the means of carry- 
 ing the Gospel from Palestine into the Grseco- 
 Roman world of culture, from the Semitic to 
 the Indo-Germanic race. Through him the 
 Gospel originally proclaimed in the Aramaic 
 language became native to the Greek world. 
 In many ways Paul continued his Master's work 
 in splendid fashion. In him was accomplished 
 
The Nature of Christianity 241 
 
 the great process of religious freedom. Paul 
 finally freed religion from the nation ; he burst 
 the last fetters which bound the young and 
 aspiring religion to Judaism. He freed piety 
 from the fetters of observance, of ceremony. 
 " Christ is the end of the law." 
 
 He comprehended Christianity as a Church, 
 as a new, spiritual religious community which 
 united the people ; and in his preaching of the 
 Spirit of God which animates Christians he 
 expresses in comprehensive fashion the true 
 inwardness and freedom, the unity and entity 
 of the Christian life as opposed to the Jewish 
 ideal of the law. 
 
 But the Gospel experienced in and through 
 the person of Paul not only a happy expansion, 
 but also essential changes and dislocations of 
 its elements. 
 
 1. The most important and the most essential 
 of these was that there was evolved from Jesus' 
 simple Gospel of God and His love to sinners 
 belief in Christ. In His preaching — I shall 
 return to this subject later — and in His whole 
 manner of life Jesus erected a clear barrier 
 between God and Himself. He never demanded Z 
 faith in Himself in the sense He demanded 
 faith in God. But even in the first community 
 of Christians, belief in Christ, who would 
 return to judge the world, became the central 
 
 17 
 
24-2 What is Religion ? 
 
 idea ; as Judge of the world Christ already, in 
 a certain sense, took the place of God. Paul 
 continued this process. He never actually 
 spoke of the divinity of Christ; indeed, he 
 drew a clearly recognised distinction between 
 God and Christ, and spoke of a time when, 
 Christ having given back to God His power, 
 God should be all in all, and Christ the first- 
 born among the brethren. Nevertheless it is 
 quite certain that to Paul the Christian belief 
 meant belief in Christ as a God, and that he 
 considered Christ as a pre-existing heavenly 
 Being, the image of God. It cannot be denied 
 that on the one hand a great truth is 
 contained in these formulae of Paul. The 
 absolute significance of the person of Christ 
 to His community is here expressed with 
 perfect definiteness ; Christ means to His 
 people, in accordance with His nature, more 
 than any of the other leaders in spiritual life, 
 with whom He is not comparable. But, on 
 the other hand, in the deification of the person 
 of Jesus, in the comprehension of Christ 
 as a supernatural being of a kind absolutely 
 different to us, a dangerous path was opened 
 up, along which Christianity was to lose its way 
 in a multitude of confused speculations. 
 
 2. From this time onwards Paul's specific 
 idea of redemption was developed. Paul's idea 
 
The Nature of Christianity 243 
 
 of redemption may be very briefly summarised. 
 The race of man, from the time of Adam 
 onwards, is, on account of its sensual, carnal 
 nature, chained with the iron fetters of necessity 
 to sin and death, and in the manifestations of 
 both heathenism and Judaism it sank deeper 
 and deeper into the depths of sin and destruc- 
 tion. A spark of higher life exists in man, but 
 this, his better self, is powerless by itself. So 
 the Redeemer, a Being of another and a higher 
 kind, the second spiritual man, descended from 
 the heavenly heights into the darkness of earth, 
 in order to deliver us from the degrading 
 domination of the flesh, sin, and death, and to 
 bring us into the world of freedom, purity, and 
 spirit. These ideas are very far removed from ■ ^ 
 the simple Gospel. A whole new world of ideas ■ 
 has been built upon the Gospel. In this Gospel 
 of Paul we hear clearly the echo of Platonic 
 conceptions and piety. In the sharp distinction 
 drawn between the material, concrete world 
 and the spiritual world ; in the pessimistic 
 judgment of this world ; in the proclamation 
 that the better, higher self of man lies captive 
 in the bonds and fetters of the flesh ; in the 
 intense longing for (physical) freedom from these 
 bonds (" Who shall deliver me out of the body 
 of this death ? " Rom. vii. 24), Paul and the great 
 Greek philosopher come into touch with one 
 
244 What is Religion ? 
 
 another. Not, of course, that Paul has in any 
 sense copied Plato ; the ethical character of 
 the religion of salvation preached by Paul 
 stands in the forefront, and instead of the 
 Platonic wise man who delivers himself, there 
 is the central idea of Christ as the Deliverer. 
 It was a great work that Paul accomplished. 
 Here for the first time is shown the capacity 
 of Christianity — on which its universality rests 
 — to amalgamate with the great and noble ideas 
 and feelings of the people with whom it is 
 brought in contact. Yet at the same time we 
 have here a development and an elaboration 
 of the simple Gospel which obliges us to ask 
 whether we are right in considering these mani- 
 festations as the definitive, final expression of 
 the Gospel. 
 
 3. Paul's idea of redemption gains a still 
 further specific stamp in that he connects it 
 with the fact of Christ's death. To the disciples 
 the death of Christ was a great and mysterious 
 problem, and it remained so even after belief 
 in the risen Christ had triumphed. At first 
 the idea of an external salvation was accepted, 
 and believers turned to the prophecies of the 
 Old Testament in which they believed the death 
 and agony of the Messiah were recorded. Soon, 
 however, apparently before the time of Paul, 
 the idea of redemption was expressed in " The 
 
The Nature of Christianity 245 
 
 death of Christ is the sacrifice for our sins." In 
 an age and in a land where it was accepted 
 as a matter of course that God was honoured 
 by sacrifice, and that the sacrifice had the 
 power of atoning for sins, the growth of a belief 
 in the atoning sacrificial significance of Christ's 
 death is absolutely comprehensible. And inter- 
 mingled with it was a second thought, the 
 thought of the value and significance of 
 martyrdom. In that wonderful fifty-third 
 chapter of Isaiah this idea is expressed for 
 the first time in marvellous fashion. It is a 
 great and Divine law that mankind rises to its 
 best and noblest through sufferings and agonies, 
 that the individual suffers for the many, the 
 just for the unjust. " Surely he hath borne our 
 griefs, and carried our sorrows : yet we did 
 esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and 
 afflicted." In the great period of martyrdom 
 during the Syrian religious persecutions, when 
 the Maccabees rose in triumph this idea once 
 again became vital. Jesus was probably think- 
 ing of this when He said that He gave His own 
 life as a ransom for many, and told His disciples, 
 through the symbol of the Last Supper, that 
 His death was for their benefit. These ideas, 
 already closely connected with one another, 
 were accepted by Paul. It would appear that 
 all that was new in his teaching was the central 
 
246 What is Religion ? 
 
 position, and the importance given to the Gospel 
 of salvation. And now for the first time there 
 arose the harsh dogma that God could not 
 pardon sin without the sacrificial death of 
 Christ, that the curse of the Law could only be 
 removed by the vicarious sufferings of the just. 
 This dogma gives the absolutely rational answer 
 to the problem of Christ's crucifixion. 
 
 But at what a price ! If Paul had been bold 
 enough to consider his sufferings and the suf- 
 ferings of every Christian as analogous to those 
 of Christ, and thus softened the harshness of 
 that conception, the conception would have 
 gradually vanished entirely. Thus it came 
 about that, instead of the Gospel's categorical 
 imperative directed towards the individual 
 (" Do that, so shalt thou live"), belief in the fact 
 of salvation accomplished for us occupied the 
 central position in Christianity. 
 
 4. An essential alteration of the simple 
 Gospel in the time of Paul is signified by 
 the incorporation of specific sacramental acts 
 into the Christian life of the community. 
 Sacraments, according to the commonly 
 accepted view, are sacred concrete acts, 
 through which spiritual gifts of grace are 
 transmitted to man by mechanical means, or 
 it may be by personal belief, personal deeds. 
 We have already become acquainted with this 
 
The Nature of Christianity 247 
 
 belief in the efficacy of the material medium 
 in religion in the religious life of mankind at 
 a lower stage of civilisation. It is a charac- 
 'teristic of religious decadence and of religious 
 syncretism (the intermixture of religions), in 
 which mysteries, secret sacramental acts and 
 consecrations, play an important part, and it 
 was from these religions that Christianity as 
 a higher religion arose. Thus we now find 
 that sacramental conceptions were attached 
 to the sacred acts of Christianity — to baptism 
 and the Last Supper — the tribute which 
 Christianity paid to the heathen world 
 surrounding it. This process, it is true, 
 was not evolved by Paul or furthered 
 by him ; it evolved its own accomplishment. 
 Paul had no personal inclination towards 
 what was sacramental. Two examples will 
 illustrate the fact that this process had 
 extended very far in the time of Paul. In 
 Corinth there already existed in the time of 
 Paul the custom of allowing the living to be 
 baptized for the dead, so that the latter 
 might be given the gift of grace. What a 
 magical, mechanical view of baptism, which 
 Paul, at any rate, did not condemn ! But 
 Paul comprehended the eating and drinking 
 in the Communion as spiritual-material inter- 
 course with the risen Lord, just as he believed 
 
248 What is Religion ? 
 
 that the heathens in their sacrificial feasts, 
 the Satanic counterpart of the Holy Eucharist, 
 had a very real spiritual and bodily inter- 
 course with the demons. Hence we have also 
 the belief that the wrong use of the Cona- 
 munion involves dangerous material results, 
 such as sickness or death. 
 
 Thus a multitude of new elements were 
 introduced into the Gospel in the time of 
 Paul, and partly through him : the worship 
 of Christ ; an intense and narrow belief in 
 salvation, influenced by Platonic ideas ; the 
 dogma of sacrifice and compensation; the 
 sacramental idea. Mention must also be made 
 here of the doctrine of justification, which will 
 be referred to again when the Reformation is 
 dealt with. Paul certainly did not place this in 
 the centre of his religion, and he probably only 
 used it as a weapon of defence against the 
 Judaism based on law. With Paul, however, 
 begins the elaboration of Christianity. 
 
 A rapid glance will now be cast over the 
 later stages of the development of Christianity, 
 which must ever be of incalculable value to 
 all evangelical Christians and supporters of 
 the Reformation. 
 
 First of all we must look to the end of 
 the second century after Christ. Here we 
 are confronted by the powerful apparition 
 
The Nature of Christianity 249 
 
 of the Christian Church. In the time of 
 Paul the idea of a Church existed, but to 
 him the Church meant intense spirituality. 
 Now the Church was established as a firmly- 
 planted, pliant, diversified organism. She had 
 won her unity by means of a collection of 
 holy writings, a common creed, universally 
 recognised rules of faith. Tradition helped the 
 Scriptures, and this tradition did not stand 
 alone. At the head of the Ohurch were the 
 leaders, the bishops ; and the bishops, regarded 
 as one body, were honoured as the preservers 
 of pure doctrine. Theologians obtained the 
 leadership in the Church ; theology came into 
 existence. The Church possessed an organised 
 and elaborate Divine worship, which, on the 
 whole, was a worship of the Almighty in 
 spirit and in truth ; yet already it had once 
 more assumed ceremonial, and more especi- 
 ally sacramental, elements. Indeed, there had 
 again penetrated into the Church the distinc- 
 tion between the priests and the laity. It is 
 in the highest degree noteworthy how this 
 ecclesiastical form of Christianity repeated in 
 many points the organic forms of the religions 
 of the law. 
 
 When we consider the further development 
 of this Church during the next century we 
 shall see how, on the whole, the various 
 
250 What is Religion ? 
 
 elements introduced into the Gospel by Paul 
 were further perfected. 
 
 1. The doctrine of the person of Christ. It 
 would appear that the belief in the divinity 
 of Christ had taken firm root almost from 
 the beginning among the majority of believers 
 belonging to the Pagan-Christian Church. 
 They had no understanding of the subtler 
 distinctions still observed in the Pauline 
 theology. To the mass of men who had 
 emerged from pagan polytheism it was quite 
 an easy matter to believe in the divinity of 
 Christ; but for the leaders, the learned men — 
 and the theologians, in whom the essentially 
 monotheistic idea of the Christian religion 
 had arisen — this presented a great difficulty. 
 For a long time an energetic attempt was 
 made courageously to maintain the subordi- 
 nation of the Son to the Father. But finally 
 the lay interest in religion was victorious, 
 and this — we shall immediately see why — 
 could only be satisfied with the dogma of 
 absolute equality. In the Nicene Creed 
 believers subscribed to the doctrine that God 
 the Father and God the Son — and very soon 
 the Holy Ghost was added — were like Beings — 
 like Beings, yet not identical ; three persons, 
 yet one God. The later creeds — for example, 
 the so-called Athanasian Creed — are full of 
 
The Nature of Christianity 251 
 
 these contradictions, of a kind appropriately 
 described by a witty artist as " wooden iron." 
 But we have not yet finished with these 
 contradictions and difficulties. If Christ is 
 God, what is the relation between the Divine 
 nature and the human nature, between the 
 Godhead of Christ and the fact of the Incar- 
 nation? The Council of Chalcedon, indeed, 
 established this absolute contradiction : that two 
 natures are in Christ — later it even asserted 
 two wills — yet there is but one person, and 
 these two natures exist in Him unmixed and 
 unchanged, undivided and inseparable ! 
 
 2. The idea of redemption and sacrifice. 
 The idea of redemption in the form expressed 
 by Paul — that is to say, belief in a super- 
 natural Redeemer, absolutely different in 
 nature from us — remained the central idea i 
 of the Christian Church. In the Eastern 
 Church the question of the nature of the 
 Redeemer, traces of which are to be found 
 in Paul's teaching, comes to the front. The 
 final object of the believer appears to have 
 been the putting on of the Divine nature 
 the highest object of salvation, immortality. 
 The belief in redemption may perhaps be 
 comprehended in the sentence, the Divine 
 Christ must become man, so that we men 
 may at some time become divine. It is clear, 
 
252 What is Religion ? 
 
 therefore, that in such a religion the belief 
 in the divinity of Christ would occupy a 
 central position. In the West, on the con- 
 trary, the idea of redemption became operative 
 in definite relation to Christ's crucifixion and 
 its moral, or, to speak more correctly, its 
 juristic significance. Here the doctrine of the 
 eternal service which Christ rendered man- 
 kind by His death, and of the eternal, 
 atoning significance of His sacrifice, reaches its 
 culmination. 
 
 3. The idea of the Sacrament. The sacra- 
 mental idea tends more and more to over- 
 shadow piety in the Christian Church. A 
 whole new world of ideas and dogmas was 
 created. A mass of superstitions now entered 
 into Christianity. From the third century 
 onwards the Sacrament dominated the whole 
 Christian worship of God. In the centre of 
 this service was the holy Mass, the sacred 
 partaking of the Communion, which was 
 regarded as a repetition of Christ's sacrificial 
 death. The priesthood experienced an enor- 
 mous strengthening of its authority. In the 
 Greek Church, especially, the belief in Sacra- 
 ments, chiefly owing to the influence of the 
 natural view of redemption, killed all spiritual 
 piety. 
 
 4. A new and powerful problem now con- 
 
The Nature of Christianity 253 
 
 fronted the Church. The Church conquered 
 the heathen world ; it became a State Church. 
 The early Church had been hostile to the 
 world and to culture ; the later Church 
 showed itself friendly to the world, and 
 desired to rule in the world. The hatred of 
 the world was concentrated in the monasti- 
 cism which now arose, which attracted to 
 itself the best and noblest spirits of Christen- 
 dom. In the East monasticism preserved its 
 ascetic, quietistic character, but in the more 
 vigorous West it developed into a civilising 
 power of the highest importance. In the 
 West, as in the East, the Church knew how 
 to make use of this movement, which was at 
 first almost revolutionary, and to appear as 
 both rulers and ascetics. 
 
 Gradually the early Church split into divi- 
 sions, into the Eastern Church and the Western 
 Church, the separation already beginning when 
 the Roman Empire was divided into an Eastern 
 and a Western empire, and being completed 
 in the Middle Ages. 
 
 In the Eastern Church — the Greek Catholic 
 Church — Christianity on the whole sank to a 
 lower stage of religious life. Its soul and its 
 capacity to civilise vanished ; dogma was con- 
 solidated ; no progress was made ; the believers 
 still clung to dogmas which were ever becoming 
 
2 54 What is Religion ? 
 
 more and more truly incomprehensible. More 
 than ever sacramental ideas dominated religion ; 
 religion sank to a system of outward, self- 
 sufficing acts and ceremonies, to be scrupulously 
 maintained. Added to this there was the rever- 
 ence paid to saints and relics, and a decadent 
 form of image-worship approaching to fetich- 
 worship. The whole of the later pagan Greek 
 world, with its mysterious character, awoke to 
 new life. Religion became entirely custom, 
 usage, as it had been when it was at the 
 national stage of religious life ; and from the 
 time when the Byzantine Empire was subdued 
 by advancing Islam the Oriental Church was 
 split up into a number of insignificant, degene- 
 rate Churches closely united to the smaller 
 Christian nations which were now arising in the 
 East. Only in the Russian Church, which, as 
 well as the Russian people, has experienced a 
 great history, and is experiencing it now — one 
 recalls to mind Tolstoy's description of Russian 
 peasant life — does there appear to be signs of 
 manifold energies and undreamt-of possibilities 
 for expansion. 
 
 In contrast to the Greek Church, the Roman 
 Catholic Church did not lose its spiritual gene- 
 rating power. The Western Church from the 
 beginning was less bound to the State. It had 
 a history, and made history, and what a history 
 
The Nature of Christianity 255 
 
 it was ! — the history of the Popes of the Middle 
 Ages and the Crusades. Its theology, aroused 
 by the philosophy of Islam, reached its zenith 
 in the Middle Ages. The Roman Church not 
 only developed the old traditional ecclesiastical 
 elements (dogma, tradition, Christology, the 
 idea of redemption and compensation), but quite 
 new elements now gained power and influence. 
 
 1. Into the Roman Catholic Church the spirit 
 of Roman law entered. While the Greek 
 Catholic Church sank almost to the level of 
 national paganism, in the Roman Church law 
 and religion formed a close union, as was the 
 case in the religions of the law. Religion 
 becomes simply a legal contract between God 
 and man. Baptism, for example, receives the 
 significance of a sacrament {sacraTnentum), 
 The word "sacrament" originally meant the 
 oath of fealty which the Roman soldier had 
 to take. Christianity became a system of 
 obligations which must be absolutely carried 
 oufc. Faults were to be atoned for by a 
 second system of obligatory penances, somewhat 
 analogous to the penance system of the Persian 
 Church. The Church is the great penitential 
 establishment that guards this system of atone- 
 ments. The death of Christ is really regarded 
 from the legal point of view of service rendered 
 and atonement executed. The Church is the 
 
256 what is Religion ? 
 
 administrator of the inestimable treasures of 
 Christ and His saints ; ceremony, religious 
 custom, stand in the forefront of religion. 
 
 2. In addition to the specific Roman legal 
 spirit, there is the spirit of Roman world- 
 empire. The position of the Church of Rome 
 was from the beginning quite other than that 
 of the great metropolis of the East. Rome 
 was the only apostolic bishopric in the West; 
 and whilst in the East the patriarchates rivalled 
 one another, the Roman Church remained in- 
 disputably the first in the West. After the 
 political power of the Western empire was 
 destroyed, and the influence of Byzantium 
 disappeared more and more, then Rome be- 
 came the political power of the West. Rome 
 stood like a rock amid the fierce surgings and 
 storms of the wanderings of the nations. She 
 took upon herself the mighty task of converting 
 and civilising the barbaric peoples. Thus she 
 drew to herself the spirit of world-domination. 
 From the period of the rise of the mighty 
 figures of the Frankish emperors, quite un- 
 connected with the East and Constantinople, 
 Rome reached the height of its political power 
 in conjunction with the German ' Empire, now 
 striving to gain ascendancy. Through the 
 centuries Rome has striven for world-domi- 
 nation, and up to our own day the Church 
 
The Nature of Christianity 257 
 
 of Rome has never abandoned her political 
 character. 
 
 And within the Roman Catholic Church itself 
 Rome succeeded in its struggle for domination 
 to the utmost limit. Even in our own day 
 the idea of the Church has been definitely- 
 broadened. In the Middle Ages it stood firmly- 
 established, with its great Councils, so that the 
 Councils (i.e., the Christian bishops as a body) 
 stood above the Pope, could decide questions 
 of faith, and make and unmake Popes. Now, 
 after centuries of struggle and friction between 
 Councils and Popes, when the Papacy practically 
 won the victory, Rome, by the Vatican Council 
 of 1870, which established the dogma of the 
 infallibility of the Pope in all matters of belief, 
 has attained lasting, unrivalled domination in 
 the Roman Church. 
 
 3. But it must not be forgotten that the 
 Roman Church rejoiced in the possession of 
 a great personality of almost prophetic power. 
 It is only necessary to read the first chapter 
 of St. Augustine's " Confessions" to recognise 
 that here we are brought face to face with 
 a personality of the highest rank. Wherever 
 true vital religion has shone forth in the Roman 
 Catholic Church we recognise the influence of 
 St. Augustine. The piety of St. Augustine is, 
 to a certain extent, a revival of Paul's piety. 
 
 18 
 
258 What is Religion ? 
 
 In just the same way everything is based on 
 the opposition between sin and grace, between 
 perdition and redemption, upon the absolute 
 incapacity and bondage of the human will, and 
 the all-sufficing Divine grace, resting on predesti- 
 nation. But the Divine grace — and here is the 
 point where St. Augustine differed from St Paul 
 — is indissolubly connected with the means of 
 grace offered by the Catholic Church. Thus the 
 influence of St. Augustine has led, not only to 
 the intensifying and deepening of the religious 
 life, but also to the development of ecclesiasti- 
 cism and outward observances. 
 
 4. As the fourth characteristic of the Roman 
 Church we must finally mention Western 
 monasticism, which, as has already been said, 
 possessed a moral and civilising significance of 
 the highest importance quite different from that 
 of the Greek Church. At the time when the 
 Roman Papacy was at the height of its power 
 monasticism likewise was at its zenith. By the 
 side of the powerful figure of Innocent IV. 
 stands the simple, humble one of St. Francis 
 of Assisi, who, so far as his influence on the 
 life of the Middle Ages is concerned, may, in 
 a certain sense, be placed by St. Augustine. 
 The influence of his personality in literature 
 extended to the time of Dante, in pictorial art 
 beyond Giotto, the delineator of St. Francis's 
 
The Nature of Christianity 259 
 
 life, and Fra Angelico to Fra Bartolomeo 
 and Raphael. 
 
 Up till now we have traced the history of 
 the elaboration of Christianity. For fifteen 
 hundred years the Gospel has unfolded itself 
 before our eyes in ever-varied, manifold and 
 diversified forms. Now we approach the era 
 of release and simplification. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 IN answering the question concerning the 
 future of Christianity it will be best, first of 
 all, to fix our attention upon the final, definitive 
 form and development which Christianity has 
 assumed. The Reformation was a mighty act 
 of freedom for Christianity accomplished by the 
 German spirit, a return to simplicity and truth. 
 First of all the Reformation signifies the 
 destruction of the whole outward fabric of the 
 Roman Church, to which more than a thousand 
 years had contributed, the abolition of the 
 political and State character of the Church, the 
 breaking down of all outward authorities on 
 which people had formerly relied. Before the 
 upright spirit of. the Wittenberg monk burdens, 
 heavy as mountains, faded away. The Church 
 could no longer be the final authority in matters 
 of doctrhie ; the Pope himself, the Councils, the 
 delegates of the whole Church, could all make 
 
 260 
 
The Future of Christianity 261 
 
 mistakes. Luther, in alliance with the newly- 
 awakened knowledge of the Universities, and 
 the scientific consciousness, appealed from all 
 authority, all tradition of the last fifteen 
 hundred years, to the Holy Scriptures. But he 
 did not even stop here, for the Scriptures were 
 not authoritative to him in every single word. 
 He made important distinctions, he gave 
 currency to the great principle, which was not, 
 however, further developed by him, that the 
 Bible is authoritative as long as it is in harmony 
 with Christ. If, indeed, he often departed from 
 this bold standpoint, yet — although in harmony 
 with modern biblical criticism which regards 
 the Bible as the historic source of the revelation 
 which culminated in Christ — he gave the Bible 
 its right to be in the Evangelical Church. 
 
 The Reformation further signifies the freeing 
 of evangelical piety and morality from a mass 
 of external observances which had accumulated 
 in the course of history. With the casting off 
 of indulgences a process began which was never 
 to cease. The substance and central idea of the 
 Catholic worship of God, the sacrificial Mass, 
 the privileges of the priesthood, the whole 
 system of penances and atonements, the (Papal) 
 dues, pilgrimages, the worship of the saints 
 and the Virgin, and many other things were 
 now destroyed. It was an enormous release. 
 
262 What is Religion ? 
 
 Luther, relying on St. Paul and his attacks on 
 the Jewish justification by the law, set his 
 doctrine of faith alone against that of works 
 preached by the Catholic Church. Thus the 
 essential nature of the Lutheran Reformation 
 may be conveniently summed up by stating that 
 Luther placed the doctrine of justification by 
 faith in the forefront of the Christian reli- 
 gion. As a matter of fact he did much more 
 than this ; he once more revealed religion as 
 religion, he freed it from all its Romish 
 deformities. With authority he announced the 
 ancient truth that religion consists in the sur- 
 render of the heart to the merciful God, who is 
 ever gracious towards us and our acts, and in 
 the directing of our conscience towards Him ; 
 religion was an act of the whole, living person- 
 ality, and not just the performance of good 
 deeds. 
 
 Luther, when he destroyed these externals, 
 also destroyed the Sacrament in its peculiar 
 significance, and with it sacramental religion. 
 He cast on one side all the accretions of the 
 Catholic sacramental religion which went be- 
 yond the teaching of the Bible. But he did 
 more than this. Perpetually, and to the very 
 end of his life, he emphasised the fact that 
 everything depended on the Word, that it 
 was the Word alone that was efficient in the 
 
The Future of Christianity 263 
 
 Sacrament itself, and that the Sacrament was 
 only a special form of the Word, and thus he 
 maintained in the most decisive manner the 
 spiritual religion of the Gospel as opposed to 
 all physical conceptions, and here he reversed 
 a tendency which had begun in the time of 
 the New Testament. It is no argument against 
 this estimate of the Reformation, however, 
 that Luther, in his struggle with the fanatics — 
 the Anabaptists and the followers of Zwingli — 
 re-admitted, both to his own mind and to his 
 Church, the Catholic view of the Sacrament ; 
 for by his fundamental attitude towards the 
 sacrament he secured for the Evangelical 
 Church, for ever, the purely spiritual (or 
 symbolical) view of the sacred acts of Chris- 
 tianity (baptism and the Communion). 
 
 The last and the most important thing, 
 perhaps, that Luther's Reformation effected 
 was the complete change in the attitude of 
 Christianity towards the secular world, with its 
 moral duties and its work. He thus entirely 
 destroyed the twofold character of the Catholic 
 Church, that peculiar and inconsistent attitude 
 towards the world, that clever combination in 
 pursuance of which the Catholic Church was at 
 once lords of the world and fugitives from the 
 world. He cast aside the last remnant of the 
 ascetic character of Christianity — at any rate in 
 
264 What is Religion ? 
 
 principle. There was only one way of serving 
 God — by living a moral, good life. The man- 
 servant and the maid-servant who served their 
 master, the mother who looked after her child, 
 the father who maintained his household, the 
 prince who ruled over his land, performed God's 
 work as well as, if not better than, the priest 
 and the monk. The Gospel teaches a secular 
 morality, the common daily life becomes sacred. 
 This is a great and mighty progress ; indeed, one 
 may say that the Reformation developed seeds 
 and thoughts which are scarcely recognisable in 
 the original Gospel, and which were, until then, 
 completely dormant and hidden. 
 
 This is the last, definitive stage of development 
 which the Gospel passed through. The Reforma- 
 tion, naturally, had its limitations and draw- 
 backs. Luther, and especially the Churches which 
 arose after him — the Evangelical Churches in 
 particular — took over from the Church of the 
 Middle Ages, without due consideration, many 
 ideas which are no longer considered to be of 
 permanent value. I will briefly name these : 
 the doctrine of the verbal inspiration of the 
 Bible, which has gained an all-powerful influence 
 in the Evangelical Churches, which are based 
 on the Bible alone ; the whole of the Christo- 
 logical dogma with all its metaphysical specu- 
 lations, such as the doctrine of the Trinity and 
 
The Future of Christianity 265 
 
 the doctrine of vicarious suffering in the form 
 
 in which it was embodied in the Middle Ages ; e-, 
 
 St. Augustine's principle, which was entirely \ * 
 
 animated by the contradiction between sin and 
 
 grace. 
 
 ***** 
 
 This question of what the Reformation has 
 bequeathed to us in the matter of problems, 
 of work for the purer development of the 
 Gospel, is connected with our inquiry con- 
 cerning the future of Christianity. We must 
 now investigate this matter somewhat more 
 closely. 
 
 First of all it must be said that the question of 
 the future of Christianity is the question of the 
 future of religion. For what we have learned in 
 the course of our wanderings through the history 
 of religion is precisely this fact, that the 
 Christian religion is absolutely superior to all 
 the other religions, and that Christianity 
 represents the highest point which religious 
 development has reached. 
 
 And, indeed, not only in Christianity is the 
 highest point reached, but in it all former lines 
 of religious thought appear to converge. First 
 of all let us observe the external position which 
 Christianity holds in history. It stands quite by 
 itself, arising a good five hundred years after 
 the great age of the prophetic revival of 
 
 c 
 
266 What is Religion ? 
 
 religion. Of all these prophetic religions, only 
 the Jewish religion reached a higher stage in the 
 form of Christianity. Islamism, which arose 
 some five hundred years later, was a distinctly 
 retrograde step. 
 
 Let us now consider the real, inward 
 superiority of Christianity. 
 
 1. In Christianity every specific national 
 element in religion was finally overthrown, 
 and yet Christianity, in a far higher degree 
 than Islamism and Buddhism, was able, in the 
 long course of its history, to penetrate into 
 the innermost being of the most different 
 nations, so that we now speak of a Roman 
 and a German, a Slavonic and an Armenian, 
 an English and a North American Christianity. 
 
 2. In the Christian religion, religion as simple, 
 spiritual belief in the living God is revealed in 
 its purest form, and most free from all outward 
 things (forms of worship, ceremonies). The 
 Gospel is in its very nature absolutely a thing of 
 the spirit, and in the course of its history 
 Christianity, in spite of backslidings, has always 
 been able to return to this inner light and 
 spirituality. And it is just because the Gospel 
 is purely spiritual that it has been able to reveal 
 itself in the most varied outward forms and 
 wrappings. Compared with Christianity, how 
 overburdened with outward ceremonies, for 
 
The Future of Christianity 267 
 
 example, Islamism is (we think of its five 
 fundamental principles), or the Hindoo religion, 
 with its strict prohibition against omitting the 
 smallest detail of the religious hfe ! 
 
 3. Christianity, in freeing religion from 
 nationality and ceremonial, accomplished the 
 deliverance of the individual in religion, and 
 supported the principle of individualism in its 
 clearest and strongest form. It did not, how- 
 ever, isolate the individual, but strenuously 
 directed his footsteps into the paths of human 
 society. 
 
 [ 4. Christianity is eminently a moral religion. 
 It shares with the religions of the law this 
 voluntary character, and in common with these 
 it has as its central belief the idea of justice 
 animating the will ; but in the purity and 
 energy of its morality Christianity is far in 
 advance of these religions. Purified religion 
 here stands in close conjunction with purified 
 morality. 
 
 5. Christianity is eminently a religion of 
 redemption. It points to a higher life, and says 
 that this earthly life is not the highest. But 
 it by no manner of means despises this life. It 
 unfolds the higher element that exists in it, and 
 finds this pre-eminently in the moral rather 
 than the intellectual nature. Thus Christianity 
 is the religion of moral redemption, and its 
 
 
 1^1 
 
 I 
 
 r 
 
268 What is Religion ? 
 
 highest good is the forgiveness of sin and 
 guilt, and the freeing of the will towards the 
 good. 
 
 6. As Christianity is a religion of moral 
 redemption it entertains no hostile disposition, 
 but rather shows itself helpful, towards the life 
 of mankind and its work of civilisation. Even 
 in the time when Christianity found in monas- 
 ticism the central point of its existence it was 
 a branch of this same monasticism that became 
 a civilising force of the highest importance. 
 (We may compare with this the Buddhist 
 ^\ monasticism.) It is no mere chance that has 
 made the Christian nations the leaders of 
 civilisation. But again, the Christian religion 
 never spent itself in the work of the world and 
 its development (as, for example, the Persian 
 religion did). It regarded all this work as a 
 means to an end ; it proclaimed to the individual 
 that he should consciously aspire to carry out 
 God's commands under His all-seeing eyes, to 
 dwell in peace with God, and to live under the 
 shadow of eternity. 
 
 Thus once more it must be said that the 
 question of the future of Christianity is the 
 question of the future of religion. We will not 
 here touch upon the question of whether within 
 a measurable distance of time Christianity, 
 which now includes perhaps a third of 
 
The Future of Christianity 269 
 
 humanity, will be the only religion to be 
 considered. 
 
 But — if there is to be only one religion — it is ^ 
 Christianity which must be the religion of the ■ 
 progressive nations of the earth. From this 
 point of view no other religion can be compared 
 with it. History speaks plainly here. Every 
 attempt to graft the Buddhist religion on 
 European culture has been unsuccessful. When 
 Schopenhauer, half a century ago, found in this 
 Oriental religion the last word of wisdom, and 
 honoured Buddha as his patron saint, the ex- 
 planation of this disposition of mind is to be 
 found in the misery and stagnation of the 
 system of petty German States under which 
 Schopenhauer grew up. In an age which still . 
 lives under the shadow of the mighty Bismarck, i^'V^^ 
 an age of national revival, of the social question, 
 of the great success of the Nietzsche-Zarathustra . • 
 teaching, the followers of the great philosopher 
 can only be regarded as very curious saints. 
 The European Buddhists may fix their head- 
 quarters in the metropolis of France, which is 
 ready to receive anything strange and morbid ; 
 here and there they may gain some following, 
 in Germany, but all these efforts will pass 
 powerless away. 
 
 In still another sense the question of the 
 future of Christianity is the question of the 
 
270 what is Religion ? 
 
 future of religion. This proposition concerns 
 those who are of opinion that they can have 
 and preserve religion while denying the religion 
 — that is, Christianity — which is based on his- 
 tory. Christianity is the only living religion 
 that concerns us. This is a fact of enormous 
 importance. When we follow carefully the 
 course of history we see that the development 
 of religion proceeds at longer and longer 
 intervals, at intervals of centuries, at inter- 
 vals of a thousand years. The higher the 
 religious life of man ascends the more firmly 
 fixed are his beliefs. New forms of belief be- 
 come more and more rare. They are always in 
 the nature of a creative miracle, they arise 
 amid a great convulsion of human life. There 
 is a rending of the elements, an upheaval of 
 the earth; and yet there are men to-day who 
 believe that a new religion can be made in a 
 moment. They declare hastily that Christianity 
 is worn out, cast it on one side, patch together 
 a few variegated shreds of belief and call that 
 modern religion ! Things are not arranged 
 quite so simply. He who proclaims in this 
 round fashion that Christianity is a failure 
 proclaims at the same time that he is without 
 religious feeling. 
 
 And on this account the future of Christianity 
 is so highly important. Now, the question of its 
 
The Future of Christianity 271 
 
 future is the question of its capacity for further 
 development. People may here object and say, 
 But is a development required? Does not the 
 old faith suffice? Our answer is that this 
 development is required because since the 
 Reformation the whole structure of human life 
 has entirely altered, and history and experience 
 teach us that when this happens religion 
 assumes other forms. 
 
 In order to answer the question, there- 
 fore, whether, and in what direction, the 
 development of Christianity is necessary, we 
 must consider first the change in human 
 society since the Reformation. What strikes 
 us here as the most distinctive and important 
 fact is, briefly, the rise and development of 
 a culture independent of all ecclesiastical 
 and religious influence. The early Church was 
 hostile to culture, while the culture of the 
 Middle Ages was entirely dependent on the 
 Church. The Renaissance marks the earliest 
 transitory rise of a magnificent culture inde- 
 pendent of the Church. But this culture, so far 
 as its outward duration was concerned, was but 
 ephemeral. The influence and the interest of 
 the Church were not at this time destroyed, but 
 simply cast on one side, a neglect which later 
 was to be rued bitterly. It was only in the 
 Protestant countries — Holland and England 
 
272 What is Religion ? 
 
 took the lead here — that modern culture was 
 developed. First of all, on the material side, we 
 see the rise of modern astronomy and natural 
 science (Newton), and modern technical know- 
 ledge (machinery, world-wide industry). Cor- 
 responding to this effort to control the powers 
 of Nature there is the endeavour to investigate 
 and control the laws of human society, and now 
 the modern sciences, politics, political economy, 
 and statistics arise. Thus there came into 
 existence a thoroughly rational system of 
 ethics, free from religious influence, based on 
 the idea of human society, a whole conception 
 which may perhaps be comprehended under the 
 name of Deism. This culture is not revolu- 
 tionary; it is not even directly hostile to the 
 Church ; it is simply secular. Enormously self- 
 conscious, with an intense and constant joy in 
 the material, concrete side of life, full of varied 
 interests, with both feet planted firmly on the 
 earth, culture cries out to us, " Behold, I am 
 here ! " — The Dutch and Flemish artists, Shake- 
 speare above all others, may be taken as 
 symbols of eternal significance. 
 
 The consequence of this was an enormous set- 
 back to all religious life. It must always be 
 accounted to the honour of German enlighten- 
 ment, German rationalism, that it has ever 
 strenuously maintained the close connection 
 
The Future of Christianity 273 
 
 between the Christian religion and modern cul- 
 ture. German idealism in poetry and philosophy- 
 has alTvays enriched and strengthened the cul- 
 ture of rationalism, especially on its religious 
 side. But yet, on the other hand, especially in 
 its general attitude, it has continued its works 
 on the basis of "rationalism," on the basis of 
 the self-evident proposition that there is an in- 
 dependent culture resting on mankind which is 
 valuable in itself and which certainly needs no 
 confirmation from the Church. In this the 
 nineteenth century has introduced no ne^v idea. 
 If we study carefully the intellectual life of 
 Germany, we see that in the eighteenth century 
 all energies were concentrated at one point 
 and proceeded to develop from that point. On 
 the one hand, in the domain of religious life 
 there is during the whole of the century a 
 strong movement towards narrowness and 
 ecclesiastical consolidation, and proportionately 
 a loss of religious influence on the community. 
 On the other hand, the eighteenth century marks 
 the beginning for Germany of the advancing 
 powers of technical science, enormous trade, 
 and international intercourse, together with 
 the dominating Tvorld-wide influence of Anglo- 
 French positivism and materialism, so that 
 the Germans fall far below the unity and 
 completeness of idealistic culture. Yet, in spite 
 
 19 
 
274 What is Religion ? 
 
 of all these currents and counter-currents one 
 important new fact has remained — the existence 
 of a modern European and North American 
 civilisation, strong in itself and resting on itself 
 alone. 
 
 As a symbol of this modern ideal of life the 
 picture of Goethe comes to mind. His person- 
 ality impresses us as that of a life animated by 
 the spirit within, and acting in accordance with 
 universal self-evolved laws of development. 
 Absorbing all the currents and ideas of his time, 
 working with enormous industry and knowledge, 
 wrestling victoriously with all the spirits of evil, 
 and courageously trampling them under foot, 
 Goethe rose triumphantly to a harmonious con- 
 ception of the world and attitude towards life, 
 and sat enthroned on the heights, like Zeus on 
 Olympus, generously dispensing his gifts. We 
 have here before our sight not merely an ex- 
 ternally magnificent culture such as the Anglo- 
 French rationalism presents us 'svith, but a 
 culture of the deepest spiritual kind, in which 
 all the nobler spiritual powers of human life, 
 religion also, find a place — a rich world, com- 
 plete in itself, firmly planted on itself. 
 
 And close to Goethe stands Bismarck ; again 
 we have the picture of a life in accord- 
 ance with universal laws — the picture of heroic, 
 energetic, infinitely capable manhood. Stand- 
 
The Future of Christianity 275 
 
 ing firmly on the earth in which his roots 
 are cast, dealing only with what is, Bismarck, 
 in a hard struggle for existence, raised his 
 humiliated nation to an undreamt-of position of 
 power and authority. As if possessed of a 
 magic wand, he awakened the idealistic German 
 dreamer. And on all sides there re-echoed — in 
 Germany as well — the cry of the duty of self- 
 preservation and self-assertion, of the struggle 
 for world-domination ; on all sides a new desire 
 to live, new aspirations, new organisations, the 
 struggle for existence, class conflicts. 
 
 Is it possible that Christianity will be able 
 to regain in this world of modern culture the 
 influence which it so notoriously lost during 
 the evolution of the last centuries ? Chris- 
 tianity, in its essential idea, dominant up to 
 the present, is based on a fundamental con- 
 ception utterly opposed to the ideal of life '* 
 which has just been described. The narrow 
 Pauline idea of redemption, which was de- 
 veloped by St. Augustine and strengthened 
 anew by Luther, still dominates it. Do not let 
 my readers misunderstand me on this point. I 
 know, of course, that the great men in the 
 history of Christianity in the vast wealth of 
 their personality possessed many other valuable 
 conceptions of religions as well as this funda- 
 mental one. But we are not concerned with 
 
276 What is Religion ? 
 
 that here, but with the question of what part of 
 their religion really survived in history, and 
 how far it influenced the world. The funda- 
 mental part which has survived may be briefly 
 stated : The race of man from Adam onwards 
 is utterly corrupt ; incapable of doing anything 
 good by itself, it sinks more and more deeply 
 into the slough of sin and corruption. At the 
 most it may attain to a certain external 
 "middle-class" righteousness of little value, a 
 purely external culture. And into this lost 
 world a Redeemer descends to redeem us ; He 
 is quite different from us, He is from the 
 heaven above, we from the earth below ; He 
 is filled with the Divine nature, we are only 
 men. All is here based on the opposition 
 between sin and grace, and in the centre of 
 religion is placed the consciousness of sin, and 
 the consolation of freedom from sin and guilt. 
 Are we to maintain the validity of this con- 
 ception in our modern civilisation? We will give 
 the highest reverence to those believers of old 
 w^ho upheld it with such absolute devotion. But 
 we must consider what the consequences to-day 
 are of such a belief. If we accept in its entirety 
 this conception, if, that is, we take from modern 
 life its very essence, and force it to self-renuncia- 
 tion, we shall have absolutely to cast on one 
 side such complete and great figures as those of 
 
The Future of Christianity 277 
 
 Goethe and Bismarck. Such a conception of 
 Christianity was comprehensible when Christi- 
 anity found itself opposed to a heathen civilisa- 
 tion against which it struggled. It remained 
 comprehensible in the Middle Ages when the 
 Church judged in this manner a civilisation 
 which she herself had created. But such a 
 conception cannot any longer be accepted in 
 modern life, with its absolutely independent 
 attitude. 
 
 Had we not better, therefore, state the prob- 
 lem in another form? Let us ask ourselves 
 if that Pauline-Lutheran conception of Christi- 
 anity is the only possible one ? Cannot the 
 Gospel be revealed in other forms ? Let us place 
 before our mind the figure of Jesus. In Him or 
 His preaching there is little of that harsh con- 
 tradiction, that exaggerated attitude. He never 
 conceived it to be the object of His preaching to 
 call forth from His hearers, at any price, the 
 confession of their radically corrupt nature. He 
 aroused moral energy. "This do and thou shalt 
 live." " Ye therefore shall be perfect as your 
 Heavenly Father is perfect." When He preached 
 to His contemporaries repentance, He meant 
 chiefly the regeneration of the will. His ideal 
 was immeasurably lofty. He said that no one 
 was good except God. His gospel was a gospel 
 of redemption, of the forgiveness of sins, but 
 
278 What is Religion ? 
 
 these represented only one part of His teaching ; 
 the other was the furtherance of moral per- 
 fection. He gladly went among sinners and 
 publicans, but He never said that all men were 
 publicans and sinners ; He told the parable of 
 the prodigal son, but He did not mean that all 
 men were prodigal or were to become such. He 
 was acquainted with those whom He called 
 blessed, who were not far from the kingdom of 
 heaven. The forgiveness of sins was of no 
 value without the regeneration of the will ; it 
 could only console those who tried, however 
 feebly, to fulfil the will of the Heavenly 
 Father. 
 
 Thus the conviction is borne in upon us that 
 we are acting in conformity to God's will when, 
 in proclaiming the Gospel, we do not assert that 
 man is hopelessly corrupt in his thoughts and 
 in his acts. But it is important to proclaim to 
 the men and women of to-day that the highest 
 and finest ideal, the perfection of life, is offered 
 to them in the Gospel, and that all their striv- 
 ings and all their work will pass aimlessly away 
 if their final object is not life with God, and 
 acts in accordance with His will as the Gospel 
 requires. And to reach to this ideal we must be 
 roused to a consciousness of our imperfection, 
 of our constant backslidings ; we must be 
 kindled to a longing for redemption ; " where 
 
The Future of Christianity 279 
 
 there is forgiveness of sins there is life and 
 blessedness." 
 
 And just as the Gospel idea of redemption 
 assumes for us a somewhat different form, so 
 our thoughts of a Redeemer have changed in a 
 particular direction. We no longer hold the 
 belief that Jesus was absolutely different from 
 ourselves — He heaven-born, we earth-born. 
 Rather, we say that His figure is the noblest 
 and the most perfect that has been granted to 
 humanity on its long journey from the lower 
 stage to the higher. He is the goal of our 
 existence, the leader of our life, to whom no 
 other leader is comparable. 
 
 And hence we no longer speak of the 
 "divinity" of Christ. For many pious Chris- 
 tians, indeed, this formula of the Godhead of 
 Christ has become the symbol of an acknow- 
 ledgment of the Christian belief, and hesitation 
 on this point means to them hesitation con- 
 cerning the principles of belief. The German 
 Emperor's confession of belief in the old faith 
 finds in these days an echo in very many 
 hearts. And yet, even though we must arouse 
 pain and anger among those who hold to the 
 old belief, we cannot but oppose this view. We 
 will state the grounds of our opposition. Adolph 
 Harnack rightly objected to the public state- 
 ment of the Emperor on the ground that the 
 
2 8o What is Religion ? 
 
 correct dogmatic expression of the old Christo- 
 logical idea was not belief in the divinity of 
 Christ, but in His Divine humanity. Further, 
 he objected that the expression "Divine 
 humanity" was no biblical term, just as the 
 Bible writers scarcely ever called Christ God, 
 or spoke of the divinity of Christ. But the 
 evidence of Jesus Himself is still more con- 
 vincing. Throughout His life He placed Himself 
 with men and not with God ; to the young man 
 who called Him good He spoke the decisive 
 word which makes the dogma of Christ's 
 divinity almost impossible : " None is good save 
 one, even God." He desired to be so little 
 different from us men that He rejected the 
 claim of absolute goodness. In all His parables, 
 in the most genuine one that has been pre- 
 served for us. He places the souls of men directly 
 in the presence of the Heavenly Father. We 
 are taking from Jesus no honour to which He 
 Himself would have laid claim when we cannot 
 acknowledge the divinity of Christ. Our faith 
 does not depend on a belief in the supernatural, 
 non-human nature of the God of redemption, 
 but on the earthly life of our Lord, on His own 
 faith, which He sealed with His death, on His 
 manner of living, on the love which He bore to 
 sinners. We honour in this earthly being the 
 Captain who guides every one to God, the Guide 
 
The Future of Christianity 281 
 
 for the simple as well as for the highly-cultured ; 
 indeed, we see in the belief in His personality 
 the presence of God, and so we gladly confess 
 that God was in Christ. 
 
 Thus we escape all further speculation con- 
 cerning the Divine nature in Christ, the relation 
 between God the Father and God the Son, the 
 relation of the two natures, the unity of the 
 three Persons. In the centre of our faith there 
 is no longer an absolutely contradictory state- 
 ment. We say with confidence that we may ^ 
 cheerfully leave all these matters alone if we 
 simply want to get at the essence and true 
 nature of Christianity. 
 
 The idea of redemption has been concentrated 
 in the course of the history of Christianity in 
 the belief in the special significance of Christ's 
 sacrificial death. Christ's death was the great 
 sacrifice offered for our sins ; it obtained a 
 vicarious value and meaning. Important con- 
 siderations affect us in this matter. We do not 
 here mainly rely on theoretical objections, but 
 on the weight of our moral consciousness, which 
 now acts independently. For this is the very 
 hall-mark of our modern life ; our moral feel- 
 ing has become so independent that it will not 
 admit any strange moral idea on the authority 
 of religion. Our moral sense, based on Kant's 
 Ethics, speaks as follows with all clearness : 
 
 
282 What is Religion ? 
 
 "The sin which you have committed no one 
 can atone for instead of you, neither man nor 
 God. It cannot be transferred, like a concrete 
 object. It is a fact that guilt can never be 
 atoned for by punishment borne by you or 
 another, and still less can the consciousness of 
 guilt be removed by another. Sin and guilt can 
 only be removed by the voluntary moral and 
 personal act of our God, who forgives sin and 
 remits guilt." Our religious perception tells us 
 that we take an unworthy view of God when 
 we say He cannot forgive of His own free will. 
 And once again our own experience bids us 
 appeal to Jesus Himself. In His preaching we 
 find no trace of the dogma of atonement, 
 whilst His saying with regard to the ransom 
 for the many, as well as the institution of the 
 Last Supper, are very far removed from the 
 dogmatic view of His death, and imply no more 
 than the idea of martyrdom (see p. 236). Jesus 
 speaks in His preaching of the Divine fatherly 
 love which pardons, without laying down any 
 conditions or any reference to His death. The 
 father in the parable forgives the prodigal son 
 unconditionally ; there is no question of a " but " 
 or an " if." An attempt has been made to read 
 into this parable the doctrine of vicarious suffer- 
 ing, but this cannot be done without altering 
 the parable entirely. 
 
The Future of Christianity 283 
 
 So far, we have endeavoured to make it clear 
 that the central idea of the Christian religion, the 
 idea of redemption, must assume, owing to the 
 great change in the structure of human society, 
 a slightly different form. In regard to another 
 matter, a similar change in what was hitherto 
 regarded as a fundamental belief is also 
 required. Corresponding to modern culture 
 there is a special mode of thinking which is 
 essentially peculiar to it. The main characteristic 
 of this modern mode of thinking rests upon 
 the determination to try to explain everything 
 that takes place in the world by natural causes ; 
 or — to express it in another form — it rests upon 
 the determined assertion of universal laws to 
 which all phenomena, natural and spiritual, are 
 subject. 
 
 As a foundation for modern thought there 
 stands on the one hand the law of Nature. 
 Our external civilisation, with its natural 
 science and its technical science, rests on 
 the recognition and acceptance of an inviol- 
 able order of Nature in accordance with 
 the laws of Nature. And science, penetrating 
 deep into the spiritual life of mankind — our 
 thoughts turn here to psycho-physiology, to 
 the science of political economy and statistics, to 
 the emphasis laid on "environment," to the 
 coherence in natural science itself due to the 
 
284 What is Religion? 
 
 action of natural law — recognises and asserts 
 an order in Nature, calculable, regulated, and in 
 accordance with la^v. It asserts even more than 
 that, for the belief in the law of Nature has 
 become a fundamental belief of our life. We 
 may, in theory, persuade ourselves that the 
 order of Nature is only apparent, and that every 
 moment a breach of that law of Nature is 
 possible, but we do not act in accordance with 
 that belief. We arrange our life on the basis of 
 that law. We make our calculations genera- 
 tions beforehand ; generations of astronomers 
 work together at an astronomical problem. We 
 make laws which can only be developed to their 
 full significance by our successors. We live 
 with the full conviction that we stand on the 
 basis of secure, reliable reality. 
 
 There is still one thing that no longer fits in 
 with this new world of thought — a miracle, in 
 the strict sense of the word, in the sense of the 
 intervention of God in this natural order of 
 things by setting aside its laws. But, on the 
 other hand, the miraculous appears deeply inter- 
 woven with the Christian religion. In all ages 
 of Christianity belief in miracles has been strong 
 — in the age of the New Testament, of the early 
 Church, the Middle Ages, the age of Luther. 
 The longing for the miraculous is strikingly 
 shown in Bjornson's book " Concerning Energy." 
 
The Future of Christianity 285 
 
 And yet we moderns can no longer hold fast 
 to this belief in miracles. Here again it is not 
 merely that it contradicts our whole mode of 
 thought, but it is in direct contradiction to our 
 changed belief in God. We have learnt to 
 believe in a God who is a God of order, and 
 not of chaos, in a God who has woven the weft 
 of this world so skilfully and securely that it 
 never needs correction, in a God -who in the 
 great orderly march onwards through the 
 apparently pitiless struggle for existence is 
 leading the generations of living beings to a 
 higher stage. A God who must perpetually help 
 on His works by miracles, who has to pick up 
 again the stitches in his web which have been 
 dropped, seems to us insignificant and useless. 
 
 And when we once more investigate the 
 history of our belief from this point of view we 
 see things differently from what they appeared 
 at the first glance. We perceive that in main- 
 taining this attitude towards the miraculous 
 we are only following the development which 
 is in accordance with history. For the Evan- 
 gelical Church has already abandoned a large 
 part of its belief in miracles. Only the early 
 Church and the Middle Ages had a strong 
 belief in miracles, and in those days man lived 
 in an atmosphere of the miraculous which 
 was an accompaniment of the daily life. In 
 
/ 
 
 2 86 What is Religion ? 
 
 the Evangelical Churches — especially in their 
 struggles with the Catholic worship of 
 saints — the conviction gained ground that, on 
 the whole, miracles no longer happen, and 
 the great miracles belonged to the past. 
 Belief in the miracles of the Gospel and of 
 the Old Testament was alone demanded. But 
 this belief in miracles is based on the idea 
 that the miracles which have come down to 
 us are not really miracles at all, and that no 
 personal act of belief can be based on them. 
 Miracles are no longer the bulwark of faith : 
 it is faith that must support miracles. Thus 
 in our denial of the miraculous we are only 
 completing what the Evangelical Church of 
 the past had done in part. And here we may 
 go a step farther back, to the life of Christ. 
 It is quite true that Jesus and His disciples 
 thought differently from ourselves on the 
 subject of miracles. Their knowledge did not 
 allow them to see clearly the boundaries of 
 the possible. Yet, in spite of this, Jesus never 
 saw in miracles the most important part of 
 faith. He performed miracles, but others did 
 that likewise. When the multitude asked for 
 a sure sign from Him, so that they might be 
 able to believe in Him, He absolutely rejected 
 the demand : " If they hear not Moses and 
 the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if 
 
The Future of Christianity 287 
 
 one arise from the dead." The peculiar and 
 extraordinary miracles of Jesus may be easily 
 separated from His life. His daily acts of 
 healing and help do not belong here ; for they 
 are not miracles in the strict sense of the 
 word, and even if we reason them away 
 the perfect and harmonious portrait of Jesus 
 remains. 
 
 Thus, led by the hand of Jesus and His Spirit, 
 we venture, even with regard to the history of 
 the Gospel, to free Christianity from a belief 
 in miracles in the restricted sense — that is to 
 say, so far as this belief requires us to deny 
 belief in the inviolable course of Nature, acting 
 in accordance with law. The miraculous in 
 the deeper sense of the word, the miracle of 
 the individual spiritual life, still exists for ue. 
 What disappears is only the belief in miracles 
 which affect the order of Nature. 
 
 The modern conception of the world 
 postulates, however, not merely the universal 
 validity of the laws of Nature, but also certain 
 inviolable principles and axioms in the develop- 
 ment of the intellectual life. As characteristic 
 of modern times, and especially of the nine- 
 teenth century, the flourishing science of history 
 must take its place by the side of natural 
 science. By the side of the law of Nature stands 
 the idea of historical evolution. With the 
 
2 88 What is Religion ? 
 
 help of this idea of evolution, historical science 
 puts before itself the object of explaining all 
 intellectual events by reference to a universal 
 law. And if she thereby lays no claim to 
 solving the fundamental riddle of the isolated 
 personalities and individualities which make 
 history, yet she is very far from accepting the 
 intervention of the supernatural in the other- 
 wise natural course of events, or from believing 
 that there is any opposition between the natural 
 course of events and that which is directed by 
 Divine revelation. 
 
 Now, the modern science of history has 
 subjected the history of religion, like all other 
 things which affect human life, to its investi- 
 gations. After a scientific method had been 
 formulated, attention was directed to the 
 history of the Old and the New Testaments. 
 With unceasing energy historical investigations 
 were made into the minutest details. We may 
 strive against this method or act in accordance 
 with it; in any case the process goes on. For 
 even those who uphold the older view of history 
 must work with the tools of history. The 
 halo of the supernatural which had clung 
 \ around " sacred history " was destroyed, and 
 everywhere a course of events was discerned, 
 which was, on the whole, explicable, in so far 
 as such events, which ever present the riddle 
 
The Future of Christianity 289 
 
 of personality and individuality, can be 
 explained. Everywhere we see development on 
 an ascending scale, and everywhere the partial 
 dependence of the spiritual on the natural ; we 
 see how religion shapes itself in accordance with 
 the universal evolution of civilisation, and 
 how close is the connection of religions with the 
 surrounding world. All is in a state of fusion, 
 all is interdependent. When all history has 
 thus been brought to a level it is impossible (^ 
 to believe in a Divine revelation, in the old 
 acceptance of the term, which restricted reve- 
 lation to one special province. 
 
 And yet the Christian religion does rest on 
 the thought of revelation. In the light of 
 this all seems capable of explanation. Luther 
 destroyed ecclesiastical authority, but he fell 
 back upon the Bible, and his Church is based 
 upon the dogma of verbal inspiration. The. 
 dogma has been abandoned, but people still 
 considered they had a right to believe in the 
 Bible as containing a special Divine revelation.* 
 We are scarcely conscious of how far the old 
 barriers have been swept away ; walls and 
 barriers are erected which last but a short time. 
 History would appear to destroy the idea of 
 inspiration — that is to say, of any special reve- 
 lation — in the Old and New Testament. The 
 theological attempt, made known to a large 
 
 20 
 
290 What is Religion ? 
 
 circle of persons through the German Emperor's 
 open letter, to enforce the acceptance of a 
 double revelation is, in the form proposed, not 
 tenable ; history does not acknowledge it. 
 
 And what if history were right? Suppose 
 this view were the true one? In that case 
 only a bold step forward will save us. If the 
 science of history demands that the seals be 
 broken and the special revelation be sur- 
 rendered, then we must seriously consider 
 the idea of a universal revelation. On the one 
 hand we may say with confidence that history 
 nowhere shows us one place where a special 
 Divine revelation took place, where a Divine act 
 occurred side by side with the human act, yet 
 to be separated from it. Everything in history 
 stands forth as human. On the other hand, 
 we may say: All is of Divine working ; the 
 whole history of mankind, with its gradual 
 creation and attainment of a standard of moral 
 values based on no external authority, is the 
 work of God, who ever draws mankind toward 
 Him. And the central idea of this great 
 spiritual course of events is the development 
 of the religious life, and the central point 
 of the history of the Old and New Testa- 
 ments, the object and crown of the whole 
 development, is the Gospel and the person of 
 Jesus. This is a liberal and pious conception 
 
The Future of Christianity 291 
 
 of history which is justified by fact and is 
 quite capable of holding its own against the 
 old conception (apart from the question of a 
 special " sacred history " the result of the 
 supernatural and almighty power of God). 
 
 If we continue this line of thought farther, 
 we are confronted by a new question : Does 
 not this historical investigation which shakes 
 the foundation of all things force us to 
 acknowledge that the Christian religion is 
 only a passing form of religion, capable of 
 being surpassed, which must necessarily lead 
 to a higher religion ? I do not think so. 
 Naturally history can pronounce here no 
 absolute judgment ; it cannot assert or prove 
 that in Christianity the height of religious 
 development has been reached. History would 
 be going beyond its proper limits if it did ; 
 this. But at the same time history cannot 
 assert the impossibility of such a supposition, 
 or it would be also going beyond its capacity. 
 History shows us, indeed, in all branches of 
 human life a gradual rise in the standard of 
 values. But it does not prove to us that this 
 process is interminable ; rather, it tends to 
 show that in many departments the heights 
 already reached cannot be overstepped. Thus 
 faith possesses an open field, and no scientific 
 certainty is here required. But if we do wish 
 
I 
 
 I 
 
 292 what is Religion ? 
 
 to rise to the belief that religion in the shape 
 of the simple, plain Gospel cannot be surpassed, 
 it is above all necessary for us to be firmly 
 convinced that for us and our age the Gospel 
 the only and the all-sufficing form of religion 
 that we require. And now we will return to 
 our original question. 
 
 We have seen how a great development 
 of the Christian religion seems to be required 
 on all sides. The conception of redemption, 
 the dogma of the divinity of Christ, the 
 doctrine of the Trinity, the idea of vicarious 
 sacrifice, the belief in the miraculous, in the 
 old view of revelation — we see how all these 
 I are swept away in the stream of development. 
 What still remains? Those who are full of 
 dread and anxiety might think only a heap 
 of ruins. But to our joyful astonishment we 
 have seen when we criticised several things 
 that what remained was the simple Gospel of 
 Jesus. Even when we differ here and there 
 from Luther and from Paul, we cling all the 
 more firmly to the person and the Gospel of 
 Jesus. 
 
 It is true we cannot simply take the Gospel 
 j of Jesus just as it stands. The Gospel has in 
 j it things of eternal value, and likewise things 
 of merely transitory value. To the latter class 
 belongs much of the eschatology of the Gospel 
 
The Future of Christianity 293 
 
 — the expectation of the iramediate end of the 
 Tvorld, and, indeed, the whole conception of 
 the world on which these ideas rest — the idea 
 of an earth placed in the middle of the 
 world, of a vaulted heaven above it, of a 
 God who, dwelling amid the clouds, sur- 
 rounded by His angels, comes to judge, 
 the belief in angels who ascend and descend 
 from heaven to earth, the belief in devils and 
 demons, in miracles and in inspiration, and 
 in many other things. But these are only 
 the outward husks through which the pure, 
 inward, true light of the Gospel — only hidden 
 for the moment — shines forth in glory every- 
 where. 
 
 But even the true inward contents of the 
 Gospel must not be slavishly copied by us. 
 They must be translated, not merely into our 
 speech, but into our common spiritual experi- 
 ences. And in doing this we do not want 
 arbitrarily to destroy the threads of historical 
 development and to go back with exaggerated 
 purism to the beginnings of the Gospel. No, 
 wherever historical evolution lends anything 
 of value to the Gospel — I am thinking here 
 of the attitude of the Reformation towards 
 secular work and many other things — we 
 must accept it and carry it farther. Pure, 
 true religion has never existed without an 
 
2 94 What is Religion ? 
 
 external covering woven of the fabric of 
 the age. 
 
 I We hold fast with all our power to the 
 { faith of the Gospel in a personal, heavenly 
 '.Father — a faith which conquers the world and 
 Irises high above this world, yet takes us into 
 I the world and the world's work. We carry 
 ^this idea of faith into our modern knowledge, 
 into our representation of God. Truly God 
 stands to us no longer as the kindly Father, 
 above the starry canopy, whose garment, the 
 firmament, is interwoven with the glory of 
 the stars, who sends His angels to guard the 
 pious, who with His miraculous powers, which 
 are visible to the bodily eye, influences this 
 our "world, whose laws He casts on one side. 
 God is to us the Eternal, the All-Powerful One, 
 who is potent in the vast starry world and 
 in the eternities of time and space, before 
 which thought grows dizzy — potent alike in 
 the eternally insignificant things and in the 
 eternally great things. He is the God whose 
 garment is the iron law of Nature, which hides 
 Him from human eyes in a thick husk which 
 cannot be torn off ; who, in accordance with 
 the terrible law of the struggle for existence, 
 leads His creatures upwards into a world of 
 moral, individual freedom ; who surrounds us 
 with His existence as with a dizzy abyss. 
 
The Future of Christianity 295 
 
 And clinging to the hand of Jesus we venture 
 to plunge into the abyss. We lift our hands 
 in prayer and say, " Our Father in Heaven." 
 It is indeed no small task which we have to 
 perform. Faith ever means struggle, work, 
 new efforts, further progress. 
 
 And we take our stand by Jesus on the 
 ground of the absolutely simple conviction 
 that God is to be found in the good, and that 
 faith in the Heavenly Father includes moral 
 deeds and moral ^vork in the human com- 
 munity. We deduce the categorical imperative 
 laid upon a life of good deeds from the Gospel, 
 from the belief in a fatherly God who desires 
 that His sons shall be perfect even as He is 
 perfect, under the shadow of whose eye we 
 feel we live, before whose judgment we shall 
 have to give an account of our life. 
 
 But here again we must not simply copy; 
 we cannot bring to our modern life the ascetic 
 mode of dealing with moral affairs which the 
 earliest Christians adopted. We plunge with 
 courage into the stream of the evolution of the 
 Gospel, into the secular conception of ethics as 
 established by the Reformation. We know 
 that to do well, in God's sense of the term, 
 does not require external works, but the simple 
 fulfilment of our earthly duties. And into a 
 world which has grown great and wide, which 
 
296 What is Religion ? 
 
 does not believe that it stands at the end, but 
 at the beginning of a new period ; into a world 
 full of obstinate questions and problems ; into 
 an age of modern technical science, of world 
 intercourse and world industry, an age of the 
 social question, of the rivalry of the nations 
 and of class war, we bring the teaching set 
 forth by the Gospel — the life spent for the 
 good of others, the nobility of love that serves, 
 the noble, holy comprehension of all human 
 life, the absolute, God-given moral tranquillity 
 in the face of all hostility. 
 
 We feel deeply the imperfection of all our 
 deeds, the eternal contradiction between what 
 we do and what we ought to do ; we feel how 
 we ever fall below what God demands of us. 
 And the more absolutely we are conscious of 
 these demands and the more earnestly we 
 regard them, the more strongly that feeling 
 of imperfection grows within us. It is just 
 the modern man who has for the first time 
 learnt to penetrate the greatness and power 
 of his God who will be particularly acces- 
 sible to that part of the Gospel which deals 
 with redemption. He will from the very first 
 be disposed to feel that, in the presence of 
 God, he is of absolute insignificance and worth- 
 lessness, and he Tvill, above all, feel his moral 
 worthlessness. We cling to Jesus's Gospel of a 
 
The Future of Christianity 297 
 
 God who forgives sins. We know that in the 
 Kfe of each one of us there are hours when 
 nothing keeps us upright except the belief in 
 a forgiving Father, such as Jesus revealed to 
 us in the parable of the prodigal son. But 
 we also believe we are in accordance with the 
 will of Jesus when no compulsion conies into 
 the question of belief. We will not make the 
 thought of sin and guilt a principle of our life 
 which destroys everything else ; we recognise, 
 indeed, times in our life when through the 
 goodness of God we have made progress and 
 have gladly done His will, and so we feel 
 joyful and free and thankful. But yet we 
 shall always accept the saying of Jesus : " When 
 you have done all, say, We are yet unworthy 
 servants." 
 
 And thus we are still possessed of a bold and 
 joyous hope. This eternal hope is not the basis 
 of our Christianity, but its highest expression 
 and object. We hope for a higher life nearer 
 to God, for a solution to all our anxious 
 questions and doubts, to our manifold fears 
 and anxieties, for freedom from the fetters of 
 the commonplace and of sin. This hope must 
 be free from all egoism. We are not only 
 concerned about our own poor life ; we feel 
 that our life is bound to a great society, a 
 kingdom of spirits, whose ruler is Christ; we 
 
298 What is Religion ? 
 
 feel we are linked to the great souls of the 
 past who ^vork with us, and that we are in 
 close connection with all who work with us in 
 the present. We cannot believe that all is 
 merely a passing show, foam which the waves 
 of the ocean will disperse. We have and we 
 hold a living personal hope : 
 
 " But heard are the voices, 
 Heard are the sages, 
 The "Worlds and the Ages. 
 Choose well, your choice is 
 Brief and yet endless; 
 Here eyes do regard you, 
 In Eternity's stillness. 
 Here is all fulness ! 
 Ye brave, to reward you ; 
 Work and despair not." 
 
 And all this : God the Father, life in accord- 
 ance with His will spent in joyful work for 
 the service of the world, forgiveness of sins 
 and eternal hope — all this hangs together and 
 is crystallised in perfect clearness in the person 
 of our Lord Jesus. And we speak thus to Him : 
 " Thou art our Leader ! There have been many 
 leaders of men in different departments of life. 
 Be Thou our Leader, with whom no other is 
 comparable, the Leader to the highest, the 
 Guide of our souls to God, the Way, the Truth 
 and the Life." 
 
The Future of Christianity 299 
 
 We modern men, with our leanings towards 
 individualism and our great independence of 
 mind, need to take to heart a warning against 
 standing alone. We must place both our feet 
 firmly in the community which owes its origin 
 to Jesus. It is a mistake to think that we can 
 have and preserve all that we have been speak- 
 ing about in isolation. For a time the individual 
 may perhaps preserve it, but later the soul slips 
 away from merely inherited ideas. It is only 
 in the community — history speaks clearly on 
 this point — that man develops the wings and 
 the capacity to soar into an invisible world ; 
 only in the community is strength developed 
 to carry the moral demands of the Gospel into 
 an unfriendly v^orld. But we only find this 
 community by joining an ecclesiastical organi- 
 sation based on an historical foundation. Un- 
 dismayed by the rubbish of old tradition which 
 is difficult to cast aside, by the many strange, 
 old-fashioned forms, by the barriers and hedges 
 and walls of ecclesiastical tradition, we preserve 
 our inviolable right to be in this community, 
 whilst we gladly and zealously accept the duties 
 attaching to this right. The question of the 
 future of Christianity is at the same time a 
 question addressed to the hearts and the 
 consciences of us modern educated men. May 
 we weigh it and consider it well ! 
 
INDEX 
 
 A 
 
 Abydos, 12 
 
 Acropolis, 103 
 
 iEschylus, 103, 104 
 
 Agag, 107 
 
 Agoraios, 103 
 
 Ahab, 124 
 
 Ahura, 74, 76, 119, 159, 160 
 
 Alexander the Great, 138 
 
 Amaziah, 130 
 
 American Indians, 30, 31 
 
 Ammon, 72 
 
 Amos, 114, 115, 117, 130 
 
 Ancestral worship, 47, 63 
 
 Animism, 35 
 
 Anu, 91 
 
 Apocrypha, 138 
 
 Apollo, 73, 74, 103, 104, 105 
 
 Areopagus, 103 
 
 Arsacidae, 139 
 
 Assyria, 127, 138 
 
 Astarte, 61, 62, 67 
 
 Athene, 73, 74, 103 
 
 Athens, 73 
 
 Augustine, 257, 258 
 
 Augustus, 214 
 
 Avesta, 138, 162 
 
 B 
 
 Baal, 61, 62, 77, 115 
 Babylonian Psalms, 96, 97 
 
 Babylonian religion, 69-72, 90- 
 
 101 
 Bel, 72, 91 
 Bismarck, 274, 275 
 Blood-relation and blood-feud, 
 
 64,65 
 Brahminism, 178-184 
 Bronze Age, 31 
 Buddha and Buddhism, 116, 117, 
 
 175-178, 184-200 
 Bushmen, 30 
 
 C 
 
 Caesar, 214 
 
 Chalcedon Council, 251 
 Christ. See Jesus. 
 Christianity, future of, 260-299 
 ,, nature of, 217-259 
 
 Confucius, 114 
 Creed, the, 159 
 
 D 
 
 Daeven, 119 
 
 Dances, religious, 4 
 
 Danites, 81 
 
 Dead, worship of, 47-55 
 
 Delian Confederation, 73 
 
 Demons, 75 
 
 Demeter, 62 
 
 301 
 
302 What is Religion ? 
 
 Dervishes, 44 
 Dionysius, 19 
 
 E 
 
 Ea, 72, 91 
 
 Eastern Church, 253, 254 
 Elijah, 113, 115 
 Eridu, 71 
 
 F 
 
 Fairy tales, 33 
 
 Fakirs, 44 
 
 Feasts, 54 
 
 Fetichism, 41-44 
 
 Fire, use and worship of, 3 
 
 ,, -burial, 87 
 Future Hfe, belief in, 88-90 
 
 G 
 
 Gaia, 54 
 
 Gathas, 116, 138 
 
 Gideon, 81 
 
 Gods as personalities, 75 
 
 Goethe, 274 
 
 Gospel, the, 217-238, 292-295 
 
 Greek culture, 212, 213 
 
 Greek religion, 81, 101, 200-207 
 
 H 
 
 Hammurabi, 67, 98 
 Harnack, 279 
 Hecate, 19, 102 
 Hereros, 34 
 Herkaios, 102 
 Hermes, 102 
 Hermopolis, 72 
 Hestia, 102 
 
 HiUel, 164 
 
 History, science of, 287-291 
 
 Hosea, 114 
 
 Image worship, 78-82 
 Iranian religion, 145-147 
 Isaiah, 78, 115, 151 
 Isis-Osiris, 214 
 Islamism, 139, 147-149 
 Israel, 107, 123-127, 157 
 
 Jacob's dream, 78 
 
 Jahwe, 60, 126, 127 
 
 Jamasp, 113 
 
 Jeremiah, 78, 114, 115 
 
 Jesus, religion of, 218, 219, 220- 
 
 238, 277-281 
 Jezebel, 124 
 
 Judaism, 137-145, 153-155 
 Judgment, idea of, 167-172 
 
 K 
 
 Kaaba, 148 
 
 Kopernican theory, 21 
 Koran, 162 
 
 Luther, 26, 262-264 
 
 M 
 Magic, belief m, 44, 45 
 Malay people, 30, 31 
 Marduk, 72, 73, 74, 76, 92, 93 
 Medicine men, 44 
 Melkarth, 77 
 
Index 
 
 303 
 
 Memphis, 72 
 Menelaus, 90 
 Mentu, 72 
 Micah, 114 
 Milkem, 77 
 Miracles, 284-287 
 Mithras, 146, 147 
 Mohanimed, 140 
 Mongolians, 30, 31 
 Moloch, 77 
 
 Monasticism, 253, 258 
 Monotheism, 122, 141 
 Music, influence of, 46 
 Mut, 72 
 Myths, 85, 86 
 
 N 
 
 Naaman, 125 
 
 Nature, Law of, 283, 284, 287, 
 
 288 
 Nebo, 72 
 
 Negro race, 30, 38, 89 
 Nergol, 92 
 Newton, 272 
 Nippur, 72 
 Nirvana, 208 
 
 O 
 
 On Heliopolis, 72 
 Orestes, 105 
 Orphic societies, 110 
 Osiris, 72, 74 
 
 Pan, 19 
 
 Paul, 78, 219, 223, 240-248, 250- 
 
 252 
 Persephone, 62 
 
 Persian religion, 145-147, 156, 
 
 157 
 Pessimism, 181, 182 
 Plato and Platonism, 116, 121, 
 
 175, 203-207 
 Pluto, 62 
 
 Polytheism, 71, 99-101, 126 
 Priesthood, origin of, 83-85 
 Prophets, 128-135 
 Prostitution in worship, 67 
 Ptah, 73 
 Punic tribes, 67 
 
 R 
 Ra, 72 
 
 Ramman, 92 
 
 Red Indians, 53 ' 
 
 Reformation, 260-265 
 
 Re-incarnation, 180, 181 
 
 Retribution, Behef in, 110, 111 
 
 Roman Law, 255 
 
 Rome, position of, 256, 257 
 
 S 
 
 Sagas, 33 
 
 Schamasch, 72, 77 
 
 Schopenhauer, 269 
 
 Secret societies, 215 
 
 Serapis, 214 
 
 Sin, the god, 72, 77 
 
 Sippar, 72 
 
 Sisyphus, 90 
 
 Socrates, 115, 116 
 
 Spirits, behef in, 36, 86-88 
 
 Stone Age, 3, 4, 31 
 
 T 
 
 Tammuz, 92 
 
304 What is Religion ? 
 
 Tantalus, 90 
 Temple, 151-153 
 Temple worship, 82 
 Teocalli, 82 
 Tertullian, 67 
 Thebes, 72 
 Thoth, 72 
 Totemism, 64 
 Tribal life, 31-55 
 
 ,, religion, 55-68 
 Tripitaku, 162 
 
 U 
 
 Ur, 72 
 
 Uranos, 77 
 
 Varuna, 74, 76 
 Vedanta philosophy, 182 
 
 Vedas, 123, 135, 182 
 Vendidad, 138 
 Vistarp, 113 
 
 W 
 
 Western Church, 254-259 
 
 X 
 
 Xenios, 102 
 
 Yasht, 145 
 
 Z 
 
 Zarathustra, 113-117 
 Zeus, 74, 103 
 
 UNWIN BROTHEBS, LIMITED, THE GEESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON. 
 
Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 01130 7685 
 
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