Chapter 14

Now if the rite as it occurs in Australia is pure magic, and if religion is not a variety of magic but fundamentally different from it, then the rite which, as it occurs everywhere else, is religious, cannot be derived from, or a variety of, the Australian piece of magic; and the spring and harvest customs which are found in Australia cannot be "based on the {202} same ancient modes of thought or form part of the same primitive heathendom" as the sacramental rites which are found everywhere else in the world. The solemn annual eating of the totem plant or animal in Australia must have a totally different basis from that on which the sacrament and communion stands in every other part of the globe: in Australia it is based on magic, elsewhere on that which is, according to Dr. Frazer, fundamentally different and opposed to magic, viz. religion. Before, however, we commit ourselves to this conclusion, we may be allowed to ask, What is it that compels us thus to sever the Australian from the other forms of the rite? The reply would seem to be that, whereas the other forms are admittedly religious, the Australian is "a magical rite intended to assure the revival of nature in spring." Now, if that were really the nature of the Australian rite, we might have to accept the conclusion to which we hesitate to commit ourselves. But, as a matter of fact, the Australian rite is not intended to assure the revival of nature in spring, and has nothing magical about it. It is perfectly true that in spring in Australia certain proceedings are performed which are based upon the principle that like produces like; and {203} that these proceedings are, by students of the science of religion, termed--perhaps incorrectly--magical. But these spring customs are quite different from the harvest customs; and it is the harvest customs which constitute the link between the rite in Australia and the rite in the rest of the world. The crucial question, therefore, is whether the Australian harvest rite is magical, or is even based on the principle that like produces like. And the answer is that it is plainly not. The harvest rite in Australia consists, as we know it now, simply in the fact that at the appointed time a little of the totem plant or animal is solemnly and sparingly eaten by the headman of the totem. The solemnity with which the rite is performed is unmistakable, and may well be termed religious. And no attempt even, so far as I am aware, has been made to show that this solemn eating is regarded as magic by the performers of the rite, or how it can be so regarded by students of the science of religion. Until the attempt is made and made successfully, we are more than justified in refusing to regard the rite as magical; we are bound to refuse to regard it as such. But if the rite is not magical--and _à fortiori_ if it is, as Dr. Frazer terms it, sacramental--then it is {204} religious; and the ancient mode of thought, forming part of primitive heathendom, which is at the base of the rite, is the conviction that manifests itself wherever the rite continues to live, viz. that by prayer and sacrifice the worshippers in any community are brought into communion with the god they worship. The rite is, in truth, what Dr. Frazer terms it as it occurs in Australia--a sacrament. But not even in Australia is a sacrament a piece of magic.

In the animistic stage of the evolution of humanity, the only causes man can conceive of are animated things; and, in the presence of any occurrence sufficiently striking to arrest his attention, the questions which present themselves to his mind are, Who did this thing, and why? Occurrences which arrest the attention of the community are occurrences which affect the community; and in a low stage of evolution, when the most pressing of all practical questions is how to live, the occurrences which most effectually arrest attention are those which affect the food supply of the community. If, then, the food supply fails, the occurrence is due to some of the personal, or quasi-personal, powers by whom the community is surrounded; and the reason why such power so acted is found in the wrath which {205} must have actuated him. The situation is abnormal, for famine is abnormal; and it indicates anger and wrath on the part of the power who brought it about. But it also implies that when things go on in the normal way,--when the relations between the spirit and the community are normal,--the attitude of the spirit to the community is peaceable and friendly. Not only, however, does the community desire to renew peaceable and friendly relations, where pestilence or famine show that they have been disturbed: the community also desires to benefit by them when they are in their normal condition. The spirits that can disturb the normal conditions by sending pestilence or famine can also assist the community in undertakings, the success of which is indispensable if the community is to maintain its existence; for instance, those undertakings on which the food supply of the community depends. Hence the petitions which are put up at seed time, or, in the pre-agricultural period, at seasons analogous to seed time. Hence, also, the rites at harvest time or the analogous season, rites which are instituted and developed for the purpose of maintaining friendly relation and communion between the community, and the spirit whose favour {206} is sought and whose anger is dreaded by the community. Such sacrificial rites may indeed be interpreted as the making of gifts to the gods; and they do, as a matter of fact, often come so to be regarded by those who perform them. From this undeniable fact the inference may then be drawn, and by many students of the science of religion it is inferred, that from the beginning there was in such sacrificial rites no other intention than to bribe the god or to purchase his favour and the good things he had to give. But the inference, which, when properly limited, has some truth in it, becomes misleading when put forward as being the whole truth. Unless there were some truth in it, the rite of sacrifice could never have developed into the form which was denounced by the Hebrew prophets and mercilessly exposed by Plato. But had that been the whole truth, the rite would have been incapable of discharging the really religious function which it has in its history fulfilled. That function has been to place and maintain the society which practises it in communion with its god. Doubtless in the earliest stages of the history of the rite, the communion thus felt to be established was prized and was mainly sought for the external blessings which were believed {207} to follow from it, or, as a means to avert the public disasters which a breach of communion entailed. Doubtless it was only by degrees, and by slow degrees, that the communion thus established came to be regarded as being in itself the end which the rite of sacrifice was truly intended to attain. But the communion of the worshippers with their god was not a purpose originally foreign to the rite, and which, when introduced, transformed the rite from what it at first was into something radically different. On the contrary, it was present, even though not prominent or predominant, from the beginning; and the rite, as a religious institution, followed different lines of evolution, according as the one aspect or the other was developed. Where the aspect under which the sacrificial rite was regarded was that the offering was a gift made to the deity in order to secure some specified temporal advantage, the religious value of the rite diminished to the vanishing point in the eyes both of those who, like Plato, could see the intrinsic absurdity of pretending to make gifts to Him from whom alone all good things come, and of those who felt that the sacrificial rite so conceived did not afford the spiritual communion for which they yearned. Where even the {208} sacrificial rite was regarded as a means whereby communion between the worshipper and his god was attained or maintained, the emphasis might be thrown on the rite and its due performance rather than on the spiritual communion of which it was the condition. That is to say, with the growth of formalism attention was concentrated on the ritual and correspondingly withdrawn from the prayer which, from the beginning, had been of the essence of the rite. By the rite of sacrifice the community had always been brought into the presence of the god it worshipped; and, in the prayers then offered on behalf of the society, the society had been brought into communion with its god. From that communion it was possible to fall away, even though the performance of the rite was maintained. The very object of that communion might be misinterpreted and mistaken to be a means merely to temporal blessings for the community, or even to personal advantages for the individual. Or the punctilious performance of each and every detail of the rite might tend to become an end in itself and displace the spiritual communion, the attainment of which had been from the beginning the highest, even if not the only or the most prominent, {209} end which the rite might subserve. The difference between the possibilities which the rite might have realised and the actual purposes for which it had come to be used before the birth of Christ is a difference patent to the most casual observer of the facts. The dissatisfaction felt alike by Plato and the Hebrew prophets with the rite as it had come to be practised may be regarded, if we choose so to regard it, as the necessary consequence of pre-existing facts, and as necessarily entailing the rejection or the reconstitution of the rite. As a matter of history, the rite was reconstituted and not rejected; and as reconstituted it became the central fact of the Christian religion. It became the means whereby, through Christ, all men might be brought to God. We may say, if we will, that a new meaning was put into the rite, or that its true meaning was now made manifest. The facts themselves clearly indicate that from the beginning the rite was the means whereby a society sought or might seek communion with its god. They also indicate that the rite of animal sacrifice came to be found insufficient as a means. It was through our Lord that mankind learned what sacrifice was needed--learned to "offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our {210} souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and lively sacrifice unto thee." That is the sacrifice Christ showed us the example of; that is the example which the missionary devotes himself to follow and to teach.

{211}

MORALITY

In this lecture I propose to consider the question whether morality is based on religion or religion on morality. It is a question which may be approached from the point of view either of philosophy or of history. Quite recently it has been treated from the former point of view by Professor Höffding in _The Philosophy of Religion_ (translated into English, 1906); and from the point of view of the history of morality by Mr. Hobhouse in his _Morals in Evolution_ (1906). It may, of course, also be quite properly approached from the point of view of the history of religion; and from whatever standpoint it is treated, the question is one of importance for the missionary, both because of its intrinsic interest for the philosophy of religion, and because its discussion is apt to proceed on a mistaken view of facts in the history of religion. About those facts and their meaning, the missionary, who is to be properly equipped for his work, should be in no doubt: a right view and a proper estimate of the facts are essential both for {212} his practical work and for the theoretical justification of his position.

One answer to the question before us is that morality is the basal fact--the bottom fact: if we regard the question historically, we shall find that morality came first and religion afterwards; and, even if that were not so, we should find that as a matter of logic and philosophy religion presupposes morality--religion may, for a time, be the lever that moves the world, but it would be powerless if it had not a fulcrum, and that fulcrum is morality. So long and so far as religion operates beneficially on the world, it does so simply because it supports and reënforces morality. But the time is not far distant, and may even now be come, when morality no longer requires any support from religion--and then religion becomes useless, nay! an encumbrance which must either fall off or be lopped off. If, therefore, morality can stand by itself, and all along has not merely stood by itself, but has really upheld religion, in what is morality rooted? The answer is that morality has its roots, not in the command that thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul, but in human solidarity, in humanity regarded as a spiritual whole. To {213} this conclusion, it is said, the history of recent philosophy has steadily been moving. If the movement had taken place in only one school of philosophic thought, it might have been a movement running into a side-track. But it is the direction taken by schools so different in their presuppositions and their methods as that of Hegel and that of Comte; and it is the undesigned coincidence of their tendency, which at first could never have been surmised, that carries with it a conviction of its correctness. Human solidarity, humanity regarded as a spiritual whole, may be called, as Hegel calls it, self-conscious spirit; or you may call it, as Comte calls it, the Mind of Humanity--it is but the collective wisdom "of a common humanity with a common aim"; and, that being so, morality is rooted, not in the will and the love of a beneficent and omnipotent Providence, but in the self-realising spirit in man setting up its "common aim" at morality. The very conception of a beneficent and omnipotent God--having now done its work as an aid to morality--must now be put aside, because it stands in the way of our recognising what is the real spiritual whole, besides which there is none other spirit, viz. the self-realising spirit in man. That spirit is only realising; it is not yet {214} realised. It is in process of realisation; and the conception of it, as in process of realisation, enables it to be brought into harmony, or rather reveals its inner harmony, with the notion of evolution. There is nothing outside evolution, no being to whom evolution is presented as a spectacle or by whom, as a process, it is directed. "Being itself," as Höffding says (_Problems of Philosophy_, p. 136), "is to be conceived as in process of becoming, of evolution." The spirit in man, as we have just said, is the real spiritual whole, and it is self-realising; it is evolving and progressing both morally and rationally. In Höffding's words "Being itself becomes more rational than before" (_ib._, p. 137). "Being itself is not ready-made but still incomplete, and rather to be conceived as a continual becoming, like the individual personality and like knowledge" (_ib._, p. 120). We may say, then, that being is becoming rationalised and moralised as and because the spirit in man realises itself. For a time the process of moralisation and self-realisation was worked by and through the conception of a beneficent and omnipotent god. That conception was, it would seem, a hypothesis, valuable as long it was a working hypothesis, but to be cast aside now that humanitarianism is found {215} more adequate to the facts and more in harmony with the consistent application of the theory of evolution. We have, then, to consider whether it is adequate to the facts, whether, when we regard the facts of the history of religion, we do find that morality comes first and religion later.

"What," Mr. Hobhouse enquires in his _Morals in Evolution_ (II, 74), "What is the ethical character of early religion?" and his reply is that "in the first stage we find that spirits, as such, are not concerned with morality." That was also the answer which had previously been given by Professor Höffding, who says in his _Philosophy of Religion_: "in the lowest forms of it ... religion cannot be said to have any ethical significance" (p. 323). Originally, the gods were "purely natural forces which could be defied or evaded," though eventually they "became ethical powers whom men neither could nor wished to defy" (p. 324). This first stage of early religion seems on the terms of the hypothesis to be supposed to be found in the period of animism and fetichism; and "the primitive conception of spirit" is, Mr. Hobhouse says (II, 16), of something "feeling and thinking like a rather stupid man, and open like him to supplication, exhortation, or intimidation." If {216} that is so, then Professor Höffding may be justified in saying that in the lowest forms of religion "the gods appear as powers on which man is dependent, but not as patterns of conduct or administrators of an ethical world order" (p. 324). Now, in the period termed animistic because inanimate things are supposed to be animated and actuated by spirits, it may be that many or most of such spirits are supposed to feel and think like a rather stupid man, and therefore to be capable of being cajoled, deluded, intimidated, and castigated by the human being who desires to make use of them. But it is not all such spirits that are worshipped then. Indeed, it is impossible, Mr. Hobhouse says (II, 15), that any such spirit could be "an object of worship in our sense of the term." Worship implies the superiority of the object worshipped to the person worshipping. But, though not an object of worship in our sense of the term, the spirit that could be deluded, intimidated, and castigated was, according to Mr. Hobhouse, "the object of a religious cult" on the part of the man who believed that he could and did intimidate and castigate the spirit. Probably, however, most students of the science of religion would agree that a cult which included or {217} allowed intimidation and castigation of the object of the cult was as little entitled to be termed religious as it is to be called worship. In the period of animism, then, either there was no religious cult, no worship in our sense of the term; or, if there was religion, then the spirit worshipped was worshipped as a being higher than man. Whether man has at any time been without religion is a question on which there is here no need to enter. The allegation we are now considering is that whenever religion does appear, then in its first and earliest stage it is not concerned with morality; and the ground for that allegation is that the spirits of the animistic period have nothing to do with morality or conduct. Now, it may be that these spirits which animate inanimate things are not concerned with morality; but then neither are they worshipped, nor is the relation between them and man religious. Religion implies a god; and a spirit to be a god must have worshippers, a community of worshippers--whether that community be a nation, a tribe, or a family. Further, it is as the protector of the interests of that community--however small--that the god is worshipped by the community. The indispensable condition of religion is the existence of a community; {218} and from the beginning man must have lived in some sort of community,--whether a family or a horde,--for the period of helpless infancy is so long in the case of human beings that without some sort of permanent community the race could not be perpetuated. The indispensable condition of religion, therefore, has always existed from the time when man was man. Further, whatever the form of community in which man originally dwelt, it was only in the community and by means of the community that the individual could exist--that is to say, if the interest of any one individual conflicted or was supposed to conflict with the interests of the community, then the interests of the community must prevail, if the community was to exist. Here, then, from the beginning we have the second condition indispensable for the existence of religion, viz. the possibility that the conduct of some member of the community might not be the conduct required by the interests or supposed interests of the community, and prescribed by the custom of the community. In the case of such divergence of interests and conduct, the being worshipped by the community was necessarily, as being the god of the community, and receiving the worship of the community, on the side {219} of the community and against the member who violated the custom of the community. But, at this period in the history of humanity, the morality of the community was the custom of the community; and the god of the community from the first necessarily upheld the custom, that is, the morality of the community. Spirits "as such," that is to say, spirits which animated inanimate things but which were not the protectors of any human community, were, for the very reason that they were not the gods of any community, "not concerned with morality." Spirits, however, which were the protectors of a community necessarily upheld the customs and therefore the morality of the community; they were not "without ethical significance." It was an essential part of the very conception of such spirits--of spirits standing in this relation to the community--that they were "ethical powers." Höffding's dictum that "the gods appear as powers on which man is dependent, but not as patterns of conduct or administrators of an ethical world order" (p. 323), overlooks the fact that in the earliest times not only are gods powers on which man is dependent, but powers which enforce the conduct required by the custom of the community and sanction the ethical order as {220} far as it has then been revealed. The fact that "the worship of the family, of the clan, or of the nation is shared in by all," not merely "helps to nourish a feeling of solidarity which may acquire ethical significance," as Höffding says (p. 325), it creates a solidarity which otherwise would not exist. If there were no worship shared in by all, there would be no religious solidarity; and, judging from the very general, if not universal, occurrence of religion in the lowest races as well as the highest, we may conjecture that without religious solidarity a tribe found it hard or impossible to survive in the struggle for existence. That religious solidarity however is not, as Höffding suggests, something which may eventually "acquire ethical significance"; it is in its essence and from the beginning the worship of a god who punishes the community for the ethical transgression of its members, because they are not merely violations of the custom of the community, but offences against him. When Höffding says (p. 328) "religious faith ... assumes an independent human ethic, which has, as a matter of fact, developed historically under the practical influence of the ethical feeling of man," he seems to overlook the fact that as a matter of history human {221} ethics have always been based--rightly or wrongly--on religious faith, that moral transgressions have always been regarded as not merely wrongs done to a man's neighbour, but also as offences against the god or gods of the community, that the person suffering from foul wrong for which he can get no human redress has always appealed from man to God, and that the remorse of the wrong-doer who has evaded human punishment has always taken shape in the fear of what God may yet do.