Part 3

In the cycle of studies which are immediately concerned with the career of mankind, the rate of progress has been no less marvellous. The scientific study of human speech may be said to date from the flash of insight which led Friedrich Schlegel in 1808 to detect the kinship between the Aryan languages. From this beginning to the researches of Fick and Ascoli in our own time, the quantity of achievement rivals anything the physical sciences can show. The study of comparative mythology, which has thrown such light upon the primitive thoughts of mankind, is still younger,--is still, indeed, in its infancy. The application of the comparative method to the investigation of laws and customs, of political and ecclesiastical and industrial systems, has been carried on scarcely thirty years; yet the results already obtained are obliging us to rewrite the history of mankind in all its stages. The great achievements of archæologists--the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs and of cuneiform inscriptions in Assyria and Persia, the unearthing of ancient cities, the discovery and classification of primeval implements and works of art in all quarters of the globe--belong almost entirely to the nineteenth century. These discoveries, which have well-nigh doubled for us the length of the historic period, have united with the quite modern revelations of geology concerning the ancient glaciation of the temperate zones, to give us an approximate idea of the age of the human race[1] and the circumstances attending its diffusion over the earth. It has thus at length become possible to obtain something like the outlines of a comprehensive view of the history of the creation, from the earliest stages of condensation of our solar nebula down to the very time in which we live, and to infer from the characteristics of this past evolution some of the most general tendencies of the future.

All this accumulation of physical and historical knowledge has not failed to react upon our study of the human mind itself. In books of logic the score of centuries between Aristotle and Whately saw less advance than the few years between Whately and Mill. In psychology the work of Fechner and Wundt and Spencer belongs to the age in which we are now living. When to all this variety of achievement we add what has been done in the critical study of literature and art, of classical and Biblical philology, and of metaphysics and theology, illustrating from fresh points of view the history of the human mind, the sum total becomes almost too vast to be comprehended. This century, which some have called an age of iron, has been also an age of ideas, an era of seeking and finding the like of which was never known before. It is an epoch the grandeur of which dwarfs all others that can be named since the beginning of the historic period, if not since Man first became distinctively human. In their mental habits, in their methods of inquiry, and in the data at their command, "the men of the present day who have fully kept pace with the scientific movement are separated from the men whose education ended in 1830 by an immeasurably wider gulf than has ever before divided one progressive generation of men from their predecessors."[2] The intellectual development of the human race has been suddenly, almost abruptly, raised to a higher plane than that upon which it had proceeded from the days of the primitive troglodyte to the days of our great-grandfathers. It is characteristic of this higher plane of development that the progress which until lately was so slow must henceforth be rapid. Men's minds are becoming more flexible, the resistance to innovation is weakening, and our intellectual demands are multiplying while the means of satisfying them are increasing. Vast as are the achievements we have just passed in review, the gaps in our knowledge are immense, and every problem that is solved but opens a dozen new problems that await solution. Under such circumstances there is no likelihood that the last word will soon be said on any subject. In the eyes of the twenty-first century the science of the nineteenth will doubtless seem very fragmentary and crude. But the men of that day, and of all future time, will no doubt point back to the age just passing away as the opening of a new dispensation, the dawning of an era in which the intellectual development of mankind was raised to a higher plane than that upon which it had hitherto proceeded.

As the inevitable result of the thronging discoveries just enumerated, we find ourselves in the midst of a mighty revolution in human thought. Time-honoured creeds are losing their hold upon men; ancient symbols are shorn of their value; everything is called in question. The controversies of the day are not like those of former times. It is no longer a question of hermeneutics, no longer a struggle between abstruse dogmas of rival churches. Religion itself is called upon to show why it should any longer claim our allegiance. There are those who deny the existence of God. There are those who would explain away the human soul as a mere group of fleeting phenomena attendant upon the collocation of sundry particles of matter. And there are many others who, without committing themselves to these positions of the atheist and the materialist, have nevertheless come to regard religion as practically ruled out from human affairs. No religious creed that man has ever devised can be made to harmonize in all its features with modern knowledge. All such creeds were constructed with reference to theories of the universe which are now utterly and hopelessly discredited. How, then, it is asked, amid the general wreck of old beliefs, can we hope that the religious attitude in which from time immemorial we have been wont to contemplate the universe can any longer be maintained? Is not the belief in God perhaps a dream of the childhood of our race, like the belief in elves and bogarts which once was no less universal? and is not modern science fast destroying the one as it has already destroyed the other?

Such are the questions which we daily hear asked, sometimes with flippant eagerness, but oftener with anxious dread. In view of them it is well worth while to examine the idea of God, as it has been entertained by mankind from the earliest ages, and as it is affected by the knowledge of the universe which we have acquired in recent times. If we find in that idea, as conceived by untaught thinkers in the twilight of antiquity, an element that still survives the widest and deepest generalizations of modern times, we have the strongest possible reason for believing that the idea is permanent and answers to an Eternal Reality. It was to be expected that conceptions of Deity handed down from primitive men should undergo serious modification. If it can be shown that the essential element in these conceptions must survive the enormous additions to our knowledge which have distinguished the present age above all others since man became man, then we may believe that it will endure so long as man endures; for it is not likely that it can ever be called upon to pass a severer ordeal.

All this will presently appear in a still stronger light, when we have set forth the common characteristic of the modifications which the idea of God has already undergone, and the nature of the opposition between the old and the new knowledge with which we are now confronted. Upon this discussion we have now to enter, and we shall find it leading us to the conclusion that throughout all possible advances in human knowledge, so far as we can see, the essential position of theism must remain unshaken.

III.

_Sources of the Theistic Idea._

Our argument may fitly begin with an inquiry into the sources of the theistic idea and the shape which it has universally assumed among untutored men. The most primitive element which it contains is doubtless the notion of _dependence_ upon something outside of ourselves. We are born into a world consisting of forces which sway our lives and over which we can exercise no control. The individual man can indeed make his volition count for a very little in modifying the course of events, but this end necessitates strict and unceasing obedience to powers that cannot be tampered with. To the behaviour of these external powers our actions must be adapted under penalty of death. And upon grounds no less firm than those on which we believe in any externality whatever, we recognize that these forces antedated our birth and will endure after we have disappeared from the scene. No one supposes that he makes the world for himself, so that it is born and dies with him. Every one perforce contemplates the world as something existing independently of himself, as something into which he has come, and from which he is to go; and for his coming and his going, as well as for what he does while part of the world, he is dependent upon something that is not himself.

Between ancient and modern man, as between the child and the adult, there can be no essential difference in the recognition of this fundamental fact of life. The primitive man could not, indeed, state the case in this generalized form, any more than a young child could state it, but the facts which the statement covers were as real to him as they are to us.[A] The primitive man knew nothing of a world, in the modern sense of the word. The conception of that vast consensus of forces which we call the world or universe is a somewhat late result of culture; it was reached only through ages of experience and reflection. Such an idea lay beyond the horizon of the primitive man. But while he knew not the world, he knew bits and pieces of it; or, to vary the expression, he had his little world, chaotic and fragmentary enough, but full of dread reality for him. He knew what it was to deal from birth until death with powers far mightier than himself. To explain these powers, to make their actions in any wise intelligible, he had but one available resource; and this was so obvious that he could not fail to employ it. The only source of action of which he knew anything, since it was the only source which lay within himself, was the human will;[3] and in this respect, after all, the philosophy of the primeval savage was not so very far removed from that of the modern scientific thinker. The primitive man could see that his own actions were prompted by desire and guided by intelligence, and he supposed the same to be the case with the sun and the wind, the frost and the lightning. All the forces of outward nature, so far as they came into visible contact with his life, he personified as great beings which were to be contended with or placated. This primeval philosophy, once universal among men, has lasted far into the historic period, and it is only slowly and bit by bit that it has been outgrown by the most highly civilized races. Indeed the half-civilized majority of mankind have by no means as yet cast it aside, and among savage tribes we may still see it persisting in all its original crudity. In the mythologies of all peoples, of the Greeks and Hindus and Norsemen, as well as of the North American Indians and the dwellers in the South Sea islands, we find the sun personified as an archer or wanderer, the clouds as gigantic birds, the tempest as a devouring dragon; and the tales of gods and heroes, as well as of trolls and fairies, are made up of scattered and distorted fragments of nature-myths, of which the primitive meaning had long been forgotten when the ingenuity of modern scholarship laid it bare.[4]

[A] See note A at the end of the volume.

In all this personification of physical phenomena our prehistoric ancestors were greatly assisted by that theory of ghosts which was perhaps the earliest speculative effort of the human mind. Travellers have now and then reported the existence of races of men quite destitute of religion, or of what the observer has learned to recognize as religion; but no one has ever discovered a race of men devoid of a belief in ghosts. The mass of crude inference which makes up the savage's philosophy of nature is largely based upon the hypothesis that every man has _another self_, a double, or wraith, or ghost. This "hypothesis of the _other self_, which serves to account for the savage's wanderings during sleep in strange lands and among strange people, serves also to account for the presence in his dreams of parents, comrades, or enemies, known to be dead and buried. The other self of the dreamer meets and converses with the other selves of his dead brethren, joins with them in the hunt, or sits down with them to the wild cannibal banquet. Thus arises the belief in an ever-present world of ghosts, a belief which the entire experience of uncivilized man goes to strengthen and expand."[5] Countless tales and superstitions of savage races show that the hypothesis of the other self is used to explain the phenomena of hysteria and epilepsy, of shadows, of echoes, and even of the reflection of face and gestures in still water. It is not only men, moreover, who are provided with other selves. Dumb beasts and plants, stone hatchets and arrows, articles of clothing and food, all have their ghosts;[6] and when the dead chief is buried, his wives and servants, his dogs and horses, are slain to keep him company, and weapons and trinkets are placed in his tomb to be used in the spirit-land. Burial-places of primitive men, ages before the dawn of history, bear testimony to the immense antiquity of this savage philosophy. From this wholesale belief in ghosts to the interpretation of the wind or the lightning as a person animated by an indwelling soul and endowed with quasi-human passions and purposes, the step is not a long one. The latter notion grows almost inevitably out of the former, so that all races of men without exception have entertained it. That the mighty power which uproots trees and drives the storm-clouds across the sky should resemble a human soul is to the savage an unavoidable inference. "If the fire burns down his hut, it is because the fire is a person with a soul, and is angry with him, and needs to be coaxed into a kindlier mood by means of prayer or sacrifice." He has no alternative but to regard fire-soul as something akin to human-soul; his philosophy makes no distinction between the human ghost and the elemental demon or deity.

It was in accordance with this primitive theory of things that the earliest form of religious worship was developed. In all races of men, so far as can be determined, this was the worship of ancestors.[7] The other self of the dead chieftain continued after death to watch over the interests of the tribe, to defend it against the attacks of enemies, to reward brave warriors, and to punish traitors and cowards. His favour must be propitiated with ceremonies like those in which a subject does homage to a living ruler. If offended by neglect or irreverent treatment, defeat in battle, damage by flood or fire, visitations of famine or pestilence, were interpreted as marks of his anger. Thus the spirits animating the forces of nature were often identified with the ghosts of ancestors, and mythology is filled with traces of the confusion. In the Vedic religion the _pitris_, or "fathers," live in the sky along with Yama, the original _pitri_ of mankind: they are very busy with the weather; they send down rain to refresh the thirsty earth, or anon parch the fields till the crops perish of drought; and they rush along in the roaring tempest, like the weird host of the wild huntsman Wodan. To the ancient Greek the blue sky Uranos was the father of gods and men, and throughout antiquity this mingling of ancestor-worship with nature-worship was general. With the systematic development of ethnic religions, in some instances ancestor-worship remained dominant, as with the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Romans; in others, a polytheism based upon nature-worship acquired supremacy, as with the Hindus and Greeks, and our own Teutonic forefathers. The great divinities of the Hellenic pantheon are all personifications of physical phenomena. At a comparatively late date the Roman adopted these divinities and paid to them a fashionable and literary homage, but his solemn and heartfelt rites were those with which he worshipped the _lares_ and _penates_ in the privacy of his home. His hospitable treatment of the gods of a vanquished people was the symptom of a commingling of the various local religions of antiquity which insured their mutual destruction and prepared the way for their absorption into a far grander and truer system.[8]

IV.

_Development of Monotheism._

Such an allusion to the Romans, in an exposition like the present one, is not without its significance. It was partly through political circumstances that a truly theistic idea was developed out of the chaotic and fragmentary ghost theories and nature-worship of the primeval world. To the framing of the vastest of all possible conceptions, the idea of God, man came but slowly. This nature-worship and ancestor-worship of early times was scarcely theism. In their recognition of man's utter dependence upon something outside of himself which yet was not wholly unlike himself, these primitive religions contained the essential germ out of which theism was to grow; but it is a long way from the propitiation of ghosts and the adoration of the rising sun to the worship of the infinite and eternal God, the maker of heaven and earth, in whom we live, and move, and have our being. Before men could arrive at such a conception, it was necessary for them to obtain some integral idea of the heaven and the earth; it was necessary for them to frame, however inadequately, the conception of a physical universe. Such a conception had been reached by civilized peoples before the Christian era, and by the Greeks a remarkable beginning had been made in the generalization and interpretation of physical phenomena. The intellectual atmosphere of Alexandria, for two centuries before and three centuries after the time of Christ, was more modern than anything that followed down to the days of Bacon and Descartes; and all the leaders of Greek thought since Anaxagoras had been virtually or avowedly monotheists. As the phenomena of nature were generalized, the deities or superhuman beings regarded as their sources were likewise generalized, until the conception of nature as a whole gave rise to the conception of a single Deity as the author and ruler of nature; and in accordance with the order of its genesis, this notion of Deity was still the notion of a Being possessed of psychical attributes, and in some way like unto Man.

But there was another cause, besides scientific generalization, which led men's minds toward monotheism. The conception of tutelar deities, which was the most prominent practical feature of ancestor-worship, was directly affected by the political development of the peoples of antiquity. As tribes were consolidated into nations, the tutelar gods of the tribes became generalized, or the god of some leading tribe came to supersede his fellows, until the result was a single national deity, at first regarded as the greatest among gods, afterwards as the only God. The most striking instance of this method of development is afforded by the Hebrew conception of Jehovah. The most primitive form of Hebrew religion discernible in the Old Testament is a fetichism, or very crude polytheism, in which ancestor-worship becomes more prominent than nature-worship. At first the _teraphim_, or tutelar household deities, play an important part, but nature-gods, such as Baal, and Moloch, and Astarte, are extensively worshipped. It is the plural _elohim_ who create the earth, and whose sons visit the daughters of antediluvian men. The tutelar deity, Jehovah, is originally thought of as one of the _elohim_, then as chief among _elohim_, and Lord of the hosts of heaven. Through his favour his chosen prophet overcomes the prophets of Baal, he is greater than the deities of neighbouring peoples, he is the only true god, and thus finally he is thought of as the only God, and his name becomes the symbol of monotheism. The Jews have always been one of the most highly-gifted races in the world. In antiquity they developed an intense sentiment of nationality, and for earnestness and depth of ethical feeling they surpassed all other peoples. The conception of Jehovah set forth in the writings of the prophets was the loftiest conception of deity anywhere attained before the time of Christ; in ethical value it immeasurably surpassed anything to be found in the pantheon of the Greeks and Romans. It was natural that such a conception of deity should be adopted throughout the Roman world. At the beginning of the Christian era the classic polytheism had well-nigh lost its hold upon men's minds; its value had become chiefly literary, as a mere collection of pretty stories; it had begun its descent into the humble realm of folk-lore. For want of anything better people had recourse to elaborate Eastern ceremonials, or contented themselves with the time-honoured domestic worship of the _lares_ and _penates_. Yet their minds were ripe for some kind of monotheism, and in order that the Jewish conception should come to be generally adopted, it was only necessary that it should be freed from its limitations of nationality, and that Jehovah should be set forth as Sustainer of the universe and Father of all mankind. This was done by Jesus and Paul. The theory of divine action implied throughout the gospels and the epistles was the first complete monotheism attained by mankind, or at least by that portion of it from which our modern civilization has descended. Here for the first time we have the idea of God dissociated from the limiting circumstances with which it had been entangled in all the ethnic religions of antiquity. Individual thinkers here and there had already, doubtless, reached an equally true conception, as was shown by Kleanthes in his sublime hymn to Zeus;[9] but it was now for the first time set forth in such wise as to win assent from the common folk as well as the philosophers, and to make its way into the hearts of all men. Its acceptance was hastened, and its hold upon mankind immeasurably strengthened, by the divinely beautiful ethical teaching in which Jesus couched it,--that teaching, so often misunderstood yet so profoundly true, which heralded the time when Man shall have thrown off the burden of his bestial inheritance and strife and sorrow shall cease from the earth.[10]

We shall presently see that in its fundamental features the theism of Jesus and Paul was so true that it must endure as long as man endures. Changes of statement may alter the outward appearance of it, but the kernel of truth will remain the same forever. But the shifting body of religious doctrine known as Christianity has at various times contained much that is unknown to this pure theism, and much that has shown itself to be ephemeral in its hold upon men. The change from polytheism to monotheism could not be thoroughly accomplished all at once. As Christianity spread over the Roman world it became encrusted with pagan notions and observances, and a similar process went on during the conversion of the Teutonic barbarians. Yuletide and Easter and other church holidays were directly adopted from the old nature-worship; the adoration of tutelar household deities survived in the homage paid to patron saints; and the worship of the Berecynthian Mother was continued in that of the Virgin Mary.[11] Even the name _God_, applied to the Deity throughout Teutonic Christendom, seems to be neither more nor less than _Wodan_, the personification of the storm-wind, the supreme divinity of our pagan forefathers.[B]

[B] See note B. at the end of the volume.