CHAPTER III.

RELIGIOUS MORALS.

I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men—Morality and immorality in primitive religions—Extension of friendly and hostile relations to the sphere of the gods—Primitive inability in matters of conscience, as in matters of art, to distinguish the great from the monstrous.

II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men—Patronage—That divine intervention tends always to be conceived after the model of human intervention and to sanction it.

III. Worship and religious rites—Principles of reciprocity and proportionality in the exchange of services—Sacrifice—Principle of coercion and incantation—Principle of habit and its relation to rites—Sorcery—Sacerdotalism—Prophecy—The externals of worship—Dramatization and religious æsthetics.

IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love; their psychological origin.

_I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men._

[Sidenote: Religion and morals not originally related.]

We are to-day inclined to see everywhere a very intimate relation between religion and morals, since Kant recognized in ethics the aim and sole foundation of the conception of God. In the beginning nothing of the sort existed. It is plain from the preceding chapters that religion was at first a physical explanation of events, and above all of events in their relation to the interests of mankind, by a theory of causes acting for ends of their own after the manner of the human will; an explanation, that is to say, by causes at once efficient and final; and theology is the development of a primitive teleology. Man imagined himself to be living in society with beneficent or maleficent beings, at first visible and tangible, then progressively invisible and separate from the objects they inhabited. Therein, as we have said, lay the first step of religion. Religion was in the beginning nothing more than an imaginative extension of human society; the explanation of things by a theory of volitions analogous to the volitions by means of which man himself acts on the world, but of another order, of a higher degree of power. Well, these volitions are sometimes good, sometimes evil, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile: friendship and hatred are the two categories under which man inevitably classified the superior powers with whom he believed himself to be in relations. Morality was in no sense one of the distinguishing characteristics of these powers; man was quite as naturally inclined to attribute to them wickedness as goodness, or rather he felt vaguely that the rules of conduct by which he was himself bound were not necessarily those by which these beings, at once analogous to men and so different from them, were themselves bound. Also in his relations with the gods, with the powers of nature, man in nowise believed that the rules of mere human society, of the family, of the tribe, of the nation, were always and in every respect applicable. Thence it came that to render the gods propitious, man had recourse to practices which he would have blamed in mere human morals: human sacrifices, anthropophagy, sacrifices of virginity, etc.[43]

[43] It has been remarked that peoples who for centuries have renounced anthropophagy have long persisted in human sacrifices: that thousands of women in certain sanctuaries have offered the painful sacrifices of their chastity to gods of a furious sensuality. The gods of paganism are dissolute, arbitrary, vindictive, pitiless, and still their adorers rise little by little to a conception of moral purity, of clemency, and of justice. Javeh is vindictive and ferocious, and yet it is in the midst of his people that the religion _par excellence_ of benignity and forgiveness took its rise. Also the real morality of men was never proportionate to the frequently fanatic intensity of their religious sentiments. See M. Réville (_Prolégomènes_, p. 281).

[Sidenote: Religion much less moral than society.]

If one stops to recollect that moral laws are in a great measure the expression of the very necessities of human life, and that the generality of certain rules is due to the uniformity of the conditions of life on the surface of the globe, one will understand why it was that one’s relations to the gods, that is to say to creatures of the imagination, were not dominated so directly as one’s relations to one’s fellow-men by the exigencies of practical life, but were regulated by much more variable and fantastic laws containing often a visible germ of immorality. The divine society was an imaginary extension of human society, not an imaginative perfection of it. It was physical fear, _timor_, and not moral reverence, which gave being to the first gods. The human imagination, labouring thus under the empire of fear, naturally gave birth to a prodigy more often than to an ideal. For the primitive conscience, as for primitive art, the distinction between the great and the monstrous was by no means sufficiently marked. The germ of immorality, therefore, not less than of morality lies at the root of every religion. Once more, it would be an error to believe that religions are immoral in that they are anthropomorphic, or sociomorphic; rather the contrary is true, they are not moral except in so far as they are sociomorphic. Mutilation, for example, cruelty, obscenity are foreign to the conceptions which dominate human conduct. One may verify in every religion what is observed in Christianity, that the truly moral God is precisely the man-God, Jesus, whereas God the Father, who pitilessly sacrifices his own son, is anti-human and immoral, precisely in that he is superhuman.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

In effect we find our fundamental proposition confirmed afresh: religion is a sociology conceived as a physical, metaphysical, and moral explanation of all things; it is the reduction of all natural, and even supernatural forces to a human type, and the reduction of their relations to social relations. Also the progress of religion has been exactly parallel to the progress in social evolution, which has itself been dominated by the progress of subjective morals and conscience. The gods were at first divided into two classes: the beneficent and the maleficent, who ultimately came to be recognized as respectively virtuous and wicked. Then these two classes were absorbed into their respective chiefs, into Ormuzd and Ahriman, into God and Satan, into a principle of good and a principle of evil. Thus by a fresh dualism spirits themselves were separated and ranged into classes, as the spirit itself had previously been separated from the body. Finally the principle of goodness subsisted victoriously under the name of God. He became the personification of the moral law and the moral sanction, the sovereign legislator and judge, in a word, the living law of universal society, as a king is the living law in a human society. To-day God tends to be identified with the human conscience purified _ad infinitum_, and adequate with the universe. For these last and most subtle representations of the religious sentiment, God is no more than a symbol of the moral and the ideal. One may see in this evolution of religious ideas the gradual triumph of sociomorphism, since it is characterized by an extension to the universe at large of social relations which are incessantly progressing toward perfection among men.

_II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men._

[Sidenote: The gods inevitably become protectors of social justice.]

To the personification of the law, religious morals inevitably joined that of the sanction which plays so capital a rôle in every human society. The celestial government has always been a projection of the human government, with a penalty at first terrible and subsequently softened. To say the truth, the theory of a sanction is the systematization of that of a providence. The distinguishing characteristic of a providence is that it awards or recompenses, insomuch that one may bring down upon one’s self or avoid its anger, by such and such conduct. Well, the instant a man admits that a divine power is governing him, this power will inevitably appear to him to be exercising a control over his conduct, and, as it were, sanctioning it. This control will at first be exercised only in regard to the personal relations of the individual, with his god and his gods. But the individual will soon recognize that if the gods take an interest in him they may well take an interest also in the other members of the tribe, provided that these last know how to render them propitious; and to injure the other worshippers of a god would be indirectly to injure the god himself, and provoke his anger. All the members of a tribe therefore find themselves protected against each other by their association with the gods, religion lends support to social justice, and whoever violates social justice expects the gods to punish him. This expectation also must have been confirmed by the facts, for if antisocial and unjust conduct had habitually prevailed among men, social life would have been impossible. Injustice must then always on an average have carried its sanction with it, and this sanction must have appeared to be the direct work of the gods, passing judgment from on high on the social conduct of their clients, as Roman patrons did, seated beneath the columns of the atrium.

[Sidenote: And of human justice.]

As religions intermingled and grew in extent, the clientage of a god, at first extended to the members of a single tribe, passed beyond its bounds. Men, of no matter what origin, might become citizens of the celestial city, of the superhuman association which took charge of each of its members, so that the divine sanction tended increasingly to become confounded with the moral sanction, and one understood that God protected justice not only within the bosom of a tribe, but everywhere within the limits of humanity.

[Sidenote: Natural desire to have the scales loaded on the side of rectitude.]

While in the matter of the sanction the sociomorphic conception of the world tended thus to become a moral conception, morality itself must have tended, in order to eke out its own insufficiency, to ally itself with religion. Human society, powerless to make itself always respected by every one of its members, inevitably invoked the aid of the society of superior beings which enveloped it on all sides. Man being essentially a social animal, ζῶον πολιτικόν, could not be resigned in the presence of the success of antisocial conduct, and whenever it seemed that such conduct had succeeded humanly, the very nature of mankind tended to make it turn toward the superhuman to demand a reparation and a compensation. If the bees should suddenly see their hives destroyed before their eyes without there being any hope of ever reconstructing them, their whole being would be shaken, and they would instinctively await for an intervention of some kind, which should re-establish an order as immutable and sacred for them as that of the stars is for us. Man, by virtue of the moral nature with which heredity has furnished him, is thus inclined to believe that wickedness ought not to have the last word in the universe; the triumph of evil and of injustice always stirs his indignation. This species of indignation is observable in infants almost before they can talk, and numerous traces of it may be found even among animals. The logical result of this instinctive protest against evil is a refusal to believe in its definitive triumph.[44]

[44] See the author’s _Esquisse d’une morale_ (I., iii.); _Besoin psychologique d’une sanction_.

[Sidenote: Results in victory being given in heaven to principle of light.]

Man, in whose eyes the society in which the gods live corresponds so closely to human society, must almost inevitably imagine the existence among them of antisocial beings, of Ahrimans and Satans, protectors of evil in heaven and on earth, but it is natural that he should give the victory in the end to the “principle of good” over the “principle of evil.” Of all things it is the most repugnant to him to believe that the universe is fundamentally indifferent to the distinction between good and evil; a divinity may be irascible, capricious, and even intermittently wicked, but man cannot understand an impassible and cold nature.

[Sidenote: Gods legitimated by alliance with the moral forces of society.]

The most powerful of the gods had thus served to reconcile force and justice, a barbarous justice appropriate to the spirit of primitive man.

Through the idea of sanction grafted thus upon that of providence, religion assumes a really systematic character, and becomes attached to the very fibres of the human heart. As instruments of goodness in the universe, the gods, or at least the sovereign gods, serve to confirm human morality; they become in some sort the life of morality. Their existence is no longer simply a physical fact; it is a physical fact, morally justified by a social instinct which relies upon it as its main safeguard. Henceforth the power of the gods is legitimate. A divine king, like a human king, requires a certain mystic consecration; it is religion which consecrates human kings, it is morality which consecrates the king of the gods.

[Sidenote: Importance of conception of immortality in the moral evolution of religion.]

The notion of a divine intervention to trim the balance of the social order, to punish and to recompense, was at first altogether foreign to the belief in a continuation of life after death; it became allied to this belief much later. Even among a people so advanced as the Hebrews in matters of religious evolution, reward and punishment beyond this life played no rôle, and yet there has scarcely ever been a people who believed more heartily in the will of God as directing the life of mankind; but in their eyes God achieved his victory in this life; they possessed no need for an immortality as a means of redressing the moral balance of the world.[45] It was only later, when the critical sense had attained a higher development, that it was recognized that the sanction did not always come in this life; the chastisement of the culpable, the hoped-for recompense of the virtuous, gradually retreated from the present world into a distant future. Hell and heaven were thrown open to correct the manifest imperfections of this life. The notion of immortality thus assumed an extraordinary importance, insomuch that it seemed as if modern life would be destroyed if it were deprived of this belief, which former times had, however, succeeded in doing without. At bottom a clear and reflective conception of a life after death, in which one is rewarded or punished for one’s life here, is a very complex and remote deduction from the notion of sanction.

[45] The question whether the Hebrews believed in the immortality of the soul has long been discussed, and M. Renan has been reproached with his negative attitude in the matter; but M. Renan never denied the existence, among the Hebrews, of a belief in a sojourn for the shadows or manes of the dead; the whole question was whether the Hebrews believed in a system of reward and punishment after death, and M. Renan was right in maintaining that any such notion is foreign to primitive Judaism. It is equally foreign to primitive Hellenism. Though the living endeavoured to conciliate the dead, they did not envy their fate which, even in the case of the just, was worse than the fate of the living. “Seek not to console me for death, noble Ulysses,” Achilles says, when he arrives in Tartarus. “I would rather be a hired labourer and till a poor man’s field than reign over all the regions of the dead.” (See _Morale d’Épicure_, 3d ed.; _Des idées antiques sur la mort_.)

[Sidenote: Religious sanction at first conceived as a vengeance.]

The religious sanction, being fundamentally an extension of human social relations to the life of the gods, successively assumed the three forms of human penalty. At first it was only vengeance, as in the case of the lower animals and of savage man. It is evil rendered in return for evil. The sentiment of vengeance has subsisted, and still subsists, in the bosom of every religion which admits a divine sanction; vengeance is confided to God, and becomes only the more terrible. “Do not avenge yourselves,” St. Paul says, “but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore, if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him to drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.” “Our patience,” St. Cyprian wrote, “comes from our certainty that we shall be avenged; it heaps coals of fire upon the heads of our enemies. The day on which the Most High shall number the faithful shall see the culpable in Gehenna, and our persecutors shall be consumed in eternal fire! What a spectacle for my transports, my admiration, and my laughter!” And by way of a refinement, one of the martyrs at Carthage told the pagans to look him well in the face so that they might recognize him on the day of judgment at the right hand of the Father, while they were being precipitated into eternal flame.[46]

[46] The most orthodox theologians, of course, mean by fire a veritable flame.

[Sidenote: Then as an expiation.]

The notion of vengeance, as it becomes more subtle and passes, so to speak, from the domain of passion into that of intelligence is transformed into the notion of expiation, which is exclusively religious, although spiritualistic philosophers believe that it contains moral and rational elements. Expiation is a sort of naïve compensation by which one fancies one may counterbalance moral evil by accepting physical evil along with it. Expiation is a penalty which possesses no utility in the way of benefiting the culprit or those who might follow his example; it is neither corrective nor preventive; it is an alleged satisfaction of the law, the re-establishment of an apparent symmetry for the delight of pure intelligence, a public prosecution pure and simple. In a singular passage in the _Pensées chrétiennes_, Father Bouhours has clearly and innocently set in relief the inutility of religious expiation: “Penitence of the damned, thou art rigorous, and how useless; could the anger of God go further than to punish pleasure so brief by torments which shall never end? When a damned soul shall have shed tears enough to fill all the rivers of the world, even if he should only have shed one a century, he will be no farther ahead after so many millions of years; he will only have begun to suffer, and even when he shall have recommenced as often as there are grains of sand upon the shores of the sea, he shall even then have done nothing.” The highest degree of the notion of expiation is in effect this of eternal damnation. In this theory of the penalty of damnation, and the pains of fire without end, one recognizes the barbarism of former time and the torments inflicted on the vanquished by the vanquisher, on the rebel by the chief of the tribe. A sort of atavism attaches even to the religion of love in this perpetual inheritance of hatred, of the customs of a savage period erected into an eternal and divine institution.

_III. Worship and religious rites._

[Sidenote: The cult an expression of supposed reciprocity between gods and men.]

The cult, which, so to speak, is no more than the religion become visible and tangible, is, like the religion itself, simply the apotheosis of a certain social relation: the exchange of services between men living in society. Man, who believes himself to receive benefits from the gods, feels himself obliged to give something in exchange. He conceives a sort of reciprocity of action as appropriate between God and man, a possible return in good or evil conduct; man possesses a certain hold on his God, he is capable of procuring Him a certain satisfaction or causing Him a certain pain, and God will reply a hundred fold in kind—pain for pain, pleasure for pleasure.

[Sidenote: Is so, even to-day.]

One knows how gross the external forms of worship in the beginning were. They simply consisted in a practical application of the social economy: the gods were given to eat and drink; an altar was a butcher’s stall or the stall of a wine merchant, and the cult was a veritable commerce between heaven and earth—a sort of a market, in which man offered lambs or sheep and received in exchange riches and health. In our days, the cult is refined; the exchange has become more and more symbolic, the gift is simply an expression of moral homage, for which the worshipper expects no immediate return; still the principle of the cult is always the same, one believes that an act on man’s part possesses a direct influence on the will of God, and this act consists in offerings or prayers fixed on beforehand.

[Sidenote: Governed by the law of the market.]

Another principle of primitive cult is proportionality. One can expect no more from another than a proportionate return; bow three times before him, and he will be better disposed toward you than if you bow but once; offer him a beef, and he will be more grateful than if you offer an egg. Accordingly, to an uncultivated and superstitious mind, it follows that quantity and number should regulate our relations with the gods as they regulate our relations with our fellow-men; multiply your prayers, and you will multiply your chances of favours; three Paternosters go farther than one, a dozen candles will produce a much greater effect than a single candle. A prayer that you go to a temple to say in public, a cantique chanted in a sonorous voice, will attract more attention than a silent demand formulated at the bottom of one’s heart. Similarly, if one wishes to obtain rain or sun for the crops, it is into the fields that one must go to offer up one’s prayer, in a motley file of chanting worshippers; it is always serviceable to point one’s finger at what one wants, and to make the demand in person. The better to stimulate the memory of one’s idol primitive man was accustomed to drive a nail into him, and the custom still survives in Brittany in the form of thrusting pins into the bodies of the saints. Out of sight, out of mind, holds good both of gods and saints. To simple minds it would be contrary to the law of proportionate exchange for a simple thought, a silent prayer, to receive such favour in the eyes of the gods as an overt act.

[Sidenote: Embodied in fixed forms.]

Every religion insists upon some quite determinate exterior form of worship, a precise manifestation, a creed; it endeavours to incorporate itself into a certain number of rites and customs, which are numerous and inviolable in proportion as the religion is primitive. The universality of an external form of worship in the different religions of the world is the consequence and the most striking proof of their sociomorphic origin. Man has always believed that he might be useful and agreeable to his gods so long as he has conceived them as analogous to himself and to his neighbours.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Which soon came to be conceived as coercive.]

Add that to the notion of seducing the gods that of constraining is soon joined. To the conception of an exchange of services is soon joined that of a species of coercion exercised in some vague manner by the intermediation of some friendly god or even by some simple magic formula which has once succeeded, once procured the object demanded! Formulæ consecrated by custom appear to be equally binding on gods and men. Accordingly the cult, at first more or less loose, more or less arbitrary, ultimately becomes minutely regulated; ultimately becomes what one knows as a rite. A rite, at its lowest, is simply the result of a tendency to repeat indefinitely an act which, at some time or other, has seemed to render a god or a fetich propitious. After propitiation comes mechanical custom. Religion, as Pascal well said, is to a large extent habit. Rites are born of the need to perform again and again the same act, under the same circumstances; a need which is the foundation of custom, and without which all life would be impossible. Moreover, there is something sacred in every habit whatsoever, and every act, whatever it may be, tends to become a habit and by that fact to become respectable, to be in some sort self-consecrated. Rites, therefore, strike root in the very foundations of our being; the need for rites manifests itself very early in the life of the child. Children not only imitate other people and themselves, repeat other people and themselves, but exact a scrupulous precision in these repetitions; in general they do not distinguish the end from the means by which, and the circumstances under which, it is pursued; they do not yet possess a sufficiently exercised intelligence to understand that the same line of action may lead to the same result in different ways and under different circumstances. I once observed a child of from eighteen months to two years old: if I got up from my armchair and paraded about the room for its amusement, and stopped, it was necessary before beginning once more that I should return to my seat; the child’s pleasure was much diminished if the repetition was not exact. The child was accustomed to be fed by a number of people indifferently; still if I had given it some one thing—milk to drink, for example—a number of times, it was no longer satisfied to receive milk from anybody else, and insisted that the same person should always give it the same thing. If, on leaving the house, I took another cane than my own, the child would take it away from me to put it back where it belonged. It was unwilling that one should wear one’s hat in the house or go bare-headed out of doors. And finally, I saw it achieve a veritable bit of ceremonial on its own account. It had been accustomed to be told to call a domestic at the top of the servants’ stairway; one day the domestic was in the room when the child was told to call her; the child looked at her, turned about, went to the top of the stairway where it usually called her, and there only shouted out her name. All the conduct of life, in effect the most important as the most insignificant, is classified in a child’s head, rigorously defined, and modelled on the type of the first act of that kind that has caught its attention, without the child’s ever being able to distinguish the object of an act from its form. This confusion between purpose and form exists in a no less striking degree among savages and primitive peoples, and it is upon this very confusion that the sacred character of religious rites is founded.

[Sidenote: Primitive man possesses a repugnance not to novelty but to a breach of custom.]

The trouble that is apparent in a child or an uncultivated man in the presence of whatever deranges his established association of ideas, has been explained by a pure and simple horror of novelty. Lombroso has even coined a word to designate this psychological state; he has called it _misoneism_. But let us not confound two quite distinct things, a horror of a breach of custom and a horror of novelty; there are new perceptions, and habits that may be added to the whole body of already existing perceptions and habits without deranging them much or at all; and against these neither the savage nor the child rebels. Though the child never wearies of listening to the same tale and becomes irritated the moment one alters its least detail, it will listen no less passionately to a new tale; and new toys and new walks delight it. The same taste for novelty is observable among savages, just in so far as it can be gratified without disturbing their preconceived ideas. Primitive man is like the miser who will not part with any of his acquired treasure, but asks nothing better than to increase it. He is naturally curious, but he has no desire to push his curiosity to the point of contradicting what he knows already or believes he knows. And in a measure he is right, he is simply obeying the powerful instinct of intellectual self-preservation; his intelligence is not sufficiently supple constantly to knit and unknit the associations of ideas which experience has established in him. A black, out of an attachment for Livingstone, wished to accompany him to Europe; a few days on the steamer drove him insane. It is, therefore, in obedience to a certain branch of the instinct of self-preservation that primitive peoples are so conservative in their customs and rites; but they show themselves no less willing to appropriate the customs and rites of other people whenever they can do so without abandoning their own. The Romans ultimately came to accept the cult of all the peoples in the world without, however, any abandonment of their national cult; and fêtes, which are properly survivals of paganism, subsist even at the present day; one acquires superstition, and customs, much more easily than one loses them.

[Sidenote: Worship in public confirms cult.]

The power of example contributes also to lend an additional stability to the public cult; an individual becomes hardened in a practice which he finds universal in the society in which he lives. Thence comes the importance of public worship; the practice of public worship makes those who abstain from it conspicuous. Public worship is a _viva voce_ poll. Everyone sits in judgment upon you, all of your acquaintances become your accusers, and all men who worship God are your enemies. Not to think as everybody else does is comprehensible—but not to act as everybody else does! To wish to break away from the servitude of action which, once established, tends to perpetuate itself! In the end the machine bends; one becomes brutalized. Even among people of superior minds the force of habit is incredible. In the hours of doubt, in his youth, M. Renan wrote to his adviser: “I recite the Psalms; I could pass hours and hours, if I but followed my own inclination, in the churches.... I experience lively returns of devotion.... At times I am simultaneously both Catholic and rationalist! When one cuts loose from such beliefs, beliefs which have become a second nature to one, it seems as if one has severed one’s self from one’s whole past. One has in some sense lived them, and one is attached to them as to one’s own life; to abandon them is to resolve to die to one’s self. It seems as if one’s entire strength had come from them and that one will be as feeble as a child when one has lost them; they are to one what Samson’s hair was to him. Happily they will grow again.”

[Sidenote: Priesthood a consequence of established rites.]

Priesthood is a consequence of the establishment of rites. The priest is the man supposed to be most capable of influencing the divinity by a minute and learned observation of the sacred rites. Rites, in effect, the moment they become complicated by an accumulation of diverse customs lie beyond the knowledge and power of the ordinary man; it requires a special education to talk to the gods in the complex language which alone they understand, in the formulæ which coerce their wills. Whoever possesses this imagination is a species of magician or sorcerer; and the priesthood arose out of sorcery, of which it was simply the regular organization.[47]

[47] “Sorcery, in the beginning purely individual and fantastic,” says M. Réville, “gradually develops into sacerdotalism and by that change, having become a permanent public institution, sacerdotal sorcery becomes systematic, develops a ritual which becomes traditional, imposes upon those who aspire to the honour of conducting the conditions of initiation, proof of efficiency, a novitiate, receives privileges, defends them if they are attacked, endeavours to augment them. This is the history of all sacerdotal institutions, which are certainly descended from a capricious, fantastic, disorderly, practice of sorcery in previous ages.”

[Sidenote: Tendency of priest to become a sacred person.]

The externals of worship remain to-day, in special in the Catholic and Greek religions, a collection of traditional, inflexible formulæ, which could not be trusted to produce their effect if a word or a gesture in them were changed; certain ceremonies are really veritable traditional forms of incantation. Rites resemble the invisible bonds in which Faust held the Devil; but it is God himself in this case that is enchanted, charmed, and overpowered. At bottom the belief which makes the Chinese priest turn his praying machine, the belief which makes the devotee tell her beads, the belief which makes the priest thumb his breviary or say salaried masses for unknown peoples, which in the Midi makes rich people pay beggars to mumble prayers before their doors, all rest upon one and the same principle: they all rest on a faith in a power of the rite, of the traditional formula in and of itself, no matter who pronounces it. The efficacity of the interested prayers does not seem to depend solely on the legitimacy of what one demands but on the form employed in demanding them; and this form has been determined at bottom by experience; the majority of devotees perform minute experiments on the comparative virtue of individual prayers, masses, offerings, pilgrimages, miraculous waters, etc.; they amass the result of their observations and transmit them to their children. The invocation of certain privileged Madonnas, such as the Madonna at Lourdes, is even to-day a vestige of primitive sorcery. The priest inherits all these naïve experiments as to the conditions appropriate to induce a miracle, and he systematizes them. Priests being men picked for their capability in the function which was regarded as the most useful of all others for the preservation of society, necessarily came to constitute a really superior caste and to be personally in some sense the object of the cult which they administered. The perfect type of sacerdotal privilege is hereditary priesthood as it existed in ancient Judaism, as it still exists in India; every Brahman is born a priest and needs no special education. The thirty-seven great priests of Vishnu in Gujerat are honoured even to-day as the visible incarnation of Vishnu.[48]

[48] It is an honour for which one pays dear to be permitted to consecrate to them one’s soul, one’s body, or the soul and body of one’s wife. One pays five rupees for the privilege of contemplating them, twenty for the privilege of touching them, thirteen for the privilege of being whipped by them, seventeen for the privilege of eating betel that they have chewed, nineteen for the privilege of drinking the water in which they have bathed, thirty-five for the privilege of washing their great toes, forty-two for the privilege of rubbing them with perfumed oil, and from one hundred to two hundred for tasting in their company the essence of delight.

[Sidenote: Antagonism between priest and prophet.]

Historically the priest has always found a rival, sometimes an adversary, in the prophet, from Buddha to Isaiah and Jesus. The prophet is not a priest bound to a sanctuary and slave to a tradition, but an individual. “Prophecy,” says M. Albert Réville, “is to religion what lyrism is to poetry.” The prophet and the lyric poet, in effect, both speak in the name of their own inspiration. The prophet is often a revolutionist, the priest is essentially a conservative; the one represents innovation, the other custom.

[Sidenote: Dramatic element in cult.]

Exterior forms of worship and rites allying themselves with refined and elevated sentiments have in all religions taken on a symbolic and expressive character that they did not possess in the practice of primitive sorcery; they have become æsthetic and by that fact rendered durable. For whoever looks upon the most ancient religious ceremonies with the eye of an artist, they consist in the reproduction, nowadays too mechanically and unconsciously, of a work of art which once was not without its significance and its beauty. They are nowadays like a hand-organ playing admirable compositions by some old master. Pfleiderer, in his “Philosophy of Religion,” has shown that the dominant element in the externals of worship is dramatic, the dramatization of some mythological or legendary scenes. It is especially among the Aryans that this element predominates; the Aryans are especially susceptible to the charm of great epics and dramas. The Semites are lyric rather, and thence arises the importance of prophecy among them; although the lyric element was also represented among the Greek poets and Pythonesses. The dramatic element, on the contrary, is visible in certain symbolic ceremonies of Christianity and Judaism. The Mass was formerly a veritable drama of the Passion in which the spectators also took part; the half pagan, half Christian processions that still subsist to-day possess for the crowd something of the attractiveness of the opera. The Communion is a dramatization of the Lord’s Supper. Catholicism especially is distinguished by the possession of dramatic and æsthetic (too often gross) elements, which explain, not less than historical reasons, its victory over Protestantism among the nations of southern Europe, which are more artistic than those of the north, and more sensually artistic. The æsthetic superiority of a religion is not to be disdained by the thinker. It is the æsthetic element in every rite which, as we shall see, is its most respectable characteristic. Moreover, religious sentiment and æsthetic sentiment have always gone hand in hand; and this union has been one of the most important factors in the development of the æsthetic sentiment; it is thus that dramas and epics dealt in the beginning with gods and demi-gods rather than with men; the earliest romances were religious legends; the first odes were sacred chants and songs. Music and religion have always been allied. But in the end, the æsthetic element becomes feeble and is replaced, as religion loses its vitality, by a species of mechanical routine. In the East, even more than among us, this phenomenon is manifest, the whole tendency there is toward monotonous and interminable ceremonials. The Parsees, the representatives of the oldest existing religion, pass six hours a day in prayer. And according to the _Indian Mirror_ the following is a description of the festival of the Lord, a part of the cult of Brahmaism, the altogether modern and wholly deistical religion founded by Ram Mohun Roy and Keshub: “At precisely six o’clock a hymn was intoned in chorus in the upper gallery of the _mandir_ to announce the day’s solemnity. Others followed to the accompaniment of the harmonium, and thus, after a succession of hymns, the sacred office was reached, which, counting in the sermon, lasted from seven to ten o’clock. A part of the congregation then retired to take some rest, but those who remained intoned the _vedi_ to demand of the minister explanations in regard to several points of his sermon. At noon, the assembly having convened, four _pundits_ came out successively and recited Sanskrit texts. At one o’clock the minister gave a conference.” Then came the exposition of a number of philosophical and religious theses, delivered by their respective authors. Hymns, meditations, and prayers in common lasted till nearly seven o’clock, when the initiation of seven new Brahmaists was celebrated. This ceremony, including a sermon, lasted not less than two hours, and the assembly, which, if one may believe the reporter, did not show any sign of fatigue after these fifteen hours of continuous devotion, separated with a hymn to the effect that it had not yet had enough: “The heart wishes not to return home.”

_IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love._

[Sidenote: Subjective worship a refinement on public and external worship.]

Subjective worship has grown out of, and been a refinement upon, the external cult, which in the beginning was in the eyes of mankind much the more important of the two. To the incantation, to the material offering, to the sacrifices of the victims succeeded subjective prayer and the subjective offering of love, and the subjective sacrifice of egoistic passion. To external homage, to evidences of fear and respect by which one was supposed to recognize the superior power of the gods, as one bows down in recognition of the superior power of kings, succeeded a mental adoration, in which a god is recognized as all-powerful but also as all-beneficent. The mental bowing down of the entire soul before God is the last refinement of ritual; and ritual itself in the higher religions comes to be the simple sign and symbol of this adoration.[49] Thus the primitive sociomorphic character of the cult becomes progressively more subtle: the semi-material society, consisting of gods and men, becomes a wholly moral society, composed of men and the principle of goodness, which still continues to be represented as a person, as a master, as a father, as a king.

[49] Among the Hindus, _Tapas_, that is to say fire, the ardour of devotion, and of voluntary renouncement, signified in the beginning simply the incantation intended to constrain the Devas to obedience, and to deprive them of a part of their power. Out of a crude conception has grown an extremely refined one. See _Manuel de l’Histoire des religions_, par C. P. Tiele, p. 19 (translated by Maurice Vernes).

[Sidenote: The love of God an outlet for the surplus of human love.]

The highest form of subjective worship is love of God, in which all the duties of religious morality may be regarded as summed up. Adoration contains in it a vitiating element of respect for power; love is a more intimate union. The love of God is a partial manifestation of the need to love which exists in every human being. This need is so great that it cannot always find satisfaction in real life; it tends therefore to stretch beyond, and not finding upon earth an object which completely suffices for it, it seeks one in heaven. The love of God appears thus to be an expression of the superabundance of the love of man. Our heart sometimes feels too big for the world and seeks to overpass its limits. Let us not forget, for the rest, that the world has been strangely contracted by religious ignorance, intolerance, and prejudice; the sphere left open to the need of loving was formerly a very narrow one: it is not astonishing that the latter should have stretched out its arms toward a celestial and supernatural being.

[Sidenote: Nourished by isolation, feebleness, and misfortune.]

The same thing happens when human affections are shipwrecked in us, lose their object, no longer find anything to which they can attach themselves. In France, as in England and America, the habitual devotion of spinsters has long since been observed, though it often coincides with a certain pining away of the heart. In our times a virtuous unmarried woman is, so to speak, predestined to devotion; divine love is for her (on an average, of course) a necessary compensation. Remark also that old men are generally more inclined to devotion than young. There are, no doubt, a number of reasons for it: the approach of death, the enfeeblement of the body and of the intelligence, the increasing need for a support, etc.; but there exists also a more profound reason. The old man, always more isolated than the young, and deprived of the excitations of the sexual instinct, possesses a smaller outlet for his instinct for affection and for love. Thus there accumulates in him an amount of treasure which he is free to apply as to him seems best; well, the service of God is that which demands least effort, which is most appropriate to the natural indolence of the old, to their preoccupation with themselves; they become therefore devotees, partly out of egoism, partly out of a need for some disinterested occupation. A grain of incense burns in every heart, and when the perfume of it can no longer be given to the earth we let it mount to heaven. Note also that the loss of beloved beings, misfortunes of every sort, and irreparable infirmities all provoke an expansion of the heart toward God. In the Middle Ages unhappiness was frequently one of the most important factors of piety; when a great and unmerited misfortune happened to a man, the chances were that he would enter the Church or else become an atheist; it depended often on his strength of mind, his habits, and his education. When one strikes an animal it is equally possible that it may bite one or crouch at one’s feet. Every time the heart is violently bruised there comes an inevitable reaction; we must reply from within to the blows from without, and this reply is sometimes revolt and sometimes adoration. The feeble, the disinherited, the suffering, all those to whom misfortune has not left strength enough for rebellion, have but one resource: the sweet and consoling humility of divine love. Whoever does not love, or is not loved completely and sufficiently, on earth will always turn toward heaven: the proposition is as regular as the parallelogram of forces.

[Sidenote: Power of mysticism a perversion of love.]

Just as we have seen in an error of the senses one of the objective principles of religious physics, so perhaps may we find in a perversion of love one of the most essential subjective principles of mysticism. It is by love that this unction, this penetrating sweetness which makes the mystic tremble to the marrow of his bones, is to be explained. Profound love, even the most terrestrial, tends to envelop the object with respect and veneration; an effect which is due to a number of causes, and among others to the psychological law according to which desire magnifies the desired object. To love is always a little to adore. If it is a human being that is the object of the love, the divinization incidental to it will be confined within certain limits, but if the love stretch up from the earth into heaven, it may command the full powers of the imagination; the soul, seeking at a distance for some vague object to which to attach itself, will go out in mystic outbursts of emotion and ecstasy. The soul will personify its ideal, will supply it with figure and speech: its ideal will be Jesus with Mary Magdalene at his feet, or the Virgin weeping at the foot of the cross, or Moses in the midst of the clouds, or the child Buddha before whom the statues of the gods rose and made obeisance. Thus mystical religions are formed of great images and passionate sentiments and the heart of man, the very life blood of which they turn to their profit. What appears often to be the most intellectual of tastes is only love in disguise. The most earthly love is often a religion in its earliest stages. Henri Beyle, visiting the salt-mines at Salzburg, found in a shaft a branch covered with incomparable diamonds scintillating in the light. It was a dead timber on which the salt had crystallized; in the timber thus transformed Beyle saw the symbol of what happens in every loving heart; every object one finds there has taken on an extraordinary brilliancy, a marvellous beauty. He calls this phenomenon crystallization; we should prefer to call it divinization. Love always divinizes its object; partially and provisionally when this object is placed upon earth and close to one’s eyes, but definitively when this object is lost in the distance of heaven. Our gods are like those mysterious beings who spring, in legend, from a drop of generous blood or a loving tear let fall upon the earth; it is with our own substance that we nourish them; their beauty, their goodness come out of our love, and if we love them as we do, the reason is that we must love something; must lift up to the four corners of the horizon, even if they be deaf, a supreme appeal. This outcome of love and religious sentiment is most visible in exalted minds, both in the Middle Ages and in our own days. The true element of originality in Christian literature is that one there finds, for the first time, a sincere and warm accent of love, scarcely divined, here and there, by the great spirits of antiquity, by Sappho and Lucretius. In a page of St. Augustine one finds the expression of a franker and more profound ardour than in all the elegant affectations of Horace or the languors of Tibullus. Nothing in pagan antiquity is comparable to the chapter in the “Imitation” on love. The passion, confined and held in check, mounts to heights till then unknown, like a dammed river; but it is no less genuinely itself. What shall we say of the visionary mystics of the people like St. Theresa, and Chantal, and Guyon? Among them piety, in its most exaggerated form, verges upon the madness of love. St. Theresa might have been a courtesan of genius equally as well as a saint. Physiologists and physicians have often observed, in our days, analogous pathological cases, in which the religious effusion is simply, so to speak, a case of mistake in identity.[50]

[50] Ribot, _de l’Hérédité_, 364; Moreau de Tours, _Psych. morbide_, 259.

[Sidenote: Worship of Christ to a considerable extent a perversion of love.]

In Christianity the conception of Jesus, the beautiful, gentle young man, the Holy Spirit incarnate in the purest and most ideal form, favours more directly than any corresponding conception in any rival religion this particular perversion of love. Christianity is the most anthropomorphic belief in existence, for it is the one of all others which, after having conceived the most elevated idea of God, abases it, without degrading it, to the most human of human conditions. By a much more refined, much more profound paganism than the paganism of antiquity, the Christian religion has succeeded in making God the object of an ardent love, without ceasing to make Him an object of respect. By a myth much more seductive and poetic even than that of Psyche, we see God, the true God, descended upon earth in the form of a blond and smiling young man; we hear him speak low in the ear of Mary Magdalene at the fall of evening; and then this vision suddenly disappears and we see in the gathering shadow two mutilated arms extended toward us, and a heart which bleeds for humanity. In this legend all the powers of the imagination are called in play, all the fibres of the heart are moved; it is an accomplished work of art. What is there astonishing in the fact that Christ has been and is still the great seducer of souls? In the ears of a young girl his name appeals at once to all her instincts, even to the maternal instinct, for Jesus is often represented as a child with the dimpled, rosy cheeks which the Greeks ascribed to Eros. The heart of the woman is thus besieged on all sides at once: her wavering and timid imagination wanders from the cherub to the youth, and from the youth to the pale figure, with the bowed head, upon the cross. It is possible that from the birth of Christianity down to the present day there has not been one single woman of an exalted piety whose heart has not first beat for her God, for Jesus, for the most lovable and loving type that the human mind has ever conceived.

[Sidenote: Moral element in the law of God.]

Side by side with its somewhat sentimental element the love of God contains a moral element, which is progressively detaching itself with the march of ideas. God being the very principle of goodness, the personification of the moral ideal, the love of God ultimately becomes a moral love properly so called, the love of virtue, of sanctity at its height. The subjective act of charity thus becomes the religious act _par excellence_, in which morality and subjective worship are identified; good works and the externals of worship are simply a translation into the outer world of the moral consciousness. At the same time, in the highest speculations of philosophic theology, charity has been conceived as embracing simultaneously all beings in the divine love, and by consequence as beginning to realize the sort of perfect society in which “all exist in all and all in every part.” The social and moral character of religion thus attains its highest degree of perfection and God appears as a sort of mystic realization of the universal society, _sub specie æterni_.

Part Second.

THE DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIONS IN EXISTING SOCIETIES.