To a modern Christian, God is a deity who is all-wise, all-powerful,
infinite, holy, the personification of all the highest virtues. To
accuse this Deity of the slightest moral flaw would be blasphemy. Now,
without going so far down as the lowest savages, let us see what
conception such barbarians as the Polynesians have of their gods. The
moral habits of some of them are indicated by their names--"The
Rioter," "The Adulterer," "Ndauthina," who steals women of rank or
beauty by night or by torchlight, "The Human-brain Eater," "The
Murderer." Others of their gods are "proud, envious, covetous,
revengeful, and the subject of every basest passion. They are
demoralized heathen--monster expressions of moral corruption"
(Williams, 184). These gods make war, and kill and eat each other just
as mortals do. The Polynesians believed, too, that "the spirits of the
dead are eaten by the gods or demons" (Ellis, _P.R_., I., 275). It
might be said that since a Polynesian sees no crime in adultery,
revenge, murder, or cannibalism, his attributing such qualities to his
gods cannot, from his point of view, be considered blasphemous. Quite
true; but my point is that men who have made so little progress in
sympathy and moral perception as to see no harm in adultery, revenge,
murder and cannibalism, and in attributing them to their gods, are
altogether too coarse and callous to be able to experience the higher
religious emotions. This inference is borne out by what a most careful
observer (Ellis, _P.R._, I., 291) says:
"Instead of exercising those affections of gratitude,
complacency, and love toward the objects of their
worship which the living God supremely requires, they
regarded their deities with horrific dread, and
worshipped only with enslaving fear."
This "enslaving fear" is the principal ingredient of primitive
religious emotion everywhere. To the savage and barbarian, religion is
not a consolation and a blessing, but a terror. Du Chaillu says of the
equatorial Africans (103) that "their whole lives are saddened by the
fears of evil spirits, witchcraft, and other kindred superstitions
under which they labor." Benevolent deities, even if believed in,
receive little or no attention, because, being good, they are supposed
to do no harm anyway, whereas the malevolent gods must be propitiated
by sacrifices. The African Dahomans, for instance, ignore their Mahu
because his intentions are naturally friendly, whereas their Satan,
the wicked Legba, has hundreds of statues before which offerings are
made. "Early religions," as Mr. Andrew Lang tersely puts it, "are
selfish, not disinterested. The worshipper is not contemplative, so
much as eager to gain something to his advantage." If the gods fail to
respond to the offerings made to them, the sacrificers naturally feel
aggrieved, and show their displeasure in a way which to a person who
knows refined religion seems shocking and sacrilegious. In Japan,
China, and Corea, if the gods fail to do what is expected of them,
their images are unceremoniously walloped. In India, if the rains
fail, thousands of priests send up their prayers. If the drought still
continues, they punish their idols by holding them under water. During
a thunderstorm in Africa, Chapman (I., 45) witnessed the following
extraordinary scene:
"A great number of women, employed in reaping the
extensive corn-fields through which we passed were
raising their hoes and voices to heaven, and, yelling
furiously, cursed 'Morimo' (God), as the terrific
thunder-claps succeeded each vivid flash of lightning.
On inquiry I was informed by 'Old Booy' that they were
indignant at the interruption of their labors, and that
they therefore cursed and menaced the cause. Such
blasphemy was awful, even among heathens, and I fully
expected to see the wrath of God fall upon them."
If any pious reader of such details--which might he multiplied a
thousand-fold--still believes that religious emotion (like love!) is
the same everywhere, let him compare his own devoted feelings during
worship in a Christian church with the emotions which must sway those
who participate in a religious ceremony like that described in the
following passage taken from Rowney's _Wild Tribes of India_ (105). It
refers to the sacrifices made by the Khonds to the God of War, the
victims of which, both male and female, are often bought young and
brought up for this special purpose:
"For a month prior to the sacrifice there was much
feasting and intoxication, with dancing round the
Meriah, or victim ... and on the day before the rite he
was stupefied with toddy and bound at the bottom of a
post. The assembled multitude then danced around the
post to music, singing hymns of invocation to some such
effect as follows: 'O God, we offer a sacrifice to you!
Give us good crops in return, good seasons, and
health.' On the next day the victim was again
intoxicated, and anointed with oil, which was wiped
from his body by those present, and put on their heads
as a blessing. The victim was then carried, in
procession round the village, preceded by music, and on
returning to the post a hog was sacrificed to ... the
village deity ... the blood from the carcass being
allowed to flow into a pit prepared to receive it. The
victim, made senseless by intoxication, was now thrown
into the pit, and his face pressed down till he died
from suffocation in the blood and mire, a deafening
noise with instruments being kept up all the time. The
priest then cut a piece of flesh from the body and
buried it with ceremony near the village idol, all the
rest of the people going through the same form after
him."
Still more horrible details of these sacrifices are supplied by Dalton
(288):
"Major Macpherson notes that the Meriah in some
districts is put to death slowly by fire, the great
object being to draw from the victim as many tears as
possible, in the belief that the cruel Tari will
proportionately increase the supply of rain."
"Colonel Campbell thus describes the _modus operandi_ in
Chinna Kimedy: 'The miserable Meriah is dragged along the
fields, surrounded by a crowd of half-intoxicated Kandhs,
who, shouting and screaming, rush upon him, and with their
knives cut the flesh piece-meal from his bones, avoiding the
head and bowels, till the living skeleton, dying from loss
of blood, is relieved from torture, when its remains are
burnt and the ashes mixed with the new grain to preserve it
from insects.'"
In some respect, the civilized Hindoos are even worse than the wild
tribes of India. Nothing is more sternly condemned and utterly
abhorred by modern religion than licentiousness and obscenity, but a
well-informed and eminently trustworthy missionary, the Abbé Dubois,
declares that sensuality and licentiousness are among the elements of
Hindoo religious life:
"Whatever their religion sets before them, tends to
encourage these vices; and, consequently, all their senses,
passions, and interests are leagued in its favor" (II., 113,
etc.).
Their religious festivals "are nothing but sports; and on no occasion
of life are modesty and decorum more carefully excluded than during
the celebration of their religious mysteries."
More immoral even than their own religious practices are the doings of
their deities. The _Bhagavata_ is a book which deals with the
adventures of the god Krishna, of whom Dubois says (II., 205):
"It was his chief pleasure to go every morning to the
place where the women bathe, and, in concealment, to
take advantage of their unguarded exposure. Then he
rushed amongst them, took possession of their clothes,
and gave a loose to the indecencies of language and of
gesture. He maintained sixteen wives, who had the title
of queens, and sixteen thousand concubines.... In
obscenity there is nothing that can be compared with
the _Bhagavata_. It is, nevertheless, the delight of
the Hindu, and the first book they put into the hands
of their children, when learning to read."
Brahmin temples are little more than brothels, in each of which a
dozen or more young Bayadères are kept for the purpose of increasing
the revenues of the gods and their priests. Religious prostitution and
theological licentiousness prevailed also in Persia, Babylonia, Egypt,
and other ancient civilized countries. Commenting on a series of
obscene pictures found in an Egyptian tomb, Erman says (154): "We are
shocked at the morality of a nation which could supply the deceased
with such literature for the eternal journey." Professor Robertson
Smith says that "in Arabia and elsewhere unrestricted prostitution was
practised at the temples and defended on the analogy of the license
allowed to herself by the unmarried mother goddess." Nor were the
early Greeks much better. Some of their religious festivals were
sensual orgies, some of their gods nearly as licentious as those of
the Hindoos. Their supreme god, Zeus, is an Olympian Don Juan, and the
legend of the birth of Aphrodite, their goddess of love, is in its
original form unutterably obscene.
Before religious emotion could make any approximation to the devout
feelings of a modern Christian, it was necessary to eliminate all
these licentious, cruel, and blasphemous features of worship--the
eating or slaughtering of human victims, the obscene orgies, as well
as the spiteful and revengeful acts toward disobedient gods. The
progress--like the Evolution of Romantic Love--has been from the
sensual and selfish to the supersensual and unselfish. In the highest
religious ideal, love of God takes the place of fear, adoration that
of terror, self-sacrifice that of self-seeking. But we are still very
far from that lofty ideal.
"The lazzarone of Naples prays to his patron saint to favor
his choice of a lottery ticket; if it turns out an unlucky
number he will take the little leaden image of the saint
from his pocket, revile it, spit on it, and trample it in
the mud."
"The Swiss clergy opposed the system of insuring growing crops because
it made their parishioners indifferent to prayers for their crops"
(Brinton, _R.S_., 126, 82). These are extreme cases, but Italian
lazzaroni and Swiss peasants are by no means the only church-goers
whose worship is inspired not by love of God but by the expectation of
securing a personal benefit. All those who pray for worldly
prosperity, or do good deeds for the sake of securing a happy
hereafter for their souls, take a selfish, utilitarian view of the
deity, and even their gratitude for favors received is too apt to be
"a lively sense of possible favors to come." Still, there are now not
a few devotees who love God for his own sake; and who pray not for
luxuries but that their souls may be fortified in virtue and their
sympathies widened. But it is not necessary to dwell on this theme any
longer, now that I have shown what I started out to demonstrate, that
religious emotion is very complex and variable, that in its early
stages it is made up of feelings which are not loving, reverential, or
even respectful, but cruel, sacrilegious, criminal, and licentious;
that religion, in a word, has (like love, as I am trying to prove)
passed through coarse, carnal, degrading, selfish, utilitarian stages
before it reached the comparatively refined, spiritual, sympathetic,
and devotional attitude of our time.
Besides the growing complexity of the religious sentiment and its
gradual ennoblement, there are two points I wish to emphasize. One is
that there are among us to-day thousands of intelligent and refined
agnostics who are utter strangers to all religious emotions, just as
there are thousands of men and women who have never known and never
will know the emotions of sentimental love. Why, then, should it seem
so very unlikely that whole nations were strangers to such love (as
they were strangers to the higher religious sentiment), even though
they were as intelligent as the Greeks and Romans? I offer this
consideration not as a conclusive argument, but merely as a means of
overcoming a preconceived bias against my theory.
The other point I wish to make clear is that our emotions change with
our ideas. Obviously it would be absurd to suppose that a man whose
ideas in regard to the nature of his gods do not prevent him from
flogging them angrily in case they refuse his requests are the same as
those of a pious Christian, who, if his prayers are not answered, says
to his revered Creator: "Thy will be done on earth as it is done in
heaven," and humbly prostrates himself. And if emotions in the
religious sphere are thus metamorphosed with ideas, why is it so
unlikely that the sexual passion, too, should "suffer a sea change
into something rich and strange?"
The existence of the wide-spread prejudice against the notion that
love is subject to the laws of development, is owing to the fact that
the comparative psychology of the emotions and sentiments has been
strangely neglected. Anthropology, the Klondike of the comparative
psychologist, reveals things seemingly much more incredible than the
absence of romantic love among barbarians and partly civilized nations
who had not yet discovered the nobler super-sensual fascinations which
women are capable of exerting. The nuggets of truth found in that
science show that every virtue known to man grew up slowly into its
present exalted form. I will illustrate this assertion with reference
to one general feeling, the horror of murder, and then add a few pages
regarding virtues relating to the sexual sphere and directly connected
with the subject of this book.