PART IV.

MODERN EVOLUTION--

1. DARWIN AND WALLACE 126

2. HERBERT SPENCER 175

3. THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 201

INDEX 267

"Nature, which governs the whole, will soon change all things which

thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and

again other things from the substance of them, in order that the

world may be ever new."

_Marcus Aurelius_, vii, 25.

PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION.

_PART I._

PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION FROM THALES TO LUCRETIUS.

B. C. 600-A. D. 50.

"These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but

having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them."--HEBREWS

xi. 13.

"One event is always the son of another, and we must never forget the

parentage," said a Bechuana chief to Casalis the missionary. The

barbarian philosopher spoke wiser than he knew, for in his words lay

that doctrine of continuity and unity which is the creed of modern

science. They are a suitable text to the discourse of this chapter, the

design of which is to bring out what the brilliancy of present-day

discoveries tends to throw into shadow, namely, the antiquity of the

ideas of which those discoveries are the result. Although the Theory of

Evolution, as we define it, is new, the speculations which made it

possible are, at least, twenty-five centuries old. Indeed, it is not

practicable, since the remote past yields no documents, to fix their

beginnings. Moreover, charged, as they are, with many crudities, they

are not detachable from the barbaric conceptions of the Universe which

are the philosophies of past, and the legends of present, times.

Fontenelle, a writer of the last century, shrewdly remarked that "all

nations made the astounding part of their myths while they were savage,

and retained them from custom and religious conservatism." For, as

Walter Bagehot argues in his brilliant little book on Physics and

Politics, and as all anthropological research goes to prove, the lower

races are non-progressive both through fear and instinct. And the

majority of the members of higher races have not escaped from the

operation of the same causes. Hence the persistence of coarse and

grotesque elements in speculations wherein man has made gradual approach

to the truth of things; hence, too--the like phenomena having to be

interpreted--the similarity of the explanation of them. And as primitive

myth embodies primitive theology, primitive morals, and primitive

science, the history of beliefs shows how few there be who have escaped

from the tyranny of that authority and sanctity with which the lapse of

time invests old ideas.

Dissatisfaction is a necessary condition of progress; and

dissatisfaction involves opposition. As Grant Allen puts it, in one

of his most felicitous poems:

If systems that be are the order of God,

Revolt is a part of the order.

Hence a stage in the history of certain peoples when, in questioning

what is commonly accepted, intellectual freedom is born. Such a stage

was markedly reached whenever, for example, an individual here and there

challenged the current belief about the beginnings and nature of things,

beliefs held because they were taught, not because their correspondence

with fact had been examined.

A pioneer (French, _pionnier_; Italian, _pedone_; from Latin _pedes_)

is, literally, a foot-soldier; one who goes before an army to clear the

road of obstructions. Hence the application of the term to men who are

in the van of any new movement; hence its special fitness in the present

connection, as designating men whose speculations cut a pathway through

jungles of myth and legend to the realities of things. The Pioneers of

Evolution--the first on record to doubt the truth of the theory of

special creation, whether as the work of departmental gods or of one

Supreme Deity, matters not--lived in Greece about the time already

mentioned; six centuries before Christ. Not in the early stages of the

Evolution idea, in the Greece limited, as now, to a rugged peninsula in

the southeastern corner of Europe and to the surrounding islands, but in

the Greece which then included Ionia, on the opposite seaboard of Asia

Minor.

From times beyond memory or record, the islands of the Ægean had been

the nurseries of culture and adventure. Thence the maritime inhabitants

had spread themselves both east and west, feeding the spirit of inquiry,

and imbibing influences from older civilizations, notably of Egypt and

Chaldæa. But, mix as they might with other peoples, the Greeks never

lost their own strongly marked individuality, and, in imparting what

they had acquired or discovered to younger peoples, that is, younger in

culture, they stamped it with an impress all their own.

At the later period with which we are dealing, refugees from the

Peloponnesus, who would not submit to the Dorian yoke, had been long

settled in Ionia. To what extent they had been influenced by contact

with their neighbours is a question which, even were it easy to answer,

need not occupy us here. Certain it is that trade and travel had widened

their intellectual horizon, and although India lay too remote to touch

them closely (if that incurious, dreamy East had touched them, it would

have taught them nothing), there was Babylonia with her star-watchers,

and Egypt with her land-surveyors. From the one, these Ionians probably

gained knowledge of certain periodic movements of some of the heavenly

bodies; and from the other, a few rules of mensuration, perchance a

little crude science. But this is conjecture. For all the rest that she

evolved, and with which she enriched the world, ancient Greece is in

debt to none.

While the Oriental shrunk from quest after causes, looking, as Professor

Butcher aptly remarks in his Aspects of the Greek Genius, on "each fresh

gain of earth as so much robbery of heaven," the Greek eagerly sought

for the law governing the facts around him. And in Ionia was born the

idea foreign to the East, but which has become the starting-point of all

subsequent scientific inquiry--the idea that Nature works by fixed laws.

Sir Henry Maine said that "except the blind forces of Nature, nothing

moves which is not Greek in its origin," and we feel how hard it is to

avoid exaggeration when speaking of the heritage bequeathed by Greece as

the giver of every fruitful, quickening idea which has developed human

faculty on all sides, and enriched every province of life. Amid

serious defects of character, as craftiness, avariciousness, and

unscrupulousness, the Greeks had the redeeming grace of pursuit after

knowledge which naught could baffle (Plato, Republic, vol. iv, p. 435),

and that healthy outlook on things which saved them from morbid

introspection. There arose among them no Simeon Stylites to mount

his profitless pillar; no filth-ingrained fakir to waste life in

contemplating the tip of his nose; no schoolman to idly speculate how

many angels could dance upon a needle's point; or to debate such fatuous

questions as the language which the saints in heaven will speak after

the Last Judgment.

In his excellent and cautious survey of Early Greek Philosophy, which we

mainly follow in this section, Professor Burnet says that the real

advance made by the Ionians was through their "leaving off telling

tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was when as yet

there was nothing, and asked instead what all things really are now."

For the early notions of the Greeks about nature, being an inheritance

from their barbaric ancestors, were embodied in myths and legends

bearing strong resemblance to those found among the uncivilized tribes

of Polynesia and elsewhere in our day. For example, the old nature-myth

of Cronus separating heaven and earth by the mutilation of Uranus occurs

among Chinese, Japanese, and Maoris, and among the ancient Hindus and

Egyptians.

The earliest school of scientific speculation was at Miletus, the most

flourishing city of Ionia. Thales, whose name heads the list of the

"Seven Sages," was its founder. As with other noted philosophers of this

and later periods, neither the exact date of his birth nor of his death

are known, but the sixth century before Christ may be held to cover the

period when he "flourished."

That "nothing comes into being out of nothing, and that nothing passes

away into nothing," was the conviction with which he and those who

followed him started on their quest. All around was change; everything

always becoming something else; "all in motion like streams." There must

be that which is the vehicle of all the changes, and of all the motions

which produce them. _What_, therefore, was this permanent and primary

substance? in other words, of what is the world made? And Thales,

perhaps through observing that it could become vaporous, liquid,

and solid in turn; perhaps--if, as tradition records, he visited

Egypt--through watching the wonder-working, life-giving Nile; perhaps as

doubtless sharing the current belief in an ocean-washed earth, said that

the primary substance was WATER. Anaximander, his friend and pupil,

disagreeing with what seemed to him a too concrete answer, argued, in

more abstract fashion, that "the material cause and first element of

things was the Infinite." This material cause, which he was the first

thus to name, "is neither water nor any other of what are now called the

_elements_" (we quote from Theophrastus, the famous pupil of Aristotle,

born at Eresus in Lesbos, 371 B. C.). Perhaps, following Professor

Burnet's able guidance through the complexities of definitions, the term

BOUNDLESS best expresses the "one eternal, indestructible substance out

of which everything arises, and into which everything once more

returns"; in other words, the exhaustless stock of matter from which the

waste of existence is being continually made good.

Anaximander was the first to assert the origin of life from the

non-living, i. e., "the moist element as it was evaporated by the sun,"

and to speak of man as "like another animal, namely, a fish, in the

beginning." This looks well-nigh akin to prevision of the mutability of

species, and of what modern biology has proved concerning the marine

ancestry of the highest animals, although it is one of many ancient

speculations as to the origin of life in slimy matter. And when

Anaximander adds that "while other animals quickly find food for

themselves, man alone requires a prolonged period of suckling," he

anticipates the modern explanation of the origin of the rudimentary

family through the development of the social instincts and affections.

The lengthening of the period of infancy involves dependence on the

parents, and evolves the sympathy which lies at the base of social

relations. (Cf. Fiske's Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, vol. ii, pp. 344,

360.)

In dealing with speculations so remote, we have to guard against reading

modern meanings into writings produced in ages whose limitations of

knowledge were serious, and whose temper and standpoint are wholly alien

to our own. For example, shrewd as are some of the guesses made by

Anaximander, we find him describing the sun as "a ring twenty-eight

times the size of the earth, like a cartwheel with the felloe hollow and

full of fire, showing the fire at a certain point, as if through the

nozzle of a pair of bellows." And if he made some approach to truer

ideas of the earth's shape as "convex and round," the world of his day,

as in the days of Homer, thought of it as flat and as floating on the

all-surrounding water. The Ionian philosophers lacked not insight, but

the scientific method of starting with working hypotheses, or of

observation before theory, was as yet unborn.

In this brief survey of the subject there will be no advantage in

detailing the various speculations which followed on the heels of those

of Thales and Anaximander, since these varied only in non-essentials;

or, like that of Pythagoras and his school, which Zeller regards as

the outcome of the teachings of Anaximander, were purely abstract and

fanciful. As is well known, the Pythagoreans, whose philosophy was

ethical as well as cosmical, held that all things are made of numbers,

each of which they believed had its special character and property. A

belief in such symbols as entities seems impossible to us, but its

existence in early thought is conceivable when, as Aristotle says, they

were "not separated from the objects of sense." Even in the present

day, among the eccentric people who still believe in the modern sham

agnosticism, known as theosophy, and in astrology, we find the delusion

that numbers possess inherent magic or mystic virtues. So far as the

ancients are concerned, "consider," as Mr. Benn remarks in his Greek

Philosophers (vol. i, p. 12), "the lively emotions excited at a time

when multiplication and division, squaring and cubing, the rule of

three, the construction and equivalence of figures, with all their

manifold applications to industry, commerce, fine arts, and tactics,

were just as strange and wonderful as electrical phenomena are to us ...

and we shall cease to wonder that a mere form of thought, a lifeless

abstraction, should once have been regarded as the solution of every

problem; the cause of all existence; or that these speculations were

more than once revived in after ages."

Xenophanes of Colophon, one of the twelve Ionian cities of Asia Minor,

deserves, however, a passing reference. He, with Parmenides and Zeno,

are the chief representatives of the Eleatic school, so named from

the city in southwestern Italy where a Greek colony had settled. The

tendency of that school was toward metaphysical theories. He was the

first known observer to detect the value of fossils as evidences of the

action of water, but his chief claim to notice rests on the fact that,

passing beyond the purely physical speculations of the Ionian school, he

denied the idea of a primary substance, and theorized about the nature

and actions of superhuman beings. Living at a time when there was a

revival of old and gross superstitions to which the vulgar had recourse

when fears of invasions arose, he dared to attack the old and persistent

ideas about the gods, as in the following sentences from the fragments

of his writings:

"Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods all things that are a shame

and a disgrace among men, theft and adulteries and deception of one

another."

"There never was nor will be a man who has clear certainty as to what I

say about the gods and about all things; for even if he does chance to

say what is right, yet he himself does not know that it is so. But all

are free to guess."

"Mortals think that the gods were born as they are, and have senses and

a voice and body like their own. So the Ethiopians make their gods black

and snub-nosed; the Thracians give theirs red hair and blue eyes."

"There is one god, the greatest among gods and men, unlike mortals both

in mind and body."

Had such heresies been spoken in Athens, where the effects of a

religious revival were still in force, the "secular arm" of the archons

would probably have made short work of Xenophanes. But in Elea, or in

whatever other colony he may have lived, "the gods were left to take

care of themselves."

Greater than the philosophers yet named is Heraclitus of Ephesus,

nicknamed "the dark," from the obscurity of his style. His original

writings have shared the fate of most documents of antiquity, and exist,

like many of these, only in fragments preserved in the works of other

authors. Many of his aphorisms are indeed dark sayings, but those that

yield their meaning are full of truth and suggestiveness. As for

example:

"The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears."

"You will not find out the boundaries of soul by travelling in any

direction."

"Man is kindled and put out like a light in the nighttime."

"Man's character is his fate."

But these have special value as keys to his philosophy:

"You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever

flowing in upon you."

"Homer was wrong in saying: 'Would that strife might perish from among

gods and men!' He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of

the universe; for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass

away."

Flux or movement, says Heraclitus, is the all-pervading law of things,

and in the opposition of forces, by which things are kept going, there

is underlying harmony. Still on the quest after the primary substance

whose manifestations are so various, he found it in FIRE, since "the

quantity of it in a flame burning steadily appears to remain the same;

the flames seems to be what we call a 'thing.' And yet the substance of

it is continually changing. It is always passing away in smoke, and its

place is always being taken by fresh matter from the fuel that feeds it.

This is just what we want. If we regard the world as an 'ever-living

fire'--'this order, which is the same in all things, and which no one of

gods or men has made'--we can understand how fire is always becoming all

things, while all things are always returning to it." And as is the

world, so is man, made up, like it, both soul and body, of the fire, the

water, and the earth. We are and are not the same for two consecutive

moments; "the fire in us is perpetually becoming water, and the water

earth, but as the opposite process goes on simultaneously we appear to

remain the same."

As speculation advanced, it became more and more applied to details,

theories of the beginnings of life being followed by theories of the

origin of its various forms. This is a feature of the philosophy of

Empedocles, who flourished in the fifth century B. C. The advance of

Persia westward had led to migrations of Greeks to the south of Italy

and Sicily, and it was at Agrigentum, in that island, that Empedocles

was born about 490. He has an honoured place among the earliest who

supplanted _guesses_ about the world by _inquiry_ into the world itself.

Many legends are told of his magic arts, one of which, it will be

remembered, Matthew Arnold makes an occasion of some fine reflections in

his poem Empedocles in Etna. The philosopher was said to have brought

back to life a woman who apparently had been dead for thirty days. As he

ascends the mountain, Pausanias of Gela, with an address to whom the

poem of Empedocles opens, would fain have his curiosity slaked as to

this and other marvels reported of him:

Ask not the latest news of the last miracle,

Ask not what days and nights

In trance Pantheia lay,

But ask how thou such sights

May'st see without dismay;

Ask what most helps when known, thou son of Anchitus.

His speculations about things, like those of Parmenides before him and

of Lucretius after him, are set down in verse. From the remains of his

Poem on Nature we learn that he conceived "the four roots of all things"

to be FIRE, AIR, EARTH, and WATER. They are "fools, lacking far-reaching

thoughts, who deem that what before was not comes into being, or that

aught can perish and be utterly destroyed." Therefore the "roots" or

elements are eternal and indestructible. They are acted upon by two

forces, which are also material, LOVE and STRIFE; the one a uniting

agent, the other a disrupting agent. From the four roots, thus operated

upon, arise "the colours and forms" of living things; trees first, both

male and female, then fragmentary parts of animals, heads without necks,

and "eyes that strayed up and down in want of a forehead," which,

combined together, produced monstrous forms. These, lacking power to

propagate, perished, and were replaced by "whole-natured" but sexless

"forms" which "arose from the earth," and which, as Strife gained the

upper hand, became male and female. Herein, amidst much fantastic

speculation, would appear to be the germ of the modern theory that the

unadapted become extinct, and that only the adapted survive. Nature

kills off her failures to make room for her successes.

Anaxagoras, who was a contemporary of Empedocles, interests us because

he was the first philosopher to repair to Athens, and the first sufferer

for truth's sake of whom we have record in Greek annals. Because he

taught that the sun was a red-hot stone, and that the moon had plains

and ravines in it, he was put upon his trial, and but for the influence

of his friend, the famous Pericles, might have suffered death.

Speculations, however bold they be, pass unheeded till they collide

with the popular creed, and in thus attacking the gods, attack a

seemingly divinely settled order. Athens then, and long after, while

indifferent about natural science, was, under the influence of the

revival referred to above, actively hostile to free thinking. The

opinions of Anaxagoras struck at the existence of the gods and emptied

Olympus. If the sky was but an air-filled space, what became of Zeus? if

the sun was only a fiery ball, what became of Apollo? Mr. Grote says

(History of Greece, vol. i, p. 466) that "in the view of the early

Greek, the description of the sun, as given in a modern astronomical

treatise, would have appeared not merely absurd, but repulsive and

impious; even in later times, Anaxagoras and other astronomers incurred

the charge of blasphemy for dispersonifying Hēlios." Of Socrates, who

was himself condemned to death for impiety in denying old gods and

introducing new ones, the same authority writes: "Physics and astronomy,

in his opinion, belonged to the divine class of phenomena, in which

human research was insane, fruitless, and impious." So Demos and his

"betters" clung, as the majority still cling, to the myths of their

forefathers. They repaired to the oracles, and watched for the will of

the gods in signs and omens.

In his philosophy Anaxagoras held that there was a portion of everything

in everything, and that things are variously mixed in infinite numbers

of seeds, each after its kind. From these, through the action of an

external cause, called NOUS, which also is material, although the

"thinnest of all things and the purest," and "has power over all

things," there arose plants and animals. It is probable, as Professor

Burnet remarks, "that Anaxagoras substituted NOUS, still conceived as a

body, for the LOVE and STRIFE of Empedocles simply because he wished to

retain the old Ionic doctrine of a substance that 'knows' all things,

and to identify this with the new theory of a substance that 'moves' all

things."

Thus far speculation has run largely on the origin of life forms, but

now we find revival of speculation about the nature of things generally,

and the formulation of a theory which links Greek cosmology with early

nineteenth-century science with Dalton's ATOMIC THEORY. Democritus

of Abdera, who was born about 460 B. C., has the credit of having

elaborated an atomic theory, but probably he only further developed what

Leucippus had taught before him. Of this last-named philosopher nothing

whatever is known; indeed, his existence has been doubted, but it counts

for something that Aristotle gives him the credit of the discovery, and

that Theophrastus, in the first book of his Opinions, wrote of Leucippus

as follows: "He assumed innumerable and ever-moving elements, namely,

the atoms. And he made their forms infinite in number, since there

was no reason why they should be of one kind rather than another, and

because he saw that there was unceasing becoming and change in things.

He held, further, that _what is_ is no more real than _what is not_,

and that both are alike causes of the things that come into being; for

he laid down that the substance of the atoms was compact and full, and

he called them _what is_, while they moved in the void which he called

_what is not_, but affirmed to be just as real as _what is_." Thus did

"he answer the question that Thales had been the first to ask."

Postponing further reference to this theory until the great name of

Lucretius, its Roman exponent, is reached, we find a genuine scientific

method making its first start in the person of Aristotle. This

remarkable man, the founder of the experimental school, and the Father

of Natural History, was born 384 B. C. at Stagira in Macedonia. In his

eighteenth year he left his native place for Athens, where he became a

pupil of Plato. Disappointed, as it is thought, at not succeeding his

master in the Academy, he removed to Mytilene in the island of Lesbos,

where he received an invitation from Philip of Macedon to become tutor

to his son, the famous Alexander the Great. When Alexander went on his

expedition to Asia, Aristotle returned to Athens, teaching in the

"school" which his genius raised to the first rank. There he wrote the

greater part of his works, the completion of some of which was stopped

by his death at Chalcis in 322. The range of his studies was boundless,

but in this brief notice we must limit our survey--and the more so

because Aristotle's speculations outside natural history abound in

errors--to his pioneer work in organic evolution. Here, in the one

possible method of reaching the truth, theory follows observation.

Stagira lay on the Strymonic gulf, and a boyhood spent by the seashore

gave Aristotle ample opportunity for noting the variations, and withal

gradations, between marine plants and animals, among which last-named it

should be noted as proof of his insight that he was keen enough to

include sponges. Here was laid the foundation of a classification of

life-forms on which all corresponding attempts were based. Then, he

saw, as none other before him had seen, and as none after him saw for

centuries, the force of heredity, that still unsolved problem of

biology. Speaking broadly of his teaching, the details of which would

fill pages, its main features are (1) His insistence on observation. In

his History of Animals he says "we must not accept a general principle

from logic only, but must prove its application to each fact. For it is

in facts that we must seek general principles, and these must always

accord with facts. Experience furnishes the particular facts from which

induction is the pathway to general laws." (2) His rejection of chance

and assertion of law, not, following a common error, of law personified

as cause, but as the term by which we express the fact that certain

phenomena always occur in a certain order. In his Physics Aristotle says

that "Jupiter rains not that corn may be increased, but from necessity.

Similarly, if some one's corn is destroyed by rain, it does not rain

for this purpose, but as an accidental circumstance. It does not appear

to be from fortune or chance that it frequently rains in winter, but

from necessity." (3) On the question of the origin of life-forms he was

nearest of all to its modern solution, setting forth the necessity "that

germs should have been first produced, and not immediately animals; and

that soft mass which first subsisted was the germ. In plants, also,

there is purpose, but it is less distinct; and this shows that plants

were produced in the same manner as animals, not by chance, as by the

union of olives with grape vines. Similarly, it may be argued, that

there should be an accidental generation of the germs of things, but he

who asserts this subverts Nature herself, for Nature produces those

things which, being continually moved by a certain principle contained

in themselves, arrive at a certain end." In the eagerness of theologians

to discover proof of a belief in one God among the old philosophers, the

references made by Aristotle to a "perfecting principle," an "efficient

cause," a "prime mover," and so forth, have been too readily construed

as denoting a monotheistic creed which, reminding us of the "one god"

of Xenophanes, is also akin to the Personal God of Christianity. "The

Stagirite," as Mr. Benn remarks (Greek Philosophers, vol. i, p. 312),

"agrees with Catholic theism, and he agrees with the First Article of

the English Church, though not with the Pentateuch, in saying that God

is without parts or passions, but there his agreement ceases. Excluding

such a thing as divine interference with all Nature, his theology, of

course, excludes the possibility of revelation, inspiration, miracles,

and grace." He is a being who does not interest himself in human

affairs.

But, differ as the commentators may as to Aristotle's meaning, his

assumed place in the orthodox line led, as will be seen hereafter, to

the acceptance of his philosophy by Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, in the

fourth century, and by other Fathers of the Church, so that the mediæval

theories of the Bible, blended with Aristotle, represent the sum of

knowledge held as sufficient until the discoveries of Copernicus in the

sixteenth century upset the Ptolemaic theory with its fixed earth and

system of cycles and epicycles in which the heavenly bodies moved. He

thereby upset very much besides. Like Anaximander and others, Aristotle

believed in spontaneous generation, although only in the case of certain

animals, as of eels from the mud of ponds, and of insects from putrid

matter. However, in this, both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and many

men of science down to the latter part of the seventeenth century,

followed him. For example, Van Helmont, an experimental chemist of that

period, gave a recipe for making fleas; and another scholar showed

himself on a level with the unlettered rustics of to-day, who believe

that eels are produced from horse hairs thrown into a pond.

Of deeper interest, as marking Aristotle's prevision, is his

anticipation of what is known as Epigenesis, or the theory of the

development of the germ into the adult form among the higher individuals

through the union of the fertilizing powers of the male and female

organs. This theory, which was proved by the researches of Harvey, the

discoverer of the circulation of the blood, and is accepted by all

biologists to-day, was opposed by Malpighi, an Italian physician, born

in 1628, the year in which Harvey published his great discovery, and by

other prominent men of science down to the last century. Malpighi and

his school contended that the perfect animal is already "preformed" in

the germ; for example, the hen's egg, before fecundation, containing an

excessively minute, but complete, chick. It therefore followed that in

any germ the germs of all subsequent offspring must be contained, and

in the application of this "box-within-box" theory its defenders even

computed the number of human germs concentrated in the ovary of mother

Eve, estimating these at two hundred thousand millions!

When the "preformation" theory was revived by Bonnet and others

in the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles

Darwin, passed the following shrewd criticism on it: "Many ingenious

philosophers have found so great difficulty in conceiving the manner of

reproduction in animals that they have supposed all the numerous progeny

to have existed in miniature in the animal originally created. This

idea, besides its being unsupported by any analogy we are acquainted

with, ascribes a greater continuity to organized matter than we can

readily admit. These embryons ... must possess a greater degree of

minuteness than that which was ascribed to the devils who tempted St.

Anthony, of whom twenty thousand were said to have been able to dance

a saraband on the point of a needle without the least incommoding each

other."

Although no theistic element could be extracted by the theologians

of the early Christian Church from the systems of Empedocles and

Democritus, thereby securing them a share in the influence exercised by

the great Stagirite, they were formative powers in Greek philosophy,

and, moreover, have "come by their own" in these latter days. Their

chief representative in what is known as the Post-Aristotelian period is

Epicurus, who was born at Samos, 342 B. C. As with Zeno, the founder of

the Stoic school, his teaching has been perverted, so that his name has

become loosely identified with indulgence in gross and sensual living.

He saw in pleasure the highest happiness, and therefore advocated the

pursuit of pleasure to attain happiness, but he did not thereby mean the

pursuit of the unworthy. Rather did he counsel the following after pure,

high, and noble aims, whereby alone a man could have peace of mind. It

is not hard to see that in the minds of men of low ideals the tendency

towards passivity which lurked in such teaching would aid their sliding

into the pursuit of mere animal enjoyment; hence the gross and limited

association of the term Epicurean. Epicurus accepted the theory of

Leucippus, and applied it all round. The _fainéant_ gods, who dwell

serenely indifferent to human affairs, and about whom men should

therefore have no dread; all things, whether dead or living, even

the ideas that enter the mind; are alike composed of atoms. He also

accepted the theory broached by Empedocles as to the survival of fit and

capable forms after life had arrived at these through the processes of

spontaneous generation and the production of monstrosities. Adopting the

physical speculations of these forerunners, he made them the vehicle of

didactic and ethical philosophies which inspired the production of the

wonderful poem of Lucretius.

Between this great Roman and Epicurus--a period of some two

centuries--there is no name of sufficient prominence to warrant

attention. The decline of Greece had culminated in her conquest by the

semi-barbarian Mummius, and in her consequent addition to the provinces

of the Roman Empire. What life lingered in her philosophy within her own

borders expired with the loss of freedom, and the work done by the

Pioneers of Evolution in Greece was to be resumed elsewhere. In the

few years of the pre-Christian period that remained the teaching of

Empedocles, and of Epicurus as the mouthpiece of the atomic theory, was

revived by Lucretius in his De Rerum Natura. Of that remarkable man but

little is recorded, and the record is untrustworthy. He was probably

born 99 B. C., and died--by his own hand, Jerome says, but of this there

is no proof--in his forty-fourth year. It is difficult, taking up his

wonderful poem, to resist the temptation to make copious extracts

from it, since, even through the vehicle of Mr. Munro's exquisite

translation, it is probably little known to the general reader in these

evil days of snippety literature. But the temptation must be resisted,

save in moderate degree.

With the dignity which his high mission inspires, Lucretius appeals to

us in the threefold character of teacher, reformer, and poet. "First, by

reason of the greatness of my argument, and because I set the mind free

from the close-drawn bonds of superstition; and next because, on so dark

a theme, I compose such lucid verse, touching every point with the grace

of poesy." As a teacher he expounds the doctrines of Epicurus concerning

life and nature; as a reformer he attacks superstition; as a poet he

informs both the atomic philosophy and its moral application with

harmonious and beautiful verse swayed by a fervour that is akin to

religious emotion.

Discussing at the outset various theories of origins, and dismissing

these, notably that which asserts that things came from nothing--"for if

so, any kind might be born of anything, nothing would require seed,"

Lucretius proceeds to expound the teaching of Leucippus and other

atomists as to the constitution of things by particles of matter ruled

in their movements by unvarying laws. This theory he works all round,

explaining the processes by which the atoms unite to carry on the birth,

growth, and decay of things, the variety of which is due to variety of

form of the atoms and to differences in modes of their combination; the

combinations being determined by the affinities or properties of the

atoms themselves, "since it is absolutely decreed what each thing can

and what it cannot do by the conditions of Nature." Change is the law of

the universe; what is, will perish, but only to reappear in another

form. Death is "the only immortal"; and it is that and what may follow

it which are the chief tormentors of men. "This terror of the soul,

therefore, and this darkness, must be dispelled, not by the rays of

the sun or the bright shafts of day, but by the outward aspect and

harmonious plan of Nature." Lucretius explains that the soul, which he

places in the centre of the breast, is also formed of very minute atoms

of heat, wind, calm air, and a finer essence, the proportions of which

determine the character of both men and animals. It dies with the body,

in support of which statement Lucretius advances seventeen arguments, so

determined is he to "deliver those who through fear of death are all

their lifetime subject to bondage."

These themes fill the first three books. In the fourth he grapples with

the mental problems of sensation and conception, and explains the origin

of belief in immortality as due to ghosts and apparitions which appear

in dreams. "When sleep has prostrated the body, for no other reason

does the mind's intelligence wake, except because the very same images

provoke our minds which provoke them when we are awake, and to such a

degree that we seem without a doubt to perceive him whom life has left,

and death and earth gotten hold of. This Nature constrains to come to

pass because all the senses of the body are then hampered and at rest

throughout the limbs, and cannot refute the unreal by real things."

In the fifth book Lucretius deals with origins--of the sun, the moon,

the earth (which he held to be flat, denying the existence of the

antipodes); of life and its development; and of civilization. In

all this he excludes design, explaining everything as produced and

maintained by natural agents, "the masses, suddenly brought together,

became the rudiments of earth, sea, and heaven, and the race of living

things." He believed in the successive appearance of plants and animals,

but in their arising separately and directly out of the earth, "under

the influence of rain and the heat of the sun," thus repeating the old

speculations of the emergence of life from slime, "wherefore the earth

with good title has gotten and keeps the name of mother." He did not

adopt Empedocles's theory of the "four roots of all things," and

he will have none of the monsters--the hippogriffs, chimeras, and

centaurs--which form a part of the scheme of that philosopher. These,

he says, "have never existed," thus showing himself far in advance of

ages when unicorns, dragons, and such-like fabled beasts were seriously

believed to exist. In one respect, more discerning than Aristotle, he

accepts the doctrine of the survival of the fittest as taught by the

sage of Agrigentum. For he argues that since upon "the increase of some

Nature set a ban, so that they could not reach the coveted flower of

age, nor find food, nor be united in marriage," ... "many races of

living things have died out, and been unable to beget and continue

their breed." Lucretius speaks of Empedocles in terms scarcely less

exaggerated than those which he applied to Epicurus. The latter is

"a god" "who first found out that plan of life which is now termed

wisdom, and who by tried skill rescued life from such great billows

and such thick darkness and moored it in so perfect a calm and in so

brilliant a light, ... he cleared men's breasts with truth-telling

precepts, and fixed a limit to lust and fear, and explained what was the

chief good which we all strive to reach." As to Empedocles, "that great

country (Sicily) seems to have held within it nothing more glorious than

this man, nothing more holy, marvellous, and dear. The verses, too, of

this godlike genius cry with a loud voice, and make known his great

discoveries, so that he seems scarcely born of a mortal stock."

Continuing his speculations on the development of living things,

Lucretius strikes out in bolder and original vein. The past history of

man, he says, lies in no heroic or golden age, but in one of struggle

out of savagery. Only when "children, by their coaxing ways, easily

broke down the proud temper of their fathers," did there arise the

family ties out of which the wider social bond has grown, and softening

and civilizing agencies begin their fair offices. In his battle for food

and shelter, "man's first arms were hands, nails and teeth and stones

and boughs broken off from the forests, and flame and fire, as soon

as they had become known. Afterward the force of iron and copper was

discovered, and the use of copper was known before that of iron, as its

nature is easier to work, and it is found in greater quantity. With

copper they would labour the soil of the earth and stir up the billows

of war.... Then by slow steps the sword of iron gained ground and the

make of the copper sickle became a byword, and with iron they began to

plough through the earth's soil, and the struggles of wavering man were

rendered equal." As to language, "Nature impelled them to utter the

various sounds of the tongue, and use struck out the names of things."

Thus does Lucretius point the road along which physical and mental

evolution have since travelled, and make the whole story subordinate to

the high purpose of his poem in deliverance of the beings whose career

he thus traces from superstition. Man "seeing the system of heaven and

the different seasons of the years could not find out by what causes

this was done, and sought refuge in handing over all things to the gods

and supposing all things to be guided by their nod." Then, in the sixth

and last book, the completion of which would seem to have been arrested

by his death, Lucretius explains the "law of winds and storms," of

earthquakes and volcanic outbursts, which men "foolishly lay to the

charge of the gods," who thereby make known their anger.

So, loath to suffer mute,

We, peopling the void air,

Make Gods to whom to impute

The ills we ought to bear;

With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.

And what a motley crowd of gods they were on whose caprice or

indifference he pours his vials of anger and contempt! The tolerant

pantheon of Rome gave welcome to any foreign deity with respectable

credentials; to Cybele, the Great Mother, imported in the shape of a

rough-hewn stone with pomp and rejoicings from Phrygia 204 B. C.; to

Isis, welcomed from Egypt; to Herakles, Demeter, Asklepios, and many

another god from Greece. But these were dismissed from a man's thought

when the prayer or sacrifice to them had been offered at the due season.

They had less influence on the Roman's life than the crowd of native

godlings who were thinly disguised fetiches, and who controlled every

action of the day. For the minor gods survive the changes in the

pantheon of every race. Of the Greek peasant of to-day Mr. Rennel Rodd

testifies, in his Custom and Lore of Modern Greece, that much as he

would shudder at the accusation of any taint of paganism, the ruling of

the Fates is more immediately real to him than divine omnipotence. Mr.

Tozer confirms this in his Highlands of Turkey. He says: "It is rather

the minor deities and those associated with man's ordinary life that

have escaped the brunt of the storm, and returned to live in a dim

twilight of popular belief." In India, Sir Alfred Lyall tells us that,

"even the supreme triad of Hindu allegory, which represents the almighty

powers of creation, preservation, and destruction, have long ceased to

preside actively over any such corresponding distribution of functions."

Like limited monarchs, they reign, but do not govern. They are

superseded by the ever-increasing crowd of godlings whose influence

is personal and special, as shown by Mr. Crooke in his instructive

Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India.

The old Roman catalogue of spiritual beings, abstractions as they

were, who guarded life in minute detail, is a long one. From the

_indigitamenta_, as such lists are called, we learn that no less than

forty-three were concerned with the actions of a child. When the farmer

asked Mother Earth for a good harvest, the prayer would not avail unless

he also invoked "the spirit of breaking up the land and the spirit of

ploughing it crosswise; the spirit of furrowing and the spirit of

ploughing in the seed; and the spirit of harrowing; the spirit of

weeding and the spirit of reaping; the spirit of carrying corn to the

barn; and the spirit of bringing it out again." The country, moreover,

swarmed with Chaldæan astrologers and casters of nativities; with

Etruscan haruspices full of "childish lightning-lore," who foretold

events from the entrails of sacrificed animals; while in competition

with these there was the State-supported college of augurs to divine the

will of the gods by the cries and direction of the flight of birds. Well

might the satirist of such a time say that the "place was so densely

populated with gods as to leave hardly room for the men."

It will be seen that the justification for including Lucretius among the

Pioneers of Evolution lies in his two signal and momentous contributions

to the science of man; namely, the primitive savagery of the human race,

and the origin of the belief in a soul and a future life. Concerning the

first, anthropological research, in its vast accumulation of materials

during the last sixty years, has done little more than fill in the

outline which the insight of Lucretius enabled him to sketch. As to the

second, he anticipates, well-nigh in detail, the ghost-theory of the

origin of belief in spirits generally which Herbert Spencer and Dr.

Tylor, following the lines laid down by Hume and Turgot (see p. 255),

have formulated and sustained by an enormous mass of evidence. The

credit thus due to Lucretius for the original ideas in his majestic

poem--Greek in conception and Roman in execution--has been obscured in

the general eclipse which that poem suffered for centuries through its

anti-theological spirit. Grinding at the same philosophical mill,

Aristotle, because of the theism assumed to be involved in his

"perfecting principle," was cited as "a pillar of the faith" by the

Fathers and Schoolmen; while Lucretius, because of his denial of design,

was "anathema maranatha." Only in these days, when the far-reaching

effects of the theory of evolution, supported by observation in every

branch of inquiry, are apparent, are the merits of Lucretius as an

original seer, more than as an expounder of the teachings of Empedocles

and Epicurus, made clear.

* * * * *

Standing well-nigh on the threshold of the Christian era, we may pause

to ask what is the sum of the speculation into the causes and nature of

things which, begun in Ionia (with impulse more or less slight from the

East, in the sixth century before Christ), by Thales, ceased, for many

centuries, in the poem of Lucretius, thus covering an active period of

about five hundred years. The caution not to see in these speculations

more than an approximate approach to modern theories must be kept in

mind.

1. There is a primary substance which abides amidst the general flux of

things.

_All modern research tends to show that the various combinations of

matter are formed of some _prima materia_. But its ultimate nature

remains unknown._

2. Out of nothing comes nothing.

_Modern science knows nothing of a beginning, and, moreover, holds

it to be unthinkable. In this it stands in direct opposition to the

theological dogma that God created the universe out of nothing; a dogma

still accepted by the majority of Protestants and binding on Roman

Catholics. For the doctrine of the Church of Rome thereon, as expressed

in the Canons of the Vatican Council, is as follows: "If any one

confesses not that the world and all things which are contained in it,

both spiritual and mental, have been, in their whole substance, produced

by God out of nothing; or shall say that God created, not by His free

will from all necessity, but by a necessity equal to the necessity

whereby He loves Himself, or shall deny that the world was made for the

glory of God: let him be anathema."_

3. The primary substance is indestructible.

_The modern doctrine of the Conservation of Energy teaches that both

matter and motion can neither be created nor destroyed._

4. The universe is made up of indivisible particles called atoms, whose

manifold combinations, ruled by unalterable affinities, result in the

variety of things.

_With modifications based on chemical as well as mechanical changes

among the atoms, this theory of Leucippus and Democritus is confirmed.

(But recent experiments and discoveries show that reconstruction of

chemical theories as to the properties of the atom may happen.)_

5. Change is the law of things, and is brought about by the play of

opposing forces.

_Modern science explains the changes in phenomena as due to the

antagonism of repelling and attracting modes of motion; when the latter

overcome the former, equilibrium will be reached, and the present state

of things will come to an end._

6. Water is a necessary condition of life.

_Therefore life had its beginnings in water; a theory wholly indorsed by

modern biology._

7. Life arose out of non-living matter.

_Although modern biology leaves the origin of life as an insoluble

problem, it supports the theory of fundamental continuity between the

inorganic and the organic._

8. Plants came before animals: the higher organisms are of separate sex,

and appeared subsequent to the lower.

_Generally confirmed by modern biology, but with qualification as to the

undefined borderland between the lowest plants and the lowest animals.

And, of course, it recognises a continuity in the order and succession

of life which was not grasped by the Greeks. Aristotle and others before

him believed that some of the higher forms sprang from slimy matter

direct._

9. Adverse conditions cause the extinction of some organisms, thus

leaving room for those better fitted.

_Herein lay the crude germ of the modern doctrine of the "survival of

the fittest."_

10. Man was the last to appear, and his primitive state was one of

savagery. His first tools and weapons were of stone; then, after the

discovery of metals, of copper; and, following that, of iron. His body

and soul are alike compounded of atoms, and the soul is extinguished at

death.

_The science of Prehistoric Archæology confirms the theory of man's slow

passage from barbarism to civilization; and the science of Comparative

Psychology declares that the evidence of his immortality is neither

stronger nor weaker than the evidence of the immortality of the lower

animals._

* * * * *

Such, in very broad outline, is the legacy of suggestive theories

bequeathed by the Ionian school and its successors, theories which fell

into the rear when Athens became a centre of intellectual life in which

discussion passed from the physical to those ethical problems which lie

outside the range of this survey. Although Aristotle, by his prolonged

and careful observations, forms a conspicuous exception, the fact abides

that insight, rather than experiment, ruled Greek speculation, the

fantastic guesses of parts of which themselves evidence the survival of

the crude and false ideas about earth and sky long prevailing. The more

wonderful is it, therefore, that so much therein points the way along

which inquiry travelled after its subsequent long arrest; and the more

apparent is it that nothing in science or art, and but little in

theological speculations, at least among us Westerns, can be understood

without reference to Greece.

TABLE.

------------+-------------+-----------+-------------------------------

| |Approximate|

NAME. | Place. | date | Speciality.

| | B. C. |

------------+-------------+-----------+-------------------------------

Thales. |Miletus | 600 |Cosmological }

| (Ionia). | | Theory as to}

| | | the Primary } Water.

| | | Substance }

Anaximander.| " | 570 | " the Boundless.

Anaximenes. | " | 500 | " Air.

Pythagoras. |Samos (near | 500 | " Numbers:

| the Ionian | | "a Cosmos built

| coast). | | up of

| | | geometrical

| | | figures,"

| | | or (Grote,

| | | Plato, i, 12)

| | | "generated

| | | out of number."

Xenophanes. |Colophon | 500 | Founder of the

| (Ionia). | | Eleatic school.

Heraclitus. |Ephesus | 500 | " Fire.

| (Ionia). | |

Empedocles. |Agrigentum | 450 | " Fire, Air, Earth,

| (Sicily). | | and Water:

| | | ruled by Love

| | | and Strife.

Anaxagoras. |Clazomenae | 450 | Nous.

| (Ionia). | |

Leucippus | | |

Democritus. |Abdera | 460 |Formulators of the Atomic

| (Thrace). | | Theory.

Aristotle. |Stagira | 350 |Naturalist.

| (Macedonia).| |

Epicurus. |Samos. | 300 |Expounder of the Atomic

| | | Theory and Ethical

| | | Philosopher.

Lucretius. |Rome. | 50 |Interpreter of Epicurus and

| | | Empedocles: the first

| | | Anthropologist.

------------+-------------+-----------+-------------------------------

_Part II._

THE ARREST OF INQUIRY.

A. D. 50-A. D. 400.

1. _From the Early Christian Period to the Time of Augustine._

"A revealed dogma is always opposed to the free research that may

contradict it. The result of science is not to banish the divine

altogether, but ever to place it at a greater distance from the

world of particular facts in which men once believed they saw

it."--RENAN, Essay on Islamism and Science.

A detailed account of the rise and progress of the Christian religion is

not within the scope of this book. But as that religion, more especially

in the elaborated theological form which it ultimately assumed, became

the chief barrier to the development of Greek ideas; except, as has been

remarked, in the degree that these were represented by Aristotle, and

brought into harmony with it; a short survey of its origin and early

stages is necessary to the continuity of our story.

The history of that great movement is told according to the bias of the

writers. They explain its rapid diffusion and its ultimate triumph over

Paganism as due either to its Divine origin and guidance; or to the

favourable conditions of the time of its early propagation, and to that

wise adaptation to circumstances which linked its fortunes with those

of the progressive peoples of Western Europe. In the judgment of every

unofficial narrator, this latter explanation best accords with the facts

of history, and with the natural causes which largely determine success

or failure. The most partisan advocates of its supernatural, and

therefore special, character have to show reason why the fortunes of the

Christian religion have varied like those of other great religions, both

older and younger than it; why, like Buddhism, it has been ousted from

the country in which it rose; and why, in competition with Brahmanism,

as Sir Alfred Lyall testifies in his Asiatic Studies (p. 110), and with

Mohammedanism in Africa, it has less success than these in the mission

fields where it comes into rivalry with them. Riven into wrangling

sects from an early period of its history, it has, while exercising a

beneficent influence in turbulent and lawless ages, brought not "peace

on earth, but a sword." It has been the cause of undying hate, of bloody

wars, and of persecutions between parties and nations, whose animosity

seems the deeper when stirred by matters which are incapable of proof.

As Montaigne says, "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which

is least known." To bring the Christian religion, or, rather, its

manifold forms, from the purest spiritualistic to such degraded type

as exists, for example, in Abyssinia, within the operation of the law

which governs development, and which, therefore, includes partial and

local corruption; is to make its history as clear as it is profoundly

instructive; while, to demand for it an origin and character different

in kind from other religions, is to import confusion into the story of

mankind, and to raise a swarm of artificial difficulties. "If," as John

Morley observes in his criticism of Turgot's dissertation upon The

Advantages that the Establishment of Christianity has conferred upon the

Human Race (Miscell., vol. ii, p. 90), "there had been in the Christian

idea the mysterious self-sowing quality so constantly claimed for it,

how came it that in the Eastern part of the Empire it was as powerless

for spiritual or moral regeneration as it was for political health and

vitality; while in the Western part it became the organ of the most

important of all the past transformations of the civilized world? Is not

the difference to be explained by the difference in the surrounding

medium, and what is the effect of such an explanation upon the

supernatural claims of the Christian idea?" Its inclusion as one of

other modes, varying only in degree, by which man has progressed from

the "ape and tiger" stage to the highest ideals of the race, makes clear

what concerns us here, namely, its attitude toward secular knowledge,

and the consequent serious arrest of that knowledge. That a religion

which its followers claim to be of supernatural origin, and secured from

error by the perpetual guidance of a Holy Spirit, should have opposed

inquiry into matters the faculty for investigating which lay within

human power and province; that it should actually have put to death

those who dared thus to inquire, and to make known what they had

discovered; is a problem which its advocates may settle among

themselves. It is no problem to those who take the opposite view.

In outlining the history of Christianity stress will be here laid only

upon those elements which caused it to be an arresting force in man's

intellectual development, and, therefore, in his spiritual emancipation

from terrors begotten of ignorance. It does not fall within our survey

to speak of that primary element in it which was before all dogma, and

which may survive when dogma has become only a matter of antiquarian

interest. That element, born of emotion, which, as a crowd of kindred

examples show, incarnates, and then deifies the object of its worship,

was the belief in the manifestation of the divine through the human

Jesus who had borne men's griefs, carried their sorrows, and offered

rest to the weary and heavy-laden. For no religion--and here Evolution

comes in as witness--can take root which does not adapt itself to, and

answer some need of, the heart of man. Hence the importance of study of

the history of all religions.

Evolution knows only one heresy--the denial of continuity. Recognising

the present as the outcome of the past, it searches after origins. It

knows that both that which revolts us in man's spiritual history has,

alike with that which attracts, its place, its necessary place, in the

development of ideas, and is, therefore, capable of explanation from

its roots upward. For this age is sympathetic, not flippant. It looks

with no favour on criticism that is only destructive, or on ridicule or

ribaldry as modes of attack on current beliefs. Hence we have the modern

science of comparative theology, with its Hibbert Lectures, and Gifford

Lectures, which are critical and constructive; as opposed to Bampton

Lectures, Boyle and Hulse Lectures, which are apologetic, the speaker

holding an official brief. Of the Boyle Lecturers, Collings the "Deist"

caustically said that nobody doubted the existence of the Deity till

they set to work to prove it. Religions are no longer treated as true or

false, as inventions of priests or of divine origin, but as the product

of man's intellectual speculations, however crude or coarse; and of his

spiritual needs, no matter in what repulsive form they are satisfied.

For "proofs" and "evidences" we have substituted explanations.

Nevertheless, so strong, often so bitter, are the feelings aroused over

the most temperate discussion of the origin of Christianity that it

remains necessary to repeat that to explain is not to attack, and that

to narrate is not to apportion blame, for no religion can do aught than

reflect the temper of the age in which it flourishes.

Let us now summarize certain occurrences which, although familiar

enough, must be repeated for the clear understanding of their effects.

Some sixty years after the death of Lucretius there happened, in the

subsequent belief of millions of mankind, an event for which all that

had gone before in the history of this planet is said to have been a

preparation. In the fulness of time the Omnipotent maker and ruler of a

universe to which no boundaries can be set by human thought, sent to

this earth-speck no less a person than His Eternal Son. He was said to

have been born, not by the natural processes of generation, but to have

been incarnated in the womb of a virgin, retaining his divine nature

while subjecting it to human limitations. This he had done that he

might, as sinless man, become an expiatory sacrifice to offended deity,

and to the requirements of divine justice, for the sins which the human

race had committed since the transgression of Adam and Eve, or which men

yet to be born might commit.

The "miraculous" birth of Jesus took place at Nazareth in Galilee, in

the reign of Cæsar Augustus, about 750 A. U. C., as the Romans reckoned

time. Tradition afterward fixed his birthday on the 25th December,

which, curiously enough, although, perhaps, explaining the choice, was

the day dedicated to the sun-god Mithra, an Oriental deity to whom

altars had been raised and sacrifices performed, with rites of baptisms

of blood, in hospitable Rome.

Jesus is said to have lived in the obscurity of his native mountain

village till his thirtieth year. Except one doubtful story of his going

to Jerusalem with his parents when he was twelve years old, nothing is

recorded in the various biographies of him between his birth and his

appearance as a public teacher. Probably he followed his father's trade

as a carpenter. The event that seems to have called him from home was

the preaching of an enthusiastic ascetic named John the Baptist. At his

hands Jesus submitted to the baptismal rite, and then entered on his

career, wandering from place to place. The fragments of his discourses,

which have survived in the short biographies known as the Gospels, show

him to have been gifted with a simple, winning style, and his sermons,

brightened by happy illustration or striking parable, went home to the

hearts of his hearers. Women, often of the outcast class, were drawn

to him by the sympathy which attracted even more than his teaching.

Among a people to whom the unvarying order of Nature was an idea

wholly foreign--for Greek speculations had not penetrated into

Palestine--stories of miracle-working found easy credit, falling in, as

they did, with popular belief in the constant intervention of deity.

Thus, to the reports of what Jesus taught were added those of the

wonders which he had wrought, from feeding thousands of folk with a few

loaves of bread to raising the dead to life. His itinerant mission

secured him a few devoted followers from various towns and villages,

while the effect of success upon himself was to heighten his own

conception of the importance of his work. The skill of the Romans in

fusing together subject races had failed them in the case of the Jews,

whose belief in their special place in the world as the "chosen people"

never forsook them. Nor had their misfortunes weakened their belief that

the Messiah predicted by their prophets would appear to deliver them,

and plant their feet on the neck of the hated conqueror. This hope,

as became a pious Jew, Jesus shared, but it set him brooding on

some nobler, because more spiritual, conception of it than his

fellow-countrymen nurtured. Finally, it led him to the belief, fostered

by the ambition of his nearer disciples, which was, however, material in

its hopes, that he was the spiritual Messiah. In that faith he repaired

to Jerusalem at the time of the Passover feast when the city was crowded

with devotees, that he might, before the chief priests and elders, make

his appeal to the nation. According to the story, his daring in clearing

the holy temple of money-changers and traders led to his appearance

before the Sanhedrin, the highest judicial council; his plainness of

speech raised the fury of the sects; and when, dreaming of a purer

faith, he spoke ominous words about the destruction of the temple, the

charge of blasphemy was laid against him. His guilt was made clear to

his judges when, answering a question of the high priest, he declared

himself to be the Messiah. This, involving claim to kingship over the

Jews, and therefore rebellion against the Empire, was made the plea of

haling him before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, for trial. Pilate,

looking upon the whole affair as a local _émeute_, was disinclined to

severity, but nothing short of the death of Jesus as a blasphemer

(although his chief offence appears to have been his disclaimer of

earthly sovereignty) would satisfy the angry mob. Amidst their taunts

and jeers he was taken to a place named Calvary, and there put to death

by the torturing process of crucifixion, or, the particular mode not

being clear, of transfixion on a stake.

This tragic event, on which, as is still widely held, hang the destinies

of mankind to the end of time, attracted no attention outside Judæa. In

the Roman eye, cold, contemptuous, and practical, it was but the

execution of a troublesome fanatic who had embroiled himself with his

fellow-countrymen, and added the crime of sedition to the folly of

blasphemy. Pilate himself passed on, without more ado, to the next duty.

Tradition, anxious to prove that retribution followed his criminal act,

as it was judged in after-time to be, tells how he flung himself in

remorse from the mountain known as Pilatus, which overlooks the lake of

Lucerne. With truer insight, a striking modern story, L'Etui de Nacre,

by Anatole France, makes Pilate, on his retirement to Sicily in old age,

thus refer to the incident in conversation with a Roman friend who had

loved a Jewish maiden.

"A few months after I had lost sight of her I heard by accident that

she had joined a small party of men and women who were following a

young Galilean miracle-worker. His name was Jesus, he came from

Nazareth, and he was crucified for I don't know what crime. Pontius,

do you remember this man? Pontius Pilate knit his brow, and put his

hand to his forehead like one who is searching his memory; then

after a few moments of silence: 'Jesus,' murmured he, 'Jesus of

Nazareth. No, I don't remember him.'"

On the third day after his death, Jesus is said to have risen from the

grave, and appeared to a faithful few of his disciples. On the fortieth

day after his resurrection he is said to have ascended to heaven. Both

these statements rest on the authority of the biographies which were

compiled some years after his death. Jesus wrote nothing himself;

therefore the "brethren," as his intimate followers called one another,

had no other sacred books than those of the Old Testament. They believed

that Jesus was the Messiah predicted in Daniel and some of the

apocryphal writings, and they cherished certain "logia" or sayings of

his which formed the basis of the first three Gospels. The earliest of

these, that bearing the name of Mark, probably took the shape in which

we have it (some spurious verses at the end excepted) about 70 A. D.

The fourth Gospel, which tradition attributes to John, is generally

believed to be half a century later than Mark. It seems likely that the

importance of collecting the words of Jesus into any permanent form did

not occur to those who had heard them, because the belief in his speedy

return was all-powerful among them, and their life and attitude toward

everything was shaped accordingly.

Without sacred books, priesthood, or organization, these earliest

disciples, whom the fate of their leader had driven into hiding for a

time, gathered themselves into groups for communion and worship. "In

the church of Jerusalem," says Selden in his Table Talk (xiv), "the

Christians were but another sect of Jews that did believe the Messias

was come." From that sacred city there went forth preachers of this

simple doctrine through the lands where Greek-speaking Jews, known as

those of the Dispersion, had been long settled. These formed a very

important element in the Roman Empire, being scattered from Asia Minor

to Egypt, and thence in all the lands washed by the Mediterranean. As

their racial isolation and national hopes made them the least contented

among the subject-peoples, a series of tolerant measures securing them

certain privileges, subject to loyal behaviour, had been prudently

granted by their Roman masters. The new teaching spread from Antioch to

Alexandria and Rome. But early in the onward career of the movement a

division broke out among the immediate disciples of Jesus which ended in

lasting rupture. A distinguished convert had been won to the faith in

the person of the Apostle Paul. He is the real founder of Christianity

as a more or less systematized creed, and all the development of dogma

which followed are integral parts of the structure raised by him. He

converted it from a local religion into a widespread faith. This came

about, at the start, through his defeat of the narrower section headed

by Peter, who would have compelled all non-Jewish converts to submit to

the rite of circumcision.

The unity of the Empire gave Christianity its chance. Through the

connection of Eurasia from the Euphrates to the Atlantic by magnificent

roads, communication between peoples followed the lines of least

resistance. Happily for the future of Christianity, the early

missionaries travelled westward, in the wake of the dispersed Jews,

along the Mediterranean seaboard, and thus its fortunes became

identified with the civilizing portion of mankind. Had they travelled

eastward, it might have been blended with Buddhism, or, as its Gnostic

phases show, become merged in Oriental mysticism. The story of progress

ran smoothly till A. D. 64, when we first hear of the "Christians"--for

by such name they had become known--in "profane" history, as it was once

oddly called. Tacitus, writing many years after the event, tells how on

the night of the 18th July, in the sixty-fourth year of our era, a

fierce fire broke out in Rome, causing the destruction of magnificent

buildings raised by Augustus, and of priceless works of Greek art.

Suspicion fell on Nero, and he, as has been suggested, was instigated by

his wife Poppaea Sabina, an unscrupulous woman, and, according to some

authorities, a convert to Judaism, "to put an end to the common talk, by

imputing the fire to others, visiting, with a refinement of punishment,

those detestable criminals who went by the name of Christians. The

author of that denomination was Christus, who had been executed in the

time of Tiberius, by the procurator, Pontius Pilate." Tacitus goes on

to describe Christianity as "a pestilent superstition," and its

adherents as guilty of "hatred to the human race." The indictment, on

the face of it, seems strange, but it has an explanation, although the

Christians were brutally murdered on the charge of arson, and not of

superstition. So far as religious persecution went, they suffered this

first at the hands of Jews, the Empire intervening to protect them.

Broadly speaking, the Roman note was toleration. Throughout the

Empire religion was a national affair, because it began and ended

with the preservation of the State. Thereupon it was the binding

duty--_religio_--of every citizen to pay due honour to the protecting

gods on whose favour the safety of the State depended. That done, a man

might believe what he chose. Polytheism is, from its nature, easy-going

and tolerant; so long as there was no open opposition to the authorized

public worship, the worshipper could explain it any way he chose. In

Greece a man "might believe or disbelieve that the Mysteries taught the

doctrine of immortality; the essential thing was that he should duly

sacrifice his pig." In Rome, that vast Cosmopolis, "the ordinary pagan

did not care two straws whether his neighbour worshipped twenty gods or

twenty-one." Why should he care?

Now, against all this, the Christians set their faces sternly, and the

result was to make them regarded as anti-patriotic and anti-social.

Their success among the lower classes had been rapid. Christianity

levelled all distinctions: it welcomed the master and his slave, the

outcast and the pure: it treated woman as the spiritual equal of man: it

held out to each the hope of a future life. Thus far, all was to the

good, although the old Mithraic religion had done well-nigh as much. But

Christianity held aloof from the common social life, putting itself out

of touch with the manifold activity of Rome. It sought to apply certain

maxims of Jesus literally; it discouraged marriage, it brought disunion

into family life; it counselled avoidance of service in the army or

acceptance of any public office. This general attitude was wholly due to

the belief that with the return of Jesus, the end of the world was

at hand. For Jesus had foretold his second coming, and the earliest

epistles of the apostles bade the faithful prepare for it. Here there

was no continuing city; citizenship was in heaven, for the kingdom of

Christ was not of this world. Therefore to give thought to the earthly

and fleeting was folly and impiety, for who would care to heap up

wealth, to strive for place or to pursue pleasure, or to search after

what men called "wisdom," when these imperilled the soul, and blocked

the way to heaven?

The prejudice created by this belief, expressed in such direct action as

refusal to worship the guardian gods and the "genius" of the Emperor,

was deepened by ugly, although baseless, rumours as to the cruel and

immoral things done by the Christians at their secret meetings. And so

it came to pass that Tacitus spoke of Christianity in the terms quoted;

that Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius (who refers to it only once in his

Meditations) dismissed it with a scornful phrase; that the common people

called it atheistic; and that, finally, it became a proscribed and

persecuted religion.

Further than this there is no need to pursue its career until, with

wholly changed fortunes, we meet it as a tolerated religion under a

so-called Christian Emperor. The object in tracing it thus far is to

indicate how enthusiasts, thus filled with an anti-worldly spirit, would

become and remain an arresting force against the advance of inquiry and,

therefore, of knowledge; and how, as their religion gathered power, and

itself became worldly in policy, it would the more strongly assert

supremacy over the reason. For intellectual activity would lead to

inquiry into the claims and authority of the Church, and inquiry,

therefore, was the thing to be proscribed. Then, too, the committal of

the floating biographies of Jesus to written form, and their grouping,

with the letters of the apostles, into one more or less complete

collection, to be afterward called the New Testament (a collection held

to embrace, as the theory of inspiration became formulated, all that it

is needful for man to know), would create a further barrier against

intellectual activity. Then, as Christianity came into nearer touch with

the enfeebled remnants of Greek philosophy, and with other foreign

influences shaping its dogmas, discussions about the person of Christ

became active. The simple fluent creed of the early Christians took

rigid form in the subtleties of the Nicene Creed, and as "Very God of

Very God" the final appeal was, logically, to the words of Jesus. Hence

another barrier against inquiry.

Conflict has never arisen on the ethical sayings of Jesus, which, making

allowance for the impracticableness of a few, place him high among the

sages of antiquity. Comparing their teaching with his, it is easy to

group together maxims which do not yield to the more famous examples in

the Sermon on the Mount as guides to conduct, or as inspiration to high

ideals. The "golden rule" is anticipated by Plato's "Thou shalt not take

that which is mine, and may I do to others as I would that they should

do to me" (Jowett's translation, v, p. 483). And it is paralleled by

Isocrates, a contemporary of Plato, in those words spoken by the King

Nicocles when addressing his governors, "You should be to others what

you think I should be to you." But if there was nothing new in what

Jesus taught, there was freshness in the method. Conflict is waged only

over statements the nature and limits of which might be expected from

the place and age when they were delivered. They who hold that Jesus was

God the Son Eternal, and therefore incapable of error, may reconcile, as

best they can with this, his belief in the mischievous delusions of his

time. If they say that so much of this as may be reported in the records

of his life are spurious, they throw the whole contents of the gospels

into the melting-pot of criticism.

Taking the narratives as we have them, documents stamped with the

hall-mark of the centuries, "declaring," as a body of clergymen

proclaimed recently, "incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in

all records, both of past events, and of the delivery of predictions to

be thereafter fulfilled," we learn that Jesus accepted the accuracy of

the sacred writings of his people; that he spoke of Moses as the author

of the Pentateuch; that he referred to its legends as dealing with

historical persons, and as reporting actual events. All these beliefs

are refuted by the critical scholarship of to-day. We need not go to

Germany for the verdict; it is indorsed by eminent Hebraists, officials

of the Church of England. Canon Driver, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford,

says that "like other people, the Jews formed theories to account for

the beginnings of the earth and man"; that "they either did this for

themselves, or borrowed from their neighbours," and that "of the

theories current in Assyria and Phoenicia fragments have been preserved

which exhibit parts of resemblance to the Bible narratives sufficient to

warrant the inference that both are derived from the same cycle of

traditions." If, therefore, the cosmogonic and other legends are

inspired, so must also the common original of these and their

corresponding stories be inspired. The matter might be pursued through

the patriarchal age to the eve of the Exodus, showing that, here also,

the mythical element is dominant; the existence of Abraham himself

dissolving in the solution of the "higher criticism." As to the

Pentateuch, the larger number of scholars place its composition, in the

form in which we have it--older documents being blended therein--about

the sixth and fifth centuries B. C.

Jesus spoke of the earth as if it were flat, and the most important

among the heavenly bodies. Knowledge of the active speculations that

went on centuries before his time on the Ionian seaboard; prevision of

what secrets men would wrest from the stars centuries hence--of neither

did he dream. That Homer and Virgil had sung; that Plato had discoursed;

that Buddha had founded a religion with which his, when Western activity

met Eastern passivity, would vainly compete; these, and aught else that

had moved the great world without, were unknown to the Syrian teacher.

Jesus believed in an arch-fiend, who was permitted by Omnipotence, the

Omnipotence against which he had rebelled, to set loose countless

numbers of evil spirits to work havoc on men and animals. Jesus also

believed in a hell of eternal torment for the wicked; and in a heaven of

unending happiness for the good. There is no surer index of the

intellectual stage of any people than the degree in which belief in the

supernatural, and, especially in the activity of supernatural agents,

rules their lives. The lower we descend, the more detailed and familiar

is the assumption of knowledge of the behaviour of these agents, and of

the nature of the places they come from or haunt. Of this, mediæval

speculations on demonology, and modern books of anthropology, supply any

number of examples. Here we are concerned only with the momentous fact

that belief in demoniacal activity pervades the New Testament from

beginning to end, and, therefore, gave the warrant for the unspeakable

cruelties with which that belief has stained the annals of Christendom.

John Wesley was consistent when he wrote that "Giving up the belief in

witchcraft was in effect giving up the Bible," and it may be added that

giving up belief in the devil is giving up belief in the atonement--the

central doctrine of the Christian faith. To this the early Christians

would have subscribed: so, also, would the great Augustine, who said

that "nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture,

since greater is that authority than all the powers of the human mind";

so would all who have followed him in ancient confessions of the faith.

It is only the amorphous form of that faith which, lingering on, anæmic

and boneless, denies by evasion.

But they who abandon belief in maleficent demons and in witches; as

also, for this follows, in beneficent agents, as angels; land themselves

in serious dilemma. For to this are such committed. If Jesus, who came

"that he might destroy the works of the devil," and who is reported,

among other proofs of his divine ministry, to have cast out demons from

"possessed" human beings, and, in one case, to have permitted a crowd of

the infernal agents to enter into a herd of swine; if he verily believed

that he actually did these things; and if it be true that the belief is

a superstition limited to the ignorant or barbaric mind; _what value can

be attached to any statement that Jesus is reported to have made about a

spiritual world_?

Here then (1) in the attitude of the early Christians toward all mundane

affairs as of no moment compared with those affecting their souls'

salvation; (2) in the assumed authority of Scripture as a full

revelation of both earthly and heavenly things; and (3) in the assumed

infallibility of the words of Jesus reported therein; we have three

factors which suffice to explain why the great movement toward discovery

of the orderly relations of phenomena was arrested for centuries, and

theories of capricious government of the universe sheltered and upheld.

While, as has been said, the unity of the Empire secured Christianity

its fortunate start; the multiform elements of which the Empire was made

up--philosophic and pagan--being gradually absorbed by Christianity,

secured it acceptance among the different subject-peoples. The break up

of the Empire secured its supremacy.

The absorption of foreign ideas and practices by Christianity, largely

through the influence of Hellenic Jews, was an added cause of arrest of

inquiry. The adoption of pagan rites and customs, resting, as these

did, on a bedrock of barbarism, dragged it to a lower level. The

intrusion of philosophic subtleties led to terms being mistaken for

explanations: as Gibbon says, "the pride of the professors and of their

disciples was satisfied with the science of words." The inchoate and

mobile character of Christianity during the first three centuries gave

both influences--pagan and philosophic--their opportunity. For long

years the converts scattered throughout the Empire were linked together,

in more or less regular federation, by the acknowledgment of Christ as

Lord, and by the expectation of his second coming. There was no official

priesthood, only overseers--"episkopoi"--for social purposes, who made

no claims to apostolic succession; no formulated set of doctrines; no

Apostles' Creed; no dogmas of baptismal regeneration or of the real

presence; no worship or apotheosis of Mary as the Mother of God; no

worship of saints or relics.

_On the philosophic side_, it was the Greek influence in the person of

the more educated converts that shaped the dogmas of the Church and

sought to blend them with the occult and mysterious elements in Oriental

systems, of which modern "Theosophy" is the tenuous parody. That old

Greek habit of asking questions, of seeking to reach the reason of

things, which, as has been seen, gave the great impulse to scientific

inquiry, was as active as ever. Appeals to the Old Testament touched not

the Greek as they did the Jewish Christian, and the Canon of the New

Testament was as yet unsettled. Strange as it may seem in view of the

assumed divine origin of the Gospels and Epistles, human judgment took

upon itself to decide which of them were, and which were not, an

integral part of supernatural revelation. The ultimate verdict, so far

as the Western Church was concerned, was delivered by the Council of

Carthage in the early part of the fifth century. There arose a school of

Apologists, founders of theology, who, to quote Gibbon, "equipped the

Christian religion for the conquest of the Roman world by changing it

into a philosophy, attested by Revelation. They mingled together the

metaphysics of Platonism, the doctrine of the Logos, which came from the

Stoics, morality partly Platonic, partly Stoic, methods of argument and

interpretation learnt from Philo, with the pregnant maxims of Jesus and

the religious language of the Christian congregations." Thus the road

was opened for additions to dogmatic theology, doctrines of the Trinity,

of the Virgin Birth, and whatever else could be inferentially extracted

from the Scriptures, and blended with foreign ideas. The growing

complexity of creed called for interpretation of it, and this obviously

fell to the overseers or bishops, chosen for their special gifts of "the

grace of the truth." These met, as occasion required, to discuss

subjects affecting the faith and discipline of the several groups. Among

such, precedence, as a matter of course, would be accorded to the

overseer of the most important Christian society in the Empire; and

hence the prominence and authority, from an early period, of the bishop

of Rome. In the simple and business-like act of his election as chairman

of the gatherings lay the germ of the audacious and preposterous claims

of the Papacy.

_On the pagan side_, the course of development is not so easily traced.

To determine when and where this or that custom or rite arose is now

impossible; indeed, we may say, without exaggeration, that it never

arose at all, because the conditions for its adoption were present

throughout in human tendencies. The first Christian disciples were Jews:

and the ritual which they followed was the direct outcome of ideas

common to all barbaric religions, so that certain of the pagan rites and

ceremonies with which they came in contact in all parts of the Empire

fitted in with custom, tradition, and desire. And this applies, with

stronger force, to the converts scattered from Edessa, east of the

Euphrates, to the Empire's westernmost limits in Britain. Moreover, we

know that a policy of adaptation and conciliation wisely governed the

ruling minds of the Church, in whom, stripped of all the verbiage about

them as semi-inspired successors of the apostles, there was deep-seated

superstition. Paganism might, in its turn, be suppressed by Imperial

edict, but it had too much in common with the later forms of

Christianity not to survive in fact, however changed in name.

It may be taken as a truism that in the ceremonies of the higher

religions there are no inventions, only survivals. This fact sent

thinkers like Hobbes, and dealers in literary antiquities of the type of

Burton, Bishop Newton, and, notablest of all, Conyers Middleton, on the

search after parallels, which have received astonishing confirmation in

our day. Burton sees the mimicry of the "arch-deceiver in the strange

sacraments, the priests, and the sacrifices," as the Romanist

missionaries to Tibet saw the same diabolical parody of their rites in

Buddhist temples. But Hobbes, with the sagacity which might be expected

of him, recognises the continuity of ideas: "_mutato nomine tantum_;

Venus and Cupid (Hobbes might have added Isis and Horus) appearing as

'the Virgin Mary and her Sonne,' and the Αποθέωσις of the Heathen

surviving in the Canonization of Saints. The carrying of the Popes 'by

Switzers under a Canopie' is a 'Relique of the Divine Honours given to

Cæsar'; the carriage of Images in _Procession_ 'a Relique of the Greeks

and Romans.' ... 'The Heathen had also their _Aqua Lustralis_, that is

to say, _Holy Water_. The Church of Rome imitates them also in their

_Holy Dayes_. They had their _Bacchanalia_, and we have our _Wakes_

answering to them; They their _Saturnalia_, and we our Carnevalls and

Shrove-tuesdays liberty of Servants; They their Procession of Priapus,

we our fetching-in, erection, and dancing about _May-Poles_; and Dancing

is one kind of worship; They had their Procession called _Ambarvalia_,

and we our Procession about the Fields in the _Rogation week_.'"

Middleton examined the matter on the spot, and in his celebrated Letter

from Rome gives numerous examples of "an exact CONFORMITY between POPERY

and PAGANISM." Since few read his book now-a-days, some of these may be

cited, because their presence goes far to explain why the conglomerate

religion which Christianity had become was proof against ideas spurned

alike by pagans and ecclesiastics. Visiting the place for classical

study, and "not to notice the fopperies and ridiculous ceremonies of the

present Religion," Middleton soon found himself "still in old Heathen

Rome," with its rituals of primitive Paganism, as if handed down by an

uninterrupted succession from the priests of old to the priests of new

Rome. The "smoak of the incense" in the churches transports him to the

temple of the Paphian Venus described by Virgil (Æneid, I, 420); the

surpliced boy waiting on the priest with the thurible reminds him of

sculptures on ancient bas-reliefs representing heathen sacrifice, with a

white-clad attendant on a priest holding a little chest or box in his

hand. The use of holy water suggests numerous parallels. At the entrance

to Pagan temples stood vases of holy liquid, a mixture of salt and

common water; and, on bas-reliefs, the aspergillum or brush for the

ceremony of sprinkling is carved. In the annual festival of the

benediction of horses, when the animals were sent to the convent of St.

Anthony to be sprinkled (Middleton had his own horses thus blest "for

about eighteenpence of our money") there is the survival of a ceremony

in the Circensian games. In the lamps and wax candles before the shrines

of the Madonna and Saints he is reminded of a passage in Herodotus as to

the use of lights in the Egyptian temples, while we know that lamps to

the Madonna took the place of those before the images of the Lares,

whose chapels stood at the corners of the streets. The Synod of Elviri

(305 A. D.) forbade the lighting of wax candles during the day in

cemeteries lest the spirits of the saints should be disquieted, but the

custom was too deeply rooted to be abolished. As for votive offerings,

Middleton truly says that "no one _custom of antiquity_ is so frequently

mentioned by all their writers" ... "but the most common of all

_offerings_ were _pictures_ representing the history of the miraculous

cure or deliverance vouchsafed upon the vow of the donor." Of which

offerings, the _blessed Virgin_ is so sure always to carry off the

greatest share, that it may be truly said of her what _Juvenal_ says of

the _Goddess Isis_, whose religion was at that time in the greatest

vogue in _Rome_, that the "_painters got their livelihood out of her_."

Middleton tells the story from Cicero which, not without covert

sympathy, Montaigne quotes in his Essay on Prognostications. Diagoras,

surnamed the Atheist, being found one day in a temple, was thus

addressed by a friend: "You, who think the gods take no care of human

affairs, do not you see here by this number of pictures how many people,

for the sake of their vows, have been saved in storms at sea, and got

safe into harbour?" "Yes," answered Diagoras, "I see how it is; for

those are never painted who happen to be drowned." There is nothing new

under the sun. Horace (Odes, Bk. I, v) tells of the shipwrecked sailor

who hung up his clothes as a thank-offering in the temple of the sea-god

who had preserved him; Polydorus Vergilius, who lived in the early part

of the sixteenth century, that is, some 1,500 years after Horace,

describes the classic custom of _ex voto_ offerings at length, while

Pennant the antiquary, describing the well of Saint Winifred in

Flintshire in the last century, tells of the votive offerings, in the

shape of crutches and other objects, which were hung about it. To this

day the store is receiving additions. The sick crowd thither as of old

they crowded into the temples of Æsculapius and Serapis; mothers bring

their sick children as in Imperial Rome they took them to the Temple of

Romulus and Remus. A draught of water from the basin near the bath, or a

plunge in the bath itself, is followed by prayers at the altar of the

chapel which incloses the well. When the saint's feast-day is held, the

afflicted gather to kiss the reliquary that holds her bones. Perhaps one

of the most pathetic sights in Catholic churches, especially in

out-of-the-way villages, is the altars on which are hung votive

offerings, rude daubs depicting the disease or danger from which the

worshipper has been delivered.

As to the images, tricked out in curious robes and gewgaws, Middleton

"could not help recollecting the picture which old Homer draws of _Q.

Hecuba of Troy_, prostrating herself before the _miraculous Image of

Pallas_," while his wonder at the Loretto image of the "Queen of Heaven"

with "a face as black as a Negus" reminds him of the reference in Baruch

to the idols black with the "perpetual smoak of lamps and incense." In

his Hibbert Lectures Professor Rhys refers to churches dedicated to

Notre Dame in virtue of legends of discovery of images of the Virgin on

the spot. These were usually of wood, which had turned black in the

soil. Such a black "Madonna" was found near Grenoble, in the commune of

La Zouche. Then, in the titles of the new deities, Middleton correctly

sees those of the old. The Queen of Heaven reminds him of Astarte or

Mylitta; the Divine Mother of the Magna Mater, the "great mother" of

Oriental cults. In other attributes of Mary, lineal descendant of Isis,

there survive those of Venus, Lucina, Cybele, or Maria. He gives amusing

examples of myths and misreadings through which certain "saints" have a

place in the Roman Calendar. He apparently knew nothing of the strange

confusion by which Buddha appears therein under the title of Saint

Josaphat; but he tells how, by misinterpretation of a boundary stone,

Proefectus Viarum, an overseer of highways, became S. Viar; how S.

Veronica secured canonization through a blunder over the words Vera

Icon: still more droll, how hagiology includes both a mountain and a

mantle!

The marks of hands or feet on rocks, said to be made by the apparition

of some saint or angel, call to mind "the impression of Hercules' feet

on a stone in Scythia"; the picture of the Virgin, which came from

heaven, suggests the descent of Numa's shield "from the clouds"; that of

the weeping Madonna the statue of Apollo, which Livy says wept for

three successive days and nights; while the periodical miracle of the

liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius is obviously paralleled in

the incidents named by Horace on his journey to Brundusium, when the

priests of the temple at Gnatia sought to persuade him that "the

frankincense used to dissolve and melt miraculously without the help of

fire" (Sat., v, 97-100).

Middleton, and those of his school, thought that they were near primary

formations when they struck on these suggestive classic or pagan

parallels to Christian belief and custom. But in truth they had probed

a comparatively recent layer; since, far beneath, lay the unsuspected

prehistoric deposits of barbaric ideas which are coincident with,

and composed of, man's earliest speculations about himself and his

surroundings. When, however, we borrow an illustration from geology, it

must be remembered that our divisions, like those into which the strata

of the globe are separated, are artificial. There is no real detachment.

The difference between former and present methods of research is

that nowadays we have gone further down for discovery of the common

materials of which barbaric, pagan, and civilized ideas are compounded.

They arise in the comparison which exists in the savage mind between the

living and the non-living, and in the attribution of like qualities to

things superficially resembling one another; hence belief in their

efficacy, which takes active form in what may be generally termed magic.

For example, the rite of baptism is explained when we connect it with

barbaric lustrations and water-worship generally; as also that of the

Eucharist by reference to sacrificial feasts in honour of the gods;

feasts at which they were held to be both the eaters and the eaten.

Middleton, himself a clergyman, shows perplexity when watching the

elevation of the host at mass. He lacked that knowledge of the origin of

sacramental rites which study of barbaric customs has since supplied.

In Mr. Frazer's Golden Bough, the "central idea" of which is "the

conception of the slain god," he shows at what an early stage in his

speculations man formulated the conception of deity incarnated in

himself, or in plant or animal, and as afterward slain, both the

incarnation and the death being for the benefit of mankind. The god is

his own sacrifice, and in perhaps the most striking form, as insisted

upon by Mr. Frazer, he is, as corn-spirit, killed in the person of his

representative; the passage in this mode of incarnation to the custom

of eating bread sacramentally being obvious. The fundamental idea of

this sacramental act, as the mass of examples collected by Mr. Frazer

further goes to show, is that by eating a thing its physical and mental

qualities are acquired. So the barbaric mind reasons, and extends the

notion to all beings. To quote Mr. Frazer: "By eating the body of the

god he shares in the god's attributes and powers. And when the god is a

corn-god, the corn is his proper body; when he is a vine-god, the juice

of the grape is his blood; and so by eating the bread and drinking the

wine the worshipper partakes of the real body and blood of his god. Thus

the drinking of wine in the rites of a vine-god like Dionysus is not an

act of revelry; it is a solemn sacrament." It is, perhaps, needless to

point out that the same explanation applies to the rites attaching to

Demeter, or to add what further parallels are suggested in the belief

that Dionysus was slain, rose again, and descended into Hades to bring

up his mother Semele from the dead. This, however, by the way. What

has to be emphasized is, that in the quotation just given we have

transubstantiation clearly anticipated as the barbaric idea of eating

the god. In proof of the underlying continuity of that idea two

witnesses--Catholic and Protestant--may be cited.

The Church of Rome, and in this the Greek Church is at one therewith,

thus defines the term transubstantiation in the Canon of the Council of

Trent:

"If any one shall say that in the most holy sacrament of the

Eucharist there remains the substance of bread and wine together

with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and shall deny

that wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the

bread into the body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the

blood, the species of bread and wine alone remaining--which

conversion the Catholic Church most fittingly calls

Transubstantiation--let him be anathema."

The Church of England, through the medium of a letter to a well-known

newspaper, the British Weekly (29th August, 1895), supplies the

following illustration of the position of its "High" section, and this,

it is interesting to note, from the church of which Mr. Gladstone's son

is rector, and in which the distinguished statesman himself often reads

the lessons:

"A few Sundays ago--8 o'clock celebration of Holy Communion. Rector,

officiating minister (Hawarden Church).

"When the point was reached for the communicants to partake, cards

containing a hymn to be sung after Communion were distributed among

the congregation. This hymn opened with the following couplet:--

Jesu, mighty Saviour,

Thou art _in_ us now.

And my attention was arrested by an asterisk referring to a

footnote. The word 'in,' in the second line, was printed in italics,

and the note intimated that those who had _not_ communicated should

sing '_with_' instead of '_in_,' i. e. those who had taken the

consecrated elements to sing 'Thou art _in_ us now,' and those who

had not, to sing 'Thou art _with_ us now.'"

Whether, therefore, the cult be barbaric or civilized, we find theory

and practice identical. The god is eaten so that the communicant thereby

becomes a "partaker of the divine nature."

In the gestures denoting _sacerdotal benediction_ we have probably an

old form of averting the evil eye; in the act of _breathing_ on a bishop

at the service of consecration there was the survival of belief in

transference of spiritual qualities, the soul being, as language

evidences, well-nigh universally identified with breath. The modern

spiritualist who describes apparitions as having the "consistency of

cigar-smoke," is one with the Congo negroes who leave the house of

the dead unswept for a time lest the dust should injure the delicate

substance of the ghost. The inhaling of the last breath of the dying

Roman by his nearest kinsman has parallel in the breathing of the risen

Jesus on his disciples that they might receive the Holy Ghost (John xx,

22). In the offering of _prayers for the dead_; in the _canonization_

and _intercession_ of _saints_; in the _prayers_ and _offerings_ at the

_shrines of the Virgin_ and _saints_, and at the _graves of martyrs_;

there are the manifold forms of that great cult of the departed which is

found throughout the world. To this may be linked the _belief in

angels_, whether good or bad, or guardian, because the element common to

the whole is animistic, the peopling of the heavens above, as well as

the earth beneath, with an innumerable company of spiritual beings

influencing the destinies of men. Well might Jews and Moslems reproach

the Christians, as they did down to the eighth century, with having

filled the world with more gods than they had overthrown in the pagan

temples; while we have Erasmus, in his Encomium Moriae, when reciting

the names and functions of saints, adding that "as many things as we

wish, so many gods have we made." Closely related to this group of

beliefs is the _adoration of relics_, the vitality of which has springs

too deep in human nature to be wholly abolished, whether we carry about

us a lock from the hair of some dead loved one, or read of the fragments

of saints or martyrs which lie beneath every Catholic altar, or of the

skull-bones of his ancestor which the savage carries about with him as a

charm. Then there is the long list of _church festivals_, the reference

of which to pagan prototypes is but one step toward their ultimate

explanation in nature-worship; there are the _processions_ which are the

successors of Corybantic frenzies, and, more remotely, of savage dances

and other forms of excitation; there is that now somewhat casual belief

in the _Second Advent_ which is a member of the widespread group wherein

human hopes fix eyes on the return of long-sleeping heroes; of Arthur

and Olger Dansk, of Väinämöinen and Quetzalcoatl, of Charlemagne and

Barbarossa, of the lost Marko of Servia and the lost King Sebastian. We

speak of it as "casual," because among the two hundred and eighty-odd

sects scheduled in Whitaker's Almanack the curious in such inquiries

will note only three distinctive bodies of Adventists.

All changes in popular belief have been, and, practically, remain

superficial; the old animism pervades the higher creeds. In our own

island, for example, the Celtic and pre-Celtic paganism remained

unleavened by the old Roman religion. The legions took back to Rome the

gods which they brought with them. The names of Mithra and Serapis occur

on numerous tablets, the worship of the one--that "Sol invictus" whose

birthday at the winter solstice became (see p. 42) the anniversary

of the birth of Christ--had ranged as far west as South Wales and

Northumberland; while the foundations of a temple to the other have been

unearthed at York. The chief Celtic gods, in virtue of common attributes

as elemental nature-deities, were identified with certain _dii majores_

of the Roman pantheon, and the _deae matres_ equated with the gracious

or malevolent spirits of the indigenous faith. But the old names were

not displaced. Neither did the earlier Christian missionaries effect any

organic change in popular beliefs, while, during the submergence of

Christianity under waves of barbaric invasion, there were infused into

the old religion kindred elements from oversea which gave it yet more

vigorous life. The eagle penetration of Gibbon detected this persistent

element at work when he described the sequel to the futile efforts of

Theodosius to extirpate paganism. The ancestor worship which lay at the

core of much of it took shape among the Christianized pagans in the

worship of martyrs and in the scramble after their relics. The bodies of

prophets and apostles were discovered by the strangest coincidences, and

transported to the churches by the Tiber and the Bosphorus, and although

the supply of these more important remains was soon exhausted, there

was no limit to the production of relics of their person or belongings,

as of filings from the chains of S. Peter, and from the gridiron of S.

Lawrence. The catacombs yielded any number of the bodies of martyrs, and

Rome became a huge manufactory to meet the demands for wonder-working

relics from every part of Christendom. A sceptical feeling might be

aroused at the claims of a dozen abbeys to possession of the veritable

crown of thorns wherewith the majesty of the suffering Christ was

mocked, but it was silenced before the numerous fragments of his cross,

since ingenuity has computed that this must have contained at least one

hundred and eighty million cubic millemetres, whereas the total cubic

volume of all the known relics is but five millions. "It must," remarks

Gibbon (Decline and Fall, end of chap. xxviii), "ingeniously be

confessed that the ministers of the Catholic Church imitated the profane

model which they were impotent to destroy. The most respectable bishops

had persuaded themselves that the ignorant rustics would more cheerfully

renounce the superstitions of paganism if they found some resemblance,

some compensation, in the bosom of Christianity. The religion of

Constantine achieved, in less than a century, the final conquest of the

Roman Empire, but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the

arts of their vanquished rivals."

Enough has been said on a topic to which prominence has been given

because it brings into fuller relief the fact that in a religion for

which its apologists claim divine origin and guidance "to the end of

the world" we have the same intrusion of the rites and customs of

lower cults which marks other advanced faiths. Hence, science and

superstition being deadly foes, the explanation of that hostile

attitude toward inquiry and that dread of its results which marked

Christianity down to modern times. While the intrusion of corrupting

elements presents difficulties which the theory of the supernatural

history of Christianity alone creates, it accords with all that might

be predicted of a religion whose success was due to its early escape

from the narrow confines of Judaism; and to its fortunate contact with

the enterprising peoples to whom the civilization of Europe and the

New World is due.

2. _From Augustine to Lord Bacon._

A. D. 400-A. D. 1600.