In all lands we find this belief in the appearance of the gods in human
form. It inspired the art and poetry of Greece. Rome believed that gods
had charged in front of their armies and given their laws. The solemn,
gloomy religion of Egypt, though it worshipped animal forms, yet told
of incarnate and suffering gods. The labyrinthine mythologies of the
East have their long-drawn stories of the avatars of their gods
floating many a rood on the weltering ocean of their legends. Tibet
cherishes each living sovereign as a real embodiment of the divine. And
the lowest tribes, in their degraded worship, have not departed so far
from the common type but that they too have some faint echoes of the
universal faith.
Do these facts import anything at all to us? Are we to dismiss them as
simply the products of a stage which we have left far behind, and to
plume ourselves that we have passed out of the twilight?
Even if we listen to what comparative mythology has to say, it still
remains to account for the tendency to shape legends of the earthly
appearance of the gods; and we shall have to admit that, while they
belong to an early stage of the world's progress, the feelings which
they express belong to all stages of it.
Now I think we may note these thoughts as contained in this universal
belief:
The consciousness of the need of divine help.
The certainty of a fellowship between heaven and earth.
The high ideal of the capacities and affinities of man.
We may note further what were the general characteristics of these
incarnations. They were transient, they were 'docetic,' as they are
called--that is, they were merely apparent assumptions of human form
which brought the god into no nearer or truer kindred with humanity,
and they were, for the most part, for very self-regarding and often
most immoral ends, the god's personal gratification of very ungodlike
passions and lust, or his winning victories for his favourites, or
satisfying his anger by trampling on those who had incurred his very
human wrath.