THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION.
'Rough draughts of Man's
Beginning God!'
Swinburne.
When Queen Mab recovered consciousness she heard the sound of violent
voices in the room before she opened her eyes, which she did half
hoping to find herself the victim of some terrible delusion. But the
sight of the professor, standing not a yard away, brought a fatal
conviction to her heart. It was too true. Was there ever a more
undesirable position for a fairy, accustomed to perfect freedom, and
nourished by honey and nectar, than to be closely confined in a tall
bottle, with smooth hard slippery walls that she could not pierce, and
nothing to live upon but a glass-stopper! It was absurd; but it was
also terrible. How fervently she wished, now, that the missionaries had
never come to Polynesia.
But the professor was not alone, two of his acquaintances were there—a
divine veering towards the modern school, and a poet—the ordinary poet
of satire and Mr. Besant's novels, with an eye-glass, who held that the
whole duty of poets at least was to transfer the meanderings of the
inner life, or as much of them as were in any degree capable of
transmission, to immortal foolscap..Unfortunately, as he observed with
a mixture of pride and regret, the workings of his soul were generally
so ethereal as to baffle expression and comprehension; and, he was wont
to say, mixing up metaphors at a great rate, that he could only stand,
like the High Priest of the Delphic oracle, before the gates of his
inner life, to note down such fragmentary utterances as 'foamed up from
the depths of that divine chaos.' for the benefit of inquiring minds
with a preference for the oracular. He added that cosmos was a
condition of grovelling minds, and that while the thoughts, faculties,
and emotions of an ordinary member of society might fitly be summed up
in the epithet 'microcosm.' his own nature could be appropriately
described only by that of 'microchaos.' In which opinion the professor
always fully coincided.
With the two had entered the professor's little boy, a motherless child
of eight, who walked straight up to the bottle.
No sooner did the child's eyes light on the vessel than a curious thing
occurred. He fell down on his knees, bowed his head, and held up his
hands.
'Great Heavens!' cried the professor, forgetting himself, 'what do I
behold! My child is praying (a thing he never was taught to do), and
praying to a green butterfly! Hush! hush!' the professor went on,
turning to his friends. 'This is terrible, but most important. The
child has never been allowed to hear anything about the
supernatural—his poor mother died when he was in the cradle—and I have
scrupulously shielded him from all dangerous conversation. There is not
a prayer-book in the house, the maids are picked Agnostics, from
advanced families, and I am quite certain that my boy has never even
heard of the existence of a bogie.'
The poet whistled: the divine took up his hat, and, with a pained look,
was leaving the room.
'Stop, stop!' cried the professor, 'he is doing something odd.'
The child had taken out of his pocket certain small black stones of a
peculiar shape. So absorbed was he that he never noticed the presence
of the men.
He kissed the stones and arranged them in a curious pattern on the
floor, still kneeling, and keeping his eye on Mab in her bottle. At
last he placed one strangely shaped pebble in the centre, and then
began to speak in a low, trembling voice, and in a kind of cadence:
'Oh! you that I have tried to see,
Oh! you that I have heard in the night,
Oh! you that live in the sky and the water;
Now I see you, now you have come:
Now you will tell me where you live,
And what things are, and who made them.
Oh Dala, these stones are yours;
These are the goona stones I find,
And play with when I think of you.
Oh Dala, be my friend, and never leave me
Alone in the dark night.'
'As I live, it's a religious service, the worship of a green
butterfly!' said the professor. At his voice the child turned round,
and seeing the men, looked very much ashamed of himself.
'Come here, my dear old man.' said the professor to the child, who came
on being called.
'What were you doing?—who taught you to say all those funny things?'
The little fellow looked frightened.
'I didn't remember you were here.' he said; 'they are things I say when
I play by myself.'
'And who is Dala?'
The boy was blushing painfully.
'Oh, I didn't mean you to hear, it's just a game of mine. I play at
there being somebody I can't see, who knows what I am doing; a friend.'
'And nobody taught you, not Jane or Harriet?'
Now Harriet and Jane were the maids.
'You never saw anybody play at that kind of game before?'
'No,' said the child, 'nobody ever.' 'Then,' cried the professor, in a
loud and blissful voice, 'we have at last discovered the origin of
religion. It isn't Ghosts. It isn't the Infinite. It is worshipping
butterflies, with a service of fetich stones. The boy has returned to
it by an act of unconscious inherited memory, derived from Palaeolithic
Man, who must, therefore, have been the native of a temperate climate,
where there were green lepidoptera. Oh, my friends, what a thing is
inherited memory! In each of us there slumber all the impressions of
all our predecessors, up to the earliest Ascidian. See how the
domesticated dog,' cried the professor, forgetting that he was not
lecturing in Albemarle Street, 'see how the domesticated dog, by
inherited memory, turns round on the hearthrug before he curls up to
sleep! He is unconsciously remembering the long grasses in which his
wild ancestors dwelt. Also observe this boy, who has retained an
unconscious recollection of the earliest creed of prehistoric man.
Behold him instinctively, and I may say automatically, cherishing
fetich stones (instead of marbles, like other boys) and adoring that
green insect in the glass bottle! Oh Science,' he added rapturously,
'what will Mr. Max Müller say now? The Infinite! Bosh, it's a
butterfly!'
'It is my own Dala, come to play with me,' said the boy.
'It is a fairy,' exclaimed the poet, examining Mab through his
eyeglass. This he said, not that he believed in fairies any more than
publishers believed in him, but partly because it was a pose he
affected, partly to 'draw' the professor.
The professor replied that fairies were unscientific, and even
unthinkable, and the divine declared that they were too heterodox even
for the advanced state of modern theology, and had been condemned by
several councils, which is true. And the professor ran through all the
animal kingdoms and sub-kingdoms very fast, and proved quite
conclusively, in a perfect cataract of polysyllables, that fairies
didn't belong to any of them. While the professor was recovering
breath, the divine observed, in a somewhat aggrieved tone, that he for
his part found men and women enough for him, and too much sometimes. He
also wished to know whether, if his talented but misguided friend
required something ethereal, angels were not sufficient, without his
having recourse to Pagan mythology; and whether he considered Pagan
mythology suitable to the pressing needs of modern society, with a
large surplus female population, and to the adjustment of the claims of
reason and religion.
The poet replied, 'Oh, don't bother me with your theological
conundrums. I give it up. See here, I am going to write a sonnet to
this creature, whatever it is. Fair denizen—!'
'Of a glass bottle!' interrupted the professor somewhat rudely, and the
divine laughed.
'No. Of deathless ether, doomed.'
'And that reminds me,' said the professor, turning hastily, 'I must
examine it under the microscope carefully, while the light lasts.'
'Oh father!' cried the child, 'don't touch it, it is alive!'
'Nonsense!' said the professor, 'it is as dead as a door-nail. Just
reach me that lens.'
He raised the glass stopper unsuspiciously, then turned to adjust his
instrument And even as he turned his captive fled.
'There!' cried the boy.
Like a flash of sunshine, Queen Mab darted upwards and floated through
the open window. They saw her hover outside a moment, then she was
gone—back into her deathless ether.
'I told you so!' exclaimed the poet, startled by this incident into a
momentary conviction of the truth of his own theory.