may be brought to light in the future as the result of excavations
in Egypt, it is most improbable that we shall ever receive from
that country any ancient Egyptian work which can properly be classed
among the literature of atheism or freethought; the Egyptian might be
more or less religious according to his nature and temperament, but,
judging from the writings of his priests and teachers which are now
in our hands, the man who was without religion and God in some form
or other was most rare, if not unknown." [243] It is not clear what
significance the writer attaches to this statement. Unquestionably the
mass of the Egyptians were always naïf believers in all that was given
them as religion; and among the common people even the minds which,
as elsewhere, varied from the norm of credulity would be too much
cowed by the universal parade of religion to impugn it; while their
ignorance and general crudity of life would preclude coherent critical
thought on the subject. But to conclude that among the priesthood and
the upper classes there was never any "freethinking" in the sense
of disbelief in the popular and official religion, even up to the
point of pantheism or atheism, is to ignore the general lesson of
culture history elsewhere. Necessarily there was no "literature of
atheism or freethought." Such literature could have no public, and,
as a menace to the wealth and status of the priesthood, would have
brought death on the writer. But in such a multitudinous priesthood
there must have been, at some stages, many who realized the mummery
of the routine religion, and some who transcended the commonplaces
of theistic thought. From the former, if not from the latter, would
come esoteric explanations for the benefit of the more intelligent
of the laity of the official class, who could read; and it is idle
to decide that deeper unbelief was privately "unknown."
It is contended, as against the notion of an esoteric and an exoteric
doctrine, that the scribes "did not, as is generally supposed, keep
their new ideas carefully concealed, so as to leave to the multitude
nothing but coarse superstitions. The contrary is evident from a
number of inscriptions which can be read by anybody, and from books
which anyone can buy." [244] But the assumption that "anyone" could
read or buy books in ancient Egypt is a serious misconception. Even in
our own civilization, where "anyone" can presumably buy freethought
journals or works on anthropology and the history of religions,
the mass of the people are so placed that only by chance does such
knowledge reach them; and multitudes are so little cultured that they
would pass it by with uncomprehending indifference were it put before
them. In ancient Egypt, however, the great mass of the people could
not even read; and no man thought of teaching them.
This fact alone goes far to harmonize the ancient Greek testimonies
as to the existence of an esoteric teaching in Egypt with Tiele's
contention to the contrary. See the pros and cons set forth and
confusedly pronounced upon by Professor Chantepie de la Saussaye,
Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. pp. 400-401. We
know from Diodorus (i, 81), what we could deduce from our other
knowledge of Egyptian conditions, that, apart from the priests
and the official class, no one received any literary culture save
in some degree the higher grades of artificers, who needed some
little knowledge of letters for their work in connection with
monuments, sepulchres, mummy-cases, and so forth. Cp. Maspero,
Hist. anc. des peuples de l'orient, p. 285. Even the images of
the higher Gods were shown to the people only on festival-days
(Meyer Gesch. des Alterthums, i, 82).
The Egyptian civilization was thus, through all its stages, obviously
conditioned by its material basis, which in turn ultimately determined
its polity, there being no higher contemporary civilization to
lead it otherwise. An abundant, cheap, and regular food supply
maintained in perpetuity a dense and easily-exploited population,
whose lot through thousands of years was toil, ignorance, political
subjection, and a primitive mental life. [245] For such a population
general ideas had no light and no comfort; for them was the simple
human worship of the local natural Gods or the presiding Gods of the
kingdom, alike confusedly conceived as great powers, figured often
as some animal, which for the primeval mind signified indefinite
capacity and unknown possibility of power and knowledge. [246] Myths
and not theories, magic and not ethics, were their spiritual food,
albeit their peaceful animal lives conformed sufficiently to their
code. And the life-conditions of the mass determined the policy of
priest and king. The enormous priestly revenue came from the people,
and the king's power rested on both orders.
As to this revenue see Diodorus Siculus, i, 73; and Erman, Handbook
of Egyptian Religion, Eng. tr. 1907, p. 71. According to Diodorus,
a third of the whole land of the kingdom was allotted to the
priesthoods. About a sixth of the whole land seems to have been
given to the Gods by Ramessu III alone, besides 113,000 slaves,
490,000 cattle, and immense wealth of other kinds (Flinders
Petrie, Hist. of Egypt, iii (1905), 154-55). The bulk of the
possessions here enumerated seems to have gone to the temple
of Amen at Thebes and that of the Sun-God at Heliopolis (Erman,
as cited). It is to be noted, however, that the priestly order
included all the physicians, lawyers, clerks, schoolmasters,
sculptors, painters, land measurers, drug sellers, conjurers,
diviners, and undertakers. Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians,
ed. Birch, 1878, i, 157-58; Sharpe, Egypt. Mythol. p. 26;
Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, § 68. "The sacred domains included
herds of cattle, birds, fishermen, serfs, and temple servants"
(Flinders Petrie, as cited, iii, 42). When the revenues assigned
for a temple of Seti I were found to be misappropriated, and the
building stopped, his son, Ramessu II, assigned a double revenue
for the completion of the work and the worship (id.). Like the
later priesthood of Christendom, that of Egypt forged documents
to establish claims to revenue (id. p. 69). Captured cattle in
great quantities were bestowed on temples of Amen (id. p. 149),
whose priests were especially grasping (id. p. 153). Thus in the
one reign of Ramessu III they received fifty-six towns of Egypt
and nine of Syria and 62,000 serfs (id. p. 155).
This was fully seen when King Akhunaton (otherwise Echnaton, or
Icheniton, or Akhunaton, or Akhunaten, or Chuenaten, or Khu-en-aten, or
Kku-n-aten, or Khouniatonou, or Khounaton!) = Amen-hetep or Amun-hotep
(or Amenophis) IV, moved by monotheistic zeal, departed so far from the
customary royal policy as to put under the ban all deities save that he
had chosen for himself, repudiating the God-name Amen in his own name,
and making one from that of his chosen Sun-God, Aten ("the sun's disk")
or Aton or Atonou [247] or Iton [248] (latterly held to be = the Syrian
Adon, "the Lord," symbolized by the sun's disk). There is reason to
think that his was not a mere Sun-worship, but the cult of a deity,
"Lord of the Disk," who looked through the sun's disk as through a
window. [249] In any interpretation, however, the doctrine was wholly
inacceptable to a priesthood whose multitudinous shrines its success
would have emptied. Of all the host of God-names, by one account only
that of the old Sun-God Ra-Harmachis was spared, [250] as being held
identical with that of Aten; and by one account [251] the disaffection
of priests and people rose to the point of open rebellion. At length
Akhunaton, "Glory of the Disk," as he elected to name himself, built
for himself and his God a new capital city in Middle Egypt, Akhet-Aten
(or Khut-Aten), the modern Tell-el-Amarna, where he assembled around
him a society after his own heart, and carried on his Aten-worship,
while his foreign empire was crumbling. The "Tell-el-Amarna tablets"
were found in the ruins of his city, which was deserted a generation
after his death. Though the king enforced his will while he lived,
his movement "bore no fruit whatever," his policy being reversed
after his family had died out, and his own monuments and capital city
razed to the ground by orthodox successors. [252] In the same way the
earlier attempt of the alien Hyksos to suppress the native polytheism
and image-worship had come to nothing. [253]
The history of Akhunaton is established by the later
Egyptology. Sharpe makes no mention of it, though the point had
been discussed from 1839 onwards. Cp. Lepsius, Letters from Egypt,
etc., Bohn trans. 1853, p. 27; and Nott and Gliddon's Types
of Mankind, 1854, p. 147, and Indigenous Races of the Earth,
1857, pp. 116-17, in both of which places will be found the
king's portrait. See last reference for the idle theory that he
had been emasculated, as to which the confutation by Wiedemann
(Aegyptische Geschichte, p. 397, cited by Budge, Hist. of Egypt,
1902, iv, 128) is sufficient. In point of fact, he figures in
the monuments as father of three or seven children (Wiedemann,
Rel. of Anc. Eg. p. 37; Erman, p. 69; Budge, iv, 123, 127).
Dispute still reigns as to the origin of the cult to which
he devoted himself. A theory of its nature and derivation,
based on that of Mr. J. H. Breasted (History of Egypt, 1906,
p. 396), is set forth in an article by Mr. A. E. P. Weigall
on "Religion and Empire in Ancient Egypt" in the Quarterly
Review, Jan. 1909. On this view Aten or Aton is simply Adon =
"the Lord"--a name ultimately identified with Adonis, the Syrian
Sun-God and Vegetation-God. The king's grandfather was apparently
a Syrian, presumably of royal lineage; and Queen Tii or Thiy, the
king's mother, who with her following had wrought a revolution
against the priesthood of Amen, brought him up as a devotee of
her own faith. On her death he became more and more fanatical,
getting out of touch with people and priesthood, so that "his
empire fell to pieces rapidly." Letters still exist (among the
Tell-el-Amarna tablets) which were sent by his generals in Asia,
vainly imploring help. He died at the age of twenty-eight; and
if the body lately found, and supposed to be his, is really so,
his malady was water on the brain.
Mr. Breasted, finding that Akhunaton's God is described by him in
inscriptions as "the father and the mother of all that he made,"
ranks the cult very high in the scale of theism. Mr. Weigall
(art. cited, p. 60; so also Budge, Hist. iv, 125) compares a hymn
of the king's with Ps. civ, 24 sq., and praises it accordingly. The
parallel is certainly close, but the document is not thereby
certificated as philosophic. On the strength of the fact that
Akhunaton "had dreamed that the Aton religion would bind the
nations together," Mr. Weigall credits him with harbouring "an
illusive ideal towards which, thirty-two centuries later, mankind
is still struggling in vain" (p. 66). The ideal of subjugating
the nations to one God, cherished later by Jews, and still later
by Moslems, is hardly to be thus identified with the modern ideal
of international peace. Brugsch, in turn, credits the king with
having "willingly received the teaching about the one God of
Light," while admitting that Aten simply meant the sun's disk
(Hist. of Egypt, 1-vol. ed. p. 216).
Maspero, again, declares Tii to have been an Egyptian of old
stock, and the God "Atonou" to have been the deity of her
tribe (Hist. anc., as cited, p. 249); and he pronounces the
cult probably the most ancient variant of the religions of Ra
(p. 250). Messrs. King and Hall, who also do not accept the theory
of a Syrian derivation, coincide with Messrs. Breasted and Weigall
in extolling Akhunaton's creed. In a somewhat summary fashion
they pronounce (work cited, p. 383) that, "given an ignorance of
the true astronomical character of the sun, we see how eminently
rational a religion" was this. The conception of a moving window
in the heavens, which appears to be the core of it, seems rather
a darkening than a development of the "philosophical speculations
of the priests of the Sun at Heliopolis," from which it is held by
Messrs. King and Hall to have been derived. Similarly ill-warranted
is the decision (id. p. 384) that in Akhunaton's heresy "we see
... the highest attitude [? altitude] to which religious ideas had
attained before the days of the Hebrew prophets." Alike in India
and in Egypt, pantheistic ideas of a larger scope than his or those
of the Hebrew prophets had been attained before Akhunaton's time.
Dr. E. A. Wallis Budge, on the other hand, points out that the cult
of the Aten is really an ancient one in Egypt, and was carried
on by Thothmes III, father of Amen-hetep II, a century before
Akhunaton (Amen-hetep IV), its "original home" being Heliopolis
(History of Egypt, 1902, iv, 48, 119). So also von Bissing,
Gesch. Aeg. in Umriss, p. 52 (reading "Iton"). Rejecting the view
that "Aten" is only a form of "Adon," Dr. Budge pronounces that
"as far as can be seen now the worship of Aten was something
like a glorified materialism"--whatever that may be--"which had
to be expounded by priests who performed ceremonies similar
to those which belonged to the old Heliopolitan sun-worship,
without any connection whatsoever with the worship of Yahweh;
and a being of the character of the Semitic God Adôn had no place
in it anywhere." Further, he considers that it "contained no
doctrines on the unity or oneness of Aten similar to those which
are found in the hymns to Ra, and none of the beautiful ideas
on the future life with which we are familiar from the hymns and
other compositions in the Book of the Dead" (Ib. pp. 120-21).
By Prof. Flinders Petrie Queen Tii or Thiy is surmised to have
been of Armenian origin (see Budge, iv, 96-98, as to her being
"Mesopotamian"); and Prof. Petrie, like Mr. Breasted, has
inferred that she brought with her the cult of which her son
became the devotee. (So also Brugsch, p. 214.) Messrs. King and
Hall recognize that the cult had made some headway before Akhunaton
took it up; but deny that there is any reason for supposing Queen
Tii to have been of foreign origin; adding: "It seems undoubted
that the Aten cult was a development of pure Egyptian religious
thought." Certainty on such an issue seems hardly possible; but
it may be said, as against the theory of a foreign importation,
that there is no evidence whatever of any high theistic cult of
Adonis in Syria at the period in question. Adonis was primarily
a Vegetation-God; and the older view that Aten simply means
"the sun's disk" is hardly disposed of. It is noteworthy that
under Akhunaton's patronage Egyptian sculpture enjoyed a term
of freedom from the paralyzing convention which reigned before
and after (King and Hall, as cited, pp. 383-84). This seems to
have been the result of the innovating taste of the king (Budge,
Hist. iv, 124-26).
As the centuries lapsed the course of popular religion was rather
downward than upward, if it can be measured by the multiplication of
superstitions. [254] When under the Ramesside dynasty the high-priests
of Amen became by marriage with the royal family the virtual rulers,
sacerdotalism went from bad to worse. [255] The priests, who held the
allegorical key to mythology, seem to have been the main multipliers of
magic and fable, mummery, ceremonial, and symbol; and they jealously
guarded their specialty against lay competition. [256] Esoteric and
exoteric doctrine flourished in their degrees side by side, [257] the
instructed few apparently often accepting or acting upon both; and
primitive rites all the while flourished on the level of the lowest
savagery, [258] though the higher ethical teaching even improves,
as in India.
Conflicts, conquests, and changes of dynasties seem to have made
little difference in the life of the common people. [259] Religion was
the thread by which any ruler could lead them; and after the brief
destructive outbreak of Cambyses, [260] himself at first tolerant,
the Persian conquerors allowed the old faiths to subsist, caring only,
like their predecessors, to prevent strife between the cults which
would not tolerate each other. [261] The Ptolemies are found adopting
and using the native cults as the native kings had done ages before
them; [262] and in the learned Greek-speaking society created by their
dynasty at Alexandria there can have been at least as little concrete
belief as prevailed in the priesthood of the older civilization. It
developed a pantheistic philosophy which ultimately, in the hands
of Plotinus, compares very well with that of the Upanishads and of
later European systems. But this was a hot-house flower; and in the
open world outside, where Roman rule had broken the power of the
ancient priesthood and Greek immigration had overlaid the native
element, Christianity found an easy entrance, and in a declining
society flourished at its lowest level. [263] The ancient ferment,
indeed, produced many stirrings of relative freethought in the
form of Christian heresies to be noted hereafter; one of the most
notable being that of Arius, who, like his antagonist Athanasius,
was an Alexandrian. But the cast of mind which elaborated the dogma
of the Trinity is as directly an outcome of Egyptian culture-history
as that which sought to rationalize the dogma by making the popular
deity a created person; [264] and the long and manifold internecine
struggles of the sects were the due duplication of the older strifes
between the worshippers of the various sacred animals in the several
cities. [265] In the end the entire population was but so much clay
to take the impress of the Arab conquerors, with their new fanatic
monotheism standing for the minimum of rational thought.
For the rest, the higher forms of the ancient religion had been
able to hold their own till they were absolutely suppressed, with
the philosophic schools, by the Byzantine government, which at the
same time marked the end of the ancient civilization by destroying
or scattering the vast collection of books in the Serapeion,
annihilating at once the last pagan cult and the stored treasure
of pagan culture. With that culture too, however, there had been
associated to the last the boundless credulity which had so long kept
it company. In the second century of our era, under the Antonines,
we have Apuleius telling of Isis worshipped as "Nature, parent of
things, mistress of all elements, the primordial birth of the ages,
highest of divinities, queen of departed spirits, first of the heavenly
ones, the single manifestation of all Gods and Goddesses," who rules
all things in earth and heaven, and who stands for the sole deity
worshipped throughout the world under many names; [266] the while
her worshipper cherishes all manner of the wildest superstitions,
which even the subtle philosophy of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonic
school did not discard. All alike, with the machinery of exorcism,
were passed on to the worship of the Christian Queen of Heaven, leaving
out only the pantheism; and when that worship in turn was overthrown,
the One God of Islam enrolled in his train the same host of ancient
hallucinations. [267] The fatality of circumstance was supreme.
§ 6. PHOENICIA
Of the inner workings of thought in the Phoenician religion we know
even less, directly, than can be gathered as to any other ancient
system of similar notoriety, [268] so completely did the Roman conquest
of Carthage, and the Macedonian conquest of Tyre and Sidon, blot out
the literary remains of their peoples. Yet there are some indirect
clues of a remarkable sort.
It is hardly to be doubted, in the first place, that Punic speculation
took the same main lines as the early thought of Egypt and Mesopotamia,
whose cultures, mixing in Syria as early as the fifteenth century
B.C., had laid the basis of the later Phoenician civilization. [269]
The simple fact that among the Syro-Phoenicians was elaborated the
alphabet adopted by all the later civilizations of the West almost
implies a special measure of intellectual progress. We can indeed
trace the normal movement of syncretism in the cults, and the normal
tendency to improve their ethics. The theory of an original pure
monotheism [270] is no more tenable here than anywhere else; we
can see that the general designation of the chief God of any city,
usually recognizable as a Sun-God, by a title rather than a name,
[271] though it pointed to a general worship of a pre-eminent power,
in no sense excluded a belief in minor powers, ranking even as
deities. It did not do so in the admittedly polytheistic period;
and it cannot therefore be supposed to have done so previously.
The chief Phoenician Gods, it is admitted, were everywhere called
by one or several of the titles Baal (Lord), Ram or Rimmon
(High), Melech or Molech (King), Melkarth (King of the City),
Eliun (Supreme), Adonai (Lord), Bel-Samin (Lord of Heaven),
etc. (Cp. Rawlinson, History of Phoenicia, p. 231; Tiele,
Hist. comp. des anc. relig., etc., Fr. tr. 1882, ch. iii,
pp. 281-87; Outlines, p. 82; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 246,
and art. "Phoenicia" in Encyc. Biblica, iii, 3742-5; Sayce,
Ancient Empires, p. 200.) The just inference is that the Sun-God
was generally worshipped, the sun being for the Semitic peoples
the pre-eminent Nature-power. "He alone of all the Gods is by
Philo explained not as a deified man, but as the sun, who had
been invoked from the earliest times" (Meyer, last cit.). (All
Gods were not Baals: the division between them and lesser powers
corresponded somewhat, as Tiele notes, to that between Theoi
and Daimones with the Greeks, and Ases and Vanes with the old
Scandinavians. So in Babylonia and India the Bels and Asuras
were marked off from lesser deities.) The fact that the Western
Semites thus carried with them the worship of their chief deities
in all their colonies would seem to make an end of the assumption
(Gomme, Ethnology of Folklore, p. 68; Menzies, History of Religion,
pp. 284, 250) that there is something specially "Aryan" in the
"conception of Gods who could and did accompany the tribes
wheresoever they travelled." Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iii, 169.
The worship of the Baal, however, being that of a special
Nature-power, cannot in early any more than in later times have
been monotheistic. What happened was a preponderance of the
double cult of the God and Goddess, Baal and Ashtoreth, as in
the unquestionably polytheistic period (Rawlinson, p. 323; Tiele,
Hist. Comp., as cited, p. 319).
Apart from this normal tendency to identify Gods called by the same
title (a state of things which, however, in ancient as in modern
Catholic countries, tended at the same time to set up special adoration
of a given image), there is seen in the later religion of Phoenicia
a spirit of syncretism which operated in a manner the reverse of that
seen in later Jewry. In the latter case the national God was ultimately
conceived, however fanatically, as universal, all others being negated:
in commercial Phoenicia, many foreign Gods were adopted, [272] the
tendency being finally to conceive them as all manifestations of one
Power. [273] And there is reason to suppose that in the cosmopolitan
world of the Phoenician cities the higher intelligence reached a yet
more subversive, though still fallacious, theory of religion. The
pretended ancient Phoenician cosmogony of Sanchoniathon, preserved
by Eusebius, [274] while worthless as a record of the most ancient
beliefs, [275] may be taken as representing views current not only in
the time and society of Philo of Byblos (100 C.E.), who had pretended
to translate it, but in a period considerably earlier. This cosmogony
is, as Eusebius complains, deliberately atheistic; and it further
systematically explains away all God stories as being originally true
of remarkable men.
Where this primitive form of atheistic rationalism originated we
cannot now tell. But it was in some form current before the time of
the Greek Evêmeros, who systematically developed it about 300 B.C.;
for in a monotheistic application it more or less clearly underlies
the redaction of much of the Hebrew Bible, where both patriarchal and
regal names of the early period are found to be old God-names; and
where the Sun-God Samson is made a "judge" [276]--having originally
been the Judge-God. In the Byblian writer, however, the purpose
is not monotheistic, but atheistic; and the problem is whether
this or that was the earlier development of the method. The natural
presumption seems to be that the Hebrew adaptors of the old mythology
used an already applied method, as the Christian Fathers later used
the work of Evêmeros; and the citation from Thallos by Lactantius
[277] suggests that the method had been applied in Chaldea, as it
was spontaneously applied by the Greek epic poets who made memorable
mortals out of the ancient deities Odysseus and Æneas, [278] Helen,
Castor and Pollux, Achilles, and many more. [279] It is in any case
credible enough that among the much-travelling Phoenicians, with their
open pantheon, an atheistic Evêmerism was thought out by the skeptical
types before Evêmeros; and that the latter really drew his principles
from Phoenicia. [280] At any rate, they were there received, doubtless
by a select few, as a means of answering the customary demand for
"something in place of" the rejected Gods. Concerning the tradition
that an ancient Phoenician, Moschus, had sketched an atomic theory,
we may again say that, though there is no valid evidence for the
statement, it counts for something as proof that the Phoenicians had
an old repute for rationalism.
The Byblian cosmogony may be conceived as an atheistic refinement
on those of Babylon, adopted by the Jews. It connects with
the theogony ascribed to Hesiod (which has Asiatic aspects),
in that both begin with Chaos, and the Gods of Hesiod are born
later. But whereas in Hesiod Chaos brings forth Erebos and
Night (Eros being causal force), and Night bears Æther and Day
to Erebos, while Earth virginally brings forth Heaven (Uranos)
and the Sea, and then bears the first Gods in union with Heaven,
the Phoenician fragment proceeds from black chaos and wind, after
long ages, through Eros or Desire, to a kind of primeval slime,
from which arise first animals without intelligence, who in
turn produce some with intelligence. The effort to expel Deity
must have been considerable, for sun and moon and stars seem
to arise uncreated, and the sun's action spontaneously produces
further developments. The first man and his wife are created by
male and female principles of wind, and their offspring proceed
to worship the Sun, calling him Beel Samin. The other Gods are
explained as eminent mortals deified after their death. See the
details in Cory's Ancient Fragments, Hodges' ed. pp. 1-22. As to
Moschus, cp. Renouvier, Manuel de philos. ancienne, 1844, i, 238;
and Mosheim's ed. of Cudworth's Intellectual System, Harrison's
tr. i, 20; also Cudworth's Eternal and Immutable Morality, same
ed. iii, 548. On the general question of Phoenician rationalism,
compare Pausanias's account (vii, 23) of his discussion with a
Sidonian, who explained that Apollo was simply the sun, and his
son Æsculapius simply the healing art.
At the same time there are signs even in Phoenician worship of an
effort after an ethical as well as an intellectual purification of the
common religion. To call "the" Phoenician religion "impure and cruel"
[281] is to obscure the fact that in all civilizations certain types
and cults vary from the norm. In Phoenicia as in Israel there were
humane anti-sensualists who either avoided or impugned the sensual
and the cruel cults around them; as well as ascetics who stood by
human sacrifice while resisting sexual licence. That the better types
remained the minority is to be understood in terms of the balance
of the social and cultural forces of their civilization, not of any
racial bias or defect, intellectual or moral.
The remark of E. Meyer (Gesch. des Alt. i, 211, § 175), that
an ethical or mystical conception of the God was "entirely
alien" to "the Semite," reproduces the old fallacy of definite
race-characters; and Mr. Sayce, in remarking that "the immorality
performed in the name of religion was the invention of the Semitic
race itself" (Anc. Emp. p. 203; contrast Tiele, Outlines, p. 83),
after crediting the Semitic race with an ethical faculty alien to
the Akkadian (above, p. 66), suggests another phase of the same
error. There is nothing special to the Semites in the case save
degree of development, similar phenomena being found in many savage
religions, in Mexico, and in India. (Meyer in later passages and
in his article on Ba'al in Boscher's Lexikon modifies his position
as to Semitic versus other religions.) On the other hand, there
was a chaste as well as an unchaste worship of the Phoenician
Ashtoreth. Ashtoreth Karnaim, or Tanit, the Virgin, as opposed to
Atergates and Annit, the Mother-Goddesses, had the characteristics
of Artemis. Cp. Tiele, Religion comparée, as cited, pp. 318-19;
Menzies, History of Religion, pp. 159, 168-71; Kuenen, Religion of
Israel, i, 91; Smith, Religion of the Semites, pp. 292, 458. [In
Rome, Venus Cloacina, sometimes ignorantly described as a Goddess
of Vice, was anciently "the Goddess of chaste and holy matrimony"
(Ettore Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, Eng. tr. 1906,
p. 199)]. For the rest, the cruelty of the Phoenician cults,
in the matter of human sacrifice, was fully paralleled among
the early Teutons. See Tiele, Outlines, p. 199; and the author's
Pagan Christs, Pt. ii, ch. i, § 4.
§ 7. ANCIENT CHINA
Of all the ancient Asiatic systems that of China yields us the
first clear biographical trace of a practical rationalist, albeit
a rationalist stamped somewhat by Chinese conservatism. Confucius
(Kung-fu-tse = Kung the Master) is a tangible person, despite some
mythic accretions, whereas Zarathustra and Buddha are at best but
doubtful possibilities, and even Lao-Tsze (said to have been born
604 B.C.) is somewhat elusive.
Before Confucius (551-478 B.C.), it is evident, there had been a
slackening in religious belief among the governing classes. It is
claimed for the Chinese, as for so many other races, that they had
anciently a "pure" monotheism; [282] but the ascription, as usual,
is misleading. They saw in the expanse of heaven the "Supreme"
Power, not as a result of reflection on the claims of other deities
among other races, but simply as expressing their primordial tribal
recognition of that special God, before contact with the God-ideas
of other peoples. Monotheistic in the modern sense they could not
be. Concerning them as concerning the Semites we may say that the
claim of a primary monotheism for them "is also true of all primitive
totemistic or clannish communities. A man is born into a community
with such a divine head, and the worship of that God is the only one
possible to him." [283] Beside the belief in the Heaven-God, there
stood beliefs in heavenly and earthly spirits, and in ancestors,
who were worshipped with altars. [284]
The remark of Professor Legge (Religions of China, p. 11), that
the relation of the names Shang-Ti = Supreme Ruler, and T'ien =
the sky, "has kept the monotheistic element prominent in the
religion proper of China down to the present time," may serve
to avert disputation. It may be agreed that the Chinese were
anciently "monotheists" in the way in which they are at present,
when they worship spirits innumerable. When, however, Professor
Legge further says (p. 16) that the ancient monotheism five
thousand years ago was "in danger of being corrupted" by nature
worship and divination, he puts in doubt the meaning of the other
expression above cited. He states several times (pp. 46, 51, 52)
that the old monotheism remains; but speaks (p. 84) of the mass of
the people as "cut off from the worship of God for themselves." And
see p. 91 as to ancestor-worship by the Emperor. Tiele (Outlines,
p. 27) in comparison somewhat overstresses the polytheistic aspect
of the Chinese religion in his opening definition; but he adds the
essential facts. Dr. Legge's remark that "the idea of revelation
did not shock" the ancient Chinese (p. 13) is obscure. He is
dealing with the ordinary Akkado-Babylonian astrology. Pauthier,
on the contrary (Chine Moderne, 1853, p. 250), asserts that in
China "no doctrine has ever been put forth as revealed."
As regards ancestral worship, we have record of a display of disregard
for it by the lords of Lû in Confucius's time; [285] and the general
attitude of Confucius himself, religious only in his adherence to
old ceremonies, is incompatible with a devout environment. It has
been disputed whether he makes a "skeptic denial of any relation
between man and a living God"; [286] but an authority who disputes
this complains that his "avoiding the personal name of Tî, or God,
and only using the more indefinite term Heaven," suggests "a coldness
of temperament and intellect in the matter of religion." [287] He was,
indeed, above all things a moralist; and concerning the spirits in
general he taught that "To give one's self to the duties due to men,
and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be
called wisdom." [288] He would never express an opinion concerning the
fate of souls, [289] or encourage prayer; [290] and in his redaction of
the old records he seems deliberately to have eliminated mythological
expressions. [291] "I would say," writes Dr. Legge (who never forgets
to be a missionary), "that he was unreligious rather than irreligious;
yet, by the coldness of his temperament and intellect in this matter,
his influence is unfavourable to the development of true religious
feeling among the Chinese people generally, and he prepared the way
for the speculations of the literati of medieval and modern times,
which have exposed them to the charge of atheism." [292]
The view that there was a very early "arrest of growth" in
the Chinese religion (Menzies, History of Religion, p. 108),
"before the ordinary developments of mythology and doctrine,
priesthood," etc., had "time to take place," is untenable as to
the mythology. The same writer had previously spoken (p. 107) of
the Chinese system before Confucius as having "already parted with
all savage and irrational elements." That Confucius would seek
to eliminate these seems likely enough, though the documentary
fact is disputed.
In the elder contemporary of Confucius, Lao-Tsze ("Old Philosopher"),
the founder of Taouism, may be recognized another and more remarkable
early freethinker of a different stamp, in some essential respects
much less conservative, and in intellectual cast markedly more
original. Where Confucius was an admirer and student of antiquity,
Lao-Tsze expressly put such concern aside, [293] seeking a law of
life within himself, in a manner suggestive of much Indian and other
Oriental thought. So far as our records go, he is the first known
philosopher who denied that men could form an idea of deity, that
being the infinite; and he avowedly evolved, by way of makeshift,
the idea of a primordial and governing Reason (Tau), closely analogous
to the Logos of later Platonism. Since the same idea is traceable in
more primitive forms alike in the Babylonian and Brahmanic systems,
[294] it is arguable that he may have derived it from one of these
sources; but the problem is very obscure. In any case, his system is
one of rationalistic pantheism. [295]
His personal relation to Confucius was that of a self-poised sage,
impatient of the other's formalism and regard to prescription and
precedent. Where they compare is in their avoidance of supernaturalism,
and in the sometimes singular rationality of their views of social
science; in which latter respect, however, they were the recipients
and transmitters of an already classic tradition. [296] Thus both had
a strong bias to conservatism; and in Lao-Tsze it went the length of
prescribing that the people should not be instructed. [297] Despite
this, it is not going too far to say that no ancient people appears
to have produced sane thinkers and scientific moralists earlier than
the Chinese. The Golden Rule, repeatedly formulated by Confucius,
seems to be but a condensation on his part of doctrine he found in the
older classics; [298] and as against Lao-Tsze he is seen maintaining
the practical form of the principle of reciprocity. The older man,
like some later teachers, preached the rule of returning kindness for
evil, [299] without leaving any biographical trace of such practice on
his own part. Confucius, dealing with human nature as it actually is,
argued that evil should be met by justice, and kindness with kindness,
else the evil were as much fostered as the good. [300]
It is to be regretted that Christian writers should keep up the
form of condemning Confucius (so Legge, Religions of China,
p. 144; Life and Teachings of Confucius, 4th ed. p. 111 sq.;
Douglas, p. 144) for a teaching the practice of which is normally
possible, and is never transcended in their own Church, where the
profession of returning good for evil merely constitutes one of
the great hypocrisies of civilization. Dr. Legge does not scruple
to resort to a bad sophism in this connection. "If," he says,
"we only do good to them that do good to us, what reward have
we?" He thus insinuates that Confucius vetoed any spontaneous act
of benevolence. The question is not of such acts, but of kind acts
to those who seek to injure us. On the other hand, Mr. Chalmers,
who dedicates his translation of Lao-Tsze to Dr. Legge,
actually taunts Lao-Tsze (p. 38) with absurdity in respect of
his doctrine. Such is the sincerity of orthodox polemic. How
little effect the self-abnegating teaching of Lao-Tsze, in turn,
has had on his followers may be gathered from their very legends
concerning him (Douglas, p. 182). There is a fallacy, further,
in the Christian claim that Confucius (Analects, v, 11; xv, 23)
put the Golden Rule in a lower form than that of the Gospels, in
that he gave it the negative form, "Do not that which ye would not
have done unto you." This is really the rational and valid form of
the Rule. The positive form, unless construed in the restrictive
sense, would merely prescribe a non-moral doing of favours in
the hope of receiving favours in return. It appears, further,
from the passage in the Analects, v, 11, that the doctrine in
this form was familiar before Confucius.
Lao-Tsze, on his part, had reduced religion to a minimum. "There is
not a word in the Tâo Têh King [by Lao-Tsze] of the sixth century
B.C. that savours either of superstition or religion." [301] But the
quietist and mystical philosophy of Lao-Tsze and the practicality
of Confucius alike failed to check the growth of superstition among
the ever-increasing ignorant Chinese population. Says our Christian
authority: "In the works of Lieh-Tsze and Chwang-Tsze, followers of
Lao-Tsze, two or three centuries later, we find abundance of grotesque
superstition, though we are never sure how far those writers really
believed the things they relate." In point of fact, Lieh-Tsze is now
commonly held by scholars to be an imaginary personage, whose name is
given to a miscellaneous collection of teachings and moral tales, much
interpolated and added to long after the date assigned to him--circa
400 B.C. [302] It contains a purely pantheistic statement of the cosmic
problem, [303] and among the apologues is one in which a boy of twelve
years is made tersely and cogently to rebut the teleological view of
things. [304] The writers of such sections are not likely to have held
the superstitions set forth in others. But that superstition should
supervene upon light where the means of light were dwindling was a
matter of course. It was but the old fatality, seen in Brahmanism,
in Buddhism, in Egypt, in Islam, and in Christianity.
Confucius himself was soon worshipped. [305] A reaction against him
set in after a century or two, doctrines of pessimism on the one hand,
and of universal love on the other, finding a hearing; [306] but the
influence of the great Confucian teacher Mencius (Meng-Tse) carried
his school through the struggle. "In his teaching, the religious
element retires still further into the background" [307] than in that
of Confucius; and he is memorable for his insistence on the remarkable
principle of Confucius, that "the people are born good"; that they are
the main part of the State; and that it is the ruler's fault if they
go astray. [308] Some rulers seem to have fully risen to this view
of things, for we have an account of a rationalistic duke, who lived
earlier than 250 B.C., refusing to permit the sacrifice of a man as
a scapegoat on his behalf; and in the year 166 B.C. such sacrifices
were permanently abolished by the Han Emperor Wen. [309] But Mencius,
who, as a sociologist, excels not only Lao-Tsze but Confucius, put his
finger on the central force in Chinese history when he taught that "it
is only men of education who, without a certain livelihood, are able to
maintain a fixed heart. As to the people, if they have not a certain
livelihood, it follows that they will not have a fixed heart." [310]
So clearly was the truth seen in China over two thousand years ago. But
whether under feudalism or under imperialism, under anarchy or under
peace--and the teachings of Lao-Tsze and Mencius combined to discredit
militarism [311]--the Chinese mass always pullulated on cheap food,
at a low standard of comfort, and in a state of utter ignorance. Hence
the cult of Confucius was maintained among them only by recognizing
their normal superstition; but on that basis it has remained secure,
despite competition, and even a term of early persecution. One
iconoclastic emperor, the founder of the Ch'in or Ts'in dynasty
(221 or 212 B.C.), sought to extirpate Confucianism as a means to a
revolution in the government; but the effort came to nothing. [312]
In the same way Lao-Tsze came to be worshipped as a God [313] under
the religion called Taouism, a title sometimes mistranslated as
rationalism, "a name admirably calculated to lead the mind astray as
to what the religion is." [314] It would seem as if the older notion
of the Tau, philosophically purified by Lao-Tsze, remained a popular
basis for his school, and so wrought its degradation. The Taoists or
Tao-sse "do their utmost to be as unreasonable as possible." [315]
They soon reverted from the philosophic mysticism of Lao-Tsze,
after a stage of indifferentism, [316] to a popular supernaturalism,
[317] which "the cultivated Chinese now regard with unmixed contempt";
[318] the crystallized common-sense of Confucius, on the other hand,
allied as it is with official ceremonialism, retaining its hold as
an esoteric code for the learned. The evolution has thus closely
resembled that which took place in India.
Nowhere, perhaps, is our sociological lesson more clearly to be
read than in China. Centuries before our era it had a rationalistic
literature, an ethic no less earnest and far more sane that that of
the Hebrews, and a line of known teachers as remarkable in their way
as those of ancient Greece who flourished about the same period. But
where even Greece, wrought upon by all the other cultures of antiquity,
ultimately retrograded, till under Christianity it stayed at a Chinese
level of unprogressiveness for a thousand years, isolated China,
helped by no neighbouring culture adequate to the need, has stagnated
as regards the main mass of its life, despite some political and other
fluctuations, till our own day. Its social problem, like that of India,
is now more or less dependent, unfortunately, on the solutions that
may be reached in Europe, where the problem is only relatively more
mature, not fundamentally different.
§ 8. MEXICO AND PERU
In the religions of pre-Christian Mexico and Peru we have peculiarly
interesting examples of "early" religious systems, flourishing at
some such culture-level as the ancient Akkadian, in full play at
the time of the European Renaissance. In Mexico a partly "high"
ethical code, as the phrase goes, went concurrently with the most
frightful indulgence in human sacrifice, sustained by the continuous
practice of indecisive war for the securing of captives, and by the
interest of a vast priesthood. In this system had been developed all
the leading features of those of the Old World--the identification
of all the Gods with the Sun; the worship of fire, and the annual
renewal of it by special means; the conception of God-sacrifice and of
communion with the God by the act of eating his slain representative;
the belief in a Virgin-Mother-Goddess; the connection of humanitarian
ethic with the divine command; the opinion that celibacy, as a state
of superior virtue, is incumbent on most priests and on all would-be
saints; the substitution of a sacramental bread for the "body and
blood" of the God-Man; the idea of an interceding Mother-Goddess;
the hope of a coming Saviour; the regular practice of prayer;
exorcism, special indulgences, confession, absolution, fasting, and
so on. [319] In Peru, also, many of those conceptions were in force;
but the limitation of the power and numbers of the priesthood by the
imperial system of the Incas, and the state of peace normal in their
dominions, prevented the Mexican development of human sacrifice.
It seems probable that the Toltecs, who either fled before or were
for the most part subdued or destroyed by the barbarian Chichimecs
(in turn subdued by the Aztecs) a few centuries before Cortes, were
on the whole a less warlike and more civilized people, with a less
bloody worship. [320] Their God, Quetzalcoatl, retained through fear
by the Aztecs, [321] was a comparatively benign deity opposed to
human sacrifice, apparently rather a late purification or partial
rationalization of an earlier God-type than a primitively harmless
conception. [322] Insofar as they were sundered by quarrels between
the sectaries of the God Quetzalcoatl and the God Votan, though
their religious wars seem to have been as cruel as those of the
early Christians of North Africa, there appears to have been at work
among them a movement towards unbloody religion. In any case their
overthrow seems to stand for the military inferiority of the higher
and more rational civilization [323] to the lower and more religious,
which in turn, however, was latterly being destroyed by its enormously
burdensome military and priestly system, and may even be held to have
been ruined by its own superstitious fears. [324]
Among the recognizable signs of normal progress in the ordinary Aztec
religion were (1) the general recognition of the Sun as the God really
worshipped in all the temples of the deities with special names;
[325] (2) the substitution in some cults of baked bread-images for a
crucified human victim. The question arises whether the Aztecs, but
for their overwhelming priesthood, might conceivably have risen above
their system of human sacrifices, as the Aryan Hindus had done in an
earlier age. Their material civilization, which carried on that of
the kindred Toltecs, was at several points superior to that which the
Spaniards put in its place; and their priesthood, being a leisured
and wealthy class, might have developed intellectually as did the
Brahmans, [326] if its economic basis had been changed. But only a
conquest or other great political convulsion could conceivably have
overturned the vast cultus of human sacrifice, which overran all life,
and cherished war as a means of procuring victims.
In the kindred State of Tezcuco, civilization seems to have gone
further than in Aztec Anahuac; and about the middle of the fifteenth
century one Tezcucan king, the conqueror Netzahualcoyotl, who has
left writings in both prose and verse, is seen attaining to something
like a philosophic creed, of a monotheistic stamp. [327] He is said
to have rejected all idol-worship, and erected, as aforesaid, an
altar "to the Unknown God," [328] forbidding all sacrifices of blood
in that worship. But among the Tezcucans these never ceased; three
hundred slaves were sacrificed at the obsequies of the conqueror's son,
Netzahualpilli; and the Aztec influence over the superior civilization
was finally complete.
In Peru, again, we find civilization advancing in respect of the
innovation of substituting statuettes for wives and slaves in the
tombs of the rich; and we have already noted [329] the remarkable
records of the avowed unbelief of several Incas in the divinity of
the nationally worshipped Sun. For the rest, there was the dubious
quasi-monotheistic cult of the Creator-God, Pachacamac, concerning
whom every fresh discussion raises fresh doubt. [330]
Mr. Lang, as usual, leans to the view that Pachacamac
stands for a primordial and "elevated" monotheism (Making of
Religion, pp. 263-70), while admitting the slightness of the
evidence. Garcilasso, the most eminent authority, who, however,
is contradicted by others, represents that the conception
of Pachacamac as Creator, needing no temple or sacrifice, was
"philosophically" reached by the Incas and their wise men (Lang,
p. 262). The historical fact seems to be that a race subdued
by the Incas, the Yuncas, had one temple to this deity; and
that the Incas adopted the cult. Garcilasso says the Yuncas had
human sacrifices and idols, which the Incas abolished, setting up
their monotheistic cult in that one temple. This is sufficiently
unlikely; and it may very well have been the fact that the Yuncas
had offered no sacrifices. But if they did not, it was because
their material conditions, like those of the Australians and
Fuegians, had not facilitated the practice; and in that case
their "monotheism" likewise would merely represent the ignorant
simplicity of a clan-cult. (Compare Tylor, Primitive Culture,
ii, 335 sq.; Brinton, Myths of the New World, p. 52.) On the
other hand, if the Incas had set up a cult without sacrifices
to a so-called One God, their idea would be philosophical, as
taking into account the multitude of clan-cults as well as their
own national worships, and transcending these.
But the outstanding sociological fact in Incarial Peru was the
absolute subjection of the mass of the people; and though its material
development and political organization were comparable to those of
ancient Persia under the Akhamenidæ, so that the Spanish Conquest
stood here for mere destruction, there is no reason to think that at
the best its intellectual life could have risen higher than that of
pre-Alexandrian Egypt, to which it offers so many resemblances. The
Incas' schools were for the nobility only. [331] Rationalistic Incas
and high priests might have ruled over a docile, unlettered multitude,
gradually softening their moral code, in connection with their rather
highly-developed doctrine (resembling the Egyptian) of a future
state. But these seem the natural limits, in the absence of contact
with another civilization not too disparate for a fruitful union.
In Mexico, on the other hand, an interaction of native cultures had
already occurred to some purpose; and the strange humanitarianism of
the man-slaying priests, who made free public hospitals of part of
their blood-stained temples, [332] suggests a possibility of esoteric
mental culture among them. They had certainly gone relatively far in
their moral code, as apart from their atrocious creed of sacrifice,
even if we discount the testimony of the benevolent priest Sahagun;
[333] and they had the beginnings of a system of education for the
middle classes. [334] But unless one of the States which habitually
warred for captives should have conquered the others--in which case
a strong ruler might have put an end to the wholesale religious
slaughter of his own subjects, as appears to have been done anciently
in Mesopotamia--the priests in all likelihood would never have
transcended their hideous hallucination of sacrifice. Their murdered
civilization is thus the "great perhaps" of sociology; organized
religion being the most sinister factor in the problem.
§ 9. THE COMMON FORCES OF DEGENERATION
It is implied more or less in all the foregoing summaries that there
is an inherent tendency in all systematized and instituted religion to
degenerate intellectually and morally, save for the constant corrective
activity of freethought. It may be well, however, to note specifically
the forms or phases of the tendency.
1. Dogmatic and ritual religion being, to begin with, a more or
less general veto on fresh thinking, it lies in its nature that the
religious person is as such less intelligently alive to all problems of
thought and conduct than he otherwise might be--a fact which at least
outweighs, in a whole society, the gain from imposing a terrorized
conformity on the less well-biassed types. Wherever conduct is a matter
of sheer obedience to a superhuman code, it is ipso facto uncritical
and unprogressive. Thus the history of most religions is a record of
declines and reformations, each new affirmation of moral freethought
ad hoc being in turn erected into a set of sheer commands. To set
up the necessary ferment of corrective thought even for a time,
there seems to be needed (a) a provocation to the intelligence, as
in the spectacle of conflict of cults; and (b) a provocation to the
moral sense and to self-interest through a burdensome pressure of
rites or priestly exactions. An exceptional personality, of course,
may count for much in the making of a movement; though the accident
of the possession of kingly power by a reformer seems to count for
much more than does genius.
2. The fortunes of such reactions are determined by socio-economic or
political conditions. They are seen to be at a minimum, as to energy
and social effect, in the conditions of greatest social invariability,
as in ancient Egypt, where progress in thought, slow at best, was
confined to the priestly and official class, and never affected
popular culture.
3. In the absence of social conditions fitted to raise popular
levels of life and thought, every religious system tends to
worsen intellectually in the sense of adding to its range of
superstition--that is, of ignorant and unreasoning belief. Credulity
has its own momentum. Even the possession of limitary sacred books
cannot check this tendency--e.g., Hinduism, Judaism, Mohammedanism,
Mazdeism, Christianity up till the age of doubt and science, and the
systems of ancient Egypt, Babylon, and post-Confucian China. This
worsening can take place alongside of a theoretic purification of
belief within the sphere of the educated theological class.
Christian writers have undertaken to show that such deterioration
went on continuously in India from the beginning of the Vedic
period, popular religion sinking from Varuna to Indra, from Indra
to the deities of the Atharva Veda, and from these to the Puranas
(cp. Dr. J. Murray Mitchell, Hinduism Past and Present, 1885,
pp. 22, 25, 26, 54). The argument, being hostile in bias from the
beginning, ignores or denies the element of intellectual advance in
the Upanishads and other later literature; but it holds good of the
general phenomena. It holds good equally, however, of the history
of Christianity in the period of the supremacy of ignorant faith
and absence of doubt and science; and is relatively applicable
to the religion of the uneducated mass at any time and place.
On the other hand, it is not at all true that religious
history is from the beginning, in any case, a process of
mere degeneration from a pure ideal. Simple statements as to
primitive ideas are found to be misleading because of their
simplicity. They can connote only the ethic of the life conditions
of the worshipper. Now, we have seen (p. 28) that small primitive
peoples living at peace and in communism, or in some respects well
placed, may be on that account in certain moral respects superior
to the average or mass of more civilized and more intelligent
peoples. [As to the kindliness and unselfishness of some savages,
living an almost communal life, and as to the scrupulous honesty
of others, there is plenty of evidence--e.g., as to Andaman
islanders, Max Müller, Anthrop. Relig., citing Colonel Cadell,
p. 177; as to Malays and Papuans, Dr. Russel Wallace, Malay
Archipelago, p. 595 (but cp. pp. 585, 587, 589); as to Esquimaux,
Keane, Man, p. 374; Reclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 15, 37, 115 (but
cp. pp. 41-42). In these and other cases unselfishness within the
tribe is the concomitant of the communal life, and represents no
conscious ethical volition, being concurrent with phases of the
grossest tribal egoism, in some cases with cannibalism, and with
the perpetual oppression of women. In the case of the preaching
of unselfishness to the young by the old among the Australians,
where Lubbock and his authorities see "the tyranny of the old"
(Origin of Civilization, 5th ed. pp. 451-52) Mr. Lang sees a pure
primeval ethic. Obviously the other is the true explanation. The
closest and best qualified observers testify, as regards a number
of tribes: "So far as anything like moral precepts are concerned
in these tribes ... it appears to us to be most probable that
they have originated in the first instance in association with
the purely selfish ideas of the older men to keep all the best
things for themselves, and in no case whatever are they supposed
to have the sanction of a superior being" (Spencer and Gillen,
North. Tribes of Cent. Australia, 1904, p. 504).]
The transition from that state to one of war and individualism
would be in a sense degeneration; but on the other hand
the entirely communistic societies are unprogressive. Broadly
speaking, it is by the path of social individuation that progress
in civilization has been made, the early city States and the later
large military States ultimately securing within themselves some
of the conditions for special development of thought, arts, and
knowledge. The residual truth is that the simple religion of the
harmless tribe is pro tanto superior to the instituted religion
of the more civilized nation with greater heights and lower depths
of life, the popular religion in the latter case standing for the
worse conditions. But the simple religion did not spring from any
higher stage of knowledge. The old theorem revived by Mr. Lang
(Making of Religion), as to religion having originally been a
pure and highly ethical monotheism, from which it degenerated
into animism and non-moral polytheism, is at best a misreading of
the facts just stated. Mr. Lang never asks what "Supreme Being"
and "monotheism" mean for savages who know nothing of other men's
religions: he virtually takes all the connotations for granted. And
as regards the most closely studied of contemporary savages
our authorities come to an emphatic conclusion that they have
no notion whatever of anything like a Supreme Being (Spencer and
Gillen, North. Tribes of Cent. Austr. pp. 491-92. Cp. A. H. Keane,
Man, p. 395, as to the "Great Spirit" of the Redskins). For the
rest, Mr. Lang's theory is demonstrably wrong in its ethical
interpretation of many anthropological facts, and as it stands
is quite irreconcilable with the law of evolution, since it
assumes an abstract monotheism as primordial. In general it
approximates scientifically to the eighteenth-century doctrine of
the superiority of savagery to civilization. (See it criticized
in the author's Studies in Religious Fallacy, and Christianity
and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 37-43, 46 sq.)
4. Even primary conditions of material well-being, if not reacted upon
by social science or a movement of freethought, may in a comparatively
advanced civilization promote religious degeneration. Thus abundance
of food is favourable to multiplication of sacrifice, and so to
priestly predominance. [335] The possession of domesticated animals,
so important to civilization, lends itself to sacrifice in a specially
demoralizing degree. But abundant cereal food-supply, making abundant
population, may greatly promote human sacrifice--e.g., Mexico.
The error of Mr. Lang's method is seen in the use he makes
(work cited, pp. 286-289, 292) of the fact that certain "low"
races--as the Australians, Andamanese, Bushmen, and Fuegians--offer
no animal sacrifice. He misses the obvious significance of the
facts that these unwarlike races have as a rule no domesticated
animals and no agriculture, and that their food supply is thus
in general precarious. The Andamanese, sometimes described
(Malthus, Essay on Population, ch. iii, and refs.; G. W. Earl,
Papuans, 1853, pp. 150-51) as very ill-fed, are sometimes said
to be well supplied with fish and game (Peschel, Races of Man,
Eng. tr. 1876, p. 147; Max Müller, Anthrop. Rel. citing Cadell,
p. 177); but in any case they have had no agriculture, and seem
to have only occasional animal food in the shape of a wild hog
(Colebrooke in Asiatic Researches, iv, 390). The Australians and
Fuegians, again, have often great difficulty in feeding themselves
(Peschel, pp. 148, 159, 334; Darwin, Voyage, ch. 10). It is argued
concerning the Australian aborigines that "as a rule they have an
abundance" (A. F. Calvert, The Aborigines of Western Australia,
1894, p. 24); but this abundance is made out by cataloguing the
whole edible fauna and flora of the coasts and the interior,
and ignores the fact that for all hunting peoples food supply
is precarious. For the Australian, "the difficulty of capturing
game with his primitive methods compels him to give his whole
time to the quest of food" (Keane, Man, p. 148). In the contrary
case of the primitive Vedic Aryans, well supplied with animals,
sacrifices were abundant, and tended to become more so (Müller,
Nat. Relig. pp. 136, 185; Physical Relig. p. 105; but cp. pp. 98,
101; Mitchell, Hinduism, p. 43; Lefmann, Geschichte des alten
Indiens, in Oncken's series, 1890, pp. 49, 430-31). Of these
sacrifices that of the horse seems to have been in Aryan use
in a most remote period (cp. M. Müller, Nat. Rel. pp. 524-25;
H. Böttger, Sonnencult der Indogermanen, Breslau, 1891, pp. 41-44;
Preller, Römische Mythologie, ed. Köhler, pp. 102, 299, 323;
Griechische Mythologie, 2te Aufg. i, 462; Frazer, Golden Bough,
ii, 315). Max Müller's remark (Physical Religion, p. 106), that
"the idea of sacrifice did not exist at a very early period,"
because there is no common Aryan term for it, counts for nothing,
as he admits (p. 107) that the Sanskrit word cannot be traced
back to any more general root; and he concedes the antiquity
of the practice. On this cp. Mitchell, Hinduism, pp. 37-38; and
the author's Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. p. 122. The reform in Hindu
sacrifice, consummated by Buddhism, has been noted above.
5. Even scientific knowledge, while enabling the thoughtful to correct
their religious conceptions, in some forms lends itself easily to
the promotion of popular superstition. Thus the astronomy of the
Babylonians, while developing some skepticism, served in general to
encourage divination and fortune-telling; and seems to have had the
same effect when communicated to the Chinese, the Hindus, and the
Hebrews, all of whom, however, practised divination previously on
other bases.
6. Finally, the development of the arts of sculpture and painting,
unaccompanied by due intellectual culture, tends to keep religion at
a low anthropomorphic level, and worsens its psychology by inviting
image-worship. [336] It is not that the earlier and non-artistic
religions are not anthropomorphic, but that they give more play
for intellectual imagination than does a cult of images. But where
the arts have been developed, idolatry has always arisen save when
resisted by a special activity or revival of freethought to that end;
and even in Protestant Christendom, where image-worship is tabooed,
religious pictures now promote popular credulity and ritualism as they
did in the Italian Renaissance. [337] So manifold are the forces of
intellectual degeneration--degeneration, that is, from an attained
ideal or stage of development, not from any primordial knowledge.