THE PANORAMA OF RELIGIONS
Twice in the history of the world has it been possible to survey a wide
panorama of religions, and twice has the interest of travellers, men of
science, and students of philosophy, been attracted by the immense
variety of worships and beliefs. In the second century of our era the
Roman Empire embraced an extraordinary range of nationalities within
its sway. In the twentieth the whole history of the human race has
been thrown open to the explorer, and an overwhelming mass of materials
from every land confronts him. It may be worth while to take a hasty
glance at the chief groups of facts that are thus disclosed, and make a
sort of map of their relations.
I
The scientific curiosity of the ancient Greeks was early awakened, and
Thales of Miletus (624-546 B.C.), chief of the seven "wise men," and
founder of Greek geometry and philosophy, was believed to have studied
under the priests of Egypt, as well as to have {38} visited Asia and
become acquainted with the Chaldean astronomy. Still more extensive
travel was attributed to his younger contemporary Pythagoras, whose
varied learning was explained in late traditions by his sojourn east
and west, among the Persian Magi, the Indian Brahmans, and the Druids
of Gaul. The first great record of observations is contained in the
History of Herodotus of Halicarnassus on the coast of Asia Minor. Born
in 484 B.C., six years after Marathon, and four years old when the
Greeks put Xerxes to flight at Salamis, he devoted his maturity to the
record of the great international struggle. Hither and thither he
passed, collecting information, an eager student of human things. In
Egypt he compared the gods with those of Greece, and attempted to
distinguish two sets of elements in Hellenic religion, Egyptian and
Pelasgic. He left notes on the Babylonians and the Persians, on the
Scythians in the vast tracts east of northern Europe, on the Getæ south
of the Danube.
When the conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) threw open the
gates of Asia, a stream of travellers passed into Persia and India,
whose reports were utilised by the geographers of later days. The
religion of Zoroaster, whose name was already known to Plato, attracted
great attention. At the court of Chandragupta on the Ganges, at the
opening of the third century B.C., Megasthenes, {39} the ambassador of
Seleucus (who had succeeded to the dominions of Alexander in Asia), set
down brief memoranda on the usages and belief of the Hindus among whom
he resided. Nearer home the representatives of Mesopotamian and
Egyptian learning commended their national cultures to their
conquerors. Berosus, priest of Bel in Babylon, translated into Greek a
Babylonian work on astronomy and astrology, and compiled a history of
his country from ancient documents; while his contemporary, Manetho, of
Sebennytus in the Nile Delta, undertook a similar service for his
native land.
Meanwhile the great library and schools at Alexandria had been founded.
Hither came students from many lands; and the Christian fathers
Eusebius and Epiphanius in the fourth century attributed to the
librarian of the royal patron of literature, Ptolemy Philadelphus
(285-247 B.C.), the design of collecting the sacred books of the
Ethiopians, Indians, Persians, Elamites, Babylonians, Assyrians,
Romans, Phœnicians, Syrians, and Greeks. The Jews had settled in
Alexandria in considerable numbers; they began to translate their
Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, and little by little they planted their
synagogues all round the Eastern Mediterranean, and finally established
their worship in Rome. The Egyptian deities in their turn went abroad.
The worship of Serapis was introduced at Athens. Isis, the sister-wife
of {40} Osiris and mother of Horus, goddess of many functions--among
others of protecting sailors--was carried round the Levant to Syria,
Asia Minor, Greece, and as far north as the Hellespont and Thrace.
Westwards she was borne to Sicily and South Italy. In due time she
entered Rome, and in spite of senatorial orders five times repeated (in
the first century B.C.), to tear down her altars and statues, she
secured her place, and received homage all through the West from the
outskirts of the Sahara to the Roman wall north of our own Tyne.
The introduction of Greek gods had begun centuries before. As early as
493 B.C., at a time of serious famine, a temple had been built to
Demeter, Dionysus, and Persephonê; many others followed; resemblances
among the native gods quickly led to identifications; and new forms of
worship tended to displace the old. After another crisis (206 B.C.)
the "Great Mother," Cybelê, the Phrygian goddess of Mount Ida, was
imported. The black aerolite which was supposed to be her abode, was
presented by King Attalus to the ambassadors of the Roman senate. The
goddess was solemnly welcomed at the Port of Ostia, and was ultimately
carried by noble Roman ladies on to the Palatine hill.
The history of later days was full of notes upon religion. Cæsar
interspersed them among the narratives of his campaigns in Gaul;
Tacitus drew on his recollections as {41} an officer in active service
for his description of the Germans. There was as yet no literature in
Wales or Ireland to embody the Celtic traditions; and the Scandinavian
Saga was unborn. But the geographers, like Strabo (first century
A.D.), collected a great deal of material that must have been gathered
ultimately from travellers, soldiers, traders, and slaves. A wise and
gentle philosophic Greek, Plutarch of Chæronea in Bœotia (A.D.
46-120), student at the university of Athens, lecturer on philosophy at
Rome, and finally priest of Pythian Apollo in his native city, is at
home in many religions. Beside altars to the Greek gods Dionysus,
Herakles, and Artemis, in his own streets, were those of the Egyptian
Isis and Anubis. The treatise on Isis and Osiris (commonly ascribed to
him) is an early essay in comparative religion. In the latter half of
the second century the traveller Pausanias passes through Greece,
describing its sacred sites, noting its monuments, recording
mythological traditions, and observing archaic rites. In this
fascinating guide-book to religious practice are survivals of ancient
savagery, still lingering at country shrines, set down with curious
unconsciousness of their significance. The historical method is as yet
only in its infancy. But Pausanias rightly discerned that its first
business is to know the facts.
In Rome, where ritual tradition held its ground with extraordinary
tenacity amid the {42} decay of belief, Marcus Terentius Varro,
renowned for his wide learning (116-28 B.C.), devoted sixteen books of
his great treatise on Antiquities to "Divine Things." Like so many
other precious works of ancient literature it has disappeared, but its
contents are partly known through its use by St. Augustine in his
famous work on "The City of God." Following a division of the gods by
the chief pontiff Mucius Scævola, he treated religion under three
heads. In the form presented by the poets' tales of the gods it was
mythical. Founded by the philosophers upon nature (_physis_) it was
physical. As administered by priests and practised in cities it was
civil. It was an old notion that religion was a legal convention
imposed by authority for purposes of popular control; and Varro does
not disdain to declare it expedient that States should be deceived in
such matters. This police-notion long regulated public custom, and
tended to render the identification of deities presenting superficial
resemblances all the more easy.
By this time the origin of the term "religion" had begun to excite
interest, as its meaning began slowly to change. Varro's
contemporaries, Cicero (106-43 B.C.) and Lucretius (about 97-53),
discussed its derivation. Cicero connected it with the root _legere_,
to "string together," to "arrange"; while Lucretius found its origin in
_ligare_, to "bind." Philology gives little help when it {43} speaks
with uncertain voice. More important is the primitive meaning which
Mr. Warde Fowler defines as "the feeling of awe, anxiety, doubt, or
fear, which is aroused in the mind by something that cannot be
explained by a man's experience or by the natural course of cause and
effect, and which is therefore referred to the supernatural." It has
nothing to do at the outset with any special rites or doctrines. It is
not concerned with state-usage or with priestly law. In its adjectival
form "religious days" or "religious places" are not days or places
consecrated by official practice; they are days and places which have
gathered round them man's sentiments of awe and scruple. The word thus
came to be applied to anything that was in some way a source or
embodiment of mysterious forces. The naturalist Pliny can even say
that no animal is "more full of religion than the mole," because
strange medicinal powers were supposed to reside in its heart and teeth.
But, on the other hand, a new use of it passes into Roman literature in
the writings of Cicero. The feeling of awe still lies in the
background, but the word takes on a reference to the acts which it
prompts, and thus comes to denote the whole group of rites performed in
honour of some divine being. These make up a particular cult or
worship, ordained and sanctioned by authority or tradition. "Religion"
thus comes to mean a body of religious duties, the entire series of
sacred acts in which {44} the primitive feeling is expressed. Roman
antiquity conceived these as under the care of priesthoods, legitimated
by the State. Around them lay a fringe of superstitions, which a
hostile critic like Lucretius could also sum up under the same term.
And thus in an age when philosophy was addressing itself to the whole
question of man's relation to the world and its unseen Rulers, and a
single word was wanted to describe his attitude to the varied
spectacle, "religion" was at hand to fill the place. It covered the
whole field of human experience, and as different nations presented it
in different forms, it became possible to speak of "religions" in the
sense of separate systems of worship and belief. The champion of
Christianity naturally distinguished his religion as the true from the
false; and over against the multiformity of polytheism he set the unity
of the faith of the Church.
Of these "religions" history and philosophy sought to give some
account. As will be seen hereafter (Chap. VI), Babylon and Egypt both
claimed a divine origin for their rites, their arts, and laws.
Plutarch expressly defends the idea of revelation in the cases of Minos
of Crete, the Persian Zoroaster, Zaleucus the shepherd legislator of
the Locrians, Numa of Rome, and others. Pan was in love with Pindar,
and Æsculapius conversed with Sophocles: if such divine diversions were
allowed, how much more should these greater {45} attempts for human
welfare be prompted from heaven! Numa had been enabled through Camena
Egeria to regulate the ceremonial law as priest-king, and pontiffs,
augurs, flamens, virgins, received their duties from him with
supernatural sanctions.
Philosophers, on the other hand, discussed the meaning of religion upon
different lines. A wide-spread view already noted presented it as a
mere instrument of policy, devised to overawe the intractable. The
diversity of religions seemed to support this view. Plato's Athenian,
in one of his latest works, the Laws, mentions the teaching of sophists
who averred that the gods existed not by nature but by art, and by the
laws of States which are different in different places, according to
the agreement of those who make them. In a fragment of a drama on
Sisyphus ascribed to Critias, the friend of Alcibiades, it was alleged
that in the primeval age of disorder and violence laws might strike
crimes committed in open day, but could not touch secret sins, hidden
in the gloomy depths of conscience. A sage advised that to moralise
men they must be made afraid. Let them invent gods who could see and
hear all things, cognisant not only of all human actions but also of
men's inmost thoughts and purposes. They were accordingly connected
with the source of the most terrifying and the most beneficent
phenomena, the sky, home alike of thunder and lightning, of the shining
sun and fertilising {46} rain, seat of divine powers helpful and
hurtful to mankind. In the discussion on "the Nature of the Gods" (by
Cicero), Cotta, of the Academic school, inquires of his Epicurean
opponent Velleius, "What think you of those who have asserted that the
whole doctrine concerning the immortal gods was the invention of
politicians, whose notion was to govern that part of the community
which reason could not influence, by religion?"
From another point of view, however, the practical universality of
religion was again and again cited in proof of its truth. Antiquity
was not scientific in its method of treatment, and though it did not
accept all religions as altogether equal, it had no difficulty in
regarding them as substantially homogeneous. The Egyptian worship of
animals might be lashed with satiric scorn, but the mysteries of its
religion, venerable from an immemorial past, deserved the highest
respect. The process of identification of the gods of different
religions was always going on as they were carried from land to land.
The Apologist, therefore, like the Cretan Cleinias in Plato's _Laws_
when the Athenian stranger asked him to prove the existence of the
gods, could always appeal to two main arguments--first, the fair order
of the universe and the regularity of the seasons, and secondly, the
common belief of all men, both Hellenes and barbarians. This common
belief, however, itself required explanation. Its value {47} really
depended on its origin. If that ranked no higher than the crouching
impulses of fear, it had little worth. Even if it was sought in the
sense of dependence, in quiet trust in a sheltering order, or in
intelligent inference based on the demand for a cause, the question
still pressed for an answer, "What made this possible?" The answer was
given by the doctrine of the _Logos_.
The term _logos_ has played a famous part in philosophical theology.
It appears in our New Testament at the opening of the fourth Gospel,
"In the beginning was the Logos." Our translators render the Greek
term by the English "Word." It is derived from the verb _legein_, to
"speak" or "say." _Logos_ is primarily "what is said," utterance, or
speech. Speech, however, must mean something. When we look out upon
the objects of the world around us--rock, river, tree, horse, star--we
learn to separate them into groups, because while some say quite
different things to us, others speak to us, as it were, with nearly the
same meaning. We recognise a common meaning in various sorts of dogs,
or in still larger classes such as the whole family of birds. But in
human intercourse what is said has first been thought. _Logos_ thus
takes on another meaning; it is what thinking says _to itself_, or what
we call "reason." The processes of science consist in finding out
these meanings or reasons, and getting them into intelligible relations
with each other. {48} And when the early Greek thinkers had reached
the conception of the unity of the world, here was a term which could
be called in to express it. The world must have a meaning; it must
express some thought. And did not thought imply thinking?
The philosophy of Heracleitus "the Obscure" (at Ephesus, 500 B.C.) has
received in modern times widely different interpretations; but whether
or not the Stoics were right in understanding his doctrine of the Logos
to imply the existence of a cosmic reason universally diffused, present
both in nature and man, it is certain that such ideas appear soon
afterwards in Greek literature. Pindar affirms the derivation of the
soul from the gods. Plato and Euripides declare the intelligence of
man both in nature and origin to be divine; and Pseudo-Epicharmus lays
it down (in the second half of the fifth century) that "there is in man
understanding, and there is also a divine Logos; but the understanding
of man is born from the divine Logos." On this basis the Stoics worked
out the conception of a fellowship between man and God which explained
the universality of religion. Its seat was in human nature. Every one
shared in the Generative Reason, the Seminal Word (the _Logos
spermatikos_). In the long course of ages, says Cicero, when the time
arrived for the sowing of the human race, God quickened it with the
gift of souls. So we possess a certain kinship with the heavenly {49}
Powers; and while among all the kinds of animals Man alone retains any
idea of Deity, among men themselves there is no nation so savage as not
to admit the necessity of believing in a God, however ignorant they may
be what sort of God they ought to believe in.
The part played by this doctrine in the early Church is well known.
When the new faith began to attract the attention of the educated, it
was impossible that the resemblances between Christian and Hellenic
monotheism should be ignored. Philosophy had reached many of the same
truths, and poets and sages bore the same witness to the unity and
spirituality of God as the prophets and psalmists of Israel. It was
easy to suggest that the Hebrew seers had been the teachers of the
Greek; might not Plato, for instance, have learned of Jeremiah in
Egypt? On the other hand, the pleas of chronological and literary
dependence might be insufficient; there were radical differences as
well as resemblances; the Apologist might deride the diversities of
opinion and make merry over the contradictions of the schools.
Nevertheless Christianity was often presented by its defenders as "our
philosophy." The Latin writer Minucius Felix (in the second century)
is so much struck by the parallels in the higher thought that he boldly
declares, "One might think either that Christians are now philosophers,
or that philosophers were then already Christian." The martyr Justin
(about {50} A.D. 150) incorporates such teachings into the scheme of
Providence by the aid of the Logos. For Justin, as for his
co-believers, the popular religion was the work of demons. But
philosophy had combated them in the past like the new faith. If
Socrates had striven to deliver men from them, and they had compassed
his death through evil men, it was because the Logos condemned their
doings among the Greeks through him, just as among the barbarians they
were condemned by the Logos in the person of Christ. The great truths
of God and Providence, of the unity of the moral government of the
world, of the nature and destiny of man, of freedom, virtue, and
retribution, which were to be found in the writings of the wisest of
the past, were the product of "the seed of the Logos implanted in every
race of men." Those who had lived with the Logos were Christians
before Christ, though men might have called them atheists, like
Heracleitus and Socrates. All noble utterances in theology or
legislation arose through partial discovery or contemplation of the
Logos, and consequently Justin could boldly claim "whatever things have
been rightly said among all men" as "the property of us Christians."
The cultivated and mystical Clement, who became head of the
catechetical school of Alexandria towards the close of the second
century, enforced the same theme. An enormous reader, he loved to
compare the {51} truths enunciated by Greek poets and philosophers with
the wisdom of the barbarians. Philosophy, indeed, was a special
historical manifestation of thought along a peculiar line of
development. It affected a particular race, it spread over a distinct
area, and appeared in a definite time. In these respects it resembled
the preparatory work of Israel itself. It was a discipline of
Providence, so that beside the generalisation of St. Paul that the Law
had been a tutor to bring the Jews to Christ, Clement could set
another, that philosophy had played the same part for the Greeks. On
the field of common speech Clement's contemporary, the fiery Tertullian
of Carthage, appealed to the worshipper who bore the garland of Ceres
on his brow, or walked in the purple cloak of Saturn, or wore the white
robe of Egyptian Isis--what did he mean by exclaiming "May God repay!"
or "God shall judge between us?" Here was a recognition of a supreme
authority and power, the "testimony of a soul naturally Christian."
Such comparisons, however, had a very different side. Greece had long
had its secret mysteries, with their sacred initiations, their rites of
purity and enlightenment, their promises of welfare beyond the grave.
When the new deities from Asia Minor, from Egypt, Syria, and the
further East, were brought to Italy, the resemblances of their practice
to that of the Christian Church excited the {52} believer's alarm, and
roused at once the charge of plagiarism. There was a congregation of
Mithra at Rome as early as 67 B.C., and towards the end of the first
century of our era his mysteries began to be widely spread. Here was a
baptism; here was a "sacrament" as the neophyte took the oath on
entering the warfare with evil; here were grades of soldiership and
service; here were oblations of bread and water mingled with wine which
were naturally compared with the Lord's supper; here were doctrines of
deliverance from sin, of judgment after death and ascent to heaven,
which brought the theology and practice of Mithraism very close to that
of the Church. So Mithra bore the august titles of the holy and
righteous God; or he was the Mediator, author of order in nature and of
victory in life between the ultimate powers of good and evil.
For a time the rivalry was acute, as his worship was carried through
the West as far as York and Chester and the Tyne. But with the triumph
of Christianity in the fourth century the sounds of conflict die away.
The men of learning, Eusebius of Cæsarea (about A.D. 260-340),
Augustine (A.D. 354-430) bishop of Hippo, surveyed the religions and
philosophies of antiquity as conquerors. The faiths of Egypt,
Phœnicia, Greece, and Rome, are passed in review. With a broad
sweep of learning Eusebius comments on the ancient mythologies, the
oracles, the theory of demons, {53} the practice of human sacrifice,
the history of Mosaism. His treatise on the "Preparation for the
Gospel" is the first great work on comparative religion which issued
out of Christian theology. With generous recognition of what lay
beyond the Church he taught (in the _Theophania_) that all higher
culture was due to participation in the Logos. Idolatry might be the
work of demons; the world might be filled with the babblings of
philosophers and the follies of poets; but the Logos had been
continuously present, sowing in the hearts of men the rudiments of the
divine laws, of various orders of teaching, of doctrines of every kind.
Thus ethics, art, science, and the fairest products of human thought,
were genially brought within the scope of Revelation.
II
The panorama of religions unrolled before the student of the present
day is far vaster than that which offered itself to the thinkers of
Greece and Rome, and its meaning is far better understood. When
Pausanias describes the daily sacrifice to a hero at Tronis in Phocis,
where the blood of the victim was poured down through a hole in the
grave to the dead man within, while the flesh was eaten on the spot, he
notes, like the careful author of a guide-book, a curious local usage,
but he does not know that it belongs to a group of {54} savage
practices that may be traced all round the globe. On Mount Lycæus in
Arcadia, he tells us, was a spring which flowed with equal quantity in
summer as in winter. In time of drought the priest of Lycæan Zeus,
after due prayer and sacrifice, would dip an oak-branch into the
surface of the spring, and a mist-like vapour would rise and become a
cloud. In the midst of Hellenic culture it was still possible, as
among the negroes of West Africa or the Indians of North America, to
make rain.
From continent to continent a multitude of observers have gathered an
immense range of facts, which show that amid numerous differences in
detail the religions of the lower culture may all be ranked together on
the basis of a common interpretation of the surrounding world.
Philosophy suggests that man can only explain nature in terms of his
own experience. He is encompassed by powers that are continually
acting on him, as he to a much smaller extent can in his turn act on
them. By various processes of observation and reflection (p. 85), he
comes to the conclusion that within his body lives something which
enables it to move and feel and think and will, until at death it goes
away. To this mysterious something many names are given, and for
purposes of modern study they are all ranked under the term "spirits."
This explanation is then applied to the behaviour of all kinds of
objects within {55} his view; though it does not at all follow that
this was actually the first explanation. The animals that are stronger
and more cunning than himself, the trees that move in the wind, the
corn that grows so mysteriously, the bubbling spring, even the things
that he himself has made, his weapons, tools, and jars, all have their
"spirits," so that the entire scene of his existence is pervaded by
them. To this doctrine, with its many branches of belief and practice,
Sir E. B. Tylor, in his classical work on _Primitive Culture_ (1871),
gave the name of "Animism," and the religions founded upon it are
called "animistic," or sometimes, from the multitude of unorganised
spirits which they recognise, "polydæmonistic" religions.
Such religions belong to no specific ethnic group. They appear either
in existing practice or in the shape of occasional survivals in all of
the three great racial divisions of mankind--the white or Caucasic, the
yellow or Mongolian, and the black or Negroid. They are to be found
under the Equator and among the Arctic snows. They are sometimes
associated with a peculiar form of social structure regulating
inter-tribal relations known as _totemism_. It was at one time
supposed that this designated a stage of evolution through which all
peoples had passed. The totem or clan-sign, whether animal or plant,
or more rarely an inanimate object like wind, sun, or star, was
supposed to have {56} become an object of worship, and various theories
were invented to explain the divisions and subdivisions of the clans,
and the selection of their special signs. Hence, it was argued, came
the cultus of beast and bird and tree; hence the altar and the idol;
hence the animal sacrifice and the sacramental meal. In clever hands
it supplied a universal key. The extraordinary intricacy of the
subject, and the widely scattered character of the evidence, prevent
any discussion here. But the most recent researches have not sustained
these attempts. Among the Central Australian tribes the totems are not
worshipped, they are in no sense deities, no prayers or sacrifices are
offered to them. They may be brought into the sphere of religion in
some tribes as part of a social order to which a superhuman origin is
ascribed (p. 171). But totemism cannot be established as the typical
form of "primitive religion" any more than any other complicated
system. Its general diffusion is questionable. At the present day
there are large areas over which no signs of totemic organisation are
found; and many phenomena which were formerly assumed to be proofs of
totemism in the higher religions of antiquity, in Egypt, Greece, and
Italy, now receive other explanations.
The higher forms of animistic religion pass out into polytheisms of
more or less dignity. They do not succeed in embodying themselves in
permanent literary product, they create no {57} scriptures or sacred
books. They have their rude chants, their songs for weddings and
funerals, their genealogies and tales of ancient heroes. Strange
cosmogonies float from island to island in Polynesia. The Finnic
peoples enshrined their faith in the ballads collected under the name
of the Kalevala. Among the Indians of North America speculation is
sometimes highly elaborated in mythologic tradition; and out of the
fusion of nationalities in Mexico rose a developed polytheism in which
lofty religious sentiment seems strangely blended with a hideous and
sanguinary ritual. Peru, no less, presented to the Spanish conquerors
bewildering and incongruous aspects. In these two cultures native
American civilisation reached its highest forms. In Mexico the
apparatus of religion was very minutely organised. There were immense
temples, which required large numbers of priests and servitors. The
capital alone is said to have contained 2000 sacred buildings, and the
great temple had a staff of 5000 priests. There were religious orders
and temple-schools; rites of baptism and circumcision; feasts and
sacrifices and sacraments, in which the monkish chroniclers found
strange parallels to their own practice. The issues of victory were
disastrous. With the death of the last Aztec emperor (1520) the doom
of the old gods was assured, and the Inquisition (1571) completed what
the sword of Cortes had begun.
{58}
In the old world Asia has been the mother of religions, but various
fates have befallen her offspring. The ancient cults of Babylonia,
after an existence longer than the period from Moses to the present
day, vanished from the scene. The teachings of Zoroaster were planted
in China in A.D. 621, and a temple was erected at the capital, Changan;
but the Persian faith could not maintain itself in such a different
culture. After the Mohammedan conquest in the eighth century it was
finally carried by a little band of exiles into India, and is still
cherished by their descendants who bear the name of Parsees. The Jew
and the Christian have only a precarious toleration in the land which
was once their home. In India and in China alone is the religion of
to-day linked in unbroken continuity with the distant past. Islam may
set itself in lineal succession to the teachers of old, and claim a
place for Mohammed in the sequence of Abraham, Moses, and Christ. But
it is the youngest, and in some respects the least original, of the
world's great faiths.
India has its own panorama of religions, from the animistic practice of
the tribes of the jungle and the hills, up to the refined pantheism of
the philosophical school. Diversities of race have been strangely
intermingled, and fifty languages make it impossible to secure any
uniformity of culture. There are the descendants of the ancient
inhabitants who occupied the country before {59} the Aryan ancestors of
the Hindus settled themselves upon the fertile lands. They are
represented to-day by the wild tribes of Central India such as the
Bhils and Gonds. Some ten million probably profess a religion of a
well-marked animistic type. But this also lies at the base of
wide-spread popular belief and custom, where the propitiation of
spirits, the cultus of Mother Earth, and the veneration of village
deities, engage much more attention than the higher gods of Hinduism.
The literary foundation of the religions of India lies in the ancient
hymns of the Rig Veda, sung by the immigrant Aryans as they entered
from the North-west and gradually established themselves in the Ganges
valley. These hymns were addressed to gods of earth and air and sky;
they celebrated the glories of dawn and day; they told of the conflict
between sunshine and storm; they praised Agni, the god of fire,
messenger between heaven and earth, himself as agent of the sacrifice a
kind of priest among the gods; they commemorated the dead who passed
into the upper world and adorned the sky with stars. Already in some
of the later hymns the poet's thought endeavoured to find some
principle or power that should unite these different agencies as
manifestations of one ultimate reality; and philosophic imagination at
length fixed on the conception of Brahman, a term whose original
meaning {60} seems to hover between that of sacred spell and prayer.
Viewed in a personal aspect (Brahma) as a god of popular worship, he
could be described as "Lord of all, the Maker, the Creator, Father of
all that are and are to be."[1] But behind this sovereign ruler
metaphysical abstraction placed a neuter Brahma, all-embracing, the
ground of all existence, summed up in three terms--Being, Thought, and
Bliss. Here was the ultimate Self of the whole universe; and to know
the identity of the human self with the Absolute, to be able to repeat
the mysterious words _tat tvam asi_, "that art thou," was the aim of
the forest-sages and the highest attainment of holy insight.
[1] So in the early Buddhist texts describing the popular religion.
Many new forms appear in these documents.
Meantime the social order was acquiring the first forms of caste. The
priests and the fighting men, the people who settled on the lands for
pasture and tillage, and the tribes of aborigines whom they
dispossessed and subdued, formed the basis of divisions which were
gradually multiplied with extraordinary complexity. A religious
authority was found for the whole system in the teachings of the Veda,
and to contest its claims was to defy the power which slowly spread
with subtle hold through the whole peninsula. By its side arose the
doctrine of the Deed (_karma_, p. 217), which explained the varied
conditions of human life by the principle that {61} "a man is born into
the world that he has made." The lot of each individual had a moral
meaning: it was the result of previous conduct, good or ill. This is
the conception embodied in the word "transmigration." It pictures man
as involved in a continuous series of births and deaths, and religion
and philosophy undertook in their several ways to secure him a
favourable destiny hereafter, or by various means of divine grace, or
strenuous self-discipline, or pious contemplation, to extricate him
altogether from the weary round of ignorance and pain.
Out of these elements, a crude and ever-varying animism at the bottom,
a highly refined metaphysical pantheism at the top, figures of
incarnation and deliverance, the cultus of the dead, caste, and
transmigration, the complex strands of modern Hinduism have been woven.
Many have been the growths upon the way. The early Buddhist texts,
representing the society of the "Middle Country," show already in the
fifth century B.C. a surprising activity of speculation, busily engaged
in questioning every received doctrine of religion and morals. Some
forms held their ground for a few centuries and then disappeared. One
religious community of that date alone survives, viz. the Jains, who
still number about a million and a third. Buddhism, after sending out
its missionaries into Ceylon in the south and China in the north, was
driven from its ancient seats, and {62} only some 300,000 hold its
creed in India itself. In Burma, however, it numbers between ten and
eleven million lay adherents, and in the adjacent kingdom of Siam it
has 13,000 temples, and more than 93,000 mendicants have taken its vows.
But Hinduism still lives on with a marvellous and self-renewing power.
Two great divine figures have been set beside the original creative
Brahma, representatives of the forces that preserve and destroy, Vishnu
and Çiva (p. 128). Vishnu succeeded to the place of the Buddha; and
Hindu religion gave prominence in him to the conception of a Divine
Person who out of love for man assumed human shape to conquer evil and
establish truth. The worship of Çiva has been carried everywhere by
the Brahmans; if he destroys, he also reproduces; he, too, appears to
bless and help, and the Tamil poets of South India in the early Middle
Ages sang his praises in hymns that still feed the piety of the people.
Again and again reforming teachers have initiated movements on behalf
of spiritual religion. Their followers have multiplied and broken up
into sects, but still remain within the general area of the ancestral
faith, which now embraces considerably more than 200 million souls.
The disciples of Nānak (1469-1538), however, known as Sīkhs,
formed into a semi-military organisation by the Guru Gobind "the Lion"
(1675-1708), retain their religious independence, {63} touching
Hinduism on one side and Mohammedanism on the other. They number at
the present day more than two millions, and are found almost
exclusively in the Punjab.
China, like India, illustrates the principle of religious continuity.
Its earliest historic date is fixed by an eclipse in 776 B.C.; and the
traditions of its dynasties stretch more than a thousand years beyond.
The ancient religion depicted in the books known as the _Shu_ and the
_Shî Kings_, which Confucius (550-478 B.C.) was supposed to have edited
out of much older documents, rested upon the solemn order of the living
Heaven and Earth, with multitudinous ranks of associated spirits, and
the generations of the dead. This has remained the formal basis of the
national religion (p. 97). Meanwhile the ethical sayings of Confucius
acquired extraordinary ascendency. They formed the chief element in
the national education, and supplied the ideals of popular culture.
Carried into Japan in the sixth century of our era, they filled a gap
in the old Japanese teaching, which we know by the name of Shin-To or
"Spirits' way." Confucius himself became the object of general
commemorative homage; and annual ceremonies are still celebrated in his
honour with great splendour in the Confucian temples which adorn every
city within the empire above a certain rank.[2]
[2] These are at present in danger, like other public forms of Chinese
State Religion, of being rudely abolished.
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In the popular religion demonology and magic play a constant part, and
numerous growths out of the worship of ancestors provide ever fresh
additions to the higher ranks of spirits. These are regulated by
decrees of the Board of Rites, one of the most ancient religious
institutions in China. The spirit of a departed governor, perhaps two
centuries ago, is believed to have appeared in time of flood, and by
his beneficent influence dangers have been averted. Memorials are sent
up to Peking by the local authorities, and after repeated
manifestations divine honours are awarded. Beneath these august
personages are the spirits which preside over the trades and
professions, over the parts of a house--the door, the bed, or the
kitchen range--over the breeding of domestic animals, and a large
variety of occupations, to say nothing of medicine and disease, the
limbs of the body, and the stars. They are analogous to the Kami, the
equivalent powers in Japan (p. 91); and they are not without parallel
in religions further west.
Half a century before Confucius, in 604, was born another sage, known
in history as Lao Tsze. Fragments of his teaching are embodied in a
small book of aphorisms, concerned with the doctrine of the Tao, the
way, the path, or course. In nature this corresponded to the ordered
round of the seasons, and the regularities which we call laws. In man
it might be seen in the line of right {65} conduct, and the inner
principles which pointed to it. On this conception, which was much
older than Lao Tsze himself, a kind of metaphysical mysticism was
reared by later disciples, not without affinities with some aspects of
the Brahmanical philosophy. They have been explained by suggestions of
travel and contact which more careful study cannot justify. The
religion of the Tao (whence the name Taoism) could never have been
popular had it not become strangely entangled with alchemy and
transformed under the influence of its later rival, Buddhism, from
which it derived much both in ritual, in ethics, and in doctrine.
The statements about the appearance of Buddhist teachers and Buddhist
books in China before our era have been much disputed: the first
trustworthy record relates that in the year A.D. 65, a deputation of
eighteen persons was sent to Khotan to make inquiries, and they
returned two years later with books and images and a teacher. A second
teacher arrived shortly after, a temple was built at the imperial
capital, Lo-Yang, and the laborious work of translation was begun. A
stream of missionaries, Hindus, Parthians, Huns, slowly flowed into the
Flowery Land, "moved," says the chronicler, "by the desire to convert
the world." After a while the Chinese students sought the holy places
in India, and learned Sanskrit at the great Buddhist university at
Nalanda, near Buddha {66} Gaya. Vast collections of sacred literature
were gathered. The first Chinese catalogue, dated A.D. 520, enumerates
2,213 distinct works. Twelve successive revisions were made under
imperial order, and to the last, in 1737, the Emperor himself,
following the example of some of his predecessors, contributed a
preface.
Opposed again and again by the Confucian _literati_, its temples
destroyed, its religious houses suppressed, its monks and nuns driven
back into the world, Buddhism has still lived on. It has created
impressive devotions, and generated numerous sects. It has spread
through Corea, Mongolia, and Japan; on the west it is planted in Tibet.
It has exercised immense influence on Chinese culture; architecture,
art and letters being all deeply indebted to it. In numerical
estimates of different religions common in the last century Buddhism
always headed the list, for the whole population of China--vaguely
reckoned at 400,000,000--was included in its fold. Such estimates are
no longer trustworthy.[3] The ancestral cultus of the dead under the
shelter of Confucianism, the rites of Taoist and of Buddhist priests,
are strangely blended. The incidents of life from birth to death are
never completed without help from one or other of the two faiths once
rivals, and now {67} so curiously intertwined. As early as the sixth
century a famous Buddhist scholar Fu Hhi was asked by the Emperor Wu-ti
if he was a Buddhist, and he pointed to his Taoist cap. "Are you a
Taoist?" he showed his Confucian shoes. "Are you a Confucian?" he wore
a Buddhist scarf. When the Abbé Hue made his famous journey two
generations ago, he observed that when strangers met, politeness
required that each should ask his neighbour, "To what sublime religion
do you belong?" The first might be a Confucian, the second a Taoist,
the third a disciple of the Buddha. Each would then begin to commend
the religion not his own, and they would conclude by saying, "Religions
are many, reason is one, we are all brothers." It was the maxim of Lu
Shun Yang (a distinguished Buddhist) centuries ago that "the teaching
of the sects is not different. The large-hearted man regards them as
embodying the same truths. The narrow-minded man observes only their
differences."
[3] The latest official estimate, February 1911, based on a reckoning
of families, gives 312,400,590 for the total Chinese people.
Yet another great religion, the latest born among the higher faiths of
the world, has established itself in both India and China. The first
Mohammedan invasion of India took place in A.D. 664. The followers of
the prophet are now reckoned at more than 66 millions. In 628 Mohammed
himself sent his uncle to China with presents to the Emperor. He
travelled by sea to Canton, where the first mosque was afterwards
built. {68} Good observers number the Mohammedans in China to-day at
30 millions, mostly in the north and west; and it is supposed that
there are about as many more in the Malay Archipelago. In Africa,
especially among the negroes of the west, their numbers have increased
enormously in the last century, and some two-fifths of the
multitudinous peoples of the Dark Continent, 80 millions out of 200,
are believed to live in the obedience of Islam.
Islam, resignation or submission to the will of God, was the name given
to his religion by the prophet himself, who died in A.D. 632. But in
the hands of his first followers submission was no passive virtue.
Tradition ascribed to him the idea of addressing all known sovereigns,
and promising them safety if they accepted the faith. His successors,
therefore, conceived that the fulfilment of Allah's will demanded a
resolute effort to make known the new revelation. A fierce burst of
missionary effort carried the Moslem armies far and wide. In the year
of Mohammed's death they attacked Persia and Syria; a few years later
they invaded Egypt. Within the first century they had entered India,
and had swept through north Africa into Spain. But they had twice been
obliged to retreat from Constantinople, and in 732 they were defeated
on the Loire by Charles Martel near Tours, and forced to retire behind
the Pyrenees.
With the same astonishing energy they {69} created centres of culture
from Baghdad to Cordova. Through Syriac versions of Aristotle's works
Arabian teachers carried Greek philosophy into Western Europe when the
light of ancient learning had grown dim. The contact with new thought
stimulated theological discussion, and the Moslem had to justify
himself against the Christian, the Zoroastrian, the Manichæan and the
Buddhist. Above the simple ritual demands of the prophet, the recital
of the creed--"There is no god but God (Allah), Mohammed is the apostle
of God"--the observance of prayer five times daily, the annual fast in
the month of Ramadhān, the bestowal of alms, and the pilgrimage to
Mecca, arose the debates of the schools and the divisions of sects.
The nature of the divine attributes, and their relation to the being or
essence of the Deity, the problems of predestination and free will, of
reason and revelation, excited eager interest. Beside the Koran vast
numbers of traditions concerning religious life and practice were
gradually put in circulation, and in the third century after Mohammed's
death they were reduced to writing in six great collections. To these
sources of truth and rules of conduct the jurists and theologians added
two others: agreement or universal consent, where beliefs and practices
are generally received though not specially sanctioned by the Koran or
tradition; and analogy, by which a doctrine or usage may be accepted as
valid because {70} of its resemblance to something legitimated by
revelation.
Like the higher religions of India, like Judaism in its long and
chequered career whether in Palestine or in the Dispersion, like the
"universal religions" of Buddhism and Christianity, Mohammedanism has
known how to accommodate itself to very different levels of culture.
In the Arabian deserts much of the earlier animism still remains. It
is not rudely expelled either at the present day as Islam advances
through Africa. Other impulses have worked in different directions.
There are religious orders and mendicant ascetics. There are mystical
schools of refined spirituality, to which the influences of
Neo-platonism, of Christianity, and Buddhism, have all contributed.
Sūfiism (as this type of thought is called) was fed from various
sources, and has assumed different forms in different countries, but
its best-known literary products came from the great poets of Persia.
From that subtle race issues the most remarkable movement which modern
Mohammedanism has produced. In 1844 a young man not twenty-five years
of age, named Ali Mohammed, of Shiraz, appeared under the title of the
"Bab" or Gate. Disciples gathered round him, and the movement was not
checked by his arrest, his imprisonment for nearly six years, and his
final execution in 1850. Thirteen years later one of his disciples
named Bahá-ullah, "Splendour of God," announced {71} himself as "He
whom God shall manifest," whose advent the Bab had foretold. Exiled to
Acre, he died in 1892, and was succeeded in the leadership by his son
Abbas Efendi. The new faith declared that there was no finality in
revelation, and while recognising the Koran as a product of past
revelation, claimed to embody a new manifestation of the divine Unity.
Carried to Chicago in 1893 by a Bâbî merchant, it succeeded in
establishing itself in the United States; and its missionaries are
winning new adherents in India. It, too, claims to be a universal
teaching; it has already its noble army of martyrs and its holy books;
has Persia, in the midst of her miseries, given birth to a religion
which will go round the world?
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