"every Samoan was supposed to be taken under the care of some tutelary
god or _aitu_ [= Atua] as it was called. The help of perhaps half a
dozen different gods was invoked in succession on the occasion, but the
one who happened to be addressed just as the child was born was marked
and declared to be the child's god for life.
"These gods were supposed to appear in some _visible incarnation,_ and
the particular thing in which his god was in the habit of appearing was,
to the Samoan, an object of veneration. It was in fact his idol, and
he was careful never to injure it or treat it with contempt. One, for
instance, saw his god in the eel, another in the shark, another in the
turtle, another in the dog, another in the owl, another in the lizard;
and so on, throughout all the fish of the sea and birds and four-footed
beasts and creeping things. In some of the shell-fish even, gods were
supposed to be present. A man would eat freely of what was regarded as
the incarnation of the god of another man, but the incarnation of his
own particular god he would consider it death to injure or eat." [23]
We have here that which appears to be the origin, or one of the origins,
of food prohibitions, on the one hand, and of totemism on the other.
When it is remembered that the old Israelites sprang from ancestors who
are said to have resided near, or in, one of the great seats of ancient
Babylonian civilisation, the city of Ur; that they had been, it is said
for centuries, in close contact with the Egyptians; and that, in the
theology of both the Babylonians and the Egyptians, there is abundant
evidence, notwithstanding their advanced social organisation, of the
belief in spirits, with sorcery, ancestor-worship, the deification of
animals, and the converse animalisation of gods--it obviously needs very
strong evidence to justify the belief that the rude tribes of Israel did
not share the notions from which their far more civilised neighbours had
not emancipated themselves.
But it is surely needless to carry the comparison further. Out of the
abundant evidence at command, I think that sufficient has been produced
to furnish ample grounds for the belief, that the old Israelites of the
time of Samuel entertained theological conceptions which were on a level
with those current among the more civilised of the Polynesian islanders,
though their ethical code may possibly, in some respects, have been more
advanced. [24]
A theological system of essentially similar character, exhibiting the
same fundamental conceptions respecting the continued existence
and incessant interference in human affairs of disembodied spirits,
prevails, or formerly prevailed, among the whole of the inhabitants
of the Polynesian and Melanesian islands, and among the people of
Australia, notwithstanding the wide differences in physical character
and in grade of civilisation which obtain among them. And the same
proposition is true of the people who inhabit the riverain shores of the
Pacific Ocean whether Dyaks, Malays, Indo-Chinese, Chinese, Japanese,
the wild tribes of America, or the highly civilised old Mexicans and
Peruvians. It is no less true of the Mongolic nomads of Northern Asia,
of the Asiatic Aryans and of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and it holds
good among the Dravidians of the Dekhan and the negro tribes of Africa.
No tribe of savages which has yet been discovered, has been conclusively
proved to have so poor a theological equipment as to be devoid of a
belief in ghosts, and in the utility of some form of witchcraft, in
influencing those ghosts. And there is no nation, modern or ancient,
which, even at this moment, has wholly given up the belief; and in which
it has not, at one time or other, played a great part in practical life.
This _sciotheism,_ [25] as it might be called, is found, in several
degrees of complexity, in rough correspondence with the stages of social
organisation, and, like these, separated by no sudden breaks.
In its simplest condition, such as may be met with among the Australian
savages, theology is a mere belief in the existence, powers, and
disposition (usually malignant) of ghostlike entities who may be
propitiated or scared away; but no cult can properly be said to exist.
And, in this stage, theology is wholly independent of ethics. The moral
code, such as is implied by public opinion, derives no sanction from the
theological dogmas, and the influence of the spirits is supposed to be
exerted out of mere caprice or malice.
As a next stage, the fundamental fear of ghosts and the consequent
desire to propitiate them acquire an organised ritual in simple forms of
ancestor-worship, such as the Rev. Mr. Turner describes among the people
of Tanna (_l.c._ p. 88); and this line of development may be followed
out until it attains its acme in the State-theology of China and
the Kami-theology [26] of Japan. Each of these is essentially
ancestor-worship, the ancestors being reckoned back through family
groups, of higher and higher order, sometimes with strict reference to
the principle of agnation, as in old Rome; and, as in the latter, it is
intimately bound up with the whole organisation of the State. There are
no idols; inscribed tablets in China, and strips of paper lodged in a
peculiar portable shrine in Japan, represent the souls of the deceased,
or the special seats which they occupy when sacrifices are offered by
their descendants. In Japan it is interesting to observe that a national
Kami--Ten-zio-dai-zin--is worshipped as a sort of Jahveh by the nation
in general, and (as Lippert has observed) it is singular that his
special seat is a portable litter-like shrine, termed the Mikosi, in
some sort analogous to the Israelitic ark. In China, the emperor is
the representative of the primitive ancestors, and stands, as it were,
between them and the supreme cosmic deities--Heaven and Earth--who are
superadded to them, and who answer to the Tangaloa and the Maui of the
Polynesians.
Sciotheism, under the form of the deification of ancestral ghosts, in
its most pronounced form, is therefore the chief element in the theology
of a great moiety, possibly of more than half, of the human race. I
think this must be taken to be a matter of fact--though various opinions
may be held as to how this ancestor-worship came about. But on the other
hand, it is no less a matter of fact that there are very few people
without additional gods, who cannot, with certainty, be accounted for as
deified ancestors.
With all respect for the distinguished authorities on the other side,
I cannot find good reasons for accepting the theory that the cosmic
deities--who are superadded to deified ancestors even in China; who are
found all over Polynesia, in Tangaloa and Maui, and in old Peru, in the
Sun--are the product either of the "search after the infinite," or of
mistakes arising out of the confusion of a great chief's name with the
thing signified by the name. But, however this may be, I think it is
again merely matter of fact that, among a large portion of mankind,
ancestor-worship is more or less thrown into the background either by
such cosmic deities, or by tribal gods of uncertain origin, who have
been raised to eminence by the superiority in warfare, or otherwise, of
their worshippers.
Among certain nations, the polytheistic theology, thus constituted, has
become modified by the selection of some one cosmic or tribal god, as
the only god to whom worship is due on the part of that nation (though
it is by no means denied that other nations have a right to worship
other gods), and thus results a worship of one God--_monolatry,_ as
Wellhausen calls it--which is very different from genuine monotheism.
[27] In ancestral sciotheism, and in this _monolatry,_ the ethical
code, often of a very high order, comes into closer relation with the
theological creed. Morality is taken under the patronage of the god or
gods, who reward all morally good conduct and punish all morally evil
conduct in this world or the next. At the same time, however, they
are conceived to be thoroughly human, and they visit any shadow of
disrespect to themselves, shown by disobedience to their commands, or by
delay, or carelessness, in carrying them out, as severely as any breach
of the moral laws. Piety means minute attention to the due performance
of all sacred rites, and covers any number of lapses in morality, just
as cruelty, treachery, murder, and adultery did not bar David's claim to
the title of the man after God's own heart among the Israelites; crimes
against men may be expiated, but blasphemy against the gods is an
unpardonable sin. Men forgive all injuries but those which touch their
self-esteem; and they make their gods after their own likeness, in their
own image make they them.
It is in the category of monolatry that I conceive the theology of the
old Israelites must be ranged. They were polytheists, in so far as they
admitted the existence of other Elohim of divine rank beside Jahveh;
they differed from ordinary polytheists, in so far as they believed
that Jahveh was the supreme god and the one proper object of their own
national worship. But it will doubtless be objected that I have been
building up a fictitious Israelitic theology on the foundation of the
recorded habits and customs of the people, when they had lapsed from
the ordinances of their great lawgiver and prophet Moses, and that my
conclusions may be good for the perverts to Canaanitish theology, but
not for the true observers of the Sinaitic legislation. The answer to
the objection is that--so far as I can form a judgment of that which is
well ascertained in the history of Israel--there is very little ground
for believing that we know much, either about the theological and social
value of the influence of Moses, or about what happened during the
wanderings in the Desert.
The account of the Exodus and of the occurrences in the Sinaitic
peninsula; in fact, all the history of Israel before the invasion of
Canaan, is full of wonderful stories, which may be true, in so far as
they are conceivable occurrences, but which are certainly not probable,
and which I, for one, decline to accept until evidence, which deserves
that name, is offered of their historical truth. Up to this time I know
of none. [28] Furthermore, I see no answer to the argument that one
has no right to pick out of an obviously unhistorical statement the
assertions which happen to be probable and to discard the rest. But it
is also certain that a primitively veracious tradition may be smothered
under subsequent mythical additions, and that one has no right to cast
away the former along with the latter. Thus, perhaps the fairest way of
stating the case may be as follows.
There can be no _a priori_ objection to the supposition that the
Israelites were delivered from their Egyptian bondage by a leader called
Moses, and that he exerted a great influence over their subsequent
organisation in the Desert. There is no reason to doubt that, during
their residence in the land of Goshen, the Israelites knew nothing
of Jahveh; but, as their own prophets declare (see Ezek. xx.), were
polytheistic idolaters, sharing in the worst practices of their
neighbours. As to their conduct in other respects, nothing is known. But
it may fairly be suspected that their ethics were not of a higher order
than those of Jacob, their progenitor, in which case they might derive
great profit from contact with Egyptian society, which held honesty and
truthfulness in the highest esteem. Thanks to the Egyptologers, we now
know, with all requisite certainty, the moral standard of that society
in the time, and long before the time, of Moses. It can be determined
from the scrolls buried with the mummified dead and from the
inscriptions on the tombs and memorial statues of that age. For,
though the lying of epitaphs is proverbial, so far as their subject is
concerned, they gave an unmistakable insight into that which the writers
and the readers of them think praiseworthy.
In the famous tombs at Beni Hassan there is a record of the life of
Prince Nakht, who served Osertasen II., a Pharaoh of the twelfth dynasty
as governor of a province. The inscription speaks in his name: "I was
a benevolent and kindly governor who loved his country.... Never was
a little child distressed nor a widow ill-treated by me. I have never
repelled a workman nor hindered a shepherd. I gave alike to the widow
and to the married woman, and have not preferred the great to the small
in my gifts." And we have the high authority of the late Dr. Samuel
Birch for the statement that the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty
abound in injunctions of a high ethical character. "To feed the hungry,
give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, bury the dead, loyally
serve the king, formed the first duty of a pious man and faithful
subject." [29] The people for whom these inscriptions embodied their
ideal of praiseworthiness assuredly had no imperfect conception of
either justice or mercy. But there is a document which gives still
better evidence of the moral standard of the Egyptians. It is the "Book
of the Dead," a sort of "Guide to Spiritland," the whole, or a part,
of which was buried with the mummy of every well-to-do Egyptian, while
extracts from it are found in innumerable inscriptions. Portions of this
work are of extreme antiquity, evidence of their existence occurring
as far back as the fifth and sixth dynasties; while the 120th chapter,
which constitutes a sort of book by itself, and is known as the "Book of
Redemption in the Hall of the two Truths," is frequently inscribed upon
coffins and other monuments of the nineteenth dynasty (that under which,
there is some reason to believe, the Israelites were oppressed and the
Exodus took place), and it occurs, more than once, in the famous tombs
of the kings of this and the preceding dynasty at Thebes. [30] This
"Book of Redemption" is chiefly occupied by the so-called "negative
confession" made to the forty-two Divine Judges, in which the soul of
the dead denies that he has committed faults of various kinds. It
is, therefore, obvious that the Egyptians conceived that their gods
commanded them not to do the deeds which are here denied. The "Book
of Redemption," in fact, implies the existence in the mind of the
Egyptians, if not in a formal writing, of a series of ordinances,
couched, like the majority of the ten commandments, in negative terms.
And it is easy to prove the implied existence of a series which
nearly answers to the "ten words." Of course a polytheistic and
image-worshipping people, who observed a great many holy days, but no
Sabbaths, could have nothing analogous to the first or the second and
the fourth commandments of the Decalogue; but answering to the third, is
"I have not blasphemed;" to the fifth, "I have not reviled the face
of the king or my father;" to the sixth, "I have not murdered;" to the
seventh, "I have not committed adultery;" to the eighth, "I have not
stolen," "I have not done fraud to man;" to the ninth, "I have not
told falsehoods in the tribunal of truth," and, further, "I have not
calumniated the slave to his master." I find nothing exactly similar to
the tenth commandment; but that the inward disposition of mind was held
to be of no less importance than the outward act is to be gathered from
the praises of kindliness already cited and the cry of "I am pure,"
which is repeated by the soul on trial. Moreover, there is a minuteness
of detail in the confession which shows no little delicacy of moral
appreciation--"I have not privily done evil against mankind," "I
have not afflicted men," "I have not withheld milk from the mouths of
sucklings," "I have not been idle," "I have not played the hypocrite,"
"I have not told falsehoods," "I have not corrupted woman or man," "I
have not caused fear," "I have not multiplied words in speaking."
Would that the moral sense of the nineteenth century A.D. were as far
advanced as that of the Egyptians in the nineteenth century B.C. in this
last particular! What incalculable benefit to mankind would flow from
strict observance of the commandment, "Thou shalt not multiply words
in speaking!" Nothing is more remarkable than the stress which the
old Egyptians, here and elsewhere, lay upon this and other kinds of
truthfulness, as compared with the absence of any such requirement in
the Israelitic Decalogue, in which only a specific kind of untruthfulnes
is forbidden.
If, as the story runs, Moses was adopted by a princess of the royal
house, and was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, it is
surely incredible that he should not have been familiar from his youth
up, with the high moral code implied in the "Book of Redemption." It
is surely impossible that he should have been less familiar with the
complete legal system, and with the method of administration of justice,
which, even in his time, had enabled the Egyptian people to hold
together, as a complex social organisation, for a period far longer than
the duration of old Roman society, from the building of the city to
the death of the last Caesar. Nor need we look to Moses alone for the
influence of Egypt upon Israel. It is true that the Hebrew nomads who
came into contact with the Egyptians of Osertasen, or of Ramses, stood
in much the same relation to them, in point of culture, as a Germanic
tribe did to the Romans of Tiberius, or of Marcus Antoninus; or as
Captain Cook's Omai did to the English of George the Third. But, at the
same time, any difficulty of communication which might have arisen out
of this circumstance was removed by the long pre-existing intercourse
of other Semites, of every grade of civilisation, with the Egyptians. In
Mesopotamia and elsewhere, as in Phenicia, Semitic people had attained
to a social organisation as advanced as that of the Egyptians; Semites
had conquered and occupied Lower Egypt for centuries. So extensively had
Semitic influences penetrated Egypt that the Egyptian language, during
the period of the nineteenth dynasty, is said by Brugsch to be as full
of Semitisms as German is of Gallicisms; while Semitic deities had
supplanted the Egyptian gods at Heliopolis and elsewhere. On the other
hand, the Semites, as far as Phenicia, were extensively influenced by
Egypt.
It is generally admitted [31] that Moses, Phinehas (and perhaps Aaron),
are names of Egyptian origin, and there is excellent authority for
the statement that the name _Abir,_ which the Israelites gave to their
golden calf, and which is also used to signify the strong, the heavenly,
and even God, [32] is simply the Egyptian Apis. Brugsch points out that
the god, Tum or Tom, who was the special object of worship in the city
of Pi-Tom, with which the Israelites were only too familiar, was called
Ankh and the "great god," and had no image. Ankh means "He who lives,"
"the living one," a name the resemblance of which to the "I am that I
am" of Exodus is unmistakable, whatever may be the value of the fact.
Every discussion of Israelitic ritual seeks and finds the explanation
of its details in the portable sacred chests, the altars, the priestly
dress, the breastplate, the incense, and the sacrifices depicted on the
monuments of Egypt. But it must be remembered that these signs of the
influence of Egypt upon Israel are not necessarily evidence that such
influence was exerted before the Exodus. It may have come much later,
through the close connection of the Israel of David and Solomon, first
with Phenicia and then with Egypt.
If we suppose Moses to have been a man of the stamp of Calvin, there is
no difficulty in conceiving that he may have constructed the substance
of the ten words, and even of the Book of the Covenant, which curiously
resembles parts of the Book of the Dead, from the foundation of Egyptian
ethics and theology which had filtered through to the Israelites
in general, or had been furnished specially to himself by his early
education; just as the great Genevese reformer built up a puritanic
social organisation on so much as remained of the ethics and theology of
the Roman Church, after he had trimmed them to his liking.
Thus, I repeat, I see no _a priori_ objection to the assumption that
Moses may have endeavoured to give his people a theologico-political
organisation based on the ten commandments (though certainly not quite
in their present form) and the Book of the Covenant, contained in our
present book of Exodus. But whether there is such evidence as amounts to
proof, or, I had better say, to probability, that even this much of
the Pentateuch owes its origin to Moses is another matter. The mythical
character of the accessories of the Sinaitic history is patent, and
it would take a good deal more evidence than is afforded by the bare
assertion of an unknown writer to justify the belief that the people who
"saw the thunderings and the lightnings and the voice of the trumpet
and the mountain smoking" (Exod. xx. 18); to whom Jahveh orders Moses to
say, "Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven.
Ye shall not make other gods with me; gods of silver and gods of gold ye
shall not make unto you" (_ibid._ 22, 23), should, less than six weeks
afterwards, have done the exact thing they were thus awfully forbidden
to do. Nor is the credibility of the story increased by the statement
that Aaron, the brother of Moses, the witness and fellow-worker of the
miracles before Pharaoh, was their leader and the artificer of the
idol. And yet, at the same time, Aaron was apparently so ignorant of
wrongdoing that he made proclamation, "Tomorrow shall be a feast to
Jahveh," and the people proceeded to offer their burnt-offerings
and peace-offerings, as if everything in their proceedings must be
satisfactory to the Deity with whom they had just made a solemn covenant
to abolish image-worship. It seems to me that, on a survey of all the
facts of the case, only a very cautious and hypothetical judgment is
justifiable. It may be that Moses profited by the opportunities afforded
him of access to what was best in Egyptian society to become acquainted,
not only with its advanced ethical and legal code, but with the more or
less pantheistic unification of the Divine to which the speculations of
the Egyptian thinkers, like those of all polytheistic philosophers, from
Polynesia to Greece, tend; if indeed the theology of the period of the
nineteenth dynasty was not, as some Egyptologists think, a modification
of an earlier, more distinctly monotheistic doctrine of a long
antecedent age. It took only half a dozen centuries for the theology
of Paul to become the theology of Gregory the Great; and it is possible
that twenty centuries lay between the theology of the first worshippers
in the sanctuary of the Sphinx and that of the priests of Ramses Maimun.
It may be that the ten commandments and the Book of the Covenant are
based upon faithful traditions of the efforts of a great leader to
raise his followers to his own level. For myself, as a matter of pious
opinion, I like to think so; as I like to imagine that, between Moses
and Samuel, there may have been many a seer, many a herdsman such as him
of Tekoah, lonely amidst the hills of Ephraim and Judah, who cherished
and kept alive these traditions. In the present results of Biblical
criticism, however, I can discover no justification for the common
assumption that, between the time of Joshua and that of Rehoboam, the
Israelites were familiar with either the Deuteronomic or the Levitical
legislation; or that the theology of the Israelites, from the king who
sat on the throne to the lowest of his subjects, was in any important
respect different from that which might naturally be expected from their
previous history and the conditions of their existence. But there is
excellent evidence to the contrary effect. And, for my part, I see no
reason to doubt that, like the rest of the world, the Israelites had
passed through a period of mere ghost-worship, and had advanced through
Ancestor-worship and Fetishism and Totemism to the theological level at
which we find them in the books of Judges and Samuel.
All the more remarkable, therefore, is the extraordinary change which is
to be noted in the eighth century B.C. The student who is familiar with
the theology implied, or expressed, in the books of Judges, Samuel, and
the first book of Kings, finds himself in a new world of thought, in
the full tide of a great reformation, when he reads Joel, Amos, Hosea,
Isaiah, Micah, and Jeremiah.
The essence of this change is the reversal of the position which, in
primitive society, ethics holds in relation to theology. Originally,
that which men worship is a theological hypothesis, not a moral ideal.
The prophets, in substance, if not always in form preach the opposite
doctrine. They are constantly striving to free the moral ideal from the
stifling embrace of the current theology and its concomitant ritual.
Theirs was not an intellectual criticism, argued on strictly scientific
grounds; the image-worshippers and the believers in the efficacy of
sacrifices and ceremonies might logically have held their own against
anything the prophets have to say; it was an ethical criticism. From
the height of his moral intuition--that the whole duty of man is to do
justice and to love mercy and to bear himself as humbly as befits his
insignificance in face of the Infinite--the prophet simply laughs at the
idolaters of stocks and stones and the idolaters of ritual. Idols of the
first kind, in his experience, were inseparably united with the
practice of immorality, and they were to be ruthlessly destroyed. As for
sacrifices and ceremonies, whatever their intrinsic value might be, they
might be tolerated on condition of ceasing to be idols; they might even
be praiseworthy on condition of being made to subserve the worship of
the true Jahveh--the moral ideal.
If the realm of David had remained undivided, if the Assyrian and the
Chaldean and the Egyptian had left Israel to the ordinary course of
development of an Oriental kingdom, it is possible that the effects of
the reforming zeal of the prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries
might have been effaced by the growth, according to its inevitable
tendencies, of the theology which they combated. But the captivity made
the fortune of the ideas which it was the privilege of these men to
launch upon an endless career. With the abolition of the Temple-services
for more than half a century, the priest must have lost and the scribe
gained influence. The puritanism of a vigorous minority among the
Babylonian Jews rooted out polytheism from all its hiding-places in the
theology which they had inherited; they created the first consistent,
remorseless, naked monotheism, which, so far as history records,
appeared in the world (for Zoroastrism is practically ditheism, and
Buddhism any-theism or no-theism); and they inseparably united therewith
an ethical code, which, for its purity and for its efficiency as a bond
of social life, was and is, unsurpassed. So I think we must not judge
Ezra and Nehemiah and their followers too hardly, if they exemplified
the usual doom of poor humanity to escape from one error only to fall
into another; if they failed to free themselves as completely from the
idolatry of ritual as they had from that of images and dogmas; if they
cherished the new fetters of the Levitical legislation which they had
fitted upon themselves and their nation, as though such bonds had the
sanctity of the obligations of morality; and if they led succeeding
generations to spend their best energies in building that "hedge round
the Torah" which was meant to preserve both ethics and theology, but
which too often had the effect of pampering the latter and starving the
former. The world being what it was, it is to be doubted whether Israel
would have preserved intact the pure ore of religion, which the prophets
had extracted for the use of mankind as well as for their nation, had
not the leaders of the nation been zealous, even to death, for the dross
of the law in which it was embedded. The struggle of the Jews, under the
Maccabean house, against the Seleucidae was as important for mankind as
that of the Greeks against the Persians. And, of all the strange ironies
of history, perhaps the strangest is that "Pharisee" is current, as
a term of reproach, among the theological descendants of that sect of
Nazarenes who, without the martyr spirit of those primitive Puritans,
would never have come into existence. They, like their historical
successors, our own Puritans, have shared the general fate of the poor
wise men who save cities.
A criticism of theology from the side of science is not thought of
by the prophets, and is at most indicated in the books of Job and
Ecclesiastes, in both of which the problem of vindicating the ways of
God to man is given up, though on different grounds, as a hopeless one.
But with the extensive introduction of Greek thought among the Jews,
which took place, not only during the domination of the Seleucidae in
Palestine, but in the great Judaic colony which flourished in Egypt
under the Ptolemies, criticism, on both ethical and scientific grounds,
took a new departure.
In the hands of the Alexandrian Jews, as represented by Philo, the
fundamental axiom of later Jewish, as of Christian monotheism, that the
Deity is infinitely perfect and infinitely good, worked itself out into
its logical consequence--agnostic theism. Philo will allow of no point
of contact between God and a world in which evil exists. For him God has
no relation to space or to time, and, as infinite, suffers no predicate
beyond that of existence. It is therefore absurd to ascribe to Him
mental faculties and affections comparable in the remotest degree to
those of men; He is in no way an object of cognition; He is [Greek] and
[Greek] [33]--without quality and incomprehensible. That is to say the
Alexandrian Jew of the first century had anticipated the reasonings
of Hamilton and Mansell in the nineteenth, and, for him, God is the
Unknowable in the sense in which that term is used by Mr. Herbert
Spencer. Moreover, Philo's definition of the Supreme Being would not be
inconsistent with that "substantia constans infinitis attributis, quorum
unumquodque aeternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit," given by another
great Israelite, were it not that Spinoza's doctrine of the immanence of
the Deity in the world puts him, at any rate formally, at the antipodes
of theological speculation. But the conception of the essential
incognoscibility of the Deity is the same in each case. However, Philo
was too thorough an Israelite and too much the child of his time to be
content with this agnostic position. With the help of the Platonic
and Stoic philosophy, he constructed an apprehensible, if not
comprehensible, quasi-deity out of the Logos; while other more or less
personified divine powers, or attributes, bridged over the interval
between God and man; between the sacred existence, too pure to be called
by any name which implied a conceivable quality, and the gross and evil
world of matter. In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented
by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine
authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics
(who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that
great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill--the
method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty "two-handed engine at
the door" of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any
and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken
allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, "poetically" or, "in a
spiritual sense," the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter
desires they should mean. In Biblical phrase, Zeno (who probably had
a strain of Semitic blood in him) was the "father of all such as
reconcile." No doubt Philo and his followers were eminently religious
men; but they did endless injury to the cause of religion by laying the
foundations of a new theology, while equipping the defenders of it
with the subtlest of all weapons of offence and defence, and with an
inexhaustible store of sophistical arguments of the most plausible
aspect.
The question of the real bearing upon theology of the influence exerted
by the teaching of Philo's contemporary, Jesus of Nazareth, is one upon
which it is not germane to my present purpose to enter. I take it simply
as an unquestionable fact that his immediate disciples, known to their
countrymen as "Nazarenes," were regarded as, and considered themselves
to be, perfectly orthodox Jews, belonging to the puritanic or pharisaic
section of their people, and differing from the rest only in their
belief that the Messiah had already come. Christianity, it is said,
first became clearly differentiated at Antioch, and it separated
itself from orthodox Judaism by denying the obligation of the rite
of circumcision and of the food prohibitions, prescribed by the law.
Henceforward theology became relatively stationary among the Jews, [34]
and the history of its rapid progress in a new course of evolution is
the history of the Christian Churches, orthodox and heterodox. The
steps in this evolution are obvious. The first is the birth of a new
theological scheme arising out of the union of elements derived from
Greek philosophy with elements derived from Israelitic theology. In
the fourth Gospel, the Logos, raised to a somewhat higher degree of
personification than in the Alexandrian theosophy, is identified with
Jesus of Nazareth. In the Epistles, especially the later of those
attributed to Paul, the Israelitic ideas of the Messiah and of
sacrificial atonement coalesce with one another and with the embodiment
of the Logos in Jesus, until the apotheosis of the Son of man is almost,
or quite, effected. The history of Christian dogma, from Justin to
Athanasius, is a record of continual progress in the same direction,
until the fair body of religion, revealed in almost naked purity by the
prophets, is once more hidden under a new accumulation of dogmas and of
ritual practices of which the primitive Nazarene knew nothing; and which
he would probably have regarded as blasphemous if he could have been
made to understand them.
As, century after century, the ages roll on, polytheism comes back under
the disguise of Mariolatry and the adoration of saints; image-worship
becomes as rampant as in old Egypt; adoration of relics takes the place
of the old fetish-worship; the virtues of the ephod pale before those of
holy coats and handkerchiefs; shrines and calvaries make up for the
loss of the ark and of the high places; and even the lustral fluid of
paganism is replaced by holy water at the porches of the temples. A
touching ceremony--the common meal originally eaten in pious memory of
a loved teacher--becomes metamorphosed into a flesh-and-blood sacrifice,
supposed to possess exactly that redeeming virtue which the prophets
denied to the flesh-and-blood sacrifices of their day; while the minute
observance of ritual is raised to a degree of punctilious refinement
which Levitical legislators might envy. And with the growth of this
theology, grew its inevitable concomitant, the belief in evil spirits,
in possession, in sorcery, in charms and omens, until the Christians of
the twelfth century after our era were sunk in more debased and brutal
superstitions than are recorded of the Israelites in the twelfth century
before it.
The greatest men of the Middle Ages are unable to escape the infection.
Dante's "Inferno" would be revolting if it were not so often sublime, so
often exquisitely tender. The hideous pictures which cover a vast space
on the south wall of the Campo Santo of Pisa convey information, as
terrible as it is indisputable, of the theological conceptions of
Dante's countrymen in the fourteenth century, whose eyes were addressed
by the painters of those disgusting scenes, and whose approbation they
knew how to win. A candid Mexican of the time of Cortez, could he
have seen this Christian burial-place, would have taken it for an
appropriately adorned Teocalli. The professed disciple of the God
of justice and of mercy might there gloat over the sufferings of his
fellowmen depicted as undergoing every extremity of atrocious and
sanguinary torture to all eternity, for theological errors no less than
for moral delinquencies; while, in the central figure of Satan, [35]
occupied in champing up souls in his capacious and well-toothed jaws, to
void them again for the purpose of undergoing fresh suffering, we have
the counterpart of the strange Polynesian and Egyptian dogma that there
were certain gods who employed themselves in devouring the ghostly flesh
of the Spirits of the dead. But in justice to the Polynesians, it must
be recollected that, after three such operations, they thought the soul
was purified and happy. In the view of the Christian theologian the
operation was only a preparation for new tortures continued for ever and
aye.
With the growth of civilisation in Europe, and with the revival of
letters and of science in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the
ethical and intellectual criticism of theology once more recommenced,
and arrived at a temporary resting-place in the confessions of the
various reformed Protestant sects in the sixteenth century; almost all
of which, as soon as they were strong enough, began to persecute those
who carried criticism beyond their own limit. But the movement was not
arrested by these ecclesiastical barriers, as their constructors fondly
imagined it would be; it was continued, tacitly or openly, by Galileo,
by Hobbes, by Descartes, and especially by Spinoza, in the seventeenth
century; by the English Freethinkers, by Rousseau, by the French
Encyclopaedists, and by the German Rationalists, among whom Lessing
stands out a head and shoulders taller than the rest, throughout the
eighteenth century; by the historians, the philologers, the Biblical
critics, the geologists, and the biologists in the nineteenth century,
until it is obvious to all who can see that the moral sense and
the really scientific method of seeking for truth are once more
predominating over false science. Once more ethics and theology are
parting company.
It is my conviction that, with the spread of true scientific culture,
whatever may be the medium, historical, philological, philosophical, or
physical, through which that culture is conveyed, and with its necessary
concomitant, a constant elevation of the standard of veracity, the end
of the evolution of theology will be like its beginning--it will cease
to have any relation to ethics. I suppose that, so long as the human
mind exists, it will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify
its intellectual conceptions. The science of the present day is as
full of this particular form of intellectual shadow-worship as is the
nescience of ignorant ages. The difference is that the philosopher who
is worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as
law, and force, and ether, and the like, are merely useful symbols,
while the ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions
of reality. So, it may be, that the majority of mankind may find the
practice of morality made easier by the use of theological symbols. And
unless these are converted from symbols into idols, I do not see
that science has anything to say to the practice, except to give an
occasional warning of its dangers. But, when such symbols are dealt with
as real existences, I think the highest duty which is laid upon men of
science is to show that these dogmatic idols have no greater value than
the fabrications of men's hands, the stocks and the stones, which they
have replaced.