II.

How, apart from the imperfect lingering tradition of some primitive

revelation, the belief in a surviving soul originates with contemporary

savages, or might have originated among still ruder past races, is a

question of some interest, not only for its own sake, but for the sake

of whatever little light it may throw upon the more vital question as to

the value of that belief. Had the doctrine of souls no other origin than

a false inference from the ordinary phenomena of sleeping and dreaming;

were it in no sense an instinctive belief, suggested perhaps and

confirmed by supernormal facts, it would still have interest for the

anthropologist as one of those almost necessary and universal errors

through which the human mind struggles to the truth, such as the errors

of astrology or alchemy; but it would in no way contribute to the

argument for immortality _ex consensu hominum_--an argument of much

avail when it is a case of man's instinctive judgments and primary

intuitions, which are God-given, but of ever less value in proportion as

there is a question of deductions, inferences, and self-formed

judgments. Even if we discard the dream-theory altogether, we get no

support from the consensus of savages as to the soul's survival, unless

we have reason to think that the facts on which their inference rests

are truly, and not only apparently, supernormal, and are, moreover, such

as leave no other inference possible.

We know only too well that there are universal fallacies as well as

universal truths of the human mind. For the practical necessities of

life the imagination stands to man in good stead, but as the inadequate

instrument of speculative thought its fertile deceitfulness is betrayed

in his very earliest attempts at philosophy; nor are his subsequent

efforts directed to anything else than the endeavour to correct and

allow for its refractions and distortions, to transcend its narrow

limitations, to force it to express, meanly and clumsily, truths which

otherwise it would entirely obscure and deny. There might well be facts,

nay, there are undoubtedly facts, which to the untutored mind

necessarily and always seem altogether supernormal, but which science

rightly explains to be, however unusual, yet natural, and in no way

outside the ordinary laws. So far as the marvels of sorcerers and

medicine-men are the work of chicanery, they will lack that persistence

and ubiquity which justifies the investigation of other marvels for

whose universality some basis must be sought in the uniform nature of

things. Cheats will not always and everywhere hit on the same plan, nor

will the independent testimony of false witnesses be found agreeing.

But if besides facts and appearances that science can really explain

away, there be a residue which takes us into a region wherein science as

yet has set no foot, then we may indeed be on our way to a confirmation

of the usually accepted arguments for immortality by which the

positivist may be met upon his own ground. In truth, metaphysical,

moral, and religious arguments, however much they may avail with

individuals who are subjectively disposed to receive them, cannot in

these days influence the crowd of men who need some sort of violence

offered to their intellect if they are to accept truths against which

they are biassed. The temper of the majority is positivist; it will

believe what it can see, touch, and handle, and no more. If then the

natural truth of the independent existence of spirits can be inade

experimentally evident--and _à priori_, why should it not?--men may not

like it, but they will have either to accept it, or to deny all that

they accept on like evidence. Such unwilling concession would of itself

make little for personal religion in the individual; but its widespread

acceptance could not fail to counteract the ethics of materialism, and

so prepare the way for perhaps a fuller return to religion on the part

of the many.

It is the belief, and perhaps the hope, of not a few men of light and

learning that a comparison of the results of the S.P.R. investigations

with those of anthropology touching the beliefs and superstitions of

savages and ruder races, may point to an order of facts which, with

reference to the admissions of existing science, are rightly called

supernormal, and yet which are in another sense strictly normal, namely,

with reference to that science of experimental psychology which, amid

the usual storm of ridicule and jealousy, is slowly struggling into

existence--ridicule from all devout slaves of the intellectual fashion

of the times; jealousy from the neighbour sciences of mental physiology

and neurology, which it declares bankrupt in the face of

newly-discovered liabilities.

So far this gathered evidence seems, in the eyes of some of its

interpreters, to point to a close connection, if not of being, at least

of influence, between soul and soul, such as binds each atom of matter

to every other; a connection which increases as we descend from the

above-ground level of full consciousness, through ever lower strata of

subconsciousness, to those hidden depths of unconscious operation from

which the most unintelligibly intelligent effects of the soul

proceed--as though, in the darkness, it were taught by God, and guided

blindfold by the hand of its Maker. In other words, the individuation of

souls is conceived to be somewhat like that of the separate branches of

the same tree which, traced downwards, run into a common root, from

whence they are differenced by every hour of their growth, yet not

disconnected, as though each several consciousness sprang from some

unconscious psychic basis common to all, wherein, like forgotten

memories, the experiences of all are buried, at a depth far beyond the

reach of all normal powers of reminiscence, yet through which terminus

of converging souls thoughts can, in our intenser moments, pass from

mind to mind,--reverberated as it were from the base, and thence caught

by the one consciousness altogether resonant to that particular

vibration. How far such an interpretation may favour pantheism, or

imperil personality, or involve a doctrine of "pre-existence," or of

innate ideas, is not for us here to discuss. If we are to judge it

fairly, it must be simply as a provisional working-hypothesis

explanatory of certain observations, and apart from all other

psychological theories with which it may seem in conflict. Truth will in

the end adjust itself with truth, but nothing is to be hoped from forced

and premature adjustments.

Mr. Lang's second and principal contention is that even if we allow the

animistic account of the belief in spirits, in no sense can we admit

that process by which belief in God is supposed to be a later

development of the belief in spirits, as though inequality among spirits

had given rise to aristocracy, and aristocracy to monarchy.

By God here we understand: "a primal eternal Being, author of all

things, the father and the friend of man, the invisible omniscient

guardian of morality," a definition which, while it fixes the high-water

mark of monotheism, yet only states with formidable distinctness what,

according to Mr. Lang, is found confusedly in the apprehension of the

rudest savages. There are two senses in which we can understand an

evolution of this idea of God; first, as Mr. Tylor understands it, in

the sense of a development by accretion from a simple germ, from the

idea of a phantasm nowise a god, to that of a spirit still lacking

divinity, thence to that of a Supreme Spirit in whom first the essential

definition of God is somewhat fulfilled. Secondly, it can be understood

strictly as a mere unfolding of the contents of a confused apprehension;

so that there is an advance only in point of coherence and distinctness.

Thus understood, the entire religious history of the race, as also of

the individual, viewed from its mental side, consists in an evolution of

the idea of God and culminates in a face-to-face seeing of God.

From the evidence amassed, or perhaps rather, sampled, by Mr. Lang it

would seem that, what we account the lowest races are in possession of a

confused idea of God, whencesoever derived, which is in substantial

agreement with the reflex conception contained in the above definition;

and that there is no existing series of intellectual stages whereby this

can be seen, as it were, in the act of growing out of previous simpler

ideas. Evolution in the direction of greater clearness and distinctness

is to be observed, as well as a downward process of obscuration and

confusion: but for a substantial development of the idea of God from an

idea of "not God" there is no proof forthcoming so far.

On the animistic hypothesis we should be prepared to find the notion of

God, as above stated, to be of very late development and accepted only

by races fairly advanced in culture. We should, _à priori_, deem it

impossible to discover more among the lower savages than a rude religion

of ghost-worship, without any consciousness of a moral Supreme Being,

the father and friend of man. Whatever might seem to suggest the

contrary, would be explainable by some infiltration of more civilized

beliefs.

Armed with this hypothesis the eye is quick "to see that it brings with

it the power of seeing," and to impose its own forms and schemata on the

phenomena offered to its observation. The "animist" ill-acquainted with

the savage's language and modes of thought; excluded from those inner

"mysteries" which figure in nearly every savage religion; confounding

the symbolism, the popular mythology, and also the corruptions,

distortions, and abuses which are the parasites of all religion, with

the religion itself, can easily come away with the impression that there

is nothing but ghost-worship, priestcraft, and superstition, no

conception whatever of a personal "Power that makes for Righteousness."

If Protestants have almost as crude an idea of the religion of their

Catholic fellow-Christians with whom they live side by side, and

converse in the same language, if they are so absolutely dominated by

their own form of religious thought, as to be as helpless as idiots in

the presence of any other, can we expect that the ordinary British

traveller, "brandishing his Bible and his bath," strong in the smug

conviction of his mental, moral, and religious preeminence, will be a

very sympathetic, conscientious, and reliable interpreter of the

religion of the Zulu or the Andamanese?

The fact is that without a preliminary hypothesis he would see nothing

at all except dire confusion. But an assumption such as that of

"animism," has the selective power of a magnet, drawing to itself all

congruous facts and little filings of probability, until it so bristles

over with evidence that a hedge-hog is easier to handle.

But before discussing the relation of this assumption to existing facts

and so bringing it to an _à posteriori_ test, let us examine its _à

priori_ supports.

First of all, as Mr. Lang points out, it takes for granted that the

savage can have no idea of the Creator until he conceive Him as a

spirit. "God is a spirit," has been dinned into our ears from childhood;

and hence we conclude that he who has no notion of a spirit can have no

notion of God; and that the idea of God is of later growth than that of

a ghost. In truth, he who ascribes to God a body does not know _all_

about Him; but which of us knows _all_ about God? The point is, not

whether the savage can know the metaphysics of divinity, but whether he

can conceive a primal eternal moral being, author of all things, man's

father and judge--a conception which abstracts entirely from the

question of matter and spirit. We ourselves, like the savage,

necessarily speak of God and imagine Him humanwise,--although our

instructed reason, at times, corrects the error of our fancy,--and

perhaps only "at times,"--only when we leave the ground of spontaneous

thought, to walk on metaphysical stilts--nor while that childish image

remains uncorrected and we neither affirm nor deny to Him a body, can

our notion be called false, however obscure it be and inadequate. If the

savage has no notion of spirit, yet he may have, and often seems to have

a very true, though of course infinitely imperfect, notion of God; nay,

perhaps a truer notion than those who affirm, without any sense of using

analogy, that God is a spirit. For if His spirituality is insisted on,

it is rather to exclude from Him the grossness and limitation of matter,

and to ascribe to Him a transcendental degree of whatever perfection our

notion of spirit may involve, than to classify Him, or to predicate of

Him that finite nature which we call a spirit. God is neither a spirit

nor a body; but rather like Ndengei of the Fijians: "an impersonation of

the abstract idea of eternal existence;" one who is to be "regarded as a

deathless _Being_, no question of 'spirit' being raised;" so that the

first intuition of the unsophisticated mind is found to be in more

substantial agreement with the last results of reflex philosophical

thought, than those early philosophizings which halt between the

affirmation and denial of bodily attributes, unable to prescind from the

difficulty and unable to solve it. The history of the Jews, nay, the

history of our own mind proves to demonstration that the thought of God

is a far easier thought and a far earlier, than that of a spirit. Our

mind, oar heart, our conscience, affirm the former instinctively, while

the latter does continual violence to our imagination, except so far as

spirit is misconceived to be an attenuated phantasmal body. Not only,

therefore, does the savage imagine God and speak of Him humanwise, as we

all do; but if he does not actually believe Him to be material, he at

least will be slow in mastering the thought of His spirituality.

Another assumption underlying the animistic hypothesis, and also

borrowed from Christian teaching, is that the savage regards the soul or

ghost as the liberated and consummated man, and that therefore he will

place God rather in the category of disembodied than of embodied men.

Yet not only the Greek and Roman, but even the Jew, looked on the shade

of the departed as a mere fraction of humanity, as a miserable residue

of man, helpless and hopeless, and withal disposed to be mischievous and

exacting, and therefore needing to be humoured in various ways. Nay,

even Christianity with its dogma of the bodily resurrection, denies that

Platonic doctrine which views the body as the prison rather than as the

complement and consort of the soul; although it holds the soul to be of

an altogether higher, because spiritual, order. But to the primitive

savage, who everywhere regards death as non-natural, as accidental and

violent, the surviving spirit, however uncertain-tempered and

incalculable in its movements, however much to be feared and

propitiated, does not command reverence as a being of a superior order.

At best it is: "Alas! poor ghost!" Better a live dog than a dead lion;

better the meanest slave that draws breath, than the monarch of Orcus.

Surely it is not in the region of shadows that the savage will look for

the great "all-father;" but in the world of solid, tangible realities.

Again, it is assumed that progress in one point is progress in all; that

because we surpass all other races and generations in physical science

and useful arts, we surpass them in every other way; and that they must

be far behind us in ethical and religious conceptions, as they are in

inventions and the production of comforts. To find our own theism and

morality among savages is therefore impossible; for as the crooked stick

is unto the steam-plough, so is the god of the savage unto the God of

Great Britain. Yet when we consider how closely religious and ethical

principles are intertwined, and how glaringly untrue it is to say that

industrial civilization makes for morality,--for purity or self-denial,

or justice, or truth, or honour: how manifestly it is accompanied with a

deterioration of the higher perceptions and tastes, we must surely pause

before taking it for granted that the course of true religion has been

running smoothly parallel to that of commerce.

In a thoughtful essay, entitled _The Disenchantment of France_, Mr. F.W.

Myers points out the goal towards which "progress" is leading us,

through the destruction of those four "illusions" which formerly gave

life all its value and dignity,--namely, belief in religion; devotion to

the State--whether to the prince or to the people; belief in the

eternity and spirituality of human love; belief in man's freedom and

imperishable personal unity. "I cannot avoid the conclusion," he says,

"that we are bound to be prepared for the worst. Yet by the worst I do

not mean any catastrophe of despair, any cosmic suicide, any world-wide

unchaining of the brute that lies pent in man. I mean merely the

peaceful, progressive, orderly triumph of _l'homme sensuel moyen_; the

gradual adaptation of hopes and occupations to a purely terrestrial

standard; the calculated pleasures of the cynic who is resolved to be a

dupe no more."

In other words, if we accept this very temperate and reluctant

conclusion, we must confess that the one-sided progress, with whose

all-sufficiency we are so thoroughly satisfied, is making straight for

the extermination, not only of religion, but of morality in any received

sense of the term.

But when Mr. Lang, who has no hypothesis of his own as to the origin of

belief in God, brings the animistic theory to an _à posteriori_ test, he

finds it encumbered with still greater difficulties; for nothing is as,

_à priori_, it ought to be.

While Mr. Tylor asserts "that no savage tribe of monotheists has ever

been known," but that all ascribe the attributes of deity to other

beings than the Almighty Creator, it appears in fact that many of the

rudest savages "are as monotheistic as some Christians. They have a

Supreme Being, and the 'distinctive attributes of deity' are not by them

assigned to other beings further than as Christianity assigns them to

angels, saints, the devil," &c. Catholics at least will readily

understand how hastily and unjustly the charge of polytheism is made by

the protestantized mind against any religion which believes in a

Heavenly Court as well as in a Heavenly Monarch. "Of the existence of a

belief in a Supreme Being" amongst the lowest savages, "there is as good

evidence as we possess for any fact in the ethnographic region. It is

certain that savages, when first approached by curious travellers and

missionaries, have again and again recognized our God in theirs."

If, therefore, belief in God grew out of belief in ghosts, it must have

been in some stage of culture lower than any of which we have experience

so far; and at some period which belongs to the region of hypothesis and

conjecture. There are no known tribes where ghosts are worshipped and

God is not known, or where the supposed process of development can be

watched in action. Nor is it only that links are missing, but one of the

very terms to be connected, namely, a godless race, is conjectural.

Still more unfortunate is it for the animists that evidence points to

the fact that advance in civilization often means the decay of

monotheism, and that the ruder races are the purer in their religious

and ethical conceptions. Once more, all facts are against the theory

that tribes transfer their earthly polity to the heavenly city; for

monotheism is found where monarchy is unknown. "God cannot be a

reflection from human kings where there are no kings; nor a president

elected out of a polytheistic society of gods, where there is as yet no

polytheism; nor an ideal first ancestor where men do not worship their

ancestors." To the substantiating of these facts Mr. Lang then applies

himself, and shows us how among the Australians, Red Indians, Figians,

Andamanese, Dinkas, Yao, Zulus, and all known savages there lives the

conception of a Supreme Being (not necessarily spirit) who is variously

styled Father, Master, Our Father, The Ancient One in the skyland, The

Great Father. He shows us, moreover, that this deity is the God of

conscience, a power making for goodness, a guardian and enforcer of the

interests of justice and truth and purity; good to the good, and froward

with the froward.

But surely, it will be said, all this is too paradoxical, too violently

in conflict with what is notorious concerning the religion and morality

of savages.

The reason of this seeming contradiction is, however, not altogether

difficult. It is to be found partly in the fact that religion, like

morality, being counter to those laws which govern the physical world

and the animal man,--to the law of egoism and competition and struggle

for existence; to the law that "might is right,"--tends from the very

nature of the case towards decay and disintegration. The movement of

material progress is in some sense a downhill movement. No doubt it

evokes much seeming virtue, such as is necessary to secure the end; but

the motive force is one with regard to which man is passive rather than

active, a slave rather than a master, as a miser is in respect to that

passion which stimulates him to struggle for gain. Religion and morality

are uphill work, needing continual strain and attention if the motive

force is to be maintained at all. Huxley, in one of his later

utterances, allowed this with regard to morality; and it is not less but

more true with regard to faith in the value of unseen realities. Even if

belief in a moral God be as natural to man as are the promptings of

conscience, it ought not to surprise us that it should be as universally

stifled, neglected, seemingly denied, as conscience is. It is not

usually in old age and after years of conflict with the world that

conscience is most sensitive and faithful to light, but rather in early

childhood. And similarly the sense of God and of His will is apparently

more strong and lively in the childhood of races than after it has been

stifled by the struggle for wealth and pre-eminence--

When yet I had not walked above

A mile or two from my first love:

But felt through all this fleshly dress

Bright shoots of everlastingness. [2]

Degradation may almost be considered a law of religion and morality

which needs some kind of violent counteraction, some continual

intervention and providence, if it is to be kept in check. After all,

this is only a dressing-up of the old platitude that a holy life means

continual warfare and straining of the spirit against the flesh, of the

moral order against the physical order, of altruism or the true egoism

against selfishness or the false egoism. Of course an ideal civilization

would help and not hinder religion; but the chances against civilization

being ideal are so large as to make it historically true that, advance

in civilization does not always mean advance in religion and morality,

and often means decay.

Far from animism being the root of theism, more often it is rather the

ivy that grows up about it, hides it and chokes it. Just because the

demands of religion and morality are so burdensome to men, they will

ever seek short-cuts to salvation; and the intercession of presumably

corruptible courtiers will be secured to win the favour, or avert the

displeasure, of the rigorously incorruptible and inexorable King, who is

"no respecter of persons." Except among Jews and Christians, the Supreme

Being is nowhere worshipped with sacrifice--that service of

food-offering being reserved for subordinate deities susceptible to

gentle bribery. The great God of conscience is naturally the least

popular object of cultus; though, were the animists right, He should be

the most popular, seeing He would be the latest development demanded and

created by the popular mind. But contrariwise, He tends to recede more

and more into the background, behind the ever-multiplying crowd of

patron-spirits, guardians, family-gods; till, as in Greece and Rome, He

is almost entirely obscured, "an unknown God ignorantly worshipped"--the

End, as usual, being forgotten and buried in the means. All this process

of degradation will be hastened by the corruption of priests whose

avarice or ambition, as Mr. Lang says, will tempt them to exploit the

lucrative elements in religion at the expense of the ethical; to

whittle-away the decrees of God and conscience to suit the wealthy and

easy-going; to substitute purchasable sacrifice, for obedience; and the

fat of rams, for charity. We need only look to the history of Israel and

of the Christian Church to see all these tendencies continually at work,

and only held in check by innumerable interventions of Divine

Providence, and of that Spirit which is always striving with man.

Scant, however, as may be the amount of direct worship accorded to the

Supreme God, compared with that received by subordinate spiritual

powers, yet it is _sui generis_, and of an infinitely higher order. The

familiar distinction of _latria_ and _dulia_ seems to obtain everywhere;

as also that between _Elohim_ and _Javeh_, that is, between supernal

beings in general, and the Supreme Being who is also supernal. Yet so

excessive in quantity is the secondary cultus compared with the primary,

that an outsider may well be pardoned for thinking that there is nothing

beyond what meets the eye on every side. As has been said, the Supreme

Being alone is usually considered above the weakness of caring for

sacrifice, or for external worship in "temples made with hands." His

name is commonly tabooed, only to be whispered in those mysteries of

initiation which are met with so universally. Outside these mysteries He

may only be spoken of in parables and myths, grotesque, irreverent,

designed to conceal rather than to reveal. But rarely is there an image

or an altar to this unknown God.

It is easy for those who recognize no other religion among savages

behind the popular observances and cults which are so much to the front,

to believe that early religion is non-ethical. For indeed, for the most

part, all this secondary cultus is directed to the mitigation of the

moral code and the substitution of exterior for interior sacrifice. It

is the result of an endeavour to compound with conscience; and to hide

away sins from the all-seeing eye. Again it is chiefly in the secrecy of

the mysteries that the higher ethical doctrine is propounded--a doctrine

usually covering all the substantials of the decalogue; and in some

cases, approaching the Christian summary of the same under the one

heading of love and unselfishness. As for the corrupt lives of savages,

if it proves their religion to be non-ethical, what should we have to

think of Christianity? We cry out in horror against cannibalism as the

_ne plus ultra_ of wickedness., but except so far as it involves murder,

it is hard to find in it more than a violation of our own convention,

while a mystical mind might find more to say for it than for cremation.

Certainly it is not so bad as slander and backbiting. Human sacrifice

offered to the Lord of life and death at His own behest, is something

that did not seem wicked and inconceivable to Abraham. Head-hunting is

not a pretty game; nor is scalping and mutilation the most generous

treatment of a fallen foe; yet war has seen worse things done by those

who professed an ethical religion.

But, chief among the causes why savage religion has been so

misrepresented, is the almost universal co-existence of a popularized

form of religion addressed to the imagination, with that which speaks to

the understanding alone. As has already been said, man's imagination is

at war with his intelligence when supersensible realities, such as God

and the soul, are in question. Without figures we cannot think; yet the

timeless and spaceless world can ill be figured after the likeness of

things limited by time and space. This mental law is the secret of the

invariable association of mythology with religion. Setting aside the

problem as to how the truths of natural religion (_sc._ that there is a

God the rewarder of them that seek Him) are first brought home to man,

it is certain that if he does not receive them embedded in history or

parable, in spoken or enacted symbolism, he will soon fix and record

them in some such language for himself. Christ recognized the necessity

of speaking to the multitude in parables, not attempting to precise or

define the indefinable; but contenting Himself with: "The Kingdom of

Heaven is _like_," &c. "I am content," says Sir Thomas Browne, "to

understand a mystery without a rigid definition, in an easie and

Platonick description," and it is only through such easie and Platonick

descriptions that spiritual truth can slowly be filtered into the

popular mind. Still when we consider how prone all metaphors are to be

pressed inexactly, either too far, or else not far enough, how abundant

a source they are of misapprehension, owing to the curiosity that will

not be content to have the gold in the ore, but must needs vainly strive

to refine it out, we can well understand how mythology tends to corrupt

and debase religion if it be not continually watched and weeded; and

how, being, from the nature of the case, ever to the front, ever on

men's lips and mingling with their lives, it should seem to the outsider

to be not the imperfect garment of religion, but a substitute for it.

Yet in some sense these mythologies are a safeguard of reverence in that

they provide a theme for humour and profanity and rough handling, which

is thus expended, not on the sacred realities themselves, but on their

shadows and images. Among certain savages God's personal name is too

holy to be breathed but in mysteries; yet His mythological substitute is

represented to be as grotesque, freakish, and immoral as the Zeus of the

populace. We can hardly enter into such a frame of mind, though possibly

the irreverences and buffooneries of some of the miracle-plays of the

middle ages are similarly to be explained as the rebound from the strain

incident to a continual sense of the nearness of the supernatural; and

perhaps the _Messer Domeniddio_ of the Florentines stood rather for a

mental effigy that might be played with, than for the reasoned

conception of the dread Deity. If we possessed a minutely elaborated

history of the Good Shepherd and His adventures, or of the Prodigal's

father, or of the Good Samaritan, interspersed with all manner of

ludicrous and profane incidents, and losing sight of the original

purport of the figure, we should have something like a mythology. Were

it not stereotyped as part of an inspired record, the mere romancing

tendency of the imagination would easily have added continually to the

original parable, wholly forgetful of its spiritual significance.

It is part of the very economy of the Incarnation to meet this weakness,

to provide for this want of the human mind; to satisfy the imagination

as well as the intelligence. Here Divine truth has received a Divine

embodiment, has been set forth in the language of deeds, in a real and

not in a fictitious history. Sacrifice and sacrament, and every kind of

natural religious symbolism, has been appropriated and consecrated to

the service of truth and to the fullest utterance of God that such weak

accents will stretch to. Here the channel of communication between

Heaven and earth is not of man's creation but of God's; or at least is

of God's composition. This is the great difference between the ethnic

religions and a religion that professes to be revealed--that is, spoken

by God and put into language by Him. The latter is, so to say, cased in

an incorruptible body, its very expression being chosen and sealed for

ever with Divine approval, and rescued from the fluent and unstable

condition of religions whose clothes are the works of men's hands. Here

it is that Catholic Christianity stands out as altogether catholic and

human, adapted as it is to the world-wide cravings of the religious

instinct; satisfying the imagination and the emotions, no less than the

intellect and the will; and yet saving us from the perils of the

myth-making tendency of our mind.

The same thought is pressed upon us when we view the collective evidence

as to the universal demand for a mediatorial system--for intercessors,

and patrons, for a heavenly court surrounding the Heavenly Monarch; a

demand often created by and tending to a degradation of purer religion,

yet most surely embodying and expressing a spiritual instinct which is

only fully explained and satisfied by the Catholic doctrine of the

communion of saints and souls in one great society, labouring for a

conjoint salvation and beatitude. We Catholics know well enough that the

degraded and superstitious will pervert saint-worship as they pervert

other good things to their own hurt and to God's dishonour, but we also

know that of itself the doctrine of the Heavenly Court is altogether in

the interests of the very highest and purest religion. In all this

matter, needless to say, Mr. Lang is not with us; but the affinities of

Catholicism with universal religion, which he marks to our prejudice,

are really in some sort proof of our contention that the Church is the

divinely conceived fulfilment of all man's natural religious instincts,

providing harmless and healthy outlets for humours otherwise dangerous

and morbid; never forgetful of man's double nature and its claims,

neither wearying him with an impossible intellectualism--a religion of

pure philosophy--not suffering him to be the prey of mere imagination

and sentiment, but tempering the divine and human, the thought and the

word, so as to bring all his faculties under the yoke of Christ.

Mr. Lang's concern is with the universality of belief in God the

Rewarder, not with its origin nor even its value; though he seems at

times to imply that the solution may be found in a primitive revelation

of some sort. For ourselves, accordant as such a notion would be with

popular Christian tradition, we do not think that the adduced evidence

needs that hypothesis; but is explained sufficiently by "the hypothesis

of St. Paul," which, as Mr. Lang admits, "seem not the most

unsatisfactory." The mere verbal tradition of a primitive "deposit" not

committed to any authorized guardians would, to say the least, be a

hazardous and conjectural way of accounting for the facts; nor is there

any evidence offered to show that such religious beliefs are held, as

the Catholic religion is, on the authority of antiquity, interpreted by

a living voice. The substance of this elementary religion--the existence

of God the Rewarder of them that seek Him--is naturally suggested to the

simple-minded by the data of unspoilt conscience, confirmed and

supplemented by the spectacle of Nature. That the truth would be

borne-in on a solitary and isolated soul we need not maintain; for in

solitude and isolation man is not man, and neither reason nor language

can develop aright. Further we may allow that as Nature or God provides

for society, and therefore for individuals, by an equal distribution of

gifts and talents, giving some to be politicians, others poets, others

philosophers, others inventors, so He gives to some what might be called

natural religious genius or talent or spiritual insight, for the benefit

of the community. Thus whatever be true of the individual savage, we

cannot well suppose that any tribe or people, taken collectively, should

fail to draw the fundamental truths of religion from the data of

conscience and nature. In this sense no doubt they would become

traditional--the common property of all--so that the innate facility of

each individual mind in regard to them would be stimulated and

supplemented by suggestion from without.

How far God can be said actually to "speak" to the soul through

conscience or through Nature so as to make faith, in the strict sense of

reliance on the word of another, possible, is for theologians to

discuss. If besides expressing these truths in creation or in

conscience, He also expresses in some way His intention to reveal them

to the particular soul, we have all that is requisite. In what way, or

innumerable ways He makes His voice heard in every human heart day by

day, and causes general truths to be brought near and recognized and

received as a particular message, each can answer best for himself.

But undoubtedly the results of comparative religion are, so far, almost

entirely favourable to the doctrine of God's all-saving will; and in

many other points confirmatory of received beliefs. Even where, for

example, in the question of the origin and meaning of sacrifice, they

seem to necessitate a modification of the somewhat elaborate _à priori_

definition, popular in some modern schools (though not in them all), yet

that modification is altogether favourable to the sounder conception of

the Eucharistic Sacrifice as a food-offering complementary to the

Sacrifice of the Cross. Above all it is in bringing out the unity of

type between natural ethnic religions, and that revealed Catholic

religion which is their correction and fulfilment, that the studies of

Mr. Lang and Mr. Jevons are of such service. The militant Protestant

delights to dwell on the analogies between Romanism and Paganism; we too

may dwell on them with delight, as evidence of that substantial unity of

the human mind which underlies all surface diversities of mode and

language, and binds together, as children of one family, all who believe

in God the Rewarder of them that seek Him, who is no respecter of

persons. What man in his darkness and sinfulness has feebly been trying

to utter in every nation from the beginning, that God has formulated and

written down for him in the great Catholic religion of the Word made

Flesh--

Which he may read that binds the sheaf

Or builds the house, or digs the grave,

And those wild eyes that watch the wave

In roarings round the coral reef.

True, even could it be established beyond all doubt that belief in the

one God were universal among rude and uncultivated races, this would not

add any new proof to the truth of religion, unless it could be shown

that it was really an instinctive, inwritten judgment, and not one of

those many natural fallacies into which all men fall until they are

educated out of them. Still, for those who do not need conviction on

this point, it is no slight consolation to be assured that simplicity

and savagery do not shut men out from the truths best worth knowing;

that even where the earthen vessel is most corrupted, the heavenly

treasure is not altogether lost; that it is only those who deliberately

go in search of obscurities who need stumble. It was not the crowds of

pagandom that St. Paul censured, but the philosophers. God made man's

feet for the earth, and not for the tight-rope. Whatever be the truth

about Idealism, man is by nature a Realist; and similarly he is by

nature a theist, until he has studiously learnt to balance himself in

the non-natural pose.

Will a man be excused for deliberately dashing his foot against a stone

because forsooth he has persuaded himself with Zeno, that there is no

such thing as motion; or with Berkeley, that the externality of the

world is a delusion; or will he be pardoned in his unbelief because he

could not justify by philosophy the truth which conscience and nature

are dinning into his ears: that there is a God the Rewarder of them that

seek Him?

_Sept. Oct._ 1898.

Footnotes:

[Footnote 1: "A hysterical fit indicates a lamentable instability of the

nervous system. But it is by no means certain _à priori_ that every

symptom of that instability, without exception, will be of a

degenerative kind. The nerve-storm, with its unwonted agitations, may

possibly lay bare some deep-lying capacity in us which could scarcely

otherwise have come to light. Recent experiments on both sensation and

memory in certain abnormal states have added plausibility to this view,

and justify us in holding that in spite of its frequent association with

hysteria, ecstasy is not necessarily in itself a morbid symptom."

(F.W.H. Myers, _Tennyson as a Prophet_.)]

[Footnote 2: _The Retreat_. By Henry Vaughan.]