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The Evolution
I
>...
OF THE
Ideh
of
God
GRANT ALLEN
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�THE
EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA
OF GOD '
AN INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGINS OF RELIGIONS
BY
GRANT ALLEN
(AUTHOR OF “PHYSIOLOGICAL AESTHETICS,” “ THE COLOURS OF FLOWERS,” “FORCE AND
ENERGY,” BTC.)
Revised and Slightly Abridged by Franklin T. Richards, M.A.
[issued for the rationalist press association, limited, by arrangement
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��PREFACE
Two main schools of religious thinking
exist in our midst at the present day:
the school of humanists and the school
of animists. This work is to some
extent an attempt to reconcile them. It
contains, I believe, the first extended
effort that has yet been made to trace
the genesis of the belief in a God from
its earliest origin in the mind of primitive
man up to its fullest development in
advanced and etherealised Christian
theology. My method is therefore con
structive, not destructive. Instead of
setting out to argue away or demolish a
deep-seated and ancestral element in our
complex nature, this book merely posits
for itself the psychological question; “ By
what successive steps did men come to
frame for themselves the conception of a
deity ?”—or, if the reader so prefers it,
“ How did we arrive at our knowledge
of God ?” It seeks provisionally to
answer these profound and important
questions by reference to the' earliest
beliefs of savages, past or present, and
to the testimony of historical documents
and ancient monuments. It does not
concern itself at all with the validity or
invalidity of the ideas in themselves ; it
does but endeavour to show how
inevitable they were, and how man’s
relation with the external universe was
certain a priori to beget them as of
necessity.
-In so vast a synthesis, it would be
absurd to pretend at the present day
that one approached one’s subject
entirely de novo. Every inquirer must
needs depend much upon the various
researches of his predecessors in various
parts of his field of inquiry. The
problem before us divides itself into
three main portions: first, how did men
come to believe in many gods—the
origin of polytheism; second, how, by
elimination of most of these gods, did
certain races of men come to believe in
one single supreme and omnipotent
God—the origin of monotheism; third,
how, having arrived at that concept, did
the most advanced races and civilisations
come to conceive of that God as Triune,
and to identify one of his Persons with
a particular divine and human incarna
tion-—the origin of Christianity. In
considering each of these three main
problems I have been greatly guided
and assisted by three previous inquirers
or sets of inquirers.
As to the origin of polytheism, I have
adopted in the main Mr. Herbert
Spencer’s remarkable ghost theory,
though with certain important modifica
tions and additions. In this part of my
work I have also been largely aided
by materials derived from Mr. Duff
Macdonald, the able author of Africana;
from Mr. Turner, the well-known Samoan
missionary; and from several other
writers, supplemented as they are by my
own researches among the works of
explorers and ethnologists in general.
�- 6
PREFACE
On the whole, I have here accepted the
theory which traces the origin of the'
belief in gods to primeval ancestor
worship, or rather corpse-worship, as
. against the rival theory which traces its
origin to a supposed primitive animism.
As to the rise of monotheism,,I have
been influenced in no small degree by
Kuenen and the Teutonic school of Old
Testament criticism, whose ideas have
been supplemented by later concepts
derived from Professor Robertson Smith’s
admirable work, The Religion of the
Semites. But here, on the whole, the
central explanation I have to offer is, I
venture to think, new and original: the
theory, good or bad, of the circumstances
which led to the elevation of the ethnical
Hebrew God, Jahweh, above all his rivals,
and his final recognition as the only true
and living god, is my own and no one
else’s.
As to the origin of Christianity, and
its relations to the preceding cults of
corn and wine gods, I have been guided
to a great extent by Mr. J. G. Frazer
and Mannhardt, though I do not suppose
that either the living or the dead
anthropologist would wholly acquiesce
in the use I have made of their splendid
materials. Mr. Frazer, the author of
that learned work, The Golden Bough,
has profoundly influenced the opinions
of all serious workers at anthropology
and the science of religion, and I cannot
too often acknowledge the deep obliga
tions under which I lie to his profound
and able treatises. At the same time,
I have so transformed the material
derived from him and from Dr. Robertson
Smith as to have made it in many ways
practically my own; and I have sup
plemented it by several new examples
and ideas, suggested in the course of my
own tolerably wide reading.
Throughout the book, as a whole, I
also owe a considerable debt to Dr.
E. B. Tylor, from whom I have borrowed
much valuable matter; to Mr. Sidney
Hartland’s Legend of Perseus ; to Mr.
Laurence Gomme, who has come nearer
at times than anyone else to the special
views and theories here promulgated ;
and to Mr. William Simpson, of the
Illustrated London News, an unobtrusive
scholar whose excellent monographs on
The Worship of Death and kindred
subjects have never yet received the
attention they deserve. My other obliga
tions, to Dr. Mommsen, to my friends
Mr. Edward Clodd, Professor John
Rhys, and Professor York Powell, as well
as to numerous travellers, missionaries,
historians, and classicists, are too frequent
to specify.
Looking at the subject broadly, I
would presume to say once more that
my general conclusions may be regarded
as representing to some extent a recon
ciliation between the conflicting schools
of humanists and animists, headed
respectively by Mr. Spencer and Mr.
Frazer, though with a leaning rather to
the former than the latter.
At the same time, it would be a great
mistake to look upon my book as in any
sense a mère eirenicon or compromise.
On the contrary, it is in every part a new
and personal work, containing, whatever
its value, a fresh and original synthesis
of the subject I would venture to point
out as especially novel the two following
points : the complete demarcation of
religion from mythology, as practice
from mere explanatory gloss or guess
work ; and the important share assigned
in the genesis of most existing religious
systems to the deliberate manufacture of
gods by killing. This doctrine of the
manufactured god, to which nearly half
�PREFACE
my book is devoted, seems to me to be
a notion of cardinal value. Among
other new ideas of secondary rank, I
would be bold enough to enumerate the
following: the establishment of three
successive stages in the conception of
the Life of the Dead, which might be
summed up as Corpse-worship, Ghost
worship, and Shade-worship, and which
answer to the three stages of preservation
or mummification, burial, and crema
tion ; the recognition of the high place
to be assigned to the safe-keeping of the
oracular head in the growth of idol
worship ; the importance attached to the
sacred stone, the sacred stake, and the
sacred tree, and the provisional proof of
their close connection with the graves of
the dead; the entirely new conception of
the development of monotheism among
the Jews from the exclusive cult of the
jealous god; the hypothesis of the origin
of cultivation from tumulus-offerings,
and its connection with the growth of
gods of cultivation ; the wide expansion
given to the ancient notion of the divine
human victim; the recognition of the
world-wide prevalence of the five-day
festival of the corn- or wine-god, and of
the close similarity which marks its rites
throughout all the continents, including
America; the suggested evolution of the
god-eating sacraments of lower religions
from the cannibal practice of honorifically
eating one’s dead relations;1 and the
evidence of the wide survival of primitive
corpse-worship down to our own times
in civilised Europe. I think it will be
1 While this work was passing through the
press a similar theory has been propounded by
Mr. Flinders Petrie in an article on “ Eaten
with Honour,” in which he reviews briefly the
evidence for the custom in Egypt and elsewhere.
allowed that, if even a few of these ideas
turn out on examination to be both new
and true, my book will have succeeded
in justifying its existence.
I put forth this work with the utmost
diffidence. The harvest is vast and the
labourers are few. I have been engaged
upon collecting and comparing materials
for more than twenty years. I have
been engaged in writing my book for
more than ten. As I explain in the last
chapter, the present first sketch of the
conclusions at which I have at last
arrived is little more than provisional.
I should also like to add here, what I
point out at greater length in the body
of the work, that I do not hold
dogmatically to all or to a single one of
the ideas I have now expressed. They
are merely conceptions forced upon my
mind by the present state of the evidence;
and I recognise the fact that in so vast and
varied a province, where almost encyclo
paedic knowledge would be necessary in
order to enable one to reach a decided
conclusion, every single one or all
together of these conceptions are liable
to be upset by further research.
I have endeavoured to write without
favour or prejudice, animated by a single
desire to discover the truth. Whether
I have succeeded in that attempt or not,
I trust my book may be received in the
same spirit in which it has been written
—a spirit of earnest anxiety to learn all
that can be learnt by inquiry and
investigation of man’s connection with
his God, in the past and the present.
In this hope I commit it to the kindly
consideration of that small section of the
reading public which takes a living
interest in religious questions.
�CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. Christianity as a Religious Standard
PAGE
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II. Religion and Mythology
tM
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III. The Life of the Dead ...
IV. The Origin of Gods
V. Sacred Stones
VI. Sacred Stakes
...
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•M
32
40
50
—
VII. Sacred Trees
»«•
54
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VIII. The Gods of Egypt
59
68
»•N
IX. The Gods of Israel
X. The Rise of Monotheism
XII. The Manufacture of Gods
***
....
77
...
• ••
XI. Human Gods
«4
....
XIII. Gods of Cultivation
XIV. Corn- and Wine-Gods
XV. Sacrifice and Sacrament
XVII. The World before Christ
XVIII. The Growth of Christianity
...
...
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...
•w
...
...
»w
«...
115
...
125
129
...
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91
100
no
...
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XIX. Survivals in Christendom
_
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XVI. The Doctrine of the Atonement
XX. Conclusion
9
16
135
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147
•W
155
�THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
CHAPTER I.
CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS
STANDARD
I PROPOSE in this work to trace out in
rough outline the evolution of the idea of
God from its earliest and crudest beginnings
in the savage mind of primitive man to
that highly evolved and abstract form
which it finally assumes in contemporary
philosophical- and theological thinking.
In the eyes of the modern evolutionary
inquirer the interest of the origin and
history of this widespread idea is mainly
psychological. We have before us a vast
group of human opinions, true or false,
which have exercised and still exercise an
immense influence upon the development
of mankind and of civilisation: the question
arises, Why did human beings ever come
to hold these opinions at all ? What was
there in the conditions of early man which
led him to frame to himself such abstract
notions of one or more great supernatural
agents, of whose objective existence he had
certainly in nature no clear or obvious
evidence ? Regarding the problem in this
light, as essentially a problem of the
processes of the human mind, I set aside
from the outset, as foreign to my purpose,
any kind of inquiry into the objective
validity of any one among the religious
beliefs thus set before us as subject-matter.
The question whether there may be a God
or gods, and, if so, what may be his or
their substance and attributes, do not here
concern us. All we have to do in our
present capacity is to ask ourselves strictly,
What first suggested to the mind of man
the notion of deity in the abstract at all ?
And how, from the early multiplicity of
deities which we find to have prevailed in
all primitive times among all human races,
did the conception of a single great and
unlimited deity first take its rise ?
To put the question in this form is to
leave entirely out of consideration the
objective reality or otherwise of the idea
itself. To analyse the origin of a concept
is not to attack the validity of the belief it
encloses. The idea of gravitation, for
example, arose by slow degrees in human
minds, and reached at last its final ex
pression in Newton’s law. But to trace
the steps by which that idea was gradually
reached is not in any way to disprove or to
discredit it. The Christian believer may
similarly hold that men arrived by natural
stages at the knowledge of the one true
God ; he is not bound to reject the final
conception as false merely because of the
steps by which it was slowly evolved. A
creative God, it is true, might prefer to
make a sudden revelation of himself to
some chosen body of men ; but an evolu
tionary God, we may well believe, might
prefer in his inscrutable wisdom to reveal
his own existence and qualities to his crea
tures by m eans of the sam e slow and tentative
intellectual gropings as those by which he
revealed to them the physical truths of
nature. I wish my inquiry, therefore, to be
regarded, not as destructive, but as recon
structive. It attempts to recover and
follow out the various planes in the evolution
of the idea of God, rather than to cast
doubt upon the truth of the evolved
concept.
In investigating any abstruse subject,
it is often best to proceed from the known
to the unknown, even although the unknown
itself may happen to come first in the order
of nature and of logical development. For
this reason, it may be advisable to begin
here with a brief preliminary examination
of Christianity, which is not only the most
familiar of all religions to us Christian
nations, but also the best known in its
origins : and then to show how far we may
safely use it as a standard of reference in
explaining the less obvious and certain
features of earlier or collateral cults.
Christianity, then, viewed as a religious
standard, has this clear and undeniable
�io
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
advantage over almost every other known
form of faith—that it quite frankly and
confessedly sets out in its development
with the worship of a particular Deified
Man.
This point in its history cannot, I think,
be overrated in importance, because in that
single indubitable central fact it gives us
the key to much that is cardinal in all other
religions ; every one of which, as I hope
hereafter to show, equally springs, directly
or indirectly, from the worship of a single
Deified Man, or of many Deified Men,
more or less etherealised. Whatever else may be said about the
origin of Christianity, it is at least fairly
agreed on either side, both by friends and
foes, that this great religion took its rise
around the personality of a certain par
ticular Galilean teacher, by name Jesus,
concerning whom, if we know anything at
all with any approach to certainty, we know
at least that he was a man of the people,
hung on a cross in Jerusalem under the
procuratorship of Caius Pontius Pilatus.
From the very beginning, however, a
legend, true or false (but whose truth or
falsity has no relation whatever to our
present subject), gathered about the per
sonality of this particular Galilean peasant
reformer. Reverenced at first by a small
body of disciples of his own race and caste,
he grew gradually in their minds into a
divine personage, of whom strange stories
were told, and a strange history believed
by a group of ever-increasing adherents in
all parts of the Graeco-Roman Mediterra
nean civilisation. The earliest of these
stories, in all probability—certainly the one
to which most importance was attached by
the pioneers of the faith—clustered about
his death and its immediate sequence.
Jesus, we are told, was crucified, dead, and
buried. But at the end of three days, if
we may credit the early documents of our
Christian faith, his body was no longer to
be found in the sepulchre where it had been
laid by friendly hands : and the report
spread abroad that he had risen again from
the dead. Supernatural messengers an
nounced his resurrection to the women
who had loved him : he was seen in the
flesh from time to time for very short
periods by one or other among the faithful
who still revered his memory. At last,
after many such appearances, he was
suddenly carried up to the sky before the
eyes of his followers, where, as one of the
versions authoritatively remarks, he was
“received into heaven, and sat on the
right hand of God”—that is to say, of
Jahweh, the ethnical deity of the Hebrew
people.
Such in its kernel was the original Chris
tian doctrine as handed down to us amid
a mist of miracle, in four or five documents
of doubtful age and uncertain authenticity.
Even this central idea does not fully
appear in the Pauline epistles, believed to
be the oldest in date of all our Christian
writings : it first takes full shape in the
somewhat later Gospels and Acts of the
Apostles. In the simplest and perhaps
the earliest of these definite accounts we
are merely told the story of the death and
resurrection, the latter fact being vouched
for on the dubious testimony of “ a young
man clothed in a long white garment,”
supplemented (apparently at a later period)
by subsequent “appearances” to various
believers. With the controversies which
have raged about these different stories,
however, the broad anthropological inquiry
into the evolution of God has no concern.
It is enough for us here to admit, what the
evidence probably warrants us in concluding,
that a real historical man of the name of
Jesus did once exist in Lower Syria, and
that his disciples at a period very shortly
after his execution believed him to have
actually risen from the dead, and in due
time to have ascended into heaven.
At a very early date, too, it was further
asserted that Jesus was in some unnatural
or supernatural sense “ the son of God ”—
that is to say, once more, the son of
Jahweh, the local and national deity of the
J ewish people. In other words, his worship
was affiliated upon the earlier historical
worship of the people in whose midst he
lived, and from whom his first disciples
were exclusively gathered. It was not, as
we shall more fully see hereafter, a
revolutionary or purely destructive system.
It based itself upon the common concep
tions of the Semitic community. The
handful of Jews and Galileans who accepted
Jesus as a divine figure did not think it
necessary, in adopting him as a god, to get
rid of their own preconceived religious
opinions. They believed rather in his
prior existence, as a part of Jahweh, and
in his incarnation in a human body for the
purpose of redemption. And when his cult
spread around into neighbouring countries
(chiefly, it would seem, through the instru
mentality of one Paul of Tarsus, who had
never seen him, or had beheld him only in
what is vaguely called “a vision”) the cult
of Jahweh went hand in hand with it, so
�CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS STANDARD
ii
that a sort of modified mystic monotheism,
connected with the personality of pre
based on Judaism, became the early creed
existent deities.
of the new cosmopolitan Christian Church.
In the earlier stages, it seems pretty clear
Other legends, of a sort familiar in the
that the relations of nascent Christianity to
lives of the founders of creeds and churches
Judaism were vague and undefined : the
elsewhere, grew up about the life of the
Christians regarded themselves as a mere
Christian leader ; or, at any rate, incidents sect of the Jews, who paid special reverence
of a typical kind were narrated by his
to a particular dead teacher, now raised to
disciples as part of his history. That a heaven by a special apotheosis of a kind
god or a godlike person should be born of with which everyone was then familiar.
a woman by the ordinary physiological But as the Christian Church spread to
processes of humanity seems derogatory to other lands, by the great seaports, it
his dignity—perhaps fatal to the godhead :x became on the one hand more distinct and
therefore it was asserted—we know not exclusive, while on the other hand it
whether truly or otherwise—that the
became more definitely dogmatic and
founder of Christianity, by some mysterious theological. It was in Egypt, it would
afflatus, was born of a virgin. Though seem, that the Christian pantheon first took
described at times as the son of one Joseph, its definite Trinitarian shape. Under the
a carpenter, of Nazareth, and of Mary, his
influence of the old Egyptian love for
betrothed wife, he was also regarded in an Triads of Trinities of gods, a sort of
alternative way as the son of the Hebrew mystical triune deity was at last erected out
god Jahweh, just as Alexander, though of the Hebrew Jahweh and the man Jesus,
known to be the son of Philip, was also with the aid of the Holy Spirit or Wisdom
considered to be the offspring of Amon-Ra of Jahweh. How far the familiar Egyptian
or Zeus Ammon. We are told, in order to Trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus may
lessen this discrepancy (on the slender have influenced the conception of the
authority of a dream of Joseph’s), how
Christian Trinity, thus finally made up of
Jesus was miraculously conceived by the
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we shall
Holy Spirit of Jahweh in Mary’s womb.
discuss later; for the present, it may
He was further provided with a royal
suffice to point out that the Graeco
pedigree from the house of David, a real or Egyptian Athanasius was the great upholder
mythical early Hebrew king ; and prophe of the definite dogma of the Trinity against
cies from the Hebrew sacred books were opposing (heretical) Christian thinkers; and
found to be fulfilled in his most childish
that the hymn or so-called creed known by
adventures.
In one of the existing his name bears the impress of the mystical
biographies, commonly ascribed to Luke,
Egyptian spirit, tempered by the Alexan
the companion of Paul, but supposed to drian Greek delight in definiteness and
bear traces of much later authorship, minuteness of philosophical distinction.
many such marvellous stories are recounted
In this respect, too, we shall observe in
of his infantile adventures: and in all our the sequel that the history of Christianity,
documents miracles attest his supernatural
the most known among the religions, was
powers, while appeal is constantly made to
exactly parallel to that of earlier and
the fulfilment of supposed predictions (all
obscurer creeds. At first, the relations of
of old Hebrew origin) as a test and the gods to one another are vague and
credential of the reality of his divine undetermined ; their pedigree is often
mission.
confused and even contradictory ; and the
We shall see hereafter that these two pantheon lacks anything like due hier
points—the gradual growth of a myth or archical system or subordination of persons.
legend, and affiliation upon earlier local
But as time goes on, the questions of
religious ideas—are common features in
theology or mythology are debated among
the evolution of gods in general, and of the
the priests and other interested parties,
God of monotheism in particular. In
details of this sort get settled in the form
almost every case where we can definitely of rigid dogmas, while subtle distinctions
track him to his rise, the deity thus begins of a, philosophical or metaphysical sort
with a Deified Man, elevated by his
tend to be imported by more civilised men
worshippers to divine rank, and provided
into the crude primitive faith.
with a history of miraculous incident, often
It was largely in other countries than
Judaea, and especially in Gaul, Rome, and
1 On this subject see Mr. Sidney Hartland’s
Egypt, that symbolism came to the aid of
Legend af Perseus, voL i. passim.
mysticism : that the cross, the tau, the
�12
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
labarum, the fish, the Alpha and Omega,
and all the other early Christian emblems,
were evolved and perfected; and that the
beginnings of Christian art took their first
definite forms.
Christianity, being a
universal, not a local or national, religion,
has adopted in its course many diverse
elements from most varied sources.
Originally, it would seem, the Christian
pantheon was almost exclusively filled by
the triune. God, in his three developments
or “ persons.” But from a very early time,
if not from the first dawn of the Christian
cult, it was customary to reverence the
remains of those who had suffered for the
faith, and perhaps even to invoke their aid
with Christ and the Father. The Roman
branch of the church, especially, accustomed
to the Roman worship of ancestors and the
Dii Manes, had its chief places of prayer
in the catacombs, where its dead were laid.
Thus arose the practice of the invocation
of saints, at whose graves or relics prayers
were offered both to the supreme deity and
to the faithful dead themselves as inter
cessors with Christ and the Father. The
early Christians, accustomed in their
heathen stage to pay worship to the
spirits of their deceased friends, could not
immediately give up this pious custom after
their conversion to the new creed, and so
grafted it on to their adopted religion.
Thus the subsidiary founders of Chris
tianity, Paul, Peter, the Apostles, the Evan
gelists, the martyrs, the confessors, came
to rank almost as an inferior order of
deities.
Among the persons who thus shared in
the honours of the new faith, the mother of
Jesus early assumed a peculiar prominence.
Goddesses had filled a very large part in
the devotional spirit of the older religions :
it was but natural that the devotees of Isis
and Pasht, of Artemis and Aphrodite,
should look for some corresponding feminine
object of worship in the younger faith.
The Theotokos, the mother of God, the
blessed Madonna, soon came to possess a
practical importance in Christian worship
scarcely inferior to that enjoyed by the
persons of the Trinity themselves—in cer
tain southern countries, indeed, actually
superior to it. The Virgin and Child, in
pictorial representation, grew to be the
favourite subject of Christian art. How
far this particular development of the
Christian spirit had its origin in Egypt,
and was related to the well-known Egyptian
figures of the goddess Isis with the child
Horus in her lap, is a question which may
demand consideration hereafter. For the
present, it will be enough to call attention
in passing to the fact that in this secondary
rank of deities or semi-divine persons, the
saints and martyrs, all alike, were at one
time or another Living Men and Women.
In other words, besides the one Deified
Man, Jesus, round whom the entire system
of Christianity centres, the Church now
worships also in the second degree a whole
host of minor Dead Men and Women,
bishops, priests, virgins, and confessors.
From the earliest to the latest ages of
the Church, the complexity thus long ago
introduced into her practice has gone on
increasing with every generation. Nomi
nally from the very outset a monotheistic
religion, Christianity gave up its strict
monotheism almost at the first start by
admitting the existence of three persons in
the godhead, whom it vainly endeavoured
to unify by its mystic but confessedly
incomprehensible Athanasian dogma. The
Madonna (with the Child) rose in time
practically to the rank of an independent
goddess (in all but esoteric Catholic theory):
while St. Sebastian, St. George, St. John
Baptist, St. Catherine, and even St. Thomas
of Canterbury himself, became as important
objects of worship in certain places as the
deity in person. As more and more saints
died in each generation, while the cult of
the older saints still lingered on everywhere
more or less locally, the secondary pantheon
grew ever fuller and fuller.
Obscure
personages, like St. Crispin and St. Cosmas,
St. Chad and St. Cuthbert, rose to the rank
of departmental or local patrons, like the
departmental and local gods of earlier
religions. Every trade, every guild, every
nation, every province, had its peculiar
saint. And at the same time the theory
of the Church underwent a constant
evolution. Creed was added to creed—
Apostles’, Nicene, Athanasian, and so forth,
each embodying some new and often
subtle increment to the whole mass of
accepted dogma. Council after council
made fresh additions of articles of faith—
the Unity of Substance, the Doctrine of
the Atonement, the Immaculate Concep
tion, the Authority of the Church, the
Infallibility of the Pope in his spiritual
capacity. And all these also are wellknown incidents of every evolving cult:
constant increase in the number of divine
beings ; constant refinements in the articles
of religion, under the influence of priestly
or scholastic metaphysics.
Two or three other points must still be
�CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS STANDARD
noted in this hasty review of the evolution
of Christianity, regarded as a standard of
religion.
In the matter of ceremonial and certain
other important accessories of religion it
must frankly be admitted that Christianity
rather borrowed from the older cults than
underwent a natural and original develop
ment on its own account. A priesthood,
as such, does not seem to have formed any
integral or necessary part of the earliest
Christendom: and when the orders of
bishops, priests, and deacons were intro
duced into the new creed, the idea seems
to have been derived rather from the
existing priesthoods of anterior religions
than from any organic connection with the
central facts of the new worship. From
the very nature of the circumstances this
would inevitably result. For the primitive
temple (as we shall see hereafter) was the
Dead Man’s tomb; the altar was his
gravestone ; and the priest was the relative
or representative who continued the
customary gifts to the ghost at the grave.
But the case of Jesus differs from almost
every other case on record of a Deified
Man in this—that his body seems to have
disappeared at an early date; and that,
inasmuch as his resurrection and ascension
into heaven were made the corner-stone of
the new faith, it was impossible for worship
of his remains to take the same form as
had been taken in the instances of almost
all previously deified Dead Persons. Thus,
the materials out of which the Temple, the
Altar, Sacrifices, Priesthood, are usually
evolved, were here to a very large extent
necessarily wanting.
Nevertheless, so essential to religion in
the minds of its followers are all these
imposing and wonted accessories that our
cult did actually manage to borrow them
ready-made from the great religions that
went before it, and to bring them into
some sort of artificial relation with its own
system. You cannot revolutionise the
human mind at one blow. The pagans
had been accustomed to all these ideas as
integral parts of religion as they understood
it : and they proceeded as Christians to
accommodate them by side-issues to the
new faith, in which these elements had no
such natural place as in the older creeds.
Not only did sacred places arise at the
graves or places of martyrdom of the
saints ; not only was worship performed
beside the bones of the holy dead, in the
catacombs and elsewhere ; but even a
mode of sacrifice and of sacrificial com
IS
munion was invented in the mass—a
somewhat artificial development from the
possibly unsacerdotal Agape-feasts of the
primitive Christians. Gradually, churches
gathered around the relics of the martyr
saints : and in time it became a principle
of usage that every church must contain
an altar—made of stones on the analogy
of the old sacred stones ; containing the
bones or other relics of a saint, like all
earlier shrines ; consecrated by the pouring
on of oil after the antique fashion ; and
devoted to the celebration of the sacrifice
of the mass, which became by degrees
more and more expiatory and sacerdotal
in character. As the saints increased in
importance, new holy places sprang up
around their bodies ; and some of these
holy places, containing their tombs, became
centres of pilgrimage for the most distant
parts of Christendom; as did also in
particular the empty tomb of Christ him
self, the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem.
The growth of the priesthood kept pace
with the growth of ceremonial in general,
till at last it culminated in the mediaeval
papacy, with its hierarchy of cardinals, arch
bishops, bishops, priests, and other endless
functionaries.
Vestments, incense, and
like accompaniments of sacerdotalism also
rapidly gained ground. All this, too, is a
common trait of higher religious evolution
everywhere. So likewise are fasting, vigils,
and the ecstatic condition. But asceticism,
monasticism, celibacy, and other forms of
morbid abstinence are peculiarly rife in the
east, and found their highest expression
in the life of the Syrian and Egyptian
hermits.
Lastly, a few words must be devoted in
passing to the rise and development of the
Sacred Books, now excessively venerated
in North-western Christendom. These
consisted in the first instance of genuine or
spurious letters of the apostles to the
various local churches (the so-called
Epistles), some of which would no doubt
be preserved with considerable reverence ;
and later of lives or legends of Jesus and
his immediate successors (the so-called
Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles).
Furthermore, as Christianity adopted from
Judaism the cult of its one supreme divine
figure, now no longer envisaged as Jahweh,
the national deity of the Hebrews, but as a
universal cosmopolitan God and Father, it
followed naturally that the sacred books
of the Jewish people, the literature of
J ahweh-worship, should also receive con
siderable attention at the hands of the new
�14
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
priesthood. By a gradual process of selec
tion and elimination, the canon of scripture
was evolved from these heterogeneous
materials : the historical or quasi-historical
and prophetic Hebrew tracts were adopted
by the Church, with a few additions of later
date, such as the Book of Daniel, under
the style and title of the Old Testament.
The more generally accepted lives of Christ,
again, known as Evangels or Gospels ; the
Acts of the Apostles ; the epistles to the
churches ; and that curious mystical alle
gory of the Neronian persecution known
as the Apocalypse, were chosen out of the
mass of early Christian literature to form
the authoritative collection of inspired
writing which we call the New Testament.
The importance of this heterogeneous
anthology of works belonging to all ages
and systems, but confounded together in
popular fancy under the name of the Books,
or more recently still as a singular noun,
the Bible, grew apace with the growth of
the Church : though the extreme and
superstitious adoration of their mere verbal
contents has only been reached in the
debased and reactionary forms of Chris
tianity followed at the present day by our
half-educated English and American Pro
testant dissenters.
From this very brief review of the most
essential factors in the development of the
Christian religion as a system, strung
loosely together with a single eye to the
requirements of our present investigation,
it will be obvious at once to every intelligent
reader that Christianity cannot possibly
throw for us any direct or immediate light
on the problem of the evolution of the idea
of God. Not only did the concept of a
god and gods exist full-fledged long before
Christianity took its rise at all, but also the
purely monotheistic conception of a single
supreme God, the creator and upholder of
all things, had been reached in all its
sublime simplicity by the Jewish teachers
centuries before the birth of the man Jesus.
Christianity borrowed from Judaism this
magnificent concept, and, humanly speak
ing, proceeded to spoil it by its addition of
the Son and the Holy Ghost, who mar the
complete unity of the grand Hebrew ideal.
Even outside Judaism the self-same notion
had already been arrived at in a certain
mystical form as the “ esoteric doctrine ” of
the Egyptian priesthood ; from whom, with
their peculiar views as to emanations and
Triads, the Christian dogmas of the Trinity,
the Logos, the Incarnation, and the Holy
Ghost were in large part borrowed. The
Jews of Alexandria formed the connecting
link between Egyptian heathenism, Hellenic
philosophy, and early Christianity; and
their half-philosophical, half-religious idea's
may be found permeating the first writings
and the first systematic thought of the
nascent church. In none of these ways,
therefore, can we regard Christianity as
affording us any direct or immediate gui
dance in our search for the origin and evolu
tion of the coricepts of many gods, and of
one God the creator.
Still, in a certain secondary and illustra
tive sense, I think we are fully justified in
saying that the history of Christianity, the
religion whose beginnings are most surely
known to us, forms a standard of reference
for all the other religions of the world.
Its value in this respect may best be
understood if I point out briefly in two
contrasted statements the points in which
it may and the points in which it may
not be fairly accepted as a typical reli
gion.
Let us begin first with the points in
which it may.
In the first place, Christianity is tho
roughly typical in the fact that beyond all
doubt its most central divine figure was at
first nothing other than a particular Deified
Man. All else that has been asserted
about this particular Man—that he was
the Son of God, that he was the incarna
tion of the Logos, that he existed previously
from all eternity, that he sits now on the
right hand of the Father—all the rest of
these theological stories do nothing in any
way to obscure the plain and universally
admitted historical fact that this Divine
Person, the Very God of Very God, being
of one substance with the Father, begotten
of the Father before all worlds, was yet, at
the moment when we first catch a glimpse
of him in the writings of his followers, a
Man recently deceased, respected, rever
enced, and perhaps worshipped by a little
group of fellow-peasants who had once
known him as Jesus, the son of the
carpenter. Jesus and his saints—Dominic,
Francis, Catherine of Siena—are no mere
verbal myths, no allegorical concepts, no
personifications of the Sun, the Dawn, the
Storm-cloud. Leaving aside for the present
from our purview of the Faith that one
element of the older supreme God—the
Hebrew Jahweh—whom Christianity bor
rowed from the earlier Jewish religion, we
can say at least with perfect certainty that
every single member of the Christian pan
theon—Jesus, the Madonna, St. John
�CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS STANDARD
Baptist, St. Peter, the Apostles, the Evan
gelists—were, just as much as San Carlo
Borromeo or St. Thomas of Canterbury or
St. Theresa, Dead Men or Women, wor
shipped after their death with divine or
quasi-divine honours. In this the best-known
of all human religions, the one that has
grown up under the full eye of history, the
one whose gods and saints are most dis
tinctly traceable, every object of worship,
save only the single early and as yet
unresolved deity of the Hebrew cult, whose
origin is lost for us in the midst of ages,
turns out on inquiry to be, in ultimate
analysis, a Real Man or Woman.
That point alone I hold to be of cardinal
importance, and of immense or almost in
estimable illustrative value, in seeking for
the origin of the idea of a god in earlier
epochs.
In the second place, Christianity is
thoroughly typical in all that concerns its
subsequent course of evolution ; the gradual
elevation of its central Venerated Man into
a God of the highest might and power ;
the multiplication of secondary deities or
saints by worship or adoration of other
Dead Men and Women ; the growth of a
graduated and duly-subordinated hierarchy
of divine personages ; the rise of a legend,
with its miracles; the formation of a
definite theology, philosophy, and syste
matic dogmatism; the development of
special artistic forms, and the growth or
adoption of appropriate symbolism ; the
production of sacred books, rituals, and
formularies ; the rise of ceremonies,
mysteries, initiations, and sacraments ; the
reverence paid to relics, sacred sites, tombs,
and dead bodies ; and the close connection
of the religion as a whole with the ideas of
death, the soul, the ghost, the spirit, the
resurrection of the body, the last judgment,
hell, heaven, the life everlasting, and all
the other vast group of concepts which sur
round the simple fact of death in theprimitive human mind generally.
Now, on the other side, let us look
wherein Christianity to a certain small
extent fails to be typical.
It fails to be typical because it borrows
largely a whole ready-made theology, and
above all a single supreme God, from a
pre-existent religion. In so far as it takes
certain minor features from other cults, we
can hardly say with truth that it does not
represent the average run of religious
systems; for almost every particular new
Creed so bases itself upon elements of still
earlier faiths ; and it is perhaps impossible
B
for us at the present day to get back to
anything like a really primitive or original
form of cult. But Christianity is very far
removed indeed from all primitive cults in
that it accepts ready-made the monotheistic
conception, the high-water mark, so to
speak, of religious philosophising. While
in the frankness with which it exhibits to
us what is practically one-half of its supreme
deity as a Galilean peasant of undoubted
humanity, subsequently deified and etherealised, it allows us to get down at a single
step to the very origin of godhead ; yet in
the strength with which it asserts for the
other half of its supreme deity (the Father,
with his shadowy satellite the Holy Ghost)
an immemorial antiquity and a complete
severance from, human life, it is the least
anthropomorphic and the most abstract of
creeds. In order to track the idea of God
to its very source, then, we must apply in
the last resort to this unresolved element of
Christianity—the Hebrew Jahweh—the
same sort of treatment which we apply to
the conception of Jesus or Buddha—we
must show it to be also the immensely
transfigured and magnified ghost of a
Human Being.
Furthermore, Christianity fails to be
typical in that it borrows also from pre
existing religions to a great extent the
ideas of priesthood, sacrifice, the temple,
the altar, which, owing to the curious dis
appearance or at least unrecognisability of
the body of its founder (or, rather, its
central object of worship), have a less
natural place in our Christian system than
in any other known form of religious prac
tice.
Magnificent churches, a highlyevolved sacerdotalism, the sacrifice of the
mass, the altar, and the relics, have all
been imported in their fullest shape into
developed Christianity. But every one of
these things is partly borrowed from earlier
religions, and partly grew up about the
secondary worship of saints and martyrs,
their bones, their tombs, their catacombs,
and theii reliquaries.
I propose, in subsequent chapters, to
trace the growth of the idea of a God from
the most primitive origins to the most
highly evolved forms ; beginning with the
ghost, and the early undeveloped deity :
continuing through polytheism to the. rise
of monotheism ; and then returning at last
once more to the full Christian conception.
I shall try to show, in short, the evolution
of God, by starting with the evolution of
gods in .general, and coming down by
gradual stages through various races to the
�i6
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
evolution of the Hebrew, Christian, and
Moslem God in particular. And the goal
towards which I shall move will be the
one already foreshadowed in this introduc
tory chapter—the proof that in its origin
the concept of a god is nothing more than
that of a Dead Man, regarded as a still
surviving ghost or spirit, and endowed
with increased or supernatural powers and
qualities.
CHAPTER II.
RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY
At the very outset of the profound inquiry
on which we are now about to embark, we
are met by a difficulty of considerable
magnitude. I n the opinion of most modern
mythologists mythology is the result of “ a
disease of language.” We are assured by
many eminent men that the origin of
religion is to be sought, not in savage
ideas about ghosts and spirits, the Dead
Man and his body or his surviving double,
but in primitive misconceptions of the
meaning of words which had reference to
the appearance of the Sun and the Clouds,
the Wind and the Rain, the Dawn and the
Dusk, the various phenomena of meteor
ology in general. If this be so, then our
attempt to derive the evolution of gods
from the crude ideas of early men about
their dead is clearly incorrect.
I do not believe these suggestions are
correct. It seems to me that the worship
of the sun, moon, and stars, instead of
being an element in primitive religion, is
really a late and derivative type of adora
tion ; and that mythology is mistaken in
the claims it makes for its own importance
in the genesis of the idea of a God or gods.
In order, however, to clear the ground for
a fair start in this direction, we ought to
begin by inquiring into the relative posi
tions of mythology and religion.
Religion, says another group of modern
thinkers, of whom Mr. Edward Clodd is
perhaps the most able English exponent,
“ grew out of fear.” It is born of man’s
terror of the great and mysterious natural
agencies by which he is surrounded. Now,
I am not concerned to deny that many
mythological beings of various terrible
forms do really so originate. I would
readily accept some such vague genesis for
many of the dragons and monsters which
abound in all savage or barbaric imaginings.
I would give up to Mr. Clodd the Etruscan
devils and the Hebrew Satan, the Grendels
and the Fire-drakes, the whole brood of
Cerberus, Briareus, the Cyclops, the Cen
taurs. None of these, however, is a god or
anything like one. A god, as I understand
the word, and as the vast mass of mankind
has always understood it, is a supernatural
being to be revered and worshipped. He
stands to his votaries, on the whole, as Dr.
Robertson Smith has well pointed out, in a
kindly and protecting relation. He may
be angry with them at times, to be sure;
but his anger is temporary and paternal
alone : his permanent attitude towards
his people is one of friendly concern; he
is worshipped as a beneficent and generous
Father. It is the origin of gods in this
strictest sense that concerns us here.
Bearing this distinction carefully in mind,
let us proceed to consider the essentials of
religion. If you were to ask almost any
intelligent and unsophisticated child,
“ What is religion ?” he would answer
off-hand, with the clear vision of youth,
“ Oh, it’s saying your prayers, and reading
your Bible, and singing hymns, and going
to church or to chapel on Sundays.” If
you were to ask any intelligent and
unsophisticated Hindu peasant the same
question, he would answer in almost the
self-same spirit, “ Oh, it is doing poojah
regularly, and paying your dues every, day
to Mahadeo.” If you were to ask any
simple-minded African savage, he would
similarly reply, “It is giving the gods flour,
and oil, and native beer, and goat-mutton.”
And finally, if you were to ask a devout
Italian contadino, he would instantly say,
“It is offering up candles and prayers to
the Madonna, attending mass, and remem
bering the saints on every festa.”
And they would all be quite right. This,
in its essence, is precisely what we call
religion. Apart from the special refine
ments of the higher minds in particular
creeds, which strive to import into it all,
according to their special tastes or fancies,
a larger or smaller dose of philosophy, or
of metaphysics, or of ethics, or of mysti
cism, this is just what religion means and
has always meant to the vast majority of
the human species. What is common to
it throughout is Custom or Practice : a
certain set of more or less similar Obser
vances : propitiation, prayer, praise, offer
ings : the request for divine favours, the
deprecation of divine anger, or other
misfortunes: and as the outward and
�RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY
visible adjuncts of all these, the altar, the
sacrifice, the temple, the church ; priest
hood, services, vestments, ceremonial.
What is not at all essential to religion in
its wider aspect—taking the world round,
both past and present, Pagan, Buddhist,
Mohammedan, Christian, savage, and
civilised—is the ethical element, properly
so called. And what is very little essential
indeed is the philosophical element, theo
logy or mythology, the abstract theory of
spiritual existences. This theory, to be
sure, is in each country or race closely
related with religion under certain aspects;
and the stories told about the gods or God
are much mixed up with the cult itself in
the minds of worshippers ; but they are no
proper part of religion, strictly so called.
In a single word, I contend that religion,
as such, is essentially practical : theology
or mythology, as such, is essentially
theoretical.
Moreover, I also believe, and shall
attempt to show, that the two have to a
large extent distinct origins and roots:
that the union between them is in great
part adventitious : and that, therefore, to
account for or explain the one is by no
means equivalent to accounting for and
explaining the other.
Frank recognition of this difference of
origin between religion and _ mythology
would, I imagine, largely reconcile the two
conflicting schools of thought which at
present divide opinion between them on
this interesting problem in the evolution of
human ideas. On the one side, we have
the mythological school of interpreters,
whether narrowly linguistic, like Professor
Max Müller, or broadly anthropological,
like Mr. Andrew Lang, attacking the
problem from the point of view of myth or
theory alone. On the other side, we have
the truly religious school of interpreters,
like Mr. Herbert Spencer, and to some
extent Mr. Tylor, attacking the problem
from the point of view of practice or real
religion. The former school, it seems to
me, has failed to perceive that what it is
accounting for is not the origin of religion
at all—of worship, which is the central-root
idea of all religious observance, or of the
temple, the altar, the priest, and the
offering, which are its outer expression—
but merely the origin of myth or fable.
The latter school, on the other hand, tvhile
correctly interpreting the origin of all that
is essential and central in religion, have
perhaps under-estimated the value of their
opponents’ work through regarding it as
really opposed to their own, instead of
accepting what part of it may be true in
the light of a contribution to an indepen
dent but allied branch of the same inquiry.
In short, if the view here suggested be
correct, Spencer and Tylor have paved
the way to a true theory of the Origin of
Religion: Max Muller, Lang, and the
other mythologists have thrown out hints
of varying value towards a true theory of
the Origin of Mythology, or of its more
modern equivalent and successor, Theo
logy.
A brief outline of facts will serve to
bring into clearer relief this view of
religion as essentially practical—a set of
observances, rendered inevitable by the
primitive data of human psychology. It
will then be seen that what is fundamental
and essential in religion is the body of
practices, remaining throughout all stages
of human development the same, or nearly
the same, in spite of changes of mytho
logical or theological theory; and that
what is accidental and variable is the
particular verbal explanation or philoso
phical reason assigned for the diverse rites
and ceremonies.
In its simplest surviving savage type,
religion consists wholly and solely in
certain acts of deference paid by the living
to the persons of the dead. I shall try to
show in the sequel that down to its most
highly evolved modern type in the most
cultivated societies, precisely similar acts
of deference, either directly to corpses or
ghosts as such, or indirectly to gods who
were once ghosts, or were developed from
ghosts, form its essence still. But to begin
with I will try to bring a few simple
instances of the precise nature of religion
in its lowest existing savage mode.
Here in outline, but in Mr. Macdonald’s1
own words, are the ideas and observances
which this careful and accurate investigator
found current among the tribes of die heart
of Africa.
4 L Cu
The tribes he-¡wed-amongi“ are unani
mous in saying that there is something be
yond the body which they call spirit. Every
human body at death is forsaken by this
spirit.” That is the almost universal though
not quite primitive belief, whose necessary
genesis has been well traced out by Mr.
Herbert Spencer and Mr. Lester Ward.
“ Do these spirits ever die ?” Mr. Mac
donald asks. “ Some,” he answers, “ I
have heard affirm that it is possible for a
’The Rev. Duff Macdonald, author vtAfricana.
C
�i8
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
troublesome spirit to be killed. Others
give this a direct denial. Many, like
Kumpama, or Cherasulo, say, ‘You ask
me whether a man’s spirit ever dies. I
cannot tell. I have never been in the
spirit-world ; but this I am certain of, that
spirits live for a very long time.’”
On the question, “ Who the gods are ?”
Mr. Macdonald says :—
“In all our translations of Scripture where
we found the word God we used Mulungu;
but this word is chiefly used by the natives
as a general name for spirit. The spirit of
a deceased man is called his Mulungu, and
all the prayers and offerings of the living
are presented to such spirits of the dead.
It is here that we find the great centre of
the native religion. The spirits of the dead
are the gods of the living.
“ Where are these gods found ? At the
grave? No........Their god is not the body in
the grave, but the spirit, and they seek this
spirit at the place where their departed
kinsman last lived among them. It is the
great tree at the verandah of the dead man’s
house that is their temple ; and if no tree
grow here, they erect a little shade, and
there perform their simple rites. If this
spot becomes too public, the offerings may
be defiled, and the sanctuary will be removed
to a carefully-selected spot under some
beautiful tree. Very frequently a man
presents an offering at the top of his own
bed beside his head. He wishes his god
to come to him and whisper in his ear as he
sleeps.”
And here, again, we get the origin of
nature-worship :—
“ The spirit of an old chief may have a
whole mountain for his residence, but he
dwells chiefly on the cloudy summit. There
he sits to receive the worship of his votaries,
and to send down the refreshing showers in
answer to their prayers.”
Almost as essential to religion as these
prime factors in its evolution—the god,
worship, offerings, presents, holy places,
temples—is the existence of a priesthood.
Here is how the Central Africans arrive at
that special function :—
“A certain amount of etiquette is ob
served in approaching the gods. I n no case
can a little boy or girl approach these deities,
neither can anyone that has not been at the
mysteries. The common qualification is
that a person has attained a certain age,
about twelve or fourteen years, and has a
house of his own. Slaves seldom pray,
except when they have had a dream..
Children that have had a dream tell their
mother, who approaches the deity on their
behalf. (A present for the god is necessary,
and the slave or child may not have it.)
“ Apart from the case of dreams and a
few such private matters, it is not usual for
anyone to approach the gods except the
chief of the village. He is the recognised
high priest who presents prayers and offer
ings on behalf of all that live in his village.
...... The natives worship not so much in
dividually as in villages or communities.
Their religion is more a public than a private
matter.”
But there are also further reasons why
priests are necessary. Relationship forms
always a good ground for intercession. A
mediator is needed.
“ The chief of a village,” says Mr. Mac
donald, “ has another title to the priesthood.
It is his relatives that are the village gods.
Everyone that lives in the village recognises
these gods; but if anyone remove to another
village, he changes his gods. He recognises
now the gods of his new chief. One wish
ing to pray to the god (or gods) of any vil
lage naturally desires to have his prayers
presented through the village chief, because
the latter is nearly related to the village god,
and may be expected to be better listened
to than a stranger.”
Elimination and natural selection next
give one the transition from the ghost to the
god, properly so called.
“The gods of the natives then are» nearly
as numerous as their dead. It is impossible
to worship all ; a selection must be made,
and, as we have indicated, each worshipper
turns most naturally to the spirits of his own
departed relatives; but his gods are too many
still, and in farther selecting he turns to those
that have lived nearest his own time. Thus
the chief of a village will not trouble himself
about his great-great-grandfather: he will
present his offering to his own immediate
predecessor, and say, ‘ O father, I do not
know all your relatives, you know them all,
invite them to feast with you.’ The offer
ing is not simply for himself, but for him
self and all his relatives.”
Ordinary ghosts are soon forgotten with
the generation that knew them. Not so a
few select spirits, the Caesars and Napo
leons, the Charlemagnes and Timurs of
savage empires.
“A great chief that has been successful
in his wars does not pass out of memory so
soon. He may become the god of a moun
tain or a lake, and may receive homage as
a local deity long after his own descen
dants have been driven from the spot.
�RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY
When there is a supplication for rain the
inhabitants of the country pray not so much
to their own forefathers as to the god of
yonder mountain on whose shoulders the
great rain-clouds repose. (Smaller hills are
seldom honoured with a deity.) ”
Well, in all this we get, it seems to me,
the very essentials and universals of religion
generally. In the presents brought to the
dead man’s grave to appease the ghost we
have the central element of all worship,
the practical key of all cults, past or
present. On the other hand, mythologists
tell us nothing about the origin of prayer
and sacrifice : they put us off with stories
of particular gods, without explaining to us
how those gods ever came to be worshipped.
Now, mythology is a very interesting study
in its own way : but to treat as religion a
mass of stories and legends about gods or
saints, with hardly a single living element
of practice or sacrifice, seems to me simply
to confuse two totally distinct branches of
human inquiry. The Origin of Tales has
nothing at all to do with the Origin of
Worship.
When we come to read Mr. Macdonald’s
account of a native funeral, on the other
hand, we are at once on a totally different
tack ; we see the genesis of the primitive
acts of sacrifice and religion.
“Along with the deceased is buried a con
siderable part of his property. We have
already seen that his bed is buried with him;
so also are all his clothes. If he possesses
several tusks of ivory, one tusk or more is
ground to a powder between two stones and
put beside him. Beads are also ground
down in the same way. These precautions
are taken to prevent the witch (who is
supposed to be answerable for his death)
from making any use of the ivory or
beads.
“ If the deceased owned several slaves,
an enormous hole is dug for a grave. The
slaves are now brought forward. They
may be either cast into the pit alive, or the
undertakers may cut all their throats. The
body of their master or their mistress is
then laid down to rest above theirs, and the
grave is covered in.
“After this the women come forward
with the offerings of food, and place them
at the head of the grave. The dishes in
which the food was brought are left behind.
The pot that held the drinking-water of the
deceased and his drinking-cup are also left
with him. These, too, might be coveted by
the witch, but a hole is pierced in the pot,
and the drinking calabash is broken.”
19
Sometimes the man may be buried in his
own hut.
“In this case the house is not taken
down, but is generally covered with cloth,
and the verandah becomes the place for
presenting offerings. His old house thus
becomes a kind of temple........The de
ceased is now in the spirit-world, and
receives offerings and adoration. He is
addressed as ‘ Our great spirit that has gone
before.’ If anyone dream of him, it is at
once concluded that the spirit is ‘up to
something.’ Very likely he wants to have
some of the survivors for his companions.
The dreamer hastens to appease the spirit
by an offering.”
So real is this society of the dead that
Mr. Macdonald says :—
“ The practice of sending messengers to
the world beyond the grave is found on the
West Coast. A chief summons a slave,
delivers to him a message, and then cuts
off his head. If the. chief forget anything
that he wanted to say, he sends another
slave as a postscript.”
I have quoted at such length from this
recent and extremely able work because I
want to bring into strong relief the fact
that we have here going on under our very
eyes, from day to day, de novo, the entire
genesis of new gods and goddesses, and of
all that is most central and essential to
religion—worship, prayer, the temple, the
altar, priesthood, sacrifice. Nothing that
the mythologists can tell us about the Sun
or the Moon, the Dawn or the Storm-cloud,
Little Red Riding Hood or Cinderella and
the Glass Slipper, comes anywhere near the
Origin of Religion in these its central and
universal elements. Those stories or
guesses may be of immense interest and
importance as contributions to the history
of ideas in our race ; but nothing we can
learn about the savage survival in the myth
of Cupid or Psyche, or about the primitive
cosmology in the myth of the children of
Kronos, helps us to get one inch nearer
the origin of God or of prayer, of worship,
of religious ceremonial, of the temple, the
church, the sacrifice, the mass, or any other
component part of what we really know as
religion in the concrete. These myths
may be sometimes philosophic guesses,
sometimes primitive folk-tales, but they
certainly are not the truths of religion.
On the other hand, the living facts, here
so simply detailed by a careful, accurate,
and unassuming observer, strengthened by
the hundreds of similar facts collected by
Tylor, Spencer, and others, do help us at
�20
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
once to understand the origin of the central
core and kernel of religion as universally
practised all the world over.
For, omitting for the present the mytho
logical and cosmological factor, which so
often comes in to obscure the plain reli
gious facts in missionary narrative or highlycoloured European accounts of native be
liefs, what do we really find as the under
lying truths of all religion ? That all the
world over practices essentially similar to
those of these savage Central Africans pre
vail among mankind; practices whose affi
liation upon the same primitive ideas has
been abundantly proved by Mr. Herbert
Spencer; practices which have for their
essence the propitiation or adulation of a
spiritual being or beings, derived from
ghosts, and conceived of as similar, in all
except the greatness of the connoted attri
butes, to the souls of men. “Whenever
the [Indian] villagers are questioned about
their creed,” says Sir William Hunter,
“ the same answer is invariably given :
‘ The common people have no idea of
religion, but to do right [ceremonially] and
to worship the village god.’ ”
In short, I maintain that religion is not
mainly, as the mistaken analogy of Chris
tian usage makes us erroneously call it,
Faith or Creed, but simply and solely
Ceremony, Custom, or Practice. And I
am glad to say that, for early Semitic
times at least, Professor Robertson Smith
is of the same opinion.
The Roman religion separates itself at
once into a civic or national and a private
or family cult. There were the great gods,
native or adopted, whom the State wor
shipped publicly, as the Central African
tribes worship the chief’s ancestors ; and
there were the Lares and Penates, whom
the family worshipped at its own hearth,
and whose very name shows them to have
been in origin and essence ancestral spirits.
And as the real or practical Hindu religion
consists mainly of offering up rice, millet,
and ghee to the little local and family
deities or to the chosen patron god in the
Brahmanist pantheon, so, too, the real or
practical Roman religion consisted mainly
of sacrifice done at the domestic altar to
the special Penates, farre pio et salients
mica.
I will not go on to point out in detail at
the present stage of our argument how
Professor Sayce similarly finds ancestor
worship and Shamanism (a low form of
ghost-propitiation) at the root of the
religion of the ancient Accadians; how
other observers have performed the same
task for the Egyptians and Japanese;
and how like customs have been traced
among Greeks and Amazulu, among
Hebrews and Nicaraguans, among early
English and Digger Indians, among our
Aryan ancestors themselves and Andaman
Islanders. Every recent narrative of travel
abounds with examples. Those who wish
to see the whole of the evidence on this
matter marshalled in battle array have
only to turn to the first volume of Mr.
Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology.
What concerns us in this chapter a little
more is to call attention by anticipation to
the fact that even in Christianity itself the
same primitive element survives as the
centre of all that is most distinctively
religious, as opposed to theological. I
make these remarks provisionally here in
order that the reader may the better under
stand to what ultimate goal our investiga
tion will lead him.
It is the universal Catholic custom to
place the relics of saints or martyrs under
the altars in churches. Thus the body of
St. Mark the Evangelist lies under the
high altar of St. Mark’s, at Venice; and in
every other Italian cathedral, or chapel, a
reliquary is deposited within the altar
itself. So well understood is this principle
in the Latin Church that it has hardened
into the saying, “No relic, no altar.” The
sacrifice of the mass takes place at such
an altar, and is performed by a priest in
sacrificial robes.. The entire Roman
Catholic ritual is a ritual derived from the
earlier sacerdotal ideas of ministry at an
altar, and its connection with the primitive
form is still kept up by the necessary
presence of human remains in its holy
places.
Furthermore, the very idea of a church
itself is descended from the early Christian
meeting-places in the catacombs or at the
tombs of the martyrs, which are universally
allowed to have been the primitive
Christian altars. We know now that the
cruciform dome-covered plan of Christian
churches is derived from these early
meeting-places at- the junction of lanes or
alleys in the catacombs ; that the nave,
chancel, and transepts indicate the crossing
of the alleys, while the dome represents
the hollowed-out portion or rudely circular
vault where the two lines of archway
intersect. The earliest dome-covered
churches were attempts, as it were, to
construct a catacomb above ground for the
reception of the altar-tomb of a saint or
�RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY.
martyr. Similarly with the chapels that
open out at the side from the aisles or
transepts. Etymologically, the word chapel
is the modernised- form of capella, the
arched sepulchre excavated in the walls of
the catacombs, before the tomb at which it
was usual to offer up prayer and praise.
The chapels built out from the aisles in
Roman churches, each with its own altar
and its own saintly relics, are attempts to
reproduce above ground in the same way
the original sacred places in the early
Christian excavated cemeteries.
Thus Christianity itself is linked on to
the very antique custom of worship at
tombs, and the habit of ancestor-worship
by altars, relics, and invocation of saints,
even revolutionary Protestantism still re
taining some last faint marks of its origin
in the dedication of churches to particular
evangelists or martyrs, and in the more or
less disguised survival of altar, priesthood,
sacrifice, and vestments.
Now, I do not say ancestor-worship
gives us the whole origin of everything
that is included in Christian English minds
in the idea of religion. I do not say it
accounts for all the cosmologies and
cosmogonies of savage, barbaric, or civilised
tribes. Those, for the most part, are pure
mythological products, explicable mainly, I
believe, by means of the key with which
mythology supplies us ; and one of them,
adopted into Genesis from an alien source,
has come to be accepted by modern
Christendom as part of that organised
body of belief which forms the Christian
creed, though not in any true sense the
Christian religion. Nor do I say that
ancestor-worship gives us the origin of
those ontological, metaphysical, or mys
tical conceptions which form part of the
philosophy or theology of many priest
hoods. Religions, as we generally get
them envisaged for us nowadays, are held
to include the mythology, the cosmogony,
the ontology, and even the ethics of the
race that practises them. These extra
neous developments, however, I hold to
spring from different roots and to have
nothing necessarily in common with
religion proper. The god is the true crux.
If we have once accounted for the origin of
ghosts, gods, tombs, altars, temples,
churches, worship, sacrifice, priesthoods,
and ceremonies, then we have accounted
for all that is essential and central in
religion.
Once more, I do not wish to insist, either,
that every particular and individual god,
2L
national or naturalistic, must necessarily
represent a particular ghost—the dead
spirit of a single definite once-living
person. It is enough to show, as Mr.
Spencer has shown, that the idea of the
god, and the worship paid to a god, are
directly derived from the idea of the ghost,
and the offerings made to the ghost,
without necessarily holding, as Mr. Spencer
seems to hold, that every god is and must
be in ultimate analysis the ghost of a
particular human being. Once the con
ception of gods had been evolved by
humanity, and had become a common part
of every man’s imagined universe, then it
was natural enough that new gods should
be made from time to time out of
abstractions or special aspects and powers
of nature, and that the same worship should
be paid to such new-made and purely
imaginary gods as had previously been
paid to the whole host of gods evolved
from personal and tribal ancestors. It is
the first step that costs : once you have
got the idea of a god fairly evolved, any
number of extra gods may be invented or
introduced from all quarters. A great
pantheon readily admits new members to
its ranks from many strange sources.
Familiar instances in one of the bestknown pantheons are those of Concordia,
Pecunia,Aius Locutius, Rediculus Tutanus.
The Romans, indeed, deified every con
ceivable operation of nature or of human
life ; they had gods or goddesses for the
minutest details of agriculture, of social
relations, of the first years of childhood, of
marriage and domestic arrangements
generally. Many of their deities, as we
shall see hereafter, were obviously manu
factured to meet a special demand on
special occasions. But, at the same time,
none of these gods, so far as we can judge,
could ever have come to exist at all if the
ghost-theory and ancestor-worship had not
already made familiar to the human mind
the principles and practice, of religion
generally.
Still, to admit that other elements have
afterwards come in to confuse religion is
quite a different thing from admitting that
religion itself has more than one origin.
Whatever gives us the key to the practice
of worship gives us the key to all real
religion. Now, one may read through
almost any books of the mythological school
without ever coming upon a single word
that throws one ray of light upon the origin
of religion itself thus properly called. To
trace the development of this, that, or the
�22
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
other story or episode in a religious myth
is in itself a very valuable study in human
evolution : but no amount of tracing such
stories ever gives us the faintest clue to the
question why men worshipped Osiris, Zeus,
Siva, or Venus; why they offered up prayer
and praise to Isis, or to Artemis ; why they
made sacrifices of oxen to Capitolian Jove
at Rome, or slew turtle-doves on the altar
of Jahweh, god of Israel, at Jerusalem.
The ghost - theory and the practice of
ancestor-worship show us a natural basis
and genesis for all these customs, and
explain them in a way to which no mytho
logical inquiry can add a single item of
fundamental interest.
It may be well at this point to attempt
beforehand some slight provisional dis
entanglement of the various extraneous
elements which interweave themselves at
last with the simple primitive fabric of
practical religion.
In the first place, there is the mytho
logical element. The mythopoeic faculty is
a reality in mankind. Stories arise, grow,
gather episodes with movement, transform
and transmute themselves, wander far in
space, get corrupted by time, in ten thousand
ways suffer change and modification. Now,
such stories sometimes connect themselves
with living men and women. Everybody
knows how many myths exist even in our
own day about every prominent or peculiar
person. They also gather more particularly
round the memory of the dead, and espe
cially of any very distinguished dead man
or woman. Sometimes they take their rise
in genuine tradition, sometimes they are
pure fetches of fancy or of the romancing
faculty. The ghosts or the gods are no less
exempt from these mythopceic freaks than
other people; and as gods go on living
indefinitely, they have plenty of time for
myths to gather about them. Most often,
a myth is invented to account for some
particular religious ceremony.
Again,
myths demonstrably older than a parti
cular human being—say Caesar, Virgil,
Arthur, Charlemagne—may get fitted by
later ages to those special personalities.
The same thing often happens also with
gods.
Again, myths about the gods come in the
long run, in many cases, to be written
down, especially by the priests, and them
selves acquire a considerable degree of
adventitious holiness. Thus we get Sacred
Books ; and in most advanced races, the
sacred books tend to become an important
integral part of religion, and a test of the
purity of tenets or ceremonial. But sacred
books almost always contain rude cosmo
logical guesses and a supernatural cosmo
gony, as well as tales about the doings,
relationships, and prerogatives of the gods.
Such early philosophical conjectures come
then to be intimately bound up with the
idea of religion, and in many cases even
to supersede in certain minds its true,
practical, central kernel. The extreme of
this tendency is seen in English Protestant
Dissenting Bibliolatry.
Rationalistic and reconciliatory glosses
tend to arise with advancing culture. At
tempts are made to trace the pedigree and
mutual relations of the gods, and to get
rid of discrepancies in earlier legends. The
Theogeny of Hesiod is a definite effort
undertaken in this direction for the Greek
pantheon. Often the attempt is made by
the most learned and philosophicallyminded among the priests, and results in
a quasi-philosophical mythology like that
of the Brahmans. In the monotheistic or
half-monotheistic religions this becomes
theology. In proportion as it grows more
and more laboured and definite, the atten
tion of the learned and the priestly class is
more and more directed to dogma, creed,
faith, abstract formulae of philosophical or
intellectual belief, while insisting also upon
ritual or practice. But the popular religion
remains usually, as in India, a religion of
practical custom and observances alone,
having very little relation to the highly
abstract theological ideas of the learned or
the priestly.
Lastly, in the highest religions, a large
element of ethics, of sentiment, of broad
humanitarianism, of adventitious emotion,
is allowed to come in, often to the extent of
obscuring the original factors of practice
and observance. We are constantly taught
that “ real religion ” means many things
which have nothing on earth to do with
religion proper, in any sense, but are
merely high morality, tinctured by emo
tional devotion towards a spiritual being or
set of beings.
What I want to suggest then in the
present chapter sums itself up in a few
sentences thus : Religion is practice, my
thology is story-telling. Every religion has
myths that accompany it: but the myths
do not give rise to the religion : on the
contrary, the religion gives rise to the
myths. And I shall attempt in this book
to account for the origin of religion alone,
omitting altogether both mythology as a
whole, and all mythical persons or beings
�THE LIFE OF THE DEAD
other than gods in the sense here illus
trated.
CHAPTER III.
THE LIFE OF THE DEAD
Religion has one element within it still
older, more fundamental, and more per
sistent than any mere belief in a god or
gods—nay, even than the custom or prac
tice of supplicating and appeasing ghosts
or gods by gifts and observances. That
element is the conception of the Life of the
Dead. On the primitive belief in such
life all religion ultimately bases itself.
The belief is, in fact, the earliest thing to
appear in religion, for there are savage
tribes who have nothing worth calling gods,
but have still a religion or cult of their dead
relatives.
But the belief in continued life, like all
other human ideas, has naturally undergone
various stages of evolution. The stages
glide imperceptibly into one another, of
course ; but I think we can on the whole
distinguish with tolerable accuracy between
three main layers or strata of opinion with
regard to the continued existence of the
dead. In the first or lowest stratum, the
difference between life and death them
selves is but ill or inadequately perceived ;
the dead are thought of as yet bodily living.
In the second stratum, death is recognised
as a physical fact, but is regarded as only
temporary; at this stage, men look forward
to the Resurrection of the body, and expect
the Life of the World to Come. In the
third stratum, the soul is regarded as a
distinct entity from the body; it survives it
in a separate and somewhat shadowy form:
so that the opinion as to the future proper
to this stage is not a belief in the Resur
rection of the body, but a belief in the
Immortality of the Soul. These two con
cepts have often been confounded together
by loose and semi-philosophical Christian
thinkers; but in their essence they are
wholly distinct and irreconcilable.
I shall examine each of these three strata
separately.
And first as to that early savage level of
thought where the ideas of life and death
are very ill demarcated. To us at the
present day it seems a curious notion that
people should not possess the conception
23
of death as a necessary event in every
individual human history. But that is
because we cannot easily unread all our
previous thinking, cannot throw ourselves
frankly back into the state of the savage.
We are accustomed to living in large
and -populous communities, where deaths
are frequent, and where natural death in
particular is an every-day occurrence. We
have behind us a vast and long history of
previous ages; and we know that historical
time was occupied by the lives of many
successive generations, all of which are now
dead, and none of which on the average
exceeded a certain fixed limit of seventy or
eighty odd years. To us, the conception
of human life as a relatively short period
is a common and familiar one.
We forget, however, that to the savage
all this is quite otherwise. He lives in a
small and scattered community, where
deaths are rare, and where natural death
in particular is comparatively infrequent.
Most of his people are killed in war, or
devoured by wild beasts, or destroyed by
accidents in the chase, or by thirst or starva
tion. Death by disease is comparatively
rare; death by natural decay almost un
known or unrecognised.
Nor has the savage a great historic past
behind him. He knows few but his tribes
men, and little of their ancestors save
those whom his parents can remember
before them. His perspective of the past
is extremely limited. That “all men are
mortal ” is to civilised man a truism ; to
very early savages it would necessarily
have seemed a startling paradox. No man
ever dies within his own- experience ; ever
since he can remember, he has continued
to exist as a permanent part of all his
adventures. Most of the savage’s family
have gone on continuously living with him.
A death has been a rare and startling occur
rence. Thus the notion of death as an
inevitable end never arises at all ; the
notion of death as due to natural causes
seems quite untenable. When a savage
dies, the first question that arises is, “ Who
has killed him ?” If he is slain in war, or
devoured by a tiger, or ripped up by an
elephant, or drowned by a stream in spate,
or murdered by a tribesman, the cause is
obvious. If none of these, then the death
is usually set down to witchcraft.
Furthermore, the mere fact of death is
much less certain among primitive or savage
men than in civilised communities. We
know as a rule with almost absolute cer
tainty whether at a given moment a sick or
�24
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
wounded man is dead or living. Never
theless, even among ourselves, cases of
doubt not infrequently occur. At times
we hesitate whether a man or woman is
dead or has fainted. If the heart continues
to beat, we consider them still living ; if
not the slightest flutter of the pulse can be
perceived, we consider them dead. Even
our advanced medical science, however, is
often perplexed in very obscure cases of
catalepsy; and mistakes have occurred
from time to time, resulting in occasional
premature burials. Naturally, among sav
ages, such cases of doubt are far more likely
to occur than among civilised people ; or
rather, to put it as the savage would think
of it, there is often no knowing when a
person who is lying stiff and lifeless may
happen to get up again and resume his
usual activity. The savage is accustomed
to seeing his fellows stunned or rendered
unconscious by blows, wounds, and other
accidents, inflicted either by the enemy, by
wild beasts, by natural agencies, or by the
wrath of his tribesmen; and he never
knows how soon the effect of such accidents
may pass away, and the man may recover
his ordinary vitality. As a rule, he keeps
and tends the bodies of his friends as long
as any chance remains of their ultimate
recovery, and often (as we shall see in the
sequel) much longer.
Again, in order to understand this atti
tude of early man towards his wounded, his
stricken, and his dead, we must glance aside
for a moment at the primitive psychology.
Very early indeed in the history of the
human mind, I believe, some vague adum
bration of the notion of a soul began to per
vade humanity. We now know that con
sciousness is a function of the brain ; that
it is intermitted during sleep, when the
brain rests, and also during times of grave
derangement of the nervous or circulatory
systems, as when we faint or assume the
comatose condition, or are stunned by a
blow, or fall into catalepsy or epilepsy. We
also know that consciousness ceases alto
gether at death, when the brain no longer
functions ; and that the possibility of its
further continuance is absolutely cut off by
the fact of decomposition. - But these
truths, still imperfectly understood or rashly
rejected by many among ourselves, were
wholly unknown to early men. They had
to frame for themselves as best they could
some vague working hypothesis of thehuman mind, from data which suggested
themselves in the ordinary course of life ;
and the hypothesis which they framed was
more or less roughly that of the soul or
spirit, still implicitly accepted by a large
majority of the human species.
According to this hypothesis, every man
consists of two halves or parts, one mate
rial or bodily, the other immaterial or spiri
tual. The first half, called the body, is
visible and tangible; the second half,
called the soul, dwells within it, and is
more or less invisible or shadowy. It is to
a large extent identified with the breath ;
and like the breath it is often believed to
quit the body at death, and even to go off
in a free form and live its own life else
where. As this supposed independence of
the soul from the body lies at the very basis
of all ghosts and gods, and therefore of
religion itself, I may be excused for going at
some length into the question of its origin.
Actually, so far as we know by direct
and trustworthy evidence, the existence of
a mind, consciousness, or “soul,” apart
from a body, has never yet been satisfac
torily demonstrated. But the savage de
rived the belief, apparently, from a large
number of concurrent hints and sugges
tions, of which such a hypothesis seemed
to him the inevitable result. During the
daytime he was awake ; at night he slept :
yet even in his sleep, while his body lay
curled on the ground beside the camp-fire,
he seemed to hunt or to fight, to make love
or to feast, in some other region. What
was this part of him that wandered from
the body in dreams ?—what, if not the soul
or breath which he naturally regarded as
something distinct and separate ? And
when a man died, did not the soul or breath
go from him? When he was badly wounded,
did it not disappear for a time, and then re
turn again? In fainting fits, in catalepsy,
and in other abnormal states, did it not
leave the body, or even play strange tricks
with it? I need not pursue this line of
thought, already fully worked out by Mr.
Herbert Spencer and Dr. Tylor. It is
enough to say that from a very early date
primitive man began to regard the soul or
life as something bound up with the breath,
something which could go away from the
body at will and return to it again, some
thing separable and distinct, yet essential
to the person, very vaguely conceived as
immaterial or shadowy, but more so at a
later than at an earlier period.1
1 The question of the Separate Soul has re
cently received very full treatment from Mr,
Frazer in The Golden Bough, and Mr. Sidney
Hartland in The Legend of Perseus.
�THE LIFE OF THE DEAD
Moreover, these souls or spirits (which
quitted the body in sleep or trance) out
lived death, and appeared again to sur
vivors. In dreams we often see the shapes
of living men; but we also see with peculiar
vividness the images of the departed. Ev erybody is familiar with the frequent reappear
ance in sleep of intimate friends or rela
tions lately deceased. The savage accepts
this dream-world as almost equally real
with the world of sense-presentation. As
he envisages the matter to himself, his
soul has been away on its travels
without its body, and there has met
and conversed with the souls of dead
friends or relations.
We must remember also that in savage
life occasions for trance, for fainting, and
for other abnormal or comatose nervous
conditions occur far more frequently than
in civilised life. The savage is often
wounded and fails from loss of blood ; he
cuts his foot against a stone, or is half
killed by a wild beast; he fasts long and
often, perforce, or is reduced to the very
verge of starvation ; and he is therefore
familiar, both in his own case and in the
case of others, with every variety of uncon
sciousness and of delirium or delusion. All
these facts figure themselves to his mind as
absences of the soul from the body, which
is thus to him a familiar and almost every
day experience.
Moreover, it will hence result that the
savage can hardly gain any clear concep
tion of Death, and especially of death from
natural causes. When a tribesman is
brought home severely wounded and un
conscious, the spectator’s immediate idea
must necessarily be that the soul has gone
away and deserted the body. For how
long it has gone, he cannot tell; but his
first attempts are directed towards inducing
or compelling it to return again. For this
purpose, he often addresses it with prayers
and adjurations, or begs it to come back
with loud cries and persuasions. And he
cannot possibly discriminate between its
temporary absence and its final departure.
As Mr. Herbert Spencer well says, the con
sequences of blows or wounds merge into
death by imperceptible stages. “ Now the
injured man shortly ‘returned to himself,’
and did not go away again ; and now, re
turning to himself only after a long absence,
he presently deserted his body for an in
definite time. Lastly, instead of these
temporary returns, followed by final ab
sence, there sometimes occurred cases in
which a violent blow caused continuous
«5
absence from the very first; the other self
never came back at all.”
In point of fact, during these earlier
stages, the idea of Death as we know it did
not and does not occur in any form. There
are still savages who do not seem to recog
nise the universality and necessity of death
—who regard it, on the contrary, as some
thing strange and unnatural, something
due to the machination of enemies or of
witchcraft. With the earliest men, it is a
foregone conclusion, psychologically speak
ing, that they should so regard it. To
them, a Dead Man must always have
seemed a man whose soul or breath or
other self had left him, but might possibly
return again to the body at any time.
Each of the three stages of thought above
discriminated has its appropriate mode of
disposing of its dead. The appropriate
mode for this earliest stage is Preservation
of the Corpse, which eventuates at last in
Mummification.
The simplest form of this mode of dis
posal of the corpse consists in keeping it in
the hut or cave where the family dwell,
together with the living. A N ew Guinea
woman thus kept her husband’s body in her
hut till it dried up of itself, and she kissed
it and offered it food every day, as though
it were living. Many similar cases are re
ported from elsewhere. Hut preservation _
is common in the very lowest races. More
frequently, however, owing to the obvious
discomfort of living in too close proximity
to a dead body, the corpse at this stage of
thought is exposed openly in a tree or on a
platform or under some other circumstances
where no harm can come to it. Among
the Australians and Andaman Islanders,
who, like the Negritoes of New Guinea,
preserve for us a very early type of human
customs, the corpse is often exposed on a
rough raised scaffold. Some of the Poly
nesian and Melanesian peoples follow the
same practice. The Dyaks and Kyans
expose their dead in trees. “ But it is in
America,” says Mr. Herbert Spencer, “that
exposure on raised stages is commonest.”
A slight variant on this method, peculiar
to a very maritime race, is that described
by Mr. H. O. Forbes among the natives of
Timurlaut:—
“ The dead body is placed in a portion
of a ■prau fitted to the length of the indi
vidual, or within strips of gaba-gaba, or
stems of the sago-palm pinned together.
If it is a person of some consequence, such
as an Orang Kaya, an ornate and decorated
/raw-shaped coffin is specially made. This
�26
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
Is then enveloped in calico, and placed
either on the top of a rock by the margin
of the sea at a short distance from the
village, or on a high pile-platform erected
on the shore about low-tide mark. On the
top of the coffin-lid are erected tall flags,
and the figures of men playing gongs,
shooting guns, and gesticulating wildly to
frighten away evil influences from the
sleeper. Sometimes the platform is erected
on the shore above high-water mark, and
near it is stuck in the ground a tall bamboo
full of palm-wine; and suspended over a
bamboo rail are bunches of sweet pota
toes for the use of the dead man’s Nitu.
When the body is quite decomposed, his
son or one of the family disinters the skull
and deposits it on a little platform in his
house, in the gable opposite the fireplace,
while to ward off evil from himself he
carries about with him the atlas and axis
bones of its neck in his luon, or siriholder.”
This interesting account is full of impli
cations whose fuller meaning we will
perceive hereafter. The use of the skull
and the talisman bone should especially be
noted for their later importance.
For
skulls are fundamental in the history of
religion.
Cases like these readily pass into the
practice of Mummifying, more especially
m dry or desert climates. Even in so
damp a tropical country as New Guinea,
however, D’Albertis found in a shed on the
banks of the Fly River two mummies,
artificially prepared, as he thought, by
removal of the flesh, the bones alone being
preserved with the skin to cover them.
Here we have evidently a clear conception
of death as a serious change, of a different
character from a mere temporary absence.
But mummification for the most part is
confined to drier climates, where it is
artificially performed down to a very
evolved stage of civilisation, as we know
well in Peru and Egypt.
One word must be said in passing as to
the frequent habit of specially preserving,
and even carrying about the person, the
head or hand of a deceased relative. This
has been already mentioned in the case of
Timurlaut; and it occurs frequently else
where. Thus Mr. Chalmers says of a New
Guinea baby : “ It will be covered with
two inches of soil, the friends watching
beside the grave ; but eventually the skull
and smaller bones will be preserved and
worn by the mother.” Similarly, in the
Andaman Islands, where we touch perhaps
the lowest existing stratum of savage
feeling, “ widows may be seen with the
skulls of their deceased partners suspended
round their necks.” The special preserva
tion of the head, even when the rest of the
body is eaten or buried, will engage our
attention at a later period : heads so pre
served are usually resorted to as oracles,
and are often treated as the home of the
spirit. Mr. Herbert Spencer has collected
many similar instances, such as that of the
Tasmanians who wore a bone from the
skull or arm of a dead relation.
At this stage of thought, it seems to me,
it is the actual corpse that is still thought
to be alive ; the actual corpse that appears
in dreams ; and the actual corpse that is
fed and worshipped and propitiated with
presents.
Ceremonial cannibalism appears in this
stratum, and survives from it into higher
levels. The body is eaten entire, and the
bones preserved ; or the flesh and fat are
removed, and the skin left; or a portion
only is sacramentally and reverently eaten
by the surviving relations. These pro
cesses will be more minutely described in
the sequel.
The first stage merges by gradual
degrees into the second, which is that of
Burial or its equivalent. Cave-burial of
mummies or of corpses forms . the tran
sitional link. Indeed, inasmuch as many
races of primitive men lived habitually in
caves, the placing or leaving the corpse in
a cave seems much the same thing as the
placing or leaving it in a shed, hut, or
shelter. The cave-dwelling Veddahs simply
left the dead man in the cave where he
died, and themselves migrated to some
other cavern. Still, cave-burial lingered
on late with many tribes or nations which
had for ages outlived the habit of cave
dwelling. Among the South American
Indians, cave-burial was common ; and in
Peru it assumed high developments of
mummification. The making of an artificial
cave or vault for the dead is but a slight
variant on this custom ; it was frequent in
Egypt, the other dry country where the
making of mummies was carried to a high
pitch of perfection. The Tombs of the
Kings at Thebes are splendid instances of
such artificial caves, elaborated into stately
palaces with painted walls, where the dead
monarchs might pass their underground
life in state and dignity. Cave-tombs,
natural or artificial, are also common in
Asia Minor, Italy, and elsewhere.
During the first stage, it may be noted-
�THE LIFE OF THE DEAD
the attitude of man towards his dead is
chiefly one of affectionate regard. The
corpse is kept at home, and fed or tended ;
the skull is carried about as a beloved
object. But in the second stage, which
induces the practice of burial, a certain
Fear of the Dead becomes more obviously
apparent. Men dread the return of the
corpse or the ghost, and strive to keep it
within prescribed limits. In this stage, the
belief in the Resurrection of the Body is
the appropriate creed ; and though at first
the actual corpse is regarded as likely to
return to plague survivors, that idea gives
place a little later, I believe, to the con
ception of a less material double or spirit.
And here let us begin by discriminating
carefully between the Resurrection of the
Body and the Immortality of the Soul.
The idea of Resurrection arose from and
is closely bound up with the practice of
burial, the second and simpler mode of
disposing of the remains of the dead. The
idea of Immortality arose from and is
closely bound up with the practice of
burning invented at the third stage of
human culture. During the early his
torical period all the most advanced and
cultivated nations burnt their dead, and, in
consequence, accepted the more ideal and
refined notion of Immortality. But modern
European nations bury their dead, and, in
consequence, accept, nominally at least,
the cruder and grosser notion of Resur
rection. Nominally, I say, because, in
spite of creeds and formularies, the
influence of Plato and other ancient
thinkers, as well as of surviving ancestral
ideas, has made most educated Europeans
really believe in Immortality, even when
they imagine themselves to be believing in
Resurrection. Nevertheless, the belief in
Resurrection is the avowed and authorita
tive belief of the Christian world, which
thus proclaims itself as on a lower level in
this respect than the civilised peoples of
antiquity.
The earlier of these two ways of dis
posing of the bodies of the dead is
certainly by burial. As this fact has
recently been called in question, I will
venture to enlarge a little upon the evidence
in its favour. In point of time, burial goes
back with certainty to the neolithic age,
and with some probability to the palaeolithic.
Several true interments in caves have been
attributed by competent geologists to the
earlier of these two periods, the first for
which we have any sure warranty of man’s
existence on earth. But, as I do not desire
n
to introduce controversial matter of any
sort into this exposition, I will waive the
evidence for burial in the palaeolithic age
as doubtful, and will merely mention that
in the Mentone caves, according to Mr.
Arthur Evans, a most competent authority,
we have a case of true burial accompanied
by neolithic remains of a grade of culture
earlier and simpler than any known to us
elsewhere. In other words, from the very
earliest beginning of the neolithic age men
buried their dead ; and they continued to
bury them, in caves or tumuli, down to the
end of neolithic culture. They buried
them in the Long Barrows in England ;
they buried them in the Ohio mounds ;
they buried them in the shadowy forests of
New Zealand ; they buried them in the
heart of darkest Africa. I know of no
case of burning or any means of disposal
of the dead, otherwise than by burial or its
earlier equivalent, mummification, among
people in the stone age of culture in
Europe. It is only when bronze and other
metals are introduced that races advance
to the third stage, the stage of cremation.
In America, however, the Mexicans were
cremationists.
The wide diffusal of burial over the globe
is also a strong argument for its relatively
primitive origin. In all parts of the world
men now bury their dead, or did once bury
them. Burial is the common, and universal
mode ; burning, exposure, throwing into a
sacred river, and so forth, are sporadic and
exceptional, and in many cases, as among
the Hindus, are demonstrably of late origin,
and connected with certain relatively
modern refinements of religion.
Once more, in many or most cases, we
have positive evidence that where a race
now burns its dead, it used once to bury
them. Burial preceded burning in preheroic
Greece, as it also did in Etruria and in
early Latium. The people of the Long
Barrows, in Western Europe generally,
buried their dead ; the people of the Round
Barrows who succeeded them, and who
possessed a far higher grade of culture,
almost always cremated. It has been
assumed that burning is primordial in India;
but Mr. William Simpson, the well-known
artist of the Illustrated London Nevus, calls
my attention to the fact that the Vedas
speak with great clearness of burial as the
usual mode of disposing of the corpse, and
even allude to the tumulus, the circle of
stones around it, and the sacred temenos
which they enclose. According to Rajendralala Mitra, whose high authority on the
�28
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
subject is universally acknowledged, burial
was the rule in India till about the thirteenth
or fourteenth century before the Christian
era ; then came in cremation, with burial of
the ashes, and this continued till about the
time of Christ, when burial was dispensed
with, and the ashes were thrown into some
sacred river. I think, therefore, until some
more positive evidence is adduced on the
other side, we may rest content with our
general conclusion that burial is the oldest,
most universal, and most savage mode of
disposing of the remains of the dead among
humanity after the general recognition of
death as a positive condition.
What is the origin of this barbaric and
disgusting custom, so repugnant to all the
more delicate sentiments of human nature ?
I think Mr. Frazer is right in attributing it
to the terror felt by the living for the ghosts
(or, rather, at first the corpses) of the
dead, and the fear that they may return
to plague or alarm their surviving fellow
tribesmen.
In his admirable paper on “Certain
Burial Customs as Illustrative of the Primi
tive Theory of the Soul,” Mr. Frazer points
out that certain tribes of early men paid
great attention to the dead, not so much
from affection as from selfish terror. Ghosts
or bodies of the dead haunt the earth every
where, unless artificially confined to bounds,
and make themselves exceedingly disagree
able to their surviving relatives. To prevent
this, simple primitive philosophy in its
second stage has hit upon many devices.
The most universal is to bury the dead—
that is to say, to put them in a deep-dug
hole, and to cover them with a mighty
mound of earth, which has now sadly de
generated in civilised countries into a mere
formal heap, but which had originally the
size and dignity of a tumulus. The object
of piling up this great heap of earth was to
confine the ghost (or corpse), who could not
easily move so large a superincumbent
mass of matter. In point of fact, men
buried their dead in order to get well rid of
them, and to effectually prevent their return
to light to disturb the survivors.
For the same reason heavy stones were
often piled on the top of the dead. In one
form, these became at last the cairn ; and,
as the ghosts of murderers and their victims
tend to be especially restless, everybody
who passes their graves in Arabia, Ger
many, and Spain is bound to add a stone to
the growing pile in order to confine them.
In another form, that of the single big stone
rolled just on top of the body to keep it
down by its mass, the makeweight has de
veloped into the modern tombstone.
Again, certain nations go further still in
their endeavours to keep the ghost (or
corpse) from roaming. The corpse of a
Damara, says Galton, having been sewn up
in an old ox-hide, is buried in a hole, and
the spectators jump backwards and forwards
over the grave to keep the deceased from
rising out of it. In America, the Tupis tied
fast all the limbs of the corpse, “ that the
dead man might not be able to get up, and
infest his friends with his visits.” You may
even divert a river from its course, as Mr.
Frazer notes, bury your dead man securely
in its bed, and then allow the stream to
return to its channel. It was thus that
Alaric was kept in his grave from further
plaguing humanity; and thus Captain
Cameron found a tribe of Central Africans
compelled their deceased chiefs to “ cease
from troubling.” Sometimes, again, the
grave is enclosed by a fence too high for
the dead man to clear even with a running
jump ; and sometimes the survivors take
the prudent precaution of nailing the body
securely to the coffin, or of breaking their
friend’s spine, or even—but this is an ex
treme case—of hacking him to pieces. In
Christian England the poor wretch whom
misery had driven to suicide was prevented
from roaming about to the discomfort of
the lieges by being buried with a stake
driven barbarously through him. The
Australians, in like manner, used to cut off
the thumb of a slain enemy that he might
be unable to draw the bow ; and the Greeks
were wont to hack off the . extremities of
their victims in order to incapacitate them
for further fighting. These cases will be
seen to be very luminiferous when we come
to examine the origin and meaning of cre
mation.
Burial, then, I take it, is simply by origin
a means adopted by the living to protect
themselves against the vagrant tendencies
of the actual dead. For some occult reason,
the vast majority of men in all ages have
been foolishly afraid of meeting with the
spirits of the departed. Their great desire
has been, not to see, but to avoid seeing
these singular visitants ; and for that pur
pose they invented, first of all, burial, and
afterwards cremation.
The common modern conception of the
ghost is certainly that of an immaterial or
shadowy form, which can be seen but not
touched, and which preserves an outer sem
blance of the human figure. But that idea
itself, which has been imported Into all our
�THE LIFE OF THE DEAD
descriptions and reasonings about the ghost
beliefs of primitive man, is, I incline to
think, very far from primitive, and has been
largely influenced by quite late conceptions
derived from the cremational rather than
the burial level of religious philosophy. In
other words, though, in accordance with
universal usage and Mr. Frazer’s precedent,
I have used the word “ ghost ” above in re
ferring to these superstitious terrors of
early man, I believe it is far less the spirit
than the actual corpse itself that early men
even in this second stage were really afraid
of. It is the corpse that may come back
and do harm to survivors. It is the corpse
that must be kept down by physical means,
that must be covered with earth, pressed
flat beneath a big and ponderous stone,
deprived of its thumbs, its hands, its eyes,
its members. True, I believe the savage
also thinks of the ghost or double as
returning to earth ; but his psychology,
I fancy, is not so definite as to distin
guish very accurately between corpse and
spirit.
If we look at the means taken to preserve
the body after death among the majority
of primitive peoples, above the Tasmanian
level, this truth of the corpse being itself
immortal becomes clearer and clearer. We
are still, in fact, at a level where ghost and
dead man are insufficiently differentiated.
In all these cases it is believed that the
dead body continues to live in the grave
the same sort of life that it led above
ground; and for this purpose it is provided
with weapons, implements, utensils, food,
. vessels, and all the necessaries of life for
its new mansion.
Continued sentient
existence of the body after death is the
keynote of the earliest level of psychical
philosophy. First, the corpse lives in the
hut with its family : later, it lives in the
grave with its forefathers.
But side by side with this naïve belief in
the continued existence of the body after
death, which survives into the inhumational
stage of evolution, goes another and appa
rently irreconcilable belief in a future
resurrection.. Strictly speaking, of course,
if the body is still alive, there is no need
for any special revivification. But religious
thought, as we all know, does not always
pride itself upon the temporal virtues of logic
or consistency; and the savage in particular
is not in the least staggered at being asked
to conceive of one and the same subject in
two opposite and contradictory manners.
He does not bring the two incongruities
into thought together ; he thinks them
29
alternately, sometimes one, sometimes the
other. Even Christian systematists are
quite accustomed to combine the incon
gruous beliefs in a future resurrection and
in the continued existence of the soul after
death, by supposing that the soul remains
meanwhile in some nondescript limbo,
apart from its body—some uncertain Sheol,
some dim hades or purgatory or “place of
departed spirits.”
It is the common belief of the second or
inhumational stage, then, that there will be
at some time or other a “ General Resur
rection.” No doubt this General Resurrec
tion has been slowly developed out of the
belief in and expectation of many partial
resurrections. It is understood that each
individual corpse will, or may, resurge at
some time : therefore it is believed that all
corpses together will resurge at a single
particular moment. So long as burial
persists, the belief in the Resurrection
persists beside it, and forms a main feature
in the current conception of the future
life among the people who practise it.
How, then, do we progress from this
second or inhumational stage to the third
stage with its practice of burning, and its
correlated dogma of the Immortality of the
Soul ?
In this way, as it seems to me. Besides
keeping down the ghost (or corpse) with
clods and stones, it was usual in many cases
to adopt other still stronger persuasives
and dissuasives in the same direction.
Sometimes the persuasives were of the
gentlest type ; for example, the dead man
was often politely requested and adjured
to remain quiet in the grave and to give no
trouble. But sometimes they were less
bland; the corpse was often pelted with
sticks, stones, and hot coals, in order to
show him that his visits at home would not
in future be appreciated. Now burning, I
take it, belonged originally to the same
category of strong measures against re
fractory ghosts or corpses ; and this is the
more probable owing to the fact that it
is mentioned by Mr. Frazer among the
remedies recommended for use in the
extreme case of vampires. Its original
object was, no doubt, to prevent the corpse
from returning in any way to the homes of
the living.
Once any people adopted burning as a
regular custom, however, the chances are
that, coeteris paribus, it would continue and
spread. For the practice of cremation is
so much more wholesome and sanitary than
the practice of burial that it would give a
�3o
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
double advantage in the struggle for exist
ence to any race that adopted it, in peace
and in war. Hence it is quite natural that
when at a certain grade of culture certain
races happened to light upon it in this
superstitious way, those races would be
likely to thrive and to take the lead in
culture as long as no adverse circumstances
counteracted the advantage.
But the superstitions and the false psy
chology which gave rise at first to the
notion of a continued life after death would
not, of course, disappear with the intro
duction of burning. The primitive cremationists may have hoped, by reducing to
ashes the bodies of their dead, to prevent
the recurrence of the corpse to the presence
of the living ; but they could not prevent
the recurrence of the ghost in the dreams
of the survivors ; they could not prevent
the wind that sighed about the dead man’s
grave, the bate that flitted, the vague noises
that terrified, the abiding sense of the
corpse’s presence. All the factors that go
to make up the ghost or the revenant (to
use a safe word, less liable to misinterpre
tation) still remained as active as ever.
Hence, I believe, with the introduction of
cremation the conception of the ghost
merely suffered an airy change. He grew
more shadowy, more immaterial, more
light, more spiritual. In one word, he
became, strictly speaking, a ghost as we
now understand the word, not a returning
dead man. This conception of the ghost
as essentially a shade or shadow belongs
peculiarly, it seems to me, to the cremating
peoples. I can answer for it that among
negroes, for example, the “ duppy” is conr
ceived as quite a material object. It is
classical literature, the literature of the
cremating Greeks and Romans, that has
familiarised us most with the idea of the
ghost as shadowy and intangible. Burying
races have more solid doubles. When
Peter escaped from prison in Jerusalem,
the assembled brethren were of opinion
that it must be “his angel.” The white
woman who lived for years in a native
Australian tribe was always spoken of by
her hosts as a ghost. In one word, at a
low stage of culture the revenant is con
ceived of as material and earthly; at a
higher stage, he is conceived of as imma
terial and shadowy.
Now, when people take to burning their
dead, it is clear that they will no longer be
able to believe in the Resurrection of the
Body. Indeed, if I am right in the theory
here set forth, it is just in order to prevent
the Resurrection of the Body at incon
venient moments that they take to burning.
To be sure, civilised nations, with their
developed power of believing in miracles,
are capable of supposing, not only that the
sea will yield up its dead, but also that
burnt, mangled, or dispersed bodies will be
collected from all parts to be put together
again at the Resurrection. This, however,
is not the naïve belief of simple and natural
men. To them, when you have burnt a
body you have utterly destroyed it, here
and hereafter.
Naturally, therefore, among cremating
peoples, the doctrine of the Resurrection of
the Body tended to go out, and what re
placed it was the doctrine of the immortality
of the Soul. You may burn the body, but
the spirit still survives ; and the survival
gives origin to a new philosophy of ghosts
and revenants. Gradually the spirit gets to
be conceived as diviner essence, entangled
and imprisoned, as it were, in the meshes
of the flesh, and only to be set free by
means of fire, which thus becomes envisaged
at last as friendly rather than destructive
in its action on the dead body. What was
at first a precaution against the return of
the corpse becomes in the end a pious duty;
just as burial itself, originally a selfish pre
caution against the pranks and tricks of
returning corpses, becomes in the end so
sacred and imperative that unburied ghosts
are conceived as wandering about, Archytaswise, begging for the favour of a handful of
sand to prevent them from homeless vaga
bondage for ever. Nations who bum come
to regard the act of burning as the appointed,
means for freeing the ghost from the con
fining meshes of the body, and regard it
rather as a solemn duty to the dead than
as a personal precaution.
Not only so, but there arises among them
a vague and fanciful conception of the
world of shades very different indeed from
the definite and material conception of the
two earlier stages. The mummy was
looked upon as inhabiting the tomb, which
was furnished and decorated for its recep
tion like a house ; and it was provided with
every needful article for use and comfort.
Even the buried body was supplied with
tools and implements for the ghost. The
necessities of the shade are quite different
and more shadowy. He has no need of
earthly tools or implements. The objects
found in the Long Barrows of the burying
folk and the Round Barrows of the cremationists well illustrate this primordial and
far-reaching difference. The Long Barrows
�THE LIFE OF THE DEAD
of the Stone Age people are piled above an
interment; they contain a chambered tomb,
which is really the subterranean home or
palace of the body buried in it. The wives
and slaves of the deceased were killed and
interred with him to keep him company in
his new life in the grave ; and implements,
weapons, drinking-cups, games, trinkets,
and ornaments were buried with their
owners. The life in the grave was all as
material and real as this one; the same
objects that served the warrior in this world
would equally serve him in the same form
in the next. It is quite different with the
Round Barrows of the Bronze Age cremationists. These barrows are piled round
an urn, which determines the shape of the
tumulus, as the chambered tomb and the
corpse determine the shape of the earlier
Stone Age interments. They contain ashes
alone; and the implements and weapons
placed in them are all broken or charred
with fire. Why ? Because the ghost,
immaterial as he has now become, can no
longer make use of solid earthly weapons
or utensils. It is only their ghosts or
shadows that can be of any use to the
ghostly possessor in the land of shades.
Hence everything he needs is burnt or
broken, in order that its ghost may be
released and liberated; and all material
objects are now conceived as possessing
such ghosts, which can be utilised accord
ingly in the world of spirits.
Note also that with this advance from
the surviving or revivable Corpse to the
immortal Soul or Spirit, there goes almost
naturally and necessarily a correlative
advance from continued but solitary life
in the tomb to a freer and wider life in an
underground world of shades and spirits.
The ghost gets greatly liberated and eman
cipated. He has more freedom of move
ment, and becomes a citizen of an organised
community, often envisaged as ruled over
by a King of the Dead, and as divided into
places of reward and punishment. But
while we modem Europeans pretend to be
resurrectionists, it is a fact that our current
ghostly and eschatological conceptions (I
speak of the world at large, not of mere
scholastic theologians) have been largely
influenced by ideas derived from this
opposite doctrine—a doctrine once held by
many or most of our own ancestors, and
familiarised to us from childhood in classical
literature. In fact, while most Englishmen
of the present day believe they believe in the
Resurrection of the Body, what they really
believe in is the Immortality of the Soul.
31
It might seem at first sight as though a
grave discrepancy existed between the two
incongruous ideas, first of burying or burn
ing your dead so that they may not be
able to return or to molest you, and second of
worshipping at their graves or making
offerings to their disembodied spirits. But
to the savage mind these two conceptions
are by no means irreconcilable. While he
jumps upon the corpse of his friend or his
father to keep it in the narrow pit he has
digged for it, he yet brings it presents of
food and drink, or slays animals at the
tomb, that the ghost may be refreshed by
the blood that trickles down to it. Indeed,
several intermediate customs occur, which
help us to bridge over the apparent gulf
between reverential preservation of the
mummified body and the coarse precau
tions of burial or burning. Thus, in many
cases, some of which we shall examine
in the next chapter, after the body has
been for some time buried, the head is
disinterred, and treasured with care in the
family oratory, where it is worshipped and
tended, and where it often gives oracles to
the members of the household. A cere
monial washing is almost always a feature
in this reception of the head; it recurs
again and again in various cases, down to
the enshrinement of the head of Hoseyn at
Cairo, and that of St. Denis at the abbey
of the same name.
I ought also to add that between com
plete preservation of the corpse and the
practice of burial there seems to have gone
another intermediate stage, now compara
tively rare, but once very general, if we
may judge from the traces it has left behind
it—a stage when all the body or part of it
was sacramentally eaten by the survivors
as an act of devotion. We will consider
this curious and revolting practice more
fully when we reach the abstruse problem
of sacrifice and sacrament; for the present
it will suffice to say that in many instances,
in Australia, South America, and elsewhere,
the body is eaten, while only the bones are
burned or buried. Among these savages,
again, it usually happens that the head is
cleaned of its flesh by cooking, while the
skull is ceremonially washed, and preserved
as an object of household veneration and
an oracular deity. Instances will be quoted
in succeeding chapters.
Thus, between the care taken to prevent
returns of the corpse, and the worship paid
to the ghost or shade, primitive races feel
no such sense of discrepancy or incongruity
as would instantly occur to civilised people.
�32
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
The three stages in human ideas with
which this chapter deals may be shortly
summed up as corpse-worship, ghost
worship, and shade-worship.
CHAPTER IV.
THE ORIGIN OF GODS
Mr. Herbert Spencer has traced so
admirably in his Principles of Sociology
the progress of development from the
Ghost to the God that I do not propose in
this chapter to attempt much more than a
brief recapitulation of his main propositions,
which, however, I shall supplement with
fresh examples, and adapt at the same time
to the conception of three successive stages
in human ideas about the Life of the Dead,
as set forth in the preceding argument.
In the earliest stage of all—the stage
where the actual bodies of the dead are
preserved—Gods as such are for the most
part unknown : it is the corpses of friends
and ancestors that are worshipped and
reverenced. For example, Ellis says of the
corpse of a Tahitian chief that it was placed
in a sitting posture under a protecting
shed ; u a small altar was erected before it,
and offerings of fruit, food, and flowers
were daily presented by the relatives, or
the priest appointed to attend the body.”
(This point about the priest is of essential
importance.) The Central Americans, again,
as Mr. Spencer notes, performed similar
rites before bodies dried by artificial heat.
The New Guinea people, as D’Albertis
found, worship the dried mummies of their
fathers and husbands. A little higher in
the scale, we get the developed mummy
worship of Egypt and Peru, which survives
even after the evolution of greater gods,
from powerful kings or chieftains. Wher
ever the actual bodies of the dead are pre
served, there also worship and offerings
are paid to them.
Often, however, as already noted, it is
not the whole body but the head alone
that is specially kept and worshipped.
Thus Mr. H. O. Forbes says of the people
of Buru : “ The dead are buried in the
forest in some secluded spot, marked often
by a merang, or grave-pole, over which at
certain intervals the relatives place tobacco,
cigarettes, and various offerings. When
the body is decomposed, the son or nearest
relative disinters the head, wraps a new
cloth about it, and places it in the Matakau
at the back of his house or in a little hut
erected for it near the grave. It is the
representative of his forefathers, whose
behests he holds in the greatest respect.”
Two points are worthy of notice in this
interesting account, as giving us an antici
patory hint of two further accessories whose
evolution we must trace hereafter : first the
grave-stake, which is probably the origin
of the wooden idol; and second, the little
hut erected over the head by the side of the
grave, which is undoubtedly one of the
origins of the temple or praying-house.
Observe also the ceremonial wrapping of
the skull in cloth and its oracular functions.
Similarly, Mr. Wyatt Gill, the wellknown missionary, writes of a dead baby at
Boera, in New Guinea : “ It will be covered
with two inches of soil, the friends watching
beside the grave ; but eventually the skull
and smaller bones will be preserved and
worn by the mother.” And of the Suau
people he says: “Inquiring the use of
several small houses, I learned that it is
to cover grave-pits. All the members of a
family at death occupy the same grave,
the earth that thinly covered the last
occupant being scooped out to admit the
newcomer. These graves are shallow; the
dead are buried in a sitting posture, hands
folded. The earth is thrown in up to the
mouth only. An earthen pot covers the
head. After a time the pot is taken off,
the perfect skull removed and cleansed—
eventually to be hung up in a basket or
net inside the dwelling of the deceased
over the fire to blacken in the smoke.” In
Africa, again, the skull is frequently pre
served in such a pot and prayed to. In
America, earthenware pots have been
found moulded round human skulls in
mounds at New Madrid and elsewhere;
the skull cannot be removed without
breaking the vessel.
The special selection and preservation
of the head as an object of worship thus
noted in New Guinea and the Malay
Archipelago is also still found among
many other primitive peoples.
Mr.
Spencer quotes several examples, a few
of which alone I extract from his pages :—
“ ‘ In the private fetish-hut of King
Adolee, at Badagry, the skull of that
monarch’s father is preserved in a clay
vessel placed in the earth.’ He ‘gently
rebukes it if his success does not happen
to answer his expectations.’ Similarly
among the Mandans, who place the skulls
�THE ORIGIN OF GODS
of their dead in a circle, each wife knows
the skull of her former husband or child,
‘and there seldom passes a day that she
does not visit it, with a dish of the best
cooked food...... There is scarcely an hour
in a pleasant day but more or less of these
women may be seen sitting or lying by the
skull of their child or husband—talking to
it in the most pleasant and endearing
language that they can use (as they were
wont to do in former days), and seem
ingly getting an answer back.’ ”
This affectionate type of converse with
the dead, almost free from fear, is especially
characteristic of the first or corpse
preserving stage of human death-con
ceptions. It seldom survives where burial
has made the feeling towards the corpse a
painful or loathsome one, and it is then
confined to the head alone, while the grave
itself with the body it encloses is rather
shunned and dreaded.
A little above this level, Mr. Du Chaillu
notes that some of his West African
followers, when going on an expedition,
brought out the skulls of their ancestors
(which they religiously preserved) and
scraped off small portions of the bone,
which they mixed with water and drank ;
giving as a reason for this conduct that
their ancestors were brave, and that by
drinking a portion of them they too
became brave and fearless like their
ancestors. Here we have a simple and
early case of that habit of “ eating the
god ” to whose universality and importance
Mr. Frazer has called attention.
Throughout the earlier and ruder phases
of human evolution, this primitive concep
tion of ancestors or dead relatives as the
chief known objects of worship survives
undiluted : and ancestor-worship remains
to this day .the principal religion of the
Chinese, and of several other peoples.
Godsj as such, are practically unknown in
China. Ancestor-worship also survives in
many other races as one of the main cults,
even after other elements of later religion
have been superimposed upon it. In
Greece and Rome it remained to the last
an important part of domestic ritual. But
in most cases a gradual differentiation is
set up in time between various classes of
ghosts or dead persons, some ghosts being
considered of more importance and power
than others ; and out of these last it is that
gods as a rule are finally developed. A
god, in fact, is in the beginning at least an
exceptionally powerful and friendly ghost
—a ghost able to help, and from whose
33
help great things may reasonably be
expected.
Again, the rise of chieftainship and
kingship has much to do with the growth
of a higher conception of godhead ; a dead
king of any great power or authority is
sure to be thought of in time as a god of
considerable importance. We shall trace
out this idea more fully hereafter in the
religion of Egypt; for the present it must
suffice to say that the supposed power of
the gods in each pantheon has regularly
increased in proportion to the increased
power of kings or emperors.
When we pass from the first plane of
corpse-preservation and mummification to
the second plane where burial is habitual,*
it might seem at a hasty glance as though*
continued worship of the dead, and their
elevation into gods, would no longer be
possible. For we saw that burial is
prompted by a deadly fear lest the corpse
or ghost should return to plague the
living. Nevertheless, natural affection for
parents or friends, and the desire to ensure
their goodwill and aid, make these seem
ingly contrary ideas reconcilable. As a
matter of fact, we find that even when men
bury or burn their dead, they continue to
worship them : while, as we shall show in
the sequel, even the great stones which
they roll on top of the grave to prevent the
dead from rising again become in time
altars on which sacrifices are offered to
the spirit.
In these two later stages of thought with
regard to the dead which accompany burial
and cremation, the gods, indeed, grow
more and more distinct from minor ghosts
with an accelerated rapidity of evolution.
They grow greater in proportion to the
rise of temples and hierarchies. Further
more, the very indefiniteness of the bodiless
ghost tells in favour of an enlarged
godship. The gods are thought of as
more and more aerial and immaterial, less
definitely human in form and nature ; they
are clothed with mighty attributes ; they
assume colossal size ; they are even identi
fied with the sun, the moon, the great
powers of nature. But they are never
quite omnipotent during the polytheistic
stage, because in a pantheon they are
necessarily mutually limiting. Even in the
Greek and Roman civilisation it is clear
that the gods were not commonly envisaged
by ordinary minds as much more than
human. It is only quite late, under the in
fluence of monotheism, that the exalted
conceptions of deity now prevalent began
D
�34
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
to form themselves in Judaism and Chris
tianity.
Mere domestic ancestor-worship, once
more, could scarcely give us the origin of
anything more than domestic religion—the
cult of the manes, the household gods, as
distinct from that of the tribal and national
deities. But kingship supplies us with the
missing link. We have seen in Mr. Duff
Macdonald’s account of the Central African
god-making how the worship of the chief s
ancestors gives rise to tribal or village gods;
and it is clear how, as chieftainship and
kingship widen, national gods of far higher
types may gradually evolve from these early
monarchs. Especially must we take the
time-element into account, remembering
that the earlier ancestors get at last to be
individually forgotten as men, and remain
in memory only as supernatural beings.
Thus kingship rapidly reacts upon godship.
If the living king himself is great, how
much greater must be the ancestor whom
even the king himself fears and worships ;
and how infinitely greater still that yet
earlier god, the ancestor’s ancestor, whom
the ancestor himself revered and propiti
ated ! In some such way there grows up
gradually a hierarchy of gods, among whom
the oldest, and therefore the least known,
are usually in the end the greatest of any.
The consolidation of kingdoms and
empires, and the advance of the arts, tell
strongly with concurrent force in these
directions ; while the invention of written
language sets a final seal on the godhead
and might of great early ancestors. Among
very primitive tribes, indeed, we find as a
rule only very domestic and recent objects
of worship. The chief prays for the most
part to his own father and his immediate
predecessors. The more ancient ancestors,
as Mr. Duff Macdonald has so well pointed
out, grow rapidly into oblivion. But with
more advanced races various agencies arise
which help to keep in mind the early dead ;
and in very evolved communities these
agencies, reaching a high pitch of evolu
tion, make the recent gods or kings or
ghosts seem comparatively unimportant by
the side of the very ancient and very longworshipped ones. More than of any other
thing, it may be said of a god, vires acquirit
eundo. Thus, in advanced types of society
saints or gods of recent origin assume but
secondary or minor importance ; while the
highest and greatest gods of all are those of
the remotest antiquity, whose human history
is lost from our view in the dim mist of ages.
Three such agencies of prime importance
in the transition from the mere ghost to the
fully-developed god must here be men
tioned. They are the rise of temples, of
idols, and, above all, of priesthoods. Each
of these we must now consider briefly but
separately.
The origin of the Temple is various ; but
all temples may nevertheless be reduced in
the last resort either into graves of the dead,
or into places where worship is specially
offered up to them. This truth, which Mr.
Herbert Spencer arrived at by examination
of the reports of travellers or historians,
and worked up in connection with his
Principles of Sociology, was independently
arrived at through quite a different line of
observation and reasoning by Mr. William
Simpson. Mr. Simpson has probably
visited a larger number of places of wor
ship all over the world than any other
traveller of any generation ; and he was
early impressed by the fact which forced
itself upon his eyes, that almost every one
of them, where its origin could be traced,
turned out to be a tomb in one form or
another. He has set forth the results of his
researches in this direction in several
admirable papers, all of which, but especi
ally the one entitled The Worship of Death,
I can confidently recommend to the serious
attention of students of religion.
The cave is probably the first form of the
Temple. Sometimes the dead man is left
in the cave which he inhabited when
living; an instance of which we have
already noticed among the Veddahs of
Ceylon. In other cases, where races have
outgrown the custom of cave-dwelling, the
habit of cave-burial, or rather of laying the
dead in caves or in artificial grottoes, still
continues through the usual conservatism
of religious feeling. Offerings are made to
the dead in all these various caves : and
here we get the beginnings of cave-temples.
Such temples are at first of course either
natural or extremely rude ; but they soon
begin to be decorated with rough frescoes,
as is done, for example, by the South
African Bushmen. These frescoes again
give rise in time by slow degrees to such
gorgeous works as those of the Tombs of
the Kings at Thebes ; each of which has
attached to it a magnificent temple as its
mortuary chapel. Sculpture is similarly
employed on the decoration of cave-tem
ples ; and we get the final result of such
artistic ornament in splendid cave-temples
like those of Ellora. Both arts were em
ployed together in the beautiful and in
teresting Etruscan tomb-temples.
�THE ORIGIN OF GODS
In another class of cases, the hut where
the dead man lived is abandoned at his
death by his living relations, and thus be
comes a rudimentary Temple where offerings
are made to him. This is the case with the
Hottentots. Of a New Guinea hut-burial,
Mr. Chalmers says : “ The chief is buried
in the centre ; a mat was spread over the
grave, on which I was asked to sit until
they had a weeping.” This weeping is
generally performed by women—a touch
which leads us on to Adonis and Osiris
rites, and to the Christian Pietà. Mr.
Spencer has collected several other ex
cellent examples. “As repeated supplies
of food are taken to the abandoned house,”
he says, “and as along with making offerings
there go other propitiatory acts, the deserted
dwelling house, turned into a mortuary
house, acquires the attributes of a temple.”
A third origin for Temples is found in
the shed, hut, or shelter, erected over the
grave, either for the protection of the dead
or for the convenience of the living who
bring their offerings. Thus, in parts of
New Guinea, according to Mr. Chalmers,
“ The natives bury their dead in the front
of their dwellings, and cover the grave with
a small house, in which the near relatives
sleep for several months.”
On the other hand, we saw in Mr. Duff
Macdonald’s account of the Central African
natives that those savages do not worship
at the actual grave itself. In this case,
terror of the revenant seems to prevent the
usual forms of homage at the tomb of the
deceased. Moreover, the ghost being now
conceived as more or less freely separable
from the corpse, it will be possible to worship
it in some place remote from the dreaded
cemetery. Hence these Africans “ seek
the spirit at the place where their departed
kinsman last lived among them. It is the
great tree at the verandah of the dead
man’s house that is their temple : and if
no tree grow here, they erect a little shade,
and there perform their simple rites.” We
have in this case yet another possible
origin for certain temples, and also for the
sacred tree, which is so common an object
of pious adoration in many countries.
Beginning with such natural caves or
such humble huts, the Temple assumes
larger proportions and more beautiful
decorations with the increase of art and
the growth of kingdoms. Especially, as
we see in the tomb-temples and pyramids
of Egypt and Peru, does it assume great
size and acquire costly ornaments when it
is built by a powerful king for himself
35
during his own lifetime. Temple-tombs of
this description reach a high point of
artistic development in such a building as
the so-called Treasury of Atreus at Mycenae,
which is really the sepulchre of some name
less prehistoric monarch. (It is admirably ■
reconstructed in Perrot and Chipiez.)
Obviously, the importance and magnifi- ■
cence of the temple will react upon the popu
lar conception of the importance and mag
nificence of the God who inhabits it. And
conversely, as the gods grow greater and
greater, more art and more constructive
skill will constantly be devoted to the building
and decoration of their permanent homes.
To the very end, the god depends largely
on his house for impressiveness.
How
much did not Hellenic religion itself owe to
the Parthenon and the temple of Olympian
Zeus ! How much does not Christianity
itself owe to Lincoln and Durham, to
Amiens and Chartres, to Milan and Pisa,
to St. Mark’s and St. Peter’s! Men cannot
believe that deities worshipped in such
noble and dimly religious shrines were
once human like themselves, compact of
the same bodies, parts, and passions Yet
in the last instance at least we know the
great works to be raised in honour of a
single Lower Syrian peasant.
With this brief and imperfect notice of
the origin of temples, I pass on from the
consideration of the sacred building itself
to that of the Idol who usually dwells
within it.
Where burial prevails, and where arts
are at a low stage of development, the
memory of the dead is not likely to survive
beyond two or three generations.
But
where mummification is the rule, there is
no reason why deceased persons should not
be preserved and worshipped for an
indefinite period ; and we know that in
Egypt at least the cult of kings who died in
the most remote times of the Early Empire
was carried on regularly down to the days
of the Ptolemies. In such a case as this
there is absolutely no need for idols to
arise ; the corpse itself is the chief object
of worship. We do find accordingly that
both in Egypt and in Peru the worship of
the mummy played a large part in the local
religions ; though sometimes it alternated
with the worship of other holy objects, such
as the image or the sacred stone, which we
shall see hereafter to have had a like origin.
But in many other countries, where bodies
were less visibly and obviously preserved,
the worship due to the ghost or god was
often paid to a simulacrum or idol; so
�36
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
much so that “idolatry” has become m
Christian parlance the common term for
most forms of worship other than mono
theistic.
Now, what is the origin and meaning of
Idols, and how can they be affiliated upon
primitive corpse or ghost worship ?
Like the temple, the Idol, I believe, has
many separate origins, several of which
have been noted by Mr. Herbert Spencer,
while others, it seems to me, have escaped
the notice even of that profound and acute
observer.
The earliest Idols, if I may be allowed
the contradictory expression, are not idols
at all—not images or representations of
the dead person, but actual bodies, pre
served and mummified. These pass readily,
however, into various types of representa
tive figures. For in the first place the
mummy itself is usually wrapped round in
swathing-cloths which obscure its features ;
and in the second place it is frequently
enclosed in a wooden mummy-case, which
is itself most often rudely human in form, and
which has undoubtedly given rise to certain
forms of idols. Thus, the images of Amun,
Khem, Osiris, and Ptah among Egyptian
gods are frequently or habitually those of a
mummy in a mummy-case. But further
more, the mummy itself is seldom or never
the entire man; the intestines at least have
been removed, or even, as in New Guinea,
the entire mass of flesh, leaving only the
skin and the skeleton. The eyes, again,
are often replaced, as in Peru, by some
other imitative object, so as to keep up the
life-like appearance. Cases like these lead
on to others, where the image or idol
gradually supersedes altogether the corpse
or mummy.
Mr. H. O. Forbes gives an interesting
instance of such a transitional stage in
Timor-laut. “ The bodies of those who die
in war or by violent death are buried,” he
says ; “ and if the head has been captured
[by the enemy], a cocoanut is placed in the
grave to represent the missing member, and
to deceive and satisfy his spirit.” There is
abundant evidence that such makeshift
limbs or bodies amply suffice for the use of
the soul, when the actual corpse has been
destroyed or mutilated. The Yucatanese
made for their fathers wooden statues, put
in the ashes of the burnt body, and attached
the skin of the occiput taken off the corpse.
These images, half mummy, half idol, were
kept in the oratories of their houses, and
were greatly reverenced and assiduously
cared for. On all the festivals food and
drink were offered to them. It is clear
that cremation specially lends itself to such
substitution of an image for the actual dead
body. Among burying races it is the
severed skull, on the contrary, that is
oftenest preserved and worshipped.
The transition from such images to small
stone sarcophagi, like those of the Etruscan
tombs, is by no means a great one. These
sarcophagi contained the burnt ashes of .
the dead, but were covered by a lid which
usually represented the deceased, reclining,
as if at a banquet, with a beaker in his
hands. The tombs in which the sarcophagi
were placed were of two types : one, the
stone pyramid or cone, which, says Dr.
Isaac Taylor, “is manifestly a survival of
the tumulus”; the other, the rock-cut
chamber, “ which is a survival of the cave.”
These lordly graves are no mere cheerless
sepulchres ; they are abodes for the dead,
constructed on the model of the homes of
the living. They contain furniture and
pottery; and their walls are decorated
with costly mural paintings. They are also
usually provided with an antechamber,
where the family could assemble at the
annual feast to do homage to the spirits of
departed ancestors, who shared in the meal
from their sculptured sarcophagus lids.
At a further stage of distance from the
primitive mummy-idol we come upon the
image pure and simple. The Mexicans,
for example, as we have seen, were cremationists ; and when men killed in battle
were missing, they made wooden figures of
them, which they honoured, and then burnt
them in place of the bodies. In somewhat
the same spirit the Egyptians used to place
beside the mummy itself an image of the
dead, to act as a refuge or receptacle for
the soul, “in case of the accidental destruc
tion of the actual body.” Mr. Spencer has
collected several similar instances of idols
substituted for the bodies of the dead.
The Roman imagines were masks of wax,
which preserved in like manner the features
of ancestors. Perhaps the most curious
modern survival of this custom of double
representations is to be found in the effigies
of our kings and queens still preserved in
Westminster Abbey.
There are two other sources of idol- '
worship, however, which, as it seems to
me, have hardly received sufficient atten
tion at Mr. Spencer’s hands. Those two
are the stake which marks the grave, and
the standing stone or tombstone. By far
the larger number of idols, I venture to
believe, are descended from one or other
�THE ORIGIN OF GODS
of these two originals, both of which I
shall examine hereafter in far greater
detail. For the present it will suffice to
remark that the wooden stake seems often
to form the origin or point of departure for
the carved wooden image, as well as for
such ruder objects of reverence as the
cones and wooden pillars so widely
reverenced among the Semitic tribes ;
while the rough boulder, standing stone, or
tombstone, seems to form the origin or
point of departure for the stone or marble
statue, the commonest type of idol the
whole world over in all advanced and
cultivated communities. Such stones were
at first mere rude blocks or unhewn masses,
the descendants of those which were rolled
over the grave in primitive times in order
to keep down the corpse of the dead man
and prevent him from returning to disturb
the living. But in time they grew to be
roughly dressed into slabs or squares, and
finally to be decorated with a rude repre
sentation of a human head and shoulders.
From this stage they readily progressed to
that of the Greek Hermse. We now know
that this was the early shape of most
Hellenic gods and goddesses ; and we can
trace their evolution onward from this point
to the wholly anthropomorphic Aphrodite
or Here. The well-known figure of the
Ephesian Artemis is an intermediate case
which will occur at once to every classical
reader.
Starting from such shapeless
beginnings, we progress at last to the
artistic and splendid bronze and marble
statues of Hellas, Etruria, and Rome, to
the many-handed deities of modern India,
and to the sculptured Madonnas and
Pieths of Renaissance Italy.
Naturally, as the gods grow more
beautiful and more artistically finished in
workmanship, the popular idea of their
power and dignity must increase paripassu.
In Egypt, that growth took chiefly the
form of colossal size and fine manipulation
of hard granitic materials. The so-called
Memnon and the Sphinx are familiar
instances of the first; the Pashts of Syenite,
the black basalt gods, so well known at the
Louvre and the British Museum, are
examples of the second. In Greece, effect
was sought rather by ideal beauty, as in
the Aphrodites and Apollos, or by cost
liness of material, as in the chryselephantine
Zeus and the Athene of the Parthenon.
But we must always remember that in
Hellas itself these glorious gods were
developed in a comparatively short space
of time from the shapeless blocks or
37
standing stones of the ruder religion;
indeed, we have still many curious inter
mediate forms between the extremely
grotesque and hardly human Mycenaean
types and the exquisite imaginings of
Myron or Phidias. The earliest Hellenic
idols engraved by Messrs. Perrot and
Chipiez in their great work on Art in
Primitive Greece do not rise in any respect
superior to the Polynesian level ; while the
so-called Apollos of later archaic work
manship, rigidly erect with their arms at
their sides, recall in many respects the
straight up-and-down outline of the
standing stone from which they are
developed.
I should add that in an immense number
of instances the rude stone image or idol,
and at a still lower grade the unwrought
sacred stone, stands as the central object
under a shed or shelter, which developes by
degrees into the stately temple. The
advance in both is generally more or less
parallel; though sometimes, as in historical
Greece, a temple of the noblest architecture
encloses as its central and principal object
of veneration the rough unhewn stone of
early barbaric worship. So even in Chris
tendom, great churches and cathedrals
often hold as their most precious possession
some rude and antique image like the
sacred Bambino of Santa Maria in Ara
Coeli at Rome, or the “ Black Madonnas ”
which are revered by the people at so many
famous Italian places of pilgrimage.
I do not mean to say that every idol is
necessarily itself a funereal relic. When
once the idea of godship has been tho
roughly developed, and when men have
grown accustomed to regard an image or
idol as the representative or dwelling-place
of their god, it is easy to multiply such
images indefinitely. Hundreds of repre
sentations may exist of the self-same Apollo
or Aphrodite or Madonna or St. Sebastian.
At the same time, it is quite clear that for
most worshippers the divine being is more
or less actually confused with the image; a
particular Artemis or a particular Notre
Dame is thought of as more powerful or
more friendly than another. I have known
women in Southern Europe go to pray at
the shrine of a distant Madonna, “because
she is greater than our own Madonna.”
Moreover, it is probable that in many cases
images or sacred stones once funereal in
origin, and representing particular gods or
ghosts, have been swallowed up at last by
other and more powerful deities, so as to
lose in the end their primitive distinctness.
�3«
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
Thus, there were many Baals and many
Ashteroths; probably there were many
Apollos, many Artemises, many Aphrodites.
It is almost certain that there were many
distinct Hermae. The progress of research
tends to make us realise that numberless
deities, once considered unique and indi
vidual, may be resolved into a whole host
of local gods, afterwards identified with
some powerful deity on the merest external
resemblances of image, name, or attribute.
In Egypt at least this process of identifi
cation and centralisation was common.
Furthermore, we know that each new reli
gion tends to swallow up and assimilate to
itself all possible elements of older cults ;
just as Hebrew Jahwehism tried to adopt
the sacred stones of early Semitic heathenism
by associating them with episodes in the
history of the patriarchs ; and just as Chris
tianity has sanctified such stones in its own
area by using them sometimes as the base
of a cross, or by congecrating them at
others with the name of some saint or
martyr.
But even more than the evolution of the
Temple and the Idol, the evolution of the
Priesthood has given dignity, importance,
and power to the gods. For the priests are
a class whose direct interest it is to make
the most of the greatness and majesty of
the deities they tend or worship.
Priesthood, again, has probably at least
two distinct origins. The one is quasi
royal ; the other is quasi-servile.
I begin with the first. We saw that the
chief of an African village, as the son and
representative of the chief ghosts, who are
the tribal gods, has alone the right to
approach them directly with offerings. The
inferior villager, who desires to ask any
thing of the gods, asks through the chief,
who is a kinsman and friend of the divine
spirits, and who therefore naturally under
stands their ideas and habits. Such chiefs
are thus also naturally priests. They are
sacred by family ; they and their children
stand in a special relation to the gods of the
tribe, quite different from the relation in
’ which the common people stand ; they are
of the blood of the deities. This type of
relation is common in many countries ; the
chiefs in such instances are “kings and
priests, after the order of Melchizedek.”
To put it briefly, in the earliest or
domestic form of religion the gods of each
little group or family are its own dead
ancestors, and especially (while the historic
memory is still but weak) its immediate
predecessors. In this stage, the head of the
household naturally discharges the func
tions of priest; it is he who approaches the
family ghosts or gods on behalf of his
wives, his sons, his dependants. To the
last, indeed, the father of each family
retains this priestly function as regards the
more restricted family rites ; he is priest of
the worship of the lares and Senateshe
offers the family sacrifice to the family gods ;
he reads family prayers in the Christian
household. But as the tribe or nation
arises, and chieftainship grows greater, it
is the ghosts or ancestors of the chiefly or
kingly family who develop most into gods ;
and the living chief and his kin are their
natural representatives. Thus, in most
cases, the priestly office comes to be asso
ciated with that of king or chief.
“ The union of a royal title with priestly
duties,” says Mr. Frazer in The Golden
Bough, “was common in ancient Italy and
Greece. At Rome and in other Italian
cities there was a priest called the Sacri
ficial King or King of the sacred rites {Rex
Sacrificulus or Rex Sacrorum), and his wife
bore the title of Queen of the Sacred Rites.
In republican Athens, the second magistrate
of the State was called the King, and his
wife the Queen ; the functions of both were
religious. Many other Greek democracies
had titular kings, whose duties, so far as
they are known, seem to have been priestly.
At Rome the tradition was that the Sacri
ficial King had been appointed after the
expulsion of the kings in order to offer the
sacrifices which had been previously offered
by the kings. In Greece a similar view
appears to have prevailed as to the origin
of the priestly kings. In itself the view is
not improbable, and it is borne out by the
example of Sparta, the only purely Greek
State which retained the kingly form of
government in historical times. For in
Sparta all State sacrifices were offered by
the kings as descendants of the god. This
combination of priestly functions with royal
authority is familiar to every one. Asia
Minor, for example, was the seat of various
great religious capitals, peopled by thousands
of ‘Sacred Slaves,’ and ruled by pontiffs
who wielded at once temporal and spiritual
authority, like the popes of mediaeval Rome.
Such priest-ridden cities were Zela and
Pessinus. Teutonic Kings, again, in the
old heathen days seem to have stood in
the position and exercised the powers of
high priests. The Emperors of China offer
public sacrifices, the details of which are
regulated by the ritual books. It is need
less, however, to multiply examples of what
�THE ORIGIN OF GODS
is the rule rather than the exception in the
early history of the kingship.” •
Where priesthood originates in this parti
cular way, little differentiation is likely to
occur between the temporal and the eccle
siastical power. But there is a second and
far more potent origin of priesthood, less
distinguished in its beginnings, yet more
really pregnant of great results in the end.
For where the king is a priest, and the
descendant of the gods, as in Peru and
Egypt, his immediate and human power
seems to overshadow and as it were to
belittle the power of his divine ancestors.
No statue of Osiris, for example, is half so
big in size as the colossal figure of Rameses
II. among the ruins of Thebes. But where
a separate and distinct priesthood gets the
management of sacred rites entirely into
its own hands, we find the authority of the
gods often rising superior to that of the
kings, who are only their vicegerents : till
at last we get Popes dictating to emperors,
and powerful monarchs doing humble
penance before the costly shrines of mur
dered archbishops.
The origin of such independent, or quasiservile, priesthood is to be found in the
institution of “temple slaves”—the atten
dants told off, as we have already seen, to
do duty at the grave of the chief or -dead
warrior. Egypt again affords us, on the
domestic side, an admirable example of the
origin of such priesthoods. Over the lintel
of each of the cave-like tombs at Beni
Hassan and Sakkarah is usually placed an
inscription setting forth the name and titles
of its occupant. Then follows a pious hope
that the spirit may enjoy for all eternity the
proper payment of funereal offerings, a list
of which is ordinarily appended. But the
point which specially concerns us here is
this : Priests or servants were appointed to
see that these offerings were duly made ;
and the tomb was endowed with property
for the purpose both of keeping up the offer
ings in question, end of providing a stipend
or living-wage for the priest. As we shall
see hereafter, such priesthoods were gene
rally made hereditary, so as to ensure their
continuance throughout all time : and so
successful were they that in many cases
worship continued to be performed for
several hundred years at the tomb ; so that
a person who died under the Early Empire
was still being made the recipient of
funeral dues under kings of the Eighteenth
and Nineteenth Dynasties.
I give this interesting historical instance
at some length because it is one of the best
39
known, and also one of the most persistent.
But everywhere, all the world over, similar
evolutions have occurred on a shorter scale.
The temple attendants, endowed for the
purpose of performing sacred rites for the
ghost or god, have grown into priests, who
knew the habits of the unseen denizen of
the shrine. Bit by bit prescriptions have
arisen; customs and rituals have developed;
and the priests have become the deposi
taries of the divine traditions. They alone
know how to approach the god ; they alone
can read the hidden signs of his pleasure
or displeasure. As intermediaries between
worshipper and deity, they are themselves
half sacred. Without them, no votary can
rightly approach the shrine of his patron.
Thus at last they rise into importance far
above their origin ; priestcraft comes into
being; and by magnifying their god the
members of the hierarchy magnify at the
same time their own office and function.
Yet another contributing cause must be
briefly noted. Picture-writing and hiero
glyphics take their rise more especially in
connection with tombs and temples. The
priests in particular hold as a rule the key
to this knowledge. In ancient Egypt, to
take a well-known instance, they were the
learned class ; they became the learned
class again under other circumstances in
mediaeval Europe. Everywhere we come
upon sacred mysteries that the priests alone
know; and where hieroglyphics exist these
mysteries, committed to writing, become
the peculiar property of the priests in a
more special sense. Where writing is
further differentiated into hieratic and de
motic, the gulf between laity and priesthood
grows still wider; the priests possess a
special key to knowledge, denied to the
commonalty. The recognition of Sacred
Books has often the same result; of these,
the priests are naturally the guardians and
exponents. I need hardly add that side by
side with the increase of architectural
grandeur in the temple, and the increase of
artistic beauty and costliness in the idols or
statues and pictures of the gods, goes
increase in the stateliness of the priestly
robes, the priestly surroundings, the priestly
ritual. Finally, we get ceremonies of the
most dignified character, adorned with all
the accessories of painting and sculpture, of
candles and flowers, of incense and music,
of rich mitres and jewelled palls—cere
monies performed in the dim shade of lofty
temples, or mosques, or churches, in honour
of god or gods of infinite might, power, and
majesty, who must yet in the last resort be
�40
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
traced back to some historic or prehistoric
Dead Man, or at least to some sacred
CHAPTER V.
stone or stake or image, his relic and repre
sentative.
K
SACRED STONES
■ Thus, by convergence of all these streams,
the primitive mummy or ghost or spirit
I MENTIONED in the last chapter two origins
passes gradually into a deity of unbounded
of Idols to which, as I believed, an insuffi
glory and greatness and sanctity. The
cient amount of attention had been directed
bodiless soul, released from necessary limits
by Mr. Herbert Spencer. These were the
of space and time, envisaged as a god, is
pictured as ever more and more super Sacred Stone and the Wooden Stake which
mark the grave. To these two I will now
human, till all memory of its origin is
add a third common object of worship,
entirely forgotten. But to the last observe
which does not indeed enter into the genesis
this curipus point : all new gods or saints or
of idols, but which is of very high impor
divine persons are, each ; as they crop up
first, of démonstrably human origin. When tance. in early religion—the sacred tree,
with its collective form, the sacred grove.
ever we find a new god added from known
All the objects thus enumerated demand
sources to a familiar pantheon, we find
without exception that he turns out to be a further attention at our hands, both from
human being. Whenever we. go back to their general significance in the history of
very primitive religions, we find all men’s religion, and also from their special interest
gods are the corpses or ghosts of their in connection with the evolution of the God
ancestors. It is only when we take rela of Israel, who became in due time the God
tively advanced races with unknown early of Christianity and of Islam, as well as the
God of modern idealised and sublimated
histories that we find them worshipping a
theism.
certain number of gods who cannot be
I will begin with the consideration of the
easily and immediately resolved into dead
men or spirits. Unfortunately, students of Sacred Stone, not only because it is by far
religion have oftenest paid the closest the most important of the three, but also
because, as we shall shortly see, it stands
attention to those historical religions which
in the direct line cf parentage of the God
lie furthest away from the primitive type,
and in which at their first appearance before of Israel.
All the world over, and at all periods of
us we come upon the complex idea of god
head already fully developed. Hence they history, we find among the most common
aré too much inclined, like Professor objects of human worship certain blocks of
stone, either rudely shaped and dressed by
Robertson Smith, and even sometimes Mr.
Frazer (whose name, however, I cannot the hand, or else more often standing alone
mention in passing without the profoundest on the soil in all their native and natural
roughness. The downs of England are
respect), to regard the idea of a godship as
primordial, not derivative ; and to neglect everywhere studded with cromlechs, dol
the obvious derivation of godhead as a whole mens, and other antique magalithic struc
tures (of which the gigantic trilithons of
from the cult and reverence of the deified
Stonehenge and Avebury are the bestancestor. Yet the moment we get away
from these advanced and too overlaid his known examples), long described by anti
torical religions to the early conceptions of quaries as “ D ruidical remains,” and certainly
simple savages, we see at once that no gods regarded by the ancient inhabitants of
Britain with an immense amount of respect
exist for them save the ancestral corpses or
ghosts ; that religion means the perform and reverence. In France we have the
endless avenues of Carnac and Locmariaker;
ance of certain rites and offerings to these
corpses or ghosts ; and that higher ele in Sardinia, the curious conical shafts
mental or departmental deities are wholly known to the local peasants as sepolture dei
giganti—the tombs of the giants. In Syria,
wanting.
Major Conder has described similar monu
ments in Heth and Moab, at Gilboa and
at Heshbon. In India, five stones are set
up at the corner of a field, painted red, and
worshipped by the natives as the Five
Pandavas. Theophrastus tells us as one
of the characteristics of the superstitious
man that he anoints with oil the sacred
�SACRED STONES
stones at the street corners ; and from an
ancient tradition embedded in the Hebrew
scriptures we learn how the patriarch Jacob
set up a stone at Bethel “ for a pillar,” and
“ poured oil upon the top of it,” ^s a like
act of worship. Even in our own day there
is a certain English hundred where the old
open-air court of the manor is inaugurated
by the ceremony of breaking a bottle of
wine over a standing stone which tops a
tumulus ; and the sovereigns of the United
Kingdom are still crowned in a chair which
encloses under its seat the ancestral sacred
stone of their heathen Scottish and Irish
predecessors.
Now, what is the share of such sacred
stones in the rise and growth of the religious
habit ?
It is hardly necessary, I suppose, to give
formal proof of the familiar fact that an
upright slab is one of the commonest modes
of marking the place ^where a person is
buried. From the ancient pillar that pre
historic savages set up over the tumulus of
their dead chief, to the -headstone that
marks the dwarfed and stunted barrow in
our own English cemeteries, the practice
of mankind has been one and continuous.
Sometimes the stone is a rough boulder
from the fields ; a representative of the big
block which savages place on the grave to
keep the corpse from rising : sometimes it
is an oblong slab of slate or marble; some
times, and especially among the more
advanced races, it is a shapely cross or
sculptured monument. But wherever on
earth interment is practised, there stones of
some sort, solitary or in heaps, almost
invariably mark the place of burial.
Again, as presents and sacrifices are
offered at graves to the spirits of the dead,
it is at the stone which records the last rest
ing-place of the deceased that they will
oftenest be presented. As a matter of fact,
we know that, all the world over, offerings
of wine, oil, rice, ghee, corn, and meat are
continually made at the graves of chiefs or
relations. Victims, both human and other
wise, are sacrificed at the tomb, and their
blood is constantly smeared on the head
stone or boulder that marks the spot.
Four well-marked varieties of early tomb
stone are recognised in the eastern conti
nent at least, and their distribution and
nature is thus described by Major Conder :
“Rude stone monuments,bearing a strong
family resemblance in their mode of con
struction and dimensions, have been found
distributed over all parts of Europe and
Western Asia, and occur also in India......
4i
They include menhirs, or standing stones,
which were erected as memorials, and wor
shipped as deities, with libations of blood,
milk, honey, or water poured upon the
stones : dolmens, or stone tables, free stand
ing—that is, not covered by any mound or
superstructure, which may be considered
without, doubt to have been used as altars
on which victims (often human) were immo
lated : cairns, also memorial, and some
times surrounding menhirs; these were
made by the contributions of numerous
visitors or pilgrims, each adding a stone as
witness of his presence : finally cromlechs,
or stone circles., used as sacred enclosures
or early hypaethral temples, often with a
central menhir or dolmen as statue or
altar.”
There can be very little doubt that every
one of these monuments is essentially sepul
chral in character. The menhir or standing
stone is the ordinary gravestone still in use
among us: the dolmen is a chambered
tomb, once covered by a tumulus, but now
bare and open : the cairn is a heap of stones
piled above the dead body : the stone circle
is apparently a later temple built around a
tomb, whose position is marked by the men
hir or altar-stone in its centre. And each
has been the parent of a numerous offspring.
The menhir gives rise to the obelisk, the
stone cross, and the statue or idol ; the dol
men, to the sarcophagus, the altar-tomb,
and the high altar ; the cairn, to the tope
and also to the pyramid ; the cromlech', or
stone circle, to the temple or church in one
at least of its many developments.
Each of these classes of monuments,
Major Conder observes, has its distinctive
name in the Semitic languages, and is fre
quently mentioned in the early Hebrew
literature. The menhir is the “pillar” of
our Authorised Version of the Old Testa
ment ; the dolmen is the “ altar ” ; the cairn
is the “heap”; and the stone circle appears
under the names Gilgal and Hazor.
In the simplest and most primitive stage
of religion, such as that pure ancestor-cult
still surviving unmixed among the people of
New Guinea or the African tribes whose
practice Mr. Duff Macdonald has so admi
rably described for us, it is the corpse or
ghost itself, not the stone to mark its dwell
ing, which comes in for all the veneration
and all the gifts of the reverent survivors.
But we must remember that every existing
religion, however primitive in type, is now
very ancient ; and it is quite natural that in
many cases the stone should thus come
itself to be regarded as the ghost or god,
�42
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
the object to which veneration is paid by
the tribesmen. In fact, just in proportion
as the ghost evolves into the god, so does
the tombstone begin to evolve into the
fetish or idol.
At first, however, it is merely as the rude
unshapen stone that the idol in this shape
receives the worship of its votaries. This
is the stage that has been christened by
that very misleading name fetishism, and
erroneously supposed to lie at the very
basis of all religion. Mr. Turner, of the
London Missionary Society, gives many
examples of this stage of stone-worship
found in Samoa : and in these cases, and
in many others, it seems to me clear that
the original gravestone or menhir itself is
the object of worship, viewed as the
residence of the ghost or god in whose
honour it was erected. For in Samoa we
know that the grave “ was marked by a
little heap of stones, a foot or two high,”
and at De Peyster’s Island “a stone was
raised at the head of the grave, and a
human head carved on it”—a first step, as
we have already seen, towards the evolution
of one form of idol.
Similar instances abound everywhere.
Among the Khonds of India every village
has its local god, represented by an upright
stone under the big tree on the green, to
use frankly an English equivalent. (The
full importance of this common combina
tion of sacred stone and sacred tree will
only come out at a later stage of our
inquiry.) In Peru, worship was paid to
standing stones which, says Dr. Tylor,
“represented the penates of households
and the patron-deities of villages ”—in
other words, the ghosts of ancestors and
of tribal chiefs.
But when once the idea of the sacred
ness of stones had thus got firmly fixed in
the savage mind, it was natural enough
that other stones, resembling those which
were already recognised as gods, should
come to be regarded as themselves divine,
or as containing an indwelling ghost or
deity. Of this stage, Mr. Turner’s Samoa
again affords us some curious instances.
“ Smooth stones apparently picked up
out of the bed of the river were regarded
as representatives of certain gods, and
wherever the stone was, there the god was
supposed to be. One resembling a fish
would be prayed to as the fisherman’s god.
Another, resembling a yam, would be the
yam god. A third, round like a breadfruit,
the breadfruit god—and so on.”
Now, the word “ apparently ” used by
this very cautious observer in this passage
shows clearly that he had never of his own
knowledge seen a stone thus selected at
random worshipped or deified, and it is
therefore possible that in all such cases the
stone may really have been one of sepul
chral origin. Still, I agree with Mr.
Spencer that when once the idea of a ghost
or god is well developed, the notion of
such a spirit as animating any remarkable
or odd-looking object is a natural
transition.1 Hence I incline to believe
Mr. Turner is right, and that these stones
may really have been picked out and
worshipped, merely for their oddity, but
always, as he correctly infers, from the
belief in their connection with some god or
spirit.
Further instances (if fairly reported)
occur elsewhere. “ Among the lower races
of America,” says Dr. Tylor, summarising
Schoolcraft, “ the Dakotahs would pick up
a round boulder, paint it, and then,
addressing it as grandfather, make offerings
to it, and pray it to deliver them from
danger.” But here the very fact that the
stone is worshipped and treated as an
ancestor shows how derivative is the
deification—how dependent upon the prior
association of such stones with the tomb
of a forefather and its indwelling spirit.
Just in the same way we know there are
countries where a grave is more generally
marked, not by a stone, but by a wooden
stake ; and in these countries, as for
instance among the Samoyedes of Siberia,
sticks, not stones, are the most common
objects of reverence. (Thus, stick-worship
is found “ among the Damaras of South
Africa, whose ancestors are represented at
the sacrificial feasts by stakes cut from
trees or bushes consecrated to them, to
which stakes the meat is first offered.”)
But here, too, we see the clear affiliation
upon ancestor-worship; and indeed, wher
ever we find the common worship of
“ stocks and stones,” all the analogies lead
us to believe the stocks and stones either
actually mark the graves of ancestors or
else are accepted as their representatives
and embodiments.
The vast majority, however, of sacred
stones with whose history we are well ac
quainted are indubitably connected with
interments, ancient or modern. All the
European sacred stones are cromlechs,
dolmens, trilithons, or menhirs, of which
1 The whole subject is admirably worked out
in The Principles of Sociology, § 159.
�SACRED STONES
Mr. Angus Smith, a most cautious authority,
observes categorically: “We know for a
certainty that memorials of burials are the
chief object of the first one, and of nearly
all, the only object apparently.” So many
other examples will come out incidentally
in the course of the sequel that I will not
labour the point any further at present.
I have already stated that the idol is
probably in many cases derived from the
gravestone or other sacred stone. I believe
that in an immense number of cases it is
simply the original pillar, more or less
rudely carved into the semblance of a
human figure.
How this comes about we can readily
understand if we recollect that by a gradual
transference of sentiment the stone itself is
at last identified with the associated spirit.
Here, once more, is a transitional instance
from our Polynesian storehouse.
The great god of Bowditch Island “ was
supposed to be embodied in a stone, which
was carefully wrapped up with fine mats,
and never seen by anyone but the king”
(note this characteristic touch of kingly
priesthood), “and that only once a year,
when the decayed mats were stripped off
and thrown away. In sickness, offerings
of fine mats were taken and rolled round
the sacred stone, and thus it got busked up
to a prodigious size ; but as the idol was
exposed to the weather out of doors, night
and day, the mats soon rotted. No one
dared to appropriate what had been offered
to the god, and hence the old mats, as they
were taken off, were heaped in a place by
themselves and allowed to rot.”
Now, the reasonableness of all this is
immediately apparent if we remember that
the stones which stand on graves are
habitually worshipped, and anointed with
oil, milk, and blood. It is but a slight
further step to regard the stone, not only
as eating and drinking, but also as needing
warmth and clothing. As an admirable
example of the same train of thought, work
ing out the same result elsewhere, compare
this curious account of a stone idol at
Inniskea (a rocky islet off the Mayo coast),
given by the Earl of Roden, as late as 1851,
in his Progress of the Reformation in
Ireland:—
“In the south island, in the house of a
man named Monigan, a stone idol, called
in the Irish ‘Neevougi,’ has been from
time immemorial religiously preserved and
worshipped. This god resembles in appear
ance a thick roll of home-spun flannel,
which arises from the custom of dedicating
43
a dress of that material to it whenever its
aid is sought; this is sewn on by an old
woman, its priestess, whose peculiar care it
is. Of the early history of this idol no
authentic information can be procured, but
its power is believed to be immense ; they
pray to it in time of sickness ; it is invoked
when a storm is desired to dash some
hapless ship upon their coast; and, again,
the exercise of its power is solicited in
calming the angry waves, to admit of fish
ing or visiting the mainland.”
Nor is this a solitary instance in modern
Europe. “ In certain mountain districts of
Norway,” says Dr. Tylor, “ up to the end of
the last century, the peasants used to pre
serve round stones, washed them every
Thursday evening,.......smeared them with
butter before the fire, laid them in the seat
of honour on fresh straw, and at certain
times of the year steeped them in ale, that
they might bring luck and comfort to the
house.”
The first transitional step towards the
idol proper is given in some rude attempt
to make the standing stone at the grave
roughly resemble a human figure. We get
every transitional form, like the Hermae and
the archaic Apollos, till we arrive at the
perfect freedom and beauty of Hellenic
sculpture. Says Grote, in speaking 'of
Greek worship, “their primitive memorial
erected to a god did not even pretend to be
an image, but was often nothing more
than a pillar, a board, a shapeless stone, or
a post [notice the resemblance to ordinary
grave-marks] receiving care and decoration
from the neighbourhood as well as worship.”
Dr. Tylor, to whose great collection of in
stances I owe many acknowledgments, says
in comment on this passage: “ Such were
the log that stood for Artemis in Euboea ;
the stake that represented Pallas Athene
‘sine effigie rudis palus, et informe lignum’;
the unwrought stone (X/5-os a’pyds) at
Hyethos, which ‘ after the ancient manner ’
represented Heracles; the thirty such stones
which the Pharaeans in like fashion wor
shipped for the gods ; and that one which
received such honour in Boeotian festivals
as representing the Thespian Eros.” Such
also was the conical pillar of Asiatic type
which stood instead of an image of the
Paphian Aphrodite, and the conical stone
worshipped in Attica under the name of
Apollo. A sacred boulder lay in front of a
temple of the Troezenians, while another in
Argos bore the significant name of Zeus
Kappotas. “ Among all the Greeks,” says
Pausanias, “ rude stones were worshipped
�44
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
before the images of the gods.” Among
the Semites, in like manner, Melcarth was
reverenced at Tyre under the form of two
stone pillars.
Intermediate forms, in which the stone
takes successively a face, a head, arms,
legs, a shapely and well-moulded body, are
familiar to all of us in existing remains.
The well-known figures of Priapus form a
good transitional example. “ At Tabala, in
Arabia,” says Professor Robertson Smith,
“a sort of crown was sculptured on the
stone of al-Lat to mark her head.” Indeed,
to the last, the pillar or monolithic type is
constantly suggested in the erect attitude
and the proportions of the statue among all
except the highest Hellenic examples. I
may add, that even in Islam itself, which so
sternly forbids images of any sort, some
traces of such anthropomorphic gravestones
may still be found. I noticed in the mosque
of Mehemet Ali at Cairo that the head
stones of the Vice-regal family were each
adorned with a fez and tassel.
It is worth noting that the obelisk, also,
doubtless owes its origin to the monolith or
standing stone. Whatever fresh sacredness
it may later have obtained from the asso
ciations of sun-Worship, as a solar ray,
cannot mask for any wide anthropological
inquirer the fact that it is by descent a
-mere shapeless head-stone, with a new
symbolic meaning given to it (as so often
happens)in a newreligion. The two obelisks
which stand so often before Egyptian
temples are clearly the analogues of the
two pillars of Melcarth at Tyre, and the
sacred pair at Paphos, Herapolis, and Solo
mon’s temple. In the same way, the Indian
tope and the pyramid are descendants of
the cairn, as the great stone-built tombs of
the Numidian kings in Algeria seem to be
more advanced equivalents of the tumulus
or round barrow. And let me clear the
ground here for what is to follow by adding
most emphatically that the genesis of stone
worship here sketched out precludes the
possibility of phallic worship being in any
sense a primitive form of it. The standing
stone may have been, and doubtless often
was, in later stages, identified with a phallus ;
but if the theory here advocated is true,
the lingam, instead of lying at the root of
the monolith, must necessarily be a later
and derivative form of it. At the same
time, the stone being regarded as the
ancestor of the family, it is not unnatural
that early men should sometimes carve it
into a phallic shape. Having said this, I
will say no more on the subject, which has
really extremely little to do with the essen
tials of stone worship, save that on many
gravestones of early date a phallus marked
the male sex of the occupant, while breasts,
or a symbolical triangle, or a mandorla,
marked the grave of a woman.
Sometimes, both forms of god, the most
primitive and the most finished, the rude
stone and the perfect statue, exist side by
side in the same community.
“In the legendary origin of Jaganndth,”
says Sir William Hunter, “we find the
aboriginal people worshipping a blue stone
in the depths of the forest. But the deity
at length wearies of primitive jungle offer
ings, and longs for the cooked food of the
more civilised Aryans, upon whose arrival
on the scene the rude blue stone gives
place to a carved image. At the present
hour, in every hamlet of Orissa, this two
fold worship co-exists. The common people
have their shapeless stone or block, which
they adore with simple rites in the open air;
while side by side with it stands a temple to
one of the Aryan gods, with its carved idol
and elaborate rites.”
Where many sacred stones exist all
round, marking the graves of the dead, or
inhabited by their spirits, it is not surpris
ing, once more, that a general feeling of
reverence towards all stones should begin
to arise—that the stone per se, especially
if large, odd, or conspicuous, should be
credited to some extent with indwelling
divinity. Nor is it astonishing that the
idea of men being descended from stones
should be rife among people who must
often, when young, have been shown head
stones, monoliths, boulders, or cromlechs,
and been told that the offerings made upon
them were gifts to their ancestors. They
would accept the idea as readily as our own
children accept the Hebrew myth of the
creation of Adam, our prime ancestor, from
“ the dust of the ground ”—a far less pro
mising material than a block of marble or
sandstone. In this way, it seems to me, we
can most readily understand the numerous
stories of men becoming stones, and stones
becoming men, which are rife among the
myths of savage or barbarous peoples.
Classical and Hebrew literature, too, are
full of examples of stones, believed to have
been once human. Niobe and Lot’s wife
are instances that will at once occur to
every reader. In Boeotia, Pausanias tells
us, people believed Alkmene, the mother
of Herakles, was changed into a stone.
Perseus and the Gorgon’s head is another
example, paralleled by the Breton idea
�SACRED STONES
that their great stone circles were people,
who, in the modern Christianised version
of the story, were turned into stone for
dancing on a Sunday. (About this Christianisation I shall have a word to say
further on ; meanwhile, observe the similar
name of the Giant’s Dance given to the
great Stonehenge of Ireland.) In the
same way there is a Standing Rock on the
upper Missouri which parallels the story of
Niobe—it was once a woman, who became
petrified with grief when her husband took
a second wife. Some Samoan gods (or
ancestral ghosts) “ were changed into
stones,” says Mr. Turner, “ and now stand
up in a rocky part of the lagoon on the
north side of Upolu.”
On the other hand, if men become
stones, stones also become men, or at least
give birth to men. We get a good instance
of this in the legend of Deucalion. Again,
by the roadside, near the city of the
Panopoeans, lay the stones out of which
Prometheus made men. Manke, the first
man in Mitchell Island, came out of a
stone. The inhabitants of the New
Hebrides say that “the human race sprang
from stones and the earth.” On Francis
Island, says Mr. Turner, “close by the
temple there was a seven-feet-long beach
sandstone slab erected, before which offer
ings were laid as the people united for
prayer” ; and the natives here told him
that one of their gods had made stones
become men. “ In Melanesia,” says Mr.
Lang, “ matters are so mixed that it is not
easy to decide whether a worshipful stone
is the dwelling of a dead man’s soul, or is
of spiritual merit in itself, or whether the
stone is the spirit’s outward part or organ.”
And, indeed, a sort of general confusion
between the stone, the ghost, the ancestor,
and the god, at last pervades the mind of
the stone-worshipper everywhere.
An interesting side-point in this gradual
mixing up of the ghost and the stone, the
god and the image, is shown in a gradual
change of detail as to the mode of making
offerings at the tomb or shrine. On the
great trilithon in Tonga, Miss GordonCumming tells us, a bowl of kava was
placed on a horizontal stone. Here it
must have been supposed that the ghost
itself issued forth (perhaps by night) to
drink it, as the serpent which represented
the spirit of Anchises glided from the tomb
to lick up the offerings presented by zEneas.
Gradually, however, as the stone and the
ghost get more closely connected in idea
the offering is made to the monument itself;
45
though in the earlier stages the convenience
of using the flat altar-stone (wherever such
exists) as a place of sacrifice for victims
probably masks the transition even to the
worshippers themselves. Dr. Wise saw
in the Himalayas a group of stones “erected
to the memory of the petty Rajahs of
Kolam,” where “ some fifty or sixty unfor
tunate women sacrificed themselves.” The
blood, in particular, is offered up to the
ghost; and “ the cup-hollows which have
been found in menhirs and dolmens,” says
Captain Conder, “ are the indications of
the libations, often of human blood, once
poured on these stones by heathen wor
shippers.” “ Cups are often found,” says a
good Scotch observer,“on stones connected
with the monuments of the dead, such as
on the covering stones of kistvaens, par
ticularly those of the short or rarest form ;
on the flat stones of cromlechs; and on
stones of chambered graves.” On the top
of the cairn at Glen Urquhart, on Loch
Ness, is an oblong mass of slate-stone,
obviously sepulchral, and marked with
very numerous cups. When the stones are
upright the notion of offering the blood to
the upper part, which represents the face or
mouth, becomes very natural, and forms a
distinct step in the process of anthropomorphisation of the headstone into the idol.
We get two stages of this evolution side
by side in the two deities of the Samoyed
travelling ark-sledge, “ one with a stone
head, the other a mere black stone, both
dressed in green robes with red lappets,
and both smeared with sacrificial blood.”
In the Indian groups of standing stones,
representing the Five Pandavas, “it is a
usual practice,” says Dr. Tylor, “to daub
each stone with red paint, forming, as it
were, a great blood-spot where the face
would be if it were a shaped idol.” Mr.
Spencer, I think, hits the key-note of this
practice in an instructive passage. “A
Dakotah,” he says, “before praying to a
stone for succour paints it with some red
pigment, such as red ochre. Now, when
we read that along with offerings of milk,
honey, fruit, flour, etc., the Bodo and
Dhimdls offer ‘ red lead or cochineal,’ we
may suspect that these three colouring
matters, having red as their common
character, are substitutes for blood. The
supposed resident ghost was at first pro
pitiated by anointing the stone with human
blood ; and then, in default of this, red
pigment was used, ghosts and gods being
supposed by primitive men to be easily
deceived by sham..”
�46
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
In any case it is interesting to note that
the faces of many Hindu gods are habitually
painted red. And that this is the survival
of the same ancient custom we see in the
case of Shashti, protectress of children,
whose proper representative is “ a rough
stone as big as a man’s head, smeared with
red paint, and set at the foot of the sacred
vata-tree.” Like customs survived in Greece
down to the classical period. “The faces
of the ancient gilded Dionysi at Corinth,”
says Mr. Lang, quoting Pausanias, “were
smudged all over with cinnabar, like fetish
stones in India or Africa.” In early South
Italy, too, the Priapus-Hermes, who pro
tected the fields, had his face similarly
“daubed with minium.” Is it possible to
dissever these facts from the cannibal
banquets of the Aztec gods, where the
images had lumps of palpitating human
flesh thrust into their lips, and where their
faces were smeared with the warm blood of
the helpless victims ?
Another point of considerable interest
and importance in the evolution of stone
worship is connected with the migration
of sacred stones. When the Israelites left
Egypt, according to the narrative in
Exodus, they carried the bones of Joseph
with them. When Rachel left her father’s
tent she stole the family teraphim to accom
pany her on her wanderings. When ./Eneas
fled from burning Troy, he bore away to his
ships his country’s gods, his Lares and
Penates. All of these tales, no doubt, are
equally unhistorical, but they represent
what, to the people who framed the legends,
seemed perfectly natural and probable con
duct. Just in the same way, when stone
worshippers migrate from one country
to another, they are likely to carry
with them their sacred stones, or at
least the most portable or holiest of the
number.
I cannot find room here for many detailed
instances of such migrations ; but there are
two examples in Britain so exceedingly in
teresting that I cannot pass them by. The
inner or smaller stones at Stonehenge are
known to be of remote origin, belonging to
rocks not found nearer Salisbury Plain than
Cumberland in one direction or Belgium in
the other. They are surrounded by a group
of much larger stones, arranged as trilithons, but carved out of the common sarsen
blocks distributed over the neighbouring
country.
I have tried to show else
where1 that these smaller igneous rocks, un* Cornhill Magazine, Jan., 1886.
touched by the tool,1 were the ancient
sacred stones of an immigrant tribe that
came into Britain from the Continent,
probably over a broad land-belt which then
existed where the Straits of Dover now
flow; and that the strangers on their arrival
in Britain erected these their ancestral
gods on the Plain of Amesbury, and further
contributed to their importance and appear
ance by surrounding them with a circle of
the biggest and most imposing grey-wethers
that the new country in which they had
settled could easily afford.
The other case is that of the Scone stone.
This sacred block, according to the ac
credited legend, was originally the ances
tral god of the Irish Scots, on whose royal
tumulus at Tara it once stood. It was
carried by them to Argyllshire on their first
invasion, and placed in a cranny of the
wall (say modern versions) at Dunstaffnage
Castle. When the Scotch kings removed
to Scone, Kenneth II. took the stone to his
new lowland residence. Thence Edward I.
carried it off to England, where it has ever
since remained in Westminster Abbey, as
part of the chair in which the sovereigns
of Britain sit at their coronation. The
immense significance of these facts or tales
will be seen more clearly when we come to
consider the analogies of the Hebrew ark.
Meanwhile, it may help to explain the
coronation usage, and the legend that
wherever the Stone of Destiny is found
“ the Scots in place must reign,” if I add a
couple of analagous cases from the history
of the same mixed Celtic race. According
to Dr. O’Donovan, the inauguration stone
of the O’Donnells stood on a tumulus in the
midst of a large plain ; and on this sacred
stone called the Flagstone of the Kings,
the elected chief stood to receive the white
wand or sceptre of kingship. A cylindrical
obelisk, used for the same purpose, stands
to this day, according to Dr. Petrie, in the
Rath-na-Riogh. So, too, M’Donald was
crowned King of the Isles, standing on a
sacred stone, with an impression on top to
receive his feet. He based himself, as it
were, upon the gods his ancestors. The
Tara stone even cried aloud, Professor
1 So Moses in the legend commanded the
children of Israel to build “an altar of whole
stones, over which no man hath lift up any
iron”; and so of the boulders composing the
altar on Mount Ebal it was said, “Thou shalt
not lift up any iron tool upon them.” The con
servatism of religion kept up the archaic fashion
for sacred purposes.
�SACRED STONES
Rhys tells us, when the true king placed
his feet above it. The coronation stone
exists in other countries ; for example, in
Hebrew history, or half-history, we learn
that when Abimelech was made king it was
“by the plain of the pillar that was in
Shechem”; and when Jehoash was anointed
by Jehoiada, “the king stood by a pillar, as
the manner was.” Beside the church of
Sant’ Ambrogio at Milan, under the ancient
lime-trees which overshadow the piazza,
stands the stone pillar at which the Lom
bard Kings and German Emperors took
the coronation oath.
Now, it is quite true that Mr. Skene, the
best authority on Celtic Scotland, rejects
this story of the Stone of Destiny in most
parts as legendary : he believes the Scone
stone to have been merely the sacred
coronation-block of the Pictish Kings at
Scone, and never to have come from
Ireland at all. Professor Ramsay thinks it
is a piece of red sandstone broken off the
rock of that district of Scotland. Even
Professor Rhys (who gives a most interest
ing account of the Tara Stone) seems to
have doubts as to migration. But, true or
not, the story will amply serve my purpose
here ; for I use it only to illustrate the
equally dubious wanderings of a Hebrew
sacred stone, at which we shall arrive in
due time ; and one legend is surely always
the best possible parallel of another.
In the course of ages, as religions
develop, and especially as a few great gods
grow to overshadow the minor ancestral
Lares and spirits, it often comes about that
sacred stones of the older faith have a new
religious significance given them in the
later system. Thus we have seen the
Argives worshipped their old sacred stone
under the name of Zeus Kappotas ; the
Thespians identified theirs with the later
Hellenic Eros ; and the Megarians con
sidered a third as the representative of
Phoebus. The original local sacred stone
of Delos has been found on the spot where
it originally stood, beneath the feet of the
statue of the Delian Apollo. And this, I
am glad to see, is Mr. Andrew Lang’s view
also ; for he remarks of the Greek un
wrought stones : “ They were blocks which
bore the names of gods, Hera, or Apollo,
names perhaps given, as De Brosses says,
to the old fetishistic objects of worship,
after the anthropomorphic gods entered [I
should say were developed in] Hellas.”
So, too, in India the local sacred stones
have been identified with the deities of the
Hindu pantheon. Islam, in like manner,
47
has adopted the Kaaba, the great black
stone of the Holy Place at Mecca; and the
Egyptian religion gave a new meaning to
the pillar or monolith by shaping it as an ,
obelisk to represent a ray of the rising
sun-god.
Sometimes the sanctity of the antique
stones was secured in the later faith by
connecting them with some legend or
episode of the orthodox religion. Thus
the ancient sacred stone kept at Delphi—
no doubt the original oracle of that great
shrine, as the rude Delian block was the
precursor of the Delian Apollo—was ex
plained with reference to the later Hellenic
belief by the myth that it was the stone
which Kronos swallowed in mistake for
Zeus : an explanation doubtless due to the
fact that this boulder was kept, like
Monigan’s Irish idol and the Samoan god,
wrapped up in flannel; and in the myth
Rhea deceived Kronos by offering him,
instead of Zeus, a stone wrapped in
swaddling-bands. The sacred stone of the
Troezenians, in like manner, lay in front of
the temple ; but it was Hellenised, so to
speak, by the story that on it the Troezenian
elders sat when they purified Orestes from
the murder of his mother.
In modern Europe, as everybody knows,
a similar Christianisation of holy wells,
holy stones, and holy places has been
managed by connecting them with legends
of saints, or by the still simpler device of
marking a cross upon them. The cross
has a threefold value : in the first place, it
drives away from their accustomed haunts
the ancient gods or spirits, always envisaged
in early Christian and mediaeval thought
as devils or demons ; in the second place,
it asserts the supremacy of the new faith ;
and in the third place, by conferring a fresh
sanctity upon the old holy place or object,
it induces the people to worship the cross
by the mere habit of resorting to the shrine
at which their ancestors so long wor
shipped. Gregory’s well-known advice to
St. Augustine on this matter is but a single
example of what went- on over all Chris
tendom. In many cases crosses in Britain
are still found firmly fixed in bld sacred
stones, usually recognisable by their un
wrought condition. The finest example in
Europe is probably the gigantic monolith
of Plumen in Brittany, topped by an
insignificant little cross, and still resorted
to by the peasants (especially the childless)
as a great place of worship. The pre
historic monuments of Narvia in the Isle
of Man have been Christianised by having
�48
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
crosses deeply incised upon them. Other
cases, like the Black Stones of Iona, which
gave sanctity to that Holy Isle long before
the time of Columbus, will doubtless occur
at once to every reader. With many of
the Scotch sculptured stones it is difficult
to decide whether they were originally
erected as crosses, or are prehistoric
monuments externally Christianised.
I have thus endeavoured briefly to
suggest the ultimate derivation of all sacred
stones from sepulchral monuments, and to
point out the very large part which they
bear in the essential of religion—that is to
say, worship—everywhere. There is, how
ever, one particular application to which I
wish to call special attention, because of its
peculiar interest as regards the origin of
the monotheistic god of Judaism and
Christianity.
That the Semites, as well as other early
nations, were stone-worshippers we know
from a great number of positive instances.
The stone pillars of Baal and the wooden
Ashera cones were the chief objects of
adoration in the Phoenician religion. The
Stone of Bethel was apparently a menhir :
the cairn of Mizpeh was doubtless a sepul
chral monument. The Israelites under
Joshua, we are told, built a Gilgalof twelve
standing stones ; and other instances in the
early traditions of the Hebrews will be
noticed in their proper place later on.
Similarly, among the Arabs of the time of
Mohammed, two of the chief deities were
Manah and Lit, the one a rock, the other a
sacred stone or stone idol: and the Kaaba
itself, the great black stone of local worship,
even the Prophet was compelled to recog
nise and Islamise by adopting it bodily into
his monotheistic religion.
It is clear that sacred stones were common
objects of worship with the Semites in
general, and also with the Hebrew people
in particular. But after the exclusive wor
ship of Jahweh, the local Jewish god, had
grown obligatory among the Jews,it became
the policy of the “Jehovist” priest to Jehovise and to consecrate the sacred stones of
Palestine by bringing them into connection
with the Jehovistic legend and the tales of
the Patriarchs. Thus Professor Cheyne
comments as follows upon the passage in
Isaiah where the prophet mocks the par
tisan of the old polytheistic creed as a
stone-worshipper: “Among the smooth
stones of the valley is thy portion : They,
they are thy lot: Even to them hast thou
poured a drink offering : Thou hast offered
a meat offering :
“The large smooth stones referred to
above were the fetishes of the primitive
Semitic races, and anointed with oil, accord
ing to a widely spread custom. It was such
a stone which Jacob took for a pillow, and
afterwards consecrated by pouring oil upon
it. The early Semites and reactionary
idolatrous Israelites called such stones
Bethels...... z>., houses of El (the early
Semitic word for God).1...... In spite of the
efforts of the ‘Jehovist’ who desired to
convert these ancient fetishes into memo
rials of patriarchal history, the old heathenish
use of them seems to have continued, espe
cially in secluded places.”
Besides the case of the stone at Bethel,
there is the later one (in our narrative)
when Jacob and Laban made a covenant,
“ and Jacob took a stone, and set it up for
a pillar. And J acob said unto his brethren,
Gather stones ; and they took stones and
made an heap : and they did eat there upon
the heap.” So, once more, at Shalem, he
erects an altar called El-Elohe-Israel; he
sets a pillar upon the grave of Rachel, and
anothar at the place at Luz where God
appeared to him. Of like import is the
story of the twelve stones which the twelve
men take out of Jordan to commemorate
the passage of the tribes. All are clearly
attempts to Jehovise these early sacred
stones or local gods by connecting them
with incidents in the Jehovistic version of
the ancient Hebrew legends.
That such stones, however, were wor
shipped as deities in early times, before the
cult of Jahweh had become an exclusive
one among his devotees, is evident from the
Jehovistic narrative itself, which has not
wholly succeeded in blotting out all traces
of earlier religion. Samuel judged Israel
every year at Bethel, the place of Jacob’s
sacred pillar: at Gilgal, the place where
Joshua’s twelve stones were set up ; and at
Mizpeh, where stood the cairn surmounted
by the pillar of Laban’s covenant. In
other words, these were the sanctuaries of
the chief ancient gods of Israel. Samuel
himself “took a stone and set it between
Mizpeh and Shem”; and its very name,
Eben-ezer, “ the stone of help,” shows that
it was originally worshipped before proceed
ing on warlike expeditions, though the
Jehovistic gloss, “saying, Hitherto the
Lord hath helped us,” does its best, of
course, to obscure the real meaning. It
was to the stone-circle of Gilgal, once more,
that Samuel directed Saul to go, saying,
1 Say rather, “for a god.”
�SACRED STONES
“ I will come down unto thee, to offer burntofferings, and to sacrifice sacrifices of peaceofferings.” It was at the cairn of Mizpeh
that Saul was chosen king; and after the
victory over the Ammonites Saul went once
more to the great Stonehenge at Gilgal to
“renew the kingdom,” and “there they
made Saul king before Jahweh in Gilgal ;
and there they sacrificed sacrifices of peaceofferings before Jahweh.” This passage is
a very instructive and important one, be
cause here we see that in the opinion of
the writer at least Jahweh was then domi
ciled at Gilgal, amid the other sacred
stones of that holy circle.
Observe, however, that, when Saul was
directed to go to find his father’s asses, he
was sent first to Rachel’s pillar at Telzah,
and then to the plain of Tabor, where he
was to meet “ three men going up to God
[not to Jahweh] at Bethel,” evidently to
sacrifice, “one carrying three kids, and
another carrying three loaves of bread, and
another carrying a bottle of wine.” These
and many other like memorials of stone
worship lie thickly scattered through the
early books of the Hebrew Scriptures, some
times openlyavowed, andsometimes cloaked
under a thin veil of Jehovism.
On the other hand, at the present day,
the Palestine exploration has shown that no
rude stone monuments exist in Palestine
proper, though East of the Jordan they are
common in all parts of the country. How,
then, are we to explain their disappearance?
Major Conder thinks that, when pure Jeho
vism finally triumphed under Hezekiah
and Josiah, the Jehovists destroyed all
these “ idolatrous ” stones throughout the
Jewish dominions, in accordance with the
injunctions in the Book of Deuteronomy to
demolish the religious emblems of the
Canaanites. Jahweh, the god of the
Hebrews, was a jealous God, and he would
tolerate no alien sacred stones within his
own jurisdiction.
And who or what was this Jahweh him
self, this local and ethnic god of the Israel
ites, who would suffer no other god or
sacred monolith to live near him ?
I will not lay stress upon the point that
when Joshua was dying, according to the
legend, he “ took a great stone ” and set it
up by an oak that was by the sanctuary of
Jahweh, saying that it had heard all the
words of Jahweh. That document is too
doubtful in terms to afford us much authority.
But I will merely point out that at the time
when we first seem to catch clear historic
glimpses of true Jahweh worship, we find
49
Jahweh, whoever or whatever that mystic
object might have been, located with his
ark at the Twelve Stones at Gilgal. It is
quite clear that in “ the camp at Gilgal,” as
the latter compilers believed, Jahweh, god
of Israel, who had brought his people up
out of Egypt, remained till the conquest of
the land was completed. But after the end
of the conquest, the tent in which he dwelt
was removed to Shiloh ; and that Jahweh
went with it is clear from the fact that
Joshua cast lots for the land there “before
Jahweh, our God.” He was there still
when Hannah and her husband went up to
Shiloh to sacrifice unto Jahweh ; and when
Samuel ministered unto Jahweh before Eli
the priest. That Jahweh made a long stay
at Shiloh is, therefore, it would seem, a true
old tradition—a tradition of the age just
before the historical beginnings of the
Hebrew annals.
But Jahweh was an object of portable
size, for, omitting for the present the des
criptions in the Pentateuch, which seem
likely to be of late date, and not too trust
worthy, through their strenuous Jehovistic
editing, he was carried from Shiloh in his
ark to the front during the great battle
with the Philistines at Ebenezer; and the
Philistines were afraid, for they said, “A
god is come into the camp.” But when the
Philistines captured the ark, the rival god,
Dagon, fell down and broke in pieces—so
Hebrew legend declared—before the face
of Jahweh. After the Philistines restored
the sacred object, it rested for a time at
Kirjath-jearim, till David, on the capture of
Jerusalem from the Jebusites, went down
to that place to bring up from thence the
ark of the god ; and as it went, on a new
cart, they “played before Jahweh on all
manner of instruments,” and David himself
“danced before Jahweh.” Jahweh was then
placed in the tent or tabernacle that David
had prepared for him, till Solomon built
the first temple, “the house of Jahweh,”
and Jahweh’s ark was set up in it, “in the
oracle of the house, the most holy place,
even under the wings of the cherubim.”
Just so Mr. Chalmers tells us that when he
was at Peran, in New Guinea, the peculiarlyshaped holy stone, Ravai, and the two
wooden idols, Epe and Kivava, “made long
ago and considered very sacred,” were for
the moment “ located in an old house, until
all the arrangements necessary for their
removal to the splendid new dubu prepared
for them are completed.” And so, too, at
the opposite end of the scale of civilisation,
as Mr. Lang puts it, “ the fetish-stones of
E
�5°
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA 01 GOD
Greece were those which occupied the holy
of holies of the most ancient temples, the
mysterious fanes within dark cedar or
cypress groves, to which men were hardly
admitted.”
That Jahweh himself, in the most ancient
traditions of the race, was similarly con
cealed within his chest or ark in the holy
of holies, is evident, I think, to any attentive
reader. 11 is true, the later J ehovistic glosses
of Exodus and Deuteronomy, composed
after the Jehovistic worship had become
purified and spiritualised, do their best to
darken the comprehension of this matter
by making the presence of Jahweh seem
always incorporeal; and even in the earlier
traditions the phrase “ the ark of the
covenant of Jahweh” is often substituted
for the simpler and older one, “ the ark of
Jahweh.” But through all the disfigure
ments with which the priestly scribes of the
age of Josiah and the sacerdotalists of the
return from the captivity have overlaid the
primitive story, we can still see clearly in
many places that Jahweh himself was at
first personally present in the ark that
covered him. And though the scribes
(evidently ashamed of the early worship
they had outlived) protest somewhat vehe
mently more than once, “There was nothing
in the ark save the two tables of stone
which Moses put there at Horeb, when
Jahweh made a covenant with the children
of Israel, when they came out of the land
of Egypt,” yet this much at least even they
admit—that the object or objects concealed
in the ark consisted of a sculptured stone
or stones; and that to dance or sing before
this stone or these stones was equivalent
to dancing or singing before the face of
Jahweh.
Not to push the argument too far, then,
we may say this much is fairly certain.
The children of Israel in early times car
ried about with them a tribal god, Jahweh,
whose presence in their midst was inti
mately connected with a certain ark or
chest, containing a stone object or objects.
This chest was readily portable, and could
be carried to the front in case of warfare.
They did not know the origin of the object
in the ark with certainty, but they re
garded it emphatically as “Jahweh their
god, which led them out of the land of
Egypt.” Even after its true nature had
been spiritualised away into a great
national deity, the most unlimited and in
corporeal the world has ever known (as
we get him in the best and purest work
of the prophets), the imagery of later
times constantly returns to the old idea of
a stone pillar or menhir. In the embel
lished account of the exodus from Egypt,
Jahweh goes before the Israelites as a
pillar or monolith of cloud by day and of
fire by night. According to Levitical law
his altar must be built of unhewn stone
{see p. 46). It is as a' Rock that the
prophets often figuratively describe Jah
weh, using the half-forgotten language of
an earlier day to clothe their own sublimer
and more purified conceptions. It is to
the Rock of Israel—the sacred stone of
the tribe—that they look for succour.
Nay, even when Josiah accepted the
forged roll of the law and promised to
abide by it, “ the king stood by a pillar (a
menhir) and made a covenant before
Jahweh.” Even to the last we see in
vague glimpses the real original nature of
the worship of that jealous god who
caused Dagon to break in pieces before
him, and would allow no other sacred
stones to remain undemolished within his
tribal boundaries.
I do not see, therefore, how we can
easily avoid the obvious inference that
Jahweh, the god of the Hebrews, wrho
later became sublimated and etherealised
into the God of Christianity, was in his
origin nothing more nor less than the
ancestral sacred stone of the people of
Israel, however sculptured, and perhaps, in
the very last resort of all, the unhewn
monumental pillar of some early Semitic
sheikh or chieftain.
CHAPTER VI.
SACRED STAKES
Milton speaks in a famous sonnet of the
time “when all our fathers worshipped
stocks and stones.” That familiar and
briefly contemptuous phrase of the Puritan
poet does really cover the vast majority of
objects of worship for the human race at all
times and in all places. We have examined
the stones ; the stocks must now come in
for their fair share of attention. They need
not, however, delay us quite so long as
their sister deities, both because they are on
the whole less important in themselves, and
because their development from grave
marks into gods and idols is almost abso
lutely parallel to that which we have already
�SACRED STAKES
followed out in detail in the case of the
standing stone or megalithic monument.
Stakes or wooden posts are often used all
the world over as marks of an interment.
Like other grave-marks, they also share
naturally in the honours paid to the ghost
or nascent god. But they are less important
as elements in the growth of religion than
standing stones, for two distinct reasons.
In the first place, a stake or post most often
marks the interment of a person of little
social consideration ; chiefs and great men
have usually stone monuments erected in
their honour ; the commonalty have to be
satisfied with wooden marks, as one may
observe to this day at Père Lachaise, or any
other great Christian cemetery. In the
second place, the stone monument is far
more lasting and permanent than the wooden
one. Each of these points counts for some
thing. For it is chiefs and great men whose
ghosts most often grow into gods ; and it is
the oldest ghosts, the oldest gods, the oldest
monuments, that are always the most sacred.
For both these reasons, then, the stake is
less critical than the stone in the history of
religion.
Nevertheless, it has its own special im
portance. As the sacred stone derives
ultimately from the great boulder piled
above the grave to keep down the corpse,
so the stake, I believe, derives from the
sharp-pointed stick driven through the body
to pin it down as we saw in the third
chapter, and still so employed in Christian
England to prevent suicides from walking.
Such a stake or pole is usually permitted to
protrude from the ground, so as to warn
living men of the neighbourhood of a spirit.
At a very early date, however, the stake,
I fancy, became a mere grave-mark ; and
though, owing to its comparative incon
spicuousness, it obtains relatively little
notice, it is now and always has been by far
the most common mode of preserving the
memory of the spot where a person lies
buried. A good example, which will throw
light upon many subsequent modifications,
is given by Mr. Wyatt Gill from Port
Moresby in New Guinea. “The body,” he
says, “ was buried. At the side was set up
a stake, to which were tied the spear, club,
bow and arrow of the deceased, but broken,
to prevent theft. A little beyond was the
grave of a woman : her cooking utensils,
grass petticoats, etc., hung up on the stake.”
Similar customs, he adds, are almost uni
versal in Polynesia.
Though worship of stakes or wooden
posts is common all over the world, I can
5*
give but few quite unequivocal instances of
such worship being paid to a post actually
known to surmount an undoubted grave.
Almost the best direct evidence I can obtain
is the case of the gravepole in Buru, already
quoted from Mr. H. O. Forbes. But the
following account of a Samoyed place of
sacrifice, extracted from Baron Nordenskiold’s Voyage of the Vega, is certainly
suggestive. On a hillock on Vaygats
Island the Swedish explorer found a num
ber of reindeer skulls, so arranged that
they formed a close thicket of antlers.
Around lay other bones, both of bears and
reindeer; and in the midst of all “ the
mighty beings to whom all this splendour
was offered. They consisted of hundreds
of small wooden sticks, the upper portions
of which were carved very clumsily in the
form of the human countenance, most of
them from fifteen to twenty, but some of
them three hundred and seventy centi
metres in length. They were all stuck in
the ground on the south-east part of the
eminence. Near the place of sacrifice
there were to be seen pieces of driftwood
and remains of the fireplace at which the
sacrificial meal was prepared. Our guide
told us that at these meals the mouths of
the idols were besmeared with blood and
wetted with brandy ; and the former state
ment was confirmed by the large spots
of blood which were found on most of the
large idols below the holes intended to
represent the mouth.” At a far earlier
date, Stephen Burrough in 1556 writes as
follows to much the same effect in his
interesting narrative printed in Hakluyt:
“There I met againe with Loshak, and
went on shore with him, and he brought
me to a heap of Samoeds idols, which
were in number about 300, the worst and
the most unartificiall worke that ever I
saw : the eyes and mouthes of sundrie of
them were bloodie, they had the shape of
men, women, and children, very groslywrought, and that which they had made
for other parts was also sprinkled with
blood. Some of their idols were an olde
sticke with two or three notches, made
with a knife in it. There was one of
their sleds broken and lay by the heape of
idols, and there I saw a deers skinne which
the foules had spoyled : and before certaine of their idols blocks were made as
high as their mouthes ; being all bloodie,
I thought that to be the table whereon
they offered their sacrifice.”
In neither of these accounts, it is true,
is it distinctly mentioned that the place of
�52
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
sacrifice was a Samoyed cemetery: but I
believe this to be the case, partly from
analogy, and partly because Nordenskiold
mentions elsewhere that an upturned sled
is a frequent sign of a Samoyed grave.
Compare also the following account of a
graveyard among nominally Christian
Ostyak Siberians, also from Nordenskiold :
“ The corpses were placed in large coffins
above ground, at which almost always a
cross was erected.” [The accompanying
woodcut shows that these crosses were
rude wooden stakes with one or two cross
bars.] “ In one of the crosses a sacred
picture was inserted which must be con
sidered a further proof that a Christian
rested in the coffin. Notwithstanding
this, we found some clothes, which had
belonged to the departed, hanging on a
bush beside the grave, together with a
bundle containing food, principally dried
fish. At the graves of the richer natives
the survivors are even said to place along
with food some rouble notes, in order that
the departed may not be altogether with
out ready money on his entrance into the
other world.”
To complete the parallel, I ought to add
that money was also deposited on the
sacrificial place on Vaygats Island. Of
another such sacrificial place on Yalmal,
Nordenskiold says, after describing a pile
of bones, reindeer skulls, and walrus jaws :
“In the middle of the heap of bones stood
four erect pieces of wood. Two consisted
of sticks a metre in length, with notches
cut in them........The two others, which
clearly were the proper idols of this
place of sacrifice, consisted of driftwood
roots, on which some carvings had been
made to distinguish the eyes, mouth, and
nose. The parts of the pieces of wood,
intended to represent the eyes and mouth,
had recently been besmeared with blood,
and there still lay at the heap of bones the
entrails of a newly-killed reindeer.”
Indeed, I learn from another source that
“ the Samoyedes feed the wooden images
of the dead ”; while an instance from
Erman helps further to confirm the same
conclusion. According to that acute
writer, among the Ostyaks of Eastern
Siberia there is found a most interesting
custom, in which, says Dr. Tylor, “ we see
the transition from the image of the dead
man to the actual idol.” When a man
dies, they set up a rude wooden image of
him in the yurt, which receives offerings at
every meal and has honours paid to it,
while the widow continually embraces
and caresses it. As a general rule, these
images are buried at the end of three
years or so : but sometimes “ the image of
a shaman (native sorcerer),” says Tylor,
“ is set up permanently, and remains as a
saint for ever.” For “saint” I should say
“ god ” ; and we see the transformation at
once completed.
With regard to the blood smeared upon
such Siberian wooden idols, it must be
remembered that bowls of blood are
common offerings to the dead ; and Dr.
Robertson Smith himself, no friendly
witness in this matter, has compared the
blood-offerings to ghosts with those to
deities. In the eleventh book of the
Odyssey, for example, the ghosts drink
greedily of the sacrificial blood; and
libations of gore form a special feature in
Greek offerings to heroes. That blood
was offered to the sacred stones we have
already seen ; and we noticed that there as
here it was specially smeared upon the
parts representing the mouth. Offerings
of blood to gods, or pouring of blood on
altars, are too common to demand
particular notice; and we shall also recur
to that part of the subject when we come
to consider the important questions of
sacrifice and sacrament. I will only add
here that, according to Maimonides, the
Sabians looked on blood as the nourish
ment of the gods; while the Hebrew
Jahweh asks indignantly in the fiftieth
Psalm, “ Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or
drink the blood of goats ?”
To pass on to more unequivocal cases of
stake-worship, where we can hardly doubt
that the stake represents a dead man,
Captain Cook noticed that in the Society
Islands “ the carved wooden images at
burial-places were not considered mere
memorials, but abodes into which the souls
of the departed retired.” So Ellis observes
of Polynesians generally that the sacred
objects might be either mere stocks and
stones, or carved wooden imager;, from six
to eight feet long down to as many inches.
The ancient Araucanians again fixed over
a tomb an unright log, “ rudely carved to
represent the human frame.” After the
death of New Zealand chiefs, wooden
images, 20 to 40 feet high, were erected as
monuments.
Dr. Codrington notes that the large
mouths and lolling tongues of many New
Zealand and Polynesian gods are due to
the habit of smearing the mouth with
blood and other offerings.
Where men preserve the corpses of their
�SACRED STAKES
dead, images are not so likely to grow up ;
but where fear of the dead has brought
about the practice of burial or burning, it
is reasonable that the feelings of affection
which prompted gifts and endearments to
the mummy in the first stage of thought
should seek some similar material outlet
under the altered circumstances. Among
ourselves, a photograph, a portrait, the
toys of a dead child, are preserved and
cherished. Among savages, ruder repre
sentations become necessary. They bury
the actual corpse safely out of sight, but
make some rough wooden imitation to
represent it. Thus it does not surprise us
to find that while the Marianne Islanders
keep the dried bodies of their dead ances
tors in their huts as household gods, and
expect them to give oracles out of their
skulls, the New Zealanders, on the other
hand, “ set up memorial idols of deceased
persons near the burial-place, talking affec
tionately to them as if still alive, and cast
ing garments to them when they pass by,”
while they also “preserve in their houses
small carved wooden images, each dedi
cated to the spirit of an ancestor.” The
Coast Negroes “place several earthen
images on the graves.” Some Papuans,
“ after a grave is filled up, collect round
an idol, and offer provisions to it.” The
Javans dress up an image in the clothes
of the deceased. So, too, of the Caribs
of the West Indies, we learn that they
“carved little images in the shape in
which they believed spirits to have ap
peared to them; and some human figures
bore the names of ancestors in memory of
them.” From such little images, obviously
substituted for the dead body which used
once to be preserved and affectionately
tended, are derived, I believe, most of the
household gods of the world—the Lares
and Penates of the Romans, the huacas of
the Peruvians, the teraphim of the Semites.
As in the case of sacred stones, once
more, I am quite ready to admit that, when
once the sanctity of certain stakes or wooden
poles came to be generally recognised, it
would be a simple transference of feeling to
suppose that any stake, arbitrarily set up,
might become the shrine or home of an
indwelling spirit. Thus we are told that
the Brazilian tribes “ set up stakes in the
ground, and make offerings before them to
appease their deities or demons.” So also
we are assured that among the Dinkas of
the White Nile, “ the missionaries saw an
old woman in her hut offering the first of
her food before a short thick staff planted
53
in the ground.” But in neither of these
cases is there necessarily anything to show
that the spot where the staff was set up was
not a place of burial; while in the second
instance this is even probable, as hut inter
ments are extremely common in Africa. I
will quote one other instance only, for its
illustrative value in a subsequent connec
tion. In the Society Islands rude logs are
clothed in native cloth (like Monigan’s idol)
and anointed with oil, receiving adoration
and sacrifice as the dwelling-place of a
deity.
Among the Semitic peoples, always
specially interesting to us from their genetic
connection with Judaism and Christianity,
the worship of stakes usually took the form
of adoration paid to the curious log of wood
described as an ashera. What kind of
object an ashera was we learn from the
injunction in Deuteronomy, “ Thou shalt
not plant an ashera of any kind of wood
beside the altar of Jahweh.” This prohibi
tion is clearly parallel to that against any
hewn stone or “ graven image.” But the
Semites in general worshipped as a rule at
a rude stone altar, beside which stood an
ashera, under a green tree—all three of the
great sacred objects of humanity being thus
present together. A similar combination is
not uncommon in India, where sacred stone
and wooden image stand often under the
shade of the same holy peepul tree. “ The
ashera” says Professor Robertson Smith,
“ is a sacred symbol, the seat of the deity,
and perhaps the name itself, as G. Hoff
mann has suggested, means nothing more
than the ‘mark’ of the divine presence.”
Those who have followed me so far in the
present work, however, will be more likely
to conclude that it meant originally the
mark of a place where an ancestor lay
buried. “Every altar,” says Professor
Smith, again, “ had its ashera, even such
altars as in the popular preprophetic forms
of the Hebrew religion were dedicated to
J ehovah.”
I will dwell no longer upon more or less
remote derivatives of the grave-stake. I
will only say briefly that in my opinion all
wooden idols or images are directly or
indirectly descended from the wooden
headpost or still more primitive sepulchral
pole. Not of course that I suppose every
wooden image to have been necessarily
once itself a funereal monument. Dona
tello’s Magdalen in San Giovanni at
Florence, the blue-robed and star-spangled
Madonna of the wayside shrine, have cer
tainly no such immediate origin. But I
�54
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
do believe that the habit of making and
worshipping wooden images arose in the
way I have pointed out.
CHAPTER VII.
SACRED TREES
The sacred tree stands less obviously in
the direct line of ancestry of gods and of
God than the sacred stone and sacred
stake which we have just considered. I
would willingly pass it over, therefore, in
this long preliminary inquisition, could I
safely do so, in order to progress at once
to the specific consideration of the God of
Israel and the rise of Monotheism. But
the tree is nevertheless so closely linked
with the two other main objects of human
worship that I hardly see how I can
avoid considering it here in the same con
nection, especially as in the end it has
important implications with regard to the
tree of the cross, as well as to the True
Vine, and many other elements of Chris
tian faith and Christian symbolism. I
shall therefore give it a short chapter as
I pass, premising that I have already
entered into the subject at greater length
in my excursus “ On the Origin of TreeWorship,” appended to my verse transla
tion of the Attis of Catullus.
The worship of sacred trees is almost
as widely diffused over the whole world as
the worship of dead bodies, mummies,
relics, graves, sacred stones, sacred stakes,
and stone or wooden idols. The great
authorities on the subject of Tree-Worship
are Mannhardt’s Baumkultus and Mr. J.
G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Neither
of those learned and acute writers, how
ever, has fully seen the true origin of wor
ship from funeral practices : and therefore
it becomes necessary to go over the same
ground again briefly here from the point
of view afforded us by the corpse-theory
and ghost-theory of the basis of religion. I
shall hope to add something to their valu
able results, and also incidentally to show
that all the main objects of worship together
lead us back unanimously to the Cult of
the Dead as their common starting-point.
Let us begin in this instance (contrary to
our previous practice) by examining and
endeavouring to understand a few cases of
the behaviour of tree-spirits in various
mythologies. Virgil tells us in the Third
^Eneid how, on a certain occasion, /Eneas
was offering a sacrifice on a tumulus
crowned with dogwood and myrtle bushes.
He endeavoured to pluck up some of these
by the roots, in order to cover the altar, as
was customary, with leaf-clad branches. As
he did so, the first bush which he tore up
astonished him by exuding drops of liquid
blood, which trickled and fell upon the soil
beneath. He tried again, and again the
tree bled human gore. On the third trial,
a groan was heard proceeding from the
tumulus, and a voice assured /Eneas that
the barrow on which he stood covered the
murdered remains of his friend Polydorus.
Now, in this typical and highly illustra
tive myth—no doubt an ancient and wellknown story incorporated by Virgil in his
great poem—we see that the tree which
grows upon a barrow is itself regarded as
the representative and embodiment of the
dead man’s soul, just as elsewhere the snake
which glides from the tomb of Anchises is
regarded as the embodied spirit of the hero,
and just as the owls and bats which haunt
sepulchral caves are often identified in all
parts of the world with the souls of the
departed.
Similar stories of bleeding or speaking
trees or bushes occur abundantly elsewhere.
“When the oak is being felled,” says
Aubrey, in his Remains of Gentilisme, “ it
gives a kind of shriekes and groanes that
may be heard a mile off, as if it were the
genius of the oak lamenting. E. Wyld,
Esq., hath heared it severall times.” Certain
Indians, says Bastian, dare not cut a par
ticular plant, because there comes out of it
a red juice which they take for its blood. I
myself remember hearing as a boy in
Canada that wherever Sanguinaria Cana
densis, the common American bloodroot,
grew in the woods, an Indian had once
been buried, and that the red drops of juice
which exuded from the stem when one
picked the flowers were the dead man’s
blood. In Samoa, says Mr. Turner, the
special abode of Tuifiti, King of Fiji, was a
grove of large and durable afzelia trees.
“No one dared cut that timber. A story is
told of a party from Upolu who once
attempted it, and the consequence was that
blood flowed from the tree, and that the
sacrilegious strangers all took ill and died.”
Till 1855, says Mannhardt, there was a
sacred larch-tree at Nauders in the Tyrol,
which was thought to bleed whenever it
was cut. In some of these cases, it is true,
we do not actually know that the trees grew
�SACRED TREES
on tumuli, but this point is specially noticed
about Polydorus’s dogwood, and is probably
implied in the Samoan case, as I gather
from the title given to the spirit as king of
Fiji.
In other instances, however, such a doubt
does not exist. We are expressly told that
it is the souls of the dead which are believed
to animate the speaking or bleeding trees.
“The Dieyerie tribe of South Australia,”
says Mr. Frazer, “regard as very sacred
certain trees which are supposed to be their
fathers transformed; hence they will not
cut the trees down, and protest against
settlers doing so.”
Now, how did this connection between
the tree and the ghost or ancestor grow up ?
In much the same way, I imagine, as the
connection between the sacred stone or the
sacred stake and the dead chief who lies
buried beneath it. Whatever grows or
stands upon the grave is sure to share the
honours paid to the spirit that dwells
within it. Thus a snake or other animal
seen to glide out of a tomb is instantly
taken by savages and even by half-civilised
men as the genius or representative of the
dead inhabitant. But do trees grow out of
graves ? Undoubtedly, yes. In the first
place, they may grow by mere accident, as
they might grow anywhere else ; the more
so as the soil in such a case has been
turned and laboured. But beyond this, in
the second place, it is common all over the
world to plant trees or shrubs over the
graves of relatives or tribesmen. Though
direct evidence on this point is difficult to
obtain, a little is forthcoming. In Algeria,
I observed, the Arab women went on
Fridays to plant flowers and shrubs on the
graves of their immediate dead. I learned
from Mr. R. L. Stevenson that similar
plantings take place in Samoa and Fiji.
The Tahitians put young casuarinas on
graves. In Roman Catholic countries the
planting of shrubs in cemeteries takes
place usually on the jour des morts, a
custom which would argue for it an
immense antiquity ; for though it is a point
of honour among Catholics to explain this
jete as of comparatively recent origin,
definitely introduced by a particular saint
at a particular period, its analogy to
similar celebrations elsewhere shows us
that it is really a surviving relic of a very
ancient form of Manes-worship. In Graeco
Roman antiquity it is certain that trees
were frequently planted around the barrows
of the dead; and that leafy branches
formed part of the established ceremonial
55
of funerals. I cannot do better than quote
in this respect once more the case of
Polydorus:—
Ergo instauramus Polydoro funus, et ingens
Aggeritur tumulo tellus ; stant Manibus arse,
Cseruleis mcestse vittis atraque cupresso.
Suetonius again tells us how the tumulus
of the divine Augustus was carefully
planted. The acacia is one of the most
sacred trees of Egypt; and Egyptian
monuments, with their usual frankness,
show us a sarcophagus from which an
acacia emerges, with the naive motto,
“ Osiris springs forth.”
An incident which occurred during the
recent Sino-Japanese war shows how easily
points of this sort may be overlooked by
hasty writers in formal descriptions. One
of the London illustrated papers printed
an account of the burial of the Japanese
dead at Port Authur, and after mentioning
the simple headstone erected at each grave
volunteered the further statement that
nothing else marked the place of interment.
But the engraving which accompanied it,
taken from a photograph, showed, on the
contrary, that a little tree had also been
planted on each tiny tumulus.
I learn from Mr. William Simpson that
the Tombs of the Kings near Pekin are
conspicuous from afar by their lofty groves
of pine trees.
Evergreens, I believe, are specially
planted upon graves or tumuli because
they retain their greenness throughout the
entire winter, and thus as it were give
continuous evidence of the vitality and
activity of the indwelling spirit. Mr.
Frazer has shown in The Golden Bough
that mistletoe similarly owes its special
sanctity to the fact that it visibly holds the
soul of the tree uninjured in itself, while
all the surrounding branches stand bare
and lifeless. Accordingly, tumuli are very
frequently crowned by evergreens. Almost
all the round barrows in southern England,
for example, are topped by very ancient
Scotch firs; and as the Scotch fir is not an
indigenous tree south of the Tweed, it is
practically certain that these old pines are
the descendants of ascestors put in by
human hands when the barrows were first
raised over the cremated and buried bodies
of prehistoric chieftains. In short, the
Scotch fir is in England the sacred tree of
the barrows. As a rule, however, in
Northern Europe, the yew is the species
specially planted in graveyards, and
several such yews in various parts of
�56
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
England and Germany are held to possess
a peculiar sanctity. The great clump of
very ancient yews in Norbury Park near
Dorking, known as the Druids’ Grove, has
long been considered a holy wood of re
mote antiquity. In southern Europe the
cypress replaces the yew as the evergreen
most closely connected with tombs and
cemeteries. In Provence and Italy, how
ever, the evergreen holme-oak is almost
equally a conventional denizen of places of
interment. M. Lajard, in his able essay,
Sur le Culte du Cypres, has brought
together much evidence of this worship of
evergreens, among the Greeks, Etruscans,
Romans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Persians,
Hindus, Chinese, and American nations.
Sacred trees, especially when standing
alone, are treated in many respects with
the same ceremonial as is employed
towards dead bodies, mummies, graves,
sacred stones, sacred stakes, and carved
idols or statues. In other words, the
offerings to the ghost or god may be made
to the tree that grows on the grave just as
well as to any other of the recognised
embodiments of the indwelling spirit.
Furthermore, the sacred tree is found in
the closest possible connection with the
other indubitably ancestral monuments,
the sacred stone and the idol. “ A Bengal
village,” says Sir William Hunter, “has
usually its local god, which it adores either
in the form of a rude unhewn stone, or a
stump, or a tree marked with red lead ” ;
the last being probably a substitute for the
blood of human or animal victims with
which it was once watered. “ Sometimes
a lump of clay placed under a tree does
duty for a deity ; and the attendant priest,
when there is one, generally belongs to
one of the half-Hinduised low castes. The
rude stone represents the non-Aryan
fetish; and the tree seems to owe its
sanctity to the non-Aryan belief that it
forms the abode of the ghosts or gods of
the village.” That is to say, we have here
ancestor-worship in its undisguised early
native development.
The association of the sacred tree with
actual idols or images of deceased ances
tors is well seen in the following passage
which I quote from Dr. Tylor : “A clump
of larches on a Siberian steppe, a grove in
the recesses of a forest, is the sanctuary of
a Turanian tribe. Gaily-decked idols in
their warm fur coats, each set up beneath
its great tree swathed with cloth or tin
plate, endless reindeer-hides and peltry
hanging to the trees around, kettles and
spoons and snuff-horns and household
valuables strewn as offerings before the
gods—such is the description of a Siberian
holy grove, at the stage when the contact
of foreign civilisation has begun by orna
menting the rude old ceremonial it must
end by abolishing. A race ethnologically
allied to these tribes, though risen to
higher culture, kept up remarkable relics
of tree-worship in Northern Europe. In
Esthonian districts, within the present cen
tury, the traveller might often see the sacred
tree, generally an ancient lime, oak, or ash,
standing inviolate in a sheltered spot near
the dwelling-house ; and the old memories
are handed down of the time when the first
blood of a slaughtered beast was sprinkled
on its roots, that the cattle might prosper,
or when an offering was laid beneath the
holy linden, on the stone where the
worshipper knelt on his bare knees, moving
from east to west and back, which stone he
kissed when he had said, ‘ Receive the food
as an offering.’ ” After the evidence
already given, I do not think there can be
a reasonable doubt, in such a combination
of tree and stone, that we have here a sacri
fice to an ancestral spirit.
In some instances it is mentioned that
the trunks of sacred trees are occasionally
draped, as we saw to be also the case with
sacred stones, sacred stakes, idols, and
relics. Another example of this practice is
given in the account of the holy oak of
Romowe, venerated by the ancient Prussians,
which was hung with drapery like the ashera,
and decked with little hanging images of
the gods. The holy trees of Ireland are
still covered with rag offerings. Other
cases will be noticed in other connections
hereafter.
Once more, just as stones come to be
regarded as ancestors, so by a like process
do sacred trees. Thus Galton says in
South Africa : “ We passed a magnificent
tree. It was the parent of all the Damaras.
...... The savages danced round it in great
delight.” Several Indian tribes believe
themselves to be the sons of trees. Many
other cases are noted by Mr. Herbert
Spencer and Dr. Tylor. I do not think it
is necessary for our argument to repeat
them here.
I hope it is clear from this rapid risumt
that all the facts about the worship of sacred
trees stand exactly parallel to those with
regard to the worship of graves, mummies,
idols, sacred stones, sacred stakes, and
other signs of departed spirits. Indeed, we
have sometimes direct evidence of such
�SACRED TREES
affiliation. Thus Mr. Turner says of a
sacred tree on a certain spot in the island
of Savaii, which enjoyed rights of sanctuary
like the cities of refuge or a mediaeval
cathedral: “It is said that the king of a
division of Upolu, called Atua, once lived
at that spot. After he died, the house fell
into decay ; but the tree was fixed on as
representing the departed king, and out of
respect for his memory it was made the
substitute of a living and royal protector.”
By the light of this remark we may surely
interpret in a similar sense such other state
ments of Mr. Turner’s as that a sweetscented tree in another place “ was held to
be the habitat of a household god, and any
thing aromatic which the family happened
to get was presented to it as an offering ” ;
or again, “ a family god was supposed to
live ” in another tree ; “ and hence no one
dared to pluck a leaf or break a branch.”
For family gods, as we saw in a previous
chapter, are really family ghosts, promoted
to be deities.
In modern accounts of sacred trees much
stress is usually laid upon the fact that they
are large and well-grown, often very con
spicuous, and occupying a height, where
they serve as landmarks. Hence it has
frequently been taken for granted that they
have been selected for worship on account
of their size and commanding position.
This, however, I think, is a case of putting
the cart before the horse, as though one
were to say that St. Peter’s and Westminster
Abbey, the Temple of Karnak or the
Mosque of Omar, owed their sanctity to
their imposing dimensions. There is every
reason why a sacred tree should grow to
be exceptionally large and conspicuous.
Barrows are usually built on more or less
commanding heights, where they may
attract general attention. The ground is
laboured, piled high, freed from weeds, and
enriched by blood and other offerings. The
tree, being sacred, is tended arid cared for.
It is never cut down, and so naturally on the
average of instances grows to be a big and
well-developed specimen. Hence I hold
the tree is usually big because it is sacred,
not sacred because it is big. On the other
hand, where a tree already full-grown is
chosen for a place of burial, it would no
doubt be natural to choose a large and con
spicuous one. Thus I read of the tree
under which Dr. Livingstone’s heart was
buried by his native servant, “ It is the
largest in the neighbourhood.”
Looking at the question broadly, the case
stands thus. We know that in many in
57
stances savages inter their dead under the
shade of big trees. We know that such
trees are thereafter considered sacred, and
worshipped with blood, clothes, drapery,
offerings. We know that young shrubs or
trees are frequently planted on graves in all
countries. We know that whatever comes
up on or out of a grave is counted as repre
sentative of the ghost within it. The pre
sumption is therefore in favour of any par
ticular sacred tree being of funereal origin ;
and the onus of proving the opposite lies
with the person who asserts some more
occult and less obvious explanation.
At the same time, I am quite ready to
allow here, as in previous instances, when
once the idea of certain trees being sacred
has grown common among men, many trees
may come to possess by pure association a
sanctity of their own. This is doubtless
the case in India with the peepul, and in
various other countries with various other
trees. Exactly the same thing has happened
to stones. And so, again, though I believe
the temple to have been developed out of
the tomb or its covering, I do not deny that
churches are now built apart from tombs,
though always dedicated to the worship of
a God who is demonstrably a particular
deified personage.
Another point on which I must touch
briefly is that of the sacred grove or cluster
of trees. These often represent, I take it,
the trees planted in the temenos or sacred
tabooed space which surrounds the primi
tive tomb or temple. The koubbas or little
dome-shaped tombs of Mohammedan saints
so common in North Africa are all sur
rounded by such a walled enclosure, within
which ornamental or other trees are habit
ually planted. In many cases these are
palms—the familiar sacred tree of Meso
potamia, about which more must be said
hereafter in a later chapter. The wellknown bois sacré at Blidah is a considerable
grove, with a koubba in its midst. A similar
temenos frequently surrounded the Egyptian
and the Greek temple. I do not assert that
these were always of necessity actual tombs ;
but they were at any rate cenotaphs. When
once people had got accustomed to the idea
that certain trees were sacred to the memory
of their ancestors or their gods, it would be
but a slight step to plant such trees round
an empty temple. When Xenophon, for
example, built a shrine to Artemis, and
planted around it a grove of many kinds of
fruit trees, and placed in it an altar and
an image of the goddess, nobody would for
a moment suppose he erected it over the
�58
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
body of an actual dead Artemis. But men
would never have begun building temples
and consecrating groves at all if they had
not first built houses for the dead god
chief, and planted shrubs and trees upon
his venerated tumulus. Nay, even the
naïve inscription upon Xenophon’s shrine
—“He who lives here and enjoys the
fruits of the ground must every year offer
the tenth part of the produce to the god
dess, and out of the residue keep the
temple in repair”—does it not carry us
back implicitly to the origin of priesthood,
and of the desire for perpetuity in the due
maintenance of the religious offices ?
I shall say nothing here about the evolu
tion of the great civilised tree-gods like
Attis and Adonis, so common in the
region of the eastern Mediterranean, be
cause I have already treated them at some
length in my essay on Tree-Worship. But
a few words must be devoted in passing
to the prevalence of tree-worship among
the Semitic peoples, intimately connected
as it is with the rise of certain important
elements in the Christian cult.
“ In all parts of the Semitic area,” says
Professor Robertson Smith, “trees were
adored as divine.” Among the species
thus honoured he enumerates especially
the pines and cedars of Lebanon, the ever
green oaks of the Palestinian hills, the
tamarisks of the Syrian jungles, and the
acacias of the Arabian wadies. Most of
these, it will be noted, are evergreens. In
Arabia the most striking case on record
is that of the sacred date-plum at Nejran.
This was adored at an annual feast, when
it was “all hung with finé clothes and
women’s ornaments.” A similar tree ex
isted at Mecca, to which the people re
sorted annually, and hung upon it
weapons, garments, ostrich eggs, and other
offerings. In a sacred acacia at Nakla a
goddess was supposed to live. The modern
Arabs still hang pieces of flesh on such
sacred trees, honour them with sacrifices,
and present them with rags of calico and
coloured beads.
As regards the Phoenicians and Canaan
ites, Philo Byblius says that plants were
in ancient times revered as gods, and
honoured with libations and sacrifices. Dr.
Robertson Smith gives several instances.
Christianity has not extinguished the
veneration for sacred trees in Syria, where
they are still prayed to in sickness and
hung with rags. The Moslems of Pales
tine also venerate the sacred trees of
immemorial antiquity.
In the Hebrew scriptures tree-worship
constantly appears, and is frankly dealt
with by Professor Robertson Smith, who
does not refuse to connect with this set of
beliefs the legend of Jahweh in the burn
ing bush. The local altars of early Hebrew
cult were habitually set up “ under green
trees.” On this subject I would refer the
reader to Dr. Smith’s own interesting dis
quisition on p. 193 of The Religion of the
Semites.
With regard to the general sacredness
of vegetation, and especially of food-plants,
such as corn, the vine, and the date-palm,
I postpone that important subject for the
present, till we come to consider the gods
of cultivation, and the curious set of ideas
which gradually led up to sacramental
god-eating. In a theme so vast and so
involved as that of human religion, it
becomes necessary to take one point at a
time, and to deal with the various parts in
analytic isolation.
We have now examined briefly almost
all the principal sacred objects of the
world, according to classes—the corpse,
the mummy, the idol, the sacred stone, the
sacred stake, the sacred tree or grove ;
there remains but one other group of holy
things, very generally recognised, which I
do not propose to examine separately, but
to which a few words may yet be devoted
at the end of a chapter. I mean, the sacred
wells. It might seem at first sight as if
these could have no possible connection
with death or burial; but that expectation
is, strange to say, delusive. There appears
to be some reason for bringing wells too
into the widening category of funereal
objects. The oxen’s well .at Acre, forexample, was visited by Christian, Jewish,
and Moslem pilgrims ; it was therefore an
object of great ancient sanctity; but observe
this point: there is a mashhed or sacred
tomb beside it, “perhaps the modern repre
sentative of the ancient Memnomum.”
Every Egyptian temple had in like manner
its sacred lake. In modern Syria, “cisterns
are always found beside the grave of saints,
and are believed to be inhabited by a sort
of fairy. A pining child is thought to be a
fairy changeling, and must be lowered into
the cistern.” The similarity of the belief
about holy wells in England and Ireland,
and their frequent association with the
name of a saint, would seem to suggest for
them a like origin. Sacred rivers usually
rise from sacred springs, near which stands
a temple. The river Adonis took its origin
at the shrine of Aphaca: and the grave of
�THE GODS OF EGYPT
Adonis, about whom much more must be
said hereafter, stood near the mouth of the
holy stream that was reddened by his blood.
The sacred river Belus had also its peculiar
Memnonium or Adonis tomb. But I must
add that sacred rivers had likewise their
annual god-victims, about whom we shall
have a great deal to say at a later stage of
our inquiry, and from whom in part they
probably derived their sanctity. Still, that
their holiness was also due in part, and
originally, to tombs at their sources, I think
admits of no reasonable doubt.
The equivalence of the holy well and the
holy stone is shown by the fact that, while
a woman whose chastity was suspected had
to drink water of a sacred spring to prove
her innocence, at Mecca she had to swear
seventy oaths by the Kaaba.
Again, sacred wells and fountains were
and are worshipped with just the same acts
of sacrifice as ghosts and images. At
Aphaca, the pilgrims cast into the holy pool
jewels of gold and silver, with webs of linen
and other precious stuffs. A holy grove
was an adjunct of the holy spring : in
Greece, according to Bötticher, they were
seldom separated. At the annual fair of
the Sacred Terebinth, or tree and well of
Abraham at Mamre, the heathen visitors
offered sacrifices beside the tree, and cast
into the well libations of wine, with cakes,
coins, myrrh, and incense : all of which we
may compare with the Ostyak offerings to
ancestral grave-stakes. At the holy waters
of Karwa, bread, fruit, and other foods were
laid beside the fountain. At Mecca, and at
the Stygian Waters in the Syrian desert,
similar gifts were cast into the holy source.
In one of these instances at least we know
that the holy well was associated with an
actual burial ; for at Aphaca, the holiest
shrine of Syria, the tomb of the local Baal
or god was shown beside the sacred foun
tain. “ A buried god,” says Dr. Robertson
Smith quaintly, in commenting on this fact,
“ is a god that dwells under ground.” It
would be far truer and more philosophical
to say that a god who dwells underground
is a buried man.
I need not recall the offerings to Cornish
and Irish well-spirits, which have now de
generated for the most part into pins and
needles.
On the whole, though it is impossible to
understand the entire genesis of sacred
founts and rivers without previous con
sideration of deliberate god-making, a sub
ject which I reserve for a later portion of
our exposition, I do not think we shall go
59
far wrong in supposing that the sacred well
most often occurs in company with the
sacred tree, the sacred stone or altar, and
the sacred tomb; and that itowes its sanctity
in the last resort, originally at least, to a
burial by its side; though I do not doubt
that this sanctity was in many cases kept
up by the annual immolation of a fresh
victim-god, of a type whose genesis will
hereafter detain us.
Thus, in ultimate analysis, we see that
all the sacred objects of the world are
either dead men themselves, as corpse,
mummy, ghost, or god; or else the tomb
where such men are buried ; or else the
temple, shrine, or hut which covers the
tomb ; or else the tombstone, altar, image,
or statue, standing over it and representing
the ghost; or else the stake, idol, or
household god which is fashioned as their
deputy; or else the tree which grows
above the barrow ; or else the well, or
tank, or spring, natural or artificial, by
whose side the dead man has been laid
to rest.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE GODS OF EGYPT
We have now completed our preliminary
survey of the nature and origin of Gods in
general. We have seen how men first
came to believe in the objective existence
of these powerful and invisible beings, how
they learnt to invest ^them with majestic
attributes, and how tliey grew to worship
them under the various forms of mummies
or boulders, stone or wooden idols, trees or
stumps, wells, rivers, and fountains. In
short, we have briefly arrived at the origin
of Polytheism. We have now to go on to
our second question—How from the belief
in many gods did men progress to the
belief in one single God, the creator and
upholder of all things ? Our task is now
to reconstruct the origin of Monotheism.
But Monotheism bases itself entirely
upon the great God of the Hebrews. To
him, therefore, we must next address
ourselves. Is he too resoluble, as I hinted
before, into a Sacred Stone, the monument
and representative of some prehistoric
chieftain ? Can we trace the origin of the
Deity of Christendom till we find him at
last in a forgotten Semitic ghost of the
earliest period ?
�6o
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
The chief Hebrew god Jahweh, when
we first catch a passing glimpse of his
primitive worship by his own people, was
but one among a number of competing
deities, mostly, it would appear, embodied
by their votaries in the visible form of stone
or wooden pillars, and adored by a small
group of loosely-connected tribes among
the mountain region in the southwest of
Syria. The confederacy among whom he
dwelt knew themselves as the Sons of
Israel; they regarded Jahweh as their prin
cipal god, much as the Greeks did Zeus, or
the early Teutons their national hero
Woden. But a universal tradition among
them bore witness to the fact that they had
once lived in a subject condition in Egypt,
the house of bondage. So consistent and
so definite was this traditional belief that
we can hardly regard it otherwise than as
enclosing a kernel of truth ; and not only
do Kuenen and other Semitic scholars of
the present day admit it as genuine, but the
Egyptologists also seem generally to allow
its substantial accuracy and full accord with
hieroglyphic literature. This sojourn in
Egypt cannot have failed to influence to
some extent the Semitic strangers : there
fore I shall begin my quest of the Hebrew
god among the Egyptian monuments. Ad
mitting that he was essentially in all respects
a deity of the true Semitic pattern, I think
it will do us good to learn a little before
hand about the people among whom his
votaries dwelt so long, especially as the his
tory of the Egyptian cults affords us perhaps
the best historical example of the growth
and development of a great national reli
gion.
A peculiar interest, indeed, attaches in
the history of the human mind to the evo
lution of the gods of Egypt. Nowhere else
in the world can we trace so well such a
continuous development from the very sim
plest beginnings of religious ideas to the
very highest planes of mysticism and philo
sophic theology. There are savage cults,
it is true, which show us more clearly the
earliest stages in the process whereby the
simple ancestral ghost passes imperceptibly
into the more powerful form of a super
natural deity: there are elevated civilised
creeds which show us more grandly in its
evolved shape the final conception of a
single supreme Ruler of the Cosmos. But
there is no other religious system known to
us in which we can follow so readily, with
out a single break, the whole evolutionary
movement whereby the earlier ideas get
gradually expanded and etherealised into
the later. The origin of the other great
historical religions is lost from our eyes
among dim mists of fable : in Egypt alone,
of all civilised countries, does our record go
back to the remote period when the reli
gious conception was still at the common
savage level, and follow it forward continu
ously to the advanced point where it had
all but achieved, in its syncretic movement,
the ultimate goal of pure monotheism.
Looked at from the evolutionary point of
view then, nothing can be clearer than the
fact that the early Egyptian religion bases
itself entirely upon two main foundations,
ancestor-worship and totemism.
I will begin with the first of these, which
all analogy teaches us to consider by far
the earliest, and infinitely the most im
portant. And I may add that it is also, to
judge by the Egyptian evidence alone,
both the element which underlies the
whole religious conceptions of the Nile
valley, and likewise the element which
directly accounts, as we shall see hereafter,
for all the most important gods of the
national pantheon, including Osiris, Ptah,
Khem, and Amen, as well perhaps as
many of their correlative goddesses. There
is not, in fact, any great ethnical religion
on earth, except possibly the Chinese, in
which the basal importance of the Dead
Man is so immediately apparent as in the
ancient cult of Pharaohnic Egypt.
The Egyptian religion bases itself upon
the tomb. It is impossible for a moment
to doubt that fact as one stands under the
scanty shade of the desert date-palms
among the huge sun-smitten dust-heaps
that represent the streets of Thebes and
Memphis. The commonest object of wor
ship on all the monuments of Nile is
beyond doubt the Mummy : sometimes the
private mummy of an ancestor or kinsman,
sometimes the greater deified mummies of
immemorial antiquity, blended in the later
syncretic mysticism with the sun-god and
other allegorical deities, but represented to
the very last in all ages of art—on the
shattered Rameseum at Thebes or the
Ptolemaic pillars of still unshaken Denderah—as always unmistakeable and
obvious mummies. If ever there was a
country where the Worship of the Dead was
pushed to an extreme, that country was
distinctly and decisively Egypt.
“ The oldest sculptures show us no acts
of adoration or of sacrifice,” says Mr.
Loftie, “ except those of worship at the
shrine of a deceased ancestor or relative.”
This is fully in keeping with what we know
�THE GODS OF EGYPT
of the dawn of religion elsewhere, and
with the immense importance always at
tached to the preservation of the mummy
intact throughout the whole long course of
Egyptian history. The Egyptian, in spite
of his high civilisation, remained always at
the first or corpse-preserving stage of
custom as regards the dead. To him,
therefore, the life after death was far more
serious than the life on earth : he realised
it so fully that he made endless preparations
for it during his days above, and built
himself a tomb as an eternal mansion.
The grave was a place of abode, where the
mummy was to pass the greater part of his
existence ; and even in the case of private
persons (like that famous Tih whose
painted sepulchre at Sakkarah every
tourist to Cairo makes a point of visiting)
it was sumptuously decorated with painting
and sculpture. In the mortuary chambers
or chapels attached to the tombs, the
relations of the deceased and the priests
of the cemetery celebrated on certain fixed
dates various ceremonies in honour of the
dead, and offered appropriate gifts to the
mummy within. “ The tables of offerings,
which no doubt formed part of the furniture
of the chambers, are depicted on the
walls, covered with the gifts of meat, fruits,
bread, and wine which had to be presented
in kind.” These parentalia undoubtedly
formed the main feature of the practical
religion of early Egypt.
The Egyptian tomb was usually a survival
of the cave artificially imitated. The outer
chamber, in which the ceremonies of the
offertory took place, was the only part
accessible, after the interment had been
completed, to the feet of survivors. The
mummy itself, concealed in its sarcophagus,
lay at the bottom of a deep pit beyond, by
the end of a corridor often containing
statues or idols of the deceased. These
idols, says M. Maspero, were indefinitely
multiplied, in case the mummy itself should
be accidentally destroyed, in order that the
Ka (the ghost or double) might find a safe
dwelling-place. Compare the numerous
little images placed upon the grave by the
Coast Negroes. It was the outer chamber,
however, that sheltered the stele or pillar
which bore the epitaph, as well as the altar
or table for offerings, the smoke from which
was conveyed to the statues in the corridor
through a small aperture in the wall of
partition. Down the well beyond, the
mummy in person reposed, in its eternal
dwelling-place, free from all chance of viola
tion or outrage. “The greatest impor
61
tance,” says Mr. Renouf, “ was attached to
the permanence of the tomb, to the con
tinuance of the religious ceremonies, and to
the prayers of passers-by.” Again, “ there
is a very common formula stating that the
person who raised the tablet ‘ made it as a
memorial to his fathers who are in the nether
world, built up what he found was imperfect,
and renewed what was found out of repair.’”
In the inscription on one of the great tombs
at Beni-Hassan the founder says : “ I made
to flourish the name of my father, and I built
chapels for his ka [or ghost]. I caused
statues to be conveyed to the holy dwelling,
and distributed to them their offerings in
pure gifts. I instituted the officiating priest,
to whom I gave donations in land and
presents. I ordered funeral offerings for all
the feasts of the nether world [which are
then enumerated at considerable length].
If it happen that the priest or any other
cease to do this, may he not exist, and may
his son not sit in his seat.” All this is
highly instructive from the point of view of
the origin of priesthood.
How long these early religious endow
ments continued to be respected is shown
by Mr. Renouf in one instructive passage.
The kings who built the Pyramids in the
Early Empire endowed a priestly office for
the purpose of celebrating the periodical
rites of offering to their ghosts or mummies.
Now, a tablet in the Louvre shows that a
certain person who lived under the Twenty
sixth Dynasty was priest of Khufu, the
builder of the Great Pyramid, who had
endowed the office two thousand years
before his time. We have actually the
tombs of some of his predecessors who
filled the same office immediately after
Khufu’s death. So that in this instance at
least, the worship of the deceased monarch
continued for a couple of thousand years
without interruption. “If in the case of
private interments,” says M. Maspero, “we
find no proof of so persistent a veneration,
that is because in ordinary tombs the cere
monies were performed not by special
priests, but by the children or descendants
of the deceased person. Often, at the end
of a few generations, either through negli
gence, removals, ruin, or extinction of the
family, the cult was suspended, and the
memory of the dead died out altogether.”
For this reason, as everywhere else among
ancestor-worshippers, immense importance
was attached by the Egyptians to the be
getting of a son who should perform the
due family rites, or see that they were per
formed by others after him. The duty of
�6i
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
undertaking these ritesis thoroughly insisted
upon in all the maxims or moral texts; while,
on the other hand, the wish that a man may
not have a son to perform them for him is
the most terrible of all ancient Egyptian
imprecations.
If even the common herd were carefully
embalmed—if even the lesser functionaries
of the court or temple lay in expensive
tombs, daintily painted and exquisitely
sculptured—it might readily be believed
that the great kings of the mighty con
quering dynasties themselves would raise
for their mummies eternal habitations of
special splendour and becoming magnifi
cence. And so they did. In Lower Egypt
their tombs are barrows or pyramids : in
Upper Egypt they are artificial caves.
The dreary desert district west of the Nile
and south of Cairo consists for many
miles, all but uninterruptedly, of the ceme
tery of Memphis—a vast and mouldering
city of the dead—whose chief memorials
are the wonderful series of Pyramids, the
desecrated tombs piled up for the kings of
the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Dynas
ties. There, under stone tumuli of enor
mous size—barrows or cairns more care
fully constructed—the Pharaohs of the Old
Empire reposed in peace in sepulchres
unmarked by any emblems of the mystic
gods or sacred beasts of later imagination.
But still more significant and infinitely
more beautiful are the rock-hewn Tombs
of the Kings at Thebes, belonging to the
great monarchs of the Eighteenth, Nine
teenth, and Twentieth Dynasties, when the
religion had assumed its full mystical
development. Those magnificent subter
ranean halls form in the truest and most
literal sense a real necropolis, a town of
mummies, where each king was to inhabit
an eternal palace of regal splendour,
decorated with a profusion of polychro
matic art, and filled with many mansions
for the officers of state, still destined to
attend upon their sovereign in the nether
world. Some of the mural paintings
would even seem to suggest that slaves or
captives were sacrificed at the tomb, to
serve their lord in his eternal home, as his
courtiers had served him in the temporal
palaces of Medinet-Hdbu or the corridors
of Luxor.
At any rate, it is quite impossible for
any impartial person to examine the exist
ing monuments which line the grey desert
hills of the Nile without seeing for himself
that the mummy is everywhere the central
object of worship—that the entire prac
tical religion of the people was based upon
this all-pervading sense of the continuity
of life beyond the grave, and upon the
necessity for paying due reverence and
funereal offerings to the manes of an
cestors. Everything in Egypt points to
this one conclusion. Even the great
sacred ritual is the Book of the Dead : and
the very word by which the departed are
oftenest described means itself “ the
living,” from the firm belief of the people
that they were really enjoying everlasting
life. Mors janua vitce is the short sum
ming-up of Egyptian religious notions.
Death was the great beginning for which
they all prepared, and the dead were the
real objects of their most assiduous public
and private worship.
Moreover, in the tombs themselves we
can trace a gradual development of the
religious sentiment from Corpse-Worship
to God-Worship. Thus, in the tombs of
Sakkarah, belonging to the Old Empire
(Fifth Dynasty), all those symbolical repre
sentations of the life beyond the tomb
which came in with the later mysticism are
almost wholly wanting. The quotations
from (or anticipations of) the Book of the
Dead are few and short. The great gods
are rarely alluded to. Again, in the grottos
of Beni-Hassan (of the Twelfth Dynasty)
the paintings mostly represent scenes from
the life of the deceased, and the mystic
signs and deities are still absent. The doc
trine of rewards and punishments remains
as yet comparatively in abeyance. It is
only at the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes
(of the Eighteenth Dynasty) that entire
chapters of the Book of the Dead are tran
scribed at length, and the walls are covered
with “ a whole army of grotesque and fan
tastic divinities.”
“ But the Egyptians,” it will be objected,
“had also great gods, distinct from their
ancestors—national, or local, or common
gods—whose names and figures have come
down to us inscribed upon all the monu
ments.” Quite true : that is to say, there
are gods who are not immediately or
certainly resolvable into deified ancestors
—gods whose power and might were at last
widely extended, and who became trans
figured by degrees beyond all recognition in
the latest ages. But it is by no means
certain, even so, that we cannot trace these
greater gods themselves back in the last
resort to deified ancestors of various ruling
families or dominant cities ; and in one or
two of the most important cases the sugges
tions of such an origin are far from scanty.
�THE GODS OE EGYPT
I will take, to begin with, one typical
example. There is no single god in the
Egyptian pantheon more important or more
universally diffused than Osiris. In later
forms of the national religion he is elevated
into the judge of the departed and king of
the nether world: to be “justified by
Osiris,” or, as later interpreters say, “ a
justified Osiris,” is the prayer of every
corpse as set forth in his funeral inscrip
tion ; and identification with Osiris is
looked upon as the reward of all the happy
and faithful dead. Now Osiris, in every
one of his representations and modes, is
simply—a Mummy. His myth, to be sure,
assumed at last immense proportions ; and
his relations with Isis and Horus form the
centre of an endless series of irreconcilable
tales, repeated over and over again in art
and literature. If we took mythology as
our guide, instead of the monuments, we
should be tempted to give him far other
origins. He is identified often with other
gods, especially with Amen ; and the disen
tanglement of his personality in the monu
ments of the newer empire, when Ra, the
sun-god, got mixed up inextricably with so
many other deities, is particularly difficult.
But if we neglect these later complications
of a very ancient cult, and go back to the
simplest origin of Egyptian history and
religion, we shall, I think, see that this
mystic god, so often explained away by
elemental symbolism into the sun or the
home of the dead, was in his first begin
nings nothing more or less than what all
his pictures and statues show him to be—a
revered and worshipped Mummy, a very
ancient chief or king of the town or little
district of This by Abydos.
I do not deny that in later ages Osiris
became much more than this. Nor do I
deny that his name was accepted as a
symbol for all the happy and pious dead.
Furthermore, we shall find at a later stage
that he was identified in the end with an
annual slain Corn-God. I will even allow
that there may have been more than one
original Osiris—that the word may even at
first have been generic, not specific. But I
still maintain that the evidence shows us
the great and principal Osiris of all as a
Dead Chief of Abydos.
We must remember that in Egypt
alone history goes back to an immense
antiquity, and yet shows us already at its
very beginning an advanced civilisation
and a developed picture-writing. There
fore the very oldest known state of
Egypt necessarily presupposes a vast
anterior era of slow growth in concentration
and culture. Before ever Upper or Lower
Egypt became united under a single crown,
there must have been endless mud-built
villages and petty palm-shadowed princi
palities along the bank of the Nile, each
possessing its own local chief or king, and
each worshipping its own local deceased
potentates. The sheikh of the village, as
we should call him nowadays, was then
their nameless Pharaoh, and the mummies
of his ancestors were their gods and god
desses. Each tribe had also its special
totem, about which I shall have a little
more to say hereafter; and these totems
were locally worshipped almost as gods,
and gave rise in all probability to the later
Egyptian Zoolatry and the animal-headed
deities. To the very last, Egyptian religion
bore marked traces of this original tribal
form ; the great multiplicity of Egyptian
gods seems to be due to the adoption of so
many of them, after the unification of the
country, into the national pantheon. The
local gods and local totems, however, con
tinued to be specially worshipped in their
original sites. Thus the ithyphallic AmenKhem was specially worshipped at Thebes,
where his figure occurs with unpleasant
frequency upon every temple ; Apis was
peculiarly sacred at Memphis; Pasht at
Bubastis ; Anubis at Sekhem ; Neith at
Sais ; Ra at Heliopolis ; and Osiris himself
at Abydos, his ancient dwelling-place.
Even Egyptian tradition seems to pre
serve some dim memory of such a state of
things, for it asserts that before the time of
Menes, the first king of the First Dynasty,
reputed the earliest monarch of a united
Egypt, dynasties of the gods ruled in the
country. In other words, it was recognised
that the gods were originally kings of local
lines which reigned in the various provinces
of the Nile valley before the unification.
In the case of Osiris, the indications
which lead us in this direction are almost
irresistible. It is all but certain that Osiris
was originally a local god of This or Thinis,
a village near Abydos, where a huge mound
of rubbish still marks the site of the great
deity’s resting-place. The latter town is
described in the Harris papyrus as Abud,
the hand of Osiris ; and in the monuments
which still remain at that site, Osiris is
everywhere the chief deity represented, to
whom kings and priests present appropriate
offerings. But it is a significant fact that
Menes, the founder of the united monarchy,
was born at the same place; and this
suggests the probability that Osiris may
�64
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
have been the most sacred and most vene
rated of Menes’s ancestors. The suggestion
derives further weight from the fact that
Osiris is invariably represented as a mummy,
and that he wears a peculiar head-dress or
cap of office, the same as that which was
used in historical times as the crown of
Upper Egypt. He also holds in his hands
the crook and scourge which are the marks
of kingly office—the crook to lead his own
people like a shepherd, the scourge to
punish evil-doers and to ward off enemies.
His image is therefore nothing more nor
less than the image of a Mummied King.
Sometimes, too, he wears in addition the
regal ostrich plumes. Surely, naught save
the blind infatuation of mythologists could
make them overlook the plain inference
that Osiris was a mummified chief of
Abydos in the days before the unification
of Egypt under a single rule, and that he
was worshipped by his successors in the
petty principality exactly as we know other
kingly mummies were worshipped by their
family elsewhere.
Not only, however, is Osiris represented
as a king and a mummy, but we are
expressly told by Plutarch (or at least by
the author of the tract De Osiride which
bears his name) that the tomb of Osiris
existed at Abydos, and that the richest
and most powerful of the Egyptians were
desirous of being buried in the adjacent
cemetery in order that they might lie, as it
were, in the same grave with the great god
of their country. All this is perfectly
comprehensible and natural if we suppose
that a Thinite dynasty first conquered the
whole of Egypt; that it extended the
worship of its own local ancestor-god over
the entire country ; and that in time, when
this worship had assumed national im
portance, the local god became the chief
figure in the common pantheon.
I had arrived at this opinion indepen
dently before I was aware that Mr. Loftie
had anticipated me in it. But in his rare
and interesting Essay on Scarabs I find he
has reached the same conclusions.
“ I have myself no doubt whatever that
the names of Osiris and of Horus are
those of ancient rulers. I think that, long
before authentic history begins, Asar and
Aset his wife reigned in Egypt, probably
in that wide valley of the Upper Nile
which is now the site of Girgeh and
Berbe ” (exactly where I place the princi
pality of Osiris). “ Their son was Hor, or
Horus, the first king of Upper and Lower
Egypt; and the ‘ Hor seshoo,’ the suc
cessors of Horus, are not obscurely
mentioned by later chroniclers. I know
that this view is not shared by all students
of the subject, and much learning and
ingenuity have been spent to prove that
Asar, and Aset, and Hor, and Ptah, and
Anep are representations of the powers of
nature ; that they do not point to ancient
princes, but to ancient principles; and that
Horus and his successors are gods and
were never men. But in the oldest in
scriptions we find none of that mysticism
which is shown in the sculptures from the
time of the eighteenth dynasty down to
the Ptolemies and the Roman Emperors.”
In short, Mr. Loftie goes on to set forth a
theory of the origin of the great gods
essentially similar to the one I am here
defending.
It is quite easy to see how Osiris would
almost inevitably grow with time to be the
King of the Dead and supreme judge of
the nether regions. For, as the most
sacred of the ancestors of the regal line,
he would naturally be the one whom the
kings, in their turn, would most seek to
propitiate, and whom they would look
forward to joining in their eternal home.
As the myth extended, and as mystical
interpretations began to creep in, identifi
cations being made of the gods with the
sun or other natural energies, the original
meaning of Osiris-worship would grow
gradually obscured. But to the last, Osiris
himself, in spite of all corruptions, is repre
sented as a mummy : and even when
identified with Amen, the later intrusive
god, he still wears his mummy-bandages,
and still bears the crook and scourge and
sceptre of his primitive kingship.
It may be objected, however, that there
were many forms of Osiris, and many local
gods who bore the same name. He was
buried at Abydos, but was also equally
buried at Memphis, and at Philae as well.
Well, that fact runs exactly parallel with
the local Madonnas and the local Apollos
of other religions : and nobody has sug
gested doubts as to the human reality of
the Blessed Virgin Mary because so many
different Maries exist in different sacred
sites or in different cathedrals. Our Lady
of Loretto is the same as Our Lady of
Lourdes. Jesus of Nazareth was neverthe
less born at Bethlehem : he was the son
of Joseph, but he was also the son of
David, and the son of God. Perhaps
Osiris was a common noun : perhaps a
slightly different Osiris was worshipped
in various towns of later Egypt; perhaps
�THE GODS OF EGYPT
a local mummy-god, the ancestor of some
extinct native line, often wrongly usurped
the name and prerogatives of the great
mummy-god of Abydos, especially under
the influence of late priestly mysticism.
Moreover, when we come to consider the
subject of the manufacture of gods, we
shall see that the body of an annual in
carnation of Osiris may have been divided
and distributed among all the nomes of
Egypt. It is enough for my present pur
pose if I point out in brief that ancestor
worship amply explains the rise and pre
valence of the cult of Osiris, the kingly
mummy, with the associated cults of
Horus, Isis, Thoth, and the other deities
of the Osirian cycle.
I may add that a gradual growth of
Osiris-worship is clearly marked on the
monuments themselves. The simpler
stelle and memorials of the earliest age
seldom contain the names of any god, but
display votaries making offerings at the
shrine of ancestors. Similarly, the scenes
represented on thè walls of tombs of early
date bear no reference to the great gods of
later ages, but are merely domestic and
agricultural in character, as may be
observed at Sakkarah and even to some
extent also at Beni-Hassan. Under the
Sixth Dynasty, the monuments begin to
make more and more frequent mention of
Osiris, who now comes to be regarded as
Judge of the Dead and Lord of the Lower
World ; and on a tablet of this age in the
Boulak Museum occurs for the first time
the expression afterwards so common,
“justified by Osiris.” Under the Twelfth
Dynasty, legend becomes more prominent ;
a solar and lunar character seems to be
given by reflex to Osiris and Isis : and the
name of Ra, the sun, is added to that of
many previously distinct and independent
deities. Khem, the ithyphallic god of the
Thebaid, now also assumes greater im
portance, as is quite natural under a line
of Theban princes ; and Chem, a local
mummy-god, is always represented in his
swathing-clothes, and afterwards con
founded, certainly with Amen, and prob
ably also with the mummy-god of Abydos.
But Osiris from this time forward rises
distinctly into the front rank as a deity.
“ To him, rather than to the dead, the
friends and family offer their sacrifices. A
court is formed for him. Thoth, the re
corder [totem-god of Abydos], Anubis the
watcher, Ra the impersonation of truth,
and others, assist in judgment on the soul.”
The name of the deceased is henceforth
65
constantly accompanied by the -formula
“justified by Osiris.” About the same
time the Book of the Dead in its full form
came into existence, with its developed
conception of the lower world, and its com
plicated arrangement of planes of purga
torial progress.
Under the Eighteenth Dynasty, the
legend thickens ; the identifications of the
gods become more and more intricate ;
Amen and Ra are sought and found under
innumerable forms of other deities ; and a
foundation is laid for the esoteric Mono
theism or pantheistic nature-worship of the
later philosophising priesthood. It was
under the Nineteenth Dynasty that the
cult of local Triads or Trinities took fullest
shape, and that the mystical interpretation
of the religion of Egypt came well into the
foreground. The great Osirian myth was
then more and more minutely and mysti
cally elaborated ; and even the bull Apis,
the totem-god of Memphis, was recognised
as a special incarnation of Osiris, who thus
becomes, with Amen, the mysterious sum
ming-up of almost all the national pantheon.
At last we find the myth going off into pure
mysticism, Osiris being at once the father,
brother, husband, and son of Isis, and also
the son of his own child Horus. Sentences
with an almost Athanasian mixture of vague
ness and definiteness inform us how “ the
son proceeds from the father, and the father
proceeds from his son”; how “Ra is the
soul of Osiris, and Osiris the soul of Ra ”;
and how Horus his child, awakened by
magical rites from his dead body, is vic
torious over Set, the prince of darkness,
and sits as Osiris upon the throne of the
father whom he has revived and avenged.
Here as elsewhere the myth, instead of being
the explanation of the god, does nothing
more than darken counsel.
This gradual growth of a dead and
mummified village chief, however, into a
pantheistic god, strange as it may seem, is
not in any way more remarkable than the
gradual growth of a Galilean peasant into
the second person of an eternal and omni
potent Godhead. Nor does the myth of
the death and resurrection of Osiris (to be
considered hereafter in a later chapter)
militate against the reality of his human
existence, any more than the history of the
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ mili
tates against the human existence of Jesus
of N azareth.
The difficulty of the evolution, indeed, is
not at all great, if we consider the further
fact that, even after the concept of godship
F
�66
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
had been fully developed, the king still re
mained of like nature with the gods, their
son and descendant, a divine personage
himself, differing from them only in not
having yet received eternal life, the symbol
of which they are often shown in sculpture
as presenting with gracious expressions to
their favoured scion. “The ruling sovereign
of Egypt,” says Mr. Le Page Renouf, “ was
the living image of and vicegerent of the
sun-god. He was invested with the attri
butes of divinity, and that in the earliest
times of which we possess monumental
evidence.” And quite naturally, for in an
tique times gods had ruled in Egypt, whose
successor the king was : and the kings
before Menes were significantly known as
“ the successors of Horus.” As late as the
times of the Ptolemies, we saw, there were
priests of Menes and other Pharaohs of the
most ancient dynasties. The pyramid kings
took the title of the Golden Horus, after
wards copied by their descendants; and
from Chafra onward the reigning monarch
was known as the Son of Ra and the Great
God. Amenophis II., during his own life
time, is “ a god good like Ra, the sacred
seed of Amen, the son whom he begot.”
And on all the monuments the king is
represented of the same superhuman stature
as the gods themselves: he converses with
them on equal terms ; they lead him by the
hand into their inmost sanctuaries, or pre
sent him with the symbols of royal rule and
of eternal life, like friends of the family.
The former guerdon bestows upon him the
same rank they themselves had held on
earth ; the latter advances him to share
with them the glories of the other existence.
I conclude, therefore, that a large part of
the greater Egyptian gods—the national or
local gods, as opposed to those worshipped
by each family in its own necropolis—were
early kings, whose myths were later
expanded into legends, rationalised into
nature-worship, and adorned by priestly
care with endless symbolical or esoteric
fancies. But down to the very latest age
of independence, inscriptions of the god
Euergetes, and the goddess Berenice, or
representations like that at Philae, of the
god Philadelphus suckled by Isis, show
that to the Egyptian mind the gulf between
humanity and divinity was very narrow,
and that the original manhood of all the
deities was an idea quite familiar to priests
and people.
There was, however, another class of
gods about which we can be somewhat less
certain; these are the animal-gods and
animal-headed gods which developed out
of the totems of the various villages. Such
bestial types, Professor Sayce remarks,
“ take us back to a remote pre-historic age,
when the religious creed of Egypt,” say,
rather, the custom of Egypt, “ was still
totemism.” But in what precise relation
totemism stood to the main line of the
evolution of gods I do not feel quite so
sure in my own mind as does Mr. Herbert
Spencer. It seems to me possible that the
totem may in its origin have been merely
the lucky-beast or badge of a particular
tribe (like the regimental goat or deer);
and that from being at first petted, domes
ticated, and to some extent respected on
this account, it may have grown at last,
through a confusion of ideas, to share the
same sort of divine honours which were
paid to the ghosts of ancestors and the
gods evolved from them. But Mr. Frazer
has suggested a better origin of totemism
from the doctrine of the Separable Soul,
which is, up to date, the best explanation
yet offered of this obscure subject. Be
that as it may, if the totems were only
gradually elevated into divinities, we can
easily understand Mr. Renoufs remark
that the long series of tombs of the Apis
bulls at Sakkarah shows “ how immeasur
ably greater the devotion to the sacred
animals was in the later times than in the
former.”
May I add that the worship of totems,
as distinct from the mere care implied by
Mr. Frazer’s suggestion, very probably
arose from the custom of carving the totem
animal of the deceased on the grave-stake
or grave-board ? This custom is still
universal among the Indian tribes of North
western America.
Nevertheless, whatever be the true origin
of the totem-gods, I do not think totemism
militates in any way against the general
principle of the evolution of the idea of a
god from the ghost, the Dead Man, or the
deified ancestor. For only after the concept
of a god had been formed from ancestor
cult, and only after worship had been
evolved from the customary offerings to the
mummy or spirit at the tomb, could any
other object by any possibility be elevated
to the godhead. Nor, on the other hand,
as I have before remarked, do I feel inclined
wholly to agree with Mr. Spencer that every
•individual god was necessarily once a
particular Dead Man. It seems to me
indubitable that, after the idea of godhead
had become fully fixed in the human mind,
some gods at least began to be recognised
�THE GODS OF EGYPT
who were directly framed either from
to draw in our second chapter, they are
abstract conceptions, from natural objects,
gods to talk about, not gods to adore—
or from pure outbursts of the mythopceic
mythological conceptions rather than
faculty. I do not think, therefore, that the
religious beings. Their names occur much
existence of a class of totem-gods in Egypt
in the sacred texts, but their images are
or elsewhere is necessarily inconsistent in
rare and their temples unknown. The
any way with our main theory of the origin
actual objects of the highest worship are
of godhead.
far other than these abstract elemental con
Be this as it may, it is at any rate clear
ceptions : they are Osiris, Isis, Horus,
that totemism itself was a very ancient
Anubis, Khem, Pasht, and Athor. The
and widespread institution in early Egypt.
quaint or grotesque incised figures of Nut,
Totems are defined by Mr. Frazer as “ a
represented as a female form with arms and
class of material objects which a savage legs extended like a living canopy over the
regards with superstitious respect, believing
earth, as at Denderah, belong, I believe,
that there exists between him and every
almost ifnot qui te exclusively to the Ptolemaic
member of the class an intimate and alto period, when zodiacal and astrological con
gether special relation.” “ Observation of ceptions had been freely borrowed by the
existing totem tribes in Africa, Australia,
Egyptians from Greece and Asia. Nut
and elsewhere,” says Sir Martin Conway,
and Seb, as gods, not myths, are, in short,
“ shows us that one or more representatives
quite recent ideas in Egypt. Even sun
of the totem are often fed or even kept alive
disk Ra, himself, important as he becomes
in captivity by the tribe.” Mr. Frazer tells
in the later developed creed, is hardly so
us that “among the Narrinyeri in South
much in his origin a separate god as an
Australia, men of the snake clan sometimes
adjunct or symbol of divinity united syncatch snakes, pull out their teeth, or sew up
cretically with the various other deities. To
their mouths, and keep them as pets. In
call a king the sun is a common piece of
a pigeon clan of Samoa a pigeon was care courtier flattery. It is as Amen-Ra or as
fully kept and fed. Among the Kalong
Osiris that the sun receives most actual
in java, whose totem is a red dog, each
worship. His name is joined to the names
family as a rule keeps one of these animals,
of gods as to the names of kings.
which they will on no account allow to be
To put it briefly, then, I hold that the
struck or ill-used by any one.” In the same
element of nature-worship is a late gloss or
way, no doubt, certain Egyptian clans kept
superadded factor in the Egyptian religion;
sacred bulls, cats, crocodiles, hawks, jackals,
that it is always rather mythological or
cobras, lizards, ibises, asps, and beetles.
explanatory than religious in the strict
Mummies of most of these sacred animals,
sense; and that it does not in the least
and little images of others, are common in
interfere with our general inference that the
the neighbourhood of certain places where
real Egyptian gods as a whole were either
they were specially worshipped.
ancestral or totemistic in origin.
There is, however, yet a third class of
From the evidence before us, broadly
divine or quasi-divine beings in the newer
considered, we may fairly conclude, then,
Egyptian Pantheon to which Mr. Andrew that the earliest cult of Egypt consisted of
Lang, in his able introduction to the pure ancestor-worship, complicated by a
Euterpe of Herodotus, still allows that
doubtfully religious element of totemism,
great importance may be attached. These
which afterwards by one means or another
are the elemental or seemingly elemental interwove itself closely with the whole
deities, the Nature-Gods who play so large ghostly worship of the country. The later
a part in all rationalistic or mystical mytho gods were probably deified ancestors of the
logies. Such are no doubt Nut and Seb,
early tribal kings, sometimes directly wor
the personal heaven and earth, named as
shipped as mummies, and sometimes per
early as the inscription on the coffin of haps represented by their totem-animals or
Menkaoura of the Fourth Dynasty in the
later still by human figures with animal
British Museum : such perhaps (though far heads. Almost every one of these great
less certainly) are Khons, identified with
gods is localised to a particular place—
the rising sun, and Turn, regarded as the
“ Lord of Abydos,” “ Mistress of Senem,"
impersonation of his nightly setting. But
“ President of Thebes,” “ Dweller at Hernone of the quite obviously elemental gods,
mopolis,” as would naturally be the case if
except Ra, play any large part in the actual
they were locally-deified princes, admitted
and practical worship of the people: to
at last into a national pantheon. In the
adopt the broad distinction I have ventured I earliest period of which any monuments
�68
TUE EVOLUTION OE TUE IDEA OF GOD
remain to us, the ancestor-worship was
purer, simpler, and freer from symbolism
or from the cult of the great gods than at
any later time. With the gradual evolution
of the creed and the pantheon, however,
legends and myths increased, the syncretic
tendency manifested itself everywhere,
identifications multiplied, mysticism grew
rife, and an esoteric faith, with leanings
towards a vague pantheistic monotheism,
endeavoured to rationalise and to explain
away the more gross and foolish portions
of the original belief. It is the refinements
and glosses of this final philosophical stage
that pass current for the most part in syste
matic works as the true doctrines of Egyptian
religion, and that so many modern inquirers
have erroneously treated as equivalent to
the earliest product of native thought. The
ideas as to the unity of God, and the sun
myths of Horus, Isis, and Osiris, are clearly
late developments or excrescences on the
original creed, and betray throughout the
esoteric spirit of priestly interpretation.
But to the very last, the Worship of the
Dead, and the crude polytheism based upon
it, were the true religion of the ancient
Egyptians, as we see it expressed in all the
monuments.
Such was the religious world into which,
if we may believe the oldest Semitic tradi
tions, the Sons of Israel brought their God
Jahweh and their other deities from beyond
the Euphrates at a very remote period of
their national history. And such, in its
fuller and more mystical form, was the reli
gion practised and taught in Ptolemaic and
Roman Egypt, at the moment when the
Christian faith was just beginning to evolve
itself round the historical nucleus of the
man Christ Jesus, and him crucified.
CHAPTER IX.
THE GODS OF ISRAEL
The only people who ever invented or
evolved a pure monotheism at first hand
were the Jews. Individual thinkers else
where approached or aimed at that ideal
goal, like the Egyptian priests and the
Greek philosophers : entire races elsewhere
borrowed monotheism from the Hebrews,
like the Arabs under Mohammed, or, to a
less extent, the Romans and the modern
European nations, when they adopted
Christianity in its trinitarian form : but no
other race ever succeeded as a whole in
attaining by their own exertions the pure
monotheistic platform, however near certain
persons among them might have arrived to
such attainment in esoteric or mystical
philosophising. It is the peculiar glory of
Israel to have evolved God. And the evo
lution of God from the diffuse gods of the
earlier Semitic religion is Israel’s great con
tribution to the world’s thought.
The sacred books of the Jews, as we
possess them in garbled forms to-day,
assign this peculiar belief to the very ear
liest ages of their race : they assume that
Abraham, the mythical common father of
all the Semitic tribes, was already a mono
theist ; and they even treat monotheism as
at a still remoter date the universal religion
of the entire world from which all poly
theistic cults were but a corruption and a
falling away. Such a belief is nowadays,
of course, wholly untenable. So also is the
crude notion that monotheism was smitten
out at a single blow by the genius of one
individual man, Moses, at the moment of
the Hebrew exodus from Egypt. The bare
idea that one particular thinker, just
escaped from the midst of ardent poly
theists, whose religion embraced an endless
pantheon and a low form of animal
worship, could possibly have invented a
pure monotheistic cult, is totally opposed
to every known psychological law of human
nature. The real stages by which mono
theism was evolved out of a preceding
polytheism in a single small group of
Semitic tribes have already been well
investigated by Dutch and German
scholars : all that I propose to do in the
present volume is to reconsider the subject
from our broader anthropological stand
point, and show how in the great Jewish
god himself we may still discern, as in a
glass, darkly, the vague but constant
lineaments of an ancestral ghost-deity.
Down to a comparatively late period of
Jewish history, as we now know, Jahweh
was but one and the highest among a
considerable group of Israelitish divinities ;
the first among his peers, like Zeus among
the gods of Hellas, Osiris or Amen among
the gods of Egypt, and Woden or Thunor
among the gods of the old Teutonic
pantheon. As late as the century of
Hezekiah, the religion of the great mass of
the Israelites and Jews was still a broad
though vague polytheism. The gods seem
to have been as numerous and as localised
as in Egypt: “ According to the number of
�THE GODS OF ISRAEL
thy cities are thy gods, O Judah,” says the
prophet Jeremiah in the sixth century. It
was only by a slow process of syncretism,
by the absorption into Jahweh-worship of
all other conflicting creeds, that Israel at
last attained its full ideal of pure mono
theism. That ideal was never finally
reached by the people at large till the
return from the captivity : it had only even
been aimed at by a few ardent and
exclusive Jahweh-worshippers in the last
dangerous and doubtful years of national
independence which immediately preceded
the Babylonish exile.
In order to understand the inner nature
of this curious gradual revolution we must
look briefly, first, at the general character
of the old Hebrew polytheism ; and
secondly, at the original cult of the great
ethnical god Jahweh himself.
In spite of their long sojourn in Egypt,
the national religion of the Hebrews, when
we first begin dimly to descry its features
through the veil of later glosses, is regarded
by almost all modern investigators as truly
Semitic and local in origin. It is usually
described as embracing three principal
forms of cult: the worship of the teraphim
or family gods; the worship of sacred
stones ; and the worship of certain great
gods, partly native, partly perhaps bor
rowed ; some of them adored in the form
of animals, and some apparently elemental
or solar in their acquired attributes.
Although for us these three are one, I
shall examine them here in that wonted
order.
The cult of the teraphim, I think, we
cannot consider, on a broad anthro
pological view, otherwise than as the
equivalent of all the other family cults
known to us ; that is to say, in other words,
as pure unadulterated domestic ancestor
worship. “ By that name,” says Kuenen,
“ were indicated larger or smaller images,
which were worshipped as household gods,
and upon which the happiness of the
family was supposed to depend.” In the
legend of Jacob’s flight from Laban, we
are told how Rachel stole her father’s
teraphim : and when the angry chieftain
overtakes the fugitives, he inquires of
them why they have robbed him of his
domestic gods. Of Micah, we learn that
he made images of his teraphim, and
consecrated one of his own sons to be his
family priest: such a domestic and private
priesthood being exactly what we are
accustomed to find in the worship of
ancestral manes everywhere. Even through
69
the mist of the later Jehovistic recension
we catch, in passing, frequent glimpses of
the early worship of these family gods, one
of which is described as belonging to
Michal, the daughter of Saul and wife of
David ; while Hosea alludes to them as
stocks of wood, and Zechariah as idols
that speak lies to the people.
It is
clear that the teraphim were preserved in
each household with reverential care, that
they were sacrificed to by the family at
stated intervals, and that they were con
sulted on all occasions of doubt or difficulty
by a domestic priest clad in an ephod. I
think, then, if we put these indications side
by side with those of family cults else
where, we may conclude that the Jewish
religion, like all others, was based upon
an ultimate foundation of general ancestor
worship.
It has been denied, indeed, that ancestor
worship pure and simple ever existed among
the Semitic races. A clear contradiction of
this denial is furnished by M. Lenormant,
who comments thus on sepulchral monu
ments from Yemen : “ Here, then, we have
twice repeated a whole series of human
persons, decidedly deceased ancestors or
relations of the authors of the dedications.
Their names are accompanied with the
titles they bore during life. They are in
voked by their descendants in the same
way as the gods. They are incontestably
deified persons, objects of a family worship,
and gods or genii in the belief of the people
of their race.” After this, we need not
doubt that the teraphim were the images of
such family gods or ancestral spirits.
It is not surprising, however, that these
domestic gods play but a small part in the
history of the people as it has come down
to us in the late Jehovistic version of the
Hebrew traditions. Nowhere in literature,
even under the most favourable circum
stances, do we hear much of the manes and
lares, compared with the great gods of
national worship. Nor were such minor
divinities likely to provoke the wrath even
of that “jealous god” who later usurped
all the adoration of Israel : so that denun
ciations of their votaries are comparatively
rare in the rhapsodies of the prophets.
“ Their use,” says Kuenen, speaking of the
teraphim, “ was very general, and was by
no means considered incompatible with the
worship of Jahweh.” They were regarded
merely as family affairs, poor foemen for
the great and awsome tribal god who bore
no rival near his throne, and would not
suffer the pretensions of Molech or of the
�7o
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
Baalim. To use a modem analogy, their
cult was as little inconsistent with Jahwehworship as a belief in fairies, banshees, or
family ghosts was formerly inconsistent
with a belief in Christianity.
This conclusion will doubtless strike the
reader at once as directly opposed to the
oft-repeated assertion thatthe early Hebrews
had little or no conception of the life
beyond the grave and of the doctrine of
future rewards and punishments. I am
afraid it cannot be denied that such is the
case. Hard as it is to run counter to so
much specialist opinion, I can scarcely see
how any broad anthropological inquirer
may deny to the Semites of the tenth and
twelfth centuries before Christ participation
in an almost (or quite) universal human
belief, common to the lowest savages and
the highest civilisations, and particularly
well developed in that Egyptian society
with which the ancestors of the Hebrews
had so long rubbed shoulders. The subject,
however, is far too large a one for full
debate here. I must content myself with
pointing out that, apart from the a priori
improbability of such a conclusion, the
Hebrew documents themselves contain
numerous allusions, even in their earliest
traditional fragments, to the belief in ghosts
and in the world of shades, as well as to
the probability of future resurrection. The
habit of cave-burial and of excavated grotto
burial ; the importance attached to the
story of the purchase of Machpelah ; the
common phrase that such-and-such a
patriarch “ was gathered to his people,” or
“ slept with his fathers ” ; the embalming of
Joseph, and the carrying up of his bones
from Egypt to Palestine; the episode of
Saul and the ghost of Samuel; and indeed
the entire conception of Sheol, the place
of the departed—all alike show that the
Hebrew belief in this respect did not largely
differ in essentials from the general belief
of surrounding peoples.
Closely connected with the teraphim is
the specific worship at tombs or graves.
“ The whole north Semitic area,” says
Professor Robertson Smith, “ was dotted
over with sacred tombs, Memnonia, Semi
rami s mounds, and the like ; and at every
such spot a god or demigod had his sub
terranean abode.” This, of course, is pure
ancestor-worship.
Second in the list of worshipful objects
in early Israel come -the sacred stones,
about which I have already said a good
deal in the chapter devoted to that interest
ing subject, but concerning whose special
nature in the Semitic field a few more words
may here be fitly added.
It is now very generally admitted that
stone-worship played an exceedingly large
and important part in the primitive Semitic
religion. How important a part we may
readily gather from many evidences, but
from none more than from the fact that
even Mohammed himself was unable to
exclude from Islam, the most monotheistic
of all known religious systems, the holy
black stone of the Kaaba at Mecca. In
Arabia, says Professor Robertson Smith,
the altar or hewn stone is unknown, and in
its place we find the rude pillar or the cairn,
beside which the sacrificial victim is slain,
the blood being poured out over the stone
or at its base. But in Israel the shaped
stone seems the more usual mark of the
ghost or god. Such a sacred stone, we
have already seen, was known to the early
Hebrews as a Beth-el, that is to say an
“ abode of deity,” from the common belief
that it was inhabited by a god, ghost, or
spirit. The great prevalence of the cult of
stones among the Semites, however, is
further indicated by the curious circum
stance that this word was borrowed by the
Greeks and Romans (in a slightly altered
form) to denote the stones so supposed to
be inhabited by deities. References to
such gods abound throughout the Hebrew
books, though they are sometimes de
nounced as idolatrous images, and some
times covered with a thin veneer of Jehovism by being connected with the national
heroes and with the later Jahweh-worship.
In the legend of Jacob’s dream we get a
case where the sacred stone is anointed
and a promise is made to it of a tenth of the
speaker’s substance as an offering. And
again, on a later occasion, we learn that
Jacob “set up a pillar of stone, and he
poured a drink-offering thereon, and he
poured oil thereon ” ; just as, in the great
phallic worship of the linga in India (com
monly called the linga puja\ a cylindrical
pillar, rounded at the top, and universally
considered as a phallus in its nature, is
worshipped by pouring upon it one of five
sacred anointing liquids, water, milk, ghee,
oil, and wine. Similar rites are offered in
many other places to other sacred stones;
and in many cases the phallic value assigned
to them is clearly shown by the fact that it
is usual for sterile women to pray to them
for the blessing of children, as Hindu wives
pray to Mahadeo, and as so many Hebrew
women (to be noted hereafter) are men
tioned in our texts as praying to Jahweh.
�THE GODS OH ISRAEL
A brief catalogue of the chief stone
deities alluded to in Hebrew literature may
help to enforce the importance of the
subject: and it may be noted in passing
that the stones are often mentioned in con
nection with sacred trees—an association
with which we are already familiar. In the
neighbourhood of Sichem was an oak—the
“ oak of the prophets ” or “ oak of the
soothsayers ”—by which lay a stone, whose
holiness is variously accounted for by
describing it as, in one place, an altar of
Abraham, in another an altar of J acob, and
in a third a memorial of Joshua. But the
fact shows that it was resorted to for sacri
fice, and that oracles or responses were
sought from it by its votaries. That is to
say, it was a sepulchral monument. Near
Hebron stood “ the oak of Mamre,” and
under it a sacred stone, accounted for as
an altar of Abraham, to which in David’s
time sacrifices were offered. Near Beer
sheba we find yet a third tree, the tamarisk,
said to have been plan ted by Abraham, and an
altar or stone pillar ascribed to Isaac. In
the camp at Gilgal were “the twelve stones,”
sometimes, apparently, spoken of as “ the
graven images,” but sometimes explained
away as memorials of Jahweh’s help at the
passing of the Jordan. Other examples
are Ebenezer, “ the helpful stone,” and
Tobeleth, the “serpent-stone,” as well as
the “ great stone ” to which sacrifices were
offered at Bethshemesh, and the other
great stone at Gibeon, which was also, no
doubt, an early Hebrew deity.
And now we come to the third and most
difficult division of early Hebrew religion,
the cult of the great gods whom the jealous
Jahweh himself finally superseded. The
personality of these gods is very obscure,
partly because of the nature of our materials,
which, being derived entirely from Jehovistic sources, have done their best to over
shadow the “false gods”; but partly also, I
believe, because, in the process of evolving
monotheism, a syncretic movement merged
almost all their united attributes into
Jahweh himself, who thus becomes at last
the all-absorbing synthesis of an entire
pantheon. Nevertheless, we can point out
one or two shadowy references to such
greater gods, either by name alone, or by
the form under which they were usually
worshipped.
The scholarship of the elder generation
would no doubt have enumerated first
among these gods the familiar names of
Baal and Molech. At present, such an
^numeration is scarcely possible. We can
71
no longer see in the Baal of the existing
Hebrew scriptures a single great god. We
must regard the word rather as a common
substantive—“ the lord ” or “ the master ”
—descriptive of the relation of each dis
tinct god to the place he inhabited. The
Baalim, in other words, seem to have been
the local deities or deified chiefs of the
Semitic region ; doubtless the dead kings
or founders of families, as opposed to the
lesser gods of each particular household.
It is not improbable, therefore, that they
were really identified with the sacred stones
we have just been considering, and with
the wooden ashera. The Baal is usually
spoken of indefinitely, without a proper
name, much as at Delos men spoke of “the
God,” at Athens of “the Goddess,” and
now at Padua of “ il Santo’’—meaning
respectively Apollo, Athene, St. Antony.
Melcarth is thus the Baal of Tyre, Astarte
the Baalath of Byblos; there was a Baal of
Lebanon, of Mount Hermon, of Mount
Peor, and so forth. A few specific Baalim
have their names preserved for us in the
nomenclature of towns ; such are Baaltamar, the lord of the palm-tree; with
Baal-gad, Baal-Berith, Baal-meon, and
Baal-zephon. But in the Hebrew scrip
tures, as a rule, every effort has been made
to blot out the very memory of these “ false
gods,” and to represent Jahweh alone as
from the earliest period the one true prince
and ruler in Israel.
As for Molech, that title merely means
“ the king ” ; and it may have been applied
to more than one distinct deity. Dr.
Robertson Smith does not hesitate to hold
that.the particular Molech to whom human
sacrifices of children were offered by the
Jews before the captivity was Jahweh him
self ; it was to the national god, he believes,
that these fiery rites were performed at the
Tophet or pyre in the ravine just below the
temple.
We are thus reduced to the most nebu
lous details about these great gods of the
Hebrews, other than Jahweh, in the period
preceding the Babylonian captivity. All
that is certain appears to be that a con
siderable number of local gods were wor
shipped here and there at special sanctua
ries, each of which seems to have consisted
of an altar or stone image, standing under
a sacred tree or sacred grove, and com
bined with an ashera. While the names of
Chemosh, the god of Moab, and of Dagon,
the god of the Philistines, have come down
to us with perfect frankness and clearness,
no local Hebrew god save Jahweh has left
�72
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
a name that can now be discerned with
approach to certainty.
I must likewise premise that the worship
of the Baalim, within and without Israel,
was specially directed to upright conical
stones, the most sacred objects at all the
sanctuaries : and that these stones are
generally admitted to have possessed for
their worshippers a phallic significance.
Certain writers have further endeavoured
to show that a few animal-gods entered into
the early worship of the Hebrews. I do
not feel sure that their arguments are con
vincing ; but for the sake of completeness
I include the two most probable cases in
this brief review of the vague and elusive
deities of early Israel.
One of these is the god in the form of a
young bull, specially worshipped at Dan
and Bethel, as the bull Apis was worshipped
at Memphis, and the bull Mnevis at On or
Heliopolis. This cult of the bull is pushed
back in the later traditions to the period of
the Exodus, when the Israelites made
themselves a “ golden calf” in the wilder
ness.
Was this bull-shaped deity Jahweh him
self, or one of the polymorphic forms of
Jahweh? Such is the opinion of Kuenen,
who says explicitly, “Jahweh was wor
shipped in the shape of a young bull. It
cannot be doubted that the cult of the
bull-calf was really the cult of Jahweh in
person.” And certainly in the prophetic
writings of the eighth century we can
clearly descry that the worshippers of the
bull regarded themselves as worshipping
the god Jahweh, who brought up his people
from the land of Egypt. Nevertheless,
dangerous as it may seem for an outsider
to differ on such a subject from great
Semitic scholars, I venture to think we
may see reason hereafter to conclude that
this was not originally the case : that the
god worshipped under the form of the
bull-calf was some other deity, like the
Molech whom we know to have been re
presented with a bull’s head; and that
only by the later syncretic process did this
bull-god come to be identified in the end
with Jahweh, a deity (as seems likely) of
quite different origin, much as Mnevis
came to be regarded at Heliopolis as an
incarnation of Ra, and as Apis came to be
regarded at Mempis as an avatar of Ptah
and still later of Osiris. On the other hand,
we must remember that, as Mr. Frazer has
shown, a sacred animal is often held to be
the representative and embodiment of the
very god to whom it is habitually sacrificed.
Here again we trench on ground which
can only satisfactorily be occupied at a
later stage of our polymorphic argument.
A second animal-god, apparently, also
adored in the form of a metal image, was
the asp or snake, known in our version as
“the brazen serpent,” and connected by
the Jehovistic editors of the earlier tradi
tions with Moses in the wilderness. The
worship of the serpent is said to have gone
on uninterruptedly till the days of Hezekiah,
when, under the influence of the exclusive
devotion to Jahweh which was then be
coming popular, the image was broken in
pieces as an idolatrous object.
It is
scarcely necessary to point out in passing
that the asp was one of the most sacred
animals in Egypt.
Such, then, seen through the dim veil of
Jehovism, are the misty features of that
uncertain pantheon in which, about the
eighth century at least, Jahweh found
himself the most important deity. The
most important, I say, because it is clear
from our records that for many ages the
worship of Jahweh and the worship of
the Baalim went on side by side without
conscious rivalry.
And what sort of god was this holy
Jahweh himself, whom the Hebrews recog
nised from a very early time as emphatically
and above all others “the God of Israel”?
If ever he was envisaged as a golden
bull, if ever he was regarded as the god of
light, fire, or the sun, those concepts, I
believe, must have been the result of a late
transference of attributes and confusion of
persons, such as we may see so rife in the
more recent mystical religion of Egypt.
What in his own nature Jahweh must have
been in the earliest days of his nascent
godhead I believe we can best judge by
putting together some of the passages in
old traditionary legend which bear most
plainly upon his character and functions.
In the legendary account of the earliest
dealings of Jahweh with the Hebrew race,
we are told that the ethnical god appeared
to Abraham in Haran, and promised to
make of him “ a great nation.” Later on,
Abraham complains of the want of an heir,
saying to Jahweh, “Thou hast given me
no seed.” Then Jahweh “brought him
forth abroad, and said, Look now toward
heaven and tell the stars : so shall thy seed
be.” Over and over again we get similar
promises of fruitfulness made to Abraham :
“I will multiply thee exceedingly”; “thou
shalt be a father of many nations”; “I will
make thee exceeding fruitful ” ; “ kings
�THE GODS OE ISRAEL
shall come out of thee”; “for a father of
many nations have I made thee.” So, too,
of Sarah : “ she shall be a mother of
nations ; kings of people shall be of her.”
And of Ishmael : “ I have blessed him and
will make him fruitful, and will multiply
him exceedingly: twelve princes shall
he beget, and I will make him a great
nation.” Time after time these blessings
recur for Abraham, Isaac, and all his
family : “ I will multiply thy seed as the
stars of the heaven, and as the sand which
is upon the seashore, and thy seed shall
possess the gate of his enemies.”
In every one of these passages, and in
many more which need not be quoted, but
which will readily occur to every reader,
Jahweh is represented especially as a god
of increase, of generation, of populousness,
of fertility.
As such, too, we find him frequently and
markedly worshipped on special occasions.
He was the god to whom sterile women
prayed, and from whom they expected the
special blessing of a son, to keep up the
cult of the family ancestors. This trait sur
vived even into the poetry of the latest
period. “He maketh the barren woman to
keep house,” says a psalmist about Jahweh,
“ and to be a joyful mother of children.”
And from the beginning to the end of
Hebrew legend we find a similar character
istic of the ethnical god amply vindicated.
When Sarah is old and well stricken in years,
Jahweh visits her and she conceives Isaac.
Then Isaac in turn “intreated Jahweh for
his wife, because she was barren ; and
Jahweh was intreated of him, and Rebekah
his wife conceived.” Again, “when Jah weh
saw that Leah was hated, he opened her
womb; but Rachel was barren.” Once
more, of the birth of Samson we are told
that Manoah’s wife “ was barren and bare
not” : but “ the angel of Jahweh appeared
unto the woman and said unto her, Behold,
now thou art barren and bearest not; but
thou shalt conceive and bear a son.” And
of Hannah we are told, even more signifi
cantly, that Jahweh had “shut up her
womb.” At the shrine of J ah weh at Shiloh,
therefore, she prayed to Jahweh that this
disgrace might be removed from her and
that a child might be born to her. “ Jahweh
remembered her,” and she bore Samuel.
And after that again, “Jahweh visited
Hannah, so that she conceived and bare
three sons and two daughters.” In many
other passages we get the self-same trait :
Jahweh is regarded above everything as a
god of increase and a giver of offspring.
73
“ Children are a heritage from Jahweh,”
says the much later author of a familiar
ode : “ the fruit of the womb are a reward
from him.” “ Thy wife shall be as a fruit
ful vine,” says Jahweh to his votary by the
mouth of the poet; “ thy children like olive
plants round about thy table.” “ Happy is
the man that hath his quiver full of them,”
says another psalmist; “ they shall speak
with the enemies in the gate.” Again and
again the promise is repeated that the seed
of Abraham or of Joseph or of Ishmael
shall be numerous as the stars of heaven
or the sands of the sea; Jahweh’s chief
prerogative is evidently the gift of increase,
extended often to cattle and asses, but
always including at least sons and daughters.
If Israel obeys Jahweh, says the Deuteronomist, “Jahweh will make thee plenteous for
good in the fruit of thy belly, and in the
fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy
ground”: but if otherwise, then “cursed
shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit
of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and
the flocks of thy sheep.”
Now, elsewhere throughout the world we
find in like manner a certain class of phallic
gods who are specially conceived as givers
of fertility, and to whom prayers and offer
ings are made by barren women who desire
children. And the point to observe is that
these gods are usually (perhaps one might
even say always) embodied in stone pillars
or upright monoliths. The practical great
god of India—the god whom the people
really worship—is Mahadeo ; and Mahadeo
is, as we know, a cylinder of stone, to whom
the linga puja is performed, and to whom
barren women pray for offspring. There
are sacred stones in Western Europe, now
crowned by a cross, at which barren women
still pray to God and the Madonna, or to
some local saint, for the blessing of chil
dren. It is allowed that while the obelisk
is from one point of view (in later theory)
a ray of the sun, it is from another point of
view (in earlier origin) a “symbol of the
generative power of nature ”—which is only
another way of saying that it is an ancestral
stone of phallic virtue. In short, without
laying too much stress upon the connection,
we may conclude generally that the upright
pillar came early to be regarded, not merely
as a memento of the dead and an abode of
the ghost or indwelling god,but also in some
mysterious and esoteric way as a represen
tative of the male and generative principle.
If we recollect that the stone pillar was
often identified with the ancestor or father,
the reason for this idea will not perhaps be
�THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
quite so hard to understand. “ From these
stones we are all descended,” thinks the
primitive worshipper: “ these are our
fathers ; therefore, they are the givers of
children, the producers and begetters of all
our generations, the principle of fertility,
the proper gods to whom to pray for off
spring.” Add that many of them, being
represented as human, or human in their
upper part at least, grow in time to be ithyphallic, like Priapus, partly by mere gro
tesque barbarism, but partly also as a sign
of the sex of the deceased : and we can see
the naturalness of this easy transition.
From the Hermse of the Greeks to the rude
phallic deities of so many existing savage
races, we get everywhere signs of this con
stant connection between the sacred stone
and the idea of paternity. Where the stone
represents the grave of a woman, the deity
of course is conceived as a goddess, but
with the same implications. Herodotus saw
in Syria stelae engraved with the female
pudenda. The upright stone god is thus
everywhere and always liable to be re
garded as a god of fruitfulness.
But did this idea of the stone pillar
extend to Palestine and to the Semitic
nations ? There is evidence that it did,
besides that of Herodotus. Major Conder,
whose opinion on all questions of pure
archaeology (as opposed to philology)
deserves the highest respect, says of
Canaanitish times: “ The menhir, or conical
stone, was the emblem throughout Syria of
the gods presiding over fertility; and the
cup hollows which have been formed in
menhirs and dolmens are the indications of
libations, often of human blood, once poured
on these stones by early worshippers.” He
connects these monuments with the linga
cult of India, and adds that Dr. Chaplin
has found such a cult still surviving near
the Sea of Galilee. Lucian speaks of the
two great pillars at the temple of Hierapolis
as phalli. Of the Phoenicians Major
Conder writes : “The chief emblem wor
shipped in the temples was a pillar or cone,
derived no doubt from the rude menhirs
which were worshipped by early savage
tribes, such as Dravidians, Arabs, Celts,
and Hottentots.”
That Jahweh himself in his earliest form
was such a stone god, the evidence, I think,
though not perhaps exactly conclusive, is
to say the least extremely suggestive. I
have already called attention to it in a
previous chapter, and need not here reca
pitulate it in full; but a few stray additions
may not be without value. Besides the
general probability, among a race whose
gods were so almost universally repre
sented by sacred stones, that any particular
god, unless the contrary be proved, was so
represented, there is the evidence of all the
later language, and of the poems written
after the actual stone god himself had per
ished, that Jahweh was still popularly
regarded as, at least in a metaphorical
sense, a stone or rock. “He is the rock,”
says the Deuteronomist, in the song put
into the mouth of Moses ; “ I will publish
the name of J ahweh; ascribe greatness unto
our god.” “Jahweh liveth, and blessed
my rock,” says the hymn which a later
writer composes for David in the Second
Book of Samuel : “ exalted be the god of
the rock of my salvation.” And in the
psalms the image recurs again and again :
“Jahweh is my rock and my fortress”;
“ Who is a god save Jahweh, and who is a
rock save our god?”; “He set my feet
upon a rock, and established my goings ” ;
“ Lead me to the rock that is greater than
I”; “Jahweh is my defence, and my god
is the rock of my refuge “O come, let us
sing to Jahweh ; let us make a joyful noise
to the rock of our salvation.”
But to the earlier Israelites their god
Jahweh was simply the object—stone pillar
or otherwise—preserved in the ark or chest
which long rested at Shiloh, and which was
afterwards enshrined “ between the thighs
of the building ” (as a later gloss has it), in
the Temple at Jerusalem. The whole of
the early traditions embedded in the books
of Judges, Samuel, and Kings show us quite
clearly that Jahweh himself was then
regarded as inhabiting the ark, and as
carried about with it from place to place in
all its wanderings. The story of the battle
with the Philistines at Eben-ezer, the fall of
Dagon before the rival god, the fortunes of
the ark after its return to the Israelitish
people, the removal to Jerusalem by David,
the final enthronement by Solomon, all dis
tinctly show that Jahweh in person dwelt
within the ark, between the guardian
cherubim. “ Who is able to stand before
the face of Jahweh, this very sacred god ?”
ask the men of Bethshemesh, when they
ventured to look inside that hallowed abode,
and were smitten down by the “jealous
god ” who loved to live in the darkness of
the inmost sanctuary.1
1 Mr. William Simpson has some excellent
remarks on the analogies of the Egyptian and
Hebrew arks and sanctuaries, in his pamphlet on
The Worship of Death.
�THE GODS OF ISRAEL
It may be well to note in this connection
two significant facts : Just such an ark was
used in Egypt to contain the sacred objects
or images of the gods. And further, at the
period when the sons of Israel were tribu
taries in Egypt, a Theban dynasty ruled the
country, and the worship of the great Theban
phallic deity, Khem, was widely spread
throughout every part of the Egyptian
dominions.
Is there, however, any evidence of a linga
or other stone pillar being ever thus en
shrined and entempled as the great god of
a sanctuary? Clearly, Major Conder has
already supplied some, and more is forth
coming from various other sources. The
cone which represented Aphrodite in
Cyprus was similarly enshrined as the chief
object of a temple, as were the stelae of all
Egyptian mummies. “ The trilithon,” says
Major Conder, “becomes later a shrine, in
which the cone or a statue stands.” The
significance of this correlation will at once
be seen if the reader remembers how, in
the chapter on Sacred Stones, I showed
the origin of the idol from the primitive
menhir or upright pillar. “ The Khonds
and other non-Aryan tribes in India,” says
Conder once more, “ build such temples of
rude stones, daubed with red—a survival
of the old practice of anointing the menhirs
and the sacred cone or pillar with blood of
victims, sometimes apparently human.
Among the Indians the pillar is a lingam,
and such apparently was its meaning
among the Phoenicians.” And in the
Greek cities we know from Pausanias that
an unhewn stone was similarly enshrined
in the most magnificent adytum of the
noblest Hellenic temples. In fact, it was
rather the rule than otherwise that a stone
was the chief object of worship in the
noblest fanes.
One more curious trait must be noted in
the worship of Jahweh. Not only did he
rejoice in human sacrifices, but he also
demanded especially an offering of the
firstborn, and he required a singular and
significant ransom for every man-child
whom he permitted to live among his
peculiar votaries. On the fact of human
sacrifices I need hardly insist : they were
an integral part of all Semitic worship, and
their occurrence in the cult of Jahweh has
been universally allowed by all unprejudiced
scholars. The cases of Agag, whom
Samuel hewed to pieces before the face of
Jahweh, and of Jephthah’s daughter, whom
her father offered up as a thank-offering for
his victory, though not of course strictly
75
historical from a critical point of view, are
quite sufficient evidence to show the
temper and the habit of the Jahwehworshippers who described them. So with
the legend of the offering of Isaac, who is
merely rescued at the last moment in order
that the god of generation may make him
the father of many thousands. Again,
David seeks to pacify the anger of Jahweh
by a sacrifice of seven of the sons of Saul.
And the prophet Micah asks, “ Shall I give
my first-born for my transgression, the
fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ?”
—a passage which undoubtedly implies
that in Micah’s time such a sacrifice of the
eldest child was a common incident of
current Jahweh-worship.
From human sacrifice to circumcision
the transition is less violent than would at
first sight appear. An intermediate type
is found in the dedication of the first-born,
where Jahweh seems to claim for himself,
not as a victim, but as a slave and devotee,
the first fruits of that increase which it is
his peculiar function to ensure. In various
laws Jahweh lays claim to the first-born of
man and beast—sometimes to all, some
times only to the male first-born. The
animals were sacrificed ; the sons, in later
ages at least, were either made over as
Nazarites or redeemed with an offering or
a money-ransom. But we cannot doubt
that in the earliest times the first-born
child was slain before Jahweh. In the
curious legend of Moses and Zipporah we
get a strange folk-tale connecting this
custom indirectly with the practice of
circumcision. Jahweh seeks to kill Moses,
apparently because he has not offered up
his child : but Zipporah his wife takes a
stone knife, circumcises her son, and flings
the bloody offering at Jahweh’s feet, who
thereupon lets her husband go. This,
rather than the later account of its
institution by Abraham, seems the true old
explanatory legend of the origin of circum
cision—a legend analogous to those which
we find in Roman and other early history
as embodying or explaining certain ancient
customs or legal formulae. Circumcision,
in fact, appears to be a bloody sacrifice to
Jahweh, as the god of generation: a
sacrifice essentially of the nature of a
ransom, and therefore comparable to all
those other bodily mutilations whose origin
Mr. Herbert Spencer has so well shown in
the Ceremonial Institutions.
At the same time, the nature of the
offering helps to cast light upon the
character of Jahweh as a god of increase ;
�7b
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
exactly as the “ emerods ” with which the
Philistines were afflicted for the capture of
Jahweh and his ark show the nature of the
vengeance which might naturally be ex
pected from a deity of generation.
Last of all, how is it that later Hebrew
writers believed the object concealed in the
ark to have been, not a phallic stone, but a
copy of the “Ten Words” which Jahweh
was fabled to have delivered to Moses ?
That would be difficult to decide : but here
at least is an aperçu upon the subject which
I throw out for what it may be worth. The
later Hebrews, when their views of Jahweh
had grown expanded and etherealised, were
obviously ashamed of their old stone-worship,
if indeed they were archaeologists enough
after the captivity to know that it had ever
really existed. What more natural, then,
than for them to suppose that the stone
which they heard of as having been enclosed
in the ark was a copy of the “ Ten Words ”
—the covenant of Jahweh? Hence, per
haps, the later substitution of the term,
“ Ark of the Covenant,” for the older and
correcter phrase, “Ark of Jahweh.” One
more suggestion, still more purely hypothe
tical. Cones with pyramidal heads, bearing
inscriptions to the deceased, were used by
the Phoenicians for interments. It is just
possible that the original Jahweh may have
been such an ancient pillar, covered with
writings of some earlier character, which
were interpreted later as the equivalents or
symbols of the “Ten Words.”
Putting all the evidence together, then,
as far as we can now recover it, and inter
preting it on broad anthropological lines
by analogy from elsewhere, I should say
the following propositions seem fairly prob
able :—
The original religion of Israel was a
mixed polytheism, containing many various
types of gods, and based, like all other
religions, upon domestic and tribal ancestor
worship. Some of the gods were of animal
shapes : others were more or less vaguely
anthropomorphic. But the majority were
worshipped under the form of sacred stones,
trees, or wooden cones. The greater part
of these gods were Semitic in type, and
common to the Sons of Israel with their
neighbours and kinsmen. The character
of the Hebrew worship, however, apparently
underwent some slight modification in
Egypt ; or, at any rate, Egyptian influences
led to the preference of certain gods over
others at the period of the Exodus. One
god, in particular, Jahweh by name, seems
to have been almost peculiar to the Sons
of Israel—their ethnical deity, and there
fore in all probability an early tribal ances
tor or the stone representative of such an
ancestor. The legends are probably right
in their implication that this god was already
worshipped (not of course exclusively) by
the Sons of Israel before their stay in
Egypt; they are almost certainly correct in
ascribing the great growth and extension of
his cult to the period of the Exodus. The
Sons of Israel, at least from the date of the
Exodus onward, carried this god or his rude
image with them in an ark or box through
all their wanderings. The object so carried
was probably a conical stone pillar, which
we may conjecture to have been the grave
stone of some deified ancestor : and of this
ancestor “Jahweh” was perhaps either the
proper name or a descriptive epithet. Even
if, as Colenso suggests, the name itself was
Canaanitish, and belonged already to a
local god, its application to the sacred stone
of the ark would be merely another instance
of the common tendency to identify the gods
of one race or country, with those of another.
The stone itself was always enshrouded in
Egyptian mystery, and no private person
was permitted to behold it. Sacrifices, both
human and otherwise, were offered up to it,
as to the other gods, its fellows and after
wards its hated rivals. The stone, like
other sacred stones of pillar shape, was
regarded as emblematic of the generative
power. Circumcision was a mark of devo
tion to Jahweh, at first, no doubt, either
voluntary, or performed by way of a ransom,
but becoming with the growth and exclu
siveness of Jahweh-worship a distinctive
rite of Jahweh’s chosen people.
From this rude ethnical divinity, the
mere sacred pillar of a barbarous tribe,
was gradually developed the Lord God of
later Judaism and of Christianity—a power,
eternal, omniscient, almighty, holy; the
most ethereal, the most sublime, the most
superhuman deity that the brain of man
has ever conceived. By what slow evolu
tionary process of syncretism and elimina
tion, of spiritual mysticism and national
enthusiasm, of ethical effort and imagina
tive impulse, that mighty God was at last
projected out of so unpromising an original
it will be the task of our succeeding chapters
to investigate and to describe.
�THE RISE OF MONOTHEISM
CHAPTER X.
THE RISE OF MONOTHEISM
We have seen that the Hebrews were
originally polytheists, and that their ethni
cal god Jahweh seems to have been wor
shipped by them in early times under the
material form of a cylindrical stone pillar.
Or rather, to speak more naturally, the
object they so worshipped they regarded as
a god, and called Jahweh. The question
next confronts us, how from this humble
beginning did Israel attain to the pure
monotheism of its later age ? What was
there in the position or conditions of the
Hebrew race which made the later Jews
reject all their other gods, and fabricate out
of their early national Sacred Stone the
most sublime, austere, and omnipotent
deity that humanity has known ?
The answer, I believe, to this pregnant
question is partly to be found in a certain
general tendency of the Semitic mind;
partly in the peculiar political and social
state of the Israelitish tribes during the
ninth, eighth, seventh, sixth, and fifth
centuries before the Christian era. Or, to
put the proposed solution of the problem,
beforehand, in a still simpler form, Hebrew
monotheism was to some extent the result
of a syncretic treatment of all the gods, in
the course of which the attributes and
characters of each became merged in the
other, only the names remaining distinct;
and to some extent the result of the intense
national patriotism, of which the ethnical
god Jahweh was at once the outcome, the
expression, and the fondest hope. The
belief that Jahweh fought for Israel, and
that by trust in Jahweh alone could Israel
hold her own against Egypt and Assyria,
wildly fanatical as it appears to us to-day,
and utterly disproved by all the facts of the
case as it ultimately was, nevertheless
formed a central idea of the Hebrew
patriots, and resulted by slow degrees in
the firm establishment first of an exclusive,
and afterwards of a truly monotheistic
Jahweh-cult.
It is one of Ernest Renan’s brilliant
paradoxes that the Semitic mind is naturally
monotheistic. As a matter of fact, the
Semitic mind has everywhere evolved pretty
much the same polytheistic pantheon as
that evolved by every other group of human
beings, everywhere. Nevertheless, there
is perhaps this kernel of truth in Renan’s
77
paradoxical contention ; the Semites, more
readily than most other people, merge the
features of their deities one in the other.
That is not, indeed, by any means an exclu
sive Semitic trait. We saw already, in
dealing with the Egyptian religion, how all
the forms and functions of the gods faded
at last into an inextricable mixture, an olla
podrida of divinity, from which it was
practically impossible to disentangle with
certainty the original personalities of Ra
and Turn, of Amen and Osiris, of Neith and
Isis, of Ptah and Apis. Even in the rela
tively fixed and individualised pantheon of
Hellas, it occurs often enough that con
fusions both of person and prerogative
obscure the distinctness of the various gods.
Aphrodite and Herakles are polymorphic
in their embodiments. But in the Semitic
religions, at least in that later stage where
we first come across them, the lineaments
of the different deities are so blurred and
indefinite that hardly anything more than
mere names can with certainty be recog
nised. No other gods are so shadowy
and so vague. The type of this pantheon
is that dim figure of El-Shaddai, the early
and terrible object of Hebrew worship, of
whose attributes and nature we know
positively nothing, but who stands in the
background of all Hebrew thought as the
embodiment of the nameless and trembling
dread begotten on man’s soul by the irre
sistible and ruthless forces of nature.
This vagueness and shadowiness of the
Semitic religious conceptions seems to
depend to some extent upon the inartistic
nature of the Semitic culture. The Semite
seldom carved the image of his god.
Roman observers noted with surprise that
the shrine of Carmel contained no idol.
But it depended also upon deep-seated
characteristics of the Semitic race. Melan
choly, contemplative, proud, reserved, but
strangely fanciful, the Arab of to-day per
haps gives us the clue to the indefinite
nature of early Semitic religious thinking.
There never was a nether world more
ghostly than Sheol ; there never were gods
more dimly awful than the Elohim who
float through the early stories of the
Hebrew mystical cycle. Their very names
are hardly known to us : they come to us 1
through the veil of later Jehovistic editing
with such merely descriptive titles as the
God of Abraham, the Terror of Isaac, the
Mighty Power, the Most High Deity.
Indeed, the true Hebrew, like many other
barbarians, seems to have shrunk either
from looking upon the actual form of his
�78
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
god itself, or from pronouncing aloud his
proper name. His deity was shrouded in
the darkness of an ark or the deep gloom
of an inner tent or sanctuary ; the syllables
that designated the object of his worship
were never uttered in full, save on the most
solemn occasions, but were shirked or
slurred over by some descriptive epithet.
Even the unpronounceable title of J ahweh
itself appears from our documents to have
been a later name bestowed during the
Exodus on an antique god : while the rival
titles of the Baal and the Molech mean
nothing more than the Lord and the King
respectively. An excessive reverence for
bade the Semite to know anything of his
god’s personal appearance or true name,
and so left the features of almost all the
gods equally uncertain and equally form
less.
But besides the difficulty of accurately
distinguishing between the forms and func
tions of the different Semitic deities which
even their votaries must have felt from the
beginning, there was a superadded difficulty
in the developed creed, due to the super
position of elemental mysticism and nature
worship upon the primitive cult of ancestral
ghosts as gods and goddesses. Just as Ra,
the sun, was identified in the latest ages
with almost every Egyptian god, so solar
ideas and solar myths affected at last the
distinct personality of almost every Semitic
deity. The consequence is that all the gods
become in the end practically indistinguish
able : one is so like the other that different
interpreters make the most diverse identifi
cations, and are apparently justified in so
doing (from the mythological standpoint)
by the strong solar or elemental family like
ness which runs through the whole pantheon
in its later stages. It has even been doubted
by scholars of the older school whether
Jahweh is not himself a form of his great
rival Baal: whether both were not at bottom
identical—mere divergent shapes of one
polyonymous sun-god. To us, who recog
nise in every Baal the separate ghost-god of
a distinct tomb, such identification is.clearly
impossible.
To the worshippers of the Baalim or of
J ahweh themselves, however, these abstruser
mythological problems never presented
themselves. The difference of name and
of holy place was quite enough for them, in
spite of essential identity of attribute or
nature. They would kill one another for
the sake of a descriptive epithet, or risk
death itself rather than offer up sacrifices
at a hostile altar.
Nevertheless, various influences con
spired, here as elsewhere, to bring about a
gradual movement of syncretism—that is
to say, of the absorption of many distinct
gods into one; the final identification of
several deities originally separate. What
those influences were we must now briefly
consider.
In the first place, we must recollect that
while in Egypt, with its dry and peculiarly
preservative climate, mummies, idols, tombs,
and temples might be kept unchanged and
undestroyed for ages, in almost all other
countries rain, wind, and time are mighty
levellers of human handicraft. Thus, while
in Egypt the cult of the Dead Ancestor
survives as such quite confessedly and
openly for many centuries, in most other
countries the tendency is for the actual
personal objects of worship to be more and
more forgotten; vague gods and spirits
usurp by degrees the place of the historic
man ; rites at last cling rather to sites than
to particular persons. The tomb may dis
appear ; and yet the sacred stone may be
reverenced still with the accustomed vene
ration. The sacred stone may go ; and yet
the sacred tree may be watered yearly with
the blood of victims. The tree itself may
die ; and yet the stump may continue to be
draped on its anniversary with festal apparel.
The very stump may decay ; and yet gifts
of food or offerings of rags may be cast as
of old into the sacred spring that once
welled beside it. The locality thus grows
to be holy in itself, and gives us one clear
and obvious source of later nature-worship.
The gods or spirits who haunt such
shrines come naturally to be thought of
with the lapse of ages as much like one
another. Godship is all that can long
remain of their individual attributes. Their
very names are often unknown ; they are
remembered merely as the lord of Lebanon,
the Baal of Mount Peor. No wonder that
after a time they get to be practically identi
fied with one another, while similar myths
are often fastened by posterity to many of
them together. Indeed, we know that new
names, and even foreign intrusive names,
frequently take the place of the original
titles, while the god himself still continues
to be worshipped as the same shapeless
stone, with the same prescribed rites, in the
same squalid or splendid temples. Thus,
Melcarth, the Baal of Tyre, was adored in
later days under the Greek name of
Herakles ; and thus at Bablos two local
deities, after being identified first with the
Syrian divinities, Adonis and Astarte, were
�THE RISE OF MONOTHEISM
identified later with the Egyptian divinities, aggression put the final coping-stone on the
Osiris and Isis. Yet the myths of the risingfabric ofmonotheistic Jah weh-worship.
It is often asserted that Jahweh was
place show us that through all that time
worshipped in many places in Israel under
the true worship was paid to the dead
the form of a golden calf. That is to say,
stump of a sacred tree, which was said to
Hebrews who set up images of a metal bull
have grown from the grave of a god—in
believed themselves nevertheless to be
other words, from the tumulus of an ancient
chieftain. No matter how greatly mytho worshipping Jahweh. Even the prophets
logies change, these local cults remain ever of the eighth century regard the cult of the
constant; the sacred stones are here des bull as a form of Jahweh-worship, though
not a form to which they can personally
cribed as haunted by djinns, and there as
give their approbation. But the bull is
memorials of Christian martyrs ; the holy
probably in its origin a distinct god from
wells are dedicated here to nymph or hero,
the stone in the ark ; and if its worship
and receive offerings there to saint or fairy.
was identified with that of the Rock of
So the holy oaks of immemorial worship in
Israel, it could be only by a late piece of
England become “ Thor’s oaks ” under
syncretic mysticism.
Perhaps the link
Saxon heathendom, and “ Gospel oaks ”
here, as in the case of Apis, was a priestly
under mediaeval Christianity.
recognition of the bull as symbolising the
Finally, in the latest stages of worship,
an attempt is always made to work in the generative power of nature ; an idea which
heavenly bodies and the great energies of would be peculiarly appropriate to the god
whose great function it was to encourage
nature into the mythological groundwork
or theory of religion. Every king is the fruitfulness. But, in any case, we cannot
descendant of the sun, and every great god but see in this later calf-worship a
is therefore necessarily the sun in person.
superadded element wholly distinct from
the older cult of the sacred stone, just as
Endless myths arise from these phrases,
which are mistaken by mythologists for the worship of Ra was wholly distinct in
the central facts and sources of religion.
origin from the totem-cult of Mnevis, or as
But they are nothing of the kind. Mysticism theworship ofAmen was wholly distinct from
and symbolism can never be primitive ;
that of Khem and Osiris. The stone-god
they are well-meant attempts by cultivated and the bull-god merge at last into one,
religious thinkers of later days to read
much as at a far later date the man Jesus
deep-seated meaning into the crude ideas
merges into the Hebrew god, and receives
and still cruder practices of traditional more reverence in modern faiths than the
religion. I may add that Dr. Robertson
older deity whom he practically replaces.
Smith’s learned and able works are con
Even in the Temple at Jerusalem itself
stantly spoiled in this way by his dogged
symbols of bull-worship were apparently
determination to see nature-worship as
admitted. The altar upon which the daily
primitive, where it is really derivative, as
sacrifice was burnt had four horns ; and
the earliest starting-point, where it is really
the laver in the court, the “ brazen sea,”
the highest and latest development.
was supported upon the figures of twelve
Clearly, when all gods have come to be
oxen. When we remember that the
more or less solar in their external and
Molech had the head of a bull, we can
acquired features, the process of identifi hardly fail to see in these symbols a token
cation and internationalisation is pro of that gradual syncretism which invariably
portionately easy.
affects all developed pantheons in all civi
The syncretism thus brought about in
lised countries.
the Hebrew religion by the superposition
Much more important are the supposed
of nature-worship on the primitive cult signs of the later identification of Jahweh
must have paved the way for the later
with the sun, and his emergence as a modi
recognition of monotheism, exactly as we
fied and transfigured sun-god.
It may
know it did in the esoteric creed of Egypt,
seem odd at first that such a character
by making all the gods so much alike that
could ever be acquired by a sacred stone,
worshippers had only to change the name
did we not recollect the exactly similar
of their deity, not the attributes of the
history of the Egyptian obelisk, which in
essential conception. Let us look first how
like manner represents, first and foremost,
far this syncretism affected the later idea of the upright pillar or monolith—that is to
Jahweh, the phallic stone-god preserved in
say, the primitive gravestone—but secon
the ark ; and then let us inquire afterward
darily and derivatively, at once the genera
how the patriotic reaction against Assyrian I tive principle and a ray of the sun. With
�So
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
this luminous analogy to guide us in our
search, we shall have little difficulty in
recognising how a solar character may
have been given to the later attributes and
descriptions of Jahweh.
To his early worshippers, then, as we saw,
Jahweh was merely the stone in the ark.
He dwelt there visibly, and where the ark
went, there Jahweh went with it. But the
later Hebrews—say in the eighth century—
had acquired a very different idea of
Jahweh’s dwelling-place. Astrological and
solar ideas (doubtless Akkadian in origin)
had profoundly modified their rude primi
tive conceptions. To Amos and to the
true Isaiah, Jahweh dwells in the open sky
above and is “ Jahweh of hosts,” the leader
among the shining army of heaven, the
king of the star-world. “ Over those celes
tial bodies and celestial inhabitants Jahweh
rules”; they surround him and execute his
commands : the host of heaven are his
messengers—in the more familiar language
of our modern religion, “ the angels of the
Lord,” the servants of Jahweh. To Micah,
heaven is “the temple of Jahweh’s holiness”:
“ God on high ” is the descriptive phrase by
which the prophet alludes to him. In all
this we have reached a very different con
ception indeed from that of the early and
simple-minded Israelites who carried their
god with them bn an ox-cart from station
to station.
Furthermore, light and fire are constantly
regarded by these later thinkers as manifes
tations of Jahweh ; and even in editing the
earlier legends they introduce such newer
ideas, making “ the glory of Jahweh” light
up the ark, or appear in the burning bush,
or combining both views, the elder and the
younger, in the pillar of fire that preceded
the nomad horde of Israel in the wilderness.
Jahweh is said to “ send” or to “cast fire”
from heaven, in which expressions we see
once more the advanced concept of an
elemental god, whose voice is the thunder,
and whose weapon the lightning. All
these are familiar developments of the
chief god in a pantheon. Says Zechariah
in his poem, “Ask ye of Jahweh rain in
the time of the latter showers : Jahweh will
make the lightnings.” Says Isaiah, “ The
light of Israel shall be for a fire, And his
holy one for a flame”; “ Behold, the name
of Jahweh cometh from afar, His anger
burneth, and violently the smoke riseth on
high : His lips are full of indignation, And
his tongue is as a devouring fire.” In these
and a hundred other passages that might
be quoted we seem to see Jahweh envis
aged to a great extent as a sun-god, and
clothed in almost all the attributes of a
fiery Molech.
Once more, though this is to anticipate a
little, the later Jahweh-worship seems to
have absorbed into itself certain astro
logical elements which were originally
quite alien to it, belonging to the cult of
other gods. Such, for example, is the
institution of the Sabbath, the unlucky day
of the malign god Kewdn or Saturn, on
which it was undesirable to do any kind of
work, and on which accordingly the super
stitious Semite rested altogether from his
weekly labours. The division of the lunar
month (the sacred period of Astarte, the
queen of heaven) into four weeks of seven
days each, dedicated in turn to the gods of
the seven planets, belongs obviously to the
same late cult of the elemental and astro
logical gods, or, rather, of the gods with
whom these heavenly bodies were at last
identified under Akkadian influence. The
earlier prophets of the exclusive Jahwehworship denounce as idolatrous such
observation of the Sabbath and the
astrological feasts—“Your Sabbaths and
your new moons are an abomination to
me”; and according to Amos, Kewdn
himself had been the chief idolatrous
object of worship by his countrymen in the
wilderness.
Later on, however, the
Jehovistic party found itself powerless to
break the current of superstition on the
Sabbath question, and a new modus vivendi
was therefore necessary. They arranged
a prudent compromise. The Sabbath was
adopted bodily into the monotheistic
Jahweh-worship, and a mythical reason
was given for its institution and its sacred
character which nominally linked it on to
the cult of the ethnical god. On that day,
said the priestly cosmogonists, Jahweh
rested from his labour of creation.
Having thus briefly sketched out the
gradual changes which the conception of
Jahweh himself underwent during the ages
when his supremacy was being slowly
established in the confederacy of Israel,
let us now attack the final problem, Why
did the particular cult of Jahweh become
at last exclusive and monotheistic ?
To begin with, we must remember that,
from the very outset of the national
existence, Jahweh was clearly regarded on
all hands as the ethnical god, the special
god of Israel.
Moreover, there is reason to suppose
that the Israelites regarded Jahweh as
their supreme god. Most pantheons finally
�THE RISE OF MONOTHEISM
settle down into a recognised hierarchy, in
which one deity or another gradually
assumes the first place. So, in Hellas, the
supremacy of Zeus was undoubted ; so, in
Rome, was the supremacy of Jupiter.
Sometimes, to be sure, as among our
Teutonic ancestors, we see room for doubt
between two rival gods: it would be difficult
to assign the exact priority to either of the
two leading deities : among the English,
Woden rather bore it overThunor ; among
the Scandinavians, Thor rather bore it over
Odin. In Israel, in like manner, there was
apparently a time when the Presidency of
the Immortals hovered between Jahweh
and one or other of the local Baalim. But
in the end, and perhaps even from the very
beginning, the suffrages of the people were
mainly with the sacred stone of the ark.
He was the God of Israel, and they were
the chosen people of Jahweh.
The custom of circumcision must have
proved at once the symbol and in part the
cause, in part the effect, of this general
devotion of the people to a single supreme
god. At first, no doubt, only the first-born,
or other persons specially dedicated to
Jahweh, would undergo the rite which
marked them out so clearly as the devotees
of the god of fertility. But as time went
on, long before the triumph of the exclusive
Jahweh-worship, it would seem that the
practice of offering up every male child to
the national god had become universal.
As early as the shadowy reign of David,
the Philistines are reproachfully alluded to
in our legends as “ the uncircumcised.”
Such universal dedication of the whole
males of the race to the national god must
have done much to ensure his ultimate
triumph.
If we look at the circumstances of the
Israelites in Palestine, we shall easily see
how both religious unity and intense
national patriotism were fostered by the
very nature of their tenure of the soil ; and
also why a deity mainly envisaged as a god
of generation should have become the most
important member of their national pan
theon. Their position during the first few
centuries of their life in Lower Syria may
be compared to that of the Dorians in
Peloponnesus : they were but a little garri
son in a hostile land fighting incessantly
with half-conquered tributaries and encirc
ling foes ; now hard-pressed by rebellions
of their internal enemies ; and now again
rendered subject themselves to the hostile
Philistines on their maritime border. The
handful of rude warriors who burst upon
the land under such bloodthirsty leaders as
Joshua could only hope for success by rapid
and constant increase of their numbers, and
by avoiding as far as possible those internal
quarrels which were always the prelude to
national disgrace. To be “ a mother in
Israel” is the highest hope of every Hebrew
woman. Hence it was natural that a god
of generation should become the chief
among the local deities ; and though all
the stone gods were probably phallic, yet
Jahweh, as the ethnical patron, seems most
of all to have been regarded as the giver
of increase to Israel.
It seems clear, too, that the common
worship of Jahweh was at first the only
solid bond of union between the scattered
and discordant tribes who were afterwards
to grow into the Israelitish people. This
solidarity of god and tribe has well been
insisted on by Professor Robertson Smith
as a common feature of all Semitic worship.
The ark of Jahweh in its house at Shiloh
appears to have formed the general meeting
place for Hebrew patriotism, as the sanc
tuary of Olympia formed a focus later for the
dawning sense of Hellenic unity. The ark
was taken out to carry before the Hebrew
army, that the god of Israel might fight for
his worshippers. Evidently, therefore, from
a very early date, Jahweh was regarded in
a literal sense as the god of battles, the
power upon whom Israel might specially
rely to guard it against its enemies. When,
as the legends tell us, the national unity
was realised under David; when the subject
peoples were finally merged into a homo
geneous whole ; when the last relics of
Canaanitish nationality were stamped out
by the final conquest of the Jebusites ; and
when Jerusalem was made the capital of a
united Israel, this feeling must have in
creased both in extent and intensity. The
bringing of Jahweh to Jerusalem by David,
and the building of his temple by Solomon
(if these facts be historical), must have
helped to stamp him as the great god of
the race : and though Solomon also erected
temples to other Hebrew gods, which re
mained in existence for some centuries, we
may be sure that from the date of the open
ing of the great central shrine, Jahweh re
mained the principal deity of the southern
kingdom at least, after- the separation.
There was one characteristic of Jahwehworship, however, which especially helped
to make it at last an exclusive cult, and
thus paved the way for its final develop
ment into a pure monotheism. Jahweh
was specially known to be a “jealous
G
�82
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
god this is a trait in his temperament
early and often insisted on. We do not
know when or where the famous “Ten
Words ” were first promulgated; but we
have every reason to believe that in essence
at least they date from a very antique
period. Now, at the head of these imme
morial precepts of Jahweh stands the pro
hibition of placing any other gods before
his face. Originally, no doubt, the prohibi
tion meant exactly what it states ; that
Jahweh would endure no companion gods
to share his temple; that wherever he
dwelt he would dwell alone without what
the Greeks would have called fellow shrine
sharers. Thus we know that no ashera
was to be driven into the ground near
Jahweh’s ark ; and that when Dagon found
himself face to face with the Rock of Israel,
he broke in pieces, and could not stand
before the awful presence of the great
Hebrew Pillar. No more than this, then,
was at first demanded by “the jealous
god”: he asked of his worshippers that
they should keep him apart from the society
of all inferior gods, should allow no minor
or rival deity to enter his precincts.
Gradually, however, as Jahweh-worship
grew deeper, and the conception of god
head became wider and more sublime, the
Jahweh-worshipper began to put a stricter
interpretation upon the antique command
of the jealous god. It was supposed that
every circumcised person, every man visibly
devoted to Jahweh, owed to Jahweh alone
his whole religious service. Nobody
doubted as yet, indeed, that other gods
existed : but the extreme Jehovists in the
later days of national independence held as
an article of faith that no true Israelite
ought in any way to honour them. An
internal religious conflict thus arose between
the worshippers of Jahweh and the worship
pers of the Baalim, in which, as might be
expected, the devotees of the national god
had very much the best of it. Exclusive
Jahweh-worship became thenceforth the
ideal of the extreme Jehovists : they began
to regard all other gods as “ idols,” to be
identified with their images ; they began
to look upon Jahweh alone as a living
god, at least within the bounds of the
Israelitish nation»
To this result another ancient prohibition
of the priests of Jahweh no doubt largely
contributed. The priesthood held it unlaw
ful to make or multiply images of Jahweh.
The one sacred stone enclosed in the ark
was alone to be worshipped : and by thus
concentrating on Shiloh, or afterwards on
Jerusalem, the whole religious spirit of the
ethnical cult, they must largely have suc
ceeded in cementing the national unity.
Strict Jehovists looked with dislike upon
the adoration paid to the bull-images in the
northern kingdom, though those, too, were
regarded (at least in later days) as repre
sentatives of Jahweh. They held that the
true god of Abraham was to be found only
in the ark at Jerusalem, and that to give to
the Rock of Israel human form or bestial
figure was in itself a high crime against the
majesty of their deity Hence arose the
peculiar Hebrew dislike to “ idolatry ” ; a
dislike never equally shared by any but
Semitic peoples, and having deep roots,
apparently, at once in the inartistic genius
of the people and in the profound meta
physical and dreamy character of Semitic
thinking. The comparative emptiness of
Semitic shrines, indeed, was always a
stumbling-block to the Greek, with his
numerous and exquisite images of anthro
pomorphic deities.
All that was now wanted to drive the in
creasingly exclusive and immaterial Jahwehworship into pure monotheism for the whole
people was the spur of a great national
enthusiasm, in answer to some dangerous
external attack upon the existence of Israel
and of Israel’s god. This final touch was
given by the aggression of Assyria, and
later of Babylon. For years the two tiny
Israelitish kingdoms had maintained a pre
carious independence between the mighty
empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia. In
the eighth century it became certain that
they could no longer play their accustomed
game of clever diplomacy and polite sub
jection. The very existence of Israel was
at stake ; and the fanatical worshippers of
Jahweh broke out in that memorable
ecstasy of enthusiasm which we may fairly
call the Age of the Prophets, and which
produced the earliest masterpieces of
Hebrew literature in the wild effort to
oppose to the arms of the invaders the
passive resistance of a supreme Jahweh.
In times of old, the prophets say, when
Jahweh led the forces of Israel, the horses
and the chariots of their enemies counted
for naught : if in this crisis Israel would
cease to think of aid from Egypt or alliance
with Assyria—if Israel would get rid of all
her other gods and trust only to Jahweh—
then Jahweh would break asunder the
strength of Assyria and would reduce
Babylon to nothing before his chosen
people.
Such is the language that Isaiah ventured
�THE RISE OF MONOTHEISM
to use in the very crisis of a grave national
danger.
Now, strange as it seems to us that any
people should have thrown themselves into
such a general state of fanatical folly, it is
nevertheless true that these extraordinary
counsels prevailed in both the Israelitish
kingdoms, and that the very moment when
the national existence was most seriously
imperilled was the moment chosen by the
Jehovistic party for vigorously attempting a
religious reformation. The downfall of
Ephraim only quickened the bigoted belief
of the. fanatics in Judah that pure Jahwehworship was the one possible panacea for
the difficulties of I srael. Taking advantage
of a minority and of a plastic young king,
they succeeded in imposing exclusive
Jehovism upon the half-unwilling people.
The timely forgery of the Book of Deuteromony—the first germ of the Pentateuch—
by the priests of the temple at Jerusalem
was quickly followed by the momentary
triumph of pure Jahweh-worship. In this
memorable document the exclusive cult of
Jahweh was falsely said to have descended
from the earliest periods of the national
existence. Josiah, we are told, alarmed at
the denunciations in the forged roll of the
law, set himself to work at once to root out
by violent means every form of “ idolatry.”
He brought forth from the house of Jahweh
“ the vessels that were made for the Baal,
and for the Ashera, and for all the Host of
Heaven, and he burned them without
Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron.” He
abolished all the shrines and priesthoods of
other gods in the cities of Judah, and put
down “ them that burned incense to the
Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to
the planets, and all the Host of Heaven.”
He also brought out the Ashera from the
temple of Jahweh, and burnt it to ashes;
and “ took away the horses that the kings
of Judah had given to the sun, and burned
the chariots of the sun with fire.” And by
destroying the temples said to have been
built by Solomon for Chemosh, Milcom,
and Ashtoreth, he left exclusive and tri
umphant Jahweh-worship the sole ac
credited religion of Israel.
All, however, was of no avail. Religious
fanaticism could not save the little princi
pality from the aggressive arms of its
powerful neighbours. Within twenty or
thirty years of Josiah’s reformation, the
Babylonians thrice captured and sacked
Jerusalem. The temple of Jahweh was
burnt, the chief ornaments were removed,
and the desolate site itself lay deserted.
83
The principal inhabitants were transported
to Babylonia, and the kingdom of J udah
ceased for a time to have any independent
existence.
But what, in this disaster, became of the
Jahweh himself? How fared or fell the
Sacred Stone in the ark, the Rock of Israel,
in this general destruction of all its holiest
belongings ? Strange to say, the Hebrew
annalist never stops to tell us. In the
plaintive catalogue of the wrongs wrought
by the Babylonians at Jerusalem every pot
and shovel and vessel is enumerated, but
“the ark of God” is not so much as once
mentioned. Perhaps the historian shrank
from relating that final disgrace of his
country’s deity ; perhaps a sense of rever
ence prevented him from chronicling it;
perhaps he knew nothing of what had
finally been done with the cherished and
time-honoured stone pillar of his ancestors.
It is possible, too, that with his later and
more etherealised conceptions of the cult of
his god, he had ceased to regard the ark
itself as the abode of Jahweh, and was un
aware that his tribal deity had been repre
sented in the innermost shrine of the temple
by a rough-hewn pillar. Be that as it may,
the actual fate of Jahweh himself is involved
for us now in impenetrable obscurity. Prob
ably the invaders who took away “ the
treasures of the house of Jahweh, and cut
in pieces all the vessels of gold which
Solomon, King of Israel, had made,” would
care but little for the rude sacred stone of a
conquered people. We may conjecture that
they broke Jahweh into a thousand frag
ments and ground him to powder, as Josiah
had done with the Baalim and the Ashera,
so that his very relics could no longer be
recognised or worshipped. At any rate, we
hear no more, from that time forth, of
Jahweh himself, as a material existence, or of
the ark he dwelt in. His spirit alone sur
vived unseen, to guard and protect his
chosen people.
Yet, strange to say, this final disappear
ance of Jahweh himself, as a visible and
tangible god, from the page of history, in
stead of proving the signal for the utter
downfall of his cult and his sanctity, was
the very making of Jahweh-worship as a
spiritual, a monotheistic, and a cosmo
politan religion. At the exact moment
when Jahweh ceased to exist the religion
of Jahweh began to reach its highest and
fullest development. Even before the cap
tivity, as we have seen, the prophets and
their party had begun to form a most exalted
and spiritualised conception of Jahweh’s
�«4
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
greatness, Jahweh’s holiness, Jahweh’s
unapproachable nature, Jahweh’s super
human sublimity and omnipotence. But
now that the material Jahweh itself, which
cramped and clogged their ideas, had
disappeared for ever, this spiritual concep
tion of a great Unseen God widened and
deepened amazingly. Forbidden by their
creed and by Jahweh’s own express com
mand to make any image of their chosen
deity, the Hebrews in Babylonia gradually
evolved for themselves the notion of a
Supreme Ruler wholly freed from material
bonds, to be worshipped without image,
representative, or symbol; a dweller in the
heavens, invisible to men, too high and pure
for human eyes to look upon. The conical
stone in the ark gave place almost at once
to an incorporeal, inscrutable, and almighty
Being.
It was during the captivity, too, that pure
monotheism became for the first time the
faith of Israel. Convinced that desertion
of Jahweh was the cause of all their previous
misfortunes, the Jews during their exile
grew more deeply attached than ever to the
deity who represented their national unity
and their national existence. They made
their way back in time to Judaea, after two
generations had passed away, with a firm
conviction that all their happiness depended
on restoring in ideal purity a cult that had
never been the cult of their fathers. A new
form of Jahweh-worship Lad become a
passion among those who sat disconsolate
by the waters of Babylon. Few if any of
the zealots who returned at last to Jeru
salem had ever themselves known the stone
god who lay shrouded in the ark : it was
the etherealised Jahweh who ruled in heaven
above among the starry hosts to whom they
offered up aspirations in a strange land for
the restoration of Israel. In the temple
that they built on the sacred site to the new
figment of their imaginations, Jahweh was
no longer personally present: it was not so
much his “ house,” like the old one demo
lished by the Babylonian invaders, as the
place where sacrifice was offered and wor
ship paid to the great god in heaven. The
new religion was purely spiritual; Jahweh
had triumphed, but only by losing his dis
tinctive personal characteristics,and coming
out of the crisis, as it were, the blank form
or generic conception of pure deity in
general.
It is this that gives monotheism its pecu
liar power, and enables it so readily to
make its way everywhere. For monotheism
is religion reduced to its single central ele- I
ment; it contains nothing save what every
votary of all gods already implicitly believes,
with every unnecessary complexity or indi
viduality smoothed away and simplified.
Its simplicity recommends it to all intelli
gent minds ; its uniformity renders it the
easiest and most economical form of pan
theon that man can frame for himself.
Under the influence of these new ideas,
before long, the whole annals of Israel were
edited and written down in Jehovistic form ;
the Pentateuch and the older historical
books assumed the dress in which we now
know them. From the moment of the
return from the captivity, too, the mono
theistic conception kept ever widening. At
first, no doubt, even with the Jews of the
Sixth Century, Jahweh was commonly
looked upon merely as the ethnical god of
Israel. But, in time, the sublimer and
broader conception of some few among the
earlier poetical prophets began to gain
general acceptance, and Jahweh was re
garded as in very deed the one true God of
all the world—somewhat such a God as
Islam and Christendom to-day acknowledge.
Still, even so, he was as yet most closely
connected with the Jewish people, through
whom alone the gentiles were expected in
the fulness of time to learn his greatness.
It was reserved for a Graeco-Jewish Cilician,
five centuries later, to fulfil the final ideal
of pure cosmopolitan monotheism, and to
proclaim abroad the unity of God to all
nations, with the Catholic Church as its
earthly witness before the eyes of universal
humanity. To Paul of Tarsus we owe
above all men that great and on the whole
cosmopolitanising conception. .
CHAPTER XI.
HUMAN GODS
We have now in a certain sense accom
plished our intention of tracing the evo
lution of gods and of God. We have shown
how polytheism came to be, and how from
it a certain particular group of men, the
early Israelites, rose by slow degrees,
through natural stages, to the monotheistic
conception. It might seem, therefore, as
though the task we set before ourselves
was now quite completed. Nevertheless,
many abstruse and difficult questions still
lie before us. Our problem as yet is hardly
�HUMAN GODS
half solved. We have still to ask, How
did this purely local and national Hebrew
deity advance to the conquest of the
civilised world? How from an obscure
corner of Lower Syria did the god of a
small tribe of despised and barbaric
tributaries slowly live down the great
conquering deities of Babylon and Susa,
of Hellas and Italy? And again, we have
further to inquire, Why do most of the
modern nations which have nominally
adopted monotheism yet conceive of their
god as compounded in some mystically
incomprehensible fashion of Three Perácms,
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost ?
In short, I am not satisfied with tracing
the idea of a god from the primitive
mummy or the secondary ghost to the one
supreme God of the ancient Hebrews ; I
desire also to follow on that developed
concept till it merges at last in the triune
God of modern Christendom.
The Christian religion with which we
have next to deal bases itself fundamentally
upon the personality of a man, by name
Jesus, commonly described as the Christ,
that is to say “the anointed.” Of this
most sacred and deified person it is
affirmed by modern Christianity, and
has been affirmed by orthodox Christians
from a very early period, that he was not
originally a mere man, afterwards taken
into the godhead, but that he was born
from the first the son of God, that is to say,
of the Hebrew Jahweh; that he existed
previously from all time; that he was
miraculously conceived of a virgin mother ;
that he was crucified and buried ; that on
the third day he arose from the dead ; and
that he is now a living and distinct person
in a divine and mystically-united Trinity.
I propose to show in the subsequent
chapters how far all these conceptions were
already familiar throughout the world in
which Christianity was promulgated, and to
how large an extent the new religion owed
its rapid success to the fact that it was but
a résumé or idealised embodiment of all
the chief conceptions already common to
the main cults of Mediterranean civilisa
tion. At the moment when the Roman
empire was cosmopolitanising the world
Christianity began to cosmopolitanise reli
gion, by taking into itself whatever was
central, common, and universal in the
worship of the peoples among whom it
originated.
We will begin with the question of the
incarnation, which lies at the very root of
the Christian concept.
85
I have said already that in ancient Egypt
and elsewhere, “ The God was the Dead
King, the King was the Living God.” This
is true, literally and absolutely. Since the
early kings are gods, the present kings,
their descendants, are naturally also gods by
descent; their blood is divine ; they differ
in nature as well as in position from mere
common mortals. While they live, they are
gods on earth ; when they die, they pass
over to the community of the gods their
ancestors, and share with them a happy and
regal immortality. The inference made in
Egypt that the children of gods must be
themselves divine was also made in most
other countries, especially in those where
similar great despotisms established them
selves at an early grade of culture. Thus
in Peru, the Incas were gods. They were
the children of the Sun ; and when they
died, it was said that their father, the Sun,
had sent to fetch them. The Mexican kings
were likewise gods, with full control of the
course of nature ; they swore at their acces
sion to make the sun shine, the rain fall, the
rivers flow, and the earth bring forth her
fruit in due season. How they could pro
mise all this seems at first a little difficult
for us to conceive ; but it will become more
comprehensible at a later stage of our in
vestigation, when we come to consider the
gods of cultivation : even at present, if we
remember that kings are children of the
Sun, and that sacred trees, sacred groves,
and sacred wells are closely connected with
the tombs' of their ancestors, we can guess
at the beginning of such a mental connec
tion. Thus the Chinese emperor is the Son
of Heaven ; he is held responsible to his
people for the occurrence of drought or
other serious derangements of nature. The
Parthian kings of the Arsacid house, says
Mr. Frazer, to whom I am greatly indebted
for most of the succeeding facts, styled
themselves brothers of the sun and moon,
and were worshipped as deities. Number
less other cases are cited by Mr. Fraser,
who was the first to point out the full im
portance of this widespread belief in man
gods. I shall follow him largely in the
subsequent discussion of this cardinal sub
ject, though I shall often give to the facts
an interpretation slightly different from that
which he would allow to be the correct one.
For to me, godhead springs always from
the primitive Dead Man, while to Mr.
Frazer it is spiritual or animistic in origin.
Besides these human gods who are gods
by descent from deified ancestors, there is
another class of gods who are gods by
�86
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
inspiration or indwelling of the divine spirit,
that is to say of some ghost or god who
temporarily or permanently inhabits the
body of a living man. The germ-idea of
such divine possession we may see in the
facts of epilepsy, catalepsy, dream, and
madness. In all such cases of abnormal
nervous condition it seems to primitive man,
as it still seemed to the Jews of the age of
the Gospels, that the sufferer is entered or
seized upon by some spirit, who bodily in
habits him. The spirit may throw the man
down, or may speak through his mouth in
strange unknown tongues; it may exalt him
so that he can perform strange feats of
marvellous strength, or may debase him to
a position of grovelling abjectness. By
fasting and religious asceticism men and
women can even artificially attain this
state, when the god speaks through them,
as he spoke through the mouth of the
Pythia at Delphi. And fasting is always
one of the religious exercises of god-pos
sessed men, priests, monks, anchorites, and
ascetics in general. Where races have
learnt how to manufacture intoxicating
drinks, or to express narcotic juices from
plants, they also universally attribute the
effects of such plants to the personal action
of an inspiring spirit—an idea so persistent
even into civilised ages that we habitually
speak of alcoholic liquors as spirits. Both
these ways of attaining the presence of an
indwelling god are commonly practised
among savages and half-civilised people.
When we recollect how we saw already
that ancestral spirits may descend from
time to time into the skulls that once were
theirs, or into the clay or wooden images
that represent them, and there give oracles,
we shall not be surprised to find that they
can thus enter at times into a human body,
and speak through its lips, for good or for
evil. I have dwelt but little in this book
on this migratory power and this ubiqui
tousness of the spirits, because I have de
sired to fix attention chiefly on that primary
aspect of religion which is immediately and
directly concerned with Worship; but
readers familiar with such works as Dr.
Tylor’s and Mr. Frazer’s will be well aware
of the common power which spirits possess
of projecting themselves readily into every
part of nature. The faculty of possession
or of divination is but one particular exam
ple of this well-known attribute. The
mysteries and oracles of all creeds are full
of such phenomena.
Certain persons, again, are born from
the womb as incarnations of a god or an
ancestral spirit. “ Incarnate gods,” says
Mr. Frazer, “are common in rude society.
The incarnation may be temporary or per
manent......... When the divine spirit has
taken up its abode in a human body, the
god-man is usually expected to vindicate
his character by working miracles.” Mr.
Frazer gives several excellent examples of
both these classes. I extract a few almost
verbatim.
Certain persons are possessed from time
to time by a spirit of deity ; while posses
sion lasts, their own personality lies in
abeyance, and the presence of the spirit is
revealed by convulsive shakings and quiver
ings of the body. In this abnormal state
the man’s utterances are accepted as the
voice of the god or spirit dwelling in him
and speaking through him. In Mangaia,
for instance, the priests in whom the gods
took up their abode were called god-boxes
or gods. Before giving oracles, they drank
an intoxicating liquor, and the words they
spoke in their frenzy were then regarded as
divine. In other cases, the inspired person
produces the desired condition of intoxica
tion by drinking the fresh blood of a victim,
human or animal, which, as we shall see
hereafter, is probably itself an avatar of the
inspiring god. In the temple of Apollo
Diradiotes at Argos, a lamb was sacrificed
by night once a month ; a woman, who had
to observe the rule of chastity, tasted its
blood, and then gave oracles. At Ægira in
Achæa the priestess of the Earth drank the
fresh blood of a bull before she descended
into her cave to prophesy. In Southern
India the so-called devil-dancer drinks the
blood of a goat, and then becomes seized
with the divine afflatus. He is worshipped
as a deity, and bystanders ask him ques
tions requiring superhuman knowledge to
answer.
Of permanent living human gods, in
spired by the constant indwelling of a deity,
Mr. Frazer also gives several apt examples.
In the Marquesas Islands there was a class
of men who were deified in their lifetime.
They were supposed to wield supernatural
control over the elements. They could give
or withhold rain and good harvests. Human
sacrifices were offered them to appease their
wrath.
.
.
.
Sometimes, I believe, kings are divine
by birth, as descendants of gods ; but
sometimes divinity is conferred upon them
with the kingship, as indeed was the case
even in the typical instance of Egypt.
Tanatoa, king of Raiatea, was deified by a
certain ceremony performed at the chief
�HUMAN GODS
temple. He was made a god before the
gods his ancestors, as Celtic chiefs received
the chieftainship standing on the sacred
stone of their fathers. As one of the deities
of his subjects, therefore, the king was
worshipped, consulted as an oracle, and
honoured with sacrifices. The king of
Tahiti at his inauguration received a sacred
girdle of red and yellow feathers, which not
only raised him to the highest earthly
station, but also identified him with the
heavenly gods. Compare the way in which
the gods of Egypt make the king one of
themselves, as represented in the bas-reliefs,
by the presentation of the divine tau. In
the Pelew Islands a god may incarnate
himself in a common person ; this lucky
man is thereupon raised to sovereign rank,
and rules as god and king over the com
munity. Not unsimilar is the mode of
selection of a Grand Lama. In later
stages the king ceases to be quite a god,
but retains the anointment, the consecration
on a holy stone, and the claim to “ divine
right ”; he also shows some last traces of
deity in his divine power to heal diseases,
which fades away at last into the practice
of “ touching for king’s evil.”
But did ideas of this character still survive
in the Mediterranean world of the first and
second centuries, where Christianity was
evolved? Most undoubtedly they did. In
Egypt, the divine line of the Ptolemies had
only just become extinct. In Rome itself,
the divine Caesar had recently under
gone official apotheosis; the divine
Augustus had ruled over the empire
as the adopted son of the new-made
god ; and altars rose in provincial cities to
the divine spirit of the reigning Trajan or
Hadrian. Indeed, both forms of divinity
were claimed indirectly for the god Julius ;
he was divine by apotheosis, but he was
also descended from the goddess Venus.
So the double claim was made for the
central personage of the Christian faith :
he was the son of God—that is to say of
Jahweh : but he was also of kingly Jewish
origin, a descendant of David, and in the
genealogies fabricated for him in the
Gospels extreme importance is attached to
this pretended royal ancestry. Further
more, how readily men of the Mediterra
nean civilisation could then identify living
persons with gods we see in the familiar
episode of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra.
Incarnation, in short, was a perfectly ordi
nary feature of religion and daily life as
then understood.
To most modern thinkers, however, it
87
would seem at first sight like a grave diffi
culty in the way of accepting the deity of
an ordinary man that he should have suf
fered a violent death at the hands of his
enemies. Yet this fact, instead of standing
in the way of acceptance of Christ’s
divinity, is really almost a guarantee and
proof of it. For, strange as it sounds to
us, the human gods were frequently or
almost habitually put to death by their
votaries. The secret of this curious ritual
and persistent custom has been ingeniously
deciphered for us by Mr. Frazer, whose
book is almost entirely devoted to these
two main questions, “Why do men kill
their gods ?” and “ Why do they eat and
drink their flesh and blood under the form
of bread and wine ?” We must go over
some of the same ground here in rapid
summary, with additional corollaries ; and
we must also bring Mr. Frazer’s curious
facts into line with our general principles
of the origin of godhead. The belief that
it is expedient that “ one man should die
for the people,” and that the person who
so dies is a god in human shape, formed,
as we shall see, a common component of
many faiths, and especially of the faiths of
the eastern Mediterranean. Mr. Frazer
has traced the genesis of this group of
beliefs in the slaughter of the man-god in
the most masterly manner. They spring
from a large number of converging ideas,
some of which can only come out in full as
we proceed in later chapters to other
branches of our subject.
In all parts of the world, one of the com
monest prerogatives and functions of the
human god is the care of the weather. As
representative of heaven, it is his business
to see that rain falls in proper quantities,
and that the earth brings forth her in
crease in due season. But, god though he
is, he must needs be coerced if he does not
attend to this business properly. Thus, in
West Africa, when prayers and offerings
presented to the king have failed to pro
cure rain, his subjects bind him with
ropes, and take him to the grave of his
deified forefathers, that he may obtain
from them the needful change in the
weather. Here we see in the fullest form
the nature of the relation between dead
gods and living ones. The Son is the
natural mediator between men and the
Father. Among the Antaymours of Mada
gascar, the king is responsible for bad
crops and all other misfortunes. The
ancient Scythians, when ’ food was
scarce, put their kings in bonds.
�88
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
The Banjars in West Africa ascribe
to their king the power of causing
rain or fine weather. As long as the
climate is satisfactory, they load him with
presents of grain and cattle. But if long
drought or rain does serious harm, they
insult and beat him till the weather changes.
The Burgundians deposed their king if he
failed to make their crops grow to their
satisfaction.
Further than that, certain tribes have
even killed their kings in times of scarcity.
In the days of the Swedish king Domalde,
a mighty famine broke out, which lasted
several years, and could not be stayed by
human or animal sacrifices. So, in a great
popular assembly held at Upsala, the
chiefs decided that King Domalde himself
was the cause of the scarcity, and must be
sacrificed for good seasons. Then they
slew him, and smeared with his blood
the altars of the gods. Here we must
recollect that the divine king is himself a
god, the descendant of gods, and he is
sacrificed to the offended spirits of his own
forefathers. We shall see hereafter how
often similar episodes occur—how the god
is sacrificed, himself to himself; how the
Son is sacrificed to the Father, both being
gods ; and how the Father sacrifices his
Son, to make a god of him.
The divine kings being thus responsible
for rain and wind, and for the growth of
crops, whose close dependence upon them
we shall further understand hereafter, it is
clear that they are persons of the greatest
importance and value to the community.
Moreover, in the ideas of early men, their
spirit is almost one with that of external
nature, over which they exert such
extraordinary powers. A subtle sympathy
seems to exist between the king and the
world outside. The sacred trees which
embody his ancestors ; the crops, which,
as we shall see hereafter, equally embody
them ; the rain-clouds in which they dwell;
the heaven they inhabit;—all these, as it
were, are parts of the divine body, and
therefore by implication part of the godking’s, who is but the avatar of his deified
fathers. Hence, whatever affects the king,
affects the sky, the crops, the rain, the
people.
Mr. Frazer has shown many strange
results of these early beliefs—which he
traces, however, to the supposed primitive
animism, and not (as I have done) to the
influence of the ghost-theory. Whichever
interpretation we accept, however, his facts
at least are equally valuable. He calls
attention to the number of kingly taboos
which are all intended to prevent the human
god from endangering or imperilling his
divine life, or from doing anything which
might react hurtfully upon nature and the
welfare of his people. The man-god is
guarded by the strictest rules, and sur
rounded by precautions of the utmost com
plexity. He may not set his sacred foot on
the ground, because he is a son of heaven ;
he may not eat or drink with his sacred
mouth certain dangerous, impure, or un
holy foods ; he may not have his sacr§4
hair cut, or his sacred nails pared; he
must preserve intact his divine body, and
every part of it—the incarnation of the
community—lest evil come of his impru
dence or his folly.
The Mikado, for example, was and still
is regarded as an incarnation of the sun,
the deity who rules the entire universe,
gods and men included. The greatest care
must therefore be taken both ¿y him and of
him. His whole life, down to its minutest
details, must be so regulated that no act
of his may upset the established order of
nature. Lest he should touch the earth, he
used to be carried wherever he went on
men’s shoulders. He could not expose his
sacred person to the open air, nor eat out
of any but a perfectly new vessel. In every
way his sanctity and his health were
jealously guarded, and he was treated like
a person whose security was important to
the whole course of nature.
Mr. Frazer quotes several similar ex
amples, of which the most striking is that
of the high pontiff of the Zapotecs, an
ancient people of Southern Mexico. He
profaned his sanctity if he touched the
common ground with his holy foot. The
officers who bore his palanquin on their
shoulders were chosen from the members
of the highest families ; he hardly deigned
to look on anything around him ; those
who met him prostrated themselves humbly
on the ground, lest death should overtake
them if they even saw his divine shadow.
A rule of continence was ordinarily im
posed upon him ; but on certain days in the
year which were high festivals, it was usual
for him to get ceremonially and sacramen
tally drunk. On such days, .we may be
sure, the high gods peculiarly entered into
him with the intoxicating pulque, and the
ancestral spirits reinforced his godhead.
While in this exalted state (“full of the
god,” as a Greek or Roman would have
said) the divine pontiff received a visit from
one of the most beautiful of the virgins
�HUMAN GODS
consecrated to the service of the gods. If
the child she bore him was a son, it suc
ceeded in due time to the throne of the
Zapotecs. We have here again an instruc
tive mixture of the various ideas out of
which such divine kingship and godship is
constructed.
It might seem at first sight a paradoxical
corollary that people who thus safeguard
and protect their divine king, the embodi
ment of nature, should also habitually and
ceremonially kill him. Yet the apparent
paradox is, from the point of view of the
early worshipper, both natural and reason
able. We read of the Congo negroes that
they have a supreme pontiff whom they
regard as a god upon earth, and all-power
ful in heaven. But, “if he were to die a
natural death, they thought the world would
perish, and the earth, which he alone sus
tained by his power and merit, would
immediately be annihilated.” This idea of
a god as the creator and supporter of all
things, without whom nothing would be, is
of course a familiar component element of
the most advanced theology. But many
nations which worship human gods carry
out the notion to its logical conclusion in
the most rigorous manner. Since the god
is a man, it would obviously be quite wrong
to let him grow old and weak ; since there
by the whole course of nature might be
permanently enfeebled; rain would but
dribble; crops would grow thin; rivers
would trickle away ; and the race he ruled
would dwindle to nothing. Hence senility
must never overcome the sacred man-god ;
he must be killed in the fulness of his
strength and health (say, about his thirtieth
year), so that the indwelling spirit, yet
young and fresh, may migrate unimpaired
into the body of some newer and abler
representative. Mr. Frazer was the first, I
believe, to point out this curious result of
primitive human reasoning, and to illustrate
it by numerous and conclusive instances.
For this reason, then, when the pontiff of
Congo grew old, and seemed likely to die,
the man who was destined to succeedhim in
the pontificate entered his house with a
rope or club, and strangled or felled him.
The Ethiopian kings of Meroe were wor
shipped as gods; but when the priests
thought fit, they sent a messenger to the
king, ordering him to die, and alleging an
oracle of the gods (or earlier kings) as the
reason of their command. This command
the kings always obeyed down to the reign
of Ergamenes, a contemporary of Ptolemy
II. of Egypt. So, when the king of Unyoro
89
in Central Africa falls ill, or begins to show
signs of approaching age, one of his own
wives is compelled by custom to kill him.
The kings of Sofala were regarded by their
people as gods who could give rain or sun
shine ; but the slightest bodily blemish,
such as the loss of a tooth, was considered
a sufficient reason for putting one of these
powerful man-gods to death; he must be
whole and sound, lest all nature pay for it.
Many kings, human gods, divine priests, or
sultans are enumerated by Mr. Frazer, each
of whom must be similarly perfect in every
limb and member. The same perfect man
hood is still exacted of the Christian Pope,
who, however, is not put to death in case
of extreme age or feebleness. But there
is reason to believe that the Grand Lama,
the divine Pope of the Tibetan Buddhists,
is killed from time to time, so as to keep
him “ ever fresh and ever young,” and to
allow the inherent deity within him to
escape full-blooded into another embodi
ment.
In all these cases the divine king or priest
is suffered by his people to retain office, or
rather to house the godhead, till by some
outward defect, or some visible warning of
age or illness, he shows them that he is no
longer equal to the proper performance of
his divine functions. Until such symptoms
appear, he is not put to death. Some
peoples, however, as Mr. Frazer shows, have
not thought it safe to wait for even the
slightest symptom of decay before killing
the human god or king; they have destroyed
him in the plenitude of his life and vigour.
In such cases the people fix a term beyond
which the king may not reign, and at the
close of which he must die, the term being
short enough to prevent the probability of
degeneration meanwhile. In some parts
of Southern India, for example, the term
was fixed at twelve years ; at the expiration
of that time the king had to cut himself to
pieces visibly, before the great local idol,
of which he was in all probability the
human equivalent. The king of Calicut,
on the Malabar coast, had to cut his throat
in public after a twelve years’ reign. But
towards the end of the seventeenth century
the rule was so far relaxed that the king
was allowed to retain the throne, and prob
ably the godship, if he could protect him
self against all comers. As long as he was
strong enough to guard his position, it was
held that he was strong enough to retain
the divine power unharmed. The King of
the Wood at Aricia held his priesthood and
ghostly kingship on the same condition.
�90
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
More often still, however, the divine
priesthood, kingship, or godhead was held
for one year alone, for a reason which we
shall more fully comprehend after we have
considered the annual gods of cultivation.
The most interesting example, and the most
cognate to our present inquiry, is that of
the Babylonian custom cited by Berosus.
During the five days of the festival called
the Sacaea, a prisoner condemned to death
was dressed in the king’s robes, seated on
the king’s throne, allowed to eat, drink, and
order whatever he chose, and even permit
ted to sleep with the king’s concubines.
But at the end of five days he was stripped
of his royal insignia, scourged, and crucified.
I need hardly point out the crucial impor
tance of this singular instance, occurring
in a country within the Semitic circle. Mr.
Frazer rightly concludes that the condemned
man was meant to die in the king’s stead ;
was himself, in point of fact, a king substi
tute ; and was therefore invested for the
time being with the fullest prerogatives of
royalty. Doubtless we have here to deal
with a modification of an older and sterner
rule, which compelled the king himself to
be slain annually. “ When the time drew
near for the king to be put to death,” says
Mr. Frazer, “he abdicated for a few days,
during which a temporary king reigned
and suffered in his stead. At first the
temporary king may have been an innocent
person, possibly a member of the king’s
own family; but, with the growth of
civilisation, the sacrifice of an innocent
person would be revolting to the public
sentiment, and accordingly a condemned
criminal would be invested with the brief
and fatal sovereignty........We shall find
other examples of a criminal representing
a dying god. For we must not forget that
the king is slain in his character of a god ;
his death and resurrection, as the only
means of perpetuating the divine life
unimpaired, being deemed necessary for
the salvation of his people and the world.”
I need not point out the importance of such
ideas as assisting in the formation of a
groundwork for the doctrines of Chris
tianity.
The annual character of some such
sacrifices seems to be derived from the
analogy of the annually-slain gods of
cultivation, whose origin and meaning we
have yet to examine. These gods, being
intimately connected with each year’s crop,
especially with crops of cereals, pulses,
and other annual grains, were naturally
put to death at the beginning of each
agricultural year, and as a rule about the
period of the spring equinox—say at
Easter. Starting from that analogy, as I
believe, many races thought it fit that the
other divine person, the man-god king,
should also be put to death annually, often
about the same period. And I will even
venture to suggest the possibility that the
institution of annual consuls, archons, etc.,
may have something to do with such
annual sacrifices. Certainly the legends of
Codrus at Athens and of the Regifugium
at Rome seem to point to an anci&üt kingslaying custom.
At any rate, it is now certain that the
putting to death of a public man-god was
a common incident of many religions.
And it is also clear that in many cases
travellers and other observers have made
serious mistakes by not understanding the
inner nature of such god-slaying practices.
For instance, it is now pretty certain that
Captain Cook was killed by the people of
Tahiti just because he was a god, perhaps
in order to keep his spirit among them. It
is likewise clear that many rites, commonly
interpreted as human sacrifices to a god,
are really god-slayings; often the god in
one of his human avatars seems to be
offered to himself, in his more permanent
embodiment as an idol or stone image.
This idea of sacrificing a god, himself to
himself, is one which will frequently meet
us hereafter ; and I need hardly point out
that, as “ the sacrifice of the mass,” it has
even enshrined itself in the central sanc
tuary of the Christian religion.
Christianity apparently took its rise
among a group of irregular northern
Israelites, the Galilaeans, separated from
the mass of their co-religionists, the Jews,
by the intervention of a heretical and
doubtfully Israelitish wedge, the Samari
tans. The earliest believers in Jesus were
thus intermediate between Jews and
Syrians. According to their own tradition,
they were first described by the name of
Christians at Antioch ; and they appear on
many grounds to have attracted attention
first in Syria in general, and particularly at
Damascus. We may be sure, therefore,
that their tenets from the first would
contain many elements more or less dis
tinctly Syrian, and especially such elements
as formed ideas held in common by almost
all the surrounding peoples. As a matter
of fact, Christianity, as we shall see here
after, may be regarded historically as a
magma of the most fundamental religious
ideas of the Mediterranean basin, and
�THE MANUFACTURE OF GODS
especially of the eastern Mediterranean,
grafted on to the J ewish cult and the J ewish
scriptures, and clustering round the person
ality of the man-god, J esus. 11 is interesting,
therefore, to note that in Syria and the north
Semitic area the principal cult was the cult
of just such a slain man-god, Adonis—
originally, as Mr. Frazer shows, an annually
slain man-god, afterwards put to death and
bewailed in effigy, after a fashion of which
we shall see not a few examples in the
sequel, and of which the Mass itself is but
an etherealised survival. Similarly in Phry
gia, where Christianity early made a
considerable impression, the most devoutly
worshipped among the gods was Attis, who,
as Professor Ramsay suggests, was almost
certainly embodied in early times as an
annually slain man-god, and whose cult was
always carried on by means of a divine
king priest, bearing himself the name of
Attis. Though in later days the priest did
not actually immolate himself every year,
yet on the yearly feast of the god, at the
spring equinox (corresponding to the
Christian Easter), he drew blood from his
own arms, as a substitute no doubt for the
earlier practice of self-slaughter. And I
may add in this connection (to anticipate
once more) that in all such god-slaughtering
rites immense importance was always
attached to the blood of the man-god; just as
in Christianity “the blood of Christ” remains
to the end of most saving efficacy. Both
Adonis and Attis were conceived as young
men in the prime of life, like the victims
chosen for other god-slaying rites.
I have dealt in this chapter only in very
brief summary with this vast and interesting
question of human deities. Mr. Frazer has
devoted to it two large and fascinating
volumes. His work is filled with endless
facts as to such man-gods themselves, the
mode of their vicarious or expiatory slaugh
ter on behalf of the community, the gentler
substitution of condemned criminals for the
divine kings in more civilised countries, the
occasional mitigation whereby the divine
king merely draws his own blood instead of
killing himself, or where an effigy is made
to take the place of the actual victim, and
so forth ad infinitum. All these valuable
suggestions and ideas I could not reproduce
here without transcribing in full many pages
of The Golden Bough, where Mr. Frazer has
marshalled the entire evidence on the point
with surprising effectiveness.
9i
CHAPTER XII.
THE MANUFACTURE OF GODS
Normally and originally, I believe, all
gods grow spontaneously. They evolve by
degrees out of dead and deified ancestors or
chieftains. The household gods are the
dead of the family ; the greater gods are
the dead chiefs of the state or town or
village. But upon this earlier and sponta
neous crop of gods there supervenes later
an artificial crop, deliberately manufactured.
The importance of this later artificial class
is so great, especially in connection with
the gods of agriculture, and with the habit
of eating the god’s body as corn and drink
ing his blood as wine, that it becomes
necessary for us here to examine their
nature in due order. We shall find that
some knowledge of them is needed pre
liminary to the comprehension of the
Christian system.
We saw that in West Africa the belief in
another world is so matter-of-fact and
material that a chief who wishes to com
municate with his dead father kills a slave
as a messenger, after first impressing upon
him the nature of the message he will have
to deliver. A Khond desired to be avenged
upon an enemy ; so he cut off the head of
his mother, who cheerfully suggested this
domestic arrangement, in order that her
ghost might haunt and terrify the offender.
Similar plenitude of belief in the actuality
and nearness of the Other World makes
attendants, wives, and even friends of a
dead man, in many countries, volunteer to
kill themselves at his funeral, in order that
they may accompany their lord and master
to the nether realms. All these examples
combine to show us two things : first, that
the other life is very real and close to the
people who behave so ; and, second, that
no great unwillingness habitually exists to
migration from this life to the next, if occa
sion demands it.
Starting with such ideas, it is not surpris
ing that many races should have delibe
rately made for themselves gods by killing
a man, and especially a man of divine or
kingly blood, the embodiment of a god, in
order that his spirit might perform some
specific divine function. Nor is it even
remarkable that the victim selected for
such a purpose should voluntarily submit
to death, often preceded by violent torture,
so as to attain in the end to a position of
�92
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
trust and importance as a tutelary deity.
We have only to remember the ease with
which Mohammedan fanatics will face
death, expecting to enjoy the pleasures of
Paradise, or the fervour with which Chris
tian believers used to embrace the crown of
martyrdom, in order to convince ourselves
of the reality and profundity of such a
sentiment. The further back we go in
time or culture, the stronger does the
sentiment in question become ; it is only
the civilised and sceptical thinker who
hesitates to exchange the solid comforts of
this world for the shadowy and uncertain
delights of the next
The existence of such artificially-manu
factured gods has been more or less recog
nised for some time past, and attention has
been called to one or other class of them
by Mi. Baring Gould and Mr. J. G. Frazer;
but 1 believe the present work will be the
first in which their profound importance
and their place in the genesis of the higher
religions have been fully pointed out in
systematic detail.
The best known instances of such delibe
rate god-making are those which refer to
the foundation of cities, city walls, and
houses. In such cases, a human victim is
often sacrificed in order that his blood may
be used as cement, and his soul be built in
to the very stones of the fabric. Thereafter
he becomes the tutelary deity or “fortune”
of the house or city. In many cases, the
victim offers himself voluntarily for the pur
pose ; frequently he is of kingly or divine
ancestry. In Polynesia, where we usually
stand nearest to the very core of religion,
Ellis heard that the central pillar of the
temple at Mseva was planted upon the body
of a human victim. Among the Dyaks of
Borneo a slave girl was crushed to death
under the first post of a house. In October,
1881, the king of Ashanti put fifty girls to
death that their blood might be mixed with
the mud used in the repair of the royal
buildings. Even in Japan, a couple of
centuries since, when a great wall was to be
built, “ some wretched slave would offer
himself as a foundation.” Observe in this
instance the important fact that the immo
lation was purely voluntary. Mr. Tylor, it
is true, treats most of these cases as though
the victim were intended to appease the
earth-demons, which is the natural inter
pretation for the elder school of thinkers to
put upon such ceremonies ; but those who
have read Mr. Frazer and Mr. Baring Gould
will know that the offering is really a piece
of deliberate god-making. Many of the
original witnesses, indeed, correctly report
this intention on the part of the perpetra
tors ; thus Mason was told by an eye
witness that at the building of the new city
of Tavoy in Tennasserim “ a criminal was
put in each post-hole to become a protect
ing demon,” or rather deity. So in Siam,
when a new city gate was being erected,
says Mr. Speth, officers seized the first four
or eight people who passed, and buried
them under it “ as guardian angels.” And
in Roumania a stahic is defined as “ the
ghost of a person who haa been immured
in the walls of a building in order to make
it more solid.” The Irish Banshee is doubt
less of similar origin.
Other curious examples are reported from
Africa, and human victims are said to have
been buried “ for spirit-watchers ” under the
gates of Mandelay. So, too, according to
legend, here a tolerably safe guide, a queen
was drowned in a Burmese reservoir, to
make the dyke safe ; while the choice for
such a purpose of a royal victim shows
clearly the desirability of divine blood being
present in the body of the future deity.
When Rajah Sala Byne was building the
fort of Sialkot in the Punjaub, the founda
tion gave way so often that he consulted a
soothsayer. The soothsayer advised that
the blood of an only son should be shed on
the spot; and the only son of a widow was
accordingly killed there. I may add that
the blood of “ an only-begotten son ” has
always been held to possess peculiar effi
cacy.
In Europe itself not a few traces survive
of such foundation-gods, or spirits of towns,
town-walls, and houses. The Picts are said
to have bathed their foundation-stones in
human blood. St. Columba himself, though
nominally a Christian, did not scruple thus
to secure the safety of his monastery.
“ Columbkille said to his people, ‘ It would
he well for us that our roots should pass
into the earth here.’ And he said to them,
‘ It is permitted to you that some one of
you go under the earth to consecrate it.’ ”
St. Oran volunteered to accept the task,
and was ever after honoured as the patron
saint of the monastery. Here again it may
be noted that the offering was voluntary.
As late as 1463, when the broken dam of
the Nogat had to be repaired, the peasants,
being advised to throw in a living man, are
said to have made a beggar drunk (in
which state he would of course be “full of
the god”) and utilised him for the purpose.
In 1885, on the restoration of Holsworthy
church in Devon, a skeleton with a mass
�THE MANUFACTURE OF GODS
of mortar plastered over the mouth was
found imbedded in an angle of the
building. To make the castle of Liebenstein fast and impregnable, a child was
bought for hard money of its mother, and
walled into the building. Again, when the
church at Blex in Oldenburg was being
built, the authorities of the village crossed
the Weser, “ bought a child from a poor
mother at Bremerleke, and built it alive
into the foundations.” We shall see here
after that “ to be brought with a price ” is
a variant, as it were, on the voluntary
offering; great stress is often laid, when a
victim is offered, on this particular fact,
which is held to absolve the perpetrators
from the crime of god murder. So, we
shall see in the sequel, the divine animal
victim, which is the god offered to himself,
his animal embodiment to his image or
altar, must always consent to its own
sacrifice ; if it refuse or show the slightest
disinclination, it is no good victim. Legend
says that the child in the case of the
Liebenstein offering was beguiled with a
cake, probably so as to make it a con
senting party, and was slowly walled up
before the eyes of the mother. All these
details are full of incidental instructiveness
and importance.
As late as 1865,
according to Mr. Speth, some Christian
labourers, working at a block-house at
Duga, near Scutari, found two young
Christian children in the hands of Moham
medan Arnauts, who were trying to bury
them alive under the block-house.
It is about city walls that we oftenest
read such legendary stories. Thus the
wall of Copenhagen sank as fast as it was
built ; so they took an innocent little girl,
and set her at a table with toys and
eatables. Then, while she played and
eat, twelve master masons closed a vault
over her. In Italy the bridge of Arta fell
in, time after time, till they walled in the
master builder’s wife ; the last point being
a significant detail, whose meaning will
come out still more clearly in the sequel.
At Scutari in Servia, once more, the fortress
could only be satisfactorily built after a
human victim was walled into it; so the
three brothers who wrought at it decided
to offer up the first of their wives who
came to the place to bring them food.
(Compare the case of Jephtha’s daughter,
where the first living thing met by chance
is to be sacrificed to Jahweh.) So, too, in
Welsh legend, Vortigern could not finish
his tower till the foundation-stone was
wetted with “ the blood of a child born of
$3
a mother without a father ”—this episode
of the virgin-born infant being a common
element in the generation of man-gods, as
Mr. Sidney Hartland has abundantly
proved for us.
In one case cited above we saw a miti
gation of the primitive custom, in that a
criminal was substituted for a person of
royal blood or divine origin—a form of
substitution of which Mr. Frazer has
supplied abundant examples in other con
nections.
Still further mitigations are
those of building-in a person who has
committed sacrilege or broken some reli
gious vow of chastity. In the museum at
Algiers is a plaster cast of the mould left
by the body of one Geronimo, a Moorish
Christian (and therefore a recusant of
Islam), who was built into a block of
concrete in the angle of the fort in the
sixteenth century. Faithless nuns were so
immured in Europe during the middle
ages; and Mr. Rider Haggard’s statement
that he saw in the museum at Mexico
bodies similarly immured by the Inquisition
has roused so much Catholic wrath and
denial that one can hardly have any hesi
tation in accepting its substantial accuracy.
But in other cases the substitution has
gone further still ; instead of criminals,
recusants, or heretics, we get an animal
victim in place of the human one. Mr.
St. John saw a chicken sacrificed for a slave
girl at a building among the Dyaks of
Borneo. A lamb was walled-in under the
altar of a church in Denmark, to make it
stand fast; or the churchyard was han
selled by burying first a live horse—an
obvious parallel to the case of St. Oran.
When the parish church of Chumleigh in
Devonshire was taken down a few years
ago, in a wall of the fifteenth century was
found a carved figure of Christ, crucified
to a vine—a form of substitution to which
we shall find several equivalents later. In
modern Greece, says Dr. Tylor, to whom
I owe many of these instances, a relic of
the idea survives in the belief that the first
passer-by after a foundation-stone is laid
will die within the year; so the masons
compromise the matter by killing a cock
or a black lamb on the foundation-stone.
This animal then becomes the spirit of
the building.
We shall see reason to suspect, as we
proceed, that every slaughtered victim in
every rite was at first a divine-human
being ; and that animal victims are always
substitutes, though supposed to be equally
divine with the man-god they personate.
�94
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
I will ask the reader to look out for such
cases as we proceed, and also to notice,
even when I do not call attention to them,
the destination of the oracular head, and
the frequent accompaniment of “ clanging
music.”
Elsewhere we find other customs which
help to explain these curious survivals.
The shadow is often identified with the
soul; and in Roumania, when a new build
ing is to be erected, the masons endeavour
to catch the shadow of a passing stranger,
and then lay the foundation-stone upon it.
Or the stranger is enticed by stealth to
the stone, when the mason secretly
measures his body or his shadow, and
buries the measure thus taken under the
foundation. Here we have a survival of
the idea that the victim must at least be
not unwilling. It is believed that the
person thus measured will languish and
die within forty days ; and we may be sure
that originally the belief ran that his soul
became the god or guardian spirit of the
edifice. If the Bulgarians cannot get a
human shadow to wall in, they content
themselves with the shadow of the first
animal that passes by. Here again we get
that form of divine chance in the pointing
out of a victim which is seen in the case of
Jephtha’s daughter. Still milder substitu
tions occur in the empty coffin walled into
a church in Germany, or the rude images
of babies in swaddling-clothes similarly
immured in Holland. The last trace of
the custom is found in England in the
modern practice of putting coins and
newspapers under the foundation-stone.
Here it would seem as if the victim were
regarded as a sacrifice to the Earth (a late
and derivative idea), and the coins were
a money payment in lieu of the human
or animal offering. I owe many of the
cases here instanced to the careful re
search of my friend Mr. Clodd. But
since this chapter was written all other
treatises on the subject have been super
seded by Mr. Speth’s exhaustive and
scholarly pamphlet on “ Builders’ Rites
and Ceremonies,” a few examples from
which I have intercalated in my argument.
Other implications must be briefly
treated. The best ghost or god for this
purpose seems to be a divine or kingly
person; and in stages when the meaning
of the practice is still quite clear to the
builders, the dearly-beloved -son or wife of
the king is often selected for the honour of
tutelary godship. Later this notion passes
into the sacrifice of the child or wife of the
master mason ; many legends or traditions
contain this more recent element. In
Vortigern’s case, however, the child is
clearly a divine being, as we shall see to
be true a little later on in certain Semitic
instances. To the last, the connection of
children with such sacrifices is most
marked; thus, when in 1813 the ice on the
Elbe broke down one of the dams, an old
peasant sneered at the efforts of the
Government engineer, saying to him,
“ You will never get the dyke to hold un
less you first sink an irinbcent child under
the foundations.” Here the very epithet
“ innocent” in itself reveals some last echo
of godship. So too, in 1843, when a new
bridge was to be built at Halle in Germany,
the people told the architects that the pier
would not stand unless a living child was
immured under the foundations. Schrader
says that, when the great railway bridge
over the Ganges was begun, every mother
in Bengal trembled for her infant. The
Slavonic chiefs who founded Detinez “sent
out men to catch the first boy they met and
bury him in the foundation.” Here once
more we have the sacred-chance victim.
Briefly I would say there seems to be a
preference in all such cases for children,
and especially for girls ; of kingly stock, if
possible, but at least a near relation of the
master builder.
Mr. Speth points out that horses’ heads
were frequently fastened on churches or
other buildings, and suggests that they
belong to animal foundation-victims. This
use of the skull is in strict accordance with
its usual oracular destination.
Some notable historical or mythical tales
of town and village gods, deliberately
manufactured, may now be considered.
We read in First Kings that when Hiel the
Bethelite built Jericho “he laid the foun
dation thereof in Abiram his first-born, and
set up the gates thereof in his youngest
Segub.” Here we see evidently a princely
master builder sacrificing his own two sons
as guardian gods of his new city. Abun
dant traces exist of such deliberate pro
duction of a Fortune for a town. And it is
also probable that the original sacrifice was
repeated annually, as if to keep up the con
stant stream of divine life, somewhat after
the fashion of the human gods we had to
consider in the last chapter. Dido appears
to have been the Fortune or foundation
goddess of Carthage ; she is represented
in the legend as the foundress-queen, and
is said to have lept into her divine pyre
from the walls of her palace. But the
�THE MANUFACTURE OF GODS
annual human sacrifice appears to have
been performed at the same place ; for “ it
can hardly be doubted,” says Professor
Robertson Smith, “ that the spot at which
legend placed the self-sacrifice of Dido to
her husband Sicharbas was that at which
the later Carthaginian human sacrifices
were performed.” At Laodicea, again, an
annual sacrifice took place of a deer, in lieu
of a maiden ; and this sacrifice, we are
expressly told, was offered to the goddess
of the city. Legend said that the goddess
was a maiden, who had been similarly
sacrificed to consecrate the foundation of
the town, and was thenceforth worshipped
as its Fortune, like Dido at Carthage; “it
was therefore the death of the goddess her
self,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “ that
was annually renewed in the piacular rite.”
(I do not admit the justice of the epithet
“piacular.”) Again, Malalas tells us that
the 22nd of May was kept at Antioch as the
anniversary of a maiden sacrificed at the
foundation of the city, and worshipped
thereafter as the Tyche, or luck, of the
town. At Duma in Arabia an annual
victim was similarly buried under the stone
which formed the altar.
In most of the legends, as they come
down to us from civilised and lettered
antiquity, the true nature of this sanguinary
foundation-rite is over-laid and disguised
by later rationalising guesses ; and I may
mention that Dr. Robertson Smith in par
ticular habitually treats the rationalising
guesses as primitive, and the real old
tradition of the slaughtered virgin as a myth
of explanation of “ the later Euhemeristic
Syrians.” But, after the examples we have
already seen of foundation-gods, I think it
can hardly be doubted that this is to
reverse the true order; that a girl was
really sacrificed for a tutelary deity when a
town was founded, and that the substitution
of an animal victim at the annual renewal
was a later refinement. Mr. Speth quotes
a case in point of a popular tradition that a
young girl had been built into the castle of
Nieder-Manderschied ; and when the wall
was opened in 1844 the Euhemeristic work
men found a cavity enclosing a human
skeleton. I would suggest, again, that in
the original legend of the foundation of
Rome, Romulus was represented as having
built-in his brother Remus as a Fortune, or
god, of the city, and that to this identifica
tion of Remus with the city we ought to
trace such phrases as turba Remi for the
Roman people. The word forum, in its
primitive signification, means the empty
95
space left before a tomb—the Ilan or
Hence I would suggest that the
Roman Forum and other Latin fora were
really the tomb-enclosures of the original
foundation-victims.1 So, too, the English
village-green and “ play-field ” are probably
the space dedicated to the tribal or village
god—a slain man-god ; and they are usually
connected with the sacred stone and sacred
tree. I trust this point will become clearer
as we proceed, and develop the whole
theory of the foundation god or goddess,
the allied sacred stone and the tree or trunk
memorial.
For, if I am right, the entire primitive
ritual of the foundation of a village con
sisted in killing or burying alive or building
into the wall a human victim, as town or
village god, and raising a stone and plant
ing a tree close by to commemorate him.
At these two monuments the village rites
were thereafter performed. The stone and
tree are thus found in their usual conjunc
tion ; both coexist in the Indian village to
the present day, as in the Siberian wood
land or the Slavonic forest. Thus, at Rome,
we have not only the legend of the death of
Remus, a prince of the blood-royal of Alba
Longa, intimately connected with the build
ing of the wall of Roma Quadrata, but we
have also the sacred fig-tree of Romulus in
the Forum, which was regarded as the em
bodiment of the city life of the combined
Rome, so that, when it showed signs of
withering, consternation spread through
the city ; and hard by we have the sacred
stone or Palladium, guarded by the sacred
Vestal Virgins who kept the city hearth
fire, and still more closely bound up with
the fortune of that secondary Rome which
had its home in the Forum. Are not these
three the triple form of the foundation-god
of that united Capitoline and Palatine
Rome ? And may not the sacred cornel on
the Palatine, again, have been similarly
the holy foundation-tree of that older Roma
Quadrata which is more particularly asso
ciated with the name of Romulus ? Of this
tree Plutarch tells us that, when it appeared
to a passer-by to be drooping, he set up a
hue and cry, which was soon responded to
by people on all sides rushing up with
buckets of water to pour upon it, as if they
were hastening to put out a fire. Clearly,
here again we have to deal with an em
bodied Fortune.
temenos.
1 In the case of Rome, the Forum would re
present the grave of the later foundation-god of
the compound Latin and Sabine city.
�96
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
We do not often get all three of these
Fortunes combined—the human victim, the
stone, and the tree, with the annual offer
ing which renews its sanctity. But we find
traces so often of one or other of the trio
that we are justified, I think, in connecting
them together as parts of a whole, whereof
here one element survives, and there
another. “Among all primitive communi
ties,” says Mr. Gomme, “ when a village
was first established, a stone was set up.
To this stone the headman of the village
made an offering once a year.” To the
present day London preserves her founda
tion-god in the shape of London Stone,
now enclosed in a railing or iron grill just
opposite Cannon - street Station. Now,
London Stone was for ages considered as
the representative and embodiment of the
entire community. Proclamations and other
important State businesses were announced
from its top; and the defendant in trials in
the Lord Mayor’s court was summoned to
attend from London Stone, as though the
stone itself spoke to the wrong-doer with
the united voice of the assembled citizens.
The first Lord Mayor, indeed, was Henry
de Lundonstone—no doubt, as Mr. Loftie
suggests, the hereditary keeper of this
urban fetish ; in short, the representative
of the village headman. I have written at
greater length on the implications of this
interesting relic in an article on London
Stone in Longman's Magazine, to which I
would refer the reader for further informa
tion. I will only add here the curious epi
sode of Jack Cade, who, when he forced
his way, under his assumed name of Morti
mer, into the city in 1450, first of all pro
ceeded to this sacred relic, the embodiment
or palladium of ancient London, and, having
struck it with his sword, exclaimed, “Now is
Mortimer lord of this city.”
A similar sacred stone exists to this day
at Bovey Tracey in Devon, of which Ormerod tells us that the mayor of Bovey used
to ride round it on the first day of his
tenure of office, and strike it with a stick—
which further explains Jack Cade’s-pro
ceeding. According to the Totnes Times
of May 13th, 1882, the young men of the
town were compelled on the same day to
kiss the magic stone and pledge allegiance
in upholding the ancient rites and privi
leges of Bovey. (I owe these details to
Mr. Lawrence Gomme’s Village Commu
nity.') I do not think we can dissociate
from these two cases the other sacred
stones of Britain, such as the King’s Stone
at Kingston in Surrey, where several of the
West Saxon kings were crowned ; nor the
Scone Stone in the coronation-chair at
Westminster Abbey; nor the Stone of
Clackmannan, and the sacred stones
already mentioned in a previous chapter
on which the heads of clans or of Irish septs
succeeded to the chieftainship of their re
spective families. These may in part have
been ancestral and sepulchral monuments;
but it is probable that they also partook in
part of this artificia^and factitious sanctity.
Certainly in some cases that sanctity was
renewed by an animal sacrifice.
With these fairly obvious instances I
would also connect certain other statements
which seem to me to have been hitherto
misinterpreted. Thus Mesha, king of
Moab, when he is close beleaguered, burns
his son as a holocaust on the wall of the
city. Is not this an offering to protect the
wall by the deliberate manufacture of an
additional deity? For straightway the be
siegers seem to feel they are overpowered,
and the siege is raised. Observe here once
more that it is the king’s own dearly-beloved
son who is chosen as victim. Again, at
Amathus, human sacrifices were offeied
to Jupiter Hospes “ before the gates ”; and
this Jupiter Hospes, as Ovid calls him, is
the Amathusian Herakles or Malika, whose
name, preserved for us by Hesychius,
identifies him at once as a local deity
similar to the Tyrian Melcarth. Was not
this again, therefore, the Fortune of the
city? At Tyre itself the sepulchre of
Herakles Melcarth was shown, where he
was said to have been cremated. For
among cremating peoples it was natural to
burn, not slaughter, the yearly god-victim.
At Tarsus, once more, there was an annual
feast, at which a very fair pyre was erected,
and the local Herakles or Baal was burned
on it in effigy. We cannot doubt, I think,
that this was a mitigation of an earlier
human holocaust. Indeed, Dr. Robertson
Smith says of this instance : “ This annual
commemoration of the death of the god in
fire must have its origin in an older rite, in
which the victim was not a mere effigy,
but a theanthropic sacrifice—i.e., an actual
man or sacred animal, whose life, according
to the antique conception now familiar to
us, was an embodiment of the divine-human
life.” This is very near my own view on
the subject.
From these instances we may proceed, I
think, to a more curious set, whose implica
tions seem to me to have been even more
grievously mistaken by later interpreters.
I mean the case of children of kings or of
�THE MANUFACTURE OF GODS
ruling families, sacrificed in time of war or
peril as additional or auxiliary deities.
Thus Philo of Byblos says : “ It was an
ancient custom in a crisis of great danger
that the ruler of a city or nation should
give his beloved son to die for the whole
people, as a ransom offered to the avenging
demons ; and the children thus offered
were slain with mystic rites. So Cronus,
whom the Phoenicians call Israel, being
king of the land, and having an onlybegotten son called Jeoud (for in the
Phoenician tongue Jeoud signifies onlybegotten), dressed him in royal robes and
sacrificed him upon an altar in a time of war,
when the country was in great danger from
the enemy.” I do not think Philo is right
in his gloss or guess about the avenging
demons”; but otherwise his story is inte
resting evidence. It helps us more or less
directly to connect the common Phoenician
and Hebrew child-sacrifices with this
deliberate manufacture of artificial gods.
I do not doubt, indeed, that the children
were partly sacrificed to pre-existent and
well-defined great gods; but I believe also
that the practice first arose as one of
deliberate manufacture of gods, and
retained to the end many traces of its
origin.
We know that in times of national
calamity the Phoenicians used thus to
sacrifice their dearest to Baal. Phoenician
history, we know from Porphyry, is full of
such sacrifices. When the Carthaginians
were defeated and besieged by Agathocles,
they ascribed their disasters to the anger
of the god ; for whereas in former times
they used to sacrifice to him their own
children, they had latterly fallen (as we
shall see hereafter the Khonds did) into
the habit of buying children and rearing
them as victims. So two hundred young
people of the noblest families were picked
out for sacrifice ; and these were accom
panied by no less than three hundred
more, who volunteered to die for the
fatherland. They were sacrificed by being
placed, one by one, on the sloping hands
of the brazen image, from which they
rolled into a pit of fire. So too at
Jerusalem, in moments of great danger,
children were sacrificed to some Molech,
whether Jahweh or another, by being
placed in the fiery arms of the image at
the Tophet/ I will admit that in these last
cases we approach very near to the mere
piacular human sacrifice ; but we shall see,
when we come to deal with gods of
cultivation and the doctrine of the atone
97
ment, that it is difficult to draw a line
between the two ; while the fact that a
dearly-beloved or only-begotten son is the
victim—especially the son of a king of
divine blood—links such cases on directly
to the more obvious instances of deliberate
god-making. Some such voluntary sacrifice
seems to me to be commemorated in the
beautiful imagery of the 53rd of Isaiah.
But there the language is distinctly
piacular.
I have dwelt here mainly on that
particular form of artificial god-making
which is concerned with the foundation of
houses, villages, cities, walls, and fortresses,
because this is the commonest and most
striking case, outside agriculture, and
because it is specially connected with the
world-wide institution of the village or city
god. But other types occur in abundance ;
and to them a few lines must now be
devoted.
When a ship was launched, it was a
common practice to provide her with a
guardian spirit or god by making her roll
over the body of a human victim. The
Norwegian vikings used to “redden their
rollers ” with human blood. That is to say,
when a warship was launched, human
victims were lashed to the round logs over
which the galley was run down to the sea,
so that the stem was sprinkled with their
spurting blood. Thus the victim was in
corporated, as it were, in the very planks
of the vessel. Captain Cook found the
South Sea Islanders similarly christening
their war-canoes with blood. In 1784, says
Mr. William Simpson, at the launching of
one of the Bey of Tripoli’s cruisers, “ a
black slave was led forward and fastened
at the prow of the vessel to influence a
happy reception in the ocean.” And Mr.
Speth quotes a newspaper account of the
sacrifice of a sheep when the first caique
for “ Constantinople at Olympia ” was
launched in the Bosphorus. In many
other cases it is noted that a victim, human
or animal, is slaughtered at the launching
of a ship. Our own ceremony of breaking
a bottle of wine over the bows is the last
relic of this barbarous practice. Here as
elsewhere red wine does duty for blood, in
virtue of its colour. I do not doubt that
the images of gods in the bow of a ship
were originally idols in which the spirits
thus liberated might dwell, and that it was
to them the sailors prayed for assistance in
storm or peril. The god was bound up in
the very fabric of the vessel. The modern
figure-head still represents these gods;
H
�98
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
figure-heads essentially similar to the
domestic idols occur in New Zealand and
Polynesian war-canoes. The canoes of the
Solomon Islanders, for example, “ often
have as figure-head a carved representation
of the upper half of a man, who holds in
his hands a human head.” This head,
known as the “ canoe-god ” or “ charm,”
“ represents the life taken when the canoe
was first used.” A canoe of importance
“ required a life for its inauguration,” says
Dr. Codrington.
Another curious instance is to be found
in the customs and beliefs regarding river
gods. Rivers, I have suggested, are often
divine because they spring near or are con
nected with the grave of a hero. But often
their divinity has been deliberately given
them, and is annually renewed by a god
making sacrifice: just as at the Jewish
Passover an annual animal-victim was
slain, and his blood smeared on the lintels,
as a renewal of the foundation sacrifice.
The best instance I have found of this
curious custom is one cited by Mr. Gomme
from Major Ellis. Along the banks of the
Prah in West Africa there are many deities,
all bearing the common name of Prah, and
all regarded as spirits of the river. At each
town or considerable village along the
stream a sacrifice is held on a day about
the middle of October. The usual sacrifice
was two human adults, one male and one
female. The inhabitants of each village
believe in a separate spirit of the Prah, who
resides in some part of the river close to
their own hamlet. Everywhere along the
river the priests of these gods officiate in
groups of three, two male and one female—
an arrangement which is peculiar to the
river gods. Here, unless I mistake, we
have an obvious case of deliberate god
making.
This savage instance, and others like it,
which space precludes me from detailing,
suggest the conclusion that many river gods
are of artificial origin. The Wohhanda in
Esthonia received offerings of little children,
whom we may fairly compare with the
children immured in buildings or offered to
the Molech. Many other rivers sponta
neously take their victim annually ■ thus the
Devonshire rhyme goes—■
River of Dart, river of Dart,
Every year thou claimest a heart.
The Spey also takes one life each year, and
so do several British rivers elsewhere.
Originally, no doubt, the victim was delibe
rately chosen and slain annually; but
later on, as a mitigation of the custom, the
river itself seems to have selected its own
spirit by divine chance, such as we have
already seen in action more than once in
the earlier cases. In other words, if a
passer-by happened to be accidentally
drowned, he was accepted in place of a
deliberate victim.1 Hence the danger of
rescuing a man from drowning ; you inter
fere with the course of divine selection, and
you will pay for it yourself by being the
next victim. “ When, in the Solomon
Islands, a man accidentally falls into a
river, and a shark attacks him, he is not
allowed to escape. If he succeeds in eluding
the shark, his fellow-tribesmen throw him
back to his doom, believing him to be
marked out for sacrifice to the god of the
river.” Similarly, in Britain itself, the Lan
cashire Ribble has a water-spirit called Peg
o’ Nell, represented by a stone image, now
headless, which stands at the spring where
the river rises in the grounds of Waddon.
(Compare the Adonis tomb and grove by
the spring at Aphaca.) This Peg o’ Nell
was originally, according to tradition, a girl
of the neighbourhood; but she was done
to death by incantations, and now demands
every seven years that a life should be
quenched in the waters of the Ribble.
When “ Peg’s night ” came round at the
close of the septennate, unless a bird, a cat,
or a dog was drowned in the river, it was
sure to claim its human victim. This name
of Peg is evidently a corruption of some
old local Celtic or pre-Celtic word for a
nymph or water-spirit; for there is another
Peg in the Tees, known as Peg Powler;
and children used there to be warned
against playing on the banks of the stream,
for fear Peg should drag them into the
water. Such traces of a child sacrifice are
extremely significant.
I cannot do more than suggest here in
passing that we have in these stories and
practices the most probable origin of the
common myth which accounts for the exist
ence of river gods or river nymphs by
some episode of a youth or maiden drowned
there. Arethusa is the example that occurs
to everyone.
I do not deny that in many of these
cases two distinct ideas—the earlier idea
1 Here is an analogue in foundation sacrifices.
A house was being built at Hind Head while
this book was in progress. A workman fell from
a beam and was killed. The other workmen
declared this was Zzz<Zr for the house, and would
ensure its stability.
�THE MANUFACTURE OF GODS
of the victim as future god, and the later
idea of the victim as prey or sacrifice—have
got inextricably mixed up ; but I do think
enough has been said to suggest the
probability that many river-gods _ are
artificially produced, and that this is in
large part the origin of nymphs and
kelpies. Legend, indeed, almost always
represents them so ; it is only our mythologists, with their blind hatred of
Euhemerism, who fail to perceive the
obvious implication. And that even the
accidental victim was often envisaged as a
river-god, after his death, we see clearly
from the Bohemian custom of going to
pray on the river bank where a man has
been drowned, and casting into the river a
loaf of new bread and a pair of wax candles
—obvious offerings to his spirit.
Many other classes of manufactured gods
seem to me to exist, whose existence I
must here pass over almost in silence.
Such are the gods produced at the
beginning of a war, by human or other
sacrifice ; gods intended to aid the warriors
in their coming enterprise by being set
free from fleshly bonds for that very
purpose. Thus, according to Phylarchus,
a human sacrifice was at one time cus
tomary in Greece at the beginning of
hostilities ; and we know that as late as
the age of Themistocles three captives
were thus offered up before the battle of
Salamis. The sacrifice of Iphigenia is a
good legendary case in point, because it is
one of a virgin, a princess, the daughter of
the leader, and therefore a typical release
of a divine or royal spirit. Here, as usual,
later philosophising represents the act as
an expiation for mortal guilt; but we may
be sure the original story contained no
such ethical or piacular element. Among
the early Hebrews the summons to a war
seems similarly to have been made by
sending round pieces of the human victim;
in later Hebrew usage this rite declines
into the sacrifice of a burnt offering;
though we get an intermediate stage when
Saul sends round portions of a slaughtered
ox, as the Levite in Judges had sent round
the severed limbs of his concubine to rouse
the Israelites. In Africa a war is still
opened with a solemn sacrifice, human or
otherwise ; and Mr. H. O. Forbes gives a
graphic account of the similar ceremony
which precedes an expedition in the island
of Timor.
In conclusion, I will only say that a
great many other obscure rites or doubtful
legends seem to me explicable by similar
99
deliberate exercises of god-making. How
common such sacrifice was in agricultural
relations we shall see in the sequel; but 1
believe that even in other fields of life
future research will so explain many other
customs. The self-immolation of Codrus,
of Sardanapalus, of P. Decius Mus, as of
so many other kings or heroes or gods or
goddesses ; the divine beings who fling
themselves from cliffs into the sea ; M.
Curtius devoting himself in the gulf in the.
Forum ; the tombs of the lovers whom.
Semiramis buried alive : all these, I takeit, have more or less similar implications.
Even such tales as that of T. Manlius
Torquatus and his son must be assimilated,
I think, to the story of the king of Moab
killing his son on the wall, or to that of the
Carthaginians offering up their children to
the offended deity ; only, in later times, the ■
tale was misinterpreted and used to point
the supposed moral of the stern and
inflexible old Roman discipline.
Frequent reiteration of sacrifices seems
necessary, also, in order to keep up the
sanctity of images and sacred rites—toput, as it were, a new soul into. them.
Thus, rivers needed a fresh river-god every
year; and recently in Ashantee it wasdiscovered that a fetish would no longer
“ work ” unless human victims were
abundantly immolated for it.
This is also perhaps the proper place to
observe that just as the great god Baal has
been resolved by modern scholarship into
many local Baalim, and just as the great
god Adonis has been reduced by recent
research in each case to some particular
Adon or lord out of many, so each such
separate deity, artificially manufactured,
though called by the common name of the
Prah or the Tiber, yet retains to the last
some distinct identity. In fact, the great
gods appear to be rather classes than
individuals. That there were many
Nymphs and many Fauni, many Silvani
and many Martes, has long been known ;
it is beginning to be clear that there were
also many Saturns, many Jupiters, many
Junones, many Vestae. Even in Greece it
is more than probable that the generalised
names of the great gods were given in
later ages to various old sacred stones
and holy sites of diverse origin : the real
object of worship was in each case the
spontaneous or artificial god ; the name
was but a general title applied in common,
perhaps adjectivally, to several such
separate deities. In the Roman pan
theon this principle is now quite well
�IOO
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
established ; in the Semitic it is probable ;
in most others the progress of modern re
search is gradually leading up to it. Even
the elemental gods themselves do not
seem in their first origin to be really singu
lar ; they grow, apparently, from general
ised phrases, like our “ Heaven ” and
“ Providence,” applied at first to the par
ticular deity of whom at the moment the
speaker is thinking. The Zeus or Jupiter
varies with the locality. Thus, when the
Latin praetor, at the outbreak of the Latin
war, defied the Roman Jupiter, we may be
sure it was the actual god there visible
before him at whom he hurled his sacri
legious challenge, not the ideal deity in
the sky above his head. Indeed, we know
that each village and each farm had a
Jovis of its own, regarded as essentially a
god of wine, and specially worshipped at
the wine-feast in April, when the first cask
was broached. This individuality of the
gods is an important point to bear in
mind ; for the tendency of language is
always to treat many similar deities as
practically identical, especially in late and
etherealised forms of religion. And mythologists have made the most of this
syncretic tendency.
A single concrete instance will help to
make this general principle yet clearer.
Boundaries, I believe, were originally put
under the charge of local and artificial
deities, by slaughtering a human victim at
each turning-point in the limits, and erect
ing a sacred stone on the spot where he
died to preserve his memory. Often, too,
in accordance with the common rule, a
sacred tree seems to have been planted
beside the sacred stone monument. Each
such victim became forthwith a boundary
god, a protecting and watching spirit, and
was known thenceforth as a Hermes or a
Terminus. But there were many Hernias
and many Termini, not in Greece and
Italy alone, but throughout the world.
Only much later did a generalised god,
Hermes or Terminus, arise from the union
into a single abstract concept of all these
separate and individual deities. Once
more the boundary god was renewed each
year by a fresh victim. Our own practice
of “ beating the bounds ” appears to be
the last expiring relic of such annual sacri
fices. The bounds are beaten, apparently,
in order to expel all foreign gods or hostile
spirits ; the boys who play a large part in
the ceremony are the representatives of
the human victims. They are whipped at
each terminus stone, partly in order to
make them shed tears as a rain-charm
(after the fashion with which Mr. Frazer
has made us familiar), but partly also
because all artificially-made gods are
scourged or tortured before being put to
death, for some reason which I do not
think we yet fully understand. The
rationalising gloss that the boys are
whipped “ in order to make them re
member the boundaries ” is one of the
usual shallow explanations so glibly offered
by the eighteenth century. The fact that
the ceremony takes place at sacred stones
or “ Gospel oaks ” sufficiently proclaims its
original meaning.
The point of view of the god-slayers
cannot be more graphically put than in the
story which Mr. William Simpson relates of
Sir Richard Burton. Burton, it seems, was
exploring a remote Mohammedan region on
the Indian frontier, and in order to do so
with greater freedom and ease had dis
guised himself as a fakir of Islam. So
great was his knowledge of Muslim devo
tions that the people soon began to enter
tain a great respect for him as a most holy
person. He was congratulating himself
upon the success of his disguise, and look
ing forward to a considerable stay in the
valley, when one night one of the elders of
the village came to him stealthily, and
begged him, if he valued his own safety, to
go away. Burton asked whether the people
did not like him. The elder answered, yes ;
that was the root of the trouble. They had
conceived, in fact, the highest possible
opinion of his exceptional sanctity, and
they thought it would be an excellent thing
for the village to possess the tomb of so
holy a man. So they were casting about
now how they could best kill him. Whether
this particular story is true or not, it at least
exhibits in very vivid colours the state of
mind of the ordinary god-slayer.
CHAPTER XIII.
GODS OF CULTIVATION
By far the most interesting in the curious
group of artificially-made gods are those
which are sacrificed in connection with agri
culture. These deities appeal to us from
several points of view. In the first place,
they form, among agricultural races as a
whole, the most important and venerated
�GODS OF CULTIVATION
objects of worship. In the second place, it
is largely through their influence or on their
analogy, as I believe, that so many other
artificial gods came to be renewed or sacri
ficed annually. In the third place, it is the
gods of agriculture who are most of all
slain sacramentally, whose bodies are eaten
by their votaries in the shape of cakes of
' bread or other foodstuffs, and whose blood
is drunk in the form of wine. The imme
diate connection of these sacramental cere
monies with the sacrifice of the mass, and
the identification of the Christ with bread
and wine, give to this branch of our inquiry
a peculiar importance from the point of view
of the evolution of Christianity. We must,
therefore, enter at some little length into the
genesis of these peculiar and departmental
gods, who stand so directly in the mainline
of evolution of the central divine figure in
the Christian religion.
All over the world, wherever cultivation
exists, a special class of corn-gods or grain
gods is found, deities of the chief foodstuff
—be it maize, or dates, or plantain, or rice
—and it is a common feature of all these
gods that they are represented by human
or quasi-human victims, who are annually
slain at the time of sowing. These human
gods are believed to reappear once more in
the form of the crop that rises from their
sacred bodies; their death and resurrec
tion are celebrated in festivals ; and they
are eaten and drunk sacramentally by their
votaries, in the shape of first-fruits, or of
cakes and wine, or of some other embodi
ment of the divine being. We have, there
fore, to inquire into the origin of this curious
superstition, which involves, as it seems to
me, the very origin of cultivation itself as a
human custom. And I must accordingly
bespeak my readers’ indulgence if I diverge
for a while into what may seem at first a
purely botanical digression.
Most people must have been struck by
the paradox of cultivation. A particular
plant in a state of nature, let us say, grows
and thrives only in water, or in some
exceedingly moist and damp situation.
You take up this waterside plant with a
trowel one day, and transfer it inconti
nently to a dry bed in a sun-baked garden;
when lo! the moisture-loving creature,
instead of withering and dying, as one
might naturally expect of it, begins to grow
apace, and to thrive to all appearance even
better and more lustily than in its native
habitat. Or you remove some parched
desert weed from its arid rock to a moist and
rainy climate ; and instead of dwindling,
IOI
as one imagines it ought to do under the
altered conditions, it spreads abroad in the
deep rich mould of a shrubbery bed, and
attains a stature impossible to its kind
in its original surroundings. Our gardens,
in fact, show us side by side plants which,
in the wild state, demand the most varied
and dissimilar habitats. Siberian squills
blossom amicably in the same bed with
Italian tulips; the alpine saxifrage spreads
its purple rosettes in friendly rivalry with
the bog-loving marsh-marigold or the dry
Spanish iris. The question, therefore,
sooner or later occurs to the inquiring
mind : How can they all live together so
well here in man’s domain, when in the
outside world each demands and exacts so
extremely different and specialised a situa
tion?
Of course it is only an inexperienced
biologist who could long be puzzled by this
apparent paradox. He must soon see the
true solution of the riddle, if he has read
and digested the teachings of Darwin.
For the real fact is, in a garden or out of it,
most of these plants could get on very well
in a great variety of climates or situations
—if only they were protected against out
side competition. There we have the
actual crux of the problem. It is not that
the moisture-loving plants cannot live in
dry situations, but that the dry-loving
plants, specialised and adapted for the
post, can compete with them there at an
immense advantage, and so, in a very short
time, live them down altogether. Every
species in a state of nature is cpntinually
exposed to the ceaseless competition of
every other; and each on its own ground
can beat its competitors. But in a garden,
the very thing we aim at is just to restrict
and prevent competition; to give each
species a fair chance for life, even in condi
tions where other and better-adapted spe
cies can usually outlive it. This, in fact, isreally at bottom all that we ever mean by a
garden—a space of ground cleared, and
kept clear, of its natural vegetation (com
monly called in this connection 'weeds}, and
deliberately stocked with other plants, most
or all of which the weeds would live down
if not artificially prevented.
We see the truth of this point of view the
moment the garden is, as we say, aban
doned^—that is to say, left once more to the
operation of unaided nature. The plants
with which we have stocked it loiter on for
a while in a feeble and uncertain fashion,
but are ultimately choked out by the
stronger and better-adapted weeds which
�132
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
compose the natural vegetation of the
locality. The dock and nettle live down
in time the larkspur and the peony. The
essential thing in the garden is, in short,
the clearing of the ground from the weeds
—that is, in other words, from the native
vegetation. A few minor things may or
may not be added, such as manuring, turn
ing the soil, protecting with shelter, and so
forth ; but the clearing is itself the one
thing needful.
Slight as this point seems at first sight, I
believe it includes the whole secret of the
origin of tillage, and therefore, by implica
tion, of the gods of agriculture. For,
looked at in essence, cultivation is weeding,
and weeding is cultivation. When we say
that a certain race cultivates a certain plant-staple, we mean no more in the last resort
than that it sows or sets it in soil artificially
cleared of competing species. Sowing
without clearing is absolutely useless. So
the question of the origin of cultivation
resolves itself at last simply into this—how
did certain men come first to know that by
clearing ground of weeds and keeping it
clear of them they could promote the
growth of certain desirable human food
stuffs ?
To begin with, it may be as well to pre
mise that the problem of the origin of culti
vation is a far more complex one than
appears at first sight. For we have not
only to ask, as might seem to the inquirer
unaccustomed to such investigations, “How
did the early savage first find out that seeds
would grow better when planted in open
soil, already freed from weeds or natural
competitors ?” but also the other and far
more difficult question, “ How did the early
savage ever find out that plants would grow
from seeds at all ?” That, I take it, is the
real riddle of the situation, and it is one
which, so far as I know, has hitherto
escaped all inquirers into the history and
origin of human progress.
Fully to grasp the profound nature of this
difficulty we must throw ourselves back
mentally into the condition and position of
primitive man. We ourselves have known
so long and so familiarly the fact that plants
grow from seeds—that the seed is the
essential reproductive part of the vegetable
organism—that we find it hard to unthink
that piece of commonplace knowledge, and
to realise that what to us is an almost selfevident truth is to the primitive savage a
long and difficult inference. Our own
common and certain acquaintance with the
fact, indeed, is entirely derived from the
practice of agriculture. We have seen
seeds sown from our earliest childhood.
But before agriculture grew up, the con
nection between seed and seedling could
not possibly be known or even suspected
by primitive man. That the seed is the
reproductive part of the plant was a fact as
little likely in itself to strike him as that
the stamens were the male organs, or that
the leaves were the assimilative and diges
tive surfaces. He could only have found
out that plants grew from seeds by the ex
perimental process of sowing and growing
them. Such an experiment he was far from
likely ever to try for its own sake. He
must have been led to it by some other and
accidental coincidence.
Now, what was primitive man likely to
know and observe about the plants around
him ? Primarily one thing only : that some
of them were edible, and some were not.
There you have a distinction of immediate
interest to all humanity. And what parts
of plants were most likely to be useful to
him in this respect as foodstuffs ? Those
parts which the plant had specially filled up
with rich material for its own use or the
use of its offspring. The first are the roots,
stocks, bulbs, corms, or tubers in which it
lays by foodstuffs for its future growth ; the
second are the seeds which it produces and
enriches in order to continue its kind to
succeeding generations.
Primitive man, then, knows the fruits,
seeds, and tubers, just as the squirrel, the
monkey, and the parrot know them, as so
much good foodstuff, suitable to his pur
pose. But why should he ever dream of
saving or preserving some of these fruits or
seeds, when he has found them, and of
burying them in the soil, on the bare offchance that by pure magic, as it were, they
might give rise to others? No idea could
be more foreign to the nature and habits of
early man. In the first place, he is far
from provident; his way is to eat up at
once what he has killed or picked ; and, in
the second place, how could he ever come
to conceive that seeds buried in the ground
could possibly produce more seeds in
future? Nay, even if he did know it—
which is well-nigh impossible—would he
be likely, feckless creature that he is, to
save or spare a handful of seeds to-day in
order that other seeds might spring from
their burial-place in another twelvemonth ?
The savage, when he has killed a deer or a
game-bird, does not bury a part of it or an
egg of it in the ground, in the expectation
that it will grow into more deer or more
�GODS OF CULTIVATION
bird hereafter. Why, then, should he,
when he has picked a peck of fruits or wild
cereals, bury some of them in the ground,
and expect a harvest? Was there ever
any way in which primitive man could have
blundered blindfold upon a knowledge of
the truth, and could have discovered inci
dentally to some other function of his life
the two essential facts that plants grow
from seeds, and that the growth and supply
of useful food-plants can be artificially
increased by burying or sowing such seeds
in ground cleared of weeds—that is to say,
of the natural competing vegetation ?
I believe there is one way, and one way
only, in which primitive man was at all
likely to become familiar with these facts.
I shall try to show that all the operations
of primitive agriculture very forcibly point
to this strange and almost magical origin
of cultivation; that all savage agriculture
retains to the last many traces of its origin;
and that the sowing of the seed itself is
hardly considered so important and essen
tial a part of the complex process as certain
purely superstitious and bloodthirsty prac
tices that long accompany it. In one word,
not to keep the reader in doubt any longer,
I am inclined to believe that cultivation
and the sowing of seeds for crops had their
beginning as an adjunct of the primitive
burial system.
The one set of functions in which primi
tive men do actually perform all the essen
tial acts of agriculture, without in the least
intending it, is the almost universal act of
the burial of the dead. Burial is, so far as
I can see, the only object for which early
races, or low savages, ever turn or dig the
ground. We have seen already that the
original idea of burial was to confine the
ghost or corpse of the dead man by putting
a weight of earth on top of him ; and lest
this should be insufficient to keep him from
troublesome reappearances, a big stone was
frequently rolled above his mound or tumu
lus, which is the origin of all our monu
ments, now diverted to the honour and
commemoration of the deceased. But the
point to which I wish just now to direct
attention is this—that in the act of burial,
and in that act alone, we get a first be
ginning of turning the soil, exposing fresh
earth, and so incidentally eradicating the
weeds. We have here, in short, the first
necessary prelude to the evolution of agri
culture.
The next step, of course, must be the
sowing of the seed. And here, I venture
to think, funeral customs supply us with
103
the only conceivable way in which such
sowing could ever have begun. For early
men would certainly not waste the precious
seeds which it took them so much time and
trouble to collect from the wild plants
around them, in mere experiments on vege
table development. But we have seen that
it is the custom of all savages to offer at the
tombs of their ancestors, food and drink of
the same kind as they themselves are in the
habit of using. Now, with people in the
hunting stage, such offerings would no doubt
most frequently consist of meat, the flesh of
the hunted beasts or game-birds ; but they
would also include fish, fruits, seeds, tubers,
and berries, and in particular such rich
grains as those of the native pulses and
cereals. Evidence of such things being
offered at the graves of the dead has been
collected in such abundance by Dr. Tylor,
Mr. Frazer, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, that
I need not here adduce any examples of so
familiar a practice.
What must be the obvious result? Here,
and here alone, the savage quite uncon
sciously sows seeds upon newly-turned
ground, deprived of its weeds, and further
manured by the blood and meat of the fre
quent sacrificial offerings. These seeds
must often spring up and grow apace, with
a rapidity and luxuriance which cannot fail
to strike the imagination of the primitive
hunter. Especially will this be the case
with that class of plants which ultimately
develop into the food-crops of civilised
society. For the peculiarity of these plants
is that they are one and all—maize, corn, or
rice, pease, beans, or millet—annuals of
rapid growth and portentous stature:
plants which have thriven in the struggle
for existence by laying up large stores of
utilisable material in their seeds for the use
of the seedling; and this peculiarity
enables them to start in life in each genera
tion exceptionally well endowed, and so to
compete at an advantage with all their
fellows. Seeds of such a sort would thrive
exceedingly in the newly-turned and wellmanured soil of a grave or barrow; and,
producing there a quantity of rich and
edible grain, would certainly attract the
attention of that practical and observant
man, the savage. For, though he is so
incurious about what are non-essentials,
your savage is a peculiarly long-headed
person about all that concerns his own
immediate advantage.
What conclusion would at once be forced
upon him ? That seeds planted in freshlyturned and richly-manured soil produce
�104
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
threefold and fourfold? Nothing of the
sort. He knows naught of seeds and
manures and soils ; he would at once con
clude, after his kind, that the dreaded and
powerful ghost in the barrow, pleased with
the gifts of meat and seeds offered to him,
had repaid those gifts in kind by returning
grain for grain a hundredfold out of his
own body. This original connection of
ideas seems to me fully to explain that
curious identification of the ghost or spirit
with the corn or other foodstuff which Mr.
Frazer has so wonderfully and conclusively
elaborated in The Golden Bough.
Just at first, under such circumstances,
the savage would no doubt be content
merely to pick and eat the seeds that thus
grew casually, as it were, on the graves or
barrows of his kings and kinsfolk. But in
process of time it would almost certainly
come about that the area of cultivation
would be widened somewhat. The first
step towards such widening, I take it, would
arise from the observation that cereals and
other seeds only throve exceptionally upon
newly-made graves, not on graves in
general. For, as soon as the natural
vegetation reasserted itself, the quickening
power of the ghost would seem to be used
up. Thus it might be found well to keep
fresh ghosts always going for agricultural
purposes. Hence might gradually arise a
habit of making a new grave annually, at
the most favourable sowing-time, which
last would come to be recognised by half
unconscious experiment and observation.
And this new grave, as I shall show reason
for believing a little later, would be the
grave, not of a person who happened to
die then and there accidentally, but of a
deliberate victim, slain in order to provide
a spirit of vegetation—an artificial god—
and to make the corn grow with vigour
and luxuriance. Step by step, I believe, it
would at length be discovered that, if only
you dug wide enough, the corn would grow
well around as well as upon the actual
grave of the divine victim. Thus slowly
there would develop the cultivated field,
the wider clearing, dug up or laboured by
hand, and finally the ploughed field, which
yet remains a grave in theory and in all
essentials.
I have ventured to give this long and
apparently unessential preamble, because
I wish to make it clear that the manufac
tured or artificial god of the corn-field or
other cultivated plot really dates back to
the very origin of cultivation. Without a
god, there would be no corn-field at all ;
and the corn-field, I believe, is long con
ceived merely as the embodiment of his
vegetative spirit. Nay, the tilled field is
often at our own day, and even in our own
country, a grave in theory.
It is a mere commonplace at the present
time to say that among early men and
savages every act of life has a sacred
significance ; and agriculture especially is
everywhere and always invested with a
special sanctity. To us, it would seem
natural that the act of sowing seed should
be regarded as purely practical and
physiological; that the seed should be
looked upon merely as the part of the
plant intended for reproduction, and that
its germination should be accepted as a
natural and normal process. Savages and
early men, however, have no such concep
tions. To them the whole thing is a piece
of natural magic ; you sow seeds, or, to be
more accurate, you bury certain grains of
foodstuff in the freshly-turned soil, with
certain magical rites and ceremonies ; and
then, after the lapse of a certain time,
plants begin to grow upon this soil, from
which you finally obtain a crop of maize or
wheat or barley. The burial of the seeds
or grains is only one part of the magical
cycle, no more necessarily important for the
realisation of the desired end than many
others.
And what are the other magical acts
necessary in order that grain-bearing plants
may grow upon the soil prepared for their
reception? Mr. Frazer has collected abun
dant evidence for answering that question,
a small part of which I shall recapitulate
here. At the same time I should like
it to be clearly understood that Mr. Frazer
is personally in no way responsible for the
use I here make ofhis admirable materials.
All the world over, savages and semi
civilised people are in the habit of sacrificing
human victims, whose bodies are buried in
the field with the seed of corn or other breadstuffs. Often enough the victim’s blood is
mixed with the grain in order to fertilise it.
The most famous instance is that of the
Khonds of Orissa, who chose special victims,
known as Meriahs, and offered them up to
ensure good harvests. The Meriah was
often kept years before being sacrificed.
He was regarded as a consecrated being,
and treated with extreme affection, mingled
with deference. A Meriah youth, on reach
ing manhood, was given a wife who was
herself a Meriah ; their offspring were all
brought up as victims. “ The periodical
sacrifices,” says Mr. Frazer, “were generally
�GODS OF CULTIVATION
so arranged by tribes and divisions of tribes
that each head of a family was enabled, at
least once a year, to procure a shred of flesh
for his fields, generally about the time when
his chief crop was laid down.” On the day
of the sacrifice, which was horrible beyond
description in its details, the body was cut
1o pieces, and the flesh hacked from it was
instantly taken home by the persons whom
each village had deputed to bring it. On
arriving at its destination, it was divided by
the priest into two portions, one of which
he buried in a hole in the ground, with his
back turned and without looking at it. Then
each man in the village added a little earth
to cover it, and the priest poured water over
the mimic tumulus. The other portion of
the flesh the priest divided into as many
shares as there were heads of houses present.
Each head of a house buried his shred in
his own field, placing it in the earth behind
his back without looking. The other
remains of the human victim—the head,
the bones, and the intestines —were burned
on a funeral-pile, and the ashes were
scattered over the fields, or mixed with the
new corn to preserve it from injury. Every
one of these details should be carefully
noted.
Now, in this case, it is quite clear to me
that every field is regarded as essentially a
grave ; portions of the divine victim are
buried in it; his ashes are mixed with the seed;
and from the ground thus treated he springs
again in the form of corn, or rice, or turmeric.
These customs, as Mr. Frazer rightly notes,
“ imply that to the body of the Meriah there
was ascribed a direct or intrinsic power of
making the crops to grow.” More than
that, it seems to me that the seed itself is
not regarded as sufficient to produce a crop:
it is the seed buried in the sacred grave with
the divine flesh which germinates at last
into next year’s foodstuffs.
A few other points must be noticed about
this essential case, which is one of the most
typical instances of manufactured godhead.
The Meriah was only satisfactory if he had
been purchased—“bought with a price,”
like the children who were built as founda
tion-gods into walls ; or else was the child
of a previous Meriah—in other words, was
of divine stock by descent and inheritance.
Khonds in distress often sold their children
as Meriahs, “ considering the beatification ”
(apotheosis, I would rather say) “of their
souls certain, and their death, for the
benefit of mankind, the most honourable
possible.” This sense of the sacrifice as a
case of “ one man dying for the people ” is
105
most marked in our accounts, and is espe
cially interesting from its analogy to Chris
tian reasoning. A man of the Panud tribe
was once known to upbraid a Khondbecause
he had sold for a Meriah his daughter
whom the Panud wished to marry; the
Khonds around at once comforted the in
sulted father, exclaiming, “ Your child died
that all the world may live.” Here and
elsewhere we have the additional idea of a
piacular value attached to the sacrifice,
about which more must be said in a subse
quent chapter. The death of the Meriah
was supposed to ensure not only good crops,
but also “immunity from all disease and
accident.” The Khonds shouted in his
dying ear, “ We bought you with a price ;
no sin rests with us.” It is also worthy of
notice that the victim was anointed with oil
—a point which recalls the very name of
Christus. Once more, the victim might not
be bound or make any show of resistance ;
but the bones of his arms and his legs were
often broken to render struggling impos
sible. Sometimes, however, he was stupe
fied with opium, one of the ordinary features
in the manufacture of gods, as we have
already seen, being such preliminary stupe
faction. Among the various ways in which
the Meriah was slain I would particularly
specify the mode of execution by squeezing
him to death in the cleft of a tree. I men
tion these points here, though they some
what interrupt the general course of our
argument, because of their great impor
tance as antecedents of the Christian theory.
In fact, I believe the Christian legend to
have been mainly constructed out of the
details of such early god-making sacrifices ;
I hold that Christ is essentially one such
artificial god ; and I trust the reader will
carefully observe for himself as we proceed
how many small details (such as the
breaking of the bones) recall in many
ways the incidents of the passion and the
crucifixion.
The Khonds, however, have somewhat
etherealised the conception of artificial god
making by allowing one victim to do for
many fields together. Other savages are
more prodigal of divine crop-raisers. The
Indians of Guayaquil, in South America,
used to sacrifice human blood and the
hearts of men when they sowed their fields.
The ancient Mexicans, conceiving the maize
as a personal being who went through the
whole course of life between seed-time and
harvest, sacrificed new-born babes when
the maize was sown, older children when it
had sprouted, and so on till it was fully ripe,
�io6
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
when they sacrificed old men. The Paw
nees annually sacrificed a human victim in
spring, when they sowed their fields. They
thought that an omission of this sacrifice
would be followed by the total failure of the
crops of maize, beans, and pumpkins. In
the account of one such sacrifice of a girl
in 1837 or 1838, we are told : “While her
flesh was still warm, it was cut in small
pieces from the bones, put in little baskets,
and taken to a neighbouring corn-field.
Here the head chief took a piece of the
flesh from a basket, and squeezed a drop of
blood upon the newly-deposited grains of
corn. His example was followed by the
rest, till all the seed had been sprinkled
with the blood ; it was then covered up with
earth.”
In West Africa a tribal queen used to
sacrifice a man and woman in the month of
March. They were killed with spades and
hoes, and their bodies buried in the middle
of a field which had just been tilled. At
Lagos, in Guinea, it was the custom annually
to impale a young girl alive soon after the
spring equinox in order to secure good
crops. A similar sacrifice is still annually
offered at Benin. The Marimos, a Bechuana tribe, sacrifice a human being for
the crops. The victim chosen is generally
a short stout man. He is seized by violence
or intoxicated (note that detail) and taken
to the fields, where he is killed among the
wheat “ to serve as seed.” After his blood
has coagulated in the sun, it is burned;
the ashes are then scattered over the
ground to fertilise it.
In India, once more, the Gonds, like the
Khonds, kidnapped Brahman boys, and
kept them as victims to be sacrificed on
various occasions. At sowing and reaping,
after a triumphal procession, one of the
lads was killed by being punctured with a
poisoned arrow. His blood was then
sprinkled over the ploughed field or the
ripe crop, and his flesh was sacramentally
devoured. The last point again will call at
a later stage for further examination.
I will detail no more such instances (out
of the thousands that exist) for fear of
seeming tedious. But the interpretation I
put upon the facts is this. Originally, men
noticed that food-plants grew abundantly
from the laboured and well-manured soil
of graves. They observed that this rich
ness sprang from a coincidence of three
factors—digging, a sacred dead body, and
seeds of foodstuffs. In time, they noted
that, if you dug wide enough and scattered
seed far enough, a single corpse was
capable of fertilising a considerable area.
The grave grew into the field or garden.
But they still thought it necessary to bury
some one in the field ; and most of the
evidence shows that they regarded this
victim as a divine personage; that they
considered him the main source of growth
or fertility ; and that they endeavoured to
deserve his favour by treating him well
during the greater part of his lifetime. For
in many of the accounts it is expressly
stated that the intended victim was treated
as a god or as a divine king, and was sup
plied with every sort of luxury up to the
moment of his immolation. In process of
time, the conception of the field as differing
from the grave grew more defined, and the
large part borne by seed in the procedure
was more fully recognised. Even so, how
ever, nobody dreamed of sowing the seed
alone without the body of a victim. Both
grain and flesh or blood came to be re
garded alike as “ seed ” : that is to say, the
concurrence of the two was considered
necessary to produce the desired effect of
germination and fertility. Till a very late
period, either the actual sacrifice or some
vague remnant of it remained as an essen
tial part of cultivation. From Mr. Frazer’s
work and from other sources, I will give a
few instances of these last dying relics of
the primitive superstition.
Mr. Gomme, in his Ethnology in Folklore,
supplies an account of a singular village
festival in Southern India. In this feast, a
priest, known as the Potraj, and especially
armed with a divine whip, like the scourge
of Osiris, sacrifices a sacred buffalo, which
is turned loose when a calf, and allowed to
feed and roam about the village. In that
case, we have the common substitution of
an animal for a human victim, which
almost always accompanies advancing
civilisation. At the high festival the head
of the buffalo was struck off at a single
blow, and placed in front of the shrine of
the village goddess. Around wrere placed
vessels containing the different cereals, and
hard -by a heap of mixed grains with a
drill-plough in the centre. The carcase
was then cut up into sfnall pieces, and each
cultivator received a portion to bury in his
field. The heap of grain was finally divided
among all the cultivators, to be buried by
each one in his field with the bit of flesh.
At last, the head, that very sacred part,
was buried before a little temple, sacred to
the goddess of boundaries. The goddess
is represented by a shapeless stone—no
doubt a Terminus, or rather the tombstone
�GODS OF CULTIVATION
of an artificial goddess, a girl buried under
an ancient boundary-mark. Here we have
evidently a last stage of the same ritual
which in the case of the Khonds was per
formed with a human victim. It is worth
while noting that, as part of this ceremony,
a struggle took place for portions of the
victim.
A still more attenuated form of the same
ceremony is mentioned by Captain Hark
ness and others, as occurring among the
Badagas of the Nilgiri Hills. Among these
barbarians the first furrow is ploughed by
a low-caste Kurrumbar, who gives his bene
diction to the field, without which there
would be no harvest. Here the member
of the aboriginal race is clearly looked upon
as a priest or kinsman of the local gods,
whose co-operation must be obtained by
later intrusive races. But the Kurrumbar
does not merely bless the field ; he also
sets up a stone in its midst; and then, pros
trating himself before the stone, he sacri
fices a goat, the head of which he keeps as
his perquisite. This peculiar value of the
oracular head retained by the priest is also
significant. When harvest-time comes the
same Kurrumbar is summoned once more,
in order that he may reap the first handful
of corn—an episode the full importance of
which will only be apparent to those who
have read Mr. Frazer’s analysis of harvest
customs. But in this case also the appear
ance of the sacred stone is pregnant with
meaning. We can hardly resist the infer
ence that we have here to do with the
animal substitute for a human sacrifice of
the god-making order, in which the victim
was slaughtered, a stone set up to mark the
site of the sacrifice, and the head preserved
as a god to give oracles, in the fashion
with which we are already familiar.
Here is a striking example from Mr.
Gomme’s Ethnology in Folklore, the ana
logy of which with preceding instances will
at once be apparent:—
“ At the village of Holne, situated on one
of the spurs of Dartmoor, is a field of about
two acres, the property of the parish, and
called the Ploy Field.' In the centre of
this field stands a granite pillar (Menhir)
six or seven feet high. On May-morning,
before day-break, the young men of the
village used to assemble there, and then
proceed to the moor, where they selected
a ram lamb, and, after running it down,
brought it in triumph to the Ploy Field,
fastened it to the pillar, cut its throat, and
then roasted it whole, skin, wool, etc. At
midday a struggle took place, at the risk
107
of cut hands, for a slice, it being supposed
to confer luck for the ensuing year on the
fortunate devourer. As an act of gallantry
the young men sometimes fought their way
through the crowd to get a slice for the
chosen among the young women, all of
whom, in their best dresses, attended the
Ram Feast, as it was called. Dancing,
wrestling, and other games, assisted by
copious libations of cider during the after
noon, prolonged the festivity till mid
night.”
Here again we get several interesting
features of the primitive ritual preserved
for us. The connection with the stone
which enshrines the original village deity is
perfectly clear. This stone no doubt repre
sents the place where the local foundation
god was slain in very remote ages ; and it
is therefore the proper place for the annual
renewal sacrifices to be offered. The selec
tion of May-morning for the rite; the ■
slaughter at the stone pillar ; the roasting
of the beast whole ; the struggle for the
pieces ; and the idea that they would con
fer luck, all show survival of primitive
feeling. So does the cider, sacramental
intoxication being an integral part of all
these proceedings. Every detail, indeed,
has its meaning for those who look close ;
for the struggle at midday is itself signifi
cant, as is also the prolongation of the feast
till midnight. But we miss the burial of
the pieces in the fields ; in so far, the primi
tive object of the rite seems to have been
forgotten or overlooked in Devonshire.
Very closely bound up with the artificial
gods of cultivation are the terminal gods
with whom I dealt in the last chapter ; so
closely that it is sometimes impossible to
separate them. We have already seen
some instances of this connection ; the pro
cession of the sacred victim usually ends
with a perlustration of the boundaries. This ■
perlustration is often preceded by the head.
of the theanthropic victim. Such a cere
mony extends all over India; in France
and other European countries it survives in
the shape of the rite known as Blessing the
Fields, where the priest plays the same part
as is played among the Nilgiri hillsmen by
the low-caste Kurrumbar. In this rite the
Host is carried round the bounds of the
parish, as the head of the sacred buffalo is
carried round at the Indian festival. In
some cases every field is separately visited.
I was told as a boy in Normandy that a
portion of the Host (stolen or concealed, I
imagine) was sometimes buried in each
field ; but of this curious detail I can now
�io8
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
obtain no confirmatory evidence, and I do
not insist upon it. We must remember,
however, that the Host is the body of
Christ, and that its presence in such cases
is the exact analogue of the carrying round
the pieces of the Meriah. In England the
ceremony merges into that of Beating the
Bounds, already described; though I
believe the significance of the boy-victims,
and the necessity for whipping them as a
rain-charm, will now be more apparent
than when we last met with it.
In many cases, all the world over,
various animals come to replace the human
victim-god. Thus we learn from Festus
that the Romans sacrificed red-haired
puppies in spring, in the belief that the
crops would thus grow ripe and ruddy;
and there can be little doubt that these
puppies, like the lamb sacrificed at Holne,
were a substitute for an original human
victim. Even so, the Egyptians, as we
shall see, sacrificed red-haired men as the
representatives of Osiris, envisaged as a
corn-god. In some cases, indeed, we have
historical evidence of the human god being
^replaced at recent dates by a divine animal
victim ; for example, in Chinna Kimedy,
. after the British had suppressed human
- sacrifices, a goat took the place of the
• -sacred Meriah.
Mannhardt has collected much evidence
- 'of the curious customs still (or lately)
■ existing in modern Europe, which look like
■ survivals in a very mitigated form of the
• same superstition. These are generally
. known by the name of “ Carrying out
Death,” or “ Burying the Carnival.” They
. are practised in almost every country of
JEurope, and relics of them survive even in
^England. The essence of these cerei ^monies consists in an effigy being substi• ;tuted for the human victim. This effigy is
' treated much as the victim used to be.
' Sometimes it is burned, sometimes thrown
'»into a river, and sometimes buried piecejneal. In Austrian Silesia, for example,
•the effigy is burned, and while it is burning
,a general struggle takes place for the
pieces, which are pulled out of the flames
with bare hands. (Compare the struggle
among the Khonds, and also at the Potraj
festival and the Holne sacrifice.) Each
person who secures a fragment of the
figure ties it to a branch of the largest tree
in his garden, or buries it in his field, in
the belief that this causes the crops to
grow better. Sometimes a sheaf of corn
does duty for the victim, and portions of it
^re buried in each field as fertilisers. In
the Hartz Mountains, at similar ceremonies, .
a living man is laid on a baking-trough
and carried with dirges to a grave ; but a
glass of brandy is substituted for him at
the last moment. Here the spirit is the
equivalent of a god. In other cases the
man is actually covered with straw, and so
lightly buried. In Italy and Spain a
similar custom bore the name of “ Sawing
the Old Woman.” In Palermo a real old
woman was drawn through the streets on
a cart, and made to mount a scaffold,
where two mock executioners proceeded to
saw through a bladder of blood which had
been fitted to her neck. The blood gushed
out, and the old woman pretended to swoon
and die. This is obviously a mitigation of
a human sacrifice. At Florence an effigy
stuffed with walnuts and dried figs repre
sented the Old Woman. At mid-Lent
this figure was sawn through the middle
in the Mercato Nuovo, and when the dried
fruits tumbled out they were scrambled for
by the crowd, as savages scrambled for
fragments of the human victim or his
animal representative.
Upon all this
subject a mass of material has been
collected by Mannhardt and Mr. Frazer.
Perhaps the most interesting case of all is
the Russian ceremony of the Funeral of
Yarilo. In this instance the people chose
an old man and gave him a small coffin
containing a figure representing Yarilo.
This he carried out of the town, followed
by women chanting dirges, as the Syrian
women mourned for Adonis, and the
Egyptians for Osiris. In the open fields a
grave was dug, and into it the figure was
lowered amid weeping and wailing.
Myth and folk-lore also retain many
traces of the primitive connection. Thus,
in the genuine American legend of Hia
watha, the hero wrestles with and van
quishes Mondamin, and w’here he buries
him springs up for the first time the maize,
or Indian-corn plant. Similar episodes
occur in the Finnish Kalevala and other
barbaric epics.
In order to complete our preliminary
survey of these artificial gods of cultivation,
before we proceed to the consideration of
the great corn-gods and wine-gods, it may ;
be well to premise that in theory at least
the original victim seems to have been a
king or chief, himself divine, or else at
least a king’s son or daughter, one of the
divine stock, in whose veins flowed the
blood of the earlier deities. Later on, it
would seem, the temporary king was often
allowed to do duty for the real king ; and
�GODS OF CULTIVATION
for this purpose he seems frequently to
have been clad in royal robes, and treated
with divine and royal honours. Examples
of this complication will crop up in the
sequel. For the present I will only refer
to the interesting set of survivals, collected
by Mr. Gomme, where temporary kings or
mayors in England are annually elected,
apparently for the sake of being sacrificed
only. In many of these cases we get mere
fragmentary portions of the original rite ;
but by piecing them all together we obtain
on the whole a tolerably complete picture
of the original ceremonial observance. At
St. Germans, in Cornwall, the mock mayor
was chosen under the large walnut-tree at
the May-fair; he was made drunk over
night, in order to fit him for office, and was in
that state drawn round the nut-tree, much
as we saw the mayor of Bovey rode round
the Bovey stone on his accession to the
mayoralty. The Mayor of St. Germans
also displayed his royal character by being
mounted on the wain or cart of old Teutonic
and Celtic sovereignty. At Lostwitliiel the
mock mayor was dressed with a crown on
his head, and a sceptre in his hand,
and had a sword borne before him. At
Penrhyn the mayor was preceded by
torch-bearers and town sergeants, and
though he was not actually burnt, either in
play or in effigy, bonfires were lighted, and
fireworks discharged, which connect the
Geremony with such pyre-sacrifices of
cremationists as the festival of the Tyrian
Melcarth and the Baal of Tarsus. On
Halgaver Moor, near Bodmin, a stranger
was arrested, solemnly tried in sport, and
then trained in the mire or otherwise illtreated. At Polperro the mayor was
generally “ some half-witted or drunken
fellow,” in either case, according to early
ideas, divine ; he was treated with ale, and,
“having completed the perambulation of
the town,” was wheeled by his attendants
into the sea. There he was allowed to
scramble out again, as the mock victim
does in many European ceremonies ; but
originally, I do not doubt, he was drowned
as a rain-charm.
These ceremonies, at the time when our
authorities learnt of them, had all degene
rated to the level of mere childish pastimes ;
but they contain in them, none the less,
persistent elements of most tragic signifi
cance, and they point back to hideous and
sanguinary god-making festivals. In most
of them we see still preserved the choice
of the willing or unconscious victim ; the
preference for a stranger, a fool, or an
109
idiot; the habit of intoxicating the chosen
person; the treatment of the victim as
king, mayor, or governor; his scourging or
mocking ; his final death ; and his burning
on a pyre, or his drowning as a rain
charm. All these points are still more
clearly noticeable in the other form of
survival where the king or divine victim
is represented, not by a mock or temporary
king, but by an image or effigy. Such is the
common case of King Carnival, who is at
last burnt in all his regalia, or thrown into
a river.
The general conclusion I would incline
to draw from all these instances is briefly
this. Cultivation probably began with the
accidental sowing of grains upon the tumuli
of the dead. Gradually it was found that,
by extending the dug or tilled area and sow
ing it all over, a crop would grow upon it,
provided always a corpse was buried in the
centre. In process of time divine corpses
were annually provided for the purpose, and
buried with great ceremony in each field.
By-and-bye it was found sufficient to offer
up a single victim for a whole tribe or vil
lage, and to divide his body piecemeal
among the fields of the community. But
the crops that grew in such fields were still
regarded as the direct gifts of the dead and
deified victims, whose soul was supposed to
animate and fertilise them. As cultivation
spread, men became familiarised at last
with the conception of the seed and the
ploughing as the really essential elements
in the process ; but they still continued to
attach to the victim a religious importance,
and to believe in the necessity of his pre
sence for good luck in the harvest. With
the gradual mitigation of savagery an
animal sacrifice was often substituted for
a human one; but the fragments of the
animal were still distributed through the
fields with a mimic or symbolical burial,
just as the fragments of the man-god had
formerly been distributed. Finally, under
the influence of Christianity and other civi
lised religions, an effigy was substituted for
a human victim, though an animal sacrifice
was often retained side by side with it, and
a real human being was playfully killed in
pantomime.
In early stages, however, I note that the
field or garden sometimes reta'ns the form
of a tumulus. Thus Mr. Turner, the
Samoan missionary, writes of the people of
Tana, in the New Hebrides :—
“ They bestow a great deal of labour on
their yam plantations, and keep them in
fine order. You look over a reed fence,
�no
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
and there you see ten or twenty mounds of
earth, some of them seven feet high and
sixty in circumference. These are heaps of
loose earth without a single stone, all
thrown up by the hand. In the centre they
plant one of the largest yams whole, and
round the sides some smaller ones.”
This looks very much like a tumulus in
its temenos. I should greatly like to know
whether a victim is buried in it.
I may add that the idea of the crop being
a gift from the deified ancestor or the
divine-human victim is kept up in the
common habit of offering the first-fruits to
the dead, or to the gods, or to the living
chief, their representative and descendant.
Our own harvest-festival seems to preserve
the offering in a Christianised form.
Finally, I will add that in many cases it
looks as though the divine agriculture
victim were regarded as the king in person,
the embodiment of the village or tribal god,
and were offered up, himself to himself, at
the stone which forms the monument and
altar of the primitive deity. Of this idea
we shall see examples when we go on to
examine the great corn-gods and wine-gods ■
.of the Mediterranean region.
CHAPTER XIV.
CORN- AND WINE-GODS
In advanced communities the agricultural
gods with whom we dealt in the last
chapter come to acquire specific class
names, such as Attis and Adonis ; are
specialised as corn-gods, wine-gods, gods
of the date-palm, or gods of the harvest;
and rise to great distinction in the various
religions.
I propose to examine at some length the
more important of these in the Mediter
ranean civilisations, where Christianity was
first evolved. And I begin with Dionysus.
One of the notable features of the Potraj
festival of southern India, of which I gave
a brief abstract in the previous chapter, is
its orgiastic character. As type of the
orgiastic god-making ceremonies, with
their five-day festival, it well deserves some
fuller description. The feast takes place
near the temple of the village goddess, who
is worshipped in the form of an unshapely
stone, stained red with vermillion, the pro
bable representative of the first human
foundation-victim. An altar was erected
behind this temple to the god who bears
the name of Potraj. He is a deity of culti
vation. The festival itself was under the
charge of the Pariahs, or aboriginal out
casts ; it was attended by all the lowest
classes, including the dancing girls of the
temple and the shepherds or other “non
Aryan ” castes. During the festival these
people took temporarily the first place in
the village ; they appeared to form the
court of the temporary king, and to repre
sent the early local worship, whose gods
the conquering races are afraid of offending.
For since the dead of the conquered race
are in possession of the soil, immigrant
conquerors everywhere have a superstitious
dread of incurring their displeasure. On
the first day of the orgy the low-caste
people chose one of themselves as priest or
Potraj.
On the second day of the feast the
sacred buffalo, already described as having
the character of a theanthropic victim, was
thrown down before the goddess ; its head
was struck off at a single blow, and was
placed in front of the shrine, with one leg
in its mouth. The carcase, as we saw
already, was then cut up, and delivered to
the cultivators to bury in their fields. The
blood and offal were afterwards collected
into a large basket ; and the officiating
priest, a low-caste man, who bore (like the
god) the name of Potraj, taking a live kid,
hewed it in pieces over the mess. The
basket was then placed on the head of a
naked man, of the leather-dresser class,
who ran with it round the circuit of the
village boundaries, scattering the fragments
right and left as he went. The Potraj was
armed with a sacred whip, like Osiris ; and
this whip was itself the object of profound
veneration.
On the third and fourth days many
buffaloes and sheep were slaughtered ; and
on the fourth day women walked naked to
the temple, clad in boughs of trees alone—
a common religious exercise, of which I
have only space here to suggest that St.
Elizabeth of Hungary and the Godiva pro-cession at Coventry are surviving relics.
(These relations have well been elucidated
by Mr. Sidney Hartland.)
On the fifth and last day the whole com
munity marched with music to the village
temple, and offered a concluding sacrifice
at the Potraj altar. A lamb was concealed
close by. The Potraj, having found it after
a pretended search, rendered it insensible
by a blow of his whip, or by mesmeric
�CORN- AND WINE-GODS
passes—a survival of the idea of the volun
tary victim. ■' Then the assistants tied the
Potraj’s hands behind his back, and the
whole party began to dance round him with
orgiastic joy. Potraj joined in the excite
ment, and soon came under the present
influence of the deity. He was led up,
bound, to the place where the lamb lay
motionless. ■ Carried away with divine
frenzy, he rushed at it, seized it with his
teeth, tore through the skin, and eat into
its throat. When it was quite dead, he
was lifted up ; a dishful of the meat-offering
was presented to him ; he thrust his blood
stained face into it, and it was then buried
with the remains of the lamb beside the
altar. After that his arms were untied, and
he fled the place. I may add that as a rule
the slaughterer of the god everywhere has
to fly from the vengeance of his worshippers,
who, after participating in the attack, pre
tend indignation as soon as the sacrifice is
completed.
The rest of the party now adjourned to
the front of the temple, where a heap of
grain deposited on the first day was divided
among all the cultivators, to be sown by
each one in the field with his piece of flesh.
After this, a distribution was made of the
piled-up heads of the buffaloes and sheep
slaughtered on the third and fourth days.
These were evidently considered as sacred
as divine heads generally in all countries
and ages. About forty of the sheeps’ heads
were divided among certain privileged per
sons ; for the remainder a general scramble
took place, men of all castes soon rolling
together on the ground in a mess of putrid
gore. For the buffaloes’ heads, only the
Pariahs contended. Whoever was fortu
nate enough to secure one of either kind
carried it off and buried it in his field. Of
the special importance of the head in all
such sacrifices Mr. Gomme has collected
many apposite examples.
The proceedings were terminated by a
procession round the boundaries : the
burial of the head of the sacred buffalo
close to the shrine of the village goddess ;
and the outbreak of a perfect orgy, a “rule
of misrule,” during which the chief musician
indulged in unbridled abuse of all the
authorities, native or British.
I have given at such length an account
of this singular festival, partly because it
sheds light upon much that has gone
before, but partly also because it helps to
explain many elements in the worship of
the great corn- and wine-gods. One point
of cardinal importance to be noticed here
hi
is that the officiating priest, who was at one
time also both god and victim, is called
Potraj like the deity whom he represents.
So, too, in Phrygia the combined Attisvictim and Attis-priest bore the name of
Attis ; and so in Egypt the annual Osirisoffering bore the name of Osiris, whom he
represented.
If I am right, therefore, in the analogy of
the two feasts, Dionysus was in his origin a
corn-god, and later a vine-god, annually
slain and buried in order that his blood
might fertilise the field or the vineyard. In
the Homeric period he was still a general
god of cultivation : only later did he be
come distinctively the grape-god and wine
deity. There was originally, I believe, a
Dionysus in every village ; and this divine
victim was annually offered, himself to him
self, with orgiastic rites like those of Potraj.
Mr. Laurence Gomme has already in part
pointed out this equation of the Hellenic
and the Indian custom. The earliest form
of Dionysus-worship, on this hypothesis,
would be the one which survived in Chios
and Tenedos, where a living human being
was orgiastically torn to pieces at the feast
of Dionysus. At Orchomenus the human
victim was by custom a woman of the
family of the Oleiae (so that there were
women Dionysi): at the annual festival
the priest of Dionysus pursued these women
with a drawn sword, and if he caught one
he had the right to slay her. (This is the
sacred-chance victim.) In other places
the ceremony had been altered in historical
times ; thus at Potniae, in Bceotia, it was
once the custom to slay a child as Dionysus;
but later on a goat, which was identified
with the god, was substituted for the origi
nal human victim. The equivalence of the
animal victim with the human god is shown
by the fact that at Tenedos the new-born
calf sacrificed to Dionysus—or as Dionysus
—was shod in buskins, while the mother
cow was tended like a woman in childbed.
Elsewhere we find other orgiastic rites
still more closely resembling the Indian
pattern. Among the Cretans a Dionysus
was sacrificed biennially under the form of
a bull; and the worshippers tore the living
animal to pieces wildly with their teeth.
Indeed, says Mr. Frazer, the rending and
devouring of live bulls and calves seems to
have been a regular feature of the Dionysiac rites. In some cities, again, the animal
that took the place of the human victim
was a kid. When the followers of Diony
sus tore in pieces a live goat and drank its
blood, they believed they were devouring
�112
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
the actual body and blood of the god. This
eating and drinking the god is an important
point.
I do not desire to dwell too long upon
any one deity, or rather class of deities ;
therefore I will say briefly here that when
Dionysus became the annual or biennial
vine-god victim, it was inevitable that his
worshippers should have seen his resurrec
tion and embodiment in the vine, and
should have regarded the wine it yielded
as the blood of the god. In this case the
identification was particularly natural, for
could not every worshipper feel the god in
the wine? and did not the divine spirit
within it inspire and intoxicate him ? To
be “ full of the god ” was the natural ex
pression for the resulting exhilaration : the
cult of the wine-spirit is thus one of those
which stands on the surest and most inti
mate personal basis.
The death and resurrection of Dionysus
are accordingly a physical reality. The god
is annually killed in the flesh, as man, bull,
or goat; and he rises again in the vine, to
give his blood once more for the good of
his votaries. Moreover, he may be used as
a fertiliser for many other trees ; and so we
find Dionysus has many functions. He is
variously adored as Dionysus of the tree,
and more particularly of the fruit-bearing
fig and apple. His image, like those of
other tree-gods already encountered, was
often an upright post, without arms, but
draped (like the ashera} in a mantle, and
with a bearded mask to represent the head,
while green boughs projecting from it
marked his vegetable character. He was
the patron of cultivated trees ; prayers were
offered to him to make trees grow ; he was
honoured by fruit-growers, who set up an
image of him, in the shape of a natural
tree-stump, in the midst of their orchards.
(Compare that last degraded and utilitarian
relic, the modem scarecrow.) For other
equally interesting facts I would refer the
reader once more to Mr. Frazer, whose rich
store I must not further rifle. It seems to
me obvious from his collection of facts that
there was originally everywhere a separate
local Dionysus, an annual man-god or
woman-god victim (for which a beast was
later substituted), and that only slowly did
the worship of the individual Dionysi pass
into the general worship of one great ideal
ised god Dionysus. The great gods are at
first classes, not individuals.
Mr. Gomme has further pointed out three
interesting points of resemblance between
the Dionysiac rites and the Indian Potraj
festival. In the first place, Dionysus is
sometimes represented to his worshippers
by his head only—no doubt a preserved
oracular head ; and in any case a parallel
to the importance of the head in the Indian
ceremony. In the second place, the sacrificer of the calf at Tenedos was driven out
and stoned after the fulfilment of the rite—
a counterpart of the Potraj fleeing from the
place after the slaughter of the lamb. And
in the third place, the women worshippers
of Dionysus attended the rites nude,
crowned with garlands, and daubed over
with dirt—a counterpart of the naked
female votaries surrounded with branches
of trees in the Indian festival. All three of
these points recur abundantly in similar
ceremonies elsewhere.
As a rule, I severely disregard mere
myths, as darkeners of counsel, confining
my attention to the purely religious and
practical elements of custom and worship.
But it is worth while noting here for its
illustrative value the Cretan Dionysusmyth. Dionysus is there represented as the
son of Zeus, a Cretan king ; and this legend
encloses the old idea that the Dionysusvictim was at first himself a divine godking, connected by blood with the supreme
god or founder of the community. Hera,
the wife of Zeus, was jealous of the child,
and lured him into an ambush, where he
was set upon by her satellites the Titans,
who cut him limb from limb, boiled his
body with various herbs, and ate it. Other
forms of the myth tell us how his mother
Demeter pieced together his mangled
remains, and made him young again.
More often, however, Dionysus is the son
of Semele, and various other versions are
given of the mode of his resurrection. It
is enough for our purpose that in all of
them the wine-god, after having been slain
and torn limb from limb, rises again from
the dead, and often ascends to his father
Zeus in Heaven. The resurrection, visibly
enacted, formed in many places a part of
the rite.
On the whole, then, though I do not deny
that the later Greeks envisaged Dionysus
as a single supreme god of vegetation, nor
that many abstract ideas were finally
fathered upon the worship — especially
those which identified the death and resur
rection of the god with the annual winter
sleep and spring revival—I maintain that
in his origin the Dionysus was nothing
more than the annual corn-victim, after
wards extended into the tree and vine
victim.
�CORN- AND WINE-GODS
I pass on to Osiris, in his secondary or
acquired character as corn-god.
I have already expressed the belief, in
which I am backed up by Mr. Loftie, that
the original Osiris was a real historical
early king of This by Abydos. But in the
later Egyptian religion, after mystic ideas
had begun to be evolved, he came to be
regarded as the god of the dead, and every
mummy or every justified soul was looked
upon as an Osiris. Moreover, it seems
probable that in Egypt the name of Osiris
was also fitted to the annual slain corn
victim or corn-god. Thus all over Egypt
there were many duplicates of Osiris ;
notably at Busiris, where the name was
attached to an early tomb like the one at
Abydos. This identification of the newmade god with the historic ancestor, the
dead king, or the tribal deity is quite habit
ual ; it is parallel to the identification of
the officiating Potraj with the Potraj god,
of the Attis-priest with Attis, of the
Dionysus-victim with the son of Zeus ; and
it will meet us hereafter in savage parallels.
Let us look at the evidence.
As in India, the Osiris festival lasted for
five days. (The period is worth noting.)
The ceremonies began with ploughing the
earth. We do not know for certain that a
human victim was immolated; but many
side analogies would lead us to that con
clusion, and suggest that as elsewhere the
sacred victim was torn to pieces in the
eagerness of the cultivators and worshippers
to obtain a fragment of his fertilising body.
For in the myth, Typhon cuts up the corpse
of the god into fourteen pieces, which he
scatters abroad (as the naked leatherdresser scatters the sacred buffalo): and
we know that in the Egyptian ceremonies
one chief element was the search for the
mangled portions of Osiris, the rejoicings
at their discovery, and their solemn burial.
On one of the days of the feast a proces
sion of priests went the round of the
temples—or beat the bounds : and the
festival closed with the erection of a pillar
or stone monument to the Osiris, which, in
a bas-relief, the king himself is represented
as assisting in raising. I think it is im
possible to overlook the general resem
blance of these rites to the rites of Potraj.
The character of the later Osiris, or the
god-victim identified with him, as a corn
and vegetable god, is amply borne out by
several other pieces of evidence. Osiris, it
is said, was the first to teach men the use
of corn. He also introduced the cultivation
of the vine. Mr. Frazer notes that, in one I
of the chambers dedicated to Osiris in the
great temple of Isis at Philte, the dead
body of Osiris is represented with stalks of
corn springing from it, and a priest is
watering the stalks from a pitcher which
he holds in his hand.
Again, in the legend of Busiris, and the
glosses or comments upon it, we get im
portant evidence. The name Busiris
means the city of Osiris, which was so called
because the grave of an ancient Osiris
(either a mummy, or a local chief identified
with the great god of Abydos) was situated
there. Human sacrifices were said to have
been offered at his tomb ; just as the Potraj
sacrifice is offered at the shrine of the
village goddess, and just as the annual
victim elsewhere was sacrificed at the Ter
minus stone or the sacred stone of the
foundation-god or goddess. The victims
were red-haired men, and strangers. Their
ashes were scattered abroad with winnow
ing fans. They were slain on the harvest
field, and mourned by the reapers (like
Adonis and Attis) in the song which
through a Greek mistake is known to us as
the Maneros. The reapers prayed at the
same time that Osiris might revive and
return with renewed vigour in the following
year. The most interesting point in this
account, pieced together from Apollodorus,
Diodorus, and Plutarch, is the fact that it
shows us how the annual Osiris was identi
fied with the old divine king who lay in his
grave hard by ; and so brings the case
into line with others we have already con
sidered aud must still consider. As for the
hunting after the pieces of Osiris’s body,
that is just like the hunting after the
mangled pieces of Dionysus by Demeter.
I interpret both the resurrection of Osiris,
and the story of the fragments being pieced
together and growing young again, told of
Dionysus, as meaning that the scattered
pieces, buried like those of the Khond
Meriah, grow up again next year into the
living corn for the harvest.
Furthermore, there exists to this day in
Egypt an apparent survival of the ancient
Osiris rite, in an attenuated form (like the
mock mayors in England), which distinctly
suggests the identification I am here at
tempting. In Upper Egypt, Klunzinger
tells us, on the first day of the (Egyptian)
solar year, when the Nile has usually
reached its highest point, the regular
government is suspended for three days in
each district, and every town chooses it own
temporary ruler. This temporary king (a
local Osiris, as I believe) wears a conical
I
�114
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
cap, and a long flaxen beard, and is
enveloped in a strange mantle. I say
unhesitatingly, the dress of an Osiris,
wearing the old royal cap of Upper Egypt.
With a wand of office in his hands—like
the crook which Osiris carries on the
monuments—and attended by men dis
guised as scribes, executioners, and so
forth, he proceeds to the governor’s house.
The governor allows himself to be deposed;
the mock Uing, mounting the throne, holds
a tribunal, to whose decisions even the
governor himself must bow. In short, like
other temporary kings, he really enjoys
royal authority for the moment. After
three days, however, the mock king is con
demned to death ; the envelope or shell in
which he is encased is committed to the
flames ; and from its ashes creeps forth
the Fellah who impersonated him. I do
not doubt that the case here represents
the antique coffer or mummy-case of Osiris.
In this graphic ceremonial, then, I see a
survival, with the customary mitigations, of
the annual Osiris sacrifice, once actually
performed on a human victim. I do not
doubt that in Egypt as elsewhere a mock
king was formerly chosen in place of the
real king to personate the descendant of
Osiris, an Osiris himself: and that this
substitute' was put to death, and torn to
pieces or burnt, while his ashes were
winnowed and scattered over the land. It
may also be worth while to inquire whether
the scourge which Osiris holds in the basreliefs is not the equivalent of the divine
whip of the Potraj, and the other whips
which Mr. Gomme has so ingeniously
correlated with that very venerable and
mystic attribute.
I would suggest, then, that Osiris in his
later embodiment was annually renewed as
a corn and vine victim. Originally a king
of Upper Egypt, or part of it, he was
envisaged in later myth as a general culture
god. Isis, his sister and wife, discovered
wheat and barley growing wild; and Osiris
introduced these grains among his people,
who thereupon abandoned cannibalism, and
took to grain-growing. An annual victim,
most often a stranger, identified with the
racial god, was torn to pieces in his place ;
and Osiris himself was finally merged with
the abstract spirit of vegetation, and sup
posed to be the parent of all trees.
Let us next look very briefly at the case
of Adonis.
The Adon or Lord commonly known as
Thammuz was one of the chief elements in
Syrian religion. He was closely connected
with the namesake river Adonis, which rose
by his grave at the sacred spring of Aphaca.
We do not actually know, I believe, of a
human Adonis-victim ; but his death was
annually lamented with a bitter wailing,
chiefly by women. Images of him were
dressed like corpses, and carried out as if
for burial, and then thrown into the sea or
into springs. This was evidently a rain
charm, such as is particularly natural in a dry
country like Syria. In certain places the
resurrection of the Adonis was celebrated
on the succeeding day. At Byblos he also
ascended into heaven before the eyes of his
worshippers—a point worth notice from its
Christian analogies. The blood-red hue
of the river Adonis in spring—really due to
the discolouration of the tributary torrents
by red earth from the mountains—was set
down to the blood of the god Adonis ; the
scarlet anemone sprang from his wounds.
But the scholiast on Theocritus expressly
explains the Adonis as “the sown corn”;
and that he was “ seed,” like the common
corn-victims in India and elsewhere, we
can hardly doubt from the repeated stories
of his death and resurrection. Ths socalled “ gardens of Adonis,” which were
mimic representations of a tumulus planted
with corn, formed a most noticeable part of
the god’s ritual. They consisted of baskets
or pots, filled with earth, in which wheat,
barley, flowers, and so forth, were sown and
tended by women ; and at the end of eight
days they were carried out with the images
of the dead Adonis, and flung into the sea
or into springs. This was no doubt another
case of a rain-charm.
What Adonis was to Syria, Attis was to
Phrygia. Originally he seems, according
to Professor Ramsay, to have been repre
sented by an annual priest-victim, who
slew himself for the people to ensure
fertility. This priest-victim himself bore
the name of Attis, and was identified with
the god whose worship he performed. In
later days, instead of killing himself, he
merely drew his own blood; and there is
reason to think that a pig was also substistuted as duplicate victim, and that this
pig was itself regarded as an Attis. Ana
logies exist with the Paschal lamb ; while
the self-mutilation of Attis-worship has
also features in common with Jewish cir
cumcision. Moveover, the ceremonies were
closely connected, at Pessinus at least, with
the ancient sacred stone which bore the
name of Cybele, and which was described
as the Mother of the Gods ; this connection
exactly recalls that of the Potraj god in
�SACRIFICE AND SACRAMENT
India with the cult of the local village
goddess. As I believe the village goddess
to be the permanent form of the foundation
human sacrifice, I also believe Cybele to
be the sacred stone of the original virgin
who was sacrificed at the first foundation
of Pessinus.
When the sacred stone of Cybele and
the cult of Attis were removed to Rome
the festival consisted of a five days’ rite,
like that of the Potraj. It took place at
the spring equinox, as does our own equiva
lent festival of Easter. On the first day a
pine-tree was cut down in the woods, and
the effigy of a young man was tied to it.
This effigy no doubt represented the
primitive human sacrifice, and its cruci
fixion answers exactly to the slaughter of
the sacred buffalo in India. The second
day yields nothing of importance ; on the
third day the Attis-priest drew blood from
his own arms and presented it as an offer
ing ; I would conjecture that this was a
substitute for self-immolation, and that the
self-immolation was originally performed
by mutilation of the genitals. It was per
haps on this night that a mourning took
place over the body of Attis, represented
by an effigy, which was afterwards solemnly
buried. On the fourth day came the
Festival of Joy, on which, as Mr. Frazer
believes, the resurrection of the god was
celebrated. The fifth day closed with a
procession to the brook Almo, in which the
sacred stone of the goddess and her
bullock-cart were bathed as a rain-charm.
On the return the cart was strewn with
flowers. I think the close parallelism to
the Indian usage is here fairly evident.
Attis was thus essentially a corn-god.
His death and resurrection were annually
celebrated at Rome and at Pessinus. An
Attis of some sort died yearly. The Attis
of Pessinus was both priest and king; it
was perhaps at one time his duty to die at
the end of his yearly reign as a corn-god
for his people. One epithet of Attis was
“very fruitful”; he was addressed as “the
reaped yellow ear of corn and when an
effigy took the place ofthe annual slain priestking, this effigy was itself kept for a year,
and then burnt as the priest-king himself
would have been at an earlier period. It
seems to me impossible to resist the cumu
lative weight of this singular evidence.
For the very curious customs and myths
regarding Demeter, Persephone, and other
female corn-victims, I must refer the reader
once more to Mr. Frazer. (It is true, the
inquirer will there find the subject treated
II5
from the opposite standpoint.) In many
countries, from Peru to Africa, a girl or
woman seems to have been offered up as a
corn-goddess ; this corn-goddess seems to
have been sown with the seed, and believed
to come to life again with the corn ; and
several European harvest customs appear
to be mitigations of the old ceremonial,
with the usual substitution of an animal or
an effigy for the human victim. Regarded
in this light, Mr. Frazer’s collection of facts
about the corn baby affords an excellent
groundwork for research.
I cannot, however, refrain from mention
ing that the ceremonies of “Carrying out
Death ” and “ Burying the Carnival,” which
prevail all over Europe, retain many inte
resting features of the Potraj, Dionysus,
and Attis-Adonis festivals. The figure of
Death—that is to say, as I understand it,
the image of the dead human god—is often
torn to pieces, and the fragments are then
burned in the fields to make the crops grow
well. But the Death is also drowned or
buried ; in the first case like Adonis, in the
second like the Osiris in the modern
Egyptian custom. And the analogies of
the festivals to those of India and Western
Asia must strike every attentive reader of
Mr. Frazer’s masterwork.
I will only add here that while corn-gods
and wine-gods are the most notable mem
bers of this strange group of artificial
deities, the sacred date-palm has its im
portance as well in the religions of Meso
potamia ; and elsewhere the gods of the
maize, the plantain, and the cocoanut rise
into special or local prominence. So do the
Rice-Spirit, the Oats-Wife, the Mother of
the Rye, and the Mother of the Barley (or
Demeter). All seem to be modifications of
the primitive victim, sacrificed to make a
spirit for the crop, or to act as “ seed ” for
the date or the plantain.
CHAPTER XV.
SACRIFICE AND SACRAMENT
We have now arrived at a point where we
can more fully understand those curious
ideas of sacrifice and sacrament which lie
at the root of so much that is essential in
the Jewish, the Christian, and most other
religions.
Mr. Galton tells us that to the Damaras,
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THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
when he travelled among them, all meat
was common property. No one killed an
ox except as a sacrifice and on a festal
occasion ; and when the ox was killed, the
whole community feasted upon it indis
criminately. This is but a single instance
of a feeling almost universal among primi
tive pastoral people. Cattle and other
domestic animals, being regarded as sacred,
are rarely killed ; and when they are killed,
they are eaten at a feast as a social and
practically religious rite—in short, sacra
mentally. I need not give instances of so
well-known a principle ; I will content my
self with quoting what Dr. Robertson Smith
says of a particular race : “ Among the
early Semites generally, no slaughter was
legitimate except for sacrifice.”
Barbaric herdsmen, indeed, can hardly
conceive of men to whom flesh meat is a
daily article of diet. Mr. Galton found the
idea very strange to his Damaras. Primi
tive pastoral races keep their domestic
animals mainly for the sake of the milk, or
as . beasts of burden, or for the wool and
hair; they seldom kill one except for a feast,
at which the gods are fellow-partakers.
Indeed, it is probable, as the sequel will
suggest, that domestic animals were origi
nally kept as totems or ancestor-gods, and
that the habit of eating the meat of sheep,
goats, and oxen has arisen mainly out of
the substitution of such a divine animal
victim for the divine human-victim of
earlier usage. Our butchers’ shops have
their origin in mitigated sacrificial canni
balism.
Sacrifice, regarded merely as offering
to the gods, has thus, I believe, two dis
tinct origins. Its- earliest, simplest, and
most natural form is that whose develop
ment we have already traced—the placing
of small articles of food and drink at the
graves of ancestors or kings or revered
fellow-tribesmen. That from a very early
period men have believed the dead to eat
and drink, whether as corpse, as mummy,
as. ?h°st °f buried friend, or as ethereal
spirit of cremated chieftain, we have already
seen.
But there is another mode of sacrifice,
superposed upon this, and gradually tend
ing to be more or less identified with it,
which yet, if I am right, had a quite dif
ferent origin in the artificial production of
gods about which I have written at con
siderable length in the last three chapters.
The human or animal victim, thus
slaughtered in order to make a new god
or protecting spirit, came in time to be
assimilated in thought to the older type
of mere honorific offerings to the dead
gods ; and so gave rise to those mystic
ideas of the god who is sacrificed, him
self to himself, of which the sacrament of
the Mass is the final ana most mysterious
outcome. Thus, the foundation - gods,
originally killed in order to make a pro
tecting spirit for a house or a tribal god
for a city or village, came at last to be
regarded as victims sacrificed to the Earth
Goddess or to the Earth Demons ; and
thus, too, the Meriahs and other agricul
tural victims, originally killed in order to
make a corn-god or a corn-spirit, came at
last to be regarded as sacrifices to the
Earth, or to some abstract Dionysus or
Attis or Adonis. And since in the last case
at least the god and the victim were still
called by the same name and recognised
as one, there grew up at last in many lands,
and in both hemispheres, but especially
in the Eastern Mediterranean basin, the
mystic theory of the sacrifice of a god,
himself to himself, in atonement or expia
tion, which forms the basis of the Christian
Plan of Salvation. It is this secondary
and derivative form of sacrifice, I believe,
which is mainly considered in Professor
Robertson Smith’s elaborate and extremely
valuable analysis.
I have said that the secondary form of
sacrifice, which for brevity’s sake I shall
henceforth designate as the mystic, is found
in most parts of the world and in both
hemispheres. This naturally raises the
question whether it has a single common
origin, and antedates the dispersal of man
kind through the hemispheres ; or whether
it has been independently evolved several
times over in many lands by many races.
For myself I have no cut-and-dried answer
to this abstruse question, nor do I regard
it, indeed, as a really important one. On
the one hand, there are many reasons
for supposing that certain relatively high
traits of thought or art were common
property among mankind before the dis
persion from the primitive centre, if a
primitive centre ever existed. On the
other hand, psychologists know well that
the human mind acts with extraordinary
similarity in given circumstances all the
world over, and that identical stages of
evolution seem to have been passed through
independently by many races, in Egypt
and Mexico, in China and Peru; so that
we can find nothing inherently improbable
in the idea that even these complex con
ceptions of mystic sacrifice have distinct
�SACRIFICE AND SACRAMENT
origins in remote countries. What is cer
tain is the fact that among the Aztecs, as
among the Phrygians, the priest who sacri
ficed, the victim he slew, and the image or
great god to whom he slew him, were all
identified; the killer, the killed, and the
being in whose honour the killing took
place were all one single indivisible deity.
Even such details as that the priest clothed
himself in the skin of the victim are common
to many lands ; they may very well be
either a heritage from remote ancestral
humanity, or the separate product of the
human mind, working along like grooves
under identical conditions.
I must further premise that no religion
as we now know it is by any means primi
tive. The most savage creeds we find
among us have still hundreds of thousands
of years behind them. The oldest religions
whose records have descended to us, like
those of Egypt and of Assyria, are still
remote by hundreds of thousands of years
from the prime original. Cultivation itself
is a very ancient and immemorial art. Few
savages, even among those who are com
monly described as in the hunting stage,
are wholly ignorant of some simple form of
seed-sowing and tillage. The few who are
now ignorant of those arts show some
apparent signs of being rather degenerate
than primitive peoples. My own belief or
suspicion is that ideas derived from the set
of practices in connection with agriculture
detailed in the last two chapters have
deeply coloured the life and thought of
almost the whole human race, including
even those rudest tribes which now know
little or nothing of agriculture.
Early pastoral races seldom kill a beast
except on great occasions. When they
kill it, they devour it in common, all the
tribe being invited to the festival. But
they also eat it in fellowship with their
gods ; every great feast is essentially a
Theoxenion, a Lectisternium, a banquet in
which the deities participate with mortals.
It is this sense of a common feast of gods
■and men which gave, no doubt, the first
step towards the complex idea of the sacra
mental meal—an idea still further developed
.at a later stage by the addition of the con
cept that the worshipper eats and drinks
the actual divinity.
My own belief is that all sacrificial feasts
of this god-eating character most probably
■originated in actual cannibalism, and that
later an animal victim was substituted for
■the human meat; but I do not insist on
this point, nor attempt, strictly speaking, to
117
prove it. It is hardly more than a deeply
grounded suspicion. Nevertheless, I will
begin for convenience sake with the canni
bal class of sacrifice, and will come round
in time to the familiar slaughter of sheep
and oxen, which in many cases is known to
have supplanted a human offering.
Acosta’s account of the Mexican custom
is perhaps the best instance we now possess
of the ritual of cannibal mystic sacrifice in
its fullest barbarity. “They took a cap
tive,” says that racy old author, “at random;
and before sacrificing him to their idols,
they gave him the name of the idol to whom
he should be sacrificed, and dressed him in
the same ornaments, identifying him with
the god. During the time that the identi
fication lasted, which was for a year in
some feasts, six months or less in others,
they reverenced and worshipped him in the
same manner as the idol itself. Mean
while, he was allowed to eat, drink, and
make merry. When he went through the
streets, the people came forth to worship
him ; and every one brought alms, with
children and sick people that he might
cure them and bless them. He did as he
pleased in everything, except that he had
ten or twelve men about him, to prevent
him from escaping. In order that he might
be reverenced as he passed, he sometimes
sounded upon a small flute, to tell the people
to worship him. When the feast arrived,
and he had grown fat, they killed him,
opened him, and, making a solemn sacri
fice, eat him.” There, in the words of a
competent authority, we have the simple
cannibal feast in its fullest nakedness.
I need hardly point out how much this
account recalls the Khond custom of the
Meriah. The victim, though not really of
royal blood, is made artificially into a
divine king; he is treated with all the
honours of royalty and godhead, is dressed
like the deity with whom he is identified,
and is finally killed and eaten. The last
point alone differs in any large degree
from the case of the Meriah. We have
still to inquire, “Why did they eat him ?”
The answer to this inquiry takes us into
the very heart and core of the sacramental
concept.
It is a common early belief that to eat
of any particular animal gives you the
qualities of that animal. The Miris of
Northern India prize tiger’s flesh for men ;
it gives them strength and courage ; but
women must not eat it; ’twould make them
“ too strong-minded.” The Namaquas
abstain from eating hare; they would
�118
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
become faint-hearted if they swallowed it ;
but they eat the meat of the lion or drink
the blood of the leopard, in order to gain
their strength and courage. Among the
Dyaks, young men and warriors must not
eat deer ; it would render them cowardly ;
but women and very old men are allowed
to eat it. Men of the Buro and Aru Islands
feed on the flesh of dogs in order to be
bold and nimble. The flesh and blood of
brave men are eaten in order to inspire
bravery. Du Chaillu’s negro attendants,
we saw, scraped their ancestors’ skulls,
and drank the powder in water.
This case of Du Chaillu’s warriors takes
us with one bound into the heart of the
subject. Many savages for similar reasons
actually eat their own dead fathers.1 We
learn from Strabo that the ancient Irish
“ deemed it honourable to devour the
bodies of their parents.” So, Herodotus
tells us, did the Issedones of Central Asia.
The Massagetae used “from compassion”
to club and eat their aged people. The
custom was quite recently common among
the Battas of Sumatra, who used “ religi
ously and ceremonially to eat their old
relations.” In Australia it was usual to
eat relatives who died by mischance.
Generally speaking, the parents or rela
tives were eaten in order “ not to let the
life go out of the family ” ; or to preserve
the bodies and souls in a kindred body;
or to gain the courage and other qualities
of the dead relation. In short, the dead
were eaten sacramentally or, as one writer
even phrases it, “ eucharistically.” Mr.
Hartland has collected many striking in
stances.
But if men eat the bodies of their
fathers, who are their family and household
gods, they will also naturally eat the bodies
of the artificial gods of cultivation, or of
the temporary kings who die for the people.
By eating the body of a god you absorb
his divinity ; he and you become one ; he
is in you and inspires you. This is the
root-idea of sacramental practice ; you eat
your god by way of complete union ; you
subsume him in yourself; you, and he are
one being.
Still, how can you eat your god if you
also bury him as a corn-spirit to use him
as seed ? The Gonds supply us with the
1 Since this chapter was written the subject
of honorific cannibalism has been far more fully
treated by Mr. Sidney Hartland in the chapter
on funeral Rites, in the second volume of The
Legend of Perseus.
answer to that obvious difficulty. For, as
we saw, they sprinkle the blood of the
victim over the ploughed field or ripe crop,
and then they sacramentally devour his
body. Such a double use of the artificial
god is frequently to be detected, indeed,
through the vague words of our authorities.
We see it in the Potraj ceremony, where
the blood of the lamb is drunk by the
officiating priest, while the remainder of
the animal is buried beside the altar ; we
see it in the numerous cases where a
portion of the victim is eaten sacramentally,
and the rest burned and scattered over the
fields, which it is supposed to fertilise.
You eat your god in part, so as to imbibe
his divinity; but you bury him in part, so
as to secure at the same time his fertilising
qualities for your corn or your vineyard.
I admit that all this is distinctly mystic ;
but mystery-mongering and strange re
duplication of persons, with marvellous
identifications and minute distinctions,
have always formed much of the stock-intrade of religion.
And now let us return awhile to our
Mexican instances.
At the annual feast of the great god
Tezcatlipoca, which, like most similar
festivals, fell about the same time as the
Christian Easter, a young man was chosen
to be the representative of the god for a
twelvemonth. As in the case of almost
all chosen victims, he had to be a person
of unblemished body, and he was trained
to behave like a god-kijig with becoming
dignity. During his year of godship he
was lapped in luxury; and the actual
reigning emperor took care that he should
be splendidly attired, regarding him
already as a present deity. He was
attended by eight pages clad in the royal
livery—which shows him to have been a
king as well as a god ; and wherever he
went the people bowed down to him.
Twenty days before the festival at which
he was to be sacrificed, four noble maidens,
bearing the names of four goddesses, were
given him to be his brides. The final feast
itself, like those of Dionysus, of Attis, and
of Potraj, occupied five days—a coincidence
between the two hemispheres which almost
points to original identity of custom before
the dispersion of the races. During these
five days the real king remained in his
palace—and this circumstance plainly
shows that the victim belonged to the
common class of substituted and temporary
divine king-gods. The whole court, on
the other hand, attended the victim. On
�SACRIFICE AND SACRAMENT
the last day of the feast the victim was
ferried across the lake in a covered barge
to a small temple in the form of a pyramid.
On reaching the summit, he was seized
and held down on a block of stone—no
doubt an altar of funereal origin—while
the priest cut open his breast with a stone
knife, and plucked his heart out. This
he offered to the god of the sun. The head
was hung up among the skulls of previous
victims, no doubt for oracular purposes,
and as a permanent god ; but the legs and
arms were cooked and prepared for the
table of the lords, who thus partook of the
god sacramentally. His place was imme
diately filled by another young man, who
for a year was treated with the same
respect, and at the end of that time was
similarly slaughtered.
I do not think I need point out the close
resemblance of this ritual to that of the
Khond Meriah, of the Potraj, and of the
festivals of Dionysus, Osiris, Attis, and
Adonis. But I would also call particular
attention to the final destination of the
skull, and its exact equivalence to the
skull of the animal-god in India and else
where.
“ The idea that the god thus slain in the
person of his representative comes to life
again immediately,” says Mr. Frazer, “was
graphically represented in the Mexican
ritual by skinning the slain man-god, and
clothing in his skin a living man, who thus
became the new representative of the god
head.”
The blood of the victims was separately
offered ; and I may add in this connection
that as a rule both ghosts and gods are
rather thirsty than hungry. I take the
explanation of this peculiar taste to be that
blood and other liquids poured upon the
ground of graves or at altar-stones soon
sink in, and so seem to have been drunk
or sucked up by the ghost or god ; whereas
meat and solid offerings are seen to be
untouched by the deity to whom they are
presented. A minor trait in this blood
loving habit of the gods is seen in the fact
that the Mexicans also gave the god to
drink fresh blood drawn from their own
ears, and that the priests likewise drew
blood from their legs, and daubed it on
the temples. Similar mitigations of selfimmolation are seen elsewhere in the Attispriest drawing blood from his arms for
Attis, in the Hebrew Baal-priests “ cutting
themselves for Baal,” and in the familiar
Hebrew rite of circumcision. Blood is
constantly drawn by survivors or wor
119
shippers as an act of homage to the dead
or to deities.
I might multiply instances of human
sacrifices of the mystic order elsewhere, but
I prefer to pass on to the various mitiga
tions which they tend to undergo in various
communities. In its fullest form, I take it,
the mystic sacrifice ought to be the selfimmolation of a divine priest-king, a god
and descendant of gods, himself to him
self, on the altar of his own divine founda
tion-ancestor. But in most cases which
we can trace, the sacrifice has already
assumed the form of an immolation of a
willing victim, a temporary king, of the
divine stock only by adoption, though
sometimes a son or brother of the actual
monarch. Further modifications are that
the victim becomes a captive taken in war
(which, indeed, is implied in the very
etymology of the Latin word wictima}, or a
condemned criminal, or an imbecile, who
can be more readily induced to undertake
the fatal office. Of all of these we have
seen hints at least in previous cases. Still
more mitigated are the forms in which the
victim is allowed to escape actual death by
a subterfuge, and those in which an image
or effigy is allowed to do duty for the living
person. Of these intermediates we get a
good instance in the case of the Bhagats,
mentioned by Col. Dalton, who “ annually
make an image of a man in wood,
put clothes and ornaments on it, and
present it before the altar of a Maha
deo ” (or rude stone phallic idol). “ The
person who officiates as priest on the
occasion says, ‘ O, Mahadeo, we sacrifice
this man to you according to ancient cus
toms. Give us rain in due season, and a
plentiful harvest.’ Then, with one stroke
of the axe, the head of the image is struck
off, and the body is removed and buried.”
This strange rite shows us a surviving but
much mitigated form of the Khond Meriah
practice.
As a rule, however, such bloodless repre
sentations do not please the gods ; nor do
they succeed in.really liberating a ghost or
com-god. They are, after all, but feeble
phantom sacrifices. Blood the gods want,
and blood is given them. The most com
mon substitute for the human victim-god
is therefore the animal victim-god, of which
we have already seen copious examples in
the ox and kid of Dionysus, the pig of
Attis, and many others. It seems pro
bable that a large number of sacrifices, if
not the majority of those in which domestic
animals are slain, belong in the last resort
�J 20
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
to the same category. Thus, indeed, we
can most easily explain the theory of the
so-called “ theanthropic ” victim — the
animal which stands for a man and a
god—as well as the point of view of sacri
fice so ably elaborated by Dr. Robertson
Smith.
According to this theory, the domestic
animals were early regarded as of the same
kin or blood as the tribe ; and the slaughter
of an ox, a goat, or a sheep could only be
permitted if it were done, like the slaughter
of a king’s son, sacrificially and sacra
mentally. In my own opinion, this scarcely
means more than that the sacred domestic
animals were early accepted as substitutes
for the human victim, and that they were
eaten sacrificially and sacramentally as the
human victim was also eaten. But I will
waive this somewhat controversial point,
and content myself with suggesting that
the animal victim was habitually treated as
in itself divine, and that its blood was
treated in the same way as the blood of
the original cannibal offering. At the same
time, the sacrifice was usually offered at the
altar of some older and, so to speak, more
constant deity, while the blood of the
victim was allowed to flow over the sacred
stone. Certainly, both among the Arabs
and the Hebrews, all slaughter of domestic
animals appears to have been at one time
sacrificial; and even when the slaughter
ceased necessarily to involve a formal
sacrifice, it was still thought necessary to
slay the victim in the name of a god, and to
pour out the blood in his honour on the
ground. Even in the Grieco-Roman world,
the mass of butcher’s meat was “meat
offered to idols.” We shall see hereafter
that among existing savages the slaughter
of domestic animals is still regarded as a
sacred rite.
I believe also that as a rule the blood
offering is the earliest and commonest form
of slaughter to the gods ; and that the
victim in the earlier stages was generally
consumed by the communicants, as we
know the cannibal victim to have been con
sumed among the Mexicans, and as we saw
the theanthropic goat or kid was orgiasti
cally devoured by the worshippers of Diony
sus. It is a detail whether the sacred victim
happened to be eaten raw or cooked; the
one. usage prevailed in the earlier and more
orgiastic rites, the other in the milder and
more civilised ceremonies. But in either
case the animal-god, like the human god,
was eaten sacramentally by all his wor
shippers, who thus took into themselves his
divine qualities. The practice of burning
the victim, on the other hand, prevailed
mainly, I think, among cremationists, like
the Tyrians and Hellenes, though it un
doubtedly extended also to many burying
peoples, like the Hebrews and Egyptians.
In most cases even of cremated victims, it
would appear, a portion at least of the
animal was saved from the fire and sacra
mentally eaten by the worshippers.
Once more, the victim itself was usually
a particular kind of sacred animal. This
sacredness of the chosen beast has some
more important bearings than we have yet
considered. For among various pastoral
races various domesticated animals possess
in themselves positive sanctity. We know,
for example, that cows are very holy in the
greater part of India, and buffaloes in the
Deccan. Among the African peoples of
the pastoral tribes, the common food is
milk and game ; cattle are seldom slaught
ered merely to eat, and always on excep
tional or sacred occasions—the very occa
sions which elsewhere demand a human
victim—such as the proclamation of a war,
a religious festival, a wedding, or the funeral
of a great chieftain. In such cases the
feast is public, all blood-relations having a
natural right to attend. The cattle-kraal
itself is extremely sacred. The herd and
its members are treated by their masters
with affectionate and almost brotherly
regard.
A few further points must also be added.
Among early races, to kill and eat wild
animals, or to kill and eat enemies, who are
not members of the tribe, is not accounted
in any way wrong. But to kill a tribesman
—to shed kindred blood—is deeply sinful;
and so it is sinful to kill and eat the domestic
herds. In old age, indeed, or when sick
and feeble, you may kill and eat your blood
relation blamelessly ; and so you may also
kill and eat old or sickly cattle. But, as a
rule, you only eat them sacramentally and
sacrificially, under the same circumstances
where you would be justified in killing and
eating a human victim. Thus, as a rule,
each tribe has its own sacred beast, w’hich
is employed as a regular substitute for a
man-god. Among the Arabs, this beast
was a camel; among the Indian peoples,
the bull or the buffalo ; among shepherd
races, it is the sheep or goat; among the
Teutons, the horse; among many settled
urban peoples, the * pig; and with the
Samoyeds and Ostiaks, their one chattel,
the reindeer.
Also, as a rule, the cow or other female
�SACRIFICE AND SACRAMENT
121
animal was not usually sacrificed ; she was every home, and partakers of every meal,
kept for milk-yielding. It was the bull, the side by side with the living. They lived in
ram, the ox, the he-goat, that was oftenest the house, as still in New Guinea. Liba
offered and eaten sacramentally. Mere tions to them were poured from every cup ;
utilitarian considerations would soon lead food was offered to their ghosts or skulls
to this use, just as our own butchers kill or wooden images at every family gather
ram lambs by choice, and spare the ewes ing. The ordinary feasts were thus mere
for breeding. The custom, once introduced,
enlarged festal gatherings, at which a victim
would tend to become sacred ; for whatever was sacrificially slain and sacramentally
our divine ancestors did is itself divine, and eaten ; and the visitors believed they were
should not be lightly or carelessly altered.
eating the body and blood of the god to
Hence we can understand that supreme their own salvation. Greater sacrifices,
sanctity of the cow which has made so like the hecatombs, or the heroic Indian
many races refuse to sacrifice it, while they horse-sacrifice, must have been relatively
sacrifice and eat the bull or ox without let rare; but in all of them we see clear proof
or scruple. Thus the Todas have never that the victim was regarded as a sacred •
eaten the flesh of the female buffalo; but animal, that is to say a god, in one of his
the male they eat once a year, sacra embodiments.
mentally, all the adult men in the village
Clear evidence of this equivalence is
joining in the ceremony of killing and seen in the fact that the worshippers often
roasting it.
clad themselves in the skin of the victim,
A remarkable instance of the thean- as the Mexicans did in the skin of the
thropic sacrifice of such a sacred animal annual god. Sometimes the hide is even
is given us in Nilus’s account of the cere used to deck the idol. In the Cyprian
mony performed by the Arabs of his time. sacrifice of a sheep to the sheep-goddess
A holy camel, chosen as a victim, was Aphrodite, the celebrants wore the skin of
bound upon a rude cairn of piled-up stones. the sheep ; while the Assyrian DagonThe leader of the band then led the wor worshipper offered the fish sacrifice to the
shippers thrice round the cairn in a solemn fish-god, clad in a fish-skin. Of similar
procession, chanting a solemn hymn as import is doubtless the aegis or goat-skin of
they went. As the last words of the hymn Athena, envisaged as a goat-goddess, and
were sung, he fell upon the camel (like the skins used in the Dionysiac mysteries.
Potraj on the lamb), wounded it, and
I do not hesitate to affiliate all these on a
hastily drank of the blood. Forthwith the primitive usage like that of the Mexican
whole company hacked off pieces of the cannibal sacrifice.
quivering flesh, and devoured them raw
Having reached this point, we can see
with such wild haste that, between the rise further that the case where a sacred animal,
of the day-star and that of the sun, the the representative of a human victim, is
entire camel was absolutely eaten. I may slaughtered before the altar of an older
note that the annual sacrifice of the paschal god is exactly equivalent to the other known
lamb among the shepherd Hebrews is case where a human victim is slaughtered
obviously a mere mitigation of this bar before the foundation-stone of a town or
barous rite. In that case, as might be village. In either case, there is a distinct
expected in a most civilised race, the victim
renewal of the divine life ; fresh blood, as it
is roasted whole ; but it is similarly neces were, is instilled by the act into the ancient
sary that every part of it should be hastily deity.
eaten. Legend further informs us, in the
As a whole, then, we may venture to say
instance of the Passover, that the lamb was not perhaps that all, but that a great
a substitute for a human victim, and that number of sacrifices, and certainly the
the first-born were sanctified to Jahweh, best-known among historic nations, are
instead of being sacrificed. Note also that slaughters of animal substitutes for human
the feast of the paschal lamb occupied the
victims ; and that the flesh is sacramentally
now familiar space of five days : the sacred consumed by the worshippers.
animal was chosen on the tenth day of the
There is one special form of this animal
month, and sacrificed on the fourteenth.
sacrifice, however, which I cannot here pass
The whole ceremonial is most illustrative over in complete silence. It is the one of
and full of survivals.
which the harvest-feast is the final relic.
And now we must also remember that in
Mr. Frazer has fully worked out this theme
most countries the gods were housemates
in his fascinating essay : to detail it here at
of their worshippers, present at all times in
length would occupy too much space ; I
�122
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
can only give the barest outline of his
instances. Originally, it would seem, the
corn-god or corn-spirit was conceived
. during the reaping as taking refuge in the
last sheaf left standing. Whoever cut that
wisp of corn slew the corn-spirit, and was
therefore, on the analogy of the slayer of
the divine king, himself the corn-spirit.
Mr. Frazer does not absolutely assert that
this human representative was originally
killed and eaten, though all analogy would
seem to suggest it; but that he was at least
killed is abundantly certain ; and killed he
still is, in dumb show at any rate, on many
modern European corn-fields. More often,
• however, the corn-spirit is supposed to be
embodied in any animal which happens to
be found in the last sheaf, where even now
small creatures like mice and hedgehogs
often take refuge. In earlier times, how
ever, wolves, wild boars, and other large
animals seem to have been frequently met
with under similar circumstances. How
ever that may be, a great many beasts—
generally sacred beasts—are or have been
sacramentally eaten as representatives of
the corn-god ; while, conversely, the last
sheaf is often made up into the image of a
man, or still more often of a woman, and
preserved religiously for a year, like the
annual king, till the next harvest. Some
times a cock is beheaded and eaten at the
harvest ■ feast, special importance being
here attached to its head, as to the head of
the human victim in so many other cases.
Sometimes, as with the ancient Prussians,
it was the corn-goat whose body was sacra
mentally eaten.' Sometimes, as at Cham
bery, an ox is slaughtered, and eaten with
special rites by the reapers at supper.
Sometimes it is the old sacred Teutonic
animal, the horse, that is believed to
inhabit the last wisp of corn. I will add
parenthetically here (what I trust in some
future work to show) that we have probably
in this and kindred ideas the origin of the
sacred and oracular heads of horses and
oxen attached to temples or built into
churches. Sometimes, again, it is a pig
that represents the god, and is ceremonially
eaten at the harvest festival.
I need hardly mention that all these
sacred animals, substitutes for the original
human god, find their parallels in the
festivals of Dionysus, Attis, Osiris,
Demeter, Adonis, Lityerses, and the other
great corn and wine gods of the historic
civilisations.
But there is yet another and more
sublimated form of sacramental feast.
Since the corn-god and the wine-god,
when slain, undergo resurrection in the
corn and the vine, may we not also eat
their bodies as bread, and drink their
blood as wine or soma ?
To people already familiar, first with the
honorific cannibal form of god-eating, and
then with its gentler animal-victim modifi
cation, nothing could be more natural than
this slight transference of feeling. Nay,
more : whoever eat bread and drank wine
from the beginning must have known it
was the body and blood of a god he was
eating and drinking. Still, there is a
certain difference between mere ordinary
every-day food and the sacramental feast,
to which sacred cannibalism and animal
sacrifice had now familiarised men’s
minds. Accordingly, we find in many
cases that there exists a special sacra
mental eating and drinking of bread and
wine, which is more especially regarded as
eating the body and drinking the blood of
the deity.
Some curious illustrative facts may here
be cited. Since straw and corn grow from
the slaughtered corn-god, they may be
regarded as one of his natural embodi
ments. Hence, when human sacrifices are
prohibited, people sometimes make a straw
god do duty for a human one. The
Gonds, we saw, used once to kidnap sacred
Brahman boys—gods by race, as it were,
yet strangers and children—scatter their
blood over the fields, and eat their bodies
sacramentally. But when the unsym
pathetic British government interfered
with the god-making habits of the Gond
people, they took, says Col. Dalton, to
making an image of straw instead, which
they now similarly sacrifice. So it may be
noted in many of the ceremonies of
“ Burying the Carnival ” and the like,
which I have already cited, that a straw
man is substituted symbolically for the
human victim. Indeed, in that singular
set of survivals we have every possible
substitute—the mock king, the imbecile,
the pretended killing, the ceremonial
shedding of blood, the animal victim, and
the straw man or effigy. I may add that
even the making of our modern Guy
Fawkes as “a man of straw” is thus no
mere accident. But we get a very similar
use of corn in the curious practice of
fashioning the corn-wife and the corn-baby,
so fully detailed by Mr. Frazer. In this
attenuated survival of human sacrifice, a
sheaf of corn does duty for a human
victim, and represents the life of the corn
�SACRIFICE AND SACRAMENT
god or corn-spirit from one year to another.
All the existing evidence goes to suggest
the idea that at harvest a corn-maiden or
corn-wife, after a year of deification, was
slain in former times, and that the human
victim is now represented by her vegetable
analogue or equivalent, the corn in the ear,
a sheaf of which does duty in her place,
and reigns as corn-queen till the next year’s
harvest. The corn-baby is thus a temporary
queen, made of corn, not of human flesh
and blood. We may compare with this
case the account of the Sioux girl who was
sacrificed by the Pawnees, by being burned
over a slow fire, and then shot (like St.
Sebastian) with arrows. The chief sacrificer tore out her heart and devoured it,
thus eating the goddess in true cannibal
fashion. While her flesh was still warm, it
was cut up into small pieces and taken to
the corn-field. Drops of blood were
squeezed from it upon the grains of seed
corn ; after which it was all covered up in
the ground to form a crop-raiser. Of such
a ghastly goddess-making ceremony our
seemingly innocent harvest comedy of the
corn baby is probably the last surviving
relic. Mr. Frazer rightly connects it with
the cult of the Athenian Kore, Persephone.
I think, indeed, the double form of the
name, “the Old Woman” and “the Corn
baby,” makes it probable that the pair are
the vegetable equivalents of both Demeter
and her ravished daughter.
In other cases, however, it is the actual
bread and wine themselves, not the straw
or the corn in the ear, that represent the
god and are sacramentally eaten. We owe
to Mr. Frazer most of our existing know
ledge of the wide prevalence and religious
importance of this singular ritual.
We have seen already that in many
countries the firstfruits of the crops are
presented either to ancestral ghosts, or to
the great gods, or else to the king, who is
the living god and present representative
of the divine ancestors. Till this is done
it would be unsafe to eat of the new harvest.
The god within it would kill you. But in
addition to the ceremonial offering of firstfruits to the spirits, many races also “eat
the god” in the new corn or rice sacra
mentally. In Wermland, in Sweden, the
farmer’s wife uses the grain of the last
sheaf (in which, as we saw, the corn-god or
corn-spirit is supposed specially to reside)
in order to bake a loaf in the shape of a
little girl. Here we have the maiden, who
was previously sacrificed as a corn-goddess
or Persephone, reappearing once more in a
123
bread image. This loaf is divided among
all the household and eaten by them. So
at La Palisse, in France, a man made of
dough is hung upon the fir-tree which is
carried home to the granary on the last
harvest-waggon. The dough man and the
tree are taken to the mayor’s house till the
vintage is over; then a feast takes place,
at which the mayor breaks the dough man
in pieces, and gives the fragments to the
people to eat. Here the mayor clearly
represents the king or chief, while the feast
of first-fruits and the sacramental eating
are combined, as was perhaps originally
the case, in one and the same sacrificial
ceremony. No particular mention is made
of wine ; but as the feast is deferred so as
to take place after the vintage, it is pro
bable that the blood of the wine-god as
well as the body of the corn-god entered
once at least into the primitive ritual.
Many similar feasts survive in Europe ;
but for the rite of eating the corn-god in
its fullest form we must go once more to
Mexico, which also supplied us with the
best and most thoroughly characteristic
examples of the cannibal god-eating. Twice
a year, in May and December, an image of
the great Mexican god Huitzilopochtli was
made of dough, then broken in pieces, and
solemnly eaten by his assembled wor
shippers. Two days before the May feast,
says Acosta, the virgins of the temple
kneaded beet-seeds with roasted maize,
and moulded them with honey into a paste
idol, as big as the permanent wooden idol
which represented the god, putting in glass
beads for eyes, and grains of Indian corn
in the place of teeth. The nobles then
brought the vegetable god an exquisite and
rich garment, like that worn by the wooden
idol, and dressed the image up in it. This
done, they carried the effigy on a litter on
their shoulders, no doubt to mark its royal
authority. On the morning of the feast the
virgins of the god dressed themselves in
garlands of maize and other festal attire.
Young men, similarly caparisoned, carried
the image in its ark or litter to the foot of
the great pyramid temple. It was drawn
up the steps with clanging music of flutes
and trumpets—a common accompaniment
of god-slaying ceremonies. Flowers were
strewed on it, as was usual with all the gods
of vegetation, and it was lodged in a little
chapel of roses. Certain ceremonies • of
singing and dancing then took place, by
means of which the paste was consecrated
into the actual body and bones of the god.
Finally, the image was broken up and
�124
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
distributed to the people, first the nobles, and
then the commonalty, who received it, men,
women, and children, “ with such tears,
fear, and reverence as if it were sacred,
saying they did eat the flesh and bones of
God, wherewith they were grieved.” I
need not point out the close resemblance
here to the mourning over the bodies of
Attis and Adonis, nor to the rites of
Dionysus.
Still more closely does the December
feast (which took place, like Christmas, at
the winter solstice) recall the cannibal prac
tice ; for here an image of the god was
made of seeds, kneaded into dough with
the blood of children. Such a Massacre of
the Innocents occurs often elsewhere in
similar connections : we shall meet with it
again on a subsequent occasion. The
image was placed on the chief altar of the
temple, and on the day of its Epiphany the
king of Mexico offered incense to it. Bam
bino gods like this are well known in other
countries. Next day it was taken down,
and a priest flung at it a flint-tipped arrow.
This was called “killing the god so that his
body might be eaten.” One of the priests
then cut out the heart of the image and
gave it to the actual king to eat, just as in
other sacrifices the priest cut out the throb
bing heart of the human victim and placed
it in the mouth of the cannibal god. The
rest of the image was divided into small
pieces, which were distributed to all the
males of the community, adults or children.
The ceremony was called “God is Eaten.”
Mr. Frazer’s work is a perfect thesaurus of
analogous customs.
Mr. Frazer calls attention to an interesting
transitional instance. Loaves made in the
shape of men were called at Rome Maniae;
and it appears that such loaves were speci
ally made at Aricia. Now, Aricia was also
the one place in Italy where a divine priestking, the Rex Nemoralis, lived on well
recognised into the full blaze of the historic
period, on the old savage tenure of killing
his predecessor. Again, Mania was the
name of the Mother or Grandmother of
Ghosts. Woollen images, dedicated to this
Latin Cybele, were hung out in Rome at
the feast of the Compitalia, and were said
to be substitutes for human victims. Mr.
Frazer suggests that the loaves in human
form which were baked at Aricia were
sacramental bread ; and that in old days,
when the Rex Nemoralis was annually
slain, loaves were also made in his image
as in Mexico, and were eaten sacramentally
by his worshippers. I do not hesitate
myself to suggest still further that the
gingerbread cakes, shaped like a man, and
still richly gilt, which are sold at so many
fairs in France and Italy, and also some
times in England, are last dying relics of
similar early sacramental images. For
fairs are for the most part diminished survi
vals of religious festivals.
As the theanthropic animal victim repre
sents a man and a god, it is reasonable
that a cake shaped as an animal and baked
of flour should sometimes do as well as the
animal victim. For the corn is after all the
embodiment of the corn-god. Hence bakers
in the antique world used to keep in stock
representations in dough of the various
sacrificial animals, for people who were too
poor to afford the originals. Oxen and
sheep were regularly so represented. When
Mithridates besieged Cyzicus, and the
people could not get a black cow to sacrifice
to Persephone, they made a dough cow and
placed it at the altar. At the Athenian
festival of the Diasia, cakes shaped like
animals were similarly sacrificed ; and at
the Osiris festival in Egypt, when the rich
offered a real pig, the poor used to present
a dough pig as a substitute.
But in many other rites the sacramental
and sacrificial cake has entirely lost all
semblance of a man or animal. The god
is then eaten either in the shapeless form of
a boiled mess of rice or porridge, or in a
round cake or loaf, without image of any
sort, or in a wafer stamped with the solar
or Christian cross. Instances of this type
are familiar to everyone.
More closely related still to primitive
cannibalism is the curious ritual of the SinEater, so well elaborated by Mr. Sidney
Hartland. In Upper Bavaria what is
called a corpse-cake is kneaded from flour,
and placed on the breast of a dead person,
in order to absorb the virtues of the de
parted. This cake is then eaten by the
nearest relation. In the Balkan peninsula
a small image of the dead person was made
in bread and eaten by the survivors of the
family. These are intermediate stages
between cannibalism and the well-known
practice of sin-eating.
I hope I have now made clear the general
affiliation which I am seeking to suggest, if
not to establish. My idea is that in the
beginning certain races devoured their own
parents, or parts of them, so as to absorb
the divine souls of their forebears into their
own bodies. Later, when artificial godmakingbecame a frequent usage, especially
in connection with agriculture, men eat the
�THE DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT
god, or part of him, for a similar reason.
But they likewise eat him as the corn or
yam or rice, sacramentally. When theanthropic victims were substituted for the
man-god, they eat the theanthropic victim
in like manner. Also they made images in
paste of both man and beast, and, treating
these as compounded of the god, similarly
sacrificed and eat them. And they drank
his blood, in the south as wine, in the north
as beer, in India as soma. If this line of
reconstruction be approximately correct,
then sacraments as a whole are in the last
resort based upon survival from the cannibal
god-feast.
It is a significant fact that in many cases,
as at the Potraj festival, the officiating
priest drinks the blood of the divine victim,
while the laity are only permitted to eat of
its body.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE DOCTRINE OF THE ATONE
MENT
One more element of some importance
yet remains in the complex conception of
the human or animal victim, or slain god,
which we must briefly examine before we
can proceed with advantage to the evolu
tion of Christianity; I mean the doctrine
of piacular sacrifice—or, in other words, of
the atonement.
“Without shedding’of blood,” says the
author of one of the earliest Christian
tractates, “ there is no remission of sin.”
This is a common theory in all advanced
religions ; the sacrifice is regarded, not
merely as the self-immolation of a willing
divine victim or incarnate god, but also as
an expiation for crimes committed. “ Be
hold the Lamb of God,” says the Baptist
in the legend, “which taketh away the
sins of the world.”
This idea, I take it, is not primitive.
Sin must be regarded as a late ethical in
truder into the domain of religion. Early
man for the most part takes his gods
joyously. He is on the best of terms with
them. He eats and drinks and carouses in
their presence. They join in his phallic
and bacchanalian orgies. They are not
great moral censors, like the noble creation
of the Hebrew prophets, “of purer eyes
than to behold iniquity.” They are crea
125
tures of like passions and failings with him
self. Angry they may be at times, no
doubt; but their anger as a rule can be
easily assuaged by a human victim, or by
the blood of slaughtered goats and bulls.
Under normal circumstances they are
familiar housemates. Their skulls or
images adorn the hearth. In short, they
are average members of the tribe, gone
before to the spirit-world ; and they con
tinue to share without pride or asceticism
in the joys and feasts and merry-makings
of their relatives.
Thus the idea of expiation, save as a
passing appeasement for a temporary tiff,
did not probably occur in the very earliest
and most primitive religions. It is only
later, as ethical ideas begin to obtrude
themselves into the sacred cycle, that the
notion of sin, which is primarily that of
an offence against the established eti
quette of the gods, makes itself slowly
visible. In many cases later glosses seem
to put a piacular sense upon what was in
its origin, by obvious analogy, a mere
practical god-making and god-slaying
ceremony. But in more consciously philo
sophic stages of religion this idea of atone
ment gains ground so fast that it almost
swallows up the earlier conception of com
munion or feasting together. Sacrifice is
then chiefly conceived of as a piacular
offering to a justly offended or estranged
deity ; this is the form of belief which we
find almost everywhere meeting us in the
hecatombs of the Homeric poems, as in
many works of Hellenic and Semitic litera
ture.
In particular, the piacular sacrifice seems
to have crystallised and solidified round
the sacred person of the artificial deity.
“ The accumulated misfortunes and sins of
the whole people,” says Mr. Frazer, “are
sometimes laid upon the dying god, who
is supposed to bear them away for ever,
leaving the people innocent and happy.”
“ Surely he hath borne our griefs and car
ried our sorrows,” says one of the Hebrew
poets, whose verses are conjecturally
attributed to Isaiah, about one such divine
scapegoat; “yet we did esteem him
stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
He was wounded for our transgressions ;
he was bruised for our iniquities. The
chastisement of our peace was upon him,
and with his stripes are we healed.
Jahweh hath laid upon him the iniquity of
us all.”.
The ideas here expressed in such noble
language were common to all the later
�126
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
man-gods of the more advanced and ethical
religions.
Mr. Frazer is probably right in connect
ing the notion of the scapegoat, human or
animal, with the popular barbaric idea of
the transference of evils. Thus, in popular
magic of all nations, diseases of every sort,
from serious fevers and plagues down to
headache, toothache, warts, and sores, are
transferred by some simple ceremony of
witchcraft to animals, rags, or other people.
I will quote examples but briefly. Epilepsy
is made over to leaves and thrown away in
the Malay Archipelago. Toothache is put
into a stone in Australia. A Bechuana king
gave his illness to an ox, which was drowned
in his stead, to secure his recovery. Mr.
Gomme quotes a terrible story of a Scotch
nobleman who transferred his mortal disease
to his brother by a magical ceremony.
“ Charms ” for fever or for warts generally
contain some such amiable element of
transferring the trouble to a string, a rag,
or a piece of paper, which is flung away to
carry the evil with it to the person who next
touches it.
Closely connected with these notions of
transference are also the occasional or
periodical ceremonies undertaken for the
expulsion of evils from a village or a com
munity. Devils, demons, hostile spirits,
diseases, and other misfortunes of every
sort, are frequently thus expelled with gongs,
drums, and other magical instruments.
Often the boundaries of the tribe or parish
are gone over, a perlustration is performed,
and the evil influences are washed out of
the territory or forcibly ejected. Our own
rite of Beating the Bounds represents on
one of its many sides this primitive cere
mony. Washings and dippings are frequent
accompaniments of the expulsive ritual; in
Peru it was also bound up with that
common feature of the com-god sacrament
—a cake kneaded with the blood of living
children. The periodical exorcism gene
rally takes place once a year, but is some
times biennial: it has obvious relations
with the sacrifice of the human or animal
victim. In Europe it still survives in many
places as the yearly expulsion of witches.
Putting these two cardinal ideas together,
we arrive at the compound conception of
the scapegoat. A scapegoat is a human or
animal victim, chosen to carry off, at first
the misfortunes or diseases, later the sin
and guilt of the community. The name by
which we designate it in English, being
taken from the derivative Hebrew usage,
has animal implications; but, as in all
analogous cases, I do not doubt that the
human evil-bearer precedes the animal one.
A good example of this incipient stage
in the evolution of the scapegoat occurs at
Onitsha, on the Quorra River. Two human
beings are there annually sacrificed, “to
take away the sins of the land”—though I
suspect it would be more true to native
ideas to say, “ the misfortunes.” The num
ber two, as applied to the victims, crops up
frequently in this special connection. The
victims here again are “bought with a
price ”—purchased by public subscription.
All persons who during the previous year
have committed gross offences against
native ethics are expected to contribute to
the cost of the victims. Two sickly people
are bought with the money, “one for the
land and one for the river.” The victims
are dragged along the ground to the place
of execution, face downward. The crowd
who accompany them cry, “ Wickedness !
wickedness!” So in Siam it was cus
tomary to choose a broken-down woman
of evil life, carry her on a litter through
the streets (which is usually a symbol of
kingship or godhead), and throw her on a
dunghill or hedge of thorns outside the
wall, forbidding her ever again to enter
the city. In this eastern case there is
mere expulsion, not actual killing.
In other instances, however, the divine
character attributed to the human scape
goat is quite unmistakable. Among the
Gonds of India, at the festival of the god
of the crops, the deity descends on the
head of one of the worshippers, who is
seized with a fit, and rushes off to the
jungle. There, it is believed he would die
of himself, if he were not brought back
and tenderly treated ; but the Gonds, more
merciful here than in many other cases,
take him back and restore him. The idea
is that he is thus singled out to bear the sins
of the rest of the village. At Halberstadt
in Thuringia an exactly similar custom sur
vived till late in the Middle Ages. A man
was chosen, stained with deadly sin, as the
public scapegoat. On the first day of Lent
he was dressed in mourning, and expelled
from church. For forty days he wandered
about, fed only by the priests, and no one
would speak to him. He slept in the street.
On the day before Good Friday, however,
he was absolved of his sins, and, being
called Adam, was believed to be now in a
state of innocence. This is a mitigated and
Christianised form of the hun' an sinoffering.
Again, the Albanians of the Eastern
�THE DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT
Caucasus kept a number of sacred slaves
in the temple of the moon, many of whom
were inspired and prophesied. When one'
of these men exhibited unusual symptoms
of inspiration, the high priest had him
bound with a sacred chain, and maintained
for a year in luxury, like the Mexican corn
god. This fact immediately brings the
human scapegoat into line with the annual
human gods we have already considered.
At the end of a year he was anointed with
unguents (or, so to speak, christed), and
led forth to be sacrificed. The sacrifice
was accomplished as a purificatory cere
mony.
In Greece we get similar traces of the
human scapegoat. At Chseronea in Bceotia,
the chief magistrate at the town-hall, and
every householder in his own house, as we
learn from Plutarch (who was himself a
magistrate there), had on a certain day to
beat a slave with rods of agnus castus, and
turn him out of doors, with the formula,
“ Out, hunger 1 in, health and wealth 1”
Elsewhere the custom retained more un
pleasant features. At Marseilles, when the
colony was ravaged by plague, a man of
the poorer classes used voluntarily to offer
himself as a sin-offering or scapegoat.
Here we have once more the common
episode of the willing victim. For a whole
year, like other annual gods, he was fed at
the public expense, and treated as a gentle
man—that is to say, a kingly man-god.
At the end of that time he was dressed in
sacred garments—another mark of godship
—decked with holy branches, the common
insignia of gods of vegetation, and led
through the city, while prayers were offered
up that the sins of the people might fall on
his head. He was then cast out of the
colony. The Athenians kept a number of
outcasts as public victims at the expense
of the town ; and when plague, drought,
or famine befell, sacrificed two of them
(note the number) as human scapegoats.
One was said to be a substitute for the
men, and one for the women. They were
led about the city (like Beating the Bounds
again), and then apparently stoned to death
without it. Moreover, periodically every
year, at the festival of the Thargelia, two
victims were stoned to death as scapegoats
at Athens, one for the men, and one for
the women. I would conjecturally venture
to connect this sacred number, not merely
with the African practice already noted,
but also with the dual kings of Sparta, the
two consuls at Rome, and the two suffetes
at Carthage and in other Semitic cities.
127
The duality of kings, indeed, is a frequent
phenomenon.
I can only add here that the many other
ceremonies connected with these human
scapegoats have been well expounded and
explained by Mannhardt, who shows that
they were all of a purificatory character,
and that the scourging of the god before
putting him to death was a necessary
point of divine procedure. Hence the
significance of the agnus cashes.
Briefly, then, the evidence collected by
Mannhardt and Frazer suffices to suggest
that the human scapegoat was the last
term of a god, condemned to death, upon
whose head the transgression or mis
fortunes of the community were laid as
substitute. He was the vicarious offering
who died for the people.
It is only here and there, however, that
the scapegoat retains to historical times
his first early form as a human victim.
Much more often, in civilised lands at
least, we get the usual successive mitiga
tions of the custom. Sometimes, as we
have seen already in these cases, the
victim is not actually killed, but merely
expelled, or even only playfully and cere
monially driven out of the city. In other
instances, we get the familiar substitution
of the condemned criminal, or the imbecile,
as in the Attic Thargelia. In the vast
majority of cases, however, we have the
still more common substitution of a sacred
animal for a human victim ; and this
appears to be in large part the origin of
that common religious feature, the piacular
sacrifice.
Occasionally we get historical or halfhistorical evidence of the transition from a
human victim to a divine or quasi-divine
animal. Thus, the people of Nias offer
either a red horse or a buffalo to purify the
land ; but formerly a man was bound to
the same stake with the buffalo, and when
the buffalo was killed the man was driven
away, no native daring to receive him or
feed him. The sacrificial camel of the
ancient Arabs, presumably piacular, is
expressly stated to be a substitute for a
human victim.
As a rule, the man-god or divine animal
selected as a scapegoat is not actually
slaughtered, in the fullest form of the rite;
he is driven away, or flung into the sea, or
left to die of hunger and thirst. Some
times, however, he is burned as a holo
caust : sometimes he is stoned, and some
times slaughtered. And in later and less
perfect forms of piacular animal sacrifice,
�128
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
slaughter was the rule, save where burning
■had ousted it. Indeed, in many cases, it
is difficult to disentangle the various
elements of the complex question. People
had got accustomed to certain forms of
sacrifice, and mixed them up indiscrimi
nately, so that one and the same rite seems
sometimes to be sacramental, sacrificial,
and piacular, all at once. Thus Dr.
Robertson Smith writes of ancient Egypt :
“Bulls were offered on the altar, and part
of the flesh eaten in a sacrificial feast ; but
the sacrifice was only permitted as a
piaculum, was preceded by a solemn fast,
and was accompanied by public lamenta
tion, as at the death of a kinsman.” Com
pare the annual mourning for Adonis ; and
also the similar union of sacrifice, sacra
ment, and Atonement in the Mass, which,
at the great resurrection-festival of the
Christian year, Easter, is equally preceded
by a fast, and by the solemn mourning of
Good Friday.
Now, I do not pretend to discriminate
accurately in these very mixed cases between
one element and another in the compound
rite. Often enough, all the various traits
of god-slaying, of sacrament, and of public
expiation are evidently present. Usually,
too, the victim is slain before the altar or
sacred stone of some earlier and greater
god, and its blood poured forth for him.
But the identity of god and victim is often
quite clear.
On the whole, then, at the stage we have
at last reached, I will not attempt to dis
tinguish in every case between the various
superposed ideas in the sacrificial cere
mony. Most sacrifices seem in the last
resort to be substitutes for human-divine
victims. Most seem to be sacramental, and
most to be more or less distinctly piacular.
I do not even know whether, in reconstruct
ing afresh for others a series of rites the
ideas of which have grown slowly clear to
my own mind by consideration of numerous
mixed examples, I have always placed each
particular fact in its best and most effective
position for illustration. I would like to
add, however, that the ideas here formu
lated must give a new meaning to many
points we could not at first understand
in ceremonies mentioned in our earlier
chapters. I will take only one example—
that of the place of Samoyed sacrifice
which Baron Nordenskiold sawon Vaygats
Island. We can now divine the meaning
of the heap of reindeer skulls piled around
the rude open-air shrine ; for reindeer are
the sacred and theanthropic animals of the
northern races ; while the preservation of
their heads at the hypoethral altar of the
elder gods or ghosts has its usual holy and
oracular meaning. We can also guess why
remains of a fireplace could be seen by the
side, at which the sacrificial and sacra
mental meal was habitually prepared ; and
why the mouths of the idols were smeared
with blood, in order to make the older gods
or ghosts participators in the festival.
Indeed, any reader who has followed me
thus far, and who now turns back to the
earlier chapters of this book, will find that
many details appear to him in quite a
different light, and will see why I have
insisted beforehand on some minor
points which must have seemed to him at
the time wholly irrelevant.
Many other curious ceremonies that seem
equally meaningless at first in narratives
of travel will also come to have a significant
meaning when thus regarded. For instance,
Mr. Chalmers tells us that among the New
Guinea natives of particular districts “ pigs
are never killed but in the one place, and
then they are offered to the spirit. The
blood is poured out there, and the carcase
is then carried back to the village, to be
divided, cooked, and eaten. Pigs’ skulls
are kept and hung up in the house. Food
for a feast, such as at house-building”—a
most pregnant hint—“is placed near the
post where the skulls hang, and a prayer
is said. When the centre-post is set up,
the spirits have wallaby, fish, and bananas
presented to them, and they are besought
to keep that house always full of food, and
that it may not fall when the wind is
strong.” If we recall other cases else
where, we can hardly doubt that the pigs
in these instances are killed as sacred
victims at the grave of the chief family
ancestor; especially when Mr. Chalmers
also tells us that “each family has a sacred
place where they carry offerings to the
spirits of deceased ancestors, whom they
greatly fear.” When sickness, famine, or
scarcity of fish occurs, it is these spirits that
have to be appeased. And if we recollect
once more that in so many cases the
central post of the hut is based on a human
or animal victim, both in New Guinea and
elsewhere, we can hardly doubt that to this
household-god or foundation-ghost the
offerings at the central post are presented.
Finally, the skulls of the pigs which are
kept in the house and hung on the post
remind us on the one hand of the skulls of
ancestor-gods similarly preserved, and on
the other hand of the skulls of theanthropic
�THE WORLD BEFORE CHRIST
129
towns at the time when Christianity began
to spring spontaneous in their midst. We
can arrive at some idea of the product itself
by observing the environment in which it
was evolved.
Once more, Christianity grew—for the
most part, among the lower orders of the
cosmopolitan seaports. It fashioned itself
among the slaves, the freedmen, the Jewish,
Syrian, and African immigrants, the
Druidical Gauls and Britons of Rome, the
petty shopkeepers, the pauperised clients,
the babes and sucklings of the populous
centres. Hence, while based upon Judaism,
it gathered hospitably into itself all those
elements of religious thought and religious
practice that were common to the whole
world, and especially to the Eastern Medi
terranean basin. Furthermore, it gathered
hospitably into itself in particular those
elements which belonged to the older and
deeper-seated part of the popular religions,
rather than those which belonged to the
civilised, Hellenised, and recognised modi
fications of the State religions. It was a
democratic rather than an official product.
CHAPTER XVII.
We have to look, therefore, at the elder far
more than the younger stratum of religious
TIIE WORLD BEFORE CHRIST
thought in the great cities for the in
fluences which went to mould Christianity.
Christianity grew. It was a natural
I do not deny, indeed, that the new faith
product. It did not spring, full-fledged,
was touched and tinged in all its higher
from any one man’s brain, as Athene sprang
parts by beautiful influences from Neo
from the head of Zeus. It was not even
Platonism, Alexandrian Judaism, and other
invented by any little group or school of half-mystical philosophic systems; but for
men, Petrine or Pauline, the apostles or the
its essential groundwork we have still to go
disciples, the early Church of Jerusalem,
to the root-stratum of religious practice
Antioch, or Alexandria. Christianity grew and belief in Antioch and Alexandria, in
—slowly. It developed, bit by bit, for three
Phrygia and Galatia, in Jerusalem and
long centuries, taking shape by gradual
Rome. It based itself above all on sacra
stages in all the teeming centres of the ment, sacrifice, atonement, and resurrec
Roman world ; and even after it had tion. Yet again, Christianity originated
assumed a consistent form as the Holy
first of all among the Jewish, Syrian, or
Catholic Church, it still went on growing in
Semitic population of these great towns of
the minds of men, with a growth which
the empire, at the very moment of its full
never ends, but which reveals itself even
cosmopolitanisation ; it spread rapidly from
now in a thousand modes, from a Vatican
them, no doubt at first with serious modi
Council to the last new departure of the
fications, to the mixed mass of sailors,
last new group of American sectaries.
slaves, freedwomen, and townspeople who
Christianity grew—in the crowded cosformed apparently its earliest adherents.
mopolitanised seaports and cities of the
Hence, we must look in it for an intimate
Roman Empire—in Antioch, Alexandria,
blend of Judaism with the central ideas of
Thessalonica, Cyrene, Byzantium, Rome.
the popular religions, Aryan or Hamitic, of
Its highway was the sea. Though partly
the Mediterranean basin. We must expect
Jewish in origin, it yet appears from its
in it much that was common in Syria, Asia
earliest days essentially as a universal and
Minor, Hellas, and Egypt—something even
international religion. Therefore we may
from Gaul, Hispania, Carthage. Its first
gain some approximate knowledge of its
great apostle, if we may believe our autho
origin and antecedents by considering the rities, was one Saul or Paul, a halfreligious condition of these various great
Hellenised Jew of Semitic and commercial
victims kept by the people of India at their
festivals, or fastened by early Greeks and
Romans on their temples. “ They cook the
heads of their slain enemies,” says Mr.
Chalmers again, “ to secure clean skulls to
- put on sacred places.”
We must then remember these two car
dinal points : first, that a dying god, human
or animal, is usually selected as a conve
nient vehicle for the sins of the people ; and
second, that “ without shedding of blood
there is no remission of sin.” These two
doctrines were commonly current all over
the world, but especially in that Eastern
Mediterranean world where Christianity
was first evolved. Indeed, they were there
so generally recognised that the writers of
the earliest Christian tractates, the Apos
tolic Epistles, take them for granted as selfevident—as principles of which every intel
ligent man would at once admit the truth
and cogency.
�13°
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
Tarsus in Sicilia, and a Roman citizen. Its
first great churches sprang up in the busy
ports and marts of the Levant. Its very
name of Christian was given to it first in
the crowded and cosmopolitan city of
■ Antioch.
It is here, then, in these huge slavepeopled hives of Hellenised and Roma
nised commerce, that we must look for the
mother-ideas of Christianity.
Antioch was quite undoubtedly in the
earliest times the principal cradle of the
new religion. I do not mean that Jeru
salem was not very probably the place
where men first began to form a small
sect of esoteric Christ-worshippers, or that
Galilee was not the region where the Christ
himself most largely lived and taught, if
indeed such a person ever really existed.
In those matters the traditions handed
down to us in the relatively late Gospels
may be perfectly correct : and, again, they
may not. But Christianity as we know it,
the Christianity of the Pauline epistles and
the later writings, such as the Gospels and
the works of the Fathers, must have been
essentially a cult of wider Syrian and
Gentile growth. It embraces in itself
elements which doubtless lingered on in
secluded corners more or less among the
mass of the people even in Judaea itself,
though discountenanced by the adherents
of the priestly and official Jahweh-worship ;
but which were integral parts of the popular
and even the recognised religion through
out the whole of northern Syria.
Antioch, where Christianity thus took its
first feeble steps, was a handsome and
bustling commercial city, the capital of
the Greek Seleucid kings, and the acknow
ledged metropolis of the Syrian area. At
the time of Paul (if there was a Paul) it
probably contained half a million people ;
it was certainly the largest town in Asia,
and worthy to be compared with Rome
itself in the splendour of its buildings.
Many things about its position are de
serving of notice. It stood upon the banks
of the Orontes, a sacred stream, ensconced
in a rich agricultural plain, fourteen miles
from the river’s mouth. Its Ostia was at
Selucia, the harbour whence flowed the
entire export trade of Syria and the east
towards Hellas and Italy. The Mediterra
nean in front connected it with Rome,
Alexandria, Asia Minor, Greece; the
caravan routes across the Syrian desert in
the rear put it in communication with the
bazaars of Mesopotamia and the remoter
east. It was thus the main entrepot of the
through trade between two important
worlds. The Venice of its time, it lay at
the focal point where the highroads of
Europe and of Asia converged.
Scholars of repute have pointed out the
fact that, even earlier than the days of Paul,
Buddhist ideas from India seem to have
dribbled through and affected the Syrian
world, as Zoroastrian ideas a little later
dribbled through and affected the thought
of Alexandria : and some importance has
been attached to this infiltration of motives
from the mystical east. Now, I do not
care to deny that budding Christianity
may have been much influenced on its
ritual and still more on its ethical side by
floating elements of Buddhist opinion.
But on the whole I think the facts we have
just been considering as to the manufacture
of artificial human gods and the nature
and meaning of piacular sacrifices will
suffice to show that Christianity was chiefly
a plant of home growth. The native soil
contained already every essential element
that was needed to feed it—the doctrine of
the Incarnation, the death of the ManGod, the atoning power of his Blood, the
Resurrection and Ascension. So that,
while allowing due weight to this peculiar
international position of Antioch, as the
double-faced Janus-gate of Europe and
Asia, I am not inclined to think that points
peculiar to Buddhism need have exercised
any predominant influence in the evolution
of the new religion. For we must re
member that Buddhism itself did but
subsume into its own fabric ideas which
were common to Peru and Mexico, to
Greece and India, to Syria and Egypt,
and which came out in fresh forms,
surging up from below, in the creed of
Christendom. If anything is clear from
our previous researches it is this—that the
world has never really had more than one
religion—“ of many names, a single central
shape,” as the poet phrases it.
The Syrian people, Semites by race and
cult, had fallen, like all the rest of the
eastern world, under the Hellenic dominion
of the successors of Alexander. A quick
and subtle folk, very pliable and plastic,
they underwent rapid and facile Hellenisa
tion. It was an easy task for them to
accept Greek culture and Greek religion.
The worshipper of Adonis had little
difficulty in renaming his chief god as
Dionysus and continuing to practise his
old rites and ceremonies to the newlynamed deity after the ancestral pattern.
The Astarte whom the east has given to
�THE WORLD BEFORE CHRIST
Hellas under the alias of Aphrodite came
back again as Aphrodite to Astarte’s old
sanctuaries. Identifications of gods and
cults were but simple matters, where so
many gods were after all essentially
similar in origin and function.
The Seleucids, however, did not fare so
well in their attempt to impose the alien
gods on the fierce Jehovistic zealots of the
southern mountains. Antiochus IV. en
deavoured in vain to force the cults of
intrusive Hellenism on his new kingdom
of Palestine. He reckoned without his
hosts. The populace of Jerusalem would
not away with his “idolatrous” rites—
would not permit the worship of Zeus and
Pallas, of Artemis and Aphrodite, to usurp
a place in the holy city of Jahweh. The
rebellion of the Maccabees secured at
least the religious independence of Judaea
from the early Seleucid period down to the
days of Vespasian and Titus. Lower
Syria remained true in her arid hills to
the exclusive and monotheistic cult of the
God of Israel. And at the same time the
Jew spread everywhere over the surround
ing countries, carrying with him not only
his straw and his basket, but also his
ingrained and ineradicable prejudices.
In Antioch, then, after the Roman absorp
tion of Syria, a most cosmopolitan religion
appears to have existed, containing mingled
Semitic and Hellenic elements, half assimi
lated to one another, in a way that was
highly characteristic of the early empire.
And among the popular cults of the great
city we must certainly place high those of
Adonis and Dionysus, of Aphrodite-Astarte,
and of the local gods or goddesses, the
Baalim and Ashtareth, such as the maiden
who, as we learnt from Malalas, was sacri
ficed at the original foundation of the city,
and ever after worshipped as its Tyche or
Fortune. In other words, the conception
of the human god, of the corn and wine
god, of the death of the god, and of his
glorious resurrection, must have all been
perfectly familiar ideas to the people of
Antioch and of Syria in general.
Let us note here, too, that the particular
group of Jahweh-worshippers among whom
the Christ is said to have found his personal
followers were not people of the priestly
type of Jerusalem, but Galilaean peasants
of the northern mountains, separated from
the most orthodox set of Jews by the intru
sive wedge of heretical Samaritans, and
closely bordering on the heathen Phoenician
seaboard—“the coasts of Tyre and Sidon.”
Here Judaism and heathenism marched
together; here Jahweh had his worshippers
among the fishers of the lake, while Hel
lenism had fixed itself in the statelier villas
of Tiberias and Ptolemais.
Alexandria was another of the great cos
mopolitan seaport towns where Christianity
made its earliest converts, and assumed
not a few of its distinctive tenets. Now,
in Alexandria, Hellenism and the immemorially ancient Egyptian religion found
themselves face to face at very close;
quarters. It is true, the town in its his
torical aspect was mainly Greek, founded?
by the great Macedonian, and priding itself'
on its pure Hellenic culture. But the mass of the lower orders who thronged its alleys
must surely have consisted of more or less
mongrel Egyptians, still clinging with all
the old Egyptian conservatism to the ideas
and practices and rites of their fathers..
Besides these, we get hints of a large cosmo
politan seafaring population, among whom,
strange faiths and exotic gods found ready
acceptance. Beside the stately forms of
the Greek pantheon and the mummified
or animal-headed Egyptian deities, the
imported Syrian worship of Adonis had
acquired a firm footing ; the annual festival
of the slaughtered god was one of the
principal holidays; and other Syrian or
remoter faiths had managed to secure their
special following. The hybrid Serapis
occupied the stateliest fane of the hybrid
city. In that huge and busy hive, indeed,
every form of cult found a recognised place,
and every creed was tolerated which did
not inculcate interference with the equal
religious freedom of others.
The Ptolemaic family represents in itself
this curious adaptability of the Graeco
Egyptian Alexandrian mind. At Alexandria
and in the Delta the kings appear before
us as good Hellenes, worshipping their
ancestral deities in splendid temples; but
in the Thebaid the god Ptolemy or the
goddess Cleopatra erected buildings in
honour of Ptah or Khem in precisely the
old Egyptian style, and appeared on their
propyla in the guise of Pharaohs engaged
in worshipping Amen-Ra or Osiris. The
great Alexander himself had inaugurated
this system when he gave himself out as
the son of “Zeus Ammon”; and his indirect
representatives carried it on throughout
with a curious dualism which excused itself
under the veil of arbitrary identifications.
Thus Serapis himself was the dead Apis
bull, invested with the attributes of an
Osiris and of the Hellenic Hades ; while
Amen-Ra was Zeus in an Egyptain avatar.
�132
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
The large Jewish colony at Alexandria
also prepared the way for the ultimate
admixture of Neo-Platonism in the Christian
faith ; while the Egyptian belief in Triads
of gods formed the groundwork for the
future doctrine of the Trinity, so doggedly
battled for by the Alexandrian Athanasius.
It is true that Ampère and Preller have
strenuously denied any Egyptian admixture
in the philosophy of Alexandria, and their
reasoning may be conclusive enough as to
the upper stratum of thought ; but it must
at least be admitted that popular belief in
the city of the Ptolemies must have been
deeply coloured by the ideas and creeds of
its Egyptian substratum. Now, in the
growth of Christianity it was the people
who counted, not the official classes, the
learned, or the philosophic. We must not
attribute to the population of the East
End of London the theology of Pusey or
the evolutionism of Herbert Spencer.
Christianity would seem also to have
taken part at least of its form in Rome.
And, as Roman influence extended likewise
over every portion of the vast empire, I must
say a few words here about the origin and
growth of the Roman religion.
That religion, as it comes upon us in the
<few glimpses we get of its early Italic and
pre-Hellenised form, was one of the rudest
.and most primitive type, almost savage in
its extreme simplicity. It knew hardly any
great gods by name: the few deities it
possessed it expressed only for the most
part by adjectival names. Few, I say, as
to type, for as to number of individuals
their name- indeed was legion ; they per
vaded the whole world in that reckless
multiplicity which distinguishes the simple
•ghosts or spirits of early hunting or pastoral
peoples. With the Romans this multipli
city, ubiquity, and vagueness survived into
a relatively settled and civilised agricultural
condition. A vast number of small depart
mental gods, with few or no great ones
—that is the first state of the Roman
pantheon.
The central point of old Roman religion
was clearly the household ; the family
ghosts or lares were the most honoured
gods. We may instructively compare Mr.
Chalmers’s account of the theology of New
Guinea. Besides these ancestral shades,
or almost identical with them, came the
penates or practical deities of the store-room,
perhaps the representatives of the victims
slain as foundation-ghosts at the first erec
tion of the building. Of these two, the
Lares were undoubtedly the departed
ancestors of the family; they lived near
the spot where they were first buried (for
the old Romans were buriers), and they still
presided over the household as in life, like
its fathers and senators. They were wor
shipped daily with prayers and simple offer
ings of food and drink : their masks or
busts which hung on the wall.were perhaps
the representatives, or in ancient days the
coverings, of the old oracular heads or
skulls ; for the skulls themselves may have
been preserved in wax, as so often elsewhere
at an earlier period.1 The Penates which
were worshipped with the Lares seem to
have stood for the family spirit in a more
generalised way; they represent the con
tinuity and persistence of its Fortune ; and
therefore, if we may trust the analogy of
the Fortune of a town, they are probably
the ghosts of the foundation or renewal
victims. In judging of all this, we cannot
attach too great importance to the analogy
of Negritto and Polynesian customs.
Other deities are more public. But most
of them seem to belong to the simplest and
most immediately ghost-like stratum. They
had to do with sowing, reaping, and vintage
—in other words, were corn or wine gods,
Or else they had to do with the navigable
river, the Tiber, and the port of Ostia,
which lay at its mouth—in other words,
were spring and river gods. Or else they
had to do with war and expeditions—in
other words, were slaughtered campaign
gods of the Iphigenia pattern, Bellonas
and battle-victims.
Among this dim crowd of elder manu
factured deities, Saturnus, the sowing god,
was most likely an annual corn-victim ; his
adjectival name by itself suggests that con
clusion. Terminus, the boundary god, is
already familiar to us. About these two at
least we can hardly be mistaken. Seia,
Segetia, Tutilina, were the successive corn
deities. They seem to equate with the suc
cessive maidens slain for the corn in other
communities, and still commemorated in
our midst by the corn-baby and the corn
wife. At each stage of age in the corn a
corresponding stage in the age of the
human victim was considered desirable.
But how reconcile this idea with the exist
ence of numerous petty functional deities—
1 To this use of the oracular head I would venture
also to refer the common employment of small
masks as amulets—an employment which, as
Bötticher rightly remarks, explains “ the vast
number of such subjects met with in antique
gems.”
�THE WORLD -BEFORE CHRIST
gods of the door and the hinge ?—with the
Cunina who guards the child in the cradle,
and the Statina who takes care of him
when he begins to stand ? I answer, all
these are but adjectival gods, mere ghosts
or spirits, unknown in themselves, but con
ceived as exercising this particular function.
“The god that does so-and-so” is just a
convenient expression, no more; it serves
its purpose, and that was enough for the
practical Roman. How readily they could
put up with these rough-and-ready identifi
cations we know in the case of Aius Locutius and of the Deus Rediculus.
Each Terminus and each Silvanus is thus
the god or protecting ghost of each boun
dary stone or each sacred grove—not a
proper name, but a class—not a particular
god, but a kind of spirit. The generalised
and abstract gods are later unifications of
all the individuals included in each genus.
The Janus, I take it, was at first the victim
once sacrificed annually before each gate of
the city, as he is sacrificed still on the west
coast of Africa : as the god of opening, he
was slaughtered at the opening of every
new year; and the year conversely opened
its course with the month sacred to the god
of opening. Perhaps he was also slain as
fortune at the beginning of each war. The
Vesta is the hearth-goddess; and every
house had its Vesta; perhaps originally a
slaughtered hearth-victim. Every man had
in like manner his Genius,- an ancestral
protecting spirit; the corresponding guar
dian of the woman was her Juno; they
descend to Christianity, especially in its
most distinctive Roman form, as the guar
dian angels. Mars was a corn-spirit; only
later was he identified with the expedi
tionary god. The Jupiter or Jovis was a
multiple wine-god, doubtless in every case
the annual victim slain, Dionysus-wise, for
the benefit of the vineyard. Each village
and each farm had once its Jovis, specially
worshipped, and, I doubt not, originally
slaughtered, at the broaching of the year’s
first wine-cask in April. But his name
shows that, as usual, he was also identified
with that very ancient Sky-god who is
common to all the Aryan race ; the par
ticular Jovis being probably sacrificed, him
self to himself, before the old Sky-god’s
altar, as elsewhere the Dionysus-victim at
the shrine of Dionysus.
These identifications, I know, may sound
fanciful to mere classical scholars, unac
quainted with the recent advances in
anthropology, and I would not have ven
tured to propound them at an earlier stage
133
of our involved argument; but now that we
have seen and learned to recognise the
extraordinary similarity of all pantheons
the whole world over, I think the exact way
these deities fall into line with the wall
gods, gate-gods, corn-gods, wine-gods,
boundary-gods, forest-gods, fountain-gods,'
and river-gods everywhere else must surely
be allowed some little weight in analogi
cally placing them.
The later Roman religion only widens, if
at all, from within its own range by the
inclusion of larger and larger tribal ele
ments. Thus the Deus Fidius, who pre
sided over each separate alliance, I take to
be the ghost of the victim slain to form a
covenant; just as in Africa to this day,
when two tribes have concluded a treaty of
peace, they crucify a slave “ to ratify thebargain.” The nature of such covenant
victims has been well illustrated by Pro
fessor Robertson Smith, but the growth of
the covenant-gods, who finally assumed
very wide importance, is a subject which
considerations of space prevent me from
including in our present purview. The
victim, at first no doubt human, became
later a theanthropic animal; as did also
the Jovis-victim and the representatives of
the other adjectival or departmental deities..
The Roman Mars and the Sabine Quirinus
may readily have been amalgamated into a
Mars Quirinus, if we remember that Mars
is probably a general name, and that any
number of Martes may at any time have
been sacrificed. The Jovis of the city of
Rome thus comes at last to be the greatest
and most powerful Jupiter of them all, and
the representative of the Roman union.
Under Hellenising influences, however, all
these minor gods get elevated at last into
generalised deities ; and the animal victims
offered to them become mere honorific or
pi.acular sacrifices, hardly identified at all
with the great images who receive them.
The Hellenising process went so far,
indeed, at Rome that the old Roman
religion grew completely obscured, and
almost disappeared, save in its domestic
character. In the home the Lares still
held the first rank. Elsewhere Bacchus
took the place of Liber, while the traits of
Hermes were fastened on the adjectival
Roman bargain-spirit Mercurius. Yet even
so, the Roman retained his primitive belief
in corn and wine gods under the newer
guises ; his Ceres he saw as one with the
Attic Demeter; his rural ceremonies still
continued unchanged by the change of
attributes that infected and transfigured the
�134
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
city temples. Moreover, the Romans, and
later the cosmopolitan population of Rome,
borrowed gods and goddesses freely from
without in ever-increasing numbers. In
very early days they borrowed from Etruria;
later they borrowed Apollo from Greece,
and (by an etymological blunder) fixed upon
their own Hercules the traits of Heracles.
On the occasion of a plague they publicly
summoned Asclepios, the Greek leech-god,
from Epidaurus; and at the very crisis of
the life-and-death conflict with Hannibal
they fetched the sacred field-stone known
as Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, from
Pessinus in Phrygia. The people of
Pessinus with strange compliance let their
goddess go; and the whole orgiastic cult of
Attis was thus transported entire to I talian
soil. The rites of the great festival were
carried on at Rome almost as they had
been carried on before in Phrygia ; so that
an Asiatic worship of the most riotous type
found a firm official footing in the centre of
the empire. The priest, indeed, was still
an Asiatic, or at least not a Roman ; but
the expulsion of Hannibal from Italy which
followed on this adoption of a foreign god
must have greatly increased the prestige
.and reputation of the alien and orgiastic
deity.
The luxurious Aphrodite of Eryx in
Sicily arrived in Rome about the same time
with Cybele. Originally a Semitic goddess,
she combined the Hellenic and oriental
ideas, and was identified in Italy with the
old Latin Venus.
Later still yet other gods were imported
from without. New deities flowed in from
Asia and Africa. The population of the
city under the early empire had almost
•ceased to be Roman, save in the upper
strata ; a vast number of slaves from all
parts of the world formed the lowest layer
m the crowded vaults : the middle rank
was filled by Syrians, Africans, Greeks,
Sicilians, Moors, and freedmen—men of
all places and races from Spain or Britain
to the Euphrates and the Nile, the steppes
and the desert. The Orontes, said Juvenal,
had flooded the Tiber. Among this mixed
mass of all creeds and colours, subfusc or
golden-haired, a curious mixture of religions
grew up. Some of these were mere ready
made foreign importations—Isis-worship
from Egypt; Jahweh-worship from Judaea;
strange eastern or northern or African cults
from the remotest parts of Pontus or Mauri
tania. Others were intermixtures or rational
isations of older religions, such as Chris
tianity, which mingled together Judaism
and Adonis or Osiris elements, such as
Gnosticism, which, starting from Zoroastrian infiltrations, kneaded all the gods of
the world at last into its own supreme
mystic and magic-god Abraxas.
Looking a little deeper through the
empire in general, we see that from the
time of Augustus onward the need for a
new cosmopolitan religion, to fit the new
cosmopolitan state, was beginning to be
dimly felt and acknowledged. Soldiers
enlisted in one country took the cult and
images of their gods to another. The bull
slaying Mithra (in whom we can hardly
fail to see a solar form of the bull-god, who
sacrifices a bull, himself to himself, before
his own altar) was worshipped here and
there, as numerous bas-reliefs show, from
Persia to Britain. The Gaul endeavoured
to identify his own local war-gods with the
Roman Mars, who had been Hellenised in
turn into the duplicate presentment of the
Greek Ares. The Briton saw his river
gods remodelled in mosaic into images
like those of Roman Tiber, or provided
with the four horses who drag the Roman
Neptune, as Neptune has borrowed the
representation at last- from the Greek
Poseidon. And this was all the easier
because everywhere alike horses were
sacrificed to sea or river, in lieu of human
victims; just as everywhere corn-gods
were dressed in green, and everywhere
wine-gods wore coronals of vine-leaves on
their holy foreheads. Men felt the truth
I have tried to impress, that everywhere
and always there is but oiie religion.
Attributes and origin were so much alike
that worship was rapidly undergoing a
cosmopolitanisation of name, as it already
possessed a similarity of rites and underly
ing features. Language itself assisted this
unifying process. In the west, as Latin
spread, Latin names of gods superseded
local ones ; in the east, as Greek spread,
Hellenic deities gave their titles and their
beautiful forms to native images.
But this was not enough. As the govern
ment was one, under a strong centralised
despotism, it was but natural that the reli
gion should be one also, under the rule
of a similar omnipotent deity. Man makes
his heaven in the image of earth, his
pantheon answers to his political constitu
tion. The mediaeval hall of heaven had
an imperial God, like the Othos or the
Fredericks, on his regal throne, surrounded
by a court of great barons and abbots in
the angels and archangels, the saints and
martyrs: the new religions, like Spiritualism
�THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIANITY
and Theosophy, which spring up in the
modern democratic world, are religions
of free and independent spirits, hardly
even theistic. The Roman empire thus
demanded a single religion under a single
strong god. Materialists were satisfied
with the worship of the Emperor or of the
city of Rome : idealists turned rather to
Isis or to Christ.
One religion there was which might
have answered the turn of the empire : the
pure and ideal monotheism of Judaea. But
the cult of Jahweh was too local and too
national; it never extended beyond the
real or adopted sons of Israel. Even so,
it gained proselytes of high rank at Rome,
especially among women ; as regards men,
the painful and degrading initiatory cere
mony of Judaism must always have stood
seriously in the way of converts. Yet, in
spite of this drawback, there were prose
lytes in all the cosmopolitan cities where
the Jews were settled ; men who loved
their nation and had built them a syna
gogue. If Judaism could but get rid of
its national exclusiveness, and could in
corporate into its god some more of those
genial and universal traits which he had
too early shuffled off—if it could make
itself less austere, less abstract, and at the
same time less local—there was a chance
that it might rise to be the religion of
humanity. The dream of the prophets
might still come true, and all the world
might draw nigh to Zion.
At this critical juncture an obscure little
sect began to appear among the Jews and
Galilaeans, in Jerusalem and Antioch, which
happened to combine in a remarkable
degree all the main requirements of a new
world-religion. And whatever the cult of
Jesus lacked in this respect in its first
beginnings, it made up for as it went, by
absorption and permeation.
It was a Catholic Church : it stood for
the world, not for a tribe or a nation. It
was a Holy Church : it laid great stress
upon the ethical element. It was a Roman
Church : it grew and prospered throughout
the Roman empire. It made a city what
was once a world. Whence it came and
how it grew must be our next and final
questions.
135
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIANITY
While the world was thus seething and
fermenting with new faiths the Creed of
the Christ made its first appearance on the
seaboard of Asia. In spite of certain re
marks in my first chapter, I am not such a
“ gross and crass Euhemerist ” as to insist
dogmatically on the historical existence of
a personal Jesus. Of the Christ himself, if
a Christ there were, we know little or
nothing. The account of his life which
has come down to us in the Gospels is so
devoid of authority, and so entirely built
up of miraculous fragments, derived from
elsewhere, that we may well be excused for
gravely doubting whether he is not rather
to be numbered with St. George and St.
Catherine, with Perseus and Arthur, among
the wholly mythical and imaginary figures
of legend and religion.
On the other hand, it is quite possible, or
even probable, that there really did live in
Galilee, at some time about the beginning
of our accepted era, a teacher and
reformer bearing the Semitic name which
is finally Hellenised and Latinised for us
as Jesus. If so, it seems not unlikely that
this unknown person was crucified (or
rather hung on a post) by the Romans at
Jerusalem under the Procurator G. Pontius
Pilatus ; and that after his death he was
worshipped more or less as a god by his
immediate followers. Such kernel of truth
may very well exist in the late and deriva
tive Gospel story ; a kernel of truth, but
imbedded in a mass of unhistorical myth
which implicitly identifies him with all the
familiar corn-gods and wine-gods of the
Eastern Mediterranean.
Furthermore, it is even possible that the
Christ may have been deliberately put to
death, at the instigation of the Jewish
rabble, as one of those temporary divine
kings whose nature and meaning we have
already discussed. If this suggestion seem
improbable from the lack of any similar
recorded case in the scanty Jewish annals,
I would answer that formal histories seldom
give.us any hint of the similar customs still
surviving in civilised European countries ;
that many popular rites exist unheard of
everywhere ; and that the Jews were com
monly believed through the Middle Ages
to crucify Christian boys, like St. Hugh
of Lincoln, in certain irregular and
�136
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
unrecognised ethnical ceremonies. Further
more, lest I should be thought to adduce this
instance through an anti-Semite tendency
(which I do not in the slightest degree
possess), I may add that even among
' Christians similar customs are believed to
exist in rural parts of Italy at the present
day—there are villages where a man dies
yearly as the representative of Christ: and
that in my opinion the Oberammergau and
other Passion Plays are survivals of like
representations in which a condemned
criminal, the usual substitute, did once
actually enact the part of Christ. In short,
■ I do not hesitate to say that god-slaying
ceremonies, more or less attenuated, have
lingered on everywhere in obscure forms
among the folk-rites and folk-customs of
the most civilised peoples.
Without doing more than briefly indicate
this possibility, however, I pass on to say
that if ever there was really a personal
Christ, and if his followers began by vaguely
believing in his resurrection, the legend, as
we get it, is obviously made up of collected
fragments of all the god-slaying customs
and beliefs we have been considering in
detail through the last six or seven chapters.
In the Gospel of his later believers, after the
sect had spread widely among the Gentiles
of the towns, Jesus is conceived of as a corn
and wine god, a temporary king, slain on a
cross as a piacular atonement, and raised
again from the dead after three days, in the
manner common to all corn and wine gods.
It is possible, of course, that the first
believers may have fastened all these ideas
on to an accidental combination and execu
tion, so to speak ; but it is possible too that
the Christ may actually have been put to
death at the great spring feast of the Passover, in accordance with some obscure and
unrecognised folk-rite of the rabble of
Jerusalem. I do not even pretend to have
an opinion on this subject; I do not assert
or deny any historical nucleus of fact ; I
am satisfied with saying that the story, on
the whole, exhibits the Christ to us entirely
in the character of a temporary king, slain
with piacular rites as a corn and wine god.
In the earliest Christian documents, the
Pauline and other Apostolic Epistles, we
get little information about the history of
the real or mythical Christ. Shadowy allu
sions alone to the crucifixion and the
resurrection repay our scrutiny.
But
through the mist of words we see two or
three things clearly. The Christ is des
cribed as the son of God—that is to say, of
the Jewish deity ; and he is spoken of con
tinually as slain on a post or tree, the
sacred symbol of so many old religions.
He dies to save mankind ; and salvation is
offered in his name to all men. A careful
reading of the epistles from this point of
view will give in brief an epitome of the
earliest and least dogmatic yet very doc
trinal Christian theology. Its cardinal
points are four—incarnation, death, resur- ■
rection, atonement.
The later accounts which we get in the
Gospels are far more explicit. The legend
by that time had taken form : it had grown
clear and consistent. All the elements of
the slain and risen corn and wine god are
there in perfection. For brevity’s sake, I
will run all these accounts together, adding
to them certain traits of still later origin.
The aspect of Christ as a survival of the
corn-gOd is already clear in Paul’s argument
in First Corinthians on the resurrection of
the body. This argument would strike
home at once to every Greek and every
Asiatic. “ That which you sow is not
quickened unless it die. And when you
sow, you sow not the body that is to be, but
bare grain ; it may be wheat or any other
grain. But God gives it a shape as pleases
him ; to every seed its own body.” The
whole of this fifteenth chapter, the earliest
statement of the Christian belief, should be
read through in this connection by any one
who wishes to understand the close relation
of the idea of sowing to the resurrection.
It might have been written by any wor
shipper of Adonis or Osiris who wished to
recommend his special doctrine .of a bodily
resurrection to a doubtful cremationist,
familiar with the cult of Dionysus and of
Attis.
The earliest known rite of the Christian
Church was the sacramental eating and
drinking of bread and wine together ; which
rite was said to commemorate the death of
the Lord and his last supper, when he eat
and drank bread and wine with his dis
ciples. The language put into his mouth
on this occasion in the Gospels, especially
the Fourth, is distinctly that of the corn and
wine god. “ I am the true vine ; ye are the
branches.” “ I am the bread of life.”
“ Take, eat, this is my body.” “ This is my
blood of the new testament.” Numberless
other touches of like kind are scattered
through the speeches.
In early Christian art, as exhibited in the
catacombs at Rome, the true vine is most
frequently figured; as are also baskets o-f
loaves, with the corresponding miracle of
the loaves and fishes. Multiplication of
�THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIANITY
bread and wine are the natural credentials
of the corn and wine god. The earliest
description we possess of Christ, that of
John of Damascus, states that his com
plexion was “of the colour of wheat”; while
in the apocryphal'letter of Lentulus to the
Roman Senate we read in the same spirit
that his hair was “wine-coloured.” The
Greek description by Epiphanius Monachus
says that Christ was six feet high ; his hair
long and golden-coloured ; and in counte
nance he was ruddy like his father David.
All these descriptions are obviously influ
enced by the identification of the bread and
wine of the eucharist with the personal
Jesus.
In the usage of the Church from very
early days, it has been customary to eat the
body of Christ in the form of bread, and to
drink his blood as wine in the sacrament.
In the Catholic Church this continuous
ceremony takes place at an altar contain
ing sacred bones, and is represented as
being the offering of God, himself to him
self, in the form of a mystic and piacular
sacrifice. The priest drinks the wine or
blood ; the laity eat only the bread or body.
A curious custom which occurs in many
churches of Sicily at Easter still further
enforces this unity of Christ with the cult
of earlier corn and wine gods, like Adonis
and Osiris. The women sow wheat, lentils,
and canary-seed in plates, which are kept
in the dark and watered every second day.
The plants soon shoot up ; they are then
tied together with red ribbons, and the
plates containing them are placed on the
sepulchres which, with effigies of the dead
Christ, are made up in Roman Catholic
and Greek churches on Good Friday, “just
as the gardens of Adonis,” says Mr. Frazer,
“ were placed on the grave of the dead
Adonis.” In this curious ceremony we get
a survival from the very lowest stratum of
corn-god worship ; the stratum where an
actual human victim is killed, and corn
and other crops are sown above his body.
Even where the sowing itself no longer
survives the sepulchre remains as a relic
of the same antique ritual. Such sepulchres
are everywhere common at Easter, as are
the cradles of the child-god at the feast of
the winter solstice. The Pietà is the final
form of this mourning of the corn-god by
the holy women.
Passing on to the other aspects of Christ
as corn-god and divine-human victim, we
see that he is doubly recognised as god
and man, like all the similar gods of early
races. In the speeches put into his mouth
137
by his biographers he constantly claims
the Jewish god as his father. Moreover,
he is a king ; and his kingly descent from
his ancestor David is insisted upon in the
genealogies with some little persistence.
He is God incarnate ; but also he is the
King of the Jews, and the King of Glory.
Wise men come from the east to worship
him, and bring gifts of gold and myrrh
and frankincense to the infant God in his
manger cradle. But he is further the
Christ, the anointed of God; and, as we
saw, anointment is a common element with
numerous other divine-human victims.
Once more, he is the King’s son; and he
is the only begotten son, the dearly beloved
son, who is slain as an expiation for the
sins of the people. The heavens open, and
a voice from them declares, “ This is my
beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”
He is affiliated, like all other such victims,
on the older and earlier ethnical god,
Jahweh ; and though he is himself God,
and one with the Father, he is offered up,
himself to himself, in expiation of the sin
committed by men against divine justice.
All this would be familiar theology indeed
to the worshipper of Osiris, Adonis, and
Attis.
The common Hebrew offering was the
paschal lamb; therefore Christ is envisaged
as the Lamb of God, that taketh away the
sins of the world. In the paintings of the
catacombs it is as a lamb that the Saviour
of the world is oftenest represented. As a
lamb he raises another lamb, Lazarus ; as
a lamb he turns the water into wine ; as a
lamb he strikes the living springs from the
rock on the spandrils of the sarcophagus
of Junius Bassus. But his birth in a
manger is also significant; and his vine
and his dove are almost as frequent as his
lamb in the catacombs.
The Gospel history represents the passion
of Christ essentially as the sacrifice of a
temporary king, invested with all the
familiar elements of that early ritual.
Christ enters Jerusalem in royal state,
among popular plaudits, like those which
always accompany the temporary king, and
the Attis or Adonis. He is mounted on an
ass, the royal beast of the Semites. The
people fling down branches of trees in his
path, as they always fling down parts of
green trees before the gods of vegetation.
On Palm Sunday his churches are still
decked with palm-branches or with sprays
of willow-catkin. Such rites with green
things form an integral part of all the old
rituals of the tree-god or the corn-god, and
�138
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
of all the modern European survivals in
folk-lore—they are equally found in the
Dionysiac festival, and in the Jack-in-theGreen revels on English fair-days. The
connection with trees is also well marked
throughout the Gospels ; and the miracle
of the barren fig-tree is specially mentioned
in close connection with the entry into
J erusalem.
The Christ goes as a willing victim to
the cross ; he does not seriously ask that
the cup should pass from him.
He
foretells his own death, and voluntarily
submits to it. But he is also bought with
a price—the thirty pieces of silver paid to
Judas. Of all this we had forecasts in the
Khond, the Mexican, and various other
rituals.
Furthermore, there is a trial—a double
trial, before the high priest and before
Pilate. Such trials, we have seen, are
common elements of the mock-king’s
degradation. Like all other similar vic
tims, the Christ, after being treated like
a monarch, is reviled and spat upon, buf
feted and insulted. He is bound with
cords, and carried before Pilate. The
procurator asks him, “ Art thou the King
of the Jews?” and the Christ by implica
tion admits the justice of the title. All the
subsequent episodes of the painful drama
are already familiar to us. The sacred
victim is cruelly scourged that his tears
may flow. As in other cases he is crowned
with flowers or with bark, in order to
mark his position as king of vegetation, so
here he is crowned with a chaplet of thorns
that adds to his ignominy. The sacred
blood must flow from the sacred head.
But still, he is clothed with purple and
saluted with the words, “ Hail, King of the
Jews 1” in solemn irony. He is struck on
the head with a reed by the soldiers : yet
even as they strike they bow their knees
and worship him. They give him to drink
wine, mingled with myrrh ; “ but he re
ceived it not.” Then he is crucified at
Golgotha, the place of a skull,1 on a cross,
the old sacred emblem of so many reli
gions ; it bears the inscription, “ The King
of the Jews,” by order of the Procurator.
After the death of the Christ he is mourned
over, like Adonis and Osiris, by the holy
women, including his mother. I do not
think I need point out in detail the many
1 According to mediaeval legend, the skull was
Adam’s, and the sacred blood which fell upon it
revived it. In crucifixions a skull is generally
represented at the foot of the cross.
close resemblances which exist between the
Mother of the Gods and the Mother of
God—the Theotokos.
The thieves crucified with the Saviour
have their legs broken, like many other
sacred victims ; but the .Christ himself has
not a bone broken, like the paschal lamb
which was the Jewish substitute for the
primitive human victim. Thus both ideas
on this subject, the earlier and the later,
seem to find an appropriate place in the
history. Instead of having his legs broken,
however, the Christ has his side pierced;
and from it flows the mystic blood of the
atonement, in which all Christians are
theoretically washed ; this baptism of blood
(a literal reality in older cults) being
already a familiar image at the date of the
Apocalypse, where the robes of the elect
are washed white in the blood of the lamb
that was slain.
After the crucifixion the Christ is taken
down and buried. But, like all other corn
and wine gods, he rises again from the
dead on the third day—this very period of
three days being already a conventional
one in similar cases. Every one of the
surroundings recalls Osiris and Attis. It
is the women once more who see him first;
and afterwards the men. Finally, he
ascends into heaven, to his Father, before
the wondering eyes of his disciples and his
mother. In each item of this there is
nothing with which we are not already
familiar elsewhere.
I will not pursue the analogy further.
To do so would be endless. Indeed, I do
not think there is an element in the Gospel
story which does not bear out the parallel
here suggested. The slight incident of the
visit to Herod, for example, is exactly
analagous to the visit of the false Osiris in
modern Egypt to the governor’s house, and
the visit of the temporary or mock king in
so many other cases to the real king’s
palace. The episode where Herod and his
men of war array the Christ in a gorgeous
robe is the equivalent of the episode of the
Mexican king arraying the god victim in
royal dress, and is also paralleled in nume
rous other like dramas elsewhere. The
women who prepare spices and ointments
for the body recall the Adonis rites ; Pilate
washing his hands of the guilt of con
demnation recalls the frequent episode of
the slaughterers of the god laying the
blame upon others, or casting it on the
knife, or crying out, “ We bought you with
a price ; we are guiltless.” Whoever will
read carefully through the Gospel accounts,
�THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIANITY
side by side with Mr. Frazer’s well-chosen
collection of mock-king narratives, will see
for himself that endless other minor traits
crop up in the story which may be equated
with numerous similar incidents in the
death and resurrection of the man-god
elsewhere.
The very subjects of the parables are in
themselves significant: the lord of the
vineyard who sends his son, whom the
hirers slay ; the labourers who come at the
eleventh hour ; the sower and the good
and bad ground ; tlie grain of mustard
seed ; the leaven of the Pharisees ; the
seed growing secretly; the sons in the
vineyard. It will be found that almost all
of th'em turn on the key-note subjects of
bread and wine, or at least of seed-sowing.
By what precise stages the story of the
Galilaean man-god arose and fixed itself
around the person of the real or mythical
Jesus it would be hard to say. Already in
the epistles we may catch stray glimpses,
in the germ, of most of it. Already we
notice strange hints and foreshadowings.
Probably the first Jewish disciples had
arrived at the outline of the existing story
even before the Gentiles began to add their
quotum. And when we look at documents
so overloaded with miracle and legend as
the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles,
we find it hard indeed to separate any
element of historical truth from the enor
mous accretion of myth and legend. Still,
I see no grave reason to doubt the general
truth of the idea that the Christian belief
and practice arose first among Galilrean
Jews, and that from them it spread with
comparative rapidity to the people of Syria
and Asia Minor. It even seems probable
that one Saul or Paul was really the person
who first conceived the idea of preaching
the new religion throughout the empire,
and especially in the great cities, as a faith
which might be embraced by both Jew and
Gentile. Certainly, while the young cult
contained most of the best features of
Judaism, viewed as a possible universal
religion—its monotheism, its purity, its
comparative freedom from vile and absurd
legends of the gods and their amours—it
surpassed the elder faith in acceptability to
the world at large, and especially to the
people of Syria and western Asia. Every
one of them could have said with perfect
truth, “ Nothing is changed ; there is but
one god more to worship.”
As the church spread, the legend grew
apace. To the early account of the death
and resurrection of the King of the Jews
139
later narrators added the story of his
miraculous birth from a virgin mother, who
conceived directly frqm the spirit of God
wafted down upon her. The wide extent
and the origin of this belief about the
conception of gods and heroes has been
fully examined by Mr. Sidney Hartland in
his admirable study of the Legend of
Perseus. The new believers further pro
vided their divine leader with a royal
genealogy from David downward, and
made him, by a tolerably circuitous argu
ment, be born at Bethlehem, according to
the supposed prophecy—though, if there
ever was really a Jesus at all, it would,
seem that the one fact of which we could .
feel tolerably sure about him was the fact.
of his being a man of Nazareth. Later
writers put into his mouth a moral teaching
high for its time, somewhat .anticipated by
Hillel and other rabbis, and perhaps im
part of Buddhist origin.; they also made him announce for himself that divine role
of mediator and atoner which they them
selves claimed for the Saviour of Mankind.
He calls himself the vine, the bread of
life, the good shepherd ; he is called “ the
lamb of God that taketh away the sins of
the world,” by John the Baptist, an enthu
siast whose fame has attracted him at last
into the Christian legend. Very early, the
old rite of water-lustration or baptism,
adopted by John, was employed as one of
the chief Christian ceremonies, the cere
mony of initiation, which replaced with
advantage the bloody and dangerous
Jewish circumcision. This allowed far
freer proselytism than Judaism could ever
expect; and though no doubt at first the
Christians regarded themselves as a sect
of the Jews, and though they always
adopted entire the Jewish sacred books
and the Jewish God, with all the Jewish
history, cosmogony, and mythology, yet
the new religion was from the beginning
a cosmopolitan one, and preached the
word unto all nations. Such a faith,
coming at such a moment, and telling men
precisely what they were ready to believe,
was certain beforehand of pretty general
acceptance. When Constantine made
Christianity the official creed of the
empire, he did but put an official stamp
of approval on a revolution that had long
been growing more and more inevitable.
In one word, Christianity triumphed, be
cause it united in itself all the most vital
elements of all the religions then current
in the world, with little that was local,
national, or distasteful ; and it added to
�140
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
them all a high ethical note and a social
doctrine of human brotherhood especiallysuited to an age of unification and syste
matic government.
Occasionally, even in the Gospels them
selves, we get strange passing echoes of a
mysterious identification of the Christ with
the ancient Hebrew ethnical god, not as
the Lord of the Universe alone, but vaguely
remembered as the sacred stone of the
ark, the Rock of Israel. “The stone
which the builders rejected, that one has
become the head of the corner.” “ Who
soever shall fall on this stone shall be
broken ; but on whomsoever it shall fall,
it will grind him to powder.” And in a
•speech put into the mouth of Christ he
says to Peter, “ Rock thou art, and on this
Rock will I build my assembly.”1
Sometimes, too, in the epistles the two
Ideas of the corn-god and the foundation
stone-god are worked upon alternately.
“ I have planted ; Apollos watered.” “Ye
are God’s husbandry; ye are God’s build
ing.” “ I have laid the foundation, and
another builds thereon. Let every man
take care how he builds upon it. For other
foundation can no man lay than that which
is laid, which is the Christ, Jesus.” Or
again : “You are built upon the foundation
of the apostles and prophets, Jesus, the
Christ, being himself the chief corner
stone.” Whoever re-reads the epistles by
the light of the analogies suggested in this
book will find that they positively teem
with similar references to the familiar
theology of the various slain man-gods,
which must have been known to every one
•along the shores of the Mediterranean.
The Church which was built upon this
rock has shown its continuity with earlier
religions in a thousand ways and by a
thousand analogies. Solar and astrologi
cal elements have been freely admitted,
side by side with those which recall the
corn and wine-gods. The chief festivals
still cling to the solar feasts of the equi
noxes and the solstices. Thus every year
the Church celebrates in mimicry the death
and resurrection of the Christ, as the
Mediterranean peoples celebrated the
death and resurrection of the Attis, the
1 I can honestly assure the polemical Protes
tant divine that I am well aware of the differ
ence in gender in this passage—and of its utter
unimportance. The name Peter could not well
be made feminine to suit a particular play upon
words, or to anticipate the objections of a par
ticular set of trivial word-twisters.
Adonis, the Dionysus, the Osiris. It cele
brates the feast at the usual time for most
such festivals, the spring equinox. More
than that, it chooses for the actual day of
the resurrection, commonly called in
English Easter, and in the Latin dialects
the Paschal feast (or Pâques), a trebly
astrological date. The festival must be as
near as possible to the spring equinox ;
but it must be after a full moon, and it
must be on the day sacred to the sun.
Before the feast a long fast takes place, at
the close of which the Christ is slain in
effigy, and solemnly laid in a mimic
sepulchre. Good Friday is the anniversary
of his piacular death, and the special day
of the annual mourning, as for Adonis and
Attis. On Easter Sunday he rises again
from the dead, and every good Catholic
is bound to communicate—to eat the body
of his slaughtered god on the annual spring
festival of reviving vegetation. Compari
son of the Holy Week ceremonies at Rome
with the other annual festivals, from the
Mexican corn-feast and the Potraj rite of
India to Attis and Adonis, will be found
extremely enlightening—I mean, of course,
the ceremonies as they were when the Pope,
the Priest-King, the representative of the
annual Attis at Pessinus, officiated publicly
in the Sistine Chapel, with paschal music
known as Lamentations, and elevation of
the Host amid the blare of trumpets. On
this subject I limit myself to the barest
hint. Whoever chooses to follow out so
pregnant a clue will find it lead him into
curious analogies and almost incredible
survivals.
Similarly, the birth of Christ is celebrated
at the winter solstice, the well-known date
for so many earlier ceremonies of the gods
of vegetation. Then the infant god lies
unconscious in his cradle. Whoever has
read Mr. Frazer’s great work will under
stand the connection of the holly and the
mistletoe, and the Christmas tree, with
this second great festival of Christendom,
very important in the Teutonic north,
though far inferior in the south to the
spring-tide feast, when the god is slain and
eaten of necessity. I limit myself to saying
that the Christmas rites are all of them
rites of the birth of the corn-god.
The Christian cross, too, it is now known,
was not employed as a symbol of the faith
before the days of Constantine, and was
borrowed from the solar wheel of the
Gaulish sun-god-worshippers who formed
the mass of the successful emperor’s legion
aries.
�THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIANITY
We are now, therefore, in a very different
position for understanding the causes which
led to the rise and development of the
Christian religion from that which we
occupied at the outset of our inquiry. We
had then to accept crudely the bare fact
that about the first century of our era a
certain cult of a Divine Man, Jesus, arose
among a fraction of a maritime people of
Lower Syria. That fact as we at first
received it stood isolated and unrelated in
its naked singularity. We can now see
that it was but one more example of a
universal god-making tendency in human
nature, high or low; and in our last chapter
we shall find that this universal tendency
to worship the dead has ever since persisted
as fully as ever, and is in fact the central
element in the entire religious instinct of
humanity.
The main emotional chord upon which
Christianity played in its early days—and
indeed the main chord upon which it still
plays-—is just, I believe, the universal feeling
in favour of the deification or beatification
of the dead, with the desire for immortality
on the part of the individual believer him
self in person. Like all other religions,
but even more than any other religion at
that time in vogue, Christianity appealed to
these two allied and deep-seated longings
of human nature. It appealed on the one
hand to the unselfish emotions and affec
tions of mankind by promising a close,
bodily, personal, and speedy reassociation
of the living believer with his dead relatives
and friends. It appealed on the other hand
to the selfish wishes and desires of each,
by holding forth to every man the sure and
certain hope of a glorious resurrection.
A necessary consequence of the universal
ferment and intermixture of pantheons
everywhere during the early days of the
Roman Empire was a certain amount of
floating scepticism about the gods as a
whole, which reaches its highest point in
the mocking humour of Lucian. But
while this nascent scepticism was very real
and very widespread, it affected rather
current beliefs as to the personality and
history of the various gods than the under
lying conception of godhead in the abstract.
Even those who laughed and those who
disbelieved retained at bottom many super
stitions and supernatural ideas. Their
scepticism was due, not like that of our own
time to fundamental criticism of the very
notion of the supernatural, but to the obvious
inadequacy of existing gods to satisfy the
requirements of educated cosmopolitans.
141
The deities of the time were too coarse, too
childish, too gross for their worshippers.
The common philosophic attitude of culti
vated Rome and cultivated Alexandria
might be compared to some extent to that
of our own Unitarians, who are not indeed
hostile to the conception of theology in its
own nature, but who demur to the most
miraculous and supernatural part of the
popular doctrine.
With the mass, however, the religious
unrest showed itself mainly, as it always
shows itself at such critical moments, in a
general habit of running after strange reli
gions, from some one or other of which the
anxious inquirer hopes to obtain some
divine answer to his difficulties. When old
faiths decay, there is room for new ones.
As might have been expected, this ten
dency was most clearly shown in the great
cosmopolitan trading towns, where men of
many nations rubbed shoulders together,
and where outlandish cults of various sorts,
had their temples and their adherents.
Especially was this the case at Rome, Alex
andria, and Antioch, the capitals respec
tively of the Roman, the Hellenic, and the
Semitic worlds. In the Grseco-Egyptian
metropolis the worship of Serapis, a com
posite deity of hybrid origin, grew gradually
into the principal cult of the teeming city.
At Antioch Hellenic deities were ousting
the Baalim. At Rome, the worship of Isis,,
of Jahweh, of Syrian and other Eastern
gods, was carried on by an ever-increasing
body of the foreign, native, and servile
population. These were the places where
Christianity spread. The men of the vil
lages were long, as the world still quaintly
phrases it, “ pagans.”
The strange cults which united in thus
gradually crushing out the old local and
national pantheons throughout the Roman
world had for the most part two marked
attributes in common : they were more or
less mystical, and they tended more or less
in the direction of monotheism. Solar
myth, syncretism, the esoteric priestly in
terpretations, and the general diffusion of
Greek philosophic notions, mixed with
subtler oriental and Zoroastrian ideas, had
all promoted the rise and growth of the
mystic element, while a vague monothe
istic movement had long been apparent in
the higher thought of Egypt, Greece, Italy,
and the East. In the resulting conflict and
intermixing of ideas, Judaism, as one of
the most mystical and monotheistic of reli
gions, would have stood a good chance of
becoming the faith of the world had it not
�142
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
been for the fatal weight of its strict and
obstinate national character. Even as it
was, Jewish communities were scattered
through all the commercial towns of the
Graeco-Roman world; a Jewish colony
strongly influenced Alexandria ; and Jewish
teachers made proselytes in Rome in the
very bosom of the imperial household.
The ferment which thus existed by the
Orontes, the Nile, and the Tiber must also
have extended in a somewhat less degree
to all the cosmopolitan seaports and trading
towns of the great and heterogeneous mili
tary empire. What was true of Rome,
Alexandria, and Antioch was true in part,
we have every reason to believe, of Damas
cus, of Byzantium, of Sinope, of Ephesus;
of Rhodes, of Cyrene, of Athens, of Car
thage ; perhaps even of Massilia, of Gades,
of Burdigala, of Lugdunum. All around
the eastern Mediterranean at least, new
faiths were seething, new ideas were brew
ing, new mysticisms were being evolved,
new superstitions were arising, Phoenix
like, out of the dying embers of decaying
creeds. Setting aside mere exotic or hybrid
cults, like the worship of Serapis at Alex
andria and of Isis at Rome, or mere abor
tive attempts like the short-lived worship of
Antinous in Egypt, we may say that three
of these new religions appealed strongly to
the wants and desires of the time, and
those three were Mithraism, Gnosticism,
and Christianity.
All were alike somewhat eclectic in cha
racter ; and all could lay claim to a certain
, cosmopolitan and catholic spirit unknown
to the cults of the old national pantheons.
All came to the Greek and Roman world
from the mystic east, the land of the rising
sun, whose magic is felt even at the present
day by the votaries of Theosophy and of
Esoteric Buddhism. Which of the three
was to conquer in the end might have
seemed at one time extremely doubtful :
nor indeed do I believe that the ultimate
triumph of Christianity, the least imposing
of the three, was by any means at first a
foregone conclusion. The religion of Jesus
probably owed quite as much to what we
call chance—that is to say, to the play of
purely personal and casual circumstances
—as to its own essential internal character
istics. If Constantine or any other shrewd
military chief had happened to adopt the
symbols of Mithra or Abraxas instead of
the name of Christ, it is quite conceivable
that all the civilised world might now be
adoring the mystic divinity of the three
hundred and sixty-five emanations as
sedulously as it actually adores the final
theological outcome of the old Hebrew
Jahweh. But there were certain real
advantages as well, which told, I believe,
in the very nature of things, in favour of
the Christ as against the coinage of
Basilides or the far-eastern sun-god. Con
stantine, in other words, chose his religion
wisely. It was the cult exactly adapted to
the times : above all others, during the two
centuries or so that had passed since its
first beginning (for we must place the real
evolution of the Christian system consider
ably later than the life or death of Jesus
himself) it had shown itself capable of
thoroughly engaging on its own side the
profoundest interests and emotions of the
religious nature.
We must remember, too, that in all
religious crises, while faith in the actual
gods and creeds declines rapidly, no
corresponding weakening occurs in the
underlying sentiments on which all religions
ultimately base themselves. Hence the
apparent paradox that periods of doubt are
also almost always periqds of intense
credulity as well. The human mind, cast
free from the moorings which have long
sufficed for it, drifts about restlessly in
search of some new haven in which it may
take refuge from the terrors of uncertainty
and infidelity. And its new faith is always
but a fresh form of the old one. A god or
gods, prayer, praise, and sacraments, are
essential elements. More especially is it
the case that when trust in the great gods
begins to fail, a blind groping after necro
mancy, spiritualism, and ghost-lore in
general takes its place for the moment.
We have seen this tendency fully exempli
fied in our own time by the spiritualists and
others ; nor was it less marked in the
tempest of conflicting ideas which broke
over the Roman world from the age of the
Antonines to the fall of the empire. The
fact is, the average man cares but little,
after all, for his gods and his goddesses,
viewed as individuals. They are but an
outlet for his own emotions. He appeals to
them for help, as long as he continues to
believe in their effective helpfulness : he is
ready to cajole them with offerings of blood
or to flatter them with homage of praise
and prayer, as long as he expects to gain
some present or future benefit, bodily or
spiritual, in return for his assiduous adula
tion. But as soon as his faith in their
existence and power begins to break down,
he puts up with the loss of their godhead,
so far as they themselves are concerned,
�THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIANITY
without one qualm of disappointment or
inconvenience. It is something far other
than that that touches him in religion : it
is his hopes for his own eternal welfare, and
the welfare after death of those that love
him.
Hence a decline of faith in the great
gods is immediately followed by a recrudes
cence of the most barbaric and original
element in religion—the cult of the ghost or
spirit, necromancy, the direct worship of the
dead or intercourse with the dead: a habit of
inquiry into the positive chances of human
immortality. This necromantic spirit is
well marked in Gnostic remains, and in
the fragmentary magical literature of the
decadent Grseco-Roman world. It is
precisely the same tendency which pro
duces spiritualism in our own time; and it
is due to the desire to find some new and
experimental basis for the common human
belief in the immortality of the soul or the
resurrection of the body.
And here we get the clue to the serious
change which Christianity wrought in the
religious feeling of the western world—a
change whose importance and whose
retrograde nature has never yet, I believe,
been fully recognised. For Christianity,
while from one point of view, as a mono
theistic or quasi-monotheistic religion, an
immense advance upon the aesthetic
paganism of Greece and Italy, was from
another point of view, as a religion of
resurrection rather than a religion of im
mortality, a step backward for all Western
Europe.
Even among the Jews themselves, how
ever, the new cult must have come with all
the force of an “ aid to faith ” in a sceptical
generation. Abroad, among the Jewish Hel
lenists, Greek philosophy must have under
mined much of the fanatical and patriotic
enthusiasm for Jahweh which had grown
stronger and ever stronger in Judaea itself
through the days of the Maccabees and the
Asmonaean princes. Scraps of vague Pla
tonic theorising on the nature of the Divine
were taking among these exiles the place
of the firm old dogmatic belief in the Rock
of Israel. At home the Hellenising ten
dencies of the house of Herod, and the
importance in Jerusalem of the Sadducees
“ who say there is no resurrection,” were
striking at the very roots of the hope and
faith that pious Jews most tenderly
cherished. Instead of Israel converting
the world, the world seemed likely to con
vert Israel. Swamped in the great absorb
ing and assimilating empire, Judah might
143
follow in the way of Ephraim. And Israel’s
work in the world might thus be undone,
or rather stultified for ever.
Just at this very moment, when all faiths
were tottering visibly to their fall, a tiny
band of obscure Galiisean peasants, who
perhaps had followed a wild local enthu
siast from their native hills up to turbulent
Jerusalem, may have been seized with a
delusion neither unnatural nor unaccustomed
under their peculiar circumstances, but
which nevertheless has sufficed to turn or
at least to modify profoundly the entire
subsequent course of the world’s history.
Their leader, if we may trust the uni
versal tradition of the sect, as laid down
long after in their legendary Gospels, was
crucified at Jerusalem under G. Pontius
Pilatus. If any fact upon earth about
Jesus is true, besides the fact of his resi
dence at Nazareth, it is this fact of the
crucifixion, which derives verisimilitude from
being always closely connected with the
name of that particular Roman official.
But three days after, says the legend, the
body of Jesus could not be found in the
sepulchre where his friends had laid him;
and a rumour gradually gained ground
that he had risen from the dead, and had
been seen abroad by the women who
mourned him and by various of his dis
ciples. In short, what was universally be
lieved about all other and elder human gods
was specifically asserted afresh in a newer
case about the man Christ Jesus. The
idea fitted in with the needs of the time,
and the doctrine of the Resurrection of
Jesus the Christ became the corner-stone
of the new-born Christian religion.
Nothing can be clearer than the fact,
admitted on all hands, that this event
formed the central point of the Apostles’
preaching. It was the Resurrection of
Jesus, regarded as an earnest of general
resurrection for all his followers, that they
most insisted upon in their words and
writings. It was the resurrection that
converted the world of Western Europe.
“Your faith is flagging,” said the early
Christians in effect to their pagan fellows :
“ your gods are half-dead; your ideas
about your own future, and the present
state of your departed friends, are most
vague and shadowy. In opposition to all
this, we offer you a sure and certain hope ;
we tell you a tale of real life, and recent;
we preach a god of the familiar pattern,
yet very close to you ; we present you with
a specimen of actual resurrection. We
bring you good tidings of Jesus as the
�144
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
Messiah, and him crucified : to the Jews, a
stumbling-block ; to the Greeks, foolish
ness ; but to such as are saved a plain
evidence of the power of the God of Israel.
Accept our word ; let your dead sleep in
Christ in our catacombs, as once they
slept in Osiris at Abydos, or rested upon
him that rests at Philte.” “ If Christ be
not risen,” says one of the earliest Christian
writers in a passionate peroration, “ then
is our preaching vain, and your faith is
vain also : but as it is, Christ is risen from
the dead, and has become the first fruits of
them that slept.” “ Else what shall they
do,” he goes on, touching to the quick that
ingrained human desire for communion
with the departed, “ what shall they do
which are baptised for the dead, if the
dead rise not at all ? Why are they then
baptised for the dead?” These, in short,
apart from the elements common to all
creeds, are the three great motors of primi
tive Christianity : one dogmatic, the resur
rection of Jesus ; one selfish, the salvation
of the individual soul ; one altruistic, the
desire for reunion with the dead among
one’s beloved.
Syria and Egypt could easily accept the
new doctrine. It involved for them no
serious change of front, no wide departure
from the ideas and ceremonies which
always formed their rounded concept of
human existence. There is a representa
tion of the resurrection of Osiris in the little
“ Temple on the Roof” at Denderah which
might almost pass for a Christian illustra
tion of the resurrection of Jesus. In its
beginnings, in short, Christianity was essen
tially an oriental religion; it spread fastest
in the eastern Mediterranean basin, where
Judaism was already well established. It
is a significant fact that its official adoption
as the public religion of the Roman state
was the act of the same prince who deli
berately shifted the seat of his government
from the Tiber to the Bosphorus, and
largely transformed the character of the
empire from a Latin to a Grieco-Asiatic
type. All the new religions which struggled
together for the mastery of the world were
oriental in origin : the triumph of Chris
tianity was but a single episode in the
general triumph of aggressive orientalism
over the occidental element in the Roman
system.
Egypt in particular, I believe, had far
more to do with the dogmatic shaping of
early Christianity, and the settlement of
Christian symbolism and Christian mysti
cism, than is generally admitted by the
official historians of the primitive Church.
There, where the idea of resurrection was
already so universal, and where every man
desired to be “justified by Osiris,” Chris
tianity soon made an easy conquest of a
people on whose faith it exerted so little
change. And Egypt easily made its in
fluence felt on the plastic young creed. It
is allowed that the doctrine of the Trinity
took shape among the Triad-worshippers
on the banks of the Nile, and that the
scarcely less important doctrine of the
Logos was borrowed from the philosophy
of Alexandrian Jews. Nobody can look at
the figures of Isis and the infant Horus in
any Egyptian museum without being at
once struck by the obvious foreshadowing
of the Coptic and Byzantine Madonna and
Child. The mystery that sprang up about
the new doctrines ; the strange syncretic
union of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost into
a single Trinity ; the miraculous concep
tion by the Theotokos or mother of God—
a clear variant in one aspect on the older
idea of Hathor; and the antenatal existence
of Christ in heaven before his incarnation
—all are thoroughly Egyptian in character,
with a faint superadded dash of Alexan
drian Jewish Hellenism. The love of
symbols which the young Church so early
exhibits in the catacombs and elsewhere
smacks equally of Ptolemaic reminiscences
of Thebes and Memphis. The mummy
form of Lazarus ; the fish that makes such
a clever alphabetic ideogram for the name
and titles of Jesus ; the dove that symbo
lises the Holy Ghost ; the animal types
of the four evangelists—all these are in
large part Egyptian echoes, resonant of
the same spirit which produced the hiero
glyphics and the symbolism of the great
Nilotic temples.
Nay, more, the very details themselves
of Christian symbolism often go back to
early Egyptian models. The central
Christian emblem of all, the cross, is holy
all the world over : it is the sacred tree ;
and each race has adapted it to its own
preconceived ideas and symbols. But in
Coptic Christianity it has obvious affinities
with the crux ansata. In the Coptic room
of the New Museum at Ghizeh is an early
Christian monument with a Greek uncial
inscription, on which is represented a cross
of four equal limbs with expanded flanges,
having a crux ansata inserted in all its
four interstices. At the Coptic church of
Abu Sirgeh at Old Cairo occurs a similar
cross, also with suggestions of Taulike
origin, but with other equal-limbed crosses
�THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIANITY
substituted for the cruces ansattz in the
corners. How far the Egyptian Christians
thus merely transferred their old ideas to
the new faith may be gathered from a
single curious example. In Mr. Loftie’s
collection of sacred beetles is a scarabaeus
containing a representation of the cruci
fixion, with two palm branches : and other
scarabs have Christian crosses. If we re
member how extremely sacred the scarab
was held in the Egyptian religion, and
also that it was regarded as the symbol of
the resurrection, we cannot possibly miss
the importance of this implication. In
deed, the Alexandrian Father, Epiphanius,
speaks of Christ as “the scarabseus of
God,” a phrase which may be still better
understood if I add that in the treatise on
hieroglyphs known under the name of
Horapollo a scarabmus is said to denote
“ an only-begotten.” Thus “ the lamb of
God” in the tongue of Israel becomes
“ the scarabaeus of God ” in the mouth of
an Egyptian speaker.
In the west, however, the results of the
spread of Christianity were far more
revolutionary. Indeed, I do not think the
cult of Jesus could ever have spread at all
in Rome had it not been for the large
extent to which the city was peopled in
later times by Syrians and Africans. And
if Christianity had not spread in Rome, it
could never have gained a foothold at all
in the Aryan world.
Foremost among the changes which
Christianity involved in Italy and the rest
of western Europe was the retrograde
change from the belief in immortality and
the immateriality of the soul, with crema
tion as its practical outcome, to the belief
in the resurrection of the body, with a
return to the disused and discredited
practice of burial as its normal correlative.
The catacombs were the necessary result
of this backward movement; and with the
catacombs came in the possibility of relic
worship, martyr-worship, and the adoration
of saints and their corpses. I shall trace
out in greater detail in my next chapter the
remoter effects of this curious revival of
the prime element in religion—the cult of
the dead : it must suffice here to point
out briefly that it resulted as a logical
effect from the belief in the resurrection
of Christ, and the consequent restoration
of the practice of burial. Moreover, to
polytheists this habit gave a practical
opening for the cult of many deities in the
midst of nominal monotheism, which the
Italians and sundry other essentially poly
145
theistic peoples were not slow to seize
upon. It is true that theoretically the
adoration paid to saints and martyrs is
never regarded as real worship ; but I
need hardly say that technical distinctions
like these are always a mere part of the
artificial theology of scholastic priesthoods,
and may be safely disregarded by the
broad anthropological inquirer. The
genuine facts of religion are the facts and
rites of the popular cult, which remain in
each race for long periods together essen
tially uniform.
Thus we early get two main forms of
Christianity, both official and popular :
one eastern—Greek, Coptic, Syrian ; more
mystical in type, more symbolic, more
philosophic, more monotheistic : the other
western—Latin, Celtic, Spanish ; more
Aryan in type, more practical, more
material, more polytheistic. And these at
a later time are reinforced by a third or
northern form—the Teutonic and Pro
testant ; in which ethical ideas prepon
derate over religious, and the worship of
the Book in its most literal and often
foolish interpretation supersedes the earlier
worship of Madonna, saints, pictures,
statues, and emblems.
At the period when Christianity first
begins, to emerge from the primitive
obscurity of its formative nisus, however,
we find it practically compounded of the
following elements—which represent the
common union of a younger god offered
up to an older one with whom he is
identified.
First of all, as the implied basis, taken
for granted in all the early Hebrew scrip
tures, there is current Judaism, in the form
that Judaism had gradually assumed in
the fourth, third, and second centuries
before the Christian era. This includes as
its main principle the cult of the one god
Jahweh, now no longer largely thought of
under that personal name, or as a strictly
ethnic deity, but rather envisaged as the
Lord God who dwells in heaven, very much
as Christians of to-day still envisage him.
It includes also an undercurrent of belief in
a heavenly hierarchy of angels and arch
angels, the court of the Lord (modifications
of an earlier astrological conception, the
Host of Heaven), and in a principle of
evil, Satan or the devil, dwelling in hell,
and similarly surrounded by a crowd of
minor or assistant demons. Further, it
accepts implicitly from earlier Judaism the
resurrection of the dead, the judgment of
the good and the wicked, the doctrine of
L
�146
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
future rewards and punishments (perhaps
in its fullest shape a Hellenistic importation
from Egypt, though also commonly found
in most spontaneous religions), and many
other tenets of the current Jewish belief.
In short, the very earliest Christians, being
probably for the most part J ews, Galilaeans,
and proselytes, or else Syrians and
Africans of Judaising tendencies, did not
attempt to get rid of all their preconceived
religious opinions when they became
Christians, bnt merely superadded to these
as a new item the special cult of the deified
Jesus.
On the other hand, as the Gospel
spread to the Gentiles, it was not
thought necessary to burden the fresh
converts with the whole minute cere
monial of Judaism, and especially
with , the unpleasant initiatory rite of
circumcision. A mere symbolical lustra
tion, known as baptism, was all that was
demanded of new adherents to the faith,
with abstinence from any participation in
“heathen” sacrifices or functions. And
the general authority of the Hebrew Scrip
tures, especially as a historical account of
the development of Judaism, from which
Christianity sprang, was more or less fully
admitted, at first by implication or quota
tion alone, but afterwards by the deliberate
and avowed voice of the whole Christian
assembly. The translation of this mixed
mass of historical documents, early cosmo
gonies ill-reported and Jehovised Jewish
traditions, misinterpreted poems, and con
scious forgeries, in the Latin version known
as the Vulgate, had the effect of endowing
Europe for many centuries with a false
body of ancient history.
Superimposed upon this substratum of
current Judaism with its worship of Jahweh
came the distinctive Jesus-cult, the worship
of the particular dead Galilaean peasant.
But how, in a religion pretending to be
monotheistic, were these two distinct cults
of two such diverse gods to be reconciled
or to be explained away ? By the familiar
doctrine of the incarnation, and the belief
in the human god who is sacrificed, himself
to himself, as a piacular offering. Jewish
tradition and subtler Egyptian mysticism
sufficed to smooth over- the apparent
anomaly. The Jews looked forward to a
mysterious deliverer, a new Moses, the
Messiah, who was to fulfil the destiny of
Israel by uniting all nations under the
sceptre of David, and by bringing the
Gentiles to the feet of the God of Israel.
Jesus, said the Christians, had proclaimed
himselfthat very Messiah, the Christ of God;
he had often alluded to the great Hebrew
deity as his father ; he had laid claim to
the worship of the Lord of heaven. Further
than this, perhaps, the unaided Jewish
intelligence would hardly have gone: it
would have been satisfied with assigning to
the slain man-god J esus a secondary place,
as the only begotten Son of God, who gave
himself up as a willing victim—a position
perhaps scarcely more important than that
which Mohammed holds in the system of
Islam. Such, it seems to me, is on the
whole the conception which permeates the
synoptic Gospels, representing the ideas of
Syrian Christendom. But here the acute
Graeco-Egyptian mind came in with its
nice distinctions and its mystical identifica
tions. There was but one god, indeed;
yet that god was at least twofold (to go no
further for the present). He had two
persons, the Father and the Son : and the
Second Person, identified with the Alexan
drian conception of the Logos, though
inferior to the Father as touching his man
hood, was equal to the Father as touching his
godhead—after the precise fashion we saw
so common in describing the relations of
Osiris and Horus, and the identification of
the Attis or Adonis victim with the earlier
and older god he represented. “ I and my
Father are one,” says the Christ of the
Fourth Gospel, the embodiment and incar
nation of the Alexandrian Logos. And in
the very forefront of that manifesto of Neo
Platonic Christianity comes the dogmatic
assertion, “In the beginning was the Logos:
and the Logos dwelt with God : and the
Logos was God.”
Even so the basis of the new creed is
still incomplete. The Father and Son give
the whole of the compound deity as. the
popular mind, everywhere and always, has
commonly apprehended it. But the scho
lastic and theological intelligence needed a
Third Person to complete the Trinity which
to all mankind, as especially to orientals, is
the only perfect and thoroughly rounded
figure. In later days, no doubt, the
Madonna would have been chosen to fill up
the blank, and, on the analogy of Isis, would
have filled it most efficiently. As a matter
of fact, in the creed of Christendom as the
Catholic people know it, the Madonna is
really one of the most important person
ages. But in those early formative times
the cult of the Theotokos had hardly yet
assumed its full importance: perhaps,
indeed, the Jewish believers would have
been shocked at the bare notion of the
�SURVIVALS IN CHRISTENDOM
worship of a woman, the readmission of an
Astarte, a Queen of Heaven, into the faith
of Israel. Another object of adoration had
therefore to be found. It was discovered in
that vague essence, the Holy Ghost, or
Divine Wisdom, whose gradual develop
ment and dissociation from God himself is
one of the most curious chapters in all the
history of artificial god-making. The
“ spirit of Jahweh ” had frequently been
mentioned in Hebrew writings ; and, with
so invisible and unapproachable a deity as
the Jewish God, was often made to do duty
as a messenger or intermediary where the
personal presence of Jahweh himself would
have been felt to contravene the first neces
sities of incorporeal divinity. It was the
“spirit of Jahweh” that came upon the
prophets : it was the “ wisdom of Jahweh ”
that the poets described, and that grew at
last to be detached from the personality of
God, and alluded to almost as a living in
dividual. In the early Church this “ spirit
of God,” this “ holy spirit,” was supposed to
be poured forth upon the heads of believers ;
it descended upon Jesus himself in the
visible form of a dove from heaven, and
upon the disciples at Pentecost as tongues
of fire. Gradually the conception of a per
sonal Holy Ghost took form and definite
ness : an Alexandrian monk insisted on the
necessity for a Triad of gods who were yet
one God ; and by the time the first creeds
of the nascent Church were committed to
writing, the Spirit had come to rank with
the Father and the Son as the Third Per
son in the ever-blessed Trinity.
By this time, too, it is pretty clear that
the original manhood of Jesus had not
merged in the idea of his eternal godhead ;
he was regarded as the Logos, come down
from heaven, where he had existed before
all worlds, and incarnate by the Holy Ghost
in the Virgin Mary. The other articles of
the Christian faith clustered gradually
round these prime elements : the myth
gathered force ; the mysticism increased ;
the secondary divine beings or saints grew
vastly . in numbers ; and the element of
Judaism disappeared piecemeal, while a
new polytheism and a new sacerdotalism
took root apace in the Aryan world. I
shall strive to show, however, in my con
cluding chapters, how even to the very end
the worship of the dead is still the central
force in modern Christianity; how religion,
whatever its form, can never wander far
from that fundamental reality; and how,
whenever by force of circumstances the
gods become too remote from human life,
147
so that the doctrine of resurrection or per
sonal immortality is endangered for a time,
and reunion with relations in the other
world becomes doubtful or insecure, a re
action is sure to set in which takes things
back once more to these, fundamental con
cepts.
CHAPTER XIX.
SURVIVALS IN CHRISTENDOM
We have now travelled far, apparently,
from that primitive stage of god-making
where the only known gods are the corpses,
mummies, skulls, ghosts, or spirits of dead
chieftains or dead friends and relations.
The God of Christianity, in his fully-evolved
form, especially as known to thinkers and
theologians, is a being so vast, so abstract,
so ubiquitous, so eternal, that he seems to
have hardly any points of contact at all
with the simple ancestral spirit or sacred
stone from which in the last resort he
appears to be descended. Yet even here
we must beware of being misled by too
personal an outlook. While the higher
minds in Christendom undoubtedly con
ceive of the Christian God in terms of
Mansel and Martineau, the lower minds
even among ourselves conceive of him in
far simpler and more material fashions. A
good deal of inquiry among ordinary
English people of various classes, not
always the poorest, convinces me that to
large numbers of them God is envisaged
as possessing a material human form, more
or less gaseous in composition; that, in
spite of the Thirty-nine Articles, he has
body, parts, and passions; that he is
usually pictured to the mind’s eye as about
ten or twelve feet high, with head, hands,
eyes and mouth, used to see with and
speak with in human fashion ; and that he
sits on a throne, like a king as he is, sur
rounded by a visible court of angels and
archangels. Italian art so invariably repre
sents him, with a frankness unknown to
Protestant Christendom.
The fact is, so abstract a conception as
the highest theological conception of God
cannot be realised except symbolically, and
then for a few moments only, in complete
isolation. The moment God is definitely
thought of in connection with any cosmic
activity, still more in connection with any
human need, he is inevitably thought of on
�148
THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
human analogies, and more or less com
pletely anthropomorphised in the brain of
the believer. Being by origin an offshoot
of the mind of man, a great deified human
being, he retains necessarily still, for all
save a few very mystical or ontological
souls, the obvious marks of his ultimate
descent from a ghost or spirit. Indeed, on
the mental as opposed to the bodily side,
he does so for us all; since even theologians
freely ascribe to him such human feelings
as love, affection, a sense of justice, a spirit
of mercy, of truth, of wisdom ; knowledge,
will, the powers of intellect, all the essential
and fundamental human faculties and emo
tions.
Thus, far as we seem to have travelled
from our base in the most exalted concepts
of God, we are nearer to it still than most
of us imagine. Moreover, in spite of this
height to which the highest minds have
raised their idea of the Deity, as the creator,
sustainer, and mover of the universe, every
religion, however monotheistic, still con
tinues to make new minor gods for itself
out of the dead as they die, and to worship
these gods with even more assiduous
worship than it bestows upon the great
God of Christendom or the great gods of
the central pantheon. The Christian reli
gion makes such minor deities no less than
all others. The fact is, the religious emotion
takes its origin from the affection and
regard felt for the dead by survivors,
mingled with the hope and belief that they
may be of some use or advantage, temporal
or spiritual, to those who call upon them;
and these primitive faiths and feelings
remain so ingrained in the very core of
humanity that even the most abstract of all
religions, like the Protestant schism, cannot
wholly choke them, while recrudescences
of the original creed and custom spring up
from time to time in the form of spiritualism,
theosophy, and other vague types of simple
ghost-worship.
Most advanced religions, however, and
especially Christianity in its central, true,
and main form of Catholicism, have found
it necessary to keep renewing from time to
time the stock of minor gods—here arbi
trarily known as saints—much as the older
religions found it always necessary from
year to year to renew the foundation-gods,
the corn- and wine-gods, and the other
special deities of the manufactured order,
by a constant supply of theanthropic
victims. What I wish more particularly to
point out here, however, is that the vast
majority of places of worship all the world
over are still erected, as at the very begin
ning, above the body of a dead man or
woman ; that the chief objects of worship
in every shrine are still, as always, such
cherished bodies of dead men and women ;
and that the primitive connection of religion
with death has never for a moment been
practically severed in the greater part of
the world—not even in Protestant England
and America.
Mr. William Simpson was one of the
first persons to point out this curious under
lying connection between churches, temples,
mosques, or topes, and a tomb or monu
ment. He has proved his point in a very
full manner, and I would refer the reader
who wishes to pursue this branch of the
subject at length to his interesting mono
graphs. In this work I will confine my
attention mainly to the continued presence
of this death-element in Christianity, with
a few stray instances picked up from the
neighbouring and interesting field of Islam.
There is no religion in all the world
which professes to be more purely mono
theistic in character than Mohammedanism.
The unity of God, in the very strictest sense,
is the one dogma round which the entire
creed of Islam centres. More than any
other cult, it represents itself as a distinct
reaction against the polytheism and super
stition of surrounding faiths. The isolation
of Allah is its one great dogma. If, there
fore, we find even in this most monotheistic
of existing religious systems a large element
of practically polytheistic survival—if we
find that even here the Worship of the
Dead remains, as a chief component in
religious practice, if not in religious theory,
we shall be fairly entitled to conclude, I
think, that such constituents are indeed of
the very essence of religious thinking.
When I first came practically into con
nection with Islam in Algeria and Egypt, I
was immediately struck by the wide pre
valence among the Mohammedan popula
tion of forms of worship for which I was
little prepared by anything I had previously
read or heard as to the nature and practice
of that exclusive and ostentatiously mono
theistic faith. Two points, indeed, forcibly
strike any visitor who for the first time has
the opportunity ofobserving a Mohammedan
community in its native surroundings. The
first is the universal habit on the part of the
women of visiting the cemeteries and mourn
ing or praying over the graves of their rela
tions on Friday, the sacred day of Islam.
The second is the frequency of Koubbas,
or little whitewashed mosque-tombs, erected
�SURVIVALS IN CHRISTENDOM
over the remains of Marabouts, fakeers, or
local saints, which form the real centres
for the religion and worship of every village.
Islam, in practice, is a religion of pil
grimages to the tombs of the dead. In
Algeria every hillside is dotted over with
these picturesque little whitewashed domes,
each overshadowed by its sacred date-palm,
each surrounded by its small walled
enclosure or temenos of prickly pear or
agave, and each attended by its local
ministrant, who takes charge of the tomb
and of the alms of the faithful. Holy
body, sacred stone, tree, well, and priest—
not an element of the original cult of the
dead is lacking. ' Numerous pilgrimages
are made to these koubbas by the devout;
and on Friday evenings the little court
yards are almost invariably thronged by a
■crowd of eager and devoted worshippers.
Within, the bones of the holy man lie
preserved in a frame hung - about with
rosaries, pictures, and other oblations of
his ardent disciples, exactly as in the case
of Roman Catholic chapels. The saint, in
fact, is quite as much an institution of
monotheistic Islam as of any other religion
with which I am practically acquainted.
These two peculiarities of the cult of
Islam strike a stranger immediately on the
most casual visit. When he comes to look
at the matter more closely, however, he
finds also that most of the larger mosques
in the principal towns are themselves
similarly built to contain and enshrine the
bones of saintly personages, more or less
revered in their immediate neighbourhood.
Some of these are indeed so holy that their
bones have been duplicated exactly like
the wood of the true cross, and two tombs
have been built in separate places where
the whole or a portion of the supposed
remains are said to be buried., I will only
specify as instances of such holy tombs the
sacred city of Kerouan in Tunisia, which
ranks second to Mecca and Medina alone
in the opinion of all devout western
Mohammedans. Here the most revered
building is the shrine of “ The Companion
of the Prophet,” who lies within a cata
falque covered with palls of black velvet
and silver—as funereal a monument as is
known to me anywhere. Close by stands
the catafalque of an Indian saint, while
other holy tomb-mosques abound in the
city. In Algiers town, the holiest place is
similarly the mosque-tomb of Sidi Abd-erRahman, which contains the shrine and
body of that saint, who died in 1471.
Around him, so as to share his sacred
149
burial-place (like the Egyptians who
wished to be interred with Osiris), lie the
bodies of several Deys and Pashas. Lights
are kept constantly burning at the saint’s
tomb, which is hung with variouslycoloured drapery, after the old Semitic
fashion, while banners and ostrich-eggs,
the gifts of the faithful, dangle round it
from the decorated ceiling. Still more
sacred is the venerable shrine of Sidi Okba
near Biskra, one of the most ancient places
of worship in the Mohammedan world.
The tomb of the great saint stands in a
chantry, screened off from the noble
mosque which forms the ante-chamber,
and is hung round with silk and other
dainty offerings. All the chief mosques at
Tlemgen, Constantine, and the other
leading North African towns similarly
gather over the bodies of saints or
marabouts, who are invoked in prayer, and
to whom every act of worship is offered.
All over Islam we get such holy grave
mosques. The tomb of the Prophet at
Medina heads the list: with the equally
holy tomb of his daughter Fatima. Among
the Shiahs, Ali’s grave at Nejef and
Hoseyn’s grave at Kerbela are as sacred
as that of the Prophet at Medina. The
shrines of the Imams are much adored in
Persia. The graves of the seers in India,
the Ziarets of the fakeers in Afghanistan,
show the same tendency. In Palestine,
says Major Conder, worship at the tombs
of local saints “represents the real religion
of the peasant.”
One word must be given to Egypt, where
the cult of the dead was always so marked
a feature in the developed religion, and
where neither Christianity nor Islam has
been able to obscure this primitive ten
dency. Nothing is more noticeable in the
Nile Valley than the extraordinary way in
which the habits and ideas as to burial
and the preservation of the dead have sur
vived in spite of the double alteration in
religious theory. At Sakkarah and Thebes
one is familiar with the streets and houses
of tombs, regularly laid out so as to form
in the strictest sense a true Necropolis, or
city of the dead. Just outside Cairo, on
the edge of the desert, a precisely similar
modern Necropolis exists to this day, regu
larly planned in streets and quarters, with
the tomb of each family standing in its own
courtyard or enclosure, and often very
closely resembling the common roundroofed or domed Egyptian houses. In this
town of dead bodies every distinction of
rank and wealth may now be observed.
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THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
The rich are buried under splendid mausolea
of great architectural pretensions; the poor
occupy humble tombs just raised above the
surface of the desert, and marked at head
and foot with simple Egyptian tombstones.
Still, the entire aspect of such a cemetery
is the aspect of a town. In northern
climates the dead sleep their last sleep
under grassy little tumuli, wholly unlike
the streets of a city; in Egypt, to this day,
the dead occupy, as in life, whole lanes
and alleys of eternal houses. Even the
spirit which produced the Pyramids and
the Tombs of the Kings is conspicuous in
modern or mediaeval Cairo in the taste
which begot those vast domed mosques
known as the Tombs of the Khalifs and
the Tombs of the Mamelooks. Whatever
is biggest in the neighbourhood of ancient
Memphis turns out on examination to be
the last resting-place of a Dead Man, and
a place of worship.
Almost every one of the great mosques
of Cairo is either a tomb built for himself
by a ruler—and this is the more frequent
case—or else the holy shrine of some saint
of Islam. It is characteristic of Egypt,
however, where king and god have always
been so closely combined, that while else
where the mosque is usually the prayer-tomb
of a holy man, in Cairo it is usually the
memorial-temple of a Sultan, an Emeer, a
viceroy, or a Khedive. It is interesting to
find, too, after all we have seen as to the
special sanctity of the oracular head, that
perhaps the holiest of all these mosques
contains the head of Hoseyn, the grandson
of the Prophet. A ceremonial washing is
particularly mentioned in the story of its
translation.
I will not linger any longer, however, in
the precincts of Islam, further than to
mention the significant fact that the great
central object of worship for the Moham
medan world is the Kaaba at Mecca, which
itself, as Mr. William Simpson long ago
pointed out, bears obvious traces of being
at once a tomb and a sacred altar-stone.
Sir Richard Burton’s original sketch of
this mystic object shows it as a square
and undecorated temple-tomb, covered
throughout with a tasselled black pall—a
most funereal object—the so-called “sacred
carpet.” It is, in point of fact, a simple
catafalque. As the Kaaba was adopted
direct by Mohammed from the early
Semitic heathenism of Arabia, and as it
must always have been treated with the
same respect, I do not think we can avoid
the obvious conclusion that this very ancient
tomb has been funereally draped in the
self-same manner, like those of Biskra,
Algiers, and Kerouan, from the time of its
first erection. This case thus throws light
on the draping of the ashera, as do also the
many-coloured draperies and hangings of
saints’ catafalques in Algeria and Tunis.
Nor can I resist a passing mention of
the Moharram festival, which is said to be
the commemoration of the death of Hoseyn,
the son of Ali (whose holy head is pre
served at Cairo). This is a rude piece of
acting, in which the events supposed to be
connected with the death of Hoseyn are
graphically represented ; and it ends with a
sacred Adonis-like or Osiris-like proces
sion, in which the body of the saint is
carried and mourned over. The funeral is
the grand part of the performance ; cata
falques are constructed for the holy corpse,
covered with green and gold tinsel—the
green being obviously a last reminiscence
of the god of vegetation. In Bombay,
after the dead body and shrine have been
carried through the streets amid weeping
and wailing, they are finally thrown into
the sea, like King Carnival. I think we
need hardly doubt that here we have an
evanescent relic of the rites of the corn
god, ending in a rain-charm, and very
closely resembling those of Adonis and
Osiris.
But if in Islam the great objects of worship are the Kaaba tomb at Mecca and the
Tomb of the Prophet at Medina, so the
most holy spot in the world for Christendom
is—the Holy Sepulchre. It was for pos
session of that most sacred place of pil
grimage that Christians fought Moslems
through the Middle Ages; and it is there
that while faith in the human Christ was
strong and vigorous the vast majority of
the most meritorious pilgrimages continued
to be directed.
For the most part, however, in Christen
dom, and especially in those parts of Chris
tendom remote from Palestine, men con
tented themselves with nearer and more
domestic saints. From a very early date
we see in the catacombs the growth of this
practice of offering up prayer by (or to) the
bodies of the dead who slept in Christ. A
chapel or ca/pella, as Dean Burgon has
pointed out, meant originally an arched
sepulchre in the walls of the catacombs, at
which prayer was afterwards habitually
made; and above-ground chapels were
modelled, later on, upon the pattern of
these ancient underground shrines. I have
alluded briefly in my second chapter to the
�SURVIVALS IN CHRISTENDOM
probable origin of the cruciform church
from two galleries of the catacombs cross
ing one another at right angles : the High
Altar stands there over the body or relics
of a dead saint; and the chapels represent
other minor tombs grouped like niches in
the catacombs around it. A chapel is thus,
as Mr. Herbert Spencer phrases it, “ a tomb
within a tomb’-’; and a great cathedral is a
serried set of such cumulative tombs, one
built beside the other. Sometimes the
chapels are actual graves, sometimes they
are cenotaphs; but the connection with
death is always equally evident. On this
subject I would refer the reader again to
Mr. Spencer’s pages.
So long as Christianity was proscribed at
Rome and throughout the empire the wor
ship of the dead must have gone on only
silently, and must have centred in the cata
combs or by the graves of saints and
martyrs—the last-named being practically
mere Christian successors of the willing
victims of earlier religions. When Chris
tianity had triumphed, however, and gained
not only official recognition but official
honour, the cult of the martyrs and the
other faithful dead became with Christian
Rome a perfect passion. The Holy Inno
cents, St. Stephen Protomartyr, the name
less martyrs of the Ten Persecutions,
together with Polycarp, Vivia Perpetua,
Felicitas, Ignatius, and all the rest, came to
receive from the Church a form of venera
tion which only the nice distinctions of the
theological mind could enable us to dis
criminate from actual worship. The great
procession of the slain for Christ in the
mosaics of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo at
Ravenna gives a good comprehensive list
of the more important of these earliest
saints (at least for Aryan worshippers),
headed by St. Martin, St. Clement, St.
Justin, St. Lawrence, and St. Hippolytus.
Later on came the more mythical and
poetic figures, derived apparently from
heathen gods—St. Catherine, St. Barbara,
St. George, St. Christopher. These form
as they go a perfect new pantheon, circling
round the figures of Christ himself, and his
mother the Madonna, who grows quickly
in turn, by absorption of Isis, Astarte, and
Artemis, into the Queen of Heaven.
The love-feasts or agapa of the early
Christians were usually held, in the cata
combs or elsewhere, above the bodies of
the martyrs. Subsequently the remains of
the sainted dead were transferred to lordly
churches like Sant’ Agnese and San Paolo,
where they were deposited under the altar
151
or sacred stone thus consecrated, from
whose top the body and blood of Christ
was distributed in the Eucharist. As early
as the fourth century we know that no
church was complete without some such
relic ; and the passion for martyrs spread
so greatly from that period onward that at
one time no less than 2,300 corpses of holy
men together were buried at S. Prassede.
It is only in Rome itself that the full im
portance of this martyr-worship can now be
sufficiently understood, or the large part
which it played in the development of
Christianity adequately recognised. Per
haps the easiest way for the Protestant
reader to put himself in touch with this
side of the subject is to peruse the very
interesting and graphic account given in
the second volume of Mrs. Jameson’s
Sacred and Legendary Art.
I have room for a few illustrative
examples only.
When St. Ambrose founded his new
church at Milan, he wished to consecrate
it with some holy relic. In a vision he
beheld two young men in shining clothes,
and it was revealed to him that these were
holy martyrs whose bodies lay near the
spot where he lived in the city. He dug
for . them accordingly, and found two
bodies, which proved to be those of two
saints, Gervasius and Protasius, who had
suffered for the faith in the reign of Nero.
They were installed in the new basilica
Ambrose had built at Milan.
The body of St. Agnes, saint and martyr,
who is always represented with that familiar
emblem, the lamb which she duplicates,
lies in a sarcophagus under the High Altar
of Sant’ Agnese beyond the Porta Pia at
Rome. The body of St. Cecilia lies in the
church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere.
Almost every church in Rome has its entire
body of a patron saint, oftenest a martyr of
the early persecutions.
The great central temple of the Catholic
Church is St. Peter’s at Rome. The very
body of the crucified saint lies enshrined
under the high altar, in a sarcophagus
brought from the catacomb near S. Sebastiano. Upon this Rock, St. Peter’s and
the Catholic Church are founded. Anacletus, the successor of Clement, built a
monument over the bones of the blessed
Peter; and if Peter be a historical person
at all, I see no reason to doubt that his
veritable body actually lies there. St. Paul
shares with him in the same shrine ; but
only half the two corpses now repose within
the stately Confessio in the Sacristy of the
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THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
papal basilica: the other portion of St.
Peter consecrates the Lateran ; the other
portion of St. Paul gives sanctity to San
Paolo fuori le Murd.
Other much venerated bodies at Rome
are those of the Quattro Coronati, in the
church of that name; S. Praxedis and St.
Pudentiana in their respective churches ;
St. Cosmo and St. Damian; and many
more too numerous to mention. Several
of the Roman churches, like San Clemente,
stand upon the site of the house of the
saint to whom they are dedicated, or whose
body they preserve, thus recalling the early
New Guinea practice. Others occupy the
site of his alleged martyrdom or enclose
the pillar to which he was fastened. In
the single church of San Zaccaria at Venice,
again, I found the bodies of St. Zacharias
(father of John the Baptist), St. Sabina,
St. Tarasius, Sts. Nereus and Achilles, and
many other saints.
How great importance was attached to
the possession of the actual corpse or
mummy of a saint we see exceptionally well
indeed in this case of Venice. The bring
ing of the corpse or mummy of St. Mark
from Alexandria to the lagoons was long
considered the most important event in the
history of the Republic; the church in
which it was housed is the noblest in
Christendom, and contains an endless series
of records of the connection of St. Mark
with the city and people that so royally
received him.
Nor was that the only important helper
that Venice could boast. She contained
also the body of St. George at San Giorgio
Maggiore, and the body of St. Nicholas at
San Niccolo di Lido. The beautiful legend
of the Doge and the Fisherman (immor
talised for us by the pencil of Paris
Bordone in one of the noblest pictures the
world has ever seen) tells us how the three
great guardian saints, St. Mark, St. George,
and St. Nicholas, took a gondola one day
from their respective churches, and rowed
out to sea amid a raging storm to circum
vent the demons who were coming in a
tempest to overwhelm Venice. A fourth
saint, of far later date, whom the Venetians
also carried off by guile, was St. Roch of
Montpelier. This holy man was a very
great sanitary precaution against the plague,
to which the city was much exposed through
its eastern commerce. So the men of Venice
simply stole the body by fraud from Mont
pelier, and built in its honour the exquisite
church and Scuola di San Rocco, the great
museum of the art of Tintoret. The fact
that mere possession of the holy body
counts in itself for much could not be
better shown than by these forcible abduc
tions.
The corpse of St. Nicholas, who was a
highly revered bishop of Myra in Lycia, 1
lies, as I said, under the high altar of San
Niccolo di Lido at Venice. But another
and more authentic body of the same great
saint, the patron of sailors and likewise of
schoolboys, lies also under the high altar
of the magnificent basilica of San Nicolà
at Bari, from which circumstance the holy
bishop is generally known as St. Nicolas of
Bari. A miraculous fluid, the Manna di
Bari, highly prized by the pious, exudes
from the remains. A gorgeous cathedral
rises over the sepulchre. Such emulous
duplication of bodies and relics is extremely
common, both in Christendom and in Islam.
The corpse of St. Augustine, for example,
lies at Pavia in a glorious ark, one of the
most sumptuous monuments ever erected
by the skill of man, as well as one of the
loveliest. Padua similarly boasts the body
of St. Antony of Padua, locally known as
“ il Santo,” and far more important in his
own town than all the rest of the Chrisfian
pantheon put together. Dominican monks
and nuns make pilgrimages to Bologna, in
order to venerate the body of St. Dominic,
who died in that city, and whose corpse is
enclosed in a magnificent sarcophagus in
the church dedicated to him. Siena has
for its special glory St. Catherine the Second
—the first was the mythical princess of
Alexandria—and the house of that ecstatic
nun is still preserved intact as an oratory
for the prayers of the pious. Her head, laid
by in a silver shrine or casket, decorates
the altar of her chapel in San Domenico,
where the famous frescoes of Sodoma too
often usurp the entire attention of northern
visitors. Compare the holy head of
Hoseyn at Cairo. The great Franciscan
church at Assisi, once more, enshrines the
remains of the founder of the Franciscans
under the high altar ; the church of Santa
Maria degli Angeli below it encloses the
little hut which was the first narrow home
of the nascent order.
North of the Alps, again, I cannot
refrain from mentioning a few salient in
stances, which help to enforce the princi
ples already enunciated. At Paris the two
great local saints are St. Denis and Ste.
Geneviève. St. Denis was the first bishop
of Lutetia and of the Parish : he is said to
have been beheaded with his two com
panions at Montmartre—Mons Martyrum.
�SURVIVALS IN CHRISTENDOM
He afterwards walked with his head in his
hands from that point (now covered by the
little church of St. Pierre, next door to the
new basilica of the Sacré Cœur) to the spot
where he piously desired to be buried. A
holy woman named Catulla (note that
last echo) performed the final rites for
him at the place where the stately abbey-,
church of St. Denis now preserves his
memory.
As for Ste. Geneviève, she rested first in
the church dedicated to her on the site now
occupied by the Pantheon, which still in
part, though secularised, preserves her
memory. Her body (or what remains of it)
lies at present in the neighbouring church
of St. Etienne du Mont.
Other familiar examples will occur to
every one, such as the bones of the Magi
or Three Kings, preserved in a reliquary in
the Cathedral at Cologne ; those of St.
Ursula and the 11,000 virgins ; those of St.
Stephen and St. Lawrence at Rome ; those
of St. Hubert, disinterred and found uncor
rupted, at the town of the same name in
the Ardennes ; and those of St. Longinus
in his chapel at Mantua. All these relics
and bodies perform astounding miracles,
and all have been the centres of important
cults for a considerable period.
In Britain, from the first stages of Chris
tianity, the reverence paid to the bodies of
saints was most marked, and the story of
their wanderings forms an important part
of our early annals. Indeed, I dwell so long
upon this point because’ few northerners
of the present day can fully appreciate the
large part which the Dead Body plays and
has played for many centuries in Christian
worship. Only those who, like me, have
lived long in thoroughly Catholic countries,
have made pilgrimages to numerous famous
shrines, and have waded through reams of
Anglo-Saxon and other early mediaeval
documents, can really understand this
phase of Christian hagiology. To such
people it is abundantly clear that the actual
Dead Body of some sainted man or woman
has been in many places the chief object of
reverence for millions of Christians in suc
cessive generations. A good British in
stance is found in the case of St. Cuthbert’s
^corpse. The tale of its wanderings can be
read in any good history of Durham.
But everywhere in Britain we get similar
local saints, whose bodies or bones per
formed marvellous miracles and were
zealously guarded against sacrilegious in
truders. Bede himself is already full of
such holy corpses ; and in later days they
153
increased by the hundred. St. Alban at
St. Alban’s, the protomartyr of Britain ; the
“ white hand ” of St. Oswald, that when all
else perished remained white and uticorrupted because blessed by Aidan ; St.
Etheldreda at Ely, another remarkable and
illustrative instance ; Edward the Confessor
at Westminster Abbey : these are but a few
out of hundreds of examples which will at
once occur to students of our history. And
I will add that sometimes the legends of
these saints link us on unexpectedly to far
earlier types of heathen worship ; as when
we read concerning St. Edmund of East
Anglia, the patron of Bury St. Edmund’s,
that Ingvar the viking took him by force,
bound him to a tree, scourged him cruelly,
made him a target for the arrows of the
pagan Danes, and finally beheaded him.
Either, I say, a god-making sacrifice of the
northern heathens ; or, failing that, a remi
niscence, like St. Sebastian, of such god
making rites as are preserved in the legends
of ancient martyrs.
But during the later Middle Ages the
sacred Body of Britain, above all others,
was undoubtedly that of Thomas A’Becket
at Canterbury. Hither, as we know, all
England went on pilgrimage; and nothing
could more fully show the rapidity of
canonisation in such cases than the fact
that even the mighty Henry II. had to
prostrate himself before his old enemy’s
body and submit to a public scourging at
the shrine of the new-made martyr. For
several hundred years after his death there
can be no doubt at all that the cult of St.
Thomas of Canterbury was much the most
real and living worship throughout the
whole of England; its only serious rivals
in popular favour being the cult of St.
Cuthbert to the north of Humber, and that
of St. Etheldreda in the Eastern Counties.
Holy heads in particular were common
in Britain before the Reformation. A
familiar Scottish case is that of the head
of St. Fergus, the apostle of Banff and the
Pictish Highlands, transferred to and
preserved at the royal seat of Scone.
“ By Sanct Fergus heid at Scone” was the
favourite oath of the Scotch monarchs, aS
“ Par Sainct Denys ” was that of their
French contemporaries.
In almost all these cases, again, and
down to the present day, popular appre
ciation goes long before official Roman
canonisation. Miracles are first performed
at the tomb, and prayers are answered; an
irregular cult precedes the formal one.
Even in our own day, only a few weeks
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THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
after Cardinal Manning’s death, advertise
ments appeared in Catholic papers in
London giving thanks for spiritual and
temporal blessings received through the
intervention of Our Lady, the saints, “and
our beloved Cardinal.”
This popular canonisation has often far
outrun the regular official acceptance, as
in the case of Joan of Arc in France at
the present day, or of “ Maister John
Schorn, that blessed man born,” in the
Kent of the Middle Ages. Wales and
Cornwall are full of local and patriotic
saints, often of doubtful Catholicity, like
St. Cadoc, St. Padern, St. Petrock, St.
Piran, St. Ruan, and St. Illtyd, not to
mention more accepted cases, like St.
Asaph and St. David. The fact is, men
have everywhere felt the natural desire for
a near, a familiar, a recent, and a present
god or saint; they have worshipped rather
the dead whom they loved and revered
themselves than the elder gods and
the remoter martyrs who have no body
among them, no personal shrine, no local
associations, no living memories. “ I have
seen in Brittany,” says a French corres
pondent of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s, “the
tomb of a pious and charitable priest
covered with garlands : people flocked to
it by hundreds to pray of him that he
would procure them restoration to health,
and guard over their children.” There,
with the Christian addition of the supreme
God, we get once more the root-idea of
religion.
I should like to add that beyond such
actual veneration of the bodies of saints
and martyrs, there has always existed a
definite theory in the Roman Church that
no altar can exist without a relic. The
altar, being itself a monumental stone,
needs a body or part of a body to justify
and consecrate it. Dr. Rock, a high
authority, says in his Hierurgia: “ By the
regulations of the Church it is ordained
that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass be
offered upon an altar which contains a
stone consecrated by a Bishop, enclosing
the relics of some saint or martyr ; and be
covered with three linen cloths that have
been blessed for that purpose with an
appropriate form of benediction.” The
consecration of the altar, indeed, is con
sidered even more serious than the
consecration of the church itself; for
without the stone and its relic the cere
mony of the mass cannot be performed at
all. Even when mass has to be said in a
private house the priest brings a conse
crated stone and its relic along with him ;
and other such stones were carried in the
retables or portable altars so common in
military expeditions of the Middle Ages.
The church is thus a tomb, with chapel
tombs around it; it contains a stone monu
ment covering a dead body or part of a
body ; and in it is made and exhibited the
Body of Christ, in the form of the conse
crated and transmuted wafer.
Not only, however, is the altar in this
manner a reduced or symbolical tomb, and
not only is it often placed above the body
of a saint, as at St. Mark’s and St. Peter’s,
but it sometimes is itself a stone sarco
phagus. One such sarcophagus exists in
the Cathedral at St. Malo ; I have seen
other coffin-shaped altars in the monastery
of La Trappe near Algiers and elsewhere.
When, however, the altar stands, like that
at St. Peter’s, above the actual body of a
saint, it does not require to contain a relic;
otherwise it does. That is to say, it must
be either a real or else an attenuated and
symbolical sarcophagus.
Apart from corpse-worship and relic
worship in the case of saints, Catholic
Christendom has long possessed an annual
Commemoration of the Dead, the Jour des
Morts., which links itself on directly to
earlier ancestor-worship. It is true, this
commemoration is stated officially, and no
doubt correctly, to owe its origin (in its
recognised form) to a particular historical
person, Saint Odilo of Cluny ; but when we
consider how universal such commemora
tions and annual dead-feasts have been in
all times and places, we can hardly doubt
that the Church did but adopt and sanctify
a practice which, though perhaps accounted
heathenish, had never died out at all among
the mass of believers. The very desire to
be buried in a church or churchyard, and
all that it implies, link on Christian usage
here once more to primitive corpse-worship.
Compare with the dead who sleep with
Osiris. In the Middle Ages many people
were buried in chapels containing the body
(or a relic) of their patron saint.
In short, from first to last religion never
gets far away from these its earliest and
profoundest associations. “God and im
mortality”—those two are its key-notes.
And those two are one ; for the god in the
last resort is nothing more than the im
mortal ghost, etherealised and extended.
On the other hand, whenever, religion
travels too far afield from its emotional and
primal base in the cult of the nearer dead,
it must either be constantly renewed by
�CONCLUSION
fresh and familiar objects of worship, or it
tends to dissipate itself into mere vague
pantheism. A new god, a new saint, a
“ revival of religion,” is continually neces
sary. The Sacrifice of the Mass is wisely
repeated at frequent intervals ; but that
alone does not suffice : men want the
assurance of a nearer, a more familiar deity.
In our own time, and especially in Protes
tant and sceptical England and America,
this need has made itself felt in the rise of
spiritualism and kindred beliefs, which are
but the doctrine of the ghost or shade in
its purified form, apart, as a rule, from the
higher conception of a supreme ruler. I
have known many men of intellect, suffer
ing under a severe bereavement—the loss
of a wife or a dearly-loved child—take
refuge for a time either in spiritualism or
Catholicism. The former seems to give
them the practical assurance of actual
bodily intercourse with the dead, through
mediums or table-turning; the latter sup
plies them with a theory of death which
makes reunion a probable future for them.
This desire for direct converse with the
dead we saw exemplified in a very early
or primitive stage in the case of the Mandan
wives who talk lovingly to their husbands’
skulls ; it probably forms the basis for the
Common habit of keeping the head while
burying the body, whose widespread results
we have so frequently noticed. I have
known two instances of modern spiritualists
who similarly had their wives’ bodies em
balmed, in order that the spirit might
return and inhabit them.
Thus the Cult of the Dead, which is the
earliest origin of all religion, in the sense
of worship, is also the last relic of the reli
gious spirit which survives the decay of
faith due to modern scepticism. To this
cause I refer on the whole the spiritualistic
utterances of so many among our leaders
of modern science. They have rejected
religion, but they cannot reject the Inherited
and ingrained religious emotions.
CHAPTER XX.
CONCLUSION
And now we have reached at last the end
of our long and toilsome disquisition. I
need hardly say to those who have per
sisted with me so far that I do not regard
155
a single part of it all as by any means final.
There is not a chapter in this book, indeed,
which I could not have expanded to double
or treble its present length had I chosen
to include in it a tithe of the evidence I
have gathered on the subject with which
it deals. But for many adequate reasons
compression was imperative. Some of the
greatest treatises ever written on this pro
foundly important and interesting question
have met with far less than the attention
they deserved because they were so bulky
and so overloaded with evidence that the
reader could hardly see the wood for the
trees : he lost the thread of the argument
in the mazes of example. In my own case
I had, or believed I had, a central idea ;
and I desired to set that idea forth with
such simple brevity as would enable the
reader to grasp it and to follow it. I go,
as it were, before a Grand Jury only. I
do not pretend in any one instance to have
proved my points ; I am satisfied if I have
made out a frima facie case for further
inquiry.
My object in the present reconstructive
treatise has therefore been merely to set
forth, in as short a form as was consistent
with clearness, my conception of the steps
by which mankind arrived at its idea of
its God. I have not tried to produce evi
dence on each step in full; I have only
tried to lay before the general public a
rough sketch of a psychological rebuilding,
and to suggest at the same time to scholars
and anthropologists some inkling of the
lines along which evidence in favour of my
proposed reconstruction is likeliest to be
found. This book is thus no more than a
summary of probabilities. As in this pre
liminary outline of my views I have dealt
with few save well-known facts, and relied
for the most part upon familiar collocations
of evidence, I have not thought it necessary
to encumber my pages with frequent and
pedantic footnotes, referring to the passages
or persons quoted.
I wish also to remark before I close that
I do not hold dogmatically to the whole or
any part of the elaborate doctrine here
tentatively suggested. I have changed my
own mind far too often, with regard to these
matters, in the course of my personal evolu
tion ever to think I have reached complete
finality. Fifteen or twenty years ago, in
deed, I was rash enough to think I had
come to anchor, when I first read Mr. Her
bert Spencer’s sketch of the origin of reli
gion in the opening volume of the Principles
of Sociology. Ten or twelve years since
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THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
doubts and difficulties again obtruded
themselves. Six years ago once more,
when The Golden Bough appeared, after
this book had been planned and in part
executed, I was forced to go back entirely
upon many cherished former opinions, and
to reconsider many questions which I had
fondly imagined were long since closed for
me. Since that time new lights have been
constantly shed upon me from without, or
have occurred to me from within ; and I
humbly put this sketch forward now for
what it may be worth, not with the idea
that I have by any means fathomed the
whole vast truth, but in the faint hope that
I may perhaps have looked down here and
there a little deeper into the profound
abysses beneath us than has been the lot of
most previous investigators. At the same
time, I need hardly reiterate my sense of
the immense obligations under which I lie
to not a few among them, and pre-eminently
to Mr. Spencer, Mr. Frazer, Mr. Hartland,
and Dr. Tylor. My only claim is that I
may perhaps have set forth a scheme of re
construction which further evidence will
possibly show to be true in parts and mis
taken in others.
On the other hand, by strictly confining
my attention to religious features, properly
so called, to the exclusion of mythology,
ethics, and all other external accretions orx
accidents, I trust I have been able to de-'
monstrate more clearly than has hitherto
been done the intimate connection which
always exists between cults in general and
the worship of the Dead God, natural or
artificial. Even if I have not quite suc
ceeded in inducing thebeliever in primitive
animism to reconsider his prime dogma of
the origin of gods from all-pervading spirits
(of which affiliation I can see no proof in
the evidence before us), I venture to think
I shall at any rate have made him feel that
Ancestor-Worship and the Cult of the Dead
God have played a far larger and deeper
part than he has hitherto been willing to
admit in the genesis of the religious emo
tions. Though I may not have raised the
worship of the Dead Man to a supreme and
unique place in the god-making process, I
have at least, I trust, raised it to a position
of higher importance than it has hitherto
held, ever since the publication of Mr.
Herbert Spencer’s epoch-makingresearches.
I believe I have made it tolerably clear that
the vast mass of existing gods or divine
persons, when we come to analyse them,
do actually turn out to be dead and deified
human beings.
This is not the place, at the very end of
so long a disquisition, to examine the theory
of primitive animism. I would therefore
only say briefly here that I do not deny the
actual existence of that profoundly animistic
frame of mind which Mr. Im Thum has so
well depicted among the Indians of Guiana;
nor that which exists among the Samoyeds
of Siberia ; nor that which meets us at
every turn in historical accounts of the old
Roman religion. I am quite ready to admit
that, to people at that stage of religious
evolution, the world seems simply thronged
with spirits on every side, each of whom has
often his own special functions and peculiar
prerogatives. But I fail to see that any one
of these ideas is demonstrably primitive.
Most often we can trace ghosts, spirits, and
gods to particular human origins: where
spirits exist in abundance and pervade all
nature, I still fail to understand why they
may not be referred to the one known source
and spring of all ghostly beings. It is
abundantly clear that no distinction of
name or rite habitually demarcates these
ubiquitous spirits at large from those
domestic gods whose origin is perfectly
well remembered in the family circle. I
make bold to believe, therefore, that in
every such case we have to deal with un
known and generalised ghosts—with ghosts
of varying degrees of antiquity. If any one
can show me a race of spirit-believers who
do not worship their own ancestral spirits,
or can adduce any effective prime differentia
between the spirit that was once a living
man and the spirit that never was human
at all, I will gladly hear him. Up to date,
however, no such race has been pointed
out, and no such differentia ever posited.
The truth is, we have now no primitive
men at all. Existing men are the descen
dants of people who have had religions, in
all probability, for over a million years.
The best we can do, therefore, is to trace
what gods we can to their original source,
and believe that the rest are of similar
development. And whither do we track
them ?
“ So far as I have been able to trace
back the origin of the best-known minor
provincial deities,” says Sir Alfred Lyall,
speaking of India in general, “they are
usually men of past generations who have
earned special promotion and brevet rank
among disembodied ghosts....... Of the
numerous local gods known to have been
living men, by far the greater proportion
derive from the ordinary canonisation of
holy personages....... The number of shrines
�CONCLUSION
thus raised in Berar alone to these ancho
rites and persons deceased in the odour of
sanctity is large, and it is constantly
increasing. Some of them have already
attained the rank of temples.” Erman
came to a similar conclusion about the gods
of those very Ostyaks who are often quoted
as typical examples of primitive animists.
Of late years numerous unprejudiced inves
tigators, like Mr. Duff Macdonald and
Captain Henderson, have similarly come
to the conclusion that the gods of the
natives among whom they worked were all
of human origin ; while we know that some
157
whole great national creeds, like the Shinto
of Japan, recognise no deities at all save
living kings and dead ancestral spirits.
Under these circumstances, judging the
unknown by the known, I hesitate to posit
any new and fanciful source for the small
residuum of gods whose human origin is
less certainly known to us.
In one word, I believe that corpse-worship
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ting that folk-lore is the protoplasm of
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philosophical offshoot, theology.
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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The evolution of the idea of God. An inquiry into the origins of religions / revised and slightly abridged by Franklin T. Richards
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 160 p. : ill. (port.) ; 23 cm.
Series: R.P.A. Cheap Reprints
Notes: Issued for the Rationalist Press Association Ltd. The last three pages are the RPA's publications list. Printed in double columns. First published, London: Grant Richards, 1897. Signature on front cover: "F. Winn". Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. Second impression (making 55,000 copies).
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Grant, Allan
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Richards, Franklin T (ed.)
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1903
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God
Religion
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (The evolution of the idea of God. An inquiry into the origins of religions / revised and slightly abridged by Franklin T. Richards), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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God
NSS
Religion
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Text
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THE TRANSFIGURATION
OF RELIGION:
A DISCOURSE
BY
J. ALLANSON PICTON, M.A.
DELIVERED AT
ffinsbmy,
On SUNDA Y, JUNE 2nd, 1878.
PRICE TWOPENCE.
�LONDON:
PRINTED BY WATERLOW AND SONS LIMITED
LONDON WALL.
�1
THE
RANSFIGURATION OF RELIGION.
We are told by the Gospels that on a certain
jojoccasion Jesus took three privileged disciples with
niihim to a high mountain apart; and there a wonder
[alhappened. For they saw no longer the carpenter
ilof Nazareth, or the heretical Rabbi of Capernaum,
Ini but a shining angel of God. “ An inner glory rent
srifi the veil ” that obscured his divine dignity, and they
rs| saw him, not as he seemed to be, but as he really
swwas. He had passed out of the shadows of time
loj into the open day of eternity. Therefore “his face
did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as
)d| the light.” Therefore, also, he was no longer
oJ bound by the vulgar limits of the little sect that
qcj -oppressed him by their dulness. The spirits of bygone times appeared, and talked with him of a
�4
mysterious future. So strange and distant did he
seem, that at first the disciples could not speak;
and when they did, it was with a sort of trembling
joy, which only asked for time to know itself aright.
“ Master,” said Peter, “ it is good for us to be here;
and let us make three tabernacles”—“for,” says
one evangelist, “ he wist not what to say, for he
was sore afraid.”
Such is the gospel story, and it does not concern
us in the least now to enter into any critical
enquiries as to its origin. Its use to me is the same
in any case. It is a parable for the church to the
end of time. But, without adventuring any criticism,
I have my own thoughts about it, and I think we
may discern in this sacred legend the resultant, or
the relief, whichever you will, of two opposing
elements in the feelings of the disciples toward
their master. On the one hand were love, reverence, and devotion such as probably never were
felt by man for man, before or since. On the other
hand there was the familiarity which generally
brings about an occasional creeping of shame at
the suspicion of exaggerated feeling. On the one
side was the import of an amazing personal supremacy; on the other were the plain rough facts of
poverty and contempt. The highest expression of
their wonder and devotion was a half-formed, and,
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as they often felt, too daring hope, that this Jesus
might be the very Christ, the hope of all their
fathers. But the form of his ministry was utterly
on incongruous with their dreams of the Messiah.
n'J Thus there was a conflict between their feelings
and the facts. The facts could not be denied, and
srl the feelings would not be silenced. Yet they could
tor not live together, and it would have required little
prophetic insight to be assured that one or other
tffil must give way or be transformed. What happened
ti'A with some of Christ’s hearers we know. They said
“whence hath this man wisdom, having never
I
learned ? ” They said “ Is not this the carpenter’s
to^son?” “And they were offended in him.” The
son i
the offensive outward facts marred, in their ears, all
affj the music of his words, and impoverished the wonder
ic of his character. But the case of those who laid
adj the foundations of the church was very different.
flT They came to discern an inner worth and a spiritual
g.cc majesty which, shining from within, transfigured
tud outward circumstances of poverty and contempt
into raiment of purity, “ white as snow, so as no
Jd fuller on earth can white them.” And the visage
1 that was so marred more than any man s was, to
their fond contemplation, irradiated by the charac
ter, so that it shone like a very sun of righteous
ness. In other words, the feelings of the primitive
1 ‘?3
�6
disciples pierced the rude facts by the fire of love,,
and discovered an inward splendour that in process
of time transfigured unconformable surroundings
into spiritual miracles.
As I have said, it is not my purpose here to
elaborate or defend any particular theory of such
traditions as the transfiguration and the resurrection
of Jesus in a glorified form. In any case it will be
allowed that, in the view of Christian faith, the
transfiguration was not a disguise, but a revelation.
It was the unveiling of the real Christ. And,
whether regarded as historic visions or legends
gradually evolved, I take it that herein the Christian
faith is right. Whether it be to personal emotion
or to impersonal evolution that we owe these tradi
tions, there is no falsehood in them, except to the
thin, pragmatic intellect of the literals. In a
parabolic way they picture the real truth, that it
was the charm and the power of Christ’s spirit
which irradiated the mean surroundings of his
earthly life, and made him the very brightness of
God’s glory to the church.
Now it is from this point of view that I take the
transfig-uration as a type of much that is happening
to Christianity in these times. We have heard of
the phases of faith, and of the eclipse of faith, but
there is also such a thing as its transfiguration,
�7
and this is far more significant than either. For in
transfiguration, its life, hidden rather than revealed,
by insufficient symbols, irradiates those symbols
with its own brightness, and, without destruction of
their form, converts them into spiritual substance.
Let me try to make plainer the general process I
have in view, before I proceed to particular illustra
tion.
The growing schism between traditional theology
MU and the actual facts of the world’s history has
become a commonplace. But what is not so
much recognised is the incongruity between the
best inspirations of religion and the body of belief
imposed by authority. “ Whatsoever things are
true,” says religion, “ think on these things.” “ Buy
the truth, and sell it not,”—no, not for social comfort,
nor even for respectability. Not so, says the system
of opinion supposed to be inseparable from religion;
it is better not to think on material facts, lest they
stifle spiritual affections; and even truth may be
bought too dear if it is won at the loss of usefulness.
11 Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts,”
says religion, in a strain of real worship. But what
passes for Christian opinion insists that doubt is to
be commanded down, if need be, by a resolute
fits effort of the will. “ In every nation,” says the voice
of religion, “he that feareth God and worketh
1
�8
righteousness is accepted of him.” But ecclesias
tical systems explain this away by so defining
righteousness as to make it is impossible, and then
show that it is not the character but right belief, at
least on 11 fundamentals,” as they are called, which
makes a man acceptable to God.
The sense of sin, the solemn conviction' that it
always demands and gets its sacrifice, the feeling at
once of personal insignificance and of ultra-personal
grandeur that comes with a perception of the
divine unity of things, the enthusiasm of humanity,
the inspirations of progress, all of them surely are
religious affections. Their fountain is the infinite,
their temple is the universe, their shrine is the heart.
But they are first shocked, then paralysed by the
poor prosaic forms imposed by an emasculated
Westminster confession, or by the helpless meta
physics of the Athanasian creed. The results of
this incongruity have been generally worked out in
one or two directions. Either under its strain the
lessons of science and criticism receive a morbid
interpretation, and religion perishes in the ruins of
theology; or else these solvent forces are resisted
by an arbitrary effort of the will, and, to a greater
or a less extent according to circumstances, religion
is degraded into superstition. But I maintain that
•another alternative is possible, that which I have
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called the transfiguration of religion. In this pro
cess the old form in a great measure remains, if not
intact, at least sufficiently to preserve its identity.
But it is, so to speak, transformed from an earthly
to a spiritual substance, and becomes a trans
parency giving finite form to an infinite light.
It was thus that Philo and the Alexandrian school
treated the Mosaic religion; and their method has
been traditional among those who may be called
Platonic Christians. The Garden of Eden became
the pure life of reason, and the forbidden tree the
jdelights of sense. The national Jehovah was trans
figured into formless and eternal being. The
creative and prophetic word, the Jewish memra,
became the logos, the divine reason. The vitalizing
breath or spirit of God became the emerging love
that completed the Platonic trinity. The narratives
of the Old Testament were regarded as inter
pretable after a spiritual manner, so as to make
them parables of things heavenly, rather than
histories of things earthly. But this method was
usually applied in a hesitating, inconsistent, and
even arbitrary manner. The allegorical sense was
allowed, but the literal sense was almost universally
insisted on as well, and the incongruity of the tw’o
was often startling. Eden, and its rivers and groves,
might be a dream of the delights of reason; but to
�10
insist at the same time on the historical reality of
the talking serpent and the miraculous tree was to
refuse all relief to the understanding. The theory
of double, or treble, or even sevenfold senses to be
discovered in the sacred text was entirely irrational.
There was no touch of nature in such a forced and
arbitrary system. There was no attempt to find
out what it was in humanity or in the constitution of
the universe which had evolved the old traditions,
and so to find their significance in this root principle.
The light was not looked for from within, but from
without, and therefore no real tranfiguration was
possible.
But in modern times the study of religion has
been very greatly affected by the adoption of the
historic method. We are coming to believe that
continuity of development has been the law in the
story of mankind, as well as in the world about us.
No institution, no custom, no opinion springs sud
denly and causelessly into being without parentage,
or without passing" through the stages of germina
tion, embryo, infancy and youth. Even those
revolutions that startle the world like the rush of a
tornado, have been brooding silently in the air for
long before, or they are but the re-combination of
old. forces. Thus for instance, both the French
Revolution and Mahommedanism, for all they burst
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upon the world so suddenly, had their origins fatback in time and deep in the bosom of humanity’
-And such is far more evidently the case with re
ligious ideas, feelings and beliefs, that have spread
slowly and grown for ag-es by some inherent and
enduring force of life. In regard to these, neither
mind nor heart, if healthily constituted, finds any
satisfaction at all-in the coldly negative conclusion
that the belief is contrary to fact, or the idea in
congruous with modern progress. What we want
much more to know is the place that the feeling has
in the life of humanity, how it attained that place,
what has been its value, and what is its real relation
to the belief now shown to be false. Supposing
these questions answered, it will probably be found
that the answer throws considerable light on the
beliefs and ceremonies by which that feeling has
been expressed. At least they no longer appear
meaningless or absurd, and it is more than possible
that though they have to be surrendered as dogmas
or supernaturally imposed duties, they may still
commend themselves to us as convenient expressions
and exercises of spiritual life. Now in this case the
new light thrown upon them comes not from without
but from within. There is no far-fetched theory of
inspired allegory or divine condescension to human
forms of speech. The historic method has simply
�12
revealed the order of nature, and in doing so has
traced back the belief or the observance to some
permanent and universal element in human life.
Thus the belief or observance becomes luminous
with significance and may even be transfigured into
real sacredness and beauty.
Let me give now one or two definite illustrations
from Christianity itself, and then perhaps my
meaning will be plainer. Take for instance the
doctrines of the Fall and of Redemption, which
can hardly be separated one from another. The
former teaches in substance that in some primeval
period mankind were innocent, holy, and happy,
but by sin fell away into a state of corruption to
which the memory of Eden gave the bitter pang of
lost but unforgotten joy. The doctrine of re
demption teaches that the love of God did not
desert mankind in their low estate but extended,
and is extending help from heaven, by which at
last a new world shall be established where
righteousness shall be supreme. Now, as to the
former, the inductions legitimately drawn from
geological records and prehistoric remains, are, to
say the least, constantly accumulating difficulties
in the way of the historic theory required by the
alleged fall of man. And on the other hand, if by
redemption be meant a miraculous interference
�*3
hi with the order of the world, the difficulties of
ea believing it are steadily increasing toward the
nil limit of impossibility. But what do you gain by
•ra these negations ? Absolutely nothing more than
"il freedom to follow the teachings of geology,
uJ authropology, and physical philosophy, without
conscious inconsistency.
The gain is some
J
thing, but it is not much when the highest ends
d
of human life are considered. And that small
gain is swallowed up in utter loss if those negations
id cut you off from communion with the grandest
passions of human experience. It is satisfactory,
no doubt, to substitute a catarrhine ape for Adam
if Adam was a fiction and the catarrhine ape a fact.
But, O, my friends, Augustine was a fact, and
Thomas-a-Kempis was a fact, and there have been
many such. Nay more, the books they left behind
are living facts, and the feelings to which they
appeal are mightier and more living still. Those
homilies on St. John, can I recall them without
feeling again the almost infinite perspective of depth
they add to human life? Those confessions,—do
they not rush past you like a very torrent of life,
sweeping' you along with their emotion, and swallow
ing you up in the personality of the man ? But
such books were evolved from minds not only
impressed, but possessed by the ideas of a Fall and
�14
Redemption. And more than that, these con
victions were not individual peculiarities. They
were characteristic of a great human movement,
which in later times has been called progress, but
which then was known as the coming of the king
dom of God. Now if the discovery that the so
called history of the Fall is legend, and that the
miracles heralding redemption were imaginary,
involves an entire extirpation of the ideas both of a
Fall and of a redemption, then the career of men
like Augustine Tauler, Wycliffe and others was a
morbid perversion of human life. And as with the
pearl oyster so with man, the most splendid and
precious products of his organization are the out
come not of its healthy working but of disease.
But splendid,—precious ? No ; they cease to be
so when emptied of reality. And there is nothing
left for us but to lament the barren dreary centuries
that produced only apostles, prophets and martyrs.
I mean it for no sneer—I mention it only as a fact or
whatever it is worth, in the problem before me,
when I say that I do not feel the most luminous
exposition of my relationship to our ancestral
catarrhine ape to be a sufficient compensation for
the loss. I accept him as a fact. I cannot help it,
because the evidence is distinctly in his favour. But
if I cannot resist evidence, so neither can I suppress
�my spiritual sympathies, and I still feel that I should
have very much preferred Augustine and the City
of God.
And is the loss inevitable ? I say no ; not only
is it preventible, but it is not even possible. When
we put the question “ whether man be an ape or
an angel,” and declare ourselves “ on the side of
the angels,” we are only playing with words. What
is represented by the ape and what is represented
by the angel both remain in human nature, how
ever we toss about the counters that symbolize
them. And the changeful proportions in which
they exist are not in the least degree affected by
our words or our authropological theories, but they
are very much affected by our feelings and tempers,
our aspirations and appetites. When the calendar
in this country was reformed, one necessary part of
the process was an enactment that the 6th of
January should be called the 16th; whereupon the
mob thought that their lives had been shortened by
eleven days, and howled at the impiety of an
infidel government that dared thus to interfere with
the prerogatives of the Almighty. lt Give us our
eleven days! ” they shouted. It was of no use to
tell them that no Act of Parliament, unless indeed
it called in the aid of the hangman, could have any
influence on the number of their days; of no use
�i6
to explain that the 6th January was transfigured
into the 16th, but otherwise remained just as
available for all practical purposes. There was
nothing for it but to let them shout themselves
hoarse under proper guardianship; and when they
came to themselves they found spring, summer,
autumn and winter pursuing their course just as if
nothing had happened. It seems to me that there
is little more meaning in some of the theological
cries now plaintive, now menacing that rend the
air amidst inevitable readjustments of thought and
speech to actual fact. “ Give us back our souls ' ”
cry some. “ Give us back our father Adam and
the Garden of Eden 1 ” cry others. Above all and
with much more meaning the unspeculative but
suffering multitude wails aloud, “ Give us back the
hope of redemption I ”
Now as to the Fall and the Redemption, it is not
without reason that they have played so large a
part in the highest experiences of the greatest men.
For they represent certain permanent and funda
mental elements in humanity, so deep and vital
that the most intensely human of men realise them
■most; so essential that the logical revolutions have
as little effect upon them as political revolutions
have on domestic affection or social instincts. The
Fall—what is it but the pictorial projection of that
�contrast between an imperative ideal on the one
hand, and actual attainment on the other, which has
thrown such tragic shadows and heroic lights over
the story of mankind ? Classic poets sang of a
primeval golden age, and even the most barbarous
races will tell of a time when their forefathers were
bigger, braver, and better than themselves. So
universal a characteristic must have its root in a
common moral nation. However they come to be
so, mankind are as a matter of fact so constituted
that they always conceive as just beyond them
and above them, tantalizingly within their reach, a
mode of life at least a little better than that which
they actually lead. And this better way of life is
felt as a commanding law, which does not indeed
secure obedience, but at least rebukes disobedience
with hauntings of regret and with occasional pangs
of remorse. Take this fact together with the in
stinct of filial reverence, and it is not difficult to
understand how simple races have fabled to them
selves better times gone by, when the nobler life
from which the degenerate children shrink was
actually lived by their remote fathers. Such a fable
may take many forms, now of a golden age, now
of the city of As-gard, now of the Garden of Eden;
but in all forms alike its living germ is the contrast
which a moral nature feels between an imperative
�i8
ideal and actual conduct. It is this spiritual fact,
not the mythical serpent or miraculous tree, or
'easily beguiled woman—it was this spiritual fact
that kindled repentance in the soul of Augustine
and awoke the conflict that enthralls us in his con
fessions. It was this spiritual fact that harassed
Luther, and tortured John Bunyan, and fired the
passion of Whitfield. And though I no longer
believe in Adam or Eve, or the serpent, or the
stolen fruit, I feel myself as truly and as deeply as
ever in communion with those heroes of the warfare
against sin. I realise the discord, the shock, the
original sin of the fall from good to evil within
myself, whenever the ideal with which God inspires
me comes into sharp contrast with the lower life I
lead. I understand St. Paul, not by the study of
theology, but by the comment of life’s experience,
when he speaks of the old Adam, or of the
law of sin which is in our members bringing into
captivity our better nature. And every earnest word
written by such men on the calamity of the Fall
and the hope of Redemption, finds a sincere
response within me. For the doctrine that hitherto
trod the world in the homely garb of fable—“ the
truth embodied in a tale”—has been transfigured to
us, as it was to many before us. The light of the
inner truth has transfused the outer garment, and
�i9
rf| the familiar face shines self-luminous now without
need of miracle to brighten it.
As with the memory of the Fall, so with the hope
■of Redemption, the miraculous accidents are losing
their importance, but the essential truth remains
behind. What is this modern notion of progress,
so unfamiliar to the ancient world ? Surely it is
the secular and practical side of the Christian idea
of redemption. The race that was once so brutal,
so low, so stagnant, is inspired now by a veritable
breath from heaven, stands erect, marches on with
accelerating steps toward, what Jewish prophets
called the glory of the latter day. Now, if you
consider in detail the higher aspects of this human
progress, you will find it consist of innumerable
individual efforts to remedy the Fall, or in other
words, to give to the imperative ideal a force to
command the lower nature. John Howard, Wilber
force, Elizabeth Fry, and such people fought the
fight in themselves before they fought it for the
world. And the effort to give the better life
)<s| sovereignty within themselves, enlarged their sym.ql pathy with their kind so that their hearts were
w| wrung with desire to lessen some evils in the lot
X; of man. Their sufferings were not ended by their
ro| own victory over sin. Indeed, their crucifixion only
jjj then began. For just in proportion to their inten-
�20
sity of desire for human redemption was their
grief at human indifference and their agony at the
obstinacy of human sin. So it has always come
to pass in this great work of redemption that the
innocent suffer for the guilty, and vicarious sacri
fices are made from age to age. Nay, oftener than
not the madness of self-will has been irreclaimable
until it has been brought, as the Jewish prophet
said, to look on one whom it has pierced, and to
mourn for him with the bitterness of remorse.
This principle pre-eminently exemplified in the power
wielded over the hearts of men by the crucified
Jesus, is the vital truth which has made the doc
trine of atonement so prominent in the Christian
hope of redemption. And a right apprehension of
it is at least a great help in conversion from a
corrupt and selfish to a noble life supernatural.
Time soon fails in so vast a subject; and the
endeavour to accomplish too much easily betrays
us into the accomplishment of nothing. If I have
to any extent succeeded in explaining my own
strong belief in the vitality of what I have else
where called the “ Evangelical tradition,” I have
not spoken in vain. The disintegration of authority
and creed is proceeding, if not so fast as some of
us desire, at least quite as quickly as is safe for the
world. Another anxiety demands some earnest
�21
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thought,—the fear lest victorious analysis should
dissolve away the organic life that has made the
unity and continuity of human progress. I sur
render without regret the pretentious science and
feeble criticism of by-gone days. But if I find my
self cold to their spiritual aspirations, indifferent to
their moral struggles, then I begin to suspect myself
an alien from the commonwealth of humanity, and
to tremble at the outer darkness that gathers round
me. The true church and the true humanity are
not opposed, but identical, and the highest hopes of
both at the present time lie in the transfiguration of
religion.
�WORKS TO BE OBTAINED IN THE LIBRARY.
BY M. D. CONWAY, M.A.
PRICES,
s.
The Sacred Anthology; A Book
of Ethnical Scriptures ..
The Earthward Pilgrimage
Do.
do.
Republican Superstitions......
Christianity
.....................................
Human sacrifices in England ..
David Frederick Strauss ..
Sterling and Maurice
Intellectual Suicide
The First Love again.........................
Our Cause and its Accusers
Alcestis in England
Unbelief: its nature, cause, and cure ..
Entering Society ..
The Religion of Children
What is Religion?—Max Muller’s First
Hibbert Lecture..
cl.
0
0
6
6
6
7
0
0 3
0 2
0 2
0 2
0 1
0 2
0 2
0 2
0 2
10
5
2
2
1
0
2
NEW WORK BY M. D. CONWAY, M.A.
Idols and Ideals (including the Essay
on Christianity^, 350 pp............................ 7 6
Members of the Congregation, can obtain, this
work in the Library at o/-.
BY A. J. ELLIS, B.A., F.R.8., &c., &o,
Salvation ..
Truth
Speculation
Duty
The Dyer’s Hand ..
......................... 0 2
......................... 0 2
t.
0
..
0
......................... 0
2
2
2
BY REV. P. H. WICKSTEED, M.A.
..
Going Through and Getting Over
0
2
BY REV. T. W. FRECKELTON.
The Modern Analogue of the Ancient
Prophet ..
..
..........................0
2
BY W. C. COUPLAND, M.A.
The Conduct of Life
Hymns and Anthems
................................ 0
••
2
1/-,2/-. 3j-
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The transfiguration of religion: a discourse ... delivered at South Place Chapel, Finsbury on Sunday, June 2nd, 1878
Description
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 21 p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 2. List of works available at the South Place Chapel Library on back page. Printed by Waterlow and Sons Limited, London Wall.
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Picton, J. Allanson (James Allanson)
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[1878]
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South Place Chapel
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Religion
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English
Morris Tracts
Religion
Sermons
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NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
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THE SERVICE OF MAN
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�Clairvaux,
Fitzjohn's Avenue, N. IK
May i6tll, 1886.
My dear Clodd.
The book which I wish to publish is entitled “ The
Service of Man: An Essay towards the Religion of the
Future. ”
It is, of course, largely founded on Positivist principles, but
by no means exclusively so. And, as a matter of fact, Comte
is never referred to or even named. Great harm has been done
to Positivism by forcing Comte crude and simple down people's
throats and winding tip every paragraph, like the prayers in
the liturgy, with “ through Auguste Comte our Lord."
But that is not the chief reason why I have chosen this
course. I differ often so deeply and completely from Comte
that I cannot take him as my sole authority; and, on the other
hand, to controvert him was not desirable or needed. The
object of the book is to show how the Service of God, or of Gods,
leads by natural evolution to the Service of Man ; from Tlieolatry to Anthropolatry.
Always yours most sincerely,
Jas. Cotter Morison.
�THE
SERVICE OF MAN
AN ESSAY TOWARDS THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE
BY
JAMES COTTER MORISON
[issued for
the rationalist tress association, ltd., by arrangement
WITH MESSRS. KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER, & CO., LTD.]
WATTS & CO.,
17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
1903
��JAMES COTTER MORISON : IN MEMORIAM1
James Cotter Morison is in a special
sense one who has left his work even
more in the memory of his friends than
in permanent fruit before the public.
At school and at college this man, who
in general acquaintance with ancient
scholarship and in wide historical know
ledge seldom met any superior, was, as
happens so often, unmarked by prizes
and the ordinary academic honours.
Like John Ruskin, John Morley,
Algernon Swinburne, and so many of
our best writers, he passed through
Oxford without official recognition or
public honour—gathering, perhaps, all
the more that he never entered into any
competitive race, a thirst for books, a
full harvest of knowledge, and a true
zest for historical literature. Though he
had no university distinctions, he made
many friends at Oxford, and was at once
marked by generosity of nature and
sympathetic charm in conversation.
With John Morley, his contemporary,
of the same college, he maintained a
life-long friendship, and perhaps a still
closer communion of literary interests
with the famous scholar, tutor, and ulti
mately Head of Lincoln College, Mr.
Mark Pattison. We can many of us
recall the graceful and sympathetic
account of his old tutor which Morison
wrote on the death of the Rector.
Sympathetic charm, affection, gene
rosity, fertility and grace in social
converse, were the leading qualities of
Morison’s nature. There have been of
course in our day many men of greater
learning; though Morison’s knowledge
was very wide and well possessed. There
have been many men of more brilliant
wit; though he would often delight a
room by the point and felicity of his
talk. There have been some men of
more astonishing fancy and poetic
imagination; though neither fancy nor
imagination was wanting in him. But
what in a really supreme degree was the
mark of Morison’s conversation was, not
so much its learning, its wit, its fancy,
its ingenuity, but that which is often
wanting when learning, wit, and fancy
are most abundant—I mean genuine
sympathy, the sense of contact of spirit
with spirit. He was no master of mono
logue, no habitual teller of stories, no
lecturer, no egotist in society. He loved
to find at their best those around him,
to put himself in contact with their
hearts, their brains, their experience;
he drew out what was in his companions,
he stimulated their curiosity, gratified
their interests, gathered from them all
he could, gave them all he knew,
exchanged with them knowledge, and
suggested to them fresh fields, new ideas.
There was keen intellectual activity in
this. But there was far more of affec
tionate sympathy. In this quality he
had no superior in the society in which
’This appreciation was originally delivered to the Positivist Society then meeting at Newton
llall, and is reproduced here in a slightly abridged form.
�6
JAMES COTTER MORISON: IN MEMORIAM
he lived. I almost doubt if he had an
equal.
Let us do full justice to this rare, this
beautiful quality. It is one very different
from that which is often admired as con
versational brilliance. I am not one of
those who would set much store by con
versational brilliance in itself, where the
brilliance is an end, the habit one of
display, the motive egoism. The sym
pathetic union of mind with mind, the
touch of one character upon another,
the genuine desire to give new life and
put fresh warmth into a friend’s spirit—
this is, surely, a moral faculty of singular
value and true social delight. And
how rare is it! There are learned
men, clever men, men of bounding
elasticity of mind and temper, who
instruct, amuse, dazzle us. But how
often do they stand apart by themselves
to themselves, from fastidiousness of
intellect, from self-absorption, from a
certain hardness and coldness of nature,
taught them in the long stern work of
their lives. How rare are those who,
having given their lives to study, have
the freshness and freedom of a college
lad, when for the first time in his life he
begins to feel all the charm, the uses, the
emotion of true conversation! How
seldom do the brilliant men really relish
the brilliance of others, at least in the
first comer or the stranger. How often
is the scholar dull, the wit irritating, the
student sententious, the great talker
fatiguing.
Now Morison, who was
certainly scholarly, witty, learned, and
brilliant, was never, I think, fatiguing;
for he was always first and foremost
sympathetic : his sympathy covered all
he did, coloured and warmed all he
said.
Sympathy is the bond of Humanity.
In the magnificent aphorism of Comte,
“ If the kingdom of Heaven belong to
the poor in spirit, the kingdom of Man
belongs to the rich in heart.” Though
men speak with the tongues of men and
of angels, and have not sympathy, it
profiteth nothing. Though men under
stand all mysteries and all knowledge,
and have not sympathy, it is nothing.
Sympathy covereth a multitude of sins.
Sympathy is but one side of the great
Apostle’s untranslatable and illimitable
dycon)—and Morison had sympathy.
Sympathy stands out in his social life,
in his friendships and his admirations,
and it stands out in his literary works.
It shines forth in his intense love of
music, the most sympathetic of the arts.
It shines out in his love of art, and his
study especially of architecture.
It
stands out in his early college life ; in his
life in Paris, where he lived long in the
centre of a Positivist group ; in his life
in London; in his devoted regard for
men who in turn taught, fascinated, and
delighted him—men so very different,
yet who each left impressions on his
mind :—first, I think, and earliest, Mark
Pattison; then perhaps Cardinal Man-|
ning ; afterwards Thomas Carlyle ; and,
lastly and finally, for the last five-andtwenty years of his life, our venerated
chief, M. Pierre Laffitte.
Few men of our time have ever
understood Paris and Frenchmen more
intimately than he. And it was by his
sympathy and affectionate instinct even
more than by his long experience and
incessant study. I well remember his
life in Paris, where he lived some years
with his wife and family, as a link
between literary Englishmen and French
republicans—a link, too, to some extent,
between classes of Parisians who are very
seldom seen in the same room, and who
are not very willing so much as to
�TF. rSmORISON: IN MEMORIAM
Bonverse or act together. Yet Morison, as
one outside the strife of class and party
in Paris, by virtue of his kindly and
genial bonhomie, would gather together
those who seldom met elsewhere. I
well remember his Paris home, where
there came men of mark in the world of
letters and the world of politics; Louis
Blanc and some of the older school of
socialists, some of the younger revolu
tionists, conservative politicians, and
young men already of promise in the
administration,
physicians, - lawyers,
journalists, and artists, mingled with
workmen, clerks, employes, typical men
of the Parisian democracy. All felt at
home—all were friendly, bright, and at
ease. In Morison’s home it was difficult
for any man not to feel at ease, not to
be bright and friendly. He led them to
feel what he was himself. He was
brilliant, sympathetic, genial, and the
source of brilliance, sympathy, and good
fellowship in others. There were but
few other houses in all Paris where such
men could meet and be at ease. It was
his gift. It is a rare gift, and a precious.
Sympathy, I have said, was the key
note of his nature; sympathy was the
keynote of his best work in letters.
It
is sympathy, even more than eloquence,
more than study, more than art, which
makes his St. Bernard a really fine and
permanent work. It is a beautiful book,
a true book, a conclusive book, what a
book ought to be. It is one of those
books which are, in a way, decisive
on a great crucial social problem.
The deepest question of our day is
thisDo men in society require
any spiritual guidance ? Is a spiritual
power a real thing; is it a possible
thing? Is a Church an evil or a
good ? And, as matter of history, was
the Catholic Church a blessing or a
7
curse ? As a matter of religion, had the
Catholic Church anypermanent residuum
of good in it at all ? I know no problem
in social science, in morality, in religion,
so crucial as this—no task which litera
ture can so usefully undertake.
On this great problem Morison’s St.
Bernard is decisive, final, crucial, so far
as history is able to decide. It is the
life of one of the most perfect natures
recorded by man, engaged in one of the
most central duties, in one of the most
typical epochs in all human story. It is
a life told with entire simplicity, the
most genuine enthusiasm, with exact
historic truth, with no unscientific weak
ness, with no foolish blindness to hard
fact, with perfectly rational sense and
self-possession. But a picture of a most
vivid personality, with complete under
standing of its meaning, and with all the
issues, the circumstances, all the problems
manfully faced and laboriously worked
out. It is no pedant’s work; it is no
mere student’s monograph; it is not a
literary tour-de-force. It is a noble
portrait of a real saint. And the brush
of the painter is dipped in sympathy.
Now, it is no slight thing to reach inwards
into the depths of the spirit of a true
saint.
When a famous painter was asked how
he mixed his colours, he answered, “Sir,
I mix them with brains.” If Morison
had been asked how he studied history,
he might have replied, “Sir, I study it
with sympathy.” His St. Bernard was
written in sympathy, and it was prepared
with sympathy, under the influence of
three men—how very different, and yet
each having much to tell us about an
Abbot of the Middle Ages—Cardinal
Manning, Thomas Carlyle, and Auguste
Comte. It was in preparing his book
on St. Bernard that Morison first acquired
�8
JAMES COTTER MORISON: IN MEMORIAH
that deep interest in the Catholic Church,
that real insight into the Catholic Church
as a historic power, which he retained
during life, and which breaks out in fine
fragments in his latest book. It was
then that he sought permission, and
obtained the privilege, of passing some
weeks within a Cistercian monastery,
where he submitted to the sternest and
most exacting form of monastic disci
pline. It was a teaching which coloured
and deepened his whole mind through
life. This fragment about twelfth-century
monasticism was dedicated to Thomas
Carlyle “ with deep reverence and grati
tude ; while writing it Morison was pro
foundly influenced by his intercourse
with the author of “Past and Present”;
but the moral or theory of the book is
already drawn from the teacher whom he
was soon to know more intimately, in
whose teaching he remained finally ab
sorbed—I mean Auguste Comte.
. The same spirit of sympathetic enthu
siasm glows throughout another picture
of Catholic zeal, the beautiful monograph
on Joan of Arc. It comes out in a
richer way in the address which he gave
in Newton Hall on the 31st of December,
the Day of the Dead, on the human
idea of subjective immortality. In a very
different vein, also, it essentially colours
those two excellent studies, the Lives of
Gibbon and of Macaulay, where the
effort to judge these famous writers at
their best so often appears through mani
fest disagreement with their judgment
and their tone. It is a curious example
how resolutely bent was Morison’s mind
on a really appreciative spirit (to use that
somewhat ill-favoured word) that he used
to say, in writing his Life of Macaulay,
that he was constantly in fear of rather
overdoing the effort to show abundant
justice to a writer for whose style, method,
and historical standpoint he himself had
so strong a distaste.
In his historical, as in his critical work,
there is always the same mark—if we
must use that clumsy word—the appre
ciative spirit, the irresistible eagerness to
get at the best side of an author, of a
book, of an institution, of a historical
character, to feel with their senses and to
place himself in their position. In how
many an essay, monograph, review—
now, alas I forgotten, or soon to be for
gotten; too many, I fear, unsigned, un
known even to his closest friends;—
through how many of them does this
appreciative spirit run! In such historical
monographs as I have mentioned, in his
graceful and thoughtful lectures, in his
enthusiastic estimate of Dr. Bridges’s
book on Richelieu and Colbert, in his
reminiscences of Mark Pattison, in his
essay on Art, in the piece on Madame
de Maintenon, in scores of short pieces
full of just judgment and various know
ledge.
It is mournful to think how scattered,
how unknown, how perilously near to
final waste and extinction, is so much
good fruit of head and heart, which was
not knit up into unity and system in
life. Most mournful of all is it to think
on the long years of labour that he gave
to his History of France, the fruit of so
much ripe study, of such instinctive
insight into character, of such grasp of
institutions—all now, we fear, gone to
waste, to uselessness, and final nothing
ness. It is the law of our life—a law
inexorable, solemn, and full of warning.
As the old Hebrew poet said : “ Let me
know mine end, and the number of my
days : that I may be certified how long
I have to live. For man walketh in a
vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in
vain : he heapeth up riches, and cannot
�JAMES COTTER MORISON: IN MEMORIAM
tell who shall gather them.” “In the
morning it is green, and groweth up :
but in the evening it is cut down, dried
up, and withered.”
Or, as the great Persian poet said :—
9
have been disposed to make, that the
book is in any sense an exposition of
the Positivist conception of what the
Service of Man may become. I cannot
myself look on it as an exposition of
Positivist opinion at all. It was not so
“ With them the seed of wisdom did I sow ;
And with mine own hand wrought to make it
designed by the author; it is not so in
grow ;
execution or result.
And this was all the Harvest that I reap’d:—
The book is a fragment, or rather a
I came like Water, and like Wind I go 1
collection of fragments, introductory to
“ There was a door to which I found no key :
a work that has never been written.
There was a veil past which I might not see :
Continually before the book appeared I
Some little talk awhile of Me and Thee
There was—and then no more of Thee and
can remember Morison explaining to me
Me.”
his purpose. The present book, he
Happily we have risen above the said, was in no sense to be a Positivist
mysticism of the Hebrew poet, the utterance. It should not contain Comte’s
scepticism of the Persian poet. In his teaching ; it should not refer to Comte.
thoughts about life and about death It should handle certain topics of religion
Morison was neither mystic nor sceptic, and social morals which stood on the
but Positivist. It would have been threshold of the question. Ultimately,
strange indeed if one so intensely sym he said, he hoped to complete a book
pathetic had not trusted in Humanity; on constructive lines, which was, in fact,
to be the substantive and positive view
and he did trust in Humanity.
I have said nothing of his last work— of the Service of Man—a far more
The Service of Man. It was but a important and far more extensive task,
fragment—indeed, not so much a frag as he felt it to be. The essays now
ment as a bundle of fragments—-some before the public wTere the critical, preli
what hastily thrown together into a minary part. The Service of Man in its
volume when he felt the approach of ultimate form, I can well remember his
death, arranged with little cohesion and saying, was to be a sort of “ Whole Duty
plan, and put out when his mortal of Man,” from the Positivist point of
disease had already insidiously sapped view, in simple words which the least
educated could understand.
his energy.
That book has not been written. I
I know nothing about it so excellent
know not if any portions of it exist.
as its beautiful title, a phrase which in
itself is worth many books, and will And, as that is the case, as the con
prove quite an epoch in the growth of structive and positive treatise on the
our faith. The Service of Man has Service of Man is wanting, I almost
many noble passages and fine sugges regret that the critical and controversial
tions ; but for my part I can hardly part has ever been put forth. Most
judge of its meaning or its tendency in assuredly, to my thinking, not a little in
the absence of the conclusive work to the book as we have it now is in no sense
which it was simply a collection of intro Positivist teaching, is not even compatible
ductory chapters. Most emphatically with Positivist teaching. We should be
do I deny the suggestion which some failing in our duty if we allowed it to be
�13
JAMES COTTER MORISON: IN MEMORIAM
publicly assumed that this book as it stands impressionable, so elastic, could not be
is in the remotest degree an embodiment rigid, would be over-indulgent to himself
of the Human Religion. It was not so and to others, would be too ready to
meant; assuredly it is not so in fact. yield, to receive, to assimilate, too care
There is much in it which, on moral and less of discipline, moral and mental, too
religious grounds, I should myself most eager to see truth anywhere and good in
emphatically repudiate, as entirely alien all things. A nature of inexhaustible
to the whole spirit of Comte’s teaching. sympathy like his, a brain of such vivid
I mean much that is said about the receptive impulsiveness, was far too
problem of population, and still more prone to submit to the impression of
much that is said as to the origin of the every powerful mind, of every fascinating
moral sense and the nature of man’s book, of every creative and fertile con
moral responsibility. Even at this ception, and in each case was too willing
moment, and on this occasion, and full to exaggerate its value. And Morison
as I am of affection and regard for my not seldom did exaggerate the value of
dead friend, I cannot pretend any sym things, and of books, and of men.
To the main conceptions of Humanity
pathy with the strange paradox : “ The
sooner the idea of moral responsibility he was uniformly true, to the great con
is got rid of, the better it will be for ception of the Service of Man, to “ the
society and moral education.” If these cultivation of the heart, as incomparably
words are to be taken literally, I say a the most important both to our own
thousand times—No ! Society and moral happiness and that of others,” and finally
education rest on the idea of moral re to the beautiful idea of Subjective
sponsibility as the very cornerstone of Immortality in Humanity. In the last
the entire edifice.
letter that I had from him—just before
In spite of this, Morison, as I say,
his death—he said : “ I am obviously in
accepted in its main spirit the faith in the last lap of life’s race, but how far
Humanity, and for the last twenty years through it I cannot say. I have been
of his life clung to it as a final and suf thinking much of Comte’s views on the
ficient basis of belief. But not, be it objective and the subjective life. And
said, without considerable reserves, much I seem never to have realised them
occasional fluctuation of mind, and some before. I feel that the transition will
definite antagonism. We here have no be rather a boon than a pain.” The
absolute standard of orthodoxy ; we pro same idea was finely worked out in his
fess no verbal adhesion to all Comte’s impressive discourse on the Day of the
utterances; we do not set up to judge
Dead.
each other’s orthodoxy, or to censure
He died in the faith of Humanity,
each other’s backslidings from the truth.
supported by the confidence and hope
that Man does not end here as the
I do not desire to be judged myself.
beasts that perish, but continues to live
Most assuredly I shall not presume to
judge him. He read and accepted in the memory of those who loved him,
Comte freely for himself, even as we claim in the continuance of much true work
and beautiful teaching, in the mighty
to read him and accept him for ourselves.
Like all of us, Morison had the defect of continuous life of Humanity itself. In
his qualities. A nature so versatile, so the absence of specific directions, his
�JAMES COTTER MORISON: IN MEMORIAM
family provided for his burial in the way
that they felt most congenial to their
feelings. And, in the absence of specific
directions, that is the natural and obvious
course that awaits us all. But none the
less it is our duty here to keep alive,
as we best are able, the memory and
the work of our departed friend and
brother. A life of such activity, of such
culture, of such varied accomplishments,
of such high designs and difficult tasks
—in so large a part marred, mutilated,
buried in the grave, by his long malady
and too early death—such a life has
profound and solemn lessons for us.
How truly does it speak in those
pathetic words of the teacher of old : “I
must work the works of him that sent
me, while it is day : the night cometh
when no man can work.” Let us, too,
work the works of Humanity, as our
dead friend yet speaks to us, in the
Service of Man ; for it is Humanity that
has sent each of us, which has taught us,
fed us, protected us, and has set us to
work—to work at what?—at what else
can man work but at the Service of
Man? The night cometh when no man
can work with his hands, when no man
can work visibly, no man can work con
sciously, but when we all work invisibly,
in the consciousness of others—unseen,
but really—when our brains, our hearts,
our good deeds continue to work in
Humanity. Death is for each of us not
the end of life, unless it be made the
end by the heartlessness, the indiffer
ence, the cruelty of those who survive
ii
on earth. The grave has not the victory,
unless we who stand beside it and live
deliberately choose to bury in it the
memory, the love, the work of our dead
friends, relations, and teachers, with tlH
same final abandonment with which we
bury in it their bones.
We are each of us some fraction,
some organ, some representative (how
ever humble and unknown) of the
Humanity which confers on every
worthy servant a truly immortal life.
Whether or not there be to any a lite
beyond the grave is a question which
depends on those who survive.
For
children, relatives, friends, contempo!
raries of all sorts, the higher duties of
Family, of Friendship, of Humanity, do
not end as the fresh sods are piled upon
the grave. They only then begin. Th J
last sad offices are over. The moral 1
the spiritual, the religious uses of death!
the moral, the spiritual, the religious
ideas of life after death, then truly begin
—not so much for our dead parent,
friend, teacher, fellow-worker—no, rather,
they begin for us.
Let us think of our dead friend and
fellow-labourer as we knew him at his
best, with his warm heart, with his
generous nature, with his bright vivacity!
with his intensely sympathetic impulses!
and think not that he is dead, but that
he sleepeth—that the best of him yet
lives and works in our lives, in our
thoughts, and finally in the bosom of
the Humanity which made him.
Frederic Harrison.
�CONTENTS
Pace
Chapter
I. Introductory
-
II. The Decay of Belief
III. Wiiy Men Hesitate-
-
-
-
-
-
-13
......
...
.
.
.
IV. The Alleged Consolations of the Christian Religion
V. On Christianity as a Guide to Conduct
-
-
-
32
-
42
VI. Morality in the Ages of Faith -----
VII. Wiiat Christianity has Done
VIII. The Service of Man
-
52
-
69
......
94
IX. On the Cultivation of Human Nature
-
-
-
-
16
29
•
-
103
�THE SERVICE OF MAN
Chapter I.
INTRODUCTORY
A ruined temple, with its fallen columns
and broken arches, has often been taken
as a suggestive example and type of the
transitory nature of all human handi
work. “Here we see”—so runs the
parable of the moralist—“ the inevitable
end of man’s most ambitious efforts.
Time and the elements cast down and
consume his proudest fabrics. He
builds high, and decorates with sculp
tured ornament his palaces and fanes.
But his work is hardly finished before
decay begins to efface its beauty and
sap its strength. Soon the building
follows the builder to an equal dust, and
the universal empire of Death alone
survives over the tombs of departed
glory and greatness.”
The parable of the moralist is only
too true. Decay and death are stamped
not only on man and his works, but on
all that surrounds him, on all that he
sees and touches. Nature herself decays
as surely, if not as rapidly, as the work
of his hands. The everlasting hills are
daily and hourly being worn away.
Alps, Andes, and Himalayas are all in
process of a degradation of which there
is no repair. Nay, the Sun himself, the
universal author and giver of life in our
planet, is only a temporary blaze—a fire
perhaps already more than half burnt
out, hastening to its final consummation
of cold and lightless ashes. And pro
bably no other fate is in store for the
countless stars which bespangle the
nightly firmament. The animalcule,
whose existence is measured by a
summer’s day, and the galaxy which
illumines the heavens for millions of
ages, are alike subject to the common
law of all life—growth, decay, and death.
Some may think that an exception
ought to be made to this statement in
favour of the perennial vitality of Truth.
Truth, it will be said, does not wear
out, decay, and die. The Elements of
Euclid are as true now as they were two
thousand years ago. Truths obtained
by induction and verified by experiment,
or by correct deduction from true
principles, do not change and pass away
with the generations of men who hold
them. It is therefore rash, such objectors
would say, to assert that all things con
nected with man are destined to ultimate
extinction. His reason is independent
of time, and has that in it which belongs
to eternity. All must see this in regard
to the incontrovertible truths established
by science; many see it in tuitions of
the mind, and others in doctrines of
religion supposed to be divinely revealed.
It is often added that it is fortunate for
man that, amid the constant change
going on in the phenomenal world, a
permanent reality does exist, on which
he can lay hold—eternal truth.
It would be careless to overlook the
importance of this counter-statement.
About the permanence of truth there
can be no question. Whether it be
obtained by observation, generalisation,
or deduction, verified by experiment and
proof, we may safely assert that such
truth will last as long as the human
mind remains constituted as it is. But
does that entitle us to claim eternal
duration for any truth ? No one believes
that the human race will last for ever.
�M
THE SERVICE OF MAN
There is a probability, amounting almost
to a certainty, that neither man nor his
dwelling-place will exist beyond a certain,
though it may be a very large, number
of years. Now, when the human race
shall have ceased to exist, would it be
correct to say that the truths cognised
by the human mind will survive it ?
This could only be maintained by an
idealist, who should place their continued
existence in some extra-mundane Eternal
mind—as that of God—which may be
an article of faith, but hardly of reason.
Moreover, if true propositions can exist
after all the minds which could affirm
them have disappeared, why should they
not exist before the phenomenal ap
pearance of those minds ? Can we
consistently say that the propositions of
Euclid existed in the Carboniferous era ?
If so, why not assert that all the truths
yet to be discovered in the remote future
exist at present ? There is no question
that things undreamt of in the philosophy
and science of to-day will be trite
commonplaces two or three thousand
years hence. But are they truths now
or yet ? Not only they are not, but the
great probability is that, if they were
expressed in words now, they -would
be denounced as wild and dangerous
errors.
So that it is still legitimate to say that
even truth exists for a time, while we
admit that verified truth will have a
duration co-equal with that of the human
race.
It is to be observed that the only
truths that belong to this permanent
class are the truths of simple observa
tion, or of rigorous scientific inference.
They have always been few in number,
if compared with the multitude of pro
positions held to be true by the mass of
mankind. They are now increasing with
unprecedented rapidity, owing to the
great development of the scientific spirit
in modern times. They obviously stand
quite apart from the truths supposed to
be derived from divine revelation. The
latter differ from them both as to the
method by which they were obtained,
and especially in their durability.
Lengthy as may seem the existence of
the great religions of the world when
measured by our small scale of chro
nology, yet their transitory, not to say
ephemeral, character is manifest to
reflection, and even to observation. Go
where we will on the earth’s surface, we
find traces of bygone men—of their
tombs, of their ashes, their temples—
which testify to the former existence of
religious beliefs nowr extinct. These
beliefs embodied the most precious and
profound of all truths in the devout
conviction of those who held them, but
they were so far from permanent that
often they move the wonder and even
the laughter of after-ages. Perishable as
are brick, stone, and marble, they have
outlived in countless instances the faiths
which once wrought them into majestic
architecture in their own honour.
Temples often survive their creeds by
thousands of years. Wind, rain, and
frost disintegrate the roof and the walls
of a shrine with more or less rapidity,
according to climate; but they are not
so swift or potent to destroy the material
fabric as knowledge and science are to
undermine the conceptions and assump
tions on which the religious beliefs were
founded, and for which the sumptuous
fanes were erected in a spirit of reverence
and sacrifice.
Not less marked in another respect is
the difference between the truths derived
from religion and the truths derived from
science. The truths of science are found
to be in complete harmony with one
another. Where this harmony is wanting,
it is at once felt that error has crept in
unawares. We never give a thought to
the alternative hypothesis, that truths in
different sciences or departments of
knowledge may be inconsistent and
mutually hostile, and yet remain truths.
On the contrary, we find that the dis
covery of new truth has invariably among
its results the additional effect of corrobo
rating other and older truths, instead of
conflicting with them. In the history of
science it has often happened that a
�INTRODUCTORY
newly-discovered truth has proved incon
sistent with prevalent opinions, which
had the sanction of tradition in their
favour. But the position has always
been felt to be intolerable, and that one
of two things must happen—either the
new truth must reconcile itself with the
old opinions, by the necessary modifica
tion ; or the old opinions must reconcile
themselves with the new truth by a
similar process.
In astronomy the
heliocentric theory, and in biology the
circulation of the blood theory, produced
the latter result, and revolutionised those
two sciences by expelling a number of
previously unsuspected errors.
In
modern times, on the other hand, the
plausible theory of spontaneous genera
tion has been forced to beat a retreat
through its proven' inconsistency with
older truths firmly established.
Now, with regard to the truths
announced with the credentials of a
divine revelation, we find a very different
state of things. There seems to be no
exception to the rule that, the older
religions grow, the more infirm do they
become, the less hold do they keep on
the minds of well-informed and thought
ful men. Their truths, once accepted
without question, are gradually doubted,
and in the end denied by increasing
numbers. This fate happened to Greek
and Roman polytheism, and according
to all appearances it is now happening to
Hindooism, Islam, and to both Protestant
and Catholic theology. We have to
consider what a very surprising fact that
is, on the supposition that any one of
these religions is true. All the chief
dogmas of the Christian and Mohamme
dan creeds have been for several centuries
before the world. They once were not
v only believed, but adored. Now the
numbers of those who doubt or dispute
them are increasing every day. Time
has not been their friend, but their
enemy.
Instead of becoming more
firmly rooted in men’s esteem and con
viction, instead of revealing unexpected
connection and compatibility with other
truth, instead of being supported by an
1!
ever-growing mass of evidence which
would make their denial insane rather
than unreasonable, they are seen more and
more to lack the proofs and credentials
never wanting in the case of genuine
truth, from which they differ in this
important respect—that, whereas scien-l
tific truth, though often disputed and
opposed on its first presentation to the
world, invariably ends by becoming
absolutely certain and unquestioned,
religious conviction begins with un
doubting acceptance, and, after a shorter
or longer period of supremacy, with the
growth of knowledge and more severe
canons of criticism, passes gradually into
the category of questioned and disputed
theories, ending at last in the class of
rejected and exploded errors.
That the world, in its cultivated!
portions, has reached one of those great
turning-points in the evolution of thought
which mark the close of an old epoch
and the opening of a new one, will
hardly be disputed by any well-informed
person.
The system of Christian
theology and thought which arose out of
the ruins of the Roman empire has beejii
gradually undermined, and its authority]
so shaken that its future survival is
rather an object of pious hope than
of reasoned judgment.
Apologists,
indeed, are not wanting, they are per*
haps never so numerous; but they
cannot stem the torrent which is rushinsa
away from theology in the direction of
science, and that negation of theology!
which science implies. Regarded as a
question merely of speculation, the
crisis is one of the most interesting
which the world has seen, only to bq
compared to the transition from poly
theism to Christianity, in the early
centuries of our era, and to the great
Protestant revolt from Rome. But the
speculative interest pales before the
momentous practical interest of the
crisis. A transfer of allegiance from
one set of first principles to another,
especially on subjects relating to morals
and conduct, cannot be effected without
considerable loss of continuity and order
�16
THE SERVICE OF MAN
by the way.
Many will halt between Humanity. A common and lofty stan
the two regimes, and, owning allegiance dard of duty is being trampled down in
to neither, will prefer discarding all the fierce battle of incompatible prin
unwelcome restraint on their freedom of ciples.
The present indecision is
action. The corruption of manners becoming not only wearisome, but
under the decaying polytheism in the
injurious to the best interests of man.
Roman world, the analogous corruption Let Theology be restored, by all means,
during the Reformation and the Renais to her old position of queen of the
sance, offer significant precedents.
It sciences, if it can be done in the light of
would be rash to expect that a transition, modern knowledge and common-sense.
unprecedented for its width and diffi If this cannot be done frankly, on the
culty, from theology to positivism, from faith of witnesses who can stand crossthe service of God to the service of Man, examination in open court, let us
could be accomplished without jeopardy. honestly take our side, and admit that
Signs are not wanting that the prevalent the Civitas Dei is a dream of the past,
anarchy in thought is leading to anarchy and that we should strive to realise
in morals. Numbers who have put off I that Regnum Hominis which Bacon
belief in God have not put on belief in I foresaw and predicted.
Chapter II.
THE DECAY OF BELIEF
Opinions and systems of thought as
well as institutions, which enjoy a con
siderable lease of life in the world, have
many of the characteristics of organisms,
or at least of organs belonging to ani
mated beings. The fact that they came
into existence and survived during a
longer or shorter period proves that they
discharged a function of more or less
utility ; that they were in harmony with
the surrounding conditions, and hence
found both exercise and nourishment for
their support. If in time they gradually
cease to discharge a useful function,
become atrophied and disappear, their
case is almost exactly parallel to the
rudimentary organs found in so many
animals, which, having ceased to be of
use, become shrunken and meaningless,
and only persist in an abortive form by
virtue of the law of heredity. Such
■organs in the body politic resemble these
analogues in the body natural, in that
they often continue to exist long after
their presence has ceased to subserve
any useful purpose of life. The common
trait of rudimentary organs belonging to
either category, biological or sociological,
is that they survive their use, that they
are nourished and live at the expense of
the organism in which they exist, and
long after they have ceased to make any
return for the support they obtain. In
the animal world rudimentary organs
may or may not be noxious to the
organism in which they inhere; in the
social organism they unquestionably are
so, especially by their occupying the
room and preventing the development of
active and efficient organs which would
succeed and replace them.
That the Christian religion is rapidly
approaching, if it has not already reached,
this position, is a part of the thesis main
tained in these pages. The decay of
belief now general over Christendom
�THE DECA Y OF BELIEF
may be regarded from two points of view,
and traced up to two distinct causes—
one rational, the other moral. The current
faith has come increasingly into conflict
with science in proportion as the latter
has extended in depth and area. The
isolated points of collision of former
days have been so multiplied that the
shock now is along the whole conter
minous line between science and theo
logy ; and it would not be easy to name
a department of inquiry-which has not,
in some measure, contributed aid to the
forces arrayed against the popular belief.
More important still is the changed tone
of feeling with regard to this subject.
Time was, and even a recent time, when
the prestige of Christianity was so great
that even its opponents were overawed
by it. But now men are ready to openly
avow that they find a great deal in the
Christian scheme which is morally shock
ing ; and in the estimation of many
minds nowadays, probably the moral
difficulties outweigh the intellectual.
Nothing is more common than the
assertion that any objections now made
to Christianity are worn-out sophisms,
which have been answered and disposed
of over and over again by previous apolo
gists. Sometimes we are told that the
objections are as old as the time of Celsus,
and were refuted by Origen ; but, gene
rally, Bishop Butler is the favourite cham
pion who is credited with a preordained
victory over all opponents, past, present,
and future. Butler was so great a man,
and his work, considered as a reply to
the shallow deism of his day, was in
many respects so successful, that it
argues a certain irreverence for his
character to load him with false praise
and unmerited laurels. But these claims
often made for Butler and others have
their interesting and instructive side.
They show how little apt the theological
mind is to see the real points at issue,
and to recognise the full gravity of the
present crisis. To suppose that argu
ments directed against such disputants
as Toland, Collins, or Tindal—pertinent
as they might be, and, indeed, for the
17
most part were—are equally potent when
directed against the methods and results
of modern science, implies a complete
misconception of the true bearings of the
question under discussion. In the early
eighteenth century the light of science
had hardly got beyond the first glimmer
ings of dawn. Mathematics and as
tronomy were the only sciences which
had passed into the positive and final
stage.
Chemistry, geology, biology,
historical criticism, were not yet in a
position to speak with authority even on
subjects in their own province, and were
far from being in possession of vast stores
of verified truth obtained by rigorous
application of correct methods, such as
now impose respect on the most ignorant
and careless. The deists were, to say
the least, as unscientific as the theologians.
Their fancies about the “light of Nature,”
which was to replace the Christian re
ligion, were as arbitrary and absurd as
any mythological legend. Tindal de
clared the light of Nature to be a “ clear
and certain light which enlightened all
men,” and from this fact he inferred that
“our duty both to God and man must,
from the beginning of the world to the
end. remain unalterable, be always alike
plain and perspicuous”; a doctrine which
had the serious defect of being contra
dicted by the total experience of the
human race. Butler had no difficulty in
showing that to advance such opinions
was to “talk wildly and at random.”
No blame attaches to the deists, able
and worthy men most of them, for
not transcending the knowledge of the
age. They attempted prematurely to
solve a problem, before the means of
solution were at hand. What they would
have liked to do was to give a rational
explanation of Christianity as an historical
phenomenon ; but they had neither the
historical nor the scientific knowledge
requisite for such an undertaking. They
consequently fell back on such vague
metaphysical conceptions as the “light
of Nature,” and essayed to show that
Christianity was not mysterious, or that
it was as old as the creation—mere
c
�i8
THE SERVICE OF MAN
sophisms which they probably believed,
but which were quite incapable of scien
tific proof.
It is not a little surprising that
apologists in the present day should be
able to deceive themselves as to the
immeasurable distance which separates
arguments of this kind from the in
ferences unfavourable to theology de
duced from science. Theobjectof science
is not to supply hostile data for the use
of agnostics against religion; though
there is reason to think that many do
believe that to be its chief end and aim.
The object of science is knowledge, the
increased number of those truths which
are capable of verification and proof. If
here and there its conclusions conflict
with the current theology, the fact is of
secondary importance, and of no per
manent interest at all to science as such,
which is concerned with positive, not
negative, results. Every statement and
proposition in the most elementary
scientific primer probably conflicts with
some theology or other. Yet it often
seems to be assumed that the sole or the
chief object of the labours of scientific
men was to find means and arguments to
damage the Bible. Scientific men, a
most hard-worked and industrious class,
have a better appreciation of the value
of time, and of the wisdom of minding
their own business. They, ho doubt,
come upon results which are fatal to the
currently-received opinions about the
Bible. But these results interest them
much less than they do those who are
assured that the Bible is the Word of
God. The tables have been turned
since the days when Science timidly
sued for leave to examine nature, and to
draw a few conclusions of her own.
Then Theology was queen, and made
her power felt. Inquirers worked then,
so to speak, with a halter about their
necks, and were anxious, above all
things, to appease their mighty enemy
by every mark of deference and docility.
Now the old sovereign has become the
suppliant—a rather importunate and
intrusive suppliant—but still by her
demeanour, if not her -words, admitting
that she has been discrowned. She no
longer, with haughty bearing, issues her
anathemas on the progress of the human
mind, but she is in great anxiety to show
that, appearances notwithstanding, this
progress is not incompatible with her
pretension. Geology seems to contra
dict Genesis in a very direct and final
way. “That is all your mistake,” says
Theology; “ Geology and Genesis are in
most perfect union; in fact, the science
confirms the Scripture so wonderfully
that each reflects light on the other.”
The fact that the geology thus warmly
accepted now was once resisted with
energy and anger as an impious and
futile science is passed over. New light
as to its harmony with Scripture -was not
noticed until it had attained a position
of power which made it more desirable as
a friend than as a foe. The fact is
suggestive.
A convenient mode of showing the
way in which science has cut the ground
from under the feet of theology will be
a quotation from a once famous and
remarkable book, which in its day, and
for a long time after, was regarded, with
justice, as a powerful piece of argument
in favour of the current religion. Dr.
Samuel Clarke was a man of con
siderable ability and of very great
attainments ; he was also a man of high
and honourable character, and his Boyle
lectures, commonly known as his two
discourses, On the Being and Attri
butes of God, and on The Truth and
Certainty of the Christian Revelation,
enjoyed an immense popularity, not only
at home but abroad, all through the
eighteenth century. The book is now
read only by the curious in religious
archaeology. In an elaborate argument,
intended to show that, although the
Christian doctrines “ may not be dis
coverable by bare Reason unassisted by
Revelation, yet when they are discovered
by Revelation they are found most
agreeable to sound, unprejudiced
Reason,” Clarke proceeds to prove that
the account in Genesis of the formation
�THE DECA Y OF BELIEF
of the earth is entirely credible, in the
following passage : “ That, about the
space of six thousand years since, the
earth was without form and void—that is,
a confused chaos, out of which God
formed this beautiful and useful fabrick
we now inhabit, and stocked it with the
seeds of all kinds of plants, and formed
upon it man, and all other specimens of
animals it is now furnished with—is very
agreeable to right reason. For though
the precise time, indeed, when all this
was done, could not now have been known
exactly without Revelation; yet, even at
this day, there are remaining many con
siderable and very strong rational proofs
which make it exceedingly probable
(separate from the authority of Revela
tion) that this presentframe arid constitu
tion of the earth cannot have been
of a very much longer date. The
universal tradition delivered down
from all the most ancient nations of the
world, both learned and barbarous ; the
constant and agreeing doctrine of all
ancient philosophers and poets con
cerning the earth’s being formed within
such a period of time out of water and
chaos ; the manifest absurdities and con
tradictions of those few accounts which
pretend to a much greater antiquity; the
numbers of men with which the earth is
at present inhabited ; the late original
of learning and all useful arts and
sciences; the changes that must neces
sarily fall out naturally in the earth in
vast length of time, as by the sinking and
washing down of mountains, the consump
tion of water by plants, and innumerable
other such-like accidents—these, I say,
and many more arguments drawn from
Nature, Reason, and Observation, make
that account of the earth’s formation
exceedingly probable in itself, which,
from the revelation delivered in Scripture
history, we believe to be certain.”1
This passage shows what a compara
tively easy matter the defence of the Bible
was in Dr. Clarke’s day. He could,
1 Truth and Certainty of Christian Tci'etalicn, p. 187 ; edition 1724.
without fear of serious contradiction,
make assumptions which no one would
venture to make now. The “ strong
rational proofs,” which show that the
earth cannot be much more than six
thousand years old, would be hard to
find. Why the shrinking and washing
down of mountains was evidence of the
recent date of the earth is difficult tosee; and the “ consumption of water by
plants,” implying that the water of the
globe was being rapidly used up and
annihilated, is an interesting example of
old notions on chemistry. In the earlier
discourse on the existence of God,
Clarke had been enthusiastic over the
support given to his thesis by the dis
coveries of his day :—
“ If Galen, so many ages since, could
find in the construction and constitution
of the parts of the human body such
undeniable marks of contrivance and_
design as forced him then to acknow
ledge and admire the wisdom of its
author, what would he have said if he
had known the late discoveries in
anatomy and physics, the circulation of
the blood, the exact structure of the
heart and brain, the uses of numberless
glands and valves for the secretion and
motion of the juices in the body:
besides several veins and other vessels
and receptacles not at all known or so
much as imagined to have any existence
in his days, but which now are discovered
to serve the wisest and most exquisite
ends imaginable ?”T
Bacon’s famous maxim, that “a little
philosophy inclineth men’s minds to
atheism, but depth in philosophy
bringeth men’s minds back to religion,”
is now being reversed. The early
glimpses of the marvels of nature
afforded by modern science undoubtedly
were favourable to natural theology in
the first instance. Knowledge revealed
so many wonders which had not been
suspected by ignorance that a general
increase of awe and reverence for the
Creator was the natural, though not very
1 Page 103.
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THE SERVICE OF MAN
logical, consequence. But a deeper
philosophy, or, rather, biology, has rudely
disturbed the satisfaction with which
“ the wisest and most exquisite ends ”
were once regarded. It is now known
that, for one case of successful adaptation
of means to ends in the animal world,
there are hundreds of failures. If organs
which serve an obvious end justify the
assumption of an intelligent designer,
what are we to say of organs which
serve no end at all, but are quite
useless and meaningless ? Such are
the rudimentary organs in plants and
animals, the design of which seems only
to point to an unintelligent designer.
■ “Some of the cases of rudimentary
organs are extremely curious—the presence of teeth in foetal whales which,
when grown up, have not a tooth in their
heads, and the presence of teeth which
never cut through the gums in the upper
jaws of our unborn calves....... Nothing
can be plainer than that wings are
formed for flight; yet in how many
insects do we see wings so reduced in
aize as to be utterly incapable of flight,
and not rarely lying under wing-cases,
firmly soldered together.”1 Again: “Eyes
which do not see form the most striking
example of rudimentary organs. These
are found in very many animals, which
live in the dark, as in caves or under
ground. Their eyes often exist in a welldeveloped condition, but they are covered
by membrane, so that no ray of light can
enter, and they can never see. Such
eyes, without the function of sight, are
found in several species of moles and
mice which live underground, in serpents
and lizards, in amphibious animals
(Proteus, Cacilia), and in fishes; also in
numerous invertebrate animals, which
pass their lives in the dark, as do many
beetles,crabs, snails,worms,”etc.2 Another
strange instance is “ the rudiment of the
tail which man possesses in his 3-5 tail
vertebrae, and which, in the human
embryo, stands out prominently during
1 Origin of Species, p. 450.
a Haeckel, History of Creation, vol. i., p. 13.
the first two months of its development.
It afterwards becomes completely hidden.
The rudimentary little tail of man is an
irrefutable proof of the fact that he is
descended from tailed ancestors. In
woman the tail is generally by one vertebra
longer than in man. There still exist
rudimentary muscles in the human tail
which formerly moved it.”1
That facts of this nature, which have
only been a short time before the world,
should fail to convince theologians
brought up in a completely different
order of ideas is in no wise surprising.
The due weight of facts will no more be
allowed than the due weight of argu
ments, by minds which habit and educa
tion, and, perhaps, even a sense of duty,
have combined to bias against them.
But the effect on the younger and suc
ceeding generations is very great, and is
already perceptible. When theology was
attacked in front with metaphysical argu
ments, such as were used by the old
deists, it was able to make a very stout
and plausible resistance. But now its
position, in military phrase, has been
turned ; the heights around it and behind
are occupied by an artillery which render
further defence impossible. Take the
instance of the origin of man. The whole
scheme of Christian theology is mean
ingless except on the assumption of the
fall of man from a primitive state of
innocence and virtue. Unless theolo
gians are prepared to throw over St. Paul,
they must hold that “as in Adam all die,
even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”
Perhaps no one doctrine ever believed
by man has had a more terrible history
than that of “ original or birth-sin,’’which,
as the Ninth Article says, is “the fault
and corruption of the nature of every
man, that naturally is engendered of the
offspring of Adam ; whereby man is very
far gone from original righteousness, and
is of his own nature inclined to evil, so
that the flesh lusteth always contrary to
the spirit; and therefore in every person
born into this world, it deserveth God’s
1 Ibid, vol. i., p. 289.
�THE DECA Y OF BELIEF
wrath and damnation.” But if ever a
thesis was demonstrated, it is that man
has not fallen, but risen, and that from
the lowest level of animal existence. No
court of justice ever witnessed a more
complete discomfiture of an unfounded
claim to a noble title and estate
than the defeat of this theological
claim for man, that he was made in
the image of God, placed in Paradise
in a state of purity, from which he fell
through disobedience.
The result is
serious. The New Testament endorses
the fall in the most emphatic way ; the
Incarnation itself had no other object
than that of neutralising its effects. Yet
it is proved to be a mere fiction of a
primitive cosmogony.
The general rejection of miracles is
another symptom of the decay of belief.
The once active controversy as to the
possibility of miracles has become nearly
extinct, because one of the parties to it
has been growing steadily in numbers
and authority, while the other party has
declined. The refuters of Hume address
constantly-decreasing audiences, and the
belief in miracles will shortly (like the
belief in witchcraft in the seventeenth
century) die a natural death among the
educated classes. The notion that the
testimony of men, however worthy and
sincere, can suffice to establish a mira
culous event is no longer felt to be
serious.
The testimony of credible
witnesses is valueless, unless they be
competent witnesses as well—competent
to observe with patience, accuracy, and
coolness the alleged facts. Were such
observers present at the working of
the miracles in Palestine which Paley
patronises ?
The argument against
miracles has gained immensely in force
since Hume’s day through the growth of
the historic method, and the larger con
ceptions of human evolution which have
led to the incipient science of sociology.
Hume’s principle was tersely and fairly
enough stated by Paley thus : “ That it
is contrary to experience that testimony
should be true, but not contrary to
experience that testimony should be
21
false a true statement, but not beyond
the reach of plausible objection, as Paley
showed. The moment we introduce
the historic element, the question seems
transferred to a higher court. Primitive,
early, and unscientific man is at all
times and everywhere prone to see
miracle in everything that appears odd
or strange to his limited experience,
Ignorant of nature’s laws, he finds no
difficulty in assuming their violation ;
he lives in an atmosphere of fiction,
fable, and myth, and much prefers a
miraculous explanation of an event to a
rational or real one.
The belief in
miracles is universal in wholly unscien
tific times. With the growth of culture
it diminishes; with the extension of
science it disappears.
Miracles are
never supposed to occur except where
and when an antecedent belief in them
exists. In other words, the belief in
miracles depends not upon objective
facts, but on the subjective conditions of
the witnesses’ minds.
Paley tried to parry the obvious,
objection that the best way to silencethe gainsayers of miracles would be torepeat them. “ To expect, concerning
a miracle, that it should succeed upon
repetition is to expect that which would
make it cease to be a miracle; which is
contrary to its nature as such, and would
totally destroy the use and purpose for
which it was wrought
a remark less
acute than Paley’s remarks usually are.
Assuming that a miracle reveals the
presence of a supernatural power, why
should its repetition destroy its miracu
lous character; above all, why should
it destroy its use? If miracles are
intended to convert the stiff-necked
and hard of heart, what more likely
way of bringing them to submission
than the repetition of miracles? And,
according to Scripture, this was pre
cisely the way in which Pharaoh, King
of Egypt, was humbled. He resisted
the miracles wrought by Moses and
1 Paley's Evidences: Preparatory Considera
tions.
�22
THE SERVICE OF MAN
Aaron with stubbornness all through
the first nine plagues ; but the universal
slaying of the first-born broke even his
spirit. Such must always be the effect of
repeated miracles; and there can be no
doubt that even at this day, in the midst
of all this science and scepticism, if mira
cles were again wrought in a public place
and manner, so as to remove the sus
picion of trickery and legerdemain, the
effect of them would be greater than ever
it was. Suppose a prophet of God were
to appear among us, and announce that
he had a revelation to make. According
to Paley, his only way of making it would
be by miracle; he therefore would per
form miracles. As all difficulties vanish
before Almighty power, one miracle
would be the same as another to him;
and let us suppose him to walk on the
water, down the centre of the Thames,
from Putney to Mortlake. May we not
be sure that one such achievement would
produce a sensation perfectly over
whelming, not only in London, but to
the furthest limits of the civilised world ?
If he rapidly followed up this miracle by
others—fed with a few loaves the crowds
on Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday,
or those on Epsom Downs on the Derby
day ; gave sight to a man notoriously
blind from his birth, or raised from the
■dead a putrescent corpse which had lain
four days in the grave—can we remotely
conceive a limit to the excitement which
would ensue ? Would not such a re
action against current scientific notions
set in as would sweep everything before
it ? Supposing always that the miracles
were bona-fide miracles, such as are
assumed to have been wrought in Judsea
some eighteen hundred years ago, we
may even be sure that many, if not all, of
the chief men of science would be among
the most impressed, if not the most ex
cited, and be prompt to own that they
had made a great mistake in asserting
the invariability of nature’s laws. A
complete recast of the philosophy of the
inductive sciences would be one of the
least results of a manifestation of genuine
miracles. As for its effect on the cause
of religion, there can be little room for
doubt. The passionate yet hopeless
yearning, which now fills so many minds,
to retain a rational belief in the super
natural would be replaced by a serene
joy over the triumph of faith. It may
suit Paley to say that repetition of
miracles would destroy their use, but he
must be a lukewarm theologian who does
not at times wish from the depth of his
heart that an authentic miracle could be
produced. Yet it is at this momentous
crisis in the religious affairs of the world,
when the enemy is carrying one position
after another, and has all but penetrated
to the citadel of belief, that no miracles
occur—that no miracles are claimed,
except, indeed, of the compromising
species made at Lourdes, and now and
then of a fasting girl exhibited in Belgium
and in Wales. When no one doubted
the possibility or the frequency of
miracles they abounded, we are told ;
that is, when, by reason of their number
and the ready credit accorded to them,
their effect was the least startling,
then they were lavished on a believing
world. Now, when they are denied and
insulted as the figments of a barbarous
age, when the faith they might support is
in such jeopardy as it never was before,
when a tithe of the wonders wasted in
the deserts of Sinai and the “ parts
beyond Jordan ” would shake the nations
with astonishment and surprise—when,
in short, the least expenditure of miracle
would produce the maximum of result—
then miracles mysteriously cease. This
fact, which is utterly beyond contest, has
borne fruit, and will yet bear more.
Instead of a short chapter, a long
volume would be needed to set forth in
detail even a spicileghtm of the rational
istic arguments which have operated to
produce a decay of belief. Any one
interested in the subject will easily find
them in the appropriate quarters—in the
attacks on, and still better, in the defences
of, the Bible. The width of the breach
between reason and faith, between
theology and science, is hardly denied ;
and the noteworthy fact is that only one
�THE DECA Y OF BELIEF
of the parties hopes for, or believes in,
an ultimate reconciliation. Reason and
science have made up their minds on
the subject, and would gladly leave it
alone, and attend to their own affairs.
It is theology that cannot resign herself
to a permanent quarrel, and is always
pursuing science with a mixture of
entreaty and reproach, and begging the
latter to hear her cause over again, and
not to say with cruel harshness that the
separation is for good and all. We may,
therefore, leave this side of our subject
with a concluding observation.
On no point were apologists more
confident than on the impossibility of
explaining the uprise of Christianity
otherwise than by a supernatural principle.
In the words of Archbishop Whately,
“No complete and consistent account
has ever been given of the manner in
which the Christian religion, supposing
it a human contrivance, could have arisen
and prevailed as it did. The religion
exists—that is, the phenomenon; those
who will not allow it to have come
from God are bound to solve the
phenomenon on some other hypothesis
less open to objection; they are not,
indeed, called on to prove that it actually
did arise in this or that way, but to
suggest (consistently with acknowledged
facts) some probable way in which it
may have arisen, reconcilable with all
the circumstances of the case. That
infidels have ’never done this, though
they have had nearly two thousand years
to try, amounts to a confession that no
such hypothesis can be devised which
will not be open to greater objections
than lie against Christianity.”1 The
passage is interesting on other grounds
than the particular one with which we are
concerned, and leaves us the alternative
of a low opinion either of Whately’s
candour or of his perspicacity. The
suggestion that infidels had or could
have been “trying” for nearly two
thousand years to concoct an hypothesis
adverse to Christianity could only be
1 Logic, bk. iii., § 17.
23
based on a strange ignorance of the
state of the human mind during at least
three-fourths of that period, or on the
safety of such an innuendo in the dark
ages when the Logic was published
(1829). But this need not detain us.
The important point to observe is how
completely Whately’s assertion that a
rational explanation of the origin of
Christianity has never been given has,
by the Biblical and historical studies of
the last half-century, been overthrown.
Strauss, F. Ch. Baur, Keim, and
Hausrath, to name only the chief writers,
have made the early history of Chris
tianity at least as intelligible as other
scholars have made the early history oil
Rome. To the unhistoric minds of the
eighteenth century, the uprise of a
religion in Palestine in the first centurl
claiming supernatural authority, seemed
as extraordinary and unaccountable as d
similar phenomenon would have been in
Paris or London. The religious passions!
especially among uncivilised races, were
at once disliked and misunderstood.
Even Robertson the historian could only
see in the Crusades “a singular monu
ment of human folly.” There was sup
posed to be no alternative between a
truly divine relation and an artful fraud
designed by priests for their own benefit.
Whately’s phrase, “ supposing ChriB
tianity a human contrivance,” points to
this crude notion. With enlarged con
ceptions of the variety of man’s nature,
and historical development, the sponta
neous appearance of such a religion^as
Christianity is now seen to be quite
natural and regular in such an age as t®
first century. The mythopceic faculty of
the human mind at certain stages is
capable of more wonderful achievement
than any exhibited in the New Test®
ment, and is at this day in full operation
in British India, weaving legends and
creating gods with unchecked luxuriant®
Meanwhile, the historical character of the
Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles,
and the genuineness of several epistjjes
ascribed to St. Paul, have been grave®
impugned, and, in the opinion of many,
�24
THE SERVICE OF MAN
seriously damaged ; an opinion not
shaken by the counter-efforts of the
Christain apologists. Again, the fortress
of theology has been surrounded and
commanded by the forces at the disposal
of knowledge.
But mere rationalism, however cogent
to some minds, often remains power
less on others, and those frequently
possessing the best qualities of intellect
and character. The deepest change
which this age has seen in reference to
men’s attitude towards the current
theology has taken place, not in the
region of the understanding, but in that
of the heart. It is not so much that the
Bible, with its miracles and legends, is
felt to be untrue and incredible by the
trained reason ; a great number of
theological dogmas are felt to be
morally repulsive and horrible, by the
more humane conscience of modern
times. This change of sentiment is so
great and far-reaching that there is no
wonder that its import is imperfectly
seized, or even wholly missed by those
whom the accidents of education and
surroundings have preserved from its
influence. It is a change not less
momentous than that which placed the
Christian converts of the Roman period
in the position of passionate hostility to
the immoralities and indecencies of
decaying polytheism. Even divines are
becoming aware that the eternity of hell
torments is a doctrine of waning efficacy,
on which it is easy to insist too much.
Some are discovering that it lacks Scrip
tural authority, and beseech us not to
believe that anything so dreadful is
delivered in the Word of God. The
minimising of irksome tenets is a fre
quent resource and an unfailing symptom
of decaying faith. Julian and his pagan
sophists essayed to spiritualise offensive
Greek myths. There is no ground for
doubting the bona fides of such attempts,
but they rarely succeed. The obvious
question, “ If your new interpretation is
the right one, why was it not discovered
before ? why did what you admit to be
dreadful error receive apparently for a
j
I
I
!
1
I
long time Divine sanction ?” cannot be
answered; and the question is followed
by another: “If your predecessors
taught error in the dogmas you discard,
what guarantee have you to offer that
those dogmas which you still maintain
may not some day be discovered to be
equally untenable ? How can you be
sure that your successors, when hard
pressed by the science of their day,
will not, like yourselves, find good
reasons for throwing them over ?” The
eternity of hell torments is a doctrine
discarded by a number of divines, who
yet cling to the doctrines of the Incarna
tion and the Atonement. There is
nothing to assure us that, in a hundred
years’ time, these also will not be
discovered to be unscriptural.
The Christian theology, in its main
features, was evolved during the most
calamitous period which the human race
has lived through in historic times. The
decline and fall of the Roman Empire
still remains the greatest catastrophe on
record ; the slow death protracted over
five centuries of the ancient world.
Every evil afflicted men in that terrible
time : arbitrary power, the most remorse
less and cruel; a grinding fiscality, which
at last exterminated wealth ; pestilences,
which became endemic and depopulated
whole provinces ; and, to crown all, a
series of invasions by barbarous hordes,
who passed over the countries like a
consuming fire. It wTas in this age that
the foundations of Christian theology
were laid—the theology of the Councils
and the Fathers. The conception of
God, of his relation to and dealings
with the world, was evolved in a society
wThich groaned under unexampled oppres
sion, misery, and affliction. Needless
to say, it was an age of great and almost
morbid cruelty : the games of the circus
were a constant discipline of the inhuman
passions. After the empire had vanished,
for long centuries there was no great
improvement. The barbarism of the
Frankish period may be seen at full
length in the pages of Gregory of Tours.
The Carling empire was an oppressive
�THE DECA Y OF BELIEF
tyranny ; the Feudal Age, one of lawless
rapine on the part of the strong, and
cowering anguish on the part of the
weak. It was in this evil time that the
Christian Theology was evolved, com
mencing with the great doctrines defined
by the Fathers, and afterwards reduced
to a logical system by the scholastics,
especially by St. Thomas, the Angel of
the schools.
With such visible rulers of the world
before them, it is no wonder that men
formed very dark and cruel notions of
the invisible ruler, who disposed of all
things.
Cruelty, injustice, arbitrary
power, were too familiar to be shocking,
too constant to be supposed accidental
or transitory. The real world before
their eyes was taken as a dim pattern
and foreshadowing of the ideal world
beyOnd the grave. God was an Almighty
Emperor, a transcendental Diocletian or
Constantine, doing as he list with his
own. His edicts ran through all space
and time, his punishments were eternal,
and whatever he did his justice must
not be questioned. And thus those
words came to be written, “Therefore
hath he mercy on whom he will have
mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth.
Thou wilt say then unto me, Why
doth he yet find fault ? For who hath
resisted his will ? Nay but, O man, who
art thou that repliest against God ?
Shall the thing formed say to him that
formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?
Hath not the potter power over the clay,
of the same lump to make one vessel
unto honour and another unto dis
honour?”1 which, probably, have added
more to human misery than any other
utterances made by man. St. Paul’s
teaching fell on a fertile soil. For some
fifteen hundred years the human con
science was not shocked by it. Since
the rise of the Arminian theology there
has been a gradual and growing revul
sion of feeling, and now it is said plainly
that the “ potter has no right to be angry
with his pots. If he wanted them different
1 Romans ix. 18-21.
25
he should have made them different.”
The pretensions of an “ omnipotent devil
desiring to be complimented ” as all
merciful, when he is exerting the most
fiendish cruelty, are no longer admitted
in abashed silence. But if the great
difficulty of hell and eternal punishments
were happily surmounted, there remain,
in the whole Christian scheme of
redemption, moral iniquities and obli
quities which no good man of the present
day, whatever his religion or theology,
would willingly be guilty of himself.
The notion that God wanted to be pro
pitiated by the death of the innocent
Christ is a thoroughly base and barbarous
one; natural enough in rude ages, when
costly sacrifice was a recognised mode
of appeasing angry deities, but repellent
now. Hardly the most depraved man,
in his right mind, would accept the
vicarious punishment of one who had
not offended him in lieu of one who
had. A high-minded man would endure
almost anything rather than countenance
such an enormity. The idea is barbarous,
well worthy of Chinese conceptions of
justice, content if the executioner gets a
subject to operate on, but indifferent
whether it be the culprit or not. Yet
this cruel and barbarous notion is the
centre of the Christian religion; at
least, it has not yet been discovered
to be unscriptural, I believe. Again,
Satan may well give latitudinarian theo
logians trouble in this world as in the
next. When they have explained away
his eternal function of tormenting souls
in hell, they will have to extenuate his
strange temporal avocations on earth,
and to explain how they can be permitted
by a merciful God. A fallen angel of
vast skill, subtlety, and guile is allowed
to tempt men and women, even young
children, to commit sin, to allure them
away from Christ, to jeopardise their
hopes of Paradise.
And God, who
permits this, is supposed to hate sin. If
he had wished sin to abound, what could
he have done more than to allow the
arch-fiend, aided by legions of minor
devils, to go about like a roaring lion
�26
THE SERVICE OF MAN
seeking whom he may devour, with con
stant access to men, nay, to their most
inward minds, whispering evil thoughts,
stimulating criminal passions, and, how
ever often driven away by holy prayer,
ever renewing his assaults on poor
souls, up to the last moment of mortal
agony, when he oftener succeeds than
fails in carrying them off to his place of
torment? Christ’s petition, “Lead us
not into temptation, but deliver us from
the evil one,” has never been heard, or
it has not been granted. We are always
being led into temptation; we are never
delivered from the evil one on this side
of the gates of death. A supernatural
being who wrecked man’s felicity in
Paradise, and brought sin and death into
the world, is appointed to the office of
tempting men at all times, in all places,
throughout life; he is able to enter into
the minds of his victims and pervert
their souls, in society and in solitude, in
sleep, and even in prayer, capable of
assuming all disguises, even to appearing
as an angel of light. A human seducer,
however artful and vile, is restricted as to
times and opportunities in corrupting the
innocent. Satan has constant and in-,
visible access. Now, a parent or guardian
who allowed children under his charge
to associate with bad characters would
be justly condemned as wanting in a
sense of duty and humanity. But God
permits something infinitely worse, by
the whole difference between an immortal
evil spirit and the most profligate of
earthly tempters. Let any human father
try and imagine the anguish with which
he would see his innocent, inexperienced
daughter walking arm-in-arm with an
accomplished and fascinating seducer.
Would not his instantaneous step be to
put an end to such corrupting inter
course ? Would not public opinion
largely condone violent measures on his
part, if it should appear that the designs
of the villain had been crowned with a
calamitous success? Yet the heavenly
father is supposed to see this and far worse
every hour and minute of the day; to see
the young, the weak, the unprotected,
assailed by a supernatural tempter, his
own creature, his rebel angel, wholly evil
and malignant; and to see him succeed
in his attempt to ruin souls. And then
the betrayed, poor human victim, not the
fiend, is punished. The fiend, indeed,
is punished, but not for these acts against
humanity. The righteous God promptly
avenged insubordination and disrespect
to himself.
But ever since man’s
creation Satan has had compensations.
His dominion is ever extending (as all
orthodox theologians admit that the
number of the damned far exceeds that
of the saved), and he is well entitled to
boast in the words of the poet :
“ To reign is worth ambition though in Hell ;
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
The old answer to such considerations
was that they were horribly profane, and
“ must be put down with a strong hand.”
They impiously meddled with “mysteries”
which man in his fallen state could not
fathom, but must reverently adore. To
which it is now replied that there is no
mystery at all in the matter. Barbarous
and cruel ages have ever generated bar
barous and cruel religions. Nay, obscene
and revolting rites and practices, which
cannot be named, have been, and still
are, sanctioned by religion. These were
outgrown by the progressive nations of
the West when Christian monotheism pre
vailed. And now Christian monotheism is
sharing the fate of its predecessors ; it is
being superseded by the growing con
science of mankind.
But the fact is that these somewhat
old-fashioned controversies about the
credibility of miracles, the evidences of
Christianity, the authenticity of portions
of Scripture, and similar topics, are now
dwarfed and overshadowed by a far
mightier question which has come to the
front with great rapidity in this age. The
being and attributes of a God have been
a subject of esoteric discussion in the
schools of philosophers for centuries, but
only recently have been seen to pass
from the closet to the market-place, and
to become one of the deepest questions
�THE DECA Y OF BELIEF
of the day. No more surprising change
of fundamental conceptions will be
recorded by the future historians of
philosophy than that which has super
vened in the last twenty-five or thirty
years in reference to the idea of God.
Up to a recent time the sturdiest sceptics
as to the truth of revelation were mostly
deists or pantheists, and often repudiated
atheism with warmth.
The wittiest
scoffer who ever attacked Christianity,
Voltaire, was a firm deist, and declared
that if God did not exist he would have
to be invented. The extreme school of
Diderot and D’Holbach, even in the
sceptical eighteenth century, failed of a
wide acceptance. Now the conception
of God is freely treated by many of the
leaders of philosophical and scientific
opinion as a transitory phase of thought
which the growth of knowledge has
finally terminated. The natural history
and evolution of the idea of God is
traced in calm outline from its cradle to
its grave—from its nascent form in
Animism to its metaphysical presenta
tion as an inscrutable First Cause, the
absolute, unconditioned, and unrelated
to the phenomenal world. The idea of
God has been “ defecated to a pure
transparency,” as one eminent writer
phrases it; it has been “ deanthropomorphised,” to use the language of another.
A new and widely-current word has been
invented to designate the large class of
persons (mostly persons of exceptional
knowledge and ability) who refuse to
entertain any more the idea of a single
divine Being, maker of all things in
heaven and earth. Agnostics are to be
met with on every side ; the place of
honour is given to their articles in the
most popular monthly reviews; and, just
as in the fourth century the mysteries of
the Trinity and the Incarnation were
discussed in the streets of Constantinople
by shopkeepers and their customers, so
now, at dinner parties and gatherings of
both sexes, the existence of God emerges
from time to time as a topic of conversa
tion, ending often in negative conclusions.
Every middle-aged man can remember a
2I
time when such a transformation of
sentiments and opinions would have
appeared beyond the pale of possibility.
As in the case of the Christian
theology, the difficulties are twofold!
intellectual and moral, which have extin
guished in many minds the traditional
belief in a Supreme Being. So long as
men were able and content to believe in
an anthropomorphic deity—an infinitely
glorified and exalted man—then difficul
ties were not perceived; a feeling also of
religious awe daunted the mind from
looking up and scrutinising even its
own conceptions with a steady gaze.
But the growth of knowledge and a
higher morality have made the concep
tion of an anthropomorphic God less
and less endurable, even to professed
theologians, who have been as ready as
philosophers to dehumanise the deity.
But the difficulty is that, in proportion
as the conception of God is stripped of
its human attributes and removed away
into the absolute, in the same proportion
does the conception cease to offer an
object capable of exciting human sym
pathy, and, what is not less important,
does it cease to be conceivable. “Simi
larly with the logical incongruities^
more and more conspicuous to growing
intelligence. Passing over the familiar
difficulties—that sundry of the implied
divine traits are in contradiction with
the divine attributes otherwise ascribed;
that a god who repents of what he has
done must be lacking either in power
or foresight; that his anger presupposes
an occurrence that has been contrary to
his intention, and so indicates defect
of means—we come to the greater
difficulty: that such emotions, like all
emotions, can exist only in a conscious
ness which is limited. Every emotion
has its antecedent ideas, and antecedent
ideas are habitually supposed to occur
in God. He is represented as seeing
and hearing this or the other, and as
being emotionally affected thereby.
That is, the conception of a divinity
possessing these traits of character
ntcessarily continues anthropomorphic,
�28
THE SERVICE OF MAN
not only in the sense that the emotions
ascribed are like those of human beings,
but also in the sense that they form
parts of a consciousness which, like the
human consciousness, is formed of
successive states. And such a con
ception of the divine consciousness is
irreconcilable with the unchangeableness
otherwise alleged, and with the omnis
cience otherwise alleged. For a con
sciousness, constituted of ideas and
feelings caused by objects and occur
rences, cannot be simultaneously occu
pied with all objects and all occurrences
throughout the universe. To believe in
a divine consciousness, men must refrain
from thinking what is meant by con
sciousness—must stop short with verbal
propositions; and propositions which
they are debarred from rendering into
thought will more and more fail to satisfy
them. Of course, like difficulties present
themselves when the will of God is
spoken of. So long as we refrain from
giving a definite meaning to the word
‘ will,’ we may say that it is possessed by
the Cause of all things, as readily as we
may say that love of approbation is
possessed by a circle; but when, from
the words, we pass to the thoughts they
stand for, we find that we can no more
unite in consciousness the terms of the
one proposition than we can those of
the other. Whoever conceives of any
other will than his own must do so in
terms of his own will, which is the sole
will directly known to him, all other wills
being only inferred. But will, as such,
is conscious, if it presupposes a motive,
a prompting desire of some kind;
absolute indifference excludes the con
ception of will. Moreover, will, as
implying a prompting desire, connotes
some end contemplated as one to be
achieved, and ceases with the achieve
ment of it; some other will referring to
some other end taking its place. That
is to say, will, like emotion, necessarily
supposes a series of states of conscious
ness. The conception of a divine will,
derived from the human will, involves,
like it, localisation in space and tinlfe;
the willing of each end excluding from
consciousness, for an interval, the willing
of other ends, and therefore being incon
sistent with that omnipresent activity
which simultaneously works out an
infinity of ends. It is the same with
the ascription of intelligence. Not to
dwell on the seriality and limitation
implied as before, we may note that
intelligence, as alone conceivable by us,
presupposes existence independent of it
and objective to it. It is carried on in
terms of changes primarily wrought by
alien activities—the impressions gener
ated by things beyond consciousness and
the ideas derived from such impressions.
To speak of an intelligence which exists
in the absence of all such alien activities
is to use a meaningless word. If to the
corollary that the First Cause, considered
as intelligent, must be continually affected
by independent objective activities, it is
replied that these have become such by
act of creation, and were previously
included in the First Cause; then the
reply is that, in such case, the First
Cause could, before their creation, have
had nothing to generate in it such
changes as those constituting what we
call intelligence, and must therefore have
been unintelligent at the time when
intelligence was most called for. Hence
it is clear that the intelligence ascribed
answers in no respect to that which we
know by the name. It is intelligence
out of which all the characters consti
tuting it have vanished.”1
On the moral side it is found impossible
to reconcile the attributes of mercy and
benevolence in the Creator with the con
dition of the animal world, which presents
an almost continued scene of carnage
and cruelty, and has done so from its
commencement. Not only are the
stronger carnivora fashioned and armed
for the purpose of hunting and killing
their prey—a gazelle or antelope, in a
state of nature, is compelled to fly three
times daily for its life—but innumerable
1 Herbert Spencer, Nineteenth Century Re
view, 1885.
�WHY MEN HESITATE
parasites exist in the bodies and at the
expense of animals generally much their
superiors. “ Of the animal kingdom as
a whole, more than half the species are
parasites.” If each individual species,
as Agassiz said, is an “ embodied creative
thought of God,” his benevolence must
be acknowledged to be of a singular
character.
The best apologists admit that a mere
metaphysical deity, an absolute First
Cause defecated to a pure transparency,
is not enough. What they wish to
restore is a belief in the God to whom
they learned to pray by their mother’s
knee. And they are abundantly justified
from their point of view in such a wish.
The only God whom Western Europeans,
with a Christian ancestry of a thousand
years behind them, can worship, is the
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; or,
rather, of St. Paul, St. Augustine, St.
Bernard, and of the innumerable “blessed
saints,” canonised or not, who peopled
•, the Ages of Faith. No one wants, no
| one cares for, an abstract God, an Un
j knowable, an Absolute, with whom we
stand in no human or intelligible relation.
What pious hearts wish to feel and believe
is the existence, “ behind the veil” of the
visible world, of an invisible Personality,
friendly to man, at once a brother and
God. The unequalled potency of Chris
tianity as a religion of the heart has ever
consisted in the admirable conception of
the Man God, Jesus Christ. Even a
I power hostile to man, if conceived as
I embodied in a person, has been felt pre
ferable to vague, passionless, unintelligent
force; because a hostile person could be
propitiated, could be appealed to, could
be brought over to mercy and goodwill
; by prayer and sacrifice. That is to say,
I that an anthropomorphic God is the only
| God whom men can worship, and also
I the God whom modern thought finds it
increasingly difficult to believe in.
I
Chapter III.
WHY MEN HESITATE
The series of arguments and considera- : has Rationalism, after such brilliant
tions against the current theology, of j victories, not triumphed completely ?
which a very imperfect summary was Why is the British Sunday without a
attempted in the last chapter, might parallel in Europe ? Why on that day
seem sufficient to bring about a rapid are museums and theatres still closed,
extinction of the vulgar belief; and and the churches and chapels full ? The
possibly that extinction is not so far off obvious answer that we are the most
as both those who wish it, and those conservative of races is not satisfactory.
who deprecate it, may be apt to think. We can overturn quickly enough institu
Still, whatever may be the case in tions with which we arc really dis
France and Germany, Christianity, if contented. The inference is that the
moribund, is by no means dead, in this mass of Englishmen, in spite of the wide
country at least: the land which has prevalence of agnostic views, are not yet
done most to work out the philosophy satisfied in their hearts that an improved
of Evolution is perhaps still the most substitute for Christianity can be found.
Christian in faith and practice remaining Intellectually, their allegiance to it has
in the world. The question arises, Why been much shaken, but their feelings
�THE SERVICE OF MAN
have not been changed in a similar
degree. This may be explained in two
ways. First, a certain slow-footed sure
ness in the national character, which
refuses to move with haste in matters of
paramount importance. Among the
peoples who embraced the Reformation,
the English were the most tardy in their
open and general revolt from Rome.
Secondly, in no country has Christianity
of late years been less offensive to any
class of dissidents. Unlimited religious
liberty has permitted every shade of
religious or irreligious sentiment to assert
itself after its own heart, in its own
fashion. Even the Established Church,
once so insolent and oppressive, has,
on the whole, shown a wise spirit of
compromise and toleration, and is,
perhaps, less hated now than at any past
period of its history. A touch of genuine
persecution would long ago have caused
an explosion, which would not only
have annihilated the Establishment, but
have reacted injuriously on the other
sects.
In the absence of the stimulus
given by persecution even to unpopular
opinions, agnosticism has had to make
its way on its own merits, so to speak,
on a fair field, and certainly with no
favour. Among certain groups, with
whom intellectual cultivation is the main
business of life, it has had a great
success, far greater than could have been
expected in only a recent past; but it
has not extended and penetrated through
the great mass of the middle and upper
classes. And the obvious reason is that
agnosticism, so far, has not only not had
feeling with it, but it has had feeling
against it. A belief in the unknowable
kindles no enthusiasm. Science wins a
verdict in its favour before any competent
intellectual tribunal; but numbers of
men, and the vast majority of women,
ignore the finding of the jury of experts.
They cling passionately to the belief in
the supernatural; they listen even with
patience and flattering hope to the
deeply suspicious and suspected pro
fessors of spiritualism and thought-read
ing, athirst for a hint, a suggestion, an
evanescent fact, which would lighten the
gloom of the grave. Above all, they will
believe, in spite of science and the laws
of their consciousness, in a good God,
who loves them and cares for them and
their little wants and trials, and will, if
they only please him, take them at last
to his bosom, and “ wipe the tears for
ever from their eyes.”
“ A. l’enfant il faut sa mere,
A l’ame il faut son Dieu.”
In this respect, at least, Carlyle was a
true son of his age, and expressed one
of its deepest heart-pangs in that bitter
cry of the Everlasting No :—“ To me
the Universe was all void of Life, of
Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility;
it was one huge, dead, immeasurable
Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead in
difference, to grind me limb from limb.
O the vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha,
and Mill of Death ! Why was the Living
banished thither companionless, con
scious ? Why, if there is no Devil; nay,
unless the Devil is your God ?” That
is the true voice of a Christian man who
has lost his faith. Some thousand or
fifteen hundred years of Christian train
ing has given this passionate turn to the
feelings, this infinite craving for sympathy
with the Invisible Lord; who must exist,
men fondly say, because to doubt him is
to despair. Again Carlyle is representa
tive : “ Fore-shadows, call them rather
fore-splendours—of that Truth, and
Beginning of Truth, fell mysteriously
over my soul. Sweeter than Day-spring
to the Shipwrecked in Nova Zembla;
ah ! like the mother’s voice to her little
child that strays bewildered, weeping, in
unknown tumults ; like soft streamings of
celestial music to my too exasperated
heart, came that Evangel. The Universe
is not dead and demoniacal, a charnelhouse with spectres; but godlike, and
my Father’s !”
How little the celestial music soothed
the exasperated heart of the care-laden
man, his tragic biography is a melancholy
witness.
�WHY MEN HESITA TE
Though perhaps the chief, the yearn
ing for divine sympathy is not the only
ground of men’s hesitation to follow the
guidance of intellect in this matter. The
idea still prevails that Christianity is,
after all, the best support of morality
extant. What system of ethics, it is
asked, can compare with the Sermon on
the Mount ? There are even some who
hold that paradise and hell can ill be
spared ; the one as incentive to good, the
other as a deterrent from evil. How can
you expect, it is inquired, self-sacrifice,
devotion to duty, if man is to die the
death of a dog, and to look for no here
after? It is assumed as obvious to
common-sense that in that case we shall
eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.
Self-indulgence the most gross, crime the
most unscrupulous, are taken for granted
to be the natural and spontaneous pre
dispositions of man, if he did not dread
having to pay dear for them in the next
world. Wickedness and sin are what he
naturally likes, virtue and righteousness
what he naturally detests. The pleasures
of lying, robbery, impurity, and murder
are beyond dispute j they would fill the
cup of enjoyment to the brim, could one
only get it without fear of after-conse
quences in the lake of brimstone. Who
can be so ignorant of human nature,
nay, of his own heart, as to doubt of
these all too fascinating temptations and
attractions ? As it is, even with the fires
of Tophet flaming in the distance, men
cannot resist their allurements, or prefer
“ The lilies and languors of virtue
To the roses and raptures of vice.”
Therefore, it is only too certain that a
general abrogation of Christianity would
be at once followed by a reign of universal
licence; and, by the lower order of
apologists, it is not seldom broadly hinted
that that is the desired result. Take
away the mingled fear and hope of a
future state of rewards and punishments,
and what possible check can be imagined
to the universal indulgence of unbridled
desires ?
Without staying to point out that
reasoners of this class, whatever their
other merits, cannot be complimented
on their estimate of human nature, and
that they, at least, can with little grace
reproach any opponents with degrading
man, we have to remark that the con
clusions of the reason, so far as they are
adverse to Christianity, are here met not
with arguments, but with threats, with
appeals to the passions of a very powerful
kind; and that it can excite no surprise
that, on the whole, passion has the
advantage in the conflict. We shall try
to examine these points with some care,
and inquire (i) if religion has really been
in the past the solace and consolation it
is asserted ; (2) whether Christianity is
such a stay and support to morality as it
is said to be; and (3) whether a general
outbreak of crime and debauchery may
be expected as a natural result of the
disappearance of the established theo
logy?
�32
THE SERVICE OF MAN
Chapter IV.
THE ALLEGED CONSOLATIONS OF THE
CHRISTIAN RELIGION
It is worthy of remark that, in propor
tion as Christianity has met with intel
lectual opposition, a progressive tendency
has been shown by divines to veil the
harsher and more inhuman features of
their creed. The older race of theo
logians, with no fear of criticism before
their eyes, spoke out freely; they preached
high doctrine, and found an austere
pleasure in dwelling on the awful judg
ments of God. The small number of
the saved, the multitude of the damned,
the narrowness of the way which leads
to life, the breadth of that which leads
to destruction, were topics on which
they loved to dwell and the congregation
to ponder. To a large extent this tone
has been dropped, and replaced by one
to which it is the direct contrary.
Preachers prefer to dwell on the cheerful
and bright side of religion—on its
glorious promises, on the delights of
the heavenly Jerusalem. They certainly
speak with much less unction of the
“wrath to come”; and if they say
nothing to impair the belief in God’s
justice, which leads him to punish sin
with endless torments, they enlarge more
on his “mercy” and “the things he
hath prepared for them that love him.”
In some cases religion is chiefly recom
mended as offering a graceful and
pleasing appendix to life, as depriving
death of its sting and the grave of its
victory, and opening a prospect up to
the sunlit heavens, amid clouds and glory
and the most sublime scenery that can
be imagined.
This change of tone, which, as a broad
matter of fact, cannot, I apprehend, be
denied, has followed on as a wide result
of the great humanitarian movement
which began towards the middle of the
eighteenth century. When legislation and
manners were equally marked by cruelty;
when criminals were tortured to death,
and prisoners kept in noisome dungeons
reeking with jail fever and swarming with
vermin; when popular sports largely
consisted in inflicting pain on men and
animals—it is no wonder that gloomy
and inhuman views of religion passed
without challenge, or even with favour.
The alteration of feeling, together with
its cause, were quaintly expressed by
an American divine, who had been
reproached by an English visitor for too
slight an insistence on the eternal damna
tion of the wicked : “ Our people would
not stand it, sir,” was the reply. But
the point which more immediately con
cerns us is whether the old religion of
terror, or its modified and softened
modern version, was or is such a source
of solace and inward joy as is commonly
assumed. Any one who has had the
privilege of knowing intimately one of
those rare and beautiful souls in whom a
single-hearted piety seems spontaneous
would be slow to deny that such solace
may exist. The meek and chastened
spirits do occasionally know that peace of
God which passeth all understanding.
But it is equally certain that that peace
is subject to painful interruptions, and
that in almost exact proportion with the
growth of a tender and watchful con
science does the liability to such eclipses
increase. It is the presumptuous, not
the truly devout, who dwell always in a
complacent conviction of their accep
tance and favour with God. All spiritual
doctors abound in warnings against the
two opposite dangers, on the one hand,
of over-confidence, self-righteousness,
Pharisaism ; on the other, of despair and
hopeless despondency of ever pleasing
God. The proud content of the Pharisee
�THE ALLEGED CONSOLATIONS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 33
can never be put to the credit of religion, not worthy of thy consolation, nor of
as it is the temper which is most of all any spiritual visitation; and, therefore,
thou dealest justly with me when thou
condemned by true piety. “ Humility,
leavest me poor and desolate. For if I
and modesty of judgment and of hope,
could shed tears as the sea, yet should I
arc very good instruments to procure
mercy and a fair reception at the day of not be wrorthy of thy consolation. Where
fore I am worthy only to be scourged
our death; but presumption or bold
and punished, because I have grievously
opinion serves no end of God or man,
and is always imprudent, even fatal, and and often offended thee, and in many
things greatly sinned; so, then, on a true
of all things in the world is its own
greatest enemy : for the more any man account, I have not deserved even the
presumes the greater reason he has to smallest consolation.”1
Cardinal Wiseman, in his preface to
fear.”1 Any solace, therefore, of this
kind, derived from religion, must be the English translation of the works of
repudiated and struck off the account as St. John of the Cross, has the following
illegitimate and in a manner fraudulent remarkable passage : “ It may be con
—a deadly spiritual sin seizing the reward sidered a rule in this highest spiritual
of perfected saintliness. It is the anxious life that, before it is attained, there must
and careworn penitent whom we have to be a period of severe probation, lasting
consider, those who, when they have often many years, and separating it from
done all that they can, still regard them the previous state, which may have been
selves as unprofitable servants. Theo one of most exalted virtue. Probably,
many whom the Catholic Church honours
logians prescribe elaborate remedies
against despair as a “ temptation and a as saints have never received this singular
horrid sin ”; but it is a sin to which the gift. But in reading the biography of
humble, the meek, and the truly devout such as have been favoured with it, we
shall invariably find that the possession
are exposed, and not the wicked and
worldly. How often it has been pushed of it has been preceded, not only by
to the destruction of reason, resulting a voluntary course of mortification of
in religious madness, the statistics of sense, fervent devotion, constant medi
insanity are there to show. Even when tation, and separation from the world,
it stops short of this fearful consumma but also by a trying course of dryness,
tion, and appears in the milder form of weariness of spirit, insipidity of devo
desponding anxiety, and fear lest the tional duties, and, what is infinitely
sinner has lost favour in the sight worse, dejection, despondency, tempta
of God, those moments of coldness tion to give up all in disgust and almost
and tediousness of spirit form a heavy despair. During this tremendous proba
deduction from the hours of peace and tion the soul is dark, parched, and way
happiness enjoyed between, as every less, as earth without water, as one
book of devotion, from the Psalms staggering across a desert, or, to rise to
downward, abundantly shows.
“ My a nobler illustration, like Him remotely
God, my God, look upon me; why hast who lay on the ground on Olivet, loathing
the cup which He had longed for, beyond
thou forsaken me: and art so far from
my health, and from the words of my the sweet chalice which He had drunk
complaint ? O my God, I cry in the with His apostles just before.” A prince
day-time, but thou hearest not: and in of the Church may, no doubt, be trusted
to speak correctly on this matter.
the night-season also I take no rest.”
In order to show that these afflictions
Thomas a Kempis denies that the
are not peculiar to Catholics, a few
truly contrite sinner has any ground even
sentences may with advantage be quoted
to hope for consolation. “ Lord, I am
’ Holy Dying, ch. v., § 6.
1 Imitation, iii. 52.
n
�34
THE SERVICE OF MAN
from that strange book of Bunyan’s,
Grace Abounding to the Chief of
Sinners:—“ And now was I both a
burden and terror to myself, nor did I
ever so know as now what it was to be
weary of my life and yet afraid to die.
Ob, how gladly now would I have been
anybody but myself, anything but a man,
and in any condition but my own, for
there was nothing did pass more fre
quently over my mind than that it was
impossible for me to be forgiven my
transgression and to be saved from wrath
to come........ I found it hard work now
to pray to God, because despair was
swallowing me up. I thought I was, as
with a tempest, driven away from God,
for always when I cried to God for
mercy this would come in, ‘ ’Tis too late;
I am lost: God has let me fall, not to
my correction, but to my condemnation.’
About this time I did light on that dread
ful story of that miserable mortal, Francis
Spira—a book that was to my troubled
spirit as salt when rubbed into a fresh
wound. Every sentence in that book,
every groan of that man, with all the rest
of his actions in his griefs; as his tears,
his prayers, his gnashing of teeth, his
wringing of hands, his twisting and
languishing and pining away under that
mighty hand of God that was upon him,
were as knives and daggers in my soul.
Especially that sentence of his was
frightful to me : ‘ Man knows the begin
ning of sin, but who bounds the issues
thereof?’ Then would the former sen
tence as the conclusion of all fall like an
hot thunderbolt against my conscience,
for you know how that afterwards, when
he would have inherited the blessing, he
was rejected, for he found no place of
repentance, though he sought it carefully
with tears.
“ Then should I be struck into a very
great trembling, insomuch that at some
times I could for whole days together
feel my very body as well as my mind to
shake and totter under the sense of this
dreadful judgment of God that should
fall on those that have sinned that most
fearful and unpardonable sin. I felt also
such a clogging and heat at my stomach,
by reason of this my terror, that I was
especially at sometimes as if my breast
bone would split asunder: then I thought
concerning that of Judas, who, by his
falling headlong, burst asunder, and all
his bowels gushed out.”
If we admit that such periods of
depression are at last more than com
pensated by the ecstasy which may follow
them, yet it is obvious that the religious
life, in its highest forms, is very far
from uniformly leading through paths of
pleasantness and peace, as is sometimes
assumed. A state bordering on despair,
which lasts for years, is no light matter;
and it would be no conclusive proof of a
carnal mind to hesitate before encounter
ing such anguish, even with the ultimate
certainty of its transmutation into ineffable
joy. But, as Cardinal Wiseman tells us,
there is no certainty of such in this life:
only in heaven can the Christian hope
for an adequate return for his spiritual
trials in this world. “ If in this life only
we have hope in Christ, we are of all
men most miserable,” said St. Paul of
himself and fellow Christians; and it
follows that neither in the design nor in
the result is Christianity adapted to confer
the highest earthly happiness : it is not a
present solace, but the promise of one
hereafter. A future life, however, is one
of the most enormous assumptions, with
out proof, ever made; and yet, on this
immense postulate, all the alleged con
solations of religion of necessity hang.
By considering the case of the truly
religious, we have discussed the question,
on the most favourable terms to Chris
tianity, as a source of happiness. The
profoundly pious are at times refreshed
with the “ beatific vision ” in the course
of their pilgrimage.
But there are
numbers of the half - converted, the
■worldly, the openly wicked, who believe
enough to be full of anxiety and fear,
and yet never attain to assurance of
complete peace with God; and perhaps
these constitute the majority of professing
Christians. If you obtain access to their
inmost thoughts, you will rarely find that
�THE ALLEGED CONSOLATIONS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 35
religion has been a consolation to them,
but a perpetual source of inward unrest
and alarm, though they never have had
the strength or the grace to turn finally
to God. These pains of the spirit are
by no means the only trials which the
Christian has to encounter. The preva
lence of heresy and schism has ever
afflicted devout men in proportion to
their devoutness. One of the peculiar
ities of this age, indeed, is the extra
ordinary cessation of controversy and
absence of new doctrines within the
Christian communion. Never, perhaps,
since the Council of Jerusalem, has
there been so marked an abeyance of
serious theological dispute.
Middleaged and old men, who can remember
the Tractarian controversy and the
Gorham controversy, when the coun
try was filled with tumult about
matters of faith, can appreciate the
strange, great calm which now prevails.
Whether true believers have any reason
to rejoice in the change may be doubted.
The differences within have been fol
lowed by far more serious hostilities
from without, and it is the deadly
war -with the sceptic and the
infidel which justly pre-occupies the
earnest thoughts of Christian men. This
last state, which is worse than the first,
tends to make us forget how painful
were the anxieties as to the threatened
prevalence of “grave error,” whenever
serious controversies arose: what fiery
pamphlets were published by deans,
archdeacons, and even by bishops; what
agitated letters appeared even in the
secular newspapers ; what meetings were
convened, and what danger to Christian
verity was apprehended if the faithful
did not see to it. The world has rolled
so far away from this state of things that
even those who witnessed it retain but
an imperfect recollection of the remote
scene. Who can easily recall the excite
ment consequent on the publication of
so anodyne a work as Professor Jowett’s
edition of St. Paul’s Epistles? How
difficult to remember the time when the
illustrious Master of Balliol was a perse
cuted man, considered more than passing
rich with forty pounds a year, for teaching
Greek as it had not been taught by a
Regius professor from time immemorial?
But faith was still lively and vigilant,
even in that recent past—a very pale
reflection of its former brightness, no
doubt. To realise what it once was, and
what mental distress it could cause, we
must have recourse to reading; and,
with such historical imagination as we
can command, revive an extinct con
troversy : not one of the mightier
disputes of the sixteenth century, the
dust-cloud of which reached up to the
heavens and obscured the stars; but a
relatively minor one, and only an episode
in that, the fate of Jacqueline Pascal.
Jacqueline, the younger sister of Blaise
Pascal, was remarkable for talent and
beauty even in her own family, in which
beauty and talent were hereditary gifts.
Like Pope, she lisped in numbers, and
composed verses which were not con
temptible before she had learned to read.
Her grace of person and manner caused
her to be invited to play in a comedy
before Richelieu, and, though only nine
years of age, she so charmed the Cardinal
that he recalled her father, who had
incurred his displeasure, from exile. We
have letters of hers written in her twen
tieth year, in which she gives to her
sister, Madame Perier, a lucid and
intelligent account of a conference
between her brother Blaise and
Descartes, when they discussed the
discovery of the barometer, and the
phenomena of atmospheric pressure.
But religion already occupied all her
thoughts, and she resolved to become
a nun of Port Royal, though, out of
deference to her father’s wish, she
refrained from taking the veil until after
his death. “ She made all her prepara
tions in my presence,” says her sister,
Madame Perier, “ and fixed the. fourth
of January as the day for entering the
convent. On the eve of that day she
begged me to speak about it to my
brother, to avoid taking him by surprise.
....... He was much touched, and retired
�36
THE SERVICE OF MAN
very sad to his room without seeing my
sister, who was in a small apartment
where she was wont to pray. She did
not leave it till my brother had gone,
fearing that the sight of her might give
him pain. I gave her the tender mes
sages he had charged me with, after
which we all went to bed. But I could
not sleep. Although I approved heartily
of her resolution, its magnitude so filled
my mind that I lay awake all night. At
seven the next morning, as I saw that
Jacqueline did not rise, I thought that
she also had not slept, and I found
her fast asleep. The noise I made
.awakened her, and she asked me the
time. I told her, and inquired how she
felt, and if she had slept well. She
replied she was well, and had had a good
night. Then she arose, dressed herself,
and went away ; doing this, as all things,
with a tranquillity and composure of soul
which cannot be conceived. We took
no farewell of each other from fear of
breaking down, and I turned away from
her path when I saw her ready to go out.
In this way she left the world; it was
the fourth of January, of the year 1652,
she being twenty-six years and three
months old.”
Sister Jacqueline, of Saint Euphemia
Pascal, was for nine years a nun at Port
Royal, and became subprioress and
mistress of the Novices. In the latter
character the duty of teaching young
children to read devolved upon her, and
she introduced into the convent the new
system of giving merely the phonetic
value of the letters and not calling them
by misleading names, which was the
invention of her brother Blaise, and
obtained afterwards great renown in the
“Grammaire Generale” of Port Royal.
But the pious Jansenist foundation was
already doomed. The Jesuits had not
yet avenged the Provincial Letters.
Strong with the support of the pope and
the king, they produced a formulary, the
signature of which was compulsory on
all ecclesiastics. It referred to the
eternal question of the Five Propositions,
ind declared that they were in the book
Augustinus of Bishop Jansenius, and
were contrary to the faith. Much
subtlety was employed to find a means
of signing it in a non-natural sense, and
the chiefs of the Jansenist party, to
escape destruction, visibly wavered. But
Jacqueline, like her brother Blaise, was
made of sterner stuff, and resisted all
compromise with passionate zeal. At
last the great authority of Arnauld and
Nicole prevailed upon their followers to
accept the bitter cup prepared for them
by their enemies. Pascal swooned away
when this decision was taken. Jacqueline
yielded at last to the pressure of her
superiors, and signed the formulary, but
with such grief and anguish of soul that
she predicted she would die of it; as,
indeed, she did in less than six months.
The affliction of the just and the
prosperity of the wicked has always been
a serious difficulty to pious persons
who combined reflection with devotion.
“ Wherefore do the wicked live, become
old,, yea, are mighty in power? Their
seed is established in their sight with
them, and their offspring before their
eyes. Their houses are safe from fear,
neither is the rod of God upon them.”1
And the prophet goes on to say in his
anguish : “ God hath delivered me to
the ungodly, and turned me over into
the hands of the wicked........ He breaketh
me with breach upon breach, he runneth
upon me like a giant........ My face is
foul with weeping, and on my eyelids
is the shadow of death ; not for any
injustice in mine hands : also my prayer
is pure.”2 Probably few religious persons
have escaped the bitterness of feeling
that they were unjustly chastened, that
the rod of God was upon them and not
upon the wicked. They no doubt
repelled the thought with an “ Aflage
Satana I ” regarding it as a snare of the
tempter. But because the thought was
banished from the mind, was the load
removed from the heart ? This is a
trial which theologians must admit is all
1 Job. xxi. 7-9.
2 Job. xvi. II, 14-17.
�THE ALLEGED CONSOLATIONS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 37
their own—a clear addition to the weary
weight “ of all this unintelligible world.”
Agnostics at least, when smitten by the
sharp arrows of fate, by disease, poverty,
bereavement, do not complicate their
misery by anxious misgivings and painful
wonder why they are thus treated by the
God of their salvation. The pitiless,
brazen heavens overarch them and
believers alike; they bear their trials,
or their hearts break, according to their
strength. But one pang is spared them,
the mystery of God’s wrath that he
should visit them so sorely. The
exceeding bitter cry of the dying Jesus,
“ My God, my God, why hast thou for
saken me?” never comes to their lips,
for it never rises in their hearts. “Jesus,
when he had cried again with a loud
voice, yielded up the ghost.” A fitting
yet terrible end of the Passion ; for what
more awful thought could come to a
devout believer in God than that he was
forsaken of God ? It may well have
been tin's, even more than the nails
through his feet and hands and the
spear in his side, which broke the heart
of the Son of man, and made Him yield
up the ghost. Christ’s followers have
discovered consolations and viatica in
the hour of death which were denied
Him. But the most truly humble and
devout at times find their chief anguish
there where they have most looked
for relief. A more pious, God-fearing
woman than the charming French
poetess, Madame Desbordes Valmore,
could not easily be found. But her life
was one long scene of bitter trial, poverty,
and bereavement. At last the cup runs
over, and this plaintive cry escapes her:
“Yes, Camille, it is very poignant; here
I am alone, without brothers or sisters,
alone and severed from all the dear
souls I have so loved, without the con
solation of surviving them and being
able to accomplish their desire, which
was ever to do some good........ What
can one say in the presence of these
decrees of Providence? If one has
deserved them, the case is more sad. I
often search my heart and try to find out
what may have caused me to be so
heavily smitten by our dear Creator ; for
it is impossible for his justice to punish
thus without a cause, and that thought
very often suffices to overwhelm me.”1
The above extracts will probably be
considered sufficient to show that it is
by no means so plain as it is often
assumed to be that the loss of the
Christian religion would deprive men of
immense consolation and an abiding
source of inward happiness amid the
trials of life. There is a serious set-off
on the other side, and this was admitted
with no difficulty in the days when the
faith was menaced by no danger. “ Do
not seek ” says Jeremy Taylor, “ for
deliciousness and sensible sweetness in
the actions of religion, but only regard
the duty and the conscience of it. For
although, in the beginning of religion
most frequently, and at other times
irregularly, God complies with our infir
mity, and encourages out duty with little
overflowings of spiritual joy and sensible
pleasure and delicacies in prayer, so as
we seem to feel some little nearer of
heaven, and great refreshment from the
spirit of consolation; yet this is not always
safe for us to have, neither safe for us to
expect and look for; and when we dor
it is apt to make us cool in our inquiries
and waitings upon Christ when we want
them ; it is running after him, not for
the miracles, but for the loaves; not for
the wonderful things of God and the
desire of pleasing him, but for the
pleasure of pleasing ourselves.”2 Now
adays the effort made is in the opposite
direction, and to dwell on the “ sensible
pleasures ” and “ delicacies in prayer,”
in order to enhance the contrast between
the bright glory and prospects afforded
by the religious life, and the gloomy and
hopeless future which are supposed to
afflict the infidel. The object now is to
make religion attractive, and it has been
pursued with very marked success. Let
any one compare the taste and beauty
1 Sainte-Bcuve,
Lundis, vol. xii.
2 ZfoZj' Living, cap. iv., § 7.
�38
THE SERVICE OF MAN
of a choral service in a modern church Meditations of James Hervey, which ran
or cathedral with the harsh and grating through numerous editions when it first
ugliness which made “ going to church ” appeared, and was still a favourite with
in the days of our youth an ascetic pious folk in the earlier portion of the
exercise. The coarse, untutored voice present century. Such pompous and
of the village shoemaker or tailor who tawdy fustian one would hope could
acted as clerk; the hideous boxes called hardly have been accepted for eloquence,
pews; the dolorous and droning music ; had it not been supposed to convey vital
the whole framed in a choice specimen religious truth. As a poetaster of the
of Georgian architecture, barbaric with day expressed it:
white-wash and clumsy ornament, will still
“ In these loved scenes what rapturous graces
return to the memory in a dreamy mood.
shine,
These things have gone, and are replaced
Live in each leaf, and breathe in every line ;
What sacred beauties beam throughout the
by what is very often a real artistic suc
whole,
cess ; good music and singing, the dim
To charm the sense and steal upon the soul.”
religious light of stained windows,
flowers, mosaics, or paintings, in Soul and sense are charmed in this wise:
churches often not untouched by the “The wicked seem to lie here, like
spirit of mediaeval beauty. This great malefactors in a deep and strong dun
reform in the ordering of divine service geon ; reserved against the day of trial.
has passed beyond the limits of the ‘ Their departure was without peace.’
■Establishment, and penetrated even Clouds of horror sat lowering upon their
among the dissenters, whose chapels no closing eyelids; most sadly foreboding
longer display the resolute deformity of the blackness of darkness for ever.
a past age. The outward change has When the last sickness seized their
been preceded and accompanied by a frame, and the inevitable change ad
deeper inward change; the doctrine of vanced ; when they saw the fatal arrow
terror has been laid aside, and replaced fitting to the strings; saw the deadly
by a doctrine of mildness and hope, so archer aiming at their life; and felt the
much so that few realise the gloomy envenomed shaft fastened in their vitals
horrors of the old creed. The younger —good God ! what fearfulness came
generation has hardly an idea of the : upon them ! What horrible dread over
dismal spiritual pit in which their fathers whelmed them ! How did they stand
lived. In the eighteenth century the shuddering upon the tremendous preci
case was still worse. The chill shade of pice, excessively afraid to die, yet utterly
religious dread spread beyond the circle unable to live.—O ! what pale reviews,
of the professedly devout, and darkened what startling prospects, conspire to
life and literature. Only profane revellers augment their sorrows I They look back
■ passed out of it, and their example was not ward ; and behold ! a most melancholy
edifying. In what a cavern of black scene! Sins unrepented of, mercy slighted,
thoughts did Samuel Johnson pass his
and the day of grace ending. They look
life, and what a fearful “ Horror of the
forward, and nothing presents itself but
Last” got hold of him in his latter days.
the righteous Judge, the dreadful tribunal,
Edward Young, who inveighed against and a most solemn reckoning. They
wealth and honours in order to obtain roll around their affrighted eyes on
them, adjusted with skill and care the attending friends, and, if accomplices in
-strains of his venal muse to the popular debauchery, it sharpens their anguish to
taste, and sang that
consider this further aggravation of their
guilt, That they have not sinned alone,
“A God all mercy is a God unjust.”
but drawn others into the snare. If
Few books in the last century were more religious acquaintance, it strikes a fresh
popular with serious persons than the gash into their hearts, to think of never
�THE^LLEGED CONSOL A ELONS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 39
seeing them any more, but only at an
unapproachable distance, separated by
the unpassable gulph.”1
Will any one presume to say that, for
one death-bed which has been smoothed
by religion, a thousand have not been
turned into beds of torture by such
teaching as this ?
But we must go back to the palmy
days of Calvinism, to Scotland in the
seventeenth century, to realise fully the
revolting devil-worship which once passed
under the name of Christianity, and, what
is more, really was Christianity, gospel
truth, supported by texts, at every point
taken from Scripture. No class of litera
ture lies buried deeper in oblivion than
old-fashioned theological literature. Its
brilliant but transitory life is followed by
a perennial death, from which there is
no resurrection. Dead divinity is the
deadest thing that ever lived. Only now
and then a literary historian recalls one
of these vanished spectres; the mass of
believers are content to ignore their
spiritual ancestry. Take the case of the
Rev. Thomas Boston, a minister of the
Church of Scotland, who lived in the
latter end of the seventeenth and begin
ning of the eighteenth century. Boston
was one of the most shining lights of
the Scottish Church, and his most famous
book, Human Nature in its Fourfold
State, was for a long period almost placed
on a level with Holy Scripture. It is
certainly a very wonderful book, written
with great power, and eloquence of a
kind which might well impose upon
readers who accepted the writer’s pre
mises. It seems written in a white heat
of sustained passion, in which the devil
worshipper (for Boston is nothing else),
persuaded that he had conciliated his
devil for his own purposes, deals dam
nation on all poor wretches not so
favoured, with an exultant and fiery joy
which is really astounding to witness.
The man would have delighted, one
would say, to be a stoker in the infernal
regions. Out of a volume of five hundred
* Meditations among the Tombs, vol. i., p. 94.
pages I select a page or two which are
nothing but average specimens of a tone
of thought which I apprehend would be
generally repudiated by theologians now
adays ; so far have we declined from
Christian verity1:—
“ Consider what a God he is with
whom thou hast to do, and whose wrath
thou art liable unto. He is the God of
infinite knowledge and wisdom; so that
none of thy sins, however secret, can be
hid from him. He infallibly finds out
all means whereby wrath maybe executed
towards the satisfying of justice. He is
of infinite power, and so can do what he
will against the sinner. How heavy
must the strokes of wrath be which are
laid on by an omnipotent hand ! Infinite
power can make the sinner prisoner, even
when he is in his greatest rage against
Heaven. It can bring again the several
parcels of dust out of the grave, put them
together again, re-unite the soul and
body, summon them before the tribunal,
hurry them away to the pit, and hold
them up with the one hand, through
eternity, while they are lashed with the
other. He is infinitely just, and there
fore must punish; it were acting contrary
to his nature to suffer the sinner to escape
wrath. Hence the execution of his wrath
is pleasing to him; for though the Lord
hath no delight in the death of a sinner,
as it is the destruction of his own
creature, yet he delights in it, as it is the
execution of justice. ‘ Upon the wicked
he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone,
and an horrible tempest.’ Mark the
reason : ‘ For the righteous Lord loveth
righteousness’ (Ps. xi. 6, 7); ‘I will
cause my fury to rest upon them, and I
will be comforted’ (Ezek. v. 13); ‘I
also will laugh at your calamity ’ (Prov.
i. 26). Finally, he lives for ever, to
pursue the quarrel. Let us therefore
conclude, ‘ It is a fearful thing to fall
into the hands of the living God.’ ”2
1 Boston’s book first appeared in 1720. It has
been republished by the Religious Tract Society.
2 T. Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold
State. The Misery of Man's Natural State.
Motive 4.
�40
TIIE SERVICE OF MAN
Again, in another place of the same which makes them, like Pashur (Jen
chapter, Boston says : “ There is wrath xx. 4), ‘a terror to themselves.’ God
upon his soul. He can have no com takes the filthy garments of their sins,
munion with God ; he is ‘foolish, and which they were wont to sleep in securely,
overlays them with brimstone, and sets
shall not stand in God’s sight ’ (Ps. v. 5).
them on fire about their ears, so they
....... There is war between Heaven and
them (natural men), and so all commerce have a hell within them.”
It may be doubted if, among all the
is cut off........ God casts a portion of
worldly goods to them, more or less as a aberrations of the human mind, anything
bone is thrown to a dog; but, alas, his so horrible as this was ever attained
wrath against them appears, in that they elsewhere; and this was the creed of
the poor Scots for more than two hundred
get no grace........ They lie open to fearful
additional plague on their souls, even in years. In reading the works of such a
man as Boston, one is tempted to admit
this life. Sometimes they meet with
one of his favourite dogmas, that the
deadening strokes, silent blows from the
heart of man is deceitful above all things
hand of an angry god; arrows of wrath,
and desperately wicked. He evidently
that enter into their souls without noise.
‘ Make the heart of this people fat, and gloats and revels in the ideas of wrath,
make their ears heavy, and shut their brimstone, fiery strokes, stunning blows,
eyes, lest they see with their eyes ’ (Isa. and all the apparatus of his infernal
torture-chamber. There is a sort of
vi. 10). God strives with them for a
while, and convictions enter their con concupiscence of lust in his passion for
cruelty; it tickles his prurient appetite,
sciences ; but they rebel against the
light; and, by a secret judgment, they and reaches to a depravity almost insane.
receive a blow on the head; so that If he stood alone, the case would be
from that time they do, as it were, live merely one of pathology; but he was a
and rot above ground. Their hearts are representative man, and spoke in the
deadened, their affections withered, their names of millions in this country and
consciences stupefied, and their whole abroad. The power of the human mind
souls blasted ; ‘ cast forth as a branch to throw up and nourish poisonous
and withered ’ (John xv. 6). They are growths of this kind is a very sad and
plagued with judicial blindness. They regrettable one. It has stained with
shut their eyes against the light; and blood many pages of history, and is not,
they are given over to the devil, the one is sorry to say, an abomination con
god of this world, to be blinded more fined to Christians. The inhuman fana
(2 Cor. iv. 4). Yea, ‘ God sends them tics of the French Revolution—-Marat,
strong delusions, that they should believe Hebert, Fouquier-Tinville, and Robes
a lie ’ (2 Thess. ii. 11). Even conscience, pierre—are inferior specimens of the same
like a false light on the shore, leads breed. But their lust of cruelty, hideous
them upon rocks, by which they are as it was, had not the infinite scope and
broken in pieces. They harden them- ■ transcendental character of Boston’s ;
selves against God, and he leaves them I yet the Reign of Terror in France, which
to Satan and their own hearts, whereby ‘ lasted but a few months, is still pointed
they are hardened more and more.
to by Christians as a supreme instance
They are often ‘ given up unto vile affec of the wickedness into which unbelievers
tions ’ (Rom. i. 26)........ Sometimes they
inevitably fall. The reign of terror in
meet with sharp fiery strokes, whereby Scotland, which lasted two centuries, is
their souls become like Mount Sinai, quietly dropped out of memory, or
where nothing is seen but fire and smoke, certainly is never consigned to the ever
nothing heard but the thunder of God’s lasting infamy which is supposed to have
wrath, and the voice of the trumpet of a overtaken the atheists. On the whole
broken law, waxing louder and louder,
this is an advantage, and the less we deal
�THE ALLEGED CONSOLA LIONS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 41
in retrospective anathema the better;
but then all parties should benefit by
the amnesty. Even Carlyle, who ever
remained a sort of distorted Calvinist,
could see that nothing was gained by
“shrieking” over the horrors of the
French Revolution ; and agnostics would
do well to abstain from hard words about
Calvinists. Determinists and evolution
ists must hold that all phenomena of
the human mind, whether welcome or
otherwise, had a very good reason, for
their existence, in that they were caused
like any other phenomena. Calvinistic
or Terrorist principles cannot be too
forcibly condemned, discouraged, or
counteracted. Like frightful forms of
disease, they show what terrible evils
human nature is exposed to. But we
do not properly blame disease, if we are
wise; we strive to combat it and prevent
its recurring again. The poor victims
of disease, whether mental or physical,
rather deserve our pity than our scorn.
They contracted it because they were
exposed to its noxious germs. The
antecedent evolution of Scotland and
France had produced the moral miasma
and the minds ready to receive it, which
led to the breaking out of those two
dreadful pestilences, Scotch Calvinism
and French Terrorism. While they pre
vailed in their greatest virulence, the
minds of men were deformed and made
hideous, as their bodies might be by
small-pox or elephantiasis.
In this slight retrospect over the darker
side of theology, I should misrepresent
my meaning if I seemed to blame the
men who held opinions, according to
my view, very pernicious. Our war
should not be with men, but with dogmas,
principles. The dogmas, under the con
ditions, were inevitable, just as the Plague
of London, under the then conditions of
over-crowding and neglect of cleanliness,
was inevitable. But we cannot blame
the men who suffered from the Plague;
we cannot even blame their ignorance of
the laws of health, because they could
not then have known better. We now
do know better, and we keep down the
Plague. In the same way, Calvinism
was a creed held by men who could not
know better. The antecedent history
of Scottish thought had led to a super
stitious adoration of a fragment of old
oriental literature, the Bible, which was
supposed to contain the authentic will
and testament of the Creator of the
universe. This supposed divine word
had been, so it was thought, somewhat
kept in the background and slighted by
the powerful Catholic Church, which
had reigned supreme for centuries, and
pressed on men’s minds with no light
yoke. Every word of this old oriental
book, very interesting and valuable in
its way, as a specimen and picture of
primitive culture, was imagined to be
in the handwriting of the Most High.
Every bloody deed recorded, every
fantastic and horrible thought enun
ciated, such as must appear in such a
document or collection of documents
compiled in such an age, was regarded
as approved and authenticated by
Almighty Wisdom. When these and
similar facts are considered, it does not
seem inexplicable that the Scotch and
other Calvinists thought and acted as
they did. They came to horrible results
and conclusions, but these were logical
conclusions from the premises. Similarly
Rousseau and Robespierre were the most
logical of men. The fault lies in the
premises—in the one case, that the Bible
is the wTord of God; in the other, that
the Contrat Social is the utterance of
pure reason.
�42
THE SERVICE OF MAN
Chapter V.
ON CHRISTIANITY AS A GUIDE TO CONDUCT
The next point to be considered is
whether the Christian religion is really
so strong and efficient a support of
morality as it is common to suppose.
An affirmative answer is generally taken
for granted, as if the case were too
obvious to admit of doubt or even of
argument. The purity and elevation of
the ethics of the gospel are indeed often
asserted to be a sufficient proof of its
divine origin. Those theologians who
wince somewhat under the scientific
argument against miracles recover all
their self-possession when they dwell on
the ethical side of their creed. If the
casting out of devils from demoniacs is
admitted to present difficulties, on the
ground that it was and still is a common
Eastern superstition to regard lunatics as
possessed by evil spirits, a superstition
which the evangelists shared with their
countrymen and contemporaries, it is
maintained that the Sermon on the
Mount is its own evidence of divine
inspiration.
“ Never man spake like
this man.” The spiritual depth and
sublimity of Christ’s teaching must, it is
argued, be superhuman, from the fact
that to this day it has never been sur
passed or approached, and never will be
in the most remote future. It is agreed
that all the great changes and improve
ments that have been made in public
and private morals, between pagan and
modern times, must be set down to the
vivifying effects of Christianity, which
has raised women, struck the fetters from
the limbs of the slave, moralised war,
conquest, and commerce—in short, done
every good thing that has been done in
the last sixteen or eighteen centuries.
This is that moral evidence for Chris
tianity which is far more convincing
than the evidence derived from works
of power. Not that the latter is to be
slighted or ignored; but one speaks to
the heart, and must abide valid and
persuasive through all time; the other
addresses the head, and perhaps may
not always be equally cogent.
Now, it will not be necessary for the
purpose of this inquiry to dispute the
claims thus advanced. Many of them
indeed are obviously without foundation,
as the raising of the status of women
and the liberation of the slave. But,
for the sake of argument, and to avoid
complicated side issues, let them be
granted; and even then we maintain
that it can be proved that Christianity is
not favourable to morality in the way
and degree commonly supposed. And
by morality is meant right conduct here
on earth ; those outward acts and inward
sentiments which, by the suppression of
the selfish passions, conduce most to
the public and private well-being of the
race.
Paley, with that clear, but at times
somewhat cynical, common sense which
marked his acute intellect, is willing to
admit that “ the teaching of morality
was not the primary design ” of the
gospel. “ If I were to describe,” he
goes on to say, “ in a very few words,
the scope of Christianity as a revelation,
I should say that it was to influence
the conduct of human life, by establish
ing the proof of a future state of reward
and punishment—‘ to bring life and
immortality to light.’ The direct object,
therefore, of the design is to supply
motives, and not rules ; sanctions, and
not precepts. And these were what
mankind stood most in need of. The
members of civilised society can, in all
ordinary cases, judge tolerably well how
they ought to act; but without a future
state, or, which is the same thing,
without credited evidence of that state,
�ON CHRISTIANITY AS A GUIDE TO CONDUCT
■43
they want a motive to their duty; they which conduces, to happiness, either in
want, at least, strength of motive, suffi ourselves or others, here, is evidently a
cient to bear up against the force of trivial matter compared to the conduct
passion and the temptation of present which conduces to happiness hereafter.
advantage. Their rules want authority. An eternal future must, in minds capable
The most important service that can be of even remotely realising such an idea,
rendered to human life, and that, con overwhelm and crush into insignificance
sequently, which one might expect a minute, temporal present. Even a
beforehand would be the great end and long temporal future suffices to do this.
office of a revelation from God, is to The inconveniences, for instance, of a
convey to the world authorised assurances sea-voyage which is going to land us in
of the reality of a future existence. And an abiding home in the Colonies or
although doing this, or by the ministry India are borne with comparative
of the same person by whom this is equanimity or indifference, on the
done, moral precepts or examples, or ground that they will soon be over,
illustrations of moral precepts, may that it does not very much matter, as
be occasionally given, and be highly the real object is not to live happily at
valuable, yet still they do not form the sea, but to prepare for happiness and
original purpose of the mission.”1 In prosperity in the distant land for which
other words, the purpose of the mission we are bound. A colonist does not
was to make men fit for a future state of prepare the outfit of a seaman, does not
reward, and to supply sanctions which look upon the ship which carries him as
would deter them from conduct which his permanent dwelling-place. He no
would make them fit for a future state of doubt secures what comfort he can at
punishment. Salvation in the next sea ; but, if he is a wise man, his medi
world is the object of the scheme, not tations are directed to his future life on
morality in this; and, although the two land beyond the ocean. It would be
objects may occasionally coincide, it is very questionable prudence in him to
only a casual coincidence. Such dif learn seamanship or navigation, to study
ference of ends must lead to a difference charts, and make himself master of the
of means. The road which is intended position of shoals and rocks. He would
to lead to happiness in heaven must say that such matters concerned persons
diverge from the road which is intended who intended to pass their working lives
to lead to happiness limited to this on the sea, whereas he had wholly
earth. And if anybody says that he different objects in view; the soil, the
does not see the necessity of such climate, and the crops proper to the
divergence, that happiness in heaven country he intended to inhabit were the
may well be only a prolongation of things that concerned him. The parallel
happiness on earth, he may be asked only fails in the inadequacy of . the
to reflect on the inevitable dwarfing and analogy between the longest life in a
subordination of this life, a transitory colony and eternal life in heaven. If
space of a few years, to a prospect of life is only a short voyage, destined to
eternal life in heaven. Clearly, if this terminate in paradise or hell, what
life is only a short, probationary trial thoughtful person could care how he
scene, preparatory to entrance upon passed it? If, moreover, he were told
eternity; if, moreover, conduct here is on good authority, or such as he con
supposed to influence or decide our sidered transcendently good, as. being
status there, happiness in this life is not divine, that happiness during this life’s
a thing to be considered by prudent and voyage was more than likely to risk
thoughtful persons; and the conduct eternal happiness -hereafter, his in
difference to happiness here would
probably become enmity to it.
He
1 Evidences of Christianity, Part II., cap 2.
�44
THE SERVICE OF MAN
would lend but a careless ear to those utterances of representative Christian
doctors.
who urged him to study the conditions
It is admitted by all Christians that
and follow the conduct, often painful
and irksome, which conduced most to man is saved only through the merits
earthly happiness. He would say, as and passion of Christ. But difficulties
good Christians have always said: “That arise concerning the true doctrine of jus
is not the one thing needful. What do tification. The Protestants, speaking
I care for happiness in this vale of tears ? generally, hold that a man is justified by
My thoughts are naturally engrossed faith alone. The Catholics hold that co
with the means of securing eternal operation with grace is needed on the
happiness in the world which is to part of man to ensure salvation. It will
come.” And the reply would be dictated not be necessary to enter the labyrinth
by prudence and common sense. How of subtle disputations which have sur
it happens that, as a matter of fact, so rounded this question from the days of
few persons, who yet believe, or say they the Reformation. To the impartial
do, in the future state of reward and spectator itwouldappear that the Catholic
punishment referred to by Paley, by the view is the more rational, and the Pro
admission of all preachers, take this testant the more scriptural. But this
serious view of their position and duties, domestic quarrel among theologians does
is a matter of interesting inquiry, but not concern us at this moment, inasmuch
one which does not concern us at this as all Christian doctors agree that true
moment.
repentance and turning to God, however
If these arguments are sound, and I these may be brought about, are rewarded
scarcely apprehend that they will be by salvation. Past sins, nay, a whole
disputed, it follows that on a priori life of sin, if repented of before death,
grounds we should be justified in con are a far less obstacle to entrance into
cluding that morality would be waived paradise than the most exemplary and
as an end, in comparison with salvation, virtuous life, if unaccompanied by true
among the most devout Christians. faith in Christ. And this, surely, is to
And this is what we find does happen.
discountenance morality in the most
It happens also in all Churches and sects, direct way, making it the “ filthy rags ”
showing that it is not an accidental but of which the Calvinists have so much to
an essential characteristic of the Christian say. That this is the genuine doctrine
scheme. But this is a very inadequate of all Christians I proceed to show by a
statement of the case as it really stands. few quotations. The Established Church
It is not going too far to say that the may well come first with the eighteenth
doctrine of all Christians in the final article of her creed. “ They also are to
result is antinomian and positively im be had accursed that presume to say,
moral. They do not only not support and That every man shall be saved by the
strengthen morality as they claim to do ; Law or Sect which he professeth, so that
they deliberately reject and scorn it.
he be diligent to frame his life according
They place on a level the most virtuous to that Law, and the light of Nature.
and the most flagitious conduct, carried For holy Scripture doth set out unto us
on throughout a long lifetime; and this only the Name of Jesus Christ, whereby
certainly must be held to be putting as men must be saved.”
great an affront on morality as it is pos
True faith and repentance at the last
sible to inflict.
moment, even in articulo mortis, are suf
As these assertions may be regarded as ficient to blot out a life of sin. “ There
savouring of paradox, I proceed not to never was a doubt in the Church,” says
give more or less plausible reasons for
Dr. Pusey, “ that all who die in a state of
accepting them as true, but to prove grace, although one minute before they
them, and that by the most authoritative
were not in a state of grace, are saved.
�ON CHRISTIANITY AS A GUIDE TO CONDUCT
....... We know not what God may do in
one agony of loving penitence for one
who accepts His last grace in that almost
sacrament of death.”1 Thus penitence
is everything and morality nothing.
Years of sin which may, which are sure
to have caused widespread moral evils,
to have been a source of corruption and
leading astray to the weak and ignorant,
are all obliterated by one moment of
loving penitence ; that is, they are oblite
rated as regards their effects on the
sinner’s status in the next world. He is
washed in the blood of the Lamb, and
goes to glory. But the partners and
companions of his sins, whom he pro
bably seduced, the women he ruined, the
youths his example depraved, they sur
vive and will be punished, unless, indeed,
they follow his example to the letter, and
close a life of wickedness by an act of
timely repentance ; and in that case, like
him, they will be as well off as if they
had led the most virtuous of lives. Can
any one presume to say that such doc
trine encourages morality ? What could
discourage it more ?
The article just quoted, and the words
of Dr. Pusey, may be allowed to stand
warrant for the English Church in this
particular. Now let us turn to the
Catholic Church. And we will take as
her representative an illustrious Saint
and Doctor, whose works have received
the approbation of his superiors, St.
Alphonso de’ Liguori. In the first
chapter of a book called The Glories of
Mary, it is written: “We read in the
life of Sister Catherine, of St. Augustine,
that in the place where she resided there
was a woman of the name of Mary, who
in her youth was a sinner, and in her old
age continued so obstinate in wickedness
that she was driven out of the city, and
reduced to live in a secluded cave ; there
she died, half consumed by disease, and
without the sacraments, and was conse
quently interred in a field like a beast.
Sister Catherine, who always recom
1 What is of Faith as to Everlasting Punish
ment, p. 115.
45
mended the souls of those who departed
from this world, with great fervour, to
God, on hearing the unfortunate end of
this poor old woman, never thought of
praying for her, and she looked upon
her, as did every one else, as irrevocably
lost. One day, four years afterwards, a
suffering soul appeared to her, and
exclaimed, ‘ How unfortunate is my lot,
Sister Catherine ! Thou recommendest
the souls of all those that die to God ;
on my soul alone thou hast not com
passion?’ ‘And who art thou?’ asked
the servant of God. ‘ I am,’ she replied,
‘ that poor Mary who died in the cave.’
‘And art thou saved?’ said Catherine.
‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘by the mercy of
the Blessed Virgin Mary.’ ‘And how?’
‘ When I saw myself at the point of
death, loaded with sins, and abandoned
by all, I had recourse to the Mother of
God, saying, “Lady, thou art the refuge
of abandoned creatures : behold me at
this moment, abandoned by all; thou
art my only hope; thou alone canst help
me; have pity on me.” The Blessed
Virgin obtained me the grace to make
an act of contrition. I died, and am
saved ; and, besides this, she, my Queen,
obtained that my purgatory should be
shortened, by enduring, in intensity, that
which otherwise would have lasted for
many years. I now only want a few masses
to be entirely delivered; I beg thee to
get them said, and on my part I promise
always to pray for thee to God and
to Mary.’ Sister Catherine immediately
had the masses said; and after a few days
that soul again appeared to her, shining
like the sun, and said, ‘ I thank thee,
Catherine : behold, I go to Paradise, to
sing the mercies of my God, and to pray
for thee.’ ”z
Nothing can be more plain. A life
from youth to old age continued in
“obstinate wickedness” is cancelled by
an act of contrition, and, after a short
1 The Glories of Mary, translated from the
Italian of St. Alphonso de’ Liguori, founder of
the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer.
By a Father of the same congregation. Page 19.
(London, 1852.) .
�46
THE SERVICE OF MAN
purgatorial purification, the sinner appears
“ shining like the sun.” Could a life of
blameless self-denial and virtue have led
to a better result ? The book I quote is
full of such stories. Here is another :—
“ Belluacensis relates that in an
English city, about the year 1430, there
was a young nobleman, called Ernest,
who, having distributed the whole of his
patrimony to the poor, became a monk,
and in the monastery to which he retired
led so perfect a life'khat he was highly
esteemed by his superiors, and this
esteem was greatly increased by their
knowledge of his tender devotion to the
most Blessed Virgin. It happened that
the city was attacked by the plague, and
the inhabitants had recourse to the
monastery, in order that the religious
might help them by their prayers. The
abbot commanded Ernest to go and pray
before the altar of Mary, forbidding him
to leave it until he should have received
an answer from our Blessed Lady. The
young man, after remaining three days
in prayer, received an answer from Mary
to the effect that certain prayers were to
be said: this was done, and the plague
ceased. After a time Ernest cooled in
his devotion towards Mary: the devil
attacked him with many temptations,
and particularly with those against purity,
and also to leave his monastery. From
not having recommended himself to
Mary, he unfortunately yielded to the
temptation, and resolved to escape by
climbing over a wall. Passing before
an image of Mary which was in the
corridor, the Mother of God addressed
him, saying, ‘ My son, why dost thou
leave me?’ Ernest, thunderstruck and
repentant, sunk to the ground, and
replied, ‘But, Lady, dost thou not see
that I can no longer resist; why dost
thou not assist me?’ ‘And why hast
thou not invoked me?’ said our Blessed
Lady.
‘ If thou hadst recommended
thyself to me, thou wouldst not have
fallen so low; but from henceforth do so
and fear nothing.’ Ernest returned to his
cell, his temptations recommenced, again
he neglected to recommend himself to
Mary, and at last fled from his monastery.
He then gave himself up to a most
wicked life, fell from one sin into another,
and at length became an assassin; for,
having hired an inn, during the night he
used to murder the poor travellers who
slept there. Among others, he one night
killed the cousin of the governor of the
place. For this crime he was tried and
sentenced to death. It so happened
that before he was made a prisoner, and
while evidence was being collected, a
young nobleman arrived at the inn.
The wicked Ernest, as usual, determined
to murder him, and entered the room at
night for this purpose; but lo! instead
of finding the young man, he beheld a
crucifix on the bed, all covered with
wounds. The image cast a look of
compassion on him, and exclaimed,
‘ Ungrateful wretch! is it not enough
that I have died once for thee? Wilt
thou again take my life ? Be it so.
Raise thy hand, strike!’ Filled with
confusion, poor Ernest began to weep,
and, sobbing, said, ‘ Behold me, Lord;
since thou showest me such mercy, I
will return to thee.’ Immediately he left
the inn, to return to his monastery, there
to do penance for his crimes; but on
the road he was taken by the ministers
of justice, was led before the judge, and
acknowledged all the murders he had
committed. He was sentenced to be
hung, without having the time given him
to go to confession. He recommended
himself to Mary, and was thrown from
the ladder; but the Blessed Virgin pre
served his life, and she herself loosened
the rope, and then addressed him, saying,
‘ Go, return to thy monastery, do penance,
and when thou seest a paper in my hands,
announcing the pardon of thy sins, pre
pare for death.’ Ernest returned, related
all to his abbot, and did great penance.
After many years, he saw the paper in
the hands of Mary, which announced
his pardon; he immediately prepared
for death, and in a most holy manner
breathed forth his soul.”1
1 The Glories of Mary, p. 48.
�ON CHRISTIANITY AS A GUIDE TO CONDUCT
It is quite clear that an ardent zeal
to save souls is compatible with great
indifference as to bodies. One would
like to know what became of the poor
travellers whom the ruffian Ernest
murdered in their sleep. Was time
granted them to make an act of con
trition ? But it is absurd to take such a
narrative au serieux. What is serious is
the unmistakeable character of the teach
ing implied. And can anything be
imagined more cynically immoral ? Here
is a man represented as falling into the
most abominable anti-social crime which
it is possible to commit. The wretch
deserved a hundred deaths for his
dastardly midnight murders; conduct
more injurious than his to society simply
cannot be conceived. Yet he is not
only saved from the gallows by the
Mother of God herself, but his life is
prolonged in order that he may have
time to repent and to get his precious
soul taken to heaven — a place which,
by the way, if it contain many such
characters as he, would offer very un
pleasant company to moral men.
And let no one reject with impatience
the above specimens of Christian teach
ing on the ground that they are not
Christian at all, but abject popish
superstitions and inventions. Our next
witness to prove that in this matter all
Christians agree in vilipending a moral
life and conduct, and placing it below a
life of crime, provided the latter be
terminated by an act of repentance and
turning to God in time to cheat the
devil, shall be the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon,
who will not be suspected of any leaning
to Romish error. This is what he says :
“Regeneration is an instantaneous
work, and justification an instantaneous
gift. Man fell in a moment....... Shall
the devil destroy us in a moment, and
Jesus be unable to save us in a moment?”1
Again: “ My dear hearer, whoever thou
mayest be, whatever thy past life may
have been, if thou wilt trust Christ, thou
47
shalt be saved from all thy sin in a
moment; the whole of thy past life shall
be blotted out; there shall not remain
in God’s book so much as a single charge
against thy soul, for Christ, who died for
thee, shall take thy guilt away, and leave
thee without a blot before the face of
God.” Again : “ Ah ! my friend, let me
assure you....... that there is hope for the
vilest through the precious blood of
Jesus. No man can have gone too far
for the long arm of Christ to reach him.
Christ delights to save the biggest
sinners....... O ye despairing sinners,
there is no room for despair this side
the gates of hell.
If you have gone
through the foulest kennels of iniquity,
no stain can stand out against the power
of the cleansing blood....... You great
sinners shall have r.o back seats in
heaven! There shall be no outer
court for you. You great sinners
shall have as much love as the best, as
much joy as the brightest of saints.
You shall be near to Christ; you shall
sit with him upon his throne; you shall
wear the crown; your fingers shall touch
the golden harps; you shall rejoice with
the joy which is unspeakable and full of
glory....... Thirty years of sin shall be
forgiven, and it shall not take thirty
minutes to do it in. Fifty, sixty, seventy
years of iniquity shall all disappear as
the morning’s hoar - frost disappears
before the sun.”1
Two things are to be remarked in
connection with these quotations : First,
that we have here a singular agreement
on one particular point, among divines
who usually are in complete antagonism.
Dr. Pusey, St. Alfonso de’ Liguori, and
Mr. Spurgeon may be regarded as repre
sentatives of opinions as widely divergent
as could well be found among men
calling themselves Christians. Yet they
agree in the opinion that no amount or
duration of sin can be accounted as a
bar to salvation, provided a suitable act
of repentance or contrition has been
1 “ A Sermon to Open Negiectersand Nominal
1Jesus at Bethesda: a sermon delivered by
I Followers of Religion;” March 24th, 1867.
C. H. Spurgeon, April 7th, 1867.
�48
THE SERVICE OF MAN
performed on “ this side of the gates of
hell.” They differ at once if you ask
for details as to how the act of contrition
or repentance is to be carried out. Mr.
Spurgeon bids the sinner turn to Jesus.
St. Alfonso tells him to have recourse to
the Mother of God ; the mere words of
which precept the great Baptist minister
would probably regard as savouring of
blasphemy. But the result is the same. A
long life devoted to sin can be blotted
out in a moment by a change in the
sinner’s mind. Secondly, this result has
exclusive reference to the next world. By
the hypothesis in each case, the life in
this world is supposed to be as good as
over ; and it has been a life of iniquity,
says Mr. Spurgeon; of obstinacy in
wickedness, says St. Alfonso. But para
dise is attained, nevertheless. Now, can
this doctrine be regarded as one leading
to morality in this world? Must it not,
rather, have a directly opposite effect ?
As many as believe it—and how many
millionshave ?—are invited,nay entreated,
to believe also that it makes absolutely
no difference as to their future welfare
whether they lead virtuous lives here
below or the most profligate, provided
they repent a moment before death.
Preachers may insist as they will on the
dangers of deferring repentance to the
last, on the awful results which will follow
if the sinner is suddenly cut off, without
having had time to make his peace with
God. One part of their teaching destroys
the effect of the other part. They admit,
they proclaim that repentance, however
late, will take the sinner to heaven.
Human nature being as it is, we cannot
wonder that the result in this world is
varied, and on the whole very unsatisfac
tory. The minute minority of naturally
pious and tender minds embrace the
cross with passion and ardent love, not
unmixed with holy fear; they realise
fully that they stand in jeopardy every
hour; they work out their salvation in
fear and trembling, and not unfrequently
are exposed to a strain too severe for
their faculties, and they become, like
Pascal, morbidly anxious about their
future state, or, like Cowper, they pass
the limits of sanity, and fall for a longer
or shorter time into utter despair. But
these are the small minority of times
d'elite. The bulk of mankind are com
monplace all round, in their virtues and
vices equally ; and they languidly believe
and languidly practise their belief; but
so imperfectly and perfunctorily that it
is the universal complaint and lamenta
tion of preachers of all denominations
that the world lieth in wickedness and is
dead in its sins. Nothing could be more
frank and candid than Mr. Spurgeon’s
language to his congregation on this
head : “ You sin, and yet you come to a
place of worship, and tremble under the
word ; you transgress, and you weep and
transgress again....... You are as religious
as the seats you sit upon, but no more;
and you are as likely to get to heaven as
those seats are, but not one whit more,
for you are dead in sin, and death cannot
enter heaven.”1 Bourdaloue, the greatest
preacher in the classic age of French
pulpit eloquence, said : “ Nous sommes
Chretiens, et nous vivons en pai'ens ;
nous avons une foi de speculation, et
dans la pratique toute notre conduite
n’est qu’infidelite. Nous croyons d’une
fagon, et nous agissons de l’autre.......
Avoir la foi, et vivre en infideles, voila
ce qui fait le prodige....... Ah! Chretiens,
faisons cesser ce prodige, accordons nous
avec nous-memes ; accordons nos mceurs
avec notre foi; autrement que n’avonsnous pas a craindre de cette foi profanee,
de cette foi scandalisee, de cette foi
deshonoree ?”2
Again, he says: “ N’entend on pas
dire sans cesse que tout est renverse dans
le .monde, que le dereglement y est
general; qu’il n’y a ni age, ni sexe, ni
etat, qui en soit exempt; qu’on ne trouve
presque nulle part ni religion, ni crainte
de Dieu, ni probite, ni droiture, ni bonne
foi, ni justice, ni charite, ni honnetete,
ni pudeur; que ce n’est partout, ou
presque partout, que libertinage, que
1 “ A Sermon to Open Neglecters,’’etc.
2 “ Sermon sur la Religion Chretienne.”
�ON CHRISTIANITY AS A GUIDE TO CONDUCT
49
dissolution, que mensonges, que tromperies, qu’envie de s’aggran dir et de
dominer, qu’avarice, qu’usure, que concus
sions, que medisances, qu’un monstrueux
assemblage de toutes les iniquites.”1
“ The title of Christian,” says Wilber
force, “ implies no more than a sort of
formal general assent to Christianity in
the gross, and a degree of morality in
practice, little, if at all, superior to that
for which we look in a good Deist,
Mussulman, or Hindoo.”2
It seems difficult to reconcile these
candid admissions by eminent authori
ties with the current claim made for
Christianity as a supremely moralising
influence. But we can hardly be wrong
in tracing the general failure of preachers
to arouse their flocks to the fact, already
dwelt on, that they undo with one hand
what they do with the other; that,
anxious above all things to save souls in
the next world, and making that infinitely
the most important object, they one and
all present the doctrine of Justification,
though varying much from one another
in minor points, in a form which neces
sarily depreciates the value of morality
in this world. With one voice they tell
men that all they do is evil and wicked,
and that there is no health in them.
They dwell with exaggerated language on
the sinfulness of sin and the extent and
vileness of human corruption. But,
except in a few special cases of unusually
sensitive natures, they do not awaken the
prick of conscience; men feeling in a
dumb, inarticulate way, that their tone is
unreal and conventional, or even merely
professional. Even when they do alarm
the conscience they as promptly send it
to sleep again by their doctrine that a
moment’s repentance can put everything
straight, and that one plunge in the blood
of the Lamb will remove all the guilty
stains from a sinner’s soul. Mr. Spurgeon,
in the sermon from which I have already
quoted some passages, avows th's very
openly. “ It is the easiest thing,” he
says, “ in the world to impress some of
you by a sermon, but I fear me you never
will go beyond transient impressions.
Like the water when lashed, the wound
soon heals. You know, and you know,
and you know, and you feel, and feel, and
feel again, and yet your sins, your selfrighteousness, your carelessness and
wilful wickedness, cause you, after having
said, ‘ I go, sir,’ to forget the promise
and lie unto God.” But the eloquent
preacher had apparently forgotten what
he had himself said on the previous page,
or at least he had not sufficiently weighed
the natural effect of his words. “ Thirty
years of sin shall be forgiven, and it shall
not take thirty minutes to do it in.” It
is no wonder if men and women, with
hearts and minds made dull and heavy
with toil and trouble, should remember
more easily and pleasantly the consola
tion conveyed in the last remark than the
objurgation of the previous one; and
should dwell more on the efficacy of
repentance when once set about than on
its immediate need and urgency. Con
sequently, we find that it is the most
scrupulous and tender consciences which
have most difficulty in embracing the
great Protestant dogma of justification by
faith alone. “The essence of Luther’s
gospel is this : that a person so affected,
that is, with scruples of conscience, has
only one great struggle to go through in
order that he may attain the indefectible
promise of eternal salvation, and that
the struggle is not against those sins,
but against his own conscience, which
would fain impede his full assurance
of immediate pardon.”1 The records of
execution show, on the other hand, that
malefactors of the deepest dye have
often little or no difficulty in turning to
Jesus when circumstances compel it.
This is acknowledged by the Christian
Observer2: “Thousands of deeply peni
tent and humble-minded persons have
lived many years, and perhaps died, in
a state of deep depression, because they
1 Opuscules: Petit Nombrc des Plus.
2 Practical View, cap. iv.
1 Ward, Ideal of a Christian Church, second
edition, p. I712 January, 1884, p. 16.
E
�5°
TIIE SERVICE OF MAN
could not attain to that confident assur of the Jewish nation which made them
ance that their sins were, pardoned at last insupportable to the Roman
which they were told was essential to world. Yet, was he punished or made
salvation; while murderers have gone to do penance, to make amends to the
to the gibbet, exulting in strains of society he had injured ? The human
rapture, as though they were being law did indeed give him his deserts by
carried to the stake as faithful martyrs hanging him as a thief and probably
a murderer, and so far morality was
of Jesus Christ.”
But the most momentous authority avenged. A powerful deterrent was
for holding a life of wickedness on earth applied, not unlikely to prevent others
immaterial, and no impediment to the from doing otherwise. But Christ undid
promptest ascent into heaven, provided all the effect of that salutary severity in
an act of contrition has been performed a moment when he promised him imme
in time, has yet to be cited. It is that diate salvation, and for what ? For
of Christ himself as he hung upon the deferential speech to himself, which the
cross. “And one of the malefactors hypothesis that Christ saw to the bottom
which were hanged railed on him, saying, of his heart will not allow us to regard
If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. as a piece of artful time-serving, suggested
But the other answering rebuked him, as politic in his desperate circumstances;
saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing but which, without that hypothesis, would
thou art in the same condemnation ? undoubtedly be open to such a suspicion.
And we indeed justly; for we receive Thus preachers have the very highest
the due reward of our deeds: but this authority for asserting that turning to
man hath done nothing amiss. And he God, even at the last moment, wijj save
said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me a soul in the next world, the admitted
when thou comest into thy kingdom. object of Christianity; and agnostics
And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say have equally a right to declare that
unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with me ; Christianity thereby shows itself hostile
to morality in this world. The penitent
in paradise.”1
This is almost exactly parallel with thief’s life, we may assume, was a per
the case cited by St. Alphonso of the nicious one as far as this world was
woman “ who was a sinner.” Though concerned. What good could his repen
it is not mentioned in the gospel, we tance do to any denizen of this earth ?
may suppose and grant that the penitent If it be said that it might lead others to
thief made a due act of contrition; that repent after a life of crime, the answer is
Christ was able to see to the bottom of that in proportion as they resembled him
his heart, and that he truly repented they also would be qualifying for heaven,
him of his sins. Does that in the least and not for well-doing in this world.
remove the slight which Christ passed Man may injure his fellows in their most
upon morality by taking him to paradise vital interests ; he may rob, murder, “ go
in spite of his past evil life ? What did through the foulest kennels of iniquity ”;
his repentance do to cancel that ? The there shall not remain in God’s book a
evil that he had done in the world was single charge against his soul, provided
still left working behind him : his bad he looks to the bleeding Lamb. On the
example; the insecurity to person and other hand, the best of good works are
property involved in his robber’s career; of no account, are worse than “filthy
the pain and suffering he had caused in rags,” and no doubt have the nature of
any case; all his immorality, in short, sin “ unless they be consummated in
was left to work on, and contributed, no real vital communion with Christ.” It
doubt, its share to that frightful depravity would not be easy to conceive a doctrine
more injurious to morality than this
Christian scheme, on which the morality
1 Luke xxiii. 39-43.
�ON CHRISTIANITY AS A GUIDE TO CONDUCT
5i
of the world, as on the surest foundation, men may become the worst, and vice
versa, as they may be touched by grace
is supposed to rest.
Indeed, this inherent opposition or not, it is obvious that morality is a
between morality and the gospel has figment of the fancy, having no sub
been held by large sections of Christians stantial existence or foundation in the
as an article of faith. “ Luther,” says nature of things. The difference is not
Moehler, “not only taught that Christ between good and bad men, whose
had not come to impart to men a purer goodness and badness depend on their
ethical code, but even maintained that moral endowment fins the training they
he had come to abolish the moral law, to receive, but between the recipients of
liberate true believers from its curse both grace and the non-recipients ; and thesefor the past and for the future, and in are interchangeable according to the
that way to make them free. The good pleasure of God. We can never
evangelical liberty which Luther pro tell, therefore, whether the greatest
pounded announces that even the sinner now may not become the greatest
decalogue shall not be brought into saint before his end; nor whether the
account against the believer, nor its best of men may not suddenly become
violation be allowed to disturb the prodigies of wickedness. This unknown
conscience of the Christian, for he is factor of Grace vitiates all calculation.
exalted above it and its contents.” No doctrine more inconsistent with the
Moehler goes on to say that the re facts of human nature can well be con
formers refer to Christ not as the ceived, and therefore no more misleading
strengthener and sanctifier, but exclu guide of conduct could be adopted.
sively as the forgiver of sins; “they Imagine such a theory applied to agri
regarded the mediator only in his culture, and that there was no reason,
capacity of pardoner.”
The great apart from the grace of God, why the
Catholic divine is at pains to show the most fertile soil should not become
superior moral tone of his communion the most barren, or the reverse. If
in this respect. But the extracts just such were the case, what inducement
cited from St. Alphonso de’ Liguori i would a farmer have to choose good
prove that the Catholic Church has no land and cultivate it with care ? The
advantage over the Protestant on this worst land might serve him as well as.
point. The Virgin takes the place of the best, and bring him overflowing,
Christ as a free pardoner of the grossest crops; and that with no effort on his
sins, in consideration of an act of con part, for “ God giveth the increase.” He
has only to wait or pray for fertilising
trition and genuine repentance.
To the above considerations it may grace. Or apply it to the raising of
be added that the doctrine of grace is horses or cattle. The grazier or breeder
presented in a way to become a standing cannot trust to the qualities of his stock.
rebuke and depredator of morality. His thoroughbreds may suddenly become
“Humility,” says Canon Liddon, “is valueless animals, which no one would
the condition and guarantee of grace; take at a gift; while his neighbour, who
and, as St. Augustine says, there is no had nothing but screws and low-breeds,
reason, apart from the grace of God, has all at once a magnificent collection of
why the highest saints should not be the superb cattle. Men differ at least as
worst of criminals.”1 In that statement much as animals in their inherited quali
I suppose all theologians would concur. ties; and to say that a man naturally
But it is easy to see how fatal such a courageous, high-minded, benevolent,
doctrine is to a systematic culture of and just can become vile and cruel,
morality. If, at any moment, the best cowardly or criminal, is not a whit less
irrational than to say that a thorough
bred Arab can become a cart-horse. The
1 Oxford Sermons ; VI.
�52
THE SERVICE OF HAN
faulty theory leads, as a matter of course,
to disastrous practice. It is no exaggera
tion to say that the vigilant, painstaking
cultivation of the moral side of man’s
nature has never been taken in hand with
earnest persistence, because theology has
always been celebrating the power of
grace, to the depreciation of ethics. A
miracle of grace, which removes the
heart of stone and replaces it by a heart
of flesh, might always be expected, or at
least hoped for. Punctual performance
of the moral law, social duty to the com
munity and individuals, could well be
postponed without harm, in view of the
celestial transfiguration which converts a
sinner from a bond-slave of Satan into a
saint of God. If this conversion takes
place in the last hour or minute of life,
we have seen that, by the unanimous con
sent of theologians of all schools, it is
enough; the object has been attained; a
soul has been saved ; the sinner’s past
wickedness has been blotted out, as
regards its effects upon him. But its effects
on society are not considered, and the
result must be, and is, solely injurious to
morality as far as it relates to conduct in
this world. That depends on the per
formance of social duty; salvation depends
on repentance and the subjective attitude
of the soul towards God. And this re
pentance is powerful to cancel any number
of previous breaches of the moral law.
In other words, morality is not the one
thing needful, but repentance is.
Chapter VI.
MORALITY IN THE AGES OF FAITH
In the previous chapter we saw on the
best evidence, that of eminent doctors in
various denominations, that true Christian
doctrine postponed morality to repen
tance; and that salvation in the next
world depended on other things than
good conduct in this. The obvious
inference was, that under such a scheme
morality must necessarily be more or
less slighted and undervalued, and that
the alleged support afforded to ethics by
the Christian religion must be either
denied or considerably diminished. It
will be perhaps useful to confirm this
abstract deduction by examples taken
from the past of the actual working of
Christian doctrine. If only a tithe of
the compliments which it is usual to pay
that doctrine be true, it is clear that the
more we retrograde into the ages where
it held undisputed sway over men’s
minds, the more moral we ought to find
the public and private life of the world.
Wickedness and crime are assumed to be
the natural result of neglected religion.
No other cause is usually thought of in
explaining the atrocities of the French
Revolution. Here we see, it is remarked,
the proper effect of atheism and for
saking of the divine light of the gospel.
Again, the corruption and immorality of
the lower Roman Empire show what
becomes of man when left to himself.
The line of argument is too familiar to
need further repetition of it. Now, we
may profitably consult history as to the
truth of these assumptions. Do we find,
as a matter of fact, that the Ages of
Faith were distinguished by a high
morality? Were they superior in this
respect to the present age, which is nearly
on all hands acknowledged not to be an
age of Faith ? The answer must be in
the negative. Taking them broadly,
the Ages of Faith were emphatically
ages of crime, of gross and scandalous
�MORALITY IN THE AGES OF FAITH
wickedness, of cruelty, and, in a word, of
immorality. And it is noteworthy that
in proportion as we recede backward
from the present age, and return into the
Ages of Faith, we find that the crime and
the sin become denser and blacker. The
temperature of faith rises steadily as we
penetrate into the past, almost with the
regularity which marks the rise of the
physical temperature of the air as we
descend into a deep mine ; but a neglect
and defiance of morality are found to
ascend in a corresponding ratio. This,
it must be owned, is an anomalous result,
if morality be indeed so dependent on
Christianity as is commonly supposed.
When all men believed and doubted not,
we should have found, according to the
Christian hypothesis, a godly world;
devout people living always with the great
Day of Judgment before their eyes,
crushing down the lusts of the flesh, in
view of the tremendous penalties pre
pared for those who indulged them. But
we find nothing of the kind. On the
contrary, we find a state of things to
which our imaginations are scarcely able
to do justice in these comparatively tame
and moral days. A progressive improve
ment has taken place in men’s conduct,
both public and private; but it has
coincided not with an increase, but with
a decay, of faith. This, beyond any
question, is the most moral age which the
world has seen ; and it is as certainly the
least believing age since Christianity
became the religion of the West. The
inference is plain, that Christianity has
not been so favourable to morality as is
usually assumed.
Let us turn back, and take a brief ex
cursion through the ages behind us.
The present century need not detain
us long. Most persons would admit that
the state of morals when George the
Fourth was king left much to be desired.
The scandals of the Court were bad
enough ; but no Court, however bad, can
compromise a nation. The mass of the
population was coarse, insolent, and cruel,
and permitted things which would not be
tolerated for a moment now. That there
53
were exceptions, not only of individuals,
but of whole though small classes, no one
would deny. The Clapham Sect was a
conspicuous example in a corrupt world ;
and many of the dissenters were truly
pious, God-fearing people, who had turned
away from the prevailing grossness. But
these were only fractions of the nation.
The general tone was low, violent, and
brutal. The drinking, gambling, prize
fighting, cock-fighting, bull-baiting Eng
land of the Regency is hardly to be
realised in these decorous days ; though
old men “ still creep among us,” who can
partly resuscitate it for us, if carefully
questioned. Let one of those venerable
seniors be induced to describe the con
dition of London in his youth, and no
hearer will have any doubt as to the'
extraordinary change for the better which
has taken place in the last two genera
tions.
From this century we pass into history;
and as the object is to ascertain the
moral tone of previous ages, let us quote
the following passages from a writer, who
was selected by common acclamation as
“ the great moralist,” and was one of the
most brave, noble, and conscientious
men who have ever lived, Samuel John
son :—“ He talked of the heinousness of the
crime of adultery, by which the peace of
families was destroyed. He said : ‘ Con
fusion of progeny constitutes the essence
of the crime; and, therefore, a woman
who breaks her marriage vows is much
more criminal than a man who does it.
A man, to be sure, is criminal in the sight
of God; but he does not do his wife a
very material injury, if he does not insult
her; if, for instance, from mere wanton
ness of appetite, he steals privately to
her chambermaid. Sir, a wife ought not
greatly to resent this. I would not receive
home a daughter who had run away from
her husband on that account.’ ”r This
was Johnson’s settled opinion, as, eleven
years after, we find Boswell recording
another conversation, in which the same
1 Croker's Boswell, chap. xxi.
�54
THE SERVICE OF MAN
thought recurs : “ I mentioned to him a cannibals in India, who subsist by
dispute between a friend of mine and plundering and devouring all the nations
his lady, concerning conjugal infidelity, about them. The president is styled
which my friend had maintained was by Emperor of the Mohocks, and his arms
no means so bad in the husband as in are a Turkish crescent. Agreeable to
the wife. Johnson : Your friend was their name, the avowed design of their
in the right, Sir. Between a man and i institution is mischief, and upon this
his Maker it is a different question ; but i foundation all their rules and orders are
between a man and his wife, a husband’s I founded. An outrageous ambition of
infidelity is nothing. They are connected doing all possible hurt to their fellow
by children, by fortune, by serious con creatures is the great cement of their
siderations of community. Wise married assembly, and the only qualification
women don’t trouble themselves about required in the members. In order to
infidelity in their husbands.”1
exert this principle in its full strength
Now, this is a very good instance of and perfection, they take care to drink
the improvement which has taken place themselves to a pitch that is beyond the
in the course of the last hundred years.
possibility of attending to any motive of
That very offence for which Johnson said reason and humanity, then make a
he would not receive his daughter home, general sally, and attack all that are so
if it were committed by a husband, is unfortunate as to walk the streets
now so universally admitted to be an through which they patrol. Some are
injury of the most serious kind that the knocked down, others stabbed, others
statutory law of the land does precisely cut and carbonadoed........ The particular
what Johnson said he would not do—give talents by which these misanthropes are
protection to the injured wife.
distinguished from one another consist
As we go further back in the century,
in various kinds of barbarities which
we make a visible approach to the state they execute upon their prisoners.
of nature. Cowardly murders and brutal Some are celebrated for a happy
outrages are perpetrated almost with dexterity in tipping the lion upon them,
impunity and very little loss of credit which is performed by squeezing the
by people of the highest rank. The nose flat on the face, and boring out the
exploits of the Mohocks must have eyes with their fingers. Others are
rendered the streets of London, in the called the dancing-masters, and teach
reign of Queen Anne, considerably more their scholars to cut capers by running
■dangerous and disgusting than any swords through their legs........ A third
Californian diggings frequented by the are the tumblers, wrhose office is to set
rabble and outlaws of Europe and women on their heads, and commit
America in the early days of the gold certain indecencies, or rather barbarities,
discoveries.
A contemporary says : on the limbs which they expose.”1 Slitting
“There are a certain set of persons,
noses, cutting people down the back, and
among whom there are some of too putting women in tubs which were rolled
great a character to be named in these down Snow Hill, were among their diver
barbarous and ridiculous encounters, did sions.
they not expose themselves by such
The manners and customs of persons
mean and ridiculous exploits ”; and their of quality were those of semi-savages.
portrait is thus drawn by the Spectator: Thackeray, who knew the period well,
“A set of men who have erected them does not go too far when he says : “You
selves into a nocturnal fraternity, under could no more suffer in a British drawing
the title of The Mohock Club, a name room, under the reign of Queen Victoria,
borrowed, it seems, from a sort of a fine gentleman or a fine lady of Queen
1 Ibid., chap. Ixix.
1 Spectator, No. 324..
�MORALITY IN THE AGES OF FAITH
Anne’s time, or hear what they heard
and said, than you would receive an
ancient Briton.” This is the manner
in which “gentlemen” quarrelled in the
good old times : Sir Cholmley Dering,
knight of the shire for Kent, and Mr.
Thornhill fought a duel, in which the
former was killed. This caused a judicial
inquiry, and “ the first Evidences were
such as related to the quarrel begun at
the Toy at Hampton Court, April 27th,
1711, who deposed that an assembly of
about eighteen gentlemen met there at
that time, a difference happened between
the deceased and the prisoner. Upon
their struggling and contending with
each other, the wainscot of the room
broke in, and Mr. Thornhill, falling
down, had some teeth struck out by Sir
Cholmley Dering’s stamping upon him.”1
Naturally a duel followed.
“ They
fought,” says Swift, “at sword and pistol
this morning in Tuttlefields, their pistols
so near that the muzzles touched.
Thornhill discharged first, and Dering,
having received the shot, discharged his
pistol as he was falling, so it went into
the air.” Thornhill was convicted for
manslaughter, but he was apparently
soon abroad again, as he was murdered
by two men, who stabbed him on horse
back, five months afterwards, at Turnham
Green.
The well-known case of the murder
of Will Mountford, the actor, by Lord
Mohun and Captain Hill, in a ruffianly
ambuscade, would seem well suited to
show the profligate temper and degraded
public opinion in the reign of William
the Third. The incident is thus related
by Thackeray:—
“ My lord’s friend, a Captain Hill,
smitten with the charms of the beautiful
Mrs. Bracegirdle, and anxious to marry
her at all hazards, determined to carry
her off, and for this purpose hired a
hackney coach with six horses and halfa-dozen soldiers to aid him in the storm.
The coach, with a pair of horses (the
1 Ashton, Social Life in the Reign of Queen
Anne, chap, xxxviii.
55
four leaders being in waiting elsewhere),
took its station opposite my Lord
Craven’s house in Drury Lane, by which
door Mrs. Bracegirdle was to pass on
her way from the theatre. As she passed,
in company of her mamma and a friend,
Mr. Page, the captain seized her by the
hand, the soldiers hustled Mr. Page and
attacked him sword in hand, and Captain
Hill and his noble friend endeavoured
to force Madam Bracegirdle into the
coach. Mr. Page called for help; the
population of Drury Lane rose; it was
impossible to effect the capture, and,
bidding the soldiers go about their
business, and the coach to drive off, Hill
let go his prey sulkily, and he waited for
other opportunities of revenge. The
man of whom he was most jealous was
Will Mountford, the comedian. Will
removed, he thought Mrs. Bracegirdle
might be his; and accordingly the
captain and his lordship lay that night
in wait for Will, and, as he was coming
out of a house in Norfolk Street, while
Mohun engaged him in talk, Hill, in the
words of the Attorney-General,- made a
pass and run him clean through the
body.”1
Mohun was tried for the murder by
his peers of the Upper House, and
acquitted by sixty-nine votes against
fourteen. “ One great nobleman,” says
Macaulay, “ was so brutal and stupid as
to say : ‘After all, the fellow was but a
player, and players are rogues.’ ”2 This,
on the first blush, seems downright
atrocious. But there are slightly extenu
ating circumstances connected with the
case which make it a degree less horrible.
In the first place, the murder and the
judgment, as Macaulay points out, were
generally condemned by public opinion.
In the second place, the Lords were
actuated by a violent esprit de corps,
and defending their privileges which
were being attacked by the Commons.
That which largely neutralises these con
siderations is the fact that Mohun was a
1 Lectures on the Humourists.
2 Macaulay’s History of England.
�56
THE SERVICE OF MAN
popular character in London, and that
the anecdotists speak very kindly of his
practical jokes. In the next reign he
was singled out for honourable dis
tinction, and accompanied “ Lord
Macclesfield’s embassy to the Elector
of Hanover when Queen Anne sent the
Garter to H.E. Highness.”
Were the men of that generation
infidels, despisers of God’s Holy Word,
and demoralised by a ■ dreary disbelief
in the unseen world ? On the contrary,
they were fanatically religious. Their
zeal about spiritual matters was fervid in
the extreme. A hint that the Church
was in danger filled them with gloomy
passion. As soon as Sacheverell’s trial
began “ it took up all men’s thoughts,
so that other business was at a stand.
It was clear from the very outset of the
trial that the popular favour was wholly
on the doctor’s side. He lodged in the
Temple, and came every day in solemn
procession through the Strand to West
minster Hall. A> he passed, great
crowds gathered round his coach, striving
to kiss his hand and shouting ‘Sacheverell
and the Church for ever!’ Those who
would not join in the shouts were often
insulted or knocked down. The ardour
of the multitude was even less justifiably
shown by their attacks on some meeting
houses,in which thepewsweredemolished
and burned.”1 The connection between
Christianity and morality does not seem
very plain here.
If we now cross the Channel and
examine the condition of morals under
the Old Monarchy of France, we shall
find that the record of Catholicism in
this respect is in no wise purer than that
of the rival communion. It is a common
opinion that the very great licence of
manners which distinguished the French
upper classes in the latter part of the
eighteenth century was one of the many
evil results of the prevalent infidelity
propagated by Rousseau, Diderot, and
Voltaire. But such an idea has no
1 Lord Stanhope, Reign of Queen Anne,
chap. xii.
foundation. Corrupt as was the society
which read the novels of Louvetand the
younger Crebillon, it was in a variety of
ways superior to the society to which
Bossuet and Bourdaloue preached, and
which flocked to hear the sacred dramas
of the spotless Racine. The whole of
the reign of Louis XIV. was marked by
a great depravity of manners, and his
depravity was found quite compatible
with an ostentatious and possibly sincere
attachment to religion. The king, in
spite of the gross immorality of his
private life, was a bigot in matters of
faith, and he was not an ungraceful or
inadequate representative of the people
who looked up to him as to an almost
supernatural being. No stress need be
laid on the laxity of the gay lords and
ladies who filled his brilliant Court,
although, if a firm belief in Christianity
were the safeguard of pure morals, as it
is supposed to be, their lives present an
unaccountable anomaly; for, as Bour
daloue said to their faces, they lived
like pagans though they believed like
Christians. The point of interest for us
is to note how largely Christianity failed
to overcome the flesh and the devil, even
in an age when it had entirely its own
way, was zealously supported by the
State, and able to wield its tremendous
sanctions without pause or hesitation.
And, again, what we have to take most
account of is the average tone and
temper of public opinion with regard to
crime and immorality. Sporadic and
exceptional crime may occur in any age,
and yet cast no reflection on the average
standard of morals. It is otherwise when
immorality is common, if not general,
and when a life of great licence and
scandal may be passed without attracting
discredit or remark. And this rule
applies especially to the conduct of
ministers of religion. If the clerical
order can indulge in abandoned courses
without exciting reprobation, we may
be sure that we do an age no injustice
in pronouncing its standard of morality .
to be low.
When the officers of an
army give an example of cowardice and
�MORALITY IN THE AGES OF FAITH
insubordination, we know what to expect
of the rank and file.
We have many instances during the
reign of Louis XIV. which show the
great corruption of the clergy in that
age, and the little resentment or surprise
which it caused. The lives of some of
the' most prominent ecclesiastics were
openly scandalous. The famous Cardinal
de Retz led a life of which any decent
layman would now be ashamed. But it
may be said that de Retz was one of
those political Churchmen who took
orders merely with ambitious views to
worldly advancement, and who ought
not to be considered as true clerics. He
also lived in times of revolution, when
men’s morality is apt to break down.
So we will pass him over. These
remarks do not apply to Harley de
Champvallon, Archbishop of Paris. He
lived in times of profound internal peace,
he never played any part in politics, and
he was for years the acknowledged leader
and representative of the French Church.
He was permanent chairman of the
Assembly of the French Clergy, and a
preacher of such popularity and power
that, during a course of his Lenten
sermons, the church was kept open at all
hours, and footmen, in order to retain
the best places, were forced to spend
the whole night in them. Yet he was a
man of profligate private life, and not
so very private, as his amours were
notorious.
“ Notre Archeveque de Paris,
Quoiqu’il soit jeune, a des faiblesses ;
Voyant qu’il en avait trop pris,
Il a retranche ses mattresses ;
Les quatre qu’il eut autrefois
Sont a present reduites a trois. ”
Several great ladies of the Court—la
Marquise de Gonville, la Marechale
d’Aumont, Madame de Brisseu—were
among his conquests, but Madame de
Bretonvilliers was his maitresse en titre,
as la Montespan was of Louis XIV.
He was not even content with these
irregularities, but carried off by force
Mademoiselle de la Varenne, a public
singer, the mistress of a gentleman
57
named Pierrepont. The latter avenged
himself in a way characteristic of the
age; he lay in wait with three men,
seized the faithless Varenne (who seems
to have made no objection to the
exchange of a poor for a rich lover) as
she was returning to the house the arch
bishop had given her, and had her
unmercifully beaten with rods. It was
probably his only mode of retaliation.
Meddling with Monseigneur and his
pleasures was attended with danger and
punished severely. Two priests who
had lampooned him were sent to the
galleys, one for life. One of the arch
bishop’s mistresses was the Countess of
Northumberland, a former favourite of
Charles II. The prelate used to visit
her in a convent of Benedictines at
Conflans. He died suddenly, at a good
old age, in the presence of his last
“amie,” la Duchesse de Lesdiguieres,
and had his funeral oration pronounced
by le pere Gaillard. It appears there
was some little trouble in finding a
preacher—a fact creditable to the time,
as far as it goes.
The convents, not without reason, had
a bad reputation. Louis XIV., who
was not a man to speak evil of religious
orders, said of the Carmelites : “Je savais
bien qu’elles etaient des friponnes, des
intrigeuses, des ravaudeuses, des bro
deuses, des bouquetieres, mais je ne
croyais pas qu’elles fussent des empoisonneuses.”1 “ There were often, says
Michelet, “twelve parlours in a convent,
in which each nun, without being heard,
could converse with her lover or a female
intriguer yet more dangerous.”2 But
Protestants and infidels are only too
ready to believe evil of convents as if
they all must necessarily be nests of
iniquity—a most unjust supposition. Port
Royal at this very time contained women
of angelic purity. We may therefore
leave them, and pass to the lower ranks
of the secular clergy.
A good example of the tone of public
1 Madame deSevigne, Lettres, Oct. 15th, 1677.
2 Histoire de France: Louis XIV., note iii.
�58
THE SERVICE OF MAN
opinion with regard to clerical irregu
larity will be found in the following
story :—
“On the 7th of November, 1665, the
cure of Saint-Babel was condemned to
death for a crime he had committed three
years before. He was a man of parts,
intelligent in matters of business, but
carried away by his passions, and not
particular in setting a good example in
his parish. He was especially ill-famed
for his amours—and amusing stories were
told about him, amusing if the tone had
not been connected with sin and wholly
unbecoming his sacred profession. He
was accused in the world of having
instructed his female parishioners in
an entirely novel manner, and having
inspired them with a love remote from
the love of God. His turn for gallantry
would show itself at such unseasonable
moments that on one occasion, having
been sent for by a good woman in
mortal sickness to hear her confession,
he neglected to administer to her the
Sacraments, in order to amuse himself
in winning the affections of a girl to his
liking, whom he found in the house;
and thought no more of the salvation of
the mistress in his design against the
honour of the maid. He forgot his
character as a priest as soon as he had
seen her personal charms, and love
overcame duty. Instead of listening to
the confession of the one, he employed
his time in making his declaration to
the other; and far from exhorting the
sick person to die piously, he solicited
her who was in good health to live in
sin; and, taking her by the hand and the
chin, he said : ‘ What a trial it is for me
to be called by a person whom age and
sickness have reduced to extremity, and
what a joy it would be to come and see
you who have youth and beauty. I
own that I do not like to hear the story
of past sins which these good old women
relate to us, and that the sins of youth
are much more agreeable. Let madame
your mistress think over the way in
which she has passed her years, and let
us consider how we will pass ours ; let
her examine and see if she has sinned,
and let me know if you can love one
who loves you. Do not be surprised if
you see me abandon my duties in order
to satisfy my inclination, and, if you
love me, regard me as a man and not as
a cure, and reflect that you can be at
once my mistress and my parishioner,
and that you will find in me a pastor
and a lover equally devoted.’ ”
This worthy priest was not interfered
with for this and similar indiscretions.
He came to an untimely end by being
hanged for the more serious offence of
murder, into which he was tempted by a
natural exasperation at having been
placed in a ridiculous and painful posi
tion by one of his flock. It happened
thus. At a short distance from his
parish he had a grange in which he
kept, not only his corn and fruit, but,
when occasion required it, the young
women whom he fancied. Hetook reason
able precautions to ensure privacy, and
even diverted a road which ran past the
grange, in order to escape the curiosity
of passers by who might feel a wish to
inquire what he was doing in his retreat.
Still suspicion was excited, and a peasant,
more enterprising and mischievous than
the rest, artfully closed the door of the
grange and fastened it on the outside,
when he had good reason to think that
the cure was within, as, indeed, he was,
with a young woman, whom he had
chosen out of his own church. . The
imprisoned pair were forced to wait till
liberated by a chance wayfarer, and the
exposure of the cure was complete.
He vowed a terrible vengeance on his
betrayer, and soon carried it out by
having him beaten to death. The very
next day he said mass for the defunct,
but the friends of the latter brought
the cure before a local tribunal, which
acquitted him. It was only three years
later, when a special commission of
judges, known as Les Grands-jours
d’Auvergne, were sent by Louis XIV.
to suppress the unbridled crime in.
Auvergne, that M. Guillaume Boyer, the
cure in question, came by his deserts.
�MORALITY IN THE AGES OF FAITH
The Church did all it could to save him.
But Colbert was at the head of affairs,
and lay-justice had its way.
Now, to whom are we indebted for
this interesting story? To no other
than the illustrious Flechier, the elo
quent preacher who became Bishop of
Nimes. His Memoires sur les Grandsjours <TAuvergne are among the choicest
pieces of French prose of the early
classical period, not without a flavour of
“bel esprit” and “ preciosite,” recalling
the Hotel de Rambouillet, but still, by
their finesse and style, worthy of the
Great Age. But all must admit that the
tone of sly humour in which the crimes
of the priest are recorded is very singular,
and conclusive that clerical irregularities
were considered objects rather of mirth
and pleasantry than of serious reproba
tion. Would any clergyman, especially
of so high a character as Flechier, dream
of speaking of them in such a strain
now ?
We will next take the case of the
famous Abbe de Choisy, as illustrating
the kind of life a Churchman might lead
under Louis XIV., not only without
discredit, but with general respect and
esteem. The Abbe de Choisy came of
a good family “ of the robe ”—that is to
say, he belonged to that rich and
powerful class of hereditary civil servants
who carried on the government of the
old French monarchy. His position in
the world is sufficiently shown by the
fact that his mother, a woman distin
guished by her wit and fine manners,
could say to the young Louis XIV. that,
if he wished to become a polished man,
he ought to frequent her society. One
may suppose she did not neglect the
education of her son, and we know,
indeed, that she loved him to excess.
This was the result of her bringing up.
After leaving the theological seminary—for he was intended for the Church from
the first—Choisy immediately became an
actor, or rather an actress, and for
several months appeared on the stage at
Bordeaux. His mother, in his child
hood, had taken pleasure in dressing
59
him as a girl, partly, perhaps, from
private whim, but more probably to
please the perverted tastes of Monsieur
(Duke of Orleans), the king’s brother,
who had a passion for wearing female
attire. Choisy was nothing loath, and
soon surpassed his Royal Highness in
his fondness for a woman’s costume. In
order to gratify his propensity, he bought
a house, as he himself tells us, in the
Faubourg Saint-Marceau, in the centre
of the “ bourgoisie of the people,” that
he might “ dress himself as he liked,
among folks who would not complain of
anything he did.” He soon became
noted for his elegant female attire, and,
though his sex was well known, no one
seems to have been scandalised. So far
from that, his services were requested in
the parish church to present the hoi)’
bread and collect the offertory. He
became one of the attractions of the
church, and a source of great profit
to his employers. In one day he
collected two hundred and seventytwo livres. People came from other
parishes when it was known he was
going to collect. “I will admit,” he
says, “ that in the evening at the salut
(the benediction) I experienced a great
pleasure. It was night, when the talk is
free. I heard several times, in different
parts of the church, people saying, ‘ But
can it be true that that is a man ? He
has good reasons for wishing to pass for
a woman.’ ”
It may well be supposed that this
comedy was continued beyond the walls
of the church, for objects less innocent
than making strangers stare. Choisy
took a large country house near Bourges,
where he passed as la Comtesse des
Barres, and spent four years in a round
of systematic seduction. Details cannot
be given ; they are to be found in his
own narrative by the curious in such
moral monstrosities. Even more singu
lar than his turpitudes is the chuckling
cynicism with which he relates them.
Yet he never lost caste for his rascality.
Once only, apparently, was he reproved,
by the Due de Montausier, who told him
�6o
THE SERVICE OF MAN
he ought to be ashamed of himself for
such conduct; but his clerical brethren
seem to have been as accommodating as
he could wish. When he went to Bourges
he imparted his secret to the cure, which,
as he says, it was only fair to do. But
the cure was not in the least scandalised,
and came to dine and sup at the rake’s
house, sitting at table with the innocent
little victims, mere children often, of the
latter’s licentiousness. But that is not
all. When the Cardinal de Bouillon went
to Rome to attend the Conclave for elect
ing a new Pope, he took Choisy with him
as his “ conclaviste.” He afterwards
occupied the same post in the service of
the Cardinal de Retz (a worthy pair),
and took a part, if we may believe him,
in the election of Odescalchi (Leo XL).
He lived till eighty, and was doyen of the
French Academy, when he died in great
honour as a man of wit and fine manners.
It is needless to add that he was “ con
verted ” before the end, with what profit
to the world does not appear.
Scotland and Spain share the bad pre
eminence of having been, each in their
way, the most fanatical nations in Europe.
It would be difficult to say in which of
the two religion was made most repulsive
and inhuman. In both countries nearly
every object was postponed to the pro
tection and propagation of the national
faith. But Calvinism in Scotland was
more blighting and deadly to all things
beautiful than Catholicism in Spain.
Terrible as it must have been to know
that the invisible eye of the Holy Office
was fixed upon your movements, and
even upon your thoughts, and that at
any moment you might disappear behind
its dreaded walls, only to emerge in a
San Benito in the ghastly procession to
an Auto da Fe, yet Spanish life was not
blackened and gnawed into hideousness
by the Spanish Inquisition as Scottish
life was by the Scottish Inquisition.
After all, there were joy, laughter, and
song in Spain; there were poetry and
painting; Cervantes, Calderon, and
Murillo, bright children of the South, in
whom the world still finds delight. But
in Scotland every green and wholesome
thing was smitten as by a black frost.
“To be poor, dirty, and hungry, to pass
through life in misery, and to leave it
with fear, to be plagued with boils and
sores and diseases of every kind, to be
always sighing and groaning, to have the
face streaming with tears and the chest
heaving with sobs; in a word, to suffer
constant affliction and to be tormented
in all possible ways—to undergo these
things was deemed a proof of goodness,
just as the contrary was a proof of evil.
....... It was a sin to go from one town to
another on Sunday, however pressing the
business might be....... No one on Sunday
should pay attention to his health, or
think of his body at all. On that day
horse-exercise was sinful; so was walking
in the fields, or in the meadows, or in
the streets, or enjoying the fine weather
by sitting at the door of your own house.
To go to sleep on Sunday before the
duties of the day were over was also
sinful, and deserved church censure.
Bathing, being pleasant as well as whole
some, was a particularly grievous offence ;
and no man could be allowed to swim
on Sunday. It was, in fact, doubtful
whether swimming was lawful for a Chris
tian at any time, even on week days, and
it was certain that God had, on one
occasion, shown his disapproval by taking
away the life of a boy while he was in
dulging in that carnal practice.”1 Life
must have been made intolerable by a
system of spies and informers who were
paid for delating breaches of the Sab
bath.2 “ Sometimes a brother and sister,
or a man and his wife, walking quietly
together, would find themselves under
the observation of the emissaries of the
Kirk. In short, if fanatical belief in
Christianity, coupled with the most
intemperate zeal in enforcing the pre
cepts of the Bible, could have made a
people moral, the Scotch should have
1 Buckle, History of Civilisation in England,
vol. ii., pp. 395-398. Buckle corroborates every
statement by redundant evidence.
2 Chambers’s Domestic Annals of Scotland,
vol. iii., p. 344.
�MORALITY IN THE AGES OF FAITH
been a moral people towards the middle
and end of the seventeenth century.
Nearly a century of gospel-teaching at
the highest pressure should, if Chris
tianity be as favourable to morality as
is commonly supposed, have produced
very marked results in the form of correct
and orderly living.
The reality does not correspond with
this pleasing inference. Indeed, to judge
from the accounts left us by Spalding
and other contemporaries, the country
districts of Scotland presented a savage
scene of lawless violence, frequently
ending in murder. Gentlemen, neigh
bours, and often relatives, quarrel and
fight and kill each other like barbarians,
with or without provocation. However,
homicide, which of all crimes in a
peaceful state of society is the most
injurious and detested, is often viewed
with strange leniency in periods agitated
by fervent religious and social or political
revolution. In the eyes of ferocious
partisans, killing is no murder when it
thins the ranks of their enemies. This
was the case in Scotland at the time
referred to; it was so in France, both
under the Red and White Terror; and
only recently it was the same in Ireland.
We will, therefore, pass over the Scotch
man-slaying of the seventeenth century,
and refer to that milder form of vice
which has nearly usurped' the name of
“ immorality ” for its own exclusive use
in familiar speech—illicit intercourse
between the sexes. On no part of ethics
have Christians of all denominations laid
greater stress that on chastity, yet with
far less result in the way of producing
purity of manners than might have been
expected, even among those who made a
particular display of religion.
In 1640 a portion of the Covenanting
army was under General Monro, on its
way from Banff to Aberdeen. “Then
Monro and his soldiers,” says Spalding,
marched that night (Friday) to Turriff;
Saturday, they marched therefrae to
Inverurie and Kintore; Sunday, they
marched therefrae to Aberdeen, and
by the way, at Bucksburn, they had a
61
sermon taught by their own minister.”
They no doubt “hungered and thirsted
by the way,” and could not pass the
Sabbath, though on military duty, without
hearing the Word. But when they
reached their quarters in Aberdeen, their
behaviour left much to be desired. “Of the
performances of the Covenanting troops
occasionally posted in Aberdeen, we
hear from the commissary clerk of‘daily
deboching ’ and ‘drinking,’ night walking,
combating and swearing, and bringing
sundry honest women-servants to great
misery. Sixty-five of this honest sister
hood were delated before the church
courts; twelve of them, after being
paraded through the streets by the hang
man, were banished by the burgh.
Several were imprisoned in a loathsome
vault, while others, more fortunate, found
safety in flight.”1 What was done to
the pious profligates who had brought
them to this “ great misery ” does not
appear. Later on in the century the
General Assembly felt called upon to
proclaim a general fast on account of
the backslidings of the people. “ There
hath been a great neglect,” they say,
“of the worship of God in public, but
especially in families and in secret.
The wonted care of sanctifying the
Lord’s Day is gone, cities full of vio
lence, so that blood touched blood.
Yea, Sodom’s sins have abounded among
us—pride, fulness of blood, idleness,
vanities of apparel, and shameful sen
suality.”2 And there is no reason to
believe that this is one of the rhetorical
exaggerations of sinfulness common to
religious persons in moods of depres
sion. Referring to a slightly earlier date,
Mr. Chambers says: “The number of
cases of uncommon turpitude in a time
of extraordinary religious purism forces
itself upon our attention....... Offences of
a horrible and unnatural kind continued
to abound to a degree which makes the
daylight profligacy of the subsequent
1 Burton, History of Scotland, vol. vi., p. 322.
2 Chambers’s Domestic Annals of Scotland,
vol. ii., p. 42.
�62
THE SERVICE OF MAM
reign (Charles II.’s) shine white in com
parison. ‘ More,’ says Nicoll, ‘ within
these six or seven years, nor within these
fifty ye irs preceding and more.’ Culprits
of all ages, from boys to old men, are
heard of every few months as burned
upon the Castle Hill of Edinburgh.
Sometimes two together—young women
who had murdered their own infants—
were frequently brought to the same
scene of punishment.
John Nicoll
states that on one day, October 15th,
1656, five persons—two men and three
women—were burnt on Castle Hill for
offences of the several kinds here glanced
at, while two others were scourged
through the city for minor degrees of the
same offences.”1
The meaner vices of fraud and cheat
ing, often supposed to be modern inven
tions from which the pious old times
were free, were not uncommon in Edin
burgh in the seventeenth century. “ The
beer, ale, and wine sold in the city were
all greatly adulterated. It was customary
to mix wine with milk, brimstone, and
other ingredients. Ale was made strong
and heady with hemp seed, coriander
seed, Turkish pepper, soot, salt, and by
casting strong wash under the cauldron
when the ale was brewing. Blown
mutton and corrupted veal, fusty bread
and light loaves, false measures and
weights, were common. In all these
particulars the magistrates were negli
gent, so that the people were abused
and neglected.”2
One does not see how, under the head
of morals, the people of the Ages of
Faith were superior to the people of
to-day. When we consider that the com
petition was much less severe than it is
now; that the size of the towns was
many degrees smaller than at present;
and that the opportunities of escaping
observation and punishment now
afforded by our immense cities were
then correspondingly less, we must
1 Ibid., vol. ii., p. 242.
2 Chambers’s Domestic Annals of Scotland,
vol. ii., p. 240.
admit that the average of morality was
singularly low, although the average of
religious belief and zeal was singularly
high. The few extracts quoted above
give a most inadequate impression of
the general violence, grossness, cruelty,
and licence of the period during which
every effort was made and almost every
other worthy object was sacrificed with
a view to making the people devoutly
Christian. We have surely a right to
say, after so large and protracted an
experiment, that the moralising element
in Christianity has been over-estimated.
Here was Christianity at work without
any competing principle; it was zeal
ously supported by the secular power;
yet we find crimes of “ uncommon turpi
tude ” co-existing with “ extraordinary
religious purism.” It is not an answer
to say that but for Christianity, matters,
bad as they were, would have been
worse; and for this good reason,
that a great improvement in decency,
order, and civilisation generally, co
incided in Scotland with a marked
decline in religious fervour, such as set
in about the middle of the last century.
What is true and quite fair to allege is,
that the Scottish people in the seven
teenth century were in that stage of
semi - barbarism in which no moral
principle is able to take a firm hold.
Only the slow growth of knowledge and
industry can civilise such a people. But
this is the doctrine of evolution, not of
grace. The latter, as emanating from
Almighty power, can no more be arrested
or withstood by imperfect development
in the race than by moral degradation
in the individual. At least, that is the
theory. In practice, we may observe,
the growth of morality depends on con
ditions widely remote from those which
favour the vigour and tenacity of theo
logical beliefs. As already shown, Chris
tianity preaches salvation in the next
world, not morality in this ; and accord
ing to the rules laid down we may not
doubt that numbers of the Scotch, in
the darkest period, after the commission
of every crime against human ethics,
�MORALITY IN THE AGES OF FAITH
were at last touched by grace and were
saved, or at least should have been. The
point does not admit of verification, and
we therefore cannot tell whether celestial
happiness did supervene as a compensa
tion for the miseries of a barbarous exist
ence on earth. The fact remains that
those miseries were not mitigated, but
were often very much increased, by a
fanatical belief in the words of Scripture.
The cruelty and injustice perpetrated in
obedience to the disgusting superstition
about witchcraft, a thoroughly scriptural
tenet, fill up one of the most horrible
pages in the history of mankind. Sor
cerers were burnt in batches of four, five,
and even of nine at a time on the Castle
Hill. But the more zealous spirits were
not satisfied. “There is much witchery
up and down our land,” says Robert
Baillie; “ the English be but sparing to
try it, but some they execute.”1 Our
sympathy is justly given, in the first
instance, to the wretched victims; but
the mental anxiety and terror of their
persecutors must have been no light
burden.
We will now, for a few moments, turn
our attention to Spain, the single Euro
pean country which rivalled Scotland in
its zeal for religion.
One of the liveliest accounts of that
interesting nation will be found in the
letters of a French lady, who went to
Spain in 1679 to attend upon the young
queen Henriette, the daughter of the un
fortunate Henrietta of England, sister of
Charles II. I confine my extracts to the
matter in hand—the union, or rather
the disconnection, of morality and reli
gion :—“The frequent assassinations in this
country, on account of some affront or
other, seem to authenticate these facts.
If a man receives a box on the ear or a
stroke in the face with a hat, nay, with a
handkerchief or a glove; if he be
called a drunkard; or a reflecting word
happens to pass on his wife’s virtue, these
1 Chambers’s Domestic Annals of Scotland,
vol. ii., p. 244.
63
must be wiped off with no less than the
blood of the aggressor, and that by
assassination. For they say it is not just
that, after a signal affront received, the
offended party should put his life in an
equal balance with the offender. They
are so tenacious of revenge that they will
not lay aside an injury for twenty years
after ; if they happen to die before they
accomplish it, they will recommend the
same upon their death-beds to be exe
cuted by their children. I had it from
credible hands that a certain person of
note, dreading the revenge of his enemy,
went to the West Indies, where he stayed
twenty years, till, hearing that both he
and his son were dead, he returned to
Spain, yet not without changing his name
for his greater security ; but in vain, for,
notwithstanding all his precaution, the
grandson of his enemy, though not above
twelve years of age, found means to hire
a ruffian, who assassinated him soon after
his return.
“ Most of their assassins are natives of
the city of Valentia, a wicked generation,
who will venture at anything for money,
and are always provided with firearms
that will discharge without noise, and
stilettoes....... I was told that a certain
Spaniard of note, having agreed with one
of these Bandoleroes, as they call them,
of Valentia, for a certain sum of money
to dispatch his enemy, but a reconcilia
tion being made soon after betwixt them,
he acquainted the Bandolero with it,
desiring him not to put his design into
execution, though at the same time he
allowed him the money as a voluntary
gift. But the assassin replied that he
scorned to have any of his money with
out deserving it, to do which he must
either kill him or his enemy. The gentle
man, being willing to preserve his own
life, was forced to let him put in execu
tion what he had designed against the
other, unless he would have resolved to
seize him—-a thing of dangerous conse
quence in Spain, where these ruffians are
so numerous and so closely united that
they are sure to revenge the quarrel of
any of their companions, which makes
�64
7'HE SERVICE OF MAN
Spain the most doleful theatre of tragical
scenes in the universe.
“ What is more surprising than all the
rest is, that as well those who leave no
stone unturned to put their revenge in
practice, as those who put them in
execution, should engage themselves in
certain devotions for the success of their
enterprises, at the very time they are
going to give the mortal wound to an
innocent person of their own religion and
country.”1*
Now, as regards the Spanish observa- •
tion of the seventh commandment:
“ The Spaniards are so kind-hearted to
one another in love affairs that, if a man
meets his mistress in a place where he
has no opportunity of conversing with
her in private, he need only go into the
next house and to request the master
(whether he know him or not) to give
him the opportunity of talking with a
lady of his acquaintance in private in his
house, and he is sure it will scarce ever
be refused.” What is meant by the
euphemistic term “talking ” is made clear
■by the following strange disclosure : “I
remember that, talking the other day
with the Marchioness d’Alcannizas, one
of the greatest and most virtuous ladies I
of the Court, she frankly told us that, if
a gentleman should be alone with her for
half an hour in a convenient place, and
not ask her the last favour, she should
think he despised her, though she should,
at the same time, not grant his request.”
Again, we have to notice the co-exist
ence of a very low moral tone with the
most exalted religious zeal and passionate
religious belief.
It is unnecessary to proceed through
the previous centuries with so much
detail, otherwise it would be easy to show
that the sixteenth century was far more
immoral, in the widest sense of the word,
than the seventeenth. The Court of the
later Valois is painted for us by the gar
rulous Brantome; and one fails to see
1 The Ingenious Letters of the Lady’s -------Travels into Spain, Harris’s Collection, ii.,
p. 756> ed. 1705.
how it differed, except for the worse,
from the Court of Caligula or Commodus.
The Italians were more refined, but
even more wicked, and impressed the
English of Elizabeth’s reign, by no means
a squeamish or fastidious folk, with a
“ sense of the rottenness of the country
whence they obtained their intellectual
nourishment, with a sense of frightful
anomaly, of putrescence in beauty and
splendour, of death in life, and life in
death.”1 No one would expect better
things of the fifteenth century, in which
the Wars of the Roses in England, and
the final struggle against English domi
nation in France, had the usual effect of
protracted warfare in injuring morality.
That the fourteenth century, the era
of the great Schism, of the captivity of
the Popes at Avignon, and of the Black
Death, should have been a period of
extraordinary licence and crime cannot
surprise us. Both civil and ecclesiastical
government were impaired by the events
of the time, and pestilence is usually
followed by moral irregularities.
So we pass these ages over, and stop
for a moment in the thirteenth century,
the age par excellence of beautiful things,
when chivalry is supposed to have been
in its noble prime, when the Church
exerted a calm and serene sovereignty
over the kneeling nations, when
mediaeval art reached its supreme and
chaste perfection, when the philosophy
and theology of the Latin Church cul
minated in works almost as intricate and
wonderful as the maze of pinnacles,
flying buttresses, arches, and columns
which, surviving still in the cathedrals of
Amiens or Chartres, sing us a deceptive
siren song of beauty which lures us to
their epoch as to a Golden Age. It was
very far from a golden age. On the
contrary, it was an age of violence, fraud,
and impurity, such as can hardly be con
ceived now. We will take it in its ideal
moment—in the reign of St. Louis, the
best of kings, and perhaps the best man
1 Euphorion, by Vernon Lee.
�65
MORALm' TN THE AGES OF FAITH
who ever lived. We will take as-' a
witness one of his most trusted and1
valued friends, Eude Rigaud, Arch
bishop of Rouen, and we will see what
he says of the morals of the clergy of
his own diocese, which, like a good
pastor as he was, he was constantly
visiting for the purpose of discipline and
reform.
The Regestrum Visitationum^ or the
diary of the pastoral visits of Archbishop
Rigaud, forms a quarto volume of up
wards of six hundred closely-printed
pages. It extends from the year 1248
101269. Rigaud had been a Franciscan
monk, a student at Paris of scholastic
philosophy under our famous countryman,
Alexander of Hales, and at an early
period acquired reputation as a preacher
of uncommon eloquence. . A tradition
obtained that he had been elevated to
the archiepiscopal see of Rouen, where
he had gone to preach, on account of the
impression produced by his piety and
learning on the Chapter. Rigaud wished
to refuse the proffered dignity, but his
professions were disregarded; the Pope,
Innocent IV., relieved him of his vows
to reject ecclesiastical honours, and he
was consecrated archbishop in the month
of March, 1248. In the month of July,
in the same year, he began his pastoral
visitations. He travelled about from
monastery to monastery, and sometimes
was entertained at the expense of the
monks, but more often at his own.
Indeed, the religious houses seem fre
quently to have been in debt, and hardly
in a position to give worthy hospitality
to so great a lord as an archbishop. He
often discovered, both among the secular
and the regular clergy, very unclerical
habits and amusements, sometimes inno
cent, at other times very much the con
trary. He found the nuns of St. Arnaud
had fallen into the evil practice of singing
the Psalms and Hours to the Virgin with
unbecoming haste—“ cum nimia festinatione et precipitatione verborum,” and
ordered, very properly, that one verse
should not be begun till a previous one
had been finished. The nuns, moreover,
did not observe the rule of silence; and
ate meat in the infirmary as often as
three times a week. A sick sister would
have two or three healthy friends to see
her, and regale them with a more dainty
repast than the usual convent fare.
They all had a measure of wine, but
some drank more than others, which
was not allowed. Some even gave wine
to persons outside the convent, with
out obtaining leave; for this offence
they were made to go without wine
the next day. The nuns also had a
fondness for linen chemises and sheets,
which were against the rule, and these
luxuries were forbidden. On the whole,
the convents for women, which Rigaud
visited, seem to have been fairly correct,
and certainly did not afford examples of
the gross licentiousness of the monks
and priests. Many of the latter fell
under episcopal censure for irregularities
which would not nowadays be considered
very serious, and give a notion of a
rollicking, schoolboyish tone, which has
an odd effect. Riding about on horse
back in an unclerical garb is noted with
disapprobation, and seems to have been
a common fault. Buying and selling
horses was hardly so venial in a priest;
no more, perhaps, was the keeping of
dogs for hunting purposes. But it was
easy to do much worse. One is surprised
to find charges of drunkenness constantly
recurring. Frequenting taverns and play
ing at dice were certainly unbecoming
in a clergyman, especially when carried
so far as to cause the priest to leave or
lose his clothes in the public-house,
“ aliquando amittit vestes suas in
tabernis.” One is glad to see that
Archbishop Rigaud would not. stand
such indecorum, and deprived the incum
bent who had been guilty of it of his
living. But these transgressions are
insignificant, both in number and gravity,
compared with the incessant sin of incontinency, which is alleged on nearly every
page in the most aggravated form.. Priest
after priest is charged with immoral
conduct, some with married women,
some with keeping two mistresses at
F
�66
THE SERVICE OF MAN
once, one with incest with his own
niece.1
Without a certain monotony of repeti
tion, it is impossible to convey the
impression produced by this protracted
catalogue of clerical disorders. “We
found the priest of Nesle in ill-repute,
on account of a certain woman who is
said to be pregnant by him; he also
trades, and ill-treats his father, who is
the patron of the church he holds. This
parson fought with a certain knight with
a drawn sword amid a clamour and con
course of his friends and relations.”2
“ The priest of Gonnetot was charged
with criminality with two women, and
he went to the Pope about the matter,
and when he returned he is said to have
offended again. The priest of Wanestanvilla was accused with reference to a
woman, one of his own parishioners, and
her husband on that account departed
over sea. He kept her eight years, and
she is pregnant; he also plays at dice
and drinks too much; he frequents the
taverns, does not abide in his church,
and goes with a hawk on his fist when
ever he likes. Also the priest of Braysur-Seine is accused with reference to a
certain woman; and because she refused
to live in the presbytery, he went to live
with her, and had his food and corn
brought to her house. Also the priest
of Saint-Just haunts taverns, and drinks
till he is full up to the throat. Also
Lawrence, priest of Longceil, keeps the
wife of a man who is abroad; she is
called Beatrice Valeran, and he has
a son by her. 3 We found that the
1 “ Item presbyter de Mesnilio David est
inobediens et habet pueros suos secum, et concubinam alibi: item duce se invenerunt in domo
ipsius et se verberaverunt invicem. Item pres
byter de Sancto Richario infamatus de quadam
conjugata, parochiana sua. Item presbyter
Sancti Remigii notatus de ebriositate, non defert
capam, ludit ad talos, frequentat tabernam,
et ibi multociens verberatur. Item Magister
Walterus presbyter de Grandi Curia, infamatus
est de propria nepte et de nimia potatione.”—Regest. Visitationum Arch. Rothomagensis, par
Th. Bonnin, Rouen, 1852, pp. 20, 21.
2 Ibid., p. 19.
3 Ibid., p. 29.
priest of Panlyu was famed for incontinency with a maidservant of his, and
likewise with two other women, who
afterwards bore him two sons; also he
is noted for inebriety; he sells his wine,
and makes his parishioners drunk. The
priest of Auberville is seriously noted
for incontinency,and he married a certain
woman with one of his servants, in order
that he might have free access to her.
Also he had relations with a certain
Englishwoman, whom he kept a long
time, and sinned with her again after
being corrected by the archdeacon;
also with the daughter of a poor woman
who lives hard by the cross.”1
Although the nuns, compared with the
priests, appear to have been well-behaved,
we occasionally meet with convents in
which there were great disorders. “ We
visited the convent of the Blessed Mary
of Almeneschiis. There are thirty-three
nuns. All are possessed of property:
they have saucepans, copper-kettles, and
necklaces. They contract debts in the
village, and eat and sit at tables in groups.
Each nun has money given her to provide
for her table and her kitchen. Many
are absent from Compline and Matins,
and drink after Compline. Sister Theophana is given to drink. They have
no regular time for confession or com
munication. Sister Hola lately had a
boy by one Michael of Vai Guido. Secular
persons freely enter the cloister and talk
with the nuns. They never dine in the
refectory. Dionisia Dehatim is accused
of ill-conduct with Nicholas de Bleve.
They quarrel finely in the cloister and
the choir. Alice, the cantatrix, had a
boy by a man named Christian. Also
the prioress formerly had one boy.
They have not got an abbess, as the last
recently died.”2 A most improper set
of ladies, certainly, considering their vows
of poverty, chastity, and obedience. The
strange thing is that Archbishop Rigaud
did not visit them, so far as appears,
with any censure; perhaps their wealth
1 Regest. Visitationum Arch. Rothomagensis,
2 Ibid., p 82.
p. 25.
�MORALITY IN THE AGES OF FAITH
67
and social position made it impolitic to no doubt because a refractory or litigious
do so. Indeed, the grosser sins of the priest, especially by appealing to Rome,
flesh are treated with what we should could give rise both to trouble and
consider singular mildness. Early lapses scandal.1
The next witness I would like to call
from virtue, and even later ones, are
pardoned on promise of reform. Only was a cardinal, an intimate friend and
in the case of hardened and persevering co-reformer of the great Hildebrand,
sinners are strong measures taken. “We Pope Gregory VII., the Blessed Peter
warned them,” says Rigaud—and in one Damiani. Unfortunately, the very nature
case “them” included Master Walter, of the crimes with which he charges the
the priest of Grandcure, who cohabited clergy is so monstrous that it is impos
with his niece—“ we warned and threat sible, even “ in the obscurity of a learned
ened them that if we found them again language,” as Gibbon said, to give an
accused of similar misdeeds we would idea of their character. Dean Milman
punish them severely.”1 And it would can only distantly refer to Peter Damiani’s
not be right to suspect the archbishop “ odious book,” the Liber Gomorof a weak toleration of vice for acting so rheanus; and quotes the title of the
leniently. The number of offenders was first chapter as an adequate indica
so great that, if he had suspended or tion of its contents. Any modern must
expelled them all, he would have had follow his example. It must suffice
few or no priests left to serve the diocese.
He probably did the best which the cir
1 “ Uni versis presentes litteras inspecturis,
cumstances permitted; which was, on Radulphus rector ecclesiae de Sana Villa Rotho
proof of repeated guilt, to obtain from magensis diocesis, salutem. Noverit universitas
quod cum super
the culprit a written promise of reform, vestra ut dicebatur, pro irregularitate commissa
a me,
eo quod, suspenses et
together with an undertaking to leave excommunicatus, dicebar celebravisse divina:
his church and the country in case of a item super crimine fornicationis et adulterii
relapse into his former depravity. Rigaud quod dicebar commisisse cum Robina penildore
has preserved for us a great number of de Nova-villa: item super eo quod dicebar lusor
ad taxillos, et frequentator tabernarum : item
these documents, signed, sealed, and super eo quod dicebar capellanum capellae de
sworn to, by the penitents, and they are Rocherobiis vulnerasse graviter cum falcone in
capite ; essem apud bonos et graves, et maxime
extremely curious. In the first place,
they show beyond doubt or cavil that apud reverendum patrem Odonem, Dei gratia,
Rothomagensem archiepiscopum adeo diffamatus,
the charges were true. Habemus confi- quod dictus pater, nolens dissimulare premissa,
tentes reos. In the next place, the poor nolebat super premissis ad inquisitionem contra
me procedere, et secundum inquisitionis exigenpriests seem heartily ashamed and sorry,
and own without ambiguity, in often tiam me canonicae subicere ultioni. Tandem
ego, queerens a dicto patre non judicium sed
crude language, the faults they have veniam, promisi, sine vi, sine dolo dicto patri
committed; though probably the draw spontaneus, quod praedictam ecclesiam meam
ing up of these confessions was not resignabo, et habebo pro resignata, quandocunque
entrusted to them, but confided to the dicto patri placuerit; volens et concedens quod
idem pater possit me privare eadem . ecclesia
sterner pens of the archbishop’s secre sine strepitu judicii et juris solemnitate in aliquo
taries ; they acknowledge that if they non observata, quandocunque suae sederit volunfall again they will have nothing to say tati. Renunciavi autem spontaneus quoad pre
exceptioni de vi et de metu et litteris a
for themselves; that they will give up missaapostolica contra premissa concedendis seu
sede
their curacies without the noise or fuss etiam impetrandis, et omni auxilio juris canonici
of a trial—sine strepitu judicii—and go vel civilis competenti seu competituro per quod
away. This appears to have been a dictae resignatio et privatio impedin valeant
great point, to get rid of them quietly; vel differi. Juravi praeterea spontaneus, tactis
sacrosanctis evangeliis, me contra premissa vel
1 Regest. Visitationum Arch. Rothomagensis,
p. 21.
aliquod premissorum per me nec per aliurn non
venturum” [^Regcst. Visitcitwivuni Arch. Rotho
magensis, p. 658).
�68
THE SERVICE OF MAN
to say that nothing in Aristophanes,
Athenaeus, or Petronius, gives a picture
of more bestial depravity than the one
drawn by a prince of the Church of the
manners of his clerical contemporaries.
It is “ unspeakable,” and with that
remark we must leave the subject. But
what about grace, what about belief in
God, Christ, and the Bible ? What
about the deterrent effect of the fear of
hell, of the purifying effect of the hope
of heaven? These are questions to
which an answer were desirable.
And now, what is the moral to be
drawn from this unpleasant but necessary
review? We have seen that not in one
country nor in one age, but all through
the Ages of Faith, the most flagrant
breaches of the moral law are quite
compatible with the most fervent and
complete belief in God, in the Bible,
and, in short, in Christianity. The
usual answer to this objection is that
these people may have had faith, but it
was not living and saving faith. They
believed like the devils, and perhaps
did not always tremble like them as
well. So let it be. Mere faith, unless
it be of a partitular kind, is not enough.
The heart must be touched by grace, as
well as the mind disposed to assent
to certain dogmatic propositions. But
agnostics say no more and no less. The
touching of the heart is everything, and
assent to propositions next to nothing.
It is abundantly plain that assent to
Christian dogmas offers the slenderest
guarantee that it will have the desired
effect in touching the heart. There
never was a moment, from the first
teaching of Christianity till the present
day, when sincere pastors have not
deplored the condition of the greater
part of their flocks. That the whole
world lieth in wickedness is the constant
burden of their complaint. Could better
proof be required or given that the
supposed connection between belief and
morality is illusory ? And it is easy to
see that this is not an accidental but a
necessary result.
By laying all the
emphasis of its teaching on repen
tance and the subjective attitude
of the soul towards God, and not on
good works performed to individuals
and society, Christianity has not applied
its force in the right direction for produc
ing the maximum of morality. As this
was not its aim, it cannot be censured for
not having attained it. But it is open to
us to point out that this misdirection of
force largely accounts for the low morality
of the past, and is one of the chief causes
of the decline of theology in the present.
It is proved by an experience of eighteen
hundred years, that the tremendous
sanctions which Christianity wields are
inoperative on the majority of minds.
They do not realise them; the threats
are not heard, as it were, by the inward
spirit.
The immediate connection
between wrong-doing and going to hell
is not grasped. Hell is a long way off,
is not visible, and its deterrent efficacy
is weakest when the attraction of sinful
pleasure is strongest. Only minds of a
fine, imaginative power, and naturally
tender consciences, seize the whole im
port of the Christian message. This
fact alone would put Christianity at a
disadvantage in dealing with the bulk of
mankind. Few persons care for remote
dangers or evils ; they banish them from
their minds, as suggesting gloomy
thoughts, and trust to the chapter of
accidents to escape them entirely.
When preachers enlarge every Sunday
on the peril of the unrepenting sinner’s
condition, and tell him that he may at
any moment be summoned before the
dread tribunal of an angry God, the
young and the strong and the giddy
accord to them but a languid assent.
They feel in robust health, sudden
death by accident or disease is the great
exception, and pleasure is very delightful,
and within reach. It is a maxim of
jurisprudence that prompt punishment
for wrong-doing is vastly more efficacious
than even severer penalties long delayed.
Suppose ordinary crime were punished,
not with the greatest dispatch compatible
with justice, but at a remote period in
after life, say, twenty or thirty years after
�WHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
69
its commission, would not the deterrent lever to keep men in the right way. But
effect of the criminal law be even less they were tied down by the terms of the
than it is ? But this is by no means all. divine deed and testament, and forced
In addition to this disadvantage, Chris to use very different language. The
tian priests have one and all placed a lamentable doctrine of Original Sin, and
greater one in their own way as teachers all that flowed from it, the washing away
of morality, by their doctrine of repen of sins, flight from the wrath to come,
tance and consequent salvation. When, forced them to show that, after all,
like St. Alphonso de’ Liguori or Mr. heaven was open, if certain conditions
Spurgeon, they teach that any amount were complied with—heartfelt repent
of crime and sin can be expunged in a ance, turning to Jesus, confession of sins,
moment by sincere contrition and turn receiving the sacrament; and that, in
ing to God, even in the last hour, they that case, previous crime or virtue made
remove from the cause of morality in no difference ; all men justly lay under
this world all the force and urgency of the sentence of God’s wrath, and if He
their exhortations, and transfer them to chose to pardon, it was only out of the
celestial happiness beyond the grave. unspeakable riches of His grace. It
If they had been able to preach that was not for man to make terms. So
good works, and good works only, would that, by exaggerating human depravity
take men to heaven, they would have and making all men worthy of hell, they
occupied a relatively strong position. If came to admit very bad characters into
they could have said to men, “It matters heaven. And quite rightly, from one point
not how sorry you are for having done of view. Salvation was their object, not
amiss, you must smart for it all the morality. They have not aimed at it,
same,” they would have had a powerful and they have not attained it
Chapter VII.
WHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
attempting to estimate the past, we
are exposed to two opposite temptations,
either of which may lead us into serious
error. We may be so impressed by the
recent advance of knowledge and the
enlarged power of man over nature, the
pomp and brilliancy of modern material
progress, that we turn with disdain
from the humbler science and perform
ance of our ancestors, and, comparing
their poverty with our own riches, com
placently draw flattering conclusions to
our own advantage. This disposition is
a common mark of energetic but unedu
cated minds, of people who have made
their way in the world by force of
In
character, and who nourish a sort of
grudge against learning and scholarship.
On the other hand, it is a tone so repul
sive to minds which have made them
selves acquainted with the past that
these are apt to fall into the opposite
extreme, and to see with over-clearness
the seamy side of the present. The
wealth and noisy progress of the present
do not impress persons of this type with
much respect. They pronounce them
to be vulgar and commonplace, and
purchased at far too great a cost; nay,
by the ruin of numerous lovely and
precious things, which the present age
does not miss, only because it is too
�70
THE SERVICE OF MAR
deeply buried in sordid cares and frivo
lous pleasures to know anything about
them. If one class points to the triumph
of industry and the victories of steam,
the other draws attention to the meanness
of our Art, and the foul defacement of
natural beauty, and even the polution
of the air we breathe and the water we
drink by factories, tall chimneys, and
the ubiquitous screaming tyrant, the
railroad. The admirers of the present
look out upon the world, which it is
their intention to subdue, as conquerors.
They are always for “ opening up ” new
countries, which they say conduces to
trade and the spread of civilisation.
The lovers of the past reply that the
march of the so-called civilisation should
rather be called the spread of ruin, vice,
and disease ; that the traders look upon
the world rather as buccaneers than as
honest men, that they regard it as their
oyster which they mean to open with a
steam hammer. The interchange of
taunts and reproaches goes on in amotbic
response, as of peasants in an idyll, and
no doubt will not readily be brought to
a close. It is referred to here in order
to exhibit the difficulty of a task which,
at one time or another, we are nearly all
of us compelled to undertake, to estimate
and fairly judge the past, if for no other
purpose than lighting up and enabling
us to direct the present.
A clear perception of the road we
have travelled is one of the best indica
tions of our probable course in the
future, whether that course be a straight
line or a curve. It is obvious, if society
be an organism—and few nowadays
would deny the fact—that, in order to
understand it, we must study its life,
behaviour, and habits, on the most
extended scale. The present is a transi
tory phase, which is as insufficient for
this purpose as a day or an hour would
be for the biological study of one of the
higher animals. Both those who wish
to break with the past and ignore its
teaching as so much dross—the revolu
tionists ; and those who on various
grounds can think of nothing better than
an impossible return to it—the reaction
aries ; will find, and indeed have found
already, though the extremes of neither
party are very docile to the lessons of
experience, that knowledge alone can
throw light on our path, and that to
take sentiment or passion as our guide
is to court catastrophe. Revolutionists,
who are too impatient and headstrong to
wait for the slow but sure effects of
evolution, and reactionaries, who are too
selfish or stupid to admit the changes
which evolution demands, are equal
enemies to progress and human well
being. Incessant and minute change
is one of the conditions of life, but
great and sudden change is disease,
and no change at all is incipient death.
One of the numerous misfortunes which
afflict mankind is the difficulty of in
culcating this truth; it appears to be
profoundly offensive to the vulgar of
all classes, the majority of the race.
A salutary change, let us suppose, is
obviously required ; it is announced and
advised by a reflective individual or
group here and there. If they are not
too obscure and insignificant to fail
wholly in attracting notice, a clamour
arises against their monstrous and un
heard-of opinions; for critical turningpoints occur in the speculative as well
as the practical order; modes of thought
and doctrines at times need reforming
as much as institutions; they cannot be
listened to, they are subversive, atheistic,
destructive of man’s best interests, and
so forth. The change does not take
place, or oftener it is not overtly admitted
as needed or salutary; it is kept down
and arrested, as far as possible even
ignored. But it is going on under
ground, as it were; its partisans increase,
and their anger also, till at last comes a
time when the dammed-up current has
accumulated an energy which overpowers
all obstacles, and it dashes furiously
forward, scattering devastation along its
course. This is the abstract history of
all revolutions in Church or State, in
thought or practice.
These considerations, even if they be
�WHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
deemed over-trite and obvious, are not
out of place as introductory to the
subject of. this chapter—an attempt to
estimate the action of Christianity in
the past. In the last chapter it was
viewed in relation to its effect on morals;
and facts were adduced which seemed
to show that in that respect its operation
had been far less salutary and decided
than it is customary to assume. At the
same time it was shown that morality
was never the special objective of Chris
tianity, and therefore any failure to foster
morality could not justly be made a
repwach against it. No system can
be Dlamed for not accomplishing what
it never attempted to do. Luther would
have read the previous chapter without
discomposure. He would have said:
“ No doubt the object of Christianity is
to save men’s souls in the next world,
not to make them moral in this. And
it does save. That is all I want.” On
this ground his position is unassailable.
Modern apologists have usually forsaken
his inaccessible heights, and put in
claims, which seem to be more than dis
putable, for their religion as a guardian
of morality.
But this is only one side of a large sub
ject. A doctrine so wide and powerful
as the Christian has many other sides,
and its energy as a social factor is not to
be limited to one point of view. Chris
tianity has had an immense influence on
politics, literature, and philosophy; it
has moulded the minds and characters
of many of the most distinguished
persons who have adorned the human
race. But neither its blind friends
nor its blind foes can be expected to
do it justice, and possibly full justice
will never be done to it till it has
ceased to exist. Still, an estimate of
its value as a social doctrine must ever
appear as one of the most important
problems presented by history, an at
tempted solution of which is almost
imposed on serious students who are
sufficiently withdrawn from theological
prepossessions to regard Christianity
neither with love nor hatred, but with
7*
that sympathy and respect justly due
to one of the greatest phases of human
evolution.
In the learned and profound investi
gations of continental scholars concern
ing the origin of Christianity and the
growth of the early Church, sufficient
attention has not always been accorded
to the precise time and place in the
order of human evolution in which that
religion arose. This is not intended as
a reproach to such illustrious men as
Strauss, F. C. Baur, Keim, Hausrath,
and Renan. They had more immediate
work of a specialist kind to do, and
might well leave the placing of Chris
tianity in world-history to others. But
the point is of great importance. It
may with reason be doubted, if the fact
is as often remembered as it should be,
that Christianity arose amid the corrup
tion and decay of the greatest civilisation
which the human race had seen, amid
the death-throes of the ancient world.
From the fact that the New Testament
was written before that corruption and
decay had assumed their final and fatal
form, that St. Paul lived and preached in
Antioch the Beautiful; visited Athens
while its citizens still retained enough
of the old inquiring spirit to “ spend
their time in nothing else but either to
tell or to hear something new ”; and at
last came to martyrdom in Rome while
the deceptive bloom of imperial splendour
still flushed the cheek of the dying mis
tress of the world—it is often assumed
that this proud heathenism and pagan
glory were overthrown by the meek and
unlearned disciples of the Galilean
prophet of God. Nothing can be less
true than this assumption. The soft
autumnal calm, and purple tints as of
an Indian summer, which lingered, up
to the Antonines, over that wide expanse
of empire, from the Persian Gulf to the
Pillars of Hercules, and from the Nile to
the Clyde, broken as it was by the year
of Revolution of a.d. 69 and the black
tyranny of Domitian’s reign, was only a
misleading transition to that bitter winter
which filled the half of the second and
�TIIE SERVICE OF MAN
the whole of the third century, to be
soon followed by the abiding dark and
cold of the Middle Ages. The Empire
was moribund when Christianity arose.
Indeed, Rome had practically slain the
ancient world before the Empire replaced
the effete Republic. The barbarous
Roman soldier who killed Archimedes
absorbed in a problem is but an instance
and a type of what Rome had done
always and everywhere by Greek art,
civilisation, and science. The Empire
lived upon and consumed the capital of
preceding ages, which it did not replace.
Population, production, knowledge, all
declined and slowly died. The Christian
apologists, headed by St. Augustine, were
justly indignant at the pagan slander
which attributed the fall of the Empire
to the spread of Christianity. Their
answer to the objection was complete,
as we can see far better even than they
did themselves. But what they could
not be expected to see, and what we can
see very well, is, that the fall of the
Empire, including the loss and ruin of
the old philosophy and knowledge, was
an indispensable condition of the spread
of Christianity. If the blood of the
martyrs was truly said to be the seed of
the Church, the decay of knowledge
was an equally needed pre-requisite. It
will not be denied that this decay of
knowledge was present and startlingly
rapid. After the silver age which ended
nobly with Tacitus and the younger
Pliny, Latin pagan literature almost
ceases to exist; and the falling off in the
form is not more striking than in the
value and quality of the contents. All
superstitions revived and flourished
apace in the ever-waning light of know
ledge. A shudder of religious awe ran
through the Roman world, and grew
more sombre and searching with the
progressive gloom and calamities of the
time. A spirit wholly different from the
light-hearted scepticism of the Augustan
age and later Republic stirred men’s
hearts, and the strongest minds did not
escape it. “ The pagans were not one
TV.hit bphind the Christians as regards |
belief in miracles and in a future life.”1
The sun of ancient science, which had
risen in such splendour from Thales to
Hipparchus, was now sinking rapidly to
the horizon; and when it at last dis
appeared, say in the fifth century, the
long night of the Middle Ages began.
But it was in this period of decaying
knowledge and civilisation that the Chris
tian religion was elaborated and consti
tuted in the historical form which it
practically still wears. The creeds and
chief dogmas of the Church were worked
out in the period which extends from
the Council of Jerusalem to the Councils
of Nice, Chalcedon, Alexandria, and
Ephesus. No evolutionist would think
of speaking in any but respectful terms
of the great Churchmen who laid down
the lines along which European thought
was destined to travel for a thousand
years. The sneering tone of sceptics in
the last age is wholly out of place, and
arose from pure ignorance of the laws
which govern social and intellectual
development. The Nicene Creed in
the fourth century after Christ was as
natural and legitimate a product of the
conditions of the time as was the
Socratic philosophy in the fourth century
before Christ. What we have to note is,
that the Nicene Creed was the product
of an age of decay, of disaster, and ap
proaching death, so far as civilisation and
science were concerned. In every light,
one of the most memorable, and in
many respects one of the most noble,
of human compositions, it yet, as it
could not fail to do, bears the marks of
its birth-time; and that time was one
of extreme calamity, of growing gloom,
ignorance, and misery.
Within two
centuries of its promulgation, the Graeco
Roman world had descended into the
great hollow which is roughly called the
Middle Ages, extending from the fifth
to the fifteenth century, a hollow in
which many great, beautiful, and heroic
things were done and created, but in
1 Hausrath, Neute$tani?ntliche Zeit^eschichte^
vol. iii. 489.
�WHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
which knowledge, as we understand it,
and as Aristotle understood it, had no
place. The revival of learning and the
;
Renaissance are memorable as the first
sturdy breasting by humanity of the
hither slope of the great hollow which
lies between us and the ancient world.
The modern man, reformed and regene
rated by knowledge, looks across it, and
recognises on the opposite ridge, in the
far-shining cities and stately porticoes,
in the art, politics, and science of
, • antiquity, many more ties of kinship and
sympathy than in the mighty concave
between, wherein dwell his Christian
ancestry, in the dim light of scholas
ticism and theology.
The birth of Christianity being on
this wise—viz., having taken place in
an era of decay and death of art and
philosophy, of knowledge, nf wealth, of
population, of progress in every form—
and the absence of these things having
!
been one of the chief negative conditions
of its growth and prosperity, we must
look for the sources of its nourishment
. in another direction than these; not in
knowledge, or the eager questioning
spirit which leads to knowledge, but in
the humble spirit which believes and
accepts on trust the word of authority;
not in regulated industry, wrhich aims at
constant increase and accumulation of
wealth, but in the resigned poverty
which, scorning this world, lays up riches
in heaven; not in political freedom and
I
popular government, which aims at the
progressive well-being of all, but in the
stern rigour of arbitrary power, which
coerces the vicious and refractory into a
little order during their brief sojourn on
earth. In the decline and fall of Rome,
or, as it would be better to say, in the
I
final ruin of ancient civilisation, the con
ditions favourable to this order of beliefs
or doctrines spontaneously emerged. It
is obvious that there could be no question
of free institutions or settled industry in
an age chastened by every scourge of
war, pestilence, and famine; by arbitrary
tyranny and military despotism. Know
ledge, agai n, is ever; more sensitive than
i
i
73
capital to the influence of public and
widespread calamities, inasmuch as the
love of knowledge is rarer and feebler
than the love of wealth in most minds.
To a man of the fifth century on the
lookrout for any sphere of activity for
his energies no prospect presented itself
in the least similar to what such a man
would see now, or would have seen in
Athens under Pericles, or in Rome
under the Scipios. Public life existed
as little as it does at this day in Russia.
The pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s
sake was out of place in a time when
daily existence was not safe from the
swords of successive barbarian hordes,
or, failing these, from the more cruel
onslaught of the merciless tax-collector.
That is to say, all the outlets through
which modem energy is chiefly expended
were then closed; a man could not
serve the state as a citizen, he could not
serve knowledge as a man of science, he
could not augment wealth as an artisan
or master of industry.
There was only one thing left for him
to do—to serve God.
The last and perhaps the most impor
tant legacy left by the ancient philosophy
to the world was the doctrine of mono
theism, the belief in a single supreme
God. The evolution of this capital idea
has never yet been traced with the care
it supremely deserves. The common
notion that it was wholly derived from
the Jews is quite unfounded. The germs
of it may be found in Greece in the
earliest speculations of the Ionic and
Eleatic philosophers. It gradually made
its way, by the force of its inherent
rationality, against manifold opposition,
and among the Stoics reached a dis
tinctness and elevation little, if at all,
inferior to the highest Jewish conception
of Jehovah. The Christian deity was a
union of the two monotheistic concep
tions, the Greek and the Jewish. Each
element was necessary for the concep
tion to attain its full universality and
power. The Jew never quite trans
cended his notions of a tribal God, who
had been in an exclusive way the God of
�74
THE SERVICE OF MAN
his fathers from the beginning; the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in whom
he had a sort of ancestral right of
property, who was bound to him, and to
whom he was bound, by covenant and
mercies and promises, such as no other
nation ever imagined. The Jew was,
therefore, on a footing of familiarity and
intimacy, so to speak, with his God, to
which the metaphysical Greek, with his
wide discourse of reason, never attained.
To the Jew, God is the great companion,
the profound and loving, yet terrible,
friend of his inmost soul, with whom he
holds communion in the sanctuary of his
heart, to whom he turns, or should turn,
in every hour of adversity or happiness.
Hear the Psalmist: “ O God, thou art
my God; early will I seek thee. My
soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh also
longeth after thee, in a barren and dry
land where no water is. For thy lovingkindness is better than the life itself:
my lips shall praise thee. Have I not
remembered thee in my bed, and
thought upon thee when I was waking ?
Because thou hast been my helper,
therefore under the shadow of thy wings
will I rejoice.”1 On the other hand,
the very closeness and specialty of the
Jew’s relation to Jehovah made his con
ception of the deity unsuitable to the
office of a cosmopolitan God. I venture
to suggest that perhaps the opposition of
Peter and the Judaizing Christians to the
wider views of St. Paul arose as much
from a reluctance to part with their
national God as from the narrow, cere
monial scruples to which it is ascribed.
The Greek was as inferior to the Jew in
the depth and intensity of his religious
sentiment as he was superior in mental
reach and philosophic power. For him
God is the deity of the intellect rather
. than of the heart; He is the symbol of
“eternal law all-ruling,”2 and the Hel
lene all but attained to the impersonal
and unknowable reality behind pheno
1 Psalm lxiii. 1-4, 7, 8 (Prayer-book Version).
2 “...... iirel oilre ftporois ytpas <lXXo re /J-eifov
oilre Oeols, ?) Koivbv ael v6p.ov tv 31kt) vfivetv.”
CleanthisHymn., 37, 38.
mena, which the last word of recent
philosophy propounds as the only
rational object of worship.
When these two, each in its way
powerful and stimulating notions of God,
coalesced into one, as they did in the
teaching of St. Paul, the effect on the
moral and spiritual world was as that of
a new force, a new centre of gravity to
which all thoughts and feelings naturally
tended with an irresistible attraction.
The rationality of monotheism as com
pared with polytheism, of the idea of
one all-ruling deity, instead of the
anarchy of a crowd of gods and god
desses thwarting each other, recom
mended the doctrine to all superior
minds, as infinitely truer, simpler, and
better. Knowledge had progressed far
enough to make the uniformity of nature
a credible result of the operations of an
eternal mind; but it had not gone far
enough to exclude the notions of miracle
and of providential interference on the
part of the deity with human affairs.
Moreover, the God of the Jews had
become, through St. Paul, the God of
the universe, and the “Father of all; in
every age, in every clime adored.” The
influence of the combined ideas on
contemporary minds, as it is shown in
the writings of the Fathers, is very
striking. A tone of exultation and
radiant joy seems to possess them when
they refer to the new-found central
object of their worship, which contrasts
not only with the sad, desponding tone
of the pagans, but even with Israel’s
delight in Jehovah, which is rarely
without a touch of gloom and fore
boding, and with the meek resignation of
the Middle Ages, which tremble even
more than they believe. Compare the
Te Deum of St. Ambrose with the Dies
Ir<z of Thomas of Alano. The two
hymns are parallel, often nearly identical,
in thought, but profoundly divergent in
sentiment. The one bright, full of hope
and trust in God; the other sombre
and anxious and care-laden, almost to
the verge of despair. Such was the
difference between the fifth and the
�WHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
thirteenth centuries. The earlier Chris
tians, reminded, no doubt, by the
paganism which still survived, are never
weary of setting forth the superior
grandeur and consolation of their faith
as compared to that of polytheism; and
it is quite easy even for us to see how
incalculably the religious sentiment must
have been intensified when its scattered
rays, dispersed among a crowd of deities,
were all united in the barely tolerable
splendour of one Almighty God and
Lord. Nowhere does the passionate
adoration, and flow of unbounded
devotion, show itself with more fervour
and power than in the Prayer for all
Conditions of Men in the Alexandrian
Liturgy. The original makes the frag
ments of it which have survived in
modern Liturgies appear very pale and
tame. Here is a short specimen :—
“ O King of Peace, give us thy peace,
keep us in love and charity, be our God,
for we know none beside thee: we call
> upon thy name ; grant unto our souls
the life of righteousness, that the death
of sin may not prevail against us or any
of thy people. Visit, O Lord, and heal
those who are sick, according to thy pity
and compassion; turn from them and
from us all sickness and diseases ; restore
them to and confirm them in their
strength. Raise up those who have
lingered under long and tedious indis
positions ; succour those who are vexed
with unclean spirits. Relieve those who
are in prisons or in the mines, under
accusations or condemnations, in exile
or in slavery, or loaded with grievous
tribute.”1
With these intense and absorbing
feelings running in a deep but, after all,
narrow channel, the Western European
world turned to meet and advance into
that dread and frightful time designated
as the Fall of the Roman Empire. How
a fragment or a germ of civilisation
escaped destruction in that great catas
trophe it is not easy to say. It is
admitted on all hands that a great debt
* Bunsen, Analecta Ante-Nicena, pp. 24, 109.
75
is owing to the Christian bishops of
those days, who were the only officials
clothed with authority and honour,
who survived the wreck of the Roman
bureaucracy. Although this fact re
dounds rather to the credit of epis
copacy than of Christianity, still a fair
criticism must admit that as, without the
previous dignity and prestige obtained
by the Christian religion, bishops would
not have been there, or in a position to
discharge their functions, the final result
must be credited to the new faith. It is
the more incumbent upon us to acknow
ledge and assert this as at a later date
the part played by Christianity in politics
was very nearly wholly evil. In attempt
ing to estimate, as was proposed, the
utility of Christianity in the past, it will
simplify our task if we divide the subject
under three heads, and consider its
Political, Philosophical, and Spiritual
action in the world.
1. The Political action of Christianity.
Owing to well-known historical reasons,
the natural and legitimate action of the
politics suggested or approved in the
New Testament was a long time in
showing itself. The courtliness of the
bishops who incensed Constantine and
Theodosius was evidence that Christian
prelates, as such, had no objection to
arbitrary power. But that is hardly a
reproach, when nothing but arbitrary
power was possible. Under the Catholic
feudal regime the Church was more often
in an attitude of hostility to the secular
power than in alliance with it. While
the Church was the rival of the State,
and bid high for supremacy, it could not
coalesce with the State and support its
despotic pretensions. But when, at the
end of the Middle Ages, the monarchies
of Europe definitively got the upper hand,
and aimed straight at arbitrary power,
the Church, so far from opposing, was
only too ready to help them. A number
of texts, which had been overlooked
before, were cited to prove the absolute
duty of every Christian man to yield
passive obedience to kings and governors.
It was one of the most critical turning
�76
THE SERVICE OF MAN
points in human evolution. In the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the
battle of freedom was fought out. All
the monarchies of Europe were moving
with rapid strides towards despotism.
Nothing can deprive the Dutch of the
honour of having been the first to step
into the breach and defend, against
apparently overwhelming odds, the cause
of liberty. The English followed them,
nobly but somewhat tardily, under
Cromwell. All through this bad time
the Christian Church threw its whole
weight on the side of oppression; and
the point to be noticed is that it had
the fullest scriptural warrant for its action,
and could not conscientiously have done
otherwise. We have all long ago for
gotten the opposition of our Jacobites
to freedom, and the narrow escape we
had of falling under arbitrary power.
The weak and worthless Stuarts, with
their immense ambition and feeble
faculties, were not the chief danger.
That lay in the adherence to their pre
tensions of such saintly men as Bishop
Ken, and such noble champions of
moral purity as Jeremy Collier. And
these men, as they believed all scripture,
believed also these texts: “ Let every
soul be subject unto the higher powers.
For there is no power but of God: the
powers that be are ordained of God.”
“ Submit yourselves to every ordinance
of man for the Lord’s sake.” “ Servants,
be subject to your masters with all fear;
not only to the good and gentle, but
also to the froward.” Professor Sewell,
commenting on these passages, says
with complete truth: “ It is idle, and
worse than idle, to attempt to restrict
and explain away this positive command.
And the Christian Church has always
upheld it in its full extent. With one
uniform, unhesitating voice it has pro
claimed the duty of passive obedience.”1
It may be objected that the Puritans
and other Christian sects have taken a
different view of their religious duties,
and shown themselves brave champions
1 Christian Politics, p. iii.
of civil freedom. To which it may be
replied that the Puritans, when they
were oppressed by Laud and Charles,
showed the common human faculty of
looking away from and ignoring incon
venient facts which told against them
and their cause ; they passed over these
parts of Scripture. Even Locke, in his
answer to Filmer, never attempted to
expound these formidable texts in a
sense favourable to his arguments ; like
the able controversialist that he was, he
felt that the, less said on that subject the
better. But further, the Puritans, by
their partiality for the Old Testament,
became almost Jewish in sentiment, and
imbibed a portion of the anti-monarchical
spirit of the Hebrew prophets and priest
hood. It was not one of these who
would have said, “Let every soul be
subject unto the higher powers.” And
yet, again, the Puritans, when they
became supreme in America, showed
that they could be as oppressive and
intolerant as any Catholics or Anglicans
in Europe.
It is not necessary to expatiate at any
length on the import and effect of this
authentic Christian and scriptural teach
ing. We can easily afford to let bygones
be bygones. But when the most im
modest and unfounded claims are put
forward in behalf of Christianity as an
unfailing and universal benefactor to
mankind, we may certainly be allowed
to point out that for two centuries it was
a consistent and determined enemy of
human liberty and welfare. It took the
side of the Stuarts, Bourbons, and Hapsburgs against their subjects, and it was
bound to do so by its own principles.
An agnostic may pardon this, as one of
those errors of which the past is full.
But a Christian, who believes in the
perennial value and beneficence of his
doctrine, must, one would think, expe
rience certain qualms in moments of
retrospection.
2. The influence of Christianity on
speculative thought has been far more
salutary than it has been on politics, and
this not from any accidental circumstance,
�WHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
but in consequence of essential qualities
in the doctrine itself. It cannot be a
mere accident that, of the three mono
theistic religions, Christianity alone has
produced elaborate systems of theology,
which in depth and compass can com
pare with any systems of philosophy,
ancient or modern. The Jews and
Mohammedans have each had their
disputes and controversies inside their
own confessions, from which the odium
theologicum has not been wanting; but
their puny differences cannot be com
pared to the splendid, far-reaching dis
cussions which have repeatedly filled the
Christian Churches with the most vigorous
and brilliant intellectual life. The sub
ject cannot be treated adequately here.
It will suffice to point to the intellectual
revival which followed the spread of
Christianity, and gave to the world the
whole literature of the Fathers, Greek
and Latin, in the third, fourth, and fifth
centuries, at the very time when pagan
literature had fallen into sterility and
decrepitude. Even Gibbon, no favour
able witness, acknowledges this. Of all
writers who have used Latin as their
mother tongue, it is no exaggeration to
say that St. Augustine is by far the most
original, suggestive, and profound.' He
is a genuine thinker, not a mere rhetori
cian like Cicero, Seneca, and the rest.
The controversies of the fourth century,
which have given rise to much tasteless
ridicule, notably the Arian controversy,
and the witticism suggested that it was
preposterous that the world should be
divided into hostile camps by a diph
thong, these controversies were mentally
the most stimulating discussions, not
only which the age admitted of, but
which have ever occupied men’s minds.
All the faculties of the reason and logical
understanding were brought into play,
subtlety the most acute, and discourse of
reason the most lofty. When the
western world sank into barbarism in
the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries,
theological controversy largely ceased;
it was a sufficient task for the West
to keep alive, and intellectual luxuries
77
had to be dispensed with. But the
moment the warmth of reviving civilisa
tion returned to the stiffened minds of the
West, deep and searching controversies
recommenced. It would be interesting
to show how all this mental activity
sprang immediately or remotely from the
central Christian doctrine, the Divinity
of Christ. A long struggle was needed,
to establish that doctrine, but it was,
worthy of a long struggle. The difference
between “ homoousion ” and “ homoiousion ” is only that of a single letter,,
but, as Emile Saisset well said, “ Probe
the matter to the bottom; between.
Jesus Christ, man, and Jesus Christ,.
man-God, there is infinity; there is, if
one may so speak, the whole thickness of
Christianity.” The subsequent contro
versies, the Monothelite, the Monophysite, and others, are obviously due to the
same origin; and all through the follow
ing ages, the Scholastic period, the Re
formation, the Jansenist and Jesuit
epoch, down to Strauss and Moehler, the
same great doctrine has been, in a greater
or lesser degree, a potent stimulus at
once of philosophical inquiry and his
torical research.
3. It is in the action of Christian
doctrine on the human spirit that we
see its power in the highest and most,
characteristic form. Neutral or injuriousin politics, favourably stimulating in the
region of speculative thought, its influ
ence on the spiritual side of characters,
naturally susceptible to its action, has
been transcendent, overpowering, and un
paralleled. The restriction to characters
“ naturally susceptible ” will probably be
resented, but it cannot be denied. The
great mass of men have at all times been
feebly sensitive to the higher _ spiritual
influences of Christianity. It is a fact
which all preachers of every denomination
are for ever denouncing and lamenting.
The true Christian saint is the rarest pro
duct in every Christian Church. What is
even more noteworthy is that the terrible
menaces of God’s wrath and damnation,
which, till quite recent times, have been
universally believed by Christian men,
�78
THE SERVICE OF MAN
have been equally inoperative; and this
to such a degree that the truly con
verted and repentant sinners, those who
have set about working out their salva
tion in fear and trembling, have ever
been lost in wonder and horror at the
reckless folly of the bulk of mankind in
leading the lives they did, coupled with
their nominal beliefs. Convinced and
earnest Christians are always compelled
to regard it as madness, or a superlative
proof of Satan’s power. Volumes of
quotations could be given from the
highest and best authorities in support
of this, as every one conversant with
religious literature will be aware. I will
restrict myself to two, taken from the
works of illustrious men, each in his own
confession among the brightest examples
of Christian virtue—Blaise Pascal and
Richard Baxter. Pascal says :—
“ Rien n’est si important a l’homme
que son etat; rien ne lui est si redoubt
able que l’eternite. Et ainsi, qu’il se
trouve des hommes indifferents a la perte
de leur etre, et au peril d’une eternite de
miseres, cela n’est point naturel. Ils sont
tout autres & l’egard de toutes les autres
choses: ils craignent jusqu’aux plus
legeres ; ils les pr^voient, ils les sentent;
et ce meme homme qui passe tant de
jours et de nuits dans la rage et dans le
d^sespoir pour la perte d’une charge, ou
pour quelque offense imaginaire a son
honneur, c’est celui-R meme qui sait
qu’il va tout perdre par la mort, sans
inquietude et sans emotion. C’est une
chose monstrueuse de voir dans un m£me
coeur et en meme temps cette sensibilite
pour les moindres choses, et cette etrange
insensibilite pour les plus grandes. C’est
un enchantement incomprehensible, et
un assoupissement surnaturel, qui marque
une force toute-puissante qui le cause.”
(Pensees, chap, i.)
Baxter says : “ Can you make so light
of heaven and hell ? Your corpse will
shortly lie in the dust, and angels or
devils will shortly seize upon your souls,
and every man or woman of you will
shortly be among other company and in
another case than you are now........ O
what a place you will be in of joy or
torment; O what a light will you shortly
see in heaven or hell; O what thoughts
will shortly fill your hearts with unspeak
able joy or horror ! What work will you
be employed in ? To praise the Lord
with saints and angels, or cry out in the
fire unquenchable with devils ? And
should all this be forgotten? And all
this will be endless and sealed up by an
unchangeable decree. Eternity, eternity
will be the measure of your joys or
sorrows, and can this be forgotten ?
And all this is true, sirs, most certainly
true. When you have gone up and
down a little longer, and slept and
awaked a few times more, you will be
dead and gone, and find all true that I
now tell you; and yet you can now so
much forget it. You shall then remem
ber that you heard this sermon, and
that this day, in this place, you were
reminded of these things, and perceive
these matters a thousand times greater
than either you or I could here con
ceive; and yet shall they be now so
much forgotten?”1
That these are only fair samples of
the tremendous -stimulants applied by
preachers to awaken Christian sinners to
a sense of their guilt and danger will be
admitted, I suppose, on all hands; and
yet it is equally admitted that they are
practically of very slight effect. Baxter,
a few pages before, had declared that
“the most will be firebrands in hell
for ever.” And no theologian with a
character to lose, till quite recent times,
would have had a doubt about it.
On theological grounds the matter is
sufficiently perplexing. True believers,
like Pascal and Baxter, have at all times
found that in this particular the con
duct of men was hardly to be explained.
If they believed God’s promises and
threats, why were their lives such a
practical denial of faith in them? The
real answer, which divines could not be
expected to give, was that the bulk
of men had neither sufficient logic,
1 Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted.
�WHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
imagination, or tenderness of heart and
conscience to assimilate the whole im
portance and bearing of the Christian
scheme. A strong head, which accepted
the premises of the Christian doctrine,
would not hesitate to work out the con
clusions. But the majority of men have
not strong heads. A powerful imagina
tion, which realised the awful prospect
of a future judgment, and the eternity
of bliss or woe consequent upon it,
would be only too much appalled by the
thought; as cases of religious madness
sufficiently show. The truly meek and
tender-hearted, again, have a natural turn
for piety; as we see by the negroes,
who seem to obtain a saintly spirit of
detachment and self-renunciation with
far greater ease than the more energetic
races of Western Europe. But when
among the Western Europeans the
saintly character, under the combined
influences of education and natural
endowment, is evolved, the result, as
might be supposed, is far more striking,
on account of their superior fibre and
temperament and general brain-power.
The true Christian saint, though a rare
phenomenon, is one of the most wonder
ful to be witnessed in the moral world;
so lofty, so pure, so attractive, that he
ravishes men’s souls into oblivion of the
patent and general fact that he is an
exception among thousands or millions
of professing Christians. The saints
have saved the Churches from neglect
and disdain. The hope, even the asser
tion, has always been that all men
could be like them, if only—the con
dition is not easily reduced to words,
and cannot be stated in a manner
generally satisfactory, but the implication
always is that but for some fault in man,
or the wiliness of Satan, sanctity might
be universal. It would be as rational to
say that the poetry of Shakespeare, the
music of Beethoven, and the geometry
of Lagrange were accessible to all men.
The genuine saint is a moral genius of a
peculiar kind ; he is born, not made;
though, like all men of genius, he is sure,
sooner or later, to acquire the best educa
79
tion and that most adapted to his powers.
Saintliness is not confined to Christianity.
There have been Pagan and Moham
medan saints; and it would not be easy
to find, even in the Christian Calendar,
men more naturally saintly than Marcus
Aurelius and Abu Beker. What needs
admitting, or rather proclaiming, by
agnostics who would be just is, that the
Christian doctrine has a power of culti
vating and developing saintliness which
has had no equal in any other creed or
philosophy. When it gets firm hold of
a promising subject, one with a heart
and a head warm and strong enough to
grasp its full import and scope, then it
strengthens the will, raises and purifies
the affection, and finally achieves a con
quest over the baser self in man, of
which the result is a character none the
less beautiful and soul-subduing because
it is wholly beyond imitation by the
less spiritually endowed. The “ blessed
saints ” are artists who work with un
earthly colours in the liquid and trans
parent tints of a loftier sky than any
accessible or visible to common mortals.
Perhaps there is a certain rashness in
attempting to illustrate these remarks by
concrete instances of saintly detachment
and self-renunciation. Hagiology is not
a favourite form of literature nowadays;
and it must be admitted that in the lives
of many saints, especially of mediaeval
times, unpleasant traits and circum
stances connected with the superstitions
of the age are often found in close
neighbourhood with virtues the most
beautiful and attractive.
Equity de
mands that we should make the same
allowance for men’s erroneous concep
tions of duty as we do for their erroneous
conceptions of intellectual truth, in
accordance with the standards and cul
ture of the times. We do not think
worse of a philosopher’s intellect, who
lived in antiquity or the Middle Ages,
because he held a number of absurd
opinions and theories in astronomy,
chemistry, and biology.
Those who
believe in the empirical origin of moral
truth are bound to be consistent and
�8o
THE SERVICE OF MAN
show the same charity in the one case
as in the other. If we take the case of
Saint Louis, King of France, we must
admit that a man of a more saintly
character never, perhaps, existed. If
we consider the temptations to which
his high position necessarily exposed
him, and the completeness with which
he surmounted every unholy and selfish
thought or act, it is difficult not to regard
him as the best man that ever lived.
Yet it is obvious that in many instances
his notions of duty were very wrong or
perverted. But though his conscience
may not have been always enlightened, his
heart was ever right. His abortive and
ruinous crusades were the cause of vast
misery and harm ; but we cannot wonder
that so devout a man strove to carry out
one of the great religious ideas and
duties of the time, and none the less so
because symptoms were arising that the
paramount nature of the duty was begin
ning to be questioned. In his private
life he saw sometimes amiss—saw duties
where none existed. I refer to his ex
aggerated submission to the imperious
temper of his mother, his excessive and
often repulsive self-mortifications. But,
this being fully allowed, there remains a
clear surplus of untarnished virtue rarely
surpassed.
There are few tests of a man’s spiritual
condition more searching and decisive
than the temper with which he bears
unmerited insult and railing speech. I
do not refer to mere self-command, to
the self-respect which forbids an answer
in kind, and imposes an external calmness
of manner on a swelling indignation
within. The man of the world, when it
suits him, can attain to this much, which
yet is not little, considering the common
“ impotentia” of mankind. The question
is not one of self-mastery under, but of
superiority to, insult, which feels no
anger or resentment at insolence or con
tempt ; and this not from an abject
and craven spirit, but from living in a
plane of feeling up to which personal
insult does not reach. This equanimity
in no wise prejudges the question whether
injurious language should not be reproved,
and in some cases punished, as by a judge
for a contempt of court. We are only
concerned with that serenity of spirit
which is not touched or wounded by
opprobrious speech, and all will admit
that it is a very rare gift. The following
anecdote told of St. Louis shows the
way in which he endured insult:—
As he was sitting in the Court of Par
liament, the highest tribunal in France,
a woman named Sarrette, who was
interested in a suit then being heard,
and perhaps dissatisfied with the decision,
exclaimed to the king : “ Fie, fie 1 a fine
king of France you are; much better
were it if another were king. You are
only the king of the monks and friars,
and the wonder is you are not turned
out of the kingdom.” The ushers wanted
to strike the woman, and expel her from
the court. But Louis would not allow
it, and said : “ What you say is very true,
and I am not worthy to be king. It
would have been much better had it
pleased God that another had been put
in my place, who knew better how to
govern the kingdom and he ordered
his chamberlains to give the woman
money. In this last act most moralists
would admit that Louis was mistaken.
To reward a scold for unseemly conduct
in a court of justice cannot be considered
justifiable. A fine and imprisonment
might have tarlght Sarrette a useful
lesson; it is clear that she needed
one. As a jurist the king was to blame.
But the meekness of spirit, which could
suggest such an answer to a king and
judge, in reply to a gross insult, was
surely very wonderful.
Louis’s justice, temperance, and entire
self-abnegation in every relation of life
are too well known from one of the
most charming of mediaeval chronicles,,
the Mtmoires of Joinville, to make it
needful to dwell upon the subject. But
to the above-cited example of his humility,
it may be well to add an equal proof of’
his firmness, and that in presence of that
very priesthood to whom he was accused
of being submissive. “ I saw hirm
�IVHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
another time,” says Joinville, “at Paris,
where all the bishops informed him that
they wished to speak with him ; and the
king went to the Palace—the law-courts
—to hear them. There was Guy, Bishop
of Auxerre, who spoke to him as follows,
in the name of all the prelates: ‘Sire,
the lords who are here, the archbishops
and bishops, have charged me to tell
you that the Christian faith is perishing
in your hands/ The king made the sign
of the cross, and said : ‘ But tell me how
this comes to pass.’ ‘Sire,’ resumed the
bishop, ‘ the reason is that people now
adays think so lightly of excommunica
tion that they allow themselves to die
rather than be absolved, and will not
give satisfaction to the Church. The
bishops request you, sire, for the love
of God, and because it is your duty,
to give orders to provosts and bailiffs
that all who have remained excom
municated for a year and a day should
be constrained, by the seizure of their
goods, to receive absolution.’ To
which the king replied, that he would
willingly command it in those cases in
which guilt was clearly proven. Where
upon the bishop answered, that the
bishops would not consent, at any price,
to that condition, and that the royal
power had no right to take cognisance
of ecclesiastical causes. Then the king
said that he would not interfere; and
that it would be against God and reason
to force people to obtain absolution when
the clergy did them wrong. ‘ And I will
give you an example of this,’ he went on
to say—‘ the case of the Earl of Brittany,
who pleaded in a state of excommunica
tion for seven years against the prelates
of his province, and with such effect that
the Pope has condemned them all. If,
therefore, I had compelled the Earl of
Brittany to seek absolution in the first
year, I should have sinned against God
and him.’ And the prelates had to sub
mit,” says Joinville; “and I never heard
that the subject was brought up again.”
There was no false humility here, but, on
the contrary, rare strength, for all it was
so softly spoken. Some years after
8i
Louis published the famous Pragmatic
Sanction, the French equivalent to our
English Statute of Praemunire, which laid
the foundation of the liberties of the
Gallican Church in opposition to the See
of Rome.
I do not merely admit, but strongly
maintain, that St. Louis was a man of
such moral elevation and tenderness of
nature that in whatever age of the world
he might have lived, and whatever creed
he had held, he would have been distin
guished as just, upright, and self-sacri
ficing in an unusual degree. But I think
it equally certain that living when he
did, at the brightest moment in the Ages
of Faith, when the emotional effect of
Christianity was at its height, and least
disturbed by intellectual opposition, his
spirituality was intensified by his creed,
till he seems more like one of the angels
who bow before the Great White Throne
than a denizen of common earth. And
this is the legitimate and consistent
result of Christian training carried to its
final perfection by lofty and heroic spirits;
a complete transcending, not only of the
sin and corruption of the world, but a
passing away from and beyond the world,
and human needs and relations, an
upward ascent towards the City of God,
even before the end of life. The highest
crown the Christian can win is that of
martyrdom, suffering death for the faith;
by which no benefit is ever supposed to
be conferred on men except, perhaps, the
example left for imitation by others.
The true Christian martyr does every
thing for Christ. He forsakes all to
follow Him, and goes to his doom re
joicing that he has been found worthy to
suffer for His name. The original mould
in which Christianity was cast cannot be
altered : that of a small congregation of
meek and lowly men, exposed to the
assaults of the “power of darkness,”
which was allowed to prevail for a season.
For them the world was no continuing
city, for they sought one to come. In
the “ tabernacle of this present life they
did groan, being burdened,” and were
“willing rather to be absent from the
G
�&2
THE SERVICE OF MAN
body and to be present with the Lord.”
The notion that the world can ever be a
place of peace and virtuous happiness is
never countenanced in the New Testa
ment. The Christian is always considered
as one in the midst of a hostile and evil
society, from which he must keep apart;
and, if only he is prepared, the sooner he
can leave it the better. We find, accord
ingly, martyrs almost without exception
professing, no doubt sincerely, the utmost
gratitude for being delivered from this
mortal life. As Sir Thomas More said,
“St. Cyprian, that famous bishop of
Carthage, gave his executioner thirty
pieces of gold, because he knew he should
procure unto him an unspeakable good
turn and More himself, when about to
suffer, and the executioner asked him
forgiveness, kissed him, and said : “Thou
wilt do me this day a greater benefit
than ever any mortal man can be able
to give me.” Heroic constancy, even to
death, is the note of the martyr, and
indeed of every true Christian. And it is
this transcendental character of Christian
perfection which has ever made it at once
such an imperfect fosterer of morality,
and such a stimulator of spirituality and
heroic passion. No vestige of self may
be suffered to remain in the true con
fessor’s heart, in which every human
desire must be burnt up by love of the
Redeemer. A man must “hate his father,
and mother, and wife, and children, and
brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own
life also,” to be a true disciple of Christ.
How utterly unequal average human
nature is to this trancendent pitch of
self-sacrifice, the past and present record
of Christianity sufficiently proves. But
some have been equal to it, and the
heroism of the saints has been illumi
nated by a radiance which seemed to
descend direct from heaven. At all
times and in all sects, the blood of
martyrs has been the seed of the Church.
To men, constituted as they are, the
voluntary and deliberate laying down of
life by confessors for conscience’ sake
is always the most impressive and soul
subduing of spectacles, conquering even
the cruelty of the persecutors who are
consenting unto their deaths.
The
“face of an angel,” remarked in the
protomartyr Stephen, is not to be for
gotten, and works miracles of conver
sion and remorse in the solitude of the
conscience, when the ghastly scene of
stoning without the city, or the burning
in the market-place, returns to the
memory in the silent watches of the
night; and the faith and meekness of
the sufferer rise up like accusers from
the world of spirits. The meekness and
docility of the victims are a cardinal
point. All bravado and self-assertion
dim the lustre of the martyr’s crown.
“ It has been a reproach to the sufferers
in the Marian persecution that, smitten
on one cheek, they did not invariably
turn the other cheek to the smiter
and
the remark is true. If we compare the
carriage of Rowland Taylor with that of
Sir Thomas More, we are sensible of the
difference. There can be no question as
to the single - hearted piety and selfdevotion of either. But More, partly ■
perhaps by reason of his superior culture
and humanist sense of the “ becoming,”
showed a sweet resignation which con
trasts favourably with the boisterous
humour and self-consciousness of Taylor.
“ His degradation was performed by
Bonner : the usual mode being to put
the garments of a Roman Catholic priest
on the clerk-convict, and then to strip
them off. Taylor refused to put them
on, and was forcibly robed by another;
and then, when he was thoroughly fur
nished therewith, he set his hands to his
side, and said : ‘ How say you, my lord,
am I not a goodly fool ? How say you,
my masters, if I were in Cheap should I
not have boys enough to laugh at these
apish toys ?’ The final ceremony was
for the bishop to give the heretic a blow
on his breast with his staff. The bishop’s
chaplain said : ‘ My lord, strike him not;
for he will sure strike again.’ ‘ Yes,
by St. Peter will I,” quoth Dr. Taylor.
‘ The cause is Christ’s, and I were no
good Christian if I would not fight in
my master’s quarrel.’ So the bishop
�WHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
laid his curse on him, and struck him
not. When he went back to his fellow
prisoner, Bradford, he told him how the
chaplain had said he would strike again,
and ‘by my troth,’ said he, rubbing his
hands, ‘ I made him believe I would do
so indeed !’ ”
The saintly spirit would seem to be
wanting here. Indeed, the temper which
has fitted men for martyrdom has always
been liable to the perversion of a fierce
fanaticism and stubbornness, in which
meek resignation is replaced by a
savage combativeness regardless of conse
quences. In his subsequent behaviour
Taylor rose to a much higher strain.
The scene on the February morning, by
St. Botolph’s church, where his wife and
children had waited for him, “suspecting
that he might be carried away ”; the
dialogue in the gloom, “for it was a very
dark morning, and the one could not
see the other,” reach the. extreme of
tragic pathos. “His daughter Elizabeth
cried, saying, ‘ O my dear father!
Mother, mother, here is my father led
away !’ Then cried his wife, ‘ Rowland,
Rowland, where art thou?’ Dr. Taylor
answered, ‘ I am here, dear wife,’ and
stayed. The sheriff’s men would have
led him forth, but the sheriff said, ‘ Stay
a little, masters, I pray you, and let him
speak to his wife.’ Then came she to
him, and he took his daughter Mary in his
arms, and he and his wife, and Elizabeth
knelt down and said the Lord’s Prayer.
At which sight the sheriff wept apace,
and so did divers others of the company.”
It is needless to repeat further one of the
best-known scenes in English history.
The point to be noticed is, that Taylor
rose to the height of saintliness in pro
portion as he laid aside his haughty
carriage. His answer to the sheriff,
who asked him, after his martyr’s ride
through Essex to Suffolk, how he fared :
“ Well, God be praised, master sheriff,
never better; for now I know I am
almost at home”; and his meek expos
tulation to the miscreant who threw a
fagot at him, “which brake his face, so
that the blood ran down his visage
83
“ O friend, I have harm enough; what
needed that ?” attain to the summit of
Christian resignation.
The death of Sir Thomas More has
ever been regarded as one of the most
sublime examples of Christian fortitude
on record. His perfect sweetness and
self-possession have melted all hearts.
He did nothing to provoke his fate, but,
on the contrary, everything that his con
science allowed him in order to escape
it. At no time was he aggressive or self
asserting. When condemned, his car
riage was at once meek and manly.
“When Sir Thomas was come now
to the Tower-Wharfe, his best-beloved
childe, my aunte Rooper, desirous to see
her father whome she feared she should
never see in this world after, to have his
last blessing, gave there attendance to
meete him; whome as soone as she had
espyed, after she had receaved upon her
knees his fatherlie blessing, she ranne hastilie unto him; and without consideration
or care of herselfe, passing through the
midst of the throng and guarde of men
who with billes and halberds compassed
him round, there openly in the sight of
them all embraced him, not able to say
anie word, but : Oh, my father ; oh, my
father! He liking well her most naturall
and deare affection towards him, gave
her his fatherlie blessing; telling her,
that whatever he should suffer, though he
were innocent, yet it was not without the
will of God; and that she knew well
enough all the secrets of his hart, coun
selling her to accommodate her will to
God’s blessed pleasure, and bade her be
patient for her losse. She was no
sooner parted from him and gonne ten
steppes, when she, not satisfied with
her former farewell, like one who had
forgotte herselfe, ravished with the intire
love of so worthie a father, having
neither respect to herselfe nor to the
presse of the people about him, suddenly
turned back, and ranne hastilie to him,
tooke him about the necke and diverse
times togeather kissed: whereat he spoke
not a word, but carrying still his gravity,
tears fell also from his eyes; yea, there
�84
THE SERVICE OF MAN
were very few in all the troupe who
could refrain thereat from weeping, no
not the guards themselves.”1
To give one more instance of Chris
tian martyrdom; none the less tragic
because it was enacted, not amid the
tumult and profanity of a public execu
tion, but in the inner chamber of a man
of genius. At thirty years of age, Blaise
Pascal determined to “ give up the world,”
and began that course of mortification
and prayer which, there can hardly be a
doubt, shortened his days. He forsook
his scientific labours, by which he had
won, as a youth, a foremost rank among
the mathematicians of Europe, devoted
himself to reading the Scriptures and
meditating his great work on the Chris
tian religion ; of which only fragments,
in the form of the immortal “ Thoughts,”
were ever achieved. The physical priva
tions and pain to which he subjected his
emaciated body are described at length
by his sister, Madame Perier, in a bio
graphy which for simple grace and pathos
rivals the best of Walton’s “ Lives.” To
avoid wandering and worldly thoughts
when engaged in conversation, “ he took
an iron girdle full of sharp points, which
he placed next to his flesh; and when
conscious of an impulse to vanity, or
even a feeling of pleasure in the place
where he happened to be, he struck the
girdle with his elbow in order to increase
the pain of the punctures.” He ate a
certain regulated quantity of food,
whether hungry or not, never exceeding
it, however good his appetite, and never
eating less, however great his loathing;
and this, on the ground that taking food
was a duty, which was never to be
accompanied by any sensual pleasure.
When his sufferings were acute, and his
friends expressed commiseration, he
would answer, “ Do not pity me; illness
is the state natural to Christians, because
it places us in the condition we ought
ever to be in—suffering evils, deprived
of all the pleasures of sense, freed from
1 Life of Sir Thomas More, Knt., by his greatgrandson, Thomas More, Esq.,p. 264, ed. 1726.
all the passions which afflict us through
out life, without ambition, without
cupidity, in the continued expectation of
death.” He mortified his affections not
less than his body, and said that we
should never allow any one to love us
with fondness; in fostering such attach
ments we occupied hearts which ought
to be given solely to God; that it was
robbing Him of that on which He set
most store. “ It is not right that others
should attach themselves to me. Even
if they do it willingly and with pleasure,
I should deceive those in whom I excited
such a feeling. Am I not about to die ?
—the object of their love then will perish.
As I should warn people against believ
ing a falsehood, however profitable to
me, I should warn them not to attach
themselves to me ; for their duty is to
spend their lives in striving to please
God, or in seeking Him.” At his death
there was found sewn up inside the lining
of his doublet two small pieces of parch
ment and paper, on which were written
in identical words a series of brief sen
tences, of which the meaning was mis
conceived by Condorcet, who first pub
lished them. The supposition was, that
it was a “ mystic amulet,” which Pascal
had worn next his person out of super
stitious motives. Its real character is
perfectly clear: a solemn record of the
hour and date of his conversion to God
and to a life of asceticism :—
The year of grace, 1654.
Monday, 23rd of November, St. Clement’s Day,
pope and martyr, and others in the martyrology.
Eve of St. Chrysogonus, martyr, and others.
From about half-past ten at night, till half an
hour past midnight.
Fire.
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob;
not of philosophers and learned men.
Certitude, certitude. Feeling, joy, peace.
God of Jesus Christ.
Deum meum es Deum vestrum.
Thy God shall be my God----Oblivion of the world and everything save God.
He is only to be found by the way taught in the
Gospel.
Greatness of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known
thee, but I have known thee.
Joy, joy, joy 1 tears of joy.
�WHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
have left him---------------------------- - ----------Dereliquerunt me fontem aquae vivae.
My God, wilt thou forsake me ?__-----------------May I not be separated from him for ever.
This is life eternal, to know thee, the only true
God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.
Jesus Christ----------------------------- --------------- —
Jesus Christ------------------------ ------------------ ;—
I have left him : I have fled from him, denied
him, crucified him.
May I never be separated from him.
He can only be kept by the way taught by the
Gospel.
Renunciation entire and sweet.
Entire submission to Jesus Christ and to my
director.
Eternal joy for one day’s suffering on earth.
Non obliviscar sermones tuos. Amen.
“ What a noble mind is here o’erthrown will probably be the thought of
many readers. And yet, why should
that thought arise ? Doctrinal differences
apart, can there be a doubt in any
candid mind that Pascal strove with all
the force and sincerity of his powerful
mind and passionate nature to attain
Christian holiness, and that he threw
himself at the foot of the cross as com
pletely and unreservedly as a human
being could? Are his austerities and
mortifications objected to ? The form
of his asceticism may be questioned by
different schools of theology; but no
earnest, thorough-going Christian exists
who does not deny himself one way or
another, and admit asceticism in prin
ciple. Indeed, asceticism represents a
tendency in human nature far wider than
Christianity, and, though liable to frightful
perversions, is one of the noblest qualities
possessed by man. It is one of the
higher forms of courage, which not only
endures or disdains suffering, but posi
tively courts it, and finds a passionate
and fiery joy in the sharp sting of pain.
If man had instinctively the universal
horror of pain which some moralists
suppose him to have, he would never
have been a hunter or a warrior. The
delight of self-mastery in some natures
easily gets the upper hand, and leads,
according to circumstances, to the volun
tary search for danger and suffering, or
to the stern refusal of sensuous pleasure.
85
“ Quae major voluptas quam fastidium
omnis voluptatis ?” asks Tertullian. The
spirit of self-sacrifice is just as much a
factor of human nature as the spirit of
self-indulgence, though, like all the higher
gifts, less common. The deplorable
thing is that the precious gift should
be wasted and thrown away on useless
objects. The hero who suffers to save
others contributes a direct and tangible
good to the world by his action, and
even a higher good indirectly by his
example. The ascetic who tortures him
self to please a cruel god does equal
harm in both ways, to himself and others.
Even the old Hebrew saw this when
he wrote that his Lord “would have
mercy, and not sacrifice.” As regards
Christian asceticism, especially in the
grosser forms of physical, self-inflicted
torture, it is a subject which has not
received, it would seem, the attention it
deserves from Church historians. It
arose early in the Church, which, like
the austerer philosophic sects, the Stoics
and Cynics, was led, by the calamities
of the decaying Roman Empire, to take
a gloomy and despondent view of the
moral government of the universe, and to
see the finger of an angry God in the in
cessant woes with which mankind were
then scourged. And? indeed, it is not
easy to see, on Christian principles, how
voluntary and unmerited suffering can be
supposed to be displeasing to God. The
whole scheme of Redemption supposes
that God was so pleased with the suffer
ings of the innocent Christ that, in con
sideration for them, He forgave guilty
man. The sufferings of Jesus were entirely
voluntary ; His buffetings, scourgings,
crucifixion, were all endured to expiate
man’s sin; the ransom for his dis
obedience, the precious blood-shedding
which obtained innumerable benefits. If
Christians would imitate Christ, should
they not do so in this particular, the
most characteristic of His office ? . If
agony unspeakable, born by the Divine
Son, the Lamb without blemish, was
well-pleasing to His father, why should
it be otherwise in sin-stained man ?
�86
THE SERVICE OF MAN
Protestant notions on this subject may
be more rational, but they are far less
scriptural. The whole idea of Chris
tianity, as given in the New Testament,
is steeped in suffering.
“ Blessed are
they that mourn”; “Blessed are they
which are persecuted for righteousness’
sake.” Why? Because “great is their
reward in heaven.” The worship of the
Man of Sorrows was not intended for
the tender and the comfortable. “Who
soever will come after me, let him deny
himself, and take up his cross, and
follow me. For whosoever will save his
life, shall lose it; but whosoever shall
lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s,
the same shall save it.” Those who
assume a tone of sneering and contempt,
for the mortifications of the Catholic
saints, show that they are true heretics in
the primitive sense of the word, inasmuch
as they choose and select those words
and parts of Scripture only which suit
their preconceived views. Let us be
rationalists by all means ; but let us be
consistent rationalists, and consider the
Bible as an interesting fragment of
ancient Semitic literature. Those who
profess to regard it as the Word of God,
and yet ignore and neglect some of its
clearest precepts, are not consistent.
Any vitality which the Catholic revival
of these latter years may have had in
Europe or America is clearly traceable
to its superior deference to the para
mount and universal authority of those
Scriptures which all Christians admit as
binding in the last court of appeal.
To return, however, to our more
immediate subject—the spirituality of
mind stimulated by Christianity, in the
higher types of the Christian character.
Within quite recent times three
women have died, who, for complete
detachment and recollection, for pro
found sincerity and devotion to the
Cross, may justly be regarded as the
equals of any of the saints of old. I do
not for a moment pretend to say that
there have not been others equally
devoted and sincere. Probably there
have been many, to me unknown. But
these are incontestably eminent enough
in Christian virtue to serve as types of
that spirituality which is the most
characteristic result of profound Christian
belief consistently carried out. The
result is in many ways touching, and
beautiful in the extreme. It is such
flowers of exquisite perfume and beauty,
grown in the garden of the soul, which
still arrest the attention of a rationalistic
age. And nothing can show how far
the modern world has drifted away from
the old Christian point of view than the
fact that these three sweet saints have
made so slight an impression upon it.
Had they lived and worked as they did,
in the Ages of Faith, their tombs would
already have become sacred shrines, to
which troops of pious pilgrims would be
crowding to kneel and pray. Sister
Agnes Jones, Mother Margaret Hallahan,
and Sister Dora Pattison are the three
pious women to whom I refer. Their
lives have been written by loving hands;
and, in the long series of religious
biographies, more touching and graceful
portraits would not easily be found.
Amid many points of difference as to
theological opinion, social position, and
character, they yet had striking points
of likeness. The passionate love and
affection with which they inspired all
who came within their influence show
what warm-hearted, generous natures
they possessed. Language seems to
fail their biographers in attempting to
render the devotion with which they
were regarded. A dying pauper in the
Liverpool workhouse said he thought
he was in heaven when Agnes came to
his bedside. A patient of Sister Dora
stood “ up and reverently pulled his
forelock as if he had pronounced the
name of a saint or angel,” every time
he mentioned her. Of Margaret it is
written: “What struck me most in our
dearest mother was her largeness of
heart, and the total absence of self in
all her words and actions.” A common
trait of these remarkable women was a
splendid physique and immense bodily
strength. Agnes, the least distinguished
�WHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
in this respect, was yet capable of enduring
extraordinary bodily fatigue.
“ After
a whole night on duty in St. Thomas’s
Hospital, she thinks it lazy to go to bed,
and spends the day in walking and paying
visits.”1 Of Dora, the surgeon of the
Epidemic Hospital said : “ Sister Dora
could set up all night and work all day
with little or no rest; and, as far as I
could judge, she was neither physically
nor mentally the worse for it. Her
strength was superhuman. I never saw
such a woman.” And this will not
appear an over-statement in the light of
the following anecdote : “A delirious
patient, a tall, heavy man, in the worst
stage of confluent small-pox, threw him
self out of bed in the dead of night,
and with a loud yell rushed to the door
before she could stop him. She had no
time for hesitation, but at once grappled
with him, all covered as he was with
the loathsome disease. Her combined
strength and determination prevailed,
and she got him back into bed, and
held him there by main force until
the doctor arrived in the morning.”2
Margaret, if possible, was still stronger.
Her biographer says: “ Possessed of
extraordinary muscular power, she was
rather proud of hearing herself called
as strong as Samson; and when about
seventeen years of age, seeing some men
hesitate to lift a great iron stove, she
thought to put them to shame, and
carried it unassisted to the top of the
house.” All three were brave, but Dora
was lion-hearted beyond compare, and
would face drunken ruffians in the slums
of Walsall, into which the police would
only venture with caution.
All had powerful minds, though in no
one of them had education been carried
very far. Indeed, Margaret was wholly
illiterate, and never mastered ortho
graphy, geography, or arithmetic. Agnes
had the usual education of a young lady
of family and position forty years ago.
Dora probably was the best trained of
1 Life, by her sister, p. 160.
2 Life, by Miss Lonsdale, p. 159.
87
the three. But native vigour of mind
supplied all defects, and each showed a
great faculty of government and organi
sation, though in different degrees.
Agnes, who died young, had not time
to show her full power; but the last
three years of her life, in charge of the
Liverpool workhouse, with its fifteen
hundred inmates, testified to her gifts
in that direction. Dora was a lovely,
fascinating despot, bending all hearts
and wills by her supreme charm and
force. Margaret was a born ruler, with
thoroughly imperial qualities, who could
have governed a state in perilous times
as well as she governed her convents.
If one might venture, in short, to imitate
the nomenclature applied to the great
Scholastics, we might call Agnes the Soror
Angelica, so ineffably meek, resigned, and
nunlike she was, for all her Protestant
training; Dora the Sotor Practica, with
her unequalled power of achieving work,
whatever it might be; Margaret the
Soror Dominatrix, by reason of her
grand and imposing mind and character,
which, in spite of her low birth and want
of culture, made her more than the equal
of the scholars, nobles, and ecclesiastics
of her own Catholic Church.
Now, is it not evident that all these
women were simply women of extraor
dinary genius ? Dora’s conversation was
bewitching ; her alternate humour and
pathos were the delight and solace of her
nurses and patients, and made an ob
server say that it was easy to see that
she might have been a great novelist, if
she had not chosen to be something
greater and better. Margaret, though
she could not spell the simplest words,
showed, in her incessant correspondence,
great powers of style. Agnes, though
inferior to either in these respects,
always writes with a simple, clear, and
direct vigour which proves what a calm,
strong brain she had. No one of them
gave a thought to literature, but one sees
that literature was easily within their
reach, if they had aimed at it. Their
distinction was founded on character,
the supreme quality; warm, fearless
�88
THE SERVICE OF MAN
hearts, exquisite tenderness of con
science, passionate self-sacrifice, and
devotion to duty. Christians by training
and inclination, they realised in their
fervent hearts the meaning and purport
of the gospel. According to the terms
of their belief, “ they forsook all and
followed ” Christ in their several ways—
the Evangelical Agnes, the High-Church
Dora, the Catholic Margaret. But even
their pious biographers admit that, apart
from the gifts of grace, which they were
not likely to undervalue, their natural
powers and endowments were extra
ordinary. Of Margaret it is said that
even at the first meeting the most
prominent features of her character
could not escape notice; “ the firm will,
the clear and rapid judgment, the
boundless power of sympathy, which
won her the title of ‘ everybody’s
mother.’” Miss Lonsdale tells us how
“ a hard, sarcastic Scotchman,” who was
a professed unbeliever, remarked of
Dora, whose patient he had been:
“ She’s a noble woman, but she’d have
been that without her Christianity.”
That is just the simple fact of the
matter. Such heads and hearts as these
are the property of no creed; they are
the choice products of that maligned
human nature which theologians tell us
is cursed and lost unless it believes this
or that article of faith. If the saintliness
of these holy women depended upon
their creed, why do not the thousands
and millions who hold the same creed
exhibit a like saintliness ? “ God did
not give them the grace ” is the theolo
gical answer ; and some are still satisfied
with it. But the answer is evidently
becoming unreal and meaningless. The
doctrine of heredity and variation has
deprived it of all weight. Strong minds
and fervent hearts, like strong bodies,
depend upon organisation; on the con
stitution and quality of the brain. But
brains “ are begotten, not made,” and
grace never made a weak brain strong.
The contemplation of these remarkable
women suggests one or two more interest
ing points of view.
i. An experience of some eighteen
centuries may be considered conclusive
as to the limited hold which Christianity
is capable of taking on mankind at large.
From the days of St. Paul to the present
time, the apathy and worldliness of the
great mass of men and women calling
themselves Christians has been the
constant lamentation of all sincere
preachers. Indeed, the parable of the
Sower clearly announces that the fact
was to be expected. The seed falls
in four different places, and only in
one does it bear fruit—where it fell on
good ground. The Wicked one, the want
of root, the cares of this world, and de
ceitfulness of riches prevent its growth
in the other places, which are evidently
supposed to cover by far the larger area;
and the parable of the Marriage of the
King’s Son, with its conclusion, “ Many
are called but few are chosen,” leaves
no doubt on the matter. The obvious
deduction is, that Christianity is only
adapted to a very limited number of
minds; that, for one reason or another,
the many, called as they may be, will not
“ hear the word and understand it.” And
this is exactly what has happened with
out interruption for nearly two thousand
years; Christendom has never been
evangelised, nor near being evangelised.
Even the smallest and most select com
munities of religious persons have their
backsliders and formalists, who are, to
use Mr. Spurgeon’s words, as religious as
the seats they sit on. The high Calvin
ists boldly face the difficulty, and say :
“ No doubt the great mass of mankind
are predestined from all eternity to
damnation; it is only the elect who are
really Christians, and go to heaven.”
Calvinism is out of fashion now, and re
proached with suggesting very unpleasant
notions as to the moral character of the
Deity ; but it is consistent and scriptural;
I do not say sensible or orthodox. So
far from Christianity being the universal
religion it is affirmed to be, it is not even
adapted to the majority of its own
believers. You must have a very fine
and peculiar organisation to be a true
�WHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
Christian; a special genius, which gene
rally declares itself in early life, as special
genius is apt to do. A Sister Agnes or
Mother Margaret takes to vital religion
with the spontaneous affinity that Mozart
took to music, Newton to mathematics,
and Keats to poetry. Religious genius,
in its highest form, is as rare, perhaps
more rare, than genius in any other form ;
and exalted piety is as unattainable to the
common herd as exalted poetry. Bishop
Ullathorne, who must have had large
opportunities of seeing nuns and others
who aimed with special earnestness at a
religious life, yet declares of Margaret that
she was distinguished from every other
holy soul that he had been acquainted
with, by three extraordinary gifts, which
he mentions : her peculiar love of God ;
the pain it cost her to turn from Him to
self-introspection ; and her angelic purity.
“Rare as suns,” he says, “are those
souls which seem to act on other souls
like a sacramental power, shedding the
rays of their own inward sense of
God and vital warmth of spirit into
the souls that come within the sphere
of their action.”1 And similar testi
mony as to the rarity of the endow
ments of Sisters Dora and Agnes are
forthcoming from those who have had
wide experience of religious persons.
Yet, good as these pious women were, I
suppose no priest or theologian would
say that they had attained the furthest
limit of Christian perfection. They all
thought in their humility that they had
fallen far short of it. What hope, then,
is there for souls less richly endowed ?
And let us observe how this pursuit of
a spirituality utterly beyond attainment
by ordinary mortals, beautiful as it is
when attained, operates injuriously on
the morality of average men and women.
The standard proposed is so exalted that,
instead of attracting the ordinary person
to aim at reaching it, it discourages and
repels him. He is inwardly conscious
that he cannot possibly reach it, even if
he tries ever so much. His preacher
* Preface to Life of Mother Margaret.
89
will probably tell him that, if he
trusts in his own strength, he can
do nothing; but that, if he will only
put all his trust in God and Christ,
the end will be attained. But that is
just what he is unable to do. He is
exhorted to exert a spirituality of mind
which, by the hypothesis, he has not got.
It is like telling a man that, if he will
only fly, he will reach great altitudes.
He has not the wings. Even the saints
have generally had long periods of pro
bation and wrestlings with God before
they could attain to that detachment,
spirituality, and perfect faith which
enabled them to perform the act of com
plete self-renunciation required. Yet
it is recommended to the common
multitude, as if it were the easiest thing
in the world.
And what is the result?
Setting
apart the openly profane and wicked,
who do not give a thought to the sub
ject ; and, without denying it, simply
ignore Christianity ; the bulk of worldly,
unconverted believers pass their time in
a middle state between sin and repent
ance ; believers, but not doers, of the
Word; wishing they could embrace
their religion with entire earnestness,
but too well aware that, constituted as
they are, they are unable to do so. Of
course, reference is made only to the
true-hearted, honest folk who transgress
from weakness, and not to the spiritually
dead Pharisee who has no doubt about
his righteousness. Such are, on all
hands, admitted to be worse than the
publicans and harlots. But the mass of
common-place people who go to church
or chapel, who are neither very good nor
very bad, neither exceptionally clever
nor stupid, the enormous middle-class of
mediocrities, fairly just, conscientious,
and kind-hearted, can it be denied that
they are constantly deterred from em
bracing a serious view of life’s duties,
just because a standard of such exalted
perfection is proposed to them that they
know it is no use attempting to reach it ?
They perhaps try, and fail, and they are
more disheartened than before. They
�9°
THE SERVICE OE MAN
then live with a mildly evil conscience,
knowing that they ought to do better.
But they are at once told that that is not
enough; that they must do their best;
that they must be perfect, as their Father
which is in heaven is perfect. Then
they do less than they could, out of
sheer, weary dejection. In what other
art or science do teachers begin by
placing the most arduous problems before
their pupils ? Young mathematicians
are not set to work on the Differential
Calculus in their first lessons; young
artists are not expected to draw like
Andrea, and colour like Titian. But the
young catechumen is told that the first
thing he must do “ is to renounce the
devil and all his works, the pomps and
vanities of this wicked world, and all the
sinful lusts of the flesh.” For the first
precept of the first lesson, this must be
admitted to be rather hard. How many
saints, after a long life’s progress in
holiness, have been equal to it ? To
renounce the devil and all his works
cannot be easy, if all that we are told of
Satan’s power be true. But the “ good
child ” is told that he must do this at
once. By a subsequent after-thought on
the part of the compiler, the learner is
warned that he cannot do this and a
great many other things of himself} he
needs God’s special grace, “which he
must learn to call for by diligent prayer.”
Probably, to nine children out of ten
“ diligent prayer,” commanded in this
way, appears even more obscure and
meaningless than renouncing the pomps
and vanities of this wicked world. How
cruel and heedless to place the last stage
of spiritual evolution at the threshold of
the neophyte’s progress. The whole
Catechism and the larger part of sermons
and Christian teaching are pervaded by
the double error of supposing that the
highest religious emotions are attainable
by all, and that they may be inculcated
at the earliest period of life.
“ My
duty towards God is to believe in him,
to fear him, and to love him with all my
heart, with all my mind, with all my
soul, and 'with all my strengths Perhaps
the most prompt and certain way of
checking an emotion in others is to tell
them that it is their duty to feel it. Tell
any one he ought to feel grateful, and
you will probably make him ten times
more ungrateful than he was before.
We may be sure that no one ever loved
God for being told that it was his duty
to love him. Wise and good mothers,
by gentle and indirect precept and very
direct example, have led their little ones
to piety; but then they used the subtle
language of the heart. The unreality
and inefficacy of sermons chiefly depend
on the transcendent disproportion be
tween the doctrine preached and the
capacity to receive it by the audience
addressed. A mixed congregation, con
sisting of men whose thoughts are
absorbed in business and women occu
pied with dress and frivolities, are spoken
to in language which would not be
inadequate to the spiritual needs of
angels. The result is a discrepancy
between faith and practice which the
profane are not slow to tax with hypo
crisy. Neither religion nor morals gain
by such exaggerations ; only the scoffers
at all goodness, who delight in pointing
out that so-called religious people are
no better than their neighbours. To
get the best you can out of men you
must not ask more than they can give.
But if you ask for that in the proper way,
nearly all but the thoroughly bad will
respond. By asking for the impossible,
you get little or nothing, or worse than
nothing; a conviction that religion is
grimace, and a disbelief in the possibility
of virtue.
And now let us contemplate these
three saints from another side : that of
the value of their work, its usefulness in
this world, and its power of diminishing
human suffering.
Before I go further I shall be met
with a refusal to allow the question to
be stated in this way. It will be said
that these ladies considered far more the
souls than the bodies of their patients,
pupils, nurses, or nuns, as the case may
be; that, although they strove earnestly
�WHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
to heal the sick, none more so, yet their
real and main object was to win souls
to Christ. I am not inclined to deny so
obvious a fact; but it is one with which
I cannot deal, because, as regards the
result of their labours in that direction,
I can form no opinion. It is wholly
beyond my power to verify any statement
on that head. Of the numbers who
died in their presence, soothed and com
forted beyond doubt, by their assured
faith, their fervent prayers, and “tranquil
regardent faces,” I cannot tell whether
any or none ever passed “to where
beyond these voices there is peace.”
The point must be left undecided, to say
the least, for want of evidence of an
objective kind, as distinguished from
evidence of a subjective kind, reposing
entirely on faith. Believers must be
satisfied with their own belief until they
can advance arguments far more cogent
than any which they have hitherto
produced in support of it. Agnostics
cannot be expected to argue on principles
which they reject. But this does not
wholly remove a common ground on
which discussion can take place. The
temporal work of these good women is
offered to us as a proof of what the
divine spirit can do when it finds fitting
channels. Now, I will vie with any one
in celebrating the unselfish devotion,
the self-sacrifice, the warm love and sym
pathy, which they all showed in assuaging
human suffering, bodily or mental. I
cannot read their lives without tears,
and the admiration I feel for them may
be truly called passionate. I regard them
as inexpressibly lovely and attractive
human souls, who, led on by their own
warm women’s hearts, nearly, if not
entirely, conquered self, and became like
the beautiful alabaster box of ointment of
spikenard, very costly and precious, which,
when poured out, filled the house with
the odour of the ointment. But this
profession does not preclude me from
pointing out that, if the question is of
diminishing human suffering, these pious
workers did not take up the problem
with any full sense of its magnitude;
9i
did not begin high enough up in their
efforts to stop the stream of evil and
pain. While the value of good nursing
can hardly be exaggerated, it can never
be more than an adjunct of practical
medicine. It is in biological and patho
logical research, with the object of
discovering and destroying the germs
and origin of disease, that science now
justly rests its main hope of serving
humanity. And is there not already
ample reason for looking on this
hope as well-founded? The anecdote,
quoted a few pages back, of Sister Dora
grappling with the delirious patient in
his loathsome condition from confluent
small-pox, presents a graphic and even
sensational picture of self-devotion for
the welfare of a fellow-creature. The
deed was heroic and admirable, whether
the sufferer’s life was ultimately saved or
not. But now, regard the method of
science in encountering disease, and this
particular malady of small-pox. A man
of genius, with his eyes open, observes
that milkmaids inoculated with cow-pox
are not susceptible to the graver con
tagion, and Jenner, after careful and
elaborate experiments, announces the
discovery of vaccination.
There is
nothing to appeal to the dramatic sym
pathies in this, nothing to stir emotion
in the ordinary spectator. On the con
trary, at the time it was considered to
afford material for ridicule as a sample
of scientific absurdity.
But which
method has been most profitable to
humanity ? Have all the self-sacrifices
of all the Doras and Sisters of Mercy
in the world spared mankind a tithe
of the suffering which has been pre
vented by vaccination? The epidemic
of small - pox at Walsall, in which
Sister Dora played so noble a part,
appears formidable and shocking to
us, with our modern ideas of the
subject. But, in the last century, before
Jenner, it would, in the dimensions it
had, have been considered beneath
notice. Half the population might have
been swept away without attracting par
ticular attention. That was the way
�92
THE SERVICE OF MAN
likened the temper excited in some
with small-pox, and people were resigned.
portions of the clerical world by the
It was the finger or the wrath of God,
recent growth of physical science to the
chastening men for their sins.
Now, as one might expect in these anger and alarm with which the savage
biographies, in no one instance is scien views the progress of an eclipse; and
tific inquiry ever mentioned as a duty of that the comparison was just these
the slightest importance or value. It sentiments of Mother Margaret suffi
would be simple indeed to look for any ciently show. It is a favourite theme
thing of the kind in such a quarter. with theologians to maintain that the
The point of view is wholly different. love of God leads to the loftiest and
God present everywhere, doing or per purest love of man, and 1 John iv. 20
mitting all that happens, is the invariable is quoted with effect. But a long experi
presumption. Sister Dora on one occa ence has shown that a verse of the
sion offered to pay a visit to a friend. Psalms is often a truer statement of the
“But,” she added, “of course, if the actual fact. “ Shall I not hate them, O
Master comes and calls for me, and Lord, that hate thee ?” Can we doubt
sends us in more cases, I cannot come.” that Mother Margaret, who, for all her
The “ Master,” of course, is God; and warm-heartedness, could rejoice in so
the cases were cases of small-pox, which dreadful a thing as shipwrecks, just
he was supposed to send on the one because, in her narrow bigotry, she
hand, and to call Dora to nurse on the thought they were a rebuke to men of
other. This is the prevailing tone. But science, could also have assisted at an
in neither of the Protestant lives is there Auto da Fe without compunction, if told
any direct railing at science. In the it was required by the interests of her
Catholic life it is very different. There creed ?
we meet the flash of anger and hatred
The particular case we have been
for science, characteristic of the theolo considering is significant enough in itself,
gian who fears that his God is in danger. as typical of the different methods of
Considering her entire want of scientific theology and science, in their contention
or philosophical culture, Mother Mar against human suffering.
But it sug
garet showed great penetration in her gests much wider issues: the whole
remark on this subject. When she first question of the great campaign against
caught sight of the Britannia Bridge she vice, evil, and misery. The principle
exclaimed : “ Oh, how wonderful ! But of Christian charity is to palliate and
if men do such things as these, they assuage physical and social evils in
will begin to think they have no their last and extreme form. If you
need of God.” And her biographers meet a beggar, give him alms; if you
tell us she felt a certain satisfaction have no money, divide your cloak
when some of the wonderful modern with him, as did St. Martin. Feed the
discoveries came to nought. She was hungry, clothe the naked. In a word,
glad to hear that the laying of the run with prompt love and sympathy to
first Atlantic cable had failed; and,
succour every case of mortal distress
what is still worse, and is a stain on her that comes within your reach. Do this
memory, she was even pleased that, “ in in remembrance of Christ, and be
spite of storm-signals and meteorological blessed. He would be a cold and
theories, the wrecks on the English coast shallow student of history who ventured
increased, instead of diminishing in to speak of this spontaneous movement
number.”1 “ I like these learned gentle of the heart with disrespect. The Chris
men to know,” she would say, “ that tian care for the sick and infirm was
God is master.” Professor Huxley once unknown to the pagan world. It was
the best and only thing to do under the
circumstances. Science was not; and
1 Life, p. 231.
�WHA T CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE
relief, such relief as could be given by
poor, uninstructed fellow-men, was all
that could be had. But science has
slowly and gradually discovered and
proved that social and physical evil
and pain may not only be soothed, but
anticipated and prevented. Not that it
neglects palliatives of suffering; on the
contrary, it applies them with an efficacy
and power utterly beyond the conception
of former ages. But it does more; it
nips evil in the bud, or rather in the
seed, and does not wait for its full
efflorescence before it attacks it. Physical,
social, and moral evil, disease and sin,
it regards as so many pathological con
ditions, which we may reasonably hope
to correct, modify, and ultimately to
suppress. As regards physical disease,
this position would hardly be questioned
even by the most orthodox. Several of
the most formidable afflictions to which
human and animal bodies are subject
have already been got under control.
Small-pox and typhoid fever are, we may
say, understood and practically mastered;
that is, they are not allowed to spread
and devastate as they formerly did. A
number of other maladies with which it
once seemed hopeless to contend are
even now passing into the class of the
controllable disorders, as consumption,
rabies, and cholera. Similarly with regard
to pauperism and other social disorders.
The prompt and easy narcotic of charity
is not to be universally proscribed as
uniformly evil, but it is ascertained to be
of dangerous application, and liable to
aggravate the evil it pretends to cure.
Pauperism can only be combated with
success by that knowledge of social and
economic laws which corresponds to the
knowledge of biological laws in the
neighbouring science. It may be proper
93
and wise, in a given case, to divide your
coat with a beggar; the only thing that a
humane man would or could do. But it
is vastly more important to ascertain the
social and economic causes of the
beggar’s existence; and, if he be a
common phenomenon, to correct those
breaches of the laws of social health
which make his emergence possible.
Again, with regard to ethics. Moral
evil, or sin, can only be successfully
corrected by such an investigation and
knowledge of man’s mental, emotional,
and physical constitution, that that part
of conduct which is concerned with
morals may be directed in a way that
conduces to the highest individual and
social happiness and well-being. In a
word, the Christian principle is to act
from spontaneous charity and bene
volence with such means as are imme
diately to hand: to regard evil, pain,
and disease as trials sent by God for
his own wise ends; chastisements, meant
for our rebuke or guidance, to make
us turn to him, and leave off caring
for a temporal, wicked, and miserable
world. The principle of science is
directly contrary. It has already pre
vented numberless evils in a way which
would have appeared to our forefathers
quite miraculous. Admitting that there
will, perhaps, be always a residue of
unconquerable evils which science cannot
hope to remove, it is maintained that the
resignation produced by a clear view of
the impossible and inevitable is more
complete than that which never wholly
renounces the hope of divine aid. Mother
Margaret was quite right in her fears;
“but if men do such things as these,
they will begin to think that they can do
without God.” That thought is rapidly
spreading over the civilised world.
�94
THE SERVICE OF MAN
Chapter VIII.
THE SERVICE OF MAN
The results of the previous inquiry would
seem to be as follows :—
1. That a widespread tendency exists
in this, and still more in other countries,
to give up a belief in Christianity. And
that the scepticism of the present day is
very far more serious and scientific than
was the deism of the last century.
2. That the supposed consolations of
Christianity have been much exaggerated.
And that it may be questioned whether
that religion does not often produce as
much anxiety and mental distress as it
does of joy, gladness, and content.
3. That by the great doctrine of forgive
ness of sins consequent on repentance,
even in the last moment of life, Chris
tianity often favours spirituality and salva
tion at the expense of morals.
4. That the morality of the Ages of
Faith was very low ; and that the further
we go back into times when belief was
strongest, the worse it is found to be.
5. That Christianity has a very limited
influence on the world at large ; but a
most powerful effect on certain hightoned natures, who, by becoming true
saints, produce an immense impression
on public opinion, and give that religion
much of the honour which it enjoys.
6. That, although the self-devotion of
saints is not only beyond question, but
supremely beautiful and attractive, yet,
as a means of relieving human suffering
and serving man in the widest sense, it
is not to be compared for efficiency with
science.
It is sufficiently obvious that, unless
the tendencies which we have been con
sidering meet with a strange and unex
pected arrest, the result, in a not distant
future, must be a general disappearance
of Christianity from among the more
advanced populations of the globe. In
making this statement, one naturally I
recalls the grave irony of the Advertise
ment prefixed to the first edition of
Butler’s Analogy, which is often cited
as affording a good example of the way
in which the hopes of unbelievers may
be deceived. “ It is come, I know not
how,” says Butler, “to be taken for
granted, by many persons, that Chris
tianity is not so much as a subject of
inquiry; but that it is, at length, now
discovered to be fictitious. And accord
ingly they treat it, as if, in the present
age, this were an agreed point among all
people of discernment; and nothing
remained but to set it up as a principal
subject of mirth and ridicule, as it were
by way of reprisals, for its having so long
interrupted the pleasures of the world.”
The “people of discernment,” it is
pointed out, were very much mistaken
in their assumption that Christianity
was discovered to be fictitious. The
Analogy was written nearly a hundred
and fifty years ago; and, for a fictitious
system, Christianity still shows con
siderable vitality. The number of new
churches and chapels built, the zeal and
activity of the clergy and missionaries,
the propagation of the gospel in foreign
parts, and similar facts, are adduced, not
without a certain tone of triumph, as
sufficient evidence of how groundless
and shallow the hopes of the “ sceptic ”
have proved to be in this particular case.
Both the original text of Butler and the
modern commentaries upon it rather
show how remote is the scientific and
historical point of view from the religious,
and what a far-off stage of thought
Butler’s expressions represent.
The
word “ fictitious ” alone, as applied to an
ancient and widespread religion, jars
upon the ear. As if great phases of
human thought and feeling could be
invented, like a stage play, or concocted
�THE SERVICE OF MAN
by designing priests for the sake of
gain.' That this really was the current
deistical opinion is certain, and it was
crudely expressed in the famous silly
verses :—
“ Natural Religion was easy, first, and plain;
Tales made it mystery, offerings made it gain ;
Sacrifices and shows were at length prepared,
The priests ate roast meat, and the people
stared.”
A wider knowledge of human nature,
past and present, has made such trivial
conceptions impossible. No form of the
religious sentiment is now regarded as
fictitious; but, on the contrary, as the
serious and solid result of the stage of
evolution in which it appears. Similarly
with regard to making Christianity a
subject of mirth and ridicule. No one
with a reputation to lose would think of
speaking with levity of the Christian or
any religion. Nothing would be con
sidered better proof of incompetence to
handle such subjects than such a tone.
The world is older and sadder, and on
the whole wiser, than it was in Butler’s
day. The alleged interruption of the
pleasures of the world by Christianity
is open to question as a matter of fact.
Pleasures in abundance, and of a
sufficiently coarse kind, were indulged in
without difficulty in the Ages of Faith.
The “ eat, drink, and be merry ” temper
is generally discountenanced in theory;
and, even in practice, is less rife than it
was among our forefathers.
In fact, the result of historical specula
tion has been, with regard to Christianity,
the same as the result of biological
speculation has been with regard to man.
Both have been taken from the isolation
and independence in which they were
supposed to exist, with reference to
other members of the same order; and
have been included in the larger classifi
cation which places man at the head of
vertebrate animals and Christianity at
the head of supernatural religions. The
biological view has prevailed, one may
say, with surprising rapidity, considering
the amount of prejudice which had to be
overcome.
The historical view has
95
naturally triumphed less completely, in
asmuch as scientific history is a much
younger science than biology. But the
end will be the same. Christianity is
already classed, by a large and growing
number of the most competent historical
inquirers, simply as the last and finest
specimen of a group of beliefs, which, in
one form or another, are co-extensive
with humanity and history. If this view
should prove to be slower in gaining
acceptance than the biological view of
the descent of man, the reason will,
probably, be not wholly referable to the
position of history in the order of the
sciences. Distasteful as it was to human
vanity to prove that man had descended
from an anthropoid ape, which again had
descended from a bird or a reptile, the
idea still is one which can be put aside,
which ordinary folk need not think of in
daily life, and which involves no imme
diate practical consequences to them
selves. The final admission, that Chris
tianity is not fictitious, indeed, in
Butler’s phrase, but simply a form of
thought unsuited to a scientific age,
and therefore no longer tenable by an
educated population, is attended by
far greater difficulties. Very obvious
practical consequences are involved in
such a conclusion, which cannot readily
be ignored. If the belief in God,
Christ, and the other articles of the
Christian faith must rationally be relin
quished, people ask : What are you going
to put in their place ? What rule of life
do you propose to substitute for the one
removed ? What is the successor to
Christianity as a religion? Or will it
have no successor ? And some even go
so far as to inquire what is to become of
those spiritual and religious instincts
which have hitherto found their exercise
and satisfaction in a religion now pro
nounced to be incompatible with the new
knowledge. Natural instincts are not to
be suppressed by the theories of savants,
however scientific; and it is argued that
the religious sentiment is as much a per
manent factor of human nature as the
logical intellect, and must, necessarily,
�9&
THE SERVICE OF MAN
survive its endlessly varied and often un
stable conclusions.
The religious sentiment, or that group
of emotions so-called, is one thing, and
the Christian or any particular religion is
another. The religious sentiment has,
during the course of ages, assumed many
divergent forms, and at this day is repre
sented in the most dissimilar and diver
sified beliefs and ceremonies. The
original elements of human nature are
all capable of morphological develop
ment and change in their manifestations,
although they remain fundamentally the
same. Nothing could well be a more
permanent constituent of human nature
than the instinct which leads to marriage;
but few things have varied more than the
institution of marriage. From marriage
by capture, through polygamy, polyandry,
down to the monogamy of modern
States, which still show great differences
of detail in their laws on the subject, the
legal relations of the sexes have varied
with the knowledge, culture, and civilisa
tion of the times. It is the same with
regard to government and civil institu
tions, with regard to war and its usages,
with regard to the notions of right and
wrong. What reason can be given to
lead us to suppose that the religious sen
timent alone should remain fixed and
crystallised in one form, and that a recent
one, which supervened in historical times,
and was preceded by a great variety of
previous forms ? Obviously none.
When, therefore, we are asked what
religion we propose to substitute in place
of the old one, now threatened with ex
tinction, the answer is that no such pre
tension is entertained for a moment.
Religions are organic growths, and are
no more capable of fabrication than
animals or plants. The notion that indi
vidual men can found religions—that is,
invent them out of their own heads, and
set them going, is on a par with the
notion that men can found States and
create policies which last for ages. Both
notions were prevalent, and not irrational
once, when neither man nor, society was
conceived as subject to natural laws. So
it was really believed that Lycurgus
founded the Spartan State, and Romulus
the Roman; that Moses founded Juda
ism, and Mohammed, Islam. No mis
conception could be greater, and none is
more certain to disappear. That longprepared changes are often suddenly
accomplished, under the inspiring leader
ship of a great man, is beyond question;
and it is quite natural that the great
man’s name should be associated with
the change in which he took a prominent
part. But he did not make the change,
in the sense of founding or beginning
something new, which would not have
existed without him. His function, and
it was great indeed, was to have intellect
enough to see the need of change, and
courage and will enough to help it for
ward, to direct forces which were already
at hand. All great changes in Church
or State exemplify this truth, in propor
tion as we are able to observe them with
accuracy of detail. Nothing is more
certain than that, in one sense, Julius
Caesar overthrew the Republic, and
founded the Empire of Rome. But how
long had such a revolution been pre
paring ? From the days of the Scipios,
or of Sulla and Marius. Or might
it not be dated from the earliest con
stitution of Rome, which rendered a
municipal form of government inade
quate, and finally impossible, for a wide
Empire? All great social revolutions
result from long precedent, although,
perhaps, occult growth, as parturition, in
the body physical, pre-supposes em
bryonic growth. Similarly with regard
to the Reformation. Luther, in vulgar
Catholic or Protestant opinion, is
credited with the whole glory, or infamy,
of the revolt from Rome. But from
the days of Wicliffe and Huss the entire
Church had been seething with projects
of reform; and Luther can only claim
the honour of having, in the fulness of
time, given the critical impulse which
liberated forces accumulated during hun
dreds of previous years.
There can be no question, therefore,
�THE SERVICE OF MAN
of making and offering a New Religion
to the world at the present juncture.
Our first task must be to try and dis
cover what is the spontaneous tendency
of thought and sentiment on this matter.
What is the direction which evolution
may be expected to take ? If that can
be ascertained, a great point will be
gained. Three courses are always open
to men called upon to deal with great
social and moral tendencies. They may
be blindly resisted ; they may be blindly
stimulated and hastened; they may, by
careful study and observation of their
a nature, be largely controlled and directed;
J that is to say, they may be dealt with in
a spirit of reaction, or in a spirit of revo' lution, or in a spirit of orderly and con
scious progress. Reaction, when con
ducted on a large scale with unflinching
vigour, by no means always fails. The
Moslem Obscurantists in Spain suc
ceeded in crushing Arab philosophy.1
The Catholic Church has several times ex
tirpated opinions, by the efficient method
of killing those who held them. In
Spain, Bohemia, Italy, and Belgium,
Protestantism was stamped out, like the
rinderpest, by prompt and persevering
slaughter. It is a method difficult of
prolonged application; and it is gene
rally avenged. The state of religion in
Catholic countries, and the animosity
felt towards it by large numbers of the
proletariat, are not encouraging examples.
The Protestants have not been behind
r the Catholics in their willingness to
prosecute, but they have seldom had
equal power. In Ireland, however, they
nearly reached the highest level of per
formance in that line. With what
disaster to all of us is now only too
apparent.
How evil, on the other hand, the revo
lutionary spirit can be has been well
shown by France in the eighteenth cen
tury—first in speculation, and afterwards
in politics. The precipitate conclusions
of the philosophes, although proceeding
on principles fundamentally sound, as
’ See Renan, Averroes.
97
subsequent results have p’roved, were yet
marked by a heat and haste which led
to the romantic reaction, and the Idealist
and Transcendental Philosophies which
nearly suspended rational speculation for
half a century. It is unnecessary to
dwell on the indelible harm done to
orderly progress by the violence of the
Revolution, which to this day supplies
reactionaries with some of their best
weapons against a large and generous
liberalism. Perhaps the sober, prudent,
middle course we have mentioned, which,
while frankly accepting and using the
new lights obtained, does not exaggerate
their illuminating power, is destined in
this age to avoid the dangers associated
with either of the two extremes.
The essence of practical religion at all
times has been Sacrifice. However the
origin of religion is to be explained—and
anthropologists in later times seem to
have elucidated the subject with much
success by ancestor worship, the ghost,
and other theories—propitiatory sacrifice
has been the unfailing mark and memo
rial of religious belief. It is unnecessary
to produce evidence of a statement so
redundantly supported. "What chiefly
deserves notice in this connection is the
progressive change in the character of the
sacrifice, corresponding with mental evo
lution. In earlier' times human sacri
fices were, probably, everywhere regarded
as the most pleasing and powerful with
the deities. Every form of possession
valued by primitive people was readily
lavished on the altar of the gods, either
to avert their wuath or to secure their
favour; cattle, first-fruits especially, as at
once the most costly to the worshipper
and the most acceptable to the Divinity.
In time this gross form of propitiation
was transcended, and even the later
Jewish prophets speak of it with disdain.
As the conceptions of the moral cha
racter of the gods grew loftier, the notion
of the sacrifices calculated to please them
rose in proportion. As men attained to
worthier ideas of moral excellence, they
recognised that sacrifice of their own
baser instincts was likely to be the most
H
�98
THE SERVICE OF MAN
pleasing offering to a moral deity. “ A
wise man,” says a passage in the Insti
tutes of Menu, “should constantly dis
charge all the moral duties, though he
perform not constantly the ceremonies of
religion, since he falls low if while he
performs ceremonial acts only, he dis
charges not his moral duties.”* And the
same law prescribes “content, returning
good for evil, resistance to sensual appe
tites, abstinence from illicit gain, purifi
cation, coercion of the organs.......
veracity, and freedom from wrath.”23 Yet
the cruelty and obscenity of the early
Hindu religion are beyond doubt. The
frank indecencies and immoralities of
primitive creeds are in time explained
away by mystical allegories of the most
spiritual purity. “ The lascivious form
of a naked Venus,” says Gibbon, refer
ring to the fancies of the Neo-Platonists,
“ was tortured into the discovery of some
moral precept or some physical truth,
and the castration of Atys explained the
revolution of the sun between the tropics,
or the separation of the human soul from
vice and error.”3 The primitive meaning
of the phallus in India, according to
Mr. Wilson, is entirely forgotten. “ The
form under which the Lingam is wor
shipped, that of a column, suggests no
impure ideas, and few of the uneducated
Hindus attach any other idea to it than
it is Siva; they are not aware of its
typical character.”4
The next point is that primitive reli
gion had little or no connection with
human welfare, apart from the action of
supernatural beings. Its chief or only
object was to guard the worshipper from
injuries which came from the spirit
world, or to procure him benefits from
the same origin. From a natural, mun
dane point of view, primitive religion was
oftener evil than good. It sacrificed
human life and property on the imaginary
propitiation of fictitious deities. It is
highly probable, indeed, that even the
1
2
3
4
Mill's History of India, Book II., cap. 6.
Ibid., Book II., cap. 6.
Decline and Fall, c. xxiii.
Note to Mill’s India, loc. cit.
most horrid primitive cults were indi
rectly beneficial, as means of discipline,
and of adapting to social conditions the
semi-brutal instincts of prehistoric man.
In that respect primitive religion re
sembled war, which, destructive as it was
in one sense, is still recognised as one
of the most educational phases which
humanity has passed through. But, just
as the antagonism between sacrifice and
morality was gradually overcome, so the
hostility of primitive religion to human
welfare was in time replaced by an
approximation to concord between them.
The angle of divergence became pro
gressively less. Worship of the gods
tended more and more to coincide with
the welfare of man. The humanisation
of the various polytheistic religions of the
world has been very unequal, both in
degree and rapidity, depending, as it
necessarily must, on the unequal progress
in knowledge and civilisation. The
Hindus in three thousand years have
made less progress in purging their
primitive beliefs of their cruelty and
grossness than the Romans did in five
hundred years. But the general rule
holds good, that a progressive people,
even without foreign help from more
advanced populations, tends to outlive
the primitively barbarous and noxious
elements of its creed, and to retain those
which harmonise with general utility.1
The Christian religion has been no
exception to this rule; in fact, it would
not be easy to mention a religion which
has profited more by the general growth
of knowledge and civilisation than the
Christian. It has been claimed, not
without a show of reason, that it is a
peculiar and exceptional merit of Chris
tianity that it has been able to adapt
itself to most unequal and divergent
stages of culture, and that it has met
the wants of barbarous and civilised
races with equal success. Though the
time is obviously approaching, if it
1 Polybius’s testimony to the value of the
Roman religion, as enforcing honesty, is too
well known to need quoting (lib. vi., cap. 56).
�THE SERVICE OF MAN
has not been already reached, when
its alleged adequacy to the needs of
civilised society becomes more and more
questionable, it may be frankly ad
mitted that Christianity has surpassed
all other religions in its power of keeping
up with human evolution. The fact is,
no doubt, owing to the large element of
Greek philosophy grafted on Christianity
by the Greek and Latin fathers, and
even by St. Paul. The religion would
probably not have survived into modern
times unless it had possessed this elas
ticity and capacity of modification,
which have allowed it to exist side by
side with the most divergent beliefs on
other subjects. A Catholic Christian of
the fifth and one of the nineteenth
century would, if they could meet in the
flesh, agree in reference to the Creeds of
the Church, but they would be able to
agree in little besides. If we could
have a conversation with the great St.
Augustine, we should soon fail to find
common ground for argument, whether
as to matters of fact, principles of
reasoning, or even as to the interpreta
tion of Scripture; and it may even be
doubted if the present able and accom
plished Pope, who has so deep a venera
tion for St. Thomas Aquinas, would not
find a prolonged discussion on things in
general difficult to maintain with the
Angel of the Schools. Yet St. Augustine,
St. Thomas, and Leo XIII., must be
admitted to be thoroughly orthodox and
authentic Christians. But this flexibility
and adaptability of Christianity on the
intellectual side are not the qualities
with which we are chiefly concerned at
this moment. The point I would bring
out' is the incomparably greater em
phasis laid by modern Christians on all
that concerns human well-being than
was usually done by their predecessors.
In the old days the Faith, holy living,
and especially holy dying, were the great
themes of Christian preachers. The
true Faith was literally all-important, as,
without it, you were hopelessly lost,
whatever else you might do or be.
Hence, the Faith was to be fought for
99
and suffered for at any cost. Wars,
massacres, burnings, tortures, were trivial
considerations compared with the one
thing needful, which alone could lead
to heaven. And we know that these
plagues were scattered through many
centuries without stint or remorse. After
the true Faith was gained, the next chief
thing was to make a good use of it, and.
by a holy life and a repentant death to.
save your soul. Earthly miseries, famines,,
pestilences, ignorance, chronic poverty,
were lamentable, no doubt; but the
famines and the pestilences were espe
cially so, as manifestations of God’s
wrath, who was thus chastising a wicked
world. Their proper and only antidote
was prayer, and repentance, and humilia
tion before God, who might thereby be
induced to stay his hand. Such afflic
tions were incidental to the lot of man,
the appropriate retribution for sin, to be
borne with resignation. As for combating
them by human means and knowledge,,
with a view to suppressing them, if such
an idea could have emerged, it would
have been unquestionably pronounced
impious and shocking. The only recog
nised form of relief was charity : the
rich must give of their abundance to the
poor, and they would be repaid in
heaven. The Church of Rome gave
practical effect to this view by the admi
rable and useful institution of, first, the
Freres de la Charite, founded by the
Portuguese Johann Ciudad, 1497, and
afterwards of the Filles de la Misericorde,
the work of the saintly Vincent of Paul,
1634. Every form of praise and honour
is due to those good men and women
who devoted themselves without stint to
the relief of human misery, regardless of
the more profitable pursuits of Church
politics and theological controversy. But
the very foundation of these institutions
showed that they supplied a great want
which had not been furnished by the
Church before ; and they were, after all,
only a small and subordinate section of
the vast hierarchy which had shared the
dominion of the world with the temporal
power. St. Vincent of Paul met in the
�IOO
THE SERVICE OF MAN
ranks of the secular clergy with some of
his most stubborn opponents.1
A Now, it is hardly too much to say
that in recent times the whole attitude
of the clergy in all countries has been
changed with regard to social questions.
Nearly every form of relief now, in
greater or lesser degree, passes through
their hands. The improvement of the
condition of the poor seems very often
to be the chief occupation of many a
hard-worked parish priest. To rescue
•children from vice and temptation, to
inform their minds with virtuous prin
ciples, to clothe and feed their bodies,
•to ameliorate the dwellings of their
parents, and admit a ray of light and
brightness into the squalor of their
daily lives—these and similar objects
occupy the time and minds of Christian
ministers to a degree which was never
even remotely approached in the past.
In other words, Christian doctrine, or,
at least, Christian practice, has been
gradually brought into harmony with
human and terrestrial wants, so as
almost to run parallel with them. The
world has much changed. The cessation
of religious controversy is a surprising
phenomenon. In place of the storm
.and fury with which polemics formerly
filled the air, we have now a great calm.
The small sputter of theological disputes
still occasionally heard is as the explo
sion of squibs and crackers compared
to that of the heavy ordnance in the
mighty controversies of old.
Thus we find two permanent factors
running through the religions of the past
in all their changes of outward presenta
tion : sacrifices on the part of the wor
shipper ; and a gradual approximation
of the service of the gods to the service
of man. Neither of these factors is the
exclusive property of any one religion;
and both of them in some degree,
perhaps, may belong to all. They are
quite capable of detachment and isola
tion from the surroundings with which
they are usually associated in theological
1 See Feillet, La Misire an Temps de la Fronde.
creeds. Sacrifice admits of almost in
finite degrees both in quality and quan
tity, from an offering of a pair of turtle
doves or two young pigeons up to a
hundred oxen; from the most partial
control of the coarsest passions up to
saintly abnegation of every impure or
selfish desire. And the spirit of sacrifice,
the postponing of self to others, the
giving up what the natural man loves
and values, whether possessions or
cherished lusts, is so little restricted to
the worshippers of a God or gods that it
may be said in its highest form to be
unattainable by them. The worshipper
of a god never quite transcends the hope
of a recompense for his devotion—not
from men, but from “ his Father which
seeth in secret,” and who shall reward
him openly. And this feeling springs
inevitably from the very conception of a
deity, especially if he be God Almighty.
A creature can be on no terms of recipro
city with his Creator; he can only be a
recipient from God, never a Tenderer
back of good.
The very thought of
performing an act of kindness or sym
pathy to God is absurd. The infinite
disparity between the. two beings, man
and his Maker, has as a consequence
that “ every good gift and every perfect
gift is from above.” Only to his fellows
can man be completely altruistic, “hoping
for nothing again.” That numbers of
men and women among the higher races
are capable of acts of unalloyed altruism,
in which there is not a vestige of after
thought tending to self-advantage, will
only be denied by the naturally cynical,
or by those educated in an evil religious
or philosophic system. The mother who
tends her sick child and scorns any
counsels to spare her health and
strength ; the rough miner who bids his
mate seize the one chance of escape up
the shaft, as he has a wife and children,
whereas the speaker is a bachelor; the
surgeon who sucks diphtheric poison
from a dying child’s throat and dies
himself in consequence—are examples
of the love and sacrifice even now to be
found in the nobler hearts. And it is
�THE SERVICE OF MAN
denying evolution in fact and theory to
question the certainty that they will
become less exceptional than they now
are. But in this capacity of sacrifice
regardless of self we have the purest
essence of the best religions—a human
quality which exists, which has been
evolved in the long travail of the world,
but which may be cultivated with pros
pects of vastly greater increase now that
its supreme beauty and price are per
ceived and valued. When the mental
and moral qualities of man are regarded
as subject, in common with other forms of
life, to the law of heredity and variation,
their cultivation and improvement will
be conducted on the scientific basis
which has already produced such sur
prising results in other parts of the
vegetable and animal kingdoms. The
plasticity of human nature is even yet
but little appreciated, though what the
Spartans, the Stoics, and the Jesuits
succeeded in doing with their imperfect
empirical methods is suggestive enough.
But these, or the two latter at least, only
contemplated the education of the
individual. What is wanted is the con
scious cultivation, enlightened by science,
of society as a whole.
As regards the end to which religions
have in an unconscious way more or less
tended—the general well-being—there
will probably be little difficulty in admit
ting that it is an object which civilised
man has proved himself capable of
attaining in a considerable measure
already. The superiority of the modern
nations, not only to savages, but even to
their own not very remote ancestors, is
beyond dispute; and this not only in
reference to physical well-being, but to
all the higher sentiments and endow
ments of man. Imperfect as our social
state still is, heartrending as the condi
tion of the poor in town and country
must be pronounced to be, it is, never
theless, vastly in advance of previous con
ditions, and our own sensitiveness and
shame on the subject, though we are not
yet sensitive and ashamed enough, are in
themselves evidence of improvement.
ioi
Arduous as the social problem is acknow
ledged to be, and sore as the suffering is
likely to be before it is finally solved,
few can deny that it is capable of solu
tion, and that by human means. The
abolition of laws which favour the rich
and strong, and sacrifice the poor and
weak, has, in a small way, begun, and we
may depend that in a democracy it will
not easily be arrested. A better distri
bution and a moralisation of wealth are
approaching with a rapidity which is not
exaggerated by the panic fears of the
amazed Few, who hear with astonish
ment and horror that the world is-no
longer made for idlers only. The period
of social revolution into which we are
about to enter will probably be marked
by many mistakes, and not a few crimes.
Man’s capacity for blunder is very great.
He smarts for his blunders, and in time
corrects them. But the point to be noted
is that the social revolution will be ac
complished on secular principles, that
this province of practical life is once forall severed from any theological inter
ference. The proletariat of Europe is
resolved to have its fair share of the
banquet of life, quite regardless of the
good or bad things in store for it in the
next world.1
It comes, therefore, to this, that the
spirit of sacrifice evolved in the theologicaL
1 See the Times (which seldom outruns public
opinion), November 18th, 1884. In the third
leading article it is said, speaking of the East
London Mission:—“The great enemy which
has to be met in dealing with this class [the
poor] is not active hostility, but total and almost
impenetrable indifference. Hostility to the
clergy, as such, cannot be said to be widespread
in London...... The London artisan looks on the
clergyman as at worst a man who is engaged in
a work with which he individually has little or
no concern; he does not interfere with the
parson, and he hopes that the parson will not
interfere with him.......Taken in the mass, the
lower classes in London are too much occupied
in the struggle for existence, and in the attempt
to make their lives endurable, to give many
thoughts to the other world.” The writer con
trasts the very different temper of the Parisian
ouvrier, who “regards the priest as a monster”;
but he admits that there is an element of active
hostility to the clergy in our midst.
�102
THE SERVICE OF MAN
stage is now severed from and inde
pendent of its parent. Its office is no
longer the same. Sacrifice to invisible
godo, with prayer sent up to the immor
tals, imploring pardon, or peace, or some
earthly good, have afforded hope and
consolation to the sons of men in the
long, dark centuries when knowledge was
not, when visible man and nature were
so hostile that faith and trust in the
unseen seemed the only refuge, that only
“beyond the veil” was a sure friend to
be found. A bitter experience has at
last taught us that the immortals are deaf,
that no prayers, however passionate, are
heard, save by the care-laden hearts
which utter them.
Thus, the worship of deities has passed
into the “ Service of Man.” Instead of
Theolatry, we have Anthropolatry. The
divine service has become human ser
vice. The accumulated experience of
mankind is beginning to bear fruit. Two
things have been ascertained with suffi
cient exactness to serve as guides, both
in practice and theory. First, the kind
of conduct needed by a social condition
such as ours—that is to say, the outlines
■of a progressive morality suited to the
present age, are fairly settled. Secondly,
the kind of social condition desired, and
■already partially in view, which shall
supersede the present inferior one, is
also in its main features apprehended.
The two factors work together to one
result, “complete life carried on under
social conditions.”1 The Service of Man
consists in furthering both. The higher
moralisation of the individuals composing
the social group will raise the quality of
the social group itself, and the improved
group will react upon individuals and
enable them to lead higher lives. In a
word, we are now in a position to pursue
human well-being as a conscious aim,
with good prospect of success.
We
know fairly well the road along which we
intend to travel, and we know the kind
of human co-operation needed to enable
1 Herbert Spencer’s Data of Ethics, p. 130.
us to do so; the type of character and
disposition needed to render social help.
And we know, further, that society
possesses now, in a degree it never
possessed before, the means of exact
ing conformity to this type.
Public
opinion, as it used to be called, but for
which a better expression would be the
“collective conscience,” is already able
to impose a standard of public and
private morals, and to punish, with
penalties keenly felt, a manifest infe
riority to it. Even in the political world
singleness of purpose, a true public and
social spirit, are valued more than great
talent and eloquence without them. A
life of selfish ease and indulgence is
pardoned to great wealth and position
with less readiness than formerly; and,
with the growth of democracy, such a
temper must necessarily spread, both in
extent and intensity.
The remainder of our subject will,
therefore, be considered under the two
aspects just indicated : (1) the improve
ment of the individual, and (2) the im
provement of society. We can serve
men firstly, and perhaps chiefly, by im
proving ourselves, and this in all respects,
physically, mentally, morally. Without
a high standard of health, duties become
difficult or impossible to perform, and
our whole efficiency is lessened. In
these days of increased knowledge, when
so much of youth, and even of manhood,
is taken up with preparatory study and
training, the longevity of its worthier
members is a distinct gain to society.
A vigorous old age is able to accomplish
out of all proportion more than several
careers, however brilliant, cut short in
youth. Few, or none, are now likely to
question the value of mental improve
ment. It remains true, all the same, that
our notions of education are lamentably
inadequate, and that the higher forms of
it are not even conceived as possible or
desirable in our so-called universities.
As regards moral training, finally, , no
one will dispute its paramount necessity;
but the subject is obscured and the
result vitiated by the emphasis laid by
�ON THE CULTIVATION OF HUMAN NATURE
the religious public, not on morals, but
on repentance ; not on the vigorous and
constant performance of social duty
throughout life, but on making our
peace with God, some time, it signifies
not how short a time, before life closes.
What humanity needs is not people who
lead unsocial and wicked lives, and are
very sorry when about to die—when, by
the nature of the case, they can do no
more harm nor good ; but people who,
at an early period, begin to render valu
able service to the good cause, and con
tinue rendering more valuable service as
they advance in years. We cannot take
regrets and repentance in lieu of work;
performance only avails. To prevent I
103
misconception, even for a moment, it
may be added that, by performance,
advance in spiritual life is by no means
excluded; and that the contemplative life
is not placed below the active life, but
contrariwise, as will be seen further on.
The improvement of society, again, is
an object to which nearly all persons
will declare themselves favourable. But
many prejudices and passions, largely
incompatible with any serious improve
ment, will need to be overcome before our
advance in that direction can become as
rapid and assured as is desirable.
There will be no want of work for
those who wish to engage in the Service
of Man.
Chapter IX.
ON THE CULTIVATION OF HUMAN NATURE
For this service to be efficient, it is
obvious that men must be adequately
trained for it. From time immemorial,
education for some object or other has
been practised by mankind. The young
savage is taught to hunt, fish, and shoot
with persevering assiduity. Every kind
of war implies discipline and drill, how
ever rude. Political life, wherever it
exists, inevitably leads to an education
fitting men for the treatment of public
affairs.
Besides these partial ends,
religion, in all societies above the lowest,
is charged with the general and para
mount end of training men in the
worship and service of the invisible but
all-powerful Being or Beings, who are
supposed to dispose of human happiness
in this world and the next. This has
ever rightly been regarded as the most
important of all training, because it
concerns every one, and incomparably
more momentous interests are involved
in its efficient carrying out. The culti
vation of human nature, in some degree
or direction, is as old as humanity.
But the partiality and imperfection of
this cultivation are equally old. The
daily acquisition of food occupies the
whole life of the savage, almost as com
pletely as it does the lives of the birds
and animals which he snares and kills.
With the growth of knowledge and
wealth, wider objects engage man’s atten
tion, and exact a corresponding culture
to secure their attainment. But these
ends, though wider than those of savage
life, are still very narrow, consisting in
success in petty warfare with neighbour
ing States, or in party struggles within the
primitive city. Even the worship of the
gods is stiffly exclusive and partial, and
confined to local or tribal divinities, who
are “jealous” in the extreme of any
rivals in popular reverence.
This imperfection of culture has con
tinued to modern times, though, with
every stride in civilisation, it has been
�104
THE SERVICE OF MAN
lessened, and replaced by something
better and larger. Yet, it is still obvi
ously local, partial, and imperfect. No
where yet does the aim exist to produce
the best human being possible ; to train
all the faculties of the body, the mind,
and the heart, with the sole object of
making the most of them. Men are
still trained for special trades and pro
fessions, for special countries, and, above
all, for special religions. And, in the
present low development of the human
mind and civilisation, it cannot be other
wise, or at least, much otherwise. But
there can be no doubt that one of the
most assured and practical means of
improving society is to improve the
individual men and women who com
pose it. This is strongly but vaguely
expressed in the cry for education;
though one is often tempted to think
that none needs education more than
the popular clamourer for it. Still, a
great advance has been made in the
mere recognition that the cultivation of
individuals, however imperfect, is a
matter of primary importance to the
general welfare. Deeper views on the
subject will come in time.
For the purpose of this essay, we need
not regard the subject from this wide and
public point of view. We may limit
ourselves to the consideration—ample
enough—of the change in the theory of
human cultivation, likely to follow the
substitution of the service of man for
the service of God ; and we will do so
under the three heads—(i) the body,
(2) the mind, and (3) the heart of man.
1. On the first we need not dwell
long. Medical science has nearly solved
the problem of health. The amount of
exercise and nourishment, the kinds and
qualities of foods and drinks, the limits
of work and relaxation, the salubrity of
sites and dwellings and clothing—these
and similar topics connected with the
health of the body physical are so fairly
well understood that anyone with a
moderately strong constitution, amenable
to good advice, may keep in satisfactory
health. Many of the worst diseases have
been almost disarmed, though a few, like
cancer, are said to be on the increase ;
and there is a great set-off in the fact
that the very success of medical skill and
science has produced serious harm by
saving numbers of weak and bad con
stitutions, which would formerly have
perished, but which now survive to pro
pagate an unhealthy stock—an evil which
will probably be diminished or removed
by stricter views of marriage and the pro
creation of children. The paramount
importance of health for the adequate
discharge of public and private duties
can escape no one. It is probable that
in a reformed public opinion of the
future a breakdown in health, when
obviously caused by excess or impru
dence, or culpable ignorance, will be
regarded as a species of bankruptcy and
severely judged. A servant of Humanity
has’ no right to be unable to perform his
duties to her.
2. Neither need we dwell long on the
cultivation of the mind, interesting as is
the subject, and much as there would be
to say about it in another connection.
The utility of knowledge is now obvious
to everybody, and nearly all departments
are fairly well-cultivated, some of them
with splendid results. Science now is
quite able to take care of itself, and we
have no reason to fear that it will not be
equal to the task. The great danger is
specialism, which cultivates one small
segment of the vast circle of knowledge,
and remains contentedly ignorant of the
rest. Specialism cannot be spared, if
only for the reason that he who is not a
specialist in some one thing is likely to
be a sciolist in all things. But, next to
the sciolist, the pure specialist is, perhaps,
the least efficient servant of man.
3. I now come to the third, and in
comparably the most important, of all
the forms of human cultivation—the
cultivation of the heart and feelings.
I have already, in a previous chapter,
attempted to show that, as a support of
morality, Christian doctrine and practice
were inherently defective; inasmuch as
that the true end of Christianity was not
�ON THE CULTIVATION OF HUMAN NATURE
morality in this world, but salvation in
the next. My object must now be to
show that a cultivation of human nature
on positive and human principles will
have a different result; first, because of
the different end; secondly, because of
the different means and theories adopted
with a view to that end.
The cultivation of nature, vegetable or
animal, since it has become scientific,
has proceeded on the assumption of a
universal law of causation, on which
were based experiment and proof. The
agriculturist and the grazier, aided by
the chemist, have discovered the most
propitious conditions, foods, soils, stocks,
etc., for their special objects in view, and
after great time and pains they have
fairly mastered the problem. The only
part of it which they have not mastered
is the meteorological part; but in other
respects their success has been eminently
satisfactory. Even pestilences in the
animal and vegetable world are stopped,
and prevented from spreading, if not
from appearing; as the extirpation of
the rinder-pest, the silkworm disease, and
perhaps, most remarkable of all, the
destruction of locusts in Cyprus, suffi
ciently show. It was different even in
the Augustan age of Rome—
“...... alitur vitium, vivitque tegendo,
Dum medicas adhibere mantis ad volnera pastor
Abnegat, aut meliora deos sedet omina.poscensT1
Epidemic diseases were regarded by Jew
and Gentile as special proofs of the anger
of the Deity; whom men sought by
prayer and sacrifice to propitiate that the
plague might be stayed.
.
“Help us, O Lares ! help us, Lares, help us!
And thou, O Marmar, suffer not
Fell plague and ruin’s rot
Our folk to devastate.”2
In these cases we now look for help to
the sanitary inspector or the veterinary
surgeon.
Now, the scientific cultivation of
human nature needs the adoption of the
same method and principles as have
1 Verg., Georg., iii. 454.
2 Song of the Arvai Brothers.
i°5
been so fruitful of good results in other
departments. We must cease to believe
in miracle and divine aid ; and, proceed
ing on the firm ground of cause and
effect, not expect to reap except where
and when we have ploughed and sown.
The theological doctrine of grace, and
the metaphysical doctrine of the freedom
of the will, are alike fatal to a steady
cultivation of human nature from a
moral point of view. Both presuppose
an unknown factor, whose presence or
absence cannot be foreseen, and whose
action cannot be measured. “It is here,
it is there, it is gone,” and no one can
tell why. It at once upsets prevision of
the future, and cancels all record of and
inference from the past.
An authorised expounder1 of Catholic
doctrine remarks : “Nothing, absolutely
nothing, neither little nor much, can be
done without the grace of God. We
cannot do a good action, nor produce
any good fruit conducive to salvation,
without the grace of God.”
“ St.
Augustine,” remarks Canon Liddon,
“ says there is no reason, apart from the
grace of God, why the highest saint
should not be the worst criminal.”2 In an
instant, therefore, a criminal may be
come a saint, or a saint may become a
criminal, according to the good pleasure
of God, “ who hath mercy on whom he
will have mercy, and whom he will he
hardeneth.” If we assume, as we surely
may, that the saintly character is marked
by rare and precious qualities, we are
made to see, on this theory, by what a
frail and uncertain tenure they exist.
It is hardly necessary to point out that
this doctrine must induce an indifference,
almost a recklessness, as to the culti
vation of human nature, so far as the
heart and feelings are concerned. We
cannot be sure for twenty-four hours
together whether we shall belong to the
diabolically wicked or the angelically
good.
The analogy between the theological
1 Power, Catechism, vol. ii., p. 33.
2 “ Oxford Sermons,” VI.
�io6
THE SERVICE OF MAN
doctrine of grace and the metaphysical
tenet of free-will is obvious. They both
appeared prominently together in the
controversy between Pelagius and St.
Augustine. Free-will is a sort of secular
correlative of theological grace.
It
delivers over man, not the arbitrary
inspiration of divine grace given or with
held, but to the arbitrary autocracy of
his own power of volition; which can
do with him what he pleases, if it
pleases. “ According to the doctrine of
free-will, there is an ultimate power of
choice in the human will, which, how
ever strongly it may be drawn, or
tempted, or attracted to decide one way
or another by external appeals or
motives, is not ruled and decided by such
motives, but by the will itself only.”12
Again : “ While there is life there is hope
and there is fear. The most inveterate
habits of vice still leave a power of self
recovery in the man if he will but exert
it; the most confirmed habits of virtue
still leave the liability to a fall.”3 The
close analogy, almost amounting to
identity, between the doctrines of free
will and grace, is here very clearly
shown. By encouraging the idea that
the most inveterate habits of vice can
be reformed by an act of will, the para
mount importance of habit is masked or
even implicitly denied ; that is to say,
that one of the most important and
widely dominant laws of biology is
denied, or the moral nature of man is
withdrawn from its dominion. If the
most confirmed habits of virtue are no
guarantee against a “ fall ” (that means,
can be destroyed by an exertion of the
wicked will), it is obvious that patient
and protracted efforts towards self-disci
pline and the higher life is so much
labour lost. The subjugation of self and
evil desires carried on for years may
end in a “ fall,” and gratification of
our most depraved instincts.
And,
contrariwise, “inveterate habits of vice ”
1 Mozley, Augustinian Doctrine of Predesti
nation, p. 217.
2 Ibid , p. 247.
are not the serious danger one might
suppose, as the power of self-recovery is
always present and capable of throwing
them off, if the man will but exert it.
While there is life there is hope and
fear; and up to the last the criminal
may become a saint, and the saint a
criminal, as St. Augustine said.
It is evident that the doctrine of the
freedom of the will supposes the phe
nomena of the mind to be exempt from
the laws and conditions which regulate
the rest of nature; and the more
courageous metaphysicians do not hesi
tate to make this assumption. “ Can the
knowledge of Nature,” asks the late
Professor Green, “ be itself a part of
Nature, in that sense of Nature in which
it is said to be an object of knowledge P”1
It is not easy to see why the subject
which cognises the object should be less
Nature than the object cognised. The
image of an object in the mirror which
reflects is as much Nature as the object
reflected. Hojyever, it is not necessary
for the purpose in hand to make a flight
into the fine aether of Kantian meta
physics. If we consult fact instead of
fiction, we shall conclude that moral
qualities are, to say the least, as per
manent and durable as any biological
phenomena. The digestive functions,
the circulation of the blood, and the
secretions of the body are not more
periodic and permanent than the passions
of the mind. Indeed, the latter are the
more lasting and persistent of the two
groups. The liver of a miser is more
likely to break down in the course of
his life than his passion for gold. The
muscular heart of the benevolent man
may, and often does, fail before the
spiritual heart which makes him un
wearied in doing deeds of mercy. The
common sense of mankind has always,
when not perverted by the necessities of
a theory, recognised the permanence of
moral qualities, not only in the indi
vidual, but in the race—
“ Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis ;
1 Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 11.
�ON THE CULTIVATION OF HUMAN NATURE
Est in juvencis, est in equis patrum
Virtus, neque inbellem feroces
Progenerant aquilm columbam.”1
107
not attend the sacraments, religious ser
vices which, at other times, he would not
have neglected for the world. Report,
however, said that he and his associates
passed their time in alternate scenes of
the exercises of religion and debauchery;
spending their day in meetings for prayer
and pious conversation, and their nights
in lewdness and revelling. Some men
are of opinion that they could not be
equally sincere in both. I am apt to
think that they were....... There is no
doubt of the profligacy; and I have
frequently seen them drowned in tears
during the whole of a sacramental Sunday;
when, so far as my observation could
reach, they could have no rational object
to act a part. The Marquis of Lothian
of that day, whom I have seen attending
the sacrament at Prestonpans with Lord
Grange, and whom no man suspected of
plots or hypocrisy, was much addicted
to debauchery. The natural casuistry of
the passions grants dispensations with
more facility than the Church of Rome.”1
There are strong rumours that such
contradictions between faith and practice
were not unknown in Scotland in a more
recent past.
Now let us take the milder, but not
less instructive, case of Dr. Johnson.
Few men have had more devout faith in
God’s grace, and more firm belief in
free-will, than Samuel Johnson. He was,
in intention at least, highly conscien
tious. In practice, as he was the first to
admit, he often fell short of his standard
of duty. We can hardly imagine more
fervent prayers and determined resolves
than he made with a view to breaking off
bad habits and turning over a new leaf.
Yet the success was very small, as we
learn from the frequent repentances and
renewed resolves published by Boswell,
That the two doctrines just referred
to, of grace and of free-will, have fre
quently operated to the injury of morality
is proved by examples too numerous to
quote. Louis XV., one of the most
profligate men in history, was punctilious
in his religious exercises ; and, as Carlyle
says, used to catechise the inmates of
his harem in the Parc aux Cerfs, “that
they might retain their orthodoxy.” But
the doctrine of grace, which he had no
doubt thoroughly grasped, allowed him
to feel that he could at any time repent,
and that when he did he would be freed
from his sins. In one of the finest
historical pictures ever drawn, even by
Carlyle, we are admitted to the side
of the “ sinner’s death-bed,” to see his
anxiety for the sacraments, and how he
made the amende honorable to God.
If it be objected that this is only a
sample of Popish superstition, we will
take from a sect the most opposed to
Catholicism, that of the Scotch Presby
terians, the case of the famous James
Erskine of Grange. Dr. Alexander
Carlyle, in his amusing autobiography,
speaks as follows of this Protestant
worthy. Referring to his father’s inti
macy with Lord Grange (Dr. Carlyle’s
father, like himself, was a minister of
the Church of Scotland), and to their
frequent meetings for prayer, he says :
“After these meetings for private prayer,
however, in which they passed several
hours before supper, praying alternately,
they did not part without wine. Not
withstanding this intimacy, there were
periods of half a year at a time when
there was no intercourse between them
at all. My father’s conjecture was that
at those times Lord Grange was engaged
in a course of debauchery at Edinburgh,
and interrupted his religious exercises.
For in those intervals he not only
neglected my father’s company, but
absented himself from church, and did
“ I have now spent fifty-five years in
resolving; having, from the earliest time,
almost, that I can remember, been
forming schemes of a better life. I have
done nothing........ O God, grant me to
1 Hor. iv. 4. 29.
1 Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle, p. 13.
�THE SERVICE OF MAN
io8
resolve aright, and to keep my resolu
tions, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.”1
The chief faults with which Johnson
reproached himself were waste of time,
procrastination, and a torpid laziness
which made early rising almost an im
possibility to him. Against these faults
he perpetually made resolutions, and
prayed fervently for divine help to keep
them. He resolved and prayed in vain ;
as we know, not only from his own
confession, but from abundant other
testimony. Boswell is delighted with
Johnson’s tenderness of conscience and
“ fervent desire of improvement.” It did
not occur to Boswell that he had given,
in other parts of his work, ample reasons
which accounted for Johnson’s failure on
this head. Johnson’s habits were wholly
incompatible with health of mind or
body, and they were peculiarly adverse to
the alertness of spirit of which he was
always lamenting his deficiency. How
could a man get up early who always sat
up at night as long as he could find any
one to keep him company ? How could
a man retain a prompt and clear energy
of mind, ready for all demands, who
never scrupled to gorge himself to reple
tion whenever he had an opportunity?
“ I never knew,”said Boswell, “any man
who relished good eating more than he
did. When at table, he was totally
absorbed in the business of the moment;
his looks seem riveted to his plate; nor
would he, unless in very high company,
say one word, or even pay the least
attention to what was said by others, till
he had satisfied his appetite—-which was
so fierce, and indulged with such intense
ness, that while in the act of eating, the
veins of his forehead swelled, and
generally a strong perspiration was
visible.”2 How much of Johnson’s
physical suffering and moral deficiencies
were owing to his habitual gross feeding
could perhaps only be determined by a
physician who had carefully examined
the patient; but that his obesity and
shortness of breath, his low spirits and
choleric temper, were largely attributable
to his self-indulgence there can hardly
be a doubt.
If Johnson had been a determinist,
and cultivated his nature on rational
principles, he would have known that
while he retained his usual habits he
could not overcome his sloth. A light
but nutritious diet, sufficient exercise in
the fresh air to induce a pleasant fatigue,
frequent cold baths, moderation in all
liquors, especially tea, and early hours
of going to bed, would probably, in a
few months, have enabled him to throw
off his lethargy.
The doctrine of determinism is now
so generally accepted that it will not be
needful to dwell upon it at any length
here. The cumulative argument in its
favour, says Mr. Sidgwick, is so strong
as almost to amount to complete proof.
But its immense importance for the
right cultivation of human nature seems
still to be overlooked, even by its most
illustrious advocates. Even Mr. Sidg
wick is of opinion that the decision of
the “ metaphysical question at issue in
this free-will controversy ”z does not
involve any point of general practical
importance. I am unable to accept
this view. It appears to me to be one
of those cases in which right theory is
all-important, as guiding to right
practice.
If we admit that “ From the universal
law that, other things equal, the cohesion
of psychical states is proportionate to the
frequency with which they have followed
one another in experience ; it is an
inevitable corollary, that all actions
whatever must be determined by those
psychical connections which experience
has generated, either in the life of the
individual or in that general antecedent
life of which the accumulated results are
organised in his constitution,”2 we must
further admit that any theory which
tends to discredit or underrate “ habit,”
1 Boswell, anno 1764.
2 Boswell, anno 1763.
1 Methods of Ethics, cap. v.
2 Herbert Spencer, Psychology, vol. i., p. 500.
�ON THE CULTIVATION OF HUMAN NATURE
tends to make human action uncertain
and vacillating, tends therefore to
weaken the automatic performance of
good actions, which is what the well
being of society demands. The free
will theory openly challenges “ habit ”
and encourages the belief that the most
inveterate habit may be broken by an act
of volition. The attention is therefore
directed to the wrong side of the prob
lem. Instead of vigilantly watching
against the slow, insidious growth of evil
habits, the failure to carry out good
resolutions, the frequent indulgence of
vicious tastes ; the mind is lulled into a
false security by the belief in free-will,
imagining himself independent and
sovereign, when and while it is being
reduced into servitude. The “cohesion
of psychical states ” is so established by
their frequent succession that it becomes
organic. If not absolutely inseparable,
their cohesion is so strong that only a
violent contrary passion or motive is
equal to breaking it. The most hard
ened lie-a-bed, whom neither duty nor
interest can rouse from his slumbers,
would promptly sally forth if informed
that the house was on fire. It is this
fact—viz., that even an inveterate habit
may be broken by a gust of passion, or
a permanent mood of profound emotion,
which has given a semblance of ration
ality to the doctrine of free-will. No
determinist ignores or underrates it. A
passion of pure love has often saved a
man from a swarm of minor vices. All
the famous and sudden religious con
versions from evil-living to righteousness
may be traced to the same principle.
Ardent love, gratitude, and veneration
for Christ, when kindled, are able to
snap the chains of habit, and sometimes
to prevent their being welded together
again. But it is rash, not to say reckless,
to trust to a random cyclone of the
nobler passions to save us from our sins.
It is of the nature of cyclones to be
violent, but of short duration. They
may never come; they are apt to be
transitory. And then the old cohesion
of psychical states reappears, the vicious
109
habit returns, probably more virulent
and domineering for its temporary exile,
and the last state of that man is worse
than the first.
It is obvious, as already remarked,
that the free-will doctrine turns the atten
tion away from the essential and real
side of moral cultivation, and directs it
to an unreal side. It resembles Sir
Kenelm Digby’s famous sympathetic
powder for the cure of wounds. Digby
professed that he would be very sorry
not to do his uttermost to make it clear
how the powder “(which they commonly
call the powder of sympathy) doth,
naturally and without any magick, cure
wounds without touching them, yea,
without seeing of the patient and he
set forth how the cure “ is performed by
applying the remedy to the blade of a
sword which has wounded a body; so
the sword be not too much heated by
the fire; for that will make all the spirits
of the blood to evaporate ; and conse
quently the sword will contribute but little
to the cure. Now, the reason why the
sword may be dressed in order to the
cure is, because the subtile spirits of the
blood penetrate the substance of the
blade, as far as it went into the body
of the wounded party; and there keep
their residence, unless the fire, as I
said before, chase them away.” Now,
the sympathetic powder is hardly more
irrational in surgery than the free-will
doctrine is in morals. In both cases
the attention is directed to the wrong
object, and diverted from the right one.
While Digby was applying his remedy
to the blade of a sword which had
caused a wound, he was giving but little
care and attention to the wound itself.
Indeed, he says that neither the wound
nor even the patient need ever be seen.
There would have been little hope of
the triumphs of modern surgery if this
method of treating wounds had pre
vailed. The real phenomena needing
elucidation would not have been studied,
and a fiction would have engrossed the
attention of the faculty. The believers
in free-will have studied ethics and the
�I IO
THE SERVICE OF MAN
cultivation of human nature, as Digby to persons who have no power to distin
studied surgery and the cure of wounds. guish one note from another, nor teach
Their doctrine is the correlative of the painting to the colour blind, nor mathe
sympathetic powder applied to the blade matics to those arrested by the Ass’s
of the sword. The real facts which it Bridge. In other words, cultivation is
behoved them to investigate they have only rationally applied where there is
original quality capable of receiving it.
neglected.
Certainly, the moral nature of man
Experience shows that moral or im
moral action depends upon the previous does not vary less widely than the other
training and character of the mind? as parts of his nature. There are men
much as healthy or morbid secretions whose quality is to manifest, from their
depend upon the previous habits and earliest years, a bias to vicious and malig
constitution of the body. A man with nant crime; who have no good instincts
a criminal nature and education, under on which a moral teacher can work; who
given circumstances of temptation, can pursue their own selfish gratification at
no more help committing crime than he any cost to others. There are also men
could help having a headache under whose bias is in the contrary direction;
certain conditions of brain and stomach. who, without teaching, or in spite of evil
Both the crime and the headache result. teaching, show a generous, upright, un
from a series of antecedent causes cul selfish spirit in all their dealings. And
minating in these effects. An unhealthy these differences are congenital: such
mode of living and, perhaps, a bad con persons differ as much as a cachectic
stitution lead inevitably to the one; an constitution differs from a healthy one.
evil training and, perhaps, a vicious Without saying that in the one case,
character combined lead to the other. therapeutics, and in the other case,
In neither case can the Will operate moral training, would be quite without
directly to suppress either crime or head effect, we may be sure that neither thera
ache at the moment. The physical peutics nor moral training will ever turn
ailment may be removed or mitigated by the bad into the good, the evil constitu
drugs or reformed habits of living, and tion or character into the vigorous and
the moral evil also may be diminished or moral.
Before drawing our practical deduc
removed by a complete change in the
ethical surroundings of the patient. But tions from these facts, let us consider
neither result is certain; and depends some of these implications.
Nature knows nothing of merit or
on numerous circumstances—the age of
the individual, the inveteracy of the desert, but only of qualities :
“Alike to her the better, the worse,
disease, the constitution or character in
The glowing angel, the outcast corse.”
either case.
All. cultivation presupposes, in the But for the well-being of man and society
vegetable, animal, or human subject, certain qualities in things, animals, and
original qualities which justify even an men are precious in the extreme, as cer
attempt to improve them. There are tain other qualities are pernicious. We
soils which no farmer in his senses cultivate the one and discard, or even,
would think of ploughing, manuring, and if possible, suppress, the other. No
sowing. There are kinds of vegetables qualities are so valuable to men in society
and stocks of cattle which are recognised as the moral qualities in each other’s
as unfit for profitable culture. They are hearts. On nothing does happiness so
left alone, either to die out or to survive much depend, both immediately and
in a state of nature. In the same way remotely, as upon the good or bad in
with human. qualities ; some original stincts of the fellow-men by whom we
quality is needed to begin upon. We do are surrounded. Within certain and
not give an elaborate musical education not very narrow limits these instincts
�ON THE CULTIVATION OF HUMAN NATURE
admit of cultivation; but unless origi
nally present in some degree they cannot
be cultivated. Their presence or absence
in the individual is no merit or fault of
his. Nothing is more certain than that
no one makes his own character. That
is done for him by his parents and an
cestors. The hero was born with his
noble and fearless heart; the saint came
into the world with his spontaneous apti
tude for good works and lofty feeling;
and the moral monster, the cowardly,
selfish, unscrupulous criminal, was born
with his evil passions inherited from pro
genitors, near or remote. No merit or
demerit attaches to the saint or the sinner
in the metaphysical and mystic sense of
the word. Their good or evil qualities
were none of their making. A man in
herits his brain as much as he inherits
his estate. The strong nature, the vivid
imagination, the tender conscience, the
firm will, all come by inheritance, as
much as money in the funds, or a noble
demesne of broad acres. The theo
logical doctrine that there is no such
thing as merit in the sight of God, that
all we have has been received as a free
gift, admits of a plainly scientific ex
pression, as a matter of fact.1
It will perhaps be said that this view
does away with moral responsibility;
that those who hold it cannot con
sistently blame any crime or resent any
injury; that we should not on this
hypothesis reproach a garrotter who half
murders us ; he is a machine, not a man
1 On this point St. Thomas uses almost Posi
tivist expressions :—
“ Et ideo meritum hominis apud Deum esse
non potest nisi secundum prmsuppositionem
divines ordinationis ; ita scilicet ut id homo
consequatur a Deo per suam opcrationem, quasi
mercedem, ad quod Deus ei virtutem operandi
deputavit, sicut etiam res naturales hoc conseqietintur per proprios motus et operationes, ad
quod a Deo sunt ordinal ee ; differenter tamen,
quia creatura rationalis seipsum movet ad
agendum per liberum arbitrium, unde sua
actio habet rationem meriti; quod non est in
aliis creaturis.”—Summa Theologica, Prima
Secundre, Quaestio cxiv. art. prim. But for the
arbitrary exception in favour of free-will, this
view would coincide with mine.
hi
with free-will, capable of doing and for
bearing according to the moral law. It
is no more rational to blame him than it
would be to blame a runaway locomotive
which knocks you down, and mangles or
kills you.
To which the answer is, that the
sooner the idea of moral responsibility is
got rid of, the better it will be for society
and moral education. The sooner it is
perceived that bad men will be bad, do
what we will—though, of course, they may
be made less bad—the sooner shall we
come to the conclusion that the -welfare
of society demands the suppression or
elimination of bad men, and the careful
cultivation of the good only. This is
what we do in every other department.
We do not cultivate curs and screws and
low breeds of cattle. On the contrary,
we keep them down as much as we can.
What do we gain by this fine language
as to moral responsibility ? The right to
blame, and so forth. Bad men are not
touched by it. The bad man has no
conscience; he acts after his malignant
nature. The fear of sharp punishment
may deter him from evil-doing, and quell
his selfish appetites; but he will not be
converted to virtue by our telling him
he has moral responsibility, that he is a
free agent to choose good or evil, and
that he ought to choose the good. His
mind is made up to choose the bad.
But society, knowing its own interests,
has a right to exclude him from its
fellowship; not only to prevent and
punish his evil actions, but to suppress
him in some effectual way, and, above all,
prevent his leaving a posterity as wicked
as himself.1 Society requires good in1 So Aristotle {Ethics, lib. x. c. 9) says that
some think that legislators ought “ direldovo-t.
oe ral dcfjveffrtpois odcri KoXdcreis re Kai n/auplas
e7riTL0^ai, tovs 8’ dviarovs 6'Xws e^vpi^ccv.” Mr.
Herbert Spencer, arguing against the modern
tendency to promote the “survival of the unfittest,” remarks : “ It rarely happens that the
amount of evil caused by fostering the vicious
and good-for-nothing can be estimated. But in
America, at a meeting of the States Charities Aid
Association, held on Dec. 18th, 1874, a startling
instance was given in detail by Dr. Harris, It
�112
THE SERVICE OF MAN
stincts and good actions. It does not
want even alternate sins and repentance;
it wants performance. The soldier who
deserts in presence of the enemy is
deservedly shot. In civil life there are
forms of criminality which are worse
than desertions ; they are open hostilities
to the best interests of humanity.
Nothing is gained by disguising the
fact that there is no remedy for a bad
heart, and no substitute for a good one.
Only on good, unselfish instincts can a
trustworthy morality repose. “ There
are many cases,” says Mr. Bain, “ where
a man’s social obedience, the fulfilment of
his bargains, his justice, veracity, respect
to other men’s rights, costs him a sacri
fice with no return, while the omission
leads to penalty. Simple prudence
would at such a moment suggest the
criminal course.”1 And Mr. Herbert
Spencer says : “The true moral deterrent
from murder is not constituted by a
representation of hanging as a conse
quence, or by a representation of tortures
in Hell as a consequence, or by a repre
sentation of the horror and hatred excited
in fellow-men; but by a representation of
the necessary natural results—the inflic
tion of death-agony on the victim, the
destruction of all his possibilities of
happiness, the entailed sufferings to his
belongings. Neither the thought of im
prisonment, nor of divine anger, nor of
social disgrace, is that which constitutes
the moral check on theft; but the
thought of injury to the person robbed,
joined with a vague consciousness of the
was furnished by a county on the Upper Hudson,
remarkable for the ratio of crime and poverty
to population. Generations ago there had existed
a certain ‘ gutter-child,’ as she would here be
called, known as ‘ Margaret,’ who proved to be
the prolific mother of a prolific race. Besides
great numbers of idiots, imbeciles, drunkards,
lunatics, paupers, and prostitutes, ‘ the county
records show two hundred of her descendants
who have been criminals.’ Was it kindness or
cruelty which, generation after generation,
enabled them to multiply and become an increas
ing curse to the society around them ?” [Man
versus the State, p. 69).
1 The Emotions and the Will, chap, x., p.
530; i§59-
general evils caused by disregard of pro
prietary rights. Those who reprobate
the adulterer on moral grounds have
their minds filled, not with ideas of an
action for damages, or of future punish
ment following the breach of a com
mandment, or of loss of reputation ; but
they are occupied with ideas of unhappi
ness entailed on the aggrieved wife or
husband, the damaged lives of children,
and the diffused mischiefs which go
along with disregard of the marriage tie.
Conversely, the man who is moved by a
moral feeling to help another in difficulty
does not picture to himself any reward
here or hereafter, but pictures only the
betterconditionheis trying to bringabout.
One who is morally prompted to fight
against a social evil has neither material
benefit nor popular applause before his
mind, but only the mischiefs he seeks to
remove, and the increased well-being
which will follow their removal.”1
Nothing can be more clearly put. The
feeling, sympathetic, generous heart,
which recognises the rights and claims of
others, which is pained by their suffering
and rejoices in their joy, is declared to
be the only trustworthy source of that
social morality on which general well
being depends. In this respect moral
conduct, regarded as an art, as it is
indeed incomparably the finest of the
fine arts, does not differ from its inferior
congeners. No one expects fine pictures
or statues from persons devoid of all
Aesthetic taste, nor oratorios and operas
from those deficient in musical ear. If
the interest of society requires a due pro
portion of altruistic sentiment in each of
its members, we can only expect them in
those individuals who are correspond
ingly organised. While all the emotions
can be cultivated, none can be implanted
or directly infused. In this, as in other
cases, we can only cultivate the good
sorts, the good stock, and eliminate and
discourage, as far as possible, the bad.
This view will very probably be
regarded by some as giving up the cause
1 Data of Ethies, pp. 120, 121.
�ON THE CULTIVATION OF HUMAN NATURE
of morality altogether. If we cannot
preach the categorical imperative of right
action to every creature, and assume and
expect that every one is capable of per
forming it, if he chooses to exert his
free-will, our preaching is supposed to be
vain ; an insincere make-believe, itself
immoral. This is very probable ; and
the foolishness of preaching, as often
practised, is perhaps only too evident.
But it may be remarked that the cause
of music is not given up because a
master counsels a pupil without an ear
for music to cease attempting to sing.
We may preach morality as we choose,
but we shall only be successful with the
apt scholars, those who have a founda
tion of good instincts on which to work.
It is, no doubt, much simpler to assume
that all are equally competent; and that,
if they do not receive our teaching, it is
not because they cannot, but because
they will not. Then we arrogate a right
to upbraid them, to punish them for their
wicked will. They can, if they choose,
be quite virtuous and moral. It is an
obvious view, recommended by a blunt
straightforwardness gratifying to many
minds which are disposed to resent and
even deny the complexity of nature.
The determinist is not less but more
resolute in teaching morality than his
free-will opponent. But he demands
pupils who can learn. What shall be
done with those who cannot learn belongs
to another branch of inquiry, and con
cerns politics rather than morals. But
much is gained by discarding the hope
of impossibilities, of ceasing to expect
grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles. The
extirpation of thorns and thistles, in the
literal or metaphorical sense, has its diffi
culties ; which we have no ground, how
ever, to regard as insuperable. The
object to be obtained is good men with
good instincts ; not the establishment of
a metaphysical theory that all men may
be good if they would only choose. So
little do we need free-will and deliberate
choice between good and evil that we
want a prompt, unreflecting bias towards
good. The option between virtue and
113
vice cannot be left an open question.
As we see good dogs chasser de race, so
we need citizens whose leanings are to
virtue’s side. And we are likely to get
them in proportion as we recognise that
good men, like poets, are born, not
made, and only in a minor degree the
product of training ; albeit that training,
in its own sphere, is of paramount
importance.
But training is not often entirely over
looked in practice, even by the partisans
of the doctrine of free-will—a fact more
creditable to their common sense than
their logic. The centre of the problem
lies in the question, how can a deter
minist cultivate virtue or good impulses,
seeing that by his principles he cannot
choose his desires ? How can he culti
vate a sense of duty, if duty depends
on altruistic sentiments, of which he is
perhaps devoid ?
It would be regarded as a truism
rather than a paradox to say that a man
cannot cultivate athletics without muscles.
Some amount of muscle must be present
on which to begin a course of muscular
development. In the same way, some
amount of congenital altruism—the tap
root of social morality—must be present,
or the cultivation of good impulses, moral
sentiments, or the sense of duty, cannot
be even attempted. We should be in
formed what manner of man the deter
minist is who is asked how he can culti
vate virtue on his principles. If he is a
base-hearted man, but sufficiently versed
in psychology to grasp the full import of
the question, he would answer that it was
obviously impossible. He would ac
knowledge a conscious absence of good
impulses, and that his only principle of
action was the gratification of self. If
the determinist, on the other hand, were
a man of generous nature, full of meek
ness, courage, and love, he would reply
that cultivation, or the satisfaction of
those impulses, was the greatest joy he
knew; that though often, through slack
ness of will, infirmity, and selfishness, he
failed in his duty (of which he was only
too conscious), yet he never felt inward
1
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THE SERVICE OF MAN
peace, except when cultivating the garden
of his soul, following the passionate ideal
of his heart in all benign works for others,
in all purifying discipline of the spirit
within him. Both these men would
answer truly; and the successful cultiva
tion of human nature demands that we
should bear in mind the answers of both.
The abstract science of morals needs
completing and correcting for the culti
vation of human nature by empirical
observation of the peculiarities of indivi
dual men.
“Duty” and “debt” are the same
word differently written, and both mean
that which is “owed.” I “ought” is
the preterite of I “ owe.” The French
“ devoir ” is applied to pecuniary debt
and moral duty. In Greek o^etXco and
show the same association of
ideas. Now, what do we mean by a
sense of duty, except a recognition of
the claims of others, of neighbour,
family, society, or God ? In no respect
do men differ more than in this sense of
duty, because in no respect are men
more unlike than in their endowment of
egoistic and altruistic impulses. In
some persons all sense of the claims of
others seems left out from the first.
They never seem to regard themselves
as owing anything to anybody; but,
contrariwise, they consider others always
as owing them a great deal. Even
borrowed money they repay with pain
and regret, and often require the threat
or the action of the law to bring them to
repayment. This type of character is
humorously exemplified in the alleged
remark of a spendthrift, who said of a
friend less hardened than himself: “ He
wasted his money in paying his debts
the use of money being only excusable,
it would appear, when no credit was to
be obtained. On the other hand, we
have natures who not only are prompt
in acknowledging claims upon them, who
would fast and starve rather than with
hold payment when due, but who perceive
debts and duties which neither society
nor individuals exact from them; who
willingly offend the world, and, with open
eyes, face its anger and resentment, so
they may render it a service which no
other is ready to offer. The saints,
martyrs, and heroes have been of this
type. Resistance to passion or strong
temptation can only be rationally ex
pected from a mind which combines a
habit of postponing self-gratification to
the interests and welfare of others, with
an ample endowment of generous and
benevolent impulses. The wave of
egoistic passion is met by a counter-wave
of altruistic emotion, and according to
the character and training one or the
other prevails. The characteristic feeling
of remorse for breach of duty, or gross
gratification of selfish desire, is evidence
of this. Genuine remorse, contrition as
distinguished from attrition, always arises
from a pain of the altruistic feelings, at
having returned evil for good) for having
injured a loving heart which deserved
different treatment at our hands. Remorse
is the note of tender and passionate, but
ill-governed, natures. There is no anguish
like it; but it is an anguish of which the
cold and the selfish are incapable. So
little does it fear or wish to evade punish
ment that it seeks it and implores it.
The grief over our own hard-heartedness
is too acute to be assuaged except by
sacrifice and penance ; and only in bitter
expiation is a slight relief derived for
transgression. In religious minds the
reason often gives way when they have
been made conscious that they have
sinned against and been ungrateful to
Christ their Lord, who for them hung
upon the tree, was pierced with wounds,
reviled, buffeted, and spat upon. Like
St. Peter, when they think thereon they
weep. In the naturally generous and
tender-hearted it soon appears and
developes with the added years. Educa
tion can do much to aid or check its
growth. The selfishness of children can
be cultivated to any extent. A habit
of regard for others may likewise be
nurtured. The proverbial selfishness of
princes largely depends on this fact.
Recognition of the “ claims ” of others,
arising from a sympathetic nature, is the
�ON THE CULTIVATION OF HUMAN NATURE
root of duty, but by no means the fullgrown tree. The size to which the tree
will grow depends upon the mental
power, upon the grasp of ideas, which
reveals an almost infinite variety of
“ claimants.” A kind heart coupled with
• a narrow mind cannot conceive the
higher forms of duty to the State, to
humanity, to unpopular causes. Culture
and mental force combined regulate the
quality of the duty paid. The difference
between abject superstition and lofty
piety depends on the intellect, not on
the heart of the worshipper.
In all societies, even the most savage,
some duties are inculcated on the young
by parents and elders; and certain acts
are forbidden or punished, others are
applauded and rewarded. The public
opinion of society carries on the process.
The teaching in childhood, youth, and
manhood is assimilated according to the
quality of the learner. The meek, the
modest, the kindly, receive in loving
trust the word of their elders. They
are told they ought to do Z/zA, that they
ought not to do that, and they accept
the obligation without hesitation or
scruple. The mala frohibita become
to them mala in se, and an infraction of
the rule laid down appears to them
monstrous and profane. In Christian
countries duty to God is naturally much
insisted on; and if it does not appear to be
always attended with the desired success,
the reason is not only in the hardness
of men’s hearts, but also in the intel
lectual difficulties involved in theism.
But whether the paramount duty be
paid to God, to the State, to humanity,
to great ideas, or any thing or being
beyond self, the germ of it always lies in
the unselfish readiness to pay a debt,
supposed to be owing to another or
others. And it often happens that the
supposition is wholly false; that the
debt is not owed; that it is imaginary,
not real. But the sense of obligation
is not concerned with the matter of a
given duty, but only with the form.
Conscience alone is a deceitful guide;
like justice, it is blind ; it will do evil as
i IS
readily as good. Its one pre-occupation
is to go out of self and pay its debt,
duty, reverence, to object, thing, or being
whom it wishes to serve. And this is
so true that the sense of duty in its
intense forms is not content with simple
disregard of self; it insists on hostility
to self, on self-mutilation, mortification;.,
as in the severer forms of asceticism.
Passion is by no means the worst:
enemy to duty; as a strong sense of
duty is itself a passion. The passionate ■
natures can often become the most bound
by it: witness St. Augustine. The cold
heart is the undutiful heart, the heart of
stone, which loves neither God nor man.
New duties. The man who recognises
new duties above those he has been
taught to observe; who sees, beyond the
circle of conventional obligation, the.
dim forms of new claimants on his heart
and service, is a moral inventor, am
enlarger of human life. Those who sawthe claims of the slave were such ; thosewho see the claims of animals are the
same. How many more such have still
to be seen I
Reward of virtue. The highest con
science has ever felt that the expectation
of reward for virtue was unjustified, and
almost incompatible with the idea of
virtue: “Not unto us, not unto us.”
“ We are unprofitable servants ; we havedone that which was our duty to do.”
These and similar utterances are the
natural and wholesome expressions of
the devout heart. And the instinct isright which inspires them. The moment
we consider duty as a debt which we owe,
we feel it does not admit of reward. Is
a man to be paid for paying his debts ?
How does this view of duty account for
resistance to strong temptation ?
The moment we recognise that we
can be in the position of owing something
to some one person, cause, or idea, it
matters not what form the payment may
take ; from coin of the realm up to giving
away one’s life, it is all one; meeting
an obligation which we have recognised
we are under. How we came by the
sense of this or that particular obligation
�116
THE SERVICE OF MAN
is immaterial. It may come through
many channels; religion, public opinion,
esprit de corps, or what not. Its fulness
and intensity depend far more on the
constitution of our minds than on any
external influence and teaching. If we
are wholly selfish, no teaching will per
suade us; if we are generous, loving,
and heroic, we move towards self-sacrifice
by a natural gravitation. And the point
to be especially noticed by those who
make virtue to consist in the choice of
the better part, after a conflict of motives,
is that the greater the virtue the less
there is of conscious self-sacrifice. The
egoist who will not sacrifice the meanest
of his own pleasures or passions for the
greatest need of others, and the hero
who gives his life for the “sheep,” are
the opposite poles of humanity. And so
little true is it that virtue only exists
after it has gained a victory over base
temptation, that the very presence or
possibility of temptation stains its purity.
In ordinary, civilised life this is so.
'What should we think of a friend or
acquaintance who we knew passed his
time in hard struggles to conquer the
sins forbidden in the sixth, seventh, and
eighth commandments? Yet, according
to the doctrine of some moralists, the
man who dines with us, and has not had
a temptation to steal our spoons, and
overcome it, is not virtuous; if he has
not lusted after the women of our house
hold and subdued his impurity, he is not
chaste; if he has not been touched by an
impulse to murder us, finally put down,
he is not a moral person.
Now, as regards resisting temptation,
it is obvious that, in proportion as we are
tempted to the commission of selfish sin,
our character, and, in a minor degree,
our education, are at fault. We have
started with an overplus of egoistic senti
ment, or we have had, by ill-education,
the egoistic sentiment unduly cultivated.
We shall behave under temptations
according to our character. The doc
trines we hold will have little weight in
the final result, though they will have
some. If we experience strong prompt
ings to murder, rape, or theft, the
chances are, whether we believe in Hell
or Utilitarianism, we shall gratify our
passions. If the altruistic element in us
is fairly represented, we shall hesitate, or
alternately fall into sin and repentance.
If self has been “annulled,” we shall
pass by the temptations with more or
less complete unconsciousness.1
Moralists have been at great pains to
show that through virtue lay the only
road to final and complete happiness;
that, on the other hand, crime and sin
inevitably led to pain and misery. It
was feared that, if any doubt were
allowed to rest on the fact that virtue
was its own reward, sensible people
would refuse so obviously bad a bargain.
As Mr. Leslie Stephen eloquently says :
“ Here we come to one of the multiform
and profound problems which has tor
tured men in all ages. Virtue—no one
denies it—does good to somebody, but
how often to the agent? A belief in
justice, as regulating the universe, has
been held to imply (I do not ask whether
rightly held) that happiness should
somehow go along with virtue. To give
up the belief in such a supreme regula
tion seemed, again, to be an admission
that virtue was folly. Yet how can this
doctrine be reconciled to the plainest
facts of experience ? The lightning
strikes the good and the bad; the hero
dies in the ruin of his cause; the highest
self-denial is repaid by the blackest
ingratitude; the keenest sympathy with
our fellows implies the greatest liability
to suffering; the cold, the sensual, and
the systematically selfish often seem to
have the pleasantest lots in life. Great
men in despair have pronounced virtue
to be but a name; philosophers have.
evaded the difficulty by a verbal denial
of the plainest truths ; theologians have
tried to console their disciples by con
structing ideal worlds, which have served
1 So again St. Thomas: “ Magis est non
posse peccare quam non peccare.
Theologies, Prima Secundre, Qurestio cxiv.
art. prim.
�ON THE CULTIVATION OF HUMAN NATURE
117
for little more than a recognition of the
unsatisfactory state of the actual world.
The problem so often attacked will per
haps be solved when we know the origin
of evil. Meanwhile we have only to
consider in what way it is related to
ethical theories.”1
This suggestive passage shows very
plainly how imperfectly the older specu
lators grasped the problem with which
they had to deal. If virtue depend on a
number of good instincts or qualities in
the agent’s mind or heart—benevolence,
sympathy, courage, and resolution—it
would seem obvious that no one could
be benefited by these precious endow
ments more than the fortunate owner of
them himself. Who derives so much
enjoyment from a fine ear for music as
the musician who has one ? Who profits
by an exquisite sense of colour so much
as the artist whom land, sea, and cloud
keep in an ecstasy of delight? Much
more, would one say, must the generous
and passionate emotions of the heart
supply an inward fountain of happiness
to the richly endowed natures which
possess them. To ask if virtue answers,
or “ pays,” is like asking if fine health
and bodily strength pay. Probably no
one would be without them if he could
help it. And yet there can be no doubt
that great strength and fine health often
lead their possessor into pain, and even
death, by tempting him to overtax his
powers. It may be said of all the higher
qualities and gifts, that under certain
conditions they are capable of causing as
much pain as pleasure to their owners ;
but these owners do not wish, therefore,
to be rid of them. The musician who
is tortured by an organ out of tune
would never think of purchasing peace
by the loss or destruction of his musical
ear. It is the same with regard to
Friendship and Love. Their betrayal
probably produces anguish as keen as
any known to the human heart. But no
one capable of either would ever regret
his capacity for love and friendship.
Those who doubt their value, or, with
Napoleon, hold that they are “ foolish
infatuations,” are out of court, as they
have no personal knowledge of qualities
they despise. We need not to be told
what manner of man he was who declared
that the secret of happiness consisted in
a good digestion and a bad heart. And
the querist, “Why should I do anything
for posterity, seeing that posterity never
did anything for me ?” receives even now
this answer from society, and will receive
it with greater emphasis in the future:
“ From you, sir, we expect nothing; but
you may expect that your shameless con
fession of selfishness will not go un
punished.” The “unsatisfactory state
of the actual world,” as Mr. Stephen says,
was no doubt a great hindrance in former
times to a recognition of the coercive
power for good which society can bring
to bear on the selfish and the wicked.
But the Christian scheme of rewards and
punishments also contributed to the con
viction that only by fear of retribution
could men be deterred from evil, and by
the hope of recompense be bribed to/7
doing good. A man who did not believe
in hell, it was thought, even by good
men, had no inducement to practise any
virtue or refrain from any vice. Dr.
Johnson said he would not believe that
Hume’s apparent equanimity when dying,
was sincere, because, on his (Hume’s)
principles, he had no motive to speak the
truth. Dr. Young, in his Night Thoughts,
gave utterance probably to the common
sentiment, crude and revolting as it
sounds :—
1 Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics, p. 398.
1 Seventh Night, 1169-1182.
“ ‘ Has Virtue charms ?’ I grant her heavenlyfair ;
But if unportioned, all will Interest wed.
*****
A Deity believed will nought avail;
Rewards and punishments make God adored •,
And hopes and fears give Conscience all her
power.
*****
Who tells me he denies his soul immortal,
Whate’er his boast, has told me he’s a knave.
His duty ’ tis to love himself alone ;
Nor care though mankind perish, if he smiles.”1
�Ii8
THE SERVICE OF MAN
only consider the agent, without reference
The line between “portioned virtue”
and “ interest ” does not appear here to to the reaction of society upon him, it is
be very clearly drawn, and virtue, it is obvious that no one course of conduct
intimated, can only be chosen for a valu can be assumed a priori as certain or
able consideration. But we must admit likely in itself to produce happiness.
all the same that in this respect the theo Virtue may, and probably will, bring
logians had the best of the argument, happiness to the virtuous man ; but to
till the conception of society as an the criminal and the selfish, virtue will
organism had arisen in speculation, with be probably the most distasteful or even
the momentous consequences which that painful thing in their experience, while
involves. The health of an organism vice will give them unmitigated pleasure.
depends on the health and efficiency of This view, as Mr. Stephen says, “is calcu
its parts; and the conduct and morals of lated to shock many respectable people”;
the individual are now seen to be no but that is not a sufficient reason for
longer the private concern of himself rejecting it if it be otherwise supported.
Now, what is a general feature common
only, but very much also of the society
of which he is a member. His vice to all forms of happiness, whether
injures and his virtue benefits the body vicious or virtuous ? Who are the people
, politic, as far as either influence extends. who visibly enjoy themselves; who are
And this is now so well seen that per never or rarely at a loss as to what they
haps the danger is, as Mr. Mill feared, shall do with their time ? Is it not those
that society and public opinion are tend persons who have one or more tastes,
ing to be too coercive and despotic, to . inclinations, or passions, so strongly
the injury of that liberty and individuality marked that they are always ready or
- -which are needed for full and vigorous ever thirsting for their gratification, which
well-being. We may certainly venture to never comes amiss ? Even the most
say this much, that society is now able sensual and repellent vices may so fill a
to make knaves, whether they believe mind with intense relish and pleasure
their souls to be immortal or not, feel that the sensualist is conscious of nothing
that crime is connected with misery but one long draught of voluptuous enjoy
rather than happiness, and that virtue,
ment. Satiety may no doubt be rapidly
perhaps not of the highest, but yet of a produced, and health ruined by excess;
fairly high standard, tends directly to the and then the sensualist has a bad time
of it; but that is because he has been
agent’s own comfort and peace of mind.
Now, as touching the problem which deprived of his pleasures, and he has
Mr. Stephen says has tortured mankind nothing to fall back on when his vices
for ages, the connection between virtue have left him. But that fact does not
and happiness, its solution would seem invalidate the statement just made, that
to require a little more precising of what a passionate pursuit of some one thing,
is meant by happiness than is customary whatever its character, is the primary
in ethical discussions. Obviously, happi condition of that glow of pleasurable
ness varies as much as men vary; and feeling which we call happiness. The
what constitutes the happiness of one gambler sitting down to the card-table,
man makes the misery of another. The the gourmand to his dinner, the book
healthy and the strong have different collector buying choice and rare editions,
sources of happiness from the sickly and the artist creating types of beauty, the
the weak. The same man at different man of science working out momentous
periods of life has very different forms problems, the philanthropist seeking and
of happiness. In other words, happiness relieving the wretched, though all enjoying
is a subjective phenomenon, depending very different kinds of happiness, have
upon the conditions and character of this factor in common—that they are
the individual. This being so, if we pursuing with keen appetite the object
�ON THE CULTIVATION OF HUMAN NATURE
they desire. They are free from the
aching languor of ennui; they escape
the hopeless and helpless nausea of the
blase mind, which is impotent even
to desire. Strong desires or passions,
capable of frequent and lasting gratifica
tion, are the only materials of happiness.
We have next to notice that the grati
fication of all the passions is more or
less attended with pain. Indeed, it
would seem that all intense pleasures
need to be tipped with a sharp point of
pain to give them their full zest. The
fatigue and danger of most manly sports
constitute a large portion of their attrac
tiveness. As, gamblers mostly end by
losing all their money, their vice must
give them more pain than pleasure ; but
the fact does not deter them from
gratifying it. The pains of the drunkard,
of the opium eater, the gourmand, are
notorious, but are not often alone suffi
cient to deter from indulgence in their
respective vices. And to this law the
higher and nobler passions offer no
exception. The ambitious man, say a
Napoleon, is always exposed to bitter
disappointment and mishaps. The agony
of a few nights at Fontainebleau, just
before his abdication, had so changed
Napoleon’s countenance that his inti
mates were shocked by it. Yet the
experience was thrown away upon him,
and he was ready to recommence the
game of ambition, as soon as opportunity
offered, by his escape from Elba. Even
the peaceful pursuits of literature and
science have their acute crises of vexation
and frustrated hope. Hume, the most
even-tempered of men, was so mortified
by the failure of the first volume of his
history that he would have gone abroad,
changed his name, and renounced author
ship, had not war broken out between
England and France. And, to complete
the survey, it must be added, that not
even the passionate pursuit of holiness
itself is without occasional sharp pain ;
in proof of which it is sufficient to cite
the “Acta Sanctorum,”passim.
A passion for virtue, therefore, is not
found to be at any disadvantage, as
119
compared with other passions, in the
occasional pain which its gratification
involves. If “il faut souffrir pour etre
belle,” it is also true, “ il faut souffrir
pour etre bon ”; and it is difficult to see
what is gained by attempting to disguise
the fact. Moralists have been so set
upon edification that they have been
over-anxious to persuade men of the
desirability of virtue, by expatiating on
the sweetness of its pleasures; that
virtuous people had an ample quid pro
quo for their virtue. And so they have at
times, and in one sense always; but they
also have dark and bitter moments in
which they are ready to faint; doubts
within and dangers without, yea, even
death itself in isolated desolation, when
“ all ” forsake them and flee ; w’hen the
hero has nothing to turn to but his own
heroic heart. Individuals, if left to
themselves, will follow “their own pecu
liar bent” in their choice of pleasures,
whether they be virtuous or vicious, sel
fish or self-denying, voluptuous or ascetic.
But there can be no doubt which class
society, in its own interests, will prefer
that its members should choose—viz.,
the virtuous, the self-denying, and ascetic.
Indeed, the most depraved and selfish of
men, whatever his own practice, will wish
his neighbours to be virtuous. Though
he may be unjust and cruel to others, he
will resent injustice and cruelty to him
self; though a libertine himself, he will
probably insist on chastity in his wife,
wfith much emphasis. Thus even the
bad are interested on the side of virtue,
as far as the conduct of others is con
cerned.
It only needs a little more
improvement in society for this to be
generally recognised, as it is already par
tially recognised, for the disfavour of
public opinion to be sharply shown to
selfish pursuits and passions, and a
steady, persistent encouragement of the
unselfish and social enjoyments of civic
life and duty. A love of good may be
cultivated to almost any extent where
the original foundation of an altruistic
nature exists. A passionate ideal of
excellence can so fill the mind that no
�120
THE SERVICE OF MAN
pleasure is felt in anything but in efforts
to realise it. “ The susceptibility to ideal
inflammation is a peculiarity of our nature,
varying with constitutions, and affected
by various circumstances.”1 All the
desires and passions in characters of
1 Bain, The Emotions and the Will, p. 49^-
normal vigour can, in the proper con
ditions, be thus inflamed,, as they can
also be starved by systematic discourage
ment. An ideal society would be one
in which an ideal education habitually
stimulated and inflamed the good pas
sions, while it starved and discouraged
the bad.
No. io of the R. P. A. Cheap Reprints will be LECTURES AND ESSAYS
{selected), by Professor Tyndall, with Biographical Sketch of the Author.
�
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The service of man : an essay towards the religion of the future
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: xxvii, 234 p. ; 20 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Annotations in pencil. Inscription in pencil on t.p. following title: as demonstrated by C.J. [i.e. Campbell Jenkins?] to E.S. 1907. First published 1887. Inscription in pencil on leaf following front flyleaf: Campbell Jenkins, United University Club, Suffolk St., Pall Mall, London.
Creator
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Morison, James Cotter, 1832-1888
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1892
Publisher
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Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., Ltd.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Religion
Social problems
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The service of man : an essay towards the religion of the future), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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N495
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application/pdf
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Text
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English
NSS
Positivism
Rationalism
Religion
Social Problems
-
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25e6667ff182612c52f75f6168cb2877
PDF Text
Text
RELIGION.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE “ HACKNEY AND KINGSLAND GAZETTE.
Sir,—As you have for some time past been favouring your readers
with the views of several of the ministers of the neighbourhood on Theology,
perhaps you will kindly find space for the following views of a layman on
what he presumes to call “ Religion,” and oblige,
Yours respectfully,
I believe in Rational Christianity, pure and simple, or Christian mo
rality, as was taught by Christ; in contra-distinction to the adulterated
clerical Christianity now so prevalent, and which has almost elbowed the
Christianity of Christ out of the world; whereby superstition and foolish
rites and ceremonies are substituted in the room of pure morality, true vir
tue, and genuine religion. I believe the Christianity of Christ to he
“ Peace on earth, goodwill to man,” the love of God and our neighbour,
universal charity and benevolence, and the golden rule of “ doing to
others as w7e would have them to do unto us,” and not in the incomprehensible
creeds and unintelligible dogmas of popular theology. I believe in a God
of perfect justice, who rewards the good in exact proportion to their merits,
and proportionately punishes the wicked ; such punishments being correc
tive and purifying : “ whatsoever a man sows so shall he reap.” That the
favour of God and happiness are to be procured by repentance and amend
ment; by personal not by vicarious agency. That well-matured reason and
conscience are the best guides to be depended on, and if we neglect or re
nounce their directions and admonitions, we lay ourselves open to all man
ner of delusion and priestcraft, hateful to God and destructive to mankind.
That instead of stereotyped creeds, blind zeal, and religious persecution for
“righteousness’ sake,” we should promote love, peace, temperance, gratitude,
charity and universal benevolence : so as to reduce religion to that plain,
simple system^ of aiming to attain that abstract perfection as taught by
Christ, wJ^Bjd“ Be ye perfect.” The principles to promote $hese are few
and easy: lst/l^^e is a God, an Almighty Creator, to whom all existence
belongs and is subject) and who ought to be worshipped by all mankind.
2nd, That by his7 immutable laws, the good are rewarded and the wicked
punished here and hereafter. 3rd, That repentance and reformation are
.required to obtain the one and escape the other. 4th, That true religion
�2
is that which was stated by Christ, “ Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart and soul and strength, and thy neighbour as thyself.”'
To love God is to love all “ Good,” as truth, justice, charity, and every
good work ; to love truth is to love the “ God of Truth,” &c.
I do not believe in the orthodox view of the atonement, that Christ
came to reconcile God to us, but rather that he came to reconcile us to God..
I do not believe in the necessity of his having to be crucified, and to take
upon himself the sins of all, before man could be saved ; if such were the
case how infinitely grateful we ought to be to those orthodox Jews who
cruelly put him to death, in order that we might be saved ! Neither do I
•believe in the orthodoxy of the present day, which says “there are three
Gods all equal,” and yet so unequal that one God is ever interceding, and
endeavouring to appease the wrath of another God ! if so, one must be in
the wrong ! I believe in the absolute perfection of a Divine Creator, and
who does not thus require to be changed in order that endless punishment
may be averted, for temporary sins. I believe that God is love, and that
his “ mercy” and not his chastisement “ endureth for ever.”
I do not believe in “ original sin” and that man was pre-ordained to
be its victim ; nor in the destruction of unbaptized infants, as the Roman
and Anglican priests tell us. I prefer Christ’s doctrine ; he says “ of such
is the kingdom of Heaven.” I do not believe in that best friend of priest
craft,—a personal devil, and who is said to be more mighty than the Allmighty in obtaining the greatest number of immortal souls, thus having
power to thwart God’s providence,—nor in a material hell-fire, which is
ever consuming those souls. I do not believe “ in three Gods, yet one
God” which the Church of England says we must believe or “ without
doubt perish everlastingly.” Its creeds are to me downright blasphemy.
1 do not believe that the Bible was divinely inspired” from beginning to
end and was all written by the “finger of God.” I believe the Bible was made
for man, not man for the Bible, that it is an historical, moral and spiritual
teacher, not altogether correct, but containing many truths and many
errors ; a compilation of different works by different authors, written at
different periods, and by the most learned and wise men of their day, but
that neither they nor their works are infallible, as the science of geology
and astronomy, and even their own contradictions prove. That men in
after ages collected and bound together such of these books as they thought
proper and called them the Bible, and that these selfsame human beings,
at the Council of Nice, &c., rejected such other books as they thought
of less worthy note ; that these men were also as learned and wise as the
times would permit, but not infallible and possibly not altogether without
prejudice or partiality.
I believe real Christianity to be absolute religion, which thinks and
works ; goodness towards man, and piety towards God; undogmatic, un
sectarian, liberal, broad and free, preached wdth faith and applied to life,
being good and doing good. There is but one real rel i gih we need
only open our eyes to see, and which requires neither creeds nor catechisms
to discern; only live it, in love to God and man, and we are blessed by
Him who liveth for ever, in spite of all that priests and their dupes may say
to the contrary, for thank God they are not to be our judges, other
wise few would escape.
�RELIGION.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE “ HACKNEY AND KINGSLAND GAZETTE.”
Sir,—As you have for some time past beeD favouring your readers
with the views of several of the ministers of the neighbourhood on Theology,
perhaps you will kindly find space for the following views of a layman on
what he presumes to call “ Religion,” and oblige,
Yours respectfully,
C.
I believe in Rational Christianity, pure and simple, or Christian mo
rality, as was taught by Christ; in contra-distinction to the adulterated
■clerical Christianity now so prevalent, and which has almost elbowed the
Christianity of Christ out of the world; whereby superstition and foolish
rites and ceremonies are substituted in the room of pure morality, -true vir
tue, and genuine religion. I believe the Christianity of Christ to be
“ Peace on earth, goodwill to man,” the love of God and our neighbour,
universal charity and benevolence, and the golden rule of “ doing to
others as we would have them to do unto us,” and not in the incomprehensible
creeds and unintelligible dogmas of popular theology. I believe in a God
-of perfect justice, who rewards the good in exact proportion to their merits,
and proportionately punishes the wicked ; such punishments being correc
tive and purifying : “ whatsoever a man sows so shall he reap.” That the
favour of God and happiness are to be procured by repentance and amend
ment; by personal not by vicarious agency. That well-matured reason and
■conscience are the best guides to be depended on, and if we neglect or re
nounce their directions and admonitions, we lay ourselves open to all man
ner ot delusion and priestcraft, hateful to God and destructive to mankind,
that instead of stereotyped creeds, blind zeal, and religious persecution for
“righteousness’ sake,’ we should promote love, peace, temperance, gratitude,
charity and universal benevolence : so as to reduce religion to that plain,
simple system of aiming to attain that abstract perfection as taught by
Christ, who said “ Be yeperfect.” The principles to promote these are few
.and easy: 1st, There is a God, an Almighty Creator, to whom all existence
belongs and is subject, and who ought to be worshipped by all mankind.
2nd, 1 hat by his immutable laws, the good are rewarded and the wicked
punished here and hereafter. 3rd, Ihat repentance and reformation are
.required to obtain the one and escape the other. 4th, That true religion
�2
is that which was stated by Christ, (t Thou shall love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart and soul and strength, and thy neighbour as thyself.”'
To love God is to love all “ Good,” as truth, justice, charity, and every
good work ; to love truth is to love the “ God of Truth,” &q.
I do not believe in the orthodox view of the atonement, that Christ’
came to reconcile God to us, but rather that he came to reconcile us to Gods
I do not believe in the necessity of his having to be crucified, and to take
upon himself the sins of all, before man could be saved ; if such were the
case how infinitely grateful we ought to be to those orthodox Jews who
cruelly put him to death, in order that we might be saved ! Neither do I
believe in the orthodoxy of the present day, which says “ there are three
Gods all equal,’" and yet so wnequal that one God is ever- interceding, and
endeavouring to appease the wrath of another God! if so, one must be in
the wrong ! I believe in the absolute perfection of a Divine Creator, and
who does not thus require to be changed in order that endless punishment
may be averted, for temporary sins. I believe that God is love, and that
his “ mercy” and not his chastisement “ endureth for ever.”
I do not believe in “ original sin” and that man was pre-ordained tn
be its victim ; nor in the destruction of unbaptized infants, as the Roman
and Anglican priests tell us. I prefer Christ’s doctrine ; he says “ of such'
is the kingdom of Heaven.” I do not believe in that best friend of priest
craft,—a personal devil, and who is said to be more mighty than the Allmighty in obtaining the greatest number of immortal souls, thus having
power to thwart God’s providence,—nor in a material hell-fire, which isever consuming those souls. I do not believe “ in three Gods, yet one
God” which the Church of England says we must believe or “ without
doubt perish everlastingly.” Its creeds are to me downright blasphemy.
I do not believe that the Bible was divinely inspired” from beginning toend and was all written by the “finger of God,” I believe the Bible was made
for man, not man for the Bible, that it is an historical, moral and spiritual
teacher, not altogether correct, but containing many truths and many
errors ; a compilation of different works by different authors, wr itten at
different periods, and by the most learned and wise men of their day, but
that neither they nor their works are infallible, as the science of geology
and astronomy, and even their own contradictions prove. That men in
after ages collected and bound together such of these books as they thought
proper and called them the Bible, and that these selfsame human beings,
at the Council of Nice, &c., rejected such other books as they thought
of less worthy note ; that these men were also as learned and wise as the
times would permit, but not infallible and possibly not altogether withottt
prejudice or partiality.
I believe real Christianity to be absolute religion, which thinks and
ivorks ; goodness towards man, and piety towards God; undogmatic, un
sectarian, liberal, broad and free, preached with faith and applied to life,
being good and doing good. There is but one real religion, which we need
only open our eyes to see, and 5vhich requires neither creeds nor catechisms
to discern; only live it, in love to God and man, and we are blessed by
Him who liveth for ever, in spite of all that priests and their dupes may say
to the contrary, for thank God they are not to be our judges, other
wise few would escape.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Religion. To the editor of the "Hackney and Kingsland Gazette."
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conner, W.E.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1865]
Publisher
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[s.n.]
Subject
The topic of the resource
Theology
Religion
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Religion. To the editor of the "Hackney and Kingsland Gazette."), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Identifier
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G5257
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: 2 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. A letter to the editor of the Hackney and Kingsland Gazette. Pencilled inscription on front page below the printed 'yours respectfully C.' : 'W.E. Conner, formerly of So. Pl. Chapel". An illegible word pencilled opposite the Conner signature. Reprinted from the Hackney and Kingsland Gazette, October 7, 1865. Ink stain on front page.
Christianity
Conway Tracts
Rationalism
-
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1794da17c3cdcc3ec53f11500d1df647
PDF Text
Text
—-SEC0ND
EDITION.
DIFFICULTIES
OF BELIEF,
A DISCOURSE DELIVERED TO OVERFLOWING AUDIENCES BY
*
SOLD BY
FREETHOUGHT PUBLISHING COMPANY, 63, Fleet Street, London;
PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPANY, 28, Stonecntter-st., London;
TRUELOVE, 256, High Holborn, London;
MORRISH, Bookseller, 18, Narrow Wine-st., Bristol.
The BOOKSTALL, 72, Humbeitone Gate, Leicester;
WITTY, Bookseller, Hull.
The BOOKSTALL, Freethought Institute, Southampton ;
ALEXANDER ORB, Edinburgh.
ROBERT FERGUSON, Glasgow.
wwiupsyaW mstitw
�BISHOPSGATE INSTITUTE
Classification
�DIFFICULTIES OF BELIEF.
A DISCOURSE BY
COL.
IKGEBSOLL,
Delivered in Chicago and other Cities in America, to overflowing audiences,
(specially reported.)
Colonel Ingersoll lectured last night at the Opera House. The
night was a most disagreeable one, sleety snow and fierce winds
united in battling with the pedestrians. Indeed, it took a brave
man to venture out of doors. Nevertheless the Opera House was
crammed. From parquette to upper gallery there was not a vacant
seat. The audience was a peculiar one. There were quite a num
ber of the very best people in the city, and not a few church mem
bers, while saloon keepers and sporting men were out in force, and
occupied front seats. Probably one-fifth of the audience were
females. The great bulk of the audience was from the middle class
of society, intelligent, well-dressed, well-behaving men and women,
the class from whom free-thinkers draw most of their recruits. All
in all, it was an excellent audience, just the kind of audience that
suited the orator of the night.
At eight o clock Colonel Ingersoll came to the front in company
with the Rev. Dr. Cravens of the Unitarian Church. The reverend
gentleman in eloquent words introduced the orator as a noble man,
a man of genius and brains who was zealously laboring to break the
chains that bind the religious freedom of mankind. He rejoiced
that liberty and freedom had such a grand champion, who had con
secrated his great talent and his unsurpassed eloquence to the noble
cause.
Colonel Ingersoll bowed to the audience, and was received with
great applause.
He said that he was glad that he had lived long enough to see
one gentleman in the pulpit brave enough to say that God would
not be oftended at one who speaks according to the dictates of his
conscience; who does not believe that God will give wings to a bird
and then damn the bird for flying. He thanked the pastor and he
thanked the church for allowing its pastor to be so brave. He then
tackled the subject of discourse announced for the night, and for
two hours held the close attention of his audience. His argument
was, in the main, as ioilows :—
�4
One of my great objections to religion is that it makes enemies
instead of friends. Whenever a man believes that he has got the
truth of God, there is in him no spirit of compromise. Whenever
a man really believes that it is necessary to do a certain thing or
to believe a certain thing in order to be happy for ever, there is in
that man no spirit of compromise. Our religion to-day divides the
whole world into saints and sinners: into people that will be
glorified, and people who will be damned. It cannot make any
compromise with any foreign nation; it must either compel that
nation to accept its doctrine, or it must remain hostile to that nation.
Another objection is that this religion consists primarily of the
duties we owe to God. In other words, we are taught that God is
exceedingly anxious that we should believe a certain way. Now I
do not believe there is any infinite being to whom we owe anything.
And the reason I say that, is this: I cannot owe any duty to any
being who requires nothing, to any being I cannot possibly help, to
any being that I cannot in any possible way increase the happiness
of ; and if God is infinite, I cannot make him happier than he is.
Anything that I can do, or may do, cannot in the slightest way
effect him, consequently there cannot exist any relations between
the finite and the infinite.
Some tell me it is the desire of God that I should worship him.
What for ? That I should sacrifice something for him. What for ?
Is He in want ? Can I assist Him ? If He is in want and I can
assist him and will not, I would be an ingrate and an infamous
wretch. But I am satisfied that I cannot by any possibility assist
the infinite. Whom can I assist ? My fellow men. (Applause I
can help to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and enlighten igno
rance. I can help at least, in some degree, towards covering this
world with a mantle of joy. I may be wrong but I do not believe
that there is any being in this universe who gives rain for praise,
who gives sunshine for prayer, or who blesses a man simply because
he kneels.
I find, too, that this religion has made man heartless to his fellow
men. Just think of the idea of sending Scotch Presbyterian
missionaries to Africa, and of the cruelties practiced there : is it not
the height of egotism to suppose that anyone could be more savage
and barbaric than the Scotch Presbyterian creed ?
The Colonel then referred to the subject of inspiration, and said
whatever else might be meant by the term they must mean that it
is true, and he added : Well, if it is true there is no need of its being
inspired. Anything actually true will take care of itself. I will
tell you what I mean by inspiration. I go and look at the sea, and
the sea says something to me; it makes an impression on my mind.
That impression depends, first, on my experience ; secondly, upon
my intellectual capacity. Another looks upon the same sea. He
has a different brain, he has a different experience, he has different
memories and different hopes. The sea may speak to him of joy,
and to me of grief and sorrow. The sea cannot tell the same thing
to two beings, because no two human beings have had the same
�5
Hr
t
experience. So, when I look upon a flower, or a star, or a painting,
or a statue, the more I know about sculpture, the more that statue
speaks to me. The more I have had of human experience, the more
I have read, the greater brain I have, the more the star says to me.
In other words, nature says to me all that I am capable of under
standing. Now when I come to a book, for instance, I read the
writings of Shakespere—Shakespere, the greatest human being
who ever existed upon this globe. What do I get out of him ? All
that I have sense enough to understand. I get my little cup full.
Let another read him who knows nothing of the drama, who knows
nothing of the impersonation of passion; what does he get from
him ? Very little. In other words, every man gets from a book, a
flower, a star, or the sea, what he is able to get from his intellectual
development and experience.
Do you then believe that the Bible is a different book to every
human being that receives it ? I do. Can God, then, through the
Bible, make the same revelation to two men ? He cannot. Why ?
.Because the man who reads is the man who inspires. Inspiration
is in the man and not in the book. There was a time when the
Bible was the best book on geology. Has anybody now the hardi
hood to say that is a standard work on geology? There was a time
when it was the best astronomical treatise that anybody knew any
thing about. Does anybody claim now that it is a standard work
on astronomy ! According to this book a personal God made us all.
It seems to me than an infinite being has no right to make im
perfect things. I may be mistaken, but it has always seemed to
me that a perfect being should produce only the perfect. If God
made us all, why did he not make us all equally well ? He had the
power of an infinite God. Why did God people the earth with so
many idiots ? I admit that orthodoxy could not exist without them
but why did God make them ? If we believe the Bible then he
should have made us all idiots, for the orthodox Christian says idiots
will not be damned, but simply transplanted, while the sensible man
who believeth not will be sent to eternal damnation ? If there is
any God who made us, what right had he to make idiots ? Is a
man with a head like a pin under any obligation to thank God ? Is
.the black man, born in slavery, under any obligation to thank God
tor his badge of servitude ?
What kind of a God is it that will allow men and women to be
put in dungeons and chains simply because they loved him and
prayed to him? And what kind of a God is it that will allow such
men and women to be burned at the stake ? If God won’t love such
men and women, then under what circumstances will he love ?
As I look around I see that justice does not prevail, that inno
cence is not always effectual and a perfect shield. If there is a God
„these things should not be. Famine stalks over the land and
millions die, not only the bad but the good, and there in the heavens
above sits an infinite God who can do anything, can change the
rocks and the stones, and yet these millions die. I do not say there
,is.no God, but I do ask what is God doing ? Look at the agony,
�¿nd wretchedness and woe all over the land. Is there goodness, is
there mercy in this ? I do not say there is not, but I want to know,
and I want to know if a man is to be damned for asking the question.
But to go on: here we are and they say that this God picked
out one tribe and thought he would civilize them. He had no time
to waste upon the Egyptians, who at that time were a vast and
splendid nation, with systems of laws, free schools, who believed in
the rights of women; who believed in the one man marrying the
one wife ; who had courts of justice and understood the philosophy
of damages. He had no time to waste upon India, with a vast and
splendid civilization and a grammar more perfect than ours to-day.
But he took a few of the tribe of Abraham and thought he would
see what he could do with them. He established a perfect despotism,
with no schools, no knowledge of geology, astronomy or medicine.
He told them how to stop the leprosy, but it never occurred to Him
to tell them how to cure it. He told them a few things about what
they might eat, and one thing about cooking, that they should not
cook a kid in its mother’s milk. But He took these people under
His mighty care and for the purpose of controlling them He
wrought many wonderful miracles. Now is it not a remarkable
thing that no priest has ever yet been able to astonish another
priest by telling about a wonderful miracle. It reminds me of a
man who sat imperturbed while another told an improbable story,
and upon being told that he did not appear to take much interest
in it replied, “Well, no, I’m a liar myself.” (Great laughter.)
Now, without desiring to hurt the feelings of anyone, I propose
to give a few reasons for thinking that at least a few passages of
the Old Testament were not written by Jehovah or by the real God.
In all civilized countries it is not only admitted, but fashionably
asserted, that slavery is, always was, and for ever will be, a hideous
crime; and I have no respect for a man who thinks slavery is right.
Such a man ought to be a slave himself, were it not for the fact
that somebody would have to be disgraced by being his master. It
is now asserted that a war of conquest is simply murder, and that a
war of extermination is simply savagery. It is also admitted that
polygamy is the enslavement of woman, destructive to home, and
the degradation of man. We also believe that nothing is more
infamous than the slaughter of decrepit men, helpless women, and
prattling babies. We all admit that nothing is more terrible than
rewarding soldiers after a victory by giving them the captured
w’omcn. We also admit that wives should not be stoned to death
on account of their religious opinions, and any man who does not
admit it is a savage. Any man who believes in slavery, polygamy,
or in a war of extermination, is a savage. But there was a time
when all these things were regarded as divine institutions. To-day,
nations that entertain such views are regarded as savage, and pro
bably, with the exception of the Fiji Indians and some citizens of
Delaware, no human beings can be found degraded enough to deny
these propositions. (Applause and laughter.) To every one except
the theologian it is perfectly easy to account for the mistakes, the
�atrocities and the crimes of the past, by saying that civilization is of
slow growth, that the moral perceptions must be cultivated, and
that it requires centuries for man to put out the eye of self and hold
in equal poise the golden scale of justice ; that conscience is born
of suffering, that mercy is the child of imagination, and that man
advances only as he finds out the laws of nature and his relations
to it and to his fellow-men.
But the believer in the inspiration of the Bible is compelled to
declare that once God was savage, or that there was a time when
slavery was right; that there was a time when polygamy was the
highest expression of human virtue; that there was a time when
wars of extermination were waged for mercy; when death was the
just penalty for having and expressing an honest thought; that
Jehovah is just as bad now as He was 4,000 years ago, or that He
was just as good then as He is now.
Referring to the doctrine of the atonement, he said that under
the Old Testament dispensation every tabernacle was a slaughter
house and every priest an accomplished butcher. But when we
commit a sin now, we do not have to bring a pair of turtle doves,
nor a sheep, nor an ox. Now we say, “ Charge it.” (Laughter).
But you have got to settle. There are in nature neither rewards
nor punishments; there are consequences. There are in nature
neither love nor hatred; there are consequences. No God can give
you tares when you sow wheat, and no God can give you wheat
when you sowltares.
Speaking of the crimes which have been perpetrated in the name
of religion, he said : If Christ was in fact God, He knew all of the
future; He knew what sects would spring up like poisoned fungi
through every age. He saw the horizon of a thousand years red
with the flowers of the auto-da-fe, and He saw His followers bleeding
in th© dungeons of the Inquisition. He saw women holding their
little babes up to the grated windows so that the poor husband and
father, chained to the floor, might catch one glimpse of the blue
eyes of his babe; He saw His disciples driving stakes into the
earth, saw them chain heroic men and women, pitch the faggots
about them, touch them with fire, and see the flames consume to
ashes the best men and women of the earth. He knew that his
disciples would interpolate His book; He knew that hypocrisy
would write verses, and that these verses would be the foundation
for persecution; He knew that his disciples would make instru
ments of pain and use them ; He knew it, and yet he died voiceless.
Why did’nt He cry out, ‘ You must not persecute your fellow-men.’
Why did He say nothing definite, positive and satisfactory about
another world ? Why did He go dumbly to his death and leave
the world to misery and to doubt ?
'Speaking of the doctrine of eternal punishment, he said : No God
has a right to make a man He intends to drown. Eternal wisdom
has no right to make a bad investment, no right to engage in a
speculation that will not finally pay a dividend, No God has a
�8
right to make a failure, and surely a man who is to be damned for
ever is not a conspicuous success.
Yet upon love’s breast, the Church has placed that asp : around
the child of immortality the Church has coiled the Worm that never
dies. For my part I want no heaven if there is to be a hell. I
would rather be annihilated than be a God and know that one
human soul would have to suffer eternal agony. (Great applause).
Where did that doctrine of hell come from ? I despise it with
every drop of my blood! and defy it. Oh, is it not an infamous
doctrine to teach to little children, to put a shadow in the heart of
a child, to fill the insane asylums with that miserable infamous lie.
I see now and then a little girl—a dear little darling with a face
like the light, and eyes of joy, a human blossom, and I think, “ is
it possible that that little girl will ever grow up to be a Presby
terian ?” (loud laughter). . “ Is it possible, my goodness, that that
flower will finally believe in the five points of Calvanism or in the
eternal damnation of man ? Is it possible that that little fairy will
finally believe that she could be happy in heaven with her baby in
hell ? Think of it. Think of it 1 And that is the Christian religion.
We cry out against the Indian mother that throws her child into
the Ganges to be devoured by the alligator or crocodile, but that is
joy in comparison with the Christian mother’s hope, that she may
be in salvation while her brave boy is in hell. (Applause.) I tell
you I want to kick the doctrine about hell. I want to kick it out
every time I go by it. I want to get Americans in this country
placed so they will be ashamed to preach it. I want to get the
congregations so that they won’t listen to it. (Applause). We
cannot divide the world off into saints and sinners in that way.
There is a little girl, fair as a flower, and she grows up until she
^12, 13, or 14 years old. Are you going to damn her in the 15th,
16th or 17th year, when the arrow from Cupid’s bow touches her
heart and she is glorified—are you going to damn her now ? She
marries and loves, and holds in her arms a beautiful child. Ara
you going to damn her now ? Because she has listened to some
Methodist minister, and after all that flood of light failed to believe.
Are you going to damn her then ? I tell you God cannot afford to
damn such a woman. (Applause.)
A woman in the State of Indiana, forty or fifty years ago, who
carded the wool and made rolls and spun them, and made the cloth
and cut out the clothes for the children, and nursed them, and sat
up with them nights, and gave them medicine, and held them in
her arms and wept over them—cried for joy and wept for fear, and
finally raised ten or eleven good men and women with the ruddy
glow of health upon their cheeks, and she would have died for
any one of them any moment of her life, and finally she, bowed
with age, and bent with care and labor, dies, and at the moment
the magical touch of death is upon her face, she looks as if she
never had had a care, and her children burying her, cover her face
with tears. (Applause) Do you tell me God can afford to damn
that kind of a woman ? (Applause.)
�9
If there is any God, sitting above Him in infinite serenity, we
have the figure of justice- Even a God must do justice and any
form of superstition that destroys justice is infamous. (Applause).
Just think of teaching that doctrine to little children ! When I
was à boy I sometimes used to wonder how the mercy of God
lasted as long as it did—because I remember that on several occa
sions I had not been at school when I was supposed to be there,
(laughter.) Why I was not burned to a crisp was a mystery to me.
There was one day in each week too good for a child to be happy
in. On that day we were all taken to church, and the dear old
minister used to ask us, “ Boys, do yon know that you all ought to
be in hell ?” and we answered up as cheerfully as we could under
such circumstances, “Yes, sir,” (laughter). “ Well, boys, do you
know that you would go to hell if you died in your sins ?” and we
said, “Yes, sir.”
And then came the great test, “ Boys,” I can’t get the tone you
know, (laughter) And do you know that is how the preachers get
the bronchitis. You never heard of an auctioneer getting, the
bronchitis, nor the second mate on a steamboat—never, (laughter).
'What gives it to the ministers is talking solemnly when they don’t
feel that way, and it has the same influence upon the organs ot
speech that it would have upon the cords of the calves of your legs
to walk on your tiptoes—(laughter)—and so I call bronchitis
‘ parsonitis.” And if the ministers would all tell exactly what
they think they would all get well, but keeping back a part of the
truth is what gives them bronchitis. Well, the old man—the dear
old minister—used to try and show us how long we should be in
hell if we should locate there But to finish the other. The grand
test- question was : “ Boys, if it was God’s will that you should go
to hell, would you be willing to go ?”
And every little liar said, “Yes, sir.” Then in order to tell how
long we would stay there, he used to say, “ Suppose once in à
million ages a bird should come from a far distant clime and carry
of in its bill one little grain of sand, the time would finally come
when the last grain of sand would be carried away. Do you under
stand?” “Yes, sir.” “Boys, by that time it would not be sun-up
in hell.” (Laughter.)
I tell you, don’t make slaves of your children on Sunday. Thé
idea that there is any God that hates to hear a child laugh ! Let
the children play and be happy. Give them a chance. When your
child confesses to you that it has committed a fault, take that child
in your arms, and let it feel your heart beat against its heart, and
raise your children in the sunlight of love, and they. will be sun
beams to you along the pathway of life. (Applause). Abolish the
club and the whip from the house, because if the civilized use a
whip, the ignorant and brutal will use a. club, and they will use it
because you use a whip. ' Be perfectly honor bright with them, and
they will be your friends when you are old. Don’t try to teach
them something they can never learn. Don’t insist upon their
pursuing some calling they have no sort of faculty for. Don’t make
�10
that poor girl play ten years on a piano when she has no ear for
music, and when she has practised until she can play, Bonaparte
crossing the Alps,” and you can’t tell after she has played it whether
he ever got across or not. (Loud and prolonged laughter and
applause.)
Every day something happens to show me that the old spirit that
was in the Inquisition still slumbers in the breasts of men. I
know an instance in which a Presbyterian minister has been dis
missed for marrying a Catholic lady. Just as though a woman
could not beat any religion that a man ever heard of. I tell you
when you come to look upon it the love that man bears towards a
woman is a thousand times above any love he can bear toward the
unknown. It is altogether better to love your wife than to love
God; altogether better to love your children than to love Jesus
Christ: and I will tell you why. He is dead ; but if you love your
child you can put a little flower of joy into every footstep from the
time they leave the cradle until you die in their arms.
Men are oaks, women are vines, children are flowers, and if there
is any heaven in this world, it is in the family. It is where the
wife loves the husband, and the husband loves the wife, and where
the dimpled arms of children are about the necks of both. That is
heaven if there is any j and I do not want any better heaven in
another world than that, and if in another world I cannot live with
the ones I loved here, then I would rather not be there. I would
rather resign (applause).
Religion does not and cannot contemplate man as free. She
accepts only the homage of the prostrate, and scorns the offerings
of those who stand erect. She cannot tolerate the liberty of
thought. The wide and sunny fields belong not to her domain.
The starlit heights of genius are above and beyond her appreciation
and power. Her subjects cringe at her feet covered with the dust
of obedience. They are not athletes standing posed by rich life
and brave endeavour like the antique statues, but shrivelled defor
mities studying with furtive glance the cruel face of power.
No religionist seems capable of understanding this plain truth.
There is this difference between thought and action:—For our
actions we are responsible to ourselves and to those injuriously
affected; for thoughts there can, in the nature of things, be no
responsibility to gods or men, here or hereafter. And yet the
Protestant has vied with the Catholic in denouncing freedom of
thought, and while I was taught to hate Catholicism with every
drop of my blood, it is only justice to say that in all essential par
ticulars, it is precisely the same as every other religion. Luther
denounced mental liberty with all the coarse and brutal vigour of
his nature, Calvin despised from the very bottom of his petrified
heart anything that even looked like religious toleration, and
solemnly declared that to advocate it was to crucify Christ afresh.
All the founders of all the orthodox churches have advocated the
same infamous tenet. The truth is that what is called religion is
necessarily inconsistent with Free Thought-,
�A believer is a songless bird in a cage. A Freethinker is an
parting the clouds with tireless wings.
Thousands of young men are being educated at this moment by
the various churches. What for ? In order that they may be pre
pared to investigate the phenomena by which we are surrounded ?
No! The object, and the only object, is that they may learn the
arguments of their respective churches, and repeat them in the dull
ears of a thoughtless congregation. If one after being th us trained
at the expense of the Methodists turns Presbyterian or Baptist, he
is denounced as an ungrateful wretch.1 Honest investigation is
'.utterly impossible within the pale of any church, for the reason
that if you think the church is right you will not investigate, and
if you think it wrong the church will investigate you. The conse
quence of this is, that most of the theological literature is the lesult
of suppression, of fear, of tyranny, and hypocrisy.
Every Orthodox writer necessarily said to himself, “ If I write
that, my wife and children may want for bread, I will be covered
with shame and branded with infamy, but if I write this, I will gain
position, power, and honor. My church rewards defenders, and
burns reformers. (Applause.)
Who can tell what the world has lost by this infamous system of
suppression ? How many grand thinkers have died with the mailed
hand of superstition on their lips ? How many splendid ideas have
perished in the cradle of the brain, strangled in the poisonous coils
of that Python, the church 1
For thousands of years a thinker was hunted down like an escaped
convict. To him who had braved the church every door was shut,
every knife was open. To shelter him from the wild storm, to give
a crust of bread when dying, to put a cup of water to his cracked
and bleeding lips; these were all crimes, not one of which the
church ever did forgive; and with the justice taught of God his
helpless children were exterminated as scorpions and vipers.
Who at the present day can imagine the courage, the devotion to
principle, the intellectual and moral grandeur it once required to be
an Infidel, to brave the church, her racks, her faggots, her dungeons,
her tongues of fire—to defy and scorn her heaven, and her devil
and her God ? They were the noblest sons of earth. They were
the real saviours of our race, the destroyers of superstition and the
creators of science. They were the real Titans who bared their
grand foreheads to all the thunderbolts of all the gods. The church
has been, and still is, the great robber. She has rifled not only the
pockets but the brains of the world. She is the stone at the sepul
chre of liberty ; the Upas tree in whose shade the intellect of man
has withered; the Gorgon beneath whose gaze the human heart
has turned to stone.
» Reason has been denounced by all Christendom as the only un
safe guide. The church has left nothing undone to prevent man
following the logic of his brain. The plainest facts have been
covered with the mantle of mystery. The grossest absurdities have
been declared to be self-evident facts. The order of nature has
j eagle
�12
been as it were, reversed, in order that the hypocritical few might
govern the honest many. The man who stood by the conclusion
of his reason was denounced as a scorner and hater of God and His
holy church.
At present, owing to the inroads that have been made by Liberals
and Infidels, most of the churches pretend to be in favor of religious
liberty. Of these Churches we will ask this question : “ How can
a man who conscientiously believes in religious liberty worship a
God who does not ?” They say to us, “We will not imprison you
on account of your belief, but our God will. We will not burn you
because you throw away the sacred Scriptures, but their author
will. We think it an infamous crime to persecute our brethren
for opinion’s sake, but the God whom we worship will on that ac
count damn his own children for ever.”
“ Why is it that these
Christians do not only detest the Infidels, but so cordially despise each
other? Why do they refuse to worship in the temples of each other?"
There is but one way to get an honest opinion upon any subject
whatever. The person giving the opinion must be free from fear.
The merchant must not fear to lose Lis custom, the doctor his prac
tice, nor the preacher his pulpit. There can be no advance without
liberty. Suppression of honest enquiry is retrogression, and must
end in intellectual night. The tendency of Orthodox religion to
day is towards mental slavery and barbarism. Not one of the
Orthodox ministers dare preach what he thinks, if he knows that
a majority of his congregation thinks otherwise. He knows that
every member of his church stands guard over his brain with a
creed like a club in his hand. He knows that he is not expected to
search after the truth, but that he is employed to defend the creed.
Every pulpit is a pillory in which stands a hired culprit, defending
.the justice of his own imprisonment.
Is it desirable that all should be exactly alike in their religious
convictions ? Is any such thing possible ? Do we not know that
,there are no two persons alike in the whole world ? No two trees,
..no two leaves, no two anythings that are alike? Infinite diversity
is the law. Religion tries to force all minds into one mould.
Knowing that all cannot believe, the church endeavours to make
.all say that they believe. She longs for the unity of hypocrisy and
detests the splendid diversity of individuality and freedom.
(Applause.)
Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up
.his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul. In this
.sense every church is a cemetery, and every creed an epitaph.
Let us look at the church of to-day. Now, what is this religion.
To believe certain things that we may be saved, that we won’t be
damned What are they ?
. First, that the Old and New Testament are inspired. No matter
how good, how kind, how just a man may be, unless he believes in
the inspiration, he will be damned.
Second, he must believe in the Trinity. That there are three in
one. That Father and Son are precisely of the same age, the son
�possibly a little mite older ; that three times one is one, and that
■ once one is three. It is a mercy you don't know how to understand
-it, but you must believe it or be damned. Therein you see the
mercy of the Lord. This trinity doctrine was announced several
.hundred years after Christ was born.
Do you believe such a doctrine will make a man good or honest ?
h^Will it make him more just ? Is the man that believes any better
than the man who does not believe ? ,
How is it with nations ? Look at Spain, the last slaveholder in
the civilized world ; she’s Christian, she believes in the Trinity!
And Italy, the beggar of the world. Under the rule of priestcraft
money streamed in from every land, and . yet she did not advance.
To-day she is reduced to a hand-organ. Take poor Ireland, could
she cast off hei* priests she would soon be one with America in
freedom.
Protestantism is better than Catholicism, because there is less of
it. Both dread education. They say they brought the arts and
Sciences out of the dark ages, why, they made the dark ages and
■what did they preserve ? Nothing of value, only an account of
events that never happened. What did they teach the world ?
Slavery!
The best country the sun ever shone upon is the northern part of
the United States, and there you find less religion than anywhere
else on the face of the earth. You will find here more people that
don’t believe the Bible, and you will find better husbands, better
wives, happier homes, where the women are most respected, and
where the children get less blows and more huggings and kissings.
We have improved just as we have lost this religion and thia
superstition.
Great Britain is the religious nation par excellence, and there you
will find the most cant and most hypocrisy. They are always
thanking God that they have killed somebody. Look at the opium
war with China. They forced the Chinese to open their ports and
receive the deadly drug and then had the impudence to send a lot
of drivelling idiots of missionaries into China.
Why should we send missionaries to China if we cannot convert
the heathen when they come here ? When missionaries go to a
foreign land, the poor benighted people have to take their word for
the blessings showered upon a Christian people; but when the
heathen come here they can see for themselves. WLat was simply
a story becomes a demonstrated fact. They come in contact with,
people who love their enemies. They see that in a Christian land
men tell the truth; that they will not take advantage of strangers:
that they are just and patient; kind and tender ; and have no pre
judice on account of color, race, or religion; that they look upon
mankind as brethren ; that they speak of God as a universal Father,
and are willing to work and even to suffer, for the good not only
;Qf their own countrymen, but of the heathen as well. All this the
.Chinese see afid know, and why they still cling to the religion of
their country is to me a matter of amazement.
�•14
Our religion can only be brought into contempt by the actions of
those who profess to be governed by its teachings. It is easy to do
more in that direction than millions of Chinese could do by burning
pieces of paper before a wooden image. If you wish to impress the
Chinese with the value of your religion, of what you are pleased to
call “ The American system,” show them that Christians are better
than heathens. Prove to them that what you are pleased to call
“ the living God” teaches higher and holier things, a grander and
purer code of morals than can be found upon pagan pages. Excel
these wretches in industry, in honesty, in reverence for parents, in
cleanliness, in frugality, and above all by advocating the absolute
liberty of human thought.
Do not trample upon these people because they have a different
conception of things about which even you know nothing.
If you wish to drive out the Chinese do not make a pretext of
religion. Do not pretend that you are trying to do God a favor.
Injustice in His name is doubly detestable. The assassin cannot
sanctify his dagger by falling on his knees, and it does not help a
falsehood if it be uttered as a prayer. Religion, used, to intensify
the hatred of men toward men, under the pretence of pleasing God
has cursed this world.
If we wish to prevent the immigration of the Chinese, let us
reform our treaties with the vast empire from whence they came.
For thousands of years the Chinese secluded themselves from the
rest of the world. They did not deem the Christian nations fit
to associate with. We forced ourselves upon them. We called,
not with cards, but with cannon. The English battered down the
door in the names of Opium and Christ. This iufamy was regarded
as another triumph for the gospel. At last in self-defence the
Chinese allowed Christians to touch their shores. Their wise men,
their philosophers, protested, and prophesied that time would show
that Christians could not be trusted. Events have proved that the
wise men were not only philosophers, but prophets.
Treat China as you would England. Keep a treaty while it is
in force. Change it if you will, according to the laws of nations,
but on no account excuse a breach of national faith by pretending
that we are dishonest for God’s sake.
The Government has nothing to do with the religion of the
people. Its members are not responsible to God for the opinions of
their constituents, and it may tend to the happiness of the consti
tuents for me to state that they are in no way responsible for the
religion of the members. Religion is an individual not a national
matter. And where the nation interferes with the right of con
science, the liberties of the people are devoured by the monster
Superstition.
T^e orthodox Church says that religion does good; that it re
strains crime. It restrains a man from artificial not from natural
crimes. A man can be made so religious that he will not eat meat
on Friday, yet he will steal.
�ib
Go around the world, and where you find the least superstition,
there you will find the best men, the best women, the best children.
Two powerful levers are at work; love and intelligence. The true
test of a man is generosity, that covers a multitude of sms.
The Bible can’t stand to-day without the support of
power. No religion ever flourished except by the support of the
sword, and no religion like this could have been established except
^Doesan Infinite Being need to be protected by a State Legislalature? If the Bible is inspired, does the author of it need tie
support of the law to command respect ? We don t need any law
to make mankind respect Shakespeare. We come to the altar of
that great man and cover it with our gratitude without a statute.
Think of a law to govern tastes! Think of a law to govern mind
on any question whatever!
. , n
Shakespeare was an intellectual ocean whose waves touched all
the shores of human thought, within which were all the tides and
currents and pulses upon which lay all the lights and shadows, and
over which brooded all the calms and swept all the storms and
tempests of which the human soul is capable.
.
I tell you that all the sweet and beautiful things m the Bible
would not make one play of Shakespeare; all the philosophy in the
Bible would not make one scene in “ Hamlet:” all the beauties of
the Bible would not make one scene in “Midsummer Nights
Dream;” all the beautiful things about woman in the Bible would
not begin to create such a character as Perdita or Imogene or
If there is any man here to-night that believes the Bible was
inspired, in any other way than Shakespeare was inspired, I want
him to pick out something as beautiful and tender as Burns poem,
“ To Mary in Heaven.” I want him to tell whether he believes
the story about the bears eating up children; whether that is
inspired. I want him to tell whether he considers that a poem or
not. I want to know if the same God made those bears that
devoured the children because they laughed at an old man out of
hair. I want him to answer it, and answer it fairly. That is all I ask.
Think of the way in which they have supported the Bible.
They’ve terrorized the old with laws, and captured the dear littlo
innocent children and poisoned their minds with their false stories
until, when they have reached the age of manhood, they have been
afraid to think for themselves. Just see in some countries what
the blasphemy laws are now, by which they guard their Bible and
their God. Every honest man should see to it that these laws are
done away with at once and for ever.
See how men used to crawl before Cardinals, Bishops and Popes, _
Before wealth they bowed to the very earth, and in the presence of
titles they became abject. It is not so now. All this is slowly but
surely changing. At one time we thought a great deal of Clergy
men but now we have got to thinking they ain t of as much im
portance as a inan that’s invented something.
�16
As man proceeds, he begins to help himself and to take advantage
of mechanical powers to assist him, and he begins to see he can help,
himself a little, and exactly in the proportion he helps himself lie
comes to rely less on the power of priest or prayer to help him.
Just to the extent we are helpless, to that extent do we rely upon
the unknown.
As religion developed itself, keeping pace with the belief id
theology, came the belief in demonology. They gave one being the
credit of doing all the good things, and must give some one credit
for the bad things, and so they created a devil. At one time it was
as disreputable to deny the existence of a devil as to deny the
existence of a God ; to deny the existence of a hell, with its fire and
brimstone, as to deny the existence of a heaven with its harp and love.
With the development of religion came the idea that no man should
be allowed to bring the wrath of God on a nation by his transgres
sions, and this idea permeates the Christian world to-day. Now*
what does this prove ? Simply that our religion is founded on fear,
and when you are afraid you cannot think. Fear drops on its
knees and believes. It is only courage that can think.
It was the idea that man’s actions could do something, outside of
any effect his mechanical works might have, to change the order of
Nature; that he might commit some offence to bring on an earth
quake, but he can’t do it. You can’t be bad enough to cause an
earthquake; neither can you be good enough to stop one. Out of
that wretched doctrine and infamous mistake that man’s belief
could have any effect upon Nature grew all these inquisitions, racks
and collars of torture, and all the blood that was ever shed by
religious persecution.
Now I assert that there is not a man or woman in this entire
audience that can think of a thing that has not been suggested to
them by Nature, and they cannot think of anything that has been
suggested to them by the supernatural. You can’t get over that,
and you may as well give up speculating over it now as at any
other time.
Day by day, religious conceptions grow less and less intense.
Day by day the old spirit dies out of book and creed. The burning
enthusiasm, the quenchless zeal of the early church have gone,
never, never to return. The ceremonies remain, but the ancient
faith is fading out of the human heart. The worn-out arguments fail
to convince, and denunciations that once blanched the faces of a
race, excite in us only derision and disgust. As time rolls on the
miracles grow small and mean, and the evidencies our fathers
thought conclusive utterly fail to satisfy us. There is an irre
pressible conflict” between religion and science, and they cannot
peaceably occupy the same brain, nor the same world. (Applause.)
While utterly discarding all creeds, and denying the truth of all
religions, there is neither in my heart nor upon my lips a sneer for
the hopeful, loving and tender souls who believe that from all this
discord will result a perfect harmony ; that every evil will in some
mysterious way become a good, that above and over all there is a
�.being who, in some way, will reclaim and glorify every one of the
children of men: but for those who heartlessly try to prove that
salvation is almost impossible; that damnation is almost certain;
that the highway of the universe leads to hell: who fill life with
fear and death with horror; who curse the cradle and mock the
tomb, it is impossible to entertain other than feelings of pity,
.contempt, and scorn.
Now, my friends, there’s a party started in this country with the
object of giving every man, woman, and child the rights they are
entitled to. Now every one of us has the same rights. I have the
right to labor and have the products of my labor. I have the right
to think, and furthermore, to express my thoughts, because ex
pression is the reward of my intellectual labor. And yet there are
some States in this country where men of my ideas would not be
allowed to testify in a court of justice. Is that right ? There are
States in this country where, if the law had been enforced, I would
have been sent to the Penitentiary for lecturing All such laws
were enacted by barbarians, and our country will not be free until
they are wiped from the statute books of every State.
These are our doctrines : We want an absolute divorce between
Church and State. We demand that Church property should not
be exempt from taxation. If you are going to exempt anything,
exempt the homesteads of the poor. Don’t exempt a. rich corpora
tion, and make men pay taxes to support a religion in which they
do not believe. But they say churches do good. I. don’t know
whether they do or not. Do you see such a wonderful difference
between a member of a church and one who does not believe in it ?
Do Church members pay their debts better than any others ? Do
they treat their families any better ? Are the people w’ho go to
Church the only good people ? Are there not a great many bad
people who go to Church ? Did you ever hear of a tramp coming
into the town and enquiring where the Deacon of a Presbyterian
Church lived ? (Great laughter.)
Not a Bank in this city will lend a dollar to theman who belongs
to the church, without security, quicker than to the man who don’t
go to church. Has not the Church opposed every science from the
first ray of light until now ? Didn’t they damn into c'ernal flames
the man who discovered the world was round ? Didn’t they damn
into eternal flames the man who discovered the movement of the
earth in its orbit ? Didn’t they persecute the astronomers ? Didn’t
they even try to put down life insurance by saying it was sinful to
bet on the time God has given you to live ?
Science built the Academy, superstition the Inquisition. Science
constructed the telescope, religion the rack ; science made us happy
here, and says if there s another world we’ll all stand an equal
chance there ; religion made us miserable here; and says a large
majority will be eternally miserable there. Should we, therefore,
exempt it from taxation for any good it has done ?
'Ihe next thing we ask is a perfect divorce between Church and
school. We say that every school should be secular, because it’s
�13
just to everybody. If I was an Israelite I would’nt want to be
taxed to have my children taught that his ancestors had murdered
a «aprenie
us teach, not the doctrines of the past, but
the discoveries of the present; not the five points of Calvinism, but
geology and geography. Education is the lever to raise mankind,
and superstition is the enemy of intelligence.
I want, if I can, to do a little to increase the rights of men, to
put every human being on an equality, to sweep away the clouds of
superstition, to make people think more of what happens to-day
than what somebody said happened 3000 years ago. This is what
I want: To do what little I can to clutch one-seventh of our time
from superstition, to give our Sundays to rest, serenity, and recrea• 1 7aUt a day °f enj°ymeilb a day to read old books, to meet
old friends, and get acquainted with one’s wife and children. I
want a day to gather strength to meet the toils of the next.
I want to get that day away from the Church, away from super
stition and the contemplation of hell, to be the best and sweetest
a,nd brightest of all the days in the week. That day is best on
which most good is done for the human race.
I want to have us all do what little we can to secularize the
Government—take it from the control of savagery and give it to
science, take it from the Government of the past and give it to the
enlightened present, and in this Government let us uphold every
man and woman in their rights, that every one, after he or she
comes to the age of discretion, may have a voice in the affairs of
the nation.
Do this, and we’ll grow in grandeur and splendour every day,
and the time will come when every man aud every woman shall
have the same rights as every other man and every other woman
has.
I believe we are growing better. I don’t believe the wail of want
shall be heard for ever: that the prison and the gallows will always
curse the ground.
The time will come when liberty and law, and love, like the Rings
of Saturn, will surround the world; when the world will cease
making these mistakes ; when every man will be judged according
to his worth and intelligence. I want to do all I can to hasten that
day.
(Immense cheering and applause, during which the Colonel
gracefully bowed and withdrew.)
�Reformer’s Library.
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Difficulties of belief : a discourse ... delivered in Chicago and other cities in America, to overflowing audiences
Description
An account of the resource
Edition: 2nd ed.
Place of publication: London
Collation: 18 p. : ill. (front. port.) ; 21 cm.
Notes: Stamp on p.[2]: Bishopsgate Institute Reference Library, 21 Nov. 1991. Sold by: Freethought Publishing Company (London); Progressive Publishing Company (London); Truelove (London); Morrish (Bristol); The Bookstall (72 Humberstone Gate, Leicester); Witty (Hull); The Bookstall, Freethought Institute (Southampton); Alexander Orr (Edinburgh); Robert Ferguson (Glasgow)||(WIT) Publishers' advertisements at end include Reformer's Library (E. Truelove, London), and the People's popular library (Ingersoll's works) available from W.H. Morrish (Bristol). Date of publication from Stein's checklist (No. 18b). Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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Ingersoll, Robert Green [1833-1899]
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Freethought Publishing Company
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[1892]
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N339
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Religion
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Difficulties of belief : a discourse ... delivered in Chicago and other cities in America, to overflowing audiences), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
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English
Belief and Doubt
Christianity
NSS
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9d351e6d2cf2764681aba520fb8809b5
PDF Text
Text
Q-
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
PROBLEMS OF THE
FUTURE
BY
S. LAING
AUTHOR OF “ MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT,”
“A MODERN ZOROASTRIAN,” ETC.
Revised and brought up to date by Joseph MeCabe
[issued for
the rationalist press association, limited]
WATTS & CO.,
17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
1905
��CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION .
*
7
CHAPTER I.
9
SOLAR HEAT
Difference between Astronomers and Geologists—The former say twenty, the latter two
hundred millions of years—Argument of Astronomers—Amount of Heat received from
Sun—How Supply kept up—Meteorites—Gravity—-Method of Calculation—Result:
Supply of Heat cannot have lasted more than ten to fifteen millions of years—Case of
Geologists—-Progress of the Science—Theological—Theologic-Scientific—Scientific
Uniformity of Conditions—Proved by Fossil Remains—By Temperature and Atmosphere
—Assuming Uniformity, Time required—Instances—-Solent River—Eocene Lake—Lake
of Geneva—Coal Measures—Geology based on Facts—-Mathematical Conclusions on
Theory—If Heat comes from Gravity, where does Gravity come from ?—Gravity really
unknown—Different Theories as to Solar Heat—Lockyer and Crookes—Sun-spots—
Magnetic Storms—Conservation of Energy.
CHAPTER II.
WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS MADE OF
.
.
.
.
.
•
•
.21
Shooting Stars: their number, velocity, size—Connection with Comets—Composition—
Spectra—Meteorite Theory—Genesis of Stars and Nebulae—Further stage of Theory
Impact Theory—Dark Suns in Space—Temperature of Visible Stars—Their proper
Motions—New Stars—Variable Stars—Facts better explained by Impact Theory—Laplace’s
Theory—Based solely on Gravity—Not inconsistent, but insufficient—Even Impact Theory
not last step—Stony Masses made of Atoms—-What are Atoms ?—Chemical Elements—
Attempts to reduce them to one—Hydrogen—Helium—Mendelejeffs Law—Atoms
Manufactured Articles—All of one Pattern—Vortex Theory—Theory of Electrons—What
behind Atoms ?—The Unknowable.
CHAPTER III.
CLIMATE
29
Conflict between Geology and Astronomy—Geology asserts Uniformity of Climate until
Recent Times—Astronomy asserts Inclination of Earth’s Axis to be invariable, and
therefore Climates necessary—-Evidence for Warm and Uniform Climates—Greenland
—Spitzbergen—Impossible under Existing Conditions—-Heat, Light, and Actinism—
Invariability of Earth’s Axis—Causes of Higher and more Uniform Temperature—
Cooling of the Earth—More Heat from the Sun—Warmer regions of Space—More
Carbonic-dioxide—Would not explain Uniformity of Temperature—Excess of Oxygen—
Modification of Species—Configuration of Sea and Land—Croll’s Theory—Displacement
*of Earth’s Axis—Inclination of Axis of Planets and Moon—Unsolved Problems of the
Future.
CHAPTER IV.
THE GLACIAL PERIOD ..........
Importance of Date of Glacial Period-—Its Bearing on Origin of Man—Short Date
Theories—Prestwich says 20,000, Lyell 200,000, years—Croll’s Theory—Prestwich’s
Arguments—Solar Heat—Human Progress—Shown by Palaeolithic Remains—Geological
Evidence—Advance of Greenland Glaciers—Denudation—-Erosion of Cliffs and Valleys—
Deposition—Loess—Elevation and Depression of Land—All Show Immense Antiquity—
35
�CONTENTS
4
Post-Glacial Period—Prestwich says 8,000 to 10,000 years—Mellard Reade 60,000—His
Reasons—Inconsistent with Short-Date Theories—Causes of Glacial Period—Cooling of
Earth—Cold Regions of Space—Change of Earth’s Axis—More Vapour in Atmosphere—
Lyell’s Theory—Different Configuration of Sea and Land—Conditions of GlaciationProblems Pressing for Solution.
PAGE
CHAPTER V.
TERTIARY MAN
..........
47
Antiquity of Man—Man part of Quaternary Fauna—What this Implies—Historical and
Neolithic Periods—Palaeolithic—Caves and River Gravels—Glacial and Inter-Glacial
Deposits—Wide Distribution of Palaeolithic Implements in Early Quaternary Deposits—
Origin of Species—Evolution and Migration—Diversity of Human Types—Objections to
Tertiary Man—Specialisation of Type—Survival through Vicissitudes .of Climate—
Positive Evidence for—-St. Prest—Thenay—Tagus Valley—Monte Aperto—Cuts in Bones
of Balaeonotus—Elephas Meridionalis and Halitherium—Auvergne Worked Flints in
Pliocene Tuffs—Castelnedolo—Human Bones in Pliocene—Olmo—Evidence from America
—Californian Auriferous Gravels—Tuolumne and Calaveras Skulls—Age of Gravels—
Skertchley’s Stone Implements—The Nampa Image—Brazilian Caves—Pamprean Strata—
Summary of Evidence.
CHAPTER VI.
THE MISSING LINK
..........
65
Human Origins—-Evolution or Miracle—First Theories Miraculous—Conception of
Natural Law—Law Proved to be Universal in Inorganic World—Application to Life
and Man—Darwin and Evolution—Struggle for Life and Survival of the Fittest—Con
firmed by Discovery of Missing Links—Professor Cope’s Summary—M. Gaudry—
Instances of Missing Links—Bears and Dogs—Horse—Pedigree of the Horse from
Palseotherium and Eohippus—Appearance and Disappearance of Species—Specialisation
from Primitive Types—Condvlarthra—Reptiles and Birds—Links between other Genera
and Orders—Marsupials and Mammals—-Monotremata—Ascidians and Fish—Evolution
of Individuals and Species from Primitive Cell—Question of Missing Links Applied to
Man—Man and Ape—Resemblances and Differences—Specialisation of Human Type—
For Erect Posture—How Man Differs from Animals—Mental and Moral Faculties—
Language—Tools—-Progress—Mental Development—Lines of Research for Missing Links
—Inferior Races—Fossil Remains—The Pithecanthropus—Point in Direction of Tertiary
Origin.
CHAPTER VII.
ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SPIRITUALISM
.
.
.
.
.
•
«
79
Binet and Fere’s Volume—School of Salpetriere—Dr. Braid—Hypnotism—How Produced
—Effects of—Lethargy—Catalepsy—Somnambulism—Hallucination—Dreams—-Hypnotic
Suggestion—Instances of—-Visible Rendered Invisible—Emotions Excited—Acts Dictated
— Magnet — Trance — Alternating Identity —• Thought - Reading —■ Clairvoyance —
Spiritualism — Slate-Writing—Scybert Commission—-Ail Gross imposture—Dancing
Chairs and Tables—Large Field Opened up by French Investigations—Point to
Materialistic Results.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.
AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
.
.
-9°
PART I.
Are they Reconcilable?—Definitions of Agnosticism and Christianity—Christian Dogma
—Rests on Intuition, not Reason—Descartes, Kant, Coleridge—Christian Agnostics—#
Tendency of the Age—Carlyle, George Eliot, Renan—Anglican Divines, Spurgeon.
CHAPTER VHL—
PART II.
1
Effect on Morals—Evolution of Morality—Moral Instincts—Practical Religion—Herbert
Spencer and Frederic Harrison—Positivism and the Unknowable—-Creeds and Doctrines
—Priests and Churches—Duty of Agnostics—Prospects of the Future.
�5
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER VIII.—(continued)
PART III.
Practical Philosophy—Zoroastrian Theory—Emerson on Compensation—Good and Evil—
Leads to Toleration and Charity-Matthew Arnold and Philistinism-Salvation ArmyConflict of Theology and Science—Creed of Nineteenth Century.
CHAPTER IX.
. 108
THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
•
•
•
Huxley and Dr. Wace-Sermon on the Mount, and Lord’s Prayer—English and German
Biblical Criticism—Papias—His Account of O^gm the Gospels-Confirmed ^ Inter^
Evidence - Common-sense Conclusions - Miracles a Question of Faith -^vMence
Required—The Ascension—Early Christian and Mediaeval Miracles—St Thoma a
Becket—Faith—Historical Element—Virgin Mary—Guiding Principles of Histor cal
Inquiry—Minimum of Miracles—Admissions which Tell Against—Jesus an Historica
Person-Born at Nazareth-Legends of Nativity-St, John the Baptist-Kingd om of Go Socialistic Spirit-Pure Morality-Nucleus of Fact in
Disputes with Scribes and Pharisees-Jesus a Jew—Messiahship—Dying Words Passion
and” Crucifixion —Improbabilities —Pilate—Resurrection—Contradictions—Growth of
Te£rend—Probable Nucleus of Fact—Riot in the Temple—Return of Disciples to Galilee
—Conflicting Accounts of Resurrection—Return of Apostles to Jerusalem and Foundation
of Christian Church.
CHAPTER X.
128
SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
Carlyle—Causes of Pessimism—Decay of Faith—A Prosaic Future-Denial of’ these
Charges—Definition of Scepticism—Demonology—Treatment of Lunatics WJ*chcra
Heresy—Religious Wars—Nationality has Superseded Religion—Wars
Humane
Originality of Modern Events and Characters-Louis Napoleon-Bismarck-GladstoneAbraham Lincoln—Lord Beaconsfield—Darwin—Huxley—Poetry—Fiction Painting
A Happier World.
CHAPTER XI.
CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
...••
••
’
14K
What is a Great Poet ?—Ancient and Modern Poets—Byron, Shelley, Swmbuije,
Browning, Pope, Dryden, Coleridge, Spenser—Chaucer—Wordsworth-Nature-Worship
—Ode on 'immortality—Byron and Shelley—Burns—Gospel of Practical Life—Shakespeare
—Self recorded in Hamlet and Prospero—The Sonnets—\ lews of Death—Behind the
Veil—Prospero—Views identical with Goethe’s Faust—And with the Maya qr Musiar ot
Buddhism—Pantheism—Ignoring of Religion—Patriotism and Loyalty his Ruling Motives
—Practical Influence of Religion Exaggerated—Religious Poets—Dante Milton
Contrast between Greek Tragedy and Modern Poetry—Tennyson—Poet of Modern
Thought—In Hemoriam^—Practical Conclusions.
INDEX
4
•
I5S
��INTRODUCTION
“ Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever
reaping something new,
That which they have done but earnest of the
things that they shall do.”
—Tennyson’s Locksley Hall.
The traveller in the Alps, after struggling
up through dense fir woods, in which his
view is limited to a few yards, emerges
on grassy slopes, where swelling ridges
and rocky peaks appear to bound the
horizon. Weary and scant of breath, he
thinks if he can surmount these his
labour will be ended, and a free view
enjoyed, with nothing but the vault of
heaven above him. But, no ! When
these heights are scaled he sees before
him ridge behind ridge of loftier summits,
and, in the background of all, the glitter
ing peaks of Jungfraus and Matterhorns,
standing out white and seemingly inac
cessible, against the deep blue sky.
But, if he is a practical mountaineer, he
knows that, grim as are the glaciers and
precipices which girdle their icy for
tresses, they are not invincible to human
effort; and, as the foot of man has stood
on some of the loftiest summits, he feels
assured that it will stand on those which
remain unsealed.
So it is with modern science. For
centuries it had to grope its purblind
way through dense jungles of superstitious
ignorance, where misty shapes of theo
logical and metaphysical speculation
obscured the real facts of the universe,
or were mistaken for them. At length,
and comparatively quite recently, the
human intellect emerged into the light of
day, and, gaining the first heights, began
to acquire accurate ideas of the true laws
and constitution of the universe. The
progress, once begun, went on at an
accelerated • rate, until in the last halfcentury it has carried with it in an
impetuous torrent old creeds and
cherished convictions, like so much
drift-wood floating on the surface of
Lake Erie, when caught by the current
which hurries it down the Falls of
Niagara.
So irresistible and so widespread has
been the advance of science that at first
sight we are perhaps disposed to overrate
it, and to fancy, like Alexander, that no
more worlds remain to conquer, or that,
at most, a few unimportant territories are
still unannexed. But the true man of
science knows differently. He sees ridge
still rising behind ridge, and at every
step wider horizons opening, with distant
peaks that still baffle the boldest climber.
But he no longer gazes at them with
aimless wonder, or, if he fails to under- •
stand them, invents a high-sounding
phrase to disguise his ignorance. His
faith is firm in the laws of Nature, and
he feels assured that whatever lies within
their domain is discoverable, and will,
sooner or later, and probably sooner
rather than later, be discovered.
In former works I have attempted to
give some popular view of what modern
�8
INTRODUCTION
science has actually accomplished in the
domains of Space, Time, Matter, Energy,
Life, Human Origins, and other cognate
subjects. In this I will endeavour to
point out some of the “Problems of
the Future” which have been raised
but not solved, and are pressing for
solution.
In both cases I address myself to what
may be called the semi-scientific reader.
The advanced student of science will find
little which he does not already know.
Ihose who are ignorant of the first
elements of science, and, like Gallio,
care for none of these things, will
scarcely understand or feel an interest in
the questions discussed. But there is a
•large, and I believe rapidly increasing,
class, who have already acquired some
elementary ideas about science, and who
desire to know more. Curiosity and
culture are in effect convertible terms:
the wish to know is the first condition of
knowing. To many who are in this
stage of culture, but who have neither
the time nor faculty for following up
closely the ever-widening circle of
advanced thought, it may be interesting
to get some general and popular idea of
a few of the unsolved problems which
have been raised by modern science, and
are occupying the thoughts of the men
who lead its van.
In selecting a few among the many
questions which have been thus raised, I
have been guided by this principle. In
the course of nature, I must have left
this earth before they have been solved.1
If the option were given me of paying it
a short visit fifty or a hundred years
hence, what are the questions which I
should ask with the most eager curiosity,
and to which I should expect to get a
satisfactory reply ?
They are partly scientific questions,
respecting the age of the earth, the con
stitution of the sun and solar system; the
ultimate nature of matter and energy, the
beginnings of life, the origin and anti
quity of man; partly religious, social, and
political questions which are looming on
the horizon and engaging the attention of
thinking men.
I do not pretend to have exhausted
the list, but I hope I may have done
something to give definiteness and pre
cision to the ideas of some of the edu
cated public who are not specialists upon
various questions which are now pressing
forward and waiting for solution.
S. L.
1 Mr. Laing died in 1903.
�PROBLEMS OF THE FUTURE
Chapter
I.
SOLAR HEAT
Difference between Astronomersand Geologists—
The former say twenty, the latter two hundred
millions of years—Argument of Astronomers—
Amount of Heat received from Sun—How Sup
ply kept up—Meteorites—Gravity—Method
of Calculation—Result: Supply of Heat can
not have lasted more than ten to fifteen millions
of years—Case of Geologists—Progress of the
Science—Theological—Theologic-Scientific—
Scientific—Uniformity of Conditions—Proved
by Fossil Remains—By Temperature and
Atmosphere—Assuming uniformity, time re
quired — Instances — Solent River—Eocene
Lake—Lake of Geneva—Coal Measures—
Geology based on Facts—-Mathematical Con
clusions on Theory—If Heat comes from
Gravity, where does Gravity come from ?—
Gravity really unknown—Different Theories
as to Solar Heat—Lockyer and Crookes—
Sun-spots—Magnetic Storms—Conservation
of Energy.
One of the most interesting and per
plexing scientific problems of the day is
that raised by the conflict between phy
sicists and geologists as to the duration
of solar heat.
Leading mathematicians, such as Lord
Kelvin and Helmholtz, assign twenty, or
more probably ten, millions of years as
the outside possible past duration of a
supply of heat from the sun, sufficient to
maintain the earth under conditions
enabling it to support life. Lyell, and a
majority of the best geologists, consider
that one hundred to two hundred millions
of years are required to account for the
undoubted facts of geology since life
began. Each side support their case by
arguments which, taken by themselves,
seem conclusive. And yet the gap
between the two is so wide that it cannot
be bridged over by mutual concessions,
and it is evident that there must be some
fundamental error in the assumed data
on one side or the other.
The mathematicians base their argu
ment on the supply of solar heat. They
say the present amount of heat radiated
by the sun is a measurable quantity ; the
principle of the conservation of energy
shows that this heat cannot J>e self
supplied, but must be a transformation
of pre-existing energy; the only sufficient
energy we know of is that of the mechan
ical force generated by the contraction
of the sun as it cools. This, again, is a
measurable quantity, and the outside
amount of mechanical power generated
by contraction of the sun’s mass to its
present volume by gravity would not
supply the present amount of heat for
more than twenty millions, or more pro
bably for more than ten or fifteen millions
of years.
This forms a chain of reasoning, every
link of which seems to be solidly welded.
Let us examine each link in detail. The
amount of solar heat received at the
earth’s surface has been carefully measured
by Herschell, Pouillet, and other eminent
observers, the principle being to intercept
a beam of sunshine of known dimen
sions, and make it give up its heat
to a known mass of water or other sub
stance, measuring accurately the rise of
A*
�IO
SOLAR HEAT
temperature produced in a given time.
The result is this: the heat, measured
by calorics, or units of heat sufficient to
raise the temperature of one kilogramme
of water one degree Centigrade, received
per minute by one square metre exposed
perpendicularly to the sun’s rays at the
upper surface of the atmosphere, ranges
from Pouillet’s estimate of 17.6 to that
of Forbes’s 28.2 calorics, the difference
arising mainly from the different allow
ance made for absorption by the atmo
sphere. Langley’s observations at a high
altitude increased the figure, and more
recent observations have raised it to
about 40 calorics.
From this it is easy to calculate the
amount of heat received by the earth
from the sun in a given time. Herschell
puts it in this striking way. The amount
of heat received on the earth’s surface,
with the sun in the zenith, would melt an
inch thickness of ice in two hours and
thirteen minutes. But, if it be assumed
that the sun radiates heat equally in all
directions, the earth intercepts only an
almost infinitesimally small amount of
this heat—in fact, only the proportion
which the earth’s surface bears to the
surface of a sphere whose centre is in the
sun, and its radius the distance of the
earth from the sun, or about ninety-three
millions of miles. This proportion is
a.To'o.o^o.ooo- . But even this minute frac
tion is sufficient to melt yearly, at the
earth’s equator, a layer of ice of more than
one hundred and ten feet thick. So, as
Lord Kelvin puts it, if the sun were a
mass of solid coal, and produced its heat
by combustion, it would burn out in less
than six thousand years. In the light of
the most recent calculations, it is said
that “the sun’s heat reaching the out
skirts of our atmosphere is capable of
doing, without cessation, the work of an
engine of four horse-power for each
square yard of the earth’s surface,” Of
course, this calculation depends on the
assumption that the sun radiates heat
equally in all directions into space. It is
difficult to conceive how this can be other
wise, for, as far as we know, all heated
bodies at the earth’s surface do so,
and all impulses which cause waves in
an elastic medium, such as we know to
be the case with heat and light, propa
gate these waves in all directions.
Assuming, therefore, that the sun gives
out this enormous amount of heat, where
does it come from, and how is the supply
kept up, uniformly, or nearly so, for
millions of years ? The law of the con
servation of energy says, in effect, that
something cannot be made out of
nothing, and that all special forms of
energy, such as heat, light, electricity, and
mechanical power, are convertible into
one another, and are simply transforma
tions of one original fund of energy. If
so, the sun’s heat must be kept up by
energy transformed into heat from some
other form.
It cannot be from com
bustion, which is a chemical action, for
we have seen that a sun of solid coal
would be burned out in six thousand
years. It must be from mechanical force,
which we know as a fact to be* con
vertible into heat in a definite and
ascertained proportion.
Now, what are the sources of mechani
cal power known in the case of the sun ?
Two—the impact of aerolites, and the
shrinkage of the sun as it contracts,
which latter resolves itself into ap effect
of gravity.
Both are real causes. Aerolites fall on
the earth and generate heat, the smaller
ones, or shooting stars, being set on
fire and burnt up by the friction
of the atmosphere; the larger ones
reaching the earth in masses of stone,
singularly like those ejected from
deep-seated volcanoes, and with their
surfaces glazed by intense heat. If such
meteors fall on the earth, it is reasonable
to suppose that far more must fall on the
sun, with its vastly greater surface and
attracting power. And it is to be noted
that comparatively small masses might
generate large amounts of heat, for the
amount of mechanical force, and there
fore of heat generated by arrested
motion, increases with the square of
the velocity. A body weighing 8.339
�SOLAR HEAT
kilogrammes, falling from a height which
gave it a velocity of one metre per second,
would generate one caloric of heat, or
enough to raise the temperature of one
kilogramme of water by i° Centigrade.
But the same body moving with the
velocity of a cannon-ball, or 500 metres
per second, would generate 250,000
times as much heat; and if moving
with a velocity of 700,000 metres per
second, which is about the velocity
with wffiich a body would fall into the
sun from the distance of the earth,
the heat produced would be nearly two
million times as great.
Lord Kelvin has calculated that a
quantity of matter equal to about onehundredth of the mass of the earth falling
annually with this velocity on the sun’s
surface would maintain its present radia
tion indefinitely. It is clear, therefore,
that, if this amount of meteoric matter
really falls on the sun, its heat might be
maintained. But many objections have
been raised to such a supposition.
To explain the sun’s helt we must
have a cause that is not only sufficient
to generate its total amount, but also one
which generates it uniformly. If the sun
were a target kept at an intense white
heat by showers of meteoric small shot
peppering into it, how is it that this
stream of small shot is incessant and
uniform ?
Only small portions of the total
meteoric mass revolving round the sun
can be captured by it gradually, as their
orbits are contracted. An extra supply,
as some solid body or enormous comet
with its attendant meteoric train falling
into the sun, would raise its temperature
above, while a deficient supply would
depress it below the average, and a com
paratively slight variation in the sun’s
temperature would destroy existing con
ditions of life on the earth.
Another objection to the meteoric
theory is that it would require such a
large mass of meteoric matter revolving
in space as might be expected to exercise
a perceptible effect on the motions of
the planets, both by the law of gravity
11
and by the retardation due to a resisting
medium. And this is specially true of'
the orbits of comets which approach the
sun very closely. As meteors do not fall
from a state of rest straight into the sun,
but revolve round it with planetary velo
cities, they can only fall into it by being
drawn inwards in gradually contracting
spirals, until they reach a point where
they impinge on the sun or its atmo
sphere. Hence a vastly greater amount
of meteoric matter must be revolving
round the sun in the space near it than
can be captured and generate heat in
any single year. But several comets are
known to have almost grazed the sun’s
atmosphere, and emerged from it to
continue to describe their elliptic orbits
and return true to time, as predicted by
calculations based on the known laws of
gravity acting on them from the sun and
planets alone, in a non-resisting medium.
Consider what this means. Comets
are bodies of such immense volume and
extreme rarity that one of them got
entangled among Jupiter’s satellites and
thrown out of its course, without affecting
in the slightest perceptible degree the
motions of those satellites. How could
such comets, rushing closely round the
sun with enormous velocities, avoid
showing perturbations, if they encoun
tered any considerable mass of meteoric
matter ?
The theory of meteorites, to which
reference will be made in a future chap
ter, meets many of these difficulties, and
strengthens the case for a meteoric origin
of a large part of solar heat, but it hardly
accounts for the uniformity of the supply,
and is hardly yet so generally accepted
as to supersede the older theory that the
main source of the sun’s heat is to be
sought in the transformation of the
mechanical energy of gravity, as its
volume contracts.
Assuming this theory, the principle on
which the supply of solar heat is calcu
lated is the following. We know the
amount of heat given out by each square
metre of the sun’s surface, and we know
the height from which a given weight
�12
SOLAR HEA T
must fall to generate this heat when its
motion is arrested. We know also that
this heat will be the same whether the
motion is suddenly or gradually arrested.
Now, in this case, the given weight is that
of a long narrow cone of matter, whose
base is one square metre at the sun’s
surface, and its apex a point at the sun’s
centre. Knowing the sun’s diameter and
mean density, it is easy to calculate the
weight of such a cone if we suppose it to
be solid. Its weight is equivalent to that
of 244,000,000 tons of solar heaviness at
the sun’s surface. To reduce this to
terrestrial tons, and their equivalent in
horse-power, we must allow for the differ
ence of weight or gravity at the respec
tive surfaces of the sun and earth.
Reduced to terrestrial figures, in which
one horse-power is 270 metre-tons per
hour—i.e., a ton lifted 270 metres in an
hour—the horse-power at the sun’s sur
face is ten metre-tons. But the radiation
from each square metre of the solar sur
face in heat per hour is equivalent to
78,000 horse-power in energy, or to that
of 780,000 metre-tons. An easy calcu
lation shows that, to supply energy at this
rate for a year, our supposed cone of
244,000,000 tons must fall one metre in
313 hours, or about thirty-five metres in
a year. Refined mathematical calcula
tions are requisite to show how this result
is effected, if we suppose, as is probable,
that the mass of matter forming the sun,
instead of being solid, existed first in the
nebulous or gaseous state, and gradually
contracted into a fluid mass in which
convection currents are constantly carry
ing down surface layers which have
become cooler by radiation, and replacing
them by ascending currents from the
hotter and denser interior. These cal
culations have been made by mathema
ticians of undoubted competence, with
the result that the dynamical equivalent
of the heat radiated from the sun in a
given time is practically the same as if it
were solid.
This result shows that if the sun has
contracted to its present size, from a
volume extending far beyond the orbit
of the remotest planet, Neptune, it has
furnished about eighteen million times
as much heat as it now supplies in a year ;
and that with its present dimensions it
must contract at the rate of thirty-five
metres per year, or one per cent, of its
radius in 200,000 years. Recent astro
nomers give a contraction of a mile in
twenty-five years.
Allowing for the increasing density of
the sun as shrinkage proceeds, the
problem works out that, if the sun’s
radiation of heat has been uniform for
the last fifteen millions of years, the solar
radius must then have been four times
greater than it is now; and that, if the
present supply were maintained by
shrinkage alone, for the next twenty
millions of years, the sun must have
shrunk to half its present size. But
these figures must be greatly reduced by
several considerations. They are based
on Herschell’s and Pouillet’s figures for
the total activity of solar radiation; but
Forbes and Langley have shown that the
allowance made for absorption of solar
heat by the earth’s atmosphere was
insufficient, and that the real amount of
heat radiated by the sun is greater than
was supposed by Pouillet in the ratio of
1.7 to 1 ; and Angstrom has more
recently fixed the amount higher still.
This diminishes the past and future
periods of solar radiation in the same
proportion. Moreover, when the sun’s
surface was four times larger, it must
have given out more heat than at present,
and more than existing conditions of life
in geological times could support. If,
therefore, the sun’s shrinkage from gravity
has been the sole or principal source of
its supply of heat, it is difficult to see
how life and the existing order of things
on the earth can have lasted for more
than eighteen millions of years at the
outside.
So far the mathematicians seem to
have it all their own way, and, as often
happens when the plaintiff’s case only
has been heard, it seems to be conclusive.
But what say the defendants—the geolo
gists ? They also base their case on an
�SOLAR HEAT
undoubted principle, and on undeniable
facts. The principle is that of the
uniformity of existing causes ; the facts,
those of actual experiment and observa
tion.
Geology, in the pre-Lyellite days,
passed through two stages, the theological
and the theologico-scientific. The theo
logical, which prevailed universally until
the present century, was based on the
belief that the book of Genesis, instead
of being a sort of poetical prelude to a
collection of ancient writings of religious
and moral import, was a strictly literal
and scientific narration of what actually
took place, every word of which was
imparted by a Divine revelation, which
it was impious to explain away or to dis
pute. Geology was therefore confined
very much to searching for facts in
Nature confirming this narrative. Thus,
when fossil-shells were observed on
mountain-tops, they were adduced as
incontrovertible proofs of Noah’s deluge;
and even a sceptical and encyclopaedic
mind like that of Voltaire could only
attempt to palliate this proof by suggest
ing that the shells were dropped from
pilgrims’ hats while crossing the Alps on
their way to Rome. The period when
such a ridiculous suggestion could be
made by an accomplished scholar seems
thousands of years from us, and yet it
occurred in the 18th century. The naive
and infantile narrative of the Noachian
deluge is now taken no more seriously
than are the little wooden arks, with
their contents of pigmy animals, which
with other toys amuse the nursery.
The next stage was what may be called
the theologico-scientific, when the facts
and laws of Nature began to be recog
nised; but the old dogmatic faith was
still so prevalent that these facts and
laws were viewed through a theological
medium, and attempts were made to
reconcile the Bible and science by dis
torting the conclusions of science, and
giving the statements of Genesis a general
and allegorical, rather than a literal,
meaning. This was the era when days
were expanded into periods, universal
13
deluges contracted into local floods, and
when miraculous catastrophes and crea
tions were invoked ad libitum,. to bring
geological and zoological facts into some
sort of possible accordance with the
non-natural versions of plain words into
which Scriptural texts were evaporated.
This school included, in its time, some
eminent men, such as Buckland and
Hugh Miller, and it lingered long on the
outskirts of science, as may be seen by
Mr. Gladstone’s essay on the Proem to
Genesis. But with all the leaders of
science it is quite extinct, and the pre
vailing tone of thought has become
Darwinian, as universally as a century
ago it was theological. Differences may
exist as to the details of Darwin’s theory,
and the extent of its application in some
of the more recondite causes of variation ;
but no one of any authority in science
doubts that evolution, under fixed laws,
is the key to the secrets of the universe,
and that one original impress, and not per
petual miracle, or secondary interference,
has been the real course of Nature.
In geology this conviction has been
embodied in what is known as Lyell’s
Law of Uniformity. If anyone wants to
get a clear idea of what this means, let
him go to the British Museum and look
at a slab of sandstone from the Silurian
formation. He will see precisely what
he may see to-day on the sands of South
end or Margate.
Ripple marks of a
gently flowing or ebbing tide, worm
castings, or even little pits showing
where rain-drops had fallen on the wet
sand, and these pits higher on one side
than the other, showing the size of the
drops, the force of the wind, and the
direction from which it was blowing.
The inference is irresistible that at this
immensely remote period the winds blew,
the rain fell, the tides ebbed and flowed,
sand-banks were formed, and worms or
sand-eels burrowed in them, as they do
at the present day. Or look at a piece
of chalk through a microscope, and you
will find it mainly composed of the
microscopic shells of a minute form of
animal life, the Globigerina, which,
�14
SOLAR HEA T
gradually falling to the bottom of a deep
ocean like the finest dust, have accumu
lated strata more than a thousand feet in
thickness. Precisely the same thing is
going on in the Atlantic to-day, where
deep-sea dredgings bring up a Globigerina ooze, which affords a safe bed
for the submarine telegraph. Or take
another instance. A shell called the
Lingula, about the size of a small mussel,
is found abundantly in the Silurian, and
even in the earlier Cambrian, formations;
and another shell, theTerebratula, in the
Devonian. Both are found living at the
present day, not only of the same genus,
but identically of the same species. It
is evident that no great change can have
taken place in the conditions of oceanic
life since these mollusks lived and
flourished in Silurian and Devonian seas.
Nor can the condition of the atmo
sphere have greatly changed since the
time of the air-breathing
Silurian
scorpion, whose fossil remains show him
to be scarcely distinguishable from the
present scorpion.
In fact, the atmosphere affords one of
the most conclusive proofs of the un
interrupted maintenance of existing con
ditions during an enormous period.
When we say enormous time, the term
is used with reference to any recent or
historical standard as applicable to the
period when geology practically com
mences ; that is, with the first dawn of
life disclosed by fossils in the Cambrian
era, or beyond that with formations like
the Laurentian, which can be clearly
proved to be sedimentary and meta
morphic. But no geologist ventures to
extend this doctrine of uniformity beyond
the date when fossils appear, or to deny
that, though the laws of Nature are the
same, the conditions must have been
totally different in the earlier stages of
the planet, when it was cooling and
condensing into its present form. • Nor
could he deny that, even within this
comparatively recent period, there may
have been changes of existing conditions,
as we know indeed from the alternations
between the Glacial period and those of
higher and more uniform temperature.
But his position is that such changes
have been of the same order, and owing
to similar causes as those which now
prevail; and that when a known cause,
given a sufficient time, will produce an
effect, it is unphilosophical to assume
miracles, catastrophes, or a totally dif
ferent order of things, in order to reduce
the time to some procrustean standard
of theoretical prepossession.
To Sir C. Lyell belongs the credit of
having established this doctrine of uni
formity on an unassailable basis, and
made it the fundamental axiom of
geological science. By an exhaustive
survey of the whole field of geology,
from the earliest formations in which
life appears down to the present day,
he has shown conclusively that while
causes identical with, or of the same
order as, existing causes, will, if given
sufficient time, account for all the facts
hitherto observed, there is not a single
fact which proves the occurrence of a
totally different order of causes. This,
of course, applies only to the geological
record commencing with the commence
ment of organic life on the earth, and
not to the earlier astronomical period
when the planet was condensing from
nebulous matter, and slowly cooling and
contracting. Nor does it imply absolute
uniformity with existing conditions, for
changes in climate, temperature, distri
bution of sea and land, and otherwise,
have doubtless occurred from the slow
operation of existing causes.
But it
excludes all fanciful theories of cata
clysms, annihilating each successive era
with its life, and introducing a new one ;
earthquakes throwing up mountain chains
at a shock; deluges sweeping over the
face of the earth, and so forth, in which
even eminent geologists used to indulge
thirty or forty years ago. While no
competent geologist of the present day
would like to affirm positively that there
may not have been, in past ages, explo
sions more violent than that of Krakatoa,
lava streams more extensive than that
of Skaptar-Jokul, and earthquakes mors
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powerful than that which uplifted five or
six hundred miles of the Pacific coast of
South America six or seven feet, it may
be doubtful if he could point out a single
instance since the Silurian epoch where
such was demonstrably the case..
Assuming the principle of uniformity,
the time requisite to explain the facts of
geology becomes a matter for approxi
mate calculation. Not readily in years
or centuries, for our historical measuring
yard does not extend beyond seven
thousand years, when we find a dense
population and high civilisation already
existing in Egypt; but in periods of
which we can form some approximate
idea.
To understand the full force of the
evidence, it is necessary to study care
fully the works of Lyell, Croll, Geikie,
and other authorities on geology; but
some idea of the sort of periods which
are required for gauging Time back to
the commencement of life may be arrived
at from a few instances.
The tests of geological time are derived
mainly from two sources—denudation
and deposition. The present rate of
denudation of a continent is known with
considerable accuracy, from careful
measurements of the quantity of solid
matter carried down by rivers. The
Mississippi affords the best test, both
because the measurements have been
made with the greatest accuracy, and
because the conditions of the vast area
drained by it and its tributary rivers
afford a better average of the rate of
continental denudation, including as it
does a great variety of climates and
geological formations, and being singu
larly free from exceptional influences.
The rate thus deduced is one foot from
the general surface of the basin in six
thousand years. Now, the measured
thickness of the known sedimentary
strata is about 177,000 feet.
The
proportion of sea to land is three
to one, and the bulk of the deposi
tion of the waste of land must have
been laid down within a compara
tively narrow margin of the sea nearest
15
to land. On these data Wallace calcu
lates that the time required to deposit
this 177,000 feet would be 28,000,000
years, taking the rate of denudation at
one foot in 3,000 years, or 56,000,000
years, taking the rate deduced from the
Mississippi. But it must have been
much more than this, for the stratified
rocks are to a great extent composed of
the debris of older strata, which have
been deposited, upheaved, and again
denuded. Most of the known stratified
rocks must have been in this way denu
ded and deposited many times over.
Nor is there any good reason for suppo
sing that the rate of denudation was
materially greater in former than in
recent geological eras. On the contrary,
the recent Glacial period, by grinding
down solid rock into loose materials,
and, as the ice and snow melted, causing
more torrential inundations of rivers,
must have tended to accelerate denuda
tion.
Another proof of the enormous amount
of solid rock which has been removed
by denudation is afforded by the faults
or cracks in the earth’s crust, which have
in many cases displaced strata by
thousands of feet, all traces of which
displacement have been subsequently
planed down to one uniform surface.
Thus the great fault which separates the
Silurian of the south of Scotland from
the Devonian and Carboniferous region
to the north of it is estimated by the
Geological Survey at 15,000 feet. A
mountain mass of this height, termi
nating in a steep cliff at the fault, must
have existed to the south of it, composed
mainly of the Devonian strata which
now stop abruptly at the north edge of
the fault. At present there is no in
equality of the surface at the fault, and
therefore 15,000 feet or nearly three
miles of rock must have been removed
by denudation.
And, what is most
important, the time in which this denu
dation was effected is fixed as having
occurred in the interval between the
Devonian and Carboniferous periods,
for, while no trace of the former
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formation is found south of the fault,
the limestones and coal-measures of the
latter lie directly on the Silurian rocks.
At the rate of denudation deduced from
the Mississippi observations of one foot
in 6,000 years, the removal of those
three miles of rock would have required
90,000,000 years for the interval between
two of the geological formations.
Croll, in his work on Stellar Evolution,
gives a number of similar instances, one
in the Appalachian Mountains, in which
the vertical displacement is not less than
20,000 feet, bringing the upper Devonian
strata on one side opposite to the lowest
Cambrian on the other. Of course, we
cannot assume these enormous intervals
of time to have actually occurred; but
they are quite sufficient to show the
absolute impossibility of reconciling
geological facts with any estimate of the
duration of solar heat derived from the
theory of contraction by gravitation.
Take another instance from a more
recent period. There is a dried-up
Eocene lake in North America, which
once occupied an extensive area in the
States of Wyoming and Nebraska,
formed by streams running down from
the Wahsatch, Uintah, and other moun
tain ranges, which are gastern outliers
of the great backbone of the continent—
the Rocky Mountains. It was gradually
silted up by a deposit of more than 5,000
feet, or a mile thick of clays and sands,
a portion of which has since been carved
by the rain and weather into the singular
formation of isolated castle-like bluffs
and pyramids, known as the “ bad lands.”
It is full of remains of Eocene animals,
often of huge size and of a peculiar type.
How long must it have taken to silt up
a lake larger than Lake Superior, with
tranquil deposits of fine mud and sand ?
The nearest approximation towards such
a calculation is afforded by the silting
up of the Lake of Geneva. Swiss geo
logists have calculated, from the rate of
advance of the delta in historical times,
that it may have taken 90,000 or 100,000
years since the silting process began,
which could only be after the first Rhone
glacier, which once extended to the
Juras, had shrunk back to the head of
the lake. This calculation may be right
or wrong, but certainly a vastly longer
time must have been required to silt up
a vastly larger lake to a depth of 5,000
feet. And, if anything, one would expect
the process of silting up to have been
slower, for in the Eocene period there
were no glaciers, or melting snow-fields,
to accelerate the denudation which must
have gone on pari passu with the deposit.
If we consider the geological evidence
more in detail, we find it all pointing
to the same conclusion of immense
antiquity.
Thus, let us take the coal-measures
which form only a part of one formation
—the Carboniferous. Each seam of
coal consists of the consolidated debris
of a forest. With every seam there is
an under-clay in which the trees and ferns
grow; and a roof of shale or sandstone
deposited on it when this floor was sub
merged. The bulk of the coal is fre
quently composed of the microscopic
spores of the ferns and club-mosses
which formed the principal vegetation of
these forests. The time required is,
therefore, that for the accumulation of
vegetable matter, consisting mainly of
fine spore-dust, to a depth sufficient,
under great compression, to give the
seam of solid coal. In Nova Scotia and
other localities the coal-measures have a
thickness of 12,000 feet, made up of
seam upon seam of coal, each with its
under-clay and roof, implying a separate
growth, submergence, and elevation.
Sir J. Dawson and Professor Huxley,
who have studied the subject minutely,
calculate that the time represented by
the coal-measures alone would be six
millions of years. In other words, the
time required for this one subordinate
member of one geological formation
would be half the total time assigned by
Kelvin and Helmholtz for the total
possible past duration of the present
supply of solar heat.
Those who fully consider and appre
ciate any one of these instances will not
�SOLAR HEAT
be astonished to hear that Sir C. Lyell,
after carefully going over and summing
up the various lines of evidence afforded
by the 100,000 feet of stratified and
fossiliferous formations above the Cam
brian, came to the conclusion that two
hundred millions of years was the pro
bable, and one hundred millions the
minimum possible, duration of the exist
ing order of things that would explain
the facts. And all subsequent discoveries,
and the best geological opinions, go to
confirm this estimate. Thus, when Lyell
made his estimate, the great Laurentian
system of gneissic and other rocks which
underlie the Cambrian was scarcely
known, or assumed to be a primitive
portion of the earth’s crust of Plutonic
origin. But it is now clearly proved to
be bedded, and therefore an aqueous
deposit from the denudation of older
rocks, though the minor signs of strati
fication have disappeared, owing to
metamorphism under heat and pressure.
This at once adds 30,000 feet to the
known thickness of deposited strata. It
is not positively known to have contained
life, for, with the doubtful exception of
the Eozoon Canadiense, the fossils, if
any, have disappeared during this pro
cess of metamorphism; but it contains
indirect evidence of life on the most
extensive scale. Thus great quantities
of graphite or plumbago are found in it,
and, as ordinary coal can be traced first
into anthracite and then into graphite,
the inference is strong that the Lauren
tian graphite must, like coal, have origi
nated from masses of vegetable matter.
It contains also great beds of limestone,
similar to those which, in later forma
tions, are known to have originated from
the remains of corals and other hard
parts of marine animals, which derived
their skeletons from calcareous matter
dissolved in sea-water. Large beds of
iron ore are also found, which, in later
formations, owe their origin to the solu
tion of peroxide of iron and its deoxida
tion by organic agency. There is thus,
therefore, evidence of the existence of
life on a vast scale in this lowest of all
17
formations, which of itself adds more
than a fourth to the thickness of the
whole of the previously known deposited
strata of the earth’s crust, and therefore
to the time presumably required for their
deposit.
And yet, as we have seen, mathema
ticians affirm with equal confidence that
Lyell’s figures must be divided by at least
ten, or probably by twenty, to arrive at
the ten millions of years, which is their
estimate of the time for which the sun has
given out its present life - sustaining
amount of light and heat; and this short
period has to provide not only for geo
logical time, but for the far larger time
during which the earth was passing
through its earlier stages, and condensing
from a gaseous vapour.
It is evident that there must be some
fundamental error on one side or the
other, which some day will be detected,
for the laws of Nature are uniform, and
there cannot be one code for astronomers
and another for geologists. I am inclined
to think that the error will be found in
some of the assumptions of the physicists.
The data of geology seem more certain
and more capable of verification by an
appeal to facts. Thus, the rate at which
rocks waste away, and lakes silt up ; the
amount of solid matter carried down by
rivers, and the number of feet or inches
per square mile thus denuded in a given
time, are all matters of approximate and
tolerably accurate observation and calcu
lation. But of the nature and constitu
tion of the sun we really know very little,
and are only beginning to get some
glimpses of them during the past ten or
twenty years by the aid of the spectro
scope. The sun, as we see it, is not
fluid, for if it were its rotation must make
it protuberant at the equator, which it is
not. It is not solid, for if it were its
equatorial region could not rotate, as it
does, more rapidly than that nearer the
pole. We know its apparent volume
and its mean density; but we do not
know how this density is distributed.
The conditions of matter under such
extreme temperature and pressure are
�SOLAR HEAT
quite conjectural. For aught we know
to the contrary, the sun may have a
nucleus much smaller and much heavier
than we are in the habit of assuming.
Above all, what makes me distrust
these mathematical calculations respect
ing the sun’s heat is that they do not
really solve the problem, but only remove
it one step further back. Heat, they say,
can be nothing but transformed mechani
cal power; but where does the mechani
cal power come from ? From gravity.
And where does the gravity come from ?
They cannot tell. It is the old Hindoo
cosmogony over again. The world rests
on aft elephant; the elephant on a
tortoise. But what does the tortoise rest
on ?
We are accustomed to speak of gravity
as the one well-known and established
fact of the universe. And so it is as
regards the various motions which result
from it, and the fact of its being an
attribute of all matter from atoms to
stars. But of its real essence and modus
operandi we know nothing; less even
than in the case of some of the other
forms of energy into which it can be
transformed. In the case of light, for
instance, we know that it is caused by
waves or vibrations of an exceedingly
elastic and imponderable medium or
ether diffused through space. We can
measure and count these vibrations, and
know the velocity with which the light
wave travels, and trace its effects from
impact on the eye, through the retina and
optic nerve up to the cells of the brain.
But in the case of gravity we know
none of these things, and cannot even
form a conception of how one mass of
matter can act upon another, without
connection and apparently without re
quiring time for the transmission of the
impulse. Is it a pulling or a pushing
force ? We do not even know this, and
are not one whit advanced beyond the
saying of Newton that he could not con
ceive how one body could act on another
without some physical connection be
tween them.
It seems to me that Lord Kelvin starts
from the assumption that gravity is the
one fundamental form of energy from
which all other forms, such as light and
heat, are derived by transformation. But
what a mere drop in the ocean is the
energy of gravity compared with the
atomic and molecular energies, which
now in a latent and now in an active form
build up the universe of matter • How
incalculably small must the gravity of the
sun be, compared with the sum of the
energies of the atoms of which its mass
is composed.
If it were permissible to hazard a con
jecture where there is no proof, it would
be that gravity may turn out to be one,
and that by no means the most impor
tant, manifestation of the primitive fund
of energy, which underlies the atoms of
which all matter is composed.
Various ingenious attempts have been
made to explain the cause of gravity, as
that of strain or stress of some inter
vening medium, or space-filling, incom
pressible fluid; or by Le Sage’s theory
of infinite impacts of ultramundane cor
puscles, partially screened in the direction
in which gravity acts by the bodies which
attract one another. But Clark Maxwell
and other accomplished mathematicians
have shown serious objections to all these
theories, and Tait, in his Properties op
Matter, sums up the latest results almost
in the identical words used by Newton
in his letter to Bentley: “ In fact, the
cause of gravitation remains undis
covered.”
Again, who can tell what is the con
stitution of the infinite space through
which our solar system and the universe
of visible stars are travelling, with a
velocity which has been estimated in
some cases as high as 200 or even 300
miles per second ?
These facts of the proper motions of
the stars, and especially of what are
known as the “ runaway stars,” seem
conclusive against the assumption that
gravity is the sole and primitive form of
energy, from which all other forms, such
as heat and light, are derived by trans
formation. These star-motions are
�SOLAR HEAT
apparently in straight lines in a variety
of directions, and the velocities are such
that it is impossible to account for them
by any conceivable action of the force
of gravity. Professor Newcomb has
shown by mathematical calculation that
the gravitation of the whole universe,
assuming it to contain 100,000,000 of
stars, each on the average five times
larger than the sun, would require to be
sixty-four times greater than it really is,
to have given one star (1830 Groom
bridge) the velocity of 200 miles per
second which it actually possesses, or to
be able to arrest its flight through space.
Of course, this applies with greater force
to a star like Arcturus, moving with a
velocity of 300 miles per second. The
amount of energy of a star like this,
whose volume has been computed to be
eleven times greater than that of the sun,
moving with a velocity of 300 miles per
second, must be enormously greater
than any energy exerted by it in the
form of gravitation; and, if its motion
were arrested, the heat engendered must
be in an even larger proportion, seeing
that it depends on the square of the
velocity, than any heat which could be
supplied by its gradual contraction, on
the theory applied by Kelvin and Helm
holtz to solar heat.
After all, what do we really know of
the contents of space except this, that
it contains a vast number of stars which
are suns like ours, scattered at enormous
distances from one another, and in
numerable meteorites? And also this,
that the phenomena of light and heat
prove the existence of waves of known
dimensions, vibrating with known veloci
ties, and transmitted at a known rate;
which waves compel us to assume a
medium or ether with certain calculable
qualities. But these qualities are so
extraordinary that it may almost be
doubted whether such an ether has a
real material existence, and is anything
more than a sort of mathematical entity.
Its elasticity must be a million million
times that of air, which, as we know, is
equal to a pressure of about fifteen
19
pounds to the square inch; the number
of its oscillations must be at least
700,000,000,000,000 in one second of
time; and it must be destitute of any
perceptible amount of the ordinary
qualities of matter, for it exerts no
gravitating or retarding force, even on
the attentuated matter of comets moving
through it with immense velocities.
Beyond this we are now aware
that space contains a number . of
larger meteors or dark suns, rushing
through it in all directions, and possibly
in the state of dissociated atoms the
elements of substances such as carbon
and oxygen, which are locked up in the
earth’s crust through the medium of life
and vegetation, in vastly greater quan
tities than could be afforded by any con
ceivable supply derived from the atmos
phere. And it may be conjectured also
that variations of temperature may exist
in different regions of space, helping to
account for the secular variations of
temperature at the earth’s surface, such
as are shown by the Glacial period or
periods.
Even if we confine ourselves to the
sun itself, leaving these cosmic specula
tions to be discussed in a subsequent
chapter, we find the greatest uncertainty
prevailing as to the conditions under
which it exerts and generates heat.
Thus, Professor Young says: “ The sun’s
mass, dimensions, and motions are, as a
whole, pretty well determined and under
stood ; but when we come to questions
relating to its constitution, the cause and
nature of the appearances presented
upon its surface, the periodicity of its
spots, its temperature, and the mainte
nance of its heat, the extent of its atmos
phere, and the nature of the corona, we
find the most radical differences of
opinion.”
Take the case of the spots. These
were originally attributed by Herschell
to cyclones in the sun’s atmosphere,
showing us glimpses, as through a
funnel, of a cool and dark solid body
below; by others they have been
thought to be splashes caused by the
�20
SOLAE HEAT
downfall of large masses of meteoric
matter; by some to be volcanic erup. tions throwing up vast scoriae; and
finally, as the most probable solution, to
be great whirlwinds, or cyclonic convec
tion currents, by which the cooler gases
of the sun’s atmosphere are sucked down
and replaced by hotter gases from the
interior. But none of these theories
gives an explanation of the observed fact
that these sun-spots have a regular
maximum and minimum period of about
eleven years. Nor do they give the
slightest clue to the other remarkable
fact that the outburst of large sun-spots
often produces an apparently instanta
neous effect on the earth’s magnetism,
causing electric telegraphs to write with
a tongue of fire, magnets to oscillate
violently, the Aurora Borealis to appear,
and otherwise indicating what is known
as a magnetic storm.
It is pretty clearly established that the
spots are cooler than the sun’s general
surface, but not sufficiently so as to
affect its general temperature, or the
course of the seasons upon the earth;
but the far more inexplicable effect upon
terrestrial magnetism is attested by too
many observations to be at all doubtful.
This opens up a new’ and quite unex
plained field of speculation as to the
sun’s electric energy. The physicists,
who treat the attractive form of gravity
as the sole cause of the sun’s energy,
and convert it all into heat, take no
account of the energy which manifests
itself as a repulsive force, and takes the
form of electricity. And yet electricity
is one of the transformable manifesta
tions of energy as much as heat or
mechanical power, and the phenomena
of comets’ tails are sufficient to show
that, under certain conditions, the sun
can exercise an enormous repulsive
force. The question also may be
raised whether, after all, it is certain that
heat is radiated out in all directions, so
that out of 1,000,000 units of the life
giving energy of the sun 999,999 are
absolutely wasted in space, and one only
is utilised. Electricity, so far as we
know, cannot exist without two opposite
poles, implying reciprocal action. Do
the sun-spots, which affect the earth’s
magnetism, radiate out an equal amount
of magnetic energy in all directions into
space ? If not, how can we be sure that
heat, into and out of which electricity
and magnetism can be transformed,
does so ?
As Professor Young observes, “per
haps we assume with a little too much
confidence that in free space radiation
does take place equally in all directions,”
and he asks “ whether the constitution
of things may not be such that radiation
and transfer of energy can take place
only between ponderable masses; and
that, too, without the expenditure of
energy upon the transmitting agent (if
such exist) along the line of transmis
sion, even in transitu? If this were the
case, then the sun would send out its
energy only to planets, meteors, and
sister-stars, wasting none in empty space;
and so its loss of heat would be enor
mously diminished, and the time-scale of
the planetary system would be corres
pondingly extended.”
The same difficulty applies in the
case of gravity. We only know it as
an attractive force reciprocally exerted
between two bodies in the proportion of
their masses and inverse squares of dis
tances. Is it radiated out in all direc
tions into empty space, where it meets
with no reciprocally attracting body?
This affects not only the permanent
maintenance of the supply of gravity,
but goes even deeper to the fundamental
axiom of all modern conceptions,
whether scientific or philosophical, of
the universe—viz., the Conservation of
Energy. You cannot make something
out of nothing; you cannot create
energy or matter, but only transform
them. Good; but how about that
which is one of the principal manifesta
tions of energy in the universe—that of
gravity ? You can catch limited portions
of it, transform them into mechanical
power, and then backwards and forwards
as you like into heat, light, chemical
�WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS MADE OF
action, electricity, and magnetism, neither
losing nor gaining a particle of the original
energy by any of these transformations.
A water-wheel may turn a dynamo, which
generates electricity that may be stored
in accumulators, and turn a wheel a
hundred miles off; and, if you could
eliminate waste and friction, the second
wheel would give out exactly what the
weight of the falling water put into the
first one. But whence came the gravity
which made the waterfall and the wheel
turn ? Was it itself a transformation of
heat or electricity ? If not, what was it,
and how came it there? If Kelvin
and Helmholtz assume an infinite fund
of energy in the form of gravity to
account for heat, why do they not as
well assume an infinite fund of heat to
account for gravity? And if heat is
dissipated by use until it is exhausted,
or reduced to one stationary average of
temperature, and worlds and suns die,
why should gravity be gifted with per
petual youth, and escape the general law
of birth, maturity, and death ?
These are problems which the present
cannot answer. Possibly the future may;
but in the meantime we shall do well to
keep a firm footing on solid earth, and
rely on conclusions based on ascertained
facts and undoubted deductions from
them, rather than on abstract and
21
doubtful theories, even if they are pre
sented to us in the apparently accurate
form of mathematical calculation. Or,
to bring this chapter to a practical
result, we shall be more likely to arrive
at just views respecting the constitution
of the earth and its inhabitants by
following Darwin and Lyell as our
guides, than by accepting astronomical
theories which would so reduce geo
logical time as to negative the idea of
uniformity of law and evolution, and
introduce once more the chaos of catas
trophes and supernatural interferences.
As a matter of fact, the most recent
and revolutionary discoveries in the
domain of physics itself seem to be
cutting the ground from under the feet
of the opponents of the geologists.
The phenomena of radium have opened
out a new source of energy which
scientists have not hesitated to apply to
this problem of the sun’s heat. It has
been proved that, if we assume the
matter 'of the sun to be radio-active, its
vast expenditure of heat could be sus
tained for an enormous period beyond
that hitherto allowed by physicists. It
remains to be seen if the solution of the
problem lies here. Meantime the mere
suggestion of this new energy bids us
put our trust rather in the solid calcula
tions of the geologist.
Chapter
II.
WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS MADE OF
Shooting Stars: their number, velocity,. size—
Connection with Comets—Composition—
Spectra—Meteorite Theory—Genesis of Stars
and Nebulae—Further stage of Theory—
Impact Theory—Dark Suns in Space—Tem
perature of Visible Stars—Their proper
Motions—New Stars—Variable Stars—Facts
better explained by Impact Theory—Laplace’s
Theory— Based solely on Gravity—N ot incon
sistent but insufficient—Even Impact Theory
not last step—Stony Masses made of Atoms
—What are Atoms ?—Chemical Elements—
Attempts to reduce them to one—Hydrogen—
Helium—Mendelejeff’s Law—Atoms Manu
factured Articles—All of one PatternVortex Theory—Theory of Electrons—What
behind Atoms?—The Unknowable.
What is the universe made of? Such
is the question which has been asked in
many ages and countries by earnest men
�22
WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS MADE OF
looking u’p at the starry vault of heaven
and down into the recesses of their own
minds. One of the latest replies of
science is that it is made of shooting
stars. The idea may seem paradoxical
to those whose only knowledge of shoot
ing stars is derived from an occasional
glimpse on a clear night when they have
seen something like a small rocket flash
across the sky, apparently close to the
earth, out of darkness into darkness,
reminding them of some human life—
“ Qui file, qui file et disparait.”
And yet it is now presented to us
by eminent authorities, and supported
by a long array of serious scientific argu
ments.
What do we know as certain facts with
regard to shooting stars ?
i. They are vastly more numerous
than any one has an idea of who has
not watched them continuously for many
nights. Astronomers who have kept a
record for many years assure us that the
average number seen by one observer at
one place on a clear moonless night is
fourteen per hour, which is shown by
calculation to be equivalent to twenty
millions daily for the whole earth. But
the number of meteorites met with by
the earth can only be the minutest
fraction of those circulating in space.
The orbits of those we see do not'
coincide with the ecliptic, but lie in
planes inclined to it at all sorts of angles,
and apparently having no relation to the
plane in which the earth travels round
the sun, or to the solar system. The
chances are almost infinite against our
minute speck of a planet encountering
any single meteor, or stream of meteors,
thus traversing space in all directions;
and, as we do encounter some seven
thousand millions of these small bodies
in the course of each year, their total
number must be an almost infinite
multiple of this large figure. Moreover,
the pun, with its attendant system, is
rushing through space with a velocity of
some twenty miles per second, and there
fore carrying us into new regions of the
universe at the rate of some six hundred
millions of miles per annum; and yet
meteorites are met with everywhere.
Granting, therefore, that each separate
meteorite may be very small, not exceed
ing on the average a fraction of an ounce
in weight, and that even in meteor
streams they may be, as some astronomers
have calculated, 200 miles apart, the
aggregate amount of this meteoric matter
in space must be practically almost
infinite.
2. They are not terrestrial phenomena
moving in the lower atmosphere, but
celestial bodies moving in orbits and
y^ith velocities comparable to those of
planets and comets. Their velocities
are seldom under ten miles a second or
over fifty, and average about thirty, the
velocity of the earth in its orbit round
the sun being eighteen.
3. They are of various composition,
comprising both a large majority of
smaller particles which are set on fire by
the resistance of the earth’s atmosphere,
and entirely burned up and resolved
into vapour long before they reach its
surface; and a few larger ones, known
as meteors, which are only partially
fused or glazed by heat, and reach the
earth in the form of stony or metallic
masses.
4. They are not uniformly distributed
through space, but collect in meteoric
swarms or' streams, two at least of which
revolve round the sun in closed rings
which are intersected by the earth’s
orbit, causing the magnificent displays
of shooting stars which are seen in
August and November.
5. They are connected with comets,
it having been demonstrated by Schia
parelli that the orbit of the comet of
1866 is identical with that of the
August swarm of meteors known as the
Perseids, and connections between
comets and meteor streams have been
found in at least three other cases.
The fact is generally believed that
comets are nothing but a condensation
of meteorites rendered incandescent by
the heat generated by their mutual
�WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS MADE OF
collision when brought into close proxi
mity.
6. Their composition, as inferred from
that of the larger meteors which reach
the. earth, is identical, or nearly so, with
that of matter brought up from great
depths by volcanic eruptions. In each
case they consist of two classes : one,
composed mainly of native iron alloyed
with nickel, the other of stony matter
consisting mainly of compounds of silicon
and magnesium. Most meteorites con
sist of compounds of the two classes, in
which the stony parts seem to have
broken into fragments by violent collision,
and become embedded in iron which
has been fused by heat into a plastic or
pasty condition.
At this point our positive knowledge
of meteorites from direct observation
ceases, and we have to be guided by the
spectroscope in further researches. This
marvellous instrument enables us, by
analysing the light transmitted to us by
all luminous objects, however composed
and however distant, to ascertain their
composition as accurately as if portions
of them had been brought down to earth
and could be analysed in our laboratories.
We can tell whether they are gaseous,
liquid, or solid; whether they shine by
intrinsic or reflected light; and, by com
paring the lines in their spectra with
those of known terrestrial elements,
whether they contain those elements, or
are made up of matter in a state unknown
to us. The first result of spectroscopic
discoveries was to establish the fact that
the sun, stars, nebulse, comets, . and
meteorites all show such an identity in
their spectra with some one or more of
those of terrestrial elements as to leave
no doubt that the composition of matter
is uniform throughout the universe.
Further experiments, of which Sir
Norman Lockyer’s paper, read to the
Royal Society, affords the most complete
summary, carry this knowledge farther.
They show that spectra are not fixed and
invariable, but change according to the
conditions of heat, pressure, and other
wise, affecting the bodies from which the
23
spectra are given out. Thus the spec
trum of a comet in perihelion, when its
component parts are crowded together
and intensely heated by the sun, is very
different from that of the same comet
when it is at a great distance from the
sun, either in advancing towards it or
receding from it. Thus the spectrum of
the great comet of 1882, when nearest
the sun, exhibited many of the lines
obtained in the laboratory from the
vapours of sodium, iron, and magnesium
at the temperature of the Bunsen
burner. As it receded the lines gradually
died out until a very few were left; and
in the'comet of 1886-7, when last seen,
all had died out except one line . of
magnesium. Thus carbon also, which
is such an important ingredient in
organic life, appears and disappears in
cometary spectra according to the con
ditions of pressure and temperature.
What Sir N. Lockyer has done is to
show that all the varied spectra and
classes of spectra, given out by suns,
stars, nebulae, comets, and shooting
stars, can be reproduced from actual
meteorites which have fallen to the
earth, by experiments in the laboratory,
with the exception only of those of
stars which, like Sirius, are glowing at a
transcendental temperature far exceed
ing that of our sun, and which cannot
be approached by the electric arc in any
form of intense heat which can be
obtained in our present earth. Thus
the “ spectrum of the sun can be very
fairly reproduced (in some parts almost
line for line) by taking a composite
photograph of the arc spectrum of
several stony meteorites between iron
meteoric poles.”
We are now in a position to under
stand the meteorite theory of the uni
verse.
Granted that the. number . of
meteorites in space is practically infinite,
and that they tend to coalesce into
streams, their collisions supply an
equally unlimited fund of heat upon
which we can draw at pleasure. The
amount of heat developed by each
collision is the transformed energy of the
�24
WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS MADE OF
mechanical force. This force, and con
sequently this heat, increases with the
square of the velocity. Thus, if a tropical
hurricane, moving at the rate of ioo
miles an hour, uproots trees and levels
houses, the same mass of air, moving
with the mean meteoric velocity of
33% miles per second, would exert a
force of 144,000,000 times greater. We
know from the explosion of dynamite
that, when a gas expands very much
quicker than the air can get out of its
way, the effect is as if the blow of a
tremendous steam-hammer were inflicted
on an unyielding anvil; arid we can
readily conceive, therefore, how meteo
rites are almost invariably burnt up and
dissipated, even in the rare air of the
upper atmosphere, and how their re
peated collisions in space might generate
any required amount of heat.
Suppose, therefore, in the beginning
of things, space filled by an innumer
able multitude of these little stony
masses, composed of the one, or pos
sibly two or three, primitive elements of
matter, moving in all directions, with
immense though different velocities,
coalescing into streams and colliding;
we have a basis out of which suns, stars,
planets, satellites, nebulae, and comets
might be formed. The looser aggrega
tions, giving fewer collisions and less
heat, form comets and nebulae, and the
clash of two mighty streams gives us
suns like Sirius in a state of intense
luminosity and temperature. As these
cool and contract by radiating out their
heat, they pass into the second stage of
stars of which our sun is one, still
glowing with heat and light, but cooled
down to a point at which the primitive
elements can combine and form secon
dary ones, which can be detected by
the spectroscope, and identified with
those with which we are familiar as
chemical elements upon earth. As
cooling proceeds, they pass from the
white-hot into the red-hot stage, and,
finally, into the cold and lifeless nonluminous stage of burnt-out suns. Not,
however, necessarily to die, for in the
chances of infinite time these dead and
invisible masses may collide together,
and at a blow regain their youth, and
commence the cycle anew as suns of the
first order.
There is grandeur in the idea which,
to a certain extent, reproduces what the
kinetic theory of gases teaches as to the
clash of innumerable atoms darting
about in all directions, producing the
temperature and pressure of a gas in a
confined space. Only here, instead of
atoms—so small that one of them is of
the size of a rifle bullet, compared to
the earth—we have stony masses for
atoms, stars and nebulae for molecules,
and, instead of glass jars or bladders, the
whole universe.
This, however, is only the first stage
of the theory. What are these little
stony bodies, and how did they come
there ? The only answer we can give
is derived from the constitution of those
larger meteor-stones which actually fall
on the earth and can be examined.
They have invariably the appearance of
fragments torn from larger bodies by
collisions or explosions, and there is
no reason for doubting that what they
appear to be they are.
This carries us back to the impact
theory of which a full account is given
in the work published by Dr. Croll on
Stellar Evolution. It supposes that, for
an almost infinite time, an almost infinite
number of dark stars, or cold and nonluminous solid bodies of stellar magni
tude, have been rushing about in an
unlimited space in all directions, and
with enormous velocities. Occasionally
they collide, and, as mechanical prin
ciples show, generate an intense heat,
more than sufficient to convert their
whole mass into glowing gas, at a tem
perature which may possibly dissociate
its atoms, with the exception of some
fragments from the shattered surfaces
which are thrown off into space by the
sudden generation of explosive gas.
That there really are such dark suns
rushing through space is certain from
what we know respecting the constitution
�WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS MADE OF
of the visible stars. We find them
exhibiting all ranges of temperature,
from the intense heat of the white stars
like Sirius to that of the duller red stars
like Aldebaran, our own sun occupying
an intermediate position; while our
moon affords an example of a dead
world, which from its smaller size has
cooled more rapidly. As the moon is,
so must the red stars inevitably become
in a sufficient number of millions of
years, if the laws of nature continue
uninterrupted. And their proper motions,
rushing through space in different direc
tions with velocities ranging up to 400
miles per second, must continue after
they have become dark, as long as the
first law of motion holds good, that
bodies in motion cannot generate
changes of motion of themselves, but
must continue to move forward in their
orbits (the majority following a circular
direction under the control of their
neighbours) or, in a few cases, in a straight
line.
Among bodies thus rushing in different
directions collisions must occasionally
occur, and it is a matter of simple calcu
lation that the mechanical force converted
into heat by such collisions is amply
sufficient to produce any temperature
that may be required to create new suns
and nebulre, and to account for all the
phenomena which are actually observed.
Moreover, the existence of such dark
bodies is established by direct observa
tion. That fragmentary masses, weigh
ing several hundredweights, come in from
space and fall upon the earth is a fact.
So also is it a fact that bright stars, some
of them like the famous new star in
Cassiopsea, brighter than stars of the first
magnitude, suddenly blaze out and
gradually disappear. The impact theory
accounts for this, while the nebular
theory, or any hypothesis based solely on
the contraction of a mass of nebulous
vapour under the law of gravity, entirely
fails to do so. Again, the phenomena of
variable stars can best be explained by
assuming that in some cases such stars
pass periodically through dense streams
25
of meteoric matter, increasing their light,
and that in others large dark bodies are
periodically interposed between us and
the stars, and thus diminish it. Modern
astronomers are, in fact, disposed to think
that the dark stars are more numerous
than the light ones. In some cases,
indeed, we have become so far acquainted
with these dark stars as to weigh and
measure them. The constitution also of
comets, and of many nebulae, as disclosed
by the spectroscope, is far better explained
by the impact than by the nebular theory.
In fact, it is inconsistent with the latter
theory in its narrow form, since this can
give no account of comets, meteorites,
or other phenomena, which imply small
dissociated portions of matter, moving in
streams or aggregating in nebulas, and
rushing with immense velocities in paths
inclined to each other at different angles,
and which have no relation to the rotating
plane of the solar or any other system.
Even within the limits of the planetary
system there are many facts which are
better explained by the theory of impact
than by that of contraction—for instance,
the great differences in the inclination of
the axes of rotation of many planets and
satellites to the plane in which they
revolve about the sun and their primaries.
But, after all, there is no real inconsistency
between the impact theory and that of
Laplace. The former takes up the history
of the universe at an earlier stage, and
supplies a mass of gas or cosmic matter
at a higher temperature, and with that
temperature longer maintained by re
peated collisions and indraught of
meteorites than is assigned to it by the
nebular hypothesis; but ultimately a great
deal of this gas must resolve itself into
such a medium as Laplace supposes,
contracting and forming whirls under the
operation of gravity. The triumphs of
mathematical science deduced from
Newton’s law of gravity were so signal
that it is not surprising that it should
have been assumed that gravity, and
gravity alone, was the fundamental law
which would explain everything. But,
as often happens, increasing knowledge
�26
WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS MADE OF
has rendered many things uncertain
which appeared to be certain. Problems
which seemed simple have grown com
plex, and it has become apparent that
the universe contains many forms of
motion and many manifestations of
energy which cannot be explained by
the laws of gravity—for instance, the
runaway stars, the world of meteorites,
the proper motions of molecules and
atoms, and the requisite duration of solar
heat to account for the undoubted facts
of geology. The law of gravity and the
nebular theory made a great step towards
reducing the phenomena of the universe
to one great uniform law; but the theory
of impact takes up the history at an
earlier stage, and carries us one step
further towards infinity and eternity. If
the whole stellar universe is not, so to
speak, the crop of a single season, but
an indefinite succession of crops, stars
being born and dying, dying and being
renewed, without appearance of a
beginning or an end, the vista of exist
ence is vastly enlarged.
But even this is not the last step
towards the unknowable. Granted that
these dark suns are facts, they are not
ultimate facts. They are matter, and
matter is made up of molecules, and
molecules of atoms. Judging from the
fragments which reach the earth, and the
teachings of the spectroscope, meteoric
matter is composed of a few atoms iden
tical with those which are the most
common elementsof terrestrial chemistry.
Hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, iron, nickel,
calcium, silicon, and aluminium are the
principal, if not the sole, constituents of
meteoric stones; and the lines of one or
more of these appear in the spectra of
stars, nebulas, meteors, and comets,
according to their conditions of tempera
ture and pressure. What, then, are
these atoms ? There are some seventy
eight of them known to chemists as
ultimate elements—that is to say, which
are not further resolvable by any means
available in our laboratories. But no
one can suppose that this is really the
ultimate fact, and that original matter
consists of seventy-eight indivisible units,
ranging in weight from the one of
hydrogen to the 240 of uranium, and
more than half of them consisting of
exceedingly rare elements, which play no
appreciable part in the construction of
any form of matter. The mind refuses
to accept the conclusion that such little
mole-hills as yttrium, zirconium, and
gallium, only known as minute products
of a few of the rarest minerals, really
present insurmountable obstacles to the
science which has scaled Alps, measured
light-waves, and weighed stars.
Accordingly, constant attempts are
being made to reduce atoms to one
simple element, and to one comprehen
sive law. The problem is not yet
solved; but it is being attacked on
various sides, and . almost every day
brings us nearer to a solution. Hydrogen
first put in a claim to be the primitive
element, as being the lightest, and it is
remarkable that the weight of a very
large proportion of the other elementary
atoms is an exact multiple of that of the
hydrogen atom. The spectral lines of
hydrogen are also the last seen in those
of the hottest stars, where all secondary
combinations may be supposed to be
dissociated.
This hydrogen theory,
which was first proposed by Prout,
proved to be only a provisional step.
Later researches seemed to show that
by halving the hydrogen atom—that is,
supposing this atom to be composed of
two-linked atoms—the deviations from
the law might be reduced within limits
which could be fairly attributable to
errors in the delicate operations requisite
for fixing atomic weights. Sir W.
Crookes suggested that helium, which
seemed to be lighter than hydrogen,
might be this half-hydrogen-atom, and
thus be the ultimate element out of
which all other atoms are manufactured.
It was, in fact, certain that some rela
tion existed among them, for the Russian
chemist Mendelejeff had shown that, if
the atomic weights of the known elements
are arranged in a consecutive order,
they show what is called a periodical
�WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS MADE OF
law. That is, the other qualities _ of
atoms, such as specific heat, . affinity,
atomicity, etc., rise with the weights up
to a certain point, then fall, then rise
again, and so describe a sort of zig-zag
line like those we see of the readings of
the barometer on a weather chart. Only
this atomic zig-zag seems to follow a
certain law, so that groups of elements
which have similar qualities recur at
nearly fixed intervals. The meaning of
this law is not yet clear, but it _ is so
certain that it enabled Mendelejeff to
predict the discovery of three new
elements, which have since been found,
filling up gaps in the series which his
law required.
The nearest approach to a mathe
matical explanation of this law is afforded
by the discovery that if the cube roots of
the atomic weights were used as ordinates
instead of the weights themselves, which
is equivalent to taking volumes instead
of lines to represent the atomic weights,
the zig-zag line resolves itself into a
regular curve, which is identical with, or
very closely resembles, the logarithmic
curve well known to mathematicians.
All these facts pointed towards the
conclusion that the atoms which we call
elementary are all really manufactured
out of some one atom or sub-atom,
which is the primary element of matter.
Where are they manufactured ? Crookes
said, on the outside of the universe,
wherever that might be, and that they
were destroyed or dissociated when they
reached the position of the lowest
potential energy, which is in the centres
of the largest stars. Whatever sort of
manufactured articles the atoms may be,
they are manufactured to the same
pattern, like the nuts and screws of a
large locomotive or gun factory. The
hydrogen-atom gives the same spectral
lines, which means that it vibrates and
starts or absorbs ether-waves precisely
in the same manner whether it exists in
Sirius, in the nebula of Orion, or in a jar
of gas in a laboratory.
Until recently the most generally
received theory of the formation of the
27
atom was the vortex theory of Helm
holtz and Kelvin, which assumed
atoms to be revolving rings of a perfect
fluid pervading space. The general idea
is given by the rings of smoke which
occasionally escape from the lips of
smokers. These rings persist for a long
time, glide before the knife so as to be
indivisible, and when two of them collide
they rebound and vibrate. In a word,
they behave in many respects very like
atoms ; and refined mathematical calcu
lations show that if we could suppose
them formed and rotating, not in air,
but in what is called a perfect fluid, in
compressible, possessing inertia, and yet
offering no resistance whatever to motion
through it in any direction, such vortex
rings would be indeed indivisible and
indestructible, and might well be what
we call atoms.
Another important
theory, that of Dr. Larmor, conceived
the atom, or the component of the
atom, to be a sort of strain-centre in
ether. But the latest researches of
physicists and chemists have opened out
a line of inquiry which marks a consider
able advance in attacking the problem.
We have now actual proof that small
particles are chipped off the atom in
certain electrical experiments. More
over, when radium was discovered, and
the same kind of radio-action was
detected in a less striking degree in
other forms of matter, it was clear that
we had before us actual instances of
the breakdown, or disintegration, of the
atom. The small particles emitted from
the atom were then identified with the
particles of electricity called electrons,
and the theory has gained ground that
the atoms of all ponderable substances
are built up of these electrons. It is
calculated that one thousand of these
tiny sub-atoms go to the making of a
single atom of hydrogen. They are
infinitesimally small—hardly one-hun
dred-thousandth of the diameter of the
atom—and are believed to form a
whirling system of forces, occasionally
breaking loose from the control of the
cluster and being shot forth, as in the
�28
WHAT THE UNIVERSE IS MADE OF
emanations of radium. The conclusion
is almost irresistible that these are the
real atoms—the ultimate particles—of
the whole solid fabric of the universe.
As yet, however, speculation is pre
carious, and is apt to run in advance of
the known facts. It remains for the
future to tell us more of the nature of
these wonderful electrons, their relation
to ether, and the way in which they are
drawn together to form the great variety
of the chemical elements. Recently a
distinguished Swedish chemist has put
forward a theory that the meteors, which
we have taken to be, as it were, the
bricks of the universe, are themselves
formed by the electrons poured out into
space from the stars. If that were so,
we should be approaching some explana
tion of the “perpetual motion” of the
universe. But it is premature to pro
nounce on these matters.
Thus it will be seen that the problem
of atoms, involving that of the ulti
mate constitution of matter, is fast
advancing towards some definite solu
tion ; but it is not yet solved, and is
a problem of the future. Seeing, how
ever, the wonderful advances which have
been made in the last half-century, and
especially in the last few years, it is im
possible to doubt that, as in the case of
gravity, some future Newton will sum
up in a comprehensive law all the
scattered facts which point in the same
direction towards the unity of the
universe, and the persistence of evolu
tion from the simplest to the most
complex.
But even when this triumph of science
has been attained, the question remains
as insoluble as ever—Whence came
this primeval ' matter and primeval
energy ?
I recollect as a boy looking up at the
stars, and asking myself what does all
this mean ? Where did it come from,
and what is beyond it ? The only answer
was a sort of painful ache, as of straining
the eyes to see in the darkness. And
now that, thanks to the discoveries of
modern science, I can see so much
beyond the visible stars, far off into the
.infinitely great, far down into the
infinitely small, far back into infinite
Time—at the end of all I am not one
whit advanced beyond that feeling of
boyhood. I gaze with straining eyes
into the Unknowable, and gaze in vain.
Others may see, or fancy they see, some
thing behind the knowable phenomena
of the universe, linked together by in
variable laws. Some a personal God,
others a design like human design, a
living whole, ideas in a Universal Mind,
illusion, Maya Nirvana, what not. For
my own part, if I candidly confess the
truth to myself, I can only say with
Tennyson,
“ Behold ! I know not anything,”
and content myself with the only creed
which seems to me certain—that of trying
to do some little good in my generation,
and leave the world a little better rather
than a little worse for my individual unit
of existence.
�CLIMA TE
29
Chapter III,
CLIMATE
Ichthyosauri have been met with in
Greenland and Spitzbergen.
Lyell,
Dana, and all modern geologists agree
that in primordial times there were “ no
zones of climate,” “ no marked difference
between life in warm and cold latitudes
“warm Arctic seas all the year round.” _
This continued until what is, geologi
cally speaking, quite the other day, the
close of the Tertiary period. In Spitz
bergen, latitude 78°. 56', are found the
remains of a luxuriant Miocene flora,
comprising species like the common
cypress, which now grow in the Southern
United States and California. Magnolias
and zamias are found in Miocene strata
Geology and astronomy are in conflict in Greenland in latitude 70 .
These species, it must be observed,
on other questions as well as that of the
time during which a sufficient supply of require not only a warm but an equable
solar heat has rendered the earth habit climate. They would be killed by a
able. The conditions of that supply are single severe night’s frost, and yet they*
as important as the -total quantity, and grew and flourished where the winter
these conditions depend mainly on night now lasts for four months, and
climate. Geology seems to show that, where the thermometer has registered
during the vast lapse of time embraced more than ioo° below freezing-point.
by fossil records from the Cambrian to The difference between summer and
the close of the Tertiary period, there winter temperature in high Arctic lati
were no well-marked zones of climate, tudes exceeds 100° Fahrenheit, and, what
and the conditions of life were uniform, ever may have been the initial tempera
or nearly so, throughout the whole earth. ture, this difference of heat, due to solar
On the other hand, the astronomical radiation, must have been added and
theory of precession asserts that the subtracted every year, as long as the
vicissitudes of the seasons, with their earth’s axis of rotation preserved its
corresponding zones of climate, must present obliquity to the plane of the
have existed from the beginning as they ecliptic in which the earth revolves round
now are. Geology relies on undoubted the sun. If the temperature of Spitz
facts. Coral formations, which require bergen was from ■ any cause high enough
both a warm and an equable climate, to prevent the thermometer from falling
and cannot live in a temperature below below zero in winter, it must have risen
66° Fahrenheit, were found by Captain in summer far above the extremest
Nares in Greenland, in latitude 8i° 40'. tropical temperature at which life and
Ammonites of the same genera and even vegetation are possible.
Nor is it a question of temperature
of the same species are found alike in
Melville’s Island and in India; and only, but of light and the actinic rays of
Conflict between Geology and Astronomy— |
Geology asserts Uniformity of Climate until 1
Recent Times—-Astronomy asserts Inclination
of Earth’s Axis to be invariable, and therefore
Climates necessary—Evidence for Warm and
Uniform Climates—Greenland—-Spitsbergen
—Impossible under Existing Conditions Heat, Light, and Actinism—-Invariability of
Earth’s Axis—Causes of Higher and more
Uniform Temperature—Cooling of the Earth
—More Heat from the Sun—Warmer regions
of Space—More Carbonic-dioxide—Would
not explain Uniformity of Temperature
Excess of Oxygen—-Modification of SpeciesConfiguration of Sea and Land—- .Crolls
Theory—-Displacement of Earth’s Axis—In
clination of Axis of Planets and Moon—Un
solved Problems of the Future.
�30
CLIMATE
the solar beam, which are Equally essen
tial for vegetation. A luxuriant forest
vegetation, including such forms as the
magnolia and cypress, could no more
flourish under any conditions now known
to us in Spitzbergen than they could if
shut up for four months in a dark cellar.
And yet, with the present obliquity of the
axis, the sun must have been below the
horizon in those latitudes from November
till March.
At present, as we go north from the
equator towards the Arctic circle, we
find species changing to accommodate
themselves to the change of environment.
Palms are succeeded by oaks and
beeches; these again by pines and
birches, and these by dwarf willows and
lichens, until all vegetation, except of
the very humblest forms, dies out as we
approach the pole. But in the geological
records of earlier periods no such changes
are discernible. The Miocene magnolia
of Spitzbergen is not even a greatly
modified magnolia, but of the same
species as the magnolia of the present
day. The Miocene cypress is the common
cypress. If there were no such science
as astronomy, geology would point to
the conclusion that until after the
Miocene period climate was uniform;
there were no distinct zones or seasons,
and therefore no obliquity of the earth’s
axis, or at any rate nothing like the
present amount. With these conditions
there would have been perpetual spring,
and all we should require would be a
higher average temperature for the whole
earth. But to this conclusion astronomy
opposes an inflexible non possumus. If
there is one thing more certain than
another, it is that mathematical calcula
tions, based on Newton’s law of gravity,
explain all the movements of the solar
system. They do so 'with a certainty
that enables us to predict the places of
the earth, moon, and planets years before
hand with absolute accuracy. And if
there is one thing more certain than
another in these calculations, it is that no
permanent change is possible in the
inclination of the earth’s axis. The earth j
now spins, in twenty-four hours, round
an axis inclined at an angle of 66}4° to
the plane on which it revolves round the
sun in a year. It must always have so
spun, for there is no cause known to
science by which, when this rotation
was once established, the inclination of
the axis could have been permanently
altered. The plane of the equator shifts
its position slowly on that of the ecliptic,
owing to various minor actions of the
force of gravity, the principal one being
the precession of the equinoxes, due to
the protuberant matter at the earth’s
equator; and thus in 22,000 years it
makes a complete circuit, returning to
its original position. But during this
circuit its inclination to the plane of the
ecliptic remains practically constant, and
the effect on the seasons is unchanged,
except that they come at different posi
tions of the earth in its orbit round the
sun, so that summer and winter alter
nately come when we are farthest from
the sun or nearest to it. At present we
are nearer the sun in winter than in
summer, and the winter half of the year
is shorter than the summer half in the
Northern hemisphere. In 11,000 years
this position will be reversed, and the
winter will be shorter than summer in
the Southern hemisphere; but there is
nothing in these slight changes to affect
the general course of the seasons, and
as we happen to be now nearer the sun
in winter the effect of any slight change
due to precession would rather be to
increase the difference between summer
and winter heat in high northern lati
tudes, and so aggravate the difficulty of
reconciling the conclusions of the two
conflicting sciences. And yet there must
be some way of reconciling them. Truth
cannot speak with two voices, and the
laws of Nature cannot give contradictory
results.
Let us consider first what the un
doubted facts of geology require us to
assume. Two things—firstly, that the
general temperature of the earth was
higher in former times than now;
secondly, that it was more uniform. As
�CLIMA TE
regards the first condition, astronomy
interposes no obstacle, but affords no
aid, and it must be admitted that we
are still in the region of conjecture
rather than of certainty. The first
obvious guess is that the earth was
formerly hotter, and has been gradually
cooling. But this guess is contradicted
by mathematical calculations as to the
cooling of heated bodies, which show
that after the earth had cooled down to
the point of forming a solid crust, many
miles in thickness, of non-conducting
rock, internal heat could have had little
or no effect on surface temperature.
This is confirmed by what we know of
the climates of areas where large reser
voirs of internal heat lie comparatively
near the surface, as in Iceland and other
volcanic districts. In the celebrated
Comstock lode the heat of the earth
increases so rapidly that it becomes im
possible to work the mines below a very
moderate depth. Yet in all these cases
the temperature at the surface remains
the same as that of other regions on the
same isotherm, and is determined by the
same circumstances of latitude, elevation,
aerial and ocean currents, and other
known conditions. Nor, if the internal
temperature of the earth was a factor in
the problem, would it be easy to account
for our recovery from the cold of the
Glacial period, in the face of a con
tinued and progressive diminution of the
planet’s heat.
A more important conjecture is that
there may have been variations in the
amount of heat given out by the sun.
Generally considered, theory points to
the paradoxical conclusion that, as the
sun has cooled, it has got hotter—that
is, that a volume of gas, in cooling,
developes rather more heat by contract
ing than it loses by radiating. But
recent research is held by some scientific
writers to have shown that “ compara
tively small changes in solar activity
produce rather important meteorological
e-ffects,” and it is claimed that there are
indications of such changes having taken
place. Dr. Sven Hedin discovered proof
31
that important changes of climate have
occurred in Central Asia during the
Christian era. It is for future investiga
tion to follow up this clue, and determine
its value in the estimation of changes of
climate.
Thepassageof the solar system through
warmer and colder regions of space is
another explanation which has been
invoked. But this—though by no
means improbable—is as yet a mere
possibility, and based on nothing ap
proaching to actual knowledge.
Of existing known causes there is one
which seems, as far as it goes, to be a
vera causa which might have given the
earth’s surface a warmer temperature in
early ages. Its reality may be proved by
the very simple experiment of sleeping
on a cold night without a blanket.
Evidently, other circumstances being the
same, such as the reading of the thermo
meter and blood heat of the body, the
question of blanket or no blanket makes
an immense difference in the resulting
temperature. Why is this the case ?
Because the blanket keeps the heat in,
or, in other words, radiates ■ it back to
the body instead of letting it radiate out
into space. There are other things
which do this even more effectually than
a woollen blanket, for they let the heat
of the sun’s rays in, and, having let it in,
catch it as in a trap, and do not let it
out again. Glass, for instance, in a con
servatory, is such a trap, and, as we all
know, will keep the temperature inside
much warmer than it is outside, even
without the aid of artificial heat. Many
other substances have the same property,
and among them two which are essential
elements of the earth’s atmosphere,
water in the form of vapour, and carbonicdioxide. Tyndall, in his Heat Con
sidered as a Mode of Motion, has shown
clearly what an immense part these
gases have in maintaining the tempera
ture of the earth’s surface. If the cold
is more intense, especially at night, on
high mountains, it is not because less
heat is received from the sun’s rays
during the twenty-four hours, but
�32
CLIMATE
because half the atmosphere is left below,
and so the heat-retaining blanket is thin
and threadbare. So in deserts where the
air is dry and there is little aqueous
vapour, the heat by day may be exces
sive and yet the cold by night well-nigh in
tolerable. “The removal,” says Tyndall,
“ for a single summer’s night of the
aqueous vapour which covers England
would be attended by the destruction of
every plant which a freezing temperature
could kill.” And such a removal on a
winter’s night would send the thermo
meter down far below zero.
This property of retaining heat is not
confined to water in the form of vapour ;
it is common to other gases, and often
in a higher degree. Among these is
one which is always present in the
atmosphere—carbonic-dioxide, a gas
formed by the combination of two
atoms of oxygen with one of carbon.
The percentage of this gas in the air
is very small, only a fraction of one per
cent., and yet it constitutes the sole
source of supply of the carbon required,
directly for vegetable and indirectly for
animal life. At present the balance
between the two sorts of life seems to
be kept up, as in an aquarium, by
animals restoring to the air, in the form
of carbonic-dioxide, the carbon which
has been abstracted from it by plants.
But when we look at the enormous
amount of carbon which has been
locked up in coal, limestone, and other
carboniferous formations of the earth’s
crust, it is evident that it must be vastly
greater than could be derived from such
a small percentage of carbonic-dioxide
as now exists in the atmosphere. It has
been estimated by experienced geologists
at many hundred times greater. Where
all this carbon could have come from is
a question not yet solved. Some have
thought that it may have been supplied
from the interior of the earth by volcanoes;
but, although it is certain that some
volcanic vents do emit carbonic-dioxide,
as in the case of Lake Avernus, and the
Grotto-del-cane, near Naples, the quan
tity is small, and the better opinion
seems to be that it is only given out
when subterranean fires come in con
tact with limestone, or some other form
of previously deposited carbon. Did
the carbon, then, come from the air?
If so, there must have been more than
one hundred times as much carbonicdioxide in it in early geological times as
there is at present.
This would go some way towards
explaining the difficulty of the higher
temperature prevailing in past ages, for
more carbonic-dioxide would undoubtedly
be equivalent to an additional blanket to
protect the earth from cold; and the
higher temperature thus caused would
enable the air to hold more aqueous
vapour in solution, and thus increase
the thickness of the water-blanket.
It is conceivable that under such con
ditions a warm and humid climate may
have prevailed over a great part of the
earth’s surface, though this would hardly
meet the difficulty of the uniform exist
ence of such a climate in latitudes where
the supply of heat from the sun must
have been so very different in winter
and summer. Nor would this difficulty
be removed even if we were to suppose
that the earth’s axis might have been
nearly vertical to the plane of the ecliptic.
This might meet the difficulty as to
light and actinic rays, for there would
be everywhere twelve hours of day
throughout the year; but it would not
meet the difficulty as to temperature, for
if the air-blanket was sufficient to retain
heat enough in the Arctic Circle to
prevent frosts, from a sun which never
rose much above the horizon, it must
have retained far too much heat for
existing life and vegetation in latitudes
nearer to the equator.
There are, however, many grave
objections to considering this to be the
sole or even the principal cause of the
warmer climates of early ages. It is by
no means certain that either animal or
vegetable life, in anything like known
forms, could exist in an atmosphere so
surcharged with carbon. Nor is carbon
all; we must account also for oxygen.
�33
CLIMA TE
If the whole of the carbon now fixed
in the different strata of the earth’s
crust was derived from carbonic-dioxide
originally present in the atmosphere,, so
also must have been the oxygen, which
in various form of oxides now forms
an even larger constituent of that crust.
Oxygen is a very active element, which,
under moderate conditions of heat , and
moisture, combines readily with iron,
silicon, calcium, aluminium, and all. the
metallic bases. Many hundred times
more oxygen must have been withdrawn
from the air than now exists in it. to
form the rocks which are the principal
part of the earth’s crust. But an excess
of oxygen is as fatal to life as an excess
of carbonic-dioxide. Terrestrial life, as
known to us, depends on a very delicate
adjustment of the quantities of oxygen
and nitrogen in the air. A very little
excess or deficit of either would, destroy
all air-breathing animals. With too
much oxygen we should be burned up
even more rapidly than the drunkard is
by too much alcohol; with too little, the
fire of life would be choked by ashes
and refuse. If there was formerly a
hundred, or even ten, times more oxygen
in the atmosphere than there is now,
there must have been a corresponding
excess of nitrogen to neutralise it, and,
if so, what has become of the nitrogen ?
Nitrogen is an inert element which enters
sparingly into combinations, and does
not, like oxygen and carbon, get locked
up in great masses of the earth’s solid
crust. Once in the atmosphere, it would
seem that it must have remained there;
and, if so, as oxygen was withdrawn in
continually increasing quantities, how
could the life-sustaining proportion of
the two gases have been maintained and
continued down to the present day ?
It has been said that life may have
been so differently organised in past
geological ages as to have existed under
very different conditions ; the mammoth
is appealed to as an instance of an
elephant modified so as to resist Arctic
cold; and the result of deep-sea dredg
ings shows that molluscs, crustaceans,
and other low forms of life may exist in
ice-cold water and without light. But
we can hardly suppose such profound
modifications of existing genera and
species of highly-organised plants and
animals as would enable them to breathe
air of a very different composition.
For we must remember that the evi
dence for an elevated and uniform tem
perature is not confined to remote geo
logical ages, but comes down to the
close of the Tertiary period, when
existing forms, both of animal, and
vegetable life, were firmly established,
and several species have survived to the
present day without perceptible change.
Thus, when the magnolia was growing in
Spitzbergen, the dryopithecus was living
in Southern France. Can it be supposed
that this anthropoid ape breathed a
different air from his congeners, the
chimpanzee and gorilla; and yet, if his
lungs required the same air, how could
excess of carbonic-dioxide have supplied
the extra warm blanket to protect the
Spitzbergen magnolia ?
A different configuration of sea and
land is the explanation which many geo
logists, following Lyell, have advanced
for different conditions of climate. And
no doubt aerial and oceanic currents,
such as now cause the trade-winds and
Gulf Stream, are responsible for great
variations of climate, while low lands in
low and high lands in high latitudes
must always have had a considerable
influence in raising or depressing tem
perature. But changes of this descrip
tion can more readily account for the
cold of the Glacial than for the heat of
the Tertiary and preceding periods. We
have now got the trade-winds and the
Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic, and
although the diversion of the latter might
bring the ice-cap back to London and
New York, and make the climate of Scan
dinavia and Scotland the same as that of
Greenland and Labrador, its presence
takes us a very short way towards enabling
magnolias to flourish in Spitzbergen.
In like manner, even if Croll’s theory
were established, which it is far from
B
�34
CLIMATE
being, and the effect of the obliquity of
the earth’s axis combined with preces
sion, though imperceptible while the
earth’s orbit was nearly circular, became
great in the two hemispheres alternately,
when the orbit was approaching its maxi
mum eccentricity, this would not explain
the high and uniform temperature of past
geological ages. If this theory were true,
what we should look for would be two or
three Glacial periods in the course of
each geological epoch; for the least time
required for any of the great geological
formations must have been long enough
to include two or three secular variations
of the earth’s orbit, from minimum to
maximum eccentricity. And each of
these Glacial periods must have included
several changes, alternating, at intervals
of 11,000 years, between severe cold and
genial heat, owing to the effect of the
precession of the equinoxes combined
with great eccentricity.
Instead of uniform warmth there must
have been more than one hundred
Glacial periods during the immense
lapse of time between the dawn of life
in the Cambrian and the last of such
periods in the Quaternary. It is a moot
point with geologists whether traces of a
single one of such periods, prior to the
last one, have been found. There are a
few conglomerates which look very like
consolidated boulder-clays, and every
now and then we hear of some formation,
supposed to be glaciated, being found in
the Permian and in other formations in
India, South Africa, and Australia; but
there is no evidence hitherto which com
mands the general assent of geologists
for a single Glacial period prior to the
recent one which closed the Tertiary
period. And there is abundant evidence
that during many formations, such as the
Carboniferous and Coal-measures, which
must have taken millions of years to
accumulate, there were no vicissitudes of
climate such as must have inevitably
occurred if any astronomical cause, such
as precession or eccentricity, had been
sufficient to bring about great vicissitudes
of heat and cold. And what is still more
conclusive, the evolution of vegetable
and animal life, as shown by fossils,
affords no trace of the repeated modifica
tions which must have taken place within
the limits of the same geological forma
tion if there had been such vicissitudes of
heat and cold as the theory requires.
It remains to be considered whether
any change in the direction of the earth’s
axis may have been possible. Clearly
no such change can have taken place
within the earth itself, for its shape is
that of an oblate spheroid, revolving
round its present axis. Any displace
ment of the poles must displace the
present equator, and tend to establish a
new one on a different plane. But the
equatorial diameter of the earth is twentysix miles longer than the polar diameter,
so that any displacement of the poles
must have tended to displace this
enormous mass of protuberant matter,
and send such portion of it as was fluid
in a diluvian wave, miles in height,
towards the new position of equilibrium;
while the solid portion remained in a
plane no longer coincident with that of
the earth’s rotation. There is no trace
of anything of the sort having ever
occurred, and, if the axis has shifted, the
whole earth has shifted with it, which is
just what astronomers declare to be
impossible by any known laws.
But are the whole of the laws really
known ? There is nothing more difficult
than to account for the varying inclina
tions of the axes of rotation of the diffe
rent bodies of the solar system. On the
older conception of the nebular hypo
thesis, which traced the sun, planets,
and satellites back to the condensation
of a revolving disc-like mass of nebulous
matter, one might have expected to find
the planes of rotation and revolution of
planets and satellites, not only in the
same general direction from west to east,
but nearly coincident.1 Jupiter, however,
* The tendency in astronomy now is to con
ceive the primitive nebula in a rough spiral form,
instead of the disk-shape which was earlier
imagined.
�THE GLACIAL PERIOD
is the only one of the planets which
fulfils this condition. Its axis of rotation
is inclined at an angle of 87°, or very
nearly at right angles, to the plane of its
revolution round the sun. But there is
no certain rule. That of Saturn, which
comes next in order on the outside of
Jupiter, has an inclination of 64°, while
that of the next planet on the inside,
Mars, is 6i° 18'. The earth’s axis is
inclined at 66° 33', while we find its
satellite, the moon, rotating like Jupiter
in a plane inclined only i° 30'; and the
axis of Venus, on the other hand, is so
oblique that in its winter the Arctic
Circle almost extends to the equator.
The case of the moon is most difficult
to understand, for on any theory of its
origin, whether as a condensed ring left
behind as the nebulous matter of the
earth contracted, or whether it was
ejected from the earth in some eruption
of its fiery stages, it might have been
expected to retain nearly the same rota
tory motion as its parent orb. But, if
so, clearly some unknown force must
have intervened, either to make the
earth’s axis more, or that of the moon
less, oblique than they were originally.
No such force is known, nor has any
plausible guess been made as to what
might have occasioned it; but the same
observation applies to many of the phe
nomena of the solar system. How has
35
the supply of solar heat been kept up for
the time required by geology ? How
does the energy we call gravitation act
across space from atom to atom, and
from star to star, and how is its supply
maintained? Why is the axis of the
earth inclined at an angle of 66° 30' to
the ecliptic, while that of Jupiter is
almost perpendicular to it, and that of
Venus oblique to the extent of nearly
two-thirds of a right angle ?
These are all problems which depend
on natural laws, and must lie within the
limits of human reason; but they are
pebbles which have not yet been picked
up on the shore of the ocean of truth.
It may bring home to us the force of
Newton’s saying that we are but as
children picking up such pebbles, when
we see what a multitude of the deepest
problems, as to the constitution of the
earth and of the universe, are raised by
the simple fact that Captain Nares
brought back a specimen of coral from
latitude 81° 40' in Greenland, and that
luxuriant forests, of a sub-tropical or
warm temperate vegetation, flourished in
Spitzbergen as lately as the period when
an anthropoid ape of the stature of man
was living in the south of France, and
when man himself, or his savage progeni
tors, were possibly, or even probably,
already chipping flints into rude imple
ments.
Chapter IV.
THE GLACIAL PERIOD
Importance of Date of Glacial Period Its
Bearing on Origin of Man—Short Date
Theories—Prestwich says 20,000, Lyell
200,000, years—Groll’s Theory—Prestwich’s
Arguments—Solar Heat—Human ProgressShown by Palaeolithic Remains—Geological
Evidence—Advance of Greenland Glaciers—
Denudation—Erosion of Cliffs and Valleys—
Deposition—Loess—Elevation and Depres
sion of Land—All Show Immense Antiquity—
Post-Glacial Period—Prestwich says 8,000 to
10,000 years—Mellard Reade 60,000—His
Reasons — Inconsistent with Short - Date
Theories—Causes of Glacial Period—Cooling
�36
THE GLACIAL PERIOD
of Earth—Cold Regions of Space—Change of
Earth’s Axis—More Vapour in Atmosphere—
Lyell’s Theory—Different Configuration of
Sea and Land—Conditions of Glaciation—
Problems Pressing for Solution.
The date and duration of the Glacial
period present a problem which is in
many respects of the highest interest.
It comes nearest to us as inaugurating
the recent period in which we live, and
for which we have historical data. It
affords the best chance of obtaining an
approximate standard by which to
measure geological times in years or
centuries. And it touches directly on
the great question of the Origin of Man.
For man is like the mammoth and
cave bear—an essential part of the
Quaternary fauna; and, whatever doubts
may.be entertained as to his existence in
Tertiary times, there can be none as to
the fact that his remains are found in
great numbers, and widely scattered over
the four quarters of the globe, in con
junction with those of the mammoth and
other characteristic Quaternary mammals,
in deposits which date, probably, from
the earlier, and certainly from the inter
mediate and later, stages of the Glacial
period. A short date, therefore, for that
period shortens that for which we have
positive proof of the existence of man,
and a very short date reduces it to a
length during which it is simply impos
sible that such a state of things as is
found existing in Egypt 7,000 years ago
could have grown up by natural laws and
evolution, and therefore brings us back
to the old theories of repeated and
recent acts of supernatural interference,
which, since the works of Lyell and of
Darwin, have been generally considered
to be completely exploded.
. The question, therefore, is one of the
highest theological as well as scientific
importance, and as such it has too often
been approached with theological pre
possessions. An extreme instance of
this is afforded by Sir J. Dawson, who,
in his work on Fossil Man, assigns 7,000
years as the probable date for the first
appearance of man upon earth, ignoring
the fact that at this date a dense and
civilised. population already existed in
Egypt with a highly-developed language
and system of writing and religion, and
that the types of the various races of
mankind, such as the Negro, the Copt,
the Semitic, and the Arian, are as clearly
distinguished in the paintings in Egyp
tian tombs 5,000 years ago as they are at
the present day.
Sir J. Dawson, however, though an
excellent geologist as long as the older
formations are concerned, is so domi
nated by the desire to square facts with
the account of creation in Genesis that
he becomes totally unreliable when the
human era is approached.
More recently, a very different autho
rity, Professor Prestwich, reasoning on
strictly scientific grounds, concludes
“ that the Glacial period, or epoch of
extreme cold, may not have lasted longer
than from 15,000 to 25,000 years, and
the Post-Glacial period of the melting
away of the ice-sheet to from 8,000 to
10,000 years or less ; giving to palaeo
lithic man no greater antiquity than,
perhaps, about 20,000 to 30,000 years,
while, should he be restricted to the socalled Post-Glacial period, his antiquity
need not go farther back than from
10,000 to 15,000 years before the time
of neolithic man.”
Prestwich cannot be accused of theo
logical bias, and, in fact, this estimate is
as inconsistent with theological theories
of Adam and Noah as if the figures
were multiplied tenfold. But he was
influenced by the wish to make geological
time accord with the short-date estimates
of Lord Kelvin, as to the possible
duration of solar heat. Be this as it
may, the fact that an authority like
Prestwich reduces to 20,000 years a
period to which Lyell and modern
geologists generally have assigned a
duration of more like 200,000, shows in
what a state of uncertainty we are as
to this vitally important problem. For
even the longest period for man’s anti
quity assigned by Prestwich would be
clearly insufficient to allow for the
�THE GLACIAL PERIOD
37
development of Egyptian civilisation as earth’s orbit was nearly circular as at
it existed 7,000 years ago, from savage present, they might become very powerful
and semi-animal ancestors, and still less when they coincided with one of the
for the evolution of the human race long periods at which the earth’s orbit
from earlier types, as is proved to have became flattened out into an ellipse of
been the case with the horse, stag, maximum eccentricity. He showed by
elephant, ape, and other mammals, with calculation that one such period began
whom man is so intimately connected, 240,000 years ago, attained its maximum
both in physical structure and in geo in 80,000 years, and passed away about
80,000 years before the present era.
logical association.
It is highly important, therefore, to These figures fitted in so well with those
consider the grounds on which the deduced by Lyell and other eminent
various theories are based of the pro geologists from geological data that
bable cause and duration of the Glacial Croll’s theory received very general
period. The first natural guess was to acceptance. But it is open to the same
attribute it to the precession of the objection, though in a less degree, that
equinoxes. Owing to this cause, the it requires us to assume a periodical
North Pole is alternately turned towards succession of Glacial epochs. The oscil
the sun every summer and away from it lations of the eccentricity of the earth’s
every winter, the reverse being the case orbit, about its maximum and minimum
in the Southern hemisphere. But, owing limits, though slow as measured by cen
to the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, turies, are not so slow according to the
the duration of the seasons is not exactly standards of geological time. Croll’s
equal, and summer and winter may occur calculations have shown that another
either when the earth is nearest to or position, such as is assumed to have
farthest away from the sun. At present caused the latest Glacial period, must
winter occurs in the Northern hemi have occurred 500,000 years earlier.
sphere when the earth is nearest the sun The calculations have not been carried
and moving with the greatest velocity, further back ; but it is tolerably certain
so that it is shorter by some days, and that, if Croll’s theory be correct, at least
summer longer, than in the Southern two or three Glacial periods must have
hemisphere. Now, it is a fact that what occurred during each of the great geo
This is opposed to
may be called a Glacial period prevails logical epochs.
at present in the Southern hemisphere, geological evidence. The Permian is
while corresponding latitudes in the the only formation in which what look
Northern hemisphere enjoy a temperate like traces of glacial action have been
climate. It might be thought that this unmistakeably found, and even these are
fact afforded an explanation of the considered doubtful by many geologists.
Glacial period; but this conjecture is Still more doubtful are the proofs of
negatived when it is considered that this older Glacial epochs deduced, from
revolution of the earth’s axis is periodical, isolated cases of boulders, as in the
and completed in about 22,000 years, Miocene conglomerate of Monte Superga,
so that, if it were the sole or principal near Turin, the Flysch of Switzerland,
cause of Glacial epochs, they must have and in some of the conglomerates of the
“Not proven” is the
recurred from the beginning of geological old Devonian.
time at this short interval, which is verdict which most geologists would
altogether inconsistent with the evidence return on the few alleged instances of
earlier Glacial periods; while, if Croll’s
of facts.
Croll expanded this crude theory into theory were true, we might expect to
one which had vastly more plausibility— find them frequently. Above all, it is
viz., that, although the effects of preces difficult to conceive how two or three
sion might be imperceptible while the great changes of temperature could have
�38
THE GLACIAL PERIOD
occurred during each geological forma advance of the glaciers of Greenland is
tion without showing unmistakeable traces found to be much more rapid than that
in the fauna, and still more distinctly in of the Swiss glaciers upon which previous
the flora, of the epoch. Ferns must theories had been based of the time
have died out and been succeeded by required for the advance of the Scandi
mosses j and these in their turn given navian and Laurentian ice-fields over
place to ferns two or three times over or Northern Europe and America.
more, during the growth of the coal. The two considerations may be briefly
measures, if any changes of climate had discussed. The first, as I have already
occurred at all resembling those of the shown, is based on a theory as to solar
recent Glacial period.
heat which is in the highest degree
The confidence, therefore, with which uncertain, which is being shaken by the
Croll’s theory was at first received has latest discoveries in physics, and which
been a good deal shaken, and, although requires rather to be tested by the posi
many geologists still believe that it may tive facts of geology than accepted as
have been one among other causes of an admitted conclusion to which those
the last great refrigeration, it can no facts must be squared. To allow it to
longer be considered as affording a distort those facts, or even to influence
reliable standard by which to measure us in interpreting them, is a preposses
the time in historical years, either of the sion only one degree less mischievous
Quaternary or still less of any previous than the theological prepossession which
geological epoch.
so long retarded the progress of true
We have to fall back, therefore, on science.
the geological evidence of deposition
The second consideration, as to the
and denudation, of the rise and fall of rate of human progress, is a mere ques
continents, of the erosion of rivers, tion of what each individual inquirer
valleys, and so forth, in any attempt to may think probable estimates, which will
decide between the 200,000 years of depend very much on his habit of mind
Lyell and the 20,000 years of Prestwich. and previous bias. There are positively
The former period, based on the minute no facts on which to base a conclusion
and careful investigations of Lyell, Geikie, as to the rate of progress of isolated
Croll, and other eminent geologists, held salvage tribes living in the hunter stage,
the field until the recent attempts of without contact with more civilised races.
Prestwich and others to reconcile geo The Australian savages, the South African
logy with Lord Kelvin’s theory of bushmen, the Negritos of the Andaman
solar heat, by reducing geological time Islands, may have lived as they were first
to about one-tenth of the accepted found by Europeans any time you like
amounts.
from 1,000 to 100,000 years, for aught
Prestwich, in his recently-published we know to the contrary. There is, in
works on geology, states that he has fact, no record of any such savage race
been influenced mainly by two con emerging into comparative civilisation
siderations :—
by any effort or natural progress of its
1. The wish to bridge over the wide own. Even much more advanced races
chasm between geologists and physicists trace back their knowledge of the higher
as to the possible duration of the supply arts and civilisation to some divine
of solar heat.
stranger, like the Peruvian Manco-Capac,
2. The difficulty of conceiving that or Chaldasan Oannes, who lands on their
man could have existed for a period of shores; or else, like the Egyptians,
80,000 or 100,000 years without change assign these inventions to gods, which
and without progress.
means that they are lost in the mists of
And the principal, or rather the sole, antiquity. The neolithic men of Europe
fact on which he relies is that the were clearly invaders, who brought a
�THE GLACIAL PERIOD
39
higher civilisation with them from Asia, decided change has taken place in the
and the knowledge of polished stone fauna, which in the Neolithic age corre
sponds closely with that of recent times
and metals was diffused by commerce.
It is incorrect, however, to say that in the same locality.
It is impossible, therefore, to deny
palaeolithic man shows no signs of change
or progress. On the contrary, the evi that both change and progress have
dence of palaeolithic deposits shows existed from the first appearance of man,
everywhere a progress which, although and there are absolutely no data to
it may have been extremely slow, is enable us to say what may have been
uniformly in the same direction—viz., the intervals of time required for the
upwards; There is no exception in the successive stages of this progress. All
hundreds, or rather thousands, ofinstances we can say is that, the more nearly
in which palaeolithic implements have primitive man approximated to a state
been found, to the law that the rudest of semi-animal existence, the slower
implements are found in the lowest must have been the steps by which he
deposits, and that improvements are emerged from it into comparative civili
traced in an ascending scale with sation.
We must fall back, therefore, on
ascending strata. This is most markedly
the case in caves, where, as in Kent’s geology for anything like reliable data on
Cavern, deposits of different ages have which to base any estimate of the time
been kept distinct and securely sealed required for the Quaternary or any
under separate sheets of stalagmite. In preceding geological epoch. Here, at
the rock-shelters, also, and river gravels, any rate, we are on comparatively certain
in which the relative antiquity is proved ground. So many feet of deposition, so
by their higher or lower levels, the same many of erosion, so many of elevation or
law prevails. In the oldest, where the depression; these are measurable facts
cave bear and mammoth are the cha which have been ascertained by compe
racteristic fossils, the stone axes, knives, tent observers. How much time is re
and scrapers are of the rudest description. quired to account for them ? This can
The celts or hatchets are mere lumps of only be an approximation, based on our
stone, roughly chipped, and with a blunt knowledge of the time in which similar
butt-end, evidently intended to be held results, on a smaller scale, have been
in the hand. In the next stage we find produced by existing natural laws within
finer chipping, and celts adapted for the Historical period. Still, if we argue
hafting; while arrow and javelin heads from natural causes, and ignore imaginary
appear, at first rude, but gradually cataclysms and supernatural interferences,
becoming barbed and finely wrought. we may arrive at some sort of maximum
Still later, with the advent of the reindeer and minimum limits of time within which
in large herds, affording in their horns a the observed results must lie.
This was the process by which Lyell
softer material than stone, a remarkable
improvement takes place, and eyed and his school of geologists arrived at
needles, barbed harpoons, and in some their estimates of geological time, and
cases engraved and sculptured portraits it is only by a careful study of their
of animals of the chase, testify to a works that it is possible to see how
decided advance in the arts of civilisa closely the chain is woven, and what a
tion. Above all these come the weapons mass of minute investigations support
and implements of the Neolithic age, their conclusions. The one solid fact
which, as already stated, are separated which Prestwich opposes to them is the
by a sharp line from the earlier records rapid advance of the glaciers of Green
of palaeolithic man. No polished stone land. Recent observations by Rink and
has ever been found in deposits belonging other explorers have shown that the
clearly to the Palaeolithic period, and a fronts of these glaciers advance much
�40
THE GLACIAL PERIOD
more rapidly than the rate which had
been assumed from the advance of the
Swiss glaciers.
The average rate of advance of the
great glaciers which discharge themselves
into Baffin’s Bay is about thirty-five feet
daily, or two and three-quarter miles
yearly. Calculating from these data,
Prestwich arrives at the conclusion that
the old ice-sheets which radiated from
the Scandinavian and Canadian moun
tains to a distance of about 500 miles
might have been formed in from 4,000 to
6,000 years. The great changes which
have taken place since the retreat of the
ice-sheets he accounts for by supposing
that, with a greater rainfall, these changes
went on much more rapidly than they
have done during the Historical period.
These views, however, did not command
the assent of other eminent geologists
who were present when Professor Prestwich’s paper was read, and they are open
to very obvious objections.
The rate of advance of a glacier thrust
outwards by such an immense mass of
ice as caps Greenland, through a narrow
fiord, on a steep descending gradient,
into a deep sea which floats off its front
in icebergs, affords little test of the
advance of an ice-sheet spread out with
a front of 1,000 miles over a whole con
tinent, unaided by gravity, and obstructed
by ranges of mountains 2,000 or 3,000
feet high, which it has to surmount.
Nor does the rate of advance of such a
sheet afford any clue to the time during
which it may have remained stationary
or been receding. The two latter condi
tions evidently depend on the climate at
the extremity of the ice-sheet, when the
ice pushed forward by it is melted by the
summer heat. As long-as the climate of
Switzerland remains the same, the Swiss
glaciers will remain at their present level
with slight local and temporary varia
tions ; and this must have been equally
true of the great Scandinavian and Cana
dian glaciers. They may have advanced
in 5,000 years, remained stationary for
50,000 years, and taken 100,000 years to
retreat, for anything we know to the con- |
trary, from the Greenland glaciers. Nor
is it a question of one advance and retreat
only, for there is distinct evidence of
several advances and retreats, and of
prolonged Inter-Glacial periods.
In the cliffs of the east of England
four boulder-clays are found, separated
by sands and gravels deposited as each
ice-sheet successively receded and melted;
and in France there is evidence of at
least one Inter-Glacial period, sufficiently
warm and prolonged to allow the Canary
laurel and fig--tree to supplant the lichen
and Arctic willow. The only real test of
time is from the amount of geological
work that has been done in the way of
denudation, deposition, elevation, and
depression since Northern Europe and
Northern America were covered by such
an ice-cap as now covers Greenland.
Tried by these tests, the conclusions
point uniformly to a longer rather than
a shorter duration of the Quaternary,
including the Glacial, period. If we take
denudation, we may refer to the fact that,
since palaeolithic man left his implements
on the banks of the old Solent river
above Bournemouth, the level of its
valley and of the adjacent land has been
denuded by that small stream to a depth
of 150 feet, and the erosion of the sea
now going on at the Needles has eaten
away a wide range of chalk downs which
were then continuous from the Isle of
Wight to Dorsetshire. The same action
of waves and tides as is now eroding
Shakespeare’s Cliff has removed the
chalk ridge between that cliff and Cape
Grisnez, and made England an island.
The valleys of the Thames, the Somme,
and other rivers of the south of England
and north of France have been excavated
to a depth of more than one hundred
feet and a width of miles by streams
which have produced no perceptible
change since the Roman period. And
a still more striking proof of the immense
time which has elapsed since the Glacial
period is afforded by the fact, stated in
Prestwich’s Geology, that the great basaltic
plateau of the Cascade Range in British
Columbia, which is cut through by the
�THE GLACIAL PERIOD
4i
argument from the disappearance of
Columbia river to the depth of 2,000 to e
the downs between the Isle of Wight and
3,000 feet, is underlain by the Northern t
Boulder-drift. Consider what a lapse of Dorsetshire, and between France and
time this requires. Since the Boulder- England, would remain the same. . Lord
1
Avebury estimates the rate of erosion of
drift, and therefore since the Glacial .
period, vast sheets of basalt must have a perpendicular cliff of solid chalk. at
<
only a few inches per century, at which
been poured out by volcanoes now <
extinct, and those sheets of hard rock rate it must have taken an enormous
1
time to wear away the chalk ridge
cut down by river action to the levels at 1
between the Needlesand Ballard downs;
which the relics of the old ice-cap now
but even if we read yards instead of
appear.
As regards the erosion of valleys, it is inches it must have taken a far longer
said that there may have been a much time than Prestwich assigns for the
whole Glacial period. There is nothing
greater rainfall formerly than in historical
times, and therefore erosion may have upon which reliable data are more
wanted than as to the rate of erosion of
gone on much more rapidly. Doubtless
there may have been more extensive inun solid cliffs by the action of the sea, for
dations while great masses of ice and here the hypothesis of a larger rainfall
and greater floods could not be invoked
snow were melting under the summer
to accelerate the rate, as in the case of
heat of an improving climate; but there
seems no adequate reason to account the erosion of valleys.
If from denudation we turn to deposi
for a much greater rainfall. The maxim
ex nihilo nihil fit applies to rain as to the tion, we find equally conclusive evidence
of the immense duration of the Glacial
other operations of nature, and more
rainfall
implies
more evaporation, period. The deposit known as loess
brought by warm winds blowing over is universally admitted to be one of fine
warm oceans, and deposited when it glacial mud, deposited tranquilly from
comes in contact with land at a lower sheets of inundation water, which have
overflowed wide tracts during the melt
temperature. We already have these
conditions in Western Europe, and the ing of the ice and snow, as the climate
improved and glaciers retreated. It is,
Gulf Stream and prevalent westerly
winds make the climate more moist and in fact, just such a loam as the Arve
genial than is due to the latitude. To deposits every summer on the meadows
have had it still more moist these condi of Chamouni, when the turbid river
tions must have been intensified, and issues in a swollen stream from the
there is no reason to suppose that in bottom of the mer-de-glace^ and overflows
recent times, and with the present con its banks. Now, this loess covers, as
with a mantle, the valley systems of all
figuration of sea and land, the Gulf
the great rivers of the Northern hemi
Stream could have been much warmer
than it now is. If the land had extended sphere, whose upper courses lie within
farther to the westward, the effect must the area which was covered by ice and
have been to diminish rather than snow during the Glacial period. The
increase the rainfall in the districts Rhone, the Rhine, the Danube, the
where the Somme and the Thames were Mississippi, the Yang-tse-kiang, all run
excavating their valleys ; and with more through cliffs of loess, which also fills
extensive forests and morasses rain-water their tributary valleys and spreads to a
would be absorbed as in a sponge, and considerable height up the slopes of the
descend more gradually and less in hills and over the adjoining plateaux.
It lies thickest in the valleys, dying off as
tumultuous floods.
But, even if a greater rainfall were; it ascends the slopes, though it can often
l
granted, it would not affect the erosion be traced to a height of 2,000 or 3,000
>
of solid chalk cliffs by the sea, and the feet. The thin beds of loess at these
,
�42
THE GLACIAL PERIOD
heights and on the plateaux are probably There is distinct evidence that since the
the result of the melting of frozen snow; first epoch of intense cold a great part of
but the great masses in the valleys are Britain has been submerged, until only a
evidently the accumulations of mud from, few of the highest mountains stood out
the overflows of the existing rivers as from the Arctic Sea as an archipelago of
they gradually cut their valley-systems frozen islands, and has been since
down from higher to lower levels.
elevated, with several minor fluctuations,
These accumulations invariably corres to its present height. Marine shells of
pond to the configuration of the existing an Arctic character have been found on
valleys, and overlie coarser sands and Moel-Tryfane, a hill in North Wales, in
gravels, showing that they have been glacial drift 1,392 feet above the level of
made since the rivers lost the transport the sea; and similar drift is traced con
ing power which they possessed when tinuously, both in Wales and Scotland,
they ran with a more rapid current to a height of over 2,000 feet. It rests
during the earlier stages of the retreat on rocks which had been already
of the glaciers. The thickness of this rounded and polished by glaciers.
accumulation of fine mud is stated by
It is evident, therefore, that sufficient
Lyell to be 800 feet or more above the time must have elapsed during an inter
existing alluvial plain of the Rhine, and mediate phase of the Glacial period for a
in other rivers it is even greater. It is depression of more than 2,000 feet,
impossible that such a thickness could followed by a re-elevation of an equal
have been accumulated in anything like amount. Consider what this means.
the shorter time assumed by some geolo All we know of these secular movements
gists for the duration of the whole of large masses of land shows them to be
Glacial period.
And yet it represents excessively slow. Even the small local
only one phase of its concluding period ; elevations and depressions, like those of
and it not only contains human remains, the temple of Serapis at Pozzuoli, which
but is itself clearly posterior to many of have taken place principally in volcanic
the sands and gravels in which remains districts, have not exceeded a few feet in
of man and his associated Quaternary historical times.
fauna have been undoubtedly found.
The deltas of rivers have increased,
It is difficult to suppose that the loess and the sea has sometimes eroded and
can have accumulated much more sometimes added to the outline of coasts;
rapidly than the alluvium of the Nile, but there has been no change for more
which has been proved to raise the soil than 2,000 years in the general level of
of Egypt at the rate of about three inches sea and land in any of the districts known
in a century. At this rate it would to the ancient world. The spit of shingle
require 320,000 years to accumulate the which connects St. Michael’s Mount with
800 feet assigned by Lyell to the loess Cornwall is still covered at flood and dry
of the Rhine valley. Making every at ebb tide, as when the ancient Britons
allowance for a quicker rate of deposition, carted their tin across it to barter with
it seems impossible that this deposit, Tyrian merchants. Marseilles is a sea
which is only an interlude in one of the port, as it was when the Phenician galleys
later stages of the Glacial period, can entered its harbour. In Egypt it is
have been accumulated in anything like evident that no considerable change of
the time assigned by Prestwich for the level, either of the land or of the Medi
whole of that period.
terranean, can have occurred since
If we consider the elevations and Menes embanked the Nile 7,000 years
depressions of land which have taken ago.
place since the commencement of the
The only authentic records we have of
Glacial period, the evidence all points to the rise or fall of masses of land as ascer
the same conclusion of immense antiquity. tained by actual measurement are those
�THE GLACIAL PERIOD
43
of Scandinavia and South America. The and Post-Glacial periods, of which this
Pacific shore of the latter was upheaved was only one of the intermediate phases,
five or six feet for a distance of 500 or within anything like the limits of from
600 miles by the shock of a single earth 25,000 to 35,000 years assigned to them
quake, and remains of human art, such by Professor Prestwich. On the con
as plaited rushes and string, have been trary, all the evidence from existing
found in a bed of marine shells near known facts points rather to an exten
Callao, showing that this part of the sion than to a contraction of the times
continent had been elevated eighty-five assigned by Lyell and Croll; and, if the
feet since it was inhabited by man. This, theory of the latter is correct, it would
however, gives no clue to the rate of almost seem as if his first period of
elevation, since we know nothing of the maximum refrigeration, 700,000 years
date of man’s appearance in Peru, and ago, was that of the formation of the first
the whole area is one of volcanic dis great ice-cap. And, whatever the time
turbance, which has been raised by may be, it is clear that in its earlier
successive earthquake shocks, and not stages man was already widely distri
buted over the earth, while there is the
by gradual elevation.
In the case- of Scandinavia, however, strongest probability that his origin must
where raised beaches up to the height of have taken place very much further back
600 feet above the sea level afford proof in the Pliocene, or even in the Miocene,
of much recent elevation, and where period.
It must always be remembered that,
there are no signs of volcanic action,
attempts have been made to measure the while the date of human origins in years
rate accurately by marks cut on rocks. or centuries is a question of great
The results, carefully considered by Sir scientific interest, it makes little difference,
C. Lyell, show a slow, uniform rate of as regards the religious and philosophical
elevation of two or three feet in a century, aspects of the question, whether it
where the rate is at its maximum at extends over 50,000 or 500,000 years.
Gefle, ninety miles north of Stockholm, In any case, the fact is beyond question
which dies out towards the North Cape that it is one of immense antiquity, far
and is converted into a slow depression transcending any period recorded by
in the south of Sweden. At this rate of history or tradition, and that during
three feet per century, the depression this immense period the course of
which carried the hills of Wales and humanity has been upward, and not
Man has not fallen, but
Scotland 2,000 feet down would have downward.
required 66,666 years, and its elevation risen, and arts, morals, societies, and
an equal period, so that, without any civilisation have been slowly developed
allowance for the time the sea-bottom from an animal-like condition of the
may have remained stationary, this inter lowest savagery.
Perhaps the issue between the long
lude of the Glacial period would have
required 133,333 years. Of course, it is and short dates of the Glacial period can
not implied that this was the real time, be most closely joined if we take that
or that the rate both of elevation and portion of it which comes nearest to
depression may not have been faster; historical times, and is known as the
but all the evidence points to its having Post-Glacial. Prestwich assigns to this
been gradual and not paroxysmal, as period a duration of “ 8,000 to 10,000
there are no traces of any contempora years or less ”—that is, a duration of not
neous earthquakes or volcanoes in Wales more than 2,000 or 3,000 years before
or Scotland. And, whatever the rate may the time when we know for certain that
have been, it is scarcely possible to sup a dense population and high civilisation
pose that it can have been such as to already existed in Egypt and Chaldaea.
enable us to compress the whole Glacial I I am not aware that he assigns any
�44
THE GLACIAL PERIOD
reason for this highly improbable date,
except the conjecture that the erosion of
river valleys may have gone on more
rapidly, owing to a greater rainfall.
Now, the duration of this Post-Glacial
period is a question, not of conjecture
or theory, but of a vast number of
definite and measurable facts. In the
British Islands these facts have been
carefully examined and ascertained with
great accuracy, mainly by the labours of
the Geological Survey. An eminent
officer of this Survey, Mr. T. Mellard
Reade, who has worked for many years
at these beds in Lancashire and Cheshire,
and is one of the best authorities
on the subject, read, in February,
1888, a paper before the Geological
Society, in which he gave a minute des
cription of the successive changes in
Post-Glacial times, by which the Mersey
valley and estuary were brought into
their present condition, with an estimate
of the time they may have required.
His estimate is “ that in round figures
60,000 years for Post-Glacial time is a
reasonable one, and, as represented by
these changes, well within the mark.”
This is not a random estimate, but
based on a careful calculation of the
different changes which are shown by
sections and borings to have actually
taken place. At the close of the Glacial
period the district was submerged, and
the valleys of the old Pre-Glacial rivers
were levelled up to a height of at least
200 feet by marine boulder-clay. The
land then rose until its surface became
an undulating upland plain, through
which the present rivers began to cut the
existing valleys. A mass of boulder
clay 200 feet in depth, and several miles
in width, must thus have been removed
by sub-aerial denudation before the next
stage, which consisted of a general
depression of the area, as is proved by
the fact that borings show a series of
estuarine deposits with marine shells in
places fifty feet thick, overlying the
boulder - clay, and levelling up the
inequalities of its surface due to sub
aerial erosion.
Above these silts and
clays is a peat-bed, containing stumps of
trees with their roots running down into
the clays below. This is a remarkable
deposit, for a similar submerged forest
bed is to be traced all round the shores
of the British Islands, from Devonshire
to the Orkneys. Evidently at a recent
period, geologically speaking, there has
been an age of forests which flourished,
and in their decay formed great beds of
peat, in localities where no trees have
grown within the Historical period.
Before these forests could have grown,
the marine silts and clays must have
been elevated above the sea to a suffi
cient height to become dry land and
covered with trees, and the climate must
have been very different from that at
present prevailing. It must have been
more of a continental and less of an
insular climate, and in all probability
the German Ocean was then dry land,
and the British Islands were connected
with an Europe which extended west
ward up to the ioo-fathom line. In no
other way can the existence of submerged
forests, and vast masses of peat with
remains of trees, be accounted for in
such isolated islands as those of Orkney
and Shetland, now swept by ocean blasts,
where no vestige of a tree has grown
for at least 2,000 years, when a Roman
author described them as “ carentes
sylva.”
But, at whatever height the land may
have stood during this Forest period, it
is evident that it must have subsided, at
any rate to the extent necessary to bring
the submerged forests to their present
level of some feet below low-water mark.
Or, indeed, some twenty-four feet more,
for there is evidence that a rise to this
extent has taken place, quite recently,
along a considerable portion of the
British coast, as shown by raised beaches.
When I say recently, I mean in geological
time, for in historical time there has
been no appreciable change of level
since the occupation of Britain by the
Romans, or for nearly 2,000 years.
In other regions, however, we have
still more conclusive evidence of the
�THE GLACIAL PERIOD
45
like the hippopotamus—which is found
great length of time which has elapsed
as far north as Yorkshire—-could by no
since any appreciable change has taken
possibility have lived in a country where
place in the physical geography of Europe,
the lakes and rivers were bound m ice
and in the present relative levels of sea
for a great part of the year. And still
and land. The localities described by
more conclusively by the presence in the
Homer in the Odyssey can be identified,
and the very cave and beach pointed south of France of a vegetation compris
ing the fig-tree and delicate Canary
out in Ithaca, on which Ulysses was
laurel in the region over which, at
landed by the Phoenician mariners. The
another period of the Glacial age,, herds
annals of Egypt carry us back . still
of reindeer roamed, feeding on lichens
farther, and show that no appreciable
and Arctic-willows, and accompanied, by
change can have taken place in the
the musk-ox, the glutton, the lemming,
levels of sea and land in the Eastern
and other exclusively Arctic animals.
Mediterranean for at least 7>oo° Years’
But, although the evidence for the
and probably for much longer.
great antiquity of the Glacial period
With these facts, even if we had no
other evidence than that of the sub seems to be conclusive, it must be con
merged forests, Professor Prestwich’s fessed that we are as far as ever from
estimate of 8,000 to 10,000 years for being able to assign any reliable explana
tion of the causes which produced it.
the whole Post-Glacial period down to
It came on suddenly, for the interval
the present time seems totally inadequate,
between the temperate Pliocene and the
and Mr. Mellard Reade’s of 60,000 years
extreme rigour of the first great ice-sheet
much more probable. In fact, it seems
is, geologically speaking, very short.
impossible that changes, such as. those
demonstrated to have occurred in the Only a few feet of clay and sand separate
the Cromer forest, in which the great
Mersey valley, can have been accom
southern elephant, the Elephas Meriplished within a period shorter than that
dionalis, and other Southern mammalia
which is shown by historical records to
roamed, from the boulder-clay of the
have elapsed in Egypt without perceptible
Scandinavian ice-sheet, which carried
change.
.
But, whether the duration of the Post- rocks from Lapland and Norway across
the North Sea and over hills and valleys
Glacial period be more or less, it is
almost to the centre of Europe. This
evidently a small fraction of the time
first period was the coldest, and after
which is required to account for the
several oscillations of heat and cold, each
work done during the preceding Glacial
period, or rather periods, for there is apparently less intense than its pre
decessor, the climate of the Northern
distinct evidence that there were several
advances and retreats of the ice-sheets, hemisphere finally settled down to its
_
and alternations of climates, during some present conditions.
These facts seem to negative most, ot
of which the winter temperature of
the theories, or rather guesses, which
Western Europe must have been higher
have been hazarded to account for this
than it is at present. The succession of
great and sudden refrigeration. It could
ice-sheets is clearly shown . by the
not be due to any cooling of the earth,
sections afforded by the coast cliffs of the
east of England, where four successive for this must have been gradual and pro
gressive, and the great cold of the first
boulder-clays are shown, separated, by
masses of sand and gravel deposited period, instead of decreasing, and dis
during the melting and retreat of each appearing, must have gone on increasing.
ice-sheet.
The alternation. of mild It has been supposed that the solar
Inter-Glacial with severe Glacial periods system on its journey through space may
is shown by the frequent presence, in have entered into, and emerged from,
regions very much colder than those of
caves of a Southern fauna, some of which,
�46
THE GLACIAL PERIOD
former ages or at present; but such a
When we inquire under what con
cause is at present little more than a con ditions great glaciers are now formed,
jecture. Nor is it possible that any we find them to be mainly heavy snow
alteration in the position of the earth’s falls combined with low temperature.
axis can have occurred within the earth, Thus the snow-fall is very heavy on the
for this would have disarranged its Pacific slope of the Sierra Nevada and
equatorial protuberance, which is pre coast range of Northern California and
cisely that of a fluid mass, rotating about British Columbia; but it does not, as
the present axis, and could not be formerly, produce glaciers, because the
altered without producing a complete temperature is not low enough to convert
cataclysm. No one can suppose that an the winter snow into the frozen “neve”
equatorial protuberance of more than which is the source of glaciers, and to
twenty miles can have been shifted produce the conditions under which the
through many degrees of latitude during accumulation finds its way to lower
the short interval between the close of levels by solid rather than by fluid rivers.
the Pliocene and the commencement of Again, extreme cold does not of itself
the Glacial period.
produce glaciers, as is seen in Northern
Neither can the theories which have Russia and Siberia. The influence of
been applied to earlier geological epochs ocean-currents is also apparent from the
of a warmer blanket of watery vapour effects of the Gulf Stream, which gives
and carbonic-dioxide in the atmosphere open winters to the coasts and islands
account for such a sudden refrigeration of Western Europe, in a latitude as high
and its gradual disappearance. The as that of the southern extremity of
conditions under which the Pre-Glacial Greenland.
Cromer forest flourished and those at
Here, then, are real causes which may
present existing in the same locality account for such a Glacial period as
cannot have been so different as to has been experienced, without invoking
imply a new order of cosmic or telluric utterly unknown and conjectural theories.
causes.
But there are considerable difficulties in
There remain only two at all plausible the way of accepting Lyell’s' theory as
theories—the astronomical one of Croll, the sole and sufficient explanation. The
and that of I,yell, who explains every suddenness with which the intense cold
thing by a different configuration of sea came on is one of them. It is difficult
and land. Croll’s theory explains many to suppose that such a great elevation
of the facts admirably, but, as we have of land in the North Atlantic as
seen, it cannot be accepted with con would be required took place, almost at
fidence, in the absence of proof that a once, in the short interval in which the
succession of Glacial periods has occurred Pliocene passed almost continuously
in previous geological epochs. Nor is it into the Quaternary. We are tolerably
very consistent with the fact that the certain, from the similarity of the fauna
cold period came on suddenly, and was and flora, that America was connected
greatest at first; while, if due to the with the Old Continent during the
eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, it ought Miocene period by a land passage across
to have come on gradually, and only . the North Atlantic, and yet there are
attained its maximum simultaneously no traces of a rigorous climate. On the
with that of the eccentricity. Lyell’s contrary, a climate almost sub-tropical
theory is, on the whole, most generally prevailed then in Greenland and Spitzaccepted, as actual experience shows bergen, far within the Arctic Circle.
that high land in high latitudes is a
Again, the Gulf Stream must always
cause of glacial conditions, and also have been an important factor in deter
that oceanic currents are a main factor mining the climate; but recent theories
in producing climate.
I as to the great geological antiquity of
�tertiary man
the Atlantic Ocean make it difficult to
conceive how this Stream can have een
greatly diverted from its present course,
in recent geological times. And t e
fact that the ice-cap extended much
farther to the south in North America
than in Europe makes it almost certain
that the influence of the warm Gulf and
cold Polar streams must have been felt
during the Glacial period, as they are
now. How otherwise can we account
for the fact that the difference of tem
perature between Europe and America
seems to have been almost the same
during the period of extreme cold m
both as it is now under temperate con
ditions? And the diversion of the
Gulf Stream would certainly tend to
produce less evaporation in the North
47
Atlantic, and therefore less fall of rain
or snow on Northern lands, whereas the
contrary is required to account for the
ice-caDS. We must conclude, therefore,
that, while Lyell’s theory affords the most
probable explanation, we are still in a
state of great uncertainty as to.the causes
which may have co-operated in bringing
about the last and greatest vicissitude of
climate, the Glacial period, which is so
interesting to us from its close connec
tion with the origin of man. The causes
and duration of the last Glacial period,
and whether there have been several,
and, if so, how many, of such periods
in former geological ages, are among the
problems of the future which are pressing
for solution.
Chapter V.
TERTIARY MAN
Antiquity of Man—Man part of Qu.atfna7
Fauna—What this Implies—Historical and
Neolithic Periods—Palaeolithic—Caves and
River Gravels—Glacial and Inter-Glacial
Deposits—Wide Distribution of Paleolithic
Implements in Early Quaternary Deposits—
Origin of Species—Evolution and Migration
—Diversity of Human Types—Objections o
Tertiary Man—Specialisation of type
Survival through Vicissitudes of Climate
Positive Evidence for—St. Prest—Thenay
Tagus Valley—Monte Aperto—Cuts in Bones
of Baleonotus—Elephas Meridionalis and
Halitherium—Auvergne Worked Flints; 1
Pliocene Tuffs-Castelnedolo-Human bones
in Pliocene—Olmo—Evidence from America
—Californian Auriferous Gravels—Tuolumne
and Calaveras Skulls—Age of GrayelsSkertchley’s Stone Implements—The Nampa
Image—Brazilian Caves—Pampiean Strata
Summary of Evidence.
geology, which only indirectly affect the
unscientific mass of mankind. It shatters
at a blow what had been for centuries
the axioms of the whole Christian world
respecting the origin of man,.his place
in creation, and the course of his develop
ment. A literal acceptance of the dates
and narrative of Genesis was assumed
to be the sole basis of knowledge on the
subject, and to question what was told
bv a Divine revelation was universally
considered to be alike ridiculous and
As far as science had a word to say it
was thought to confirm theology, for did
not Cuvier himself lay down as an axiom
that no human remains had been found
in a fossil state, or in conjunction with
the remains of any of the extinct animals
Of all the discoveries of modern science, And although a few scientific men here
that of the antiquity of man has been
and there, basing their ideas mainly on
the most startling. It is not like the
the dates of Egyptian monuments,
abstract discoveries of astronomy and
�48
TERTIARY MAN
pleaded for a somewhat longer period
than the date assigned by Archbishop
Usher, there may fairly be said to have
been a universal consensus of opinion
among all men, learned or unlearned,
that the existence of the human race on
our planet had not lasted longer than
some 6,000 or 7,000 years before the
present period. This was the universal
opinion only forty years ago, when in
1859 Mr. Prestwich read his memorable
paper to the Royal Society, confirming
the discoveries of M. Boucher de
Perthes, and proving beyond a possi
bility of doubt that flint implements,
fashioned by human hands, were found
in Quaternary gravels and brick-earths of
the valley of the Somme in juxtaposition
with remains of the mammoth and other
extinct animals, which must have been
deposited when the river ran at more
than one hundred feet above its present
level. The careful exploration of the
Devonshire caves of Brixham and Kent’s
Hole by committees of competent geolo
gists removed the last doubts on the
subject, and since then evidence has
accumulated so rapidly from all quarters
of the world that the existence of
Quaternary man has become as certain
a fact as that the earth revolves round
its axis.
Consider what this implies.
The
Tertiary epoch, in which mammalian life
for the first time appears prominently
and an approximation is made to existing
conditions, is itself but a small fraction
of the succession of geological ages since
our planet became the abode of animal
and vegetable life. At the outside, its four
divisions of Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene,
and Pliocene may together represent onetwentieth part of the thickness of fossiliferous strata from the Cambrian to the
Cretaceous. The Quaternary period
again is but a fraction of the Tertiary;
and the recent or existing epoch, includ
ing the Historic and Pre-Historic, is but
a fraction of the Quaternary. The recent
or Historical epoch, characterised by the
existing fauna, and, in the main, by the
existing climate and disposition of sea
and land, is certainly not less than 7,000
years old, when Egyptian records and
monuments show us a populous and
highly civilised nation already existing
in the valley of the Nile and civilised
empires of almost as early a date in
Chaldaea and China. The Pre-Historic
period, characterised by the existing
fauna and by neolithic man, must have
lasted much longer before such empires
could have been developed from the
rude and primitive civilisation shown by
the Scandinavian Kjokken-middens, the
Swiss Lake-dwellings, and other early
records of the Neolithic period. Borings
in the Nile valley have everywhere
brought up rude pottery and other
neolithic remains from depths below
the foundations of the oldest historical
monuments, which, at the present rate
of silting up by the annual inundations
of the river, imply an antiquity of about
26,000 years. This may not be quite
accurate as a chronological standard in
years, but undoubtedly this, and other
similar calculations from physical changes
during the Neolithic period, all point to
the conclusion that 15,000 or 20,000
years is the shortest time that can have
elapsed since its commencement.
Then comes a long break.
The
climate, geographical and physical con
ditions, and fauna have undergone great
changes when we next meet with traces
of man, and the Quaternary period
stretches back into the Pliocene, through
an immense though unknown duration
of time. This much, however, is known,
that it embraces two, if not more, great
Glacial periods, during the first and most
severe of which the northern halves of
Europe and America were buried under
an ice-cap, in places 5,000 or 6,000 feet
thick, resembling that of modern Green
land, and driving all terrestrial life before
it into more southern regions. These
Glacial periods alternated with long
Inter-Glacial ages, when the ice retreated,
and vegetation and animal life again
returned to their old abodes, and again
advanced and retreated, finally occupy
ing their present stations when the
�TER T1A R Y MA N
49
glaciers had shrunk into the valleys of and flint flakes and scrapers, are almost
identically of the same type.
the loftier mountains.
These facts have such an important
It is certain, also, that vast changes in
the physical geography and configuration bearing on the origin of the human race
of sea, land, and rivers. occurred during that it is desirable to consider them in
this period. The British Islands, or a some detail.
The discoveries, both of implements
large portion of them, were at one time
submerged to a depth of certainly i,5oo> and of human skulls and skeletons, have
and probably 2,000 or 2,500, feet beneath now been so numerous, especially in the
an Arctic sea, presenting nothing above caves of France, England, Germany, and
it but an archipelago of what are now Belgium, that it has enabled_ geologists
mountain peaks while at another time not only to prove the existence of
they were part of an European continent, Quaternary man, but to a considerable
then connected with Africa, and across extent to analyse and classify the succes
which huge extinct lions, tigers, bears, sive stages of his progress.
The earliest is that known as the Cave
elephants, and rhinoceroses roamed, and
left their remains in the caves of lime bear epoch, which occupies the lowest
stone districts and the sands and gravels position in the oldest caves, and in
of rivers when they flowed 100 feet which the rudest human implements are
or more above their present level. found associated with a preponderance
During part of this period a southern of bones belonging to this formidable
fauna, and even the hippopotamus, found animal. Thus, in Kent’s Cavern, in
their way as far north as Yorkshire, Devonshire, we have in descending
testifying to the existence of great rivers order:—
1. A layer of black mould, near the
flowing from the south across this
entrance, from three to twelve inches
Quaternary continent.
Now, three facts have come out clearly thick, containing successively relics of
the Historical and Neolithic periods,
from the latest research.
1. That man is a characteristic mem and bones of existing species of animals.
2. A bed of granular stalagmite from
ber of this Quaternary fauna just as
much as any of these extinct animals ; one to three feet thick, securely sealing
or, in other words, that, wherever you all below it.
3. Red cave earth, in places five to six
find the mammoth, cave bear, or woolly
rhinoceros, you may expect to find man j feet thick.
4. A bed of older crystalline stalagmite,
and where you find man in old deposits
you may expect to find the mammoth, in places twelve feet thick.
5. Breccia of angular stones; red-clay
cave bear, and rhinoceros.
2. That the man whom you thus find and bones to the rock floor of the cave.
In the lower deposits (4 and 5) the
is “ Palaeolithic man ”—that is,' man in
such a rude and savage state that he has bones are numerous, but almost exclu
not yet attained the art of polishing sively those of the cave-bear, and a few
stones, and uses implements roughly human implements have been found,
fashioned by chipping from flints or other including a flint hache or celt in the
breccia, which is the oldest deposit of
hard stones of the district.
3. That these rude implements are all. In the upper stalagmite, and cave
found in the caves and gravels of the earth beneath it, were found numerous
Quaternary period in Europe, Asia, human implements of various sorts,
Africa, and America—in fact, throughout including a bone needle and barbed
the whole world, so far as it has been harpoon, associated with remains of lion,
hitherto explored; and, wherever they cave-bear, mammoth, rhinoceros, hyena,
are found, the rudest and earliest imple reindeer, Irish elk, and other usual
ments, such as stone hatchets or celts, animals of the Quaternary fauna,
�5o
TERTIARY MAN
including one tooth of the Machairodus
or sabre-toothed tiger, which is charac
teristic of the Pliocene fauna.
Similar facts have been recorded in
such a multitude of caves in France,
Belgium, and Germany, especially in
those of the South of France, that it is
a perfectly well-established fact that the
Palaeolithic period may be divided
roughly into three, groups—an upper
one, in which the reindeer was very
abundant, and
human implements
showed a considerable advance in
civilisation; a middle stage, in which
the reindeer was scarcer and the
mammoth more abundant, with ruder
human implements, though still showing
considerable design; and the lowest of
all, with fewer remains of the mammoth
and more of the cave-bear, and with
fewer implements, and those exclusively
of stone of a very rude type.
This is exactly what might be expected
if the theory of evolution applies to the
human race. The first dawn of intelli
gence when primitive man emerged
from the animal state would show itself
by picking up natural stones to use as
tools or weapons of offence. He would
naturally select stones of the type of the
hache, with a sharp point for crushing in
the skull, and a blunt butt-end to give
weight to the blow and a firm grasp for
the hand. This would hardly require
more intelligence than that of the
gorilla, who, living in forests, uses
branches of trees as clubs; or of apes,
who throw stones at enemies. The next
stage would be to improve natural
stones, or supply them if deficient, by
chipping, so as to give a sharper and
more solid point or edge, and a similar
process would apply to flint chips used
as knives or scrapers.
After a while, some genius would dis
cover that, by hafting the hache and
attaching it as a lance to a long handle,
he could kill without coming to such
dangerous close quarters as was neces
sary when striking with the hand. This
would lead to finer chipping, both to
ensure penetration at the point, and to
fit the butt-end for attachment. And
finally the invention of the bow would
lead to diminished size and still finer
chipping for the arrow-head. From this
point the progress can be readily traced
to the invention of barbs for arrows and
harpoons, and the occasional substitution
of bone for stone as being more easily
scraped into the desired form; and from
these the evolution is uninterrupted up
to the beautifully finished weapons of
the Neolithic and Bronze periods. But
the starting-point is the rude stone
hache, such as is universally found in
the oldest deposits of caves and river
gravels.
There has been a good deal of discus
sion as to the purposes for which these
implements were employed; but there
can be little doubt that their primary
use was for killing large game and
human enemies.
The bushmen of
South Africa, who represent most nearly
this primitive savage state, use for this
purpose implements so closely resem
bling those of the river drifts that some
of those exhibited at the Colonial Exhi
bition, and labelled “pourle gros gibier,”
might have been specimens from Amiens
or St. Acheul.
A good deal of discussion has also
taken place among British geologists as
to the exact place, with reference to the
great Glacial periods, occupied by the
earliest drift and cave implements which
have been found in this country. Most
of them are Post-Glacial—that is, later
than the retreat of the last of the two or
more great ice-caps which extended over
all except a few of the southern counties
of England, during the Quaternary
period.
Some, however, are clearly
proved to be either Inter-Glacial or
Pre-Glacial, being overlaid by boulder
clay, as at Brandon, and in the caves of
Cae Gwyn in North Wales ; while as to
the lowest deposits of many caves, as,
for instance, the lower stalagmite and
bone breccia of Kent’s Cavern, there is
no distinct evidence except of extreme
antiquity, though the presumption is
strong that they are either Pre-Glacial or
�TER T1A R Y MA N
Inter-Glacial. Mr. Pengelley, who has
devoted years of research to Kent’s
Cavern, expresses an unhesitating opinion
that the lowest deposits are Pre-Glacial.
As fresh evidence accumulates, it all
points towards the existence of man on
British soil in Pre-Glacial, or very early
Glacial, times, and therefore seems, to
carry it back far beyond the period
assigned to it by Post-Glacial geologists.
Thus, quite recently, rude palseolithic
implements of unmistakeable human
design have been found near Wye, in
Kent, at an elevation of upwards of 300
feet, in a gravel which does not corres
pond with the existing valleys, but which
overspreads the chalk plateau of the
North Downs, and was drained by rivers
running southwards in a directly oppo
site course to that of the present streams.
Professor Prestwich, whose bias, as we
have seen, is towards shortening the
period of man’s antiquity, after a per
sonal examination of the locality, came
to the conclusion that this drift was
immensely older than the ordinary highlevel gravels of existing rivers, and in all
probability was Pre-Glacial.
Since Professor Prestwich’s paper was
read, similar palseolithic implements have
been found by Mr. Worthington Smith,
on the Chalk downs near Dunstable, up
to a height of 759 feet above Ordnance
datum, and some of them embedded in
the brown clay which, with gravel, covers
the chalk. But the question of the evi
dence afforded by England is compara
tively unimportant, for the wider induc
tion of continental experience settles
conclusively the general relations of
palseolithic man to the Quaternary
period. It is absolutely certain that in
the later stages of the Palaeolithic record,
when man had already made consider
able progress, and was able to draw and
carve figures of the contemporary animals
with a good deal of artistic skill, vast
herds of reindeer roamed over the plains
of Southern France and Germany, accom
panied by a group of Arctic animals,
such as the musk-ox and the lemming,
which are found even on the Italian side
gi
of the Alps. When this was the case in
Southern Europe, it is evident that all
its northern portion and higher, moun
tains must have been covered by ice and
frozen snow, and one of the great Glacial
periods must have been in full force.
All earlier deposits, therefore, in which
ruder implements and a more temperate
or even African fauna are found must of
necessity have been either Inter-Glacial
or Pre-Glacial, and there is no reason
able doubt that the earliest of such
deposits date back at least to the earlier
stages of the Quaternary period. We
must recollect that, when we talk of
geological periods, there was no real
break in the succession of time. We
merely use a convenient expression to
distinguish those formations between
which the evidence of the regular pro
gression of development has been lost
for such a long period, that when we
find it again the characteristic fauna and
flora have undergone a marked change.
But the idea of cataclysms and of re
peated destructions and miraculous
renovations of the whole vegetable and
animal worlds is completely exploded,
and every day affords fresh evidence of
the gradual process of transition from
one so-called epoch or formation to the
succeeding one. Thus types and even
species appear sparingly in one forma
tion, become abundant in another, and
finally die out and disappear, or persist
with slight modifications, as we see. in
the first appearance of fish in the Silurian
and of reptiles in the Carboniferous eras,
in each case in one or two geological
periods before they became the pre
dominant type. This applies specially
to the relation of the Quaternary to the
Pliocene and Miocene periods. It is
difficult to say definitely where one
begins and the other ends. Thus not
only do most of the great Mammalian
genera persist from the Miocene, through
the Pliocene and Quaternary, down to
the recent periods, but some specific
forms, such as the tapir, have continued
unchanged; while the ox, bear, horse,
wild boar, and other species first found
�52
TERTIARY MAN
in the Pliocene survive through the
Quaternary to the present day.
The gravels and sands of St. Prest,
the forest bed of Cromer and other Pre
Glacial formations, contain such a mix
ture of characteristic mammals that
some geologists have considered them
to be Pliocene, while others have pro
nounced them to be Quaternary.
What we really can affirm with certainty
is that as soon as we find a Quaternary
fauna firmly established we find man
forming an essential and characteristic
part of it. Can he be traced further
back into the Tertiary? The question
involves points of the highest interest,
for, as in the issue between short-time
and long-time geologists as to the dura
tion of the Glacial period, the issue really
is between evolution and miracle.
Even if the Glacial or Quaternary
periods were extended to the 200,000
years assigned to them by Lyell, Croll,
Geikie, and other leading geologists, the
difficulty as to man being a product of
evolution would be only postponed, and
not removed. By no possibility could
such conditions of the human race as
are found at the commencement of the
Quaternary period have been produced
by the natural laws applicable to the rest
of the animal creation, unless man can
be carried back into the Tertiaries.
For under what circumstances do we
find undoubted traces of the existence of
man upon the earth early in the Quater
nary period? Not in small numbers, or
in some limited locality, in which we
may suppose the human species to have
originated, and from which we can trace
the different races slowly developing and
radiating out to more distant regions.
No; when we find them lowest in the
Quaternary, we find them in large num
bers and practically all over the world,
from China to Peru, and from Northern
Europe to South Africa. This is so
important that I proceed to state the
facts in some detail, and specify the
localities in which stone hatchets and
knives of the rude type of the oldest
river drifts and lowest cave deposits have
been found in Europe, Asia, Africa, and
America.
The list is doubtless incomplete, and
every day is adding to it, but it is already
amply sufficient to prove the general
proposition.
In England they have been found in
the river drifts and deposits of the
Thames, the old Solent river, and all
the existing and Quaternary valley
systems south of a line drawn across it,
a little to the north of the Bedford Ouse;
and in the caves of all the limestone
districts of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, North
and South Wales, Somersetshire, and
Devonshire; and they are absent only
in those northern districts which were
covered with ice during the successive
phases of the Glacial period. In France
and Belgium they are met with in the
oldest drifts of the valleys of the Seine,
Somme, Meuse, Loire, Rhone, Garonne,
and other rivers, and in almost innumer
able caves and rock-shelters in all the
limestone districts, from Liege and
Maestricht to the Pyrenees, and on the
Mediterranean coast at Mentone. In
Spain and Portugal they appear in the
drifts of the Tagus and Ebro, and in
Italy in those of the Tiber and Arno.
In Central and Southern Germany and
Switzerland they are found in numerous
caves and river drifts, often deeply buried
under thick beds of the loess, or fine
glacial mud, which was deposited during
the melting of the great ice-fields.
In Asia these palaeolithic implements
associated with extinct animals have
been found almost everywhere where
search has been made for them. They
have been found in Asia Minor and
Syria, in the Caucasus, in Mongolia,
China, and Japan. India, which has
been examined by competent geologists,
affords the most authentic and complete
record. Here they have been found in
large numbers, both in the river drifts of
the Nerbudda, Godavery, and other
rivers, and in the laterite of Madras and
other places, which is a loamy land
deposit similar to that of the loess of
Europe and China. Implements almost
�TERTIARY MAN
53
exactly of the type of those of St. Acheul, twenty feet deep, in an old bed of gravel,
1
though made of quartzite, as. flints were with large boulders, which is exposed in
wanting, have been found, in Bengal, 1the cliffs of the river’s banks. A portion
Orissa, the Deccan, Scinde, Assam, and of a human lower jaw was found at a
<
other provinces; and some of them in depth of sixteen feet in the gravel, and
■
deposits which, from the extinct animals also a human skull of a peculiar type,
associated with them, experienced.geolo being small, long, and very thick.
We are able, therefore, to affirm as an
gists are doubtful whether to consider as
upper Pliocene or as the lowest Quater undoubted fact that, at the earliest stage
of the Quaternary period, the human
nary.
In Africa well-characterised palaeolithic species not only existed, but was already
implements have been found in Algeria widely diffused over four continents, and
and in the valley of the Nile; and at the occupied nearly the whole surface of the
other extremity of the continent, in habitable globe. How did man get
there ? Evidently by the same process
Natal and at places in Cape Colony.
America furnishes some of the most by which other fauna become distributed
conclusive proofs, both of the extreme over wide distances and extensive zoo
antiquity and of the wide diffusion of logical provinces—that is, by migration
man. Human implements, human skulls from one or more centres, where the
and bones, have been found associated different species were first developed in
with the mastodon and other extinct the course of evolution. In the case of
animals over nearly the whole area of land mammals this implies that there
the United States; in Mexico, Brazil, has been an uninterrupted land connec
and in the pampas of Buenos Ayres and tion within recent geological periods.
There is no fact better established by
Patagonia; associated in South America
geological and zoological research than
with the Glyptodon and other extinct
mammals of its peculiar fauna. In one that the existing fauna are not uniformly
instance, in Buenos Ayres, a human alike throughout the world, but are
skull was found under a huge carapace located in separate provinces, bounded
of this extinct armadillo, which it was by some barrier of sea, mountain, or
conjectured might have been used as a desert, insurmountable by the ordinary
roof for a hut. In these South American animal species. The most signal instance
cases, however, as well as in those which of this is that of the absolute separation
will presently be referred to from Cali of the two totally dissimilar faunas of
fornia, the geological age is uncertain, Southern Asia and Australia, by the
and they are considered by some to be narrow strait of Lombok, not above
evidences of Pliocene, by others of early twenty miles wide, which is a deep sea
Quaternary, man; while in other instances fissure or channel, dating back to very
they are probably Post-Glacial, or, at remote geological times. On the other
latest, Inter-Glacial. In one typical hand, in the north temperate zone of
case, that of the discoveries of Mr. Europe and Asia one may travel from
Abbott in the drift of the Delaware the Atlantic coast of Western Europe to
valley at Trenton, in New Jersey, there the Eastern coast of China without
can be little hesitation in referring them observing any marked change in the
to the same early Quaternary period as familiar fauna and flora, the extension of
the corresponding finds in the oldest which to the British Islands and Japan
river drifts of Europe and Asia, though leaves no doubt that they recently formed
it is not yet fully admitted. The Trenton part of the same continent; while the
implements are of a granular argillite,, existence of so many of the same forms
closely resembling in size and form the: in North America makes it certain that
flint implements of the valley of the: there was a land connection, at no
Somme; and they are found sometimes> distant geological date, between the Old
l
�TERTIARY MAN
and New Worlds, by what is now the the exception of the Esquimaux and
North Atlantic, and probably also by Fuegians, there is little doubt that they
Behring’s Straits. The familiar instance would creep onwards along the sea-coast,
of the absence of snakes in Ireland accumulating their Kjokken-middens as
shows clearly how this extension of a they went, until they had occupied the
fauna was accomplished by gradual whole continent. But the process must
migration. Ireland was connected with necessarily have been a very slow one,
England and with continental Europe and there must have been already a con
long enough to enable most forms of the siderable population and pressure on
European fauna to occupy it. Herds of the means of subsistence, before these
Irish elk, deer, oxen, wolves, and other Quaternary men could have spread over
animals roamed over it; but some of the nearly the whole habitable globe, and
slower-moving reptiles had not had time left their remains where we now find
to reach it before it became finally them. . The fact that they are so found
separated from England by St. George’s makes it certain that they must have had
Channel.
a long series of ancestors, and that the
The only alternative to migration is first origins of the human race must be
the special miraculous creation of every sought in a vastly more remote antiquity.
separate species which has ever existed The immense time required for such
throughout the vast range of geological migrations will be apparent when we
time, and this idea is as thoroughly consider that it is not only a question of
exploded as that of the absence of traversing such great distances, but much
snakes in Ireland being due to the prayers more of becoming gradually acclimatised
of St. Patrick in the seventh or eighth during the passage from Arctic, or tem
century. It breaks down under the perate, through tropical regions. Evi
weight of the innumerable instances of dently the existing Esquimaux or Lap
special miracles, which must be invoked landers could not reach Patagonia or
on the most trivial occasions. Thus it South Africa without passing through a
has been shown that more than 160 wide extentof hot andpestilential country,
miraculous creations must have taken in which the northern immigrants could
place to account for the separate species only live by the gradual survival of new
of land-shells alone which are peculiar types adapted to the altered conditions.
to the little group of the Madeira Islands.
Another well-established fact points
Admitting, then, evolution to be the to the great antiquity of the human race
cause of the origin of species, and when those early palaeolithic implements
migration for their diffusion, it must be were so widely distributed. A sufficient
observed that the human species is number of skulls and skeletons have
specially organised for extensive migra been found associated with these imple
tion. . The structure of man, and his ments to enable ethnologists to classify
intelligence, even in the most rudi them as belonging to essentially different
mentary form, enable him to overcome races. Thus the skulls found in America
obstacles and resist changes of climate all present distinctive characters of the
and environment, which would be fatal high and narrow type now existing among
to most of the brute creation. And, as the various native races of that continent.
a matter of fact, in historical times we In Europe those of the Canstadt type,
know that New Zealand and the Pacific which is considered to be the oldest,
Islands have been peopled by migration; and of which the celebrated Neander
and that races like the Bushmen, thal skull is an extreme instance, are
Esquimaux, and Australians, which come very dolicocephalic, or long-headed, with
nearest to the state of primitive men, markedly projecting brows, differing
are essentially migratory. If the popu essentially from those of the Cro-Magnon
lation of America were annihilated, with type, which represent an exceptionally
�TERTIARY MAN
tall race with a good cranial development,
equal to that of many modern European
races j while the Furfooz type, again, is
that of a dwarfish race, with small round
heads, resembling the modern Lap
landers. This diversity of race argues
for a long departure from the original
type, involving development through a
long series of ages. We know from the
Egyptian monuments that a period of
5,000 years has been insufficient to pro
duce any perceptible change in the type
of the Negro, the Copt, the Semite, and
other races of Africa and Western Asia.
It is remarkable, however, that, while
this diversity of race type is thus early
found, there is almost perfect identity
among the early palaeolithic implements
found in regions the most distant from
one another. Rude stone hatchets,
knives, and scrapers are of the same
form and fabricated in the same way
whether they come from the gravels of
the Delaware, the Thames, the lagus,
the Godavery, or the Yang-tse-Kiang;
from the caves of Devonshire, the deserts
of Mongolia, or the plains of Patagonia
and South Africa. The only apparent
exception is afforded by the stone imple
ments found in the auriferous gravels of
California, which consist mainly of rude
stone mortars and pestles, resembling
those used for pounding acorns by
modern tribes of Digger Indians,
inhabiting the same districts. This
uniformity of industrial type over such
wide spaces shows that the peopling of
the earth by migration must have been
effected while the human race was still
in that uniform state of rudimentary
intelligence which had not got beyond
the first stage of supplementing natural
stones by rude chipping.
Thus far we have been going on
ascertained facts, admitted by all com
petent geologists ; but in taking the next
step, and carrying man back into the
Tertiary period, we enter on new ground,
where positive evidence is scanty and
disputed, and where probabilities and
theoretical preconceptions are, to a great
extent, invoked to supply its want.
55
Among English geologists especially
there still remains a strong desire to
abridge as much as possible the time of
man’s existence upon earth. The evi
dence furnished by England, which has
been almost entirely covered during
recent geological times by two or more
successive ice-sheets, is comparatively
weak to carry back the evidence for
palaeolithic man, even into Pre-Glacial
times, and some good authorities still
contend for all such remains in this
countrybeingPost-Glacial. Others, again,
of less weight, and the general public who
have a smattering of science, have a
vague fear that every extension of man’s
antiquity carries them further away from
the old theological standpoint, and
brings them nearer to the proof that
man is the product of evolution from
an animal ancestry. The evidence of
facts has, however, become too strong
to maintain this ground, and, the Qua
ternary line of defence being broken
through, the defenders of old ideas
have fallen back on their next entrench
ment, and insist that man, if not I ostDiluvian or Post-Glacial, is, at any rate,
Post-Tertiary.
We pass here from the region of facts
universally admitted into that of proba
bilities, and statements of facts which,
although probable in themselves, and
apparently well authenticated, . are still
disputed by competent authorities. Let
us first deal with the probabilities. for
and against the existence of Tertiary
man. It is objected that an animal so
highly organised and specialised as man
can hardly have come into existence in
geological periods characterised by a
fauna, so much nearer the primitive and
generalised type of Mammals, as those
of the Pliocene, and still more of the
Miocene and Eocene eras. The answer
to this is that such a highly specialised
specimen of the anthropoid type as the
Pliopithecus undoubtedly did exist in
the Middle-Miocene. This, which was
an anthropoid ape, as highly organised
as the chimpanzee or gorilla, and of a
stature equal to that of man, has been
�56
TERTIARY MAN
found in that formation in the South of man in the Quaternary period, sprung
France and in Germany. A slightly suddenly into life along with him by
lower form, the Dryopithecus, has also some act of miraculous creation, in the
been discovered. Now, looking at man teeth of all the accumulated and irre
simply as an animal, the anthropoid ape sistible evidence which shows them
is just as much a specialised develop existing in the upper Tertiary, and traces
ment of the primitive quadrumanous their ancestry and lines of progressive
type, as man. Monkeys and apes are development through the Miocene into
specialised for life in forests and climbing the earliest Eocene period.
trees, as man is for life on the earth and
Having thus cleared the ground of
walking; but in their anatomical struc probabilities, I proceed to state the
ture they correspond bone for bone and positive evidence for discoveries of
muscle for muscle. If there is any human remains in Tertiary formations,
truth in evolution, they must have premising that it is nearly all the result
descended, not necessarily one from the of the last few years, and is rapidly
other, but both from a common ancestor. accumulating; and that there is no
Again, it is said that man could not reason to expect that it will ever be
have survived for such a succession of abundant, as the more nearly we approach
geological periods during which so many to the time and place of man’s origin,
other species have died out and dis the narrower must be the area, and the
appeared. But here, again, the answer fewer the stations, at which we can hope
is that many of the animals which are to find his traces, and the greater the
associated with man as part of the effect of denudation in obliterating those
Quaternary fauna have, in fact, survived traces.
unchanged from the Pliocene, and with
The first well-authenticated instance
slight modifications from the Miocene is that of St. Prest, near Chartres, on
periods, and that man’s larger brain, and the Eure, one of the tributaries of the
consequently greater intelligence, must Seine. Here the lowest gravels of the
have given him a better chance of present river rest on gravels of what
survival than in the case of elephants, Lyell, after personal examination, con
rhinoceroses, oxen, and horses. If man sidered to be an earlier Pliocene river,
could survive, as we know he did, the and which are characterised by the
severe and extreme fluctuations of the older forms of elephant and rhinoceros—
different Glacial, Inter-Glacial, and Post- the Elephas Meridionalis and Rhinoceros
Glacial periods, what was there in the Leptorhinus, instead of by the Quater
milder and more equable conditions of nary Mammoth and Rhinoceros Tichothe Pliocene and Miocene to have pre rinus. In these older gravels have been
vented his existence ?
found stone implements, and bones of
The theoretical objections, therefore, the Elephas Meridionalis with incisions
to Tertiary man seem to be of the evidently made by a flint knife worked
weakest and vaguest character, while, on by a human hand. This was disputed
the other hand, the probabilities in its as long as possible, but Quatrefages, a
favour are so cogent as almost to amount very cautious and competent authority,
to demonstration. How could man, states in his latest work, published in
early in the Quaternary period, have 1887, that it is now established beyond
already found his way to the remotest the possibility of doubt. It is con
regions of the globe, and developed a tended, however, by some geologists,
varie.ty of types and races, if his first that this formation, though always con
appearance on earth lay within the sidered to be Pliocene until human
limits of that period? One might as remains were found in it, is in reality
well suppose that elephants, horses, and a very low stage of the Quaternary, or
all the other mammals associated with a transition bed between it and the
�TERTIARY MAN
57
Pliocene. The instance, therefore, been deceived by workmen, and mis
cannot be accepted as absolutely con taken in supposing that flints, which
clusive for anything more than tne really came from overlying Quaternary
existence of man at the earliest com strata, were found in the Miocene
mencement of the Quaternary period, deposit. This hardly seems probable in
though the evidence all points to the the case of such an experienced observer,
gravels being really Pliocene. The and, had it been so, the implements
same uncertainty applies to the cele might have been expected to show, the
brated discovery by the Abbe Bourgeois, usual Quaternary types of celts, knives,
of flint knives and scrapers in the and arrow-heads fashioned by percussion,
Miocene strata of Thenay, near Blois. whereas the specimens found all bear a
When these were first produced, the distinct type, being scrapers and borers
opinion of the best authorities was very of small size, and partly fashioned by
equally divided as to their being the fire. The other supposition is based on
work of human hands; but subsequent no evidence, and contrary to all we
discoveries have produced specimens as know of the limited intelligence of
to which it is impossible to entertain any any anthropoid ape. If it were, true,
doubt, especially the flint knife and two we might at once say that the missing
small scrapers figured by M. Quatre- link had been discovered, as a Dryo
fages' at p. 92 of his work on Races pithecus, able to do what the Mincopics
humaines. They present all the charac are now doing, might well have been the
teristic features by which human design ancestor of man. On the whole, the
is inferred in other cases—viz.,. the bulb evidence for these Miocene implements
of percussion and repeated chipping, by seems to be very conclusive, and the
small blows all in the same direction, objections to have hardly any other
round the edge which was intended for ground than the reluctance to admit the
great antiquity of man, which so long
use.
The human origin of these implements opposed itself to the recognition of the
has been greatly confirmed by the dis discoveries of M. Boucher de Perthes.
covery that the Mincopics of the A similar later discovery of flints at. Puy
Andaman Islands manufacture whet Courny strongly confirms this position.
The same class of objection applies to
stones or scrapers almost identical with
those of Thenay, and by the same the palaeolithic hatchets found by M.
process of using fire to split the stones Ribiero in beds of the valley, of the
into the requisite size and shape. Tagus, at Oita, in Portugal, which have
These Mincopics are not acquainted always been considered as being of the
with the art of chipping stone into celts Upper Miocene. It is thought possible
or arrow heads, but use fragments of that they may have fallen at some distant
large shells, of which they have a great period from overlying Quaternary gravels,
abundance, or of bone or hard wood; and and become mixed up with the upper
the scrapers are employed in bringing bed of the Miocene. The congress of
these to a sharper point or finer edge. geologists, therefore, who met at Lisbon
The main objection, therefore, at first a few years ago, thought it wise, to
raised to the authenticity of these relics suspend their opinion as to the Tertiary
of Miocene man, that they did not afford age of M. Ribiero’s implements.
Other discoveries, however, of the
conclusive proof of design, may be con
sidered as removed, and the objectors same nature .seem to be absolutely
have to fall back on the assumption conclusive for man’s existence, at least
either that the implements were fabri as far back as into the Pliocene era. An
cated by some exceptionally intelligent Italian geologist, M. Capellini, has found
Dryopithecus, or that, as Prestwich in the Pliocene strata of Monte Aperto,
supposed, the Abbe Bourgeois may have near Sienna, bones of the Balaeonotus, a
�58
TERTIARY MAN
well-known species of a sort of Pliocene had found in a Miocene deposit a* Billy.
whale, which are scored by incisions
The only incisions on bones from very
obviously made by a sharp-cutting instru early strata which these experts have
ment, such as a flint knife, guided by admitted as undoubtedly made by sharp
design and by a human hand. At first cutting instruments held by a human
it . was contended that these incisions hand are those above mentioned—viz.,
might have been made by the teeth of on the Elephas Meridionalis of St. Prest,
fishes, but as specimens multiplied, and and the Pliocene Bateeonotus of Monte
were carefully examined, it became evi Aperto, and in the humerus of a Halident that no such explanation was therium from the Upper Miocene of
possible. The cuts are in regular curves, Pouance (Maine et Loire). This shows
and sometimes almost semi-circular, such with what caution and scrupulous good
as a sweep of the hand could alone have faith the experts have worked who bear
caused, and they invariably show a clean- testimony to facts which, if admitted,
cut surface on the outer or convex side, are a conclusive demonstration of the
to which the pressure of a sharp edge existence of Tertiary man.
was applied with a rough or abraded
But, in addition to these instances
surface on the inner side of the cut. from cut bones, there are others equally
Microscopic examination of the cuts certain and well-authenticated. In the
confirms this conclusion, and leaves no region of the extinct volcanoes of
doubt that they must have been made Auvergne, in which the celebrated fossil
by such an instrument as a flint knife, man of Denise was discovered under a
held obliquely and pressed against the stream of lava, embedded in a volcanic
bone while in a fresh state with con tuff, which, however, was considered to
siderable force, just as a savage would be probably Quaternary, there are older
do in hacking the flesh off a stranded lava streams overlaying tuffs and gravels,
whale. Cuts exactly similar can now be which, from the fossils contained in them,
made on fresh bone by such flint knives, are undoubtedly Tertiary. From one of
and in no other known or conceivable these Tertiary gravels at Puy Courny, M.
way. It seems, therefore, more like Rames, a competent geologist, assisted
obstinate prepossession than scientific by MM. Badoche, Chibret, and Grandscepticism to deny the existence of vaux, obtained at three different points a
Tertiary man if it rested only on this considerable number of flint implements,
single instance.
which, if found in any Quaternary deposit,
As regards the evidence from cut would have been accepted without hesi
bones, it is very conclusive, for expe tation as of human origin. They com
rienced observers, with the aid of the prise small and rude specimens of the
microscope, have no difficulty in distin types found in the lowest Quaternary
guishing between cuts which may have gravels, such as celts, knives, and scrapers,
been made accidentally or by the teeth and present all the characters by which
of fishes and those which can only have artificial are distinguished from natural
been made in fresh bone by a sharp flints in those formations—viz., bulbs of
cutting instrument such as a flint knife. percussion, and chippings in a deter
In fact, the best authorities on the minate direction on the sides and points
subject, such as M. Mortillet, the intended for use; while no such chip
Curator of the Museum at St. Germain, pings appear on other parts of the flint,
M. Hamy, and M. Quatrefages, while as must have been the case if they had
admitting the authenticity of the cuts been the result of casual blows on natural
submitted to them in a few cases, have flints.
rejected it in numerous others, as in the
M. Quatrefages, by whom the subject
well-known instance of the grooves on is fully discussed, and the objects
the bones of a rhinoceros which Delaunay figured in his recent work, lays great
�TERTIARY MAN
stress on the fact that, while the beds
contain five different sorts of flints, those
which present traces of design are con
fined exclusively to one description of
flint, which is most easily manufactured,
and best adapted for human use. He
observes with much force that a torrent
capable of tearing flints from their bed
and rolling them on, with collisions
violent enough to imitate artificial chip
ping, could not have exercised a selec
tion and confined its operations to one
only out of five different descriptions of
flints. He shows also that the worked
edges exhibit, when closely examined,
both intentional chipping and fine
parallel striae, as from repeated use in
cutting or scraping, while nothing of the
sort is to be seen on the sides left in the
natural state, though they are often as
sharp, or even sharper.
It only remains to add that these
specimens were submitted by M. Rames
to two Congresses of French geologists—
the first at Blois, when doubts were
expressed in some quarters ; the second
one at Grenoble, when the Congress
decided that the existence of Tertiary
man was in this case fully established.
Italy supplies the next instance, and
it is a very remarkable one, for here
competent geologists have found, not
merely implements or cut bones showing
human design, but man himself, includ
ing skeletons of several individuals. The
discovery was made on the flank of the
hill of Castelnedolo, near Brescia, in a
bed which is identified by its fossils as
belonging to the Lower Pliocene. The
excavations were made with the utmost
care, in undisturbed strata, by M.
Ragazzoni, a scientific man of good
reputation, assisted by M. Germani, and
the results confirmed by M. Sergi, a
well-known geologist, who visited the
spot and inquired minutely into all
the circumstances. According to their
united statement, some human bones
were found in this deposit by M. Ragaz
zoni as far back as i860. This led to
further excavations, made at different
times, and with all the precautions
59
pointed out by experience. The deposit
was removed in successive horizontal
layers, and nowhere was the least trace
found of the beds having been mixed or
disturbed. At a considerable depth in
it were found the bones of four indivi
duals—a man, a woman, and two chil
dren, which presented the same appear
ance of fossilisation as the bones of
extinct animals found in the same
deposit. The female skeleton was almost
entire, and the fragments of the skull
were sufficiently perfect to admit of their
being pieced together so as to show
almost its whole form.
This preservation of the entire skeleton
might lead to the conjecture that it had
come there as the result of a subsequent
burial; but this supposition is negatived
by the undisturbed nature of the beds,
and by the fact that the other bones
were found scattered in the same stratum,
at considerable distances from the per
fect skeleton. M. Quatrefages sums up
the evidence by saying, “that there exists
no serious reason for doubting the dis
covery of M. Ragazzoni, and that, if made
in a Quaternary deposit, no one would
have thought of contesting its accuracy.
Nothing, therefore, can be opposed to it
but theoretical a priori objections, similar
to those which so long repelled the exist
ence of Quaternary man; objections which
have long since been refuted, and shown
to be absolutely inconsistent with a
multitude of established facts.”
If we accept this conclusion, this
remarkable consequence follows: that
man, so far back as the Early Pliocene
period, was perfectly human, for the
skull and bones present no marked
peculiarity, or approximation to an
animal type. The skull is of fair capa
city, and very much what might be
expected of a female of the Canstadt
race. But, if this be so, it necessarily
puts back the origin of the human species
to a vastly more remote antiquity, which
can hardly be less than that of the Early
or Middle Miocene, in which the remains
of the great anthropoid Dryopithecus
have been found.
�6o
TERTIARY MAN
A skull very similar to the above has
also been found in Italy, in a lacustrine
deposit at Olmo, near Arezzo, on the
flank of the Apennines; but, although it
was found at a depth of nearly fifty feet
from the surface, and some feet lower
than a layer of clay containing a tooth of
the Elephas Meridionalis, a species which
in Northern Europe scarcely survived
the Pliocene period, the whole forma
tion is considered, from other remains
found in it, as probably belonging to an
early Quaternary age, and therefore not
affording satisfactory evidence of Ter
tiary man. It can only be quoted as
affording some corroboration of the dis
coveries of Capellini and Ragazzoni, by
showing that man has existed in Italy
for an immense period, and is found
in deposits between which and the
Pliocene there is no abrupt line of de
marcation.
This completes the evidence from the
Old World. Turning to the New World,
we find, both in North and South
America, numerous proofs of the exist
ence of man from a very remote anti
quity; but there is some difficulty in
arriving at definite conclusions as to
their Tertiary date, from the fact that the
succession of geological periods does not
exactly correspond on the two sides of the
Atlantic. America has been said to be,
in some respects, a whole period behind
Europe and Asia in this succession.
Thus the mastodon, which in the Old
World is a characteristic Miocene and
Pliocene species, and did not survive
into the Quaternary, is found in America
in the latest drifts, and even in peat
mosses associated with neolithic flint
arrows, and not impossibly survived into
the Historical period. The bear family,
on the other hand, which is so conspic
uous in the old formations of Europe,
is not found in America until the Quater
nary. The extinct fauna also of South
America is, like the present, that of a
distinct zoological province from either
North America or Europe, so that we
cannot assume that the Zenglodon and
other huge ancestral types of armadillos
and ant-eaters were necessarily of an
age corresponding to our Tertiary.
With this reservation, I proceed to
state some of the leading instances which
have been referred to by American geo
logists as establishing the existence of
Tertiary man on that continent.
The most important case is that of the
skulls and stone implements which have
been found in the auriferous gravels of
California, the evidence for which, and
for other ancient remains in North
America, has been very carefully summed
up by the distinguished naturalist, Mr.
Alfred Wallace, in an article in the
Nineteenth Century of November, 1887.
These gravels are the result of an enor
mous denudation of the Sierra Nevada,
which has filled up all the great valleys
on its Pacific slope with thick deposits
of debris, forming in some cases detached
hills, and even mountains, of consider*
able height. While this was going on
there were repeated volcanic eruptions
in the higher range, giving rise to beds
of lava, tuff, and ashes, which are fre
quently inter-stratified with the gravels;
and, finally, the close of the volcanic
period was marked by a great flow of
basaltic lava, which spread in a nearly
level capping over the whole surface of
the country. This, and the subjacent
beds of gravels and tuffs, has since been
cut down by the action of the present
rivers, to a depth of sometimes 1,500 or
2,000 feet, leaving a series of isolated,
tabular hills composed, on the upper
part, of a horizontal layer of basalt,
varying from 50 to 200 feet in thickness,
and, in the lower part, of 800 to 1,500
feet of gravels, lava-beds, and tuffs.
Thus what was once a single lava stream,
or succession of lava streams, is now a
series of detached hills, the tops of
which form parts of one gently-inclined
plane, sloping from the mountains
towards the plains, and now, in some
cases, 1,000 feet or more above the
adjacent valleys.
The present rivers have in some places
cut down the lavas and gravels to the
beds of ancient rivers, which flowed in,
�TERTIARY MAN
different courses from the existing ones ;
and it is in the beds of these ancient
rivers that the principal accumulations
of gold are found. Hence an enormous
amount of the oldest gravels has been
excavated in working for gold, and . in
some of these workings human remains
have been found, associated with animal
remains, which are all of extinct species,
entirely distinct from those that now
inhabit any part of the North American
continent. Some of the genera, such as
Hipparion, Auchenia, and Elotherium,
would, if found elsewhere, undoubtedly
be taken to denote a Pliocene, if not a
Miocene, formation.
The vegetable
remains also indicate a totally different
flora from that now prevailing in Cali
fornia, and which Professors Lesqueraux
and Whitney—the latter the geologist of
the State, and well-known from his
Report on the Auriferous Gravels of the
Sierra Nevada—consider to be of Plio
cene age, with some affinities to Miocene.
Numerous stone implements have been
found associated with this extinct fauna
and flora in nine different counties, and
human bones in five widely-separated
localities. The two most remarkable
instances of the latter are :—
1. The Tuolumne skull. A fragment
brought up from a shaft in Table Moun
tain, at a depth of 180 feet below the
surface, beneath a bed of three feet of
consolidated volcanic tuff, with fossil
leaves and branches, over which is a
deposit of seventy feet of clay and
gravel.
2. The Calaveras skull. This was
found in 1866, under four beds of lava,
and in the fourth bed of gravel from the
surface, embedded in a rounded mass
of earthy and stony matter containing
bones.
The cemented gravel was
removed with great difficulty, and dis
closed a human skull, nearly entire, with
several bones of the human foot and
other parts wedged into the cavity of the
skull, the whole being in a fossilised
condition, like that of the animal bones
in similar formations. Human bones
have been found in two other instances
61
—one by an educated observer, under a
bed eight feet thick of lava; and more
recently a discovery has been announced
ofy rude stone implements in Tertiary
gravels of Stone Creek, Colorado, asso
ciated with shells which are considered
by conchologists to be not later than of
the older Pliocene.
The Calaveras case is, however, the
typical one, owing to its having been
extracted from the matrix by Professor
Wyman, and all the circumstances of the
find thoroughly investigated by Professor
Whitney. When the discovery was first
announced, it was objected that the skull
was possibly taken by the miners from
some Indian grave. But this objection
disappears before the fact that it was
fossilised, and embedded in a matrix
which no forger could have counterfeited,
and even more conclusively from the
great number of instances in which
human bones and implements have been
discovered at different localities . in
similar formations. Even the polemical
imagination of the Duke of Argyll could
hardly invent a conspiracy of so many
groups of Californian miners, at different
times, and in different localities, to hoax
scientists, or to supply proofs for or
against the Darwinian theory of the
descent of man. Nor would men intent
on such a fraud have buried fragments
instead of whole skulls, and stone imple
ments of a type different from that which,
if they had known enough on these sub
jects to conceive the fraud, they must
have been aware would have been
expected.
For the nature of these
implements is an exception to the general
rule, that the oldest type found through
out the world, from South Africa . to
China, is everywhere the same, consist
ing of rudely-chipped celts, knives, and
scrapers, the Californian implements
consisting of stone plates or mortars, and
pestles or pounding stones, very like
those used by some living tribes of
Indians for crushing acorns.
Quatrefages, assuming that these im
plements were used for pounding corn,
justly considers it highly improbable that.
�62
TERTIARY MAN
agriculture could have been known at
such an early period, and that Pliocene
man in California could have been so far
in advance of his Quaternary brother on
the Atlantic side of the continent, as
shown by the rude celts and knives of
the Trenton gravels. But if they were
used for crushing acorns, the argument
is not so clear, for a tribe of primitive
savages, living among oak forests, might
use flat stones and pounders for the pur
pose, while hunting tribes might-use rude
celts, as the bushmen do at the present
day. Either form seems equally within
the range of the early dawn of human
intelligence, and not much in advance of
that of the gorilla or chimpanzee.
Equally futile is Sir J. Dawson’s sur
mise that the skull may have been
dropped into some old mining shaft.
There is no evidence for any prehistoric
mining for gold in California, such as is
found in the copper region of Lake
Superior; and it is certain that, if any
such had existed, it must have been con
fined to the superficial deposits. Noth
ing but an intrepid determination to
ignore facts could have led to such a
supposition. The Calaveras skull is not
a solitary instance, but one of several
human bones, and hundreds of human
implements, which have been found, at
wide distances apart, in these auriferous
gravels, and often underneath beds of
dense basalt, which could by no pos
sibility have been pierced without the
aid of metal tools and blasting powder.
Objections like these prove nothing
except that the objector is in the theologico-scientific frame of mind, which
sees everything relating to the origin of
man through the medium of the first
chapter of Genesis.
The only serious objection to assum
ing these Californian discoveries to be a
conclusive proof of the existence of
Tertiary man arises from the fact that
several good American geologists dispute
Professor Whitney’s conclusion that these
auriferous gravels are of Tertiary origin.
They consider that such an enormous
accumulation could only have been
formed during a Glacial period, when
frost and ice were grinding down the
mountains, and swollen rivers, from
melting snow and glaciers, sweeping the
debris down the valleys into the plains.
This leaves doubt as to their origin in
the comparatively mild and equable
climate of the Pliocene period, but as
regards the question of the great anti
quity of man it does not much signify
to which period we assign them. Any
time subtracted from the Pliocene has to
be added to the Quaternary, for the fact
remains _ unquestioned that, since man
existed in California, valleys have been
filled up by drifts from the waste of moun
tains toadepth in some casesof 1,500 feet;
these covered by a succession of tuffs^
ashes, and lava streams, from volcanoes
long since extinct, and finally cut down
by the present rivers through beds of
solid basalt, and through this accumula
tion of lavas and gravels. Such an
operation corresponds in time with that
by which the great river systems of the
Old World were sculptured out from a
table-land, standing, in some cases, many
hundred feet higher than at present, as
shown by the deposit of the loess, which
is universally recognised to be an
accumulation of fine glacial mud.
A later contribution towards the anti
quity of human remains in California is
contained in a paper read to the Anthro
pological Society by Mr. Skertchley, the
well-known geologist, to whom we are
indebted for the discovery of palaeolithic
implements beneath the chalky boulder
clay at Thetford, in Norfolk.
During a visit to the Spring Valley
gold-mine, in one of the tributary valleys
of the Sacramento River, he ascertained
the following facts: This mine is worked
by hydraulic jets directed on the sands
and gravels of an old river which once
flowed in an impetuous course down a
steep gradient from the Sierra Nevada.
It has long since ceased to flow, and the
bed of the old river is now buried under
500 feet of its own deposits, capped in
places by 100 feet of basalt, which has
flowed in wide sheets from long-since
�TERTIARY MAN
63
variety of other sources as to the frequent
discovery of human implements, and
even, in a few instances, of human
1. Basalt cap
...
... 25 to 100 feet.
skulls, from similar auriferous . gravels
2. White sands and gravels
45° >>
over a wide range of country in Cali
3. Blue gravel, with boulders 2 to 15 >>
fornia. Whether Tertiary or not, it is
4. Blue gravel, with large
evident that they must carry back the
boulders
...
•••
5° »
5. Bed rock —metamorphoid
date of man’s existence in the north
cretaceous slates.
west of America to a period vastly older
Stone mortars, rudely chipped, occur than that of 25,000 or 30,000 years
abundantly in the white sand (No. 2), assigned to him by the latest guess of
about 300 having been found; and one Professor Prestwich.
is said to have occurred in No. 3. ' Another recent discovery in connec
There can be no question of their occur tion with the great basalt cap of Northring in situ, as they are washed out of Western America presents a similar
the gravel by powerful hydraulic jets, difficulty to that of M. Ragazzoni. In
from the working face of the mine, which boring for an artesian well at Nampa, in
forms an artificial cliff of 400 to 600 feet Ada County, Idaho, a small clay image
of a human figure was brought up from
in height.
Nor can there be any doubt as to their a depth of 215 feet. The borer had
human origin, for the specimen produced cut through a lava-cap fifteen feet thick,
by Mr. Skertchley to the Anthropological and then penetrated through some 200
Society was universally admitted to have feet of sand and clay. Mr. Emmons, of
been artificially wrought. Their use was the State Geological Society, gave the
probably for pounding acorns, which opinion that the stratum from which the
then afforded a great part of the food of Nampa image was taken is older by far
the savages who inhabited the district, than any others from which human
as they did recently of the Digger remains have been taken. The little
statuette, however, evinces a relatively
Indians.
The question, therefore, is entirely one high degree of artistic skill in modelling,
of the age of the gravels, as to which and thus seems to indicate a fairly
American geologists differ, some assign developed brain in the man of this most
ing the upper or white gravels to the distant period. We await, however, a
Pliocene, others to the early Quaternary closer determination of the age of the
period. As Mr. Skertchley says : “ If the American formations.
The other instances from America are
human remains had not been found in
them, geologists would never have open to the same doubt as to their
doubted their Tertiary age. At any geological age. The cavern of Semirate, they must be of immense antiquity. douro, in the plateau of Lagoa-Santo, in
Since they were deposited the present Brazil, has yielded sixteen human skulls,
river system of the Sacramento, Joaquim, associated with bones of extinct species,
and other large rivers has been estab such as Glyptodon, Machserodus, Hydrolished ; canons 2,000 feet deep have chserus, Scalidotherium, and others,
been excavated by these later rivers which, if found in Europe, would un
through lava, gravels, and into the bed doubtedly be taken to imply a Tertiary
rock; and the gravels, once the bed of fauna. But there remains the doubt
a large river, now cap hills 6,000 feet as to the real succession of geological
periods in America; and if the Mastodon
high.”
This definite information, conveyed lived on there until recent times, for
by an experienced geologist like Mr. which there is a good deal of evidence,
Skertchley, gives confirmation and preci there is no conclusive reason why the
sion to what has been stated from a Machserodus and other Tertiary forms
extinct volcanoes. The section given by
Mr. Skertchley is :—
�64
TERTIARY MAN
might not have survived from the Plio human remains in the presumably
cene or Miocene into the Quaternary. Pliocene auriferous gravels of California;
The human implements also found in and in South America, in the pampean
these Brazilian caves seem, in many remains of Buenos Ayres. Of these,
cases, of too advanced a type to be the discoveries at Puy-Courny, Monte
readily accepted as of such extreme Aperto, St. Olmo, and Castelnedolo
antiquity.
seem to be undoubted, both as regards
The same doubt also applies to the the human nature of the remains and
numerous human remains found by two the Tertiary character of the deposits.
competent observers, M. Ameghino and Those of St. Prest and of the Californian
M. Burmeister, at different points in the gravels are doubtful only as regards the
pampas of Buenos Ayres. They both question whether the deposits may not
recognise two distinct beds in this be of the earliest Glacial or Quaternary
pampean formation—an upper one, in period, rather than Tertiary, the evidence
which these remains have been found, from the associated fossil remains being
and a lower one, in which nothing of strongly in favour of their Tertiary origin.
human origin has yet been discovered. There remain three cases of alleged
Ameghino, relying on the fossil remains discoveries in the Miocene—viz., at
of extinct animals, considers the upper Thenay, Pouance, and in Portugal—the
bed to be Tertiary; while Burmeister evidence for which, especially for the
considers the lower one only to be Pre two former, is extremely strong and
Glacial and the upper one to be Quater almost conclusive, while the objections
nary. While these doubts continue we to them are obviously based on a reluc
must hold our judgment in suspense as tance to admit such an extension of
to the evidence from America, though human origins, rather than on scientific
undoubtedly it tends as far as it goes to evidence.
confirm the rapidly accumulating evi
In none of these cases, as further
dence from the Old World of the evidence has accumulated, has it tended
existence of Tertiary man; and the to shake the conclusions of the first
discovery of his traces at so many discoverers as to the human character of
widely-separated places, at such a remote the implements and the Miocene age of
antiquity, adds to the irresistible force of the formations. On the contrary, the
the conclusion that his first origin, and most cautious authorities, such as M.
subsequent diffusion by migration, must Quatrefages, who held their judgment in
be sought in one of the geological forma suspense when the first implements were
tions preceding the Quaternary,
produced, have been converted by sub
To sum up the evidence, there are at sequent discoveries, and expressed their
least ten instances of the alleged dis conviction that doubt is no longer pos
covery of human remains in Tertiary sible. . And a recent Congress of French
strata, of each of which it may be safely geologists has expressed the decided
said that, if the remains had been those opinion that the existence of Tertiary
of any other Mammalian species, no man is fully proved. In the next
doubt would have been entertained of chapter we shall learn of a remarkable
their Tertiary origin by any geologist. discovery of a semi-human form which
Four of these are in France, those of St. adds great force to all these earlier
Prest and of Puy-Courny in the Pliocene, evidences.
and of Thenay and Pouance in the
On the whole, we may say with con*
Miocene; three in Italy, in the Pliocene fidence of the problem of Tertiary man
of Monte Aperto, St. Olmo, and Castel- that, if not completely solved, it is
nedolo; one in Portugal, in the Miocene very near solution, and that there is
of the Tagus; in North America, the little doubt what the solution will be.
skull of Calaveras and other numerous
The next generation will probably
�THE MISSING LINK
accept it as an obvious fact, and wonder
at the doubts now entertained, very
much as we wonder at the incredulity
with which the discovery of palaeolithic
65
implements in the Quaternary gravels of
the Somme by M. Boucher de Perthes
was received by the scientific world
when it was first announced.
Chapter VI.
THE MISSING LINK
Human Origins—Evolution or Miracle First
Theories Miraculous—Conception of Natural
Law—Law Proved to be Universal in Inor
ganic World—Application to Life and Man—
Darwin and Evolution—Struggle for Life and
Survival of the Fittest—Confirmed by Dis
covery of Missing Links—Professor Cope’s
Summary—M. Gaudry—Instances of Missing
Links—Bears and Dogs—Horse—Pedigree of
the Horse from Palseotherium and Eohippus—
Appearance and Disappearance of Species—
Specialisation from Primitive Types—Condylarthra—Reptiles and Birds—Links between
other Genera and Orders—Marsupials and
Mammals — Monotremata — Ascidians and
Fish—Evolution of Individuals and Species
from Primitive Cell—Question of Missing
Links Applied to Man—Man and Ape—
Resemblances and Differences—Specialisation
of Human Type—For Erect Posture—How
Man Differs from Animals—Mental and Moral
Faculties — Language — Tools— Progress—
Mental Development—Lines of Research for
Missing Links — Inferior Races —Fossil
Remains—The Pithecanthropus—Point in
Direction of Tertiary Origin.
Of all the problems which have been
raised, but not solved, the most impor
tant is that of the origin of man. It is
important not only as a question of the
highest scientific interest, but from its
bearings on the deepest mysteries of
philosophy and religion. Is man, like
the rest of the animal creation, a product
of evolution acting by natural laws, or is
he an exception to the general rule, and
the product of some act of secondary
supernatural interference? Or, to put
it in theological language, is man a con
sequence of that “ original impress ”
which Dr. Temple considered to be more
in accordance with the idea of an
omniscient and omnipotent Creator, to
whom “a day is as a thousand years, and
a thousand years as a day,” than the
tiaditional theory of a Creator con
stantly interposing to supplement and
amend his original creation by miracles?
Or is he an exceptional supplement and
amendment to such original creation,
miraculously introduced at one of its later
stages ? It is a question which has to
be solved by facts, and not by theories
or prepossessions.
As regards the physical universe, and
the whole of the world of lii$ with the
possible exception of man, it may be
taken as already solved in the sense of
evolution and original impress. But in
the case of man there are still a few men
of science who question whether the
human mind, at least, has been formed
by natural evolution. The problem is
of such importance that it may be well
to state its conditions in some detail.
When I say that evolution has become
the accepted law of the whole animate
and inanimate universe, with the possible
exception of man, why do I say this?
The old theory of special miraculous
interpositions to account for all unex
plained phenomena was the most natural
and the most obvious. It was, in fact,
the inevitable result of the first attempts
of the human mind to connect effects
with causes, or, in other words, to
reason. Take the case of thunder.
What could the first savage who reasoned
c
�66
THE MISSING LINK
on the subject infer except that the noise,
being like the roar of an angry wild
beast or enemy, and the flash like that
of the darting of an arrow or javelin,
there was probably a sort of magnified
man like himself in the clouds full of
wrath and very capable of doing him an
injury ? The savage who reasoned thus,
and the early priests and astronomers
who, whenever they saw motion in the
sun and planets, inferred life, were
natural philosophers, who reasoned
correctly from their premises, only their
premises were wrong. In the course of
time it came to be demonstrated that
phenomena formerly supposed to be
isolated miraculous acts of an anthropo
morphic power were linked together by
that invariable sequence which we call
law, and that their real first cause or origin
must be pushed vastly further back in
space and time, and relegated more and
more from the known to the unknown.
The establishment of Newton’s law of
gravity as the pervading principle of all
celestial movements gave the first great
blow to the old miraculous theory, and
introduced the conception of Natural Law.
Geology did for time what astronomy
had . done for space; and since the
publication of Lyell’s .Principles no
serious thinker has doubted that the
successive stages by which the earth
was brought to its present state were
due to evolution, acting by natural
laws over immense periods of time. The
discoveries of modern chemistry have
confirmed the impression of the uni
formity and invariability of Law by show
ing it extending from the infinitely great
to the infinitely small, from stars to atoms;
while the spectroscope shows the identity
of matter and energy throughout this
extreme range. Above all, the establish
ment of the laws of the indestructibility
of matter and energy, and their mutual
transformation into new forms and new
modes of action, have placed special
causes altogether out of court, and
reduced all the phenomena of the inor
ganic universe to one law of universal
simplicity and generality. Instead of
speculating with ancient sages who may
be the . God who flashes lightnings from
the skies, or drives the chariot of the
sun, or even as late as Kepler, assigning
a spirit to each planet to direct its
harmonious movement, the question for
modern science is reduced to the
ultimate stage of—What mean these
atoms and energies into which everything
can be resolved? Whence came they,
and how did they become endowed with
those laws which have enabled them to
build up the universe by an irresistible
evolution ?
But the miraculous theory died hard.
Based as it wras on popular apprehension
and on theological prepossession, when
driven from the outwork of the inorganic
universe, it held out stoutly in the
inner citadel of life. Were not species
distinct, and, if so, how could they have
come into existence unless by a series of
special acts of miraculous creation ?
Above all, was not man a miracle, with
his high faculties, “only a little lower
than the angels
and did not all records
and traditions describe him as a recent
creation, who had fallen from a high
state of perfection by an act of original
sin ? Nay, more. Did not science itself
confirm this view, and had not Cuvier
laid down the axiom that no human
remains had been found in connection
with any extinct animals, or in any but
the most superficial deposits ? The dis
covery of innumerable human imple
ments and remains in all quarters of the
globe, in caves and river drifts of
immense antiquity, and associated with
extinct animals, has shattered this theory
into fragments, and it is now as impos
sible to believe in man’s recent origin
and fall as it is in the sun’s daily journey
round the earth, or the notion that it
might be as big as the Peloponnesus.
Still, the difficulty as to the creation
of distinct species remained, and until
the publication of Darwin’s celebrated
work on The Origin of Species the
miraculous theory, though driven back,
could hardly be said to be routed. But
evolution was in the air, and Darwin’s
�THE MISSING LINK
book produced the effect of a fragment
of crystal dropped into a saturated
solution. In an incredibly short time
all the floating elements crystallised
about it, and the speculations of science
took a definite form, the evidence for
which has gone on strengthening and
increasing from that day to this, until, as
I have said, with the solitary exception
of human origins, evolution or original
impress has become the axiom of science,
and is admitted by every one who has
the slightest pretensions to be considered
a competent authority.
This predisposition to accept Darwin’s
views arose from various causes. The
establishment of evolution as a fact in
the material universe had familiarised
men’s minds with the idea of Natural
Law, and the discoveries of astronomy
and geology had proved to demonstra
tion that the accounts of creation, for
merly taken to be inspired truths which
it was impious to question, could only be
considered as vague poetical versions of
the ideas which were current among
Eastern nations in the infancy of Science.
The last remnant of respect for these
narratives as literal records of actual
events vanished when the discoveries of
M. Boucher de Perthes were confirmed,
and it became apparent that man was
not a recent creation who had fallen
from a high estate, but the descendant
of palaeolithic savages, who had struggled
slowly up to civilisation through immense
periods of time. As a knowledge of
natural history increased, it became
apparent that the earth had not been
peopled recently from a single centre,
but that it was divided into numerous
vegetable and zoological provinces, each
with its own separate flora and fauna;
and a better acquaintance with the
zoological record showed that this had
been the case for millions of years, and
through the vast succession of strata of
which the earth’s crust is composed.
Finally, the multiplication of species,
both now existing and in past geological
ages, reached a point which, on any
theory of separate supernatural creations,
67
required an amount of miracle which
was plainly absurd and impossible.
When it came to this, that 160 separate
miracles were required to account for
the 160 species of land shells found, to
exist in the one small island of Madeira,
and that 1,400 distinct species of a single
shell, the Cerithium, had been described
by conchologists, the miraculous theory
had evidently broken down under its
own weight and ceased to be credible.
In this state of things Darwin not
only supplied a vast number of instances,
drawn from his own observation, of
graduation of species into one another,
and the wide range of varieties produced
and rendered permanent by artificial
selection, but, what was more important,
he showed the existence of a vera causa
operating in nature, which could not
fail to produce similar effects. If a
pigeon fancier could, by pairing .birds
which showed a tendency to variation in
a particular direction, produce in a few
generations races as distinct from the
original blue-rock as the fantail or the
pouter, it is evident that nature could do
the same in a longer period. Nay, not
only that nature could., but that nature
must, do this, for in the struggle, for
existence variations, however slight,
which gave an advantage to individuals,
must tend to survive and become extended
and fixed by the operation of heredity.
This was the famous theory of “ Natural
Selection ” and “ Survival of the Fittest,”
which at once converted the chaos of
life into a cosmos, and extended the
domain of harmonious law to the organic
as well as the inorganic universe. At
tractive, however, as the theory was from
the first to thinking men, its universal
acceptance at the present day is due
mainly to the immense amount of con
firmation which it has since received.
This confirmation has come from two
independent sources—the discovery of
Missing Links and Embryology.
When Darwin’s theory was first pro
pounded the objection was raised that,
if species were not created. distinct, but
gradually evolved from one another by
�68
THE MISSING LINK
slight variations, geology ought to show
radius, femurs, feet, etc., of the one,
us the intermediate forms which must
side by side with those of the other, the
have existed before the permanent types
sum of the likenesses will appear so
were established. The objection was much greater than that of the differences
reasonable, and Darwin was the first to that, the idea of family relationship
admit it j but he pleaded the imperfec
will impose itself on the mind. In vain
tion of the geological record, and pre
would sceptics try to throw doubts on
dicted that with fuller knowledge of it
this relationship by pointing out some
the gaps would be filled up and the slight shades of difference. We see
missing links discovered. The truth or
too many points of resemblance to
falsehood of his theory was thus staked
admit that they can be all fallacious.”
on the discovery of missing links. The And, again, he says: “ Where our pre
case was almost similar to that of the decessors. saw ten or one hundred dis
truth of Halley’s calculations as to the tinct beings, we see only one; and
orbit of his comet being staked on its
instead of creations thrown, as it were,
return at the predicted period. The into the world at haphazard, without
comet did return, and the missing links law and without connection, we follow
have been discovered, or so many of
the trace of a few types whose essential
them that no doubt remains in the
characters are so similar as to enable us
minds of scientific men that evolution
to comprehend them in still simpler
has been the real law of the animal and
types, and thus hope to arrive some day
vegetable kingdoms.
at understanding the plan which God
In fact, the discovery of missing links
has followed in producing and developing
has gone so far that Professor Cope, one
life in the world.”
of the latest and highest authorities on
This is almost identical with Dr.
the subject, who has done so much for
Temple’s profession of faith, “that it
it by hisWdiscoveries of the wonderfully
seems something more majestic, more
rich fossil fauna of the Tertiary forma
befitting of Him to whom a thousand
tions of the Rocky Mountains and
years are as one day, thus to impress His
California,. says: “We have attained
will once for all on His creation, and
the long-since extinct ancestor of the
provide for all its countless varieties by
lowest vertebrates. We have the ancestor
this one original impress than by special
of all the reptiles, of the birds, and of
acts of creation to be perpetually modi
the mammals. If we consider the
fying what He had previously made.”
mammals separately, we have traced up
A clear, popular conception of this
a great many lines to their points of question of “ missing links ” is so impor
departure from very primitive types.
tant for all who desire to understand the
Thus we have obtained the genealogical
latest, conclusions of modern science
trees of the deer, the camel, the musk, that it may be well to illustrate it by a
the horse, the tapir, and the rhinoceros;
homely example. Fifty years ago the
of the cats and dogs, of the lemurs and
popular belief respecting the animal
monkeys, and have important evidence creation was summed up in the simple
as to the origin of man.”
words of Dr. Watts’s hymn :—
M. Gaudry, the celebrated discoverer
“ Let dogs, delight to bark and bite,
of the fossil treasures of the Upper
For ’tis their nature to ;
Miocene of Pikermi, repeats the same
And bears and lions growl and fight,
thing. He says : “ If we take a skeleton
For God has made them so.”
of a fossil mammalian species, and com Science could only shrug its shoulders
pare it with one of an analogous living and say: “ So it seems; I have no better
species ” as, for instance, a Mammoth explanation to give.”
or Mastodon with a modern elephant—
How different are the terms in which
“ placing the heads, vertebrae, humerus, science would now reply: “Made, if
�THE MISSING LINK
69
you like, but how made? As individuals, and masticating grass were better than
each from a cell not distinguishable from the more millstone-like tubercular teeth
any other microscopic cell of the lowest adapted for grinding down shrubs and
animal and vegetable organisms, but branches of trees. Accordingly, we find
endowed with such an impress of evolu the evolution of the horse constantly
tion that it developes through the stages following this line. In Europe, the
of fish, reptile, and mammal into the Hipparion, who is the immediate ancestor
special mammalian form of its parents. of the horse, whom it closely resembles,
As species, traceable through a similar has already the two lateral toes so rudiprogression backwards from the living mental as to have become wholly useless;
form, through intermediate ancestral in the Anchitherium the tips of the outer
forms graduating by slight distinctions toes just touch the ground, while the
into one another up to the generalised Palseotherium is a distinctly three-toed
Eocene type of the Placental mammal, animal, though the middle toe is larger
and thence backwards by less definite than the two side toes. We have thus a
but still traceable variations to the types complete progression from a slow, heavy
of the marsupial, the reptilian, the fish, animal, adapted for living on marshy
the vertebrate, and so up to the primitive ground, like the tapir, to the courser of
cell in which the individual living animal the plains, whose latest development,
under artificial selection, is seen in a
originated.”
Thus the dog and bear, now so dis Ladas or a Sceptre.
In America, the links in the pedigree
tinct, can be traced up to Amphicyon
and Hysenarctus, which combined the of the fossil horse are still more numerous,
qualities of both; the former being rather and the transitions closer. The line
more dog than bear, the latter rather begins in the Early Eocene with the
more bear than dog; and these again, Eohippus, an animal of the size of a
either through the Creodonta to the fox, which, in addition to four wellBunodonta of the early Eocene, or developed toes of the forefoot, had the
through the Ictitherium to the Cyno- remnants of the hoofed fifth toe. In
dictis, or weasel-like dog of the same the Upper Eocene, the Eohippus was
formation, which is clearly a descendant replaced by the Orohippus, in which the
of the insectivorous Marsupials of the rudimentary first digit had disappeared,
and the fifth was reduced to a splint.
Secondary age.
The horse affords the best example of In the Lower Miocene the Mesohippus,
this progressive evolution, the specialisa which was about as large as a sheep, had
tion from the generalised Eocene type only three toes with a rudimentary splint
of a five-toed and tubercular-toothed on the foreleg, and in its teeth and other
mammal being clearly traced, step by particulars approached more closely to
step, down to the present one-toed horse. the horse. In the Upper Miocene,
The evolution took the course of adapt Mesohippus is replaced by Miohippus,
ing the original form to the requirements which approaches closely to the Anchi
of an animal which had to live on wide therium of Europe ; while in the Lower
prairies or desert plains, where a bulky Pliocene this gives way to the Proto
body had to be transported at high hippus, which approached the horse
speed, by leaps and bounds, over great very closely, and was about the size of
distances, both to find food and to escape an ass. Like the Hipparion of Europe,
from enemies by flight. For this purpose, which in many respects it resembles, it
evidently, one solid toe, protected by a had three toes, of which only the middle
single enlarged nail or hoof, was prefer one reached the ground. In the Middle
able to five or three weak toes terminating Pliocene we have the Pliohippus, which
each in a separate nail or claw; and in has lost the small hooflets on the rudi
like manner teeth adapted for cutting mentary toes, and is in all respects very
�7°
THE MISSING LINK
like a horse; and, finally, in the Upper accidental variations in this direction, or
Pliocene we have the true horse. This partly by this and partly by heredity
progression gives rise to two important fixing variations induced by use and
remarks. First, that size cannot be disuse of organs in stretching to reach
accepted as of much importance in the branches of palms, in no way affects
tracing lines of descent, as might, the question whether the animal is a
indeed, have been anticipated from the product of evolution or a miraculous
wide variations in the size of dogs and creation.
other domestic animals introduced by
To return to the pedigree of the
artificial selection. Secondly, that the horse, which may be taken as the typical
extinction of widespread and apparently instance of descent traced by progressive
unexhausted races of animals is a fact specialisation. What is a horse ? It is
which has to be reckoned with. The essentially an animal specialised for a
total disappearance of the horse in particular object—that of the rapid pro
America, where it and its ancestors had gression of a bulky body over open
existed in such numbers from the Early plains or deserts. When mammalian
Eocene down to quite recent times, is a life first appears abundantly in the lower
most perplexing problem. There is no Tertiaries,it is in the primitive generalised
appearance of any great change of type, in which nature seems always to
environment since the horse roamed in make its first essays, as if it were trying
countless numbers over the continent of its ’prentice hand on a simple sketch, to
America; and we know, from the experi be gradually developed into a series of
ence of Europe, that it was a hardy finished pictures. The primitive sketch
animal, capable of resisting both the in this instance took the form of what
torrid heat of Arabia and the intense Professor Cope calls a “ pentadactyle,
cold of the Glacial period. And so plantigrade, bunodont,” by which for
many other species survived in America, midable collocation of words we are to
from the Pliocene to the Quaternary understand an animal which had five
and recent periods, as to show that the toes at the extremities of each of its
extinction of the horse was an isolated limbs; which walked on the flat of its
phenomenon. And as of extinction, so feet, and whose molar teeth presented a
of creation. We do not fully under flat surface, with four, or in the very
stand the exact process by which types earliest form three, little cones or
and species have either appeared or dis tubercles, to assist in grinding its food.
appeared, and this affords the only It may give some idea of the precision
ground left to those who, from theo and certainty to which such researches
logical or other prepossessions, are have attained to say that this primitive
hostile to Darwinism. They say his form was predicted by Professor Cope
theory of natural selection from spon in 1874, from the progress towards it
taneous variations does not account for traced in following backwards various
everything, and does not explain fully lines of later descent; and that seven
all the laws of these variations. This years later, in 1881, the prophecy was
may be partly true; but it in no way fulfilled by the discovery that such a
affects the truth of evolution, which is a type of mammals, now known as the
fact and not a theory, and is quite inde Condylarthra, actually existed in large
pendent of the subsidiary question numbers in North America in the early
whether natural selection can account Eocene period.
for all or only for a principal part of
Consider now what the specialisation
the facts which, in some way or other, from this original type to the horse
have to be accounted for. Thus, whether implied. The first step was to walking
the long neck of the giraffe was developed on the toes instead of on the flat of the
by natural selection taking advantage of foot—a change which, whether owing
�THE MISSING LINK
or not to the lady Condylarthra having
adopted the modern fashion of wearing
high-heeled boots, became general in
most lines of their descendants. . For
galloping on hard ground it is evident
that one strong and long toe, protected
by a solid hoof, was more serviceable
than four short and weak toes, protected
by separate nails. Accordingly, coales
cence of the toes is the fundamental
fact in the progress of structural changes
through successive species, by which the
primitive Bunodont was converted into
the modern horse. Corresponding with
this are other progressive changes in the
articulation of the joints, especially those
of the bones corresponding to the ankle
and wrist joints, which are modified from
a contact of plane surfaces into a system
of tongues and grooves, which give
freedom of action in direct progression,
but secure them against the dislocations
from shocks and strains to which they
would be exposed in galloping or jumping.
So in other types the specialisation takes
different forms, but always towards the
sharper distinction of species formerly
more united and generalised. Thus the
half-bear, half-dog, and half-cat original
type of the Eocene becomes differen
tiated into the three distinct types of the
wholly bear, dog, and cat of later forma
tions.
Nor is this tracing back of existing
mammalian species to ancestral forms in
the Early Tertiary all that recent science
has accomplished.
The course of
palaeontological discovery for the last
twenty, and specially for the last ten,
years may almost be summed up as
that of the discovery of “ missing links,”
until gap after gap, which seemed to
separate not only species, but genera
and orders, by insurmountable barriers,
has been bridged over by intermediate
forms. Thus, to take one of the most
striking instances, what can, at first
sight, appear more unlike than reptile
and bird, and who would have ventured
to predict that any relationship could be
traced between a tortoise and a swallow?
And yet nothing is more certain than
71
that the Reptilia pass over into the Aves
by successive gradations which make it
difficult to pronounce where one ends
and the other begins. The pterodactyl,
or flying dragon of the lias, approaches
in structure and habits towards the bird
type; the ostrich retains some resem
blance to the pterodactyl, but the com
plete transitional type, or “ missing link,”
has been found in those feathered
reptiles, or birds with reptilian heads
and teeth, whose remains have fortunately
been preserved in a fossil state. The
Archaeopteryx, from the CEningen slate
of the Upper Oolite, in the museum of
South Kensington, is a beautiful specimen
of such a missing link, and would cer
tainly be taken for a bird by any casual
observer, though comparative anatomists
find many of its essential features to be
reptilian.
The Archaeopteryx and other transi
tional types, which have been discovered
in Europe and America between birds
and reptiles, afford perhaps the most
obvious and universally intelligible in
stances of what recent palaeontology has
done in the way of the discovery of
“missing links,” between genera and
orders now widely separated ; but similar
discoveries have gone a long way towards
establishing the continuity of life from
the earliest periods in which it appears
down to the present day, and showing
the kind and progress of the changes in
structure which in the course of evolu
tion have linked the various orders and
species of living forms together. Thus
the higher form of Placental mammals
which became predominant in the Early
Tertiary differs from the Marsupials,
which extend into the trias of the
Secondary period, by the greater exten
sion of the allantois or membrane which
surrounds the foetus. In the Placentals
this completely surrounds it, so that the
foetus remains part of the mother until
birth; while in the Marsupial the young
are born incomplete, and take refuge for
a time in a pouch which is attached to
the mother’s stomach. But there are
fossil animals in the Eocene which
�72
THE MISSING LINK
combine the two characters, showing a
Marsupial brain and dentition, with a
Placental development. They are, in
effect, Marsupials in which the allantois,
instead of being arrested at an early
stage, has continued to grow.
Again, the Marsupials are linked on to
still lower forms of animal life through
the Monotremata, of which a few speci
mens survive in Australia, typified by
the Ornithorynchus, or water-mole, which
has the bill of a duck, and lays eggs.
This order has only one opening, called
the cloaca, for the purposes which, in
higher orders,' are performed by separate
organs; and it is remarkable that this
stage is passed through by man and the
higher mammals in the course of their
embryonic development.
Going still further back, the lines of
demarcation between orders are, as in
the case of birds and reptiles, more and
more broken down every day by the dis
covery of intermediate forms, and we
can almost trace the evolution from the
Ascidian or lowest vertebrate type into the
fish, the amphibia, the reptile, and so
upwards. And it is remarkable that this
course of evolution invariably corresponds
with the general progressive evolution
of types through geological ages, and
with the embryonic evolution of indi
vidual life from the primitive cell. It
is not too much, therefore, to assume
evolution to be the demonstrated law of
the world of life as well as of that of
matter, and to confine ourselves to the
question whether man is or is not a
solitary exception to this law.
We are now in a position to examine
more closely the bearing of this question
of “ missing links ” on that of human
origins. Geologically speaking, man is
one of the order of Primates, which
includes also the catarrhine apes and
monkeys of the Old World, the platyrhine
apes and monkeys of America, and the
lemurs or half-monkeys which are found
principally in Madagascar and a few
districts of continental and insular Asia
and Africa. Of these, the anthropoid
apes—the chimpanzee, gorilla, and orang
—approach most closely to man in their
structure.
In fact, considered as mere machines,
the resemblance between them and man
is something wonderful. It is much
closer than is suggested by a mere com
parison of outward forms. One must
have read the results arrived at by the
most distinguished comparative anato
mists. to understand how close is the
identity. Not merely does every bone,
every muscle, and every nerve in the
one find its analogue more or less
developed in the other, but even in such
minute particulars as the direction of the
hairs on the forearm converging towards
the elbow there is an absolute corre
spondence.
It is in the brain, however, which is
the most important organ, as being that
on .which the specially human faculty
of intelligence depends, that the close
- physical resemblance between man and
the other quadrumana is most striking.
The brain of all quadrumanous animals is
distinguished from that of quadrupeds by
certain well-defined characters. Those
of lemurs, monkeys, baboons, and apes
show a progression of these characters
from the lemurs, whose brain differs little
from that of rodents, up to the anthro
poid apes, the chimpanzee, the gorilla,
and the orang, who have a brain which
in its most essential particulars closely
resembles that of man. In fact, the
brain of these apes bridges over much
more than half the interval between the
simplest quadrumanous form of the
lemur and the most advanced—that of
man; while, in like manner, the brains of
some of the inferior races of mankind,
and of idiots, where the development of
the brain has been arrested, bridge over
the interval between man and ape, and,
in some extreme cases, approach more
nearly to the latter than to the former
type both in size and structure.
Attempt after attempt has been made
to find some fundamental characters in
the human brain on which to base a
generic distinction between man and the
brute creation; but such attempts have
�THE MISSING LINK
invariably broken down under a close
investigation. Thus, in the celebrated
controversy between Owen and Huxley,
the former distinguished anatomist
thought that he had found such a
distinction in the hinder part of the
human brain, but it turned out that he
had been misled by relying on the plates
in the work of the Dutch anatomists,
Camper and Vrolik; and Huxley, con
firmed by them, proved by actual dis
section that all the characters on which
Owen relied were to be found equally in
the brain of the chimpanzee and other
higher quadrumana.
The distinction also on which the
very term “ quadrumana ” is founded is
proved to be fallacious, for Huxley has
shown that the termination of the hinder
limbs of the anthropoids is really a foot
with a prehensile great toe, and not a
hand; and there are many instances,
both of human individuals and races,, in
which this toe has considerable flexibility,
and is used in climbing trees or picking
up small objects. And so in innumerable
other cases in which anatomical observa
tions, supposed to be specifically human,
have either been found wanting in some
individual men, and present in some
individual quadrumana, or have been
traced in both in some undeveloped or
foetal condition.
And yet with this close identity of
anatomical conditions there is, as Huxley
emphatically asserts, a wide gap between
man and the highest ape, which has
never been bridged over, and which pre
cludes the idea of direct lineal descent
from one to the other, though it implies
close relationship. The differences are
partly physical and partly intellectual.
Of the former, it may be said that they
may be all summed up in the fact that
man is specialised for erect posture.
Speaking broadly, it may be said that
man is a member of the order of Primates,
specialised for erect posture; while mon
keys are specialised for climbing trees;
and anthropoid apes are a sort of inter
mediate link, specialised mainly for
forest life, but with a certain amount of
73
capability for walking erect and on the
ground.
Thus, to begin at the foundation of
the human structure, the foot, with its
solid heel bone, arch of the instep, and
short toes, is obviously better adapted
for walking and worse for climbing than
that of monkeys. The upright basis of
the foot corresponds with longer, stronger,
and straighter bones of the leg, and a
greater development of muscles to move
them. The erect posture determines
the shape of the pelvis and haunch
bones, which have to support the weight
of the vertebral column and intestines
in a vertical direction. The vertebral
column, again, is arranged with a slight
double curvature, so as to enable the
body to maintain an upright posture, and
to afford a vertical support for the head.
And, finally, the larger brain is rendered
possible by its weight being nicely
balanced on a vertical column, instead
of hanging down and being supported
by powerful muscles requiring strong
processes for lateral attachment in the
vertebrse of the neck.
Again, the fore-limbs being entirely
relieved from the necessity of being used
as supports, acquire the marvellous
flexibility and adaptability of the human
arm and hand; a specialisation which
has doubtless a good deal to do with
man’s superior intelligence, for, as we
see in the case of the elephant, the
intelligence of an animal depends not
merely on the mass of the brain, but
very much on the nature of the organs
by which it is placed in relation with
the surrounding environment.1 In this
respect there is no animal organ com
parable to the human hand, and we may
probably trace its influence in other
divergencies of the human from the
bestial type. Thus, the greater develop
ment of the jaws and bones of the face
in animals, giving rise to a projecting
1 At a recent Congress of the British Associa
tion the theory was put forward, on high autho
rity, that this setting free of the arms may have
reacted on the brain and occasioned man’s great
mental progress.
�THE MISSING LINK
muzzle, is no longer requisite when the
arm and hand afford so much better an
instrument than the mouth for seizing
objects, and for attack or defence; while
from the same cause the canine teeth
tend to diminish. In fact, the specialisa
tion of improved types from the early
generalised type takes very often the
form of a reduction of the number of
teeth to that required for the relations of
the new types to their environment.
Thus, in the pure carnivora, like the
cats, the molars disappear and the
canines and sectorial premolars assume
a great development. In the herbivora,
on the other hand, the molars are
developed at the expense of the flesh
cutting teeth ; and in civilised man there
is a progressive diminution in the size of
the jaws, which hardly leaves room for
the normal number of teeth, some of
which are probably destined to dis
appear, as the so-called wisdom-teeth
have already almost done.
Thus, from the single point of view of
specialisation for erect posture, we arrive
at all the physical characteristics which
distinguish man from the monkeys and
anthropoid apes. At the same time, it
is a difference only of adaptation, and
not of essence. The machine man
differs from the machine ape, much as
the modern railway locomotive differs
from the old-fashioned pumping steamengine. The essential parts—boiler,
pistons, cylinders, valves—are the same,
but differently modified; those of the
locomotive being vastly better adapted
for condensed energy and rapid motion
in a smaller compass. Still, no one can
doubt their affinity and common origin,
or suppose that, while the Newcomen
engine owed its existence to human
invention, the Wild Irishman or Flying
Scotchman could only be accounted
for by invoking supernatural agency.
This is precisely the case as regards
man in his physical aspect. It is diffi
cult to imagine that the combination of
bones, muscles, and nerves, which make
a man, originated in any different manner
than did the combination of the same I
identical bones, muscles, and nerves
which make a chimpanzee or gorilla. If
one originated by evolution, the other
must have done so also; and conversely,
if. one came into being by special
miraculous creation, so also must the
other, and not only the other, but all
the innumerable varieties of distinct
species, now, and in past geological
times, existing upon earth.
It is only when we come to the higher
intellectual and moral faculties that the
wide gulf appears between man and the
animal creation, which it is so difficult
to bridge over. It is true that all or
nearly all of these faculties appear in a
rudimentary state in animals, and that
not only apes and monkeys, but dogs,
elephants, and others of the higher
species, show a certain amount of
memory, reasoning power, affection, and
other human qualities; while, on the
other hand, some of the inferior races of
mankind show very little of them. The
chimpanzee Sally, in the Zoological
Gardens, and Lord Avebury’s dog
Van, can count up to five; while it is
said that three is the limit of the count
ing power of some of the Australian
tribes. The gorilla, in his native forests,
according to the accounts of travellers,
lives respectably with a single wife and
family, and is a better husband and
parent than many of our upper ten who
figure in Divorce Courts. Still, there is
this wide distinction—that even in the
highest animals these faculties remain
rudimentary, and seem incapable of
progress, while even in the lowest races
of man they have reached a much higher
level, and seem capable of almost un
limited development. No human race
has yet been discovered which, however
savage, is entirely destitute of speech,
and of the faculty of tool-making in the
widest sense of adapting natural objects
and forces to human purposes.
As
regards speech, no animal has advanced
beyond the first rudimentary stage of
uttering a few simple sounds, which by
their modulations and accent give ex
pression to their emotions. They are in
�THE MISSING LINK
the first stage of what Max Muller calls
the “ bow-wow and pooh-pooh theory,”
and even in this they have advanced but
a little way. They have a very few root
sounds, and those are all emotional. A
dog or an ape can express love, hatred,
alarm, pain, or pleasure, but has. not
risen even to the height of coining
roots imitating sounds of nature, such as
“crack” and “splash,” and still less to
that which all human races have attained,
of multiplying these primitive roots
indefinitely, by extending them by some
sort of mental analogy to more abstract
ideas ; and connecting ' them by some
sort of grammar, by which they are
made to express a variety of shades of
meaning and modifications of human
thought. Animals understand their own
simple language perfectly well, and to a
certain extent some of the higher orders,
such as dogs and monkeys, can be
taught to understand human language;
but no animal has ever learned to speak
in the sense of using a series of articulate
sounds to convey meaning, though, as
in the case of the parrot, the vocal organ
may be there, capable of uttering imita
tion words and sentences.
As regards tool-making, no human
race is known which has not shown some
faculty in this direction. The rudest
existing tribes, such as Bushmen or
Mincopies, chip stones, and are acquain
ted with fire and with the bow and arrow,
spear, or some corresponding weapon
for offence and defence. The highest
apes have not got beyond the stage of
using objects actually provided for them
by nature for definite purposes. Thus
monkeys enjoy the warmth of a fire and
sit over it, but have never got the length
of putting on coals or sticks to keep it
up, much less of kindling it when extin
guished. Sally and Mafuca perfectly
understood the use of the keeper’s key,
and would steal and hide it, and use it
to let themselves out of their cage; but
no chimpanzee or gorilla has ever been
known to fashion any implement, or do
more than use the sticks and stones
provided by nature, for throwing at
75
enemies or cracking nuts. Their nearest
approach to invention is shown in con
structing rude huts or nests from branches
and leaves, for shelter and protection ;
an art in which both apes and savages
are very inferior to most species of birds,
to say nothing of insects. The difference
is a very fundamental one, for in the
case of man we can trace a constant
progression, from the rudest form of
palaeolithic chipped stones up to the
steam-engine and electric telegraph; but
in the ape we can discern no signs of
progress, or of a capacity for progress.
It is conceivable that by taking a certain
number of Bushmen or Australians when
young, placing them in a favourable
environment, and breeding selectively
for intelligence, as we breed race-horses
for speed or short-horns for fat, we might,
in a few generations, produce a race far
advanced in culture ; but it is not readily
conceivable that we could do the same
with orangs or chimpanzees. It would
be a most interesting experiment, to try
how far we could go with them in this
direction, but unfortunately it cannot be
tried, as we have no sufficient number
of specimens to begin with, and the race
cannot be kept alive, much less per
petuated, in our climate. Even if it
could, there is no reason to expect that
it would succeed up to the point of
making a race of apes or monkeys who
could speak a primitive language or
make primitive tools. For the funda
mental difference between them and
man may be summed up in the words,
“arrested development.”
At an early age the difference between
a young chimpanzee and a young negro
is not very great. The form and capa
city of the skull, the convolutions of the
brain, and the intellectual and moral
characters are within a measurable dis
tance of one another; but as age
advances the brain of the negro child
continues to grow, and its intelligence
to increase up to manhood; while in the
case of the ape the sutures of the skull
close, the growth of the brain is arrested,
and development takes the direction of
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THE MISSING LINK
bony structure, giving rise to a projecting
muzzle, protuberant crests and ridges,
and generally a more bestial appearance;
while the character undergoes a corre
sponding change and becomes less
human-like.
It is evident, therefore, that these two
branches of the Primates, man and ape,
follow diverging lines of development,
and can never be transformed into one
another, and that the “missing links”
to connect the human species with the
common law of evolution of the animal
kingdom are to be sought in other direc
tions than that of direct descent from
any existing form of ape or monkey.
There are three lines of research
which may be followed in looking for
traces of such missing links.
1. We may compare the higher with
the lower varieties of the existing human
species, and see if we can discover any
tendency towards a lower form of ances
tral development.
2. We may observe the results in the
cases of arrested development which
occur in those unfortunate beings who
are born idiots or microcephali—that is,
with deficient brains.
3. We may explore the records of the
past, of which we have now numerous
remains preserved in the fossil state.
. The first and second of these lines
give us a certain amount of clear and
positive result.
Comparing civilised
man with the Negro, Australian, Bush
man, and other inferior races, we invari
ably find differences which all tend in
the direction of the primitive “pentadactyle, plantigrade, bunodont.” The
brain is of less volume, its convolutions
less clearly marked, the bony develop
ment of the skull, face, and muzzle more
pronounced, the legs shorter and frailer,
the arms longer, the stature less. The
most primitive savage races known to us
are apparently those Pygmies who, like
the Akkas and Bushmen of Africa, the
Negrillos of Asiatic islands, some of the
hill tribes of India, and the Digger
Indians of North America, have been
driven everywhere into the most inacces
sible forests and mountains by the inva
sion of superior races.
The average
stature of many of these does not exceed
four feet, and in some instances falls as
low as three feet six inches; and in
structure, as well as in appearance and
intelligence, there is no doubt that they
approximate towards the type of monkeys.
In the case of idiots the resemblance
to an animal type is carried much further,
so far, indeed, that they may be almost
described as furnishing one of the missing
links. As Vogt says, “we need only
place the skulls of the negro, chimpanzee,
and idiot side by side to show that the
idiot holds, in every respect, an inter
mediate place between them.”
Thus the average weight of the brain
of Europeans is about 49 oz., while that
of Negroes is 44^oz.; and in some of
the inferior races it is still lower, descend
ing to about 35 oz. in the case of some
skulls of Bushwomen. This approaches
very closely to the limit of 32 oz. which
Gratiolet and Broca assign as the lowest
weight of brain at which human intelli
gence begins to be possible; but in many
cases of small-headed idiots the weight
descends much lower, and has even been
observed as low as 10 oz. The average
weight of the brain of the large anthro
poid apes is estimated at about 20 oz.,
and in some cases is even higher, so that
the brains of some of the inferior human
races stand about half-way between those
of the superior races and of the anthro
poids, which latter again differ more
from those of the lemurs and inferior
monkeys than they do from those of
man.
The approximation towards primitive
conditions shown by a comparison of
superior with inferior races, and of nor
mally developed men with idiots and
apes, might have been expected to derive
further confirmation from tracing back
to the third line of inquiry, that of fossil
remains.
And yet it is just here, where we might
expect to find conclusive evidence, that
we meet with least success. The number
of skulls and skeletons dating back to
�THE MISSING LINK
77
early Quaternary times, distant from us the muscle of the tongue is attached, and
1
certainly not less than 50,000 years, and is said to be necessary for the movements
i
probably much more, is now so great as 1of the tongue which render speech pos
to enable us to speak confidently as to sible. It is absent in the monkey and
1
their character, and even to classify their .all non-speaking animals ; and Mortillet
different types. The oldest is that known asserts that in the Naulette skull the
as the Canstadt type, the next oldest bone is absent, and its place shows a
that of Cro-Magnon. Now, the Cro- hollow. He argues that the primitive
Magnon type is not only not a degraded men of the Neanderthal or Canstadt
one, but, physically speaking, that of a type were incapable of speech, and his
fine race—tall in stature, with large and conclusion is thought probable by several
symmetrical brain-structure, and, on the good authorities. But the induction
whole, on a par with some of the best seems too wide to be drawn from a single
instance, and, as far as I am aware, it
modern races.
The Canstadt type is somewhat more has not been confirmed by any other
rude, and in extreme cases, like that of undoubted specimen of early palaeolithic
the celebrated Neanderthal skull, so man.
But a far greater advance was made
simious in the low forehead and massive
by the discovery of a few fragments of
bony ridges that at first sight it was
thought that one of the missing links what is now known as the pithecanthro
had really been discovered. But further pus erectus. In 1894 a Dutch military
inquiry showed that this was only an physician, Dr. Eugene Dubois, found in
■ extreme instance of a type which is Java the skull-cap, a femur, and two
presented by numerous other skulls of a teeth of some man-like animal. They
character entirely human, certainly not were submitted to the International
inferior to that of existing savages, and Zoological Congress at Leyden; and,
which may be traced as surviving among although they naturally gave rise to a
many of the best European races. Even heated discussion at first, they are now
in the extreme case of the Neanderthal generally recognised to be relics of some
skull, the brain was of fair capacity; and ancestral form, almost midway between
a modern skull, that of Lykke, a Dane man and his Simian progenitors. The
of distinguished intellectual capacity, is form to which they belonged is computed
preserved in the museum at Copenhagen, to have stood, when erect, five feet six
which closely resembles it in all its inches high, and to have had a skull
with a cranial capacity little more than
principal peculiarities.
If the Tertiary skulls of Olmo, Cas- half that of the native Australian or
telnedolo, and Calaveras are accepted Veddah woman. The bones rested upon
as genuine, they carry us back much a conglomerate which lies upon a bed of
further in the same direction. Every marine marl and sand of Pliocene age.
thing about these remains is entirely Professor Haeckel claims that we have
human, and in the female skull of Castel- in these remains “ the long-searched-for
nedolo, M. Quatrefages thinks he can missing link,” or “ a Pliocene remainder
discover a specimen of one of the milder of that famous group of highest Catarrand less savage forms of the Canstadt hines which were the immediate pithe
coid ancestors of man.” And as a writer
type,
. .
d
A nearer approach to positive data (Professor Keabley) in the Popular
seemed to be provided by a human jaw Science Monthly (February, 1902) says :
found in the Cave of La Naulette, inl “These remains have been subjected to
Belgium, in which Mortillet and other• the strictest scientific scrutiny and progood authorities assert that the genal[ nounced genuine.”
No further discoveries of intermediate
tubercle is wanting. This is a small[
bony excrescence on the chin, to whichl forms have yet been reported, but the
�78
THE MISSING LINK
evidence for at least the bodily evolution origins of man are to be sought as far
of man is now no longer seriously dis back as the Miocene, we can hardly
puted, and further investigation can only expect to find many specimens of the
serve the purpose of filling the gap in missing link. If we find such an abun
our galleries of palaeontology. No doubt dance of palaeolithic remains early in the
this gap will be supplied as the search Quaternary period, it must be because
proceeds, but the circumstances forbid the human race had long existed, and
us to hope to find these intermediate been driven by the pressure of increasing
forms in any abundance.
population to diffuse themselves over
From the wide diffusion of mankind nearly the whole of the habitable globe.
over nearly the whole of the habitable But this radiation from the original birth
globe in early Quaternary times, it is place must have been extremely slow,
clear that, if the race originated, like and immense periods must have elapsed
other animal races, from evolution, the before it reached the countries which have
origin must be sought in a much more been the fields of scientific research.
remote antiquity. The existence of the Again, great geological changes have
Dryopithecus and other anthropoid taken place since the Miocene period,
apes in the Middle Miocene shows that and it is quite probable that the earliest
the development of another branch, so scene of man’s development may be now
closely allied to man in physical structure, submerged beneath the Indian or Pacific
had been completed in the first half of Ocean.
the Tertiary period. Unless we assume
In Miocene times, when Greenland
direct descent, and not parallel develop and Spitzbergen supported a luxuriant
ment, for the two species, why should vegetation, such a continent would be
the starting-point of man be later than found to the north, possibly in that sub
that of the Dryopithecus ? The horse, merged northern continent which afforded
whose ancestral pedigree is the best a bridge for the passage of so many forms
established of any of the existing of animal life between the Old and New
mammals, was already in existence in Worlds. In fact, many geologists incline
the Pliocene period; and the Hipparion, to the conclusion that the more recent
which is the first of the links connecting forms of animal and vegetable life have
him with the primitive mammal, is first migrated southwards from this circum
found in the Miocene and not later than polar Miocene land, and not northwards
the Pliocene. Why should the develop from tropical regions.
ment of man have begun later, and
We can, therefore, draw no conclusion
followed a more rapid course than that from this scarcity of the remains of
of the horse ? Man, as M. Quatrefages intermediate forms. Science can only
observes, must, from his superior intelli continue to probe the crust of the earth
gence and knowledge of fire and clothing, wherever it is opened, and trust that
have been more able to resist changes of some lucky chance may again add to
climate and environment than many of our knowledge of them. The problem
the animals which undoubtedly outlived is one of the greatest theoretical interest,
the change from the Tertiary to the though we can now happily state that the
Quaternary period, and even survived admission of the fact of man’s animal
the excessive rigour of the Glacial epoch. descent no longer depends on such dis
If, as seems almost certain, the first coveries.
�ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SPIRITUALISM
79
Chapter VII.
ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SPIRITUALISM
Binet and Fere’s Volume—School of Salpetri^re could do just as much as a Mesmer with
his flowing robes and magic wand. This
_ .Dr. Braid—Hypnotism—How Produced
Effects of—Lethargy—Catalepsy—Somnam led to the further conclusion that any
bulism — Hallucination—Dreams—Hypnotic thing that strained the attention, or, in
Suggestion—Instances of—Visible Rendered
Invisible—Emotions Excited—Acts Dictated other words, excited certain sensory
—Magnet—Trance—Alternating Identity- centres of the brain abnormally, threw
Thought - Reading—Clairvoyance—Spiritual it, so to speak, out of gear, an<i caused
ism—Slate-Writing—Scybert _ Commission- both sensory and motor nervous centres
All Gross Imposture—Dancing Chairs and to behave in a very extraordinary and
Tables—Large Field Opened up by French
Investigations—-Point to Materialistic Results. unusual manner.
.
The volume by Messrs. Binet and. Fere,
published in the International Scientific
Series, gives a lucid view of the recent
researches by which the mysterious sub
jects comprised under the cognate heads
of animal magnetism, hypnotism, som
nambulism, catalepsy, hallucination, and
spiritualism have been,. to a consider
able extent, brought within the domain of
experimental science. The existence of
extraordinary phenomena in this misty
region had been known since the time
of Mesmer, and at times professors. of
what seemed to be something very like
the black art had excited a temporary
sensation, which died out as their tricks
were exposed, or as folly changed its
fashion. But there was such an atmos
phere of imposture, delusion, and super
stitious credulity about the whole subject
that rational men, and especially men of
science really competent to make experi
mental inquiries, turned fromit in disgust.
The first step towards a really scientific
inquiry was made by Dr. Braid, a wellknown surgeon in Manchester, about
forty-five years ago. He proved conclu
sively that the state known as mesmerism,
or artificial somnambulism, could be
produced by straining the eyes for a short
time to look at a given object.
A black wafer stuck on a white wall
Thus it produced a state of anaesthesia,
and, if chloroform had not proved a more
generally efficacious and manageable
agent, hypnotism would probably have
been employed to this day in surgical
operations. Healing effects also were
produced, which bordered very closely
on what used to be considered as
miraculous cures; and in several cases
Braid literally made the blind to see and
the lame to walk, by directing a stream
of vital energy to a paralysed nerve.
Still more extraordinary were the
effects produced in exalting the faculties
and paralysing the will. Muscular force
could in certain cases be so increased
that a limb became as rigid as a bar of
iron, and memory so stimulated that
words and scenes scarcely noticed at the
time, and long since forgotten, started
into life with wonderful vividness and
accuracy.
Thus, in one of Dr. Braid’s experi
ments, an ordinary Scotch servant-girl
startled him by repeating in Hebrew a
passage from the Bible.. It turned out
that she had been maid to a Scotch
minister who was learning. Hebrew, and
who used to walk about his study recit
ing passages from the Hebrew text.
Another instance shows the remark
able obliteration of the will in hypnotised
subjects. A puritanical old lady, to
�8°
ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SPIRITUALISM
whom dancing was an abomination, was process is repeated may be soon brought
sent capering about the room by playing into a state in which the slightest hint or
a reel tune on a piano, and telling her to suggestion is sufficient to produce the
join in the dance.
abnormal condition. Thus a highly
Dr. Braid’s experiments, however, did sensitive patient may be hypnotised if
not carry the subject much farther than led to believe that an operator is making
to make believe that there was really passes in an adjoining room, although
something in it; and the subsequent rise he is not really there; while, on the
of spiritualism, with its vulgar machinery other hand, the weight of evidence is
of table-turning and spirit-rapping, and against any effect being produced by
frequent exposures in police-courts, once real passes if the patient is totally
more repelled rational men and consigned unaware of anything of the sort going on,
the subject to oblivion.
or being expected.
But within the last few years a school
But with the class of patients at the
has arisen of French medical men, con Salpetriere the various effects can, in
nected with the hospital of Salpetriere, many cases, be produced with as much
at Paris, who have taken up the subject precision and certainty as when a bar of
in a thoroughly scientific spirit, and iron is magnetised or de-magnetised by
have arrived at truly wonderfully results. turning on or off an electric current
This hospital, affording as it does a con through a coil of copper wire surround
stant supply of hysterical and epileptic ing it.
patients, presents peculiar facilities for
These effects may be classed under
conducting a series of experiments. In two heads — physical and mental or
cases of individual experiments there is psychical. . Not but that the latter
always danger of error from simulation depend ultimately on mechanical move
on the part of the patient, or delusion ments of nerve-centres of the brain, but
on that of the operator. But here the they are connected with will, conscious
experiments were conducted by a body ness, and other phenomena which we
of scientific and sceptical men, selected are accustomed to consider as mental.
from the flower of French surgeons and The purely physical efforts, again, may
physicians; and the patients were so be classified under three heads—viz.,
varied and numerous that, by proper those of lethargy, catalepsy, and som
precautions, it was possible to eliminate nambulism.
The divisions shade off
the element of conscious imposture. into one another, but the typical states
This supply of a large number of patients, are sufficiently distinct to justify this
suffering from hysteria and other nervous classification, which is due to M. Charcot,
disorders, was an essential element for the Director of the Salpetriere.
success, for it is with this class of patients,
In lethargy the patient appears to be
and especially of female patients, that in the deepest sleep. In fact, all the
the phenomena can be produced with functions of mind and body, except the
most completeness and certainty. It is bare life, seem to be suspended. The
a moot point whether all human organ eyes are closed, the body is perfectly
isms are subject more or less to the helpless; the limbs hang slackly down,
influence of hypnotism; but it is certain and, if they are raised, they drop heavily
that with healthy adults not more than into the same position. The charac
one out of every five or six subjects can teristic feature of this state is that any
be hypnotised at the first attempt, and excitement of the muscles, either direct
a great majority of those who can are or through a stimulus applied to the con
only so in a slight degree.
necting motor nerve, produces what is
The liability, however, to hypnotic called a contracture. Thus, if the ulnar
influence increases rapidly by practice, nerve is pressed, the third and fourth
so that nervous patients on whom the fingers of the corresponding hand are
�ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SPIRITUALISM
forcibly contracted, and so for every
other nerve and corresponding muscle
of the body. This evidently affords a
perfect security against simulation, for no
one who was not a skilled anatomist
would know what muscles were con
nected with a particular nerve.
One of the most remarkable pheno
mena connected with these contiactures
is that they may be produced by a
magnet not in physical contact with the
nerve or muscle excited, and, still more
wonderful, that it may be transferred by
a magnet from one side of the body to the
other. Thus, if the fingers of the right
hand have been contracted by pressure
on the ulnar nerve of the right arm, and
a magnet is brought close to that nerve,
both hands become agitated with slight
jerking movements, and soon the con
tracture of the right fingers ceases, and
is transferred to the same fingers of the
left hand. We shall see later that in
more advanced stages of hypnotism still
more marvellous effects are produced by
the magnet, even to the extent of transfer
ring moral emotions into their opposites,
as love into hatred, or hatred into love.
In the meantime, it may be sufficient
to observe that these experiments with
the magnet seem to point out the most
likely way of bringing these mysterious
phenomena within the domain of accurate
science, and here the researches of the
Salpetriere school seem to be deficient.
We are merely told that the magnet pro
duces certain effects, but we want to
know at what distance does it produce
these effects. Do the effects and distance
vary with the power of the magnet ? are
they produced differently by the pre
sentation of the positive or negative pole?
are they produced by an electro-magnet
or by electric currents? is there any and
what reaction by the nerve or muscle on
the magnet ? and other similar questions.
When these are certainly known and
can be expressed in terms of weight and
movement, we shall have made the first
solid and secure step in advance towards
a solution of the more complicated
problems.
81
The next stage is that of catalepsy,
into which lethargy may be made to pass
by simply opening the eyelids. But,
although so closely allied to lethargy,
the states are very different. In catalepsy
all power of movement, or of resistance
to movement, is absolutely suspended,
and the body is like a lump of plastic
clay, which may be moulded into, and
will retain, any form given to it by the
operator. In fact, the subject becomes
a lay figure, with this sole difference,
that he remains so only for some ten or
fifteen minutes, after which the con
strained positions give way to natural
ones. But that he is a bona fide lay
figure for the time is proved by registering
the movements of the extended arm and
the regularity of the respiration, by means
of tracing instruments, and comparing
them with those of a healthy man volun
tarily assuming the same position. The
contrast of the tracings is most remark
able. That of the arm extended by
catalepsy is a straight line showing abso
lutely no tremors; while that of the arm
voluntarily extended shows such a series
of abrupt and increasing oscillations as
to make it quite conceivable how
thought-reading may be possible by con
tact between persons of exceptionally
delicate nervous organisation.
Another remarkable feature in cata
lepsy is that the position in which the
body is placed seems to react on the
mind, and call up the emotions, and
their reflex muscular motions, which are
habitually associated with the attitude.
Thus, if the head is depressed, the face
assumes the expression of humility; if
elevated, that of pride.
The most extraordinary phenomena
known are those of somnambulism, and
of the artificial somnambulism which is
produced by animal magnetism or
hypnotism. These are of various stages,
graduating from that of, ordinary waking
dreams to that of profound hypnotism,
in which will, consciousness, _ memory,
and perception are affected in a way
which at first sight appears to be truly
I magical or supernatural. The symptoms
�82
ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SPIRITUALISM
may be classed for convenience as nation and suggestion that the results
physical or psychical, although the latter are most startling and most opposed to
are really physical, depending ultimately ordinary experience. What is an hallu
on movements of nerve-centres.
cination? It may be described in one
The direct physical effect seems to be word as seeing the invisible and not
the exact opposite of that of lethargy— seeing the visible. And the same of the
viz., that the senses, instead of being other senses. They not only deceive us,
asleep, have their sensibility exalted in but give evidence directly contradictory
an extraordinary degree. Thus, subjects of that of the waking senses. We hear
feel the heat or cold produced by the inaudible, and are deaf to the audible;
breathing from the mouth at a distance we touch the intangible, and lose touch
of several yards. The hearing is so of the tangible; bitter tastes sweet, and
acute that a conversation may be over sweet bitter.
The fundamental fact
heard which is carried on in the floor seems to be that, if certain conditions or
below.
molecular movements of certain sensory
The amount of this exaltation of the nerve-centres of the brain are caused, no
senses can almost be measured. There matter how, the corresponding percep
is a familiar experiment in which the tions, with their train of associated ideas
impression of two points, as of separate and reflex movements, inevitably follow.
pencils near one another, is felt as one ; In. the normal waking state these con
and an instrument has been constructed, ditions are created by real objects con
known as Weber’s compasses, which veyed to the brain through the senses.
measures the amount of deviation neces We see a man, and we conclude him to
sary to produce a two-fold sensation. be a real man because our other senses
This deviation appears to be six times confirm the testimony of sight. If he
greater in the waking than in the som speaks, we hear him; if we touch him, we
nambulistic state, whence it may be in feel him ; and the evidence of all other
ferred that the sensibility of the sense people who see and hear him confirms
of touch has been exalted sixfold.
our experience. But in dreams we have
A similar exaltation is produced in the commencement of a different experi
the faculty of memory, as shown in the ence, for we see and hear distinctly for
instance already quoted, in which an the time, though in a fleeting and imper
ignorant servant-girl recited a long passage fect manner, scenes and persohs which
in Hebrew. As in dreams, perceptions have no real objective existence. In
long since photographed on the brain hallucinations we have the same thing,
and completely forgotten seem to be only in a waking or partially waking
revived with all the vividness of actually state, and the impressions made are
present perceptions when recalled by vastly more vivid and permanent.
some association with the dominant idea
Take the following as instances of
which has taken possession of the mind. positive hypnotic hallucinations, or seeing
This arises doubtless, in a great measure, the invisible, recorded by Messrs. Binet
from the mind being closed against the and Fere from their experience at the
innumerable other impressions which, in Salpetriere. A patient told to look at a
the waking state, wholly or partially butterfly which had just alighted on the
neutralise any one suggested idea, and table before her immediately said, “ Oh,
weaken its impression. Thus, a som what a beautiful butterfly,” and proceeded
nambulist walks securely along a narrow cautiously to catch it and impale the
plank, because no other outward impres imaginary butterfly with a pin on a piece
sions of surrounding objects confuse his of cardboard. Another patient, being
mind with suggestions of danger.
shown a photographic plate with an
It is, however, when we come to the impression of a scene in the Pyrenees,
partly psychical phenomena of halluci and told that it was a portrait of herself
�ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SPIRITUALISM
83
in a very unbecoming dress, or rather in the waking mind, and produce the
want of dress, immediately saw it so, and effects corresponding to the idea as by
was so enraged that she threw the plate an inevitable piece of machinery. This
on the ground and stamped on it. And brings the subject within the domain
what is remarkable, as showing the of criminal jurisprudence, for there is
intensity and persistency of these hallu abundant evidence that a normally moral
cinations, for nearly two months after person may obey a hypnotic suggestion
wards, when shown in her waking state which had been totally, forgotten, even
photographs of this landscape which had to the extent of committing the greatest
been taken from the plate, she saw her crimes, as attempting to stab or adminis
own portrait and fell into fits of passion. ter poison. Thus M. Fere relates that,
In another case a patient, being told that having ordered a subject in a state of
one of the hospital doctors would be somnambulism on awakening to. stab
present at a ball to be given, next night M. B------ with the pasteboard knife he
among the inmates of Salpetriere, saw, put into her hand, as soon as she awoke
conversed, and walked about with this she rushed on him and struck him in
imaginary doctor, who was not really the region of the heart. M. B-——•
present, and when she saw the real man feigned to fall down. The subject,
the day after could not recognise him being asked why she had killed him,
until she had been again hypnotised and replied with an expression of ferocity,
“He is an old villain, and wished to
the hallucination dispelled.
The negative experiences of making insult me.”
It is evident that, if these phenomena
the visible invisible are even more extra
are real, hypnotism ought to be regulated
ordinary. Take the following case:—
“ We suggested to a hypnotised patient by law as much as the far less dangerous
that when she awoke she would be unable practice of vivisection. The practice of
to see F----- •. She could not see him, it should be confined to licensed medical
and asked what had become of him. . practitioners, and under conditions re
We replied, 1 He has gone out; you may quiring the presence of at least two or
return to your room.’ She rose, said more witnesses, one of whom, especially
good morning, and, going to the door, in the case of females, should be some
knocked up against F------ , who had respectable friend or relative. I prefer,
placed himself before it. We next took however, not to dwell on this branch of
a hat, which she saw quite well, and the question, but to return to its purely
touched it so as to be sure that it was scientific and philosophical aspects.
The purely mechanical origin of these
really there. We placed it on F------’s
head, and words cannot express her hallucinations is shown by a number of
surprise when she saw the hat apparently interesting experiments. An hallucina
suspended in the air. F------ took off tory image can be reflected, refracted, or
the hat and saluted her with it several made to appear double, in precisely the
times, when she saw it, without any same manner as a real one. Thus, in
support, describing curves in the air. in what is known as Brewster’s experi
She declared the hat must be suspended ment, where an image is duplicated by
by a string, and even got on a chair to a slight lateral pressure on one eye
throwing it out of focus with the other,
feel for it.”
Numerous other instances equally the same effect is produced. A case is
remarkable are recorded, and there is a recorded where an hysterical patient, who
whole class of cases in which suggestions had a vision of the Virgin Mary appear
impressed on the subject’s mind in a ing in great glory, saw two Virgins
state of hypnotism may long afterwards, directly this lateral pressure was applied.
and when totally forgotten, be revived at Complementary colours also appear to
predicted periods, with irresistible force, an hallucinatory image of a red or green
�84
ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SPIRITUALISM
spot on a sheet of white cardboard, just: really displaced by F------ , who had been
as they would in the waking state if the: rendered invisible by suggestion. It is
spot were real. The magnet also, by’ evident that, if there is any real residue
a purely mechanical action, transfers of facts in the phenomena of spiritualistic
unilateral hallucinations which affect one; seances, after deducting what is due to
eye only, from the right to the left eye, legerdemain and imposture, the above
and vice versa, and it may be made to experiments would go a long way to
destroy an hullucination, as when X------ account for them. The preliminaries of
was made invisible to an hypnotic a seance, such as darkened rooms, con
subject; on applying a magnet to the tact of hands, and excited imagination,
back of the head, X------ again became are almost identical with those employed
visible.
by Mesmer, and it would be contrary to
And what is still more wonderful, the experience if they did not frequently
magnet is capable of transferring emo produce, on susceptible subjects, hyp
tions. Thus the idea was impressed on notic effects which made them suscep
a hypnotised subject that on awaking tible to hallucinating suggestions. If so,
she would feel a desire to strike F
—. there is no doubt that they might see
A magnet was placed near her right foot. tables move and Mr. Home float in the
On awaking, she jumped up and tried air, with a full conviction that they were
to give F----- - a slap, saying, “ I do not awake all the time and in possession of
know why, but I feel a desire to strike their ordinary senses.
him.” In another moment her face
This much I would observe, that all
assumed a gentle and endearing ex these attempts to escape from the inexor
pression, and she said, “ I want to able laws of nature invariably fail.
embrace him,” and tried hard to do so. Spiritualism is grasped at by many
Consecutive oscillations between love because it seems to hold out a hope of
and hatred were then observed.
escaping from those laws and proving
Another most remarkable phenomenon the existence of disembodied spirits.
is recorded. It was suggested to a sub But, when analysed by science, spiritual
jected X----- r that she had become M. ism leads straight to materialism. What
F------•. On awaking, she was unable to are we to think of free will if, as in the
see M. F------ , who was present, but she case of Dr. Braid’s old lady, it can be
exactly imitated his gestures, put her annihilated, and the will of another brain
hands in her pockets, and stroked an substituted for it, by the simple mechani
imaginary moustache. When asked if cal expedient of looking at a black wafer
she was acquainted with herself, X------ , stuck on a white wall ? Or what becomes
she replied with a contemptuous shrug, of personal consciousness and identity
“Oh, yes, an hysterical patient. What if, as in the case above quoted, a young
do you think of her? She is not too woman can be brought to refer to herself
wise.”
with contemptuous pity as a strange girl
There are two experiments recorded who “was not over wise ”? These cases
which throw a good deal of light on the of an alternating identity are most per
phenomena of what is known as spiritual plexing. Smith falls into a trance and
ism. In slight hypnotism, the subjects believes himself to be Jones. He really
assert, on awaking, that they have never is Jones, and Smith has become a stranger
for a moment lost consciousness, and to him while the trance lasts; but when
that they have been present as wit he awakes he is himself, Smith, again,
nesses at the phenomena of suggestion ;and forgets all about Jones. He falls
developed by the magnetisers.
In into another trance, and straightway he
another case the furniture of the room 1forgets Smith and takes up his Jones
seemed to the subject to be noisily <existence where he dropped it in the
moved about by invisible hands, being ]previous trance, and so he may go on
�ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SPIRITUALISM______
ments. These are transmitted, in the
r
case of hearing, by sound-waves of air ;
c
in that of sight by light-waves of ether,
1
to the nerve-endings of B, and along
t
those nerves to his brain, where they
t
originate cell-movements corresponding
Jto the original movements in the brain
t
of A, and which are accompanied by the
(
same train of ideas and perceptions. In
s
the sense of touch, there is no interme
1
diate medium between the nerve-endings
<
of A and B, and the movements of the
<
former are communicated directly to
those of B by contact. The senses of
taste and smell are hardly used by the
human species as means of communicat
ing ideas, though in many animal species,
as in the dog, the latter, sense is greatly
used in placing them in relation with
their environment.
This also may be affirmed respecting
the different senses, that they are capable
of being brought to an exceptional degree
of susceptibility by necessity and practice,
as is well illustrated by the facility with
which the blind substitute the sense of
“We are such stuff as dreams are made of,”
touch for that of sight, and read fluently
he enunciated what has become a scien books printed with raised letters. The
tific fact. The “stuff” is in all cases sense of sight also may be brought to a
the same—vibratory motions of nerve degree of unusual acuteness, enabling
the observer to read indications in the
particles.
The researches of the French school face and expression so slight as to be
of physiologists throw a good deal of invisible to the ordinary sense, and of
light on the mysterious regions of pheno which the person observed is . himself
mena, or alleged phenomena, which unconscious. A remarkable instance
are classed under the general heads of of this is given by Lord Avebury, of a
thought-reading, clairvoyance, and spirit dog who could pick out from a series of
ualism. Those of thought-reading and numbers on cards laid on the floor the
clairvoyance may be summed up in the; correct answer of sums in arithmetic,
question whether or no it is possible for and even extract cube-roots,. doubtless
one brain to communicate with another■ by observing unconscious indications in
otherwise than through the ordinary- his master’s face when he touched the
medium of the senses. It is certain that; correct card.
This, no doubt, goes a long way towards
in the immense majority of cases it is5
not possible. Consider how the ideas5 explaining the phenomena of what is
or perceptions of A are communicated1 called thought-reading. It is quite conto B. Certain movements of the brain- ceivable that, with contact, an exception
cells of A which are, if not the cause,, ally delicate sense of touch, exceptionally
j
the invariable concomitants of those cultivated, may enable a man to read
s
ideas and perceptions, send currents the insensible tremors which are unalong the nerves, which at their extre- consciously transmitted to nerve-ends
mities contract muscles and cause move and superficial muscles, the existence of
alternating between Smith and Jones,
I often ask myself the question—If he
died during one of his trances, which
would he be, Smith or Jones ? and I
confess that it takes some one wiser than
I am to answer it.
Again, what can be said of love and
hate if, under given circumstances, they
can be transformed into one another by
the action of a magnet ? It is evident
that these phenomena all point to the
conclusion that all we call soul, spirit,
consciousness, and personal identity are
indissolubly connected with mechanical
movements of the material elements of
nerve-cells, and that, if we want any
further solution, we must go down deeper
and ask what this matter, and what these
movements, or rather the energy which
causes them, may really mean. Can the
antithesis between soul and body, spirit
and matter, be solved by being both
resolved into one eternal and universal
substratum of existence ? When Shake
speare said,
�86
ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SPIRITUALISM
which is a necessary consequence of all
different. Here we find ourselves on
brain-motion or thought, and which is
less firm ground, and opinions vary
proved to exist as a matter of fact by the
considerably. Mr. Frank Podmore, who
irregularities in the line traced by a
was for many years the secretary of, and
pencil under suitable conditions. And
an indefatigable and critical worker in,
it is to be remarked that keeping the
the above society, believes that there
mind fixed on the idea—in other words,
making the corresponding brain-motions remain a large number of facts after the
keenest analysis which point to the
and nerve-currents stronger and more
persistent — is the condition usually existence of telepathy and a kind of clair
required for a successful experiment in voyance. He has discussed the matter
fully m his Apparitions and Thoughtthought-reading.
Transference and later works. Professor
Thus far—and Mr. Cumberland, the
Charles Richet has also conducted a
most successful thought-reader of the number of experiments which lead him
day, carries it no farther—there is nothing
to the same conclusion. In their theory
impossible, or even a priori improbable, the active particles in the brain cause
in the assertion that thought may be
waves in the surrounding ether, and
thus read. It is a question of evidence,
these are received and interpreted by a
and here the weight of the negative
sympathetic brain, much as in the pro
evidence is so great that it requires
cess of wireless telegraphy. But other
extremely strong proof to establish ex scientific men consider that coincidence
ceptions. It is a matter of notoriety is not inadequate to explain the few
that persons, even of delicate tempera
phenomena which can be demonstrated
ments, may lie in the closest contact, to be free from fraud or hallucination.
clasped in each other’s arms, without
Consider the enormous number of
either having the remotest idea of what
dreams, 300,000,000 at least, of civilised
is passing. in the mind of the other, human beings dreaming for most nights
unless it is conveyed by the ordinary of the year, and these dreams all made
channels of sight or hearing. On the
up of fragments of actual scenes and
other hand, the evidence for a few rare
persons, which have been photographed
exceptions is strong, especially in the
on the brain. The wonder is not that
case of some of Mr. Cumberland’s ex there should be occasional coincidences
periments, which are all the stronger
between dreams and contemporaneous
because he does not pretend to any
or subsequent occurrences, but that there
supernatural power, and shows none of should be so few of them. How many
the ordinary signs of an impostor. All
anxious brains must have dreamt of
we can say, therefore, is that where there absent friends or relations dying or in
is contact, or where unconscious indi
danger, and in how many millions of
cations may be read by the eye, there is
cases must the dream not have been
nothing in thought-reading inconsistent verified. And how many vivid dreams,
with the known laws of Nature ; but that or dreams in a dozing state, between
the evidence, though strong, is hardly sleeping and waking, must have passed
strong enongh to enable us to accept it into the stage of hallucination, and been
as an established fact.
taken for actual visions. And how weak
Yet when we come to thought-reading is memory, and how strong the myth
at a distance, and to the analogous making propensity of the human mind
alleged phenomena of clairvoyance,
to convert these dreams and visions into
fulfilled dreams and visions, and com waking realities. Of the many cases of
munications across the globe, mostly distant communications collected by the
from the dead and dying, such as are so Psychical Research Society, I do not
plentifully recorded in the annals of the know of one which may not be thus
Psychical Research Society, the case is
accounted for; and in some the proof is
�ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SPIRITUALISM_________ 87
what the answer was I The “m” of
conclusive, as where visions have been
seen or impressions felt of events before “mother” had been written not very
'
they occurred, owing to the difference of legibly, with the first stroke too long, so
1
that at a hasty glance in a constrained
time due to longitude.
. .
1
In the case of spiritualism it is re- position it might be easily read as
i
And sure enough the
markable that it is only the more vulgar “brother.”
and grotesque forms which there is any answer came, “ Your brother’s spirit not
•
difficulty in explaining. We understand being here, we do not know his Christian
This was my first and last
how spirits are materialised, for the name.”
apparatus has been frequently exposed experience of omniscient spirits, and it
in the police-courts; there is. nothing was perfectly apparent that it was only a
very mysterious in the way in which piece of very simple and very clumsy
No doubt things more
slight hints and clues are followed up by legerdemain.
professional mediums. And there is this marvellous are done by superior legerde
conclusive consideration—that the spirits main, but nothing that I have ever heard
never say or know anything which has of that is beyond the resources of leger
not passed through the mind of the demain, or which is so wonderful as the
medium. If he is illiterate, the spirits mango and other tricks of Indian
would be plucked for their spelling; if jugglers. No one who has not studied
he is weak in his h’s, so are they; if he the art of legerdemain can be aware how
makes a mistake or is entrapped into a great its resources are, and how com
contradiction, they follow suit. In no pletely the senses may be deceived by a
single instance has any communication skilful operator. Nor is it at all difficult
of the slightest use or novelty been made to understand how slight clues may .be
used by an experienced operator, to give
by these visitors from another world.
In short, the whole affair is obviously what are apparently astounding answers.
legerdemain in rapping or writing on Thus, if a medium happens to know that
slates, answers to questions known to the a death has at any time occurred in the
medium, supplemented by any hints or family of the questioner, the answer
clues he may possess, and in the absence wrapped or written out is sure to profess
of these by such commonplaces as “We to come from the spirit of the deceased
are happy,” “ We are with you.” I saw relative.
If any doubt had remained as to the
a conclusive proof of this in the only
experience I ever had with a professional nature of these spiritualistic experiences,
medium, one of great repute.
The it would have been removed by the
question put was, “ What was my report made in 1887 by the Scybert
mother’s Christian name?” This was Commission. In this case Mr. Scybert,
written on a slate out of sight of the an enthusiastic spiritualist in the United
medium, and turned down, and ap States, bequeathed a considerable sum of
parently held by one of his hands under money to the University of Philadelphia,
a table, while the other hand was held by on the condition that it should appoint
the questioner. Nothing occurred for a a Commission to investigate modern
while, but then began a series of groans spiritualism. Ten Commissioners were
and twistings by the medium, which I appointed, including several professors
took to be part of the usual conjurer’s and well-known men of science j some
patter to divert attention; but, looking of whom, including their chairman, Dr.
closely, I distinctly saw a corner of the; Furness, confessed “ to a leaning in
slate reversed under the table, with the: favour of the substantial truth . of
writing on it uppermost, followed by the: spiritualism.” They took . great pains
scratching of a pencil, after which the: with the investigation, which was conanswer was produced, alleged to have; ducted wiih scrupulous fairness, and
been written by the spirits. But mark; examined many of the most famous
�88
ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SPIRITUALISM
mediums, among whom was the well- are produced. There is a deal of eviknown Dr. Slade.
Their unanimous dence from persons whose good faith
5
report was that the whole thing was based cannot be doubted that they have seen
1
on “gross, intentional fraud.” They1 pieces of furniture move at the end of a
saw distinctly how the tricks were; room, without any contact or apparent
effected, and a professional conjurer,, cause, and that this took place in private
Mr. Kellar, who had been at first baffled houses, where there was no possibility of
by the phenomena of slate - writing,, prepared machinery.
having turned his attention more closely
The mediums say it is done by spirit
to this branch of conjuring, was able not hands. This is obviously absurd, for it
only to repeat the processes of the best is not a case which lies outside of known
mediums, but to do so with far greater laws of Nature, but one which radically
skill, and _ produce effects which they
conflicts with them. As long as the law
could not imitate; while he has given a of motion holds “that action and reaction
challenge to the spiritualistic world that
are equal and opposite,” there can be no
he will reproduce by sleight-of-hand any action without a solid point of resistance.
alleged spiritualistic phenomena which Archirnedes said that he could move the
he has witnessed three times. Slade world if you gave him a irov trra, or
himself was later condemned to prison fulcrum, on which to rest his machinery;
in London for fraud.
and the ghost of Archimedes, if sum
This report is so conclusive to any moned from the Elysian fields at the
reasonable mind that it is scarcely bidding of a seedy professional medium,
necessary to refer to the mass of corro could say no more. Spirit-hands must
borative evidence to the same effect; be attached to a solid spirit body, stand
such, for instance, as the confession of ing on solid feet on a solid floor, to lift a
the Fox family, that the rappings, in weight. And the same thing applies to
which the spiritualistic faith originated, any supposed magnetic or psychic force
were produced by a knack they had of enacted by the medium. If the medium
half-dislocating toe and knee joints, and pulls the chair, the chair must pull the
replacing them with a sudden snap— medium, and it becomes a case of “pull
a knack which, singularly enough, is also devil, pull baker.” If a magnet lifts an
possessed by Professor Huxley; the iron bar, it is because the magnet is fixed
confessions of Home and other exposed to some point of attachment.
mediums; and the experiences of Mr.
The question, therefore, resolves itself
Davy, Mrs. Sedgwick, and others, related into one either of hallucination or
in a volume of the Psychical Research legerdemain. Do the chairs and tables
Society.
really move, or only seem to move?
Those who are not convinced by such There appears to be no trustworthy
proofs as these are impervious to reason, evidence as to this fundamental point,
and it would be a waste of words to argue and yet it is one easily determined.
the matter any farther. It may be Does the housemaid when she comes
assumed as a demonstrated fact that all :into the room next morning, or anyone
the phenomena which profess to be based ■who has not been under the influence
on a communication with a spiritual <of the seance, find the furniture where it
world are, in the words of the Scybert 1was originally, or where it seemed to be
Report, simple instances of vulgar leger- jplaced. If it was really moved, who moved
demain and of human credulity.
jit? Here, also, hallucination might come
It is only when we come to what may i
into play in another form, for if, as
be called the tomfoolery of spiritualism, <
described in the experiment of Binet and
such as unmeaning tricks of dancing ]
Fere, already mentioned, the medium
chairs and tables, that we are left in c
could release his hands without being
doubt how some of the appearances I [
perceived, and render himself invisible
�ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND SPIRITUALISM_________ 89
by suggestion, or perform the trick in a apparent contact. Nor do they seem to
dark room, he could easily move the have thoroughly studied and mastered
chairs himself without being seen. ^his the resources of legerdemain, which are
seems the more probable, as in all the obviously one of the principal causes,
accounts I have read the articles moved and in many cases the sole cause, of the
do not exceed the weight which the so-called spiritualistic manifestations, and
medium might move, either in his natural without a knowledge of which no one
is really competent to form an opinion.
condition, or with his muscular strength
excited by hypnotism. Assuming a state Indeed, it is questionable whether, when
all the more refined tricks of spiritualistic
of hypnotism to be induced in the spec
mediums have been so thoroughly
tators, the explanation would be easy,
and, in fact, identical with many of the exposed, it is worth while to seek for
scientifically-recorded experiments of any other hypothesis than that of ordi
Binet and Fere. And it is remarkable nary conjuring to account for those
that the preliminary conditions of the mere childish and unmeaning manifesta
stance, such as darkened rooms, clasped tions, the modus operandt of which has
hands, and strained attention, are identi not yet been fully explained.
It is evident, however, from the wellcal with those employed, from Mesmer
attested experiments of the French school,
downwards, in producing real hypnotism.
At the same time, it would seem that that there really is opening up a most
the hypnotism (if it be so) introduced at interesting field of inquiry as to the
stances differs from ordinary hypnotism. relations of mind to matter under certain
The subjects retain the fullest convic exceptional conditions, and the extent
tion that they have been wide awake all to which illusions may appear as realities
the time, and in full possession of their under the influence of excited imagi
Hypnotism, somnambulism,
ordinary senses. Can there be a state of nation.
semi-hypnotism in which the brain, while dreams, and hallucinations are becoming
retaining its full consciousness, is rendered exact sciences; and researches pursued
susceptible to suggested hallucinations ? in the same manner into the alleged
If so, the whole matter is explained. If phenomena of spiritualism and thought-’
not, it is very singular that the same reading would end either in exposing
preliminary operations which produce imposture, or in reducing such residuum
hypnotism, where hypnotism is expected, of truth as they may contain to known
should make chairs and tables dance, laws analogous to those which prevail
and bodies float in the air, where that is in other branches of physiological and
what the spectators expect to see. But psychological investigation.
In the meantime, I conclude by saying
the problem could easily be solved, so
that, so far as we have yet gone, the whole
far as the medium is concerned, by
connecting him with an electric current, of what is called “ spiritualism. seems
which would be broken and ring a bell to be quite dreadfully “materialistic.”
if he moved hand or foot, and seeing The one fact which comes out with
whether, under such circumstances, the demonstrated certainty is that definite
ideas are indissolubly connected with
furniture could be moved.
It is singular that the men of really definite vibrations of brain-cells; and
scientific attainments who profess a belief that, however these vibrations are
in spiritualism, such as Sir W. Crookes induced, the corresponding ideas and
and Mr. Wallace, do not seem to have perceptions inevitably follow. In the
proceeded in this way of accurate experi ordinary course of things, these vibrations
ment pursued by the French school of are induced by what are called realities
Salpetriere, even as regards the first acting through the senses, and by the
rudimentary alleged facts of moving normal action of the brain-cells on the
heavy bodies at a distance without perceptions thus received and stored up.
�90
AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
But this applies only to about twothirds of our existence—viz., the waking
state. In sleep and dreams the vibra
tions set up are from former perceptions,
photographed on the brain, and grouped
together in unreal and often fantastic
pictures.
In somnambulism this is
carried to a further point, and we act
our dreams. In hypnotism it is carried
still farther, and the vibrations are excited
by a foreign will and by foreign sugges
tions. In the ultimate state, madness,
the hallucinations have become per
manent. But what strange questions
does it raise when we find that, in
certain abnormal conditions, all that is
most intimately connected with what we
call soul, individuality, and conscious
ness can be annihilated, or exchanged
for those of another person, by the
mechanical process of exciting their
corresponding brain-motions in another
way. What are love and hate, if a
magnet applied to a hypnotised patient
can transform one into the other? What'
is personal identity if the suggestion of
a. third person can make an hysterical
girl forget it so completely as to make
her talk of herself as a distant acquaint
ance “ who is not over wise ” ? What is
the value of the evidence of the senses
if a similar suggestion can make us see
the hat, but not the man who wears it,
or dance half the night with an imaginary
partner? Am I “I myself, I,” or am I
a barrel-organ, playing “ God save the
Queen, if the stops are set in the normal
fashion, but the “ Marseillaise ” if some
cunning hand has altered them without
my knowledge? These are questions
which I cannot answer. All I can say
is that practically the wisest thing I can
do is to keep myself, as far as possible,
in the sphere of normal conditions, and
assume its conclusions to be real; avoid
ing, except as a matter for strict scientific
investigation, the various abnormal paths
which, in one way or other, all converge
towards the ultimate end of insanity.
Chapter VIII.
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE. AGNOSTICISM
AND CHRISTIANITY
PART I.
Are they Reconcilable ?—Definitions of Agnosti
cism and Christianity—Christian Dogma—
Rests on Intuition, not Reason—Descartes,
Kant, Coleridge—Christian Agnostics—Ten
dency of the Age—Carlyle, George Eliot,
Renan—Anglican Divines, Spurgeon.
we know nothing of what may be beyond
phenomena,” and “ that a man shall not
say he knows or believes that which he
has no scientific grounds for professing
to know or believe.” This is not a
positive or aggressive creed, and is recon
Is Agnosticism reconcilable with Chris cilable with any . form of moral, intel
tianity, orare theyhopelesslyantagonistic? lectual, or religious belief which is not
That depends on the definition we give dogmatic—/.<?., which does not attempt
to the two terms. That of Agnosticism to impose on us some hard-and-fast
is very simple. It is contained in the theory of the universe, based on attempts
sentence of Professor Huxley’s, “ That to define the indefinable and explain
�AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
the unknowable.
The definition of
Christianity is by no means so simple.
Practical Christianity resolves itself very
much, and more and more every day,
into a sincere love and admiration of the
life and teaching of Jesus, the son of the
carpenter of Nazareth, as depicted in the
narratives which have come down to us
respecting them, mainly in the Synoptic
Gospels. This love and admiration
translates itself into a desire to imitate as
far as possible this life, and to act upon
these precepts; to be good, pure, loving,
charitable, and unselfish even to the
death.
With this form of Christianity the
Agnostic has no quarrel; on the contrary,
if he is not dwarfed and stunted in his
faculties, if he has a heart to feel and
an imagination to conceive, he recognises
as fully as the most devout Christian all
that is good and beautiful in the true spirit
of Christianity and its Author. Nay,
more, he will not quarrel with the mass of
humble and simple-minded Christians
who show their love and admiration by
piling up adjectives until they reach the
supreme one of “ divine,” and who, in
obedience to the ineradicable instinct of
the human mind to personify abstract
ideas and emotions, make Jesus of
Nazareth their Ormuzd, or incarnation
of the good principle, and author of all
that is pure, righteous, and lovely in the
universe.
But there is another definition of
Christianity of a totally different char
acter—the dogmatic or theological defini
tion, which, commencing with St. Paul
and St. John, and culminating in the
Athanasian Creed, has been accepted
from the early ages of Christianity,
almost until the present day, as the
miraculous revelation of the true theory
of the universe. It teaches how a
personal God created the universe, how
he deals with it and sustains it, how
he formed man in his own image, and
what relations he has with him. It pro
fesses to explain mysteries such as the
origin of evil, man’s fall and redemption,
his life beyond the grave, the conditions
9i
of his salvation, and a variety of other
matters which, to ordinary human percep
tion, and human reason, are absolutely
and certainly hidden “ behind the veil.”
With this definition of Christianity
Agnosticism has nothing in common.
It cannot be both true that we know
certain things and that we do not and
cannot know anything about them.
Theology asserts that we are quite
capable of knowing the truth respecting
these mysteries, and that, in point of fact,
we do know it, either by intuition or
by historical evidence.
Philosophy
traverses the assertion that we know it
by intuition; Science shatters into frag
ments the scheme assumed to be taught
historically by a miraculous revelation.
To begin with intuition. It rests on
Cardinal Newman’s celebrated theory of
the “Illative sense,” or a. complete
assent of all the faculties, which gives a
more absolute proof than any that can
be attached to proofs of science, which
are only deductions from certain limited
faculties, such as experience and reason.
This was very clearly put by Father
Dalgairns in the discussion on “The
Uniformity of Laws of Nature ” at the
Metaphysical Society. He said: “I
believe in God in the same sense in
which I believe in pain and pleasure, in
space and time, in right and wrong, in
myself. If I do not know God, then
I know nothing whatever.” That is, the
idea of such a being as the God of
theology, a personal creator of the uni
verse, with faculties like, though trans
cendently like, those of man, appeared
to him a necessary postulate, or rather a
fundamental instinct or mould of thought,
as universal and imperative as those of
space and time. Now, is this so? It is
at once refuted by the fact that it is not
universal and not imperative. The im
mense majority of mankind, both now
and in all past ages, have had no such
intuition. It is the refined product of
an advanced civilisation, confined to a
few exceptional minds of high culture,
acute intellect, and tender conscience.
Even in Christian countries it is an
�92
AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
affair of education and authority, rather the attempted definitions are mere
than of necessary intuition; and even juggles with words which convey no real
those who assert most loudly that it meaning. We talk of creation; but when
is a fundamental category of thought it comes to the point we find that we
complain that ninety-nine men out of really mean transformation, and that of
every hundred in modern England live creation, properly speaking, we have no
practically as if there were no God. Not more idea than the babe unborn. We
so with the real categories of thought and talk of immortality; but what we were
perception. No man, past or present, before we were born, or what we shall
in Monotheistic, Pantheistic, or Poly be after we die, what soul, consciousness,
theistic countries, has ever lived practi personal identity really are, how they
cally as if there were no such things as came to be indissolubly connected with
space and time, or as if such primary matter, and what they will be when
perceptions as those of pain and pleasure that union is dissolved, are mysteries as
had no real existence. These have to which we can only make guesses, like
never deceived us ; but the instances are the Brahmins and Buddhists, whose
innumerable in which the “illative guess is transmigration, or the Red
sense,” the complete, earnest, and con Indians, whose guess is a happy hunting
scientious assent of all the faculties, has ground beyond the setting sun.
deceived us, and has led to conclusions
The greatest philosophers have come
which a wider knowledge has shown to to this as the ultimate fact of their meta
be not only erroneous, but, in many physical reasonings.
Descartes says
cases, absurd and noxious.
“ that by natural reason we can make
When closely analysed, the theological many conjectures about the soul, and
idea of God may be clearly seen to be have flattering hopes, but no assurance.”
an attempt to define the indefinable. Kant confesses that reason can never
The primary idea is that of a creator. prove the existence of a God. Even
But what is creation ? Making a thing, great theologians, in the midst of their
in the sense in which alone man makes dogmatic definitions, let drop admissions
anything—that is, transforming existing which show that, at the bottom of their
matter and energy into new forms—we hearts, they feel their ignorance of the
can understand. As we make a watch high mysteries of which they talk so con
or a steam-engine, we can conceive how fidently. The Athanasian Creed, the
a Being, with faculties like our own, but very essence and incarnation of dogma
indefinitely magnified, might make a tism, says “the Father incomprehen
universe out of atoms and energies, and sible” in the midst of a long series of
make it so perfectly that it would go for articles, every one of which is absolutely
ever. But how he could make some devoid of meaning unless on the assump
thing out of nothing, which is what tion that he is comprehensible, and that
creation really implies, altogether passes the writer rightly comprehended him.
our understanding. We have absolutely St. Augustine writes, “ God is unspeak
no faculties which enable us to form even able,” and then proceeds, in a long
the remotest conception of what those treatise on “ Christian Doctrine,” to
atoms and energies really are, how they speak of him as if he knew all about
came there, or what will become of them. his personality, attributes, and ways of
The more closely we examine, the dealing with the world and man. Even
clearer it will appear that these theo St. Paul says, “ O the depths of God 1
logical intuitions are, in effect, nothing how unsearchable are his judgments, and
but aspirations; or reflections, like how inscrutable are his ways !”
Brocken spectres, of our earnest longings,
What more have Huxley and Herbert
fears, and hopes on the back-ground Spencer ever said ? Only they have said
mists of the Unknowable; and that all it deliberately, consistently, and knowing
�AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
93
things is regulated by a special personal
the reason why; while theologians,
providence, frequently interfering by
admitting the premises, have preferred to
miracles with the course of evolution and
act and argue as if a totally different set
the uniformity of the laws of Nature.
of premises were true. The cause is The cause of miracles may be considered
obvious: Reason failing, they have as out of court when even enlightened
fallen back on Revelation. They had an
advocates who hold a brief for them,
• assured belief that an inspired volume,
like Dr. Temple, an Archbishop of the
attested by miracles, . taught things
Anglican Church, throw it up . and
respecting these mysteries which other
declare “ that all the countless varieties
wise must have remained, unknown.
of the universe were provided for. by an
Thus Coleridge, who occupies a fore
original impress, and not by special acts
most place among those who have
of creation modifying what had pre
attempted to base Christian theology on
abstract reason, arrives at this conclusion, viously been made.”
Dogmatic theology, therefore, having
that “aChristian philosophy or theology
no solid foundation either in abstract
has its own assumptions, resting.on three
ultimate facts—namely, the reality of the reason or in historic facts, and. being in
law of conscience, the existence of a hopeless conflict with science, is bound
responsible will as the subject of that law, to disappear; and even now, in address
ing enlightened and impartial men, it
and, lastly, the existence of God. The
first is a fact of consciousness; the may be taken as “ une quantite negligesecond, of reason necessarily concluded able.” This being the. case, the barrier
which separates Agnosticism from Chris
from the first; the third, a fact of history
tianity is to a great extent removed.
interpreted by both.” He clearly sees
The term “Christian Agnostic” is
that any certain knowledge respecting the
coming more and more to the front in
existence of God, and the various. con
clusions deduced from it by Christian the thoughts and utterances, of en
theology (such as the creation of man, lightened Christian men. I notice these
his fall and redemption, the origin of sin with pleasure, for it is always more
and evil, atonement, grace, and pre profitable to find points of . agreement
destination), if a fact at all, is a fact. of rather than of difference with sincere
A Professor of
history—that is, depends on a conviction and reasonable men.
that these mysteries were . actually Divinity, preaching in the University of
revealed as recorded by the Bible, and Oxford a short time ago, said : “ The field
that the Bible is an inspired, book of speculative theology may be regarded
attested by historical facts; that it con as almost exhausted: we must be. con
tains prophecies which really were ful tent henceforward to be Christian
filled, and describes miracles which Agnostics.” Canon Freemantle, in an
article in the Fortnightly Review, quotes
actually occurred.
This assumption has turned out to be this with approval. In the course of a
a broken reed.
In face of the dis very able argument on the changed con
coveries of recent science, no reasonable ditions of theology, he says that “ theo
man doubts that, beautiful, and admirable logians, in defiance of Aristotle s axiom,
as the Bible, and especially the New that you must not expect demonstration
Testament, may be in many parts,, it is from a rhetorician, have begun with
not a true, and therefore not a Divine, axioms and definitions and proceeded to
They have said or
revelation of the scheme of the universe. demonstrations.
1 proved ’ that God is just or. good, God
It is not true that the world was created
as described by Genesis; that man is a is personal, God is omniscient and
recent creation made in God’s image, omnipotent; and they have used these
who fell from his high estate by an act phrases, not in a literary, but in a quasiof disobedience; or that the course of scientific, manner, and have proceeded to
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AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
draw strict inferences from them. But,
in doing this, they have not only acted
in the way of unwarrantable assump
tions; they have often produced what
St. Paul termed the vain janglings of a
science falsely so-called; have enslaved
the Divine to their own puny conceptions,
and have provoked violent revolt.”
This is precisely what Agnostics con
tend for. They do not deny that, in the
course of evolution, certain feelings and
aspirations have grown up and come to
be part of the mental furniture of civi
lised nations, which find a poetical
expression in the ideas of God and of
immortality. They simply deny that we
have, or ever can have, any certain,
definite, and scientific knowledge respect
ing these mysteries.
To take an
instance—that of the pre-existence of
the soul before birth; we recognise a
certain poetical truth in Wordsworth’s
noble ode when he asserts this pre
existence, and tells us that in infancy—
“ Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.”
But we do not accept it as a known or
knowable fact. We have absolutely no
experience of any consciousness or
personal identity before birth, or as
existing otherwise than in association
with the matter and energy of our cor
poreal body. No more have we of any
continuance of that identity after death.
It is “behind the veil,” in that great
region of the “ Unknowable ” where
nothing is known, and therefore all
things are possible. Here Agnosticism
comes in as a powerful auxiliary to those
emotions and aspirations which consti
tute what is called “religion.” It is the
best of all arguments against Atheism
and Materialism, for, if we cannot prove
an affirmative, still less can we prove a
negative.
No man who understands
what knowledge really means can affirm
that any conception of what may exist in
the great Unknowable which compasses
us about on every side is impossible.
He can only call it impossible when it
conflicts with known facts and laws; but
as long as it remains in the region of
poetical imagination or moral emotion
he cannot disprove it, and may even, if
he finds consolation or guidance from
it, give it a sort of provisional assent.
Thus, no Agnostic can deny that, if he
had faculties to see him, there might be
in the Unknowable a Divine spirit or *
substratum bearing some resemblance
to what enlightened men understand by
the term “God”; that there maybe a
Divine eye watching his every thought
and recording his every action ; and he
will not be. acting unwisely if he endea
vours to mould his life as if this were a
true supposition.
Only he does not
pretend to know this as a dogma or
certain truth, and therefore he does not
quarrel with any brother-man who thinks
differently, or who fancies that he has
more certain assurance.
Christian
morality he recognises fully, not as
taught by the later inventions of Churches
and casuists, but as displayed in the life
and teachings of Jesus, the son of the
carpenter of Nazareth, as they stand out,
when stripped of their mythical and
supernatural attributes, in the narrative
of the Gospels.
He looks on these
moral precepts as the results of a long
process of evolution in the best minds of
the best races, and not as arbitrary rules,
invented for the first time, and imposed
from without by miraculous teaching;
and he sees in Jesus simply the brightest
example and best model of a large class
of the virtues which are most needed to
make practical life pure, lovely, and of
good repute. In this sense may we not
all shake hands in the near future and be
“ Christian Agnostics ” ?
The tide is already running breasthigh in this direction. During the last
half-century how many of the foremost
men of light and leading have drifted
towards orthodox Christianity, and how
many away from it? Darwin, Herbert
Spencer, Huxley, Carlyle, Mill, all the
great thinkers who have influenced the
currents of modern thought, are men
who had renounced all belief in the
traditional theories of miracles and
�AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
inspiration, and who, a few centuries
earlier, would have been burned as
heretics. The conversions have been
all one way; Romanes expressly stating
that his late acceptance of Theism rested
on non-rational grounds. Darwin, greatest
of all, was an orthodox believer in his
early life, and had even contemplated
taking orders before he embarked on his
mission of naturalist to the expedition
of the Beagle. In his case no violent
impulse or sudden crisis changed his
views; but the theological mists simply
melted away as the sun of Science rose
higher above his horizon. Patiently he
worked out his great book, guided solely
by his unswerving allegiance to truth,
until his conception of the universe as
the product, not of innumerable super
natural interferences, but of evolution by
natural law, became the creed of all men
of all countries who are able to appreciate
scientific facts and evidence.
But Darwin and men of scientific
training are not the only ones who have
exchanged the old for the new stand
point. Conversions have been even
more remarkable among eminent leaders
in literature and philosophy who were
brought up in the strictest traditions of
the old religious beliefs. In another
work1 I have called attention to the fact
that, if ever there were three minds
trained under the strongest influences
binding them to typical though different
forms of faith in Christian theology, they
are Carlyle, George Eliot, and Renan.
Carlyle was a Puritan of the Puritans,
bred in a farmhouse, whose inmates
might have been Covenanters who
fought against Claverhouse at Drumclog;
George Eliot was, in her surroundings
and early life, a typical representative
of middle-class English Evangelicalism ;
Renan of the simple Catholic piety of
Breton peasants, developed in an eccle
siastical seminary. How came they, all
three, to break away, with a painful
wrench, from old ideas and associations,
and become leaders of advanced thought?
1 Modern Science and Modern Thought.
95
How, indeed, except that they were
sincere searchers after truth, and that
truth compelled them ? If the case for
miracles and the inspiration of the Bible
had been convincing or even plausible,
is it conceivable that Carlyle, George
Eliot, and Renan should have all three
rejected it ? Where are the conversions
that can be shown in the opposite direc
tion? Where the leading minds which,
bred in the doctrine of Darwinism, have
abandoned it for the doctrine of St.
Athanasius or of Calvin ? The few
eminent men who literally adhered to
the old theology late in the last century,
such as Cardinal Newman and. Mr.
Gladstone, were of a generation which is
passing away. Where are their succes
sors? Where are the rising naturalists
who are to refute Darwin? where the
young geologists who are to dethrone
Lyell ? where the Biblical critics who are
to answer Strauss ? Such men as Lord
Kelvin and Sir O. Lodge are quoted,
but how slender and unorthodox is the
theology they profess 1.
Perhaps the best proof of the irresist
ible force of the movement is afforded
by the attitude of those who still remain
within the pale of the Church, and are
among its most distinguished members.
Three eminent Bishops of the Anglican
Church preached sermons in Manchester
Cathedral, during the meeting of the
British Association there in 1887, which
were published in a pamphlet, under the
title of The Advance of Science. They
adopt the doctrine of Evolution and the
conclusions of modern science so frankly
that Huxley, reviewing them in the Nine
teenth Century, says that “theology, acting
under the generous impulse of a sudden
conversion, has given up everything to
science, and, indeed, on one point, has
surrendered more than can reasonably
be asked.” Other bishops, it is true,
denounce this as “an effort to get up a
non-miraculous invertebrate Christianity, ”
and assert that “Christianity is essen
tially miraculous, and falls to the ground
if miracles never happened.” Perfectly
true of the old theological Christianity;
�g6
AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
but, if this is the only Christianity, it is
its sentence of death, for it is becoming
more and more plain every day that it is
as impossible for sincere and educated
men to believe in Scripture miracles as
it is to believe that the sun stood still in
the Valley of Ajalon, or that the world
was peopled from pairs of animals shut
up, a few centuries ago, in Noah’s Ark.
These truths are rapidly passing from
the schools into the streets, and becom
ing the commonplace possessions of the
rank-and-file of thinkers. Thus, in a
lower plane of thought and among the
strictest sect of believers, we find Spur
geon complaining that, whereas “ twenty
years ago there was no question of
fundamental truth (brethren used to
controvert this or that point; but they
were at least agreed that whatever the
Scripture said should be decisive), now,
however, it did not matter what Scripture
said; it was rather a question of their
own inner consciousness.” And, again,
that “the position of sitting on the fence
is the popular one. There are two or
three very learned men who are trying
to get down on both sides of the fence
at once.”
There is something touching in the
spectacle of a man like Spurgeon thus
finding the solid earth giving way and
heaving under his feet, and even the
preachers of his own persuasion lapsing
into views inconsistent with his own
rigid orthodoxy. But did it never occur
to him to ask himself why the landmarks
were thus drifting steadily past him all
in one direction? Is it a question of
inner consciousness and human perver
sity, or is it not rather that a flood-tide
of advancing knowledge and allegiance
to truth is really setting in and running
with increasing velocity ?
Chapter VIII.—fcontinued)
PART II.
Effect on Morals—Evolution of MoralityMoral Instincts—Practical Religion—Herbert
Spencer and Frederic Harrison—Positivism
and the Unknowable—Creeds and Doctrines
—Priests and Churches—Duty of Agnostics
—Prospects of the Future.
Assuming, as I do, that some form of
liberal and reverent Agnosticism is
certain to supersede old theological and
metaphysical creeds in our conceptions
of the universe, it remains to consider
how this will practically affect the
machinery and outward form of religion,
and, what is of more importance, the
interests of morality.
In stating the results of my reflections
on this subject I am far from wishing to
dogmatise, or, like Comte, to build up
any positive religion of the future, which,
like his, might be comprehensively
summed up as “ Catholicism without
Christianity.” I know too well that
religions, like other social institutions,
are evolved and not manufactured, and
that religious rites and institutions only
flourish when they are a spontaneous
growth. Nevertheless, I think the time
has come when the intellectual victory
of Agnosticism is so far assured that it
behoves thinking men to begin to con
sider what practical results are likely to
follow from it.
The first question is as to the effect
on morals. Those who cling to old
creeds make great use of the argument
that religion is the best of policemen,
and that, if faith in a future state of
rewards and punishments, as taught by
�AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
an inspired Bible, were once shaken, all
security for life and property would be
at an end. This, if it were true, would
be no argument, any more than the fact
that a nurse may occasionally quiet a
naughty child by the threat of a bogey
would prove the existence of a black
man with horns and a tail in the
cupboard. But it is distinctly untiue.
The foundations of morals are fortunately
built on solid rock, and not on shifting
sand; they are based on ideas and
feelings which, in the course of the
evolution of the human race, have
gradually become instinctive in civilised
communities, and passed beyond the
sphere of abstract reasonings or specu
lative criticisms. So far from morality
being a thing altogether apart from
human nature, and which owes its obli
gation solely to its being a revelation of
God’s will, it may be truly said, in a
great many cases that, as individuals
and nations become more sceptical, they
become more moral. Thus, for instance,
an implicit belief in the inspiration of
the Old Testament perverted the moral
sense to such an extent that the. most
monstrous cruelties were inflicted in the
name of religion. Murders, adulteries,
witchcraft, religious wars and persecu
tions, all found their origin and excuse
in texts either expressly enjoining them,
or showing that they formed part of the
character and conduct of men “after
Jehovah’s own heart.” We no longer
burn heretics, torture old women, or
hew captives in pieces before the Lord.
Why? Because we have become scep
tical, and no longer believe in the Bible
as an infallible record of God’s word.
When we find anything in it contrary
either to the facts of science or to the
moral instincts of the age in which we
live, we quietly ignore it; and, instead
of trying science and morality, as our
forefathers did, at the bar of inspiration,
we reverse the process, and bring religion
before the bar of reason.
Is the world better or worse for this
latest phase of its evolution? Is it
more or less tolerant, humane, liberal-
97
minded, charitable, than it was in the
ages of superstitious faith ? The answer
is not doubtful, and it confirms my posi
tion that, as a matter of fact, as we have
become more sceptical we have become
more moral.
If there is one fact more certain than
another in the history of evolution, it is
that morals have been evolved by the
same laws as regulate the development
of species. They were no more created,
or taught supernaturally, than .were the
various successive forms of animal and
vegetable life. Take, for instance, the
simplest case—the abhorrence of murder.
It is not an implanted and universal
instinct, for even at the present day we
find sections of the human race among
whom murder is honourable. The Dyak
maiden scorns a lover who has not taken
a head ; the Indian squaw tests a suitor’s
manhood by the number of scalps in his
wigwam, and the more they were taken
by stratagem and treachery the more
honourable are they esteemed. The
priest and prophet of ancient Israel
considered it an act of duty towards
Jehovah to hew Agag to pieces before
the Lord ; and Jael was famous among
Hebrew women because she drove a
nail into the head of the sleeping refugee
who had sought shelter within her tent. •
David, the man after God’s own heart,
committed the most treacherous and
cold-blooded murder in order to screen
a foul act of adultery. Where in those
cases was either the implanted instinct
or the recognition of a divine precept
commanding “ Thou shalt do no
murder ”? Millions of Brahmins and
Buddhists, who never heard of Moses
or of the Commandment inscribed on
the table of stone at Sinai, have carried
the abhorrence of murder to such an
extreme as to shrink from destroying
even the humblest form of animal life,
while millions of savages have killed and
eaten strangers and captives without
scruple or remorse.
Evidently moral ideas are, like other
products of evolution, the result of the
interaction of the two factors, heredity
D'
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AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
and environment, determined in the
course of ages by natural selection.
They may be seen in the simplest form
in the instinct of all social animals, from
ants and bees up to man, which makes
them abstain from injuring those of the
same nest or herd, and prompts them to
act together for the common good.
Those who had this instinct strongest
would be most likely to survive in the
struggle for existence, and each succes
sive generation would tend to fix the
instinct more strongly by heredity.
What is instinct ? In the last analysis
it is motion, or tendency to motion, of
certain nerve-cells, which have become
so fixed, by frequent practice or by
heredity, that they become unconscious,
and follow necessarily on impulses from
without, as in the act of breathing or
swallowing. The simpler instincts, as
in the case of animals, are the most
spontaneous and inevitable. The duck
ling swims, to the alarm of the mother
hen, because it is the descendant of
generations of ducks which have taken
to the water as their natural element.
The sight of water sets up certain
motions in the duckling’s brain which,
by reflex action, impel it to swim.
But, in higher organisations and more
complicated instincts, what is inherited
is not so much absolute motion as
tendency to motion. The almost in
finitely complex moleciiles of the higher
brain do not move mechanically, so as
to produce a definite result from a definite
impulse, but they move more readily in
certain directions than in others, those
directions being determined partly by
the ancestral channels in which they
have run for generations, and partly by
the action of the surrounding environ
ment. Thus it may be accepted as
certain that a child born and educated
in England in the nineteenth century
will, as a rule, grow up with an instinctive
abhorrence of murder; but it is not so
certain as that it will breathe and eat.
A very violent outward impulse, such as
greed or revenge, may overcome the
instinct; and if the child had been kid
napped in infancy and brought up among
Dyaks or Indians, its notions would
probably have been the same as theirs as
to the taking of heads or scalps. But,
speaking generally of modern civilised
societies, there is such an enormous pre
ponderance in favour of the fundamental
rules of morality that with each succes
sive generation theresults both of heredity
and environment tend more and more to
make them instinctive. The lines which
Tennyson, the great poet of modern
thought, puts into the lips of his Goddess
of Wisdom—
“ And because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence ”—
are becoming more and more every day
the instinct, not of higher minds only,
but of the mass of the community.
Such a foundation for morals is clearly
both more certain and more comprehen
sive than one based on doubtful revela
tions. It is more certain, for it does not
depend on evidence which, with the
progress of science, is fast becoming
incredible. The command not to murder
is not weakened by proof that the book
of unknown origin and date which con
tains it gives a totally erroneous account
of the creation, and is therefore not
inspired ; nor does adultery cease to be
a crime because the narrative of Noab’s
deluge is shown to be fabulous. It is
also more comprehensive, for no hardand-fast written code can long conform
to the conditions of an ever-varying
society. It will err both by enjoining
things which have become obsolete, and
by omitting others which have become
imperative.
Thus the Mosaic code
classes sculptors with murderers and
thieves, and makes Canova and Thorwaldsen as great offenders against Divine
commands as the last criminal who was
convicted at the Old Bailey. On the
other hand, there is no injunction against
slavery or polygamy, but, on the contrary,
an implied sanction of them, from the
example of the patriarchs who are held
up as patterns of holiness. The feeling
against slavery is a conspicuous instance
�AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
of the development of a moral instinct
in quite recent times. It is the result of
advancing civilisation leading to more
humane ideas, and to a clearer recog
nition of the intrinsic sacredness and
dignity of every human soul.
In like manner, a multitude of moral
ideas have come to be part of our mental
furniture which had no place in the early
code of the Jews, or even in the more
advanced period of early Christianity.
The Christian ideal, to a great extent,
ignored courage, hardihood, self-reliance,
foresight, providence, and all the sterner
and harder qualities that make the man,
for the softer and more feminine virtues
of love, patience, and resignation. The
aesthetic side of life also, the recognition
and love of all that is beautiful in art
and nature, was not only ignored, but, to
a great extent, condemned by it, owing to
an exaggerated and one-sided antithesis
between the flesh and the spirit.
Among the modern ideas which are
fast becoming moral instincts is that of
the duty of following truth for its own
sake. Doubt is no longer regarded as a
crime, but as a duty, when there are real
ground's for doubting. We may parody
the words of the poet, and say
“ And because truth is truth, to follow truth
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.”
And this allegiance to truth carries with
it the virtue of sincerity. A man must
not palter with his convictions, and pro
fess to hold one set of opinions because
■they are expedient, while he holds others
because they are true. If it be a fact
that the human race has risen by evolu
tion through long ages from palaeolithic
savagery, he has no right to admit the
fact and at the same time profess to
believe that he is a fallen creature
descended from the Biblical Adam.
His duty is to use his reason to ascer
tain which statement is true, and, having
done so, to the best of his ability and
without bias or prejudice, to cleave with
his whole heart to the truth, and not
remain a miserable, half-hearted Mr.
Facing-both-ways.
99
So far, therefore, as morality is con
cerned, we need not much concern our
selves about the future of religion.
Morality can take care of itself, and,
with or without theological creeds, it
will go on strengthening, widening, and
purifying its instinctive hold on the
character and conduct of civilised com
munities. As regards conduct, which
is, after all, the practical test of the
goodness or badness of theoretical
opinions, a system which can produce a
life like that of Darwin is good enough
for anything. Conduct is, fortunately,
not dependent on creeds, and good men
and women can be found plentifully
among all classes of belief, from Ortho
doxy to Agnosticism. But it cannot, I
think, be denied that the leaders of
scientific thought, such as Darwin,
Herbert Spencer, Lyell, Huxley, and
other honoured names, have led, on the
whole, simple, noble lives, and present
characters worthy of imitation. Nor is
there any reason to believe that the vast
and increasing number of the rank-andfile, who have more or less adopted the
views of these great leaders, are in any
respect below the average type, or lead
worse lives than those who walk in the
narrower paths of pre-scientific tradi
tions.
Thus far the religion of the future
has been comparatively plain sailing.
Intellectually, it is clear that evolution
has become the mould of thought, and
that the lines of Agnostic Christianity
and of Agnosticism pure and simple,
but recognising Christianity as one of
the forces of evolution, have converged
so closely that the difference between
them is almost reduced to a name.
What Herbert Spencer calls the infinite,
eternal energy, which underlies all phe
nomena, and of whose existence we feel
certain, though we can never know or
define it, Bishop Temple calls “ God.”
Accurate thinkers may prefer the former
definition, for the term “ God ” has come
to be associated with a number of anthro
pomorphic and other ideas, which imply
knowledge of the Unknowable; but
�IOO
AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
practically the bishop and the philosopher
mean much the same. thing, and the
converging lines of science and religion
approach so nearly that they may be said
to coincide. Morally, it is equally clear
that there is nothing to fear from such a
view of religion, and that the moral
instincts are based on something much
more permanent and certain than intel
lectual conceptions or antiquated tradi
tions. But when we come to practical
religion there is a great deal comprised
in the word which it is not so easy to
dispose of.
In the recent controversy between
Herbert Spencer and Frederic Harrison
the latter reproached the former with
offering to the world the mere ghost of
a religion. Religion, he says, must be
something positive; it must have a
“ creed, doctrines, temples, priests,
teachers, rites, morality, beauty, hope,
consolation”; and these, he adds, can
be found only in a religion which is
intensely anthropomorphic. “You can
have no religion without kinship, sym
pathy, relation of some human kind
between the believer, worshipper, servants,
and the object of his belief, veneration,
and service.”
As Mr. Harrison not only admits, but
asserts strongly, that science has upset
all existing anthropomorphic creeds and
theories, his logical conclusion apparently
ought to be that there can be no more
any religion. But he escapes from his
dilemma by offering us a new religion—
Positivism, or the religion according to
Comte. For the dethroned Deity of
the Christians, who has been, by the
confession of his own theologians,
“ defecated to a pure transparency,” we
are to substitute “ Humanity,” the symbol
of the new Divinity being a woman of
the age of thirty, with her son in her
arms; and Christian worship is to be
replaced by an elaborate series of rites
and ceremonies, evolved from the inner
consciousness of the French philosopher,
and which, to the apprehension of an
ordinary observer, are for the most part
puerile and ridiculous. Thus among
the Positivist saints, who are to be
canonised in order of merit, Gall, who,
in conjunction with Spurzheim, wrote an
obsolete book on phrenology, gets a
week, while Kepler gets only a day;
Tasso is assumed to be a seven-times
greater poet than Goethe, and Mozart
a seven-times greater musician than
Beethoven; while in politics Louis XI.,
the crafty and sinister French king, de
picted by Walter Scott in Quentin Durward, is to be worshipped as a seven
times greater saint than Washington.
Of the only two new forms of positive
religion which have been started in my
recollection, Positivism and Mormonism,
I may be excused if, barring the plurality
of wives, I give the preference to the
latter, which has, at any rate, proved its
vitality by laying hold, not without a
certain amount of success, of colonisa
tion, temperance, and other problems of
practical life. Herbert Spencer had little
difficulty in answering this attack. He
showed that his definition of the “ Un
knowable” was very different from the
mere negation, or algebraical symbol,
which Harrison assumed it to be, and
that it was distinctly the assertion of
something positive and actually existing,
though beyond our faculties. In fact,
it is very much the same as Words
worth’s—
“ Sense sublime,
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round earth, and in the mind of man.”
And if such a feeling can inspire noble
poetry, why not a noble religion ? The
retort was obvious that, if the Unknow
able were too refined an idea on which
to base a religion, at any rate it was
better than humanity; for the first is
based on a fact, while the second has no
foundation but a phrase.
It is an undoubted fact that, when we
trace phenomena back to their source,
we arrive at a substratum, or first cause,
which we cannot understand, or even
form any conception of. But what is
Humanity ? It is but a convenient
expression, like gravity or electricity, by
�AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
IOI
and sordid asceticism. Hope would, as
which we sum up a number of separate, a
at present, find its field in the possibili
individual facts, which have certain a
ties which lie behind the veil, and time,
attributes in common. The only thing t
real about gravity is, that individual the one great consoler of human sorrows,
t
would still exert its beneficent influence
bodies attract one another directly as v
to assuage the poignancy of recent afflic
the mass and inversely as the. square of t
the distance. Annihilate the individual tions.
t
But what will become of the “creed,
masses, and you cannot anthropomoidoctrines, temples, priests, teachers, and
phise the law of gravity; for instance, c
rites,” which constitute what may be
following the example of Comte, under r
called the machinery or practical side of
the symbol of a woman with a child. (
No more can you individualise and existing religions? Is the creed the key
f
anthropomorphise “ Humanity,’ apart stone of the fabric, and will it crumble
s
from the individual human beings, good, to pieces if this creed ceases to be
1
credible ? In other words, if the creeds
bad, and indifferent, of whom the aggre- <
gate has been, is, and will be composed. of Christian Churches, instead of .being
<
“ Parturiunt monies ”—the mountains definite doctrines, as embodied in the
i
Thirty-nine Articles, or the dicta of
labour to produce a new religion; and
infallible Popes and Councils, are sub
the result of Positivism is to make a
limated into such vague and remote
fetish of a phrase.
.
.
At the same time, it must be admitted conceptions as enable Huxley to say
that the three bishops have conceded
that, while Positivism is no more likely
than Mormonism to become the world’s all he asks, and Mivart to remain so long
a good Catholic while admitting all the
religion of the future, the new creed to
most advanced conclusions of. Darwinian
which we are tending, whether we call
it Agnostic Christianity or Christian science and of Biblical criticisms, can
sincere men become Christian priests and
Agnosticism, places in jeopardy a great
deal of what has hitherto been included officiate in Christian churches ?
I judge no one, and can appreciate
under the word “religion.” Mr. Harrison’s
definition is not an unfair one, that the the reasons which may induce enlight
ened and excellent men to cleave to old
term includes “creed, doctrines, temples,
priests, teachers, rites, morality, beauty, creeds and remain in positions when
hope, consolation.” Of these, the last they feel that they are doing good, as
long as it is possible for them to allegorise
four may be called spiritual, and the first
six practical elements of religion. As or explain away accepted doctrines,
regards the spiritual elements, they will without feeling that they are consciously
remain unaffected, and, in some cases, insincere. But I confess that it is not
will be strengthened. Morality, as we> easy to understand how this can go even
the length it has, and, still more, how it
have seen, depends on rules of conduct,
; can go further and become general, withwhich have, to a great extent, become
instinctive; and it would be strengthened,, out degenerating into hypocrisy and
f
Take, for instance, the
rather than impaired, by getting rid of insincerity.
1
the Calvinistic conceptions of a cruel Apostles’ Creed, which, I suppose, con1
and capricious Deity, condemning untold tains the minimum of doctrine that is
s
millions to eternal punishment for the generally considered consistent with a
y
offence of a remote ancestor, and only profession of Christianity. I can unders
partially appeased by the sacrifice of his stand how, by an allowable latitude, of
y
only son. Beauty, again, would certainly construction, a Broad Church divine
fl
gain by getting rid of the idea that all may adopt the first Article and confess
e
But when we come
pleasant things are of the domain of the a belief in God.
n
flesh and the devil, and substituting an to the subsequent, more precise and
iv
enlightened aestheticism for a narrow definite Articles, which profess a belief
�102
AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
in the miraculous conception, birth, and a class, much better than they were in
resurrection of Jesus, the carpenter’s1 former ages. . Few exercise an influence
son of Nazareth, I fail to see how actively injurious, many are respectable
anyone can subscribe to them who and harmless, and a considerable number
believes in the permanence of Natural set a good example of virtuous lives, and
Law and the Darwinian theory of devote themselves to the promotion of
Evolution. Even in the form of Dr. works of charity and benevolence. They
Temples theory.of original impress, as have, no doubt, to a considerable extent,,
opposed to special acts of supernatural lost touch with the masses of population
interference, it must be admitted that in large towns and industrial centres;
miracles, if not impossible, are in the and where they have preserved it, chiefly
highest degree improbable, and that it among dissenting congregations, it is
would require an immense amount of too often exerted towards narrowness, of
the clearest possible evidence to admit views and sectarian prejudices. Still, on
occurrences which are so entirely opposed the whole, it is exerted for good; and in
to all we know of the real facts of the many rural parishes and poor districts,
universe, and which, in so many cases, like the East-end of London, the priest
have been shown to be mere delusions is a powerful factor in organising charities,
of the imagination. And the slightest visiting the sick, rescuing the fallen, and
acquaintance with Biblical criticism is giving consolation to the suffering. To
sufficient to show how weak the evidence take an extreme case, what would a poor
really is, and how utterly unfounded are parish, in the West of Ireland be without
the claims of the various books of the its. priest ? He is the sole centre of
Old.and New Testament to anything like civilisation in a district of, perhaps,
Divine inspiration. But, if the creeds twenty square miles ; he is not only the
go, what becomes of the priests? and, spiritual guide of his flock, but, to a
without priests, where are the Churches, great extent, their Education Board and
rites, and ceremonies? And, if these Poor Law Guardian ; he is their friend
disappear, what an immense gap does it and adviser in all their difficulties, and,
make in the whole framework of existing in case of need, their “ Village Hamp
society ! Consider the priests, including den,” who fights their battles with
in the word all ministers of all denomina tyrannical landlords, and negotiates the
tions. It is easy to denounce priestcraft, compromises by which they are enabled
and to show by a thousand examples to retain their humble roofs over their
that wherever priests have had power heads. . He is worth all the magistrates
they have done infinite mischief. They and policemen put together in repressing
have too often been cruel persecutors crime and preventing outrages. It will
and narrow-minded bigots; and, even at be long before a population like that of
the best, have been opposed to freedom rural Ireland can dispense with priests.
of thought and progress. But, for all
Again, priests and Churches go to
this, the question has another side, and gether ; and, although Church services
there is a good deal to be said for the have to a great extent become a repetition
existence of a special class, set aside of formulas, and sermons an anachron
from the ordinary pursuits of life, for ism, still there is a good deal in institu
spiritual instruction and works of mercy tions which bring people together on
and charity.
one day in the week, cleanly in dress
In countries like England, where and. decorous in behaviour, to join in
priests have long since ceased to possess services and listen to discourses which
any temporal power, and where they live .appeal, however faintly and drearily, to
more and more every day—in an higher things than those of ordinary
atmosphere of free and liberal thought, prosaic life. Especially to the female
there can be no doubt that they are, as ;half of the population attendance at
�AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
IO3
Barnardo,and thousands of other devoted
church or chapel is, in many cases, a men and women who fight in the fore
great pleasure; and, if it were only to see
most ranks against sin and misery.
and be seen and criticise one anothei s
With such as these all men can sym
bonnets, it is a relief from the monotony pathise ; and a more intellectual creed
of life, gives them topics of interest, and ought to be no obstacle in giving aid and
promotes a feeling of decency and
co-operation, but rather an incentive to
respectability. Those, therefore, who
show that a belief in the truths of science
hold larger views, and feel that they
is not inconsistent with active charity
cannot without insincerity subscribe to
creeds which to them have become and benevolence. which Agnostics would
Another point
incredible, would do well to be liberal
do well to attend to is to cultivate a love
and tolerant towards traditional opinions of Nature and Art, so as to keep alive
and traditional practices, and trust with
the imaginative and emotional faculties
cheerful faith to evolution to bring about which might wither in the too exclusive
gradually such changes of form as may atmosphere of pure reason. A prosaic
be required to embody changes of spirit. life is a dwarfed and stunted life, which
In the meantime, the course of those has been more than half a failure ; and,
who worship Truth above all other con as old dogmatic religions fail to supply
siderations is plain. There are abun
the spiritual stimulus, it is the more
dance of duties clear enough for men ot necessary to find it in the wonders o
all creeds : the difficulty is to live up to the universe, the beauties of nature, and
them. But for those who hold the in communion with great minds through
larger views the first duty is to be doubly
music, painting, and books. These are
careful as to conduct. It would be too
now brought, to a great extent, .within t e
great a scandal if the larger creed were
reach of every one, and there is no more
made the excuse for a looser life. Those
hopeful symptom of the times than to
who are Darwinians in theory ought to
find that really good books by great
try to be like Darwin in practice—like
authors, when brought out in cheap
him, high-minded, modest, gentle, patient,
editions, circulate by the millions.
honourable in all relations of life, loving
Shilling and even sixpenny editions ot
and beloved by friends and family. Shakespeare, Scott, Carlyle, and other
This, at least, is within the reach of every
standard authors, are continually brought
one, high or low, rich or poor, if not to out, and must be sold in tens of thousands
attain to, at any rate to aim at, as an to make them a paying, speculation.
ideal. Nor do I think that Freethinkers
Who buys them ? Certainly not the
will be wanting in this passive side of
upper classes, who, in former days, were
conduct. On the contrary, as far as my
the only buyers of books. They must
experience has gone, while more liberal
circulate widely among the masses, and
and large-minded, they lead lives quite
especially among the more thoughtful
as good, on the average, as those which
members of the working-classes, and the
are more directly under the traditional
rising generation of all classes who. are
influences of religion. But what the
earnestly seeking to improve their, minds
Agnostic must beware of is, not to be
and widen their range of sympathies and
content with the passive side of virtue,
culture. To read good books rather
but to cultivate also its active side, and
not let himself be surpassed in works of than silly novels is a practical measure
within the reach of every one, and it is
charity and benevolence by those whose
supplying, more and more every day, a
intellectual creeds are narrower than his
larger and more liberal education than
own. There is no doubt that the evan
was ever afforded by theological con
gelical faith in Jesus has been and. is
a powerful incentive with men like troversies and conventional sermons.
Another hopeful symptom is to see
Lord Shaftesbury, General Gordon, Dr.
�104
AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
the growing demand among the working
classes for schools, libraries, museums,
music-halls, excursion trains, and all
manner of clubs and societies for
mutual help, instruction, and amuse
ment. These are the plastic cells multi
plying and forming new combinations,
out of which, in due time, will be evolved
the “ priests and temples, the rites and
ceremonies,” and other institutions requi
site to give life and form to the demon
strated truth of the “Great Unknowable,”
and leave the magnificent conception of
Darwin and Herbert Spencer no longer
the ghost of a religion, but the founda
tion of a rational, lovable, and, on the
whole, happy existence, useful and
honourable while its little span of life
lasts, and looking forward with hope and
manly fortitude to whatever may await
it behind that veil which no mortal hand
has ever lifted.
Chapter VIII. —(continued)
PART III.
Practical Philosophy — Zoroastrian Theory —
Emerson on Compensation—Good and Evil—
Leads to Toleration and Charity—Matthew
Arnold and Philistinism—Salvation Army—
Conflict of Theology and Science—Creed of
Nineteenth Century.
The philosophy which I have found
work best, both in reconciling intel
lectual difficulties and as a guide in prac
tical life, is that which I have described
elsewhere1 at some length as “ Zoroas
trianism,” or “ Polarity.” It amounts to
this—that the infinite, eternal, and incon
ceivable essence of all phenomena, which
theologians call God, and philosophers
the Unknowable, manifests itself to
human apprehension under conditions
or categories which are equally certain
and equally incomprehensible.
We
know that it is so, or so appears to us;
but we do not know why. Thus Space
and Time are fundamental moulds of
thought, or, to use the phraseology of
Kant, imperative categories. Another
of such categories is that of Polarity:
no action without reaction, no positive
without a negative, no good without evil.
1 A Modern Zoroastrian,
In the physical world this is a demon
strated fact. Matter is made of mole
cules j molecules are made of atoms;
atoms are little magnets which link
th^piselves together and form all the
complex creations of an ordered cosmos,
by virtue of the attractive and repulsive
forces which are the results of polarity.
Ordered and regular motion also —
whether it be of planets round suns, of
an oscillating pendulum, or of waves of
water, air, or ether, vibrating in rhythmic
succession—is a result of the conflict
between energy of motion and energy of
position.
As Emerson well says in his essay on
“Compensation”: “Polarity, or action and
reaction, we meet in every part of nature :
in darkness and light; in heat and cold;
in the ebb and flow of waters ; in male
and female; in the inspiration and
expiration of plants and animals ; in the
undulations of fluids and of sound; in
the centrifugal and centripetal gravity;
in electricity, galvanism, and chemical
affinity. Superinduce magnetism at one
end of a needle, the opposite magnetism
takes place at the other end. If the
South attracts, the North repels. To
�AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
10$
cruel, unjust, and even devilish, in the
empty here you must condense there.
case of a human despot become merci
An inevitable dualism besets nature, so
ful and righteous if done by an Almighty
that each thing is a half, and suggests
Ruler in Heaven. Such a dogma is, to
another to make it whole; as spirit,
all intents and purposes, devil-worship,
matter; man, woman; odd, even; sub
and degrades man into a slave crouching
jective, objective; in, out; upper, under;
under the lash of a harsh master. How
motion, rest; yea, nay.” This principle,
infinitely superior was the ideal of the
applied to the higher problems of religion
old Roman poet of the “justum. el
and philosophy, leads to results singularly
tenacem propositi virum”; the upright
like those which, if we may believe the
and firm-minded man, whom no threats
sacred books of the Parsees, were taught
of a frenzied mob or raging tyrant could
3,000 years ago by the ancient Bactrian
sage, Zoroaster. His religion was one of shake from his purpose, or induce to
palter with his convictions; nay, not
pure reason. He disclaimed all preten
even though the earth and sky fell in
sion to found it on miracles, or to define
ruins about his head, could the convul
the indefinable by dogmas; but, taking
sion of nature daunt his steadfast soul.
natural laws and human knowledge as
his basis, he asserted, in the identical “ Victrix causa Deis placuit sed victa CatoniT
words used by Emerson thirty centuries But, with a Polar theory of existence,
later, that an “ inevitable dualism besets the difficulty is relegated to the realm, of
nature,’’and embodied the two conflicting the unknown, and, instead of sinking
principles under the names of Ormuzd with Cowper into the despairing depths
and Ahriman. To Ormuzd belong all of religious madness, we may hold with
things that are bright, beautiful,, pure, Wordsworth—
lovely, and of good repute, both in the
The cheerful faith that all which we behold
material and moral universe; to Ahriman,
Is full of blessings.”
all that is foul, ugly, and evil.. Apart A serene and cheerful faith is, of itself,
from certain archaisms of expression and
one of the greatest blessings, and. it is
ritual observances which have become
specially needed in an age in which so
obsolete, the Zendavesta might have been
many gospels of pessimism are abroad,
compiled to-day from the writings of
and so many failures in the struggle for
Herbert Spencer and Huxley. This con
existence tell us that society is a sham, civi
ception of the universe has the enormous
lisation an imposture, and life a, mistake.
advantage over all those which rest on
Another advantage. of this Polar
the idea of an anthropomorphic Creator
theory of the universe is that it teaches
that it does not make religion a means
us to take a large and tolerant view of
of perverting the fundamental instincts
men and of events. The true charity
of morality by making an Omnipotent
which “ suffereth long and is kind ” is
Creator the conscious author of evil.
scarcely compatible with a bigoted and
This is a dilemma from which no
one-sided adherence to a particular set
anthropomorphic form of religion can
escape : either its God is not omnipo of opinions. Whether in politics or in
religion, if we believe that all those who
tent or he is not benevolent. Sin and
differ from us have a double dose of
suffering are facts, as much as virtue and
original sin, we can scarcely comprehend
happiness; and, if the good half of crea
tion argues for a good Creator, it is an or love them. Good natures may pity
them, bad natures hate them, conscien
irresistible inference that the bad half
tious natures feel it a duty to stamp
argues for one who is evil.
them out; but we can never really feel
Theologians, in attempting to escape
towards them as brothers and sisters,
from this dilemma, have been only too
apt to confuse the instincts of morality who have gone a ‘c a kenning wrang,
by arguing that actions which would be and been drawn a little too far by the
�io6
AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
attraction of the opposite polarity to that commoners; if of religion, they are sons
under the influence of which we ourselves of perdition.
To the narrow-minded
live and have our being.
Thus, in Tory all Irish are dynamiters, all Radicals
politics, the cosmos of an ordered rebels, and Gladstone is Antichrist. To
society can only be maintained, as in the narrow-minded Radical all landlords
the orbit of a planet, by a due balance are robbers and all parsons hypocrites.
between the centripetal and centrifugal Socialists seek to regenerate society by
forces. If we were all Conservatives, abolishing capital; capitalists, to save it
society would condense into a sluggish by ignoring that property has duties as
and inert mass ; if all Radicals, it would well as rights. It is all Philistinism, and
be apt to fly off into space. Evolution incapacity to see that there are two sides
will surely bring about in their appro to every question,, and that one thing
priate time the results which are fittest only is certain—that falsehood lies in
to survive.
Why quarrel, then, and extremes. Half the difficulties which
entertain hard and bitter thoughts be perplex us would disappear if we could
cause our own individual atom is acting enlarge our minds, so as, in the words of
in one direction, while that of our Burns,
neighbour is acting in another? Act
“ To see ourselves as others see us”;
strenuously in that direction which, after
conscientious inquiry, seems to be the and to act on the precept of the wise
best; do the duty which lies most nearly old Rabbi Hillel, now 1,900 years old :
and plainly to our hands ; and trust to “ Never to judge another man till you
what religious men call Providence, and have stood in his shoes.”
scientific men Evolution, for the result.
Another advantage of this Polar philo
A large-minded and. large-hearted sophy is that it enables us more readily
creed is the more needful, as the weak to assimilate with those who hold dif
part in the otherwise admirable British ferent forms of belief. What matters it
nature is a tendency to that peculiar whether the Parsee embodies his good
form of narrowness which is commonly principle in an Ormuzd, the Christian in
called Philistinism. Why the Philistine, a Jesus, the Stoic in a Marcus Aurelius,
or dweller in the land of palms on the or the philosopher finds no need for any
border of the Mediterranean, should personification at all?
The essential
have been taken as the type of strait thing is that they are all soldiers fighting
laced and narrow-minded convention together in the cause of goodness and
ality, is hard to see. But the fact is light, against evil and darkness. Practi
there, and the word expresses it; and it cally, a great many modern Christians
is beyond doubt that there is a great are Zoroastrians, with Jesus for their
deal of truth in Matthew Arnold’s in Ormuzd. They care little for dogmas,
dignant diatribes, and that the average except as exalting the character of the
well-meaning and respectable citizen is object of their veneration and giving
apt to be an awful Philistine. It is not expression to their transcendental love
confined to classes; in fact, there is and adoration for his person and char
probably more of it in the upper and acter. Listen to the simple preaching
middle classes than among workmen. of the Salvation Army, and you will find
But whether it be the cut of a coat, or of how exclusively it turns upon the one
a creed, and whether going to a court or element of the love of Jesus.
You
to a chapel, the essence of the thing is would never discover that Christianity
the same—viz., that some class or coterie had been identified with mysterious
fences itself in behind some narrow con dogmas and metaphysical puzzles, and
ventionality, and ignores the great outer that salvation depended on holding the
world. If the pale be one of fashion, Catholic faith as defined by St. Athana
those not within it are outsiders, cads, sius. But sinners are exhorted to give
�AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
up drink and evil ways for the love of logical theory is based entirely on the
the dear Redeemer who died for them , assumption that the Bible is an inspired
and if this touches simple natures, and record of Divine truth, attested by
if calling themselves soldiers, .marching miracles. The scientific theory rests on
in ranks, and beating drums, aid in the the evidence of a vast and ever-accumu
work, why should anyone object to it ? lating mass of facts, which admit of no
We are nearer to these simple souls than doubt or contradiction. It seems to me
we are to the divines who beat the drum that an unlearned man need not go
ecclesiastic, and tell us from pulpits that, farther than to contrast , the theories of
unless we believe all the articles of the man’s descent. Let him go to the
Catholic faith, without doubt we shall British Museum and look at the imple
ments of flint and bone which have been
perish everlastingly.
To sum up, the duty of a man of the found in conjunction with remains, of
twentieth century is clear. He has to extinct animals, in caves and river
follow truth at all hazards. Questions gravels of immense antiquity. How
of the highest importance have . been can the theological theory hold water,
raised which he cannot shirk without unless it could be proved that these, and
narrowing his whole nature, and shutting the hundreds of thousands of similar
himself up in an ever-contracting circle human remains, including skulls and
of ignorance and prejudice. There aie skeletons, which have been discovered
two theories of the universe, and two of in similar deposits over the four quarters
man, which are in direct conflict. Of of the earth, were placed there by a
the universe, one, the theological, that it conspiracy of scientific men who wished
was created and is upheld by miracles— to discredit the Bible ? Even the Duke
that is, by a succession of secondary of Argyll, who has conspiracy on the
supernatural interferences by a Being brain, would hardly contend for such a
who is a magnified man, acting from conclusion, or maintain that the narrative
motives and with an intelligence which, of Noah’s deluge gives a true. account of
however transcendental, are essentially the manner in which animal life has been
human; the other, the scientific, that it diffused over the different zoological
is the result of original impress, or of provinces in which it is actually divided.
The more he extends his researches
evolution acting by natural laws on a basis
of the Unknowable. In like manner, of and enlarges his knowledge, the more
man, one theory, the theological, is that will every honest and conscientious
he is descended from the Biblical Adam, inquirer find that the scientific theory is
created quite recently in a state of high victorious along the whole line. . If he
moral perfection, from which he fell by is a lover of truth, therefore, he will find*
an act of disobedience, entailing on his himself constrained to adopt the larger
descendants the curse of sin and death, creed. But, in doing so, let. him show
from which a portion were redeemed by that it is not merely a speculative creed or
the sacrifice of the Creator’s own son, an intellectual deduction ; that the larger
incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth; the other, creed leads to a larger life; that it makes
the scientific theory, that man is a him more liberal and tolerant, more pure
product of evolution from palaeolithic and upright, more loving and unselfish,
ancestors, who lived for innumerable more strenuous, as becomes a soldier
ages in a state of savagery, but always fighting in the foremost ranks in the
gradually progressing upwards in arts and campaign against sin and misery; . so
that, when the last day comes which
civilisation.
Both theories cannot be true; they comes to all, it may be recorded of him
are in direct contradiction upon funda that his individual atom of existence left
mental facts, which are a question of the world, on the whole, a little better,
evidence. The evidence for the theo- rather than a little worse, than he found it.
�io8
THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
Chapter IX.
THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
Huxley and Dr. Wace—Sermon on the Mount,
and Lord’s Prayer—English and German
Biblical Criticism—Papias—His Account of
Origin of the Gospels—Confirmed by Internal
Evidence —• Common-sense Conclusions —
Miracles a Question of Faith — Evidence
Required—The Ascension—Early Christian
and Mediaeval Miracles — St. Thomas it
Becket—F aith—Historical Element—Virgin
Mary — Guiding Principles of Historical
Inquiry—Minimum of Miracles—Admissions
which Tell Against—-Jesus anHistorical Person
—Born at Nazareth—Legends of Nativity—
St. John the Baptist—Kingdom of God—Socialistic Spirit—Pure Morality—Nucleus of
Fact in Miracles—Precepts and Parables—
Disputes with Scribes and Pharisees—Jesus a
Jew—Messiahship—Dying Words—Passion
and Crucifixion —• Improbabilities — Pilate —
Resurrection —- Contradictions — Growth of
Legend—Probable Nucleus of Fact—Riot in
the Temple—Return of Disciples to Galilee—
Conflicting Accounts of Resurrection—Return
of Apostles to Jerusalem and Foundation of
Christian Church.
Professor Huxley, in an article in the
Nineteenth Century, refers to the great
difficulty he has felt in his efforts to
define “the grand figure of Jesus as it
lies in the primary strata of Christian
literature. What did he really say and
do? and how much that is attributed
to him in speech and action is the
embroidery of the various parties into
which his followers tended to split them
selves within twenty years after his death,
when even the threefold tradition was
only nascent ? ”
I have felt the same difficulty myself,
and after reading a mass of critical litera
ture, both English and German, I must
confess to having found myself more
than ever perplexed. In English Biblical
criticism the tone is almost invariably
that of advocates rather than of judges.
The opponents of Orthodoxy insist too
much on finding arguments against
inspiration in every text, while its sup
porters are almost always guilty of
the fallacy which is known to logicians
as the petitio principii, and begin by
assuming the very points which they
profess to prove. Thus Dr. Wace, in
his reply to Huxley, starts with the
assumption that the Sermon on the
Mount and the Lord’s Prayer prove the
divinity of Jesus and the inspiration of
the Gospels; and, this being proved, it
follows that we must believe everything
we find recorded in these Gospels as
true, down even to the miracle of the
Gadarene swine, under pain of making
Jesus out to be a liar. Of course we
must, if we admit the theory of divine
inspiration; but this is the very point
to be proved. How does Dr. Wace
attempt to prove it? By lengthened
arguments to show that the omission
of all mention of the Sermon on the
Mount and Lord’s Prayer by Mark is
not a fatal objection; that the Synoptic
Gospels, or parts of them, were probably
written not later than from 70 to 75 a.d.,
and other doubtful points of really very
little importance. But he totally ignores
what is the real difficulty in the way of
accepting his fundamental axiom that
the Sermon on the Mount and Lord’s
Prayer compel us to admit inspiration.
The difficulty is this—that their precepts,
admirable as they are, are not original.
There is scarcely one which is not to be
found, identical in substance and often
almost in the exact words, in the older
writings of earlier religions and philo
sophies. Thus the cardinal precepts,
such as to “ Love your neighbour as your
self,” to “Do as you would be done by,”
to “ Return good for evil,” etc., are found
�THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
io9
in the old Egyptian ritual, the Vedic ordinary men using their reasoning
faculties, and either refuse to reason and
literature, the maxims of Confucius, and
still more conspicuously in the oldest appeal to faith, or battle about minor
;
writings of the Buddhist and Zoroastrian points which hardly touch the real
objections.
_ . .
religions.
When I turned to German criticism,
And what is even more important,
I found it less obscured by theological,
the Talmudic or Rabbinical literature
of the age immediately preceding that but more by theoretical, prepossessions.
of Jesus is full of them; the writings Every professor had his own theory to
of Jesus, the son of Sirach, of Hillel, establish, and that of his predecessors
to demolish, and in doing so applied an
and of Philo, contain many of the same
enormous amount of erudition to points
precepts, almost verbatim, and they were
the common possession of the Jewish which, for the most part, seemed to me
to remain doubtful, or to be of minor
world at the time when the Sermon on
the Mount is supposed to have been importance. The effect produced on
my mind by critics such as Strauss,
preached.
.
. .
These facts are undeniable, and it is Baur, Volckmar, and Reuss was to leave
a sort of blurred and hazy image, as of
equally undeniable that, if so, the bottom
a landscape in which the essential
is knocked out of Dr. Wace s assump
features are lost in the multitude of
tion ; for, if these precepts and this code
of morality could be evolved in other details.
For instance, it seemed to me that
ages and countries by natural means,
why should they require the miracle of the enormous mass of literature which
Divine Inspiration to account for them has been written to assign the precise
in the New Testament ? The Sermon, date of each Gospel, their respective
no doubt, has its value in bringing to a priorities, how many successive editions
focus a number of excellent precepts, they went through, and how far each
and helping to form the ideal of Jesus copied from the others or from older
and his teaching which has become the manuscripts, might have been greatly
fundamental fact of Christianity ; but as abridged if the learned authors had
anything like reasonable proof of miracu been content to take the simple, straight
lous inspiration it is worthless. Nor is forward evidence of the earliest Christian
writer who gives any account of their
there anything in the Lord’s Prayer
which might not have been the prayer origin—viz., Papias.
Papias was Bishop of Hierapolis, one
of any pious Jew of the time, or, for
the matter of that, of any pious Gentile, of the Churches in Asia Minor, which
for “Our Father which art in heaven” was reputed to have been founded by
is a literal translation of Jupiter, or St. John, and who suffered martyrdom
Dyaus-piter, the father of gods and men for his faith when an aged. man, about
identified with the vault of the sky. 160 a.d. He was certainly in a position
And it cannot be reasonably denied to know what was accepted as of authority
that the omission of all mention of it in by the early Christian Church of his
Mark tells strongly against its authen period. He had been in close personal
ticity, for, if really taught by Jesus, it communication with Polycarp and others
would have been the very thing to be of the generation preceding his own, who
committed to memory, and taught to all had been themselves disciples of the
Apostles, and his information was, there
converts by his immediate disciples.
I refer to this argument of Dr. Wace’s fore, only removed by one degree from
to illustrate what I find to be the great being that of a contemporary and eye
fault of English theologians—viz., that witness. His work is unfortunately lost;
they shirk the obvious difficulties which but Eusebius, who was a great collector
present themselves to the minds pf' of information respecting the Gospels
�no
THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
in the fourth century, happily preserves
the most important part of it in a long
quotation.
What does Papias say? Practically
this—that he preferred oral tradition to
written documents, of which he expresses a
somewhat contemptuous opinion, assign
ing as a reason that there were only two
written records which possessed any real
authority : one a collection of anecdotes
or reminiscences, taken down without
method or order from the mouth of St.
Peter by.Mark, his interpreter; the other
a collection of logia, or sayings of Jesus,
written by St. Matthew in Hebrew, and
badly translated into Greek by various
writers.
This statement of Papias, if correct,
proves several things :—
1. The Gospel of St. John could not
have been known to Papias, or he, a
bishop of a Church reputed to have
been founded by that Apostle and a
friend of Polycarp and others who had
known him personally, could never have
expressed an almost contemptuous pre
ference for oral tradition over any written
records, and made no mention of what
has been always considered the most
important and spiritual of all the Gospels,
proceeding direct from the Apostle whom
Jesus loved.
2. The same remark applies to the
Gospel and Acts of St. Luke, which
contain by far the most precise details of
the crowning miracles of the Resurrec
tion and Ascension.
3. It is equally clear that he could not
have known the Gospels of Mark and
Matthew as they now exist, for they are
connected biographies of the life and
teachings of Jesus, and not fragmentary
anecdotes and sayings such as Papias
describes.
4. It is evident, however, that two
written records—one attributed to Mark,
and the other to Matthew—were known
in the time of Papias, and received as of
sufficient authority to make him refer
to them in his general depreciation of
written as compared with oral testimony.
Ibis is a perfectly clear and intel
ligible statement, made apparently in
good faith, without any dogmatic or other
prepossession; and it is confirmed by all
the. evidence we possess of this obscure
period — whether it be the external
evidence that the Gospels in their
present form are not quoted or referred
to as an authority by any Christian
writer earlier than the second century,
or the internal evidence derived from the
Gospels themselves. That of Mark has
exactly the appearance of having been
compiled into a biography from a series
of such reminiscences as Papias describes.
It is full of little life-like touches which
have no special significance, but seem to
have come from the recollection of an
eye-witness.
For instance, that the
throng was so great to hear Jesus that
not only the room but the doorway was
crowded, and that the hurry and bustle
were such that they had not time even
to eat.
It is. true that such touches are not
conclusive, and may have been added to
give local colour and a life-like character
to the narrative, a remarkable instance
of which is afforded by the episode of
the woman taken in adultery, in St.
John, which is not found in the oldest
manuscripts, and is doubtless an inter
polation.
This episode has every ap
pearance of being taken from the life :
the abstracted air, the writing with the
finger on the sand, the exact words
spoken, all give it an air of reality; and
yet it must have been interpolated at a
comparatively late date after several
manuscripts of the Gospel were already
in existence.
Such an instance may
make us hesitate in judging of similar
passages from internal evidence, but it
hardly applies to Mark, whose character
istic traits are much shorter and simpler,
and whose level of culture and literary
ability is much lower than that of the
compiler—whoever he may have been—■
of the Gospel according to St. John.
The Gospel of Matthew, again, has
exactly the appearance of having been
compiled from such a collection of logia
as Papias describes, woven into a
�THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
biography by the aid of the original Mark
and other early traditions, and embel
lished by the addition of much mythical
matter intended to show the fulfilment
of Messianic prophecies, and to meet
objections.
It has always seemed to me, therefore,
that all theories as to the date and origin
of the Canonical Gospels were com
paratively worthless which did not take
into account the fundamental fact of this
statement of Papias. It is either true or
false. If true, it is worth a hundred
theories evolved, like the ideal camel,
from the inner consciousness of German
professors, and is conclusive of the fact
that the Gospels in their present form
were not known, or not accepted as an
authority, by the early Christian Churches
of the East in the first half of the second
' century, though this is quite consistent
with their containing passages and tradi
tions which may date back to the siege
of Jerusalem, or even to a much earlier
period. If, on the other hand, Papias is
to be rejected, let us know the reason why,
and give us some sort of an intelligible
explanation of how such a passage came
to be quoted from his work by Eusebius.1
ni
I give this as an illustration of the way
in which, the more I studied these pro
fessional works of Biblical criticism, the
more confusion became worse con
founded. At length, after having aban
doned the subject for a time, I resolved,
almost in despair, to see what conclusion
I could form for myself by the applica
tion of common sense and the ordinary
rules of evidence. I succeeded thus in
forming a tolerably clear and consistent
view of what might be the real, historical
element in the origin of Christianity and
the personality of its Founder. I do not
pretend to impose on others my own
origin: and therefore that the silence of Eusebius
is no proof that there may not have been refer
ences to and quotations from these Gospels in
the writings of Papias.
But this, which is in itself a very far-fetched
supposition, is contradicted by the words of
Eusebius himself, who says, “ As my history
proceeds, I will take care. to indicate what
Church writers from time to time have made use
of any of the disputed books, and what has
been said by them concerning the Canonical ana
acknowledged Scriptures.”
2. That when Papias says, I thought I could
not derive so much advantage from books as from
the living and abiding oral tradition, he meant
books which were not Gospels, but commentaries
on Gospels.
.
Here again this far-fetched supposition is con
1 The difference to which I have referred
tradicted by Papias himself, who says books
between the conclusions of common sense and
without any qualification, and refers to written
those of erudite ingenuity acting under the records—viz., the notes of Mark and the logia
influence of theological prepossession is well,
of Matthew, which assuredly were not commen
illustrated by the attempt of Bishop Lightfoot,
taries or interpretations of existing Gospels, but
in his Essays on Supernatural Religion, to
historical records of the sayings and doings oi
answer the obvious inference from this passage the Founder of the religion as much as the
of Papias. Common sense says, if the Canonical Canonical Gospels themselves; or rather they
Gospels, and especially that of St. John, had
were the primary matter and first forms of the
beenextant in their present form.and accepted Synoptic Gospels, and could not have been so
as an authority by the early Christian Church, referred to if the Gospels, in their more complete
Papias must have known them. If he had
and elaborate form, and especially that according
known them, he could not have referred in such
to St. John, had been known to Papias and
contemptuous terms to written records as inferior
to oral tradition, and could not have mentioned received as authorities.
The closer the connection is drawn between
the disconnected anecdotes of Mark and the
Papias and the Apostle John through Polycarp—
Hebrew logia. of Matthew as the only records of
importance. Nor could Eusebius.have quoted and the Bishop insists greatly on this m his
Essays—the more impossible does it become
this passage alone from Papias, which obviously
that, if Papias had known of such a Gospel as is
tells against his own views, without quoting other attributed to John, he could have written such
passages which refer to the Canonical Gospels,
as is quoted from
y
if any such had existed in other portions of the a sentencesaying that he could his lost worprofit
Eusebius,
get “little
work of Papias. The Bishop replies
i. That the design of Eusebius may have been from books,” and have referred, as he does, to
to quote only references to the Apocryphal Matthew and Mark, without saying a word of
John, or of the Gospel which is pre-eminently
writings, and. in the case of the Canonical
Gospels anything which threw light on their the foundation-stone of Christian theology.
�112
THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
solution of this extremely difficult and■ life. You wish to establish some five or
obscure question, but I think it may Six exceptions to this rule, or rather one,
perhaps aid some sincere inquirers in for, if the return to life of Jesus cannot
giving clearness and precision to their be proved, few would be disposed to
ideas, and defining the boundaries rest their faith in miracles on any other
between what may be accepted by the of the alleged cases of resurrection.
ordinary rules of reason and that which And the historical truth of the appear
lies outside the province of reason, and ances of a living and tangible Jesus after
can only be accepted as an article of faith. death hinges mainly on the account of
. To begin with, I believe that miracles the Ascension given by St. Luke in the
lie entirely within the domain of faith. Acts of the Apostles. This is the
I mean real miracles, for a large number crowning miracle of all, the appropriate
of those narrated by the Gospels may conclusion of his mission on earth, and
well be natural occurrences described in strongest proof of his Divine nature;
the language of the day. For instance, and it . is described in the fullest detail
casting out devils, faith-healing, or curing as having occurred in the presence of a
paralytic affections of the nerve or will by large.number of witnesses. St. Paul says
a strong impulse; and the effects of reli of this, or of some other appearance not
gious excitement, the sympathy of crowds, recorded in any of the Gospels, that there
dreams, visions, and hallucinations, are were five hundred witnesses, many of
all well-known causes of the present day, whom remained alive till his day, and in
of effects which in former ages would a definite and well-known locality close
undoubtedly have been considered as to . the large city of Jerusalem. If the
miraculous. These may very well have evidence for this miracle fails us, how
actually occurred, and be as historical as can we believe in others more obscure
any other part of the narrative.
and less well authenticated ?
But when we come to such miracles
Surely the evidence for an event which
as raising the dead, or permanently is a solitary exception to i55ooo,ooo,ooo
curing organic diseases, they require a experiences requires to be proved by
special supernatural interference with testimony far stronger than would be
the laws of nature.. Now, what does required to prove an ordinary occur
reason say to such miracles ? It tells us rence.. But how stands the evidence for
that in thousands of such cases of alleged the miracle of the Ascension ? Of the
miracles, alike in Pagan, early Christian, four witnesses called into court, one,
and mediaeval ages, once firmly believed Mark, the. oldest of all, and probably
in and attested by what seems strong deriving his information direct from St.
contemporary evidence, not one now Peter, makes no mention whatever (if we
holds the field and is seriously accepted, omit the last verses, which are an obvious
with the possible exception of some half addendum, and, as the authors of the
dozen which are accepted solely on the revised edition tell us, are not found in
authority of the New Testament.
the oldest manuscripts) of the Ascension,
Take, as an illustration, the statement or of any other supernatural event con
that one who was really dead returned nected with the Resurrection. Matthew
to life.
There are some thousand says distinctly that the message sent by
millions of people living in the world Jesus to his Apostles was to “depart
who are renewed by death and birth at into Galilee,” and that they went there
least three times in every century, and accordingly, where they saw him, but
this has been going on for some fifty cen
some doubted,”and makes no reference
turies. That makes some 15,000,000,000 to. any. Ascension. John describes cer
human beings who have died, and of •tain miracles occurring at Jerusalem, but
whom it may be said with certainty that places the concluding scene of the
;
not one has ever returned in the body to \Resurrection, when Jesus took his final
�THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
113
farewell of his disciples, in Galilee, and, comply with the perfectly reasonable
request of the Pharisees to prove his
like Mark and Matthew, makes no men
Messiahship by a sign from heaven—a
tion of any Ascension.
Observe that Luke says distinctly that refusal which, if he possessed the power,
was unfair to men who, if narrow and
Jesus charged the Apostles “not to
depart from Jerusalem,” and that all the fanatical, were doubtless many of them
miraculous appearances, including the sincere and zealous for their country and
Ascension, occurred there. There can religion.
I do not see how it can be doubted
not be a more flagrant contradiction than
that the evidence for many early Christian
that between Matthew and Luke. Con
sider now what would be the chance of and mediaeval miracles, which no one
establishing, not a stupendous miracle, any longer believes, is much stronger
but such a commonplace event as the than for those of the Gospels. St.
signature of a will, if the first witness Augustine, a perfectly historical and
called was a solicitor who said that the leading personage of his day, testifies
testator in his last illness asked him to that in his own time, and in his own
remain in London to draw and attest bishopric of Hippo, upwards of seventy
his will, which he did, while the second miracles had been wrought by the relics
of St. Stephen. The friend and bio
witness was another solicitor, who swore
that the testator told him he was going grapher of St. Ambrose relates numerous
down to his place in Yorkshire, on the miracles, one a resurrection from the dead,
chance that the air of the country might which had been notoriously wrought at
Milan by the saint during his lifetime.
revive him, and asked the witness to
follow him there by the next day’s train, Eginhard, the secretary of Charlemagne,
in order to complete his will, which who was a well-known historical char
instructions he accordingly carried out. acter, relates, as from his own experience,
And let any candid and dispassionate a number of miracles wrought by the
person say how, if tried by the ordinary relics of two Christian martyrs which an
rules of reason, this differs from the emissary of his had purloined from
direct contradiction between Matthew Rome, and which he was transporting to
Heiligenstadt. To come to later times,
and Luke.
With this conclusive proof of the im St. Thomas a Becket was as well known
possibility of establishing the greatest of an historical character as King Henry,
and no miracles were attributed to him
all miracles by the ordinary rules of
evidence, it is almost superfluous to in his lifetime; but after his niurder,
refer to the many other circumstances under circumstances causing universal
which, on the showing of the Gospels horror and excitement, a whole crop of
themselves, lead to the same result. For miracles sprung up about his shrine at
instance, the next greatest miracle to Canterbury. Any one who will consult
those of the Resurrection, the raising of the authorities cited by Freeman will be
Lazarus, is related only in one Gospel, astonished to find how very precise and
and that the latest and least authentic; circumstantial is the evidence for. many
while, if it really occurred, it must have of these miracles. One instance is that
been known to and recorded by the of the attestation of the mayor and
three other evangelists. Or what can be several burgesses of a northern borough
said of the admission that even the to the fact that a fellow-townsman of
minor miracles of casting out devils and theirs, blind from his youth, had gone to
faith-healing depended . on faith, and the shrine and returned with perfect
could not be performed in the sceptical sight. There is nothing in the account
atmosphere of Nazareth, where Jesus of any miracle in the New Testament at
and his family and surroundings were all approaching this in what constitutes
well known j or of the refusal of Jesus to the force of evidence, precision of date,
�114
THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
place, persons, and circumstance. And
yet, for millions who believe on the
weaker evidence, there is scarcely one
who retains any belief in such miracles
as those related of St. Thomas a Becket.
The reason is obvious : miracles are
in a totally distinct province—-that of
faith. What is faith ? St. Paul tells us
it is “ the assurance of things hoped for,
the proving of things not seen.” Hardly
of “things not seen,” for, in that case,
mathematicians and chemists who believe
in atoms and molecules would, of all
men, have the largest faith. But say of
“things not proven,” and it is a very
accurate definition. There can be no
doubt that there are men, often of great
piety and excellence, who have, or fancy
they have, a sort of sixth sense, or, as
Cardinal Newman calls it, an “illative
sense,” by which they see by intuition,
and arrive at a fervid conviction of the
truth of things unprovable or disprovable
by ordinary reason. The existence of a
personal God, the divinity of Christ, the
inspiration of the Bible, and consequent
reality of .miracles, appear to them to be
fundamental and necessary truths beyond
the scope of reason. They feel that, if
their belief in these were shaken, their
whole life would be shattered, and they
would lose what Wordsworth says
Nature was to him—
“ The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.”
With such men I have no quarrel.
Let them hold to their faith, and leave
reason to poor ordinary mortals, who,
like myself, have no such transcendental
intuitions. Only do not let them confound
the two provinces, and try to ride on two
horses at the same time. Faith is either
a delusion or something which is above
and beyond reason. If the latter, they
only weaken it by seeking to prop it up
by weak and sophistical arguments. If,
for instance, a man tells me that he
believes in the miracle of the Ascension
by faith, I have no more to say; but if
he proceeds to back up his assertion by
arguing that there is no contradiction
between Luke’s account of it and that of
the other evangelists, I say : “This man
is either insincere or illogical.” His
motto is, “ Believe if you can; if you
can’t, cant.”
I do not, therefore, so much deny the
truth of the Christian miracles as affirm
that they are altogether outside the
province of reason, and have no place
in such an historical resume as I am
attempting to give in this essay.
Another reservation I have to make is
that, if the historical element in the life
of Jesus may seem to be reduced to very
slender proportions, this does not neces
sarily affect the vital truth of the
Christian religion.
This religion has
always been to a considerable extent,
and is becoming more and more every
day, not so much a question of external
evidence, or of dogma, as of a sincere
love and reverence for the ideal which
has come to be associated with the name
of Jesus. This ideal is a fact, and has
long been, and will continue to be, an
important factor in the progress of human
evolution from lower to higher things.
How the ideal grew up and came to be
established is of far less importance than
what it is. Love, charity, purity, com
passion, self-sacrifice, are not the less
virtues because the Jdeas and emotions
of so many good men and women, for
nineteen centuries, have taken form and
crystallised about a comparatively small
nucleus of historical fact.
My meaning will be best explained by
an illustration. In Catholic countries
there is a figure 'which competes with, if
indeed it does not often supersede, that
of Jesus—-the figure of the Virgin Mary.
Now, here we can trace the historical
nucleus down to a minimum. What do
we really know of the mother of Jesus as
an historical fact?
That she was a
Jewish matron, the wife of a mechanic
in a small provincial town, the mother of
a large family, for four brothers of Jesus
are mentioned as well as sisters. Apart
from the legends of the .Nativity, which
are obviously mythical, nothing else is
�THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
ii5
known of her, except that she was pro historical evidence ? I tell you it is a
bably one of the sceptical friends and fact, far more certain and more impor
kindred at Nazareth whose want of faith tant than nine-tenths of the events
prevented the working of miracles there, related in history. If you doubt it, look
and whose impression seems to have at Raffaelle’s Madonna di San Sisto,
been that Jesus was not altogether in his or Murillo’s Immaculate Conception ; or
right mind. Her relations with her Son listen to Mozart’s Ave Maria, or
do not appear to have been very cordial, Rossini’s Stabat Mater, and you will
from his refusal to go out to her when see that this ideal worship of the car
she came to the door asking to see him, penter’s wife of Nazareth has produced
and his emphatic assertion that those works which will remain for ever as highwho believed in him were dearer to him water marks which have been reached in
the evolution of modern art. You will
than his blood-relations.
The only other mention of Mary by say with Byron :—
St. John, who describes her as sitting at
“ Ave Maria, oh, that face so fair,
Those downcast eyes beneath the Almighty
the foot of the Cross, is apocryphal, being
dove.
directly contradicted by the very precise
Ave Maria, may our spirits dare
statement in the three other Gospels, that
Soar up to thee and to thy Son above.”
the Mary who was present on that occa
And so of Jesus; the historical figure,
sion was a different woman, the mother
of Salome. The motive of this intro though a good deal more certain and
duction of Mary, the mother of Jesus, definite than that of his Mother, is but
by the author of the fourth Gospel is a small matter compared with the ideal
obvious—viz., to exalt the character of which has grown up, in the course of
St. John, as is apparent throughout this ages, about it. It is but as the fragment
Gospel, in which the “ Boanerges,” the which, dropping into a saturated solu
violent and narrow-minded John of the tion, attracts molecule after molecule,
other Gospels, is converted into the until it grows into a large and lovely
gentle and amiable Apostle whom Jesus crystal which all eyes admire.
With these reservations, which may
loved.
What is the sort of figure which, if we go some way to mitigate the scruples of
relied on historical evidence only, we orthodox readers, if I should happen to
should draw from these scanty records ? have any—viz., that miracles are a ques
That of a plain, motherly Jewish woman, tion of faith, and that the historical
who did her own scrubbing and washing, element does not materially affect the
and was probably too much oppressed vital truth of Christianity—I fall back
by household cares, and those of a large on my own humble province of reason,
family, to know or care much for the and attempt to show what can be
spiritual aspirations and prophetical gathered by it from the earliest records
as to the personality and teaching of
pretensions of her eldest son.
And yet from this homely figure -what Jesus.
I begin by stating the two principles
a world of beautiful ideas and associa
tions have flowered into life.
The by which I have been mainly guided in
Madonna has become an embodiment the research. The first is what I may
of all female virtues carried to a point call the “Minimum of Miracle.” Of
where they become divine.
Love, different biographies of the same person,
purity, innocence, maternal affection, that which contains the fewest miraculous
human suffering, have all found their legends is almost certain to be the
highest ideal in the “ Mother of God,” earliest and most authentic. It is far
the “ mild and merciful Madonna,” the more likely that such legends should be
“ Blessed Virgin.” Do you tell me this added or invented than that, if they
is not a fact because it is not based on actually occurred, or were generally
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THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
accredited, they should be designedly
omitted. As an illustration of what I
mean by this, take the case, already
referred to, of St. Thomas a Becket. If
newspapers had existed in his time which
published a biography of eminent men
on the day after their death, such a
biography would have contained no
miracles; one written a few weeks later
would have doubtless contained some
reference to the miraculous vision of the
monk who watched by his remains, and
some of the miracles said to have
occurred at his shrine; while still later
accounts would have multiplied the
miracles into scores and hundreds.
There can be no doubt here that the
succession in point of time would have
been—No miracles, few miracles, many
miracles. And the same holds good of
all biographies of eminent men, saints,
and martyrs. The outlines of their
historical figures are almost lost in the
accumulation of myths and legends,
which in uncritical times have grown up
about them. Even . in the nineteenth
century we have had a most significant
illustration of this. When the life of
the Bab, a great religious reformer of
modern Persia, was published shortly
after his death, it contained no miracles.
But in thirty years it came to be packed
with miracles.
The second even more important
principle is, that admissions of events
and sayings which tell against the point
of view of the writer are far more likely
to be historical than those which have
the appearance of being introduced to
show the fulfilment of prophecies, to
answer objections, or to support dogmatic
views. Thus, if Jesus is described as
being born and bred at Nazareth, the
son of a carpenter whose family and
surroundings were well known there, the
statement is far more likely to be true
than one which describes him as having
been born at Bethlehem, and attributes
to. him a whole series of marvellous and
miraculous incidents.
Tried by both these tests, the Gospel
of Mark has every appearance of being
the earliest and most authentic record;
and when this is confirmed by the clear
and explicit statement of Papias, I have
no hesitation in assuming it to be the
surest basis of our historical knowledge,
and in all probability mainly derived
from the reminiscences of Peter himself,
or of other contemporary witnesses of
the events described.
Starting from this basis, I assume, as
beyond all doubt, that Jesus was an
historical personage. There is nothing
in Mark which would lead to the sup
position that any considerable portion of
his Gospel was legend or myth. The
time is too modern, and the narrative
too precise, to allow us to suppose that
the whole story had been elaborated by
later theologians from Oriental myths
and Messianic prophecies. The age
was long past when religions could
originate in solar myths and misunder
stood personifications of natural pheno
mena. Every great religious movement
which comes fairly within the historical
period, from Buddha and Zoroaster down
to Mohammed, had some real personality
as its starting-point, about whom myths
and dogmas accumulated, until almost
obscuring the historical nucleus. So
also was doubtless the case with Jesus.1
The next point I consider to be quite
certain is, that he was born of humble
parents at the little town of Nazareth in
Galilee. The legends of the Nativity
and Infancy may all be dismissed as
purely mythical. The two accounts
and genealogies in Matthew and Luke
do not agree, and are each hopelessly
inconsistent with the evidence of the
other Gospels. It is plain that during
his life and afterwards Jesus was supposed
to have been born at Nazareth, that this
was cast in his teeth as being irrecon
cilable with any claim to be the Messiah,
and that neither he nor his Apostles ever
attempted to deny it, or made any claim
J. The reader who desires to study the more
critical position, which calls into question the
historical reality of Jesus, will do well to read
Mr. J. M. Robertson’s Christianity and Mytho
logy and Pagan Christs,
�THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
117
to his having been born at Bethlehem. heroes and gods of antiquity, and is
If such a series of startling events as almost certainly derived from a solar
are described by Matthew had really myth of the sun rising in the constella
occurred, the inhabitants of Nazareth tion of Virgo. The story of the massacre
could hardly have ignored his claims as of the innocents is related of Krishna;
a prophet on the ground that he was a and, if we accept the narrative of Matthew,
mere ordinary fellow-townsman, “the we have to suppose that there were two
Son of the carpenter, whose brothers wicked kings, one in India and another
in Judaea, separated by an interval of
and sisters are with us every day.’'
The accounts of the nativity, infancy, many centuries, who both adopted the
arid early manhood of Jesus may be same expedient, of a massacre of all
dismissed as purely legendary. I do male children under two years of age,
not say so merely because they contain to destroy a Divine Incarnation who was
so many miracles, but on the ordinary Lorn in one of their cities. The escape
grounds of historical criticism. In the by flight, owing to a miraculous warning,
first place, the two accounts of Matthew and other particulars, are almost word
and Luke are contradictory. The second for word the same in the two legends;
admits that Nazareth was the abode of and we may fairly assume that both are
Joseph and Mary, and accounts for the alike unhistorical. We know that a
birth of Jesus at Bethlehem by the sup whole crop of such legends grow up in
posed necessity of Joseph’s going there early Christian tradition, for we have
to be taxed, as being of the family of the Gospel of the Infancy, which is full
David; while the first assumes that of the most childish and absurd magical
Bethlehem was the abode of the parents, tricks, supposed to have been performed
and says that they only went to Nazareth during the boyhood of the Messiah.
The first firm historical ground is
some years later from fear of Archelaus,
who had succeeded to his father Herod. afforded by the Gospel of St. Mark, who
Matthew describes the Massacre of the begins with the visit of Jesus to John the
Innocents at Bethlehem, and says that Baptist. This is very likely to be true,
Jesus escaped it by flying into Egypt; for we know from Josephus that the time
while Luke omits all mention of the was one of great religious and political
massacre, the miraculous star, and the excitement, and that there were several
wise men of the East, and says that the such preachers or prophets as John the
parents took the babe straight to Jeru Baptist is described to have been, who
salem. In both cases all the events are went about holding what may be called
described as happening in fulfilment of camp-meetings, and in some cases caus
prophecies. The other two evangelists, ing local insurrections, which had to be
Mark and John, make no mention of repressed by the Roman soldiery. Noth
any such occurrences, and begin their ing is more likely than that a young man
biographies with the visit of Jesus, when of original genius and strong religious
a grown-up man, to John the Baptist. sentiment should go to one of such
It is now recognised by prominent theo meetings, not far from his home, to hear
logians, such as Dr. Loofs, that the a celebrated preacher. That such a
account given in Luke is a late interpola young man was not altogether satisfied
with the narrow and fierce denunciations
tion in the text.
But the most conclusive fact is that of a rude ascetic, and did not enrol him
these legends are identical, both in their self as one of his disciples, was also very
general tenour and in many minute details, probable; but that John really did make
with similar legends of earlier religions. a considerable impression on him is
Thus the miraculous birth from a virgin evident from the fact that he left his
is related of Horus, of Krishna, of home immediately afterwards, assumed
Buddha, and of many of the celebrated the character of a wandering missionary,
�ii8
THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
and began to preach identically the same
the New Testament. They supply a
gospel as that of John: “Repent ye, for
motive-power which may explain the
the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
early conversions and the rapid spread
Let us pause for a moment to consider
what was meant by the kingdom of heaven of the new religion. Evidently the hope
eing at hand. It did not mean such a of a large and .immediate reward was
millennium as certain enthusiasts may present in the minds of the Apostles,
now suppose, after nineteen centuries of these humble peasants and fishermen
unfulfilled expectation—thatis, the advent we're to sit on twelve thrones judging
of an era of purer morals and better laws the twelve tribes of Israel,” and “every
—but the literal end of the world and last one who has left houses, or brethren, or
judgment, to take place within the life sisters, or children, or lands, for My
Name’s sake shall receive a hundred
time of some of the existing generation.
fold.” And this not in a remote future,
1 he sun was to be darkened, the moon
but m the lifetime of the existing genera
not to give her light, and the stars fall
tion. It is conceivable also that many
rom heaven. And then they were to
see the “ Son of Man coming in clouds educated Jews, who despaired of an
with great power and glory,” and his armed resistance to the overwhelming
angels to gather all mankind from the power of Rome, might be inclined to
four winds of heaven before the judgment view with favour the idea of a spiritual
Messiah who should bring about the
seat, where the tares are to be separated
advent of an end of the world and last
from the wheat, the goats from the sheep,
judgment, in which the elect children of
the good rewarded and the wicked cast
God should be rewarded and the heathen
into everlasting fire. Nothing can be punished.
more explicit than the assurance that this
Another element which must have
event would come to pass in the lifetime
contributed largely towards the reception
of the present generation. “Verily I say
of the Gospel by the poorer classes is
unto you, This generation shall not pass
the extreme socialistic spirit which is
away until all these things are accom uniformly displayed. For “rich’’write
plished.”
Such was evidently the current opinion “capital,” and for “poor” “wages,” and
the preaching of Jesus is almost identical
among the Apostles and early Christians: with that of modern socialists. The
and even the cultured and educated Paul,
poor are to be rewarded and the rich
some twenty years later, repeats it with punished in the kingdom of God, irre
the fullest conviction, and describes how
the Lord shall descend from heaven spective of any merit or demerit. Thus,
blessed are ye poor,” “woe unto you
with a shout, with the voice of an arch
that are rich.” Even the rich young
angel, and with the trump of God”; and
how “the dead shall rise first; then we man, who had kept all the Command
that are alive, that are left, shall together ments, is told that he cannot be saved
unless he “sells all his possessions and
with them be caught up in the clouds, to gives to the poor”; and the remark of
meet the Lord in the air.”
Jesus is, that it is “ easier for a camel to
It is clear that, according to all rules
go through a needle’s eye than for a rich
of ordinary reason, predictions thus con
man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
fidently made and conclusively refuted For anything that appears to the contrary,
are an irresistible argument against the Lazarus may have been a loafing vaga
possession of any inspiration or special bond, who had brought poverty and dis
foresight on the part of the prophets, and
ease upon himself by his own misconduct;
that prophecies, like miracles, must be and Dives a man who, having inherited
relegated to the province of faith. But,
a large estate, spent it hospitably in
on the other hand, they bring us nearer
entertaining his neighbours; but no moral
to the human and historical element in is inculcated. It is enough that Lazarus
�THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
is poor and Dives rich, to place one in
Abraham’s bosom and the other in eternal
fire.
It is evidently neither in these falsified
prophecies, nor in this exaggerated social
ism, that we are to find the fascination
which the ideal of Jesus has exercised
over so many minds for so many centuries.
It is rather in the interpretation which he
gave to the first words of the Baptist’s
formula, “ Repent ye, for the kingdom of
God is at hand.” Repentance, as taught
by Jesus, meant not merely an outward
obedience to formal laws and abstinence
from direct breaches of moral command
ments, but such a spiritual conversion as
embraced the whole sphere of human
life and made the very idea of sin insup
portable. Men were to be good, pure,
merciful, compassionate, and charitable,
because the principle of “loving God and
thy neighbour as thyself” was so wrought
into the soul that it became a second
nature. The law was to be observed, but
in a liberal, tolerant, and comprehensive
spirit, and the intention was to be looked
to rather than the outward act. The
widow’s mite was of more value than the
rich man’s offering, and the publican’s
remorseful prayer was more acceptable
than the formal and lengthened devotions
of the strait-laced Pharisee.
It is remarkable, when we come to
consider it, how much more the ideal of
Jesus, which is the central fact of Chris
tianity, is founded on the precepts and
parables by which this spiritual religion
is taught, and by the human incidents of
his life which illustrate it, than it is on
the alleged miracles. The Sermon on
the Mount, the Parable of the Good
Samaritan, the tenderness to children,
the affectionate and “sweetly reason
able ” intercourse with his humble
followers—these and such as these are
the traits which build up the ideal char
acter that draws all hearts.
The miracles, on the other hand, are
at best but capricious instances of a
supernatural power, healing one and
leaving thousands unhealed, and failing
when most required as evidences, as in
119
the case of the incredulous Nazarenes
and the Pharisees who asked for a sign;
while, at the worst, some of them are
wholly inconsistent with the historical
character of the just and gentle Jesus.
Thus the miracle of the Gadarene swine,
if true, obviously detracts from this char
acter. It is an act of cruelty to animals
(for what had the poor swine done to
deserve death?), and it is a wanton
destruction of property cruel. to the
owners. Doubtless these swine had
owners, perhaps some poor Galilean
peasants, who, like those of Donegal or
Galway, depended on the pig to pay
their rent and save them from eviction.
It was a wanton and a cruel act to send
their humble property to destruction m
order to please a pack of devils. Again,
the miracle of the fig-tree reads rather
like the hasty curse of a passionate fool
than the act of a gentle, long-suffering,
and sweetly reasonable man.
But, to return to the historical narative,
I find no difficulty in believing that the
accounts of the commencement of the
mission of Jesus, of his comings and
goings among the small towns of Galilee,
of his camp-meetings, and of most of
his preachings, parables, and sayings, are
substantially accurate. There is nothing
improbable in them, except in some of
the miracles taken literally, and these
may readily be explained, or indeed
were inevitable, in such a medium of
excited crowds of poor and ignorant
men, where everyone believed in miracles
as events of daily occurrence, and where
many natural acts of faith-healing and
casual coincidences had given a popular
prophet the reputation of being a worker
of mighty works.
Indeed, many of the miracles appear
as if they had a nucleus of historical fact,
which became expanded into legend.
Thus, the legends of Jesus and Peter
walking on the sea appear to be based
on the first simple narrative, how a
sudden squall having overtaken the boat
in which they were crossing at night,
they awoke Jesus, who was asleep, and
the squall passed over.
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THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
Those, again, of the “ loaves and fishes ” nent . makes a desperate thrust by a
may have readily arisen from the recol puzzling question; it is parried by an
lection of some occasion when a scanty adroit answer, both leaving the root of
supply of food had lasted out longer than the matter untouched. Thus the cele
was expected, owing very probably to brated answer, “ Render unto Csesar the
many of those who attended the camp things that are Caesar’s, and unto God
meeting having brought their own provi the things that are God’s,” is clever, but
sions—a conjecture which is confirmed no answer to the real question whether a
by the abundance of baskets, in which conscientious servant of Jehovah could
to collect the fragments, and which could voluntarily pay taxes to a heathen power
not have been required to carry seven or which had usurped his place. The posi
five loaves.
tion was precisely that of a conscientious
These, however, are mere conjectures, Dissenter in our own days, who was in
and not to be taken as facts, and I only doubt whether to pay Church rates or
mention them to show that a good many let his chattels be seized. He would
of the miraculous legends need not have got little enlightenment from being
necessarily detract from the general told to pay King Edward VII. the things
historical value of Mark’s simple narra that were his, and render to God what
tive of this early part of the career of was God’s. The question was, what
Jesus in Galilee.
things were Caesar’s and what God’s.
And I think the sayings and parables
Again, the puzzle of the Sadducee,
may generally be taken .as authentic. It whose wife she would be in heaven who
is true that most of both may be found had been married successively to seven
in the literature of the Talmud and of brothers, remains a puzzle to this day.
older religions, but this does not negative It is no question of marrying in the
the probability that Jesus may have used kingdom of heaven, but of marriages
them in his popular addresses, and at which have taken place on earth. Shall
any rate they afford a view of what his we preserve our personal identity after
doctrine and style of preaching really death, so that two souls which have been
were ; and . many of the parables and united by the holiest and closest ties
shorter sayings are just such things as while living shall be united in a future
would be readily retained in the memory life ? Shall we know and recognise those
and transmitted by oral tradition. Many whom we have loved and lost—
of the details also of the incidents and
“ See every face we feared to see no more ” ;
wanderings to and fro of this Galilean
or is Arthur’s last wish, that Guinevere
period are very like what might be
expected from the reminiscences in old should cling to him and not to Launcelot,
age of an Apostle like Peter, who had when they meet before “ the fair father
accompanied Jesus from the first, though Christ,” a vain dream ? If it be not,
we must always recollect that the author who can answer the Sadducee’s question,
who worked up these reminiscences, as or say more than our greatest poet:
“ Behind the veil, behind the veil ”?
described by Papias, into a connected
biography may have added a good deal What Jesus might have said, but did
from other sources.
not, is : The rule is an abominable one;
I am inclined also to accept as it degrades the sanctity of marriage, and
authentic a good many of the contro reduces woman to a mere chattel, who is
versies between Jesus and the Scribes to be handed over like an ox or an ass—
and Pharisees. They are exactly in the they to bear burdens, she to bear chil
style of the verbal conflicts which were dren—for their master, man.
so common in the East, and which sur
Up to this point, therefore, I see no
vived down to the scholastic tourna difficulty in accepting the Synoptic narra
ments of the Middle Ages. An oppo tive, best told in the earliest and simplest
�THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
121
Gospel of Mark, as being in the main and Pharisees had introduced in later
historical. And if so, the best picture I times. Thus, he strolled through the
can form of it fs something very like the fields on a Sunday afternoon with his
Salvation Army of the present day. The disciples, plucking ears of corn, and
movement had evidently no political declared that “ the Sabbath was made
significance, and attracted little notice, for man, not man for the Sabbath,” a
or Josephus must have mentioned it; and saying in respect of which our modern
there is no trace of any interference with Pharisees have generally sided with those
it, in the earlier stages, on the part of of old rather than with the liberal-minded
the authorities. In fact, the modern and tolerant Jesus.
What did Jesus believe respecting his
Salvationists have suffered more from
provincial Bumbles and Justice Shallows own Messiahship ? This is a very per
than Jesus and his disciples seemed to plexing question, aggravated by the
have done while they remained in Galilee. tendency, after the doctrine was firmly
But, like the Salvation Army, there was established, to invent or adopt traditions
a loose organisation of a general, twelve showing that he had fulfilled the condi
principal officers, and a body of disciples tions attached to such a character by the
or professed adherents, who went about prophecies of the Old Testament, and by
holding camp-meetings, and preaching the prevailing expectations.
But it is tolerably clear that in the
the advent of the kingdom of God and
a new and better life to excited crowds, early part of his career he advanced no
who listened eagerly, and on the whole such pretension. The Gospels all agree
sympathised with them. The only dif in describing the remarkable persistency
ference was in the superior genius, with which he endeavoured to suppress
eloquence, and attractiveness of the all evidence which tended to support
personality at the head of the movement, such a claim. The evil spirits who
and the purity, spirituality, and general recognise him, the patients whom he
miraculously cures, Peter when he calls
excellence of his doctrine.
There are one or two points in this him the Christ, are all enjoined to “ tell
doctrine which it is interesting to con no man anything.” When the little
sider. Did Jesus regard himself as a damsel is supposed to have been raised
Jewish reformer, or as the founder of a from the dead, his first care is to “ charge
new religion ? Decidedly the former. them much that no man should know
The declarations are quite explicit : this.” In any ordinary case the inference
“Think not that I come to destroy the would be that he did not wish miracles,
law or the prophets, but to fulfil ”; “Till which passed muster with ignorant dis
heaven and earth pass away, one jot or ciples, to be investigated by impartial
one tittle shall in no wise pass away from and educated critics. If this explanation
the law ”; “ I was not sent but unto the be negatived as inconsistent with his
lost sheep of the house of Israel.” He pure and holy character, the only other
was as far as possible from Paul’s doc that can be suggested is that he did not
trine, that he was sent to liberate the wish it to be supposed that he was a
Jews from the bondage of the law,, and supernatural being attested by miracles,
to introduce a new and universal religion believing miracles to be vulgar things
for Jews and Gentiles alike. But in a of which even false prophets might be
few exceptional cases he healed Gentiles capable, but that he preferred to rely on
who had shown extraordinary faith, and the excellence of his doctrine and his
his interpretation of the law was a large own powers of eloquence and persuasion.
It would seem, however, that later in
and liberal one, looking to the spirit
rather than the letter of the Mosaic his career the conviction began to dawn
commandments, and rejecting the trifling on him that he might be the Messiah of
and vexatious rules which the Scribes . the prophecies, and that he stood in
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THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
some peculiar relation to God, and would any other record. It is evident that, if
be His vicegerent in inaugurating His Luke s version had represented the words
kingdom and holding the assizes of the really spoken, they could never have been
last judgment.
altered by eye-witnesses or by early tradi
The most distinct assertion of this is tion into words conveying such a totally
found after he had gone to Jerusalem, in different impression as “My God, my
his reputed reply to the adjuration of the God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
high priest to say whether he was “ the
We come now to the concluding scene
Christ, the Son of the Blessed,” to which at Jerusalem, when it becomes more
he replied, according to one version, “ I than ever difficult to distinguish between
am,” and to another, “ Thou sayest.”
fact and legend. The narratives of the
It is evident, however, that he never three Synoptic Gospels are fairly consis
thought of equalling himself to God, or tent up to the Crucifixion, when they
representing himself in the literal sense become hopelessly discordant. That of
as being “of one substance with the John is apparently founded on the same
Father,” and he would probably have torn tradition, though, after the fashion of the
his clothes and shouted “blasphemy ” if author, dealt with in a very freehand
he had heard the articles of the Athana- way, altered, transposed, so as to make it
sian Creed. To the last he uses the the ground-work for several dogmatical
term “ Son of Man ” in speaking of him speeches and visits to Jerusalem, and
self, even in his answer to the high embellished by various amendments and
priest j and he never adopts the language details. But the primitive narrative is
of the evil spirits who address him as clear enough. Jesus and his Apostles go
“Jesus, thou Son of the Most High up to Jerusalem to keep the Passover ;
God,” or as “ the Holy One of God.” they are received there with a triumphal
He never doubts that" “my Father is procession; Jesus clears the Temple of
greater than I,” or that God alone knows the money-changers; the authorities
things which he does not know.
become alarmed, but are afraid to arrest
. The best clue to his conception of him openly, as the people are in his
himself is, to my mind, afforded by the favour ; one of the Apostles betrays his
pathetic dying words, “ Eloi, Eloi, lama hiding-place, and he is arrested at night;
sabachthani ?” These, if any, must be he is tried and condemned by the Sanhe
historical, for they tell against the drim and by the Roman Governor;
orthodox view, and could never have Pilate believes him to be innocent, and
been invented, while they are just the tries to save him, but the Jews clamour
sort of thing which would impress itself, for his blood; Pilate yields, and he is
in the actual words spoken, on the crucified.
memory of his affectionate disciples.
Thus far the story is consistent, and it
But if these words were really spoken, involves nothing that is impossible. But
they show that he really believed himself it is full of the gravest improbabilities.
to be the promised Messiah, and trusted Why should the Jews, who one day are
up to the last in some signal miraculous so much in his favour that the authorities
act of deliverance, such as the advent of are afraid to arrest him, be converted in
the last day, or the descent from heaven a single day into a furious crowd clamour
of “ more than twelve legions of angels.” ing for his execution ? Why should an
It is worthy of remark that the author appeal to Pilate be necessary for a reliof Luke seems to have felt the force of gious offence against the Mosaic law,
this objection, for he transforms the when Stephen, under precisely similar
expression into “My God, into thy circumstances, was publicly stoned to
ha ids I commend my spirit,” and inserts death, and Paul made havoc of Chris
“ Forgive them, for they know not what tians without any Roman mandate ? Why
they do,” which words are not found in • should false witnesses, whose testimony
�THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
123
was inconsistent, be required to prove any one written document or from any
an offence which Jesus avowed in open fixed tradition. Thus, Judas’s death is
differently described. Herod is intro
court ?
But the portion of the narrative which duced by Luke, and not mentioned by
relates to Pilate is that which is open to the others. Jesus carried his own cross
the gravest suspicion. It is opposed in one account, while Simon of Cyrene
alike to human nature and to Roman bore it in another. Jesus gave no answer
practice that a high functionary should to Pilate, says Matthew; he explained
first publicly proclaim his belief in the that “his kingdom was not of this world,”
innocence of a prisoner whom he was says John. Mary his mother sat at the
trying, and go through the solemn act of foot of the cross, according to John; it
washing his hands to show that he would was not his mother, but another Mary,
not be guilty of his blood, and immedi the mother of Salome, who “beheld from
ately afterwards condemn him to a cruel afar,” according to Mark and Matthew.
and ignominious death. Nor is it con There was a guard set to watch the tomb,
ceivable that such a Governor, if forced says Matthew; there is no mention of one
to yield by the threat of being reported by the others.
These, however, are minor discrepan
to Csesar for disloyalty, should insist,
against the remonstrances of the Jewish cies which are only important as showing
rulers, in placing an inscription on the that there was no clearly fixed historical
cross, which proclaimed Jesus to be “ the tradition, except of the general outline of
the course of events, when the different
king of the Jews.”
In fact, the whole episode of Pilate Gospels were compiled; and subsequent
has very much the air of being an inter to the Crucifixion there is, as we have
polation of much later date, when the seen, a hopeless discordance.
In some cases it is almost possible to
feeling of hatred between Christians and
Jews had become intense. The object trace, step by step, how the legends grew
evidently is to show that this hatred was with each successive repetition. Thus,
justified by the Jews having imprecated according to Mark, two women went to
the blood of Jesus on their own heads the tomb, found the stone rolled away
and those of their sons, and to represent and the tomb empty, and saw a young
the heathens as having been better than man clothed in white, who gave them a
the Jews, inasmuch as Pilate tried to save message to Peter and the disciples that
Jesus, and to a certain extent believed in Jesus had risen and gone before them to
him. It is difficult to credit that such Galilee, where they would see him—a
a narrative could have come from men message which they never delivered,
like Peter, John, and James, who re being afraid. In Matthew the young
mained devout Jews, zealous for their man has become an angel who rolled the
stone away and sat on it, delivering the
faith and country.
Nor, again, is it easy to see how, if the same message to go to Galilee, where his
events had really assumed the publicity disciples would see him, which they ran
and importance assigned to them, there and delivered. In Luke there are the
should be no mention of them by Jose same two Marys, with another woman
phus, or any contemporary writer, espe named Joanna, and several others, and
cially if there was, as the Gospels say, a they saw not one but two men in dazzling
miraculous darkness over the land, an apparel; “Go to Galilee” is changed
earthquake, the veil of the Temple rent, into “ As he spoke unto you while yet in
and ghosts walked about the streets. Galilee,” which in the Acts is enlarged
The Gospel narratives also, though con into a positive injunction “ Not to depart
sistent in the main outlines, contain a from Jerusalem ”; and Peter is intro
number of discrepancies in details which duced as running to the tomb and finding
show that they were not derived from it empty. In John there are two angels;
�124
THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
John runs along with Peter to the tomb;
and Mary Magdalene has a miraculous
vision of Jesus, whom she at first mistakes
for the gardener. No one who reads
these narratives by the ordinary light of
reason can doubt that the simple story
of Mark is nearest to the original fact or
tradition, and that the successive amplifi
cations of one into two, men into angels,
the introduction of Peter, and finally of
Peter and John, and the miraculous
vision of Mary Magdalene, have grown
up about it. If the facts had really
happened as described by Luke and
John, no one could have subsequently
cut them down into the bald statement
of Mark, while the opposite process is
what we know to be historically true in
the case of so many early Christian
martyrs and mediaeval saints. It is the
clearest possible case of the application
of.the principle of the “Minimum of
Miracle.”
I may here remark, however, that, as
I said before, the historical nucleus is of
minor importance compared with the
fact that the belief in the Resurrection
did somehow come to be entertained,
and became the chief agent in the estab
lishment and evolution of the new reli
gion, and that there is no reason to doubt
that it was honestly entertained by sincere
men, who, if they did not see it with their
bodily eyes, saw it with the eyes of faith,
and to whom visions, dreams, hallucina
tions, and subjective impressions were as
much facts as objective realities.
In trying to disentangle the historical
nucleus from these legends, the best ray
of light I can discover is afforded by the
account of the riot in the Temple, and
assault on the traders who changed money
and who sold doves and other objects of
sacrifice. This is found in all the Gospels,
and could hardly be an invention; while,
if true, it must have been followed by
immediate consequences. Prompt and
stern repression must have been exercised
both by the Jewish and the Roman
authorities.
. We must recollect that their point of
view would not be that of later Christians,
when the faith in the Divine character of
Jesus had been established for centuries,
but that of contemporaries who knew
nothing of him but as the provincial
prophet of an obscure sect. To recur to
the simile of the Salvation Army, it
would be as if a body of Salvationists,
who had preached without interruption
in some remote province of Russia, came
to Moscow, and in a fit of religious
enthusiasm invaded the cathedral, and
broke the windows of the shopkeepers
in its vicinity who exhibited ikons and
other sacred objects of the Greek ritual.
Undoubtedly the Metropolitan would
complain to the Governor, and the
leader of the rioters would be summarily
arrested, and, if not crucified, sent to
Siberia.
Supposing this narrative to be true, it
affords a natural explanation of many
of the incidents recorded. A disciple
might well be bribed to disclose the
hiding-place of his Master; the arrest
might be made under the circumstances
described; the disciples might disperse
in alarm, and Peter deny his connection
with them; Jesus might be taken before
the high priest, and by him referred to
the Roman Governor. The incredible
legends about his trial and Pontius
Pilate might resolve themselves into the
fact that Jesus had no defence to make,
and was condemned, not on theological
grounds, or on the charge of having
proclaimed himself as a temporal king of
the Jews, but on the simple charge of
having been the ringleader in a serious
riot. Crucifixion would, as we know
from numerous instances in Josephus,
have been a common Roman method of
dealing with such leaders, and its various
incidents, such as the brutality of the
soldiers and the procession to Golgotha,
are only what might be expected. The
historical part of the narrative can hardly
be carried farther than that Jesus came
up to Jerusalem with a body of his
followers, that a riot took place in the
Temple, and that he was arrested, tried,
and executed by the Roman Governor
at the request of the Jewish authorities.
�THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS________
125
might well have come from an enemy of
His entombment and the finding of the
tomb empty rest, according to Mark, who the new faith, but hardly from an
Apostle. On the other hand, at a subse
is the best authority, on the testimony of
quent period, when the eye-witnesses
two women, Mary Magdalene and Mary
were dead, and the original records and
the mother of James, who are alone
traditions were obscured by time, and
mentioned as seeing where the body
when the dogmas of the Resurrection
was laid, and as afterwards, with
and Divine nature of Jesus were firmly
Salome, finding the tomb empty, but,
established, nothing is more likely than
being afraid, said nothing at the time to
that the birthplace of the new religion
anv one.
.
.
should be transferred to Jerusalem, and
The next historical question is one of
the vague statements of occurrences in
great importance. Did the Apostles, as
directly asserted by Matthew, and in Galilee should be transformed into, a
series of stupendous miracles occurring
directly by Mark, return immediately to
at the sacred city in the presence of a
Galilee, where the belief in. the Resur
rection took form; or did they, as large number of witnesses.
The probabilities of the case, also, are .
asserted with equal positiveness by Luke,
all in favour of the return to Galilee.
remain at Jerusalem, where a series of
startling miraculous appearances took The disciples had come to Jerusalem on
a special pilgrimage to keep the Passplace ?
.
There can be little doubt in consider over there, which was over j there was
no intimation of any intention to remain,
ing the Galilean tradition to be the true
nor could they well have brought with
one. Independently of the great weight
them any sufficient resources for a long
of authority for considering the narrative
stay. They were in mortal fear of the
of Mark, which is substantially the same
Jews, and several of them had wives and
as that of Matthew, to be the earliest and
families at home, to whom they would
most authentic, it is inconceivable that,
hasten to return. If we could believe
if events had really occurred as described
by Luke, any author or compiler of any John, they not only returned, but
resumed their original occupation as
other Gospel should have ignored them
fishermen ; but I lay little stress on this,
and transferred the scene to Galilee.
as the author of John, whoever he was,
However simple-minded such an author
was evidently a man of considerable
may have been, he could not but have
seen that he was weakening immensely literary attainments and dramatic genius,
which he displayed in writing a Gospel,
the evidence for the cardinal fact of the
great parts of which may be most aptly
Resurrection if, instead of referring to
such precise and definite statements of described as a theological romance.
But it is useless to dwell on details, as
miracles, including the. Ascension, occur
the conclusive argument is that Mark
ring in or near the capital city Jerusalem,
and Matthew could by. no possibility
in the presence of numerous witnesses,
many of whom survived to attest their have written as they did if the course of
events immediately after the death of
truth twenty or more years afterwards,
he either omitted all mention of such Jesus had really been, or even had been
generally supposed to be, as described
occurrences like Mark, or like Matthew
transferred the scene to a remote pro by Luke.
With the return of the disciples to
vince and to a select few of his own
disciples, and whittled down the evi Galilee the curtain falls on what may be
fairly called the historical drama of the
dence to the vague statement that these
went into the “ mountain where Jesus life of Jesus, and we enter on a region
had appointed them,” where “some where all is conjecture and uncertainty.
The belief in the Resurrection evidently
worshipped him and some doubted.”
It probably
Such a perversion of Luke’s narrative grew up in Galilee.
�126
THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
originated with the women, for they are
mentioned in all the accounts as the first
to have seen the risen Jesus, or to have
brought a message from him or from
angels, and this is hardly likely to have
been invented.
If at first they were afraid to tell any
one, nothing is more natural than that,
when they found themselves in their
own country, and among friends, their
tongues would have been loosened, and
they would begin to talk of the wonderful
things they had seen, or fancied they
had seen, at Jerusalem. '
The only thing certain is that the
belief in the Resurrection, once started,
grew rapidly, but that the various
accounts of how it grew are so vague
and contradictory that it is hopeless to
attempt to draw any certain conclusion
respecting them. This will be apparent
if we simply place in juxtaposition the
five different records which have come
down to us in the New Testament.
The most certain and authentic record
is that related by St. Paul in his Epistle
to the Corinthians. It is true that Paul
was not an eye-witness, or at all likely to
have examined the evidence critically,
and he places the appearance to himself,
which, whether supernatural or not, was
obviously in the nature of a vision, on
precisely the same footing as the others.
Still, it is good evidence that, some
twenty years after the event, the appear
ances he mentions were currently believed
by the early Christian community at
Jerusalem.
They are six in number, and, presum
ably, though he does not mention the
place, all at Jerusalem, except that to
himself on the road to Damascus.
Viz.
1. To Peter.
2. To the twelve.
3.
4.
56.
To above 500 brethren at once.
To James.
To all the Apostles.
To himself.
Compare this with the other accounts,
beginning with that of Mark, which
probably came direct from St. Peter.
In the genuine Mark of the oldest
manuscripts :—
Miraculous appearances. None.
Only a message from a young man in
white delivered to the two Marys and
Salome.
In the addition to Mark, introduced
later than the date of the oldest manu
scripts :—
/
Three. 1. To Mary Magdalene.
2. To the two walking from Em
maus.
3- T° the eleven.
i and 2 being distinctly stated not to
have been believed by those to whom
they were told, at the time of their
alleged occurrence.
According to Matthew :—
Miraculous appearances. Two.
1. To Mary Magdalene and the other
Mary at Jerusalem.
2. To the eleven on a mountain in Gali
lee, when some worshipped and
“some doubted.”
According to Luke :—
Miraculous appearances. Four — all at
Jerusalem.
1. Messages of tWo men in dazzling
apparel, probably angels, to the two
Marys, Joanna, and other women.
2. To the two disciples walking from
Emmaus, who at first did not recog
nise him.
3. To the eleven, when he eat the broiled
fish.
4. The Ascension, when he was bodily
taken up in a cloud to-heaven in the
presence of the eleven.
According to John :—
Miraculous appearances. Four—first three
at Jerusalem, fourth in Galilee.
1. To Mary Magdalene alone, who at first
took him for the gardener.
2. To the disciples sitting in a room with
closed doors.
3. A second time to the disciples, to re
move Thomas’s doubts.
4. By the sea of Galilee, when Peter and
six other disciples caught the miracu
lous draught of fishes, when at first
none of them recognised him.
And John expressly states that this
last was the third appearance to the dis
ciples after Jesus had risen from the
dead, thus excluding all others except
1, 2, and 3.
�THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN THE GOSPELS
It will be remarked that, of the five
miraculous appearances recorded by St.
Paul as being the current belief at Jeru
salem twenty years after the event, three
—those to Peter, James, and above 500
brethren at once—are not even men
tioned in any other account. The latter
can hardly be the same as Luke’s Ascen
sion, which comes in its natural place as
the concluding scene of the great drama
of the life and resurrection of Jesus, and
the spectators are confined to the eleven
Apostles.
Paul’s No. 5, or second appearance to
all the Apostles, may refer either to that
described by John to convince Thomas,
or to Luke’s Ascension; but Paul makes
no mention either of Thomas or of the
Ascension, which would be very strange
if the bodily Ascension to heaven was a
cardinal article of faith when Paul visited
Jerusalem, which it must have been if it
really happened as described by Luke.
There remains, therefore, only the vague
tradition that Jesus had appeared to the
twelve, as to which the enumeration by
Paul of five miraculous appearances
receives not the slightest confirmation
from any of the Gospels.
The Gospel accounts, again, vary so
much that there is not a single case in
which any one is confirmed by any of
the others. The nearest approach to it
is in the appearances to women; but
here John says distinctly it was to Mary
Magdalene alone, while Matthew says
it was to the two Marys ; Luke, that the
vision was to the two Marys, Joanna,
and other women, and was one of angels,
and not of Jesus; Mark, that the message
was given to the two Marys and Salome
by a young man. Evidently the tradi
tion as to the women was very vague.
Again, the Ascension at Jerusalem,
the greatest of all the miracles, rests on
Luke alone, and is negatived by the
testimony of Matthew and John that
the Apostles returned to Galilee, and
that the final scene, whatever it may
have been, took place there; and still
more significantly by their silence, and
that of Mark, respecting an event which,
if it took place as described by Luke,
must have been known and mentioned.
The appearance to the two disciples
returning from Emmaus rests also on
the sole authority of Luke, and that to
convince Thomas on that of John. The
miraculous draught of fishes is mentioned
by John, and by John alone. The appear
ance to the eleven is the only event
mentioned by three of the Evangelists;
but of these, two place it in a room at
Jerusalem, while one places it on a
mountain in Galilee.
It is evident that it would be futile to
attempt to form any historical estimate
from such accounts as these ; they must
be left, with miracles generally, to the
province of faith rather than that of
reason. All we can rationally infer is,
that, as in the case of St. Thomas a
Becket and so many other saints and
martyrs, the growth of miraculous myths
was very rapid, and that probably those
records which contain the fewest of
them must date back very closely to the
original events, and to the actors who
took a principal part in them. I have never
been able to see any explanation of the
silence of the Gospel according to St. Mark
respecting any miraculous appearances
after the Resurrection, and the brief and
vague reference to them in St. Matthew,
except in the supposition that the account
given by Papias is true, and that they are
really based on written notes taken down
by Mark from Peter, whose authority
was sufficient to prevent later compilers
and editors from adding to them legends
and traditions which were floating about
in the early Christian world, unsupported
by any direct Apostolic authority.
Here, then, the curtain falls on any
attempt to realise the historical element
in what Huxley so appropriately terms
“the grand figure of Jesus as it lies
embedded in the primary strata of
Christian literature.” We see him cruci
fied at Jerusalem, his disciples returning
to Galilee, and the faith in his Resurrec
tion growing up there, and soon becom
ing an assured conviction, though with
no agreement as to the facts on which it
�128
SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
was founded, and rapidly becoming
surrounded with an atmosphere of myths
and miracles.
The next stage is even more obscure.
We have no information as to when and
how the Apostles returned from Galilee
to Jerusalem, and became, as we find
them twenty years later, pillars of the
Church there, and leaders of a great
religious movement. The Acts of the
Apostles may contain some authentic
records of their proceedings at a later
period, after they had established them
selves at Jerusalem, and exchanged the
profession of fishermen for that of
missionaries of the new religion; but
Luke’s account is discredited by the
obvious fact that his earlier narrative of
what occurred during the first period of
the Crucifixion is unhistorical. It is
clear that some time must have elapsed,
and considerable changes taken place at
Jerusalem, during the interval between
the departure of the disciples for Galilee,
in mortal fear of the Jews, and their
return to the capital, where they seem
to have preached publicly, and made
numerous converts, without any serious
interference by the populace or the
authorities.
The narrative of this early period in
the Acts, up to the date of Paul’s appear
ance on the scene, is full of improbabili
ties. The miracles attributed to Peter,
his deliverance from prison by angels, the
gift of tongues by the Holy Ghost, which
did not enable Peter to dispense with an
interpreter, these and many other inci
dents have rather the air of legends than
of genuine history.
They stand in
marked contrast with the naive and
natural incidents recorded by Mark—how
the crowd overflowed into the street, how
the bustle was such that they had no time
to eat, how Jesus slept through a night
squall which endangered the boat. I can
find no solid historical ground until Paul
met the pillars of the Church at Jerusalem,
except the general fact that the Apostles
returned there from Galilee, preached
publicly, made numerous converts, and
that Peter probably played a leading part.
But with the death of Jesus and the
flight of his disciples to Galilee the first
chapter ends, and the second opens with
the history of the early Christian Church,
when the preoccupations of the principal
actors were doctrinal rather than his
torical, and we enter on a new and wider
phase of religious controversies and
metaphysical speculations. It requires
all the erudition of the most learned
divines and professors to find any clue
through this labyrinth, and takes us far
from that which is the sole object of this
essay—to endeavour to form some con
ception of what may be the historical
element in the records of the life and
death of the Founder of the religion.
Chapter X.
SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
Carlyl e—Causes of Pessimism—Decay of Faith
—A Prosaic Future—Denial of these Charges
—Definition of Scepticism—Demonology—
Treatment of Lunatics—Witchcraft—-Heresy
—Religious Wars—Nationality has Super
seded Religion—Wars More Humane—Origi
nality ot Modern Events and Characters—
Louis Napoleon — Bismarck — Gladstone —
Abraham Lincoln — Lord Beaconsfield —
Darwin — H uxley —Poetry— Fiction—Paint
ing—A Happier World.
Carlyle was a great genius, but he was
a dreadful croaker. Barren, brainless,
soulless, faithless, were the epithets he
�SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
129
commonly applied to the age in which passing over to the masses. And above
]
he lived; and his favourite simile for his all there are the orthodox divines, and
;
contemporaries was that of apes chatter- good but narrow-minded religious public,
j
ing on the shores of the Dead Sea. In whose one idea of religion is that it
the case of Carlyle, the cause of this consists of adherence to traditional
<
pessimism is not far to seek. He <dogmas and an unbroken belief in the
suffered from chronic dyspepsia. If, truth of every word of the Bible as the
1
with the many other excellent qualities inspired word of God, and the ne plus
:
of his peasant progenitors, he had in- ultra of human knowledge.
;
With prejudices such as these it would
herited some share of the dura messorum
be a waste of time to attempt argument;
ilia, and been able to eat his three
square meals a day and feel all the but there are a certain number of
better for it, his views of the age and earnest and thoughtful men who hold
of his contemporaries would have been what are substantially the same views
materially altered. He would have seen upon different grounds, which deserve
an age which is one of the most marked more careful consideration. They are
chapters in the history of human evolu not confined to social swells, would-be
tion ; an age of great events and marvel superior persons and orthodox theolo
lous progress—progress not material gians, but even a man of light and lead
only, but fully to an equal extent ing like Mr. Frederic Harrison can see
social, political, moral, and intellectual. no salvation except in the exceedingly
The shores of the Dead Sea would have improbable contingency of the world
blossomed with verdure, and, instead of adopting the cult of humanity as evolved
chattering apes, he would have seen by the inner consciousness of M. Auguste
human faces, “ men my brothers, men Comte. What they say is substantially
the workers,” with a great deal of human this: Science is killing faith; scepticism
nature in them, good and bad, weak and and democracy are advancing on old
strong, joyous and sad, healthy and creeds and old institutions, like the lion
suffering, but on the whole working up of the desert, who, in Tennyson’s splendid
to a level which, if not necessarily happier, simile—
“ Drawing nigher,
is at any rate higher.
Glares at one who nods and winks behind a
For such dyspeptic pessimists there is
slowly-dying fire.”
an excuse. Pessimism is probably as
Religion, they say, is becoming extinct,
inevitably their creed as optimism is for
the more fortunate mortals who enjoy not only in the simple, old-fashioned
the mens sana in corpore sano. But sense of belief in creeds and cate
there are a large number of our modern chisms, but in the higher sense of
pessimists for whom no such excuse can doubting the truth of the essential
principles on which the Christian
be pleaded.
There are the would-be superior scheme of theology, and ultimately all
persons, who think their claim to supe spiritual faith and all religions, depend.
riority is best established by affecting a A God who, according to one eminent
lofty air of superfine disdain for the rude Anglican divine, has been “ defecated to
realities of real life; the critics who, as a pure transparency,” and, according to
Lord Beaconsfield wittily says, are the another, removed behind the primaeval
failures; the minor poets, painters, and atoms and energies into an “original
writers, who, in their own opinion, would impress ” acting by unvarying laws, is,
have been shining lights if their tapers; they tell us, practically equivalent to no
■
had burned in a more congenial atmos God at all, and instead of Agnostics we
phere; the prejudiced politicians and1 ought to call ourselves Atheists. Witharistocratic classes who feel that know out a lively faith in such a personal, everledge, and with it political power, is> present Deity, who listens to our prayers,
E
�130
SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
modifies the course of events, records deliveis his verdict, and, if the evidence
our. actions, and finally rewards or is insufficient, makes him return one of
punishes us after death according to our
not proven.” Doubt of doubtful things
deserts, there can be, they say, no real is to such a one as sacred a duty as
religion; and they hold, and I think affirmation of what is true and denial of
rightly hold, that the only support for what is false. His cardinal maxim is
such a religion is to be found in the that of Dr. Johnson, “ Clear your mind
assumed inspiration of the Bible and the of cant.
Don’t say you believe when
divinity of Christ.
you really disbelieve, or only half believe,
Destroy these, and they think the and try to hide your misgivings from
world will become vulgar and materialised, yourself and from the world by loudness
losing not only the surest sanction of of asseveration or bitterness of denuncia
morals, but, what is even more important, tion.
the spiritual aspirations and tendencies
But to this general meaning of the
which lift us above the sordid realities of
word “ scepticism ” a more limited and
daily existence, and give poetry to the precise significance has come to be
prose of life. The Muses will take their attached, and it is commonly used to
flight with their sister Theology to denote disbelief in the inspiration of the
happier spheres ; imagination, idealism, Bible and the dogmas of theological
heroism, and originality will disappear, Christianity. In this sense I accept it,
leaving the world to a barren and prosaic and proceed to join issue with those who
sort of Chinese civilisation. In short, deny my assertion that the world is a better
their forecast of human existence is very place to live in on account of scepticism.
similar to that which astronomers make
I will begin by taking a specific instance
of the planet upon which the human —the treatment of lunatics. Ever since
race live—viz., that, as its inner heat the establishment of Christianity there
radiates away in the course of ages, it has been a controversy between doctors
will become, like its satellite the moon, and theologians. Theologians, and the
a barren and burnt-up cinder.
public generally, relying on texts of Scrip
To these gloomy forebodings I venture ture, held that lunacy, with its kindred
to return a positive and categorical diseases of epilepsy and nervous affec
denial; to assert, on the contrary, that tions, were caused by demons, or evil
scepticism has been the great sweetener and unclean spirits, taking bodily posses
of modern life, has not only given us sion of the unfortunate patients. Doctors,
truer and juster views of the realities of who for a long time alone represented
the universe, but has made us more the cause of science, relying on fact and
liberal-minded, tolerant, merciful, charit experiment, and the teachings of great
able,. than in the hard, cruel days of physicians of pre-Christian times, such
mediceval superstition; and, in a word, as Hippocrates and Galen, held that
that almost in exact proportion as we such diseases were simply cases of
have drifted away from the letter, we pressure on the brain and over-wrought
have approached nearer to the spirit of nervous systems. This was held to be
true Christianity.
so contrary to the truths of revealed
This, I am aware, will appear to many religion that doctors were looked upon
a strong assertion, and I must be pre as infidels of the worst sort, and the
pared to justify it by specific instances, saying became general, “ Ubi tres medici
which I proceed to do. But first let me duo Athei ” ; Atheist being the polite
define what I mean by the term “scepti appellation with which every one was
cism.” In a general way it means alle pelted who dared to appeal from Scrip
giance to truth; the habit of mind which ture to reason and think for himself.
makes a man, like a conscientious
This radical divergence of view respect
juryman, require evidence before he ing the cause of lunacy led naturally to a
�SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
i3i
Here, then, was a distinct issue joined
corresponding difference in the mode of
between the Doctors of Divinity and the
treatment. From the orthodox point of
view the lunatic was a loathsome and Doctors of Medicine, between the
repulsive object, whose body, probably “theologici” and the “athei.” If the
question were to be decided by. texts,
for sins of his own or of his ancestors,
had been taken possession of by an evil the “theologici” had it all their own
way, and the “athei” were nowhere.
spirit. The only hope of cure was, so to
speak, to bully the demon out of him by Nothing can be clearer than that Jesus
portentous exorcisms in ecclesiastical over and over again asserted the theory
of demoniacal possession. The demons
latin, and, worse still, by ill-treatment
knew him, he knew them, they con
amounting often to the most horrible
versed together; and he was so well
torture. Bedlam, with its row of raving
acquainted with their ways that, he could
madmen chained like wild beasts to the
wall, was a type of the usual mode of tell what sort could only be ejected by
prayer and fasting. In the famous
treatment.
instance of the Gadarene swine, a raging
Even such a great and good man as Sir
Thomas More ordered acknowledged madman was cured by evicting a legion
lunatics to be publicly flogged; and of devils, and, instead of leaving them
homeless on the roadside, as if they had
throughout rural England there were
many what were called bowsening-places, been Irish peasants, allowing them to
for curing of madmen, consisting of deep occupy as caretakers the bodies of more
walled cisterns full of water, into which, than two thousand unfortunate pigs.
Nothing can be more.explicit. . Ortho
as Carew describes it in his Survey of
Cornwall, “the lunatic was suddenly dox Christians were quite right in strug
gling to the last against a theory of
plunged by a blow on his breast, tum
bling him headlong into the pond, where lunacy which was in such direct con
tradiction with the express words of
a strong fellow, kept for the purpose,
dragged him about till he was quite Scripture and of Jesus himself. We
cannot wonder at Bossuet preaching his
exhausted”; when he was taken to
two great sermons, “Sur les Demons,”and
church, masses said over him, and, if he
John Wesley insisting that “ most lunatics
did not recover, he was “bowsened
again and again while there remained are really demoniacs,” and that “ to give
up witchcraft is to give up the Bible, and
any hope of life in him.”
to take ground against the fundamental
This simple picture of what was going
on every day in remote country parishes truths of theology.”
There cannot be a clearer illustration
of England enables us to realise the
practical consequences of the theory of of the logical strength of Dr. Wace’.s
demoniacal possession better, perhaps, formula that, if you believe in the inspi
than an enumeration of the Papal bulls ration of the Bible and in the Divine
and sermons of eminent divines, which nature of Jesus, you must believe, these
urged the civil to unite with the eccle things, or make him out to be a liar I
siastical authorities and the Inquisition in may add, a liar of the worst description,
for, if he were Divine and Omniscient,
rooting out the bond-servants of Satan.
The medical men, on the other hand, he must have known not only that he
was fostering a delusion, but that this
of whom two out of every three were
reputed to be Atheists, took the opposite delusion would be in future ages the
view—that madness was nothing but a cause of misery and torture to thousands
form of brain disease, that its. victims of the most helpless of the human race.
were rather objects for compassion than But I reply, not without some little tone
for aversion, and that gentle treatment of indignation : “ It is you, not I, who
was far more likely to effect cures than make J esus out to be a liar ; it. is your
assumption of Divine inspiration and
exorcisms and tortures.
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SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
Divine nature which defaces the pure and, with Galileo, Newton, and the
and noble image of the Man Jesus, and triumphs of modern science, created the
places us in the alternative of either purer sceptical and scientific atmosphere
believing incredible things, or making of the present age, in which the monsters
him out to be an utterer of falsehoods. of mediaeval theology simply die out like
As a man, no taint of falsehood or insin the Saurians of the secondary period,
cerity attaches to him in admitting that leaving a few fossil remains and degenerate
he used the language and shared the descendants.
mistakes of his age and country. But
Witchcraft affords another test-case
as a God, there is; and a God who in which the humanising influence of
teaches theories which are demonstrably scepticism is most apparent. Down to
false, and which lead to barbarous and a comparatively recent period the belief
revolting practices, is an incarnation, not in witchcraft was universal, and whole
of goodness, but of evil.”
hecatombs of miserable victims were
For the theory of demoniacal posses sacrificed to a superstition which is no
sion is demonstrably false. If, instead less barbarous and degrading than that
of appealing to texts, the appeal is made which exists to the present day in
to facts, the verdict is reversed ; it is the Dahomey and among the cannibals of
“athei” who hold the field, and the Central Africa. Why ? Because the
“ theologici ” who are nowhere.
texts of what was supposed to be the
Which cure or alleviate the larger inspired Word of God explicitly asserted
number of cases of lunacy—exorcisms the reality of witchcraft, and contained
and tortures or gentle treatment? Which the command—“Ye shall not suffer a
is most in harmony with the best instincts witch to live.”
of human nature—love, charity, mercy,
The case is the same as that of the
and compassion, Hanwell, with its harm belief in demoniacal possession as the
less and happy inmates; or Bedlam, cause of lunacy, except that the treat
with its row of chained wild beasts ? If ment of witches was even more cruel
a Doctor of Divinity says of a lunatic than that of lunatics, being founded
that he is possessed by a devil, while a more on texts of the Old Testament,
Doctor of Medicine says he is suffering dating back to a barbarous age. It was
from a lesion of the brain; if the lunatic a form of cruelty also for which Pro
dies, and his brain is dissected, which testants were even more responsible than
do you find, the devil or the lesion ? Catholics, its worst excesses occurring in
Nay, has not medical science gone so Protestant countries after the Reforma
far that you can often predict the exact tion. In Germany alone it is estimated
spot where the pressure on the brain is that, in the great age of witch-burning
taking place, and by an operation remove which followed that event, more than
the tumour, and restore the patient to 100,000 persons perished by an excru
reason ?
ciating death in the course of a single
If these things are true, and if the century.
modern treatment of madness is really
On a smaller scale, one of the worst
an improvement on the old one, it is and latest outbreaks of the witch-burning
quite clear that we are indebted for the epidemic occurred in Puritan Massachu
change to scepticism, for it was impos setts at the close of the seventeenth
sible as long as the authority of Scripture century, incited and fanned into a flame
was held to be the supreme tribunal, by the efforts of the Mathers and other
superior to fact and reason, and whose leading Calvinistic divines. Hundreds
dicta it was impious to dispute. Mon of innocent men and women of good
taigne, Hume, Voltaire, and a host of characters were tortured into confessions,
what used to be called infidel writers, or convicted on the testimony of private
were the precursors of Pinet and Tuke; enemies and professional witch-hunters,
�SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
133
remarkable Creed. What right have we
and perished in the flames, as was clearly to rail against Torque mada, or blame
proved when the epidemic subsided, and Calvin for burning Servetus, if we really
reason began to resume its sway thoug 1 believe this to be true? They were
divines like Cotton Mather held out to simply carrying out, conscientiously and
the last, and groaned over the evil spin logically, the principles to which all
of unbelief which had thwarted the orthodox Christians profess to adhere.
glorious work of freeing New England Surely, if it is right to stamp out the
from demons.
.
cattle plague, it must be still more right
Nobody now believes in witchcraft, to stamp out a moral cattle plague, which
and foolish old women and hysterical is eminently contagious, and which beyond
young ones may talk as much nonsense all doubt causes those who contract the
as they like without fear of being burned disease “to perish everlastingly.” There is
alive. Surely the world is the better for no possible answer to this, except that we
this • but how has it been brought about? do not believe the Creeds; that we feel
Not" that the texts have become more the burning of men for differences, of
ambiguous, but that people have ceased opinion to be cruel, and the suppression
practically to believe in them. I say of freedom of thought to be mischievous.
practically. for there are a good many who In short, that our attitude has become
still retain a sort of half-belief, and who
would be shocked either to confess that that of the poet who says
“ There is more truth in honest doubt,,
the Bible is not inspired, or to say, with
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
Tohn Wesley, that “to give up witchcraft
is to give up the Bible”; but as the If this is not “scepticism,” I do not
Ichthyosauri died out, and left harmless know what the meaning of the word is.
lizards as their successors in the purer air
We live, fortunately, in an age when
of the Tertiary era, so this, with other scepticism has so effectually killed . the
barbarous superstitions, has lost all real class of ideas which led to persecutions
hold on the minds and consciences 01 for heresy that we have almost forgotten
those who, happily for themselves, live what the Inquisition and the fires of
in the atmosphere of a scientific and Smithfield really were. From first to last
sceptical age.
.
,
hundreds of thousands of victims perished
If the idolatry of Scriptural texts has in horrible tortures for the crime of think
caused so much human misery in the ing for themselves. There is hardly a
case of lunacy and witchcraft, the same man of light and leading of the present
idolatry, expanded from texts into dogma century who would not have been sent
tical creeds and confessions, has been• to the stake if Spain had conquered
even more destructive in the case ot• England, and the integrity of the Catholic
heresy. Heresy, or the holding of different■ faith had been enforced by the civil
beliefs from those of the Church, is either. power, or if Calvin had ruled in England
a harmless and necessary incident m the as he did in Geneva. Darwin, Huxley,
use of human reason, or it is an act of and Herbert Spencer would certainly
pernicious and contagious wickedness have been burned; Carlyle, George Eliot
' which it is the duty of the State to aid Byron, and Shelley would have shared
the Church in stamping out. This the same fate; and Dean Stanley, Dr.
depends on whether we do or do not Temple, and the whole Broad Church
believe the Creeds. If we believe the would have been in imminent peril.
Athanasian Creed, which contains the Spain, where the Inquisition so long
fullest summary of the articles of the reigned supreme, is an instance, not only
Catholic faith, and which is still retained of the devilish cruelty which a misplaced
in the Anglican ritual, all men will “with religious earnestness can inspire, but
out doubt perish everlastingly ” who do of the inevitable political and social
not believe in every single article of that
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SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
decrepitude which follow from successful mate and exhaustive record written by
attempts to stamp out freedom of God’s finger has vanished, never to return,
thought.
and has quite lost its power as a practical
Religious wars were only an outcome, factor in the life of nations. We retain
on a larger scale, of the ideas which our affection and reverence for it, from
inspired religious persecutions.
At old associations, and as containing many
bottom, it was a firm conviction by those beautiful and excellent things; but we
who held one set of opinions that those no longer make it an idol. We criticise
who held different ones were miscreants, it freely, and find it to be a collection
enemies of the human race, who ought of various writings of various ages,
to be forcibly converted or exterminated. by unknown or doubtful authors,
Given the conviction, the persecutions and containing, with much that is
and wars followed as a matter of course, of the highest truth and highest
or rather of conscience. Destroy it, and interest, much that bears evident traces
the persecutions and wars cease. We no of the ignorance, superstition, ferocity,
longer persecute and go to war in the and immorality of the rude and bar
name of religion. Why ? Because the barous ages over which its traditions
age has become too liberal, enlightened, extend. No one now would think of
tolerant, and humane. And why has it appealing to every single text of Scrip
become so ? Because scepticism has ture as an ultimate tribunal from which
triumphed over orthodoxy. That the there was no appeal, or, like the Caliph
age has become more sceptical, and that Omar, burning all the other books in the
faith in the old hard-and-fast lines of world because, if they agreed with the
orthodox religion has declined, are facts Bible, they were superfluous, and, if they
which all acknowledge, though some disagreed with it, mischievous.
deplore. It is evident, moreover, that
A better proof cannot be afforded of
these two facts are not merely concurrent, the extent to which ecclesiastical religion
but stand to one another in the relation has ceased to be a motive-power in
of cause and effect. It is a case not human affairs than by a reference to the
merely of post hoc, but of propter hoc. great wars of the last half-century. By
Voltaire, who may be taken as the an irony of fate, the first great exhibition
representative of the literary scepticism in Hyde Park, which was thought to
of the last century, was inspired in his have inaugurated an era of peace, has
attacks on orthodoxy by his indignation been, like opening the temple of Janus,
at one of the last autos-da-fe, or acts of the signal for a series of the greatest
faith, in the burning of a heretic. His wars recorded in history—wars great not
shafts of ridicule wounded the monster only in the magnitude of the scale on
to death more effectually, perhaps, than which they were waged, but in the
could have been done by solid argu momentous importance of the issues
ments. The name of Darwin, again, may involved. In all these wars the element
be taken as the representative of the of religion was entirely absent, and its
scientific scepticism which has effected place was supplied by the new element
the greatest revolution of thought in the of Nationality. The net result of these
history of the human race, and substi wars has been the consolidation of a
tuted the idea of original impress, acting great Germany, a great Italy, and a great
by unvarying law, for that of secondary United States. Everywhere people of
supernatural interferences with the course the same race, speaking the same lan
of Nature. No educated man any longer guage, and having a common literature
accepts the Bible in the sense in which and common interests, however broken
our forefathers accepted it, and in which up and divided into fragments by
Mohammedans still believe in the Koran. internal dissensions or foreign foes,
The assured faith in the Bible as an ulti have tended with irresistible force to
�SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
135
ally herself to heretic Prussia. France
consolidate themselves into great nations.
,, | has for more than a century been
Even the weaker races—the Greeks, intensely national, and very httle
Roumanians, Servians, and Bulgarians—- i
Even"?n Spain a dominant
gsgof
and Chili are entering on a career of
A they have emancipated themselves
ideas.
. .
given them a free Press and Parliamen modern this change from religious to
Has
STyctolninc^
I £a^al ™
iTceffain-Jha^wa;
and recognition of their separate nation- | ficial? One thing is certain
among civilised States has become infi
ality, which we hesitate to concede,
nitely more humane. Compare the
because we fear that it would destroy picture by a military correspondent of
the old system of English ascendancy,
and subvert many of the settled prin the advance of the Crown Prince s army
through France with the details of the
ciples of English law. . If we have saved
Thirty Years’ War as given in Schiller’s
our colonial empire, it is only by con history. In the one case you see French
ceding with the freest hand to Canada, peasant girls standing at the doors of
Australia, New Zealand, and South , their cottages to see the brilliant staff
nee conrenueu. ivb
Africa all that we once contended for,
he fullest scope to ride by, and exchanging nods and smiles
and giving them the _ as independent with the German soldiers ; in the other
■ uesuui«
work out their destinies as
communities, attached to interests and you have Tilly’s the points of their pikes
— the mother heretic babies on pappenhei^^^
country oy
uf
country by ties of common
r:CrOnSo?±rer£XS the hard'“d’ at
si^S LtlU perhaps, of
fast linesin all fhese force. movements it the humanising influence"
of superior great
No“
is remarkable that ecclesiastical religion ideas is afforded by the actip
“ on!; not been an appreciable United States after the close of the great
factor but that in many cases they have
rone on in the teeth of whatever influfn?e ff might be supposed to have
remaining In Italy, [he headquarters
of Tcdefiastical authority, the4 Pope,
though still the venerated head of
Sus of Catholics, has been utterly
powerless when opposed to the idea ot
Italian nationality. The Catholics of
South Germany fought as stoutly at
Gravelotte and Sedan, shoulder to
shoulder with the Protestants of the
North, to make a great Germany, as
their ancestors did under Tilly and
Wallenstein against the ancestors of the
same Protestants to secure the ascen
dancy of their respective creeds. Austria
has to forget the traditions of the Thirty
Years’ and the Seven Years’ Wars and
I
Civil War. A
P
magnitude, costing tens of thousands of
lives and millions of money had been
fought out with unexampled determmation. The yanqutshed had begun the
war, and tn the view of the victors were
rebelsbut not a smglehauyrfjhe.r
heads was touched after the contest was
over, not a single political prisoner was
brought to trial. Jeff Davis was not
hanged on a sour-apple tree, and. the
leading generals and politicians on either
side for the most part returned quietly
to civil occupations. I sometimes
wonder what an historian writing a
century hence will think of this record
compared with our English one of
twenty-five members of Parliament
imprisoned as common felons for
�136
SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
political offences. To pursue this
S
further would, however, lead me too far
r
towards the burning region of contem
porary politics, and I content myself byz
drawing this conclusion. If the spiritt
of the age be really sceptical and demo
cratic, as all admit and many deplore,,
then scepticism and democracy must be:
included among those “ingenuas artes”
of which the Roman poet says :—
“ Girt by friends or foes,
A man may speak the thing he will.”
That world-old though newly-named
institution, the “ boycott,” is no longer
applied to differences of opinion, but
confined to conspicuous offenders against
the unwritten laws of a nation’s conscience; to respondents in divorce
courts, exceptionally bad landlords, and
heartless profligates. The poor are
always with us, but we no longer pass
“ Emolht mores nec sinit esse faros.”
them by on the other side like the
Nor is it in war only that milder Pharisee, muttering our ecclesiastical
manners and a more humane and charit texts and economical formulas. We
able spirit have accompanied, if they feel for them; our consciences are
have not been created by, the develop touched; a daily diminishing number
ment of these two great principles of ignore them, and an increasing number
modern society. The air is full of try, in their, respective spheres, to assist
projects, visionary or otherwise, which them by active effort, or sympathise with
are all based on the spirit, if not on the those who do.
letter, of true Christianity, of assisting
The truth is that morals are built on
the poor and suffering, and sweetening a far surer foundation than that of
the conditions of life. Bismarck and creeds, which are here to-day and gone
the German Emperor adopt large to-morrow. They are built on the solid
schemes of State socialism, and aim at rock of experience and of the “sur
a universal insurance of workmen against vival of the fittest,” which, in the long
poverty and old age. Trades Unions, evolution of the human race from
Provident Societies, and Savings Banks primeval savages, have by “natural
do the same on an ever-widening scale selection ” and “ heredity ” become
in English-speaking communities. The almost instinctive. Every day of civi
old harsh principles of English law, lised society, working in an atmosphere
which always sided with the strong of free discussion and free thought,
against the weak, with man against tends to make the primary rules of
woman, with landlord against tenant, morality more and more instinctive, and
with capital against labour, are being to extend and widen their application.
broken down in all directions. The
The other charge against the spirit of
rigid conclusions of political economy the age is still more easily refuted. It
are no longer accepted as axioms. The is said that scepticism has killed spiri
duties of property, so long ignored, are tualism, and stripped life of its poetry
coming into formidable antagonism with and higher aspirations, while democracy
its rights.
has reduced everything to a dead level
So far from impairing the sanctions of of prosaic mediocrity. Those who say
morality, moral considerations are coming so see the reflection of their own souls.
more and more to the front in this age The man must be, indeed, hopelessly
of material progress.. Slavery, long <commonplace and prosaic who fails to
sanctioned by Bible texts and im recognise the grandeur, splendour, and
memorial usage, offends the public con- idramatic interest of the events of the
science and disappears. We began by ;age in which we live, and the striking
burning heretics; then burning softened <originality of its principal characters.
into boycotting; and finally this last 1Was there ever in classic or mediaeval
vestige of intolerance has disappeared, ttimes such a tragic drama of human life
and we live in an England where,
a is afforded by the career of Louis
as
�SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
B7
Napoleon ? See him in his early years, a his power: “ The world will some day
dreamy youth, dabbling in obscure con discover that the man has a better heart
spiracies, and musing over vague ideas and a worse head than it gives him credit
and destinies connected with the name for.”
I have mentioned Bismarck. There
he bore. Then comes the attempt at
Strasburg ; the life in London, half is a man, indeed; a man such as Europe
Bohemian, half on the outskirts of has not produced since Luther and
fashionable society ; the ludicrous fiasco Cromwell. Think of his career from a
at Boulogne; the romantic escape from wild student, a provincial Tory squire,
the prison at Ham. The curtain falls training himself by degrees to be first a
on the first act, and when it rises we diplomatist, and then a statesman;
find the obscure adventurer clearing the startling the starched representatives of
streets of Paris with grape-shot, imprison the German Confederation at Frankfort
ing all that is noblest and most respect by lighting his cigar without the per
able in the public life of France, and, mission of the Austrian Envoy, with the
finally, firmly seated on the Imperial same cool courage and happy audacity
throne. He proclaims the Empne to which led him to Sadowa and Sedan;
be at peace, and he plunges France into and, finally, the founder of the German
four great wars—the Crimean, the Italian, Empire, the great Chancellor, the arbiter
of the peace of Europe. What made
the Mexican, and the Franco-German
all alike senseless in the view of any him what he was ? His solid strength
possible French interest. He inaugurates of character, his sagacious sincerity, his
the system of armed peace and excessive keen insight, glancing through the out
armaments, and for a quarter of a century ward show of things into their, real
is the disturbing element in European essence, and, above all, his indomitable
politics. The attitude of all other courage, which never quailed before hostile
nations is, to use the expression of the parliaments or vacillating emperors, and
witty Frenchman, that of spaniels watch led him to stake his head on the success
ing the eye of their master at the of the Prussian needle-gun and Prussian
Tuileries. Then comes the collapse, discipline against the veteran legions of
and in the closing scene we see a Austria and the showy prestige of imperial
wretched creature driving out in a hack France.
At the opposite pole from Bismarck
carriage from Sedan to give up his
sword to the German Emperor, and was our own “ Grand Old Man.”
sitting on a wooden chair with Bismarck, Opinions may differ as to Mr. Gladstone’s
in front of a little wayside cabaret, to policy, and whether his powerful per
discuss the terms of the surrender as sonality was an element for good or for
prisoners of war of his last army of evil in English history; but no one who
120,000 men. What must have been is not a purblind political partisan can
the emotions on that fatal day, hid deny that, whether for good or evil, he
under the mask of an imperturbable was a grand and striking figure. Where
countenance and an eternal cigar ? And will you find a man of such universal
all the time the man was essentially the attainments, wide sympathies, and per
same. Kind-hearted, easy-going, utterly suasive eloquence ? Where look for an
unprincipled, vague, moony, idealistic; intellect which combined such scholastic
easily influenced by those about him, subtlety with such argumentative power,
and twisted round his finger by a strong such a grasp of details, such juvenile
and practical nature like that of Bismarck. energy, and such a fervid white heat of
As his best counsellor and most intimate passionate conviction. What a rich and
friend, the shrewd, cynical, polished, and complex nature must it have been, which
worldly De Morny once said to me, had in it the evolution from the ecclesias
when the Emperor was in the height of tically-minded Oxford student who was
�SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
the rising hope of the Tories to the great
financier of Free Trade, the disestablisher
of the Irish Church, the statesman at
the head of all Liberal movements, the
man whose eager sympathies side with
liberty and with the masses “of our
own flesh and blood,” from Ireland to
Italy. His mind was like the steam
hammer, which can either crack nuts or
mould masses of stubborn iron.
Again, there is Abraham Lincoln, one
of the greatest, as he was certainly one
of the most original and interesting, of
modern statesmen. Wise, far-seeing,
steadfast, simple, and noble, as Wash
ington, he had a fund of genial humour,
and a touch of the quaintness and eccen
tricity of the old Illinois rail-splitter,
which endears his memory to the affec
tionate respect of all classes of Englishspeaking men, and makes him a bright
example for all time of the height of
heroism to which a self-taught working
man of the new democracy may attain.
If we turn from what may be called
the epic of modern history to its romance,
what figure can be more original and
interesting than that of Lord Beacons
field? What a career, from a secondrate novelist and dandy about town,
seeking notoriety by resplendent small
clothes, to become the minister of a
great country, the favourite of sovereigns,
the superior of dukes, the champion and
hero of a proud aristocracy and of a
great historical party. And yet, as the
novel of his last years shows, essentially
the same man throughout. Brilliant,
audacious, a master of phrases, and
believing in them as stronger than facts.
A sort of glorified Gil Blas, or hero of a
Spanish comedy ; and yet with qualities
which endeared him to friends, captivated
the popular imagination, and enabled
him to play his part to perfection in all
the varied vicissitudes of his extraordinary
career. Infinite cleverness, infinite
courage, infinite self-possession, and at
bottom a genial and artistic tempera
ment, which made him always, whatever
else he might be, a finished gentleman.
No one ever heard of him, whether as
leader of a Government or as leader of
an Opposition, doing a coarse, vulgar,
or ungentleman-like thing. He never
lost his temper ; he fought, like a courtly
duellist of one of Dumas’ romances, with
the keen rapier of polished sarcasm and
pungent epigram; but he fought fairly,
and left the coarser work, the flouts and
jeers, to titled subordinates. His ideas,
if vague and visionary, were always
grandiose, and, according to his lights,
imperial and patriotic. He had no pre
judices, and although the leader of
bucolic squires and favoured guest of
ducal drawing-rooms, he was fully con
vinced that Toryism could only survive
by becoming democratic. Here surely
was a product of the age as piquant and
original as any to be met with in the
romance of history.
I turn gladly to the serener regions of
science and art. Here also, while we
find everywhere the influence of the
spirit of the age, we find everywhere
genius and originality of character. It
is the age of science; its marvellous
triumphs have given man an undreamt
of command over the forces of nature,
and revolutionised his ideas both of the
material and of the spiritual universe.
But what I wish principally to remark
for the present purpose, these triumphs
have been achieved, not by a mechanical
process of second-rate specialists working
each in his separate groove like wheels
and pulleys in the mill of progress, but
by a succession of great men, worthy
leaders of great events. Take Darwin,
the greatest of all. Who, in the school
boy scolded by his master for wasting
the time which should have been devoted
to hexameters in trying rude chemical
experiments and collecting beetles, could
have foreseen the great philosopher who
was to revolutionise the whole course of
modern thought ? At college he was,
like many another careless student,
thinking more of partridge-shooting than
of books, and looking forward to taking
orders, and becoming a college don, or
vicar of a country parish. But his
beetle-hunting saved him; it brought
�SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
him into connection with men of science
at the University like Henslow, and the
merest accident led to his being appointed
as naturalist to accompany Captain Fitzroy in the exploring voyage of the Beagle.
He saw new lands and new races of
men, and his mind, rapidly expanding,
acquired a storehouse of new facts and
ideas which were the germ.of his future
greatness. See him next a martyr to
ill-health in his quiet cottage in a
secluded Kentish village, thinking out
his ideas, trying simple experiments,
clipping out extracts, and patiently col
lecting informaticta, until one day he
woke to find himself famous, and to
have his name associated with the
greatest revolution ever known in man’s
conception of the universe. In less
than forty years “ Darwinism ”—that is,
evolution by unvarying law—-superseded
“ Supernaturalism,” or the theory of a
world created and maintained by a suc
cession of secondary interferences, as
completely as the Copernican theory
superseded that of Ptolemy.
Before he died he could see all edu
cated thought, all men of light and lead
ing in all countries, converts, if not to all
the details, to the leading ideas and factsof his world-wide theory. And what a
simple, noble character he was 1 Patient,
candid, magnanimous, modest, loving,
and beloved in all intercourse with family
and surroundings down even to his little
dog, faithful friend, single-minded wor
shipper of truth; one might say that,
apart from his fame, here was a model
man of the nineteenth century, and, if
scepticism can give us more like him,
we may well be content to take what the
outcome of a sceptical age has in store
for us without much apprehension.
And if Darwin was the Napoleon of
science, what a brilliant array of mar
shals marched under him at the head of
its various divisions—men not of one
idea and cramped intellects, but largeminded men of genius and originality,
men such as Lyell, Huxley, Herbert
Spencer, and a host of others.
Take Huxley as a typical instance.
139
If he had never made a discovery in
science, he would go down to posterity
as the greatest master of style and best
writer of English prose in the whole
range of modern literature. To a wit
keen as that of Voltaire he added a far
greater range of accurate knowledge and
force of pungent logic; his. grave irony
and undercurrent of genuine humour
are delicious, and every sentence goes
straight to the mark like a rifle-bullet.
In controversy he was like a sun-god
shooting his arrows of light through the
thickest cuirass of ignorance and preju
dice. Given something to say on a
theme of science or philosophy, I know
of no writer who could say it as well as
Huxley.
Of all these, and of the hundred other
names which might easily be . added to
the list of generals and captains of the
army of modern science, it may safely
be said that, as a rule, they lived true,
simple, and noble lives, giving no cause
of scandal or offence to the world, and
showing that the high priests of truth
need not fear a comparison as regards
character and conduct with those of any
stereotyped and formalised religious
creed or caste.
The remaining complaint of the pes
simists, that the world is becoming
uninteresting and prosaic, is easily dis
posed of.
I reserve for another time
what I have to say as to the creeds of
the great poets; but, for the present, it
is enough to ask whether Byron and
Shelley were believers or sceptics, and
whether their poems show any falling-off
in the poetic faculty ? Swinburne, what
ever we may think of him otherwise, has
the gift of word-music and of brilliant
imagination in an eminent degree; and
Victor Hugo, though too turgid and
rhetorical for an English taste, strikes a
powerful lyre whose chords resound
loudly in the souls of his sceptical
countrymen. Above all, Tennyson, the
great poet of modern thought, attained
a height of inspiration which has been
seldom if ever equalled. Whatever his
creed may have been, he was thoroughly
�140
SCEPTICISM AND PESSIMISM
the man of his age, imbued with its
science, from which many of his noblest
similes are drawn, and a sharer in its
strength and weakness, its hopes and
fears, its grandest aspirations and its
blankest misgivings. The stanzas in
In Memoriam, which conclude with the
solemn words, “Behind the veil,” are
the profoundest expression of the deepest
thoughts of the most earnest minds of
the nineteenth century.
In fiction we have a hundred writers
and a thousand readers, of works of a
fairly high standard of excellence, for
one of former centuries. Nothing gives
me more hope for the future of that
inevitable democracy which is advancing
on us with such rapid steps than the
multitude of standard works which are
circulated in cheap editions. Shake
speare, Walter Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,
George Eliot, as well as works on history,
philosophy, andart, like thoseof Macaulay,
Carlyle, and Ruskin, are published in
ever-increasing numbers and at ever
lower prices. Who reads them ? They
must be bought by hundreds of thou
sands, or it would not pay to publish
them. They must be read by millions
who never read before, but who now
read with intelligent interest for educa
tion and self-culture.
If we turn to painting, we find the
same phenomenon. It is becoming
more popular and more democratic.
Prints and chromo-lithographs hang on
the walls of every cottage ; illustrations,
often admirable, like those of the modern
school of wood-cut, adorn the pages of
pictorial newspapers and magazines, and
have become almost a necessary accom
paniment of every work of wide circula
tion. And how has this affected the
higher class of painting? Has it be
come more prosaic ? Distinctly the
reverse; it is far more poetical—-that is
to say, it aims far more at expressing the
real essence and typical spirit of the
varying moods, whether of external or
of human nature. The contrast between
the modern French school and that of
conventional classicism affords the best
instance for my present purpose, for
Prance is par excellence the country
whose scepticism and democracy may
be supposed to have killed poetry.
Compare a landscape of Corot’s with a
landscape of Poussin; which is the
more poetical? Or take Millet, who
has caught for all time the type of the
true French peasant, with his simple or
even sordid surroundings, his narrow
horizon as he bends with an almost
ferocious intensity of labour over his
paternal clods, yet illumined by gleams
of humble poetry, as in the Angelas, or
of pure domestic affection, as in Teaching
the Baby to Walk. Surely this is real
poetry, and worth a thousand of the
academic pictures of the school of
David.
In the English school of art the same
tendency is manifest. All the great
modern masters aim at representing
types and ideas rather than traditional
conventionalities or prosaic realities.
Thus Millais’s “North-West Passage”
and “ Boyhood of Raleigh ” give us the
essence of that spirit of maritime adven
ture which has made Britannia rule the
waves ; Faed’s pictures of humble Scot
tish life are as tender and true as if they
were poems of Burns transferred to
canvas; Peter Graham, Brett, and Hook
paint the sea as it never was before
painted, in all its moods of strength,
repose, and of the joyous freshness of
its rising flood. And so of a host of
others. They aim at and often succeed
in painting pictures which are really
poems, true and touching phases of
human characters, types of nature which
speak to the varying emotions of the
human soul, and their masterpieces find
a ready response in the hearts of mil
lions.
All this does not look like the advent
of a drab-coloured age of prosaic medioc
rity ; or as if the fresh bracing breeze of
modern science and free thought, sweep
ing through the confined air of mediaeval
cloisters, were going to do otherwise than
sweeten and purify the atmosphere, and
make the blue of heaven more blue, the
�CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
141
grass greener, and the earth, on the whole, filling the lungs with ozone, bracing the
a better and more genial place for man nerves and brightening the eye.
to live in. Blow, brave North-Wester!
“ Who loves not Knowledge, who shall rail
sweeping over the free and boundless
Against her beauty ? may she mix
ocean of Truth, chilling to _ worn-out
With men and prosper, who shall fix
Her pillars ; may her cause prevail.”
creeds and decrepit superstitions, but
Chapter XI.
CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
What is a Great Poet—Ancient and Modern
Poets—Byron, Shelley, Swinburne, Brown
ing, Pope, Dryden, Coleridge, Spenser—
Chaucer — Wordsworth — Nature-Worship—Ode on Immortality—Byron and Shelley—
Burns—Gospel of Practical Life—Shakespeare
—Self recorded in Hamlet and Prospero—
The Sonnets—Views of Death—Behind the
Veil—Prospero—Views identical with Goethe’s
Faust—And with the Maya or Musair of
Buddhism—-Pantheism—Ignoring of Religion
—Patriotism and Loyalty his Ruling Motives
—Practical Influence of Religion Exaggerated
—Religious Poets—Dante—Milton—Contrast
between Greek Tragedy and Modern Poetry
—Tennyson—Poet of Modern Thought—In
Memoriam—Practical Conclusions.
or even a considerable poet; but to make
,
a great poet something more is required.
To this fine susceptibility and musical
nature must be added a great intellect;
an intellect capable of casting flashes of
insight into the varying phases of human
character, and the deepest problems of
man’s relations to the universe; an in
tellect so imbued with the spirit of the
age and abreast of the knowledge of the
day as to be able to sum them up in a
few glowing lines which embody their
inmost essence. Such poets are ex
tremely rare. Of the ancient world,
Homer, JEschylus, Sophocles, and Eu
What is a poet, and what is a great ripides of the Greeks, Lucretius and
poet ? A poet I take to be one whose Virgil of the Romans, still shine as stars
nature is exceptionally susceptible to of the first magnitude among the “ stars
impressions from the surrounding uni of mortal night,” though dimmed by
verse, especially those of a character distance and seen under greatly altered
which comes within the domain of art, conditions. Of moderns, I hardly know
and who unites with this a certain that the very first class can be assigned
musical faculty and command of lan to othernames than those of Shakespeare,
guage, which enables him to translate Dante, Milton, Goethe, Burns, Words
these impressions into apt and harmo worth, and Tennyson. Many come near
nious verse. The poet’s brain may be it from exceptional excellence in some
compared to a photographic plate which of the qualities which are most essential
is extremely sensitive and retentive of to true poetry. Shelley, for instance, is
images which flash across it; or to a equal to the very greatest in the exquisite
delicate LEolian harp which vibrates susceptibility to all that is beautiful in
responsive to harmonies of nature, un nature, and the faculty of reproducing it
heard, or only half-heard, by the coarser in the loveliest and most musical of lyrics.
His Skylark and Cloud may well stand
fibres of ordinary mortals.
This of itself, where it exists in an as the high-water mark to which lyrical
exceptional degree, may make a pleasing poetry has ever attained. But he was
�142
CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
cut off at an early age, before his intellect
had got over the stage of youthful effer
vescence, and settled down into the sober
and serene wisdom requisite to reflect
truly the spirit of an age, and guide a
world towards better and higher things.
He and Keats have given us “things of
beauty” which are “joys for ever,” but
scarcely wise counsels and consoling
words, to enable us better to live our
lives and face our destinies. The same
may be said of Byron, the vigour of
whose verse and vividness of feeling and
description are unsurpassed, but whose
ideal of life and character, be it real or
be it affected, is about the last any one
would do well to follow.
Of more recent poets Tennyson alone
comes up to the highest standard. Others
approach it on different sides, but on
special sides only, and fail as conspicu
ously in many of the attributes of the
highest poetry as they excel in others.
Swinburne, for instance, almost equals
Shelley in the exquisite musical suscepti
bility of rhythm and language; but the
ideas behind the words are, for the most
part, rhetorical and exaggerated, like
those of his prototype, Victor Hugo.
Browning, again, has intellect and insight,
but his style is so rugged and obscure
that to read his poetry is almost like
trying to solve chess-problems. He is
to Shelley or Tennyson what Wagner is
to Rossini or Beethoven; caviare to the
multitude, and almost outside the range
of the true art which is based essentially
on the beautiful.
Of other well-known poets, Pope is a
great master of the art of weaving appro
priate words into harmonious verse, and
his ideas are, for the most part, clear
and sensible. . But they are not profound,
and in his chief philosophical work, the
Essay on Man, he rather reflects, with
point and precision, the somewhat con
ventional and commonplace views of the
average intellect of his age than gives
flashes of insight drawn from his own
inward struggles .and experiences. The
same may be said of Dryden, who had
a singular gift of terse and vigorous
expression, which has made so many of
his lines survive in the form of standard
quotations. But he was hardly a deep
and original thinker, and, however much
we may admire his poetry, we learn little
from it.
Coleridge I hardly mention as a poet,
for his principal work, as a religious
philosopher influencing to a certain
extent the spirit of his age, was done in
prose and in conversation. His Aids to
Reflection was long the text-book of the
advanced thinkers of Anglican theology,
but his Christabel, Kubla Khan, and
Ancient Mariner, admirable as they are,
are little more than the dreams of a
gorgeous imagination. . They might be
the visions of an “English Opium-Eater,”
in the earlier stages of the seductive drug
as described by De Quincey.
Of the early English poets, the names
of Chaucer and Spenser stand out pre
eminent. Spenser, indeed, has perhaps
as large a share as any other, even of the
greatest poets, of that which is the sub
stratum or first requisite of all true poetry:
the exquisite susceptibility to all that is
beautiful in the surrounding universe.
But his philosophy does not go much
beyond an allegorical representation of
vices and virtues as they appear in the
abstract, rather than in the concrete form
of living individuals. Compare Una,
who is his most distinct and lovable
character, with Imogen, and you feel at
once that Shakespeare gives you a living
woman, in contact with an actual world;
while Spencer’s embodiment of nearly
the same ideal is shadowy and mystic,
half woman and half allegory, living in a
world of impossible giants and monsters.
Chaucer, on the other hand, stands on
solid earth, and deals with real characters.
In the dramatic faculty of depicting actual
living men and women he has no rival
except Shakespeare, and is inferior to him
rather in the narrower width of his canvas,
and in the complexity and variety of the
characters depicted, than in the truth and
vividness of the portraits themselves.
In his Canterbury Tales we have the real
England of the reign of Edward III.
�CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
U3
brought before us as distinctly as if we His wise Providence, so established its
had been one of the company assembled order that definite pieces and progres
at the Tabard, and had ridden on the sions of things shall not be eternal, but
come into existence and pass away in
Dover road to the shrine of St. Thomas,
with the worthy knight, the dainty and due succession.
“ Thus the oak, which grows so slowly
soft-hearted abbess, the jolly wife of Bath,
and has so long a life, at last wastes
and the other typical representatives of
away and dies. Even the hard rock in
the various classes who made up what
was the framework of English society in time wasteth away; broad rivers run dry;
great cities decay and disappear; and all
the fourteenth century. How like they
things have an end. So also of the
are to us, how completely we feel that
they are our own flesh and blood, and human race. All die; some in youth,
that five centuries have made but little others in old age; kings as well as
change either in human nature itself or commoners; some in their beds, some
in the special form of it which may be in the deep sea, some in battlefields.
“There is no help; all go the same
called English nature.
In reading Chaucer I am also struck way; all die. What causeth this but the
by the wonderful anticipations of the Ruler and First Cause of all things, who
most advanced modern thought, which draws back into His own essence all that
occasionally crop up in the most unlikely was derived from it, against which decree
places, and which only require to be it availeth no living creature to strive.
translated into modern language to be at Therefore it seems to me to be wise to
once recognised. For instance, I came make a virtue of necessity, and make the
across a passage the other day which, if best of that which we cannot prevent;
expressed in the terminology which would and that a man is a fool who grumbles
now be used to convey the same ideas, at that which is the universal fate, and
rebels against the law to which he is
would read as follows :—
“The inscrutable First Cause of the indebted for his own existence.”
If anyone came across this passage
universe knew well what He was about
without knowing its origin, he would be
when He established the fair chain of
love or of mutual attraction. For with apt to attribute it to some writer who was
this chain He bound the elements, fire, conversant with the works of Herbert
air, water, and land, together in definite Spencer, Darwin, and Lyell; and about
forms, so as not to fly asunder into the last guess he would make would be
that it came from the father of English
primeval chaos.
“In like manner He established certain poetry writing in the fourteenth century.
periods and durations for all creation, And yet, if he would turn to the speech
beyond which nothing could pass. This of Duke Theseus in the Knight's Tale,
needs no authority to confirm it, for it he would find that it is a literal though
is proved by universal experience. Men, modernised version of what Chaucer puts
therefore, by this order of the universe, into the mouth of his representative of
may easily discern that the laws of nature perfect manhood and mature wisdom.
are 'fixed and eternal. And anyone who Religions and philosophies have changed,
is not a fool can understand that, as every knowledge has increased; but these lines
part is derived from a whole, nature of Chaucer remain as a summary of the
cannot have originated from any part or best and truest attitude in which a man
parcel of a thing, but from something can face the insoluble mysteries of the
that is perfect and stable, passing by universe.
This passage alone should be sufficient
evolution from the homogeneous into
the heterogeneous, until it becomes to justify Chaucer’s claim to rank among
subject to change and corruption. The the great poets.
My object, however, is not so much to
Creator of the universe has, therefore, in
�144
CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
review poetry generally, or to assign to
each poet his proper place in the hier
archy of Art, as to ascertain what have
been the real creeds or inmost convic
tions of those who, by universal consent,
are ranked among the highest. And
when I talk of creeds, I do not mean
the outward professions, which, with poets
as with other men, may be mainly affairs
of time and circumstance; but the deeper
insight with which they “see into the life
of things,” and find, with Wordsworth,
Wordsworth, in common with Brahmins,
Buddhists, and Platonists, solves this
problem by postulating pre-existence :—
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.”
. It is remarkable that this Pantheistic
view of the universe is essentially that of
other great modern poets, who, in many
respects, differ most widely from the
calm and self-contained character and
“ The anchor of the purest thoughts, the nurse, serene wisdom of Wordsworth. Byron,
The guide, the guardian of the heart, and soul in his _ moments of best and truest
Of all the moral being. ”
inspiration, expresses, in still more
In Wordsworth’s case the answer is easy: passionate and vigorous language, the
he gives it himself. He finds it in nature.’ same feeling for one great living whole,
Not in a. dead or mechanical nature, or comprising nature, humanity, and him
one limited to seas and skies, mountains self :—
and rivers; but one which includes
All heaven and earth are still—though not in
“ The still sad music of humanity,”
and which lives with
“ A presence which disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfuse
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”
This is very nearly pure Pantheism,
and it is remarkable how closely he
approximates in other respects to the
Oriental philosophy which finds its ex
pression in the religions of Brahma and
of Buddha, and which tinged the
speculations of Plato. In the Intima
tions of Immortality he adopts, to a
considerable extent, the doctrine of the
transmigration of souls, or, to express it
in modern language, the “ Conservation
of Energy,” applied to the immaterial
soul as a distinct and indestructible
essence.
The problem of immortality hinges on
two questions : life before birth, life after
death. They hang very much together,
for if from nothing we came —
nothing in the sense of no conscious
personal identity—it is more than pro
bable that to nothing we shall return.
sleep,
But breathless, as we grow when feeling most;
And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep_
All heaven and earth are still ; from the high
host
Of stars to the lulled lake and mountain-coast,
All is concentred in a life intense,
Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost,
But hath a part of being, and a sense
Of that which is of all Creator and defence.
Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt
In solitude when we are least alone.”
And again, in the rush of the midnight
storm, he wishes to be
“ A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,
A portion of the tempest and of thee ! ”
Shelley, again, was essentially the poet
of Pantheism, and derived all his best
inspiration from
“ Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood !”
The song of the skylark, the fleeting
cloud, the forest at noonday, the
“ Waste and solitary places, where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be,”'
spoke to him and he to them as living
beings, vibrating in unison with the most
delicate harmonies.
Of Death he speaks as
The boundless realm of unending change,”
where
“ All that we feel, and know, and see
■Shall pass like an unreal mystery.”.
�CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
In other words, his glance of insight
into the mysteries of the universe is
essentially Pantheistic and Agnostic.
In sharp contrast with the ethereal
poetry of Shelley, Burns, while equal to
him or any other poet in the exquisite
delicacy of his lyrics, stands on solid
earth, and teaches what may be called
a gospel of practical life. He may not
always have acted up to it, but his
poetry is pre-eminent in laying down
sound and sensible maxims of conduct,
and investing common things and ordi
nary life with a halo of tenderness and
dignity drawn from the inspiration of
the highest feelings of human nature.
Thus, when he says,
.“To make a happy household clime
For weans and wife
Is the true pathos and sublime
Of human life,”
he presents an ideal universal in its
application, within reach of all, common
to all sorts and conditions of men; and
he presents it in a way which lifts the
fundamental fact of the family tie from
the region of prose into that of poetry.
The poorest man, who lives even approxi
mately up to these lines, may feel that
he has not lived in vain. By industry,
prudence, self-restraint, good temper, and
kindness, he has made his humble home
a shrine of affection and happiness, and
has made good his title to rank as one
of nature’s gentlemen. Goethe means
much the same thing when he says that
“no man carries it farther than to per
petuate the species, beget children, and
nourish them as well as he can.” But
how cold and ironical does this sound
when contrasted with Burns. One is
prose, the other poetry ; one a criticism
on life, the other an incentive to purify
and exalt it.
No one equals Burns in the keenness
of insight with which he looks through
the outer husks and habiliments of
things to their real essence. Carlyle’s
clothes philosophy in Sartor Resartus
is but a sermon on the text—
“ The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man’s the gold for a’ that.”
145
A manly independence, based on the
qualities which Tennyson attributes to
the Goddess of Wisdom,
“ Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,”
is to Burns, as it is to everyone, the
solid basis of all the manly virtues.. It
is a basis which is more readily provided
to those who live by work, whether of
the hand or head, than to those who are
born with a silver spoon in their mouths,
and are cradled in comfort and luxury.
A man never knows what is really , in
him until he has measured himself with
his fellows in real honest work. I. have
known many a man who fancied himself
one of the creme de la creme, and looked
down on the rest of the world as “ cads
and “ outsiders,” who was not honestly
worth twenty shillings a week of any
man’s money. He could ride, but not
well enough to be a whipper-in; shoot,
but did not know enough of wood-craft
or rearing pheasants to be a game
keeper ; dance, sing, or draw, perhaps,
but nothing well enough to earn a penny
by it. Strip him of his cotton-wool
wrappings of wealth and rank, and land
him at Sydney or Melbourne without a
sixpence in his pocket, and what could
he do to earn a living ? Possibly drive
a cab, or be a waiter at an eating-house.
How can such a man feel the same
manly independence as one who knows
that, wherever he goes, he has muscles
or brains to sell which are honestly
worth their price in the world’s market.
No one sets forth so forcibly as Burns
the dignity of labour, and the compen
sations which go so far to equalise the
lot of the rich and poor. If I wanted
to convert to sounder views some narrow
minded social democrat, whose one idea
was envy of the rich, I would make him
read Burns’ Twa Dogs, where the rela
tive advantages _ and disadvantages of
different stations of life are set forth
with so much force and humour. Against
the hardships and privations of the
working masses, alternating with the
enjoyments of the evening rest, the
healthy appetite, and the sound sleep,
�146
CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
he would read of the non-working classes,
how
“ Gentlemen, and ladies worst,
With even-down want of work are curst,”
and learn
“ It’s no in riches or in rank,
' It’s no in wealth like London Bank,
To bring content and rest.
“If happiness has no its seat
And centre in the breast,
We may be rich, or wise, or great,
But never can be blest.”
He may learn also from the Cotter's
Saturday Night how peasant life may
rise to the level of patriarchal dignity;
and from Highland Mary or Bonnie
Jean how the romance of love may be
as true and tender by the “ banks and
braes o’ bonnie Doon ” as in Belgravian
drawing-rooms. Nor will the lesson be
wanting from Willie brewed a peck o'
maut and Auld Lang Syne, that frank
joviality and hearty friendship are not
the exclusive appanage of any class or
condition of mortal men.
From Burns to Shakespeare is a long
stretch, but any attempt to ascertain the
creeds of great poets would be . incom
plete without some analysis of what
seems to be the inmost and truest
attitude of the greatest of all poets
towards the deepest problems of life.
In the case of Shakespeare this is not
easy to discover, for his genius is so
essentially dramatic that his characters
speak and act their own lives, and are
not mere masks behind which the author
discourses to the publiic. Thus Childe
Harold, Conrad, Lara, and Manfred are
only Byron himself posing in different
attitudes, while Othello and Macbeth,
Falstaff and Dogberry, are types of
themselves reflecting nature, and not
Shakespeare. All we can say from them
of Shakespeare’s individuality is, that it
must have been wide enough and rich
enough to realise, with a certain amount
of sympathy, all the varied range of
human passions and emotions, strength
.and weakness, wisdom and folly. Even
the humorous drolleries, and rogueries,
and sheer imbecilities of human nature
are noted and reproduced with a genial
smile.
We cannot say that Shakespeare had
any resemblance to Falstaff, but we may
be sure that he had noted someone like
him; some humorous ton of flesh,
unblushing compound of braggart,
coward, liar, and glutton, yet who half
redeemed these evil qualities by his
ready wit and unfailing good-humour,
and left us almost sorry for him when
he died babbling of green fields in
Mistress Quickly’s hostelry.
It is only in one or two of his
characters that we can discover some
thing of the real Shakespeare himself,
projected from within outwards, and
fashioned in some mood of his own
image. This is the case mainly with
Hamlet and Prospero. Of Hamlet I
think we may say with some certainty
that no one could have conceived such
a character who had not a Hamlet in
him. He must have felt the irresolu
tion, the despondency, the metaphysical
thought sicklying over the “native hue
of resolution,” the burden of life almost
too heavy to be borne, which made a
noble nature and high intelligence drift
the sport of circumstances, rather than
“ take arms against a sea of troubles ”
and incur the pain of coming to a definite
decision.
The Sonnets, in which Shakespeare
speaks in his own person, reveal a good
deal of this frame of mind. The general
tone is that of thought rather than of
action, with an undercurrent of despon
dency and gentle melancholy. Thus, if
the twenty-ninth Sonnet be really Shake
speare’s, what a sermon is it on the vanity
of human things to find the supreme
artist of the world, the man who had
apparently led the most prosperous life,
who had risen from a poor country lad
to be the admired friend of the highest
nobles and best intellects of his day, and
who had in a few years achieved fame
and competence, writing such lines as
these:—
“ When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
�CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
147
by anyone who had not known it by
personal experience. We can hardly
And look upon myself, and curse my fate.”
suppose the high-born and accomplished
Or think of such a man, when recalling heir to the Danish throne to have been
his past life to the “sessions, of sweet a party to a Chancery suit, or to have
trod for years, like Peter Peebles, the
silent thought,” thus summing it up :—
corridors of a Copenhagen Court of
“ I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,.
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s Session. Nor was he likely to have
waste ;
suffered from
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death s dateless
night,
And weep afresh love’s long-since cancelled
And moan the expense of many a vanished
sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan.”
No one can mistake the analogy
between these Sonnets and the melan
choly musings of the Prince of Denmark.
Again, the sixty-sixth Sonnet is almost
identical with the enumeration of the ills
of life which make death desirable in
Hamlet’s famous soliloquy :—
“ Tired with all these, for restful death I cry—
As, to behold desert a beggar born.
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily foresworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
'
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be
gone.”
The evidence of this identity between
Shakespeare and Hamlet is strengthened
if we examine in detail the enumeration
of the “whips and scorns of time” which
might almost compel a man to suicide.
As a general rule, Shakespeare’s charac
ters speak with an admirable dramatic
propriety of place and circumstance.
They say nothing but what such charac
ters in such conditions might have said.
But in this soliloquy there are things
which Hamlet hardly could have said,
and which must be Shakespeare speaking
of his own experiences. Thus, the “law’s
delay ” would hardly be included among
the serious ills of life justifying suicide
“ The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes.”
If, then, Hamlet’s soliloquy expresses
the real sentiments of Shakespeare, we
have his judgment on the great questions
of death and immortality summed up
almost in the identical words of Tenny
son :—
“ Behind the veil, behind the veil.”
To die is “to sleep—to sleep ! perchance
to dream.” Death is “the undiscovered
country from whose bourne no traveller
returns.” There is no assurance, abso
lutely none ! He cannot say, with the
Materialist, we shall certainly perish,, or,
with the Christian, we shall certainly live.
The character of Prospero affords even
a better test than that of Hamlet for
ascertaining what were Shakespeare’s
■ mature views on these subjects. There
can be little doubt that in Prospero
Shakespeare has an eye to himself, retir
ing in the plenitude of his powers from
London and the stage, to spend the
autumn of his days in a round of domestic
duties in his native town. The magic
which Prospero abjures can hardly be
other than the poet’s imagination, and
the staff which he breaks and book which
he drowns,
“ Deeper than did ever plummet sound,”
the poet’s pen, which had bodied forth
so many of these airy nothings, and given
them
“ A local habitation and a name.”
It is well worthy of remark how nearly
this practical solution of the problem of
life coincides with that of another of the
world’s greatest geniuses, Goethe.
The drama of Faust concludes by
showing howr the hero is delivered from
the power of evil, and how the sins and
�148
CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
miseries of his career while commanding
the powers of magic are condoned, by
devoting himself to the practical work of
real life—reclaiming a waste tract from
the sea, colonising it, and making it the
abode of healthy human industry.
The moral is precisely the same in the
two cases, that man’s true life is in the
natural and not in the supernatural, or,
as Goethe expresses it elsewhere, that
“here is your America’’—not in visionary
continents across unmeasured oceans, but
in doing, as Carlyle phrases it, “the duty
that lies nearest to your hand, as the best
guide to further duties.”
But Shakespeare, speaking through
Prospero, in his farewell address to the
world, goes beyond the sphere of practical
life, and gives us his views of the highest
problems of the universe in the wellknown lines :—
“ And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
. Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this unsubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
If, in the case of Wordsworth, I had
to remark on the singular approximation
of modern poetry to the Pantheistic views
of Oriental religions and philosophies,
this passage of Shakespeare carries the
comparison still closer. It is the pure
doctrine of Maya or illusion, which plays
such a great part in the systems of
Brahma and Buddha.
There is no
reality but the great unknowable; all the
manifestations of the universe are illu
sive dreams, rising and falling like mists
from the Ocean of the Infinite. Indi
vidual existence is but one of these
illusions, destined to disappear like
others when its “little life is rounded
with a sleep.”
Observe that in this latest utterance
Shakespeare has gone beyond the phase
of thought which dictated the soliloquy
of Hamlet. There, death was a sleep
indeed, but a sleep in which there might
be dreams, an undiscovered bourne
where there might be anything. But I
here there is not merely Agnosticism,
but the positive assertion that sleep is
all, and that the individual life is ab
sorbed, like everything else, in the great
Ocean from which it came, of the
Infinite and Absolute.
_ Goethe’s theory of the universe is very
similar to that of Shakespeare, but he
approximates to the Oriental philosophy
rather on its positive or Pantheistic side
than on the metaphysical side of Illu
sion. Thus, in the famous reply of
Faust to the simple inquiry of Margaret
whether he believes in God, “ Wer darf
ihn nennen ? ” he says :—
“ Who dares to name Him ?
Who to say of Him, I believe?
Who is there ever
With a soul to dare,
To utter, I believe Him not?
The All-encompasser, the All-upholder,
Enfolds, sustains He not
Thee, me, Himself?”
And he goes on to say how the over
arching sky, the solid earth, the ever
lasting stars, the depths of human
emotion, are but manifestations of the
eternal essence, call it what name you
will—
“ Words are but mist and smoke
Obscuring Heaven’s glow.”
This is almost identical with Words
worth’s
“ Sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.”
In a word, it is pure Pantheism. So
also is the hymn of the Earth Spirit, who
sits weaving the varied shows of the
universe,
“ And at Time’s humming loom prepares
The garment which the Eternal Spirit wears.”
It has often been observed to what a
little extent religion—that is, the formal
religion of theological creeds, appears in
Shakespeare’s plays. Love, ambition,
jealousy, all the various motives which
practically influence human conduct and
character, are depicted to the life ; but
religious belief is as completely ignored as
if it had no existence. One would have
thought that in an age which had wit
nessed the martyrdoms of Latimer and
�CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
149
Cranmer, the destruction of the Spanish threat of foreign interference he would
Armada, and the innumerable wars and have been for England, whether under a
conspiracies of the reign of Elizabeth, King, a Protector, or a Parliament.
Perhaps Shakespeare is right, and after
almost every one must have been a keen
all religion plays a less part in the real
partisan either of the Protestant or of the
Catholic persuasion. And yet such is life of individuals and of nations than
Shakespeare’s indifference or impartiality we are apt to assign to it. It becomes
that it is impossible to say to which side important when it happens to coincide
he inclined. The only conjecture that with great currents of feeling or opinion
has been hazarded is that he leant which are setting in the same direction,
towards the old faith, because his friars, but it has little effect when it runs counter
especially Father Lawrence in Romeo to them. Thus at the present day we
and Juliet, are depicted in a favourable see that the feeling of nationality is vastly
light. But this can hardly be carried more powerful than any differences of
I renchmen,
further than to show that he was not one religious denomination.
of those bigoted Protestants to whom Italians, and Germans are for national in
everything connected with Rome was an dependence and greatness alike, whether
abomination. On the other hand, we they are Catholics, Protestants, or Free
find no trace of it, where it might have thinkers, just as English Catholics were
been most expected, in ridicule or abuse Englishmen first and Catholics afterwards
at the time of the Armada. Catholic
of the Puritans.
The Puritans were already a consider Ireland bows the Pope’s rescript respect
able sect, and from their bitter hostility to fully out of Court when it comes in con
the stage must have appeared to Shake flict with national feeling, and follows
speare almost in the light of personal the lead of an “uncrowned king’’who is
enemies. His observant eye could not a Protestant. In private life nothing can
have failed to notice many of the traits be clearer than that the Christian theory
which, as in Butler’s Hudibras, laid them is that it is better to be poor than rich;
open to ridicule. Many of his characters, while the Christian practice is that it is
as for instance that of Malvolio, would better to be rich than poor. The example
have enabled him with perfect dramatic of Lazarus and Dives does not prevent
propriety to sharpen the shafts of his the immense majority of mankind fiom
satire by introducing an element of striving to be better fed, better clothed,
Puritanism. But he entirely abstains better lodged, and more independent;
from doing so by a single word or and the precept to “ take no thought for
insinuation. Malvolio is a prig, but not the morrow ” is nowhere in competition
with Burns’s ideal of life :
a Puritan.
The fact is that patriotism and loyalty
“ To make a happy household clime
For weans and wife ”—•
seem to have been such ruling motives
in Shakespeare’s breast as to have left no
room for political or theological differ an ideal which, under existing conditions,
ences. The dithyrambic and almost is only to be realised by the constant
Jingoist praises of England which he puts exercise of providence and foresight. So
® the mouth of John o’ Gaunt and other also nine-tenths of the very men who
characters are evidently written con amore, preach and who repeat the command,
and express his real sentiments ; and so “ Thou and thy servant shall do no work
also are the glowing eulogiums on the on the Sabbath,” go home to a hot dinner,
“imperial votaress throned in the West.” which compels their cook to do the same
Had he lived a generation later, we may work on the seventh as on the other days
conjecture that he would have been a of the week.
The fact is that these remote and
Cavalier, and charged with Rupert rather
than with Cromwell; but at the first metaphysical speculations, whether of
�150
CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
theology or philosophy, exert wonder
fully little influence on practical life.
The spiritualist who holds with Berkeley
that matter has no real existence walks
on solid earth exactly as does the
materialist who believes in nothing but
matter. The determinist, who holds
that everything is the result of preestablished harmony or of mechanical
necessity, when it comes to practical
action differs in no perceptible degree
from the believer in free-will, who holds
with Tennyson that
“ Man is man, and master of his fate.”
In either case, the practical incentive is
that
“ Because right is right, to follow right
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.”
In other words, that the rules of right
and wrong, which have become almost
instinctive by the operation of heredity,
education, and environment, influence
conduct far more than any theoretical
considerations as to the origin of morals,
and practical life is made up mainly of
the conflict between these instincts and
the lower inducements of selfishness,
sensuality, and passion, which tempt us
to disregard them.
Of great poets who may be considered
to have drawn their inspiration from
theology there are two—Dante and
Milton. In the case of Dante, however,
it is doubtful whether the phantasmagoria
of mediaeval horrors in the Inferno can
be considered as anything more than
the canvas on which he has painted his
immortal pictures. He is a great poet,
from the passionate insight with which
he has described contemporary events
and characters, his knowledge of universal
human nature, his vivid power of descrip
tion, and the occasional gleams of pity
and tenderness which lighten up his
gloomy landscape. His inspiration is,
to a great extent, political and personal
rather than theological. He loves and
hates with the intense vehemence of an
exile whose life has been marred by the
struggles of contending factions, and
who has known the misery of eating the I
bread of charity and mounting the cold
stairs of haughty patrons. He takes the
regions of Tartarus, the tortures of the
damned, and the malignity of devils, as
he finds them ready to his hand in the
popular beliefs of his day, and on this
canvas dashes down the vivid impres
sions and brooding ideas of which his
soul is full; and that soul being a great
one, the picture is great also.
In the case of Milton, on the other
hand, we have an instance of a really
great poet, who, “smit by the love of
sacred song,” derived his inspiration
mainly from the Bible and from theo
logy. And if theology acted thus power
fully on him, he in return reacted no
less powerfully on it, for the conceptions
of Adam and Eve, of paradise, of heaven
and hell, and of the whole hierarchy of
good and bad angels, are derived mainly
from his Paradise Lost. In particular that
of Satan transformed from the grotesque,
Pan-like devil of popular mythology into
an heroic figure, not less than “arch
angel ruined,” is purely Miltonic. The
indomitable resolution with which he
opposes his own personality and free
will to the buffets of adverse fate and
the decrees of Omnipotence elevates
the horned and tailed “auld Clootie”
of vulgar tradition into an heroic figure
akin to the Prometheus of Greek tragedy.
It may easily be seen from the example
of Milton how readily poetry may pass
into mythology in uncritical ages. It
was thought by some Greek philosophers
that the gods of Olympus were a creation
of Homer’s. Had Milton’s Paradise
Lost been written before the invention
of printing and transmitted for centuries
by the chants of itinerant bards, probably
the same thing might have been said of
many of the personifications of popular
Christianity.
In contrasting the spirit of the Greek
tragedians with that of modern poetry,
it strikes me very forcibly how much
more the element of morality enters
into the former. The ground-note of
■/Eschylus and Sophocles, and in a less
degree of Euripides, is that of an
�CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
inexorable and irresistible Fate, based
mainly on a vindication of immutable
moral laws. This all-powerful Fate grinds
gods and mortals alike, regardless of indi
vidual lives, and of individual pains and
sufferings, merits and demerits.
The
essence of tragedy lies in the heroic
struggles of lofty souls to oppose this
inexorable Fate, and either vindicate
against it the more immediate laws
of human justice and mercy, or, if
defeated, to suffer and endure with
unshaken resolution. Thus the Thyestian banquet entails a curse on the
house of Atreus, which is visited from
father to son, to the third and fourth
generation, of those whose ancestor had
violated one of the fundamental laws of
human nature and been guilty of canni
balism. The avenging Furies pursue
Orestes to assert the eternal law against
the unnatural crime of matricide, regard
less of the extenuating circumstances
which might have induced a modern
jury to bring in a verdict of justifiable
homicide. So also (Edipus undergoes
the extreme of human suffering, regard
less of the fact that the homicide of his
father and marriage with his mother
were committed in total ignorance, and
without any taint of what may be
called personal depravity. Antigone and
Electra suffer, not only when they are
free from guilt, but when their lives have
been devoted to acts of natural piety.
They suffer not for their own sins, but
because circumstances have involved
them in the train of events and family
connections, for which the eternal moral
laws require expiation. The spirit of
modern poetry is very different. It is
based less on Fate and more on nature;
on nature as it is seen in the outward
universe, conceived in the Pantheistic
spirit of a living whole, and on nature as
shown by the actual course of events and
real characters and actions of actual
men and women. Virtue is sometimes
^rewarded and vice punished, but not
always ; characters are partly good and
partly bad, just as we see them in the
real world; they do not stalk before us
151
on the stage as heroes or demi-gods, in
heroic mask and buskin, but tell their
tale and act their parts as ordinary
mortals, by the play of words, gesture,
and of the human countenance. From
Chaucer and Shakespeare downwards,
the aim of all first-rate poets, dramatists,
and novelists has been, not to preach
sermons or illustrate views of “fate, free
will, foreknowledge absolute,” but to
hold up a mirror to nature and reflect it
as it really is. Not partially, as in the
modern French realistic school, which
photographs only that which is ugly and
obscene; nor as in society novels, which
find nothing in the world but school-girl
romance and the rose-coloured trivialities
of fashionable circles; but, as Shakespeare
did in a supreme degree, the whole real
world of nature, which lies within the
domain of art—that is, which admits of
being illuminated by genius into some
thing which, in its final impression, is
beautiful and not ugly, pleasing and not
repulsive.
I have reserved for the last Tennyson,
for he was the great poet of modern
thought, who stood nearest to us, and
who wrote with the fullest knowledge of
the discoveries of recent science, and of
the problems which occupied the minds
of the living generation. In writing of
Tennyson I have to bear in mind that
he lived many days, and went through
many phases of thought, and might,
therefore, probably have objected to be
classed in any one category, or repre
sented as consistently holding in his
declining years the views which he ex
pressed in his early youth or mature
manhood. It is a long journey from the
first Locksley Hall, where the poet of
progress hails with exulting spirit the
“ wondrous mother age,” and sees in his
fellow-men—
“ Men my brothers, men the workers ever
working something new,
What they have done but the earnest of the
things that they shall do,”
to the Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After,
of the mournful bard who, being old,
“ thinks gray thoughts,” and walks from
�152
CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
Dan to Beersheba, finding all things
barren. It is not for us to complain
that the sun is not always at its meridian
splendour, but, after having given us light
and warmth for its appointed season,
sinks, not in the softer glories of a glow
ing sunset, but behind the gray and
clammy mists that obscure the horizon.
_ Let us rather take our great poet at
his best and fullest, in the days when
he poured out his inmost soul in In
Memoriam, and gave the world his views
on the deepest problems, in lines which
dwell for ever in the minds of the fore
most thinkers of his generation. No
poet of any generation struck a deeper
or truer note than Tennyson in those
noble stanzas in In Memoriam in which
he says :—
“ No more ? a monster then, a dream,
A discord. Dragons of the prime,
Who tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music matched with him.
“ Oh, life as futile, then, as frail '
Oh, for thy voice to soothe and bless !
What hope of answer or redress ?
Behind the veil, behind the veil! ”
I never read those noble lines without
almost a thrill of awe at the intense
truthfulness wfith which they sum up the
latest conclusions of the human intellect.
Here, at last, is the true truth, based on
the inexorable facts and laws of modern
science, and on the ineradicable hopes,
fears, and aspirations of human nature
which underlie them in presence of the
“ unknowable.” Tennyson has read his
Darwin, and understands the facts of
“ Are God and Nature then at strife,
“ Evolution ” and the “ struggle for
That Nature lends such evil dreams ?
existence.” He has read his Lyell, and
So careful of the type she seems,
knows how the facts of geology show
So careless of the single life ;
that what is true of individuals is true
“ That I, considering everywhere
of types, and that all creation lives and
Her secret meaning in her deeds,
dies, comes into existence, and is trans
And finding that of fifty seeds
She often brings but one to bear ;
formed, by immutable laws. He sees
this as clearly as Llerbert Spencer, but,
“ I falter where I firmly trod,
And falling with my weight of cares
like Spencer, he sees that this is not all,
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
and that underlying these known or
That lead from darkness up to God ;
knowable facts and laws is a great
“ I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, Unknowable, in presence of which we
And gather dust and chaff, and call
can only veil our faces and bow in
To Him I feel is Lord of all,
reverent silence.
And faintly trust the larger hope.
This much, at any rate, it teaches us
“ ‘ So careful of the type ? ’ but No !
—that the apprehensions are visionary
From scarped cliff and quarried stone
She cries, ‘ A thousand types are gone: which tell us that the progress of science
I care for nothing, all shall go.
and the light of reason will banish all
poetry and all religion from the world,
“ ‘Thou makest thine appeal to me :
and reduce life to an arid and prosaic
I bring to life, I bring to death :
The spirit doth but mean the breath :
desert like that of a burnt-out planet.
I know no more.’—And He, shall He,
His science furnishes him with some of
“ Man, her last work, who looked so fair,
the most magnificently poetical similes
With splendid purpose in his eyes,
ever penned by mortal poet.
The
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,
struggle for existence, and apparent
And built him fanes of fruitless prayer ;
cruelty of nature, is embodied as the
“ Who trusted God was love indeed,
wild eagle, dropping gore from beak and
And Love Creation’s final law—
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw talon, and shrieking with ravine against
the creed of love and mercy.
The
With ravine, shrieked against his creed ;
Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus give him
“ Who loved, who suffered countless ills,
the
And battled for the True and Just,
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or sealed within the iron hills ?
“ Dragons of the prime,
Who tare each other in the slime.”
�CREEDS OF GREAT POETS
The decay of the old simple paths, the
slowly-dying creeds, translate themselves
into a deep undertone of the “ still, sad
music Of humanity.” Men “ falter where
they firmly trod,” doubt whether their
churches and cathedrals are not “ fanes
of fruitless prayer,” and their accepted
creeds and solemn services but as the
“ cry of an infant in the night,” and with
“no'language but a cry.”
Tennyson’s practical conclusion is very
similar to that of Shakespeare and Goethe
—viz., to place the centre of gravity of
human life in the natural rather than in
the supernatural. The advice of his
Goddess of Wisdom is to cultivate “ self
reverence, self-knowledge, self-control
and, without investigating too closely the
origin of conscience, to accept it as a fact,
153
“And because right is right, to follow right.”
In his Two Voices, after a deep philo
sophical disquisition on the Zoroastrian
doctrine of polarity, or conflict of two
principles, he finds the best solution of
the problem in the spectacle of a man
walking to the parish church between
his wife and child.
This is apparently the last word of
religions and philosophies. Work while
it is day, for the night cometh when no
man can work. Work well and wisely,
and when your little day is over go to
sleep calmly, accepting with an equal
mind whatever fate, if fate there be, that
may be in store for you
“Behind the veil.”
�.................................................
i
-1
4
�INDEX
Clairvoyance, 85
Bear, evolution of the, 69
Acts of the Apostles, 128
Clergy, the modern, 102
Bethlehem, story of, 117
Advance of Science, 95
Coal-measures, thickness of the,
Aerolites as cause of solar heat, Bible, inspiration of the, 93
16
Bird, evolution of the, 71
10-11
Coleridge as a poet, 142
^Esthetic sense and Christianity, Birth-place of mankind, 78
----- on theological assumptions,
Bismarck, 136, 137
99, 101
93
Africa, prehistoric implements Boucher de Perthes, discoveries
Comets, II
of, 48
in, 53
Comets and meteorites, 32
Agnosticism and morality, 96- Boulder-drift, 40-1.
Comstock, 31
Bourgeois, discoveries of, 57
100
Bow-wow theory of language, 75 Comte, religion of, 96
Agnosticism, definition of, 90
Conduct and creed, 99
Boycotting, 136
Ahriman, 105
Condylarthra, 70
America, prehistoric man in, 53, Braid, Dr., 79
Configuration, Lyell’s theory of,
Brain of man and the ape, 72
60
46
Brain, weight of the, 76 .
Amphicyon, 69
Britain, Ancient, animal life in, 49 Conservation of energy, 29
Ancestors of man, 78
British Islands, once joined to Contraction as source of solar
Anchenia, 61
heat, 12
continent, 49
Angstrom, on solar heat, 12
Contradictions in the Gospels,
Browning, 142
Animals, language of, 75
112, 117
----- non-progressiveness of, 75 Buckland, 13
Buenos Ayres, pre-historic man Conversions, religious and scien
----- tools not used by, 75
tific, 94-5
in, 64
Anthropoid apes, fossil, 55
Cope, Professor, on missing
Anthropomorphism of the savage, Bunodonta, 69
links, 68
Burns, 145
65-6
Bushmen, intelligence of, 74? 75 Corals in Greenland, 29
Ape, man and the, 55-6, 72
Corot, 140
Byron, 139, 142
Apostles, the, 118
Creation an absurdity, 92
Apostles’ Creed, the, 101
Creeds, decay of, 101
Calaveras skull, the, 61
Apparitions of the dying, 86
California, prehistoric man in, Creodonta, 69
Archaeopteryx, the, 71
Groll’s theory of climatic varia
55? 60-3
Architherium, the, 69
tion, 33-4, 37
Arctic regions, former high Canstadt man, 54, 77
Carbonic-dioxide in atmosphere, Cro-Magnon man, 54, 77
temperature of, 29, 30
Cromer forest, the, 45
31, 32
Arcturus, speed of, 19
Carew on the treatment of luna Cromwell, 137
[Argyll, Duke of, 61
Crucifixion of Christ, 122
tics, 131
Arrested development in apes, 75
Crust of the earth, 31
Carlyle, pessimism of, 128-9
Art, beginnings of, 51
Cumberland, the
thought
Cassiopzea, 25
----- need of cult of, 103
reader, 86
Ascension, evidence for the, 112, Castelnedolo discoveries, the, 59
Cures by mesmerism, 79
Catalepsy, 81
127
Cuvier on fossil man, 47
Cerithium, the, 67
Ascidian, the, 72
Asia, prehistoric implements in, Chalk downs, implements of the, Cynodictis, 69
52
51
Dalgairns on the existence of
Atmosphere, the, as a blanket, Chamouni, 41
God, 9^
Chauc'er, 142
31-2
Chimpanzee, mind of the, 74, 75 Dante, 150
Atoms, 26
Dark stars, 19, 24, 25
Christian Agnostics, 93
Athanasian Creed, the, 92
Darwin, life of, 138-9
(Augustine, St., on miracles, 113 Christian morality, 94
----- views of, 95,
Axis, terrestrial, variations in, 34 Churches, future of the, 102
Darwinism, spread of, 67
Civil war in America, 135
Civilisation, rate of progress of, Dawson, Sir J., on fossil man,
Bab, miracles of the, 116
36
Be&consfield, Lord, 138
38
�156
Death of Christ, probable truth
about, 124
Denise, fossil man of, 58
Denudation, rate of, 15, 39
Deposition, rate of, 15, 39
Depressions of earth’s surface, 42
Descartes on the soul, 92
Devils, possession by, 131
Digger Indians, 55
Divinity of Christ, 121-2
Dog, evolution of the, 69
Dogmatic Christianity, 91
Doubt, morality of, 99
Dreams, 86
Dryden, 142
Dryopithecus, the, 56, 59
Dualism in nature, 105
Dual personality, 84
Earth, age of the, 9-17
Eginhard, 113
Egypt, ancient civilisation of, 48
Electricity in the sun, 20
Electrons, 27
Elephas meridionalis, 56
Elevation of earth’s surface, 43
Eliot, George, secession of, 95
Elotherium, 61
Emerson on polarity, 104
Energy, primitive fund of, 18
----- problem of, 20-21
Eohippus, the, 69
Erect posture of man, 73
Erosion, rate of, 39, 41
Esquimaux, migrations of the, 54
Euripides, 150
Eusebius, 109
Evil, problem of, 105
Evolution and creation, 65-9
----- of prehistoric man, 50
----- reception of theory, 67
Exorcisms, 132
Faith, nature of, 114
Fate, 151
Faust, 146
Flint instruments, making of, 50
Fiction, 140
Foot of man and the ape, 73
France, progress in, 135
Freeman on miracles, 113
Freemantle, Canon, on theo
logy, 93
Freethought and conduct, 103
Furfooz type, the, 55
Future life, our ignorance about,
94
Gadarene swine, the, 119
Gaudry on evolution, 68
Genesis, refutation of, 47
Geneva, Lake of, 16
Geological time, duration of, 15
Geology, history of, 13
INDEX
Germany, progress in, 135
Glacial deposits in England, 40
Glacial period, the, 36-47
----- duration of the, 43, 45
Glacial periods, number of, 34,
37
Glaciers, formation of, 46
----- rate of advance of, 38, 39,
40
Gladstone, 137-8
Glyptodon, 63
God, theological idea of, 92
Goethe, 147
Gorilla, morality of the, 74
Gospels, date of the, no
----- miracles of the, 112
Gravitation, nature of, 18
Greenland, glaciers of, 40
Gulf Stream, the, 46-7
Hallucinations, 82-3
Hamlet, 146-7
Harrison, F., on religion, 100
Heat received from sun, IO
Helium, 26
Heresy, nature of, 133
■---- - persecution of, 133
Herschell on solar heat, IO
Higher critics, the, 109
Hipparion, the, 69
Historical epoch, the, 48
Horse, evolution of the, 69-71
Hugo, Victor, 139
Humanism and progress, 97
Humanity, religion of, 100
Huxley, sketch of, 139
Hyrenarctus, 69
Hyde Park exhibition, 134
Hydrochrerus, 63
Hydrogen, 26
Hypersesthesia, 82
Hypnotism, 79-85
----- dangers of, 83
Hysteria and hypnotism, 80
John, Gospel of, no
Jupiter, 34
Kellar and the spiritists, 88
Kent’s cavern, 49, 51
Krakatoa, 14
Krishna, 117
Lakes, drying up of, 16
Language of animals, 75
Laplace, theory of, 25
Larmor’s theory of atoms, 27
Law of Uniformity, the, 13
Lazarus, raising of, 113
Lemurs, the, 72
Lethargy, hypnotic, 80
Leyden, Congress of, 77
Lightfoot on the testimony of
Papias, ill
Lincoln, Abraham, 138
Lingula, 14
Lisbon Congress, 57
Literature, growth of, 103
Loaves and fishes, miracle of the,
120
Loess deposits, 41-2
Lockyer, Sir N., on stellar evo
lution, 23
Lord’s Prayer, the, 108
Luke, Gospel of, no
Lunacy, medieval treatment of,
130
Luther, 137
Lyell on the causes of climatic
variation, 33
----- on the earth’s age, 17
----- on solar heat, 9
----- on uniformity, 13
Lykke, skull of, 77
Machairodus, the, 50
Machine, man as a, 74
Magnet, effect of, in hypnotism,
81, 84
Mammoth, the, 36
Man, antiquity of, 36, 43
Ictitherium, 69
Manco-Capac, 38
Idiots, skulls of, 76
Mark, Gospel of, no
Illative sense, the, 91
Immortality, irrationality of, 92 Marriage, Christ on, 120
Mars, 34
Impact theory, 25
Marseilles, 42
Incisions on bone, 58
Marsupials, the, 71
Inter-glacial periods, 45
Massachusetts, witch-burning in,
Inquiry, duty of, 107
132
Inquisition, the, 133
Massacre of the innocents, II7
Instinct, nature of, 98
Mastodon, 60, 63
Intuition, 91, 92
Ireland, once connected with Mather, Cotton, 133
Matter, nature of, 26
England, 54
Matthew, Gospel of, no
Irish question, the, 135
Medicine and Christianity, 130
Italy, progress in, 135
Mediums, fraud detected in, 87.
Mellard Reade’s geological esti
Jesus, character of, 108-20
mates, 44
----- historicity of, 116
Memory, abnormal feats of, 82
John the Baptist, 117
�INDEX
157
Rabbinical literature and the
New Testament, 109
Races, lower and human, 76
Radiation in space, 20
Radio-action, 27
Radium, 21
Rainfall, variations in, 41
Religion, elements of, 101
Religion of the future, 99
Renan, secession of, 95
Pagan parallels of birth stories, Resurrection, contradictory ac
counts of the, 123
117
Painting, modern standard of, ----- improbability of, 112
•----- - witnesses to the, 112-3
140
Rhinoceros Leptorhinus, 56
Palaeolithic man, 39, 49, 51
Romanes, 94
----- weapons, 39
Rotation of the earth, 30
----- period, stages of, 50
Palaeotherium, the, 69
Salpetriere experiments, the,
Pantheism, 144
80-85
Papias, 109-10
Parables, authenticity of the, Salvation Army, the, 106
Saturn, 34
120
Paul, St., on the Resurrection, Savages, characteristics of, 7b
Scalidotherum, 63
126
Scandinavia, elevation of, 43
Pessimism, 129
Scepticism, consequences of, 130
Pharisees, the, 113
----- nature of, 130
Philistinism, 106
Physical phenomena of spiritism, Scybert Commission, the, 87-8
Seances, hypnotic conditions of,
88
89
Pilate, 123
Pithecanthropus erectus, the, 77 Semidouro skulls, the, 63
Sermon on the Mount, the, 108
Pliocene man, 59
Services, evolution of, 103
Pliohippus, 69
Shakespeare, 146
Pliopithecus, the, 55
Shelley, 139, 144
Poetry, 141
----- not injured by scepticism, Shooting-stars, 22
Sierra Nevada, prehistoric re
139
mains of, 60-1
Polarity, 104
Sirius, 24
Politics, polarity in, 106
Polygamy sanctioned in Old Skaptar-jokal, 14
Skertchley, discoveries by, 62
Testament, 98
Slade, the spiritist-medium, 88
Pope, 142
Slate-writing, 87
Positivism, 100
•*. '
Slavery sanctioned in Old Testa
Post-glacial period, the, 43-4
Nampa image, the, 62
ment, 98
Napoleon, Louis, sketch of, 137 Pouillet on the sun's heat, 12
Snakes, absence of from Ireland,
Poussin, 140
Nationality, 134
Practical Christianity, 90
Nativity, legends of the, 116
Social instincts and morality, 98
Precession, theory of, 30, 37
Natural law and miracles, 66
Social progress, 136
Pre-historic man, 49
Natural selection, 67
Prestwich on the Glacial period, Socialism of Christ and early
Nature, the law of, 103
Christians, 118
36, 38
Naulette, prehistoric remains of,
Solar heat, source of, 9, 10
Priests, future of the, 102
77
----- supply of, 9, IO
Primates, the, 76
Neanderthal man, 77
Primitive man, migrations of, 54 Solar radiation, variations in,
Nebulse, 24
31
Progress in palaeolithic age, 39
Nebular hypothesis, 25, 34
Psychical Research Society, 86 Somnambulism, artificial, 81
Neolithic weapons, 39
Space, cold regions of, 45
Nervous disease and hypnotism, Pterodactyl, the, 71
------constitution of, 18, 19
Puritanism, 149
80
Puy Courny discoveries, the, 58 Spain, progress in, 135
New stars, 25
Species, evolution of, 66
Newcomb on gravitation, 18
Quadrumania, incorrectness of Spectra, classes of, 23
Newman’s idea of faith, 114
Spectroscope, work of the, 23
name, 73
Nile valley, borings in, 48
Speech of animals, 74
Nitregen in the atmosphere, 33 Quaternary epoch, the, 48
Spencer on Positivism, 100
I----- man, distribution of, 51-2
North Pole, the, 37
Mendelejeff’s law, 26
Mersey valley, changes in the,
44
Mesmer, 79
Mesmerism, 79-85
Mesohippus, 69
Messiahship of Jesus, 121
Metamorphism, 17
Meteoric theory, the, II, 23-5
Meteorites, II, 22-3
Meteors, nature of, 26
—— origin of, 26
Millais, 140
Millennium, the, 118
Miller, Hugh, 13
Millet, 140
Milton, 150
Mincopics, implements of the, 57
Mind in man and the lower
animals, 74-5
Minimum of miracle, theory of,
115
Miohippus, 69
Miracle theory, refutation of, 66
Miracles, decay of belief in, 112
----- of Christ, absurdity of, 119
Missing links, 67-69
Mississippi, work of the, 15
Monotremata, the, 72
Monte Aperto discoveries, the,
57
Moon, origin of the, 35
Morality and religion, 96-9
---- » foundations of, 97, 98
---- •» in the Old Testament, 97
----- source of, 98
More, Sir Thomas, on lunatics,
I31
Mormonism, 100
Mosaic code, the, 98
. law and Jesus, 121
Murder, abhorrence of, 97
Oannes, 83
Old Testament, degrading fea
tures of, 97
Olmo skull, the, 60
Oita discoveries, the, 57
Ormuzd, 105
Ornithorhyncus, the, 72
Orohippus, 69
Oxygen in the atmosphere, 33
�158
Spenser, 142
INDEX
Temperature of the earth, 33
Temple, Dr., on evolution, 93
Tennyson, 139, 151-3
Tertiary epoch, the, 48
Tertiary man, question of, 55-65
Thenay discoveries, the, 57
Theologians and science, 129
Theology and science, 107
Thirty Years’ War, 135
Thomas a Becket, miracles of,
116
Thought-reading, 85
Thought-transference, 86
Tolerance, growth of, 105
Tools as a human characteristic,
75
Trenton implements, the, 53
Trial of Christ, 122
Truth, modern reverence for, 99
Talmudic literature and the Tuolumne skull, the, 61
New Testament, 109
Teeth, evolution of the, 74
Universe, nature of the, 19
Telepathy, 86
Unknowable, the, 92
Spiritualism, 84-90, 136
Spitzbergen, tropical plants in,
2?, 3°
Spring Valley remains, the, 62
Spurgeon on liberalism, 96
St. Prest, prehistoric remains of,
56
Stars, motion of the, 18, 25
Stellar evolution, 24-6
Strain theory of matter, the, 27
Sub-atoms, 27
Sun, age of the, 9
------temperature of the, 10
----- nature of the, 19
----- spots, 19
----- - shrinkage of the, 12
Swinburne, 139
Usher, Archbishop, estimate of, 48
Vertebral column in man and
the ape, 73
Vibrations from the brain, 90
Virgin Mary, cult of the, 114
------------ historical account of
the, 115
Voltaire on persecution, 134
Vortex theory of matter, the, 26
Wace, reply of, to Huxley, 108
Wars, religious, 134
Wesley on witchcraft, 133
Whitney, Professor, 61
Witchcraft, 132
Wordsworth, 144
Working-classes, improvement
in the, 104
Zenglodon, 60
Zoroaster, 105
Zoroastrianism, 104
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Problems of the future
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Edition: [Rev.ed.]
Place of publication: London
Collation: 160 p. ; 22 cm.
Series title: R.P.A. Cheap Reprints
Series number: No. 22
Notes: Includes index. Printed in double columns. Issued for the Rationalist Press Association, Limited. First published, London: Chapman and Hall,1902, but without the final three chapters. Front cover has added imprint for Chapman & Hall, Ltd. At head of title on front cover: 'A fascinating work'. Publisher's advertisements p.[159]-160, also inside and on back cover. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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Text
Uffi-ACHON AND -REACTION BETWEEN GH-ERCIIES AND
TBfr-WE- GOVERNMENT.
A LECTURE
F. W. NEWMAN,
LATIN PROFESSOR AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON,
AT SOUTH-PLACE CHAPEL, FINSBURY,
MAY 20, 1860.
Irhrteb Eg request
LONDON:
ALLIANCE DEPOT, 335 STRAND.
MANCHESTER: ALLIANCE OFFICES, 41 JOHN DALTON STREET.
�A LECTURE,
ETC.
It is a notorious fact of ancient and modern times, that very
many politicians who have no belief in religion have upheld
religious creeds as conducive to the national morality : and
they have generally much to say that is plausible in their
defence. Side by side with this, it has been maintained, upon a
large survey of the world, that national morality depends very
little on the avowed creed of nations ; and it may be worth
while to dwell for a moment on the evidence of this fact. I
will begin by contrasting the Turks with the Persians. Ac
cording to the testimony of a series of impartial English
men who have known them well, the peasants of Turkey pro
per are eminently upright, truthful, simple-hearted, honest,
friendly; faithful and devoted in domestic relations,—the
tie of parent and child being peculiarly tender and beautiful.
The Persians, on the contrary, are described as prevailingly
frivolous, false, cheating, and generally without conscience.
Both nations are Mohammedan. It is true, that they are of
different sects. The Persians regard the three first Caliphs
as usurpers, and reject the “traditions of the elders” con
cerning the miracles of Mohammed and various observances.
But none of us will for a moment impute the superiority of
Turkish morality to this ceremonial difference. It undoubt
edly rises out of the social organization, local influences, and
mode of life, which have come down from remote times. We
have a confirmation of this in the fact, that all which is best
in the Turkish character is apt to be lost as soon as the indi
�3
vidual is transplanted, and especially if he be raised into high
office. Yet his Mohammedan creed remains as orthodox as
before. Here then we see, that though a right creed is of
course better than a wrong creed, yet social institutions have
more effect on our moral state than the national religion.
And now look back to Europe. Are not Ireland, France,
Spain, South Germany, and Italy, under the same church ?
Yet how diverse are they morally ! If we had time to con
sider separate virtues and vices, the contrasts would perhaps
seem deeper the longer we dwelt on them. What greater
contrast in manliness can there be than that between Spain
and Naples ? It is conceded to be immense even between
the border countries, Spain and Portugal. What French
man, however patriotic and Catholic, will dare to extol the
French women for chastity 1 Yet, coming of the same race,
and with very much of the same temperament, the Catholic
Irishman justly boasts that the honoui’ of Irish women stands
as high as that of any in the whole world. Again, for long
ages past, who would have seemed uncharitable in rating very
low the truthfulness of the Italians or French ? Yet no one
would have dared so to speak of the Catholic Germans or of
the Spaniards. Again, was not England once Catholic ? Yet
the England of Edward III. and that of Queen Elizabeth are
not in any great moral contrast. I need not go farther. I
have sufficiently indicated on what ground we are forced to
believe that national morality does not depend chiefly on the
theoretic religion, but on those social institutions, habits, and
laws which pervade daily life.
The truth which I have been stating has been often darkly
felt by those who avow as their motto, “ Religion has nothing
to do with politics.” I believe the*se were accurately the words
for which our late eminent statesman Mr. Canning encountered
much obloquy some thirty-five years ago. In his mouth it
meant, that an English Catholic had more of the Englishman
in him than of the Catholic, so that the difference between his
religion and that of the Protestant ought to be overlooked in
Parliament; a doctrine which shortly gained a great prac
�4
tical triumph. My main object in now addressing you, is to
point out the false theory which is founded on this movement
towards a more comprehensive state. Those who desired to
admit Dissenters and Catholics into civil equality with Church
men, who claimed that the State should turn a blind eye to
wards the creed of an individual, were sure to condemn any
public hostility to voluntary religious institutions, and very
generally may have wished that all such institutions should
be left without national endowments. The State being thus,
in their view, neutral towards the sects, they have naturally
claimed that the sects should be neutral towards the State.
They have conceived of Church and State (or, if you prefer so
to phrase it, the Churches and the State) as occupying two
parallel lines of movement which cannot come into collision :
as though the Church were something of the other world alone;
as though its business were with creeds and ceremonies, feasts
and fastings, chanting and prayers, ordination and sacraments,
consolation in sickness and hopes beyond the grave; but had
no right to interfere with laws and customs which make men
moral or immoral. To very many politicians of this class, to
use religious influence against any measures of State is prim&
facie evidence of an ambitious and meddling Church. On the
other hand, they often avow, that in the State it is an erring
obtrusiveness to legislate for the morality of the nation ; and
that all zeal for morality should be yielded up to individuals,
or to voluntary societies.
If this were not a widely-prevailing theory, influencing
public men, often asserted in public journals, and espoused
by those who have a name as political philosophers, I should
not now address you on the other side. But since I regard
this as the cardinal heresy of the Liberal party in both conti
nents,—the heresy which, in proportion as it triumphs, de
moralizes nations, and makes them vacillate between anarchy
and despotism; the heresy which, by the reaction from it,
gives a new life to bigotry, and generates dangerous forms of
socialism,—I think the close examination of it is of urgent
practical importance.
�5
I began by pointing out the evidence lying on the surface
of history, that the morality of nations is more dependent on
laws and institutions than on religious creed. I think I
should hardly overstate in saying, that laws, enactments, in
stitutions of property, and the social relations which rise out
of them (all of which are the sphere of the State), must of
necessity affect the national character for good or evil: hence
the action of the State is essentially either moral or immoral.
But inasmuch as the Churches, or Church, either need not
exist at all, or very often exist in a feeble, cloudy, ceremonial
life, their action on the national morality is apt to be but a
secondary force. Hence, instead of saying with the Ultravoluntaryist, that morality is the sphere of the Church alone,
it is more true to assert, that the State has necessarily a
moral action, the Church only accidentally and occasionally.
And if we admit that Religion rises above a solemn mummery
or a wild fanaticism, only in proportion as morality underlies
it; if we are conscious that Spiritualism is the glorification of
the highest Morality, and that the immoral man cannot be
permanently and consistently spiritual, nor ever reap the
noblest fruits and blessed joys of spirituality; if we feel that
an immoral atmosphere is corrupting to the most of us, and
intensely painful to the best;—then never can those institu
tions and measures of State which make our neighbours and
ourselves moral or immoral be matter of indifference to the
spiritual man ; nor can the religious unions, which we call
Churches, ever wisely cherish neutral sentiment towards them.
The best and noblest churches, however strong and fresh the
religious impetus within them, must necessarily be weakened,
disorganized, and degraded, by prevailing public depravities.
I will add, that when the spiritual influence within them be
comes most intense, most pure, most beneficial, it will produce
permanent results of good only in proportion as it affects
public action or institutions.
It may aid to clear our view of this subject, if I present a
slight sketch historically of the part which religious influence
has played among nations. Civilization begins when brute
�6
force ceases to rule, and the warrior is subjected to the
civilian.
In China perhaps this was effected by the ascend
ency of mere moralists over the State, without any strictly
religious development; but the result was, even more em
phatically, that the State had the cognizance of morality, and
became the moral teacher as well as enforcer. Every where
else, in all the great civilised powers, we find religion to iden
tify itself with civilianism, and to become so incorporated
with the magistracy and laws as to appear to dictate the
whole constitution. In fact, it must have been a struggle
between the men of the sword and the men of mind,—or be
tween a ruling family on the one hand, and a combination of
civilians and warriors on the other,—which resulted in a
compromise, by which the sword ruled under sanction of re
ligious law. But we have seldom any history of the earliest
stage. One thing only I here assert and press,—that, as a
fact, whether we approve it or not, whether we like it or not,
in the whole earlier stage of humanity,—I mean down to the
Christian era,—we know no instance in which a religion pro
duced moral results, or any results but such as we must de
plore, except in so far as it acted upon and through civil
institutions j imparting to them solemnity and permanence,
curbing alike despotism and anarchy, making law moral, and
investing judicial sentences with power over the conscience.
Out of this sprang, and always will spring, the greatness of
nations, even when the theory of the religion is disfigured by
antiquated fable and impure blots.
But the dispersion of the Jews, and the Christianity which
followed, opened a new phase of human existence. A pheno
menon came forth, known previously in the far East, but
unparalleled in the West,—a religion appealing to individual
conviction, and propagated by individual energy, through
many countries, in spite of resistance and persecution from
the civil power. As to certain broad facts concerning this
great movement there can be no mistake. The Roman aristo
cracy, which conquered the Western world, had disorganized
itself by plunder and by civil war, which ended in a military
�7
despotism, so complete within, and so uncontrolled without,
as to become wildly immoral. During the monstrous rule
of the three emperors, Caius Caligula, Claudius, and Nero,
Christianity put forth its first and most signal efforts. The
first churches looked out upon a civil power, which seemed
to be made of iron and clay, without heart or conscience; a
power as unsusceptible of Christian conversion as behemoth
or leviathan. Sacrifice and incense, if offered only to Jupiter
Best and Greatest, might perhaps have been interpreted as to
the True Jehovah ; but when incense to the images of the
Csesars, deceased and living, was the symbol of loyalty, and
as it were the oath of office,—when persecution and death was
inflicted on those who refused the test,—the Christian churches,
from the time of Nero onward, not only despaired of such a
civil power, but pictured it as a hideous and fierce beast, and
impatiently expected its destruction by fire from heaven. To
coalesce with it was “to worship the beast and his image,”
and involved an impious dereliction of the faith. The hostility
thus kindled generated worse distrust, and before long, wider
persecutions. Christ did not return in the clouds of heaven,
at the time they expected him, to overthrow these incurable
iniquities by flaming fire; but the despotism decayed by its
own misrule, and the Goths from the Danube and the Black
Sea began their terrible inroads. At last appeared a prince
on the throne of the Csesars who sought the alliance of the
Christian churches, then already consolidated into a power
ful Organization. From that day the views, the policy, the
aspiration of the Church was changed; and a second era
began.
In this first era, which alone is regarded by many Protes
tants as the time of the Church’s purity, will any one assert
that the impurity of the State was no calamity to the Church ?
We cannot read the apostolic epistles without seeing what
scandalous immoralities were liable to break out in those who
were received as saints. The energy of Christian conviction
to rescue men out of vice and crime was sometimes wonderful,
—then, as in later ages; but to make deep spiritual impres
�8
sions abiding is of all mental tasks the hardest. Habit is the
ever-plodding tortoise which wins the race while the hare is
asleep. Oh, how great the misery to a struggling human soul
to have been reared in profligacy and recklessness of right I
Moreover, he who seemed to be rescued from it by repentance
and faith was not only open to the insidious re-approaches of
old habit; he also of necessity worked and lived with old com
panions, was surrounded by reminiscences of his old offences,
and by all the old solicitations. Where the public institutions
favour vice and crime, and almost enforce it, how many of us
will remain untainted? To touch pitch, and not be defiled;
to walk through fire, and not be burned; to live in the midst
of every thing immoral, and maintain a conscience void of
offence; to be subject to an unscrupulous and exacting supe
rior, and behave to him with modesty and dutiful boldness,
performing all his rightful commands, and refusing his un
rightful,—is a task rather for an angel than for a man. Now
let me ask : If we are truly religious men—I care not under
what name,—if those whom I address are a religious church,
what greater calamity from without could befal you as a reli
gious body, in its religious hopes and aims, than if some evil
demon could suddenly turn the civil institutions of our Eng
land into those of Nero’s Rome? Oh, what a thing it is for
our own moral and religious life to have no slavery among us!
What a thing to have fixed law and fair juries, a police which
cannot plunder and torture, magistrates who cannot arrest
without cause, judges who cannot be terrified by power, soldiers
who are restrained by civil law, and a law which is enforced
equally upon all ranks ! What a thing it is that impurity
dares not to obtrude itself in full glare, usurping art, invading
literature, penetrating into public religion, and dislocating
family relations ! Is it a fond fancy of Englishmen that it is
characteristic of their nation to love fair play, to esteem truth
fulness, to abhor hypocrisies and slanders, to uphold the rights
of the weak, to disapprove all cruel extremes of punishment,
all mere vindictiveness, all making of oneself judge in one’s
own cause ? If in any of these things our boasts are justified,
�9
we owe these good qualities to the laws of the land. Let us
not deceive ourselves. The best foundations of our moral
character come to us as a gift from our predecessors, who have
elaborated our civil institutions. Very imperfect we are ;
but the majority of us would be far worse if the laws of Eng
land were worse ; and if we desire a purer and nobler moral
ity to be wider spread and more permanent, we must desire
and seek the removal of all those public regulations and cus
toms which are experienced to be corrupting ; we must aid
every movement towards a purer condition of the whole social
state.
But what did the Christian Church in her second age ?
Of course, her bishops, before often haughty and overbearing,
became now, equally often, ambitious and worldly, bent on
aggrandizing in wealth and power the religious community
from which their greatness sprang. I have no thought at
present to attack nor to palliate this conduct. But, measure
their evil as you please, of their good we now reap the fruits ;
precisely because they fundamentally abandoned the original
limitation of Christian effort, and embraced the institutions
of this world in the sphere of the Church’s action. To the
apostles’ eyes the saints were nothing but an elect remnant,
snatched out of an evil world which was soon about to be de
stroyed by fire. They laboured for to-day, not for a morrow
which might never come. They tried to relieve the poor, but
not to remove the causes of poverty; to rescue the vicious, but
not to extirpate the social roots of vice; to comfort and teach
the slave, but not to overthrow slavery; to defy evil law and
wicked governors, but not to displace and replace them. Their
whole action was upon individuals, not upon society; it was
palliative, not radical; and hence its benefit was in many
great countries of the world temporary only, and barely
touched a fraction of the people. The Christian Church of the
fourth century had built up its theoretic creed out of a mo
saic of biblical texts, commented on in the spirit alternately
of a Rabbinist and of a Neo-Platonist. But if on the side of
the creed it manifested a weak understanding, yet in its eccle
�10
siastical action it used the freest judgment, never tying itself
down to the precedent or precepts of apostles who lived in a
world differently circumstanced ; but it undertook to remould
the State, to infuse a new spirit into law, and claim the whole
realm of the magistrate as the domain of the Church, that is,
of Christ and of God. So long as the Church was morally
higher than the State, the ambition of churchmen, however
grasping and occasionally unscrupulous, was on the whole, of
course, an immense benefit: and in that period of six or seven
centuries, while barbarous invasion or riotous internal conflict
tormented nearly all Europe, the Church in superadding her
sanction to law and social institutions infused somewhat of
broadly humane and moral aims. Those ecclesiastics assuredly
made a great many mistakes, as fallible men will, and sowed
much tare with their wheat. Judge their evil as severely as you
choose, it will nevertheless remain true that we owe to them
the moral reorganization of the State,—a basis on which fresh
and fresh growths of good take place and shall take place.
We Protestants are too accustomed to think solely of the
later stage of this history. We think of the Romish clergy as
jealous of the cultivated laity, as animated by a narrow idolatry
of church power, as claiming for churchmen an impunity of
crime, crushing freedom among the clergy themselves, distorting
or debauching society by monkery, nunnery, clerical celibacy,
and auricular confession j in short, sacrificing moral ends to
ecclesiastical glorification : finally, as convulsing Europe with
war, and rending States with civil contention, in order to uphold
a worn-out creed and the preposterous claims of a foreign priest.
I name all this, lest, being unknown to many who hear me, I
may seem to overlook, to doubt, or to defend it. I do not. But
while I reprobate the evil ambition of Rome, and very much
beside, I nevertheless defend, approve, and thank that good
ambition, with which at an earlier time she made it a religious
effort to improve the public institutions of barbarous Europe.
In the most far-going and active Protestantism the very
same tendency appeared, as in Calvin, in Knox, in the Puri
tans. All of these regarded it as a first object of importance
�11
with the religious man to make the institutions of the State
virtuous; and much permanent benefit, it is universally agreed,
has remained from this to Scotland and to New England. The
rock on which they all split is only too notorious. They iden
tified Virtue with their own private creed, instead of inter
preting it from the most highly developed conscience of men
and nations. They tried to enforce what cannot be enforced,
and limit what cannot be limited, measuring all minds by their
own, as though they had the infallibility against which they
rebelled. Reaction and indignation was sure to follow, from
those reared in their own bosom. It began among us with the
sects of the Independents and Quakers, and with the writings
of Locke; it has been reinforced from the school of Bentham :
and now, from hatred of Established Churches, and dread of
Over-legislation and Communism, the error spreads wide, that
the State can do little, and is not bound to do any thing, for
moral improvement; and that the business of religious men,
and religious communities as such, is not at all to act upon
or through the public institutions.
But does any one seriously believe that the State can do
little, or rather does not at present do much, for moral interests ?
What if it were to sanction polygamy ? Must we go to the
Mormons, or to the universally decaying Mohammedan powers,
to ask the probable consequences ? If it threw open the trade
of gambling, betting-houses and lotteries, have the churches
so much spare energy, kept in reserve, that they could coun
teract the demoralizing influences which are now pent up ?
Indecent and corrupting exhibitions or gatherings, which evade
the existing law, are at present believed to perpetrate much
moral mischief in our great towns. And if you duly consider
how willing a fraction of mankind is to enrich itself by acting
the tempter and promoting vice, can any of you doubt how
grave an addition to our existing vice would be caused, if every
vile man were allowed by law to thrust upon our children such
sights and sounds as more mature years know to poison the
fountains of youthful peace, innocence, and love 1 In the year
1830, grave statesmen and economists talked learnedly on the
�12
efficacy of free-trade in beer to promote sobriety. Free beer
houses were established by the consent of both sides of Parlia
ment ; but in four years’ time a select committee of the Com
mons, likewise composed of both sides of the House, judicially
pronounced that a flood of vice had been set loose by the
measure. Several select committees of both Houses have since
declared themselves on the subject, always confirming this
fact; yet it pleases the larger part of the press of England to
shut its eyes, and pretend that the State can do nothing for
morality. If time allowed, it would not be difficult to show,
in numberless ways, how the action of public law is either a
depraving or an improving influence. That we often are not
aware of this, is a result, and in part a means, of its very effi
cacy. As a child has all its habits determined for it by the
rules of the family, and moves in leading-strings unawares, so
is it largely with the nation that has once become accustomed
to the regulations of State. Habit is the great regulator of
conduct, and hereby of morality. The atmosphere which we
are ever breathing, without observing it, is the main source
of health or of sickness.
But let me ask, how have the voluntary churches and soli
tary individuals in these later days rendered their good per
manent to society ? As far as I am aware, the earliest phi
lanthropist of Protestant times was William Penn the Quaker.
Of State-Churches he disapproved; but his celebrity for doing
good on any large scale must surely rest on his public laws
and institutions in Pennsylvania. In the next century John
Howard, the visitor of prisons, was the most celebrated phi
lanthropist. Of how little comparative avail would his career
have been, if he had merely relieved the sufferings of indivi
dual prisoners ! His real efficacy was through the political
authorities, by stimulating them to improve the public regula
tions ; and through this, he is a benefactor of Europe down
to the present moment. So, again, the great religious move
ment of Wesley and Whitfield was not a mere reform in
private life, but marked its moral success in public law, its
effect on which is left permanently in regard to fairs, wakes,
�13
revels, and other public gatherings, once sources of demorali
zation, of which many are now suppressed, others are chastised.
Once more, the greatness of Clarkson and Wilberforce as phi
lanthropists does not rest on their charities in private life,
but on the extinction of West-Indian slavery and the over
throw of public lotteries. The labours of the philanthropist
seem always to find their legitimate goal in the amelioration
of public institutions ; for so only is the evil against which
he is warring brought to its minimum. Bad institutions,
acting on the less developed and imperfect minds, generate
mischief far more rapidly than any argument of reason or of
pure religion can check it. The further moral progress of
mankind is to be looked for by regulations which hinder the
corruption of the weak and ignorant by the cunning, the co
vetous, and the lustful. To make a trade of corruption is the
highest of all offences against the social union. In proclaim
ing this, I utter no new political doctrine, but one ever avowed
in England, and confirmed by many laws which are in daily
active life. Yet the doctrine needs, I think, to be made more
prominent to the conscience of the nation, and to be more
pressed on the religious, as a clue to their own duties. In the
last thirty or forty years we have become acquainted with that
phrase, “ the dangerous classeswe have learnt that there
is within our nation another nation, separated from it men
tally, morally, religiously,—a nation of criminals born from
criminals, living chiefly on plunder,—barbarous in the midst
of civilization. Many self-denying efforts have been systemati
cally made by Ragged Schools and Town Missionaries to reach
this population. If I were competent to measure, yet this is
no place to measure, the amount of good thus effected, and
how far it keeps pace with the progress of the evil. But to
me it seems perfectly clear, that the State has no right to ex
pect the diseases of its body to be removed year after year by
the zeal of private philanthropy; and that the rightful result
of these efforts is, that those at whose sacrifice they are made
should prevail with the public authorities to prevent the evils
in an earlier stage. After it has been shown (and I think it
�14
has already been shown) what is the utmost which voluntary
zeal can effect, it becomes clearer what the State must under
take. Two causes, it is notorious, chiefly, if not solely, gene
rate “the dangerous classes”—seduction of women, and the
retail trade in intoxicating drink. Hence it is clear in what
direction the State has, in the first instance, to move, in order
to counteract the evil.
Very few indeed of us can take up (what I may call) the
profession of philanthropy; the rest of us are perhaps apt to
think that they fully do their part, if, having found some
agency to which they can trust, they support it by one or
more annual guineas. That is all well and right in itself;
but if the agency is only palliative, if it aspire only to cure
partially, not to prevent evil, something earlier remains
to be done, and it must be done by the civil community
itself
This truth was discerned by the founder of one other phi
lanthropic movement, which proved wholly abortive, through
the enormous errors mingled with it; nevertheless its moral
strength was derived from its firm grasp of a truth which the
opposite schools were holding every day more loosely; the
doctrine that man cannot he perfected in isolation; that his
social union has a higher object than that of the market; that
his virtue, feeble in the individual, becomes strong by mutual
support; that in proportion as we are immature, our will is
puerile, and we are the creatures of our circumstances; and
that it is the proper business of the local civil community to
promote the training of all to industry and to virtue. I allude
to the late Robert Owen of Lanark, the founder of English
Socialism, a true philanthropist (I believe) in heart, though
his public schemes were impossible, and his moral theories all
ill balanced, some of them monstrous. A part of his aims has
been adopted by those who call themselves Christian Socialists,
in whom it is easy to discern (side by side with very question
able opinions of another sort) a wholesome intensity of convic
tion that our nation is forgetting the duty of the State to use
its vast power for moral good. Against us all, in every capa
�15
city, public or private, it is a fixed truth, that “ Whosoever
knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin.”
If plunder and fightings, fires and murder, abounded in
our streets, we should cry aloud and protest to our magis
trates and rulers, imploring more vigorous measures. Let us
hope that some higher motive than selfish fear would inspire
the protest. But alas, when the evil threatens not ourselves,
but those who are morally weaker than we, our outcry is far
too tranquil. If the daughters or sisters of others are seduced,
if the families of others are ruined by the public solicitations
to drunkenness, we are apt to think it is no case for our com
plaint. Yet surely to shelter the weak in mind from exces
sive temptation is as much a duty of society as to rescue the
weak in body from attack ; and as to drunkenness it is a duty
which the State, for four centuries and upwards, has deliber
ately and avowedly assumed. Let no religious churches fancy
that God has reserved for them corporately an isolated and pe
culiar goodness. They are in great measure products of their
age and nation, and partake of its evil. They cannot be made
perfect without the surrounding community. If there is what
Frenchmen call a solidarity between nation and nation, each par
taking of the other’s good, each in some measure afflicted by the
other’s evil, so that each is in some sense responsible for all,—
much more is this true of the natives of the same country, mem
bers of the same State, dwellers in the same locality, partners
in daily transactions or company. If the law acts well for our
moral good, because we are strong, but works ill to our neigh
bours because they are weak; — conduce as it may to the
energy of the self-controlled, yet if it ensure a harvest of crime
and debauchery under the windows of our happy homes, indeed
it is a selfish and short-sighted principle in us to be contented
and silent. England has long been heart-sick under a sense that
religion has unduly been severed from the affairs of daily life.
We long for a religion that shall be at once deep-hearted and
practical. Whatever the professional politicians think or do
not think, the nation at large is as weary of the personal ques
tions which divide statesmen as of the theological quarrels on
�16
which sects are founded. The nation is very competent to
discriminate repartee from wisdom, malicious speech from
earnestness of heart; and out of the earnestness of its own
heart has a natural right to claim that the moral welfare of
the many shall never be sacrificed to the exchequer, nor to
party. Nay, I will add, this is conceded and avowed on both
sides by those who declare themselves to be party-men. Hence,
without a struggle to dislocate existing entanglements, the
moral earnestness of the religious unions of this nation, when
it joins in one prayer, has forthwith a great, a mighty force
with Parliament and with the Throne. The claim rising from
us all, that the authorities, central and local, armed by the
law, shall put down public solicitations to corruption, and
shall thereby help us and those weaker than some of us to
avoid ruinous vice, will never be mistaken for ecclesiastical
ambition or democratic disaffection. There is therefore a real
and great power resting in the churches, just in proportion to
their moral simplicity and earnestness,—a power which they
cannot innocently disuse. All that is needful is, that they
shall speak from the heart of all good men, not from their own
private heads, and plead with the organs of the State for that
virtue on which we all agree, not for that theology on which
we so deeply differ. This is reasonable ; for the State belongs
to us in common, and no man or sect may claim to work it
for private ends. This also is on the side of spiritual advance
ment ; for the higher the morality of the nation, the better
material it affords for a truly spiritual church. Oh, what a day,
worth living for and worth dying for, that would be, in which
all the good and pure-hearted should cooperate to abate every
palpable immorality of the land! The common action would
teach them a common esteem. Their unwise animosities
would drop off. Cultivating simplicity of eye, they would
find their whole souls full of light; and without proselytisms,
controversies, or heart-burnings, a new and real reformation
would be begun.
ROBSON, LEVEY, AND FRANKLYN, GREAT NEW STREET AND FETTER LANE, E.C.
r
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The action and reaction between churches and the civil government.
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Newman, Francis William [1805-1897]
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Place of publication: London; Manchester
Collation: 16 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: A lecture by F.W. Newman, Latin Professor at University College London, at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, May 20 1860. The original title crossed out by unknown hand and added in ink "Moral Influence of Law". From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Robson, Levey and Franklyn, Fetter Lane, London.
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Alliance Depot; Alliance Offices
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1860
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CT76
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Religion
Politics
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Church and State-England
Conway Tracts
Morality
Religion
Religion and politics
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CT Iq
RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES:
A SERMON PREACHED AT
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baptist’s,
GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET,
AND AFTERWARDS READ AS A PAPER ^BEFORE
THE
LONDON DIALECTICAL SOCIETY,
BY THE
EEV. MAURICE DAVIES, D.D.,
Author of “Orthodox,” “Unorthodox,” and “Heterodox London,” &c.,&c.
MEDIO TUTI88IMUS IBIS.
KENSINGTON:
JAMES WAKEHAM, BEDFORD TERRACE, CHURCH STREET.
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��RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES.
------------- 0-------------
St. Luke xii. 51.
“ Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth ? I
tell you nay, but rather division.”
For those who are disposed to take a sentimental
view of religion, it must be infinitely distressing to find
that the revelation of Jesus Christ has not proved that
complete panacea for all evils social and theological
which their own a priori principles laid down that it
ought to be. Peace on earth was the anticipatory
announcement of the Coming Man. Not Peace, but a
Sword, his own account of his mission, more than
borne out by the event. Before he came there was
that stagnation which men artificially make and mis
name Peace. Since that time they have ever been
ready to fight and slay one another for their religion.
Every new era of Reformation has been a fresh
development of odium theologicum, until the old
encomium is quite reversed, and people cry out “ See
how these Christians hate one another;” and on the
Augustinian principle, but with a new meaning, the
seed of every evolution in Church development has
been the blood of martyrs. Every Reformer from
�Christ himself to the Wesleys has realised this. The
method and measure only of their misery has differed :
the principle that inflicted it was identical. The
Scribes and Pharisees crucified Christ. The Bishop of
Lincoln erases from the tombstome of a dead child the
title which courtesy awarded to its Wesleyan father.
In proportion to the purity of their faith have men
been prone to
Prove their doctrines orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks ;
and to
Call fire, and sword, and desolation,
A godly, thorough Reformation.
Along with general progress, religious stagnation
has had the tendency to pass into its violent antithesis,
and in both cases, general and special, has humanity
been the gainer. Only in proportion as it has caught
the contagion has religion in any degree seemed not
to deserve the stigma cast upon it by Mr. Buckle of
being the static as opposed to the dynamic force in
SocietyIt may be edifying, and certainly will not be unin
teresting to trace in one or two typical cases this con
dition of human stagnation met by what we are bold
to call the genuine revulsion of Christian Faith and
Energy, and collaterally to notice some of those Com-
�5
promises by which the ingenuity of man tries to over
ride the great principle “ Not Peace but Division ” —
the quieta non movere method which is characteristic of
so great a portion of modern orthodoxy.
In the Jewish Synagogue ■ t the date of the
Christian era, degenerated though it was held to be
from the perfect centralisation of the Temple pure and
simple, we have an admirable picture of full-blown
Sacerdotalism, which the recent lectures of Dr.
Benisch, at St. George’s Hall, only amplified in more
minute details without questioning the vraisemblance o^
the New Testament account. The result was, to a great
extent, the stagnation we spoke of. True, the Pharisees
were disposed to carry things with a high hand; they
were the Ritualists of' the hour; while Broad Church
men in the shape of Sadducees spread into the very
highest quarters doctrines which seemed to spiritualise
away a good deal of the antique Faith and olden dis
cipline. But on the whole the Jewish Church repre
sented to a very satisfactory extent that artificial Peace
which the Sacerdotalism of every age creates and pro
nounces “Very good; ” and, in complete opposition to
this came the system of Christ. Aiming in the Judaean
Ministry at being nothing more than a reformation
and expansion of Judaism to meet the growing needs
of humanity, it was driven by the fulminations of the
Sanhedrim into fierce revolution out among the
�G
Galilaean hills, and finally culminated in the fatal
mistake of Calvary.
Here we have the two poles in extreme opposition.
On one side the established faith, with its prestige of
centuries, its delicate nuances of theological opinion
just to relieve the monotony of Infallibility—on tlie
other the levelling* doctrines of Nazareth branded with
the stigma of Golgotha.
Between these two came the accommodations and
compromises which some pretend to find even in St.
Paul himself—in the anathemas hurled at the Corin
thian Church, and at those who questioned his personal
apostleship; and which certainly were discernible in the
constant efforts of well-meaning heretics to drag the
Christian schism back into the respectable position of a
Jewish sect.
And so History repeats itself. Sown in the blood
of martyrs, established by the policy of Constantine,
developed in the east and west by the finesse of
Patriarchs and Popes, the Christian Church stood
after fifteen centuries curiously in the same position
as the Jewish Synagogue had done—and just as that
had developed, in a precisely similar period, out of the
simple institutions of Sinai. The so-called Catholic
Church stood supreme in Western Europe, until Luther,
like a second Baptist, sounded his note of defiance
“ Repent,” “ Reformand again the reformation was
refused, the reformers were persecuted, and, in Eng-
�7
land, like another Galilee, the battle of Faith and Free
Thought seemed likely to be fought to the very knife.
When, lo! another compromise.
The Anglican
Church, under Royal Supremacy, threw herself into
the breach. It is no sort of disrespect to speak of
her thus as the result of a compromise. The fact
stands recorded in the very structure of her formularies
and articles, just as the successive changes in the
structure of the globe are written in the solemn letters
of the igneous and the stratified rocks. A fresh totality
was formed by the superposition of the new doctrines
on the antique faith. We can concede thus much with
out joining Mr. Froude to attribute all the cardinal
virtues to Henry VIII., as Head of the Church, or
wailing with the Church Times about “ the lamentable
schism of the sixteenth century.”
The Anglican
Church first, and the Protestant sects afterwards,
were efforts more or less respectable, more or less
graceful, more or less successful, to graft the new
opinions on the old trunk.
Our position as ministers and members of the Church
of England shows that we hold the Anglican Commun
ion to have a logical locus standi. What else counteracts
the centrifugal force which would otherwise drive us
off into the abysses of theological space, until we
reached the position of the Dialectical Society itself,
and accepted nothing save as the conclusion of a
syllogism ?
�8
But is not the same apparently inevitable mistake
being made over again,—the mistake of High Priest
and Sanhedrim as opposed to Christ, of Pope and
Cardinal as opposed to the Reformers ? Do not the
words of the Founder still stand good, “Nay, but
rather division
“ Not peace but a sword ?’’ We are
always trying to do away with Divisions—to wreathe,
prematurely and precociously, the Sword with the
Olive Branch.
On one side stereotyped Faith, on the other crude
Reason. On both sides Intolerance; on neither Con
ciliation—is not that a fair statement of what we see
around us ?
What shall we do then ? Try to eliminate either of
these opposed elements—the static or the dynamic?
As well seek for the Philosopher’s Stone or the Elixir
Vitae. As wisely think to ensure peace by suspending
either the centripetal or the centrifugal in the balanced
forces of the universe. From the collision of these
forces results the well-being of humanity, as the
symmetry of our planetary orbits.
Shall we, on the contrary, drift into an Epicurean
optimism, and say, Whatever is is best ? The alterna
tive would seem scarcely necessary. It is surely pos
sible to agree to differ. The endeavour to develope
Pure Faith is the Idol of the Churchman : to excise
Faith the Idol of the Philosopher (if we may borrow a
�9
Baconian term.) The supreme mistake is to carry into
science the dogmatisms of theology. The opposite
error, though not so fatal, palpably is erroneous, to
import into theology, which claims to be in some
degree a matter of d priori revelation, the purely
inductive method of science.
Is there no via media—no spicy equatorial zone
between these poles of Pure Faith and utter Free
Thought ? That is the problem we set ourselves so
wearily to solve in our Churches, Communities, and
Parties. The pervading error is that we all claim
finality. Each assumes to have ultimated truth : and,
worse than all, wants to call down fire from Heaven on
those who differ.
Surely here come in the words of the Master, “ Ye
know not what Spirit ye are of.”
Can any Christian read the posthumous work of
John Stuart Mill, or the recent utterances of Professor
Tyndall at Belfast, and say there is nothing in common
between true Theism and self-styled Materialism ?
On the other hand will those who make of the works
of the Philosophers what they accuse the Christians of
making of the Bible—will they deny the existence of a
missing link in science—a failure of Philosophy to
cover all the knowable ? Is it necessary to assume a
sort of mental emasculation in every one who accepts
anything on trust ? Is that not what Lord Lytton
�10
called “the most stubborn of all bigotries—the fanati
cism of unbelief? ” Such was scarcely the doctrine of
him who wrote on the Scientific use of the Imao-inao
tion thus :—“ The clergy of England—at all events the
clergy of London—have nerve enough to listen to the
strongest views which any one amongst us would care
to utter; and they invite, if they do not challenge,
men of the most decided opinions to state and stand
by those opinions in open court. No theory upsets
them. Let the most destructive hypothesis be stated
only in the language current among gentlemen, and
they look it in the face * * smiting the theory, if
they do not like it, with honest secular strength. In
fact the greatest cowards of the present dag are not to he
found among the clergy but within the pale of science
itself.”
The question of questions at the present hour is
whether it be not possible to elaborate something like
a Christian Positivism—the terms are not contradic
tory—which, accepting the broad basis of the Christian
Revelation, and leaving its extent undefined, should
range—not below, not above, but co-ordinately there
with the great demonstrations of science; making of
the revelations of faith and the facts of science, not
two discrepant books, but simply two volumes in the
Great Book of Nature—each, in the truest sense, a
Revelation, neither of the two (in the words of the
�11
Athanasian Creed) before or after the other, greater
or less than, the other. Is it chimerical to look for
such an issue of our divisions ?
Is it not, at all events more hopeful to seek thus to
utilise those inevitable divisions than to try to drill
men into an artificial and unreal unity either on the
side of implicit Faith or licensed Scepticism ?
Such utilitarianism is not—need it be said?—the
present tendency on either side. On the one hand
there stand the Dogma of Infallibility and the Vatican
Decrees which no special pleading in the world will
ever convince men to be anything like an extension of
Magna Charta; on the other there is what has been
clearly defined by its promulgator as not the atheistic
position which reluctantly doubts the existence of God,
but the antitheistic which dogmatically, and in the very
spirit of the Vatican Decrees, denies such existence—■
and still between these poles any number of com
promises good, bad, and indifferent, temperate,
tropical, and frigid.
It is for some such compromise we plead; and
therefore would not indiscriminately condemn all or
any, though neither would we lose sight of the fact
that they are compromises and accommodations. The
grand mistake is not the putting the new wine into
the old bottles (though that is proverbially a delicate
and dangerous experiment), but the insisting that the
�12
wineskins are intact when the wine is palpably spilt
before our eyes.
In all things charity: agreement to differ: the
simple logical processes of abstraction and generalisa
tion—are not these the methods by which we may get
at the essence of the Christian Faith and Morals ?
What, on the contrary, do we do ? Pass a Bill,
nominally to “ put down Ritualism,” but which will
certainly “ put down ” defects as well as excess of
rubrical orthodoxy, even if the “ putting down ” any
thing or anybody were not as much an anachronism in
the Reformed Church, as the excommunication of an
offender by Paul was alien from the spirit of him who
raised the sinful woman from the ground, and bade her
go and sin no more when none of her accusers were
found capable of casting a stone at her.
The infallibility which we look for in a Vatican
Decree, comes incongruously enough from Fulham or
Lambeth : and whereas the Catholic only holds infal
lible the decisions of Pius IX. given ex cathedra, we—
some of us—are disposed to accept as final all the
utterances of our Episcopate—the Fulham Code of
Morals—the Canterbury Standard of Faith (each no
doubt of the very purest kind),—the diatribes of Dr.
Wordsworth against race-horses, Wesleyan Ministers,
and Cremation ’
The cardinal clerical virtue at the present moment is
�13
holding one’s tongue—Tacere tutum est—the being
content to keep quiet: not to have “ views ” either in
the direction of Dr. Pusey or Bishop Colenso. What
a commentary on the elasticity of our Establishment is
the simultaneous presence of each of these dignitaries
within its comprehensive fold! Whoever gravitates
towards either of those poles is labelled in the Index
Expurgatorius of episcopal regards a “ dangerous man.”
But it is too late; there are others equally high in
dignity to those just mentioned, who have set the
fashion of speaking out, and the Muscular Christians
among our clergy are taking up the old battle cry from
Marmion :—
“ On, Stanley, on !”
And as with the priests, so with the people. They
are beginning to see that the assumption of authority
in a body whose very raison d'etre is the emancipation
of its adherents from Jewish and Roman bondage is
an incongruity and an anachronism. If they like
genuflexions and a full band in church, they feel they
have a right to them ; if moral essays and a shortened
service, who shall say them nay ? The question of
establishment or disestablishment is one more likely to
come from without than within; but already the myster
ious words of Mr. Miall, with reference to possibly
uncongenial allies of the Liberationist, point towards a
very novel reproduction of the junction between the
Pharisees and Herodians.
�14
Recognising, then, as we are taught on highest
authority to do, the supreme authority of the individual
conscience, we may still discern a work for the com
bined consciences of the many fused into sympathetic
union in churches, just as the individual duties and
rights of men run up into their social rights and duties
as citizens of a State; but we see no reason for churches
any more than nations claiming to represent mankind
exhaustively; and a judicious balance of power stands
far above any supremacy of one faith over another.
Our lots as Englishmen, whether in Church or State,
will, we venture to think, well bear comparison with
any; but it would be the poorest insularity to deem
that we exhaust excellence in either capacity. To
assume authority in a system which, whether we like it
or not, is the outcome of that schism of the sixteenth
century as well as the previous schism of the first, is as
incongruous as that aping of national supremacy which
too often renders our countrymen ridiculous when they
come into contact with other and more cosmopolitan
people.
It is thus I feel that without sacrificing one iota of
our individual convictions we may still comport our
selves courteously towards those forms of faith or
systems of discipline that differ even most widely from
our own, whether in the direction of sacerdotalism or
scepticism.
�15
The very fact—so travellers tell us—that at the
equator the sun is all the year overhead, and that
at the poles there is the wearisome monotony of the
one long day and dreary night, makes more enjoyable
the changes of our temperate climate—the long summer
days, the short grey winter evenings, the alternate
sunshine and rain—which things ” surely “ are an
allegory.”
Jaines Wakebam, Printer,4, Bedford Terrace, Church Street, Kensington.
�‘Wj
�
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Victorian Blogging
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An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Religious differences: A sermon preached at St. John the Baptist's, Great Marlborough Street, and afterwards read as a paper before the London Dialectical Society
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Davies, Maurice [Rev.]
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 15 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Extensive annotations in pencil written upside down on title page and last printed page and blank page at the end. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
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James Wakeham
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CT5
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Sermons
Religion
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Victorian Blogging
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An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Proceedings of the third annual meeting of the Free Religious Association, held in Boston May 26 and 27, 1870
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Free Religious Association
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Place of publication: Boston, Mass.
Collation: 121, [1] p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
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John Wilson and Son
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1870
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Free thought
Religion
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Conway Tracts
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Freedom of Religion
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210525ac64e618134cbc695798f17a04
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Text
ON THE
FORMATION OF RELIGIOUS OPINIONS.
BY THE LATE
EEV. JAMES CRANBROOK,
EDINBURGH.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
Price Threepence.
��ON THE
FORMATION OF RELIGIOUS OPINIONS.
-----------------PURPOSE this evening to discourse to you upon
“The Formation of Religious Opinions.” The
subject is closely connected with, and arises out of
what I was saying last Sunday evening. I shall
therefore quote the same passage as a text, 1 Cor. x.
15, “I speak as unto wise men; judge ye what I say.”
But what I aim at to-night is to make some practical
observations that I think we are too apt to lose sight
of. Indeed, people seldom follow any principle or
rule in forming their opinions upon questions of
religion. They pick them up at hap-hazard; or
simply retain what they had been taught in their
youth. And even where they come to a resolution to
investigate the subject, and form a judgment for
themselves, they seldom go about it systematically.
One person recommends this book, another person
recommends that book. They read them, and adopt
the opinions which seem the more probable, or to
which particular circumstances incline them. But it
is very seldom they can give you a reason which will
bear strict scrutiny and investigation why they have
chosen one opinion rather than another.
The general spirit of one’s culture and mental
character has more to do with the adoption of
opinions in the majority of cases than anything else.
I
�4
The Formation of
Some men are naturally very narrow-minded, and the
education they have received has not tended to cor
rect the narrowness. They will incline, therefore, to
whatever is. narrow and bigoted. Others, again, are
generous, liberal, and free: whatever partakes of
their own generosity, liberality, and freedom will
therefore seem to them to have a preponderance of
evidence on its side. Some are learned in ancient
literature, and have thoroughly imbibed its spirit.
What harmonises with this will seem to them as
true. Others are addicted to metaphysical specula
tions, and can only discern truth in what presents
itself under the formulae sanctioned by their school.
Whilst others have the purely scientific spirit, and
require all religious opinions before they accept them
to be subjected to the tests of their special methods.
And thus it is each one has certain predilections
which very materially influence him when he thinks
about religious questions and endeavours to make
up his mind as to what is true. They look at
the questions subjectively, rather than objec
tively—study them in relation to their own
thoughts and feelings rather than as they are in
themselves, and resting on evidence which needs to
be examined simply according to its own merits.
And this will be the case with a large number for a
long time to come.
To form an independent rational opinion upon
any subject affecting the higher interests of life re
quires an amount of training and leisure few possess.
The majority must take their opinions at second
hand, and they will naturally take those which are
most in accordance with their own tastes, inclinations,
and culture. It is just the same, for example, in
questions of politics or legislation, as in questions of
religion. These questions depend upon a scientific
knowledge of human nature, its laws and tendencies,
upon a thorough knowledge of all the circumstances,
�Religious Opinions.
5
the conditions physical, intellectual, and moral of
the country, and a foreseeing sagacity capable of
calculating the effects of a given measure upon a
country in such a condition and in such circumstances,
the people of which are subject to those fixed laws of
human nature. Now, I suppose there are not fifty
members of the House of Commons who possess this
knowledge, or who attempt to study these questions
scientifically. Yet we all hold some opinion or
other about the questions. And the opinions we
hold are adopted just in the same way as the majority
adopt their religious opinions, i.e., according as they
agree, harmonise and are in accordance with our
tastes, inclinations, tendencies and general culture.
And opinions upon very many other subjects are
adopted by the mass of people in just the same way.
But you will see that there can properly be no cer
tainty about opinions so received. Their truth or
untruth will be a mere matter of chance, depending
upon accidental circumstances. And it is unworthy
of a man capable of thought and reasoning, not to
form his opinions upon a rational and trustworthy
method. It becomes, therefore, each one of us to seek
out the true method by which our religious opinions
may be formed.
The methods by which real students have formed
their religious opinions have always been the methods
they have followed in their philosophical enquiries—
indeed, religious opinions have never been anything
more than the outcoming of the various systems of
philosophy in this region of religious thought. It
was, for example, the imaginative philosophy of
Plato, modified by neo-Platonism and the Alexand
rian school which determined the theological or reli
gious opinions of the Church of the third, fourth, and
fifth centuries. The method of inquiry pursued by
the philosophers was the method adopted by the
theologians, and the resultant philosophy and theology
�6
The Formation of
were one harmonious whole. So again the special
philosophy which embodied itself in the writings of
Locke, found its religious expression in the theological
school of the English Deists, in the Unitarianism of
Priestley and Belsham, and in certain broad, or, as
they were then called, latitudinarian sections of the
reputed orthodox churches. So, once more, the
transcendental philosophy which Coleridge did so
much to bring into reputation, has furnished F. D.
Maurice and his school with their method and the
basis of their system, and is greatly influencing the
thinking and forms of religious opinion amongst
many who are striving hard to retain their orthodox
position. At the same time the severe method of
positivism is working in another direction and revo
lutionizing the religious opinions of all who come
under its influence.
These illustrations, then, will serve to show you
that the very first step for us to take, when seeking to
form our religious opinions, is to determine upon the
method by which our enquiries shall be conducted.
The method will inevitably determine the conclusions
at which we shall arrive.
But here a certain school interposes and claims for
its method an absolute control over our inquiries. It
says, “ God has given us a revelation in a book, and
the only method we ought to pursue is to take a
grammar and dictionary, ascertain the precise literal
meaning of the book, and accept that as the absolute
truth and rule.” But let us see if this method be as
conclusive as they seem to suppose. We will take a
precept, not a dogma, and that one spoken by the
highest, truest lips, Matt. v. 38, &c., “Ye have heard
that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth
for a tooth—(you will recollect that that is a law laid
down for the guidance of courts of justice, see Ex. xxi.
23, &c., so that Christ is here referring not to taking
personal vengeance, but to getting one who has injured
�Religious Opinions.
7
you punished by law): but I say unto you resist not
evil (by bringing him before the magistrate); but
whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn
to him the other also. And if any man will sue
thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have
thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to
go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that
asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee
turn not thou away.”
Now, I ask respecting these precepts, as I have asked
before on frequent occasions, does any sensible per
son in the present day think they are to be obeyed?
Are we never to prosecute at law those doing us an
injury ? If any one prosecute us for an unjust claim
are we not to defend our cause ? Are we to give
to every beggar ? And are we never to refuse to
lend to those who want to borrow ? There can be
but one answer, and that answer will be in direct
contradiction to the precepts. I ask then upon what
ground, by what authority, these plain, simple and
direct precepts of Christ, spoken in unmistakeable
language, are modified or set on one side ? It will be
said, one's common sense sees they are inapplicable,
and would be unworkable in the present day in our
circumstances. Precisely so. But see what this in
volves. You apply your common sense, or reason, or
judgment, whatever you like to call it, to these pre
cepts and set them aside by its authority. Then you
apply your common sense, reason, or judgment to
other precepts, and by its authority pronounce them
still obligatory. You have left your grammar and
lexicon, and you are trying these precepts by tests
furnished by your own mind. Their authority really
rests therefore not upon the claims of him who
spoke them, but upon the judgments you have
formed respecting them. It is you who pronounce
them binding or not binding in virtue of some
test your judgment has supplied.
�8
The Formation of
. Now, what I say, and what the whole drift of this
discourse is intended to shew, is that it is of the
first importance that in selecting this test by which
moral precepts, doctrines and religious opinions of
all kinds are to be tried, you be guided by right and
rational principles or rules, in other words that
your method of enquiry be sound and good.
In searching for this method it is a fortunate thing
for us that we have the history and experience of up
wards of two thousand years to help us. For we are
thus enabled at all events to see where and how
others have failed, and to avoid the same blunders.
All the old systems of opinion have broken down
and failed to hold their ground against the advancing
tide of progress. Each one in turn has given place
to something fresh and has never revived excepting
under a new phase and with great modifications.
The system of St Augustine, for example, is said to
have been revived by Luther and other Reformers.
And without doubt the statement is partially true,
but no one who knows the writings of Augustine and
Luther would say the Augustine theology of the
sixteenth century is precisely the same as the
Augustine theology of the fourth. The questions are
looked at, argued, and concluded upon under different
phases, under different modes of culture. It is not
the theology of Augustine, it is the theology of
Augustine moulded, modified and permeated by the
spirit of the sixteenth century. The old questions
come up, but they come in a new dress, and they are
discussed from a different standing ground. And so
it has ever been, a constant flux of systems, succeed
ing and superseding each other, but the old questions
ever returning to be debated over again.
Now, how is it that all these discussions and
philosophies have failed to settle these questions or
to give us, at least, some points settled which should
be debateable no more for ever, and from which we
�Religious Opinions.
9
might set out upon fresh and more extended inquiries.
The answer appears to me quite plain. They failed
because their methods of inquiry were vicious from
the very beginning. They started upon untested
assumptions, and built up their theories by imagin
ative reasonings, the elements of which were furnished
by their fancies alone. Sometimes, indeed, they
would appeal to facts of consciousness or of man’s
history, i.e., facts of the inner or of the outer life ;
but when they did so, they interpreted them by
assumptions or fancies wholly gratuitous, and the
facts therefore became as worthless as their fancies.
Thus, as an example, the Semitic and Western con
ceptions of God assumed his similitude to man in
mind, while not also in body. Now, that assump
tion once made the remaining conceptions, and the
interpretations of his proceedings would legitimately
follow according to what men at the time being found
in themselves. Accordingly, at one time his govern
ment was represented as that of an arbitrary despot;
at another time, as that of a constitutional king, his
actions being limited by supposed principles of eternal
right and fitness; at another, as that of a still more
merciful sovereign striving to find a remedy against
the terrible mischief done by his too severe law; and
now recently as a father governing his family and
never chastening but in love. But each and all of
these representations are equally true for those who
have believed them, and equally founded upon a
purely gratuitous assumption, viz., that there is such
a resemblance between the mind of God and man
that you may reason from the principles, modes of
thought, and of action in the one, to the principles,
modes of thought, and of action in the other.
Now, I deny that there is the least pretence in
reason for this assumption. It is purely fanciful and
baseless. There are no means of proving that it is
true, if it be true. And therefore the whole system
�io
The Formation of
of the divine government built upon it is as worthless,
as uncertain, and as irrational as its base. But, say
those who make and rest upon this assumption, if
God be not like to man in his mental character and
principles of action, what is He like ? I answer, I
do not know. But say they, if you do not know,
what affections, dispositions, characteristics, will you
ascribe to him 1 I answer, I ascribe none. Then say
they, you are left in the hands of this terrible
almighty power, in total ignorance of his intentions
towards you. I reply, not so, I know many of
his intentions towards me with tolerable certainty.
I find that he always acts in the same way,
by the same laws, causing the same antecedents
to be followed by the same consequents, the same
causes by the same effects, the same conditions by the
same results. So far, therefore, as I know these
causes, conditions, laws (call them what you please),
I know precisely what God’s intentions are. His
intentions concerning me are, that whenever I come
under any one of these laws, conditions, or causes,
that the consequences he has attached to it in the
order of things shall inevitably follow. And that is
enough for me to know. I have no longing after the
impossible, the comprehension of the Infinite and
Absolute. . I know, as the late Sir William Hamilton .
expressed it, the length of my tether. I acquiesce in
my conditioned knowledge.
Now, this illustration has not been a digression
from our enquiry into the right method of forming
religious opinions. It has expounded it. It lias
shown how baseless, uncertain and fluctuating must
be all systems originated in mere speculative fancies
and assumptions. It has shewn there can be only
one method fixed, certain, and unchangeable—that,
namely, which is purely based upon facts, and brings
all its reasonings to the test of facts before it finally
accepts as true its conclusions. It is by this method
�Religious Opinions.
11
the whole advance in every kind of human knowledge
has been made. So far as it was pursued in ancient
times what was discovered by it, is as true to day as
it was then. Every great deliverance from human
ignorance and superstition has been wrought out by it.
There is not an enlightened conception of the divine
government but what may be traced to its influence
acting directly or indirectly upon the mind. From
its conclusions there can be no possible appeal. It
is the highest and ultimate test of all truth, of all
speculation, of all reasoning. What it ascertains
must be true as long as the world lasts, and its
judgments can never be set aside, excepting by
assumption into higher and more general truths. It
is the only method left to us in this nineteenth
century. But now, you say, where shall we find the
facts to which this method is to be applied, and upon
the study of which all our religious opinions are to be
formed ? I answer, in the whole experience of man,
in general, and in your own special experience in
particular, and this experience carries us out of
ourselves recollect, in virtue of the relations we
sustain to the external world. Whatever is evolved
in your religious experience constantly, under the
same conditions that is for you a religious fact, and
forms the basis of a true religious opinion—the basis
of a true religious opinion for you, recollect, not the
basis of a general religious opinion true for all men.
For our individual peculiarities and circumstances
constitute individual conditions which may lead to
results altogether untrue in the experience of other
men. Yet that these conditions may be true for you
cannot be questioned. It is an individual truth
affecting only yourself. You come into contact, for
example, with some great and sublime object in
nature which immediately produces in you feelings
of reverence and awe, and suggests the idea of a
present good and beneficent Creator calling forth
�12
The Formation of
your love and trust. That, therefore, is the fact of
your experience, and you found upon it the opinion
that it is the tendency of such objects to produce
such results. Now that opinion is true for you
individually. But you extend your inquiries to the
experience of other men, and then you find that
these results do not always follow. In some you find
there is the deep feeling produced by contemplating
the object, but no suggestion of the idea of God.
In others, the idea of God is suggested, but it is
accompanied by fear and terror. So that you correct
the conclusion of your personal experience by the
wider experience of mankind, and instead of
saying that the grand objects of nature tend to
suggest the idea of God and to produce love and
trust, you say these objects tend to produce these
effects under certain conditions only.
Your re
ligious. opinion is modified, generalized by a more
extensive observation of facts. The first opinion
founded upon your own experience is still true for
you, because your mind is in that condition under
which this love for and trust in God follow; but it is
not a general truth and your opinion has to be
modified accordingly.
But now, suppose you are not content to rest here.
You want to ascertain which is the normal, proper
and natural condition and result, that which ends, as
in your own mind, in love and trust, or that which
ends in terror and apprehension. Still you have
nothing but the facts to guide you. You begin
therefore by examining and scrutinizing more closely
the facts. You find in those in whom the terror is
excited some humanised conception of God which
clothes him with attributes which have a malignant
aspect towards man, and by examination you find
that this conception rests upon the baseless assumption
that God must be like man, and so like malignant
and fierce men. Or in other cases you find it has
�Religious Opinions.
13
been produced by some great calamity, which has
produced the impression that God delights in calamity,
an impression depending upon a few circumstances
and not upon general observation. On the other hand,
your own trust and love rest upon no such ground.
You do not pretend to know God as he is in himself;
but by extensive observation you find that upon the
whole his operations in nature are beneficent and
good, leading to human well being and happiness.
You observe that the calamities are the result of
conditions which may for the most part be controlled
and constitute a system of discipline which is benefi
cial and merciful. Seeing therefore that the real facts
call forth the love and trust, and that it is fancy or
an imperfect observation of a few facts that inspire
the mistrust and fear, you form the generalized
religious opinion that those conditions in which the
apprehensions of God’s presence call forth trust and
love, are the true, normal, and proper conditions of
man. Nor could anything possibly shake that opinion
but such an appeal to the facts as would shew you
had misconceived or misinterpreted them.
But possibly some one may say, this method will
answer very well in such a question as you have pro
posed, but will it apply to all, such as the peculiar
doctrines of Christianity for example1? Now, I have
already answered that question in effect. For leaving
out of consideration the evidences by which the
authority of Christianity has to be established,
involving as they do the questions of miracles, which
is purely one of facts, I remind you of what I have
already said about the interpretation. Every one
interprets by his system of philosophy formed by his
judgment according to certain methods. The ultimate
appeal in these questions of interpretation is not to
the grammar and lexicon, but to the principles held
by the interpreter. Hence the opposite conclusions
come to by men equally sincere, equally learned,
�14
Fhe Formation of
equally pious, and equally skilled in interpretation.
The Calvinists, for example, the older Unitarians, and
the Arminians equally believe in the divine authority
of the New Testament or of Christ. They equally
strive to find out the meaning of the text. They
come to opposite conclusions. Why1? Oh, the bigots
of each party would say, because the others do not
come with an open mind, but seek only their own
preconceived opinions. I have, however, nothing to
do with the bigots just now. The real cause is,
because each comes with his own system to the inter
pretation, and so arrives at different results. And
it could not from the nature of things be otherwise,
whether men know it or not. So that in reality the
ultimate appeal is to these judgments formed before
consulting the oracle, and all depends upon the method
by which those judgments are formed.
Take, for example, the doctrine of the atonement.
Now, the Calvinist holding certain views about
God’s justice, government &c., interprets the passages
speaking of Christ’s death in one way, and gives to the
atonement one meaning. The Arminian, holding
modified views of God’s justice and government, and
exalting higher his love, interprets the same passages
in another way, and gives to the atonement a modified
meaning. Whilst the older Unitarian, holding other
views of God’s character, apd exalting his love still
higher than the Arminian, interprets the passages in
quite another way, and does not hold the doctrine of
the atonement in the Calvinistic sense at all. Now
how can any one form an opinion upon these three
different modes of interpretation ? Only by determin
ing the truth or the untruth of the principles upon
which their system of interpretation is based; and that
must be done by the method I have explained. If
any one do not care for any of these systems, and
wishes to determine the question simply upon its
own merits, how can he do so but by a reference to
�Religious Opinions.
15
facts ? Do all those who believe in the atonement get
delivered, so far as we see, from the consequences of
their past sins 1 Would the drunkard, for example,
who has drunk himself into a state verging on
delirium tremens, get saved from the fit which was
coming upon him to-night, by a sudden conversion
experienced at twelve o'clock this morning ? And
secondly, do none but those who so believe, amend
their lives and reap all the good and happiness of
the amendment ? There can be but one answer to
such questions, and it is determined by matters of
fact easily ascertained, and from which there can be
no appeal.
I trust, then, I have said enough to explain the
method by which our religious opinions must be
formed. There is none other left to us amidst the
jarring controversies of the day. At all events, of
this we are quite sure, whatever we come short of,
through this method (for myself I do not think we
shall come short of any then) yet whatever we do
grasp will be unalterable and infallibly sure.
It
will rest on a basis of fact which cannot be
removed. In this method is certainty, and in this
alone. All others are a delusion and a snare.
But let me conclude with one caution. Above all
things, in the use of this method, do not too hastily
generalize your conclusions. See to it that you have
a sufficient number of facts to form your opinion upon.
There is no greater evidence of a philosophical ’mind
than the power of suspending one’s judgment until
all the evidence is before one; as there is no greater
proof of a weak mind than hesitancy after the con
clusions are formed. And herein doubtlessly lies the
danger to which those employing this method are
exposed. Too often they want to rise to certainty
by a leap. Most enquirers get impatient of delay.
After a rapid glance over a few facts, selected it may
be but from one class, age, or type, they rashly conclude
�16
The Formation of Religious Opinions.
that they have comprehended the universal law. They
mistake the individual and it may be accidental
process for the general, and therefore go blundering
on into all sorts of errors. The very first requisite
to the formation of true religious opinions, as of all
others, is patience, caution, suspension of judgment
until the whole field of facts is surveyed and nothing
left out that is essential to the result. Then the con
clusion, so far as it goes, will be as certain as the fact of
one’s own existence. And then recollect, as an
encouragement to this patience and suspension of
judgment, that religion may exist actively where the
opinions are yet in abeyance, for truthful, well
formed opinions are not necessary to religious feeling
and life; although on the other hand the opinions
once formed have a momentous result on the
religious life.
Be deliberate then, scrutinize, weigh, compare,
discount all fancies and all prejudices, earnestly
judge by the facts widely inducted, and God will
guide you into all truth.
TURNBULL AND SPEABS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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On the formation of religious opinions
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Cranbrook, James
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Place of publication: Ramsgate
Collation: 16 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Turnbull and Spears, Edinburgh.
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Thomas Scott
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[1871]
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CT166
G5742
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G5749
RA1602
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Rationalism
Religion
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English
Conway Tracts
Faith and Reason