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THE
SOUTH PLACE MAGAZINE:
A MONTHLY-RECORD
OF THE WORK OF
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Vol. 1., No. 1.
~[ace
lBtbical $ociet\?
APRIL, 1895.
2d. Montbly;
liB. Od. Annually. post free.
TWO HISTORICAL SOUTH PLACE EDITORS .
By
MONcuRE
D.
CONWAY, M .A .
The large sects with their militant journals may smile at
the small size and scope of the South Place Magazine, but
the Society may find some reason for satisfaction in its
unpretending dimensions and aims. Some record and indication of the ociety's large and varied work has been found
?esirable, but the general periodical literature of the country
~s sufficiently pervaded by rational ideas and liberal principles,
Its pages sufficiently open to free expression of every opinion,
to render unnecessary any such separate representative of a
~ociety essentially unsectarian, and aiming only to diffuse a
hberalleaven in the world . This was not always the case .
For fifty years after the foundation of the Society (February
14th, 1793), its ministers were also editors, and during the
long reign of terror for English liberalism, which followed
!he brief reign of terror in France, they did valiant service
111 keeping alive the traditions of constitutional liberty.
'Ye
can now hardly realise the heavy price paid by our fathers
for the freedom we enjoy. "From the beginning of the
century to the death of Lord Liverpool," wrote idney Smith,
'~ was an awful period for anyone who ventured to maintain
h?eral principles. He was sure to be assailed with all the
blllingsgate of the French Revol uti on : 'J acobin,' , Leveller,'
, Atheist,' 'Incendiary,' , Regicide,' were the gentlest terms
used, and any man who breathed a syllable against the
senseless bigotry of the Georges was shunned as unfit for
social life. To say a word against any abuse that a rich
man inflicted, and a poor man suffered, was bitterly and
steadily re ented, and in one year 12,OOO persons were
committed for offences against the game laws."
Leigh Hunt was among the first who began the paper-and-
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type siege against this British Bastille built on ruins of the
constitution . In 1808 he and his brother John founded the
Examiner, to "promote parliamentary reform, liberality of
opinion in general," and especially "freedom from superstition."
It took only five years to lodge these brave
brothers in prison . At a Saint Patrick's day dinner the
toa t to the Prince Regent was coldly received, and Sheridan
was hissed while trying to say a good word for the Prince.
Next day the Morning Post described the Prince Regent as
" the Mecrenas of the Age," and as an" Adonis of loveliness,
attended by Honour, Virtue and Truth." The Examiller
placed beside this flattery the prosaic facts, and therefore,
despite Lord Brougham's able defence, the brothers Hunt
were sentenced to two years imprisonment in separate prisons
and a fine of £500 each . The Government offered to pardon
both if the Examiner would promise to abstain from criticisms
of the Prince Regent and his actions, but the brothers
declined these terms and underwent their full penalties.
The Examiner, edited from Surrey goal, acquired, of course,
increased popularity and became a power in the land.
Thomas Carlyle told me that among his early recollections
was the excitement caused in Scotland by this journal. In
his native village, Ecclefechan, the place of its delivery was
eyery week besieged by an eager crowd, and its columns
furnished the town talk till another number came.
Among thof>e stirred by these events was William J ohnson
Fox, who soon after Leigh Hunt's release from prison
(I IS), became the minister of the Society which some years
later erected its chapel in South Place. A warm friendship,
founded in their common principles, was formed between
these two men, and for many years they were fellow sowers
scattering the seed of liberal ideas through various journals
and magazines.
Leigh Hunt was nearly two years older
than Fox, aDd his fine literary culture and polish were of
much service to the minister in enlarging his relation to the
intellectual world, while, sitting at the feet of the impassioned orator in his chapel, he himself gained increase of that
religious sentiment which touches us in his "Abou ben
Adhem." After Fox had been for some years editing the
Monthly Repository as an organ of the Unitarian denomination,
he purchased it (1831), and transformed it from a theological
publication into an organ of political and social reform, and
of literary and dramatic criticism . In this work his chief
helper and frequent contributor was Leigh Hunt, who, in
1837, succeeded him as the Editor. These veteran comrades
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sur:,ived into a generation which little realized how much
of Its harvest of liberty had been sown by their unwearied
labours, but they enjoyed a happy old age together, and to
th.e last were surrounded by a loving circle ·of those who had
wItnessed their struggles and the triumph of their principles.
It will interest our South Place people to read the subjoined letters exchanged between -these our noble forerunners
In their old age-the occasion being the death of Leigh
Hunt's son Vincent.
3 Sussex Place, Regent's Park,
7th November, 1852.
DEAR HUNT,-Experience might have hardened me to it
by this time, but I still have a melancholy surprise at seeing
~ow greatly my juniors take precedence of me in the final
Journey. Both feelings came strongly over me when I read
a late announcement as to one in whom, what little I saw of
him (some years ago), made me take a lively interest in him,
for his own sake as well as yours. Forgive the sympathy of
a fellow veteran in this battle of life, if it expresses itself
inopportunely during the season of your domestic calamity.
~ou and I have lived through the same stormy and changeful
tJ~es, we have fought under the same banner, though you
wIth finer weapons, and winning the more enduring wreaths;
and it may probably be about the same time that we both
make the" great experiment." Allow, therefore, the mourn~ul hand-shake of an old comrade, whose sympathy for you
In this trial will not be satisfied with entire quiescence.
I
will say no more, for you know quite as well as myself all
that is to be said on such sad events.
Ever yours affectionately,
W. J. Fox.
Kensington, 11th N ovembel', 1852.
Most welcome was your letter, my dear friend, though I
have not had the courage to open it until this moment. I felt
the letter like your presence, and wrung your hand, as it were,
looking away from you . There is only one point in it with
which I can differ, and that concerns yourself; but how can
I do anything but thank you for it, and love you the more,
and consider it a new bond for the remainder of life between
us. I cannot proceed for tears; but you have helped to make
them sweeter. He was all you fancied him. God bless you
a.nd yours, my kind friend, prays your grateful and affectIOnate
LEIGH HUNT.
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I. '
my tical, utterly opposed to the inflexible theology of the
Protestantism of Ulster. Let England take to Ireland half
as good a God as St . Patrick, and there may be a little
chance of its conversion. But a deity like Patrick has his
drawbacks . He directs the eyes of his worshippers backwards in tead of concentrating them on the things of today. There is too much of clan in his cult and not enough
universal brotherhood, but there are no hard dogmas, nor
Puritanical ab baths. He demands no long faces, nor sacrifice ; he is the intercessor, guardian, friend, providence, the
dispenser of good things. The thorn of superstition, always
growing, blossoms in the hand of the gentle St. Patrick.
THE
FORCES
OF
IRRELIGION .
On Sunday, March 24th, Mr. Conway's discourse was on
"The Forces of Irreligion ." Religion, he said, means restraint; it connotes spiritual obligation-something beyond
personal advantage, and is essentially unsectarian. There
is no balancing of chances or barter in religion, and the nun
who renounces this world for the next is not really rcligieuse .
It is partly in the increase of religious institutions that the
decline of true religion is observable. What sacrifices are
these organizations making? What secular advantages are
they giving up? The compulsory human sacrifice of the
ab bath is due chiefly to their craving.for full congregations,
and by the Leeds judgment Sunday is still under the benighted reign of George Ill. They suppress that text
of St . Luke, well-known to scholars: "And He came to a
place and saw one working on the abbath . And he said
unto him : '0 man, if thou knowest what thou art doin a ,
blessed art thou; if thou knowest not, thou art a transgressor.'" The extra sanctity of one day is irreligious,
and so is the extra sanctity of one Book. That Book is
known to contain thousands of errors, and though some of
the wor t are corrected in the Revised Version, no religious
organization has sanctioned its use. They prefer the responsibility of circulating proved falsehoods to an admission that they have been mistaken, and Truth is sacrificed
to their prestige . True religion is shown in the relinquihing of adventitious secular advantages. \\That Church has
done this? Their excuse is that the pious frauds of the
Bible and present worldly advantages are a great help
in saving mankind from a fearful de tiny, so that they are
forces of irreligion with religion on their lips, and man is
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left among those forces without a religion . Religion is
ebbing away from Theology and cutting new channels for
itself. Forty years ago one heard onLy the din of the strife of
Theological controversy; now Theology is almost as extinct
as the dodo. A very hopeful sign of to-day is the diffusion
of genius, so that the mountain peaks are lost in the general
elevation, and we have no great leaders. Heroes are not
needed now, for most Hydras are dead, and the Hero is often
in the way after he has slain his Hydra. Public interest
now centres in social questions; the crucifixion of the Jesus
of London is being stopped. He is to be fed, clothed,
educated, made healthy and moral; but if we are not careful
we shall only equip him with powers to attain selfish ends.
He must also have character, self-control, and the subtle
alchemy, like the spiritual love of worshippers, by which the
mud may be changed into the lily. We must see our own
nature in all its fulness . Nothing will so bind us to mankind
in love as the idea that there also is the same potential
beauty. A Zoroastrian seer visited Paradise and saw a
youth who had just died meet a maiden and ask her: "V/ho
art thou? fairer than any on earth." She replied, "0 youth,
I am thine own thoughts, words, and actions, I am thyself! "
SOWERS OF SEEDS AND TARES.
Mr. Conway began his discourse on March 3Ist by
describing in detail a fine allegorical painting he had seen,
representing the Devil sowing gold coins round the Cross;
but he pointed out that money is not tares any more than it
is wheat; it is power, both for good and evil. He mentioned
incidentally that Benjamin Flower, the philanthropic editor
of the" Arena," who has just published a book about the
power of money, is a grandson of the father of Eli za Flower
who was for so long an active member of this Society; and
went on to say that man is the sowel" and it behoves him to
sow truth, to cultivate carefully and well so that the tares of
superstition, ignorance, and vice may be choked out of
existence by its exuberant growth . The problem is not one
concerning evil in the abstract, but how to deal with each
individual injurious thing. The evils of the world are the
~ymptoms of the world's malady.
Everyone is reaping
what others have sown and is sowing for others to reap .
The tares of superstition, of race prejudice, of cynical ideas
concerning man or woman may be planted in us by others
and bear fruit, degrading our moral nature. An eastern
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proverb says" No seed will die," and this is absolutely true
of moral seed. Jesus taught that the best way to plant the
seed was deep in the earth, not on the stones, or cast up to
the unfertilizing heavens. The seed in its growth evolves or
changes character in response to the pressure of outside conditions . The germ of opposition to slavery, and silent
meetings, is to be found in the teaching of George Fox, the
founder of the Quakers; the evolution of which is seen in
the adoption of the silent meeting as one of their distinctive
characteristics, and their enthusiastic abolitionism.
" As you sow, so shall you reap," is not accurate, it should
be-as you sow, so shall others reap .
S UNDAY S CHOOL.
On March 3rd Mr. W . Varian spoke to the Combined Class on
"A great Dog."
On the following Sunday Mr. H. Crossfield told" The story
of Lafayette."
On the three succeeding Sundays, March 17th, 24th, and 3 1St,
Mr. F . J. Gould, superintendent of the East London Ethical
Sunday School, kindly addressed the children on "Anthropology." By the help of many illustrations the addresses were
made very entertaining and instructive.
SUNDAY AFTERNOON FREE LECTURES.
The course on Industries was brought to a satisfactory close by
Mr. Sidney Webb on Sunday, March 31st . We are compelled to
hold over till next month the account of this lecture, and those
deliver~d on the two preceding Sundays.
During the last two
years forty-eight lectures have been given, nearly all by workers
on their own Industries, and though some trades may not have
been represented, the course has covered pretty well all those of
the London district.
On March 3rd, Mr. Samuel Wood, M.P., lectured on "Coal
Miners ar:d Coal Mines," and his twenty-two years' personal ex.
perience as a collier much added to the interest of his lecture.
Opening with a graphic description of the surroundings and
general appearance of a coal-mine, he then entered into details
concerning the mode of working, and the relative remuneration
received by the miner and mine owner. He stated that 600,000
men are employed in coal mines, about 1,000 lives are lost
annually, and that in 1891 185 millions of tons of coal were
produced .
On March loth Herbert Burrows lectured on the Civil Service.
The lecturer, who met with a very cordial reception, after carefully
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tracing its origin and gradual transition from the reign of Charles
n. to the present time pointed out that up to 1855 the various
positions were filled by nominees of the Crown and 'its Ministers,
creating a direct incentive to corruption and abuse; whereas now
the lower Division is supplied by candidates who have gained the
most marks in an open competitive examination . Even in the
higher Division although a nomination is necessary the candidate
is subject to a difficult examination before receiving any appointment. After pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of
the Service, the lecturer said that taking into consideration the
monotony of the work and the little prospect for any material
advance for the majority of those who entered the ranks, he did
not know another body of servants who on the whole could
'claim to be more conscientious or loyal to the nation 's interest.
In conclusion Mr. Burrows aJluded to the increased tendency
of the Crown to employ more and more women, and could never
understand why they were paid on a lower scale than men,
realising as he did that it threw many men out of employment.
Without offering any solution of the problem he wished to warn
his hearers the difficulty would press more and more heavily as
time went on and sooner or later would have to be grappled with.
SOUTH PLACE SUNDAY POPULAR CONCERTS .
An event of unusual importance and interest in the history of
the above occurred on March 17th, when the two-hundredth
Concert was given. As by a happy coincidence this event feIJ
on St. Patrick's Day, it was decided to arrange an Irish Concert,
for which the active help of Dr. C. ViJliers Stanford was secured,
and the co-operation of so eminent an Irish musician served to
give special prominence to this" second century" concert. He
took the Pianoforte part in his own Sonata in D minor for Piano
and Violoncello, and also in his Quintet for Piano and Strings, his
a sociates being Messrs. Arthur Bent, Wall ace utcliffe, Alfred
Hobday, and Paul Ludwig. Our friend Mr. Herbert Thorndike
sang a number of Irish songs with excellent taste and expressIOn .
The other Concerts during March have included two appearances of Mr. John Saunders's
tring Quartet Party, whose
masterly performances have included such fine works as
Beethoven's Quartet in F minor, and Dvorak's Quartet in E flat.
On March 31st the Misses Annie and Amy Grimson, Miss
Ethel Rooke, Mr. Philip A. Rooke, and Mr. H. Wildman, were
the instrumentalists, the four first named making their first
appearances at our Concerts. ExceJlent performers they proved
themselves to be, and the very enjoyable concert included capital
renderings of Gade 's charming String Quintet in E minor (a
!10velty to our audience), and Dvorak's fine and favourite Quintet
111 A, for Piano and Strings.
Mrs. Helen Trust sang in her most
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artistic manner; those who know this lady's performances will
consequently feel no surprise on hearing that the delighted
audience was most enthusiastic, and insisted on an encore.
Special attention is called to the fact that on the afternoon of
April 7th, Miss Josephine Troup will lecture on ., Beethoven ,"
with vocal and instrumental illustrations, and in the evening
of this day a special Beethoven Concert will be given in connection with the lecture. This concert will be the twenty-seventh
and final one of the present (ninth) season, and the Concert
Committee hope the support on this interesting occasion will be
such as to enable them to clear off the deficit with which they are
at present troubled . Every previous season has closed free from
debt, and it is hoped this one will not be an unpleasant exception
to the rule.
TUES D AY EVENING LECT URES_
Mr. Richards, B.A., concluded on March I2th the very instructive and important course of Lectures on Greater Britain that has
occupied the spring session.
The main purpose or theme has been to impress upon the
audience the significance of the expansion of England that has
taken place during the last two centuries. The lecturer, while
sometimes severely critical of the methods by which much of t h is
came about, yet in large degree considered that the forward policy
was inevitable under the peculiar circumstances in which England
was placed.
The final lectures dealt more particularly with the condition of
the colonies in the nineteenth century and the prospects in the
immediate future of the British Empire as a whole. The problems created by the contact of the native races with the colonists
were touched upon, though they were necessarily left with little
more than hints as to their solution . Probably the facts were
too strange and conflicting for any profitable generalization to be
made at present.
The progress of the colonies towards the democratical ideal was
criticised and the process led at once to an intensely interesting
speculation as to whether the several dependencies would as in
the case of America proceed to an independent polItical existence;
whether, on the other hand, the sentiments that sprin~ from a
common language, literature, traditions, and character will prove
a sufficiently stron cr bond to unite the remainder of the Englishspeaking race. Several other interesting questions were also
glanced at in the concluding lectures, such as the religious
prospects in the colonies and the possibIlities of im perial federation.
This course, which was Illustrated throughout by lantern slides,
was instructive and suggestive in a more than ordinary degree,
and it is to be regretted that it was not better attended .
�II
SATURDAY AFTERNOON RAM BLES.
The Rambles for the season commenced on March 2nd, and
although, in consequence of there being m'uch illness amon g our
members, many tickets have been returned, the attendance at
each excursion has equalled the limit and peen very large,
BRITISH MUSEUM LIBRARY. - The ramblers to the British
Museum Library on March 2nd were most fortunate in having
as conductor Mr. J. Macfarlane, whose bright geniality and clear
explanations added greatly to the interest of the visit. Pausing
first by some of the glass cases he pointed out early examples of
printing from wood blocks, and many fine specimens of French,
German, and Italian work, some of the latter being most beautifully executed. On entering the private rooms of the library the
comprehensive detail of the great catalogue was demonstrated by
reference to the works of Bunyan, which alone occupied several
pages in one of its volumes. Many rare books were also shown,
including a first edition of Shakspere and the daintily embroidered
church-going outfit of a dame of the cavalier period.
After
traversing part of the three miles of book cases we entered the
Reading Room, and that being closed for repairs, we had an
exceptional opportunity of admiring its fine proportions and
magnificent dome, second only to that of the Parthenon.
THE GUILDHALL.-When Gog and Magog hear the clock strike
one they come down from their high position and go to dinner.
But they were not seen to do so on the 2nd March when the
Ramblers paid a visit to the Guildhall, its library, and museum .
The Ramblers got there too late, for it was past two o'clock
before they assembled. They (Gog and Magog) were too exalted
on their pedestals to take notice of even such distinguished g uests,
so instead Mr. Charles Welch, F.S.A ., the principal librarian,
very kindly received the South Place visitors in his beautiful
room, and gave an account of the history of the Guildhall a nd the
gradual growth of the library and museum. On the table were
ma ny choice books, ancient and modern, arranged for their inspection. They were then escorted through the readin g room,
down into the now well-lit museum, which contains much of
interest relating to the past history of London from prehistoric
times onward; it is particularly rich in Roman antiquities. In
one case is displayed one of the few existing signatures of
Shakspere. Clever people are usually bad writers. If Shakspere's
great genius were a matter of dispute, this one specimen of his
caligraphy ought surely once for all to settle the qu estion in his
favour. From the museum the party went into the Guildhall
crypt and almost sniffed the savoury smell of real turtle soup. In
the Guildhall itself, Mr. Welch gave a graphic description of the
brilliance of the great banquet on Lord Mayor's D ay. The
beautiful timber roof of the hall was also pointed out. Before
leaving, the Ramblers were taken into the New Chamber for the
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meetings of the Common Council, the Court of Aldermen's Ro:) m
and the Old Common Council Chamber, which is likely soon to
be demolished, the slte then serving a more useful purpose.
NATIONAL GALLERY .- On Saturday, March 9th, Mr. Charles
Holroyd, F.R.S.P.E., conducted a number of ramblers through
the Sienese, Tuscan, Italian, and Venetian Rooms of the National
Gallery. The sun was not so kind and considerate as Mr.
Holroyd, for while he threw all the light on the subject whlch
long study and enthusiastic interest enabled him to do, the sun
retired into private life and refused to glve his help in showing the
wonderful coloring of pictures painted centuries ago. Visions of
Fra Angelico's lovely Angels, the "Madonna and Chlld" of
Sandro Bottlcelli, with roses in the background, "drawn as none
is likely to draw for many a day," says Ruskin, the Raphaels, the
grand Titians (sketched many of them by Michael Angelo's hand),
and the works of hundreds of magnificent artists crowded together
in one's mind more or less clearly after two and a half hours of
Mr. Holroyd's delightful talk. Would it not be well now to visit
the Gallery by ourselves and see how much or how little we have
carried away of the information, suggestions, and ideas given us
so generously by Mr. Holroyd ?
LAMBETH PALAcE.- On Saturday, March 9th, in spite of the
inclement weather, we had an enjoyable and instructive ramble
over Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury's to"vn
house. We were shown over by the Porter, who evidently took
a pride in the historic buildings in his charge. We first enter
the Library, a fine hall, rebuilt from the original design after the
Civil War by Bishop Juxon . Here every ten years is held the
Pan-Anglican Conference, consisting of Bishops from all parts of
the world. From the Library we went by a winding corridor,
after visiting the old Guard Chamber-now the Dining Hall-to
the Chapel, a handsomely fitted-up building, and then to the socalled Lollards' Tower, though our guide took great pams to
convince us the Lollards had nothing to do with it. In the top
story of this tower prisoners have often been confined, especially
during the Civil Wars. One cavalier prisoner escaped by means
of a rope through a window in this tower, his wife waiting for him
in a boat on the river beneath. It its related that, the rope being
too short, the unfortunate man fell into the boat and broke both
his legs . Our visit was finished by inspecting the exterior of
some of the buildings, our guide pointing out a mark some feet
above the ground, which shows the height the tide used sometimes to reach before the construction of the embankment. In
those days they were forced to keep the water out by filling up
the space between the bottom of the gate and the ground with
clay, and for this purpose our guide said his predecessor had
often been called up at night.
vVe are reluctantly compelled through pressure on the space at
�13
our disposal to hold over interesting accounts of several other
Rambles in March.
MONTHLY SOIREE.
It was unfortunate that the very bad weather prevented a
larger attendance at the March Soiree,-which was most interesting,
Mrs. Theodore Wright giving readings from Ibsen's "Doll's
House" and" Ghosts ." In the readings from" Ghosts " she. was
most ably assisted by Mr. Acton Bond, who gave full effect to
Pastor Mander's horror on discovering that Fru Alvig's whole
married life had been one long struggle to keep her wrongs from
the world and to bring up her son in ignorance of his father's
vices. Mrs. Wright as Fru Alvig read excellently.
As Nora in the" Doll 's House," Mrs. Wright was delightful,
and many of those present wished it were possible to see her act
that part in the play. She so thoroughly realtzed the depth and
stren gth of the character, and the contrast with the priggishness
of Helmer was so vivid that the audience were charmed and, like
Oli ver, wished for more .
Mrs. Bunn and Mr. Morressy gave some piano duets, and so a
very pleasant evening came to an end.
THE LENDING LIBRARY.
The Hon. Librarian would be glad to receive additions to the
list of books which members are willing to lend. Books can be
obtained from the Lending Library every Sunday morning and at
the Monthly Soirees. It is proposed to announce in the Magazine
from time to time any additions to the Library.
SOUTH PLACE DISCUSSION SOCIETY.
A Debate on "Capital Punishment" was opened by Mrs. H.
Bradlaugh Bonner on Wednesday evening, March 13th, Mr. ].
Hallam 111 the chair.
Mrs. Bonner, in her opening address, expressed the opinion
that Capital Punishment is at once too severe and too lenient;
too severe in that the punishment provokes compassion and can
never be remitted; too lenient in that the whole suffering is confin ed to the brief period of, at most, three weeks. Mrs. Bonner
confessed to grave doubts about advocating the total abolition of
Capital Punishment, as in it she sees the most effective means
of coping with those cases of hereditary criminality which not
infrequently occur. The points upon which the discussion was
rai sed were mostly minor ones, Mr. Read's being the only chal lenge offered to the general views expressed by Mrs. Bonn er,
wh o , in her reply, did not fail to deal with every item of contention in a lucid and comprehensive mann er.
The second Discussion of the month was upon "Banks,
Breakable and Unbreakable," opened by Mr. A. E. Porter on
�Wednesday evening, March 27th, Mr. W. J. Reynolds in the chair.
The pa per bein g somewhat len gthy, the time left for criticism
was consequently short. Mr. Porter, after describing the evils of
the present system of " Breakable" Banks, proceeded to point
out how, in his opinion, under Free Currency a perfect system of
" Unbreaka ble" Banks would be established. He did not succeed, however, in satisfying his opponents, who maintained a
lively discussion.
A NEW HALL FOR SOUTH PLACE.
Althou gh there is no further development of the re-building
scheme since the appointment of the Special Sub-Committee to
thresh out the matter, we would still urge the members, in the
words of George Meredith, to
.. Keep the young generations in hail,
And bequeath them no tumbled house I"
MEMBERS' "AT HOMES."
On March 15th Mr. & Mrs. Tait and Miss Christie gave an" At
Home " for m embers at 54 Fellows Road, Hampstead. About
thirty-five guests were present and a most delightful time was
spent. Miss Beatrice Gough and Miss Amy Carter sang some
charming duets, and other friends played, sang and recIted.
Everyone seemed so pleased to meet and had so much to talk
about that not a dull moment was spent. The evening was
thoroughly enjoyed, several friends saying that this was one of
the most ag reeable ways of meeting that South Place had ever
inaugurated.
During the month Miss Bristed (241 West Green Road, N .),
Dr. and Mrs. Newton Parker (10 Tollington Park, Holloway),
and Mr. and Mrs. Wm. Rawlings (406 Mare Street, Hackney),
also gave" At Homes" to the members in their respective
districts. A lady who was present at Mrs. Rawlings 's writes ;_
" It was an exceedingly pleasant one."
WHAT MAN CAN OBTAIN FROM THE LAND.
On Tuesday , March 19th, Prince Kropotkin kindly delivered a
lecture in aid of the fund for paying off the debt on the building,
his subj ect bein g " What Man can obtain from the Land." Mr.
Sidney Webb , L.C.C., presided. The lecture was full of practical
suggestions for the greater utility of the land and was listened to
throughout with marked appreciation. On the proposition of
Mr. ]. H allam, seconded in a humorous speech by Miss A. C.
Morant (Chiswick) , and carried with acclamation, a cordial vote
of thanks was given to the lecturer for his services. The net
proceeds of the lecture amounted to more than £5.
We shall endeavour in a future number of the South Place
�15
Magazine to deal at greater length with this valuable contribution
on an important question . Meanwhile, those intere~ted in the
subject will find in the Library copies of twO small works by
Mr. \Villiam E. Bear, from which Prince Kropotkin quoted, i.e.
" A Study of Small Holdings," and" The British Farmer and his
Competitors."
.
ANNUAL BOOK SALE.
The Annual Book Sale in aid of the Debenture Redemption
Fund has been arranged to take place on Tuesday and
Wednesday, May 14th and 15th, and the Committee would
now be pleased if members will forward any intended gifts
as soon as possible to facilitate the necessary preparations.
As a two days' sale requires a very much larger selection
than in 1894, and many members having probably given all
their surplus publications last year, the Committee are now
seeking contributions outside as well as from the members .
The Committee will gladly receive all descriptions of books,
music, prints, &c. (which should be sent to the Institute,
marked Book Sale), feeling confident from last year's
experience that they can turn every gift to advantage.
CONCERT ON GOOD FRIDAY EVENING.
A Concert, in aid of the Sunday Afternoon Free Lectures,
will be given at South Place on Good Friday, commencing
at 8 o'clock.
The programme will include Beethoven's
"Kreutzer Sonata" for pianoforte and violin. The vocalists will be Miss Louise Phillips, Mr. W . A. Hamilton,
and Mr. Arthur Walenn: and the instrumentalists Miss
Josephine Troup (pianoforte) ; Messrs. Hans Wessely, Percy
Miles, and Erwin Bank (violin); and Miss Kate Augusta
Davies (accompanist). Tickets may be had at the Institute:
Prices, threepence, sixpence, and one shilling.
MEMS. ABOUT MEMBERS.
Miss Mildred Conway, the only daughter of Mr. and Mrs.
Moncure Conway, was married at New York on Wednesday,
February 6th, to Mr. Sawyer, an architect, of that City. She
carries with her into her new life the heartfelt good wishes of
every member of the Society, which is moreover testifying its
love for the bride and her parents by the presentation of a cheque
as a little marriage Souvenir. That every good and sweet influence may follow the young couple in their married life is the
earnest wish of their many friends at South Place.
The South Place Sewing Meetings of the season have just
�16
finished. Nearly 100 flannel gowns for the Royal Free Hospital
represent the praiseworthy industry of these benevolent ladies.
A prospective new member of South Place has arrived in the
person of Dorothy Muriel Crawshay, daughter of Mr. and Mrs.
Waiter Crawshay.
We ought all to be grateful to Mrs. Dixon; the Soirees under
her active superintendence are unvarying successes, and she has
recently added to her other responsibilities the Joint-Secretaryship
of the Members' Committee, thereby ensuring similar success for
the Members' "At Homes."
Mr. and Mrs. Gibson will have the sympathies of all members
of South Place in their grievous trouble owing to the serious
illness of one of their daughters.
We are pleased to learn that Mrs. Harold Hunns has now quite
recovered.
Mr. Morris with his usual generosity has arranged to give the
Ramblers an extra Dance at Armfield's on April 20th, the
invitations for which are out.
Mr. Mudie is happily quite restored to health, after his severe
attack of influenza, by his visit to Wych Cross.
The genial face of Mr. Todd has recently been missed from
South Place. He is with his family recruiting in Brighton.
Miss N. Hickson and Miss Gova have been travelling in Italy
durin <Y the winter. Miss Gova has been laid up with influenza in
a Fior nce hotel.
On dtt that two members of South Place will be married this
month.
Mr. J. A. Lyon, a South Place Veteran, whose recollections of the South Place ociety go back to the time when the
Chapel was not yet built, and who remembers Mr. Fox's predecessor, Mr. Vidler, completed his eighty-sixth year on March 23 rd .
On the evening of that day he presided, with the vigour of a man
of fifty, at a meeting of the Discu sion Class connected with the
South London Ethical Society, and assisted in the discussion,
which was on the thrilling theme of" Bimetallism."
ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS.
W. M.-(Discllssion Society) . In our next number the subject
of your letter will receive attention.
REMOVALS.
Members who have moved since the issue of the last Annual
Report should notify their present address for insertion in the
Magazine.
KENNY
& Co., Printers,
25
Camden Road, London, N. w.
�
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Ethical Record Volume 1, April 1895
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Text
ESSAYS ON CHAUCER,
His Words and Works.
PART II.
III. Practica Chilindri : or, The Working of the Cylinder, by
John Hoveden. Edited, with a Translation, by Edmund
Brock.
IV. The use of final -e in Early English, and especially in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales. By Professor Joseph Payne.
V. Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Chaucer.
“ English Poets,” ed. 1863.
From her
VI. Specimen of a critical edition of Chaucer’s Compleynte to Fite,
with the Genealogy of its Manuscripts. By Prof. BernHARd
Ten-Brink,
PUBLISHED FOR THE CHAUCER SOCIETY BY
N. TRUBNER & CO., 57 & 59, LUDGATE HILL,
�Smnir
9.
JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS.
�III.
PRACTICA CHILINDRI:
OR
THE WORKING OF THE CYLINDER,
BY
JOHN HOVEDEN.
EDITED WITH A TRANSLATION
BY
Edmund Brock
��57
PREFACE.
By the kindness of Mr Frederick Norgate, we are now
able to lay before the reader another short treatise on the
cylinder. How it was found, and what it contains, may
be learnt from the following notice, which we reprint from
Notes and Queries, 4th Series, III, June 12, 1869.
“CHILENDBE: (‘ SCHIPMANNES TALE, 206.’)
"We have to thank the Chaucer Society for the publica
tion of a very early tract on the ‘ Chilindre,’ removing to
a great extent the difficulty about the meaning of this
word, which for ages has puzzled all the commentators on
the Canterbury Tales. This little tract is devoted almost
exclusively to information as to the construction of the in
strument in question, with only a few brief rules at the
end for its use. I have recently been so fortunate as to
discover another MS. which may be a useful and interest
ing supplement to that which Mr Brock has edited for the
above-named society; and before describing its contents,
let me mention the strange way in which I found it.
Looking through the Index of Authors at the end of Ayscough’s Catalogue of the Sloane MSS. (not thinking at the
time of Chaucer or anything relating to him), my attention
was arrested by the name ‘ Chilander,’ and on turning to
the page referred to, I found Chilander noted as the author
of a work entitled Practica Astrologorum, fyc. Hereupon
I determined on taking the first opportunity of examining
the MS. itself, and having done so, to my surprise I found,
instead of Practica Astrologorum, with Chilander for its
author, a tract entitled Practica Cliilindri secundum magistrum Johannem Astrologum 1 The MS. is of the beginning
of the fourteenth century, neatly written (on vellum), and
differs from that which the Chaucer Society has brought to
�58
PREFACE.
light, inasmuch as it is devoted exclusively to instructions
for using the instrument.
“ The whole is comprised in six pages, closely written,
and in a small but neat hand. The titles of the several
chapters are as follows1:—
1. Primum capitulum est de horis diei artificialis
inueniendis.
2. De gradu solis inueniendo.
3. De altitudine solis et lune, et vtrum fuerit ante
meridiem uel post.
4. De linea meridiei inuenienda et oriente et occidente.
5. Quid sit vmbra versa, quid extensa.
6. De punctis vmbre verse et extense similiter.
7. De altitudine rerum per vmbram uersam.
8. De declinacione solis omni die, et gradu eius per declinacionem inueniendo, et altitudine eius omni hora anni.
9. De latitudine omnis regionis inuenienda.
10. De inuenienda quantitate circuitus tocius orbis et
spissitudine eius.
“ The colophon is as follows :—
‘ Explicit practica chilindri Magistri
Iohannis de Houeden astrologi.’
Fred. Norgate.
“ Henrietta Street, Covent Garden."
This tract, with the former, will give a tolerably clear
idea of the nature and uses of the instrument; but there is
much more on the subject which we have no space to
print, and we must therefore be content with giving the
reader references, which will enable those who care to read
more about the cylinder, to do so.
1. Compositio horologiorum, in piano, muro, truncis,
anulo, con[uexo], concauo, cylindro & uarijs quadrantibus,
cum signorum zodiaci & diuersarum horarum inscriptionibus : autore Sebast. Munstero. Basileae, 1531. Composi
tio cylindri, hoc est, trunci columnaris. Caput xxxix.
2. Horologiographia, post priorem seditionem per Se
bast. Munsterum recognita, & plurimum aucta atqwe
locupletata, adiectis multis nouis descriptionibus & figuris,
in piano, concauo, conuexo, erecta superficie &c. Basileae.
1533. Compositio cylindri, hoc est, trunci columnaris.
Caput xliii.
1 The table is printed according to the MS, from which Mr
Norgate’s copy deviates in one or two cases.
�PREFACE.
59
3. Set
/ Dber Sonnen vpren / $imftft$e
Sefdjvetfcung / wt'e btefelfcigen nad) mantyerley aprt an bte
SDlauren / Sffienbte / (Bme / fie fepen Stgenbe / Sluffgertc^fet /
@d;reg / audf auff S'lonbe I Slu^gepolte vnb fonft alter
$anbt ^nftrument / Sluf^uretffen / 2)urc^ Sebafitanum
STOunfter. 23afel, 1579. 2Ste man etnen timber @ircu*
Iteren vnb jurtc^ten foil. ®ad rrrvj. daptlel
4. Dialogo della descrittione teorica et pratica de gli
horologi solari. Di Gio: Batt. Vimercato Milanese. In
Ferrara, per Valente Panizza Mantouano Stampator Ducale.
1565. In gual modo per pratica operatione si possono
fabricare i Cilindri. Capitolo xi.
5. Gnomonice Andrese Schoneri Noribergensis, hoc est:
de descriptionibils horologiorum sciotericorum omnis generis,
proiectionibns circulorum Sphaericorum ad superficies, cum
planas, turn conuexas concauasqwe, Sphsericas, Cylindricas,
ac Conicas : Item delineationibus quadrantum, annulorum,
&c. Libri tres. Noribergse, 1562. The second book treats
of spherical, cylindrical, and conical dials.
6. Io. Baptistae Benedicti Patritij Veneti Philosophi
de Gnomonum umbrarumqwe solarium usu liber. Augustae
Taurinorum. 1574. De examinations pensilium horologio
rum, § de nouo horologio circulari. Cap. lxxviii.
7. Horarii Cylindrini Canones, 1515. Eeprinted in
Opera Mathematica Ioannis Schoneri, fol. Norinbergae,
1551. This, like Hoveden’s treatise, consists of rules for
using the cylinder.
8. Histoire de l’Astronomie du Moyen Age par M.
Delambre, Paris. 1819, 4to. The third book, entitled
Gnomonique, gives an account of the cylindrical dial
(padran cylindrique') of the Arabians as treated of by
Aboul-Hhasan (pp. 517—520), and of Sebastian Munster’s
(pp. 597, 598).
There is a large cut of the cylinder on page 166 of
Munster’s Compositio Horologiorum, page 269 of his Horologiographia, and page 125 of Der Horologien Beschreibung;
a smaller one on the title-page and page 131 of Horologiographia. In Vimercato’s treatise, page 165, is a cut show
ing the separate parts of the cylinder.
In Cotton MS. Nero C ix, leaves 195—226, we find eight
Latin poems by John Hoveden, chaplain of Queen Eleanor,
mother of King Edward. There can be little doubt that
this writer is the same as the author of the present treatise.
We here give the beginnings and endings of these poems.
�60
PREFACE.
I. Incipit meditacio Iohan?iis de houedene, clerici regine
anglie, matris regis Edwardi/ de natiuitate, passione, et resurreccione domini saluatoris edita, ut legentis affeccio in
christi amore profici[a]t et celerius accendatur / hoc opus
sic incipzt: Aue verbum ens in principi'o. & sic finitur. &
uoluzt editor quod liber medffa&onis illius philomena
uocaretur.
Begins : Ave uerbum ens in principio,
Caro factum pudoris gremio;
Fac quod fragreif presens laudaczo.
Ends : Melos tzfei sit et laudacio,
Salus, honor, et iubilacio,
Letus amor lotus in lilio,
Qui es verbum ens in principio.
Explicit libellus rigtmichus1 qui philomena uocatur, que
meditacio est de natiuitate, passione, et resurrecti’one, ad
honorem domini noshi iesu christi saluatoris edita, a Iohanne
de houedene, clerico Alianore regine anglie, matris edwardi
regis anglie.
II. Incipiunt .xv. gaudia virgznis gloriose, edita a
Magistro Iohanne houedene Clerico.
Begins : Virgo vincens vernancia
Carnis pudore lilia.
Ends : Et nocteni lianc excuciens,
Ducas ad portum pahie. Amen.
Expliciunt .15. gaudia beate virgznis, edita ritmice2 ex
dictamine Iohannis de Houedene.
III. Hie scribitnr meditacio Iohannis de Honedene,
edita ad honorem domini saluatoris, et ut legentes earn proficiant .in amore diuino: et vocatur hec meditacio cantica
.50. quod in .50. canticis continetur.
The first canticle begins :
In laude nunc wpirituo omnis exultet,
Et leta mens do?nini laude sustollat.
The last one ends :
Et ut nouella cantica cumulentur,
In laude nunc spmYuc omnis exultet. Amen.
Explicit meditacio dicta cantica 50*?, edita a Iohanne
de Houedene ad honorem domini saluatoris.
IV. In honore domini saluatoris incipit meditacio, edita
a Iohanne de houedene, clerico Alianore regine anglie, matr/s
regis Edwardi / faciens mencionem de saluatoris redolentissima passione; et amoris christi suaue??i inducit affecturn.
Hec meditacio uocatur cythara eo quod verbzs amoriferis,
1 So in MS.
2 MS. ricunce.
�PREFACE.
61
qnaszquibwsdam cordis musice, ad delectacionemspmTualem
legentes inuitat.
Begins : I mi vena du'lcedinis,
Proles pudica numinis,
Verbum ens in principio,
Fructns intacte virginis.
Ends : Verbum ens in principio,
Et des ut gost has semitas
Nos foueat et felicitas
In celebri coliegio. Amen.
Explicit laus de domino saluatore uel meditacio que
cythara nominator, a Iohanne de Houedene, edita ut legent is
affectus in amore diuino proficiat et celerius accendator.
V. Incipiunt 50^ salutaczones beafe virgwiis, quibns
inseritor memoria domznice passionis, edita. a lohanne de
houedene ad honorem virginis matris, & laudem domzni
saluatoris.
Begins : Ave stella maris,
Virgo singularis,
Vernans lilio.
Ends : Fer michi remedia,
Vt in luce qua lustraris
Michi dones gaudia. Amen.
Expliciunt 50^ salutaciones beate marie, edite a
Iohanne de Houedene.
VI. Incipit laus de beata virgine,. que uiola uocatur,
edita a Iohanne de Houedene.
Begins : Maria stella maris,
Fax sum mi luminaris,
Kegina singularis.
Ends : Penas mittigatura,
Assis in die dura,
Maria virgo pura.
Explicit uiola beate virginis, a Iohanne de Houedene
edita.
VII. Incipit lira extollens virginem gloriosam.
Begins : 0 qui fontem gracie
Captiuis regeneras,
Celos endelichie.1
Ends ; Quos expiat sic puniat,
Vt vices quas variat, i
Alternis sic uniat, ne lira deliret.
Explicit lira NLagistri Iohannis houedene.
So in MS.
�62
PREFACE.
VIII. Canticu?n amoris quod composuit Iohannes de
Houedene.
Begins : Princeps pacis, proles puerpere,
Hijs te precor labris illabere,
Vt sincere possim disserere
Laudem tuam, et letus legere.
End lost from :
Eius claui punctura perea?n,
Cum superstes magis inteream.
There is a copy of the first of these poems in the Lambath MS. 410, and another in Harleian MS. 985 with the
heading : Incipit tractates metricus N. de lion dene, de processu cliristi & redempcfonis nostre, qui aliter dicitur
philomena. At the end are merely these words : Explicit
liber q?zi uocatwr philomena. It appears from Nasmith’s
Catalogue that there is a French version of the poem in
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS. 471, intitled, Li
rossignol, ou la pensee Iohan de Hovedene, clerc la roine
d’Engleterre, mere le roi Edward de la neissance et de la
mort et du relievement et de 1’ascension Iesu Crist et de
l’assumpcion notre dame.
It is perhaps worthy of mention that Hoveden’s Plulo''trte.na has long been confounded by the catalogue-writers
with a wholly different composition, by another writer, and
beginning:
Philomena preuia temporis ameni,
Que recessum nuncians i??zbris atgrne ceni,
Dum demulces animos tuo cantu leni,
Auis predulcissima, ad me queso veni.
End : Quicquid tamen alij dicant, frafer care,
Istam novam martirem libens imitare;
Cumque talis fueris, deum deprecare
Vt nos cantus martiris faciat cantare. Amen.
Copies of this poem are contained in Cotton MS. Cleo
patra A xii., Harleian MS. 3766, and Royal MS. 8 G vi.,
from the first of which the above lines are taken. A late
hand has written the following mistaken heading over it
in the Cotton MS.: philomela Canticum per Ioannem de
Houedene Capellanum Alienorse Reginse matris Ed. primi.
�PREFACE.
63
The Laud MS. 368 contains both these poems; the latter
has the following heading: Incipit meditaczo frafris
Iohawzis de peccham, qwondam cantuarze archiepz'scojh,
de ordine frafrum minorww, que Nocatur philomena. The
real author, however, appears to be Giovanni Fidanza,
better known as Cardinal Bonaventura. The whole poem,
with some additional lines at the end, is printed in his
works, Mayence, 1609, vol. 6, p. 424, and Venice, 1751-56,
vol. 13, p. 338. The English poem of The Nyghtyngale
in Cotton MS. Caligula A ii., leaves 59-64, has no con
nection with Hoveden’s Philomena, but is an imitation of
Bonaventura’s poem.
According to Bale’s account,1 which is followed by Pits2
and Tanner,3 John Hoveden was a native of London, doc
tor of divinity, and chaplain of Queen Eleanor, but after
wards parish priest at Hoveden, where he died in the year
1275. Besides the poems already mentioned, Bale, Pits,
and Tanner ascribe to him the work called Speculum
Laicorum ; 4 but this could not have been written till long
after Hoveden’s death, since it contains mention of Henry
the IVth’s reign.5
1 Bale, v. 79.
2 Pitseus, p. 356.
3 Tanner, under Hocedenus
4 See Royal MS. 7 C xv and Oxford Univ. MSS. 29 and 36.
5 In chapter 36.
�64
PRACTICA CHILINDRI.
[Sloane MS 1620, leaf 2.]
PRACTICA
CHILINDRI
SEOHMD DM
MAGISTRITM
[iOHANNEm]1
[aJstrologum.
1. Primnm capz'bdwm ost de horis diei artificiab's
inueniendis.
2. De gradu sob's inueniendo.
3. De altitudine sobs et lune, et vtrum fuerit anfe
meridiem uel post
4. De linea meridiei inuenienda et oriente et, occide??te.
5. (6.)2 Qzdd sit vmbra versa, (5) qnid extensa.
6. (7.) De punctis vmbre verse, et extense similiter.
7. (8.) De altifojtb'ne rerzzm per vmbram uersam.
8. (9.) De declinaczone sob's omni die, et gradueiwsper
decb’nocionem inueniendo, (10) et eMitudioo eius omni hora
anni.
9. (11.) De latitudine omnis regionis inuenienda.
10. (12.) De inuefnjienda qnanti/ate circuitns tociws
orbis et -spissitudine eius.
DE HORIS INUENIENDIS.
1. Z^vm volueris scire horas diei, verte stilum superiorem super mensem aut signuzn in quo fueris, et
super partem que preteriit de ipso; cumqne hoc feceris,
1 Nearly obliterated.
2 The numbers in parentheses correspond to those which head
the sections.
�65
THE WORKING OF THE CYLINDER.
THE WORKING OF THE CYLINDER ACCORDING TO MASTER
JOHN, THE ASTROLOGER.
1. The first chapter is on finding the hours of the
artificial day.
2. On finding the sun’s degree.
3. On the altitude of the sun and of the moon; and
whether it is before midday or after.
4. On finding the meridian line, and the east and the
west.
6. What umbra versa is, (5) and what umbra extensa.
7. On the points of the umbra versa, and likewise of
the umbra extensa.
8. On (finding) the height of objects by the umbra
versa..
9. On (finding) the sun’s declination on any day, and
on finding his degree by the declination; (10) and on
(finding) his altitude at any hour of the year.
11. On finding the latitude of any region.
12. On finding the extent of the circumference of the
whole world, and its thickness.
1.
ON FINDING THE HOURS.
When you wish to know the hours of the day, turn the
upper style1 over the month or sign in which you are, and
over the part of it which is gone by; and when you have
1 Only one style is mentioned in the former treatise.
�66
. PRACTICA CH1LJNDRI.
vertes etiam inferiorezzz stiluzzz in opposituzzz stili szzperioris,
et erit izzstrumezztum disposituzzz ad horas sumendas.
Cumqzze volueris horas sumere, suspende chilindruzzz pez*
filuzzz suuzzz ad solezzz, mouezzdo ipszzm chilindruzzz hue et
illuc donee vrnbra superioris stili super chilizzdruzzz eqzzidistazzter longitudzzzi eius ceciderit; et ad qzzamczzzzzqzze horazzz
peruenerit vmbra stili, ipsa est hora diei pertransita.
Qzzod si ceciderit finis vmbre inter duas horas, tuzzc apparebit etiam pars hore in qua fueris, secundum quod plus
uel minzzs occupauerit vmhra de ipso spacz'o qzzod est inter
duas lineas horarzzzzz. Est eniro. hora spacium [cojntentuzzz
inter duas lineas horarzzzzz; ipse autezzz linee szzzzt fines
horarzzzzz,
DE GRADU SOLIS.
2. /~^vm volueris scire in quo signo fuerit sol, et in’
quoto gradu eizze, eqzzabis solem ad meridiem
diei in quo volueris hoc scire, siczz£ in lecczonibz/s tabzzlarzzzzz
docetzzr, et addes ei motuzzz 8ue spere, et haftebis graduzzz
solz's quesituzzz. Qzzod si volueris hoc ipszzm leuizzs scire,
intra cum die mezzsis in quo fueris izz aliqzzam 4 tabzzlarzzzzz,
seczzzzdzzm qzzod fuerit annzzs bissextilis uel distans ab eo ;
que qzzidezzz tabzzle izztitulantzzr sic :—Tabzzle solis ad izzuezzienduzzzjlocuzzz eius in orbe decliui fixo. Et izz dirp.e.to
diei cum quo intras statizzz inuenies graduzzz solzs equatum,
et hoc est qzzod voluisti. Qzzod si nec has nec illas tabzzlas
1 That is, straight down the cylinder.
2 The following extract from Delamhre’s Astronomic du Moyen
Age, Paris, 1819, pp. 73, 74, may serve to explain the motion of the
eighth sphere :—
“ Thebith ben Chorath.—Son malheureux systeme de la trepi
dation infecta les tables astronomiques jusqu’a Tycho, qui, le
premier, sut les en purger. Ce long succes n’a point empeche que
son livre ne soit reste inedit; mais j’en ai trouve un exemplaire
latin manuscrit, a la Bibliotheque du Boi, n° 7195. Ce traite a
pour titre Thebith ben Chorath de motu octaves Spheres.........
“ Il imagine une ecliptique fixe, qui coupe l’equateur fixe dana
les deux points equinoxiaux, sous un angle de 23° 33', et une eclip
tique mobile, attachee par deux points diametralement opposes a
deux petits cercles, qui ont pour centres les deux points equinoxiaux
�67
ON THE SUN’S DEGREE.
done this, turn also the lower style into the place opposite
the upper style, and the instrument will be set in order for
taking the hours. And when you wish to take the hours,
suspend the cylinder by its string against the sun, moving
it to and fro, until the shadow of the upper style falls on
the cylinder parallel to its length,1 and whatever hour the
shadow of the style reaches, the same is the (last) past
hour of the day. But if the end of the shadow falls be
tween two hours, then will appear also the part of the hour
in which you are, according as the shadow occupies more
or less of that space which is between the two hour-lines.
For the space contained between two hour-lines is an hour;
but the lines themselves are the ends of the hours.
2. ON THE sun’s DEGREE.
'
When you wish to know in what sign the sun is, and
in what degree thereof, you must adjust (?) the sun to the
noon of the day on which you wish to know this, as it is
taught in the readings of the tables, and add to it the
motion of the eighth sphere,2 and you will have the sun’s
degree which you have sought. But if you wish to know
the same more easily, enter with the day of the month in
which you are into one of the four tables according as it is
leap-year or distant from it. These tables are thus en
titled :—Tables of the sun for finding his place in the fixed
ecliptic, and in a line -with the day with which you enter
de l’ecliptique fixe, et dont le rayon est de 4° 18' 43/z. Ces points
de l’ecliptique tournent sur la circonference des deux petits cercles
opposes; l’ecliptique mobile s’eleve done et s’abaisse alternativement sur l’ecliptique fixe ; les points equinoxiaux avancent ou
retrogradent d’une quantite qui peut aller a 10° 45z. Ce mouve
ment est commun a tous les astres ; ce mouvement est celui de la
huitieme sphere, et il s’appelle mouvement d’acces ou de reces. Le
lieu de la plus grande declinaison du Soleil change done continuellement, puisqu’il est toujours a 90° de l’une et l’autre intersections
de l’ecliptique mobile avec l’equateur fixe. La plus grande decli
naison est done tantot dans les Gemeaux et tantot dans le Cancer.”
For Thebit’s treatise see Harleian MS 13, leaf 117. Incipiif
thehit de motu octaue spere. Or Harleian MS 3647, leaf 88, col. 2,
incipit libfr tebith bewcorat de motu octave spere.
�68
PRACTICA CHILINDRI.
habueris, et volueris [leaf 2, bk] aliter querere gradum solis
[a]ut fere, scito qnod secwndnm compotistas xv. kalendas
cuiuslibet mensis ingreditur sol nouu?n signum, sicn^ patet
in kalendario. Considera ergo qnot dies transierint de
mense i?z qwo fueris, et adde supe?’ eos qnindecim dies, et
serua eos. Computabis ergo ab inicio signi, in qno fuerit
sol, totidem gradus, et ubi finitzzs fuerit nu?nerns, ip.se est
gradus solis quern queris. Qwod si nu??ze?7zs tuus excesserit
xxx., tot gradus qwot excedit xxx. perambulauit sol de
signo seq-"^ 0 si Deus voluerit.
DE ALTIT UDINE SOLIS.
3. ZA vod si altitudinem sohs seu lune placuerit inuestiAv gare, verte stilum sn^eriorem super gradus chilindri, et stilum inferiore?n in oppositum ei-us semper; et
hoc sit tz&i generale, ut uersus qwamcunqwe partem chilindri verteris stilum snperiorem, semper vertas stilum inferiorem in partem ei oppositam. Post hec opponas instrnmentmn. soli, et ad qwemcunqne gradum peruenerit vmbra,
ipsa est altitudo solis, seu lune, si feceris de luna, in eadem
bora. Qnod si volueris scire si fuerit ante meridiem uel
post, aspice snper qnot gradns ceciderit vmbra, et expectans
paulisper, iterato sumes altitudinem sobs; epuod si creuerit
vmbi’a, tunc est ante meridiem. Simz'k/er qnog'we scies de
luna. Et per hoc ipsnm quod dzc/nm est, scies vtrum ipsa
fuerit orientals 9, meridie uel occidental^; qnia dum
vmbra crescit, est in parte orientali a meridie, dum uero
decrescit, est in parte occidentis.
o
�ON THE ALTITUDE OF THE SUN.
69
you will immediately find the sun’s degree rectified, and
this is what you desired. If, however, you have neither
of these tables, and wish to seek, in another way, the sun’s
degree or thereabouts, know that, according to the calcu
lators, the sun enters a new sign on the 15 th before the
kalends of every month, as appears in the calendar. Con
sider, therefore, how many days of the month in which you
are have passed, and add to them fifteen days, and keep
them. Reckon then the same number of degrees from the
beginning of the sign in which the sun is*?&p4, when the
number is completed, the same is the sun’ • gree which
you seek. But if your number exceeds 30, the sun has
passed through as many degrees of the next sign as it (the
number) exceeds 30, if God will.
3.
ON THE ALTITUDE OF THE SUN.
Now if it is your pleasure to investigate the altitude of
the sun or of the moon, turn the upper style over the de
grees of the cylinder, and the lower style always into the
opposite place. And let this be a general rule, that to
whichever part of the cylinder you turn the upper style
you always turn the lower style to the part opposite to it.
After that .hold up the instrument against the sun, and
to whatever degree the shadow reaches, the same is the
altitude of the sun; or of the moon, if you are deal
ing with the moon, at that hour. But if you wish to
know whether it is before midday, or after, see over how
many degrees the shadow falls, and having waited a little
time, take the sun’s altitude again, and if the shadow has
increased, then it is before midday. In like manner you
will know also of the moon. And by what has been said
you shall know whether she is on the east of the meridian
or on the west; for while the shadow increases, she is on
the eastern side of the meridian, but while it decreases, she
is on the western side.
CH. ESSAYS.
F
�70
RRACTICA CHXLINDRI.
DE LINEA MERIDIEI.
4. Z~\ vod si volueris scire lineam meridiei per hoc instrwmentom, fiat circizlws in swperficie aliqwa preparata, eqizidistanter orizonti, cuiwscunqzie magnitudes
volueris, non sit tamen nimis paruus; deinde sumes altitudinem soli's diligentissime, et serua earn; et suspended
etiam in eaAem bora filum vnum cum aliqwo ponderoso in
directo iam fetch circwli, ita u.t vmbra eins cadat omnino
super centrum circuli, et attingat circumferenciam in parte
opposita soli; notabisque contactum vmbre in circumferencia, et post hoc expectabis donee iterato post meridiem
fiat sol in prius accepta altitudine, notabisque etiam [leafs;
tunc vmbram fili super centrum ut prius transeuntem
notabi's, dico, contactum eius in circumferencia in opposito
soli's. Deinde diuide arcum qizi est inter duas notas
vmbre per equedia, et notam iizprimes, coniungesque earn
cum centro, perficiens diametrum circuli, et hoc diametrum
erit linea meridiei. Quadrabis cpuoque circulum ipsum per
diametra, et ha&ebis lineam orientis et occidentis, ut apparet in isto circulo. Sic etiam inuenies omnes partes
orizontis, si Dews voluerit. Et nota quod hec consideracio
verior et leuior est quam ilia que fit per erecci'onem stilj
ortogonalis in circulo, quia vix uel nuncquam possi? ita
ortogonaliter erigi, sicuZ perpendiculum dummorZo pendeat
inmobiliter. SeeZ hec consideracz'o verissima erit, si sumatur
in solsticialibus diebws, et hoc anZequam sol ascendat multum in ilia die.
Nota quod a. et b. sunt note vmbre
anta meridiem et posi ad eandern altitudinem sold ; et mediuzn inter a. et b.
est meridies.
Occident
�ON THE MERIDIAN LINE.
4.
71
ON THE MERIDIAN LINE.
And if you wish to know the meridian line oy means
of this instrument, let a circle he made, of whatever size
you will, only let it not he too small, on some plane pre
pared (for the purpose) parallel with the horizon. Then
take the sun’s altitude very accurately, and keep it; and
also at the same hour hang, over the circle already made,
a thread with something heavy (on it), so that its shadow
falls exactly upon the centre of the circle and reaches the
circumference on the side opposite to the sun; and mark the
(point of) contact of the shadow with the circumference,
and after this wait until the sun again arrives at the before-,
taken altitude after midday; and mark then also the
shadow of the thread passing as before across the centre,
mark, I say, its point of contact with the circumference
opposite to the sun. Then divide the arc which is between
the two shadow-marks into equal parts, and impress a
mark. Join it with the centre, and complete the diameter
of the circle. This diameter will be the meridian line.
■Quarter the circle itself by diameters,1 and you will have
the line of east and west, as appears in this circle. Thus
also you will find all parts of the horizon, if God will.
Note that this observation is truer and easier than that which
is made by raising a rectangular style in the circle, because it
can with difficulty or never be raised as rectangularly as a
plumb-line, provided it (viz. the plumb-line) hangs motion
less. But the observation will be truest, if it be made on the
solstitial days, and that before the sun rises high on that day.
West
�72
PRACTICA CHILINDRI.
DE VMBRA EXTENSA.
5. nVTvnc dicendus est quia! sit vmbra versa, et quid
11 sit vmbra extensa. Igitur intelligamus superfi
cies quanda??! equidistautem orizonti, et super hanc super-'
ficies intelligamus aliquid ortogonaliter erectus, verbi
gratia, palus rectus; huius pali sic erecti cadens vmbrrf
in dzcZam superficiem (iicitur vmbra extensa. Est igitur
vmbra extensa rei erecte ad superficiem orizontis perpendiculariter vmbra cadens iu eades szzperficie.
DE VMBRA VERSA.
6. TTem intelligamus eande?n superficies quam prius, ei
JL in ipsa aliquid perpendiculariter erectus, et ab illo
sic erecto iutelligasus stilus ortogonalt'Zer prominentes,
sicut sunt stili qui prominent in parietibus eccZesiarus ad
horas sumendas; vmbra huius stili cadens super rem orto
gonaliter erectas, equidistanter s[cilicet] longitudzni eiusdes rei, dicitur vmbra versa; equidistanter, dico, cadens,
quia alite?' esset vmbra irregularis. Et huiusmodi vmbra
cadit in chilindro. Hec auZes vmbra versa sesper crescit
vsque ad meridies, et tunc, i[d est] in meridie, est maxisa.
Econuerso est de vmbra extensa, quia ilia decrescit vsque
ad meridie??t, et tunc fit minima.
DE PUN0T1S VMBRE.
vm volue?is scire omni hora quot puncta ha&ue?'it
vmbra versa, verte stilus super puncta vmb/'e, et
super quot puncta ceciderit vmbra, ipsa sunt puncta vmbre
quesite. Quod si volue?-is [scire] vmbra?n extensa??! ad
eandes altitudinem, diuide 144 pe?' [leafs&j puncta que habueris, et exibunt puncta vmbre extense in eades hora. Et si
volueris scire quot status sunt i?i vmb?‘a, diuZde puncta que
7.
�ON THE UMBRA. EXTENSA AND. THE. UMBRA ' VERSA.
5. ' ON THE UMBRA EXTENSA.
'
73
-
Now we must explain, -what is the umbra versa, and
what the umbra extensa. Therefore let us conceive some
plane parallel to the horizon, and on this plane let us con
ceive something raised at right angles, for instance, a
straight stake; the shadow of this stake so raised, falling
on the said plane, is called umbra extensa. The umbra
extensa is, therefore, the shadow of an object which is
raised perpendicularly to the plane of the horizon, falling
on the same plane.
6.
ON THE UMBRA VERSA.
Also let us conceive the same plane as before, and upon
it something raised perpendicularly; and from the latter
so raised let us conceive a style jutting out at a right
angle, like the styles which jut out from the walls of
churches for taking the hours; the shadow of this style
falling upon the object raised at right angles, parallel, of
course, to the length of the same object,1 is called umbra
versa—falling parallel, I say, because otherwise the shadow
would be irregular. And such a shadow falls on the
cylinder. Now this umbra versa always increases until
midday, and then, that is at midday, it is greatest; the
contrary is the case with the umbra extensa, for that de
creases until midday, and then becomes least.
7.
ON THE POINTS OF THE SHADOW.
'When you wish to know how many points the umbra
versa has at any hour, turn the style over the points of the
shadow; and. as many points as the shadow falls over, the
same are the required points of the shadow. But if you
wish to know the umbra extensa at the same altitude,
divide 144 by the points which you have, and the result
will be the points of the umbra extensa at the same hour.
1 That is, straight down it.'
�74
TRACTICA CHILINDRI.
ha&ueris per 12, et exz'bunt states. Quod si non haZ>u[er]is
12 puzzcta, uide quota pars sint puncta de 12, et tota pars
erunt puncta que haftuez’is ad vnuzn statuzn. Est autezn1
status tota longitudo cuzuslibe^ rei, et quia ozzzzzem rem quo
ad vmbrazn eius sumendam diuz’dimzzs in 12 partes eqwales,
propterea 12 puncta vmbre faciunt vnuzn statuzn; est eniin
quodlihet punctuzn longitudznis oznnis eqwale duodecimo
parti2 rei cuius est vmbra.
DE ALTITUDINE RERIZM PER VMBRAAf.
8. Z~^vm volueris scire altitudinem turris per vmbrazzz
V.7 versazzz que cadit in chilindro, aut altitudinem
alicuz'us rei erecte, cum hoc, inquam, volueris, verte stiluzzz
super puncta uznbre, et vide super quot puncta ceciderit
vmbra. Deinde considera izz qua pz’oporczone se ha Sent
puncta uzzzbre in chilindro ad stiluzzz, izz eadezzz proporczone
se ha&et oznnis res erecta ad suazzz uzzzbrazn, hoc est, si
puncta uznbre in chilindro fuerint sex, stilus duplus est ad
vmbrazn, et tunc in eadezn hora erit oznnis uznbz-a extensa
dupla ad suam rein ; et si uzzzbra in chilindro fuerit dupla
ad stiluzn, hoc est, cum vmbra fuerit 24 punctoruzn, erzt
oznnis res erecta dupla ad suazn uznbrazn ; et sic semper in
qua proporczone se haZzet uznbra ‘chilindri ad stiluzzz, in
eadezn proporczozze se ha Set econtrario omnis res erecta ad
vmbrazzz suazzz extensazn, omnis res erecta, dico, que fecerit
vmbrazn sub eadezzz solzs altiZuzfzne, in,ilia hora;.vel, si,
nescieris proporczonem sumez-e, diuide 144 per puncta que
ha&ueris, sicut dz’cbzm est, et exibit vmbra rei erecte que
dzczYur extensa, vide ergo quot status .sint in ilia uznbra
extensa, auZ quota fuerint puncta de 12, et haSebis quod
voluisti.
1 Read, enim.
The word vmbre is wrongly inserted after parti in the MS.
�FINDING THE HEIGHT OF OBJECTS BY THE SHADOW.
75
And if you wish to know how many status are in the
shadow, divide the points which you have by 12, and the
status will be the result. And if you have not 12 points,
see what part of 12 the points are, and the points which
you have will be that part of one status. For a status is
the whole length of any object; and because we divide
every object into 12 equal parts whereby to take its shadow,
therefore 12 points of the shadow make one status; for
every point is equal to a twelfth part of the whole length
of the object, whose the shadow is.
8.
on
(finding)
the height of objects by the shadow.
When you wish to know the height of a tower by the
umbra versa which falls on the cylinder, or the height of
any upright object—I say, when you wish this, turn the
style over the points of the shadow, and see over how
many points the shadow falls. Then consider : what
ever proportion the points of the shadow on the cylinder
hold to the style, every upright object holds the same
proportion to its shadow; that is, if the points of the
shadow on the cylinder be six, the style is double of the
shadow, and then at the same hour every umbra extensa
will be double of its object; and if the shadow on the
cylinder be double of the style, that is, when the shadow
is of 24 points, every upright object will be double of its
shadow; and so always, whatever proportion the shadow
on the cylinder holds to the style, conversely every upright
object holds the same proportion to its umbra extensa.,
every upright object, I say, which throws a shadow under
the same altitude of the sun at that hour. Or, if you do
not know how to take the proportion, divide 144 by the
points which you have, as was said, and the result will be
the shadow which is called extensa of the upright object;
see, then, how many status are in that umbra extensa, or
what part of 12 the points are, and you will have what
you desired.
�76
PRACTICA CHIL1NDRI.
DE DECLINACIONE SOLIS.
vm volueris scire declinaci'onem sobs omni die
anni, scias umbram uersam Arietis in regione in
qua fueris, i[d est], scias ad quem, gradum chihndri proueniat vmbra stili eius in meridie, cum fuerit sol in primo
gradu Arietis, et hec est mbra Arietis in gradibns chilindri in ilia regione. Qno scito, sume vmbram meridiei per
chilindrum qnocunyne die volueris scire declinacionem
soli's, et vide super quot gradus chilindri ceciderit umbra,
et quantum plus uel minns fuerit umbra ilia qnam vmbra
Arietis, tanta erit declinacio solzs in meridie illins diei.
Sed si umbra tua fuerit maior quarn vmbra Arietis, erit
declinacio solis [leaf 4] septemtrionalz's ; si uero minor fuerit,
erzt declinacio meridiana. Qnod si volueris scire gradum
solis in ilia die per eins declinacionem, intra1 in tabnlam
declinacionis solzs, et quere similem declinaci'onem ei quam
inuenisti per chilindrum, et aliqnis 4 graduum quem in
directo eins inueneris erit gradus sob's uel fere; et scies
qnis erit gradus ex ilb’s 4, vt aspicias vtrum declinaci'o
fuerit meridiana uel septemtrionab's. Qnod si fuerit meridiana, erit vnns de gradibns meridionalibas, et si fuerit
declinacio septemtrionalz's, erit vnns de gradibns septemtrionalibiis; ha&ent autem omnes 4 gradus eqnidistantes ab
eqninoctiali eandem declinaci'onem. Cum ergo sciueris
quod fuerit vnns de gradibns septemtrionis seu meridiei,
scies qnis duornzn fuerit gradus soli's, ut aspicias seqnenti
die declinacionem per chilindrum, et si umbra fuerit maior
qnam die precedent^ fueritqne declinacio meridiana, erit
gradus ille a Capricorno in Ariete?n; et si umbra tails declinaci'onis fuerit minor, erit gradus ille a Libra in Capricornum; si uero umbra creuerit, fueritqne declinacio septemtrionalis, erit gradus ille ab Ariete in Cancruzn; si uero
decreuerit, a Cancro in Libram.
9.
1 MS ‘ iuxZn.’
�ON THE DECLINATION OF THE SUN.
9.
77
ON THE DECLINATION OF THE SUN.
When- you wish, to know the declination of the sun on
any day in the year, know the urn,bra versa of Aries in the
region in which you are, that is, know to what degree of
the cylinder the shadow of its style reaches at midday,
when the sun is in the first degree of Aries, and this is the
shadow of Aries in the degrees of the cylinder in that
region. That being known, take the midday shadow by
the cylinder on whatever day you wish to know the de
clination of the sun, and see over how many degrees of the
cylinder the shadow falls, and the declination of the sun
at noon of that day, will be as great as that shadow is
greater or less than the shadow of Aries. But if your
shadow is greater than the shadow of Aries, the sun’s de
clination will be northern, but if it is less, the declination
will be southern. And if you wish to know the sun’s de
gree on that day by his declination, enter into the table of
the sun’s declination, and seek a similar declination to that
which you have found by the cylinder, and some one of
the 4 degrees, which you find on a line with it will be the
sun’s degree or nearly (so); and you shall know which
will be the degree out of those 4, as you look whether the
declination is southern or northern ; for if it be southern,
it will be one of the southern degrees, and if the declina
tion be northern, it will be one of the northern degrees.
But all the 4 parallel degrees have the same declination
from the equinoctial. When, therefore, you know that it
is one of the northern degrees orcofi the southern, you
shall know which of the two is the degree of the sun, as
you observe the declination on the following day by the
cylinder, and if the shadow be greater than on the preced
ing day and the'declination be southern, the degree will be
that from Capricorn towards Aries ; and if the shadow of
such declination be less, ther degree will be that from
Libra towards Capricorn; but if the shadow has increased
and the declination is northern, the degree will be that
from Aries towards Cancer; but- if it has decreased, from
Cancer towards Libra. . '
�78
-
PRACTICA CHILINDRI.
DE ALTITUDINE SOLIS OMNI HORA ANNI.
10. IjlT si volueris scire altiinch'nem sob's que poterit
-Li esse omni bora anni, vide quantum capiet quelibei hora anni de gradibns chilindri, mensurando per circinum aut per festucam, et ipsa erit altitudo sob's ad quamlibei horam anni in regione tua, s[cilicet], snj?er qnam
figurantnr hore chilindri, si Deus voluerit.
DE LATIT UDLVE REGIONIS.
11. Oil volueris scire latitudinem regionis ignote ad
quam veneris, tunc vertes stilum super gradus
altitudz'nis, et vide ad qnot gradus peruenerit vmbra.
Quod si hoc feceris in die eqninoctiali, niinue gradus qnos
habueris de 90, et residuuzn er it latitudo regionis. Quod
si no?z feceris hoc in eqninoctio, vide per tabnlam decb'nacionis que fuerit declinacio solis in ipsa die. Quam declinacionem, si fuerit australis, adde snper susceptam
altitudinem, et hafrebis altitudinem eqninoctialis in eadem
regione ; et si declinacio fuerit septemtrionalis, niinue earn
de accepta altiinciine, haSebisqne altitudinem eqninoctiab's
in eadem regione. Haftita autem alti/nciine eqninoctialis,
minuas ipsam semper de 90, et residuum er it latitudo regionis, que est distencia cenith ab eqninoctiali.
DE QUANTITATE ORBIS TERRE.
12. Oil autem volueris scire quantitatem Deaf4,bk] cirKJj cuitns terre per chilindrum, verte stilum super
gradus chilindri, et scias optime gradum solis et &eelinacionem eins, et serua earn. Cumqne hoc sciueris, sumas
altitudinem sob's meridianam, et serua eam; post hec
autem procedas directe uersus septemtrionem uel meridiem,
donee altera die, absqne augmenta[ta] uel minorata interim
�ON THE LATITUDE OF A REGION.
10.
ON
(finding)
79
THE ALTITUDE OF THE SUN AT ANY
HOUR OF THE YEAR.
And if you wish to -know the sun’s altitude, which may
be at any hour of the year, see how much of the degrees of
the cylinder any hour of the year will take, measuring with
the compasses or with a rod, and the same will he the
sun’s altitude at any hour of the year in your region, that
is to say, (the region) upon which the hours of the cylinder
are figured, if God will.
11.
on
(finding) the latitude of a region.
If you wish to know the latitude of an unknown region
to which you have come, then turn the style over the de
grees of altitude, and see to how many degrees the shadow
reaches. And if you do this on the equinoctial day, sub
tract the degrees which you have from 90, and the re
mainder will be the latitude of the region. But if you do
this not at the equinox, see by the table of declination
:what is the sun’s declination on the same day; add the
declination, if it be southern, to the altitude you have
taken, and you will have the altitude of the equinoctial in
the same region; and if the declination be northern, sub
tract it from the taken altitude, and you will have the
altitude of the equinoctial in the same region. Moreover,
the altitude of the equinoctial being had, subtract it always
from 90, and the remainder will be the region’s latitude,
which is the distance of the zenith from the equinoctial.
12.
ON THE SIZE OF THE WORLD.
If, moreover, you wish to know the extent of the
earth’s circumference by the cylinder, turn the style over
the degrees of the cylinder, and know most accurately the
degree of the sun and his declination, and keep it. And
when you know this, take the meridian altitude of the sun,
and keep it. Then after this travel directly northward or
southward, until on another day, without increase or de-
�80
PRACTICA CHILINDRI.
declinaczone, ascendent sol in gradibus chilindri plus vno
gradu quam prizzs ascendent, plus dico, si processeris
versus meridiem, uel minus, si processeris uersus septemtrionem, et iam pertransisti spaciuzn in terra quod subiacet
vni gradui celi. Metire ergo illud, et vide quot miliaria
sint in eo. Deinde multiplica, sfcilicet], miliaria illius
spacij quod haSueris per 360, qui sunt gradus circuli, et tot
miliaria scias esse in circuitu mundi. Quod si volueris
scire spissitudinem mundi, diuide circuitum eius per tria
et septimam partem vnius, eritque hoc quod exierit diametrum terre, et medietas eius erit quantitas que est a superdcie ad centrum eius, si Deus voluerit. De inueniendis
autem ascendente et ceteris domibus per vmbram satis
dictum est in lecczonibus tabularum, et idea de illis nichil
ad presens. Et hec de practica chilindri sufficiant. Ex
plicit.
■
Explicit practica chilindri
Mag is tri
Houeden astrologi.
Iohannis
de
�ON THE SIZE OF THE WORLD.
81
crease of declination in the mean time, the sun has risen
one degree more in the degrees of the cylinder than he
rose before; more, I say, if you have travelled south
ward, or less, if you have travelled northward; and now
you have traversed on the earth the space which lies
under one degree of the heaven. Measure it therefore, and
see how many miles are in it. Then multiply, of course,
the miles in that space which you have by 360, which are
the degrees of a circle, and know that there are so many
mi les in the circumference of the world. But if you wish
to know the thickness of the world, divide its circumfer
ence by three and the seventh part of one, and the result
will be the diameter of the earth, and half of it will be the
distance from its surface to the centre, if God will. But
on finding the ascendant and the other houses by the
shadow enough has been said in the readings of the tables,
and therefore nothing of them at present. And let this
suffice upon the working of the cylinder. End.
Here ends Master John Hoveden, the astrologer’s,
Working
of the
Cylinder.
�‘4*
I
'I
�83
IV.
THE USE OF FINAL -e
IN EAELY ENGLISH,
AND ESPECIALLY IN
CHAUCER’S CANTERBURY TALES.
BY
JOSEPH PAYNE, ESQ.
�84
SYNOPSIS OF THE ARGUMENTS.
The two main arguments are :—
I. That in the ordinary English speech of the 13th and 14th
centuries there was no recognition of the formative, and little of th6
inflexional, -e, which, chiefly for orthoepical reasons, was appended
to many words employed in written composition.
II. That the phonetic recognition of final -e was confined to
verse composition, and only occasionally adopted by license, under
rhythmical exigency, and consequently not adopted at the end of
the verse where it was unnecessary.
These arguments are maintained, (1.) by considerations inherent
in the nature of the case, (2.) by reference to the practice of AngloNorman and Early English writers, and are supported by illus
trations derived (a.) from the laws which governed the formation
of words in early French, (5.) from the manner in which Norman
words are introduced into ancient Cornish poems, and (c.) from the
usage of old Low German dialects (especially that of Mecklenburg),
in respect to words identical (except as regards final -e) with Early
English words.
�85
THE USE OF FINAL -e IN EARLY ENGLISH, WITH
ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE FINAL -e AT
THE END OF THE VERSE IN CHAUCER’S
CANTERBURY TALES.
1. STATEMENT OE THE QUESTION AT ISSUE.
H'
The question whether the final -e, which is so obvious
a feature of numerous English words in the 13th and 14th
centuries, was or was not frequently recognized as a factor
of the rhythm in verse, is not the question which it is
here proposed to discuss. It needs, in fact, no discussion,
since there can be no doubt whatever on the point. The
real question is what it meant, that is, whether it was an
organic and essential element of the words in which it
occurred, to be accounted for by reference to original
formation, inflexion, &c., or whether it was, for the most
part, an inorganic orthoepic adjunct of the spelling, and
only exceptionally performed any organic function.
If the former hypothesis is true, the -e was recognized
in the rhythm because it was recognized in ordinary
parlance as a necessary part of the pronunciation of the
word, and the instances in which it was silent were excep
tional and irregular. If the latter is true, the instances
in which it was silent represent the regular pronunciation
of the words, and those in which it is sounded an excep
tional pronunciation, allowed by the fashion of the times
in verse composition. It is a consequence, moreover, of
the former theory that the -e, being by assumption a neces
sary organic part of the word, ought to be sounded even
where, as in the case of the final syllable of the verse, it is
CH. ESSAYS.
G
�86
THE USE OF FINAL
-e
not required by the rhythm. By the latter theory the -e
of the final rhyme, being generally an inorganic element
of the orthography, not recognized in the ordinary pro
nunciation and not required by the rhythm, was (with
rare exceptions, such as Rome—--to me, sothe—to the, &c., in
the Canterbury Tales and elsewhere) silent.
These theories are obviously inconsistent with each
other, the exceptions of the one being the rule of the
other, and vice versa. The former is that adopted by
Tyrwhitt, Guest, Gesenius, Child, Craik, Ellis, Morris,
and Skeat; the latter is that maintained by the present
writer, supported to some extent by the authority of the
late Mr Richard Price.
In anticipation of the full discussion of the various
points involved, it may be here briefly remarked, that the
former theory requires us to assume that such words as
schame, veyne, sake, space, rose, joie, vie, sonne, witte,
presse, were in ordinary parlance pronounced as scha-me,
vey-ne, ro-se, joi-e, son-ne, wit-te, presse; moreover, that
corage, nature, were pronounced as cora-ge, natu-re, and
curteisie, hethenesse, as cwrfezsz-e, hethenesse, and that
the recognition of the -e in verse as a factor of the rhythm
was required to represent the true pronunciation. The
second theory, on the other hand, assumes that schame,
veyne, seke, joie, witte, nature, curteisie, &c., conventionally
represent scham, veyn, selc, joi, wit, natur, curteisi, as the
ordinary pronunciation of the words, and that the recogni
tion of the -e as significant, was a rhythmical license.
By way of further illustration of the difference between
the two theories, it may be noted that in such verses as
these:
Enbrouded was he, as it were a mede—C. T. v. 89.
Ful wel sche sang the servise devyne—ib. v. 122;
the first theory requires mede and devyne to be pro
nounced me-de, devy-ne; the second, regarding mede
(== A.S. med) and devyne (= Fr. devyn) as conventional
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
87
spellings, requires them to be pronounced med and devyn.
Servise (Fr. servis, service), here servi-se, is regular by the
first theory, exceptional by the second.1
The main principle of the theory here adopted is
that very early (probably in the 12 th century) phonetic
began to supersede dynamic considerations, and, as a con
sequence, to change. the significance of the originally
organic -e ; and that this change was especially due to the
introduction of the Norman speech and the usages of the
Norman scribes into England. The Norman dialect was
the simplest and purest of all the dialects of the French
language, and largely exhibited the influence of phonetic
laws. This influence it began to propagate on its contact
with English. The first effect was to simplify the for
mative English terminations of nouns. Hence in the
beginning of the 12th century -a, -o, -u (as in tima, hcelo,
sceamu) became -e (as in time, sceame, or schame, hele).
It next acted on the grammatical inflexions, as, for in
stance, in nouns, either by suppressing the -e of the
oblique or dative case altogether (cf. Orrmin’s “ be word,”
“bi brsed,” “o boc,” “off stan,” &c.); or by converting it
from an organic to an inorganic termination, reducing it,
in short, to the same category as name, shame, hele. It
next affected the orthography generally by introducing an
expedient of the Norman scribes (before unknown in
England), which consisted in the addition of an inorganic
-e to denote the length of the radical vowel, an expedient
which, when adopted in English, converted, after a time,
A.S. tar, ben, bed, into tare, bene, bede, without disturbing
the individuality of the words, and re-acted on name,
1 In support of the assumption that sonant -e is exceptional,
not regular, it may be noted that in the first 100 lines of the Pro
logue (Ellesmere text) out of 160 instances of final -e only 22 occur
in which it is sounded before a consonant; of the remaining 138
25 are silent before a consonant, 49 before a vowel or It, and 64 in
the final rhyme where its sound is superfluous—that is to say, in
138 instances the words in -e have, it is assumed, their natural
pronunciation against 22 in which, by license, the -e is reckoned as
an additional syllable.
�88
THE USE OF FINAL -C
schame, hele, &c., by treating them (whatever they may
have been before) as monosyllables. It finally acted on
the versification by introducing the license, well known
in early and, by descent, in modern French, of recog
nizing, under rhythmical exigency, the inorganic -e (silent
in ordinary discourse) as a factor of the verse. It hence
appears that certain principles introduced by the Normans,
and exhibited in their own tongue, affected first the spoken
and then the written English, gradually superseding the
organic function of the -e, by treating it as inorganic, as
an orthoepic sign to guide the pronunciation of the reader;
and that this great change was fundamentally due to the
law of phonetic economy, which, by its tendency to
simplification, gradually overpowered the original dynamic
laws of the language, and ended in converting the forma
tive and inflexional -e into a conventional element of the
spelling.
2.
OBJECTIONS WITH RESPECT TO THE VERSIFICATION CON
SIDERED.
I _
Two d priori objections may be taken, and indeed
have been taken, against this conclusion as applied to
Chaucer’s versification. The first is indicated in these
words of Mr Ellis,1 “that Chaucer and Gdthe'used the
final -e in precisely the same way,” and in these of Pro
fessor Child,2 “that the unaccented, final -e of nouns of
French origin is sounded in Chaucer as it is in French
verse,” by which assertions it is affirmed that the laws of
modern German and French versification are identical with
those of Chaucer.
The full answer to this objection will be found in the
subsequent investigation, but for the present it may be
urged, without pressing the argument already presumptively
1 “ Early English Pronunciation,” p. 339.
2 “ Observations on the Language of Chaucer,” by Professor
Child of Harvard University, a paper contributed to the “ Memoirs
of the American Academy,” vol. viii. p. 461.
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
89
stated, that the use of -e in German and French versifica
tion is (with very rare exceptions) regular and constant,
while that in Chaucer is continually interfered with hy
instances of silent -<?, which, indeed, outnumber those in
which it is sounded (see note, p.' 87), even -without taking
into consideration the -e of the final rhyme. Then with
regard to the final rhyme, the objection as applied to
French versification proves too much, inasmuch as the -e
at the end of a French verse is not, and probably never
was, a factor of the rhythm. This argument, then, as far
as it is worth anything, is for, not against, the theory here
maintained.
The following instances, which are typical, show that
the laws of French versification are continually violated by
Chaucer:
And he hadde ben somtyme in chivachie.— v. 85.
In hope to stonden in his lady grace.—v. 88.
He sleep nomore than doth a nightyngale.—w. 97, 98.
Ful semely aftui' hire mete sche raught.—v. 13-6.
By cause that it was old and somdel streyt.—v. 174.
Kfrere ther was, a wantoun and a merye.—v. 208.
In alle the ordres foure is noon that can.—v. 210, &c.
If these verses are read by the French rule they become
unmetrical; it is only by ignoring it that they can be read
with metrical precision. The conclusion, then, is that the
only exact identity between French and early English
versification consists in the silence of the -e at the end of
the verse.
Nor would it be difficult to show from the above and
from thousands of other instances, that the strict applica
tion of the laws of German versification would render
Chaucer unreadable.
The second'd priori argument, first put forward by
Tyrwhitt, against the theory here adopted, that the -e at
the end of a verse was silent, is to the effect that Chaucer
intended the verse of the Canterbury Tales to be an imita
tion of the Italian endecasyllabic, that of Boccaccio, &c.,
and, therefore, that he required the -e at the close of the
�90
THE USE OF FINAL -0
line to be pronounced to make the eleventh syllable.
Against this assumption, however, it may be urged that he
simply adopted the decasyllabic French verse, of which
there were numerous examples before his time. The metre
of the Chanson de Roland, Huon de Bordeaux, Guillaume
d’Orange, &c., as well as of many of the “Ballades” of his
contemporary Eustache Deschamps, appears to be pre
cisely that of the Canterbury Tales. The following are
typical examples :—
Co sent Rollenz que la mort le tresprent,
Devers la teste sur le quer li descent.— Chan, de Roland.
Ma douce mere jamais ne me verra.—Huon de Bordeaux.
Cis las dolans, vrais dex, que devenra.—ib.
Forment me poise quant si estes navres
Se tu recroiz, a ma fin sui alez.— Guillaume d? Orange.
En bon Anglais le livre translatas.—Eustache Deschamps.
Grant translateur, noble Geoffroy Chaucier.—ib.
Ta noble plant, ta douce melodie.—ib.
We see, then, that there was no occasion for Chaucer to
go to the Italians for a model. It may, moreover, be
plausibly urged that in none of Chaucer’s earlier works is
there any trace of Italian influence, whether as regards
subject, general treatment, or versification.3
3. THE SECTIONAL PAUSE.
Before entering on the illustration by reference to the
actual usage of early French and English poets of the
theory which has been already stated, some notice may be
taken of a characteristic feature of early French and
English verse which has an important bearing on the
point at issue.1 It is that of the sectional pause, a stop
made in the reading of the verse, for the sake of the sound,
and having no immediate connection with the sense.
This pause in decasyllabic verse (to which, however, it is by
no means confined) occurred at the end of the fourth or
1 It is remarkable that scarcely any of the writers on early
English versification (except Dr Guest) have noticed the sectional
pause, or explained the true use of the prosodial bars or full-points
found in the MSS.
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
91
sixth measure, and divided the verse into two parts, which
were prosodially independent of each other; that is, it
made each part a separate verse. Dr Guest (History of
English Rhythms, i. 181) thus states the rule generally:
“ When a verse is divided into two parts or sections by
what is called the middle pause, the syllable which follows
such pause is in the same situation as if it began the
verse.” The bearing of this point, however, on the ques
tion at issue is more fully seen in the usage of early
French verse, in which the effect of the pause was to
silence the -e which closed the section. This usage is
altogether unknown in modern French verse; a fact which
of itself forms an argument against the presumed identity
of the laws of early English and modern French versifica
tion. The rule is thus stated by Quicherat (“Versification
frangaise,” p. 325) :• “ Une preuve de Timportance que nos
anciens poetes donnaient au repos de la cesure ” (he means
the sectional pause) “ c’est qu'ils la traitaient comme la
rime, et lui permettaient de prendre une syllabe muette, qui
n'etait pas comptee dans la mesure.”
This principle, in its application to early Anglo-Nor
man and English, may be thus formulated :—
The -e that occurred at the sectional pause (and, pre
sumptively, that at the final pause closing the
verse) was silent, and not a factor of the rhythm.
Instances in which the -e at the pause was silent
abound in early French and Anglo-Norman poems, and
this usage was borrowed or imitated by English poets, as
may be seen in the instances which follow.
Fors Sarraguce || ki est en une muntaigne.— Chanson de
Roland, v. 6.
De vasselage || fut asez chevaler.—ib. v. 25.
Mais ami jeune || quiert amour et amie.—Eustache Des
champs, i. 122.
Car vieillesse || sans cause me decoipt.—ib. ii.' 20.
Desous la loi de Rome || na nule region.—Rutebeuf, i. 236.
Si li cors voloit fere || ce que lame desire.—ib. i. 399.
Toz cis siecles est foire || mais lautre ert paiement.—ib. i. 400.
/
�92
THE USE OF FINAL -6
De medle se purpense || par ire par rancour.—Langtoft (ecl.
Wright), i. 4.
Lavine sa bele file || li done par amour.—i&.
Norice le tient en garde || ke Brutus le appellait.— ib.
I rede we chese a hede || fat us to werre kan dight.—De
Drvnne (ed. Hearne, i. 2).
pat ilk a kyng of reame || suld mak him alle redie.—ib. i. 4.
Sorow and site he made || per was non oper rede.—ib. 5.
That ben commune || to me and the.—Eandlyng Synne (ed.
Furnivall, p. 1).
In any spyce || pat we falle ynne.—ib. p. 2.
For none \>arefore || shulde me blame.—ib.
On Englyssh tunge || to make pys boke.—ib.
In al godenesse || pat may to prow.—ib. p. 3.
pe yeres of grace || fyl pan to be.—ib.
Faire floures for to fecclie || pat he bi-fore him seye.— William
of Palerne (ed. Skeat), v. 26.
and comsed pan to crye || so ken[e]ly and schille.—ib. v. 37.
panne of saw he ful sone || pat semliche child.—ib. n. 49.
pat alle men vpon molde || no mqt telle his sorwe.—ib. v. 85.
but carfuli gan sche crie || so kenely and lowde.—ib. v. 152.
It will be seen that in all these instances the power of
the pause overrides the grammatical considerations. Alle,
commune (plurals), reame, spyce, tunge, grace, molde
(datives), crie (infin.), to fecche, to crye (gerundial infini
tives), have the -e silent.
The following examples show that Chaucer adopted
the same rule :—
Schort was his goune || with sleeves long and wyde.—Earl.
n. 93.
He sleep no more || than doth a nightingale.—ib. v. 97.
Hire gretest otliex || nas but by seint Eloi.—Tyrmhitt, v. 120.
Hire grettest ooth || nas | but by | seint Loi.—-Earl. v. 120.
That no drope || til | uppon | hire brest.—ib. v. 131.
That no drope || ne fille upon hir brist.—Ellesmere, v. 131.
I durste swere || they weyghede ten pound.—Earl. v. 454.
And of the feste || that was at hire weddynge.—ib. v. 885.
And maken alle || this lamentacioun.—ib. v. 935.
For Goddes love || tak al in pacience.—iA v. 1086.
Into my herte || that wol my bane be.—ib. v. 1097.
No creature || that of hem maked is.—ib. v. 1247.
And make a werre || so scharpe in this cite.—ib. v. 1287.
Thou mayst hire wynne || to lady and to wyf.—ib. v. 1289.
Ther as a beste || may al his lust fulfille.—ib. v. 1318.
1 Othe and ooth are the same word, the inorganic -e being
merely an index to the sound. This exclamation occurs in
“ Nenil, Sire, par Seint Eloi ” (Theatre Frangais du Moyen Age, p.
120). Loi itself appears to be simply a contraction of Eloi,
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
93
In. the following instances the independence of the
second section of the verse is shown :—
Whan that Aprille || with ] hise shore | wes swoote.—•
Harl. v. 1.
- And whiche they were || and | of what | degree.—Elies, v. 40.
In al the parisshe || wyf | ne was | ther noon.—Harl. v. 451.
Sche schulde slope || in | his arm | al night.—ib. v. 3406.
That wyde where' || sent | her spy | eerie.—ib. v. 4556.
Than schal your soule || up | to he|ven skippe.—ib. v. 9546.
For Goddes sake || think | how I | the chees.—ib. v. 10039.
And with a face || deed | as ai|sshen colde.—ib. v. 13623.
In view of the numerous instances given above of the
silence of the -e at the sectional pause, it would seem a
fortiori improbable that it would be sounded at the greater
pause, that formed by the end of the verse. This argu
ment, though as yet only presumptive, is held to be
strongly in favour of the theory adopted by the present
writer, who would therefore read,
In God|des love || tak al | in pa|cience
as ten syllables and no more.
Even if the illustrations adduced are not admitted as
decisive of the silence of -e at the end of the verse, they
undoubtedly account for its silence at the sectional pause
as a characteristic of Anglo-Norman and Early English
versification, and confirm the general argument, that in
Chaucer’s time the law of phonetic economy prevailed over
what have been assumed to be the demands of word
formation and grammar.
4. THE USE OF FINAL
-e
AS A FORMATIVE CONVENTIONAL
ELEMENT OF THE SPELLING.
The position to be here maintained has been already
stated (see p. 87), and amounts to this, that, as a con
sequence of Norman influence, the -e, which, whether
1 If the -e of where is sounded, it is probably the single instance
in which it is so used, either in Chaucer or any other Early English
writer. Here and there, too, are always monosyllables, and there
fore Mr Child’s marking of them as dissyllables when final, as in
1821, 3502, 5222, &c., is entirely gratuitous. They will be con
sidered hereafter.
�94
THE USE OF FINAL -e
formative or inflexional, was once organic and significant,
became, as in time = turn, dede = ded, &c., simply a
mark or index of the radical long vowel sound, or as in
witte = wit, presse = press, a mere conventional append
age of the doubled consonant which denoted the radical
short vowel sound.
It- is further assumed that this phonetic influence,
which probably acted first on the formative -e, as in the
instances just given, gradually involved with varying
degrees of velocity also the inflexional -e, and therefore
that the so-called oblique cases as roote, brethe, ramme, &c.,
and the infinitives as take, arise, telle, putte, merely repre
sent in their spelling the sounds rot, breth, ram, tali, arts,
tel, put, the formative and the inflexional -e being reduced
to the same category.
The doctrine here laid down in its largest generality
involves, it is easily seen, the whole question of the cor
respondence between the sound of words uttered in ordin
ary speech and their orthographic representation, as far as
the final -e is concerned, and is to be considered independ
ently of the exceptional use of -e as, by the usage of the
times, an occasional factor of the verse. If, however, it
can be proved it disposes entirely of the assumption that
the -e was sounded at the end of the verse, and this is the
main object in view.
5. CANONS OF
ORTHOGRAPHY
AND ORTHOEPY APPLICABLE
TO EARLY ENGLISH.
The main points, then, to be proved—by reference to
the nature of the case and to actual usage—are, that in the
time of Chaucer and long before, final -e had become either
(1) an orthoepic or orthographic mark to indicate the sound
of the long radical vowel or diphthong, or (2) a superfluous
letter added for the eye, not for the ear, after a doubled
consonant.
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
95
These conventionalities may he reduced for convenience
of reference to the following
Canons of orthography and orthoepy.
Canon I. (1) When final -e followed a consonant or
consonants which were preceded by a long vowel or
diphthong, it was not sounded.
Thus mede = med, rose = rds, veyne = veyn.
(2) When final -e followed a vowel or diphthong, tonic
or atonic, it was not sounded.
Thus curteisie = curteisi, glorie = glori, weye = wey,
merie = meri.
Canon II. When final -e followed a doubled consonant
or two different consonants, preceded by a short
vowel, it was not sounded.
Thus witte = wit, blisse = blis, sette = set, ende =
end, reste = rest.
Once more admitting that the -e in each of these cases
could be made, and was made, at the will of the poet,
exceptionally significant, we proceed to consider these pro
positions seriatim, merely observing, by the way, that these
rules—framed and adopted five or six hundred years ago—
are in substance the same as those now in common use.
(1.) Final -e suffixed to a consonant or consonants which
were preceded by a long vowel or diphthong, as in mede,
penaunce, veyne.
On this point we are bound to listen to the doctrine of
Mr Richard Price, contained in the preface to his edition of
Warton’s History of English Poetry.
Referring first to the fact that in A.S. the long vowel of
a monosyllabic word was commonly marked by an accent,
which in the Early English stage of the language was
entirely disused, he inquires what was done to supply its
place, and maintains that in such cases an -e was generally
suffixed to indicate the long quantity of the preceding
�9G
THE USE OF FINAL
-e
radical vowel. “The Norman scribes,” he says, “or at
least the disciples of the Norman school, had recourse to
the analogy which governed the French language;”1 and,
he adds, “ elongated the word or attached, as it were, an
accent instead of superscribing it.” “ From hence,” he
proceeds to say, “ has emanated an extensive list of terms
having final e’s and duplicate consonants, [as in witte,
synne, &c.,J which were no more the representatives of
additional syllables than the acute or grave accent in the
Greek language, is a mark of metrical quantity.” He adds
in a note, “ The converse of this can. only be maintained
under an assumption that the Anglo-Saxon words of one
syllable multiplied their numbers after the Conquest, and
in some succeeding century subsided into their primitive
simplicity.” Illustrating his main position in another
place,2 he observes, “ The Anglo-Saxon a was pronounced
like the Danish aa; the Swedish ci, or our modern o in
more, fore, &c. The strong intonation given to the words
in which it occurred would strike a Norman ear as indicat
ing the same orthography that marked the long syllables of
his native tongue, and he would accordingly write them
with an e final. It is from this cause that we find liar,
sar, lidt, bat, wd, an, ban, stan, &c., written hore (hoar),
sore, hote (hot), bote (boat), woe, one, bone, stone, some of
1 Mr Price makes no attempt to prove this position, but a few
remarks upon it may not be out of place here. The general
principle in converting Latin words into French was to shorten
them, and the general rule, to effect this by throwing off the termin
ation of the accusative case. Thus calic-em would become calic,
which appears in Old French both as callz and callee, evidently
equivalent sounds. So we find vertiz, devis, servis, surplis, graas,
and in phonetic spelling ros, clios. Conversely, as showing the
real sound of such words, we find in Chaucer and other English
poets, trespaas, solaas, caas, faas, gras (also grasse~), las, which
interpret solace, case, face, grace, lace, as words in which -e was
mute, and this because it was mute in French. French words
ending in -nee, as sentence, paclence, experience, were presumpt
ively sounded without -e, since we find Chaucer and other English
writers expressing them as sentens, paciens, experiens. See Ap
pendix I “ On the final -e of French nouns derived from Latin.”
2 End of note to the Saxon Ode on the Victory of Athelstan.
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
97
which have heen retained. The same principle of elonga
tion was extended to all the Anglo-Saxon vowels that were
accentuated; such as rec, reke (reek), lif, life, god, gode
(good), scur, shure (shower); and hence the majority of
those e’s mute, upon which Mr Tyrwhitt has expended so
much unfounded speculation.” 1
Mr Price means to assert—what is maintained by
the present writer—that an original monosyllable, as
lif, for instance, was never intended by those who sub
sequently wrote it life to be considered or treated, when
used independently, as a word of two syllables, though
when introduced into verse it might be employed as such,
under the stress of the rhythm. There seems an a priori
absurdity in the conception of such an interference with
the individuality of a word, as is involved in denying the
essential identity of lif and life. The fact, too, that in
Early English, as distinguished from Anglo-Saxon so
called, nearly, if not quite all, the words in question
appear as monosyllables, seems strikingly to confirm the
hypothesis. Thus in the Orrmulum we find boc, blod,
brad, braed, cwen, daed, daef, daefy, god, so], wa, an, stan,
nearly all of which are the identical A.S. forms, and were
most of them in later texts lengthened out by an inorganic
-e. As the pronunciation of these words was no doubt
well established, there seemed no need for the scribe to
indicate in any way what was everywhere known, but soon
the confusion that began to arise, in writing, between long
and short syllables, suggested the more general use of the
orthoepical expedient in question, and accordingly we find
in early English texts both forms employed. Thus along
with lif, str if, drem, bot, &c., we see bede (A.S. bed),
bene, bone (A.S. ben), bode (A.S. b6d), &c.
The “ Early English Poems” (written before 1300,
1 Mr Price promised to resume the subject “ in a supplementaryvolume, in an examination of that ingenious critic’s ‘ Essay upon
the Language and Versification of Chaucer.’ ” This promise was,
however, never fulfilled.
�98
THE USE OF FINAL -e
in a “pure Southern” dialect1) supply us with numerous
examples. The following are from “ A Sarmun ” :
pe dere (A.S. deor) is nauqte (A.S. naht, nawht) pat pou
mighte sle
v. 24
If pou ertpr.wtfe (A.S. prut) man, of pi fleisse
v. 25
pe wiked wede (A.S. wed) pat was abute
v. 49
Hit is mi rede (A.S. rad, red) while pou him hast
v. 61
pen spene pe gode (A.S. god) pat god ham send
v. 68
His hondes, \sfete (A.S. fet) sul ren of blode
v. 117
Of sinful man pat sadde pi blode (A.S. blod)
v. 124
flopefire (A.S. fyr) and wind lude sul crie
v. 125
And forto hir pe bitter dome (A.S. dom)
V. 134
Angles sul quake, so seip pe bohe (A.S. hoc)
v. 135
To crie ihsu pin ore (A.S. ar)
v. 142
While pou ert here (A.S. her) be wel iware (A.S. gewar) v. 143
Undo pin hert and live is lore (A.S. lar)
v. 144
Hit is to late (A.S. last) whan pou ert pare (A.S. pa*r, par,
per)
v. 146
For be pe soule (A.S. sawl) enis oute (A.S. ut)
v. 171
he nel nojt leue his eir al bare (A.S. bser)
v. 174
and helpip pai pat habip nede (A.S. nead, neod, ned) v. 186
pe ioi of heven hab to mede (A.S. med)
v. 188
heven is heij hope lange (A.S. lang) and wide (A.S. wid) v. 213
In this long list of passages It will be seen that not one
instance occurs in which the formative -e is phonetic, so
that bede, bone, blode, boke, ore, here, lore, nede, bare, ware,
wide, late, &c., are all treated as words of one syllable
in which the -e is merely an orthoepical index to the
sound.
These instances, alone, go far to show what the ordinary
pronunciation of the words in question was, and to make
it appear very improbable that, except by poetical license,
the -e which closes them was ever pronounced.
It appears, then, clear that the A.S. words above quoted
are absolutely equivalent to the corresponding Early English
words ending in -e. But the principle admits of some ex
tension. We find that not only A.S. words ending in a
consonant assumed -e in Early English, but that the A.S.
terminations -a, -o, -u, were also represented by -e. This we
see in time from tima, and hele from hselo, or hselu. When
1 “ Some notes on the leading grammatical characteristics of the
principal Early English dialects.” By Wm. T. P. Sturzen-Becker,
Ph.D. Copenhagen, 1868.
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
99
these forms were generally adopted, the next step would
he to consider them as in the same category as blode, dome,
&c., and to apply the same rule of pronunciation to them.
Hence, except by way of license, we find in the 13th and
14th centuries no practical difference in the use of the two
classes of words—crede from creda, stede from steda, care
from cearu, shame from sceamu, being treated precisely as
blode from blod, dome from dom, &c.; and the same remark
applies to such adjectives as blithe, dene, grene, &c., which
in their simple indefinite use, at least, were probably mono
syllables.
The position now gained is, that the -e in such English
words as dome, mede, fode, mone, name, &c., was orthoepic,
not organic. It is highly probable—as Mr Price appears
to have believed—that Latin words became French by a
si-mil ar process, and that the orthoepic expedient in question
is of French origin.1 The Norman words place, grace,
face, space, as interpreted in English by plas, graas, faas,
spas, are found in “ Early English Poems,” and later, in
Chaucer, and we also find conversely trespace, case, for
the French trespas, cas. Both in Early French and English
we moreover find as equivalent forms, devis, devise, and
device; servis, servise, service; pris, prise, price; surplis,
surplice; assis, assise.2
It will now be shown by examples, both Anglo-Norman
and English, that in words containing a long vowel
followed by a consonant and final -e, the -e was simply an
index to the quantity of the vowel, and therefore not
generally pronounced in verse composition—though under
stress of the rhythm it might be.
The usage in Anglo-Norman verse will first be shown
generally:
1 See Appendix I.
2 The phonetic identity of -s, -sse, -ce, in Anglo-Norman and
English is shown by numerous illustrations in a paper by the pre
sent writer, on Norman and English pronunciation, in the Philo
logical Transactions for 1868-9, pp. 371, 418-19, 440.
�100
TIIE USE OF FINAL -e
Quy a la dame de parays.—Lyrical Poetry of reign of Edward
I. (ed. Wright), p. 1.
Quar ele porta le noble enfant.—ib.
De tiele chose tenir grant pris.— ib. p. 3.
Vous estes pleyne de grant docour,—ib. p. 65.
The word dame is derived from domin-am — domin —
domn — dom — dam — dame, just as anim-am becomes
anim, anm, dm, ame. In both instances the -e is inorganic.
Dame frequently occurs in Chaucer, and generally, as
we might expect, with -e silent.1 Examples are :—
Of themperoures doughter dame Custaunce.—Harl. v. 4571.
Madame, quod he, ye may be glad & blithe.—ib. v. 5152. (See
also v. 4604, 7786, &c.)
We may presume, then, that at the end of a line, the -e
in this word would be silent, and that the -e of any word
rhyming with it would therefore be silent, as of blame in
And elles certeyn hadde thei ben to blame :
It is right fair for to be clept madarne.—Harl. v. 378-0.
We may infer, then, that English words of the same
termination—as scliame, name, &c., would follow the same
rule—and accordingly we find—
J?e more scliame Jsat he him dede.—Ear. Eng. Poems, p. 39.
We stunt noj?er for schame ne drede.—ib. p. 123.
In gode burwes and \mx-fram
Ne funden he non f>at dede hem sham.—Haveloh (ed. Skeat),
v. 55-6.
Ful wel ye witte his nam,
Ser Pers de Birmingham.—Harl. v. 913 (date 1308) ;
and in Wiclif’s “ Apology for the Lollards ” (Camden
Society), “ in pe nam of Crist ” (p. 6); “ in nam of the
Kirke” (p. 13), &c., as also “in the name" on the same
page. We may therefore conclude that shame = sham, and
name = ndm.
Following out the principle we should conclude that
1 Professor Child, in a communication to Mi- Furnivall, in
tended for publication, decides that “ dame is an exception ” from
the general rule, but quotes Chaucer’s usage of fame throughout the
“House of Fame ” as a dissyllable. There is, of course, no disputing
the fact, but we see nothing in it beyond a convenient license.
Does Mr Child pretend that fame was formed on some special
principle, and for this reason employed by Chaucer as a dissyllable?
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
101
what is true of -ame would also he true of -erne, in dreme,
-ime in rime, -ome in dome, -ume in coustume; and by
extending the analogy we should comprehend -ene in queue,
-ine in pine, as well as -ede in bede, -ete in swete, -ote in
note, -ute in prute, -ere in chere, &c., and expect that the -e
in all these cases would be mute. This, with exceptions
under stress, is found to be the case—the Northern MSS.
(as seen above) very frequently even rejecting it in the
spelling.
For the purpose of this inquiry it is obvious that such
terminations as -ume, -ine, -ete, -ere, -age, -ance, &c., are virtu
ally equivalent to monosyllabic words of the same elements.
As, however, it would be quite impossible without extend
ing the investigation to an enormous length, to illustrate
them all, the terminations -are, -ere, -ire, -ure, -age, -ance,
will be taken as types of the class.
-ere. We commence -with -ere because Professor Child
asserts that “ there can be no doubt -e final was generally
pronounced after r,” a conclusion inconsistent with the law
of formation already considered, and, as it would appear,
with general usage in early Anglo-Norman and English.
He farther maintains that “ the final -e of deere (A.S. deor,
deore) and of cheere (Fr. chere) was most distinctly pro
nounced ” [in Chaucer].
The first of these propositions evidently includes the
second, and means that words in -are, as bare, in -ere, as
here, in -ire, as fire, in -ore, as lore, generally have sonant -e.
Now it has been shown (p. 98) that bare, here, fire, lore,
were monosyllables in the 13th century. It is, therefore,
extremely improbable that these words would in the 14th
century put on another syllable. And if not these words,
why others of the same termination, as deere and cheere ?
However frequently, then, such words may appear in
Chaucer, with sonant -e, the cases are exceptional, and
being themselves exceptions from a general rule, cannot
form a separate rjile to override the general one.
CH. ESSAYS.
n
�102
THE USE OE FINAL
-e
Although, then, it were proved that Chaucer more
generally than not uses deere as a dissyllable, that fact
being exceptional cannot prove that here,1 prayere, frere,
manere,1 matere, have the -e sonant because they rhyme with
deere. The argument, in fact, runs the other way, inas
much as here, which is without exception a monosyllable
—manere and matere, which are almost without exception
dissyllables, being themselves representatives of the general
law of analogy—have a right, which no exceptional case
can have, to lay down the law. When therefore we find
heere and deere rhyming together, it is here, not deere,
that decides the question, and proves deere in that in
stance to be a monosyllable. We are indeed, in deter
mining such cases, always thrown back on the formative
law, which, being general, overrides the exceptions. All
the instances, then, in which deere rhymes with here,
manere and matere, are instances of monosyllabic deere.
As to chere, on which Mr Child also relies, he seems to
have forgotten that this word is very frequently written
cheer (there are eight such instances in the Clerk’s Tale
alone), and wherever so written confirms, and indeed proves,
the contention that it was-only exceptionally a dissyllable.
Every instance, then, in which deere and cheere rhyme with
here, there, where, matere, manere, frere, cleere, all repre
sentatives of the formative rule, is an argument against Mr
Child’s partial induction.
A few instances will now be given, showing the use of
-are, -ere, -ire, -ore, -ure, in Anglo-Norman and English
writers:
-are, -ere, -ire, -ore:—
’ No instance has yet been met with in Chaucer of here, there,
or manere with sonant -e. Two from Gower of manere, as a tri
syllable, have been found by Professor Child. Gower however,
who affected Frenchisms everywhere, being, if possible, more
French than the native authorities, and in his French ballads writes
in the “ French of Paris,” not Anglo-Norman—is no authority on
the question.
�IN EARLY ENGLISH.
103
Si fut un sirex de Rome la citet.—Alexis, v. 13.
. Quant vint al fare, dune le funt gentement.—ib. v. 47.
En cele manere1 Dermot le reis.— Conquest of Ireland (ed.
2
Michel), p. 6.
Vers Engletere la haute mer.—ib. p. 153.
En Engleter sodeinement.—French Chronicle (Cam. Soc.),
Appendix.
Deus le tot puissant ke eeel e terre crea.—Langtoft (ed.
Wright), v. 1.
Ke homme de terre venuz en terre revertira.—ib.
Uncore vus pri pur cel confort.—Lyrical Poetry, p. 55.
Then, for English instances :
Lyare wes mi latymer.— Lyrical Poetry, p. 49.
Careful men y-cast in care.—ib. p. 50.
Thareiena ne lette me nomon.—ib. p. 74.
Ther is [mani] maner irate—Land of Cokaygne, v. 49.
On fys manure handyl J>y dedes.—Handlyng Synne, p. 5.
Four manere joyen hy hedde here.—Shoreham's Poems (Percy
Soc.), p. 118.
And alle ine nout maner . . . Ine stede of messager.—ib. p. 119.
Sire quap pis holi maide our louerd himself tok.—Seinte,
Margarete (ed. Cockayne), p. 27.
Fyrst of my lvyre my lorde con wynne.—Allit. Poems, i. v. 582.
Bifore3 J?at spot my honde I spennd.—ib. i. v. 49.
pat were i-falle for prude an hove
To fille har stides pat wer ilor.—Ear. Eng. Poems, p. 13.
And never a day pe dore to pas.—ib. p. 137.
More j?en me lyste my drede aros.—ib. v. 181.
1 In Anglo-Norman verse of the 13th century Sire is generally
a monosyllable, and is even repeatedly written Sir. See in “ Polit
ical Songs ” (Camd. Soc.), pp. 66, 67, “ Sir Symon de Montfort,”
“Sir Rogier,” and also in “Le Privilege aux Bretons,” a song con
taining, like that just quoted from, a good deal of phonetic spelling,
“ Syr Hariot,” “ Syr Jac de Saint-Calons ” and “ Biaus Sir ” (Jubinal’s “Jongleurs et Trouveres,” pp. 52—62). Writings of this kind
in which words are phonetically, not conventionally, spelt, are often
very valuable as showing the true sound, and illustrate a pithy re
mark of Professor Massafia’s, that “ pathological examples are fre
quently more instructive than sound ones.”
2 In the “Assault of Massoura,” an Anglo-Norman poem (13th
century, Cotton MS. Julian A. v.), we find mere,frere, banere, arere,
almost always spelt without the -e. Manere (when not final) is a
dissyllable, and, when final, rhymes with banere, which in its turn
rhymes with/re?’. Mester and mestere both occur, and the latter
rhymes with eschapere and governere, for eschaper and governer,
showing that the added -e was inorganic and merely a matter of
spelling.
3 A.S. biforan became in Early English biforen, which fell
under the orthoepic rule which, as in many infinitives (see infra),
elided the -e in the atonic syllable -en. Biforen thus became
biforn, then lost the n and received an inorganic or index letter, e,
becoming bifore or before. No instance has yet been found by the
present writer, of bifore as a trisyllable.
�
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Essays on Chaucer: his words and works. Part II
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Place of publication: London
Collation: [3], 57-177, [2] p. ; 23 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by John Childs and Son. Published for The Chaucer Society. Publisher's series list inside and on the back over.
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171.4
LVE
—......
=
The
Pleasures of Life
BY
THE RIGHT HON.
SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, BART., M.P.
F.R.S., D.C.L., LL.D.
Volition
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
1899
Price Sixpence
�9omp.
‘ Give me Health and a Day, and
I will make the Pomp of Emperors Ridiculous.’—Emerson.
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J. TV. Neil, Holy Trinity Church, North Shields.}
Experience!
‘ Vie Gather the Honey of Wisdom
From Thorns, not from Flowers.’—Lytton.
HOW TO AVOID
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THE PRESENT SYSTEM OF LIVING—
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and FEVERISH condition of the system is SIMPLY MARVELLOUS. It is, in fact,
NATURE’S OWN REMEDY, and AN UNSURPASSED ONE.
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��PREFACE
Those who have the pleasure of attending the opening meetings of schools and
colleges, and of giving away prizes and certificates, are generally expected at
the same time to offer such words of counsel and encouragement as the ex
perience of the world might enable them to give to those who are entering life.
Having been myself when young rather prone to suffer from low spirits,
I have at several of these gatherings taken the opportunity of dwelling on
the privileges and blessings we enjoy, and I reprint here the substance of
some of these addresses (omitting what was special to the circumstances of
each case, and freely making any alterations and additions which have since
occurred to me), hoping that the thoughts and quotations in which I have
myself found most comfort may perhaps be of use to others also.
- It is hardly necessary to say that I have not by any means referred to
all the sources of happiness open to us, some indeed of the greatest pleasures
and blessings being altogether omitted.
In reading over the proofs I feel that some sentences may appear too
dogmatic, but I hope that allowance will be made for the circumstances under
which they were delivered.
High Elms,
Down, Kent, January 1887.
�PREFACE
TO THE TWENTIETH EDITION
A lecture which I delivered three years ago at the Working Men’s College, and
which forms the fourth chapter of this book, has given rise to a good deal of
discussion. The Pall Mall Gazette took up the subject and issued a circular to many
of those best qualified to express an opinion. This elicited many interesting replies,
and some other lists of books were drawn up. When my book was translated, a
similar discussion took place in Germany. The result has been very gratifying, and
after carefully considering the suggestions which have been made, I see no reason
for any material change in the first list. I had not presumed to form a list of my
own, nor did I profess to give my own favourites. My attempt was to give those
most generally recommended by previous writers on the subject. In the various
criticisms on my list, while large additions, amounting to several hundred works in
all, have been proposed, very few omissions have been suggested. As regards those
v orks with reference to which some doubts have been expressed—namely, the few
Oriental books, Wake’s Apostolic Fathers, etc.—I may observe that I drew up the
list, not as that of the hundred best books, but, which is very different, of those
which have been most frequently recommended as best worth reading.
For instance as regards the Shelving and the Analects of Confucius°I must-humbly
confess that I do not greatly admire either ; but I recommended them because they
are held in the most profound veneration by the Chinese race, containing 400,000,000
of our fellow-men. I may add that both works are quite short.
The Ramayana and Maha Bliarata (as epitomised by Wheeler) and St. Hilaire’s
Bouddha are not only very interesting in themselves, but very important in reference
to our great oriental Empire.
The authentic writings of the Apostolic Fathers are very short, being indeed
comprised in one small volume, and as the only works (which have come down to
us) of those who lived with and knew the Apostles, they are certainly well worth
reading.
I have been surprised at the great divergence of opinion which has been expressed.
Nine lists of some length have been published. These lists contain some three
hundred works not mentioned by me (without, however, any corresponding omissions),
and yet there is not one single book which occurs in every list, or even in half of
them, and only about half a dozen which appear in more than one of the nine.
If these authorities, or even a majority of them, had concurred in their recom
mendations, I would have availed myself of them ; but as they differ so greatly I
will allow my list to remain almost as I first proposed it. I have, however, added
Kalidasa’s Safomfato or The Lost Ring, and Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, omitting, in
consequence, Lucretius and Miss Austen : Lucretius because though his work is most
remarkable, it is perhaps too difficult and therefore less generally suitable than most
of the others in the list; and Miss Austen because English novelists were somewhat
over-represented.
High Elms,
Down, Kent, August 1890.
�CONTENTS
PART I
CHAP.
*
PAGE
I. The Duty
of
II. The Happiness
III. A Song
of
of
V. The Blessing
VI.The
.
.
Friends
.
Value of Time
VII. The Pleasures
VIII. The Pleasures
IX.Science
.
.
Books
of
1
...
Duty ......
of
Books
IV. The Choice
.
Happiness
of
of
.
.
.13
.
.
.
17
.
.
.
.
.22
.
.
.
.
.25
-
.
28
Travel
.
.
.
.
.
Home
.
.
.
.
.32
........
X. Education
7
.
.
.
.
.
36
.42
�‘ All places that the eye of Heaven visits
Are to the wise man ports and happy havens.”
Shakespeare.
“ Some murmur, when their sky is clear
And wholly bright to view,
If one small speck of dark appear
In their great heaven of blue.
And some with thankful love are fill’d
If but one streak of light,
One ray of God’s good mercy gild
The darkness of their night.
‘ ‘ In palaces are hearts that ask,
In discontent and pride,
Why life is such a dreary task,
And all good things denied.
And hearts in poorest huts admire
How love has in their aid
(Love that not ever seems to tire)
Such rich provision made.”
Trench.
�THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
PART I
CHAPTER I
THE DUTY OF HAPPINESS1
“ If a man is unhappy, this must be his own
fault; for God made all men to be happy.”—
Epictetus.
Life is a great gift, and as we reach
years of discretion, we most of us natur
ally ask ourselves what should be the
main object of our existence. Even those
who do not accept “the greatest good
of the greatest number” as an absolute
rule, will yet admit that we should all
endeavour to contribute as far as we may
to the happiness of others. There are
many, however, who seem to doubt
whether it is right that we should try to
be happy ourselves. Our own happiness
ought not, of course, to be our main
object, nor indeed will it ever be secured
if selfishly sought. We may have many
pleasures in life, but must not let them
have rule over us, or they will soon hand
us over to sorrow; and “ into jvhat
dangerous and miserable servitude doth
he fall who suffereth pleasures and
sorrows (two unfaithful and cruel com
manders) to possess him successively 1” 2
I cannot, however, but think that the
world would be better and brighter if our
teachers would dwell on the Duty of
Happiness as well as on the Happiness of
Duty; for we ought to be as cheerful as
we can, if only because to be happy our
selves, is a most effectual contribution to
the happiness of others.
1 The substance of this was delivered at the
Harris Institute, Preston.
2 Seneca.
B
Every one must have felt that a cheer
ful friend is like a sunny day, shedding
brightness on all around ; and most of
us can, as we choose, make of this world
either a palace or a prison.
There is no doubt some selfish satisfac
tion in yielding to melancholy, and fancy
ing that we are victims of fate ; in brood
ing over grievances, especially if more or
less imaginary. To be bright and cheer
ful often requires an effort; there is a
certain art in keeping ourselves happy :
and in this respect, as in others, we re
quire to watch over and manage ourselves,
almost as if we were somebody else.
Sorrow and joy, indeed, are strangely
interwoven. Too often
“We look before and after,
And pine for wliat is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught ;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest
thought. ”1
As a nation we are prone to melancholy.
It has been said of our countrymen that
they take even their pleasures sadly.
But this, if it be true at all, will, I hope,
prove a transitory characteristic. “ Merry
England ” was the old saying ; let us hope
it may become true again. We must look
to the East for real melancholy. What
can be sadder than the lines with which
Omar Khayyam opens his quatrains : 2
“ We sojourn here for one short day or two,
And all the gain we get is grief and woe ;
And then, leaving life’s problems all unsolved
And harassed by regrets, we have to go ; ”
1 Shelley.
2 I quote from Whinfield’s translation.
IE
�2
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
PART I
or the Devas’ song to Prince Siddartha, inherit ; the glories and beauties of the
in Edwin Arnold’s beautiful version :
Universe, which is our own if we choose
to have it so ; the extent to which we can
‘ ‘ We are the voices of tlie wandering wind,
Which moan for rest, and rest can never find. make ourselves what we wish to be ; or
Lo ! as the wind is, so is mortal life—
the power we possess of securing peace, of
A moan, a sigh, a sob, a storm, a strife. ”
triumphing over pain and sorrow.
If this indeed be true, if mortal life
Dante pointed to the neglect of oppor
be so sad and full of suffering, no wonder tunities as a serious fault:
that Nirvana—the cessation of sorrow—
“Man can do violence
should be welcomed even at the sacrifice
To himself and his own blessings, and for this
of consciousness.
He, in the second round, must aye deplore,
With unavailing penitence, his crime.
But ought we not to place before our
Whoe’er deprives himself of life and light
selves a very different ideal—a healthier,
In reckless lavishment his talent wastes,
manlier, and nobler hope ?
And sorrows then when he should dwell in joy.”
Life is not to live merely, but to live
Ruskin has expressed this with special
well. There are some “ who live without
any design at all, and only pass in the allusion to the marvellous beauty of this
world like straws on a river : they do not glorious world, too often taken as a matter
go ; they are carried,”1—-but as Homer of course, and remembered, if at all, al
makes Ulysses say, “ How dull it is to most without gratitude. “ Holy men,” he
pause, to make an end, to rest un complains, “in the recommending of the
burnished ; not to shine in use — as love of God to us, refer but seldom to those
things in which it is most abundantly and
though to breathe were life ! ”
Goethe tells us that at thirty he resolved immediately shown; though they insist
“ to work out life no longer by halves, much on His giving of bread, and raiment,
and health (which He gives to all inferior
but in all its beauty and totality.”
creatures): they require us not to thank
“Im Ganzen, Guten, Schonen
Him for that glory of His works which
Resolut zu leben.”
He has permitted us alone to perceive :
Life indeed must be measured by
they tell us often to meditate in the closet,
thought and action, not by time. It
but they send us not, like Isaac, into the
certainly may be, and ought to be, bright,
fields at even : they dwell on the duty of
interesting, and happy ; for, according to
self-denial, but they exhibit not the duty
the Italian proverb, “ if all cannot live on
of delight: ” and yet, as he justly says
the Piazza, every one may feel the sun.”
elsewhere, “ each of us, as we travel the
If we do our best; if we do not mag
way of life, has the choice, according to
nify trifling troubles ; if we look resolutely,
our working, of turning all the voices of
I do not say at the bright side of things,
Nature into one song of rejoicing ; or of
but at things as they really are ; if we
withering and quenching her sympathy
avail ourselves of the manifold blessings
into a fearful withdrawn silence of con
which surround us ; we cannot but feel
demnation,—into a crying out of her
that life is indeed a glorious inheritance.
stones and a shaking of her dust against
“ More servants wait on man
us.”
Than he’ll take notice of. In every path
Must we not all admit, with Sir Henry
lie treads down that which doth befriend
Taylor, that “the retrospect of life swarms
him
When sickness makes him pale and wan. with lost opportunities ” ? “ Whoever en
Oh mighty Love ! Man is one world, and hath joys not life,” says Sir T. Browne, “ I
Another to attend him.” 2
count him but an apparition, though he
Few of us, however, realise the wonder wears about him the visible affections of
ful privilege of living, or the blessings we flesh.”
St. Bernard, indeed, goes so far as to
1 Seneca.
2 Herbert.
�CHAP. I
THE DUTY OF HAPPINESS
3
and that “ rather than follow a multitude
to do evil,” one should “ stand like Pom
pey’s pillar, conspicuous by oneself, and
single in integrity.” 1 But to many this
isolation would be itself most painful, for
the heart is “ no island cut off from other
lands, but a continent that joins to them.”2
If we separate ourselves so much from
the interests of those around us that we
do not sympathise with them in their
sufferings, we shut ourselves out from
sharing their happiness, and lose far more
than we gain. If we avoid sympathy
and wrap ourselves round in a cold chain
armour of selfishness, we exclude ourselves
from many of the greatest and purest joys
of life. To render ourselves insensible to
pain we must forfeit also the possibility
of happiness.
Moreover, much of what we call evil
is really good in disguise, and we should
not “ quarrel rashly with adversities not
yet understood, nor overlook the mercies
often bound up in them.” 3 Pleasure and
pain are, as Plutarch says, the nails which
fasten body and soul together. Pain is
a signal of danger, a very necessity of
existence. But for it, but for the warnings
which our feelings give us, the very bless
ings by ■which we are surrounded would
soon and inevitably prove fatal. Many
of those who have not studied the question
are under the impression that the more
deeply-seated portions of the body must
be most sensitive. The very reverse is
the case. The skin is a continuous and
ever-watchful sentinel, always on guard
to give us notice of any approaching
danger ; while the flesh and inner organs,
where pain would be without purpose,
“ Unaffrighted by the silence round them,
Undistracted by the sights they see,
are, so long as they are in health, com
These demand not that the things without paratively without sensation.
them
“We talk,” says Helps, “of the origin
Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.
of evil ; . . . but what is evil ? We mostly
Bounded by themselves, and unobservant
speak of sufferings and trials as good, per
In what state God’s other works may be,
haps, in their result ; but we hardly
In their own tasks all their powers pouring,
These attain the mighty life you see.”
admit that they may be good in them
selves. Yet they are knowledge—how
It is true that
else to be acquired, unless by making
“ A man is his own star ;
maintain that “nothing can work me
damage except myself; the harm that I
sustain I carry about with me, and never
am a real sufferer but by my own fault.”
Some Heathen moralists also have
taught very much the same lesson. “ The
gods,” says Marcus Aurelius, “ have put all
the means in man’s power to enable him
not to fall into real evils. Now that
which does not make a man worse, how
can it make his life worse ? ”
Epictetus takes the same line : “ If a
man is unhappy, remember that his un
happiness is his own fault; for God has
made all men to be happy.” “ I am,” he
elsewhere says, “ always content with that
which happens ; for I think that what
God chooses is better than what I choose.”
And again : “ Seek not that things should
happen as you wish ; but wish the things
which happen to be as they are, and you
will have a tranquil flow of life. ... If
you wish for anything which belongs to
another, you lose that which is your own.”
Few, however, if any, can I think go
as far as St. Bernard. We cannot but
suffer from pain, sickness, and anxiety;
from the loss, the unkindness, the faults,
even the coldness of those we love. How
many a day has been damped and dark
ened by an angry word !
Hegel is said to have calmly finished
his Phaenomenologie des Geistes at Jena, on
the 14th October 1806, not knowing any
thing whatever of the battle that was
raging round him.
Matthew Arnold has suggested that we
might take a lesson from the heavenly
bodies.
Our acts our angels are
For good or ill,”
1 Sir T. Browne.
2 Bacon.
3 Sir T. Browne.
�4
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
men. as gods, enabling them to understand
without experience. All that men go
through may be absolutely the best for
them—no such thing as evil, at least in
our customary meaning of the word.”
Indeed, “ the vale best discovereth the
hill,” 1 and “ pour sentir les grands biens,
il faut qu’il connoisse les petits maux.” 2
But even if we do not seem to get all
that we should wish, many will feel, as
in Leigh Hunt’s beautiful translation of
Filicaja’s sonnet, that —
“ So Providence for us, high, infinite,
Makes our necessities its watchful task,
Hearkens to all our prayers, helps all our wants,
And e’en if it denies what seems our right,
Either denies because ’twould have us ask,
Or seems but to deny, and in denying grants.”
Those on the other hand who do not
accept the idea of continual interferences,
will rejoice in the belief that on the whole
the laws of the Universe work out for
the general happiness.
And if it does come—
“ Grief should be
Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate,
Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free :
Strong to consume small troubles; to commend
Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts last
ing to the end.” 3
If, however, we cannot hope that life
will be all happiness, we may at least
secure a heavy balance on the right side ;
and even events which look like mis
fortune, if boldly faced, may often be
turned to good. Oftentimes, says Seneca,
“calamity turns to our advantage; and
great ruins make way for greater glories.”
Helmholtz dates his start in science to
an attack of illness. This led to his
acquisition of a microscope, which he was
enabled to purchase, owing to his having
spent his autumn vacation of 1841 in the
hospital, prostrated by typhoid fever ;
being a pupil, he was nursed without
expense, and on his recovery he found
himself in possession of the savings of
his small resources.
“ Savonarola,” says Castelar, “ would,
1 Bacon.
2 Rousseau.
3 Aubrey de Vere.
PART I
under different circumstances, undoubtedly
have been a good husband, a tender
father; a man unknown to history,
utterly powerless to print upon the sands
of time and upon the human soul the
deep trace which he has left : but mis
fortune came to visit him, to crush his
heart, and to impart that marked melan
choly which characterises a soul in grief;
and the grief that circled his brows with
a crown of thorns was also that which
wreathed them with the splendour of
immortality.
His hopes were centred
in the woman he loved, his life was set
upon the possession of her, and when her
family finally rejected him, partly on
account of his profession, and partly on
account of his person, he believed that it
was death that had come upon him, when
in truth it was immortality.”
It is, however, impossible to deny the
existence of ewl, and the reason for it
has long exercised the human intellect.
The Savage solves it by the supposition of
evil Spirits. Even the Greeks attributed
the misfortunes of men in great measure
to the antipathies and jealousies of gods
and goddesses.
Others have imagined
two Celestial Beings, opposite and an
tagonistic—the one friendly, the other
hostile, to men.
Freedom of action, however, seems to
involve the existence of evil. If any
power of selection be left us, much must
depend on the choice we make. In the
very nature of things, two and two cannot
make five. Epictetus imagines Jupiter
addressing man as follows : “ If it had
been possible to make your body and
your property free from liability to injury,
I would have done so. As this could not
be, I have given you a small portion of
myself.”
This divine gift it is for us to use
wisely. It is, in fact, our most valuable
treasure. “ The soul is a much better
thing than all the others which you
possess. Can you then show me in what
way you have taken care of it ? For it
is not likely that you, who are so wise a
man, inconsiderately and carelessly allow
�THE DUTY OF HAPPINESS
CHAP. I
the most valuable thing that you possess
to be neglected and to perish.” 1
Moreover, even if evil cannot be alto
gether avoided, it is no doubt true that
not only whether the life we lead be good
and useful, or evil and useless, but also
whether it be happy or unhappy, is very
much in our own power, and depends
greatly on ourselves. “ Time alone re
lieves the foolish from sorrow, but reason
the wise,”2 and no one was ever yet
made utterly miserable excepting by him
self. We are, if not the masters, at any
rate almost the creators of ourselves.
With most of us it is not so much great
sorrows, disease, or death, but rather the
little “daily dyings” which cloud over
the sunshine of life.
Many of our
troubles are insignificant in themselves,
and might easily be avoided L
How happy home might generally be
made but for foolish quarrels, or mis
understandings, as they are well named !
It is our own fault if we are querulous or
ill-humoured ; nor need we, though this
is less easy, allow ourselves to be made
unhappy by the querulousness or illhumours of others.
Much of what we suffer we have
brought on ourselves, if not by actual
fault, at least by ignorance or thought
lessness. Too often we think only of the
happiness of the moment, and sacrifice
that of the life. Troubles comparatively
seldom come to us, it is we who go to
them. Many of us fritter our life away.
La Bruyere says that “ most men spend
much of their lives in making the rest
miserable • ” or, as Goethe puts it:
“ Careworn man has, in all ages,
Sown vanity to reap despair.”
Not only do we suffer much in the
anticipation of evil, as “ Noah lived many
years under the affliction of a flood, and
Jerusalem was taken unto Jeremy before
it was besieged,” but we often distress
ourselves greatly in the apprehension of
misfortunes which after all never happen
at all. We should do our best and wait
1 Epictetus.
2 Ibid.
5
calmly the result. We often hear of
people breaking down from overwork,
but in nine cases out of ten they are
really suffering from worry or anxiety.
“Nos maux moraux,” says Rousseau,
“ sont tous dans 1’opinion, hors un seul,
qui est le crime ; et celui-la depend de
nous : nos maux physiques nous detruisent, ou se detruisent. Le temps, ou la
mort, sont nos remedes.”
“ Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven.” 1
This, however, applies to the grown up.
With children of course it is different.
It is customary, but I think it is a mistake,
to speak of happy childhood. Children
are often over-anxious and acutely sensi
tive. Man ought to be man and master
of his fate ; but children are at the mercy
of those around them. Mr. Rarey, the
great horse-tamer, has told us that he has
known an angry word raise the pulse of
a horse ten beats in a minute. Think
then how it must affect a child !
It is small blame to the young if they
are over-anxious ; but it is a danger to be
striven against. “ The terrors of the storm
are chiefly felt in the parlour or the
cabin.” 2
To save ourselves from imaginary, or
at any rate problematical, evils, we often
incur real suffering. “The man,” said
Epicurus, “who is not content with little
is content with nothing.” How often do
we “ labour for that which satisfieth not.”
More than we use is more than we need,
and only a burden to the bearer.3 We
most of us give ourselves an immense
amount of useless trouble ; encumber our
selves, as it were, on the journey of life
with a dead weight of unnecessary bag
gage ; and as “a man maketh his train
longer, he makes his wings shorter.” 4 In
that delightful fairy tale, Alice through
the Looking-Glass, the “ White Knight ” is
described as having loaded himself on
starting for a journey with a variety of
odds and ends, including a mousetrap, lest
1 Shakespeare.
3 Seneca.
2 Emerson.
4 Bacon.
�6
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
PART I
he should be troubled by mice at night,
“ How is it possible,” he says, “ that a
and a bee-hive in case he came across a Inan who has nothing, who is naked,
swarm of bees.
houseless, without a hearth, squalid, with
Hearne, in his Journey to the Mouth of out a slave, without a city, can pass a life
the Coppermine River, tells us that a few that flows easily ? See, God has sent you
days after starting on his expedition he a man to show you that it is possible.
met a party of Indians, who annexed a Look at me, who am without a city,
great deal of his property, and all Hearne without a house, without possessions,
says is, “ The weight of our baggage being without a slave ; I sleep on the ground ;
so much lightened, our next day’s journey I have no wife, no children, no prsetorium,
was much pleasanter.” I ought, however, but only the earth and heavens, and one
to add that the Indians broke up the poor cloak. And what do I want ? Am
philosophical instruments, which,no doubt, I not without sorrow ? Am I not with
were rather an encumbrance.
out fear ? Am I not free ? When did
When troubles do come, Marcus Aur any of you see me failing in the object of
elius wisely tells us to “ remember on my desire ? or ever falling into that which
every occasion which leads thee to vex I would avoid ? Did I ever blame God
ation to apply this principle, that this is or man ? Did I ever accuse any man ?
not a misfortune, but that to bear it nobly Did any of you ever see me with a
is good fortune.” Our own anger indeed sorrowful countenance ? And how do I
does us more harm than the thing which meet with those whom you are afraid of
makes us angry; and we suffer much and admire ? Do not I treat them like
more from the anger and vexation which slaves ? Who, when he sees me, does not
we allow acts to rouse in us, than we do think that he sees his king and master ? ”
from the acts themselves at which we are
Think how much we have to be
angry and vexed. How much most people, thankful for. Few of us appreciate the
for instance, allow themselves to be dis number of our everyday blessings; we
tracted and disturbed by quarrels and look on them as trifles, and yet “ trifles
family disputes. Yet in nine cases out make perfection, and perfection is no
of ten one ought not to suffer from being trifle,” as Michael Angelo said. We for
found fault with. If the condemnation is get them because they are always with
just, it should be welcome as a warning ; us ; and yet for each of us, as Mr. Pater
if it is undeserved, why should we allow well observes, “ these simple gifts, and
it to distress us 1
others equally trivial, bread and wine,
Moreover, if misfortunes happen we do fruit and milk, might regain that poetic
but make them worse by grieving over and, as it were, moral significance which
them.
surely belongs to all the means of our
“ I must die,” says Epictetus. “ But daily life, could we but break through the
must I then die sorrowing ? I must be veil of our familiarity with things by no
put in chains. Must I then also lament? means vulgar in themselves.”
I must go into exile. Can I be prevented
“Let not,” says Isaak Walton, “the
from going with cheerfulness and con blessings we receive daily from God make
tentment ? But I will put you in prison. us not to value or not praise Him because
Man, what are you saying ? You may they be common; let us not forget to
put my body in prison, but my mind not praise Him for the innocent mirth and
even Zeus himself can overpower.”
pleasure we have met with since we met
If, indeed, we cannot be happy, the together. What would a blind man give
fault is generally in ourselves. Socrates to see the pleasant rivers and meadows
lived under the Thirty Tyrants. Epic and flowers and fountains ; and this and
tetus was a poor slave, and yet how much many other like blessings we enjoy daily.”
we owe him !
Contentment, we have been told by
�CHAP. I
THE HAPPINESS OF DUTY
Epicurus, consists not in great wealth, but
in few wants. In this fortunate country,
however, we may have many wants, and
yet, if they are only reasonable, we may
gratify them all.
Nature indeed provides without stint
the main requisites of human happiness.
“.To watch the corn grow, or the blossoms
set; to draw hard breath over plough
share or spade ; to read, to think, to love,
to pray,” these, says Ruskin, “ are the
things that make men happy.”
“ I have fallen into the hands of
thieves,” says Jeremy Taylor ; “ what
then ? They have left me the sun and
moon, fire and water, a loving wife and
many friends to pity me, and some to
relieve me, and I can still discourse ; and,
unless I list, they have not taken away
my merry countenance and my cheerful
spirit and a good conscience. . . . And
he that hath so many causes of joy, and
so great, is very much in love with
sorrow and peevishness who loses all
these pleasures, and chooses to sit down
on his little handful of thorns.”
“ When a man has such things to think
on, and sees the sun, the moon, and stars,
and enjoys earth and sea, he is not
solitary or even helpless.” 1
“ Paradise indeed might,” as Luther
said, “apply to the whole world.” What
more is there we could ask for ourselves ?
“Every sort of beauty,” says Mr. Greg,2
“has been lavished on our allotted home ;
beauties to enrapture every sense, beauties
to satisfy every taste • forms the noblest
and the loveliest, colours the most
gorgeous and the most delicate, odours
the sweetest and subtlest, harmonies the
most soothing and the most stirring : the
sunny glories of the day; the pale
Elysian grace of moonlight; the lake, the
mountain, the primeval forest, and the
boundless ocean; ‘ silent pinnacles of
aged snow ’ in one hemisphere, the
marvels of tropical luxuriance in another ;
the serenity of sunsets; the sublimity of
storms ; everything is bestowed in bound
less profusion on the scene of our exist1 Epictetus,
? The Enigmas of Life.
7
ence ; we can conceive or desire nothing
more exquisite or perfect than what is
round us every hour; and our percep
tions are so framed as to be consciously
alive to all. The provision made for our
sensuous enjoyment is in overflowing
abundance ; so is that for the other
elements of our complex nature. Who
that has revelled in the opening ecstasies
of a young Imagination, or the rich
marvels of the world of Thought, does not
confess that the Intelligence has been
dowered at least with as profuse a benefi
cence as the Senses ? Who that has truly
tasted and fathomed human Love in its
dawning and crowning joys has not
thanked God for a felicity which indeed
‘passeth understanding.’ If we had set
our fancy to picture a Creator occupied
solely in devising delight for children
whom he loved, we could not conceive
one single element of bliss which is not
here.”
CHAPTER II
THE HAPPINESS OF DUTY1
“I am always content with that which
happens ; for I think that what God chooses is
better than what I choose.”
Epictetus.
“ 0 God, All conquering ! this lower earth
Would be for men the blest abode of mirth
If they were strong in Thee
As other things of this world well are seen ;
Oh then, far other than they yet have been,
How happy would men be.”
King Alfred’s ed. of Boethius’s
Consolations of Philosophy.
We ought not to picture Duty to our
selves, or to others, as a stern taskmistress.
She is rather a kind and sympathetic
mother, ever ready to shelter us from the
cares and anxieties of this world, and to
guide us in the paths of peace.
To shut oneself up from mankind i°,
in most cases, to lead a dull, as well as a
selfish life. Our duty is to make ourselves
useful, and thus life may be made most
1 The substance of this was delivered at the
Harris Institute, Preston.
�8
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
PART I
interesting, while yet comparatively free if we have done our best to make others
from anxiety.
happy; to promote “ peace on earth and
But how can we fill our lives with life, goodwill amongst men.” Nothing, again,
energy, and interest, and yet keep care can do more to release us from the cares
outside ?
of this world, which consume so much of
Many great men have made shipwreck our time, and embitter so much of our
in the attempt. “ Anthony sought for life. When we have done our best, we
happiness in love ; Brutus in glory; Cfesar should wait the result in peace ; content,
in dominion : the first found disgrace, the as Epictetus says, “with that which
second disgust, the last ingratitude, and happens, for what God chooses is better
each destruction.” 1 Riches, again, often than what I choose.”
bring danger, trouble, and temptation ■
At any rate, if we have not effected all
they require care to keep, though they we wished, we shall have influenced our
may give much happiness if wisely spent. selves. It may be true that one cannot
How then is this great object to be do much. “You are not Hercules, and
secured ? What, says Marcus Aurelius, you are not able to purge away the wicked
“ What is that which is able to conduct ness of others ; nor yet are you Theseus,
a man ? One thing and only one—philo able to drive away the evil things of
sophy. But this consists in keeping the Attica. But you may clear away your
daemon 2 within a man free from violence own. From yourself, from your own
and unharmed, superior to pains and thoughts, cast away, instead of Procrustes
pleasures, doing nothing without a pur and Sciron,1 sadness, fear, desire, envy,
pose, yet not falsely and with hypocrisy, malevolence, avarice, effeminacy, intem
not feeling the need of another man’s perance. But it is not possible to eject
doing or not doing anything ; and besides, these things otherwise than by looking to
accepting all that happens, and all that God only, by fixing your affections on
is allotted, as coming from thence, where- Him only, by being consecrated by His
ever it is, from whence he himself came ; commands.” 2
and, finally, waiting for death with a
Duty does not imply restraint. People ’
cheerful mind, as being nothing else than sometimes think how delightful it would
a dissolution of the elements of which be to be quite free. But a fish, as Ruskin
every living being is compounded.” I con says, is freer than a man, and as for a fly,
fess I do not feel the force of these last few it is “a black incarnation of freedom.”
words, which indeed scarcely seem requisite A life of so-called pleasure and self-indul
for his argument. The thought of death, gence is not a life of real happiness or
however, certainly influences the conduct true freedom. Far from it, if we once
of life less than might have been expected. begin to give way to ourselves, we fall
Bacon truly points out that “there is under a most intolerable tyranny. Other
no passion in the mind of man so weak, temptations are in some respects like that
but it mates and masters the fear of of drink. At first, perhaps, it seems
death. . . . Revenge triumphs over death, delightful, but there is bitterness at the
love slights it, honour aspireth to it, grief bottom of the cup. Men drink to satisfy
flieth to it.”
the desire created by previous indulgence.
So it is in other things. Repetition soon
“Think not I dread to see my spirit fly
Through the dark gates of fell mortality;
becomes a craving, not a pleasure. Re
Death has no terrors when the life is true ;
sistance grows more and more painful;
’Tis living ill that makes us fear to die.” 3
yielding, which at first, perhaps, afforded
We need certainly have no such fear some slight and temporary gratification,
1 Colton, Lacon, or Many Things in Few soon ceases to give pleasure, and even if
JFotyZs.
2 J.e. spirit.
I
3 Omar Khayyam.
1 Two robbers destroyed by Theseus.
2 Epictetus.
�CHAP. II
THE HAPPINESS OF DUTY
9
for a time it procures relief, ere long have of the Universe must in some measure
damp personal ambition. What it is to be
becomes odious itself.
To resist is difficult, to give way is pain king, sheikh, tetrarch, or emperor over a
ful ; until at length the wretched victim ‘ bit of a bit ’ of this little earth ? ” “ All
to himself can only purchase, or thinks rising to great place,” says Bacon, “ is by
he can only purchase, temporary relief from a winding stair; ” and “ princes are like
intolerable craving and depression, at the heavenly bodies, which have much vener
expense of even greater suffering in the ation, but no rest.”
Plato in the Republic mentions an old
future.
On the other hand, self-control, how myth that after death every soul has to
ever difficult at first, becomes step by step choose a lot in life for the existence in the
easier and more delightful. We possess next world ; and he tells us that the wise
mysteriously a sort of dual nature, and Ulysses searched for a considerable time
there are few truer triumphs, or more for the lot of a private man. He had
delightful sensations, than to obtain some difficulty in finding it, as it was lying
neglected in a corner, but when he had
thorough command of oneself.
How much pleasanter it is to ride a secured it he was delighted ; the recollec
spirited horse, even perhaps though requir tion of all he had gone through on earth
ing some strength and skill, than to creep having disenchanted him of ambition.
along upon a jaded hack. In the one
Moreover, there is a great deal of
case you feel under you the free, re drudgery in the lives of courts. Cere
sponsive spring of a living and willing monials may be important, but they take
force ; in the other you have to spur a up much time and are terribly tedious.
dull and lifeless slave.
A man then is his own best kingdom.
To rule oneself is in reality the greatest “ He that ruleth his spirit,” says
triumph. “ He who is his own monarch,” Solomon, “ is better than he that taketh
says Sir T. Browne, “ contentedly sways a city.” But self-control, this truest and
the sceptre of himself, not envying the greatest monarchy, rarely comes by in
glory to crowned heads and Elohim of the heritance. Every one of us must conquer
earth ; ” for those are really highest who himself; and we may do so, if we take
are nearest to heaven, and those are low conscience for our guide and general.
est who are farthest from it.
No one really fails who does his best.
True greatness has little, if anything, Seneca observes that “no one saith the
to do with rank or power. “ Eurystheus three hundred Fabii were defeated, but
being what he was,” says Epictetus, “ was that they were slain,” and if you have
not really king of Argos nor of Mycenee, done your best, you will, in the words of
for he could not even rule himself ; while an old Norse ballad, have gained
Hercules purged lawlessness and intro
“ Success in thyself, which is best of all.”
duced justice, though he was both naked
and alone.”
Being myself engaged in business, I was
We are told that Cineas the philosopher rather startled to find it laid down by no
once asked Pyrrhus what he would do less an authority than Aristotle (almost as
when he had conquered Italy. “ I will if it were a self-evident proposition) that
conquer Sicily.” “And after Sicily?” commerce “ is incompatible with that
“ Then Africa.” “ And after you have dignified life which it is to be wished that
conquered the world ? ” “I will take my our citizens should lead, and totally ad
ease and be merry.” “ Then,” asked verse to that generous elevation of mind
Cineas, “ why can you not take your ease with which it is our ambition to inspire
and be merry now ? ”
them.” I know not how far that may
Moreover, as Sir Arthur Helps has really have been the spirit and tendency
wisely pointed out, “ the enlarged view we of commerce among the ancient Greeks;
�IO
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
but if so, I do not wonder that it was not
more successful.
I may, indeed, quote Aristotle against
himself, for he has elsewhere told us that
“business should be chosen for the sake
of leisure ; and things necessary and useful
for the sake of the beautiful in conduct.”
It is not true that the ordinary duties
of life in a country like ours—agriculture,
manufactures, and commerce,—the pur
suits to which the vast majority are and
must be devoted—are incompatible with
the dignity or nobility of life. Whether
a life is noble or ignoble depends, not on
the calling which is adopted, but on the
spirit in which it is followed. The
humblest life may be noble, while that of
the most powerful monarch or the greatest
genius may be contemptible. Commerce,
indeed, is not only compatible, but I
would almost go further and say that it
will be most successful, if carried on in
happy union with noble aims and generous
aspirations. What Ruskin says of art is,
with due modification, true of life gener
ally. It does not matter whether a man
“ paint the petal of a rose or the chasms
of a precipice, so that love and admiration
attend on him as he labours, and wait for
ever on his work. It does not matter
whether he toil for months on a few
inches of his canvas, or cover a palace
front with colour in a day ; so only that
it be with a solemn purpose, that he have
filled his heart with patience, or urged his
hand to haste.’’
It is true that in a subsequent volume
he refers to this passage, and adds, “ But
though all is good for study, and all is
beautiful, some is better than the rest for
the help and pleasure of others ; and this
it is our duty always to choose if we have
opportunity,” adding, however, “ being
quite happy with what is within our
reach if we have not.”
We read of and admire the heroes of
old, but every one of us has to fight his
ow’n Marathon and ThermopyIse ; every
one meets the Sphinx sitting by the road
he has to pass ; to each of us, as to
Hercules, is offered the choice of Vice or
PART I
Virtue; we may, like Paris, give the apple
of life to Venus, or Juno, or Minerva.
There are many who seem to think that
we have fallen on an age in the world
when life is especially difficult and anxious,
when there is less leisure than of yore,
and the struggle for existence is keener
than ever.
On the other hand, we must remember
how much we have gained in security?
It may be an age of hard work, but -when
this is not carried to an extreme, it is by
no means an evil. If we have less leisure,
one reason is because life is so full of
interest. Cheerfulness is the daughter of
employment, and on the whole I believe
there never was a time when modest
merit and patient industry were more
sure of reward.
We must not, indeed, be discouraged if
success be slow in coming, nor puffed up
if it comes quickly. We often complain
of the nature of things when the fault is
all in ourselves. Seneca, in one of his
letters, mentions that his wife’s maid,
Harpaste, had nearly lost her eyesight,
but “ she knoweth not she is blind, she
saith the house is dark. This that seemeth
ridiculous unto us in her, happeneth unto
us all. No man understandeth that he is
covetous, or avaricious. He saith, I am
not ambitious, but no man can otherwise
live in Rome ; I am not sumptuous, but
the city requireth great expense.”
Newman, in perhaps the most beautiful
of his hymns, “ Lead, kindly light,” says :
“ Keep thou my feet, I do not ask to see
The distant scene ; one step enough for me. ”
But we must be sure that we are really
following some trustworthy guide, and not
out of mere laziness allowing ourselves to
drift. We have a guide within us which
will generally lead us straight enough.
Religion, no doubt, is full of difficulties,
but if we are often puzzled what to think,
we need seldom be in doubt what to do.
“ To say well is good, but to do well is better ;
Do well is the spirit, and say well the letter ;
If do well and say well were fitted in one frame,
All were won, all were done, and. got were all
the gain.”
�THE HAPPINESS OF DUTY
CHAP. II
il
Cleanthes, who appears to have well every fourth. But if you have inter
merited the statue erected to him at mitted thirty days, make a sacrifice to
God. For the habit at first begins to be
Assos, says :
weakened, and then is completely de
“ Lead me, 0 Zeus, and thou, 0 Destiny,
stroyed. When you can say, ‘ I have not
The way that I am bid by you to go :
To follow I am ready. If I choose not,
been vexed to-day, nor the .day before, nor
I make myself a wretch ;—and still must yet on any succeeding day during two or
follow.”
three months ; but I took care when some
If we are ever in doubt what to do, it exciting things happened,’ be assured that
is a good rule to ask ourselves what we you are in a good way.” 1
Emerson closes his Conduct of Life
shall wish on the morrow that we had
with a striking allegory.
The young
done.
Moreover, the result in the long run Mortal enters the Hall of the Firmament.
will depend not so much on some single The Gods are sitting there, and he is
resolution, or on our action in a special alone with them. They pour on him
case, but rather on the preparation of gifts and blessings, and beckon him to
daily life. Battles are often won before their thrones. But between him and
they are fought. To control our passions them suddenly appear snow-storms of
we must govern our habits, and keep illusions. He imagines himself in a vast
watch over ourselves in the small details crowd, whose behests he fancies he must
obey. The mad crowd drives hither and
of everyday life.
The importance of small things has thither, and sways this way and that.
been pointed out by philosophers over What is he that he should resist ? He
and over again from jEsop downwards. lets himself be«carried about. How can
“ Great without small makes a bad wall,” he think or act for himself? But the
says a quaint Greek proverb, which seems clouds lift, and there are the Gods still
to go back to cyclopean times. In an old sitting on their thrones ; they alone with
Hindoo story Ammi says to his son, him alone.
“ The great man,” he elsewhere says,
“ Bring me a fruit of that tree and break
it open. What is there ? ” The son said, “is he who in the midst of the crowd
“ Some small seeds.” “ Break one of keeps with perfect sweetness the serenity
them and what do you see ? ” “ Nothing, of solitude.”
We may all, indeed, if we will, secure
my lord.”
“ My child,” said Ammi,
“where you see nothing there dwells a peace of mind for ourselves.
“ Men seek retreats,” says Marcus Au
mighty tree.” It may almost be questioned
whether anything can be truly called relius, “ houses in the country, sea-shores,
and mountains ; and thou too art wont
small.
to desire such things very much. But
“ There is no great and no small
this is altogether a mark of the most
To the soul that maketh all ;
common sort of men ; for it is in thv
And where it cometh all things are,
And it cometh everywhere.” 1
power whenever thou shalt choose, to
We should therefore watch ourselves in retire into thyself. For nowhere either
small things. If “ you wish not to be of with more quiet or more freedom from
an angry temper, do not feed the habit: trouble does a man retire, than into his
throw nothing on it which will increase own soul, particularly when he has within
it: at first keep quiet, and count the days him such thoughts that by looking into
on which you have not been angry. I them he is immediately in perfect tran
used to be in a passion every day ; now quillity.”
Happy indeed is he who has such a
every second day ; then every third ; then
sanctuary in his own soul. “He who is
1 Emerson.
1 Epictetus.
�12
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
virtuous is wise ; and he who is wise is
good ; and he who is good is happy.” 1
But we cannot expect to be happy if
we do not lead pure and useful lives. To
be good company for ourselves we must
store our minds well ; fill them with pure
and peaceful thoughts ; with pleasant
memories of the past, and reasonable
hopes for the future. We must, as far
as may be, protect ourselves from selfreproach, from care, and from anxiety. We
shall make our lives pure and peaceful,
by resisting evil, by placing restraint upon
our appetites, and perhaps even more by
strengthening and developing our tend
encies to good. We must be careful, then,
on what we allow our minds to dwell.
The soul is dyed by its thoughts; we
cannot keep our minds pure if we allow
them to be sullied by detailed accounts
of crime and sin. Peace of mind, as
Ruskin beautifully observes, “ must come
in its own time, as the waters settle
themselves into clearness as well as quiet
ness ; you can no more filter your mind
into purity than you can compress it into
calmness ; you must keep it pure if you
would have it pure, and throw no stones
into it if you would have it quiet.”
The penalty of injustice, said Socrates,
is not death or stripes, but the fatal neces
sity of becoming more and more unjust.
Few men have led a wiser or more
virtuous life than Socrates himself, of
whom Xenophon gives us the following
description :—“ To me, being such as I
have described him, so pious that he did
nothing without the sanction of the gods;
so just, that he wronged no man even in
the most trifling affair, but was of service
in the most important matters to those
who enjoyed his society ; so temperate
that he never preferred pleasure to virtue;
so wise, that he never erred in distinguish
ing better from worse ; needing no counsel
from others, but being sufficient in himself
to discriminate between them ; so able to
explain and settle such questions by argu
ment ; and so capable of discerning the
character of others, of confuting those
1 King Alfred’s Boethius.
PART I
who were in error, and of exhorting them
to virtue and honour, he seemed to be
such as the best and happiest of men
would be. But if any one disapproves
of my opinion let him compare the con
duct of others with that of Socrates, and
determine accordingly.”
Marcus Aurelius again has drawn for us
a most instructive lesson in his character
of Antoninus:—“Remember his constancy
in every act which was conformable to
reason, his evenness in all things, his
piety, the serenity of his countenance,
his sweetness, his disregard of empty
fame, and his efforts to understand things ;
how he would never let anything pass
without having first most carefully ex
amined it and clearly understood it ; how
he bore with those who blamed him
unjustly without blaming them in return;
how he did nothing in a hurry; how he
listened not to calumnies, and how exact
an examiner of manners and actions he
was ; not given to reproach people, nor
timid, nor suspicious, nor a sophist; with
how little he was satisfied, such as lodging,
bed, dress, food, servants ; how laborious
and patient ; how sparing he was in his
diet; his firmness and uniformity in his
friendships ; how he tolerated freedom of
speech in those who opposed his opinions;
the pleasure that he had when any man
showed him anything better ; and how
pious he was without superstition. Imi
tate all this that thou mayest have as
good a conscience, when thy last hour
comes, as he had.”
Such peace of mind is indeed an in
estimable boon, a rich reward of duty
fulfilled. Well then does Epictetus ask,
“Is there no reward? Do you seek a
reward greater than that of doing what
is good and just ? At Olympia you wish
for nothing more, but it seems to you
enough to be crowned at the games.
Does it then seem to you so small and
worthless a thing to be good and happy?”
In Bernard of Morlaix’s beautiful
lines —
“ Pax erit ilia fidelibus, ilia beata
Irrevocabilis, Invariabilis, Intemerata.
�A SONG OF BOOKS
CHAP. Ill .
13
Pax sine crimine, pax sine turbine, pax sine himself to-be a zealous follower of truth,
rixa,
of happiness, of wisdom, of science, or
Meta Laboribus, inque tumultibus anchora
even of the faith, must of necessity make
fixa ;
Pax erit omnibus unica. Sed quibus ? Im- himself a lover of books.” But if the
maculatis
debt were great then, how much more
Pectore niitibus, ordine stantibus, ore sacratis.” now.
What greater reward can we have than
this ; than the “peace which passeth all
understanding,” which “ cannot be gotten
for gold, neither shall silver be weighed
for the price thereof.” 1
CHAPTER III
A SONG OF BOOKS2
“ Oil for a booke and a sliadie nooke,
Eyther in doore or out;
With the grene leaves whispering overhead
Or the streete cryes all about.
Where I maie reade all at my ease,
Both of the newe and old ;
For a jollie goode booke whereon to looke,
Is better to me than golde.”
Old English Song.
Of all the privileges we enjoy in this
nineteenth century there is none, perhaps,
for which we ought to be more thankful
than for the easier access to books.
The debt we owe to books -was well
expressed by Richard de Bury, Bishop of
Durham, author of Philobiblon, written
as long ago as 1344, published in 1473,
and the earliest English treatise on the
delights of literature :—“ These,” he says,
“ are the masters who instruct us without
rods and ferules, without hard words and
anger, without clothes or money. If you
approach them, they are not asleep; if
investigating you interrogate them, they
conceal nothing ; if you mistake them,
they never grumble ; if you are ignorant,
they cannot laugh at you. The library,
therefore, of wisdom is more precious
than all riches, and nothing that can be
wished for is worthy to be compared with
it. Whosoever therefore acknowledges
1 Job.
2 Delivered at the Working Men’s College.
This feeling that books are real friends
is constantly present to all who love read
ing. “ I have friends,” said Petrarch,
“ whose society is extremely agreeable to
me ; they are of all ages, and of every
country. They have distinguished them
selves both in the cabinet and in the
field, and obtained high honours for their
knowledge of the sciences. It is easy to
gain access to them, for they are always
at my service, and I admit them to my
company, and dismiss them from it,
whenever I please. They are never
troublesome, but immediately answer every
question I ask them. Some relate to me
the events of past ages, while others
reveal to me the secrets of Nature. Some
teach me how to live, and others how to
die. Some, by their vivacity, drive away
my cares and exhilarate my spirits ; while
others give fortitude to my mind, and
teach me the important lesson how to
restrain my desires, and to depend wholly
on myself. They open to me, in short,
the various avenues of all the arts and
sciences, and upon their information I
may safely rely in all emergencies. In
return for all their services, they only ask
me to accommodate them with a con
venient chamber in some corner of my
humble habitation, where they may
repose in peace; for these friends are
more delighted by the tranquillity of
retirement than with the tumults of
society.”
“ He that loveth a book,” says Isaac
Barrow, “ will never want a faithful
friend, a wholesome counsellor, a cheer
ful companion, an effectual comforter.
By study, by reading, by thinking, one
may innocently divert and pleasantly
entertain himself, as in all weathers, so
in all fortunes.”
Southey took a rather more melancholy
view :
�THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
“My days among the dead are pass’d,
Around me I_beliold,
Where’er these casual eyes are cast,
The mighty minds of old;
My never-failing friends are they,
With whom I converse day by day.”
Imagine, in the words of Aikin, “ that
we had it in our power to call up the
shades of the greatest and wisest men
that ever existed, and oblige them to con
verse with us on the most interesting
topics—what an inestimable privilege
should we think it !—how superior to all
common enjoyments! But in a wellfurnished library we, in fact, possess this
power. We can question Xenophon and
Csesar on their campaigns, make Demos
thenes and Cicero plead before us, join in
the audiences of Socrates and Plato, and
receive demonstrations from Euclid and
Newton. In books we have the choicest
thoughts of the ablest men in their best
dress.”
“Books,” says Jeremy Collier, “are a
guide in youth and an entertainment for
age. They support us under solitude,
and keep us from being a burthen to
ourselves. They help us to forget the
crossness of men and things ; compose
our cares and our passions ; and lay our
disappointments asleep. When we are
weary of the living, we may repair to
the dead, who have nothing of peevish
ness, pride, or design in their conversa
tion.”
Sir John Herschel tells an amusing
anecdote illustrating the pleasure derived
from a book, not assuredly of the first
order. In a certain village the black
smith having got hold of Richardson’s
novel, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, used
to sit on his anvil in the long summer
evenings and read it aloud to a large and
attentive audience. It is by no means a
short book, but they fairly listened to it
alL At length, when the happy turn of
fortune arrived, which brings the hero
and heroine together, and sets them living
long and happily together according to
the most approved rules, the congregation
were so delighted as to raise a great shout,
PART I
and procuring the church keys, actually
set the parish bells a-ringing.
“The lover of reading,” says Leigh
Hunt, “will derive agreeable terror from
Sir Bertram and the Haunted Chamber;
will assent with delighted reason to every
sentence in Mrs. Barbauld’s Essay; will
feel himself wandering into solitudes with
Gray; shake honest hands with Sir Roger
de Coverley; be ready to embrace Parson
Adams, and to chuck Pounce out of the
window instead of the hat ; will travel
with Marco Polo and Mungo Parle; stay
at home with Thomson; retire with
Cowley; be industrious with Hutton;
sympathising with Gay and Mrs. Inch
bald; laughing with (and at) Buncle;
melancholy, and forlorn, and self-restored
with the shipwrecked mariner of De Foe.”
Carlyle has wisely said that a collection
of books is a real university.
The importance of books has been
appreciated in many quarters where we
might least expect it. Among the hardy
Norsemen runes were supposed to be
endowed with miraculous power. There
is an Arabic proverb, that “a wise man’s
day is worth a fool’s life,” and another—
though it reflects, perhaps, rather the
spirit of the Califs than of the Sultans,—
that “ the ink of science is more precious
than the blood of the martyrs.”
Confucius is said to have described
himself as a man who “ in his eager pur
suit of knowledge forgot his food, who
in the joy of its attainment forgot his
sorrows, and did not even perceive that
old age was coming on.”
Yet, if this could be said by the Arabs
and the Chinese, what language can be
strong enough to express the gratitude we
ought to feel for the advantages we enjoy !
We do not appreciate, I think, our good
fortune in belonging to the nineteenth
century. Sometimes, indeed, one may
even be inclined to wish that one had not
lived quite so soon, and to long for a
glimpse of the books, even the school
books, of one hundred years hence. A
hundred years ago not only were books
extremely expensive and cumbrous, but
�CHAP .III
A SONG OF BOOKS
many of the most delightful were still
uncreated—such as the works of Scott,
Thackeray, Dickens, Shelley, and Byron,
not to mention living authors. How
much more interesting science has become
especially, if I were to mention only one
name, through the genius of Darwin!
Renan has characterised this as a most
amusing century; I should rather have
described it as most interesting : present
ing us as it does with an endless vista of
absorbing problems ; with infinite oppor
tunities ; with more interest and less
danger than surrounded our less fortunate
ancestors.
Cicero described a room without books,
as a body without a soul. But it is by no
means necessary to be a philosopher to
love reading.
Reading, indeed, is by no means neces
sarily study. Far from it. “ I put,” says
Mr. Frederic Harrison, in his excellent
article on the “ Choice of Books,” “ I
put the poetic and emotional side of
literature as the most needed for daily
use.”
In the prologue to the Legende of Goode
Women, Chaucer says :
“ And as for me, though that I konne but lyte,
On bokes for to rede I me delyte,
And to him give I feyth and ful credence,
And in myn herte have him in reverence,
So hertely, that tlier is game noon,
That fro my bokes maketh me to goon,
But yt be seidome on the holy day,
Save, certynly, when that the monthe of May
Is comen, and that I here the foules synge,
And that the floures gynnen for to sprynge,
Farwel my boke and my devocion.”
But I doubt whether, if he had enjoyed
our advantages, he could have been so
certain of tearing himself away, even in
the month of May.
Macaulay, who had all that wealth and
fame, rank and talents could give, yet, we
are told, derived his greatest happiness
from books. Sir G. Trevelyan, in his
charming biography, says that—“of the
feelings which Macaulay entertained to
wards the great minds of bygone ages it is
not for any one except himself to speak.
He has told us how his debt to them was
IS
incalculable; how they guided him to
truth; how they filled his mind with
noble and graceful images ; how they stood
by him in all vicissitudes—comforters in
sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in
solitude, the old friends who are never
seen with new faces ; who are the same in
wealth and in poverty, in glory and in
obscurity. Great as were the honours and
possessions which Macaulay acquired by his
pen, all who knew him were well aware
that the titles and rewards which he gained
by his own works were as nothing in the
balance compared with the pleasure he
derived from the works of others.”
There was no society in London so agree
able that Macaulay would have preferred
it at breakfast or at dinner “ to the com
pany of Sterne or Fielding, Horace Wal
pole or Boswell.” The love of reading
which Gibbon declared he would not ex
change for all the treasures of India was,
in fact, with Macaulay “ a main element of
happiness in one of the happiest lives that
it has ever fallen to the lot of the bio
grapher to record.”
“History,” says Fuller, “maketh a
young man to be old without either
wrinkles or gray hair, privileging him
with the experience of age without either
the infirmities or the inconveniences
thereof.”
So delightful indeed are books that we
must be careful not to forget other duties
for them; in cultivating the mind we
must not neglect the body.
To the lover of literature or science,
exercise often presents itself as an irksome
duty, and many a one has felt like “ the
fair pupil of Ascham (Lady Jane Grey),
who, while the horns were sounding and
dogs in full cry, sat in the lonely oriel,
with eyes riveted to that immortal page
which tells how meekly and bravely
(Socrates) the first martyr of intellectual
liberty took the cup from his weeping
jailer.” 1
Still, as the late Lord Derby justly ob
served,2 those who do not find time for
1 Macaulay.
2 Address, Liverpool College, 1873.
�i6
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
exercise will have to find time for ill
ness.
Books, again, are now so cheap as to be
within the reach of almost every one.
This was not always so. It is quite a
recent blessing. Mr. Ireland, to whose
charming little Book Lover's Enchiridion,
in common with every lover of reading, I
am greatly indebted, tells us that when
a boy he was so delighted with White’s
Natural History of Selborne, that in order
to possess a copy of his own he actually
copied out the whole work.
Mary Lamb gives a pathetic description
of a studious boy lingering at a bookstall :
“ I saw a boy with eager eye
Open a book upon a stall,
And read, as he’d devour it all;
Which, when the*stall man did espy,
Soon to the boy I heard him call,
‘ You, sir, you never buy a book,
Therefore in one you shall not look.’
The boy passed slowly on, and with a sigh
He wished he never had been taught to read,
Then of the old churl’s books he should have
had no need.”
Such snatches of literature have, indeed,
a special and peculiar charm. This is, I
believe, partly due to the very fact of
their being brief. Many readers miss
much of the pleasure of reading by forceing themselves to dwell too long con
tinuously on one subject. In a long
railway journey, for instance, many persons
take only a single book. The consequence
is that, unless it is a story, after half an
hour or an hour they are quite tired of it.
Whereas, if they had two, or still better
three books, on different subjects, and one
of them of an amusing character, they
would probably find that, by changing as
soon as they felt at all weary, they would
come back again and again to each with
renewed zest, and hour after hour would
pass pleasantly away. Every one, of
course, must judge for himself, but such
at least is my experience.
I quite agree, therefore, with Lord
Iddesleigh as to the charm of desultory
reading, but the wider the field the more
important that we should benefit by the
very best books in each class. Not that we
PART I
need confine ourselves to them, but that
we should commence with them, and they
will certainly lead us on to others. There
are of course some books which we must
read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
But these are exceptions. As regards by
far the larger number, it is probably
better to read them quickly, dwelling only
on the best and most important passages.
In this way, no doubt, we shall lose much,
but we gain more by ranging over a wider
field. We may, in fact, I think, apply to
reading Lord Brougham’s wise dictum as
regards education, and say that it is well
to read everything of something, and
something of everything. In this way
only we can ascertain the bent of our
own tastes, for it is a general, though not
of course an invariable, rule, that we
profit little by books which we do not enjoy.
Every one, however, may suit himself.
The variety is endless.
Not only does a library contain “in
finite riches in a little room,” 1 but we
may sit at home and yet be in all quarters
of the earth. We may travel round the
world with Captain Cook or Darwin,
with Kingsley or Ruskin, who will show
us much more perhaps than ever we
should see for ourselves.
The world
itself has no limits for us ; Humboldt
and Herschel will carry us far away to
the mysterious nebulas, beyond the sun
and even the stars : time has no more
bounds than space; history stretches out
behind us, and geology will carry us back
for millions of years before the creation
of man, even to the origin of the material
Universe itself. Nor are we limited to
one plane of thought.
Aristotle and
Plato will transport us into a sphere none
the less delightful because we cannot
appreciate it without some training.
Comfort and consolation, peace and
happiness, may indeed be found in his
library by any one “ who shall bring the
golden key that unlocks its silent door.” 2
A library is true fairyland, a very palace
of delight, a haven of repose from the
storms and troubles of the world. Rich
1 Marlowe.
2 Matthews.
�THE CHOICE OF BOOKS
CHAP. IV
and poor can enjoy it alike, for here, at
least, wealth gives no advantage. We
may make a library, if we do but rightly
use it, a true paradise on earth, a garden
of Eden without its one drawback ; for
all is open to us, including, and especially,
the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, for
which we are told that our first mother
sacrificed all the Pleasures of Paradise.
Here we may read the most important
histories, the most exciting volumes of
travels and adventures, the most interest
ing stories, the most beautiful poems ; we
may meet the most eminent statesmen,
poets, and philosophers, benefit by the
ideas of the greatest thinkers, and enjoy
the grandest creations of human genius.
CHAPTER IV
THE CHOICE OF BOOKS 1
“ All round the room my silent servants wait—
My friends in every season, bright and dim,
Angels and Seraphim
Come down and murmur to me, sweet and low,
And spirits of the skies all come and go
Early and Late.”
Proctor.
And yet too often they wait in vain.
One reason for this is, I think, that people
are overwhelmed by the crowd of books
offered to them.
In old days books were rare and dear.
Now on the contrary, it may be said with
greater truth than ever that
“Words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions,
think.”2
Our ancestors had great difficulty in pro
curing books. Ours now is what to select.
We must be careful what we read, and
not, like the sailors of Ulysses, take bags
of wind for sacks of treasure—not only
lest we should even now fall into the
error of the Greeks, and suppose that
1 Delivered at the London Working Men’s
College.
2 Byron.
c
17
language and definitions can be instru
ments of investigation as well as of
thought, but lest, as too often happens,
we should waste time over trash. There
are many books to which one may apply,
in the sarcastic sense, the ambiguous
remark which Lord Beaconsfield made to
an unfortunate author, “ I will lose no
time in reading your book.”
There are, indeed, books and books ;
and there are books which, as Lamb said,
are not books at all. It is wonderful
how much innocent happiness we thought
lessly throw away. An Eastern proverb
says that calamities sent by heaven may
be avoided, but from those we bring on
ourselves there is no escape.
Many, I believe, are deterred from
attempting what are called stiff books for
fear they should not understand them ;
but there are few* who need complain of
the narrowness of their minds, if only
they would do their best with them.
In reading, however, it is most im
portant to select subjects in which one is
interested. I remember years ago con
sulting Mr. Darwin as to the selection of
a course of study. He asked me what
interested me most, and advised me to
choose that subject. This, indeed, applies
to the work of life generally.
I am sometimes disposed to think that
the great readers of the next generation
will be, not our lawyers and doctors,
shopkeepers and manufacturers, but the
labourers and mechanics. Does not this
seem natural1? The former work mainly
with their head ; when their daily duties
are over, the brain is often exhausted, and
of their leisure time much must be de
voted to air and exercise. The labourer
and mechanic, on the contrary, besides
working often for much shorter hours,
have in their work-time taken sufficient
bodily exercise, and could therefore give
any leisure they might have to reading
and study. They have not done so as
yet, it is true ; but this has been for
obvious reasons. Now, however, in the
first place, they receive an excellent edu
cation in elementary schools, and in the
�i8
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
second have more easy access to the best
books.
Ruskin has observed that he is not sur
prised at what men suffer, but he often
wonders at what they lose. We suffer
much, no doubt, from the faults of others,
but we lose much more by our own
ignorance.
“ If,” says Sir John Herschel, “ I were
to pray for a taste which should stand
me in stead under every variety of cir
cumstances, and be a source of happiness
and cheerfulness to me through life, and
a shield against its ills, however things
might go amiss and the world frown upon
me, it would be a taste for reading. I
speak of it of course only as a worldly
advantage, and not in the slightest degree
as superseding or derogating from the
higher office and surer and stronger
panoply of religious principles—but as
a taste, an instrument, and a mode of
pleasurable gratification.
Give a man
this taste, and the means of gratifying it,
and you can hardly fail of making a
happy man, unless, indeed, you put into
his hands a most perverse selection of
books.”
It is one thing to own a library ; it
is quite another to use it wisely. I
have often been astonished how little care
people devote to the selection of ■what
they read. Books, we know, are almost
innumerable ; our hours for reading are,
alas ! very few. And yet many people
read almost by hazard. They will take
any book they chance to find in a room
at a friend’s house ; they will buy a novel
at a railway-stall if it has an attractive
title ; indeed, I believe in some cases even
the binding affects their choice.
The
selection is, no doubt, far from easy. I
have often wished some one would re
commend a list of a hundred good books.
If we had such lists drawn up by a few
good guides they would be most useful.
I have indeed sometimes heard it said
that in reading every one must choose for
himself, but this reminds me of the re
commendation not to go into the water
till you can swim.
PART I
In the absence of such lists I have
picked out the books most frequently
mentioned with approval by those who
have referred directly or indirectly to the
pleasure of reading, and have ventured to
include some which, though less frequently
mentioned, are especial favourites of my
own. Every one who looks at the list
will wish to suggest other books, as indeed
I should myself, but in that case the
number would soon run up.1
I have abstained, for obvious reasons,
from mentioning works by living authors,
though from many of them I have myself
derived the keenest enjoyment; and I
have omitted works on science, with one
or two exceptions, because the subject is
so progressive.
I feel that the attempt is over bold,
and I must beg for indulgence, while
hoping for criticism ; indeed one object
which I have had in view is to stimu
late others more competent than I am to
give us the advantage of their opinions.
Moreover, I must repeat that I suggest
these works rather as those which, as far
as I have seen, have been most frequently
recommended, than as suggestions of my
own, though I have slipped in a few of
my own special favourites.
In any such selection much weight
should, I think, be attached to the general
verdict of mankind. There is a “ struggle
for existence ” and a “ survival of the
fittest” among books, as well as among
animals and plants. As Alonzo of Aragon
said, “Age is a recommendation in four
things—old wood to burn, old wine to
drink, old friends to trust, and old books
to read.” Still, this cannot be accepted
without important qualifications.
The
most recent books of history and science
contain, or ought to contain, the most
accurate information and the most trust
worthy conclusions. Moreover, while the
1 Several longer lists have been given ; for
instance, by Comte, Catechism of Positive Philo
sophy ; Pycroft, Course of English Pleading;
Baldwin, The, Book Lover; Perkins, The Best
Reading ; and by Ireland, Books for General
Readers.
�CHAP. IV
THE CHOICE OF BOOKS
books of other races and times have an
interest from their very distance, it must
be admitted that many will still more
enjoy, and feel more at home with, those
of our own century and people.
Yet the oldest books of the world are
remarkable and interesting on account
of their very age; and the works which
have influenced the opinions, or charmed
the leisure hours, of millions of men in
distant times and far-away regions are
well worth reading on that very account,
even if to us they seem scarcely to deserve
their reputation.
It is true that to
many, such works are accessible only in
translations ; but translations, though
they can never perhaps do justice to the
original, may yet be admirable in them
selves. The Bible itself, which must
stand first in the list, is a conclusive
case.
At the head of all non- Christian
moralists, I must place the Enchiridion
of Epictetus and the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius, certainly two of the noblest
books in the whole of literature ; and
which, moreover, have both been admir
ably translated. The Analects of Con
fucius will, I believe, prove disappointing
to most English readers, but the effect it
has produced on the most numerous race
of men constitutes in itself a peculiar
interest. The Ethics of Aristotle, per
haps, appear to some disadvantage from
the very fact that they have so profoundly
influenced our views of morality. The
Koran, like the Analects of Confucius,
will to most of us derive its principal
interest from the effect it has exercised,
and still exercises, on so many millions of
our fellow-men. I doubt whether in any
other respect it will seem to repay per
usal, and to most persons probably certain
extracts, not too numerous, would appear
sufficient.
The writings of the Apostolic Fathers
have been collected in one volume by
Wake. It is but a small one, and though
I must humbly confess that I vas dis
appointed, they are perhaps all the more
curious from the contrast they afford to
19
those of the Apostles themselves. Of the
later Fathers I have included only the
Confessions of St. Augustine, which Dr.
Pusey selected for the commencement of
the Library of the Fathers, and which, as
he observes, has “ been translated again
and again into almost every European
language, and in all loved ; ” though
Luther was of opinion that St. Augustine
“ wrote nothing to the purpose concerning
faith.” But then Luther was no great
admirer of the Fathers. St. Jerome, he
says, “ writes, alas ! very coldly ; ” Chrys
ostom “ digresses from the chief points ; ”
St. Jerome is “very poor;” and in fact,
he says, “ the more I read the. books of the
Fathers the more I find myself offended ; ”
while Renan, in his interesting auto
biography, compared theology to a Gothic
Cathedral, “ elle a la grandeur, les vides
immenses, et le peu de solidite.”
Among other devotional works most
frequently recommended are Thomas a
Kempis’s Imitation of Christ, Pascal’s
Pensees, Spinoza’s Tractatus TheologicoPoliticus, Butler’s Analogy of Religion,
Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying,
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and last, not
least, Keble’s beautiful Christian Year.
Aristotle and Plato stand at the head
of another class. The Politics of Aristotle,
and Plato’s Dialogues, if not the whole,
at any rate the Phcedo, the Apology, and
the Republic, will be of course read by all
who wish to know anything of the history
of human thought, though I am heretical
enough to doubt whether the latter repays
the minute and laborious study often
devoted to it.
Aristotle being the father, if not the
creator, of the modern scientific method,
it has followed naturally—indeed, almost
inevitably—that his principles have be
come part of our very intellectual being,
so that they seem now almost self-evident
while his actual observations, though very
remarkable—as, for instance, when he
observes that bees on one journey confine
themselves to one kind of flower—still
have been in many cases superseded by
others, carried on under more favourable
�20
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
conditions. We must not be ungrateful
to the great master, because his own
lessons have taught us how to advance.
Plato, on the other hand, I say so with
all respect, seems to me in some cases to
play on words : his arguments are very
able, very philosophical, often very noble ;
but not always conclusive ; in a language
differently constructed they might some
times tell in exactly the opposite sense.
If his method has proved less fruitful, if
in metaphysics we have made but little
advance, that very fact in one point of
view leaves the Dialogues of Socrates as
instructive now as ever they were; while
the problems with which they deal will
always rouse our interest, as the calm
and lofty spirit which inspires them
must command our admiration.
Of
the Apology and the Phcedo especially
it would be impossible to speak too grate
fully.
I would also mention Demosthenes’s
De Corona, which Lord Brougham pro
nounced the greatest oration of the
greatest of orators ; Lucretius, Plutarch’s
Lives, Horace, and at least the De Officiis,
De Amicitia, and De Senectute of Cicero.
The great epics of the world have
always constituted one of the most popu
lar branches of literature. Yet how few,
comparatively, ever read Homer or Virgil
after leaving school.
The Nibelungenlied, our great AngloSaxon epic, is perhaps too much neglected,
no doubt on account of its painful char
acter. Brunhild and Kriemhild, indeed,
are far from perfect, but we meet with few
such “ live ” women in Greek or Roman
literature. Nor must I omit to mention
Sir T. Malory’s Morte d’A rthur, though I
confess I do so mainly in deference to the
judgment of others.
Among the Greek tragedians I include
zEschylus, if not all his works, at any rate
Prometheus, perhaps the sublimest poem
in Greek literature, and the Trilogy (Mr.
Symonds in his Greek Poets speaks of the
“ unrivalled majesty ” of the Agamemnon,
and Mark Pattison considered it “the
grandest work of creative genius in the
PART I
whole range of literature”); or, as Sir
M. E. Grant Duff recommends, the Persce;
Sophocles (CEdipus Tyrannus), Euripides
(Medea), and Aristophanes (The Knights and
Clouds') ; unfortunately, as Schlegel says,
probably even the greatest scholar does
not understand half his jokes ; and I think
most modern readers will prefer our own
poets.
I should like, moreover, to say a word
for Eastern poetry, such as portions of the
Maha Bharata and Ramayana (too long
probably to be read through, but of which
Taiboys Wheeler has given a most interest
ing epitome in the first two volumes of
his History of India); the Shali-nameh, the
work of the great Persian poet Firdusi;
Kalidasa’s Sakuntala, and the Sheking, the
classical collection of ancient Chinese odes.
Many I know, will think I ought to have
included Omar Khayyam.
In history we are beginning to feel that
the vices and vicissitudes of kings and
queens, the dates of battles and wars, are
far less important than the development
of human thought, the progress of art, of
science, and of law, and the subject is on
that very account even more interesting
than ever. I will, however, only mention,
and that rather from a literary than a his
torical point of view, Herodotus, Xenophon
(the Anabasis), Thucydides, and Tacitus
(Germania); and of modern historians,
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (“ the splendid
bridge from the old world to the new ”),
Hume’s History of England, Carlyle’s
French Revolution, Grote’s History of Greece,
and Green’s Short History of the English
People.
Science is so rapidly progressive that,
though to many minds it is the most
fruitful and interesting subject of all, I
cannot here rest on that agreement which,
rather than my own opinion, I take as the
basis of my list. I will therefore only
mention Bacon’s Novum Organum, Mill’s
Logic, and Darwin’s Origin of Species; in
Political Economy, which some of our
rulers do not now sufficiently value, Mill,
and parts of Smith’s Wealth of Nations,
for probably those who do not intend to
�CHAP. IV
THE CHOICE OF BOOKS
make a special study of political economy
would scarcely read the whole.
Among voyages and travels, perhaps
those most frequently suggested are Cook’s
Voyages, Humboldt’s Travels, and Darwin’s
Naturalist’s Journal; though I confess I
should like to have added many more.
Mr. Bright not long ago specially re
commended the less known American poets,
but he probably assumed that every one
would have read Shakespeare, Milton
(Paradise Lost, Lycidas, Comus and minor
poems), Chaucer, Dante, Spenser, Dryden,
Scott, Wordsworth, Pope, Byron, and
others, before embarking on more doubtful
adventures.
Among other books most frequently re
commended are Goldsmith’s Vicar of
Wakefield, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights, Don
Quixote, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, White’s
Natural History of Selborne, Burke’s Select
Works (Payne), the Essays of Bacon,
Addison, Hume, Montaigne, Macaulay, and
Emerson, Carlyle’s Past and Present,
Smiles’s Self-Help, and Goethe’s Faust and
Autobiography.
Nor can one go wrong in recommending
Berkeley’s Human Knowledge, Descartes’s
Discours sur la Methode, Locke’s Conduct
of the Understanding Lewes’s History of
Philosophy ; while, in order to keep within
the number one hundred, I can only
mention Moliere ,and Sheridan among
dramatists. Macaulay considered Mari
vaux’s La Vice de Marianne the best novel
in any language, but my number is so
nearly complete that I must content my
self with English: and will suggest
Thackeray (Vanity Fair and Pendennis'),
Dickens (Pickwick and David Copperfield),
G. Eliot (Adam Bede or The Mill on the
Floss), Kingsley (Westward Ho!), Lytton
(Last Days of Pompeii), and last, not least,
those of Scott, which indeed constitute a
library in themselves, but which I must
ask, in return for my trouble, to be allowed,
as a special favour, to count as one.
To any lover of books the very mention
of these names brings back a crowd of de
licious memories, grateful recollections of
21
peaceful home hours, after the labours and
anxieties of the day. How thankful we
ought to be for these inestimable blessings,
for this numberless host of friends who
never weary, betray, or forsake us !
LIST OF 100 BOOKS
Works by Living Authors are omitted
The Bible
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Epictetus
Aristotle’s Ethics
Analects of Confucius
St. Hilaire’s “Le Bouddha et sa religion”
Wake’s Apostolic Fathers
Thos. a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ
Confessions of St. Augustine (Dr. Pusey)
The Koran (portions of)
Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
Pascal’s Pensees
Butler’s Analogy of Religion
Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
Keble’s Christian Year
Plato’s Dialogues ; at any rate, the Apology,
Crito, and Pheedo
Xenophon’s Memorabilia
Aristotle’s Politics
Demosthenes’s De Corona
Cicero’s De Officiis, De Amicitia, and De
Senectute
Plutarch’s Lives
Berkeley’s Human Knowledge
Descartes’s Discours sur la Methode
Locke s On the Conduct of the Understanding
Homer
Hesiod
Virgil
Maha Bliarata
Ramayana
Epitomised in Taiboys
Wheeler’s History of
India, vols. i. and ii.
The Shahnameh
The Nibelungenlied
Malory’s Morte d’Arthur
The Sheking
Kalidasa’s Sakuntala or The Lost Ring
Alschylus’s Prometheus
Trilogy of Orestes
Sophocles’s (Edipus
Euripides’s Medea
Aristophanes’s The Knights and Clouds
Horace
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (perhaps in
Morris’s edition ; or, if expurgated, in C.
Clarke’s, or Mrs. Haweis’s)
�22
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
Shakespeare *
Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lycidas, Comus, and
the shorter poems
Dante’s Divina Commedia
Spenser’s Fairie Queen
Dryden’s Poems
Scott’s Poems
Wordsworth (Mr. Arnold’s selection)
Pope’s Essay on Criticism
Essay on Man
Rape of the Lock
Burns
Byron’s Childe Harold
Gray’s Poems
Tennyson’s Idylls and smaller poems
PART I
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
Pendennis
Dickens’s Pickwick
David Copperfield
Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii
George Eliot’s Adam Bede
Kingsley’s Westward Ho >.
Scott’s Novels
CHAPTER V
THE BLESSING OF FRIENDS1
Herodotus
Xenophon’s Anabasis
Thucydides
Tacitus’s Germania
Livy
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall
Hume’s History of England
Grote’s History of Greece
Carlyle’s French Revolution
Green’s Short History of England
Lewes’s History of Philosophy
“They seem to take away the sun from the
world who withdraw friendship from life ; for
we have received nothing better from the Im
mortal Gods, nothing more delightful.”—Cicero.
Most of those who have written in praise
of books have thought they could say
nothing more conclusive than to compare
them to friends.
All men, said Socrates, have their
different objects of ambition—horses, dogs,
Arabian Nights
money, honour, as the case may be ; but
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
for his own part he would rather have a
Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield
good friend than all these put together.
Cervantes’s Don Quixote
And again, men know “ the number of
Boswell’s Life of Johnson
their other possessions, although they
Moliere
Schiller’s William Tell
might be very numerous, but of their
Sheridan’s The Critic, School for Scandal, and friends, though but few, they were not
The Rivals
only ignorant of the number, but even
Carlyle’s Past and Present
when they attempted to reckon it to such
as asked them, they set aside again some
Bacon’s Novum Organum
that they had previously counted among
Smith’s Wealth of Nations (part of)
Mill’s Political Economy
their friends; so little did they allow
Cook’s Voyages
their friends to occupy their thoughts.
Humboldt’s Travels
Yet in comparison with what possession,
White’s Natural History of Selborne
of all others, would not a good friend
Darwin’s Origin of Species
Naturalist’s Voyage
appear far more valuable ? ”
Mill’s Logic
“ As to the value of other things,” says
Cicero, “most men differ; concerning
Bacon’s Essays
friendship all have the same opinion.
Montaigne’s Essays
What can be more foolish than, when
Hume’s Essays
Macaulay’s Essays
men are possessed of great influence by
Addison’s Essays
their wealth, power, and resources, to
Emerson’s Essays
procure other things which are bought
Burke’s Select Works
by money—horses, slaves, rich apparel,
Smiles’s Self-Help
costly vases—and not to procure friends,
Voltaire’s Zadig and Micromegas
Goethe’s Faust, and Autobiography
1 The substance of this was delivered at the
London Working Men’s College.
�CHAP. V
THE BLESSING OF. EE ZENDS
the most valuable and fairest furniture of
life?” And yet, he continues, “every
man can tell how many goats or sheep
he possesses, but not how many friends.”
In the choice, moreover, of a dog or of a
horse, we exercise the greatest care : we
inquire into its pedigree, its training and
character, and yet we too often leave the
selection of our friends, which is of in
finitely greater importance—by whom our
whole life will be more or less influenced
either for good or evil—almost to chance.
It is no doubt true, as the Autocrat of
the Breakfast Table says, that all men are
bores except when we want them. And
Sir Thomas Browne quaintly observes
that “ unthinking heads who have not
learnt to be alone, are a prison to them
selves if they be not with others ; whereas,
on the contrary, those whose thoughts are
in a fair and hurry within, are sometimes
fain to retire into company to be out of
the crowd of themselves.” Still I do not
quite understand Emerson’s idea that
“men descend to meet.” In another
place, indeed, he qualifies the statement,
and says, “ Almost all people descend to
meet.” Even so I should venture to
question it, especially considering the
context.
“ All association,” he adds,
“must be a compromise, and, what is
worse, the very flower and aroma of the
flower of each of the beautiful natures
disappears as they approach each other.”
What a sad thought! Is it really so ;
Need it be so ? And if it were, would
friends be any real advantage ? I should
have thought that the influence of friends
was exactly the reverse : that the flower
of a beautiful nature would expand, and
the colours grow brighter, when stimu
lated by the warmth and sunshine of
friendship.
It has been said that it is wise always
to treat a friend, remembering that he
may become an enemy, and an enemy,
remembering that he may become a
friend ; and whatever may be thought
of the first part of the adage, there is
certainly much wisdom in the latter.
Many people seem to take more pains
23
and more pleasure in making enemies,
than in making friends. Plutarch, in
deed, quotes with approbation the. advice
of Pythagoras “ not to shake hands with
too many,” but as long as friends are
well chosen, it is true rather that
“ He who has a thousand friends,
Has never a one to spare,
And he who has one enemy,
Will meet him everywhere,”
and unfortunately, while there are few
great friends there is no little enemy.
I guard myself, however, by saying
again—As long as they are well chosen.
One is thrown in life with a great many
people who, though not actively bad,
though they may not wilfully lead us
astray, yet take no pains with themselves,
neglect their own minds, and direct the
conversation to petty puerilities or mere
gossip ; who do not seem to realise that
conversation may by a little effort be
made instructive and delightful, without
being in any way pedantic ; or, on the
other hand, in ay be allowed to drift into
a mere morass of muddy thought and
weedy words. There are few from ■whom
we may not learn something, if only they
will trouble themselves to tell us. Nay,
even if they teach us nothing, they may
help us by the stimulus of intelligent
questions, or the warmth of sympathy.
But if they do neither, then indeed their
companionship, if companionship it can
be called, is mere waste of time, and of
such we may well say, “ I do desire that
we be better strangers.”
Much certainly of the happiness and
purity of our lives depends on our making
a wise choice of our companions and
friends. If badly chosen they will in
evitably drag us down ; if well they will
raise us up. Yet many people seem to
trust in this matter to the chapter of
accident. It is well and right, indeed, to
be courteous and considerate to every one
with whom we are brought into contact,
but to choose them as real friends is an
other matter. Some seem to make a man
a friend, or try to do so, because he lives
near, because he is in the same business,
�24
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
travels on the same line of railway, or for
some other trivial reason. There cannot
be a greater mistake. These are only, in
the words of Plutarch “ the idols and
images of friendship.”
To be friendly with every one is
another matter ; we must remember that
there is no little enemy, and those who
have ever really loved any one will have
some tenderness for all. There is indeed
some good in most men. “ I have heard
much,” says Mr. Nasmyth in his charming
autobiography, “ about the ingratitude
and selfishness of the world. It may
have been ray good fortune, but I have
never experienced either of these unfeel
ing conditions.” Such also has been my
own experience.
“ Men talk of unkind hearts, kind deeds
With coldness still returning.
Alas ! the gratitude of men
Has ofteuer left me mourning.”
I cannot, then, agree with Emerson
when he says that “we walk alone in the
world. Friends such as we desire are
dreams and fables. But a sublime hope
cheers ever the faithful heart, that else
where in other regions of the universal
power souls are now acting, enduring,
and daring, which can love us, and which
we can love.”
No doubt, much as worthy friends
add to the happiness and value of life,
we must in the main depend on ourselves,
and every one is his own best friend
or worst enemy.
Sad, indeed, is Bacon’s assertion that
“ there is little friendship in the world,
and least of all between equals, which
was wont to be magnified. That that is,
is between superior and inferior, whose
fortunes may comprehend the one to the
other.” But this can hardly be taken as
his deliberate opinion, for he elsewhere
says, “ but we may go farther, and affirm
most truly, that it is a mere and miser
able solitude to want true friends, without
which the world is but a wilderness.”
Not only, he adds, does friendship intro
duce “ daylight in the understanding out
of darkness and confusion of thoughts;”
PART I
it “ maketh a fair day in the affections
from storm and tempests:” in consultation
with a friend a man “ tosseth his thoughts
more easily; he marshalleth them more
orderly ; he seeth how they look when
they are turned into words ; finally, he
waxeth wiser than himself, and that more
by an hour’s discourse than by a day’s
meditation.” . . . “ But little do men
perceive what solitude is, and how far it
extendeth, for a crowd is not company,
and faces are but a gallery of pictures,
and talk but a tinkling cymbal where
there is no love.”
With this last assertion I cannot alto
gether concur. Surely even strangers may
be most interesting ! and many will agree
with Dr. Johnson when, describing a
pleasant evening, he summed it up—“ Sir,
we had a good talk.”
Epictetus gives excellent advice when
he dissuades from conversation on the
very subjects most commonly chosen, and
advises that it should be on “ none of
the common subjects—not about gladi
ators, nor horse-races, nor about athletes,
nor about eating or drinking, which are
the usual subjects ; and especially not
about men, as blaming them ; ” but when
he adds, “or praising them,” the injunction
seems to me of doubtful value. Surely
Marcus Aurelius more wisely advises that
“when thou wishest to delight thyself,
think of the virtues of those who live
with thee ; for instance, the activity of
one, and the modesty of another, and the
liberality of a third, and some other good
quality of a fourth. For nothing delights
so much as the examples of the virtues,
when they are exhibited in the morals of
those who live with us and present them
selves in abundance, as far as is possible.
Wherefore we must keep them before us.”
Yet how often we know merely the sight
of those we call our friends, or the sound
of their voices, but nothing whatever of
their mind or soul.
We must, moreover, be as careful to
keep friends as to make them. If every
one knew what one said of the other,
Pascal assures us that “ there would not
�THE VALUE OF TIME
CHAP. V
be four friends in the world.” This I
hope and think is too strong, but at
any rate try to be one of the four. And
when you have made a friend, keep
him. Hast thou a friend, says an Eastern
proverb, “ visit him often, for thorns and
brushwood obstruct the road which no
one treads.” The affections should not be
mere “tents of a night.”
Still less does Friendship confer any
privilege to make ourselves disagreeable.
Some people never seem to appreciate
their friends till they have lost them.
Anaxagoras described the Mausoleum as
the ghost of wealth turned into stone.
“ But he who has once stood beside the
grave to look back on the companionship
which has been for ever closed, feeling
how impotent then are the wild love and
the keen sorrow, to give one instant’s
pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone
in the lowest measure to the departed
spirit for the hour of unkindness, will
scarcely for the future incur that debt to
the heart which can only be discharged
to the dust.” 1
Death, indeed, cannot sever friendship.
“Friends,” says Cicero, “though absent,
are still present ; though in poverty they
are rich ; though weak, yet in the enjoy
ment of health ; and, what is still more
difficult to assert, though dead they are
alive.” This seems a paradox, yet is
there not much truth in his explanation ?
“ To me, indeed, Scipio still lives, and
will always live ; for I love the virtue of
that man, and that worth is not yet ex
tinguished. . . . Assuredly of all things
that either fortune or time has bestowed
on me, I have none which I can compare
with the friendship of Scipio.”
If, then, we choose our friends for
what they are, not for what they have,
and if we deserve so great a blessing, then
they will be always with us, preserved in
absence, and even after death, in the
amber of memory.
25
CHAPTER VI
THE VALUE OF TIME1
Each day is a little life
All other good gifts depend on time
for their value. What are friends, books,
or health, the interest of travel or the de
lights of home, if we have not time for
their enjoyment ? Time is often said to
be money, but it is more—it is life ; and
yet many who would cling desperately to
life, think nothing of wasting time.
Ask of the wise, says Schiller in Lord
Sherbrooke’s translation,
‘ ‘ The moments we forego
Eternity itself cannot retrieve. ”
And, in the words of Dante,
“ For who knows most, him loss of time most
grieves.”
Not that a life of drudgery should be our
ideal. Far from it. Time spent in
innocent and rational enjoyments, in
healthy games, in social and family inter
course, is well and wisely spent. Games
not only keep the body in health, but give
a command over the muscles and limbs
which cannot be over-valued. Moreover,
there are temptations which strong exercise
best enables us to resist.
It is the idle who complain they cannot
find time to do that which they fancy
they wish. In truth, people can generally
make time for what they choose to do ; it
is not really the time but the will that is
wanting: and the advantage of leisure is
mainly that we may have the power of
choosing our own wTork, not certainly that
it confers any privilege of idleness.
“ Time travels in divers paces with
divers persons. I’ll tell you who time
ambles withal, who time trots withal, who
time gallops withal, and who he stands
still withal.” 2
1 Ruskin.
1 The substance of this was delivered at the
Polytechnic Institution.
2 Shakespeare.
�26
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
PART I
For it is not so much the hours that Devil tempts the busy man, but the idle
tell, as the way we use them.
man tempts the Devil. I remember, says
Hillard, “a satirical poem, in which the
“ Circles are praised, not that excel
In largeness, but th’ exactly framed ;
Devil is represented as fishing for men,
So life we praise, that does excel
and adapting his bait to the tastes and
Not in much time, but acting well.” 1
temperaments of his prey ; but the idlers
“Idleness,” says Jeremy Taylor, “is were the easiest victims, for they swallowed
the greatest prodigality in the world ; it even the naked hook.”
throws away that which is invaluable in
The mind of the idler indeed preys upon
respect of its present use, and irreparable itself. “ The human heart is like a mill
when it is past, being to be recovered by stone in a mill; when you put wheat
no power of art or nature.”
under it, it turns and grinds and bruises
Life must be measured rather by depth the wheat to flour ; if you put no wheat,
than by length, by thought and action it still grinds on—and grinds itself away.” 1
rather than by time. “ A counted number
It is not work, but care, that kills, and
of pulses only,” says Pater, “is given to us it is in this sense, I suppose, that we are
of a variegated, aromatic, life. How may told to “ take no thought for the morrow.”
we see in them all that is to be seen by To “ consider the lilies of the field, how
the finest senses 1 How can we pass most they grow ; they toil not, neither do they
swiftly from point to point, and be present spin : and yet even Solomon, in all his
always at the focus where the greatest glory, was not arrayed like one of these.
number of vital forces unite in their Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of
purest energy ? To burn always with this the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow
hard gem-like flame, to maintain this is cast into the oven, shall he not much
ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to more clothe you, O ye of little faith 1 ” It
form habits, for habit is relation to a would indeed be a mistake to suppose that
stereotyped world ; . . . while all melts lilies are idle or imprudent. On the
under our feet, we may well catch at any contrary, plants are most industrious, and
exquisite passion, or any contribution to lilies store up in their complex bulbs a
knowledge, that seems, by a lifted horizon, great part of the nourishment of one year to
to set the spirit free for a moment.”
quicken the growth of the next. Care, on
I would not quote Lord Chesterfield as the other hand, they certainly know not.2
generally a safe guide, but there is certainly
“ Hours have wings, fly up to the author
much shrewd wisdom in his advice to his of time, and carry news of our usage.
son with reference to time. “ Every All our prayers cannot entreat one of them
moment you now lose, is so much character either to return or slacken his pace. The
and advantage lost ; as, on the other hand, misspents of every minute are a new record
every moment you now employ usefully, against us in heaven. Sure if we thought
is so much time wisely laid out, at pro thus, we should dismiss them with better
digious interest.”
reports, and not suffer them to fly away
And again, “ It is astonishing that any empty, or laden with dangerous intelli
one can squander away in absolute idleness gence. How happy is it when they carry
one single moment of that small portion up not only the message, but the fruits of
of time which is allotted to us in the world. good, and stay with the Ancient of Days
. . . Know the true value of time ; snatch, to speak for us before His glorious
seize, and enjoy every moment of it.”
throne! ” 3
‘ Are you in earnest ? seize this very minute,
What you can do, or think you can, begin it.” 2
There is a Turkish proverb that
1 Waller.
2 Faust.
1 Luther.
2 The word used iiepifiv-qa-qTe is translated in
the Liddell and Scott “to be anxious about, to be
distressed in mind, to be cumbered with many
cares.”
3 Milton.
�CHAP. VI
THE VALUE OF TIME
Time is often said to fly : but it is not
so much the time that flies ; as we that
waste it, and wasted time is worse than no
time at all; “ I wasted time,” Shake
speare makes Richard II. say, “and now
doth time waste me.”
“He that is choice of his time,” says
Jeremy Taylor, “ will also be choice of
his company, and choice of his actions ;
lest the first engage him in vanity and
loss, and the latter, by being criminal, be
a throwing his time and himself away,
and a going back in the accounts of
eternity.”
The life of man is seventy years, but
how little of this is actually our own.
We must deduct the time required for
sleep, for meals, for dressing and undress
ing, for exercise, etc., and then how little
remains really at our own disposal!
“ I have lived,” said Lamb, “ nominally
fifty years, but deduct from them the
hours I have lived for other people, and
not for myself, anct you will find me still
a young fellow.”
The hours we live for other people,
however, are not those which should be
deducted, but rather those which benefit
neither oneself nor any one else ; and
these, alas 1 are often very numerous.
“ There are some hours which are taken
from us, some which are stolen from us,
and some which slip from us.”1 But
however we may lose them, we can never
get them back. It is wonderful, indeed,
how much innocent happiness we thought
lessly throw away. An Eastern proverb
says that calamities sent by heaven may
be avoided, but from those we bring on
ourselves there is no escape.
Some years ago I paid a visit to the
sites of the ancient lake villages of Switzer
land in company with a distinguished
archseologist, M. Morlot. To my surprise
I found that his whole income was £100
a year, part of which, moreover, he spent
in making a small museum. I asked him
whether he contemplated accepting any
post or office, but he said certainly not.
He valued his leisure and opportunities
1 Seneca.
27
as priceless possessions far more than
silver or gold, and would not waste any
of his time in making money.
Time, indeed, is a sacred gift, and each
day is a little life. Just think of our
advantages here in London ! We have
access to the whole literature of the
world ; we may see in our National
Gallery the most beautiful productions of
former generations, and in the Royal
Academy and other galleries the works of
the greatest living artists. Perhaps there
is no one who has ever found time to
see the British Museum thoroughly. Yet
consider what it contains ; or rather, what
does it not contain ? The most perfect
collection of living and extinct animals;
the marvellous monsters of geological
ages ; the most beautiful birds, shells, and
minerals ; precious stones and fragments
from other worlds ; the most interesting
antiquities ; curious and fantastic speci
mens illustrating different races of men ;
exquisite gems, coins, glass, and china ;
the Elgin marbles; the remains of the
Mausoleum ; of the temple of Diana of
Ephesus; ancient monuments of Egypt
and Assyria ; the rude implements of our
predecessors in England, who were coeval
with the hippopotamus and rhinoceros, the
musk-ox, and the mammoth ; and beauti
ful specimens of Greek and Roman art.
Suffering may be unavoidable, but no
one has any excuse for being dull. And
yet some people are dull. They talk of
a better world to come, while whatever
dulness there may be here is all their
own. Sir Arthur Helps has well said :
“ What! dull, when you do not know
what gives its loveliness of form to the
lily, its depth of colour to the violet, its
fragrance to the rose; when you do not
know in what consists the venom of the
adder, any more than you can imitate the
glad movements of the dove. What !
<jull, when earth, air, and water are all
alike mysteries to you, and when as you
stretch out your hand you do not touch
anything the properties of which you have
mastered ; while all the time Nature is
inviting you to talk earnestly with her,
�28
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
part I
to understand her, to subdue
be blessed by her 1 Go away,
something, do something,
something, and let me hear
your dulness.”
her, and to
Surely no one who has the opportunity
man ; learn should omit to travel. The world belongs
understand to him who has seen it. “ But he that
no more of would make his travels delightful must
first make himself delightful.” 1
According to the old proverb, “ the fool
wanders, the wise man travels.” Bacon
tells us that “the things to be seen and
observed are the courts of princes, especi
CHAPTER VII
ally when they give audience to ambas
THE PLEASURES OF TRAVEL 1
sadors ; the courts of justice while they
sit and hear causes ; and so of consistories
“I ain a part of all that I have seen.”
ecclesiastic • the churches and monasteries,
with the monuments which are therein
I AM sometimes disposed to think that
extant; the walls and fortifications of
there are few things in which we of this cities and towns ; and so the havens and
generation enjoy greater advantages over harbours, antiquities and ruins, libraries,
our ancestors than in the increased facili colleges, disputations and lectures, when
ties of travel; but I hesitate to say this, any are; shipping and navies ; houses
not because our advantages are not great, and gardens of state and pleasure near
but because I have already made the same great cities; armouries, arsenals, maga
remark with reference to several other zines, exchanges, burses, warehouses, exer
aspects of life.
cises of horsemanship, fencing, training of
The very word “ travel ” is suggestive. soldiers, and the like; comedies, such
It is a form of “travail”—excessive labour; whereunto the better sort of persons do
and, as Skeat observes, it forcibly recalls resort; treasuries of jewels and robes;
the toil of travel in olden days. How cabinets and rarities ; and, to conclude,
different things are now !
whatsoever is memorable in the places
It is sometimes said that every one where they go.”
should travel on foot “ like Thales, Plato,
But this depends on the time at our
and Pythagoras ” ; we are told that in disposal, and the object with which we
these days of railroads people rush through travel. If we are long enough in any
countries and see nothing. It may be so, one place Bacon’s advice is no doubt
but that is not the fault of the railways. excellent; but for the moment I am
They confer upon us the inestimable ad thinking rather of an annual holiday,
vantage of being able, so rapidly and with taken for the sake of rest and health ;
so little fatigue, to visit countries which for fresh air and exercise rather than for
were much less accessible to our ancestors. study. Yet even so, if we have eyes to
What a blessing it is that not our own see, we cannot fail to lay in a stock of
islands only—our smiling fields and rich new ideas as well as a store of health.
woods, the mountains that are full of
We may have read the most vivid and
peace and the rivers of joy, the lakes and accurate description, we may have pored
heaths and hills, castles and cathedrals, over maps and plans and pictures, and yet
and many a spot immortalised in the the reality will burst on us like a revela
history of our country :—not these only, tion. This is true not only of mountains
but the sun and scenery of the South, and glaciers, of palaces and cathedrals,
the Alps the palaces of Nature, the blue but even of the simplest examples.
Mediterranean, and the cities of Europe,
For instance, like every one else, I had
with all their memories and treasures, are read descriptions and seen photographs
now brought within a few hours of us.
and pictures of the Pyramids. Their
1 The substance of this was delivered at Oldham.
1 Seneca.
�CHAP. VII
THE PLEASURES OF TRAVEL
form is simplicity itself. I do not know
that I could put into words any character
istic of the original for -which I was not
prepared. It was not that they were
larger ; it was not that they differed in
form, in colour, or situation. And yet,
the moment I saw them, I felt that my
previous impression had been but a faint
shadow of the reality. The actual sight
seemed to give life to the idea.
Every one who has been in the East
will agree that a -week of oriental travel
brings out, with more than stereoscopic
effect, the pictures of patriarchal life as
given us in the Old Testament. And
what is true of the Old Testament is true
of history generally. To those who have
been in Athens or Rome, the history of
Greece or Italy becomes far more interest
ing ; -while, on the other hand, some
knowledge of the history and literature
enormously enhances the interest of the
scenes themselves.
Good descriptions and pictures, how
ever, help us to see much more than we
should perhaps perceive for ourselves. It
may even be doubted whether some
persons do not derive a more correct im
pression from a good drawing or descrip
tion, which brings out the salient points,
than they would from actual, but unaided,
inspection. The idea may gain in ac
curacy, in character, and even in detail,
more than it misses in vividness. But,
however this may be, for those who cannot
travel, descriptions and pictures have an
immense interest; while to those who
have travelled, they will afford an inex
haustible delight in reviving the memories
of beautiful scenes and interesting expedi
tions.
It is really astonishing how little most
of us see of the beautiful world in which
we live. Mr. Norman Lockyer tells me
that while travelling on a scientific mission
in the Rocky Mountains, he w’as astonished
to meet an aged French Abbe, and could
not help showing his surprise. The Abbd
observed this, and in the course of con
versation explained his presence in that
distant region.
29
“You were,” he said, “I easily saw,
surprised to find me here. The fact is,
that some months ago I was very ill. My
physicians gave me up : one morning I
seemed to faint and thought that I was
already in the arms of the Bon Dieu. I
fancied one of the angels came and asked
me, ‘Well, M. l’Abbe, and how did you
like the beautiful world you have just
left?’ And then it occurred to me that
I who had been all my life preaching
about heaven, had seen almost nothing
of the world in which I was living. I
determined therefore, if it pleased Provi
dence to spare me, to see something of
this world ; and so here I am.”
Few of us are free, however much we
might wish it, to follow the example of
the worthy Abbe. But although it may
not be possible for us to reach the Rocky
Mountains, there are other countries nearer
home which most of us might find time
to visit.
Though it is true that no descriptions
can come near the reality, they may at
least persuade us to give ourselves this
great advantage. Let me then try to
illustrate this by pictures in words, as
realised by some of our most illustrious
countrymen; I will select references to
foreign countries only, not that we have
not equal beauties here, but because every
where in England one feels oneself at
home.
The following passage from Tyndall’s
Hours of Exercise in the Alps, is almost as
good as an hour in the Alps themselves :
“ I looked over this wondrous scene
towards Mont Blanc, the Grand Combin,
the Dent Blanche, the Weissliorn, the
Dom, and the thousand lesser peaks which
seemed to join in the celebration of the
risen day. I asked myself, as on previous
occasions, How was this colossal work
performed ? Who chiselled these mighty
and picturesque masses out of a mere
protuberance of the earth ? And the
answer was at hand. Ever young, ever
mighty—with the vigour of a thousand
worlds still within him—the real sculptor
was even then climbing up the eastern
�30
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
PART I
i
sky. It was lie wlio raised aloft the
waters which cut out these ravines; it
was he who planted the glaciers on the
mountain-slopes, thus giving gravity a
plough to open out the valleys ; and it is
he who, acting through the ages, will
finally lay low these mighty monuments,
rolling them gradually seaward, sowing
the seeds of continents to be ; so that the
people of an older earth may see mould
spread, and corn wave over the hidden
rocks which at this moment bear the
weight of the Jungfrau.” And the Alps
lie within twenty-four hours of London !
Tyndall’s writings also contain many
vivid descriptions of glaciers ; those
“ silent and solemn causeways . . . broad
enough for the march of an army in line
of battle and quiet as a street of tombs in
a buried city.” 1 I do not, however, borrow
from him or from any one else any descrip
tion of glaciers, for they are so unlike any
thing else, that no one who has not seen,
can possibly visualise them.
The history of European rivers yet
remains to be written, and is most inter
esting. They did not always run in their
present courses. The Rhone, for instance,
appears to have been itself a great traveller.
At least there seems reason to believe
that the upper waters of the Valais fell
at first into the Danube, and so into
the Black Sea ; subsequently joined the
Rhine and the Thames, and so ran far
north over the plains which once connected
the mountains of Scotland and of Norway
—to the Arctic Ocean ; and have only
comparatively of late years adopted their
present course into the Mediterranean.
But, however this may be, the Rhine
of Germany and the Rhine of Switzerland
are very unlike. The catastrophe of Schaff
hausen seems to alter the whole character
of the river, and no wonder. “ Stand for
half an hour,” says Ruskin, “beside the
Fall of Schaffhausen, on the north side
where the rapids are long, and watch how '
the vault of water first bends, unbroken,
in pure polished velocity, over the arching
rocks at the brow of the cataract, covering ,
1 Ruskin.
' them with a dome of crystal twenty feet
j thick, so swift that its motion is unseen
i except when a foam globe from above
, darts over it like a falling star ; . . . and
, how ever and anon, startling you with its
white flash, a jet of spray leaps hissing
out of the fall, like a rocket, bursting in
the wind and driven away in dust, filling
the air with light; and how, through the
curdling wreaths of the restless crushing
abyss below, the blue of the water, paled
by the foam in its body, shows purer
than the sky through white rain-cloud •
. . . their dripping masses lifted at inter
vals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by some
stronger gush from the cataract, and
bowed again upon the mossy rocks as its
roar dies away.”
But much as we may admire the
majestic grandeur of a mighty river,
either in its eager rush or its calmer
moments, there is something which
fascinates even more in the free life, the
young energy, the sparkling transparence,
and merry music of smaller streams.
“ The upper Swiss valleys,” as the
same great Seer says, “ are sweet with
perpetual streamlets, that seem always to
have chosen the steepest places to come
down, for the sake of the leaps, scattering
their handfuls of crystal this way and
that, as the wind takes them, with all the
grace, but with none of the formalism, of
fountains . . . until at last . . . they
find their way down to the turf, and lose
themselves in that, silently ; with quiet
depth of clear water furrowing among the
grass blades, and looking only like their
shadow, but presently emerging again in
little startled gushes and laughing hurries,
as if they had remembered suddenly that
the day was too short for them to get
down the hill.”
How vividly does Symonds bring before
us the sunny shores of the Mediterranean,
which he loves so well, and the contrast
between the scenery of the North and
the South.
“ In northern landscapes the eye travels
through vistas of leafy boughs to still,
secluded crofts and pastures, where slow-
�CHAP. VII
THE PLEASURES OF TRA VEL
moving oxen graze. The mystery of
dreams and the repose of meditation haunt
our massive bowers. But in the South,
the lattice-work of olive boughs and foliage
scarcely veils the laughing sea and bright
blue sky, while the hues of the landscape
find their climax in the dazzling radiance
of the sun upon the waves, and the pure
light of the horizon. There is no conceal
ment and no melancholy here. Nature
seems to hold a never-ending festival and
dance, in which the waves and sunbeams
and shadows join. Again, in northern
scenery, the rounded forms of full-foliaged
trees suit the undulating country, with its
gentle hills and brooding clouds ; but in
the South the spiky leaves and sharp
branches of the olive carry out the defined
outlines which are everywhere observable
through the broader beauties of mountain
and valley and sea-shore. Serenity and
intelligence characterise this southern
landscape, in which a race of splendid men
and women lived beneath the pure light
of Phoebus, their ancestral god. Pallas
protected them, and golden Aphrodite
favoured them with beauty. Olives are
not, however, by any means the only trees
which play a part in idyllic scenery. The
tall stone pine is even more important. . . .
Near Massa, by Sorrento, there are two
gigantic pines so placed that, lying on the
grass beneath them, one looks on Capri
rising from the sea, Baiae, and all the bay
of Naples sweeping round to the base of
Vesuvius. Tangled growths of olives,
oranges, and rose-trees fill the garden
ground along the shore, while far away in
the distance pale Inarime sleeps, with
her exquisite Greek name, a virgin island
on the deep.
“ On the wilder hills you find patches
of ilex and arbutus glowing with crimson
berries and white waxen bells, sweet myrtle
rods and shafts of bay, frail tamarisk and
tall tree-heaths that wave their frosted
houghs above your head. Nearer the
shore the lentisk grows, a savoury shrub,
with cytisus and aromatic rosemary.
Clematis and polished garlands of tough
sarsaparilla wed the shrubs with clinging,
3i
climbing arms ; and here and there in
sheltered nooks the vine shoots forth
luxuriant tendrils bowed with grapes,
stretching from branch to branch of mul
berry or elm, flinging festoons on which
young loves might sit and swing, or
weaving a lattice-work of leaves across the
open shed. Nor must the sounds of this
landscape be forgotten,—sounds of bleat
ing flocks, and murmuring bees, and
nightingales, and doves that moan, and
running streams, and shrill cicadas, and
hoarse frogs, and whispering pines. There
is not a single detail which a patient
student may not verify from Theocritus.
“ Then too it is a landscape in which
sea and country are never sundered. The
higher we climb upon the mountain-side
the more marvellousis the beauty of the sea,
which seems to rise as we ascend, and
stretch into the sky. Sometimes a little
flake of blue is framed by olive boughs,
sometimes a turning in the road reveals
the whole broad azure calm below. Or,
after toiling up a steep ascent we fall
upon the undergrowth of juniper, and
lo ! a double sea, this way and that,
divided by the sharp spine of the jutting
hill, jewelled with villages along its shore,
and smiling with fair islands and silver
sails.”
To many of us the mere warmth of the
South is a blessing and a delight. The
very thought of it is delicious. I have
read over again and again Wallace’s graphic
description of a tropical sunrise—of the
sun of the early morning that turneth all
into gold.
“ Up to about a quarter past five o’clock,”
he says, “ the darkness is complete ; but
about that time a few cries of birds begin
to break the silence of night, perhaps
indicating that signs of dawn are percept
ible in the eastern horizon. A little later
the melancholy voices of the goatsuckers
are heard, varied croakings of frogs, the
plaintive whistle of mountain thrushes,
and strange cries of birds or mammals
peculiar to each locality. About half-past
five the first glimmer of light becomes
perceptible ; it slowly becomes lighter, and
�32
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
then, increases so rapidly that at about a
quarter to six it seems full daylight. For
the next quarter of an hour this changes
very little in character ; when, suddenly,
the sun’s rim appears above the horizon,
decking the dew-laden foliage with glitter
ing gems, sending gleams of golden light
far into the woods, and waking up all
nature to life and activity. Birds chirp
and flutter about, parrots scream, monkeys
chatter, bees hum among the flowers, and
gorgeous butterflies flutter lazily along or
sit with full expanded wings exposed to
the warm and invigorating rays. The
first hour of morning in the equatorial
regions possesses a charm and a beauty
that can never be forgotten. All nature
seems refreshed and strengthened by the
coolness and moisture of the past night,
new leaves and buds unfold almost before
the eye, and fresh shoots may often be
observed to have grown many inches since
the preceding day. The temperature is
the most delicious conceivable. The slight
chill of early dawn, which was itself
agreeable, is succeeded by an invigorating
warmth ; and the intense sunshine lights
up the glorious vegetation of the tropics,
and realises all that the magic art of the
painter or the glowing words of the poet
have pictured as their ideals of terrestrial
beauty.”
Or take Dean Stanley’s description of
the colossal statues of Amenophis III., the
Memnon of the Greeks, at Thebes—“The
sun was setting, the African range glowed
red behind them ; the green plain was
dyed with a deeper green beneath them,
and the shades of evening veiled the vast
rents and fissures in their aged frames.
As I looked back at them in the sunset,
and they rose up in front of the background
of the mountain, they seemed, indeed, as
if they were part of it,—as if they belonged
to some natural creation.”
But I must not indulge myself in more
quotations, though it is difficult to stop.
Such pictures recall the memory of many
glorious days : for the advantages of travels
last through life ; and often, as we sit at
home, “some bright and perfect view of
PART I
Venice, of Genoa, or of Monte Rosa comes
back on you, as full of repose as a day
wisely spent in travel.” 1
So far is a thorough love and enjoyment
of travel from interfering with the love of
home, that perhaps no one can thoroughly
enjoy his home who does not sometimes
wander away. They are like exertion and
rest, each the complement of the other ; so
that, though it may seem paradoxical, one
of the greatest pleasures of travel is the
return ; and no one who has not roamed
abroad, can realise the devotion which the
wanderer feels for Domiduca—the sweet
and gentle goddess who watches over our
coming home.
CHAPTER VIII
THE PLEASURES OF HOME
“There’s no place like Home.”—
Old English Song.
It may ■well be doubted which is more
delightful,—to start for a holiday which
has been fully earned, or to return home
from one which has been thoroughly
enjoyed ; to find oneself, with renewed
vigour, with a fresh store of memories
and ideas, back once more by one’s own
fireside, with one’s family, friends, and
books.
“ To sit at home,” says Leigh Hunt,
“with an old folio (?) book of romantic
yet credible voyages and travels to read,
an old bearded traveller for its hero, a
fireside in an old country house to read it
by, curtains drawn, and just wind enough
stirring out of doors to make an accom
paniment to the billows or forests we are
reading of—this surely is one of the
perfect moments of existence.”
It is no doubt a great privilege to
visit foreign countries; to travel say
in Mexico or Peru, or to cruise among
the Pacific Islands ; but in some respects
the narratives of early travellers, the
histories of Prescott or the voyages of
1 Helps.
�CHAP. VIII
THE PLEASURES OF HOME
Captain Cook, are even more interesting ;
describing to us, as they do, a state of
society which was then so unlike ours,
but which has now been much changed
and Europeanised.
Thus we may make our daily travels
interesting, even though, like those of the
Vicar of Wakefield, all 'our adventures
are by our own fireside, and all our migra
tions from one room to another.
Moreover, even if the beauties of home
are humble, they are still infinite, and a
man “ may lie in his bed, like Pompey
and his sons, in all quarters of the
earth.” 1
It is, then, wise to “ cultivate a talent
very fortunate for a man of my dis
position, that of travelling in my easy
chair ; of transporting myself, without
stirring from my parlour, to distant places
and to absent friends ; of drawing scenes
in my mind’s eye ; and of peopling them
with the groups of fancy, or the society
of remembrance.” 2
We may indeed secure for ourselves
endless variety without leaving our own
firesides.
In the first place, the succession of
seasons multiplies every home.
How
different is the view from our windows as
we look on the tender green of spring, the
rich foliage of summer, the glorious tints
of autumn, or the delicate tracery of
winter.
Our climate is so happy, that even in
the worst months of the year, “ calm
mornings of sunshine visit us at times,
appearing like glimpses of departed spring
amid the wilderness of wet and windy
days that lead to winter. It is pleasant,
when these interludes of silvery light
occur, to ride into the woods and see how
wonderful are all the colours of decay.
Overhead, the elms and chestnuts hang
their wealth of golden leaves, while the
beeches darken into russet tones, and the
wild cherry glows like blood-red wine.
In the hedges crimson haws and scarlet
hips are wreathed with hoary clematis or
1 Sir T. Browne.
2 Mackenzie, The Lounger.
D
33
necklaces of coral briony-berries ; the
brambles burn with many-coloured flames ;
the dog-wood is bronzed to purple ; and
here and there the ’ spindle-wood puts
forth its fruit, like knots of rosy buds,
on delicate frail twigs. Underneath lie
fallen leaves, and the brown bracken
rises to our knees as we thread the forest
paths.”1
Nay, every day gives us a succession of
glorious pictures in never-ending variety.
It is remarkable how few people seem
to derive any pleasure from the beauty of
the sky. Gray, after describing a sunrise
—how it began, with a slight whitening,
just tinged with gold and blue, lit up
all at once by a little line of insufferable
brightness which rapidly grew to half an
orb, and so to a whole one too glorious
to be distinctly seen—adds, “ I wonder
whether any one ever saw it before. I
hardly believe it.” 2
No doubt from the dawn of poetry, the
splendours of the morning and evening
skies have delighted all those who have
eyes to see.
But we are especially
indebted to Ruskin for enabling us more
vividly to realise these glorious sky
pictures. As he says, in language almost
as brilliant as the sky itself, the whole
heaven, “from the zenith to the horizon,
becomes one molten, mantling sea of
color and fire ; every black bar turns
into massy gold, every ripple and wave
into unsullied, shadowless crimson, and
purple, and scarlet, and colors for which
there are no words in language, and
no ideas in the mind—things which can
only be conceived while they are visible ;
the intense hollow blue of the upper sky
melting through it all, showing here deep
and pure, and lightness ; there, modulated
by the filmy, formless body of the trans
parent vapour, till it is lost imperceptibly
in its crimson and gold.”
' It is in some cases indeed “ not color
but conflagration,” and though the tints
are richer and more varied towards morn
ing and at sunset, the glorious kaleidoscope
goes on all day long. Yet “ it is a strange
1 J. A. Symonds.
2 Gray’s Letters.
�THE PLEASURES OE LIRE
34
thing how little in general people know
about the sky. It is the part of creation
in which Nature has done more for the
sake of pleasing man, more for the sole
and evident purpose of talking to him and
teaching him, than in any other of her
works, and it is just the part in which we
least attend to her. There are not many
of her other works in which some more
material or essential purpose than the
mere pleasing of man is not answered by
every part of their organisation ; but
every essential purpose of the sky might,
so far as we know, be answered, if once
in three days, or thereabouts, a great,
ugly, black rain-cloud were brought up
over the blue, and everything well
watered, and so all left blue again till
next time, with perhaps a film of morning
and evening mist for dew. And instead
of this, there is-not a moment of any day
of our lives when Nature is not producing
scene after scene, picture after picture,
glory after glory, and working still upon
such exquisite and constant principles of
the most perfect beauty, that it is quite
certain it is all done for us, and intended
for our perpetual pleasure.” 1
Nor does the beauty end with the day.
“ Is it nothing to sleep under the canopy
of heaven, where we have the globe of
the earth for our place of repose, and the
glories of the heavens for our spectacle? ”2
For my part I always regret the custom
of shutting up our rooms in the evening,
as though there was nothing worth seeing
outside. What, however, can be more
beautiful than to “ look how the floor of
heaven is thick inlaid with patines of
bright gold,” or to watch the moon
journeying in calm and silver glory
through the night. And even if we do
not feel that “ the man who has seen the
rising moon break out of the clouds at
midnight, has been present like an Arch
angel at the creation of light and of the
world,”3 still “ the stars say something
significant to all of us : and each man
has a whole hemisphere of them, if he
r Ruskin.
2 Seneca.
3 Emerson.
PART I
will but look up, to counsel and befriend
him ” ;1 for it is not so much, as Helps
elsewhere observes, “in guiding us over
the seas of our little planet, but out of
the dark waters of'our own perturbed
minds, that we may make to ourselves
the most of their significance.” Indeed,
“ How beautiful is night !
A dewy freshness fills the silent air ;
No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor
stain,
Breaks the serene of heaven :
In full-orbed glory yonder moon divine
Rolls through the dark blue depths ;
Beneath her steady ray
The desert circle spreads,
Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky ;
How beautiful is night ! ” 2
I have never wondered at those who
worshipped the sun and moon.
On the other hand, when all outside is
dark and cold ; when perhaps
“ Outside fall the snowflakes lightly ;
Through the night loud raves the storm ;
In my room the fire glows brightly,
And ’tis cosy, silent, warm.
Musing sit I on the settle
By the firelight’s cheerful blaze,
Listening to the busy kettle
Humming long-forgotten lays.” 3
For after all the true pleasures of home
are not without, but within ; and “ the
domestic man who loves no music so well
as his -own kitchen clock and the airs
which the logs sing to him as they burn
on the hearth, has solaces which others
never dream of.” 4
We love the ticking of the clock, and
the flicker of the fire, like the sound of
the cawing of rooks, not so much for any
beauty of their own as for their associations.
It is a great truth that when we re
tire into ourselves we can call up what
memories we please.
“ How dear to this heart are the scenes of my
childhood,
When fond recollection recalls them to view.—
The orchard, the meadow, the deep-tangled
wildwood
And every lov’d spot which my infancy knew.” 5
1 Helps.
2 Southey.
3 Heine, trans, by E. A. Bowring.
4 Emerson,
8 Woodworth.
�THE PLEASURES OF HOME
CHAP. VIII
It is not so much the
“ Fireside enjoyments,
And all the comforts of the lowly roof,” 1
but rather, according to the higher and
better ideal of Keble,
“ Sweet is the smile of home ; the mutual look,
When hearts are of each other sure ;
Sweet all the joys that crowd the household
nook,
The haunt of all affections pure.”
In ancient times, not only among
savage races, but even among the Greeks
themselves, there seems to have been but
little family life.
What a contrast was the home life of
the Greeks, as it seems to have been, to
that, for instance, described by Cowley—
a home happy “ in books and gardens,”
and above all, in a
“ Virtuous wife, where thou dost meet
Both pleasures more refined and sweet;
The fairest garden in her looks
And in her mind the wisest books.”
No one who has ever loved mother or
wife, sister or daughter, can read without
astonishment and pity St. Chrysostom’s
description of woman as “a necessary
evil, a natural temptation, a desirable
calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascina
tion, and a painted ill.”
In few respects has mankind made a
greater advance than in the relations of
men and women. It is terrible to think
how women suffer in savage life; and
even among the intellectual Greeks, with
rare exceptions, they seem to have been
treated rather as housekeepers or play
things than as the Angels who make a
Heaven of home.
The Hindoo proverb that you should
“ never strike a wife, even with a flower,”
though a considerable advance, tells a
melancholy tale of what must previously
have been.
In The Origin of Civilisation I have
given many cases showing how small a
part family affection plays in savage life.
Here I will only mention one case
in illustration. The Algonquin (North i
1 Cowper.
|
35
America) language contained no word
for “ love,” so that when the missionaries
translated the Bible into it they were
obliged to invent one. What a life, and
what a language, without love.
Yet in marriage even the rough passion
of a savage may contrast favourably with
any cold calculation, which, like the en
chanted hoard of the Nibelungs, is almost
sure to bring misfortune. In the Kalevala,
the Finnish epic, the divine smith, Ilmarinnen, forges a bride of gold and silver
for Wainamoinen, who was pleased at first
to have so rich a wife, but soon found
her intolerably cold, for, in spite of fires
and furs, whenever he touched her she
froze him.
Moreover, apart from mere coldness,
how much we suffer from foolish quarrels
about trifles ; from mere misunderstand
ings ; from hasty words thoughtlessly
repeated, sometimes without the context
or tone which would have deprived them
of any sting. How much would that
charity which “beareth all things, believeth all things, bopeth all things,
endureth all things,” effect to smooth
away the sorrows of life and add to the
happiness of home. Home indeed may
be a sure haven of repose from the storms
and perils of the world. But to secure
this we must not be content to pave it
with good intentions, but must make it
bright and cheerful.
If our life be one of toil and of suffer
ing, if the world outside be cold and
dreary, what a pleasure to return to
the sunshine of happy faces and the
warmth of hearts we love.
�36
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
’Twas she discovered that the world was
young,
And taught a language to its lisping tongue.”
CHAPTER IX
SCIENCE 1
“Happy is he that findeth wisdom,
And the man that getteth understanding :
For the merchandise of it is better than silver,
And the gain thereof than fine gold.
She is more precious than rubies :
And all the things thou canst desire are not to
be compared unto her.
Length of days is in her right hand,
And in her left hand riches and honour.
Her ways are ways of pleasantness,
And all her paths are peace.”
Proverbs
of
PART I
Solomon.
Those who have not tried for themselves
can hardly imagine how much Science
adds to the interest and variety of life.
It is altogether a mistake to regard it as
dry, difficult, or prosaic—-much of it is
as easy as it is interesting. A wise in
stinct of old united the prophet and the
“ seer.” “ The wise man’s eyes are in
his head, but the fool walketh in dark
ness.” Technical works, descriptions of
species, etc., bear the same relation to
science as dictionaries do to literature.
Occasionally, indeed, Science may de
stroy some poetical myth of antiquity,
such as the ancient Hindoo explanation
of rivers, that “ Indra dug out their beds
with his thunderbolts, and sent them
forth by long continuous paths ; ” but
the real causes of natural phenomena are
far more striking, and contain more true
poetry, than those which have occurred
to the untrained imagination of mankind.
In endless aspects science is as wonder
ful and interesting as a fairy tale.
‘ ‘ There are things whose strong reality
Outshines our fairyland ; in shape and hues
More beautiful than our fantastic sky,
And the strange constellations which the Muse
O’er her wild universe is skilful to diffuse.” 2
Mackay justly exclaims :
“Blessings on Science! When the earth
seemed old,
When Faith grew doting, and our reason cold,
1 The substance of this was delivered at
Mason College, Birmingham.
2 Byron.
Botany, for instance, is by many re
garded as a dry science. Yet though
without it we may admire flowers and
trees, it is only as strangers, only as one
may admire a great man or a beautiful
woman in a crowd. The botanist, on the
contrary—nay, I will not say the botanist,
but one with even a slight knowledge of
that delightful science—when he goes
out into the woods, or into one of those
fairy forests which we call fields, finds
himself welcomed by a glad company of
friends, every one with something inter
esting to tell. Dr. Johnson said that, in
his opinion, when you had seen one
green field you had seen them all; and a
greater even than Johnson—Socrates—
the very type of intellect without science,
said he was always anxious to learn, and
from fields and trees he could learn
nothing.
It has, I know, been said that botanists
“Love not the flower they pluck and know it
not,
And all their botany is but Latin names. ”
Contrast this, however, with the language
of one who would hardly claim to be a
master in botany, though he is certainly a
loving student. “Consider,” says Ruskin,
“ what we owe to the meadow grass, to
the covering of the dark ground by that
glorious enamel, by the companies of
those soft, countless, and peaceful spears
of the field ! Follow but for a little
time the thought of all that we ought to
recognise in those words. All spring and
summer is in them—the walks by silent
scented paths, the rest in noonday heat,
the joy of the herds and flocks, the power
of all shepherd life and meditation; the
life of the sunlight upon the world, fall
ing in emerald streaks and soft blue
shadows, when else it would have struck
on the dark mould or scorching dust;
pastures beside the pacing brooks, soft
banks and knolls of lowly hills, thymy
slopes of down overlooked by the blue
�CHAP. IX
SCIENCE
line of lifted sea ; crisp lawns all dim
with early dew, or smooth in evening
warmth of barred sunshine, dinted by
happy feet, softening in their fall the
sound of loving voices.”
My own tastes and studies have led
me mainly in the direction of Natural
History and Archaeology ; but if you
love one science, you cannot but feel in
tense interest in them all. How grand
are the truths of Astronomy ! Prudhomme, in a sonnet, beautifully trans
lated by Arthur O’Shaugnessy, has
pictured an Observatory. He says—
“ ’Tis late ; the astronomer in his lonely height,
Exploring all the dark, descries afar
Orbs that like distant isles of splendour are.”
He notices a comet, and calculating its
orbit, finds that it will return in a
thousand years—
“ The star will come. It dare not by one hour
Cheat Science, or falsify her calculation ;
Men will have passed, but, watchful in the
tower,
Man shall remain in sleepless contemplation ;
And should all men have perished in their
turn,
Truth in their place would watch that star’s
return.”
Ernest Rhys well says of a student’s
chamber—
“ Strange things pass nightly in this little room,
All dreary as it looks by light of day ;
Enchantment reigns here when at evening
play
Red fire-light glimpses through the pallid
gloom.”
And the true student, in Ruskin’s words,
stands on an eminence from which he
looks back on the universe of God and
forward over the generations of men.
Even if it be true that science was dry
when it was buried in huge folios, that is
certainly no longer the case now ; and
Lord Chesterfield’s wise wish, that Minerva
might have three Graces as well as Venus,
has been amply fulfilled.
The study of natural history indeed
seems destined to replace the loss of what
is, not very happily I think, termed
“ sport; ” engraven in us as it is by the
37
operation of thousands of years, during
which man lived greatly on the produce
of the chase. Game is gradually becoming
“small by degrees and beautifully less.”
Our prehistoric ancestors hunted the
Mammoth, the woolly-haired Rhinoceros,
and the Irish Elk ; the ancient Britons
had the wild ox, the deer, and the wolf.
We have still the pheasant, the partridge,
the fox, and the hare; but even these are
becoming scarcer, and must be preserved
first, in order that they may be killed
afterwards. Some of us even now—and
more, no doubt, will hereafter—satisfy
instincts, essentially of the same origin, by
the study of birds, or insects, or even
infusoria—of creatures which more than
make up by their variety what they want
in size.
Emerson avers that when a naturalist
has “got all snakes and lizards in his
phials, science has done for him also, and
has put the man into a bottle.” I do not
deny that there are such cases, but they
are quite exceptional. The true naturalist
is no mere dry collector.
I cannot resist, although it is rather
long, quoting the following description
from Hudson and Gosse’s beautiful work
on the Rotifera :—
“ On the Somersetshire side of the Avon,
and not far from Clifton, is a little combe,
at the bottom of which lies an old fish-pond,
Its slopes are covered with plantations of
beech and fir, so as to shelter the pond on
three sides, and yet leave it open to the
soft south-western breezes, and to the
afternoon sun. At the head of the combe
wells up a clear spring, which sends a
thread of water, trickling through a bed
of osiers, into the upper end of the pond.
A stout stone wall has been drawn across
the combe from side to side, so as to dam
up the stream ; and there is a gap in one
corner through which the overflow finds
its way in a miniature cascade, down into
the lower plantation.
“ If we approach the pond by the game
keeper’s path from the cottage above, we
shall pass through the plantation, and
come unseen right on the corner of the
�38
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
wall; so that one quiet step will enable
us to see at a glance its whole surface,
without disturbing any living thing that
may be there.
“Far off at the upper end a water-hen
is leading her little brood among the
willows ; on the fallen trunk of an old
beech, lying half way across the pond, a
vole is sitting erect, rubbing his right ear,
and the splash of a beech husk just at our
feet tells of a squirrel who is dining some
where in the leafy crown above us.
“ But see, the water-rat has spied us out,
and is making straight for his hole in the
bank, while the ripple above him is the
only thing that tells of his silent flight.
The water-hen has long ago got under
cover, and the squirrel drops no more
husks. It is a true Silent Pond, and
without a sign of life.
“But if, retaining sense and sight, we
could shrink into living atoms and plunge
under the water, of what a world of
wonders should we then form part ! We
should find this fairy kingdom peopled
with the strangest creatures—creatures
that swim with their hair, that have ruby
eyes blazing deep in their necks, with
telescopic limbs that now are withdrawn
wholly within their bodies and now
stretched out to many times their own
length. Here are some riding at anchor,
moored by delicate threads spun out from
their toes ; and there are others flashing
by in glass armour, bristling with sharp
spikes or ornamented with bosses and
flowing curves ; while fastened to a green
stem is an animal convolvulus that, by
some invisible power, draws a neverceasing stream of victims into its gaping
cup, and tears them to death with hooked
jaws deep down within its body.
“ Close by it, on the same stem, is some
thing that looks like a filmy heart’s-ease.
A curious wheelwork runs round its four
outspread petals ; and a chain of minute
things, living and dead, is winding in and
out of their curves into a gulf at the back
of the flower. What happens to them
there we cannot see ; for round the stem
is raised a tube of golden-brown balls, all j
PART I
regularly piled on each other. Some
creature dashes by, and like a flash the
flower vanishes within its tube.
“We sink still lower, and now see on
the bottom slow gliding lumps of jelly
that thrust a shapeless arm out where they
will, and grasping their prey with these
chance limbs, wrap themselves round their
food to get a meal; for they creep without
feet, seize without hands, eat without
mouths, and digest without stomachs.”
Too many, however, still feel only in
Nature that which we share “ with the
weed and the worm ; ” they love birds as
boys do—that is, they love throwing
stones at them ; or wonder if they are good
to eat, as the Esquimaux asked about the
watch ; or treat them as certain devout
Afreedee villagers are said to have treated
a descendant of the Prophet—killed him
in order to worship at his tomb: but
gradually we may hope that the love of
Science—the notes “we sound upon the
strings of nature ”1—-will become to more
and more, as already it is to many, a
“ faithful and sacred element of human
feeling.”
Science summons us
“ To that cathedral, boundless as our wonder,
Whose quenchless lamps the sun and moon
supply ;
Its choir the winds and waves, its organ thunder,
Its dome the sky.” 2
Where the untrained eye will see
nothing but mire and dirt, Science will
often reveal exquisite possibilities. The
mud we tread under our feet in the street
is a grimy mixture of clay and sand, soot
and water. Separate the sand, however,
as Ruskin observes—-let the atoms arrange
themselves in peace according to their
nature—and you have the opal. Separate
the clay, and it becomes a white earth,
fit for the finest porcelain; or if it still
further purifies itself, you have a sapphire.
Take the soot, and if properly treated it
will give you a diamond. While, lastly,
the water, purified and distilled, will
become a dew-drop, or crystallise into a
lovely star. Or, again, you may see as
1 Emerson.
2 H. Smith.
�CHAP. IX
SCIENCE
39
you will in any shallow pool either the many years ago by Professor Huxley to
mud lying at the bottom, or the image the South London Working Men’s College
of the heavens above.
which struck me very much at the time,
Nay, even if we imagine beauties and and which puts this in language more
charms which do not really exist ; still if forcible than any which I could use.
we err at all, it is better to do so on the
“Suppose,” he said, “it were perfectly
side of charity; like Nasmyth, who tells certain that the life and fortune of every
us in his delightful autobiography, that one of us would, one day or other, depend
he used to think one of his friends had a upon his winning or losing a game of
charming and kindly twinkle, and was chess. Don’t you think that we should
one day surprised to discover that he all consider it to be a primary duty to
had a glass eye.
learn at least the names and the moves of
But I should err indeed were I to the pieces ? Do you not think that we
dwell exclusively on science as lending should look with a disapprobation amount
interest and charm to our leisure hours. ing to scorn upon the father who allowed
Far from this, it would be impossible his son, or the State which allowed its
to overrate the importance of scientific members, to grow up without knowing a
training on the wise conduct of life.
pawn from a knight ? Yet it is a very
“ Science,” said the Royal Commission plain and elementary truth that the life,
of 1861, “quickens and cultivates directly the fortune, and the happiness of every
the faculty of observation, which in very one of us, and more or less of those who
many persons lies almost dormant through are connected with us, do depend upon
life, the power of accurate and rapid our knowing something of the rules of a
generalisation, and the mental habit of game infinitely more difficult and compli
method and arrangement; it accustoms cated than chess. It is a game which
young persons to trace the sequence of has been played for untold ages, every
cause and effect; it familiarises them with man and woman of us being one of the
a kind of reasoning which interests them, two players in a game of his or her own.
and which they can promptly compre The chessboard is the world, the pieces
hend • and it is perhaps the best correc are the phenomena of the Universe, the
tive for that indolence which is the vice rules of the game are what we call the
of half-awakened minds, and which shrinks laws of Nature. The player on the other
from any exertion that is not, like an side is hidden from us. We know that
effort of memory, merely mechanical.”
his play is always fair, just, and patient.
Again, when we contemplate the gran But also we know to our cost that he
deur of science, if we transport ourselves never overlooks a mistake or makes the
in imagination back into primeval times, smallest allowance for ignorance. To the
or away into the immensity of space, man who plays well the highest stakes
our little troubles and sorrows seem to are paid, with that sort of overflowing
shrink into insignificance. “ Ah, beautiful generosity which with the strong shows
creations ! ” says Helps, speaking of the delight in strength. And one who plays
stars, “it is not in guiding us over the ill is checkmated—without haste, but
seas of our little planet, but out of the without remorse.”
dark waters of our own perturbed minds,
I have elsewhere1 endeavoured to show
that we may make to ourselves the most the purifying and ennobling influence of
of your significance.” They teach, he tells science upon religion ; how it has assisted,
us elsewhere, “something significant to if indeed it may not claim the main share,
all of us; and each man has a whole in sweeping away the dark superstitions,
hemisphere of them, if he will but look the degrading belief in sorcery and witch
up, to counsel and befriend him.”
craft, and the cruel, however well-intenThere is a passage in an address given
1 The, Origin of Civilisation.
�40
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
tioned, intolerance which embittered the
Christian world almost from the very days
of the Apostles themselves. In this she
has surely performed no mean service to
religion itself. As Canon Fremantle has
well and justly said, men of science, and not
the clergy only, are ministers of religion.
Again, the national necessity for
scientific education is imperative. We
are apt to forget how much we owe to
science, because so many of its wonderful
gifts have become familiar parts of our
everyday life, that their very value makes
us forget their origin. At the recent
celebration of the sexcentenary of Peterhouse College, near the close of a long
dinner, Sir Frederick Bramwell was called
on, some time after midnight, to return
thanks for Applied Science. He excused
himself from making a long speech on the
ground that, though the subject was
almost inexhaustible, the only illustration
which struck him as appropriate under
the circumstances was “ the application
of the domestic lucifer to the bedroom
candle.” One cannot but feel how un
fortunate was the saying of the poet that
“The light-outspeeding telegraph
Bears nothing on its beam.”
The report of the Royal Commission
on Technical Instruction, which has
recently been issued, teems with illustra
tions of the advantages afforded by
technical instruction. At the same time,
technical training ought not to begin too
soon, for, as Bain truly observes, “ in a
right view of scientific education the first
principles and leading examples, with
select details, of all the great sciences,
are the proper basis of the complete and
exhaustive study of any single science.”
Indeed, in the words of Sir John Herschel,
“it can hardly be pressed forcibly enough
on the attention of the student of Nature,
that there is scarcely any natural pheno
menon which can be fully and completely
explained in all its circumstances, with
out a union of several, perhaps of all, the
sciences.” The most important secrets of
Nature are often hidden away in unex
pected places. Many valuable substances
PART I
have been discovered in the refuse of
manufactories ; and it was a happy
thought of Glauber to examine what
everybody else threw away. There is
perhaps no nation the future happiness
and prosperity of which depend more on
science than our own. Our population is
over 35,000,000, and is rapidly increas
ing. Even at present it is far larger
than our acreage can support.
Few
people whose business does not lie in the
study of statistics realise that we have
to pay foreign countries no less than
£150,000,000 a year for food. This, of
course, we purchase mainly by manu
factured articles. We hear even now a
great deal about depression of trade, and
foreign, especially American, competition ;
but let us look forward a hundred years
—no long time in the history of a nation.
Our coal supplies will then be greatly
diminished. The population of Great
Britain doubles at the present rate of
increase in about fifty years, so that we
should, if the present rate continues,
require to import over £400,000,000 a
year in food. How, then, is this to be
paid for ? We have before us, as usual,
three courses.
The natural rate of
increase may be stopped, which means
suffering and outrage ; or the population
may increase, only to vegetate in misery
and destitution; or, lastly, by the de
velopment of scientific training and
appliances, they may probably be main
tained in happiness and comfort. We
have, in fact, to make our choice between
science and suffering. It is only by
wisely utilising the gifts of science that
we have any hope of maintaining our
population in plenty and comfort.
Science, however, will do this for us if
we will only let her. She may be no
Fairy Godmother indeed, but she will
richly endow those who love her.
That discoveries, innumerable, marvel
lous, and fruitful, await the successful
explorers of Nature no one can doubt.
“We are so far,” says Locke, “from
being admitted into the secrets of Nature,
that we scarce so much as approach the
�CHAP. IX
SCIENCE
first entrance towards them.”
What
would one not give for a Science primer
of the next century ? for, to paraphrase a
well-known saying, even the boy at the
plough will then, know more of science
than the wisest of our philosophers do
now. Boyle entitled one of his essays
“ Of Man’s great Ignorance of the Uses
of Natural Things; or that there is no
one thing in Nature whereof the uses to
human life are yet thoroughly under
stood ”—a saying which is still as true
now as when it was written. And, lest I
should be supposed to be taking too
sanguine a view, let me give the authority
of Sir John Herschel, who says : “Since
it cannot but be that innumerable and
most important uses remain to be dis
covered among the materials and objects
already known to us, as well as among
those which the progress of science must
hereafter disclose, we may hence conceive
a well-grounded expectation, not only of
constant increase in the physical resources
of mankind, and the consequent improve
ment of their condition, but of continual
accession to our power of penetrating into
the arcana of Nature and becoming
acquainted with her highest laws.”
Nor is it merely in a material point of
view that science would thus benefit the
nation. She will raise and strengthen
the national, as surely as the individual,
character. The great gift which Minerva
offered to Paris is now freely tendered to
all, for we may apply to the nation, as
well as to the individual, Tennyson’s
noble lines :—
“ Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control:
These three alone lead life to sovereign power,
Yet not for power (power of herself
Would come uncalled for), but to live bylaw ;
Acting the law we live by without fear.”
“ In the vain and foolish exultation of
the heart,” said John Quincey Adams, at
the close of his final lecture on resigning
his chair at Boston, “ which the brighter
prospects of life will sometimes excite,
the pensive portress of Science shall call
you to the sober pleasures of her holy
cell. In the mortification of disappoint
4i
ment, her soothing voice shall whisper
serenity and peace. In social converse
with the mighty dead of ancient days,
you will never smart under the galling
sense of dependence upon the mighty
living of the present age. And in your
struggles with the world, should a crisis
ever occur, when even friendship may
deem it prudent to desert you, when
priest and Levite shall come and look on
you and pass by on the other side, seek
refuge, my unfailing friends, and be
assured you shall find it, in the friend
ship of Laelius and Scipio, in the
patriotism of Cicero, Demosthenes, and
Burke, as well as in the precepts and
example of Him whose law is love, and
who taught us to remember injuries only
to forgive them.”
Let me in conclusion quote the glow
ing description of our debt to science
given by Archdeacon Farrar in his address
at Liverpool College-—-testimony, more
over, all the more valuable, considering
the source from which it comes.
“In this great commercial city,” he
said, “ where you are surrounded by the
triumphs of science and of mechanism—
you, whose river is ploughed by the great
steamships whose white wake has been
called the fittest avenue to the palace
front of a mercantile people—you know
well that in the achievements of science
there is not only beauty and wonder, but
also beneficence and power. It is not
only that she has revealed to us infinite
space crowded with unnumbered worlds ;
infinite time peopled by unnumbered
existences ; infinite organisms hitherto in
visible but full of delicate and irridescent
loveliness ; but also that she has been, as
a great Archangel of Mercy, devoting
herself to the service of man. She has
laboured, her votaries have laboured, not
to increase the power of despots or add to
the magnificence of courts, but to extend
human happiness, to economise human
effort, to extinguish human pain. Where
of old, men toiled, half blinded and half
naked, in the mouth of the glowing
furnace to mix the white-hot iron, she
�THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
42
now substitutes the mechanical action of
the viewless air. She has enlisted the
sunbeam in her service to limn for us,
with absolute fidelity, the faces of the
friends we love. She has shown the
poor miner how he may work in safety,
even amid the explosive fire-damp of the
mine.
She has, by her anaesthetics,
enabled the sufferer to be hushed and
unconscious while the delicate hand of
some skilled operator cuts a fragment
from the nervous circle of the unquiver
ing eye. She points not to pyramids
built during weary centuries by the
sweat of miserable nations, but to the
lighthouse and the steamship, to the rail
road and the telegraph. She has restored
eyes to the blind and hearing to the deaf.
She has lengthened life, she has minimised
danger, she has controlled madness, she
has trampled on disease. And on all
these grounds, I think that none of our
sons should grow up wholly ignorant of
studies which at once train the reason
and fire the imagination, which fashion as
well as forge, which can feed as well as
fill the mind.”
CHAPTER X
EDUCATION
“No pleasure is comparable to the standing
upon the vantage ground of truth.”—Bacon.
‘ ‘ Divine Philosophy !
Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo’s lute,
And a perpetual feast of nectar’d sweets
Where no crude surfeit reigns.”—Milton.
It may seem rather surprising to include
education among the pleasures of life ;
for in too many cases it is made odious
to the young, and is supposed to cease
with school; while, on the contrary, if it
is to be really successful it must be suit
able, and therefore interesting, to children,
and must last through life. The very
process of acquiring knowledge is a
privilege and a blessing. It used to be
PART I
said that there was no royal road to learn
ing : it would be more true to say that
the avenues leading to it are all royal.
“It is not,” says Jeremy Taylor, “the
eye that sees the beauties of heaven, nor
the ear that hears the sweetness of music,
or the glad tidings of a prosperous
accident; but the soul that perceives all
the relishes of sensual and intellectual
perceptions: and the more noble and
excellent the soul is, the greater and
more savoury are its perceptions. And
if a child behold the rich ermine, or the
diamonds of a starry night, or the order
of the world, or hears the discourses of
an apostle ; because he makes no reflex
act on himself and sees not what he sees,
he can have but the pleasure of a fool or
the deliciousness of a mule.”
Herein lies the importance of educa
tion. I say education rather than in-,
struction, because it is far more important
to cultivate the mind than to store the
memory. Instruction is only a part of
education : the true teacher has been well
described by Montgomery :
‘ ’ And while in tones of sportive tenderness,
He answer’d all its questions, and ask’d others
As simple as its own, yet wisely framed
To wake and prove an infant’s faculties ;
As though its mind were some sweet instru
ment,
And he, with breath and touch, were finding
out
What stops or keys would yield the richest
music.”
Studies are a means and not an end.
“To spend too much time in studies is
sloth ; to use them too much for orna
ment is affectation ; to make judgment
wholly by their rules is the humour of a
scholar : they perfect nature, and are per
fected by experience. . . . Crafty men
contemn studies, simple men admire
them, and wise men use them.” 1
Moreover, though, as Mill says, “in
the comparatively early state of human
development in which we now live, a
person cannot indeed feel that entireness
of sympathy with all others which would
make any real discordance in the general
1 Bacon.
�EDUCATION
CHAP. X
direction of tlieir conduct in life impos
sible,” yet education might surely do more
to root in us the feeling of unity with our
fellow-creatures. At any rate, if we do
not study in this spirit, all our learning
will but leave us as weak and sad as
Faust.
Our studies should be neither “a
couch on which to rest; nor a cloister in
which to promenade alone ; nor a tower
from which to look down on others; nor
a fortress whence we may resist them ;
nor a workshop for gain and merchandise ;
but a rich armoury and treasury for the
glory of the creator and the ennoblement
of life.” 1
For in the noble words of Epictetus,
“ you will do the greatest service to the
state if you shall raise, not the roofs of
the houses, but the souls of the citizens :
for it is better that great souls should
dwell in small houses rather than for
mean slaves to lurk in great houses.”
It is then of great importance to con
sider whether our present system of
education is the one best calculated to
fulfil these great objects. Does it really
give that love of learning which is better
than learning itself ? Does all the study
of the classics to which our sons devote
so many years give any just appreciation
of them; or do they not on leaving
college too often feel with Byron—
“ Then farewell, Horace ; whom I hated so ! ”
Too much concentration on any one
subject is a great mistake, especially in
early life. Nature herself indicates the
true system, if we would but listen to
her. Our instincts are good guides,
though not infallible, and children will
profit little by lessons which do not
interest them. In cheerfulness, says
Pliny, is the success of our studies—
“ studia hilaritate proveniunt ”—and we
may with advantage take a lesson from
Theognis, who, in his Ode on the
Marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia,
makes the Muses sing —
1 Bacon.
43
‘ ‘ What is good and fair,
Shall ever be our care ;
Thus the burden of it rang,
That shall never be our care,
Which is neither good nor fair.
Such were the words your lips immortal sang.”
There are some who seem to think
that our educational system is as good as
possible, and that the only remaining
points of importance are the number of
schools and scholars, the question of fees,
the relation of voluntary and board
schools, etc. “No doubt,” says Mr.
Symonds, in his Sketches in Italy and
Greece, “ there are many who think that
when we not only advocate education but
discuss the best system we are simply
beating the air ; that our population is
as happy and cultivated as can be, and
that no substantial advance is really
possible. Mr. Galton, however, has ex
pressed the opinion, and most of those
who have written on the social condition
of Athens seem to agree with him, that
the population of Athens, taken as a
whole, was as superior to us as we are to
Australian savages.”
That there is, indeed, some truth in
this, probably no student of Greek history
will deny. Why, then, should this be so ?
I cannot but think that our system of
education is partly responsible.
Manual and science teaching need not
in any way interfere with instruction in
other subjects. Though so much has
been said about the importance of science
and the value of technical instruction, or
of hand-training, as I should prefer to
call it, it is unfortunately true that in
our system of education, from the highest
schools downwards, both of them are
sadly neglected, and the study of language
reigns supreme.
This is no new complaint. Ascham,
in The Schoolmaster, long ago lamented
it; Milton, in his letter to Mr. Samuel
Hartlib, complained “ that our children
are forced to stick unreasonably in these
grammatick flats and shallows ; ” and
observes that, “though a linguist should
pride himself to have all the tongues
�44
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
Babel cleft tlie world into, yet, if he have
not studied the solid things in them as
well as the words and lexicons, he were
nothing so much to be esteemed a learned
man as any yeoman or tradesman com
petently wise in his mother dialect only ; ”
and Locke said that “ schools fit us for
the university rather than for the world.”
Commission after commission, committee
after committee, have reiterated the same
complaint. How then do we stand now ?
I see it indeed constantly stated that,
even if the improvement is not so rapid
as could be desired, still we are making
considerable progress. But is this so ?
I fear not.
I fear that our present
system does not really train the mind, or
cultivate the power of observation, or
even give the amount of information
which we may reasonably expect from the
time devoted to it.
Sir M. E. Grant-Duff has expressed
the opinion that a boy or girl of fourteen
might reasonably be expected to “read
aloud clearly and agreeably, to write a
large distinct round hand, and to know
the ordinary rules of arithmetic, especially
compound addition — a by no cneans
universal accomplishment; to speak and
write French with ease and correctness,
and have some slight acquaintance with
French literature ; to translate ad aperturam libri from an ordinary French
or German book ; to have a thoroughly
good elementary knowledge of geography,
under which are comprehended some
notions of astronomy—enough to excite
his curiosity ; a knowledge of the very
broadest facts of geology and history—
enough to make him understand, in a
clear but perfectly general way, how the
larger features of the world he lives in,
physical and political, came to be like
what they are ; to have been trained from
earliest infancy to use his powers of
observation on plants, or animals, or rocks,
or other natural objects; and to have
gathered a general acquaintance with what
is most supremely good in that portion
of the more important English classics
which is suitable to his time of life; to
PART I
have some rudimentary acquaintance with
drawing and music.”
To effect this, no doubt, “industiy
must be our oracle, and reason our
Apollo,” as Sir T. Browne says ; but surely
it is no unreasonable estimate; yet how
far do we fall short of it ? General
culture is often deprecated because it is
said that smatterings are useless. But
there is all the difference in the world
between having a smattering of, or being
well grounded in, a subject. It is the
latter which we advocate-—to try to know,
as Lord Brougham well said, “ every
thing of something, and something of
everything.”
“It can hardly,” says Sir John Her
schel, “ be pressed forcibly enough on
the attention of the student of nature,
that there is scarcely any natural phe
nomenon which can be fully and com
pletely explained, in all its circumstances,
without a union of several, perhaps of all,
the sciences.”
The present system in most of our
public schools and colleges sacrifices
everything else to classics and arithmetic.
They are most important subjects, but
ought not to exclude science and modern
languages. Moreover, after all, our sons
leave college unable to speak either Latin
or Greek, and too often absolutely with
out any interest in classical history or
literature. But the boy who has been
educated without any training in science
has grave reason to complain of “ wisdom
at one entrance quite shut out.”
By concentrating the attention, indeed,
so much on one or two subjects, we defeat
our own object, and produce a feeling of
distaste where we wish to create an
interest.
Our great mistake in education is, as
it seems to me, the worship of book
learning—the confusion of instruction and
education. We strain the memory instead
of cultivating the mind. The children
in our elementary schools are wearied
by the mehanical act of wilting, and
the interminable intricacies of spelling;
they are oppressed by columns of dates
�CHAP. X
EDUCATION
45
by lists of kings and places, which convey man he was. I doubt, however, whether
no definite idea to their minds, and have the boys were deceived by the hat ; and
no near relation to their daily wants am very sceptical about Dr. Busby’s
and occupations; while in our public theory of education.
schools the same unfortunate results are
Master John of Basingstoke, who was
produced by the weary monotony of Latin Archdeacon of Leicester in 1252, learnt
and Greek grammar. We ought to follow Greek during a visit to Athens, from
exactly the opposite course with children Constantina, daughter of the Archbishop
—to give them a wholesome variety of of Athens, and used to say afterwards
mental food, and endeavour to cultivate that though he had studied well and
their tastes, rather than to fill their minds diligently at the University of Paris, yet
with dry facts. The important thing is he learnt more from an Athenian maiden
not so much that every child should be of twenty. We cannot all study so
taught, as that every child should be pleasantly as this, but the main fault
given the wish to learn. What does it I find with Dr. Busby’s system is that
matter if the pupil knows a little more or it keeps out of sight the great fact of
a little less ? A boy who leaves school human ignorance.
knowing much, but hating his lessons,
Boys are given the impression that
will soon have forgotten almost all he the masters know everything. If, on the
ever learnt; while another who had contrary, the great lesson impressed on
acquired a thirst for knowledge, even if them was that what we know is as nothing
he had learnt little, would soon teach to what we do not know, that the “great
himself more than the first ever knew. ocean of truth lies all undiscovered before
Children are by nature eager for informa us,” surely this would prove a great
tion. They are always putting questions. stimulus, and many would be nobly
This ought to be encouraged. In fact, anxious to enlarge the boundaries of
we may to a great extent trust to their human knowledge, and extend the in
instincts, and in that case they will do I tellectual kingdom of man. Philosophy,
much to educate themselves. Too often, says Aristotle, begins in wonder, for Iris
however, the acquirement of knowledge is the child of Thaumas.
is placed before them in a form so irk
Education ought not to cease w’hen we
some and fatiguing that all desire for leave school; but if well begun there,
information is choked, or even crushed will continue through life.
out; so that our schools, in fact, become
Moreover, whatever our occupation
places for the discouragement of learning, or profession in life may be, it is most
and thus produce the very opposite effect desirable to create for ourselves some
from that at which we aim. In short, other special interest. In the choice of
children should be trained to observe and a subject every one should consult his
to think, for in that way there would own instincts and interests. I will not
be opened out to them a source of the attempt to suggest whether it is better to
purest enjoyment for leisure hours, and pursue art or science ; whether we should
the wisest judgment in the work of study the motes in the sunbeam, or the
life.
heavenly bodies themselves. Whatever
Another point in which I venture to may be the subject of our choice, we shall
think that our system of education might find enough, and more than enough, to
be amended, is that it tends at present repay the devotion of a lifetime.
to give the impression that everything is
Life no doubt is paved with enjoyments,
known.
but we must all expect times of anxiety,
Dr. Busby is said to have kept his of suffering, and of sorrow ; and when
hat on in the presence of King Charles, these come it is an inestimable comfort to
that the boys might see what a great have some deep interest which will, at
�46
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
any rate to some extent, enable us to escape
from ourselves.
“ A cultivated mind,” says Mill—“ I do
not mean that of a philosopher, but any
mind to which the fountains of knowledge
have been opened, and which has been
taught in any tolerable degree to exercise
its faculties—will find sources of inex
haustible interest in all that surrounds
it; in the objects of nature, the achieve
ments of art, the imaginations of poetry,
the incidents of history, the ways of man
kind, past and present, and their prospects
in the future. It is possible, indeed, to
become indifferent to all this, and that too
without having exhausted a thousandth
part of it ; but only when one has had
from the beginning no moral or human
interest in these things, and has sought in
them only the gratification of curiosity.”
I have been subjected to some goodnatured banter for having said that I
looked forward to a time when our artizans
and mechanics would be great readers. But
it is surely not unreasonable to regard our
social condition as susceptible of great im
provement. The spread of schools, the
cheapness of books, the establishment of
free libraries will, it may be hoped, exercise
a civilising and ennobling influence. They
will even, I believe, do much to diminish
poverty and suffering, so much of which
is due to ignorance and to the want of
interest and brightness in uneducated life.
So far as our elementary schools are con
cerned, there is no doubt much difficulty in
apportioning the National Grant without
unduly stimulating mere mechanical in
struction. But this is not the place to dis
PART I
cuss the subject of religious or moral train
ing, or the system of apportioning the grant.
If we succeed in giving the love of learn
ing, the learning itself is sure to follow.
We should therefore endeavour to edu
cate our children so that every country
walk may be a pleasure ; that the dis
coveries of science may be a living interest;
that our national history and poetry may
be sources of legitimate pride and rational
enjoyment. In short, our schools, if they
are to be worthy of the name—if they are
to fulfil their high function—must be
something more than mere places of dry
study ; they must train the children edu
cated in them so that they may be able
to appreciate and enjoy those intellectual
gifts which might be, and ought to be, a
source of interest and of happiness, alike
to the high and to the low, to the rich
and to the poor.
A wise system of education will at
least teach us how little man yet knows,
how much he has still to learn ; it will
enable us to realise that those ■who com
plain of the tiresome monotony of life
have only themselves to' blame ; and that
knowledge is pleasure as well as power.
It will lead us all to try with Milton “ to
behold the bright countenance of truth
in the quiet and still air of study,” and to
feel with Bacon that “no pleasure is com
parable to the standing upon the vantage
ground of truth.”
We should then indeed realise in part,
for as yet we cannot do so fully, the
“ sacred trusts of health, strength, and
time,” and how thankful we ought to be
for the inestimable gift of life.
�PAET II
��PREFACE
“ And what is writ, is writ—
Would it were worthier.”
Byron.
Herewith I launch the conclusion of my subject. Perhaps I am unwise in
publishing a second part. The first was so kindly received that I am running
a risk in attempting to add to it.
In the preface, however, to the first part I have expressed the hope that
the thoughts and quotations in which I have found most comfort and delight,
might be of use to others also.
In this my most sanguine hopes have been more than realised. Not only
has the book passed through twenty editions in less than three years, but the
many letters which I have received have been most gratifying.
Two criticisms have been repeated by several of those who have done me
the honor, of noticing my previous volume. It has been said in the first
place that my life has been exceptionally bright and full, and that I cannot
therefore judge for others. Nor do I attempt to do so. I do not forget, I
hope I am not ungrateful for, all that has been bestowed on me. But if I
have been greatly favoured, ought I not to be on that very account especially
qualified to write on such a theme 1 Moreover, I have had,—who has not,—
my own sorrows.
Again, some have complained that there is too much quotation—too little
of my own. This I take to be in reality a great compliment. I have not
striven to be original.
If, as I have been assured by many, my book has added to their power
of enjoying life, and has proved a comfort in the hours of darkness, that
is indeed an ample reward and is the utmost I have ever hoped.
High Elms, Down, Kent,
April 1889.
E
�CONTENTS
PART II
CHAP.
I. Ambition ....
51
II. Wealth ....
54
III. Health
....
IV. Love
....
V. Art
....
65
....
70
....
74
VI. Poetry
•VII. Music
VIII. The Beauties of Nature
IX. The Troubles of Life
.
X. Labour and Rest
XI. Religion .
XII. The Hope of Progress .
XIII. The Destiny of Man
56
61
79
86
89
92
98
102
�THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
PART II
CHAPTER I
I know, says Morris,
“ How far high failure overleaps the bound
Of low successes.”
AMBITION
“ Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth
raise
(That last infirmity of noble mind)
To scorn delights and live laborious days.”
Milton.
If fame be the last infirmity of noble
minds, ambition is often the first ; though,
when properly directed, it may be no
feeble aid to virtue.
Had not my youthful mind, says
Cicero, “ from many precepts, from many
writings, drunk in this truth, that glory
and virtue ought to be the darling, nay,
the only wish in life; that, to attain
these, the torments of the flesh, with the
perils of death and exile, are to be
despised ; never had I exposed my person
in so many encounters, and to these daily
conflicts with the worst of men, for your
deliverance. But, on this head, books
are full; the voice of the wise is full;
the examples of antiquity are full: and
all these the night of barbarism had still
enveloped, had it not been enlightened
by the sun of science.”
The poet tells us that
“The many fail: the one succeeds.”1
And Bacon assures us that “ if a man
look sharp and attentively he shall see
fortune; for though she is blind, she is
not invisible.”
To give ourselves a reasonable prospect
of success, we must realise what we
hope to achieve ; and then make the
most of our opportunities.
Of these the use of time is one of the
most important. What have we to do
with time, asks Oliver Wendell Holmes,
but to fill it up with labour. “At the
battle of Montebello,” said Napoleon, “I
ordered Kellermann to attack with 800
horse, and with these he separated the
6000 Hungarian grenadiers before the
very eyes of the Austrian cavalry. This
cavalry was half a league off, and required
a quarter of an hour to arrive on the
field of action ; and I have observed that
it is always these quarters of an hour
that decide the fate of a battle,” including,
we may add, the battle of life.
Nor must we spare ourselves in other
ways, for
“ He who thinks in strife
To earn a deathless fame, must do, nor ever
care for life.” 1
But this is scarcely true. All succeed
who deserve, though not perhaps as they
hoped. An honourable defeat is better
than a mean victory, and no one is really
the worse for being beaten, unless he
loses heart. Though we may not be able
to attain, that is no reason why we should
not aspire.
In the excitement of the struggle,
moreover, he will suffer comparatively
little from wounds and blows which
would otherwise cause intense pain.
It is well to weigh scrupulously the
object in view, to run as little risk as
may be, to count the cost with care.
1 Tennyson.
1 Beowulf.
�52
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
But when the mind is once made up,
there must be no looking back, you must
spare yourself no labour, nor shrink from
danger.
“ He either fears his fate too much
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.” 1
Glory, says Renan, “is after all the
thing which has the best chance of not
being altogether vanity.” But what is
glory ?
Marcus Aurelius observes that “ a
spider is proud when it has caught a fly,
a man when he has caught a hare,
another when he has taken a little fish
in a net, another when he has taken
wild boars, another when he has taken
bears, and another when he has taken
Sarmatians ; ”2 but this, if from one
point of view it shows the vanity of
lame, also encourages us with the evidence
that every one may succeed if his objects
are but reasonable.
Alexander may be taken as almost a
type of Ambition in its usual form,
though carried to an extreme.
His desire was to conquer, not to in
herit or to rule. When news was brought
that his father Philip had taken some
town, or won some battle, instead of
being delighted, he used to say to his
companions, “ My father will go on con
quering, till there be nothing extra
ordinary left for you and me to do.”3
He is said even to have been mortified at
the number of the stars, considering that
he had not been able to conquer one
world. Such ambition is justly fore
doomed to disappointment.
The remarks of Philosophers on the
vanity of ambition refer generally to that
unworthy form of which Alexander may
be taken as the type—the idea of self
exaltation, not only without any reference
to the happiness, but even regardless of
the sufferings, of others.
“A continual and restless search after
1 Montrose.
2 He is referring here to one of his expeditions.
3 Plutarch.
PART II
fortune,” says Bacon, “ takes up too much
of their time who have nobler things to
observe.” Indeed he elsewhere extends
this, and adds that “No man’s private
fortune can be an end in any way worthy
of his existence.”
Goethe well observes that man “ exists
for culture; not for what he can accom
plish, but for what can be accomplished
in him.” 1
As regards fame, we must not confuse
name and essence. To be remembered is
not necessarily to be famous. There is
infamy as well as fame; and unhappily
almost as many are remembered for the
one as for the other, and not a few for a
mixture of both.
Who would not, however, rather be
forgotten, than recollected as Ahab or
Jezebel, Nero or Commodus, Messalina
or Heliogabalus, King John or Richard
III.?
“To be nameless in worthy deeds ex
ceeds an infamous history. The Canaanitish woman lives more happily without
a name than Herodias with one ; and
■who would not rather have been the good
thief than Pilate ? ” 2
Kings and Generals are often remem
bered as much- for their misfortunes as
for their successes, for their deaths as for
their lives. The Hero of Thermopylae
was Leonidas, not Xerxes. Alexander’s
Empire fell to pieces at his death.
Napoleon was a great genius, though no
Hero. But what came of all his victories ?
They passed away like the smoke of his
guns and he left France weaker, poorer,
and smaller than he found her. The
most lasting result of his genius is no
military glory, but the Code Napoleon.
A surer and more glorious title to
fame is that of those who are remembered
for some act of justice or self-devotion:
the self-sacrifice of Leonidas, the good
faith of Regulus, are the glories of history.
In some cases where men have been
called after places, the men are remem
bered, while the places are forgotten.
When we speak of Palestrina or Perugino,
1 Emerson.
2 Sir T. Browne.
�CHAP. I
AMBITION
of Nelson or Wellington, of Newton or
Darwin, who remembers the towns ?
We think only of the men.
Goethe has been called the soul of his
century.
We have but meagre biographies of
Shakespeare or of Plato • yet how’ much
we know about them.
Statesmen and Generals enjoy great
celebrity during their lives. The news
papers chronicle every word and move
ment. But the fame of the Philosopher
and Poet is more enduring.
Wordsworth deprecates monuments to
Poets, with some exceptions, on this very
account. The case of Statesmen, he says,
is different. It is right to commemorate
them because they might otherwise be
forgotten ; but Poets live in their books
for ever.
The real conquerors of the world in
deed are not the generals but the
thinkers ; not Genghis Khan and Akbar,
Barneses, or Alexander, but Confucius
and Buddha, Aristotle, Plato, and Christ.
The rulers and kings wrho reigned over
our ancestors have for the most part long
since sunk into oblivion—they are for
gotten for want of some sacred bard to
give them life—or are remembered, like
Suddhodana and Pilate, from their associ
ation with higher spirits.
Such men’s lives cannot be compressed
into any biography.
They lived not
merely in their own generation, but for
all time. When we speak of the Eliza
bethan period we think of Shakespeare
and Bacon, Raleigh and Spenser. The
ministers and secretaries of state, with
one or two exceptions, we scarcely re
member, and Bacon himself is recollected
less as the Judge than as the Philosopher.
Moreover, to what do Generals and
Statesmen owe their fame? They were
celebrated for their deeds, but to the
Poet and the Historian they are indebted
for their immortality, and to the Poet and
Historian we owe their glorious memories
and the example of their virtues.
‘ ‘ Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona
Multi; sed omnes illacrimabiles
53
Urgentur ignotique Tonga
Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.”
Montrose happily combined the tw*o,
when in “ My dear and only love ” he
promises,
“ I’ll make thee famous by my pen,
And glorious by my sword.”
It is remarkable, and encouraging, how
many of the greatest men have risen
from the lowest rank, and triumphed
over obstacles which might well have
seemed insurmountable; nay, even ob
scurity itself may be a source of honour.
The very doubts as to Homer’s birthplace
have contributed to his glory, seven cities
as we all know laying claim to the great
poet—
“Smyrna, Rhodos, Colophon, Salamis, Chios,
Argos, Athenaj.”
Take men of Science only. Ray was
the son of a blacksmith, Watt of a ship
wright, Franklin of a tallow-chandler,
Dalton of a handloom weaver, Fraunhofer
of a glazier, Laplace of a farmer, Linnseus
of a poor curate, Faraday of a blacksmith,
Lamarck of a banker’s clerk ; George
Stephenson wras a working collier, Davy
an apothecary’s assistant, Wheatstone a
musicalinstrumentmaker; Galileo, Kepler,
Sprengel, Cuvier, and Sir W. Herschel
were all children of very poor parents.
It is, on the other hand, sad to think
how many of our greatest benefactors are
unknown even by name. Who discovered
the art of procuring fire ? Prometheus is
merely the personification of forethought.
Who invented letters ? Cadmus is a
mere name.
These inventions, indeed, are lost in
the mists of antiquity, but even as re
gards recent progress the steps are often
so gradual, and so numerous, that few in
ventions can be attributed entirely, or
even mainly, to any one person.
Columbus is said, and truly said, to
have discovered America, though the
Northmen were there before him.
We Englishmen have every reason to
be proud of our fellow-countrymen. To
�54
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
PART II
take Philosophers and men of Science what as the years roll on, does add to the
only, Bacon and Hobbes, Locke and comfort of life. But this is of course on
Berkeley, Hume and Hamilton, will the supposition that you are master of
always be associated with the progress of your money, that the money is not master
human thought; Newton with gravita of you.
tion, Adam Smith with Political Economy,
Unquestionably the possession of wealth
Young with the undulatory theory of is attended by many drawbacks. Money
light, Herschel with the discovery of and the love of money often go together.
Uranus and the study of the star depths, The poor man, as Emerson says, is the
Lord Worcester, Trevethick, and Watt man who wishes to be rich ; and the more
with the steam-engine, Wheatstone with a man has, the more he often longs to
the electric telegraph, Jenner with the be richer. Just as drinking often does
banishment of smallpox, Simpson with but increase thirst; so in many cases the
the practical application of anaesthetics, craving for riches grows with wealth
and Darwin with the creation of modern
This is, of course, especially the case
Natural History.
when money is sought for its own sake.
These men, and such as these, have Moreover, it is often easier to make money
made our history and moulded our than to keep or to enjoy it. Keeping it
opinions ; and though during life they is dull and anxious drudgery. The dread
may have occupied, comparatively, an of loss may hang like a dark cloud over
insignificant space in the eyes of their life. Seneca tells us that when Apicius
countrymen, they became at length an had squandered most of his patrimony,
irresistible power, and have now justly but had still 250,000 crowns left, he
grown to a glorious memory.
committed suicide, for fear he should die
of hunger.
Wealth is certainly no sinecure. More
over, the value of money depends partly
CHAPTER II
on knowing what to do with it, partly
WEALTH
on the manner in which it is acquired.
“ Acquire money, thy friends say, that
“ The rich and poor meet together : the Lord
is the maker of them all.” — Proverbs of we also may have some. If I can acquire
money and also keep myself modest, and
Solomon.
faithful, and magnanimous, point out the
Ambition often takes the form of a love way, and I will acquire it. But if you
of money. There are many who have ask me to lose the things which are good
never attempted Art or Music, Poetry or and my own, in order that you may gain
Science ; but most people do something things that are not good, see how unfair
for a livelihood, and consequently an and unwise you are. For which would
increase of income is not only acceptable you rather have? Money, or a faithful
in itself, but gives a pleasant feeling of and modest friend. . . .
success.
■“What hinders a man, who has clearly
Doubt is indeed often expressed whether comprehended these things, from living
wealth is any advantage. I do not my with a light heart, and bearing easily the
self believe that those who are born, as reins, quietly expecting everything which
the saying is, with a silver spoon in their can happen, and enduring that which has
mouth, are necessarily any the happier for already happened ? Would you have me
it. No doubt wealth entails almost more to bear poverty ? Come, and you will
labour than poverty, and certainly more know what poverty is when it has found
anxiety. Still it must, I think, be con one who can act well the part of a poor
fessed that the possession of an income, man.” 1
whatever it may be, which increases some
1 Epictetus.
�CHAP. II
WEALTH
We must bear in mind Solon’s answer
to Croesus, “ Sir, if any other come that
hath better iron than you, he will be
master of all this gold.”
Midas is another case in point. He
prayed that everything he touched might
be turned into gold, and this prayer was
granted. His wine turned to gold, his
bread turned to gold, his clothes, his very
bed.
“Attonitus novitate mali, divesque miserque,
Effugere optat opes, et quse modo voverat, odit.”
He is by no means the only man who
has suffered from too much gold.
The real truth I take to be that wealth
is not necessarily an advantage, but that
whether it is so or not depends on the
use we make of it. The same, however,
might be said of most other opportunities
and privileges ; Knowledge and Strength,
Beauty and Skill, may all be abused ; if
we neglect or misuse them we are worse
off than if we had never had them.
Wealth is only a disadvantage in the hands
of those who do not know how to use it.
It gives the command of so many other
things—leisure, the power of helping
others, books, works of art, opportunities
and means of travel.
It would, however, be easy to exagger
ate the advantages of money. It is well
worth having, and worth working for,
but it does not requite too great a sacri
fice ; not indeed so great as is often offered
up to it. A wise proverb tells us that
gold may be bought too dear. If wealth
is to be valued because it gives leisure,
clearly it would be a mistake to sacrifice
leisure in the struggle for wealth. Money
has no doubt also a tendency to make men
poor in spirit. But, on the other hand,
what gift is there which is without
danger ?
Euripides said that money finds friends
for men, and has great (he said the
greatest) power among Mankind, cynically
adding, “ Mighty indeed is a rich man,
especially if his heir be unknown.”
Bossuet tells us that “he had no
attachment to riches, still if he had only
55
what was barely necessary, he felt him
self narrowed, and would lose more than
half his talents.”
Shelley was certainly not an avaricious
man, and yet “ I desire money,” he said,
“ because I think I know the use of it.
It commands labour, it gives leisure ; and
to give leisure to those who will employ
it in the forwarding of truth is the noblest
present an individual can make to the
whole.”
Many will have felt with Pepys when
he quaintly and piously says, “ Abroad
with my wife, the first time that ever I
rode in my own coach ; which do make
my heart rejoice and praise God, and pray
him to bless it to me, and continue it.”
This, indeed, was a somewhat selfish
satisfaction. Yet the merchant need not
quit nor be ashamed of his profession,
bearing in mind only the inscription on
the Church of St. Giacomo de Bialto at
Venice: “ Around this temple let the
merchant’s law be just, his weights true,
and his covenants faithful.” 1
If, however, life has been sacrificed to
the rolling up of money for its own sake,
the very means by which it was acquired
will prevent its being enjoyed ; the chill
of poverty will have entered into the very
bones. The miser deprives himself of
everything, for fear lest some day he
should be deprived of something. The
term Miser was happily chosen for such
persons ; they are essentially miserable.
“ A collector peeps into all the picture
shops of Europe for a landscape of Poussin,
a crayon sketch of Salvator; but the
Transfiguration, the Last Judgment, the
Communion of St. Jerome, and what are
as transcendent as these, are on the walls
of the Vatican, the Uffizi, or the Louvre,
where every footman may see them ; to
say nothing of Nature’s pictures in every
street, of sunsets and sunrises every day,
and the sculpture of the human body
never absent. A collector recently bought
at public auction in London, for one
hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an auto
graph of Shakespeare : but for nothing a
1 Ruskin.
�56
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
schoolboy can read Hamlet, and can detect
secrets of highest concernment yet un
published therein.”1 And yet “What
hath the owner but the sight of it with
his eyes.” 2
We are really richer than we think.
We often hear of Earth hunger. People
envy a great Landlord, and fancy how
delightful it must be to possess a large
estate. But, too often, as Emerson says,
“if you own land, the land owns you.”
Moreover, have we not all, in a better
sense—have we not all thousands of acres
of our own ? The commons, and roads,
and footpaths, and the seashore, our grand
and varied coast—these are all ours.
The sea-coast has, moreover, two great
advantages. In the first place, it is for
the most part but little interfered with
by man, and in the second it exhibits most
instructively the forces of Nature.
We are, indeed, all great landed pro
prietors, if we only knew it. What we
lack is not land, but the power to enjoy it.
This great inheritance has the additional
advantage that it entails no labour, requires
no management. The landlord has the
trouble, but the landscape belongs to
every one who has eyes to see it. Thus
Kingsley called the heaths round Eversley
his “ winter garden ” ; not because they
were his in the eye of the law, but in that
higher sense in which ten thousand persons
may own the same thing.
CHAPTER III
HEALTH
“ Health is best for mortal man ; next beauty ;
thirdly, well gotten wealth ; fourthly, the
pleasure of youth among friends.”
Simonides.
But if there has been some difference of
opinion as to the advantage of wealth,
with reference to health all are agreed.
“Health,” said Simonides long ago, “is
best for mortal man ; next beauty ; thirdly,
well gotten wealth ; fourthly, the pleasure
1 Emerson.
2 Solomon.
PART II
of youth among friends.” “Life, ’ says
Longfellow, “ without health is a burden,
with health is a joy and gladness.” Em
pedocles delivered the people of Selinus
from a pestilence by draining a marsh, and
was hailed as a Demigod. We are told
that a coin was struck in his honour, re
presenting the Philosopher in the act of
staying the hand of Phoebus.
We scarcely realise, I think, how much
we owe to Doctors. Our system of Medi
cine seems so natural and obvious that it
hardly occurs to us as something new and
exceptional. When we are ill we send for
a Physician ; he prescribes some medicine ;
we take it, and pay his fee. But among
the lower races of men pain and illness
are often attributed to the presence of evil
spirits. The Medicine Man is a Priest, or
rather a Sorcerer, more than a true Doctor,
and his effort is to exorcise the evil Spirit.
In other countries where some advance
has been made, a charm is written on a
board, washed off, and drunk. In some
cases the medicine is taken, not by the
patient, but by the Doctor. Such a sys
tem, however, is generally transient; it is
naturally discouraged by the Profession,
and is indeed incompatible with a large
practice. Even as regards the payment
we find very different- systems. The
Chinese pay their medical man as long as
they are well, and stop his salary as soon
as they are ill. In ancient Egypt we are
told that the patient feed the Doctor for the
first few days, after which the Doctor paid
the patient until he made him well. This
is a fascinating system, but might afford
too much temptation to heroic remedies.
On the whole our plan seems the best,
though it does not offer adequate encour
agement to discovery and research. There
is probably some cure for cancer if we did
but know it. If, however, the substantial
rewards of discovery are inadequate, we
ought to be all the more grateful to such
men as Hunter and Jenner, Simpson and
Lister. And yet in the matter of health
we can generally do more for ourselves
than the greatest Doctors can for us.
But if all are agreed as to the blessing
�CHAP. Ill
HEALTH
of health, there are many who will not
take the little trouble, or submit to the
slight sacrifices, necessary to maintain it.
Many, indeed, deliberately ruin their own
health, and incur the certainty of an early
grave, or an old age of suffering.
No doubt some inherit a constitution
which renders health almost unattainable.
Pope spoke of that long disease, his life.
Many indeed may say, 111 suffer, therefore
I am.” But happily these cases are excep
tional. Most of us might be well, if we
would. It is very much our own fault
that we are ill. We do those things
which we ought not to do, and we leave
undone those things which we ought to
have done, and then we wonder that there
is no health in us.
Like Naaman, we expect our health to
be the subject of some miraculous interfer
ence, and neglect the homely precautions
by which it might be secured.
We all know that we can make ourselves
ill, but few perhaps realise how much we
can do to keep ourselves well. Much of
our suffering is self-inflicted. It has been
observed that among the ancient Egyptians
it seemed the chief aim of life to be well
buried. Many, however, live even now
as if this were the principal object of their
existence.
I am inclined to doubt whether the
study of health is sufficiently impressed
on the minds of those entering life. Not
that it is desirable to potter over minor
ailments, to con over books on illnesses,
or experiment on ourselves with medicine.
Far from it. The less we fancy ourselves
ill, or bother about little bodily discom
forts, the more likely perhaps we are to
preserve our health.
It is, however, a different matter to
study the general conditions of health. A
well-known proverb tells us that, by the
time he is forty, every one is either a fool
or a physician. Unfortunately, however,
many persons are invalids at forty as well
as physicians.
Ill-health, however, is no excuse for
moroseness. If we have one disease we
may at least congratulate ourselves that
57
we are escaping all the rest. Sydney
Smith, ever ready to look on the bright
side of things even when borne down by
suffering, wrote to a friend that he had
gout, asthma, and seven other maladies,
but was “otherwise very well”; and many
of the greatest invalids have borne their
sufferings with cheerfulness and good
spirits.
It is said that the celebrated physiog
nomist, Campanella, could so abstract his
attention from any sufferings of his body,
that he was even able to endure the rack
without much pain ; and whoever has the
power of concentrating his attention and
controlling his will, can emancipate him
self from most of the minor miseries of
life. He may have much cause for anxiety,
his body may be the seat of severe suffer
ing, and yet his mind will remain serene
and unaffected ; he may triumph over care
and pain.
It is sad to think how much unnecessary
suffering has been caused, and how many
valuable lives have been lost, through
ignorance or carelessness.
We cannot
but fancy that the lives of many great
men might have been much prolonged by
the exercise of a little ordinary care.
If we take musicians only, what a
grievous loss to the world it is that Pergolesi should have died at twenty-six,
Schubert at thirty-one, Mozart at thirtyfive, Purcell at thirty-seven, and Mendels
sohn at thirty-eight.
In the old Greek myth the life of
Meleager was indissolubly connected by
fate with the existence of a particular
log of wood. As long as this was kept
safe by Althaea, his mother, Meleager bore
a charmed life. It seems wonderful that
we do not watch with equal care over our
body, on the state of which happiness so
much depends.
The requisites of health are plain
enough: regular habits, daily exercise,
cleanliness, and moderation in all things
—in eating as well as in drinking—would
keep most people well.
I need not here dwell on the evils of
alcohol, but we perhaps scarcely realise
�THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
how much of the suffering and ill-humour
of life is due to over-eating. Dyspepsia,
for instance, from which so many suffer,
is in nine cases out of ten their own fault,
and arises from the combination of too
much food with too little exercise. To
lengthen your life, says an old proverb,
shorten your meals. Plain living and
high thinking will secure health for most
of us, though it matters, perhaps, com
paratively little what a healthy man eats,
so long as he does not eat too much#
“ Go to your banquet then, but use delight,
So as to rise still with an appetite.”1
Mr. Gladstone has told us that the
splendid health he enjoys is greatly due
to his having early learnt one simple
physiological maxim, and laid it down as
a rule for himself always to make twentyfive bites at every bit of meat.
No doubt, however, though the rule not
to eat or drink too much is simple enough
in theory, it is not quite so easy in applica
tion. There have been many Esaus who
have sold their birthright of health for a
mess of pottage.
Yet, though it may seem paradoxical,
it is certainly true, that in the long run
the moderate man will derive more enjoy
ment even from eating and drinking, than
the glutton or the drunkard will ever
obtain. They know not what it is to
enjoy “the exquisite taste of common
dry bread.” 2
Even then if we were to consider
merely the pleasure to be derived from
eating and drinking, the same rule would
hold good. A lunch of bread and cheese
after a good walk is more enjoyable than
a Lord Mayor’s feast. Without wishing,
like Apicius, for the neck of a stork, so
as to enjoy our dinner longer, we must
not be ungrateful for the enjoyment we
derive from eating and drinking, even
though they be amongst the least aesthetic
of our pleasures.
They are homely,
no doubt, but they come morning, noon,
and night, and are not the less real
Herrick,
2 Hamerton.
PART II
because they have reference to the body
rather than the soul.
We speak truly of a healthy appetite,
for it is a good test of our bodily condi
tion ; and indeed in some cases of our
mental state also. That
“ There cometh no good thing
Apart from toil to mortals,”
is especially true with reference to appe
tite ; to sit down to a dinner, however
simple, after a walk with a friend among
the mountains or along the shore, is a
pleasure not to be despised.
Cheerfulness and good humour, more
over, during meals are not only pleasant
in themselves, but conduce greatly to
health.
It has been said that hunger is the
best sauce, but most would prefer some
good stories at a feast even to a good
appetite; and who would not like to
have it said of him, as of Biron by
Rosaline—
“A merrier man,
Within the limit of becoming mirth,
I never spent an hour’s talk withal.”
In the three great “Banquets” of
Plato, Xenophon, and Plutarch, the food
is not even mentioned.
In the words of the old Lambeth
adage—
“ What is a merry man ?
Let him do all he can
To entertain his guests
With wine and pleasant jests,
Yet if his wife do frown
All merryment goes down.”
What salt is to food, wit and humour
are to conversation and literature. “You
do not,” an amusing writer in the Cornhill
has said, “expect humour in Thomas a
Kempis or the Hebrew Prophets”; but
we have Solomon’s authority that there is
a time to laugh, as well as to weep.
“ To read a good comedy is to keep
the best company in the world, when the
best things are said,* and the most amus
ing things happen.” 1
It is not without reason that every one
1 Hazlitt.
�HEALTH
CHAP. Ill
resents the imputation of being unable to
see a joke.
Laughter appears to be the special
prerogative of man. The higher animals
present us with proofs of evident, if not
highly-developed reasoning power, but it
is more than doubtful whether they are
capable of appreciating a joke.
Wit, moreover, has solved many diffi
culties and decided many controversies.
“ Ridicule shall frequently prevail,
And cut the knot when graver reasons fail.” 1
The most wasted of all days, says
Chamfort, is that on which one has not
laughed.
A careless song, says Walpole, “with
a little nonsense in it now and then, does
not misbecome a monarch ; ” but it is
difficult now to realise that James I.
should have regarded skill in punning in
his selection of bishops and privy coun
cillors.
It is no small merit of laughter that it
is quite spontaneous. “You cannot force
people to laugh ; you cannot give a
reason why they should laugh; they
must laugh of themselves or not at all.
. . . If we think we must not laugh,
this makes our temptation to laugh the
greater.”2 Humour is, moreover, con
tagious. A witty man may say, as Falstaff does of himself, “ I am not only
witty in myself, but the cause that wit is
in other men.”
One may paraphrase the well-known
remark about port wine and say that
some jokes may be better than others, but
anything which makes one laugh is good.
“After all,” says Dryden, “it is a good
thing to laugh at any rate ; and if a straw
can tickle a man, it is an instrument of
happiness,” and I may add, of health.
I have been told that in omitting any
mention of smoking I was overlooking
one of the real pleasures of life. Not
being a smoker myself I cannot perhaps
judge ; much must depend on the in
dividual temperament ; to some nervous
natures it certainly appears to be a great
1 Francis.
2 Hazlitt.
59
comfort; but I have my doubts whether
smoking, as a general rule, does add to
the pleasures of life. It must, at any
rate, detract somewhat from the sensitive
ness of taste and of smell.
Those who live in cities may almost
lay it down as a rule that no time spent
out of doors is ever wasted. Fresh air is
a cordial of incredible virtue ; old families
are in all senses county families, not town
families ; and those who prefer Homer
and Plato and Shakespeare to rivers and
forests and mountains must beware that
they are not tempted to neglect this great
requisite of our nature.
An Oriental traveller, having been
taken to watch a game of cricket, was
astonished at hearing that many of those
playing were rich men. He asked why
they did not pay some poor people to do
it for them.
Most Englishmen, however, love open
air, and it is probably true that most of
us enjoy a game at cricket or golf more
than looking at any of the old masters.
The love of sport is engraven in the
English character.
As was said of
William Rufus, “ he loves the tall deer as
if he had been their father.”
Wordsworth made it a rule to go out
every day, and used to say that as he
never consulted the weather, he never had
to consult the physicians.
It always seems to be raining harder
than it really is when you look at the
weather through the window. Even in
winter, though the landscape often seems
cheerless and bare enough when you look
at it from the fireside, still it is far better
to go out, even if you have to brave the
storm : when you are once out of doors
the touch of earth and the breath of the
fresh air will give you new life and
energy. Men, like trees, live in great
part on air.
After a gallop over the downs, a row
on the river, a sea voyage, a walk by the
seashore or in the woods,
“ The blue above, the music in the air,
The flowers upon the ground,” 1
1 Trench.
�6o
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
one feels as if one could say with Henry
IV., “ Je me porte comme le Pont Neuf.”
The Roman proverb that a child should
be taught nothing which he cannot learn
standing up, went no doubt into one
extreme, but surely we fall into another
when we act as if games were the only
thing which boys could learn upon their
feet.
The love of games among boys is
indeed a healthy instinct, and though
carried too far in some of our great
schools, there can be no question that
cricket and football, fives and hockey,
bathing and boating, are not only among
the greatest pleasures, but the best medi
cines, for boys.
We cannot always secure sleep. When
important decisions have to be taken, the
natural anxiety to come to a right decision
will often keep us awake.
Nothing,
however, is more conducive to healthy
sleep than plenty of open air. Then in
deed we can enjoy the fresh life of the
early morning : “ the breezy call of in
cense-breathing mom.”1
“ At morn the blackcock trims his jetty wing,
’Tis morning prompts the linnet’s blithest
lay,,
All Nature’s children feel the matin spring
Of life reviving, with reviving day.”
Epictetus described himself as “ a
spirit bearing about a corpse.” That
seems to me an ungrateful description.
Surely we ought to cherish the body, even
if it be but a frail and humble companion.
Do we not owe to the eye our enjoyment
of the beauties of this world and the
glories of the Heavens ; to the ear the
voices of friends and all the delights of
music ; are not the hands most faithful
and invaluable instruments, ever ready
in case of need, ever willing to do our
bidding ? and even the feet bear us with
out a murmur along the roughest and
stoniest paths of life.
With reasonable care, most of us may
hope to enjoy good health. And yet
what a marvellous and complex organisa
tion we have!
1 Gray.
PART II
We are indeed fearfully and wonder
fully made. It is
“ Strange that a harp of a thousand strings
Should keep in tune so long.”
When we consider the marvellous com
plexity of our bodily organisation, it
seems a miracle that we should live at
all; much more that the innumerable
organs and processes should continue day
after day and year after year with so
much regularity and so little friction
that we are sometimes scarcely conscious
of having a body at all.
And yet in that body we have more
than 200 bones, of complex and varied
forms, any irregularity in, or injury to,
which would of course grievously inter
fere with our movements.
We have over 500 muscles ; each
nourished by almost innumerable blood
vessels, and regulated by nerves. One
of our muscles, the heart, beats over
30,000,000 times in a year, and if it
once stops, all is over.
In the skin are wonderfully varied
and complex organs—for instance, over
2,000,000 perspiration glands, which
regulate the temperature, communicating
with the surface by ducts which have a
total length of some ten miles.
Think of the miles of arteries and veins,
of capillaries and nerves ; of the blood,
with the millions of millions of blood
corpuscles, each a microcosm in itself.
Think of the organs of sense,—the eye
with its cornea and lens, vitreous humour,
aqueous humour, and choroid, culminating
in the retina, no thicker than a sheet of
paper, and yet consisting of nine distinct
layers, the innermost composed of rods
and cones, supposed to be the immediate
recipients of the undulations of light,
and so numerous that in each eye the
cones are estimated at over 3,000,000,
the rods at over 30,000,000.
Above all, and most wonderful of all,
the brain itself. Meinert has calculated
that the gray matter alone contains no
less than 600,000,000 cells ; each cell
consists of several thousand visible mole-
�LOVE
CHAP. IV
cules, and each molecule again of many
millions of atoms.
And yet, with reasonable care, we can
most of us keep this wonderful organisa
tion in health, so that it will work with
out causing us pain, or even discomfort,
for many years ; and we may hope that
even when old age comes
“ Time may lay his hand
Upon your heart gently, not smiting it,
But as a harper lays his open palm
Upon his harp, to deaden its vibrations.”
61
To this a look, to that a word, dispenses,
And, whether stern or smiling, loves them
still;—
So Providence for us, high, infinite,
Makes our necessities its watchful task,
Hearkens to all our prayers, helps all our
wants,
And e’en if it denies what seems our right,
Either denies because ’twould have us ask,
Or seems but to deny, and in denying
grants.”1
Sir Walter Scott well says—
“And if there be a human tear
From passion’s dross 2 refined and clear,
’Tis that which pious fathers shed
Upon a duteous daughter’s head.”
Epaminondas is said to have given as
his main reason for rejoicing at the victory
of Leuctra, that it would give so much
LOVE
pleasure to his father and mother.
“ £)tre avec ceux qu’on aime, cela suffit.”
Nor must the love of animals be
La Bruy1:re.
altogether omitted. It is impossible not
Love is the light and sunshine of life. to sympathise with the Savage when he
We cannot fully enjoy ourselves, or any believes in their immortality, and thinks
thing else, unless some one we love enjoys that after death
it with us. Even if we are alone, w’e
“Admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.” 3
store up our enjoyment in hope of shar
ing it hereafter with those wre love.
In the Mahabharata, the great Indian
Love lasts through life, and adapts Epic, when the family of Pandavas, the
itself to every age and circumstance ; in heroes, at length reach the gates of
childhood for father and mother, in man heaven, they are welcomed themselves,
hood for wife, in age for children, and but are told that their dog cannot come
throughout for brothers and sisters, re in. Having pleaded in vain, they turn
lations and friends. The strength of to depart, as they say they can never
friendship is indeed proverbial, and in leave their faithful companion. Then at
some cases, as in that of David and the last moment the Angel at the door
Jonathan, is described as surpassing the relents, and their Dog is allowed to enter
love of women. But I need not now with them.
refer to it, having spoken already of what
We may hope the time will come when
we owe to friends.
we shall learn
The goodness of Providefice to man has
to blend
or our pride,
been often compared to that of fathers “Never sorrow of our pleasure thing that feels.” 4
With
the meanest
and mothers for their children.
But at the present moment I am speak
“ Just as a mother, with sweet, pious face,
ing rather of the love which leads to mar
Yearns towards her little children from her
riage. Such love is the music of life, nay,
seat,
Gives one a kiss, another an embrace,
“there is music in the beauty, and the
Takes this upon her knees, that on her silent note of love, far sweeter than the
feet;
sound of any instrument.” 5
And while from actions, looks, complaints,
CHAPTER IV
pretences,
She learns their feelings and their various
will,
1 Filicaja. Translated by Leigh Hunt.
2 Not from passion itself.
3 Pope.
4 Wor ds worth.
5 Browne.
�62
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
The Symposium of Plato contains an in
teresting and amusing disquisition on Love.
“ Love,” Ph sod r us is made to say, “ will
make men dare to die for their beloved—
love alone ; and women as well as men.
Of this, Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias,
is a monument to all Hellas ; for she was
willing to lay down her life on behalf of
her husband, when no one else would,
although he had a father and mother ;
but the tenderness of her love so far ex
ceeded theirs, that she made them seem
to be strangers in blood to their own son,
and in name only related to him ; and so
noble did this action of hers appear to the
gods, as well as to men, that among the
many who have done virtuously she is
one of the very few to whom they have
granted the privilege of returning to earth,
in admiration of her virtue ; such exceed
ing honour is paid by them to the devo
tion and virtue of love.”
Agathon is even more eloquent—
Love “fills men with affection, and
takes away their disaffection, making them
meet together at such banquets as these.
In sacrifices, feasts, dances, he is our lord
—supplying kindness and banishing un
kindness, giving friendship and forgiving
enmity, the joy of the good, the wonder
of the wise, the amazement of the gods,
desired by those who have no part in him,
and precious to those who have the better
part in him ; parent of delicacy, luxury,
desire, fondness, softness, grace, regardful
of the good, regardless of the evil. In
every word, work, wish, fear—pilot, com
rade, helper, saviour ; glory of gods and
men, leader best and brightest: in whose
footsteps let every man follow, sweetly
singing in his honour that sweet strain
with which love charms the souls of gods
and men.”
No doubt, even so there are two
Loves, “one, the daughter of Uranus,
who has no mother, and is the elder and
wiser goddess ; and the other, the daughter
of Zeus and Dione, who is popular and
common,”—but let us not examine too
closely. Charity tells us even of Guine
vere, “ that while she lived, she was a
PART II
good lover and therefore she had a good
end.” 1
The origin of love has exercised philo
sophers almost as much as the origin of
evil. The Symposium continues with a
speech which Plato attributes in joke to
Aristophanes, and of which Jowett ob
serves that nothing in Aristophanes is
more truly Aristophanic.
The original human nature, he says,
was not like the present. The Primeval
Man “ was round,2 his back and sides form
ing a circle ; and he had four hands and
four feet, one head with two faces, look
ing opposite ways, set on a round neck
and precisely alike.
He could walk
upright as men now do, backwards or
forwards as he pleased, and he could
also roll over and over at a great rate,
whirling round on his four hands and
four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going
over and over with their legs in the
air ; this was when he wanted to run fast.
Terrible was their might and strength, and
the thoughts of their hearts were great, and
they made an attack upon the gods ; of
them is told the tale of Otys and Epliialtes,
who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven,
and would have laid hands upon the gods.
Doubt reigned in the celestial councils.
Should they kill them and annihilate the
race with thunderbolts, as they had done
the giants, then there would be an end
of the sacrifices and worship which men
offered to them ; but, on the other hand,
the gods could not suffer their insolence
to be unrestrained. At last, after a good
deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way.
He said : ‘ Methinks I have a plan which
will humble their pride and mend their
manners ; they shall continue to exist, but
I will cut them in two, which will have a
double advantage, for it will halve their
strength and we shall have twice as many
sacrifices. They shall walk upright on
two legs, and if they continue insolent and
will not be quiet, I will split them again
and they shall hop on a single leg.’ He
spoke and cut men in two, ‘ as you might
1 Malory, Morte eVArthur.
2 I avail myself of Dr. Jowett’s translation.
�LOVE
CHAP. IV
split an egg with a hair.’ . . . After the
division the two parts of man, each de
siring his other half, came together. . . .
So ancient is the desire for one another
which is implanted in us, reuniting our
original nature, making one of two, and
healing the state of man. Each of us when
separated is but the indenture of a man,
having one side only, like a flat-fish,
and he is always looking for his other
half.
“ And when one of them finds his other
half, the pair are lost in amazement of
love and friendship and intimacy, and
one will not be out of the other’s sight,
as I may say, even for a minute : they
will pass their whole lives together ; yet
they could not explain what they desire
of one another. For the intense yearn
ing which each of them has towards the
other does not appear to be the desire of
lovers’ intercourse, but of something else,
which the soul of either evidently desires
and cannot tell, and of which she has
only a dark and doubtful presentiment.”
However this may be, there is such in
stinctive insight in the human heart
that we often form our opinion almost
instantaneously, and such impressions
seldom change, I might even say, they
are seldom wrong. Love at first sight
sounds like an imprudence, and yet is
almost a revelation. It seems as if we
were but renewing the relations of a
previous existence.
‘ But to see her were to love her,
Love but her, and love for ever."1
Yet though experience seldom falsifies
such a feeling, happily the reverse does
not hold good. Deep affection is often of
slow growth. Many a warm love has
been won by faithful devotion.
Montaigne indeed declares that “ Few
have married for love without repenting
it.” Dr. Johnson also maintained that
marriages would generally be happier if
they were arranged by the Lord Chan
cellor ; but I do not think either Mon
taigne or Johnson were good judges. As
1 Burns.
63
Lancelot said to the unfortunate Maid of
Astolat, “ I love not to be forced to love,
for love must arise of the heart and not
by constraint.” 1
Love defies distance and the elements ;
Sestos and Abydos are divided by the
sea, “ but Love joined them by an arrow
from his bow.” 2
Love can be happy anywhere. Byron
wished
“ 0 that the desert were my dwelling-place,
With one fair Spirit for my minister,
That I might all forget the human race,
And, hating no one, love but only her.”
And many will doubtless have felt
“ 0 Love ! what hours were thine and mine
In lands of palm and southern pine,
In lands of palm, of orange-blossom,
Of olive, aloe, and maize and vine.”
What is true of space holds good equally
of time.
“ In peace, Love tunes the shepherd’s reed ;
In war, he mounts the warrior’s steed ;
In halls, in gay attire is seen ;
In hamlets, dances on the green.
Love rules the court, the camp, the grove,
And men below, and saints above ;
For love is heaven, and heaven is love.”3
Even when, as among some Eastern
races, Religion and Philosophy have com
bined to depress Love, truth reasserts
itself in popular sayings, as for instance
in the Turkish proverb, “ All women are
perfection, especially she who loves you.”
A French lady having once quoted to
Abd-el-Kader the Polish proverb, “ A
woman draws more with a hair of her
head than a yoke of oxen well harnessed ; ”
he answered with a smile, “ The hair is
unnecessary, woman is powerful as fate.”
But we like to think of Love rather as
the Angel of Happiness than as a ruling
force : of the joy of home when “hearts
are of each other sure.”
“ It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart, and mind to mind
In body and in soul can bind.” 4
1 Malory, Morte. d’Arthur.
2 Symonds.
3 Scott.
4 Ibid.
�THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
64
What Bacon says of a friend is even
truer of a wife ; there is “ no man that
imparteth his joys to his friend, but he
joyeth the more ; and no man that
imparteth his griefs to his friend, but he
grieveth the less.”
Let some one we love come near us and
“ At once it seems that something new or
strange
Has passed upon the flowers, the trees, the
ground ;
Some slight but unintelligible change
On everything around.” 1
PART II
Glistering with dew ; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers ; and sweet the coming-on
Of grateful evening mild ; then silent night,
With this her solemn bird, and this fair moon,
And these the gems of heaven, her starry
train.
But neither breath of morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds ; nor rising sun
On this delightful land; nor herb, fruit,
flower,
Glistering with dew; nor fragrance after
showers ;
Nor grateful evening mild ; nor silent night,
With this her solemn bird ; nor walk by moon,
Or glittering starlight, without thee is sweet.”
Moreover, no one need despair of an
ideal marriage. We fortunately differ so
much in our tastes ; love does so much to
create love, that even the humblest may
hope for the happiest marriage if only he
deserves it; and Shakespeare speaks, as
11 Her feet are tender, for she sets her steps
Not on the ground, but on the heads of men.” he does so often, for thousands when he
says
Love and Reason divide the life of man.
“ She is mine own,
We must give to each its due. If it is
And I as rich in having such a jewel
impossible to attain to virtue by the aid
As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearls,
The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold.”
of Love without Reason, neither can we
do so by means of Reason alone without
True love indeed will not be unreason
Love.
able or exacting.
Love, said Melanippides, “ sowing in
“ Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind
the heart of man the sweet harvest of
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
desire, mixes the sweetest and most
To war and arms I fly.
beautiful things together.”
How true is the saying of La Bruyere,
“ Etre avec ceux qu’on aime, cela suffit.”
We might, I think, apply to Love what
Homer says of Fate :
“ Love is kind, and suffers long,
Love is meek, and thinks no wrong,
Love than death itself more strong—
Therefore give us Love.”
True ! a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field,
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore,
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.”1
No one indeed could complain now,
with Phaedrus in Plato’s Symposium,
And yet
that Love has had no worshippers among
the Poets. On the contrary, Love has 1 ‘ Alas ! how light a cause may move
Dissension between hearts that love !
brought them many of their sweetest in
Hearts that the world in vain had tried,
spirations : none perhaps nobler or more
but more
beautiful than Milton’s description of And sorrowthe storm, closely tied, were rough,
That stood
when waves
Paradise :
Yet in a sunny hour fall off,
Like ships that have gone down at sea,
‘ With thee conversing, I forget all time,
When heaven was all tranquillity.” 2
All seasons, and their change ; all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet
For love is brittle. Do not risk even
With charm of earliest birds ; pleasant the
any little jar ; it may be
sun,
When first on this delightful land he spreads
“The little rift within the lute,
His orient beams, on herb, treo, fruit, and
That by and by will make the music mute,
flower,
And ever widening slowly silence all.”3
1 Trench.
1 Lovelace.
2 Moore.
3 Tennyson.
�ART
CHAP. V
Love is delicate; “ Love is hurt with
jar and fret,” and you might as well ex
pect a violin to remain in tune if roughly
used, as Love to survive if chilled or
driven into itself. But what a pleasure
to keep it alive by
“ Little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.” 1
“ She whom you loved and chose,” says
Bondi,
“ Is now your bride, •
The gift of heaven, and to your trust consigned;
Honour her still, though not with passion blind;
And in her virtue, though you watch, confide.
Be to her youth a comfort, guardian, guide,
In whose experience she may safety find ;
And whether sweet or bitter be assigned,
The joy with her, as well as pain, divide.
Yield not too much if reason disapprove ;
Nor too much force ; the partner of your life
Should neither victim be, nor tyrant prove.
Thus shall that rein, which often mars the bliss
Of wedlock, scarce be felt; and thus your wife
Ne’er in the husband shall the lover miss.” 2
65
Earthly these passions of the Earth,
They perish where they have their birth,
But Love is indestructible ;
Its holy flame for ever burneth,
From Heaven it came, to Heaven retumeth ;
Too oft on Earth a troubled guest,
At times deceived, at times opprest,
It here is tried and purified,
Then hath in Heaven its perfect rest:
It soweth here with toil and care,
But the harvest time of Love is there.
“ The Mother when she meets on high
The Babe she lost in infancy,
Hath she not then, for pains and fears,
The day of woe, the watchful night
For all her sorrow, all her tears,
An over-payment of delight ? ”1
As life wears on the love of husband or
wife, of friends and of children, becomes
the great solace and delight of age. The
one recalls the past, the other gives in
terest to the future ; and in our children
we live our lives again.
Every one is ennobled by true love—
“ ’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.” 3
Perhaps no one ever praised a woman
more gracefully in a sentence than Steele
when he said of Lady Elizabeth Hastings
that “ to know her was a liberal educa
tion ” ; but every woman may feel as she
improves herself that she is not only
laying in a store of happiness for herself,
but also raising and blessing those whom
she would most wish to- see happy and
good.
Love, true love, grows and deepens
with time. Husband and wife, who are
married indeed, live
CHAPTER V
ART
“ High art consists neither in altering, nor in
improving nature ; but in seeking throughout
nature for ‘whatsoever things are lovely, what
soever things are pure ’ ; in loving these, in dis
playing to the utmost of the painter’s power
such loveliness as is in them, and directing the
thoughts of others to them by winning art, or
gentle emphasis. Art (caeteris paribus) is great
in exact proportion to the love of beauty shown
by the painter, provided that love of beauty
forfeit no atom of truth.”—Ruskin.
The most ancient works of Art which we
possess, are representations of animals,
rude indeed, but often strikingly charac
teristic, engraved on, or carved in, stag’s“ By each other, till to love and live
Be one.” 4
horn or bone ; and found in English,
Nor does it end with life. A mother’s French, and German caves, with stone
and other rude implements, and the re
love knows no bounds.
mains of mammalia, belonging apparently
“ They err who tell us Love can die,
to the close of the glacial epoch: not
With life all other passions fly,
only of the deer, bear, and other animals
All others are but vanity.
In Heaven Ambition cannot dwell,
now inhabiting temperate Europe, but
Nor Avarice in the vaults of Hell ;
of some, such as the reindeer, the musk
4 Wordsworth.
2 Bondi. Tr. by Glassford. sheep, the mammoth, and the woolly-
3 Tennyson.
K
4 Swinburne.
1 Southey.
�66
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
haired rhinoceros, which have either re
treated north or become altogether ex
tinct. We may even, I think, venture to
hope that other designs may hereafter be
found, which will give us additional in
formation as to the manners and customs
of our ancestors in those remote ages.
Next to these in point of antiquity
come the sculptures and paintings on
Egyptian and Assyrian tombs, temples,
and palaces.
These ancient scenes, considered as
works of art, have no doubt many faults,
and yet how graphically they tell their
story ! As a matter of fact a king is not,
as a rule, bigger than his soldiers, but in
these battle-scenes he is always so repre
sented. We must, however, remember
that in ancient warfare the greater part
of the fighting was done by the chiefs.
In this respect the Homeric poems re
semble the Assyrian and Egyptian repre
sentations. At any rate, we see at a
glance which is the king, which are
officers, which side is victorious, the
struggles and sufferings of the wounded,
the flight of the enemy, the city of refuge
—so that he who runs may read ; while
in modern battle-pictures the story is
much less clear, and, indeed, the untrained
eye sees for some time little but scarlet
and smoke.
These works assuredly possess a grandeur
and dignity of their own, even though
they have not the beauty of later art.
In Greece Art reached a perfection
which has never been excelled, and it
was more appreciated than perhaps it has
ever been since.
At the time when Demetrius attacked
the city of Rhodes, Protogenes was paint
ing a picture of Ialysus. “ This,” says
Pliny, “hindered King Demetrius from
taking Rhodes, out of fear lest he should
burn the picture; and not being able to
fire the town on any other side, he was
pleased rather to spare the painting than
to take the victory, which was already in
his hands. Protogenes, at that time, had
his painting-room in a garden out of the
town, and very near the camp of the
PART II
enemies, where he was daily finishing
those pieces which he had already begun,
the noise of soldiers not being capable of
interrupting his studies. But Demetrius
causing him to be brought into his pre
sence, and asking him what made him so
bold as to work in the midst of enemies,
he answered the king, ‘That he under
stood the war which he made was against
the Rhodians, and not against the Arts.’ ”
With the decay of Greece, Art sank too,
until it was revived in the thirteenth
century by Cimabue, since whose time its
progress has been triumphal.
Art is unquestionably one of the purest
and highest elements in human happiness.
It trains the mind through the eye, and
the eye through the mind. As the sun
colors flowers, so does art color life.
“In true Art,” says Ruskin, “the
hand, the head, and the heart of man go
together. But Art is no recreation : it
cannot be learned at spare moments, nor
pursued when we have nothing better to
do.”
It is not only in the East that great
works, really due to study and labour,
have been attributed to magic.
Study and labour cannot make every
man an artist, but no one can succeed in
art without them. In Art two and two
do not make four, and no number of
little things will make a great one.
It has been said, and on high authority,
that the end of all art is to please. But
this is a very imperfect definition. It
might as well be said that a library is
only intended for pleasure and ornament.
Art has the advantage of nature, in so
far as it introduces a human element,
which is in some respects superior even
to nature. “If,” says Plato, “you take
a man as he is made by nature and com
pare him with another who is the effect
of art, the work of nature will always
appear the less beautiful, because art is
more accurate than nature.”
Bacon also, in The Advancement of
Learning, speaks of “ the world being in
ferior to the soul, by reason whereof there
is agreeable to the spirit of man a more
�CHAP. V
ART
ample greatness, a more exact goodness,
and a more absolute variety than can be
found in the nature of things.”
The poets tell us that, Prometheus
having made a beautiful statue of Minerva,
the goddess was so delighted that she
offered to bring down anything from
Heaven which could add. to its perfection.
Prometheus on this prudently asked her
to take him there, so that he might choose
for himself. This Minerva did, and Pro
metheus, finding that in heaven all things
were animated by fire, brought back a
spark, with which he gave life to his
work.
In fact, Imitation is the means and not
the end of Art. The story of Zeuxis and
Parrhasius is a pretty tale ; but to deceive
birds, or even man himself, is but a
trifling matter compared with the higher
functions of Art. To imitate the Iliad,
says Dr. Young, is not imitating Homer ;
though, as Sir J. Reynolds adds, the more
the artist studies nature “the nearer he
approaches to the true and perfect idea of
art.”
Art, indeed, must create as well as
copy. As Victor Cousin well says, “ The
ideal without the real lacks life ; but the
real without the ideal lacks pure beauty.
Both need to unite; to join hands and
enter into alliance. In this way the best
work may be achieved. Thus beauty is
an absolute idea, and not a mere copy of
imperfect Nature.”
The grouping of the picture is of course
of the utmost importance. Sir Joshua
Reynolds gives two remarkable cases to
show how much any given figure in a
picture is affected by its surroundings.
Tintoret in one of his pictures has taken
the Samson of Michael Angelo, put an
eagle under him, placed thunder and
lightning in his right hand instead of the
jawbone of an ass, and thus turned him
into a Jupiter. The second instance is
even more striking. Titian has copied
the figure in the vault of the Sistine
Chapel which represents the Deity divid
ing light from darkness, and has intro
duced it into his picture of the battle of
67
Cadore, to represent a general falling from
his horse.
We must remember that so far as the
eye is concerned, the object of the artist
is to train, not to deceive, and that his
higher function has reference rather to
the mind than to the eye.
Those who love beauty will see beauty
everywhere. No doubt
“ To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to
garnish,
Is wasteful aud ridiculous excess.”1
But all is not gold that glitters, flowers
are not all arrayed like the lily, and
there is room for selection as well as
representation.
“The true, the good, and the beautiful,”
says Cousin, “ are but forms of the in
finite : what then do we really love in
truth, beauty, and virtue1? We love the
infinite himself. The love of the infinite
substance is hidden under the love of its
forms. It is so truly the infinite which
charms in the true, the good, and the
beautiful, that its manifestations alone do
not suffice. The artist is dissatisfied at
the sight even of his greatest works ; he
aspires still higher.”
It is indeed sometimes objected that
Landscape painting is not true to nature;
but we must ask, What is truth ? Is the
object to produce the same impression on
the mind as that created by the scene
itself? If so, let any one try to draw
from memory a group of mountains, and
he will probably find that in the impres
sion produced on his mind the mountains
are loftier and steeper, the valleys deeper
and narrower, than in the actual reality.
A drawing, then, which was literally
exact would not be true, in the sense of
conveying the same impression as Nature
herself.
In fact, Art, says Goethe, is called Art
simply because it is not Nature.
It is not sufficient for the artist to
choose beautiful scenery, and delineate
1 Shakespeare.
�68
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
tART ii
it with accuracy. He must not be a
mere copyist.
Something higher and
more subtle is required. He must create,
or at any rate interpret, as well as copy.
Turner was never satisfied merely to
copy even the most glorious scenery. He
moved, and even suppressed, mountains.
A certain nobleman, we are told, was
very anxious to see the model from whom
Guido painted his lovely female faces.
Guido placed his color-grinder, a big
coarse man, in an attitude, and then drew
a beautiful Magdalen. “ My dear Count,”
he said, “ the beautiful and pure idea
must be in the mind, and then it is no
matter what the model is.”
When painting St. Michael for the
Church of the Capuchins at Rome, Guido
wished that he “ had the wings of an
angel, to have ascended unto Paradise, and
there to have beheld the forms of those
beautiful spirits, from which I might have
copied my Archangel. But not being
able to mount so high, it was in vain for
me to seek for his resemblance here below;
so that I was forced to look into mine
own mind, and into that idea of beauty
which I have formed in my own imagina
tion.” 1
Science attempts, as far as the limited
powers of Man permit, to reproduce the
actual facts in a manner which, however
bald, is true in itself, irrespective of time
and scene. To do this she must submit
to many limitations ; not altogether unvexatious, and not without serious draw
backs. Art, on the contrary, endeavours
to convey the impression of the original
under some especial aspect.
In some respects, Art gives a clearer
and more vivid idea of an unknown
country than any description can convey.
In literature rock may be rock, but in
painting it must be granite, slate, or some
other special kind, and not merely rock
in general.
It is remarkable that while artists have
long recognised the necessity of studying
anatomy, and there has been from the
commencement a professor of anatomy in
the Royal Academy, it is only of late
years that any knowledge of botany or
geology has been considered desirable,
and even now their importance is by no
means generally recognised.
Much has been written as to the rela
tive merits of painting, sculpture, and
architecture. This, if it be not a some
what unprofitable inquiry, would at any
rate be out of place here.
Architecture not only gives intense
pleasure, but even the impression of
something ethereal and superhuman.
Madame de Stael described it as
“ frozen music ”; and a cathedral is a
glorious specimen of “ thought in stone,”
whose very windows are transparent walls
of gorgeous hues.
Caracci said that poets paint in their
words and artists speak in their works.
The latter have indeed one great advan
tage, for a glance at a statue or a painting,
will convey a more vivid idea than a long,
and minute description.
Another advantage possessed by Art
is that it is understood by all civilised
nations, whilst each has a separate language.
Again, from a material point of view
Art is most important.
In a recent
address Sir F. Leighton has observed that
the study of Art “ is every day becoming
more important in relation to certain
sides of the waning material prosperity of
the country. For the industrial compe
tition between this and other countries
—a competition, keen and eager, which
means to certain industries almost a race
for life—runs, in many cases, no longer
exclusively or mainly on the lines of
excellence of material and solidity of
workmanship, but greatly nowadays on
the lines of artistic charm and beauty
of design.”
The highest service, however, that Art
can accomplish for man is to become “ at
once the voice of his nobler aspirations,
and the steady disciplinarian of his
emotions ; and it is with this mission,
rather than with any eesthetic perfection,
that we are at present concerned.” 1
1 Dryden.
1 Haweis.
�CHAI’. V
ART
69
Science and Art are sisters, or rather story, that the picture was sold for a pot
perhaps they are like brother and sister. of porter and a cheese, which, however,
The mission of Art is in some respects does not give a higher idea of the ap
like that of woman. It is not Hers preciation of the art of landscape at that
so much to do the hard toil and moil date.
Until very recently the general feeling
of the world, as to surround it with a
halo of beauty, to convert work into with reference to mountain scenery has
been that expressed by Tacitus. “ Who
pleasure.
In Science we naturally expect pro would leave Asia or Africa or Italy to go
gress, but in Art the case is not so clear : to Germany, a shapeless and unformed
and yet Sir Joshua Reynolds did not country, a harsh sky, and melancholy
hesitate to express his conviction that in aspect, unless indeed it was his native
the future “ so much will painting im land?”
It is amusing to read the opinion of
prove, that the best we can now achieve
will appear like the work of children,” Dr. Beattie, in a special treatise on Truth.,
and we may hope that our power of Poetry, and Music, written at the close
enjoying it may increase in an equal of last century, that “ The Highlands of
ratio. Wordsworth says that poets have Scotland are in general a melancholy
to create the taste for their own works, country. ■ Long tracts of mountainous
and the same is, in some degree at any country, covered with dark heath, and
often obscured by misty weather ; narrow
rate, true of artists.
In one respect especially modern painters valleys thinly inhabited, and bounded by
appear to have made a marked advance, precipices resounding with the fall of
and one great blessing which in fact we torrents ; a soil so rugged, and a climate
owe to them is a more vivid enjoyment so dreary, as in many parts to admit
neither the amenities of pasturage, nor
of scenery.
I have of course no pretensions to speak the labours of agriculture ; the mournful
with authority, but even in the case of the dashing of waves along the firths and
greatest masters before Turner, the land lakes ; the portentous noises which every
scapes seem to me singularly inferior to the change of the wind is apt to raise in a
figures. Sir Joshua Reynolds tells us that ' lonely region, full of echoes, and rocks,
Gainsborough framed a kind of model of a and caverns ; the grotesque and ghastly
landscape on his table, composed of broken appearance of such a landscape by the
stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking- light of the moon: objects like these
glass, which he “ magnified and improved diffuse a gloom over the fancy,” etc.1
Even Goldsmith regarded the scenery
into rocks, trees, and water” ; and Sir
Joshua solemnly discusses the wisdom of of the Highlands as dismal and hideous.
such a proceeding. “ How far it may be Johnson, we know, laid it down as an
useful in giving hints,” he gravely says, axiom that “ the noblest prospect which
“ the professors of landscape can best a Scotchman ever sees is the high road
determine,” but he does not recommend that leads him to England ”—a saying
it, and is disposed to think, on the whole, which throws much doubt on his dis
the practice may be more likely to do tinction that the Giant’s Causeway was
“ worth seeing but not worth going to
harm than good !
In the picture of Ceyx and Alcyone, by see.” 2
Madame de Stael declared, that though
Wilson, of whom Cunningham said that,
with Gainsborough, he laid the foundation she would go 500 leagues to meet a clever
of our School of Landscape, the castle is man, she would not care to open her
said to have been painted from a pot of window to see the Bay of Naples.
porter, and the rock from a Stilton cheese.
Nor was the ancient absence of apThere is indeed another version of the
1 Beattie. 1776.
2 Boswell.
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THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
preciation confined to scenery. Burke,
speaking of Stonehenge, even says, “ Stone
henge, neither for disposition nor ornament,
has in it anything admirable.”
Ugly scenery may well in some cases
have an injurious effect on the human
system.
It has been ingeniously sug
gested that what really drove Don Quixote
out of his mind was not the study of his
books of chivalry, so much as the mono
tonous scenery of La Mancha.
The love of landscape is not indeed
due to Art alone. It has been the happy
combination of art and science which has
trained us to perceive the beauty which
surrounds us.
Art helps us-to see, and “hundreds of
people can talk for one who can think ;
but thousands can think for one who can
see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy,
and religion all in one. . . . Remember
ing always that there are two characters
in which all greatness of Art consists—
first, the earnest and intense seizing of
natural facts ; then the ordering those
facts by strength of human intellect, so
as to make them, for all who look upon
them, to the utmost serviceable, memor
able, and beautiful. And thus great Art
is nothing else than the type of strong
and noble life ; for as the ignoble person,
in his dealings w’ith all that occurs in the
world about him, first sees nothing clearly,
looks nothing fairly in the face, and then
allows himself to be swept away by the
trampling torrent and unescapable force
of the things that he would not foresee
and could not understand : so the noble
person, looking the facts of the world full
in the face, and fathoming them with deep
faculty, then deals with them in unalarmed
intelligence and unhurried strength, and
becomes, with his human intellect and
will, no unconscious nor insignificant
agent in consummating their good and
restraining their evil.” 1
May we not also hope that in this
respect also still further progress may be
made, that beauties may be revealed, and
pleasures may be in store for those who
1 Ruskin.
PART JI
come after us, which we cannot appreciate,
or at least can but faintly feel ?
Even now there is scarcely a cottage
without something more or less success
fully claiming to rank as Art,—a picture,
a photograph, or a statuette; and we may
fairly hope that much as Art even now
contributes to the happiness of life, it
will do so even more effectively in the
future.
CHAPTER VI
POETRY
“ And here the singer for his Art
Not all in vain may plead
‘ The song that nerves a nation’s heart
Is in itself a deed.’ ”
Tennyson.
After the disastrous defeat of the Athen
ians before Syracuse, Plutarch tells us
that the Sicilians spared those who could
repeat any of the poetry of Euripides.
“ Some there were,” he says, “ who owed
their preservation to Euripides. Of all
the Grecians, his was the muse with whom
the Sicilians were most in love. From
the strangers who landed in their island
they gleaned every small specimen or
portion of his works, and communicated
it with pleasure to each other. It is said
that upon this occasion a number of
Athenians on their return home went to
Euripides, and thanked him in the most
grateful manner for their obligations to
his pen ; some having been enfranchised
for teaching their masters what they re
membered of his poems, and others having
procured refreshments, when they were
wandering about after the battle, by sing
ing a few of his verses.”
Nowadays we are not likely to owe our
lives to Poetry in this sense, yet in another
we many of us owe to it a similar debt.
How often, when worn with overwork,
sorrow, or anxiety, have we taken down
Homer or Horace, Shakespeare or Mil ton,
and felt the clouds gradually roll
away, the jar of nerves subside, the con-
�POETRY
CHAP. VI
sciousness of power replace physical
exhaustion, and the darkness of despond
ency brighten once more into the light of
life.
“And yet Plato/’ says Jowett, “expels
the poets from his Republic because they
are allied to sense; because they stimulate
the emotions ; because they are thrice re
moved from the ideal truth.”
In that respect, as in some others, few
would accept Plato’s Republic as being
an ideal Commonwealth, and most would
agree with Sir Philip Sidney that “ if you
cannot bear the planet-like music of
poetry ... I must send you in the be
half of all poets, that while you live, you
live in love, and never get favour for
lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you
die, your memory die from the earth, for
want of an epitaph.”
Poetry has often been compared with
painting and sculpture. Simonides long
ago said that Poetry is a speaking picture,
and painting is mute Poetry.
“ Poetry,” says Cousin, “ is the first of
the Arts because it best represents the
infinite.”
And again, “Though the arts are in
some respects isolated, yet there is one
which seems to profit by the resources of
all, and that is Poetry. With words,
Poetry can paint and sculpture ; she can
build edifices like an architect; she unites,
to some extent, melody and music. She
is, so to say, the centre in which all arts
unite.”
A true poem is a gallery of pictures.
It must, Tthink, be admitted that paint
ing and sculpture can give us a clearer and
more vivid idea of an object we have
never seen than any description can
convey. But when we have once seen it,
then on the contrary there are many
points which the poet brings before us,
and which perhaps neither in the repre
sentation, nor even in nature, should we
perceive for ourselves. Objects can be
most vividly brought before us by the
artist, actions by the poet; space is the
domain of Art, time of Poetry.1
1 See Lessing’s Tmocooh.
71
Take, for instance, as a typical instance,
female beauty. How laboured and how
cold any description appears, The great
est poets recognise this ; as, for instance,
when Scott wishes us to realise the Lady
of the Lake he does not attempt any de
scription, but just mentions her attitude
and then adds—
“ And ne’er did Grecian chisel trace
A Nymph, a Naiad, or a Grace,
Of finer form or lovelier face ! ”
A great poet must be inspired ; he
must possess an exquisite sense of beauty,
with feelings deeper than those of most men,
and yet well under control. “The Milton
of poetry is the man, in his own magnifi
cent phrase, of devout prayer to that
Eternal Spirit that can enrich with all
utterance and knowledge, and sends out
his seraphim with the hallowed fire of his
altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom
he pleases.” 1 And if from one point of
view Poetry brings home to us the im
measurable inequalities of different minds,
on the other hand it teaches us that genius
is no affair of rank or wealth.
“ I think of Chatterton, the marvellous boy,
The sleepless soul, that perish’d in his pride ;
Of Burns, that walk’d in glory and in joy
Behind his plough upon the mountain-side.” 2
A man may be a poet and yet write no
verse, but not if he writes bad or poor
ones.
“ Mediocribus esse poetis
Non homines, non Di, non concessere column a?.”3
Poetry will not live unless it be alive,
“ that which comes from the head goes to
the heart ”;4 and Milton truly said that
“ he who would not be frustrate of his
hope to write well hereafter in laudable
things, ought himself to be a true poem.”
For “ he who, having no touch of the
Muses’ madness in his soul, comes to the
door and thinks he will get into the temple
by the help of Art—he, I say, and his
Poetry are not admitted.” 5
Secondrate poets, like secondrate writers
1 Arnold.
3 Horace.
2 Wordsworth.
4 Coleridge.
5 Plato.
�THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
72
PART II
generally, fade gradually into dreamland;
The works of our greatest Poets are all
but the work of the true poet is immortal. episodes in that one great poem which
“ For have not the verses of Homer the genius of man has created since the
continued 2500 years or more without commencement of human history.
the loss of a syllable or a letter, during
A distinguished mathematician is said
which time infinite palaces, temples, once to have inquired what was proved
castles, cities, have been decayed and by Milton in his Paradise Lost; and there
demolished ? It is not possible to have are no doubt still some who ask them
the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, selves, even if they shrink from putting
Alexander, or Ciesar ; no, nor of the kings the question to others, whether Poetry
or great personages of much later years ; is of any use, just as if to give pleasure
for the originals cannot last, and the were not useful in itself. No true Utili
copies cannot but lose of the life and tarian, however, would feel this doubt,
truth. But the images of men’s wits and since the greatest happiness of the greatest
knowledge remain in books, exempted number is the rule of his philosophy.
from the wrong of time and capable of
We must not however “ estimate the
perpetual renovation. Neither are they works of genius merely with reference
fitly to be called images, because they to the pleasure they afford, even when
generate still and cast their seeds in the pleasure was their principal object. We
minds of others, provoking and causing must also regard the intelligence which
infinite actions and opinions in succeeding they presuppose and exercise.”1
ages ; so that if the invention of the ship
Thoroughly to enjoy Poetry we must
was thought so noble, which carrietli riches not limit ourselves, but must rise to a
and commodities from place to place, and high ideal.
consociateth the most remote regions in
“ Yes ; constantly in reading poetry, a
participation of their fruits, how much sense for the best, the really excellent,
more are letters to be magnified, which, and of the strength and joy to be drawn
as ships, pass through the vast seas of time from it, should be present in our minds,
and make ages so distant to participate of and should govern our estimate of what
the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, we read.” 2
the one of the other 1 ” 1
Cicero, in his oration for Archias, well
The poet requires many qualifications. asked, “ Has not this man then a right to
“ Who has traced,” says Cousin, “ the plan my love, to my admiration, to all the
of this poem ? Reason. Who has given means which I can employ in his defence ?
it life and charm ? Love. And who has For we are instructed by all the greatest
guided reason and love ? The Will.” All and most learned of mankind, that educa
men have some imagination, but the lover tion, precepts, and practice, can in every
and the poet
other branch of learning produce excel
“ Are of imagination all compact.
lence. But a poet is formed by the hand
of nature ; he is aroused by mental vigour,
The Poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
and inspired by what we may call the
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth
spirit of divinity itself. Therefore our
to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
Ennius has a right to give to poets the
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen epithet of Holy,3 because they are, as it
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing !
were, lent to mankind by the indulgent
A local habitation and a name.” 2
bounty of the gods.”
Poetry is the fruit of genius; but it
“Poetry,” says Shelley, “awakens and
cannot be produced without labour. Moore, enlarges the mind itself by rendering it
one of the airiest of poets, tells us that he
1 St. Hilaire.
2 Arnold.
was a slow and painstaking workman.
1 Bacon.
2 Shakespeare.
3 Plato styles poets the sons and interpreters
of the gods,
�CHAP. VI
POETRY
73
The man who has a love for Poetry can
scarcely fail to derive intense pleasure
from Nature, which to those who love it
is all “ beauty to the eye and music to
the ear.”
“Yet Nature never set forth the earth
in so rich tapestry as divers poets have
done ; neither with so pleasant rivers,
fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flow’ers, nor
whatsoever else may make the too-muchloved earth more lovely.”1
In the smokiest city the poet will
transport us, as if by enchantment, to the
fresh air and bright sun, to the murmur
of woods and leaves and water, to the
ripple of waves upon sand ; and enable
us, as in some delightful dream, to cast
off the cares and troubles of life.
The poet, indeed, must have more true
knowledge, not only of human nature,
but of all Nature, than other men are
gifted with.
Crabbe Robinson tells us that when a
“ Higher still and higher
stranger once asked permission to see
From the earth thou springest
Wordsworth’s study, the maid said, “ This
Like a cloud of fire ;
The blue deep thou wingest,
is master’s Library, but he studies in the
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever fields.” No wonder then that Nature
singest.
has been said to return the poet’s love.
the receptacle of a thousand unappre
hended combinations of thought. Poetry
lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of
the world, and makes familiar objects be
as if they were not familiar ; it repro
duces all that it represents, and the im
personations clothed in its Elysian light
stand thenceforward in the minds of those
who have once contemplated them, as
memorials of that gentle and exalted
content which extends itself over all
thoughts and actions with which it co
exists.”
And again, “All high Poetry is infinite;
it is as the first acorn, which contained
all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may
be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty
of the meaning never exposed. A great
poem is a fountain for ever overflowing
with the waters of wisdom and delight.”
Or, as he has expressed himself in his
Ode to a Skylark :
“ Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:
“ Call it not vain ;—they do not err
Who say that, when the poet dies,
Mute Nature mourns her worshipper,
And celebrates his obsequies.” 2
Swinburne says of Blake, and I feel
“ Like a glow-worm golden
entirely with him, though in my case the
In a dell of dew,
application would have been different,
Scattering unbeholden
that “The sweetness of sky and leaf, of
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it grass and water—the bright light life of
from the view.”
bird, child, and beast—is, so to speak,
We speak now of the poet as the
Maker or Creator—•ttoitjtt/s ; the origin
of the word “ bard ” seems doubtful.
The Hebrews well called their poets
“ Seers,” for they not only perceive more
than others, but also help other men to
see much which would otherwise be lost
to us. The old Greek word was aoiSos
—the Bard or Singer.
Poetry lifts the veil from the beauty
of the world which would otherwise be
hidden, and throws over the most familiar
objects the glow and halo of imagination.
kept fresh by some graver sense of
faithful and mysterious love, explained
and vivified by a conscience and purpose
in the artist’s hand and mind. Such a
fiery outbreak of spring, such an insurrec
tion of fierce floral life and radiant riot
of childish power and pleasure, no poet
or painter ever gave before ; such lustre
of green leaves and flushed limbs, kindled
cloud and fervent fleece, was never
wrought into speech or shape.”
1 Sydney, Defence of Poetry.
3 Scott.
�74
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
To appreciate Poetry we must not
merely glance at it, or rush through it,
or read it in order to talk or write about
it. One must compose oneself into the
right frame of mind. Of course for one’s
own sake one will read Poetry in times of
agitation, sorrow, or anxiety, but that is
another matter.
The inestimable treasures of Poetry
again are open to all of us. The best
books are indeed the cheapest. For the
price of a little beer, a little tobacco,
we can buy Shakespeare or Milton—or
indeed almost as many books as a man
can read with profit in a year.
Nor, in considering the advantage of
Poetry to man, must we limit ourselves
to its past or present influence. The
future of Poetry, says Mr. Matthew
Arnold, and no one was more qualified to
speak, “ The future of Poetry is immense,
because in Poetry, where it is worthy of
its high destinies, our race, as time goes
on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.
But for Poetry the idea is everything ;
the rest is a world of illusion, of divine
illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to
the idea; the idea is the fact. The
strongest part of our religion to-day is its
unconscious Poetry. We should conceive
of Poetry worthily, and more highly than
it has been the custom to conceive of it.
We should conceive of it as capable of
higher uses, and called to higher destinies
than those which in general men have
assigned to it hitherto.”
Poetry has been well called the record
“ of the best and happiest moments of the
happiest and best minds ” ; it is the light
of life, the very “ image of life expressed
in its eternal truth ” ; it immortalises all
that is best and most beautiful in the
world ; “ it purges from our inward sight
the film of familiarity which obscures
from us the wonder of our being” ; “it
is the centre and circumference of know
ledge ” ; and poets are “ mirrors of the
gigantic shadows which futurity casts
upon the present.”
Poetry, in effect, lengthens life ; it
creates for us time, if time be realised as
TART II
the succession of ideas and not of minutes ;
it is the “ breath and finer spirit of all
knowledge ” ; it is bound neither by time
nor space, but lives in the spirit of man.
What greater praise can be given than
the saying that life should be Poetry put
into action ?
CHAPTER VIT
MUSIC
“Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to
the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the
imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life
to everything. It is the essence of order, and
leads to all that is good, just, and beautiful, of
which it is the invisible, but nevertheless
dazzling, passionate, and eternal form.”—Plato.
Music is in one sense far more ancient
than man, and the voice was, from the
very commencement of human existence,
a source of melody. The early history of
Music is, however, unfortunately wrapped
in much obscurity. The use of letters
long preceded the invention of notes, and
tradition in such a matter can tell us but
little. So far, however, as musical in
struments are concerned, it is probable
that percussion came first, then wind in
struments, and lastly, those with strings :
first the Drum, then the Flute, and
thirdly, the Lyre.
The contest between Marsyas and
Apollo is supposed by some to typify the
struggle between the Flute and the Lyre ;
Marsyas representing the archaic Flute,
Apollo the champion of the Lyre. The
latter of course was victorious : it sets the
voice free, and the sound
“ Of music that is born of human breath
Conies straighter to the soul than any strain
The hand alone can make.” 1
Various myths have grown up to ex
plain the origin of Music. One Greek
tradition was to the effect that Grass
hoppers were human beings themselves
in a world before the Muses ; that when
1 L. Morris.
�CHAP. VII
MUSIC
75
the Muses came, being ravished with
delight, they “sang and sang and forgot
to eat, until they died of hunger for the
love of song. And they carry to heaven
the report of those who honour them on
earth.” 1
The old writers and commentators tell
us that Pythagoras, “ as he was one day
meditating on the want of some rule to
guide the ear, analogous to what had
been used to help the other senses,
chanced to pass by a blacksmith’s shop,
and observing that the hammers, which
were four in number, sounded very har
moniously, he had them weighed, and
found them to be in the proportion of
six, eight, nine, and twelve. Upon this
he suspended four strings of equal length
and thickness, etc., fastened weights in
the above-mentioned proportions to each
of them respectively, and found that they
gave the same sounds that the hammers
had done; viz., the fourth, fifth, and
octave to the gravest tone.”2 However
this may be, it would appear that the
lyre had at first four strings only;
Terpander is said to have given it three
more, and an eighth was subsequently
added.
The Chinese indicated the notes by
words or their initials. The lowest was
termed “ Koung,” or the Emperor, as
being the Foundation on which all were
supported ; the second was Tschang, the
Prime Minister ; the third, the Subject;
the fourth, Public Business ; the fifth,
the Mirror of Heaven.3 The Greeks also
had a name for each note. We have
unfortunately no specimens of Greek 4 or
Roman, or even of Early Christian music.
The so-called Gregorian notes were not
invented until six hundred years after
Gregory’s death. The Monastery of St.
Gall possesses a copy of Gregory’s Antiphonary, made about the year 780 by a
chorister who was sent from Rome to
Charlemagne to reform the Northern
music, and in this the sounds are indi
cated by “ pneumes,” from which our
notes were gradually developed, being
first arranged along one line, to which
others were gradually added.
The most ancient known piece-of music
for several voices is an English four men’s
song, “Summer is i-comen in,” which is
considered to be at least as early as 1240,
and is now in the British Museum.
.In the matter of music Englishmen
have certainly deserved well of the world.
Even as long ago as 1185 Giraldus
Cambrensis, Archdeacon of St. David’s,
says, “ The Britons do not sing their
tunes in unison like the inhabitants of
other countries, but in different parts.
So that when a company of singers meet
to sing, as is usual in this country, as
many different parts are heard as there
are singers.”1
The Venetian ambassador in the time
of Henry VIII. said of our English
Church music : “ The mass was sung by
His Majesty’s choristers, whose voices are
more heavenly than human; they did
not chaunt like men, but like angels.”
Dr. Burney says that Purcell was “ as
much the pride of an Englishman in
music as Shakespeare in productions of
the stage, Mil ton in epic poetry, Locke
in metaphysics, or Sir Isaac Newton in
philosophy and mathematics ” ; and yet
Purcell’s music is unfortunately but little
known to us now, as Macfarren says, “ to
our great loss.”
Purcell died early, and on his tomb is
the celebrated epitaph—
“ Here lies Henry Purcell, who left
this life, and is gone to that blessed place,
where, only, his harmony can be exceeded.”
The authors of some of the loveliest
music, and even in some cases that of
comparatively recent times, are unknown
to us. This is the case for instance with
the exquisite song “Drink to me only
with thine eyes,” the words of which
were taken by Jonson from Philostratus,
1 Plato.
2 Crowest.
and which has been considered as the
3 Rowbotliam, History of Music.
4 Since this was written some fragments of a most beautiful of all “people’s songs.”
hymn to Apollo have been found at Delphi.
1 Wakefield.
�76
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
The music of “ God save the Queen ”
has been adopted in more than half a
dozen other countries, and yet the author
ship is a matter of doubt, being attributed
by some to Dr. John Bull, by others to
Carey. It was apparently first sung in a
tavern in Cornhill.
Both the music and words of “ O
Death, rock me to sleep ” are said to be
by Anne Boleyn : “ Stay, Corydon ” and
“ Sweet Honey-sucking Bees ” by Wildye,
“ the first of madrigal writers. ” “ Rule
Britannia ” was composed by Arne, and
originally formed part of his Masque of
Alfred, first performed in 1740 at Cliefden, near Maidenhead. To Arne we are
also indebted for the music of “ Where
the Bee sucks, there lurk I.” “ The
Vicar of Bray ” is set to a tune originally
known as “ A Country Garden.” “ Come
unto these yellow sands ” we owe to
Purcell; “ Sigh no more, Ladies ” to
Stevens ; “ Home, Sweet Home ” to
Bishop.
There is a curious melancholy in
national music, which is generally in the
minor key ; indeed this holds good with
the music of savage races generally.
They appear, moreover, to have no love
songs.
Herodotus tells us that during the
whole time he was in Egypt he only
heard one song, and that was a sad one.
My own experience there was the same.
Some tendency to melancholy seems in
herent in music, and Jessica is not alone
in the feeling
Pz\RT II
composed “ Il trillo del Diavolo,” con
sidered to be his best work, in a dream.
Rossini, speaking of the chorus in G
minor in his “ Dal tuo stellato soglio,”
tells us: “ While I was writing the
chorus in G minor I suddenly dipped my
pen into a medicine bottle instead of the
ink. I made a blot, and when I dried
this with the sand it took the form of a
natural, which instantly gave me the idea
of the effect the change from G minor to
G major would make, and to this blot is
all the effect, if any, due.” But these of
course are exceptional cases.
There are other forms of Music, which,
though not strictly entitled to the name,
are yet capable of giving intense pleasure.
To the Sportsman what Music can excel
that of the hounds themselves. The
cawing of rooks has been often quoted as
a sound which has no actual beauty of its
own, and yet which is delightful from its
associations.
There is, moreover, a true Music of
Nature,— the song of birds, the whisper
of leaves, the ripple of waters upon a
sandy shore, the wail of wind or sea.
There was also an ancient impression
that the Heavenly bodies give out sound
as well as light: the Music of the Spheres
has become proverbial.
“There’s not the smallest orb which thou beholdest
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims ;
Such harmony is in immortal souls.
But while this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.” 1
Music indeed often seems as if it
scarcely belonged to this material universe,
The histories of music contain many but was
curious anecdotes as to the circumstances
“ A tone
under w’hich different works have been
Of some world far from ours,
Where music, and moonlight, and feeling are
composed.
one.” 2
Rossini tells us that he wrote the over
“ It is a language which is incapable
ture to the “ Gazza Ladra ” on the very
day of the first performance, in the upper of expressing anything impure.” There
loft of the La Scala, where he had been is music in speech as well as in song.
confined by the manager under the guard Not merely in the voice of those we love,
of four scene-shifters, who threw the text and the charm of association, but in
out of window to copyists bit by bit as it actual melody ; as when Milton says,
was composed. Tartini is said to have
1 Shakespeare.
2 Swinburne.
“ I am never merry when I hear sweet music.”
�MUSIC
CHAP. VII
77
“ The Angel ended, and in Adam’s ear
As touching the human heart—
So charming left his voice, that he awhile
Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed “ The soul of music slumbers in the shell,
Till waked and kindled by the master’s spell ;
to hear.”
And feeling hearts—touch them but rightly—
pour
It is remarkable that more pains are
A thousand melodies unheard before.”1
not taken with the voice in conversation
As an education—
as well as in singing, for
“What plea so tainted and corrupt
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil.”
As a general rule
“ I have sent books and music there, and all
Those instruments with which high spirits call
The future from its cradle, and the past
Out of its grave, and make the present last
In thoughts and joys which sleep, but cannot
die,
Folded within their own eternity.” 2
‘ ‘ The man that hath no Music in himself
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils ” ;1 As an aid to religion—
“ As from the power of sacred lays
but there are some notable exceptions.
The spheres began to move,
Dr. Johnson had. no love of music. On
And sung the great Creator’s praise
one occasion, hearing that a certain piece
To all the blessed above,
So when the last and dreadful hour
of music was very difficult, he expressed
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
his regret that it was not impossible.
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
Poets, as( might have been expected,
The dead shall live, the living die,
have sung most sweetly in praise of song.
And music shall untune the sky.” 3
They have, moreover, done so from the Or again—
opposite points of view.
“Hark how it falls ! and now it steals along,
Milton invokes it as a luxury—
“ And ever against eating cares
Lap me in soft Lydian airs ;
Married to immortal verse
Such as the meeting soul may pierce,
In notes -with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out ;
With wanton heed, and giddy cunning,
The melting voice through mazes running ;
Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony.”
Like distant beHs upon the lake at eve,
When all is still; and now it grows more strong
As when the choral train their dirges weave
Mellow and many voiced ; where every close
O’er the old minster roof, in echoing waves
reflows.
Oh ! I am rapt aloft. My spirit soars
Beyond the skies, and leaves the stars behind;
Lo ! angels lead me to the happy shores.
And floating paeans fill the buoyant wind.
Farewell! base earth, farewell ! my soul is
freed.”
Sometimes it is used as a temptation : so
The power of Music to sway the feel
Spenser says of Phsedria,
ings of Man has never been more cleverly
“ And she, more sweet than any bird on bough, portrayed than by Dryden in “ The
Would oftentimes amongst them bear a part, Feast of Alexander,” though the circum
And strive to passe (as she could well enough)
stances of the case precluded any reference
Their native musicke by her skilful art.”
to the influence of Music in its nobler
Or as an element of pure happiness—
aspects.
Poets have always attributed to Music
“There is in souls a sympathy with sounds ;
And as the mind is pitched, the ear is pleased —and who can deny it—a power even
With melting airs or martial, brisk or grave ; over the inanimate forces of Nature.
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Shakespeare accounts for shooting stars
Is touched within us, and the heart replies.
by the attraction of Music :
How soft the music of those village bells,
Falling at intervals upon the e.ar
In cadence sweet, now dying all away,
Now pealing loud again and louder still
Clear and sonorous, as the gale comes on.” 2
1 Shakespeare.
2 Cowper.
“ The rude sea grew civil at her song,
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the Sea-maid’s Music.”
Prose writers have also been inspired
1 Rogers.
2 Shelley.
3 Dryden.
�7«
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
by Music to their highest eloquence.
“ Music,” said Plato, “ is a moral law.
It gives a soul to the universe, wings to
the mind, flight to the imagination, a
charm to sadness, gaiety and life to
everything. It is the essence of order,
and leads to all that is good, just, and
beautiful, of which it is the invisible,
but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and
eternal form.”
“Music,” said Luther,
“is a fair and glorious gift from God. I
would not for all the world renounce my
humble share in music.” “Music,” said
Halevy, “is an art that God has given
us, in which the voices of all nations
may unite their prayers in one harmoni
ous rhythm.” And Carlyle, “ Music is a
kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech,
which leads us to the edge of the infinite,
and lets us for moments gaze into it.”
“ There are but seven notes in the
scale; make them fourteen,” says Newman,
“ yet what a slender outfit for so vast an
enterprise ! What science brings so miicli
out of so little ?
Out of what poor
elements does some great master in it
create his new world ! Shall we say that
all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere
ingenuity or trick of art, like some game
of fashion of the day, without reality,
without meaning ? . . . Is it possible that
that inexhaustible evolution and dis
position of notes, so rich yet so simple, so
intricate yet so regulated, so various yet
so majestic, should be a mere sound, which
is gone and perishes ? Can it be that
those mysterious stirrings of the heart, and
keen emotions, and strange yearnings after
we know not what, and awful impressions
from we know not whence, should be
wrought in us by what is unsubstantial,
and conies and goes, and begins and ends
in itself ? it is not so ; it cannot be. No ;
they have escaped from some higher
sphere ; they are the outpourings of eter
nal harmony in the medium of created
sound ; they are echoes from our Home ;
they are the voice of Angels, or the Mag
nificat of Saints, or the living laws of
Divine Governance, or the Divine Attri
butes ; something are they besides them
PART II
selves, which we cannot compass, which
we cannot utter, though mortal man, and
he perhaps not otherwise distinguished
above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting
them.”
Let me also quote Helmholtz, one of
the. profoundest exponents of modern
science. “Just as in the rolling ocean,
this movement, rhythmically repeated, and
yet ever-varying, rivets our attention and
hurries us along. But whereas in the sea
blind physical forces alone are at work,
and hence the final impression on the
spectator’s mind is nothing but solitude—
in a musical work of art the movement
follows the outflow of the artist’s own
emotions. Now gently gliding, now grace
fully leaping, now violently stirred,
penetrated, or laboriously contending with
the natural expression of passion, the
stream of sound, in primitive vivacity,
bears over into the hearer’s soul unimagined
moods which the artist has overheard
from his own, and finally raises him up to
that repose of everlasting beauty of which
God has allowed but few of his elect
favourites to be the heralds.”
Poetry and Music unite in song. From
the earliest ages song has been the sweet
companion of labour. The rude chant of
the boatman floats upon the water, the
shepherd sings upon the hill, the milk
maid in the dairy, the ploughman in the
field. Every trade, every occupation,
every act and scene of life, has long
had its own especial music. The bride
went to 'her marriage, the labourer to
his work, the old man to his last long rest,
each with appropriate and immemorial
music.
Music has been truly described as the
mother of sympathy, the handmaid of
Religion, and will never exercise its full
effect, as the Emperor Charles VI. said to
Farinelli, unless it aims not merely to
charm the ear, but to touch the heart.
There are many who consider that our
life at present is peculiarly prosaic and
mercenary. I greatly doubt whether
that be the case, but if so our need for
Music is all the more imperative.
�CHAP. VIII
THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE
Much indeed as Music has already done
for man, we may hope even more from it
in the future.
It is, moreover, a joy for all. To ap
preciate Science or Art requires some
training, and no doubt the cultivated ear
will more and more appreciate the beauties
of Music ; but though there are exceptional
individuals, and even races, almost devoid
of any love of Music, still they are happily
but rare.
Good Music, moreover, does not neces
sarily involve any considerable outlay ; it
is even now no mere luxury of the rich,
and we may hope that as time goes on, it
will become more and more the comfort
and solace of the poor.
CHAPTER VIII
THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE
“ Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee.”
Job.
“ And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running
brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
Shakespeare.
We are told in the first chapter of Genesis
that at the close of the sixth day “ God
saw every thing that he had made, and,
behold, it was very good.” Not merely
good, but very good. Yet how few of us
appreciate the beautiful world in which we
live 1
In preceding chapters I have incident
ally, though only incidentally, referred to
the Beauties of Nature ; but any attempt,
however imperfect, to sketch the blessings
of life must contain some special reference
to this lovely world itself, which the Greeks
happily called /cocr/ws—beauty.
Hamerton, in his charming work on
Landscape, says, “ There are, I believe,
four new experiences for which no de
scription ever adequately prepares us, the
first sight of the sea, the first journey in
the desert, the sight of flowing molten lava,
79
and a walk on a great glacier. We feel in
each case that the strange thing is pure
nature, as much nature as a familiar
English moor, yet so extraordinary that
we might be in another planet.” But it
would, I think, be easier to enumerate the
Wonders of Nature for which description
can prepare us, than those which are
beyond the power of language.
Many of us, however, walk through
the world like ghosts, as if we were in it,
but not of it. We have “ eyes and see
not, ears and hear not.” We must look
before wre can expect to see. To look is
indeed much less easy than to overlook,
and to be able to see what we do see, is a
great gift. Ruskin maintains that “ The
greatest thing a human soul ever does in
this world is to see something, and tell
what it saw in a plain way.” . I do not
suppose that his eyes are better than ours,
but how much more he sees with them !
“ To the attentive eye,” says Emerson,
“ each moment of the year has its own
beauty ; and in the same field it beholds
every hour a picture that was never seen
before, and shall never be seen again.
The heavens change every moment and
reflect their glory or gloom on the plains
beneath.”
The love of Nature is a great gift, and
if it is frozen or crushed out, the character
can hardly fail to suffer from the loss.
I will not, indeed, say that a person
who does not love Nature is necessarily
bad ; or that one who does, is necessarily
good; but it is to most minds a great
help. Many, as Miss Cobbe says, enter
the Temple through the gate called
Beautiful.
There are doubtless some to whom none
of the beautiful wonders of Nature; neither
the glories of the rising or setting sun ; the
magnificent spectacle of the boundless
ocean, sometimes so grand in its peaceful
tranquillity, at others so majestic in its
mighty power ; the forests agitated by the
storm, or alive with the song of birds;
nor the glaciers and mountains—there
are doubtless some whom none of these
magnificent spectacles can move, w’hom
�So
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
l’ART II
“ all the glories of heaven and earth else is illusion, or mere endurance. To
may pass in daily succession without be beautiful and to be calm, without
touching their hearts or elevating their mental fear, is the ideal of Nature.”
minds.” 1
I must not, however, enlarge on the
Such men are indeed pitiable. But, contrast and variety of the seasons, each
happily, they are exceptions. If we can of which has its own special charm and
noire of us as yet fully appreciate the i interest, as
beauties of Nature, we are beginning to
“ The daughters of the year
do so more and more.
Dance into light and die into the shade.” 1
For most of us the early summer has a
Our countrymen derive great pleasure
special charm. The very life is luxury.
The air is full of scent, and sound, and from the animal kingdom, in hunting,
sunshine, of the song of birds and the shooting, and fishing, thus obtaining fresh
murmur of insects ; the meadows gleam 1 air and exercise, and being led into much
with golden buttercups ; one can almost varied and beautiful scenery. Still it
see the grass grow and the buds open ; will probably ere long be recognised that
the bees hum for very joy, and the air even from a purely selfish point of view,
is full of a thousand scents, above all killing animals is not the way to get
the greatest enjoyment from them. How
perhaps that of new-mown hay.
The exquisite beauty and delight of much more interesting would every walk
a fine summer’s day in the country has in the country be, if Man would but treat
never perhaps been more truly, and there-I other animals with kindness, so that they
fore more beautifully, described, than by might approach us without fear, and we
Jefferies in his “Pageant of Summer.” I might have the constant pleasure of
Their
“ I linger,” he says, “ in the midst of the watching their winning ways.
long grass, the luxury of the leaves, and origin and history, structure and habits,
the song in the very air. I seem as if I senses and intelligence, offer an endless
could feel all the glowing life the sunshine field of interest and wonder.
The richness of life is marvellous. Any
gives and the south wind calls to being.
The endless grass, the endless leaves, the one who will sit down quietly on the
immense strength of the oak expanding, grass and watch a little, will be indeed
the unalloyed joy of finch and blackbird ; surprised at the number and variety of
from all of them I receive a little. . . . living beings, every one with a special
In the blackbird’s melody one note is history of its own, every one offering
mine ; in the dance of the leaf shadows ' endless problems of great interest.
“ If indeed thy heart were right, then
the formed maze is for me, though the
motion is theirs ; the flowers with a thou would every creature be to thee a rnirrox'
sand faces have collected the kisses of the of life, and a book of holy doctrine.” 2
The study of Natural History has the
morning. Feeling with them, I receive
some, at least, of their fulness of life. special advantage of carrying us into the
Never could I have enough ; never stay country and the open air.
Not but what towns are beautiful too.
long enough. . . . The hours when the
mind is absorbed by beauty are the only They teem with human interest and his
hours when we really live, so that the torical associations.
Wordsworth was an intense lover of
longer we can stay among these things
so much the more is snatched from nature ; yet does he not tell us, in lines
inevitable Time. . . . These are the which every Londoner will appreciate,
only hours that are not wasted—these that he knew nothing in nature more
hours that absorb the soul and fill it fair, no calm more deep, than the city of
with beauty. This is real life, and all London at early dawn ?
1 Beattie.
1 Tennyson.
Thomas a Kempis.
�THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE
CHAP. VIII
“Earth has not anything to show more fair ;
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the igorning ; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky ;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air..
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep !
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep ;
And all that mighty heart is lying still ! ”
Milton also described London as
81
mountain-side up to the very edge of the
eternal snow.
And what an infinite variety they
present.
“Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty ; violets, dim.
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes,
Or Cytherea’s breath ; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady
Most incident to maids ; bold oxlips and
The crown imperial ; lilies of all kinds,
The flower-de-luce being one.”1
Nor are they mere delights to the eye ;
they are full of mystery and suggestions.
Some of our streets indeed are lines of They almost seem like enchanted prin
cesses waiting for some princely deliverer.
loveliness, but yet, after being some time
Wordsworth tells us that
in a great city, one longs for the country.
“Too blest abode, no loveliness we see
In all the earth, but it abounds in thee.”
“The meanest floweret of the vale,
The simplest note that swells the gale,
The common sun, the air, the skies,
To him are opening paradise.”1
“ To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
Here Gray justly places flowers in the
first place, for whenever in any great
town we think of the country, flowers
seem first to suggest themselves.
“ Flowers,” says Ruskin, “ seem in
tended for the solace of ordinary humanity.
Children love them; quiet, tender, con
tented, ordinary people love them as they
grow ; luxurious and disorderly people
rejoice in them gathered. They are the
cottager’s treasure ; and in the crowded
town, mark, as with a little broken frag
ment of rainbow, the windows of the
workers in whose heart rests the covenant
of peace.” But in the crowded street, or
even in the formal garden, flowers always
seem, to me at least, as if they were pining
for the freedom of the woods and fields,
where they can live and grow as they
please.
There are flowers for almost all seasons
and all places,—flowers for spring,
summer, and autumn ; while even in the
very depth of winter here and there one
makes its appearance. There are flowers
of the fields and woods and hedgerows, of
the seashore and the lake’s margin, of the
Every color again, every variety of form,
has some purpose and explanation.
And yet, lovely as Flowers are, Leaves
add even more to the Beauty of Nature.
Trees in our northern latitudes seldom
own large flowers; and though of course
there are notable exceptions, such as the
Horse-chestnut, still even in these cases
the flowers live only a few days, while
the leaves last for months.
Every tree indeed is a picture in itself:
The gnarled and rugged Oak, the symbol
and source of our navy, sacred to the
memory of the Druids, the type of
strength, is the sovereign of British trees :
the Chestnut has beautiful, tapering, and
rich green, glossy leaves, delicious fruit,
and wood so durable that to it we owe
the grand and historic roof of Westminster
Hall.
The Birch is the queen of trees, with
her feathery foliage, scarcely visible in
spring but turning to gold in autumn;
the pendulous twigs tinged with purple,
and silver stems so brilliantly marked
with black and white.
The Beech enlivens the country by its
tender green in spring, rich tints in
summer, and glorious gold and orange in
1 Gray.
1 Shakespeare.
G
�THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
82
autumn, set off by the graceful gray
stem ; and has, moreover, such a wealth
of leaves that, as we see in autumn, there
are enough not only to clothe the tree
itself but to cover the grass underneath.
If the Beech owes much to its delicate
gray stem, quite as beautiful is the reddish
crimson of the Scotch Pine, in such
charming contrast with the rich green of
the foliage, by which it is shown off
rather than hidden. Pines, moreover,
with the green spires of the Firs, keep the
woods warm in winter.
The Elm forms grand masses of foliage
which turn a beautiful golden yellow in
autumn ; and the Black Poplar with its
perpendicular leaves, rustling and trem
bling with every breath of wind, towers
over most of our other forest trees.
Nor must I overlook the smaller trees :
the Yew with its thick green foliage ; the
wild Guelder rose, which lights up the
woods in autumn with translucent glossy
berries and many-tinted leaves ; or the
Bryonies, the Briar, the Traveller’s Joy,
and many another plant, even humbler
perhaps, and yet each with some exquisite
beauty and grace of its own, so that we
must all have sometimes felt our hearts
overflowing with gladness and gratitude,
as if the woods were full of music—as if
“ The woods were filled so full with song
There seemed no room for sense of wrong.”1
On the whole, no doubt, woodlands are
most beautiful in the summer ; yet even
in winter the delicate tracery of the
branches, which cannot be so well seen
when they are clothed with leaves, has a
special beauty of its own ; while every
now and then hoar frost or snow settles
like silver on every branch and twig,
lighting up the forest as if by enchant
ment in preparation for some fairy
festival.
I feel with Jefferies that “by day or
by night, summer or winter, beneath
trees the heart feels nearer to that depth
of life which the far sky means. The
rest of spirit found only in beauty, ideal
,
1 Tennyson.
TART II
and pure, comes there because the distance
seems within touch of thought.”
The general effect of forests in tropical
regions must be very different from that
of those in our latitudes.
Kingsley
describes it as one of helplessness, con
fusion, awe, all but terror. The trunks
are lofty and straight, rising to a great
height without a branch, so that the wood
seems at first comparatively open. In
Brazilian forests, for instance, the trees
struggle upwards, and the foliage forms
an unbroken canopy, perhaps a hundred
feet overheard. Here, indeed, high up in
the air is the real life of the forest.
Everything seems to climb to the light.
The quadrupeds climb, birds climb,
reptiles climb, and tlie variety of climb
ing plants is far greater than anything to
which we are accustomed.
Many savage nations worship trees,
and I really think my first feeling would
be one of delight and interest rather than
of surprise, if some day when I am alone
in a wood one of the trees were to speak
to me. Even by day there is something
mysterious in a forest, and this is much
more the case at night.
With wood, Water seems to be natur
ally associated. Without water no land
scape is complete, while overhead the
clouds add beauty to the heavens them
selves. The spring and the rivulet, the
brook, the river, and the lake, seem to
give life to Nature, and were indeed re
garded by our ancestors as living entities
themselves.
Water is beautiful in the
morning mist, in the broad lake, in the
glancing stream, in tlie river pool, or the
wide ocean, beautiful in all its varied
moods. Water nourishes vegetation ; it
clothes the lowlands with green and the
mountains with snow. It sculptures the
rocks and excavates the valleys, in most
cases acting mainly through the soft rain,
though our harder rocks are still grooved
by the ice-chisel of bygone ages.
The refreshing power of water upon
the earth is scarcely greater than that
which it exercises on the mind of man.
After a long spell of work how delightful
�CHAP. VIII
THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE
83
it is to sit by a lake or river, or on the and quarries and lines of stratification
seashore, and enjoy the fresh air, the began to show themselves, though the
glancing sunshine on the water, and the cliffs were still in shadow, and the more
ripple of the waves upon sand.
distant headlands still a mere succession
Every Englishman loves the sight of of ghosts, each one fainter than the one
the Sea. We feel that it is to us a second before it. As the morning advances the
home. It seems to vivify the very at sea becomes blue, the dark woods, green
mosphere, so that Sea air is proverbial as meadows, and golden cornfields of the
a tonic, and the very thought of it makes opposite coast more distinct, the details
the blood dance in our veins. The Ocean of the cliffs come gradually into view,
gives an impression of freedom and and fishing-boats with dark sails begin to
grandeur more intense perhaps even than appear.
the aspect of the heavens themselves. A
Gradually as the sun rises higher, a
poor woman from Manchester, on being yellow line of shore appears under the
taken to the seaside, is said to have ex opposite cliffs, and the sea changes its
pressed her delight on seeing for the first color, mapping itself out as it were, the
time something of which there was enough shallower parts turquoise blue, almost
for everybody. The sea coast is always green ; the deeper ones violet.
interesting. When we think of the cliff
This does not last long—a thunderstorm
sections with their histories of bygone comes up. The wind mutters overhead,
ages ; the shore itself teeming with sea the rain patters on the leaves, the coast
weeds and animals, waiting for the return opposite seems to shrink into itself, as if
of the tide, or thrown up from deeper it would fly from the storm. The sea
water by the waves; the weird cries of grows dark and rough, and white horses
seabirds ; the delightful feeling that, with appear here and there.
every breath, we are laying in a store of
But the storm is soon over. The clouds
fresh life, and health, and energy, it is break, the rain stops, the sun shines once
impossible to over-estimate all we owe to more, the hills opposite come out again.
the Sea.
They are divided now not only into fields
It is, moreover, always changing. We and woods, but into sunshine and shadow.
went for our holiday last year to Lyme The sky clears, and as the sun begins to
Regis. Let me attempt to describe the descend westwards the sea becomes one
changes in the view from our windows beautiful clear uniform azure, changing
during a single day. Our sitting-room again soon to pale blue in front and dark
opened on to a little lawn, beyond which violet beyond; and once more, as clouds
the ground dropped suddenly to the sea, begin to gather again, into an archipelago
while over about two miles of water were of bright blue sea and islands of deep
the hills of the Dorsetshire coast—-Golden ultramarine. As the sun travels west
Cap, with its bright crest of yellow sand, ward, the opposite hills change again.
and the dark blue Lias Cliff of Black Ven, They scarcely seem like the same country.
When I came down early in the morning What was in sun is now in shade, and
the sun was rising opposite, shining into what was in shade now lies bright in the
the room over a calm sea, along an avenue sunshine. The sea once more becomes a
of light; by degrees, as it rose, the whole uniform solid blue, only flecked in places
sea glowed in the sunshine while the hills by scuds of wind, and becoming paler
were bathed in a violet mist. By break towards evening as the sun sinks, the cliffs
fast-time all color had faded from the which catch his setting rays losing their
sea—it was like silver passing on each deep color and in some places looking
side into gray ; the sky blue, flecked with almost as white as chalk ; while at sunset
fleecy clouds ; while, on the gentler slopes they light up again for a moment with a
of the coast opposite, fields and woods, | golden glow, the sea at the same time
�84
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
sinking to a cold gray. But soon the
hills grow cold too, Golden Cap holding
out bravely to the last, and the shades of
evening settle over cliff and wood, corn
field and meadow.
These are but a part, and a very small
part, of the changes of a single day. And
scarcely any two days are alike. At
times a sea-fog covers everything. Again
the sea which sleeps to-day so peacefully,
sometimes rages, and the very existence of
the bay itself bears witness to its force.
The night, again, varies like the day.
Sometimes shrouded by a canopy of dark
ness, sometimes lit up by millions of
brilliant worlds, sometimes bathed in the
light of a moon, which never retains the
same form for two nights together.
If Lakes are less grand than the sea,
they are in some respects even more
lovely. The seashore is comparatively
bare. The banks of Lakes are often
richly clothed with vegetation which
comes close down to the water’s edge,
sometimes hanging even into the water
itself. They are often studded with wellwooded islands. They are sometimes
fringed with green meadows, sometimes
bounded by rocky promontories rising
directly from comparatively deep water ;
while the calm bright surface is often
fretted by a delicate pattern of interlacing
ripples ; or reflects a second, softened, and
inverted landscape.
To water again we owe the marvellous
spectacle of the rainbow—“ God’s bow in
the clouds.” It is indeed truly a heavenly
messenger, and so unlike anything else that
it scarcely seems to belong to this world.
Many things are colored, but the rain
bow seems to be color itself.
“ First the flaming red
Sprang vivid forth ; the tawny orange next,
And next delicious yellow ; by whose side
Fell the kind beams of all-refreshing green.
Then the pure blue that swells autumnal skies.
Ethereal play’d ; and then, of sadder hue
Emerged the deeper indigo (as when
The heavy-skirted evening droops with frost),
While the last gleamings of refracted light
Died in the fainting violet away.”1
1 Thomson.
PART II
We do not, I think, sufficiently realise
how wonderful is the blessing of color.
It would have been possible, it would
even seem more probable, that though
light might have enabled us to perceive
objects, this would only have been by
shade and form. How we perceive color
is not yet understood ; and yet when we
speak of beauty, among the ideas which
come to us most naturally are those of
birds and butterflies, flowers and shells,
precious stones, skies, and rainbows.
Our minds might have been constituted
exactly as they are, we might have been
capable of comprehending the highest and
sublimest truths, and yet, but for a small
organ in the head, the world of sound
would have been shut out from us ; we
should have lost all the varied melody of
nature, the charms of music, the conversa
tion of friends, and have been condemned
to perpetual silence: a slight alteration
in the retina, which is not thicker than a
sheet of paper, not larger than a finger
nail,—and the glorious spectacle of this
beautiful world, the exquisite variety of
form, the glow and play of color, the
variety of scenery, of woods and fields,
and lakes and hills, seas and mountains,
the beauty of the sky alike by day and
night, would all have been lost to us.
Mountains, again, “ seem to have been
built for the human race, as at once their
schools and cathedrals ; full of treasures
of illuminated manuscript for the scholar,
kindly in simple lessons for the worker,
quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker,
glorious in holiness for the worshipper.”
They are “great cathedrals of the earth,
with their gates of rock, pavements of
cloud, choirs of stream and stone, altars of
snow, and vaults of purple traversed by
the continual stars.” 1
All these beauties are comprised in
Tennyson’s exquisite description of (Enone’s
vale—the city, flowers, trees, river, and
mountains.
“ There lies a vale in Ida, lovelier
Than all the valleys of Ionian hills.
1 Ruskin.
�CHAP. VIII
THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE
The swimming vapour slopes athwart the glen,
Puts forth an arm, and creeps from pine to pine,
And loiters, slowly drawn. On either hand
The lawns and meadow-ledges midway down
Hang rich in flowers, and far below them roars
The long brook falling thro’ the clov’n ravine
In cataract after cataract to the sea.
Behind the valley topmost Gargarus
Stands up and takes the morning; but in front
The gorges, opening wide apart, reveal
Troas and Ilion’s column’d citadel,
The crown of Troas.”
85
The evening colors indeed soon fade
away, but as night comes on,
“ how glows the firmament
With living sapphires ! Hesperus that led
The starry host, rode brightest ; till the moon
Rising in clouded majesty, at length,
Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light,
And o’er the dark her silver mantle threw.” 1
We generally speak of a beautiful night
when it is calm and clear, and the stars
shine brightly overhead ; but how grand
And when we raise our eyes from earth, also are the wild ways of Nature, how
who has not sometimes felt “ the witchery magnificent when the lightning flashes,
of the soft blue sky ” ? who has not “ between gloom and glory ” ; when
watched a cloud floating upwards as if on ‘ ‘ From peak to peak, the rattling crags among
its way to heaven ?
Leaps the live thunder. ” 2
And yet “if, in our moments of utter
In the words of Ossian—
idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky
“ Ghosts ride in the tempest to-night;
as a last resource, which of its phenomena
Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind,
do we speak of? One says, it has been
Their songs are of other worlds.”
wet; and another, it has been w'indy;
Nor are the -wonders and beauties of the
and another, it has been warm. Who,
heavens limited by the clouds and the blue
among the whole chattering crowd, can
sky, lovely as they are. In the heavenly
tell me of the forms and the precipices
bodies we have before us the perpetual
of the chain of tall white mountains that
presence of the sublime. They-are so im
girded the horizon at noon yesterday 1
mense and so far away, and yet on soft
Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came
summer nights “they seem leaning down
out of the south, and smote upon their
to whisper in the ear of our souls.” 3
summits until they melted and mouldered
“ A man can hardly lift up his eyes to
away in a dust of blue rain ? Who saw
wards the heavens,” says Seneca, “ without
the dance of the dead clouds when the sun
wonder and veneration, to see so many
light left them last night, and the west
millions of radiant lights, and to observe
wind blew them before it like withered
their courses and revolutions, even with
leaves ? All has passed, unregretted as
out any respect to the common good of the
unseen ; or if the apathy be ever shaken
Universe.”
off, even for an instant, it is only by -what
Who does not sympathise with the
is gross, or what is extraordinary ; and
feelings of Dante as he rose from his visit
yet it is not in the broad and fierce mani
to the lower regions, until, he says,
festations of the elemental energies, not in
the clash of the hail, nor the drift of the “ On our view the beautiful lights of heaven
Dawned through a circular opening in the cave,
whirlwind, that the highest characters of
Thence issuing, we again beheld the stars.”
the sublime are developed.” 1
As we watch the stars at night they
But exquisitely lovely as is the blue
arch of the midday sky, with its inexhaust seem so still and motionless that we can
ible variety of clouds, “ there is yet a light hardly realise that all the time they are
which the eye invariably seeks with a rushing on with a velocity far far exceed
deeper feeling of the beautiful, the light ing any that man has ever accomplished.
Like the sands of the sea, the stars of
of the declining or breaking day, and
the flakes of scarlet cloud burning like heaven have ever been used as an appro
watch-fires in thegreen sky ofthe horizon.” 2 priate symbol of number, and we know
that therfe are more than 100,000,000 ;
1 Ruskin.
2 Ibid.
1 Milton.
2 Byron.
3 Symonds.
�86
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
many, no doubt, with planets of their own.
But this is by no means all. The floor of
heaven is not only “ thick inlaid with
patines of bright gold,” but is studded also
with extinct stars, once probably as bril
liant as our own sun, but now dead and
cold, as Helmholtz thinks that our own
sun will be some seventeen millions of
years hence. Then, again, there are the
comets, which, though but few are visible
to the unaided eye, are even more numerous
than the stars ; there are the nebulae, and
the countless minor bodies circulating in
space, and occasionally visible as meteors.
Nor is it only the number of the
heavenly bodies which is so overwhelm
ing ; their magnitude and distances are
almost more impressive. The ocean is
so deep and broad as to be almost infinite,
and indeed in so far as our imagination
is the limit, so it may be. Yet what is
the ocean compared to the sky ? Our
globe is little compared to the giant orbs
of Jupiter and Saturn, which again sink
into insignificance by the side of the Sun.
The Sun itself is almost as nothing com-,
pared with the dimensions of the solar
system. Sirius is a thousand times as
great as the Sun, and a million times as
far away. The solar system itself travels
in one region of space, sailing between
worlds and worlds ; and is surrounded by
many other systems at least as great and
complex; while we know that even then
we have not reached the limits of the
Universe itself.
There are stars so distant that their
light, though travelling 180,000 miles in
a second, yet takes years to reach us ; and
beyond all these are other systems of stars
which are so far away that they cannot
be perceived singly, but even in our most
powerful telescopes appear only as minute
clouds or nebulae.
The velocities of the Heavenly bodies
are equally astounding. We ourselves
make our annual journey round the Sun
at the rate of 1000 miles a minute ; of
the so-called “ fixed ” stars Sirius moves
at the same rate, and Arcturus no less
than 22,000 miles a minute. And yet
PART II
the distances of the stars are so great
that 1000 years makes hardly any differ
ence in the appearance of the Heavens.
It is, indeed, but a feeble expression
of the truth to say that the infinities re
vealed to us by Science,—the infinitely
great in the one direction, and the in
finitely small in the other,—go far beyond
anything which had occurred to the un
aided imagination of Man, and are not
only a never-failing source of pleasure
and interest, but lift us above the petty
troubles, and help us to bear the greater
sorrows, of life.
CHAPTER IX
THE TROUBLES OF LIFE
“ Count each affliction, whether light or grave,
God’s messenger sent down to thee ;
Grief should be
Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate ;
Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free ;
Strong to consume small troubles ; to commend
Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts
lasting to the end.”
Aubrey be Vere.
We have in life many troubles, and
troubles are of many kinds. Some
sorrows, alas, are real enough, especially
those we bring on ourselves, but others,
and by no means the least numerous, are
mere ghosts of troubles : if we face them
boldly, we find that they have no sub
stance or reality, but are mere creations
of our own morbid imagination, and that
it is as true now as in the time of David
that “ Man disquieteth himself in a vain
shadow.”
Some, indeed, of our troubles are evils,
but not real; while others are real, but
not evils.
“ And yet, into how unfathomable a
gulf the mind rushes when the troubles
of this world agitate it. If it then forget
its own light, which is eternal joy, and
rush into the outer darkness, which are the
�CHAP. IX
THE TROUBLES OF LIFE
cares of this world, as the mind now does,
it knows nothing else but lamentations.” 1
“Athens,” said Epictetus, “is a good
place,—but happiness is much better ; to
be free from passions, free from dis
turbance.”
We should endeavour to maintain our
selves in
“ that blessed mood
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight,
Of all this unintelligible world
Is lightened.” 2
87
happen equally to good men and bad,
being things which make us neither
better nor worse.”
“ The greatest evils,” observes Jeremy
Taylor, “ are from within us ; and from
ourselves also we must look for our
greatest good.”
“ The mind,” says Milton,
“ is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
Milton indeed in his blindness saw
more beautiful visions, and Beethoven in
his deafness heard more heavenly music,
So shall we fear “neither the exile of than most of us can ever hope to enjoy.
Aristides, nor the prison of Anaxagoras,
We are all apt, when we know not
nor the poverty of Socrates, nor the con what may happen, to fear the worst.
demnation of Phocion, but think virtue When we know the full extent of any
worthy our love even under such trials.” 3 : danger, it is half over. Hence, we dread
We should then be, to a great extent, in-1 ghosts more than robbers, not only with
dependent of external circumstanced, for out reason, but against reason ; for even
if ghosts existed, how could they hurt us ?
“ Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage,
and in ghost stories, few, even of those
Minds innocent and quiet take
who say that they have seen ,a ghost, ever
That for an hermitage.
profess or pretend to have felt one.
“ If I have freedom in my love,
Milton, in his description of death,
And in my soul am free ;
dwells on this characteristic of obscurity :
Angels alone that soar above
Enjoy such liberty.” 4
In the wise words of Shakespeare,
“ All places that the eye of Heaven visits
Are to the wise man ports and happy havens.”
“ The other shape—
If shape it might be call’d that shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb ;
Or substance might be call’d that shadow
seem’d,
For each seem’d either—black he stood as
night,
Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell.
And shook a dreadful dart. What seem’d
his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.”
Happiness indeed depends much more
on what is within than without us.
When Hamlet says that the world is “ a
goodly prison ; in which there are many
confines, wards, and dungeons; Denmark
The effect of darkness and night in
being one of the worst,” and Rosencrantz enhancing terrors is dwelt on in one of
differs from him, he rejoins wisely, “ Why the sublimest passages in Job—
then, ’tis none to you : for there is
“ In thoughts from the visions of the night,
nothing either good or bad, but thinking
When deep sleep falleth on men,
makes it so : to me it is a prison.”
Fear came upon me, and trembling,
Which made all my bones to shake.
“All is opinion,” said Marcus Aurelius.
Then a spirit passed before my face ;
“ That which does not make a man worse,
The hair of my flesh stood up :
how can it make his life worse ? But
It stood still, but I could not discern the form
death certainly, and life, honor and dis
thereof:
An image was before mine eyes,
honor, pain and pleasure, all these things
1 King Alfred’s translation of the Consola
tions of Boethius.
2 Wordsworth.
3 Plutarch.
4 Lovelace.
There was silence, and I heard a voice, saying,
Shall mortal man be more just than God ? ”
Thus was the terror turned into a lesson
of comfort and of mercy.
�88
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
We often magnify troubles and diffi
culties, and look at them till they seein
much greater than they really are.
Dangers are often “ light, if they once
seem light; and more dangers have
deceived men than forced them: nay,
it were better to meet some dangers
half way, though they come nothing
near, than to keep too long a watch
upon their approaches ; for if a man
watch too long, it is odds he will fall
asleep.” 1
Foresight is wise, but fore-sorrow is
foolish ; and castles are at any rate better
than dungeons, in the air.
It happens, unfortunately too often,
that by some false step, intentional or
unintentional, we have missed the right
road, and gone astray. Can we then
retrace our steps ? can we recover what
is lost ? This may be done. It is too
gloomy a view to affirm that
“ A sigh too much, or a kiss too long,
And there comes a mist and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.” 2
There are two noble sayings of Socrates,
that to do evil is more to be avoided
than to suffer it; and that when a man
has done evil, it is better for him to be
punished than to be unpunished.
We generally speak of selfishness as
a fault, and as if it interfered with the
general happiness. But this is not alto
gether correct. The pity is that so many
people are foolishly selfish ; that they
pursue a course of action which neither
makes themselves nor any one else happy.
Is there not some truth in Goethe’s
saying, though I do not altogether agree
with him, that “ every man ought to begin
with himself, and make his own happiness
first, from which the happiness of the
whole world would at last unquestionably
follow” ? This is perhaps too broadly
stated, and of course exceptions might be
pointed out : but assuredly if every one
would avoid excess, and take care of his
own health ; would keep himself strong
and cheerful; would make his home
1 Bacon.
2 G. Macdonald.
PART II
happy, and’give no cause for the petty
vexations which often embitter domestic
life ; would attend to his own affairs and
keep himself sober and solvent; would,
in the words of the Chinese proverb,
“sweep away the snow from before his
own door, and never mind the frost upon
his neighbour’s tiles”: even though it
were not from the nobler motives, still,
how well it would be for his family,
relations, and friends. But, unfortunately,
“ Look round the habitable world, how few
Know their own good, or, knowing it, pursue.”1
It would be a great thing if people
could be brought to realise that they can
never add to the sum of their happiness
by doing wrong. In the case of children,
indeed, we recognise this ; we perceive
that a spoilt child is not a happy one;
that it would have been far better for
him to have been punished at first and
thus saved from greater suffering in after
life.
The beautiful idea that every man has
with him a Guardian Angel is true in
deed : for Conscience is ever on the watch,
| ever ready to warn us of danger.
No doubt we often feel disposed to
complain, and yet it is most ungrateful:
‘‘ For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity ;
To perish rather, swallowed up, and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated thought! ” 2
But perhaps it will be said that we are
sent here in preparation for another and
a better world. Well, then, why should
we complain of what is but a preparation
for future happiness ?
We ought to
“ Count each affliction, whether light or grave,
God’s messenger sent down to thee ; do thou
With courtesy receive him ; rise and bow ;
And, ere his shadow pass thy threshold, crave
Permission first his heavenly feet to lave ;
Then lay before him all thou hast; allow
No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow,
Or mar thy hospitality ; no wave
Of mortal tumult to obliterate
1 Dryden.
2 Milton.
�LABOUR AND REST
CHAP. X
and joy”; and if properly understood,
would enable us “ to acquiesce in the
present without repining, to remember
the past with thankfulness, and to meet
the future hopefully and cheerfully with
out fear or suspicion.”
The soul’s marmoreal calmness : Grief should
be
Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate ;
Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free ;
Strong to consume small troubles ; to commend
Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts
lasting to the end.” 1
Some persons are like the waters of
Bethesda, and require to be troubled
before they can exercise their virtue.
“We shall get more contentedness,”
CHAPTER X
says Plutarch, “ from the presence of all
LABOUR AND REST
these blessings if we fancy them as absent,
and remember from time to time how
“ Through labour to rest, through combat to
people when ill yearn for health, and victory.”
Thomas a Kempis.
people in war for peace, and strangers
and unknown in a great city for reputa Among the troubles of life I do not, of
tion and friends, and how painful it is to course, reckon the necessity of labour.
Work indeed, and hard work too, if
be deprived of all these when one has
once had them. For then each of these only it be in moderation, is in itself a
blessings will not appear to us only great rich source of happiness. We all know
and valuable when it is lost, and of no how quickly time passes when we are
value when we have it. . . . And yet it well employed, while the moments hang
makes much for contentedness of mind to heavily on the hands of the idle. Occupa
look for the most part at home and to our tion drives away care and all the small
own condition ; or if not, to look at the troubles of life. The busy man has no
case of people worse off than ourselves, time to brood or to fret.
and not, as people do, to compare our
“ From toil he wins his spirits light,
selves with those who are better off. . . .
From busy day the peaceful night ;
But you will find others, Chians, or
Rich, from the very want of wealth,
Galatians, or Bithynians, not content
In Heaven’s best treasures, peace, and
health.” 1
with the share of glory or power they
have among their fellow-citizens, but
This applies especially to t^e labour of
weeping because they do not wear sena the field and the workshop. Humble it
tors’ shoes ; or, if they have them, that may be, but if it does not dazzle with the
they cannot be praetors at Rome; or if promise of fame, it gives the satisfaction
they get that office, that they are not of duty fulfilled, and the inestimable
consuls ; or if they are consuls, that they blessing of health. As Emerson reminds
are only proclaimed second and not first. those entering life, “ The angels that live
. . . Whenever, then, you admire any one with them, and are weaving laurels of life
carried by in his litter as a greater man for their youthful brows, are toil and truth
than yourself, lower your eyes and look and mutual faith.”
at those that bear the litter.” And again,
Labour was truly said by the ancients
“ I am very taken with Diogenes’ remark to be the price which the gods set upon
to a stranger at Lacedaemon, who was everything worth having. We all admit,
dressing with much display for a feast. though we often forget, the marvellous
‘ Does not a good man consider every day power of perseverance; and yet all Nature,
a feast ? ’ . . . Seeing then that life is down to Bruce’s spider, is continually
the most complete initiation into all these | impressing this lesson on us.
things, it ought to be full of ease of mind J Hard writing makes easy reading ;
1 Aubrey de Vere.
.
1 Gray.
�THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
9°
Plato is said to have rewritten the first
page of the Aepit&Zic thirteen times ; and
Carlo Maratti, we are told, made three
hundred sketches of the head of Antinous
before he brought it to his satisfaction.
It is better to wear out than to rust
out, and there is “ a dust which settles on
the heart, as well as that which rests upon
the ledge.”1
At the present time, though there may
be some special drawbacks, we come to
our work with many advantages which
were not enjoyed in olden times. We
live in much greater security ourselves,
and are less liable to have the fruits of
our labour torn violently from us.
But though labour is good for man,
it may be, and unfortunately often is,
carried to excess.
Many are wearily
asking themselves
“ All why
Should life all labour be ? ” 2
There is a time for all things, says
Solomon, a time to work and a time to
play : we shall work all the better for
reasonable change, and one reward of
work is to secure leisure.
It is a good saying that where there’s
a will there’s a way ; but while it is all
very well to wish, wishes must not take
the place of work.
In whatever sphere his duty lies, every
man must rely mainly on himself. Others
can help us, but we must make ourselves.
No one else can see for us. To profit by
our advantages we must learn to use for
ourselves
“The dark lantern of the spirit
Which none can see by, but he who bears it. ”
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that
honest work is never thrown away. If
we do not find the imaginary treasure, at
any rate we enrich the vineyard.
“Work,” says Nature to man, “in
every hour, paid or unpaid; see only
that thou work, and thou canst not
escape the reward : whether thy work be
fine or coarse, planting corn or writing
1 Jefferies.
2 Tennyson.
part II
epics, so only it be honest work, done to
thine own approbation, it shall earn a
reward to the senses as well as to the
thought: no matter how often defeated,
you are born to victory. The reward
of a thing well done is to have done
it.” 1
Nor can any work, however persever
ing, or any success, however great, exhaust
the prizes of life.
The most studious, the most successful,
must recognise that there yet remain
“ So much to do that is not e’en begun,
So much to hope for that we cannot see,
So much to win, so many things to be.”2
In olden times the difficulties of study
were far greater than they are now.
Books were expensive and cumbersome,
in many cases moreover chained to the
desks on which they were kept. The
greatest scholars have often been very
poor. Erasmus used to read by moonlight
because he could not afford a candle, and
“ begged a penny, not for the love of
charity, but for the love of learning.” 3
Want of time is no excuse for idleness.
“ Our life,” says Jeremy Taylor, “ is too
short to serve the ambition of a haughty
prince or a usurping rebel; too little
time to purchase great wealth, to satisfy
the pride of a vainglorious fool, to
trample upon all the enemies of our just
or unjust interest: but for the obtaining
virtue, for the purchase of sobriety and
modesty, for the actions of religion, God
gives us time sufficient, if we make the
outgoings of the morning and evening,
that is our infancy and old age, to be
taken into the computations of a man.”
Work is so much a necessity of exist
ence, that it is less a question whether,
than how, w’e shall work. An old saying
tells us that the Devil finds work for those
who do not make it for themselves and
there is a Turkish proverb that the Devil
tempts the busy man, but the idle man
tempts the Devil.
If we Englishmen have succeeded as a
2 W. Morris.
1 Emerson.
3 Coleridge.
�LABOUR AND REST
CHAP. X
race, it has been due in no small measure
to the fact that we have worked hard.
Not only so, but we have induced the
forces of Nature to work for us. “ Steam,”
says Emerson, “ is almost an Englishman.”
The power of work has especially
characterised our greatest men. Cecil
said of Sir W. Raleigh that he “ could
toil terribly.”
We are most of us proud of belonging
to the greatest Empire the world has ever
seen. It may be said of us with especial
truth in Wordsworth’s words that
“ The world is too much with us ; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”
Yes, but what world ? The world will be
with us sure enough, and whether we
please or not. But what sort of world it
will be for us, will depend greatly on
ourselves.
We are told to pray not to be taken
out of the world, but to be kept from the
evil.
There are various ways of working.
Quickness may be good, but haste is bad.
“Wie das Gestirn
Ohne Hast
. Ohne Rast
Drehe sich Jeder
Um die eigne Last.”1
“Like a star, without haste, without rest,
let every one fulfil his own best.”
Lastly, work secures the rich reward of
rest ; we must rest to be able to work
well, and work to be able to enjoy rest.
“We must no doubt beware that our
rest become not the rest of stones, which
so long as they are torrent-tossed and
thunder-stricken maintain their majesty ;
but when the stream is silent, and the
storm past, suffer the grass to cover them,
and the lichen to feed on them, and are
ploughed down into the dust. . . . The
rest which is glorious is of the chamois
couched breathless in its granite bed, not
of the stalled ox over his fodder.” 2
When we have done our best we may
wait the result without anxiety.
“ What hinders a man, who has clearly
1 Goethe.
2 Ruskin.
9i
comprehended these things, from living
with a light heart and bearing easily the
reins ; quietly expecting everything which
can happen, and enduring that which has
already happened ? Would you have me
to bear poverty ? Come and you will
know what poverty is when it has found
one who can act well the part of a poor
man. Would you have me to possess
power1? Let me have power, and also
the trouble of it. Well, banishment ?
Wherever I shall go, there it will be well
with me.” 1
“We complain,” says Ruskin, “of the
want of many things—-we want votes, we
want liberty, we want amusement, we
want money. Which of us feels, or
knows, that he wants peace ?
“ There are two ways of getting it, if
you do want it. The first is wholly in
your own power; to make yourselves
nests of pleasant thoughts. . . . None of
us yet know, for none of us have yet been
taught in early youth, what fairy palaces
we may build of beautiful thought—proof
against all adversity. Bright fancies,
satisfied memories, noble histories, faith
ful sayings, treasure-houses of precious
and restful thoughts ; which care cannot
disturb, nor pain make gloomy, nor
poverty take away from us—houses built
without hands, for our souls to live in.”
The Buddhists believe in many forms
of future punishment; but the highest
reward of virtue is Nirvana—the final
and eternal rest.
Very touching is the appeal of Ashmanezer to be left in peace, which was
engraved on his Sarcophagus at Sidon.2
“ In the month of Bui, the fourteenth
year of my reign, I, King Ashmanezer,
King of the Sidonians, son of King
Tabuith, King of the Sidonians, spake,
saying : ‘ I have been stolen away before
my time—a son of the flood of days.
The whilom great is dumb ; the son of
gods is dead. And I rest in this grave,
even in this tomb, in the place which I
have built. My adjuration to all the
Ruling Powers and all men : Let no one
1 Epictetus.
2 Now in Paris.
�9*
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
open this resting-place, nor search for
treasure, for there is no treasure with us ;
and let him not bear away the couch of
my rest, and not trouble us in this
resting-place by disturbing the couch of
my slumbers. . . . For all men who
should open the tomb of my rest, or any
man who should carry away the couch of
my rest, or any one who trouble me on
this couch : unto them there shall be no
rest with the departed : they shall not be
buried in a grave, and there shall be to
them neither son nor seed. . . . There
shall be to them neither root below nor
fruit above, nor honour among the living
under the sun.’ ” 1
The idle man does not know what it is
to enjoy rest, for he has not earned it.
Hard work, moreover, tends not only to
give us rest for the body, but, what is
even more important, peace to the mind.
If we have done our best to do, and to
be, we can rest in peace.
“ En la sua voluntade e nostra pace.” 2
In His will is our peace ; and in such
peace the mind will find its truest delight,
for
“When, care sleeps, the soul wakes.”
In youth, as is right enough, the idea
of exertion, and of struggles, is inspiriting
and delightful; but as years advance the
hope and prospect of peace and of rest
gain ground gradually, and
“ When the last dawns are fallen on gray,
And all life’s toils and ease complete,
They know who work, not they who play
If rest is sweet.” 3
1 From Sir M. E. Grant Duff’s A Winter in
Syria.
2 Dante.
3 Symonds.
PART II
CHAPTER XT
RELIGION
“ And what doth the Lord require of thee,
but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with thy God ? ”—Micah.
“Pure religion and undefiled before God and
the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and
widows in their affliction, and to keep himself
unspotted from the world.”—James i.
“The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”
2 Corinthians.
It would be quite out of place here to
enter into any discussion of theological
problems or to advocate any particular
doctrines. Nevertheless I could not omit
what is to most so great a comfort and
support in sorrow and suffering, and a
source of the purest happiness.
We commonly, however, bring together
under the name of Religion two things
which are yet very different: the religion
of the heart, and that of the head. The
first deals with conduct, and the duties of
Man ; the second with the nature of the
supernatural and the future of the Soul,
being in fact a branch of knowledge.
Religion should be a strength, guide,
and comfort, not a source of intellectual
anxiety or angry argument. To persecute
for religion’s sake implies belief in a
jealous, cruel, and unjust Deity. If we
have done our best to arrive at the truth,
to torment oneself about the result is to
doubt the goodness of God, and, in the
words of Bacon, “ to bring down the Holy
Ghost, instead of the likeness of a dove,
in the shape of a raven.” “ The letter
killeth, but the spirit giveth life,” and it
is a primary duty to form the highest
possible conception of God.
Many, however, and especially many
women, render themselves miserable on
entering life by theological doubts and
difficulties. These have reference, in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, not
to what we should do, but to what we
should think. As regards action, con-
�RELIGION
CHAP. XI
science is generally a ready guide; to
follow it is the real difficulty. Theology,
on the other hand, is a most abstruse
science ; but as long as we honestly wish
to arrive at truth we need not fear that
we shall be punished for unintentional
error. “For what,” says Micah, “doth
the Lord require of thee, but to do justly,
to love mercy, and to walk humbly with
thy God.” There is very little theology
in the Sermon on the Mount, or indeed
in any part of the first three Gospels ; and
the differences which keep us apart have
their origin rather in the study than the
Church. Religion was intended to bring
peace on earth and goodwill towards men,
and whatever tends to hatred and perse
cution, however correct in the letter, must
be utterly wrong in the spirit.
How much misery would have been
saved to Europe if Christians had been
satisfied with the Sermon on the Mount!
Bokhara is said to have contained more
than three hundred colleges, all occupied
with theology, but ignorant of everything
else, and it was probably one of the most
bigoted and uncharitable cities in the world.
“ Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth.”
We must not forget that
“ He prayeth best who lovetli best
All things both great and small.” 1
Theologians too often appear to agree that
“ The awful shadow of some unseen power
Floats, though unseen, among us ” ; 2
and in the days of the Inquisition many
must have sighed for the cheerful childlike
religion of the Greeks, if they could but
have had the Nymphs and Nereids, the
Fays and Faeries, with Destiny and Fate,
but without Jupiter and Mars.
Sects are the work of Sectarians. No
truly great religious teacher, as Carlyle
said, ever intended to found a new Sect.
Diversity of worship, says a Persian
proverb, “ has divided the human race
into seventy-two nations. From among
all their dogmas I have selected one—‘ Di
vine Love.’ ” And again, “ He needs no
1 Coleridge.
2 Shelley.
93
other rosary whose thread of life is struug
with the beads of love and thought.”
There is more true Christianity in some
pagan Philosophers than in certain Chris
tian theologians. Take, for instance,
Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and
Plutarch.
“ Now I, Callicles,” says Socrates, “ am
persuaded of the truth of these things,
and I consider how I shall present my
soul whole and undefiled before the judge
in that day. Renouncing the honours at
which the world aims, I desire only to
know the truth, and to live as well as I
can, and, when the time comes, to die.
And, to the utmost of my power, I exhort
all other men to do the same. And in
return for your exhortation of me, I
exhort you also to take part in the great
combat, which is the combat of life, and
greater than every other earthly conflict.”
“As to piety towards the Gods,” says
Epictetus, “you must know that this is
the chief thing, to have right opinions
about them, to think that they exist, and
that they administer the All well and
justly; and you must fix yourself in this
principle (duty), to obey them, and to
yield to them in everything which
happens, and voluntarily to follow it
as being accomplished by the wisest
intelligence.”
“ Do not act,” says Marcus Aurelius,
“ as if thou wert going to live ten
thousand years. Death hangs over thee.
While thou livest, while it is in thy
power, be good. . . .
“ Since it is possible that thou mayest
depart from life this very moment, regu
late every act and thought accordingly.
But to go away from among men, if there
be Gods, is not a thing to be afraid of,
for the Gods will not involve thee in
evil; but if indeed they do not exist, or
if they have no concern about human
affairs, what is it to me to live in a
universe devoid of Gods, or without a
Providence. But in truth they do exist,
and they do care for human things, and
they have put all the means in man’s
power to enable him not to fall into real
�94
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
evils. And as for the rest, if there was
anything evil, they would have provided
for this also, that it should be altogether
in a man’s power not to fall into it.”
And Plutarch : “ The Godhead is not
blessed by reason of his silver and gold,
nor yet Almighty through his thunder
and lightnings, but on account of know
ledge and intelligence.”
It is no doubt very difficult to arrive
at the exact teaching of Eastern Moralists,
but the same spirit runs through Oriental
Literature.
For instance, in the Toy
Cart of King Sudraka, the earliest
Sanskrit drama with which we are ac
quainted, when the wicked Prince tempts
Vita to murder the Heroine, and says
that no one would see him, Vita declares
“ All nature would behold the crime—
the Genii of the Grove, the Sun, the
Moon, the Winds, the Vault of Heaven,
the firm - set Earth, the mighty Yama
who judges the dead, and the conscious
Soul.”
There is indeed a tone of doubting sad
ness in Roman moralists, as in Hadrian’s
dying lines to his soul—
“Animula, vagula, blandula
Hospes, comesque corporis
Qua nunc abibis in loca :
Pallidula, rigida, nudula,
Nec, ut soles, dabis jocos.”
PART II
than to say that Plutarch is a man in
constant, fickle, easily moved to anger,
revengeful for trifling provocations, vexed
at small things.”
Many things have been mistaken for
religion ; selfishness especially, but also
fear, hope, love of music, of art, of pomp ;
scruples often take the place of love, and
the glory of heaven is sometimes made to
depend upon precious stones and jewellery.
Many, as has been well said, run after
Christ, not for the miracles, but for the
loaves.
In many cases religious differences are
mainly verbal. There is an Eastern tale
of four men, an Arab, a Persian, a Turk,
and a Greek, who agreed to club together
for an evening meal, but when they had
done so they quarrelled as to what it
should be. The Turk proposed Azum,
the Arab Aneb, the Persian Anghur,
while the Greek insisted on Staphylion.
While they were disputing
“ Before their eyes did pass
Laden with grapes, a gardener’s ass.
Sprang to his feet each man, and showed,
With eager hand, that purple load.
‘ See Azum,’ said the Turk ; and ‘ see
Anghur,’ the Persian ; 1 what should be
Better.’ ‘Nay Aneb, Aneb ’tis, ’
The Arab cried. The Greek said, 'This
Is my Staphylion.’ Then they bought
Their grapes in peace.
Hence be ye taught.” 1
The same spirit is expressed in the
It is said that on one occasion, when
epitaph on the tomb of the Duke of Dean Stanley had been explaining his
Buckingham in Westminster Abbey—
views to Lord Beaconsfield, the latter
replied, “ Ah 1 Mr. Dean, that is all very
“ Dubins non improbus vixi
Incertus morior, non perturbatus ;
well, but you must remember,—No dog
Humanum est nescire et errare,
mas, no Deans.” To lose such Deans as
Deo confido
Stanley would indeed be a great misfor
Omnipotent! benevolentissimo :
tune ; but does it follow ? Religions, far
Ens entium miserere mei.”
from being really built on Dogmas, are
Take even the most extreme type of too often weighed down and crushed by
difference. Is the man, says Plutarch, them. No one can doubt that Stanley
“ a criminal who holds there are no gods ; has done much to strengthen the Church
and is not he that holds them to be such of England.
as the superstitious believe them, is he
We may not always agree with Spinoza,
not possessed with notions infinitely more but is he not right when he says, “ The
atrocious 1 I for my part would much first precept of the divine law, therefore,
rather have men say of me that there indeed its sum and substance, is to love
never was a Plutarch at all, nor is now,
1 Arnold. Pearls of the Faith.
�RELIGION
CHAP. XI
God unconditionally as the supreme good
—unconditionally, I say, and not from
any love or fear of aught besides ” ? And
again, that the very essence of religion is
belief in “ a Supreme Being who delights
in justice and mercy, whom all who would
be saved are bound to obey, and whose
worship consists in the practice of justice
and charity towards our neighbours ” ?
“ Theology,” says the Master of Balliol,
“is full of undefined terms which have
distracted the human mind for ages.
Mankind have reasoned from them, but
not to them; they have drawn out the
conclusions without proving the premises ;
they have asserted the premises without
examining the terms. The passions of
religious parties have been roused to the
utmost about words of which they could
have given no explanation, and which
had really no distinct meaning.” 1
Doubt is of two natures, and we often
confuse a wise suspension of judgment
with the weakness of hesitation. To pro
fess an opinion for which we have no
sufficient reason is clearly illogical, but
when it is necessary to act we must do so
on the best evidence available, however
slight that may be.
Why should we expect Religion to
solve questions with reference to the origin
and destiny of the universe ? We do not
expect the most elaborate treatise to tell
us as yet the origin of electricity or of
heat. Natural History throws no light
on the origin of life. Has Biology ever
professed to explain existence ?
Simonides was asked at Syracuse by
Hiero, who or what God was, when he
requested a day’s time to think of his
answer. On subsequent days he always
doubled the period required for deliber
ation ; and when Hiero inquired the reason,
he replied that the longer he considered
the subject, the more obscure it appeared.
The Vedas say, “In the midst of the
sun is the light, in the midst of light is
truth, and in the midst of truth is the
imperishable being.” Deity has been
defined as a circle whose centre is every1 Jowett’s Plato,
95
where, and whose circumference is no
where ; but the “ God is love ” of St.
John appeals more forcibly to the human
soul.
“ Love suffereth long, and is kind ;
Love envieth not;
Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly,
Seeketh not her own,
Is not easily provoked,
Thinketh no evil;
Rejoieeth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the
truth ;
Beareth all things, believeth all things,
Hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Love never faileth ; but whether there be pro
phecies, they shall fail : whether there be tongues,
they shall cease ; whether there be knowledge,
it shall vanish away. ... Now abideth Faith,
Hope, Love, these three ; but the greatest of
these is Love.” 1
The Church is not a place for study or
speculation. Few but can sympathise
with Eugenie de Guerin in her tender
affection for the little Chapel at Cahuzac,
where she tells us she freed herself from
“ tant de miseres.”
Doubt does not exclude faith.
“ Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At last he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.” 2
Unfortunately many have attempted
to compound for wickedness of life by
purity of belief; a vain and fruitless
effort. To do right is the sure ladder
which leads up to Heaven, though the
true faith will help us to find and to
climb it.
“ It was my duty to have loved the highest,
It surely was my profit had I known,
It would have been my pleasure had I seen.” 3
But though religious truth can justify no
bitterness, it is well worth any amount of
thought and study.
If we must admit that many points are
still, and probably long will be, involved
in obscurity, we may be pardoned if we
indulge ourselves in various speculations
both as to our beginning and our end.
1 St. Paul,
2 Tennyson.
3 Ibid.
�&
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
‘ ‘ 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 :
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.” 1
I hope I shall not be supposed to
depreciate any honest effort to arrive at
truth, or to undervalue the devotion of
those who have died for their religion.
But surely it is a mistake to regard
martyrdom as a merit, when from their
own point of view it was in reality a
privilege.
Let every man be persuaded in his own
mind
“Truth is the highest thing that man may
keep.” 2
It is impossible to overvalue the power
“ which the soul has of loving truth and
doing all things for the sake of truth. ” 3
To arrive at truth we should spare our
selves no pains, but certainly inflict none
on others.
We may be sure that quarrels will
never advance religion, and that to per
secute is no way to convert. No doubt
those who consider that all who do not
agree with them will suffer eternal tor
ments, seem logically justified in persecu
tion even unto death. Such a course, if
carried out consistently, might stamp out
a particular sect, and any sufferings which
could be inflicted here would on this
hypothesis be as nothing in comparison
with the pains of Hell. Only it must be
admitted that such a view of religion is
quite irreconcilable with the teaching of
Christ, and incompatible with any faith
in the goodness of God.
Moreover, the Inquisition has even
from its own point of view proved gener
ally a failure. The blood of the martyrs
is the seed of the Church.
“ In obedience to the order of the
Council of Constance (1415) the remains
of Wickliffe were exhumed and burnt to
1 Wordsworth.
2 Chaucer.
3 Plato.
TART II
ashes, and these cast into the Swift, a
neighbouring brook running hard by, and
thus this brook hath conveyed his ashes
into Avon ; Avon into Severn ; Severn
into the narrow seas ; they into the main
ocean. And thus the ashes of Wickliffe
are the emblem of his doctrine, which
now is dispersed all the world over?’1
The Talmud says that when a man
once asked Shamai to teach him the Law
in one lesson, Shamai drove him away in
anger. He then went to Hillel with the
same request. Hillel said, “Do unto
others as you would have others do unto
you. This is the whole Law ; the rest,
merely Commentaries upon it.”
Collect from the Bible all that Christ
thought necessary for His disciples, and
how little Dogma there is. Christianity
is based, not on Dogma, but on Charity
and Love.
“ By this shall all men
know that ye are my disciples, if ye have
love one to another.” “ Suffer little
children to come unto me.” And one
lesson which little children have to teach
us is that religion is an affair of the heart
and not of the mind only. St. James
sums up as the teaching of Christ that
“Pure religion and undefiled is this, to
visit the fatherless and widows in their
affliction, and to keep himself unspotted
from the world.”
The Religion of the lower races is
almost as a rule one of terror and of
dread. Their deities are jealous and
revengeful, cruel, merciless, and selfish,
hateful and yet childish. They require
to be propitiated by feasts and offerings,
often even by human sacrifices. They are
not only exacting, but so capricious that,
with the best intentions, it is often
impossible to be sure of pleasing them.
From the dread of such evil beings
Sorcerers and Witches derived their
hellish powers. No one was safe. No
one knew where danger lurked. Actions
apparently the most trifling might be
fraught with serious risk : objects ap
parently the most innocent might be fatal.
In many cases there were supposed to
1 Fuller.
�RELIGION
CHAP. XI
97
be deities of Crime, of Misfortunes, of we were to show them a near, visible,
Disease. These wicked Spirits naturally inevitable, but all-beneficent Deity, whose
encouraged evil rather than good. An presence makes the earth itself a heaven,
energetic friend of mine was sent to a I think there would be fewer deaf children
district in India where smallpox was sitting in the market-place.”
specially prevalent, and where one of the
But it must not be supposed that those
principal Temples was dedicated to the who doubt whether the ultimate truths of
Goddess of that disease. He had the the Universe can be expressed in human
people vaccinated, in spite of some opposi , words, or whether, even if they could,
tion, and the disease disappeared, much we should be able to comprehend them,
to the astonishment of the natives. But undervalue the importance of religious
the priests of the Deity of Smallpox were ' study. Quite the contrary. Their doubts
not disconcerted ; only they deposed the , arise not from pride, but from humility :
Image of their discomfited Goddess, and ! not because they do not appreciate divine
petitioned my friend for some emblem of . truth, but on the contrary because they
himself which they might install in her doubt whether we can appreciate it
stead.
' sufficiently, and are sceptical whether the
We who are fortunate enough to live (infinite can be reduced to the finite.
in this comparatively enlightened century
We may be sure that whatever may be
hardly realise how our ancestors suffered ■ right about religion, to quarrel over it
from their belief in the existence of must be wrong. “ Let others wrangle,”
mysterious and malevolent beings; how said St. Augustine, “I will wonder.”
their life was embittered and overshadowed
Those who suspend their judgment are
by these awful apprehensions.
not on that account sceptics, and it is
As men, however, have risen in civilisa often those who think they know most,
tion, their religion has risen with them; who are especially troubled by doubts
they have by degrees acquired higher and anxiety.
and purer conceptions of divine power.
It was Wordsworth who wrote
We are only just beginning to realise
“ Great God, I had rather
that a loving and merciful Father would A Pagan suckled in some ereed outworn ;he
not resent honest error, not even perhaps So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
the attribution to him of such odious Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.”
injustice. Yet what can be clearer than
In religion, as with children at night, it
Christ’s teaching on this point.
He
is darkness and ignorance which create
impressed over and over again on his
disciples, that, as St. Paul expresses it, dread ; light and love cast out fear.
In looking forward to the future we
“ The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth
may fairly hope with Ruskin that “the
life.”1
“If,” says Ruskin, “for every rebuke charities of more and more widely ex
that we utter of men’s vices, we put forth tended peace are preparing the way for
a claim upon their hearts; if, for every a Christian Church which shall depend
assertion of God’s demands from them, neither on ignorance for its continuance,
we should substitute a display of His nor on controversy for its progress, but
kindness to them; if side by side, with shall reign at once in light and love.”
every warning of death, we could exhibit
proofs and promises of immortality ; if,
in fine, instead of assuming the being of
an awful Deity, which men, though they
cannot and dare not deny, are always
unwilling, sometimes unable, to conceive :
1 2 Cor. in. 6.
H
�THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
PART II
because they fancied that pain was ordained
under certain circumstances.
CHAPTER XII
We are told that in early Saxon days
Edwin, King of Northumbria, called his
THE HOPE OF PROGRESS
nobles and his priests around him, to dis
cuss whether a certain missionary should
“ To what then may we not look forward, when
a spirit of scientific inquiry shall have spread be heard or not. The result was doubtful.
through those vast regions in which the progress But at last there rose an old chief, and said
of civilisation, its sure precursor, is actually —“You know, 0 King, how, on a winter
commenced and in active progress ? And what evening, when you are sitting at supper
may we not expect from the exertions of powerful
minds called into action under circumstances in your hall, with your company around
totally different from any which have yet existed you, when the night is dark and dreary,
in the world, and over an extent of territory far when the rain and the snow rage outside,
surpassing that which has hitherto produced the when the hall inside is lighted and warm
whole harvest of human intellect ?”
with a blazing fire, sometimes it happens
Herschel,
that a sparrow flies into the bright hall
There are two lines, if not more, in out of the dark night, flies through the
which we may look forward with hope to hall and then out at the other end
progress in the future. In the first place, into the dark night again. We see him
increased knowledge of nature, of the for a few moments, but we know not
properties of matter, and of the pheno whence he came nor whither he goes in
mena which surround us, may afford to the blackness of the storm outside. So is
our children advantages far greater even the life of man. It appears for a short
than those which we ourselves enjoy. space in the warmth and brightness of
Secondly, the extension and improvement this life, but what came before this life,
of education, the increasing influence of or what is to follow this life, we know not.
Science and Art, of Poetry and Music, If, therefore, these new teachers can en
of Literature and Religion,—of all the lighten us as to the darkness that went
powers which are tending to good, will, we before, and the darkness that is to come
may reasonably hope, raise man and make after, let us hear what they have to teach
him more master of himself, more able us.”
It is often said, however, that great
to appreciate and enjoy his advantages,
and to realise the truth of the Italian and unexpected as recent discoveries
proverb, that wherever light is, there is have been, there are certain ultimate
problems which must ever remain un
joy.
One consideration which has greatly solved. For my part, I would prefer to
tended to retard progress has been the abstain from laying down any such limita
floating idea that there was some sort of tions. When Park asked the Arabs what
ingratitude, and even impiety, in attempt became of the sun at night, and whether
ing to improve on what Divine Providence the sun was always the same, or new each
had arranged for us. Thus Prometheus day, they replied that such a question was
was said to have incurred the wrath of foolish, being entirely beyond the reach
Jove for bestowing on mortals the use of of human investigation.
M. Comte, in his Cours de Philosophic
fire ; and other discoveries only escaped
similar punishment when the ingenuity of Positive, as recently as 1842, laid it down
priests attributed them to the special as an axiom regarding the heavenly bodies,
favour of some particular deity. This that’“we may hope to determine their
feeling has not even yet quite died out. forms, distances, magnitude, and move
Even I can remember tlie time when ments, but we shall never by any means be
many excellent persons had a scruple or able to study their chemical composition
prejudice against the use of chloroform, or mineralogical structure.” Yet within a
�CHAP. XII
THE HOPE OF PROGRESS
few years this supposed impossibility has
been actually accomplished, showing how
unsafe it is to limit the possibilities of
science.1
It is, indeed, as true now as in the time
of Newton, that the great ocean of truth
lies undiscovered before us. I often wish
that some President of the Royal Society,
or of the British Association, would take
for the theme of his annual address “ The
things we do not know.” Who can say
on the verge of what discoveries we are
perhaps even now standing ! It is extra
ordinary how slight a barrier may stand
for years between Man and some import
ant improvement. Take the case of the
electric light, for instance. It had been
known for years that if a carbon rod be
placed in an exhausted glass receiver, and
a current of electricity be passed through
it, the carbon glowed with an intense
light, but on the other hand it became so
hot that the glass burst. The light, there
fore, was useless, because the lamp burst
as soon as it was lit. Edison hit on
the idea that if you made the carbon
filament fine enough, you would get rid
of the heat and yet have abundance
of light.
His right to a patent has
been contested on this very ground. It
has been said that the mere introduction
of so small a difference as the replacement
of a thin rod by a fine filament was so
slight a change thaf it could not be
patented. The improvements by LaneFox, Swan, and others, though so import
ant as a whole, have been made step by
step.
Or take again the discovery of anaes
thetics. At the beginning of the century
Sir Humphry Davy discovered laughing
gas, as it was then called. He found that
it produced complete insensibility to pain
and yet did not injure health. A tooth
was actually taken out under its influence,
and of course without suffering. These
facts were known to our chemists, they
were explained to the students in our
jreat hospitals, and yet for half a century
1 Lubbock.
Fifty Years of Science.
99
the obvious application occurred to no
one. Operations continued to be per
formed as before, patients suffered the
same horrible tortures, and yet the bene
ficent element was in our hands, its divine
properties were known, but it never oc
curred to any one to make use of it.
I will only give one more illustration.
Printing is generally said to have been
discovered in the fifteenth century ; and
so it was for all practical purposes. But
in fact printing was known long before.
The Romans used stamps; on the monu
ments of the Assyrian kings the name of
the reigning monarch may be found duly
printed. What then is the difference ?
One little, but all-important step. The
real inventor of printing was the man
into whose mind flashed the fruitful
idea of having separate stamps for each
letter, instead of for separate words.
How slight seems the difference, and
yet for 3000 years the thought occurred
to no one. Who can tell what other
discoveries, as simple and yet as farreaching, lie at this moment under our
very eyes !
Archimedes said that if he had room
to stand on, he would move the earth.
One truth leads to another; each dis
covery renders possible another, and,
what is more, a higher.
We are but beginning to realise the
marvellous range and complexity of Na
ture. I have elsewhere called attention
to this with special reference to the prob
lematical organs of sense possessed by
many animals.1
There is every reason .to hope that
future studies will throw much light on
these interesting structures. We may,
no doubt, expect much from the improve
ment in our microscopes, the use of new
reagents, and of mechanical appliances ;
but the ultimate atoms of which matter is
composed are so infinitesimally minute,
that it is as yet difficult to foresee any
manner in which we may hope for a final
solution of these problems.
1 The Senses of A nimals.
�ICO
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
Loschmidt, who has since been con
firmed by Stoney and Sir W. Thomson,
calculates that each of the ultimate atoms
of matter is at most •y0';b 00,000 °f an
inch in diameter. Under these circum
stances we cannot, it would seem, hope
at present for any great increase of our
knowledge of atoms by improvements in
the microscope. With our present in
struments we can perceive lines ruled on
glass which are 90,000' °f an inch apart ;
but owing to the properties of light itself,
it would appear that we cannot hope to
be able to perceive objects which are
much less than y 0 q*0 0 0 °f an inch in
diameter.
Our microscopes may, no
doubt, be improved, but the limitation
lies not merely in the imperfection of
our optical appliances, but in the nature
of light itself.
Now it has been calculated that a
particle of albumen son) 00
an inch
in diameter contains no less than
125,000,000 of molecules. In a simpler
compound the number would be much
greater ; in water, for instance, no less
than 8,000,000,000. Even then, if wre
could construct microscopes far more
powerful than any which we now possess,
they could not enable us to obtain by
direct vision any idea of the ultimate
organisation of matter. The smallest
sphere of organic matter which could be
clearly defined with our most powerful
microscopes may be, and in all proba
bility is, very complex ; it is built up of
many millions of molecules, and it follows
that there may be an almost infinite
number of structural characters in organic
tissues which we can at present foresee
no mode of examining.1
Again, it has been shown that animals
hear sounds which are beyond the range
of our hearing, and I have proved that
they can perceive the ultra-violet rays,
which are invisible to our eyes.2
Now, as every ray of homogeneous
1 Lubbock. Fifty Years of Science.
2 Ants, Bees, and Wasps.
PART II
light which we can perceive at all, appears
to us as a distinct color, it becomes
probable that these ultra-violet rays must
make themselves apparent to animals as
a distinct and separate color (of which we
can form no idea), but as different from
the rest as red is from yellow, or green
from violet. The question also arises
whether white light to these creatures
would differ from our white light in con
taining this additional color.
These considerations cannot but raise
the reflection how different the world
may—I was going to say must—appear
to other animals from what it does to us.
Sound is the sensation produced on us
when the vibrations of the air strike on
the drum of our ear. When they are
few, the sound is deep; as they increase
in number, it becomes shriller and shriller ;
but before they reach 40,000 in a second,
they cease to be audible. Light is the
effect produced on us when waves of
light strike on the eye. When 400
millions of millions of vibrations of ether
strike the retina in a second, they give
the sensation of red, and as the number
increases the color passes into orange,
then yellow, green, blue, and violet. But
between 40,000 vibrations in a second
and 400 millions of millions we have no
organ of sense capable of receiving an
impression.
Yet between these limits
any number of sensations may exist. We
have five senses, and sometimes fancy
that no others are possible. But it is
obvious that we cannot measure the in
finite by our own narrow limitations.
Moreover, looking at the question from
the other side, we find in animals complex
organs of sense, richly supplied with
nerves, but the function of which we are
as yet powerless to explain. There may
be fifty other senses as different from ours
as sound is from sight; and even within
the boundaries of our own senses there
may be endless sounds which we cannot
hear, and colors, as different as red from
green, of which we have no conception.
These and a thousand other questions
remain for solution. The familiar world
�CHAP. XII
THE HOPE OF PROGRESS
which surrounds us may be a totally
different place to other animals. To them
it may be full of music which we cannot
hear, of color which we cannot see, of
sensations which we cannot conceive. To
place stuffed birds and beasts in glass
cases, to arrange insects in cabinets, and
dried plants in drawers, is merely the
drudgery and preliminary of study ; to
watch their habits, to understand their
relations to one another, to study their
instincts and intelligence, to ascertain
their adaptations and their relations to
the forces of Nature, to realise what the
world appears to them ; these constitute,
as it seems to me at least, the true interest
of natural history, and may even give us
the clue to senses and perceptions of which
at present we have no conception.1
From this point of view the possi
bilities of progress seem to me to be
almost unlimited.
So far again as the actual condition of
man is concerned, the fact that there has
been some advance cannot, I think, be
questioned.
In the Middle Ages, for instance,
culture and refinement scarcely existed
beyond the limits of courts, and by no
means always there. The life in English,
French, and German castles was rough
and almost barbarous. Mr. Galton has
expressed the opinion, which I am not
prepared to question, that the population
of Athens, taken as a whole, was as
superior to us as we are to Australian
savages. But even if that be so, our
civilisation, such as it is, is more diffused,
so that unquestionably the general Euro
pean level is much higher.
Much, no doubt, is owing to the greater
facility of access to the literature of our
country, to that literature, in the words
of Macaulay, “ the brightest, the purest,
the most durable of all the glories of our
country ; to that Literature, so rich in
precious truth and precious fiction; to
that Literature which boasts of the prince
of all poets, and of the prince of all
1 Lubbock.
The, Senses of Animals.
IOI
philosophers; to that Literature which
has exercised an influence wider than
that of our commerce, and mightier than
that of our arms.”
Few of us, however, make the most of
our minds. The body ceases to grow in
a few years ; but the mind, if we will let
it, may grow almost as long as life lasts.
The onward progress of the future will
not, we may be sure, be confined to mere
material discoveries. We feel that we
are on the road to higher mental powers ;
that problems which now seem to us
beyond the range of human thought will
receive their solution, and open the way
to still further advance. Progress, more
over, wre may hope, will be not merely
material, not merely mental, but moral
also.
It is natural that we should feel a
pride in the beauty of England, in the
size of our cities, the magnitude of our
commerce, the wealth of our country, the
vastness of our Empire. But the true
glory of a nation does not consist in the
extent of its dominion, in the fertility of
the soil, or the beauty of Nature, but
rather in the moral and intellectual pre
eminence of the people.
And yet how few of us, rich or poor,
have made ourselves all we might be. If
he does his best, as Shakespeare says,
“ What a piece of work is man ! How
noble in reason ! How infinite in faculty !
in form and movement, how express and
admirable ! ” Few indeed, as yet, can be
said to reach this high ideal.
The Hindoos have a theory that after
death animals live again in a different
form ; those that have done well in a
higher, those that have done ill in a lower
grade. To realise this is, they find, a
powerful incentive to a virtuous life.
But whether it be true of a future life or
not, it is certainly true of our present
existence. If we do our best for a day,
the next morning we shall rise to a higher
life ; while if we give way to our passions
and temptations, we take with equal
certainty a step downwards towards a
lower nature.
�y -y. #;■ '
u? UV ' “■ ■
ZAL? PLEASURES OF LIFE
102
It is an. interesting illustration, of the
Unity of Man, and an encouragement to
those of us who have no claims to genius,
that, though of course there have been
exceptions, still on the whole, periods of
progress have generally been those when
a nation has worked and felt together ;
the advance has been due not entirely to
the efforts of a few great men, but of their
countrymen generally; not to a single
genius, but to a national effort.
Think, indeed, what might be.
“All ! when shall all men’s good
Be each man’s rule, and universal Peace
Lie like a shaft of light across the land,
And like a lane of beams athwart the sea,
Thro’ all the circle of the golden year ? ”1
Our life is surrounded with mystery,
our very world is a speck in boundless
space ; and not only the period of our
own individual life, but that of the whole
human race is, as it were, but a moment
in the eternity of time.
We cannot
imagine any origin, nor foresee the con
clusion.
But though we may not as yet perceive
any line of research which can give us a
clue to the solution, in another sense we
may hold that every addition to our
knowledge is one small step towards the
great revelation.
Progress may be more slow, or more
rapid. It may come to others and not to
us. It will not come to us if we do not
strive to deserve it. But come it surely
will.
“ Yet one thing is there that ye shall not slay,
Even thought, that fire nor iron can affright?’2
The future of man is full of hope, and I
who can foresee the limits of his destiny ?'
1 Tennyson.
2 Swinburne.
PART II
CHAPTER XIII
THE DESTINY OF MAN
“For I reckon that the sufferings of this
present time are not worthy to be compared
with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”—
Romans viii. 18.
But though we have thus a sure and
certain hope of progress for the race, still,
as far as man is individually concerned,
with advancing years we gradually care
less and less for many things which gave
us the keenest pleasure in youth. On the
other hand, if our time has been well
used, if we have warmed both hands
wisely before the fire of life, we may gain
even more than we lose. As our strength
becomes less, we feel also the less necessity
for exertion. Hope is gradually replaced
by memory : and whether this adds to
our happiness or not depends on what our
life has been.
There are of course some lives which
diminish in value as old age advances ; in
which one pleasure fades after another,
and even those which remain gradually
lose their zest; but there are others which
gain in richness and in peace all, and
more than, that of which time robs them.
The pleasures of youth may excel in
keenness and in zest, but they have at the
best a tinge of anxiety and unrest ; they
cannot have the fulness and depth which
may accompany the consolations of age,
and are amongst the richest rewards of
an unselfish life.
For as with the close of the day, so
with that of life ; there may be clouds,
and yet if the horizon is clear, the evening
may be beautiful.
Old age has a rich store of memories.
Life is full of
“Joys too exquisite to last,
And yet more exquisite when past.” 1
Swedenborg imagines that in heaven
the angels are advancing continually to
1 Montgomery.
�CHAP. XIII
THE DESTINY OF MAN
103
Is it not extraordinary that many men
will deliberately take a road which they
, know is, to say the least, not that of
happiness ? That they prefer to make
others miserable, rather than themselves
happy ?
Plato, in the Phsedrus, explains this
by describing Man as a Composite Being,
“ Age cannot wither nor custom stale
Their infinite variety.”
having three natures, and compares him
“ When I consider old age,” says Cicero, to a pair of winged horses and a charioteer.
“I find four causes why it is thought “ Of the two horses one is noble and of
miserable : one, that it calls us away from noble origin, the other ignoble and of
the transaction of, affairs ; the second, ignoble origin ; and the driving, as might
that it renders the body more feeble ; the be expected, is no easy matter.” The
third, that it deprives us of almost all noble steed endeavours to raise the
passions j the fourth, that it is not very chariot, but the ignoble one struggles to
far from death. Of these causes let us drag it down. As time goes on, if the
see, if you please, how great and how charioteer be wise and firm, the noble
part of our nature will raise us more
reasonable each of them is.”
To be released from the absorbing and more.
“Man,” says Shelley, “is an instru
affairs of life, to feel that one has earned
a claim to leisure and repose, is surely in ment over which a series of external and
internal impressions are driven, like the
itself no evil.
To the second complaint against old alternations of an ever-changing wind
age, I have already referred in speaking over an JEolian lyre, which move it by
their motion to ever-changing melody.”
of Health.
The third is that it has no passions.
Lastly, Cicero mentions the approach
“ 0 noble privilege of age I if indeed it of death as the fourth drawback of old
takes from us that which is in youth our age. To many minds the shadow of the
greatest defect.” But our higher aspira end is ever present, like the coffin in the
tions are not necessarily weakened ; or Egyptian feast, and overclouds all the
rather, they may become all the brighter, sunshine of life.
being purified from the grosser elements
But ought we to regard death as an
of our lower nature.
evil ? Shelley’s beautiful lines,
“Single,” says Manu, “is each man
born into the world; single he dies j
“ Life, like a Dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity ;
single he receives the reward of his good
Until death tramples it to fragments,”
deeds ; and single the punishment of his
sins. When he dies his body lies like a
fallen tree upon the earth, but his virtue contain, as it seems to me at least, a
accompanies his soul. Wherefore let Man double error. Life need not stain the
harvest and garner Virtue, that so he white radiance of eternity ; nor does
may have an inseparable companion in death necessarily trample it to fragments.
Man has, says Coleridge,
that gloom which all must pass through,
and which it is so hard to traverse.”
“Three treasures,—love and light
Then, indeed, it might be said that
And calm thoughts, regular as infants’ breath ;
“ Man is the sun of the world ; more And three firm friends, more sure than day and
than the real sun. The fire of his
night,
wonderful heart is the only light and Himself, his Maker, and the Angel Death.’
heat worth gauge or measure.” 1
Death is “the end of all, the remedy
1 Emerson.
the spring-time of their youth, so that
those who have lived longest are really
the youngest; and have we not all had
friends who seem to fulfil this idea ? who
are in reality—that is in mind—as fresh
as a child : of whom it may be said with
more truth than of Cleopatra that
�THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
104
of many, the wish of divers men, deserv
ing better of no men than of those to
whom she came before she was called.” 1
After a stormy life, with death comes
peace.
‘ ‘ Duncan is in his grave ;
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.”'2
If death be final, then no one will
ever know that he is dead.
It is often, however, assumed that the
journey to
‘ ‘ The undiscovered country from whose bourne
No traveller returns ”
must be one of pain and suffering. But
this is not so. Death is often peaceful
and almost painless.
Bede during his last illness was trans
lating St. John’s Gospel into AngloSaxon, and the morning of his death his
secretary, observing his weakness, said,
“ There remains now only one chapter,
and it seems difficult to you to speak.”
“It is easy,” said Bede ; “take your pen
and write as fast as you can.” At the
close of the chapter the scribe said, “ It
is finished,” to which he replied, “ Thou
hast said the truth, consummatum est.”
He asked to be placed opposite to the
place where he usually prayed, said
“Glory be to the Father, and to the
Son, and to the Holy Ghost,” and as he
pronounced the last word he expired.
Goethe died without any apparent
suffering, having just prepared himself
to write, and expressed his delight at
the return of spring.
We are told of Mozart’s death that
“ the unfinished requiem lay upon the
bed, and his last efforts were to imitate
some peculiar instrumental effects, as he
breathed out his life in the arms of his
Wife and their friend Sussmaier.”
Plato died in the act of writing;
Lucan while reciting part of his book on
the war of Pharsalus ; Blake died sing
1 Seneca.
Shakespeare.
PART II
ing ; Wagner in sleep with his head on
his wife’s shoulder. Many have passed
away in their sleep. Various high
medical authorities have expressed their
surprise that the dying seldom feel either
dismay or regret. And even those who
perish by violence, as for instance in
battle, feel, it is probable, but little
suffering.
But what of the future 1 There may
be said to be now two principal views.
Some believe in the immortality of the
soul, but not of the individual soul: that
our life is continued in that of our
children would seem indeed to be the
natural deduction from the simile of St.
Paul, as that of the grain of wheat is
carried on in the plant of the following
year.
So long as happiness exists, it is selfish
to dwell too much on our own share in
it. Admit that the soul is immortal, but
that in the future state of existence there
is a break in the continuity of memory,
that one does not remember the present
life ; will it in that case matter to us
more what happens to the soul inhabiting
our body, than what happens to any
other soul ? And from this point of
view is not the importance of identity
involved in that of continuous memory ?
But however this may be, according to
the general view, the soul, though de
tached from the body, will retain its
conscious identity, and will awake from
death, as it does from sleep ; so that if
we cannot affirm that
“ Millions of spiritual creatures walk the Earth,
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we
sleep,” 1
at any rate they exist somewhere else in
space, and we are indeed looking at them
when we gaze at the stars, though to our
eyes they are as yet invisible.
In neither case, however, can death be
regarded as an evil. To wish that health
and strength were unaffected by time
might be a different matter.
1 Milton.
�THE DESTINY OF MAN
CHAP. XIII
“But if we are not destined to be
immortal, yet it is a desirable thing for a
man to expire at his fit time. For, as
nature prescribes a boundary to all other
things, so does she also to life. Now old
age is the consummation of life, just as of
a play : from the fatigue of which we
ought to escape, especially when satiety is
superadded.” 1
From this point of view, then, we need
“ Weep not for death,
’Tis but a fever stilled,
A pain suppressed,—a fear at rest,
A solemn hope fulfilled.
The moonshine on the slumbering deep
Is scarcely calmer. Wherefore weep ?
105
“ We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.” 1
According to the more general view
death frees the soul from the encumbrance
of the body, and summons us to the seat
of judgment. In fact,
“ There is no Death ! What seems so is transi
tion ;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of that life elysian,
Whose portal we call Death.” 2
We have bodies, we are spirits. “ I am
a soul,” said Epictetus, “ dragging about
a corpse.” The body is the mere perish
able form of the immortal essence. Plato
“ Weep not for death !
! concluded that if the ways of God are to
The fount of tears is sealed,
be justified, there must be a future life.
Who knows how bright the inward light
To those closed eyes revealed ?
To the aged in either case death is a
Who knows what holy love may fill
release. The Bible dwells most forcibly
The heart that seems so cold and still.”
on the blessing of peace. “ My peace I
Many a weary soul will have recurred give unto you : not as the ■world giveth,
give I unto you.” Heaven is described
with comfort to the thought that
I as a place where the wicked cease from
“ A few more years shall roll,
| troubling, and the weary are at rest.
A few more seasons come,
But I suppose every one must have
And we shall be with those that rest
asked himself in what can the pleasures
Asleep within the tomb.
of heaven consist.
“ A few more struggles here.
A few more partings o’er,
A few more toils, a few more tears,
And we shall weep no more.”
“ For all we know
Of what the blessed do above
Is that they sing, and that they love.” 3
By no one has this, however, been
It would indeed accord with few men’s
more grandly expressed than by Shelley. ideal that there should be any “struggle
for existence ” in heaven. We should then
“ Peace, peace ! he is not dead, he doth not be little better off than we are now. This
sleep 1
world is very beautiful, if we would only
He hath awakened from the dream of life.
enjoy it in peace. And yet mere passive
’Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
existence—mere vegetation—would in
He has outsoared the shadows of our night.
itself offer few attractions.
It would
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
indeed be almost intolerable.
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Again, the anxiety of change seems
Can touch him not and torture not again.
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain inconsistent with .perfect happiness ; and
He is secure, and now can never mourn
I yet a wearisome, interminable monotony,
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray, in
1 the same thing over and over again for
vain—”
ever and ever without relief or variety,
Most men, however, decline to believe I suggests dulness rather than delight.
that
1 Cicero.
1 Shakespeare.
2 Longfellow.
3 Waller.
�106
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
PART II
“For still the doubt came back,—Can God misconceiving us, or being harassed by us :
provide
—of glorious work to do, and adequate
For the large heart of man what shall not
faculties to do it—-a world of solved
pall,
problems, as well as of realised ideals.”
Nor through eternal ages’ endless tide
On tired spirits fall ?
| Cicero surely did not exaggerate when
he said, “ 0 glorious day ! when I shall
depart to that divine company and assem
blage of spirits, and quit this troubled and
polluted scene. For I shall go not only
to those great men of whom I have spoken
“ What shall the eyes that wait for him survey
When his own presence gloriously appears before, but also to my dear Cato, than
whom never was better man born, nor
In worlds that were not founded for a day,
But for eternal years ? ” 1
more distinguished for pious affection;
whose body was burned by me, whereas,
Here Science seems to suggest a on the contrary, it was fitting that mine
possible answer : the solution of problems should be burned by him. But his soul
which have puzzled us here; the acqui not deserting me, but oft looking back, no
sition of new ideas ; the unrolling the doubt departed to these regions whither it
history of the past; the world of animals saw that I myself was destined to come.
and plants; the secrets of space; the Which, though a distress to me, I seemed
wonders of the stars and of the regions patiently to endure : not that I bore it
beyond the stars. To become acquainted with indifference, but I comforted myself
with all the beautiful and interesting spots with the recollection that the separation
of our own world would indeed be some and distance between us would not con
thing to look forward to—and our world tinue long. For these reasons, O Scipio
is but one of many millions. I some (since you said that you with Laelius were
times ■wonder as I look away to the stars accustomed to wonder at this), old age is
at night whether it will ever be my tolerable to me, and not only not irksome,
privilege as a disembodied spirit to visit but even delightful. And if I am wrong
and explore them. When we had made in this, that I believe the souls of men to
the great tour fresh interests would have be immortal, I willingly delude myself:
arisen, and we might well begin again.
nor do I desire that this mistake, in
Here then is an infinity of interest which I take pleasure, should be wrested
without anxiety. So that at last the only from me as long as I live ; but if I, when
doubt may be
dead, shall have no consciousness, as some
narrow-minded philosophers imagine, I do
“ Lest an eternity should not suffice
To take the measure and the breadth and not fear lest dead philosophers should
height
ridicule this my delusion.”
Of what there is reserved in Paradise
Nor can I omit the striking passage
Its ever-new delight.”2
in the Apology, when, defending himself
I feel that to me, said Greg, “ God has before the people of Athens, Socrates says,
promised not the heaven of the ascetic “ Let us reflect in another way, and we
temper, or the dogmatic theologian, or of shall see that there is great reason to hope
the subtle mystic, or of the stern martyr that death is a good ; for one of two
ready alike to inflict and bear ; but a things—either death is a state of nothing
heaven of purified and permanent affec ness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men
tions—of a book of knowledge with eternal say, there is a change and migration of
leaves, and unbounded capacities to read the soul from this world to another.
it—of those we love ever round us, never Now if you suppose that there is no con
sciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of
him who is undisturbed even by dreams,
1 Trench.
2 Ibid.
“ These make him say,—If God has so arrayed
A fading world that quickly passes by,
Such rich provision of delight has made
For every human eye,
�CHAP. XIII
THE DESTINY OF MAN
107
death will be an unspeakable gain. For' to death for asking questions1; assuredly
if a person were to select the night in not. For besides being happier in that
which his sleep was undisturbed by world than in this, they will be immortal,
dreams, and were to compare with this if what is said be true.
the other days and nights of his life, and ’ “ Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer
then were to tell us how many days and about death, and know of a certainty
nights he had passed in the course of his that no evil can happen to a good man,
life better and more pleasantly than this either in life or after death. He and his
one, I think that no man, I will not say a are not neglected by the gods ; nor has
private man, but not even the Great my own approaching end happened by
King, will find many such days or nights, mere chance. But I see clearly that to
when compared with the others. Now, die and be released was better for me;
if death is like this, I say that to die is and therefore the oracle gave no sign.
gain ; for eternity is then only a single For which reason, also, I am not angry
night. But if death is the journey to with my condemners, or with my accusers ;
another place, and there, as men say, they have done me no harm, although
all the dead are, what good, 0 my they did not mean to do me any good ;
friends and judges, can be greater than and for this I may gently blame them.
The hour of departure has arrived, and
this ?
“ If, indeed, when the pilgrim arrives in we go our ways—I to die and you to
the world below, he is delivered from the live. Which is better God only knows.’’
professors of justice in this world, and , In the Wisdom of Solomon we are
finds the true judges, who are said to promised that—
give judgment there,—Minos, and Rhada“ The souls of the righteous are in the
manthus, and yEacus, and Triptolemus, hand of God, and there shall no torment
and other sons of God who were righteous touch them.
in their own life,—that pilgrimage will
“ In the sight of the unwise they
indeed be worth making. What would seemed to die ; and their departure is
not a man give if he might converse with taken for misery.
Orpheus, and Musseus, and Hesiod, and
“ And their going from us to be utter
Homer ? Nay, if this be true, let me die destruction ; but they are in peace.
again and again. I myself, too, shall have
“ For though they be punished in the
a wonderful interest in there meeting and sight of men, yet is their hope full of
conversing with Palamedes, and Ajax the immortality.
son of Telamon, and other heroes of old,
“ And having been a little chastised,
who have suffered death through an unjust they shall be greatly rewarded : for God
judgment ; and there will be no small proved them, and found them worthy for
pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own himself.”
sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall
And assuredly, if in the hour of death
then be able to continue my search into the conscience is at peace, the mind need
true and false knowledge ; as in this I not be troubled. The future is full of
world, so also in that ; and I shall find doubt, indeed, but fuller still of hope.
out who is wise, and who pretends to be
If we are entering upon a rest after the
wise, and is not. What would not a man struggles of life,
give, O judges, to be able to examine the ,
leader of the great Trojan expedition; |
“ Where the wicked cease from troubling,
And the weary are at rest,”
or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless ;
others, men and women too 1 What in
that to many a weary soul will be a
finite delight would there be in conversing
with them and asking them questions.
1 Referring to the cause of his own condemna
In another world they do not put a man tion.
�108
THE PLEASURES OF LIFE
PART II
welcome bourne, and even then we may read and enjoyed, but those also whom
say,
we have loved and lost; when we shall
“ 0 Death ! where is thy sting ?
leave behind us the bonds of the flesh and
0 Grave ! where is thy victory ? ”
the limitations of our earthly existence ;
On the other hand, if, trusting humbly when we shall join the Angels, the Arch
but confidently in the goodness of an angels, and all the company of Heaven,—
Almighty and loving Father, we are then, indeed, we may cherish a sure and
entering on a new sphere of existence, certain hope that the interests and
where we may look forward to meet not pleasures of this world are as nothing,
only those Great Men of whom we have compared to those of the life that awaits
heard so much, those whose works we have us in our Eternal Home.
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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 pleasures of life
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 108, [4] p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: Publisher's list and advertisements on unnumbered pages at the begining and end. Paper covers. Pictorial cover - portrait of author. Includes bibliographical references. Printed in double columns. Advertisements on preliminary pages and unnumbered pages at the end.
Contents: Part 1: The duty of happiness -- The happiness of duty -- A song of books -- The choice of books -- The blessing of friends -- The value of time -- The pleasures of travel -- The pleasures of home -- Science -- Education. Part 2: Ambition -- Wealth -- Health -- Love -- Art -- Poetry -- Music -- The beauties of nature -- The troubles of life -- Labour and rest -- Religion -- The hope of progress -- The destiny of man.
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Lubbock, John
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1899
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Macmillan and Co. Limited
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Philosophy
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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 pleasures of life), 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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Text
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English
Conduct of life
Education
Health
Life
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PDF Text
Text
ETERNAL PUNISHMENT.
AN EXAMINATION OF THE DOCTRINES
HELD BY THE CLERGY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
ON THE
SUBJECT OF FUTURE PUNISHMENT.
WITH
SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE TEACHING OF BISHOPS PEARSON AND
BUTLER, ARCHBISHOP WHATELY, THE BISHOP OF OXFORD, THE
BISHOP OF NATAL, THE ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN,
DR NEWMAN, AND THE REV. F. D. MAURICE.
BY
PRESBYTER ANGLICANUS.
[Reprinted, with Additions, from the "National ReviewNo. XXXI, for January, 1863.]
WITH
AN APPENDIX,
CONTAINING
A
REPLY
TO THE
ARTICLE
ON
UNIVERSALISAT
AND
ETERNAL-
rUNISHMENT IN THE “ CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER,” NO. CNN, FOR
APRIL, 1863, AND SOME REMARKS ON A SERMON ON
EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT, BY THE REV.
E. B. PUSSY, D.D.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY CHARLES W. REYNELL,
LITTLE PULTENEY STREET, HAYMARKET.
�ê
�CONTENTS.
--------------SECTION I.
State
or
Beliee with Regard to the Doctrine
Punishment.
oe
Eternal
PAGE
Belief of the Clergy of the Church of England
.
.
Tendency of Modern Thought .
.
.
.
Practical Difficulties of Missionaries
.
.
.
Their Bearing on the History of the Old Testament
.
Tacit Rejection of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment
»
Necessary Inferences from this Doctrine .
.
.
Differences in the Expression of this Doctrine
.
.
Its Repulsive Character, as admitted hy the Dean of St Paul’s
The Appeal to Authority .
.
.
.
.
The Denial of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment not necessarily
Result of Lax Practice and General Unbelief .
.
Foundation ofWIie Doctrine of Endless Punishment
.
..
Extent of Belief in this Doctrine
.
.
‘ .
. 1
.3
. 4
.5
. 6
.6
.
7
7
. 8
a
.9
. 9
.12
SECTION II.
Teaching
of the
Clergy of the Church of England
of Eternal Punishment.
on the
Subject
Two-fold Division involved in this Doctrine as drawn out by Mr
Newman
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 13
Practical Effects of this Division
.
.
.
.15
Statements of the Bishop of Oxford
.
.
.
. 15
Inferences from these Statements
.
.
.
.18
Their Bearing on the Proportion of Punishment
.
.
. 20
The Idea that Sin may be Compensated by a Fixed Penalty
.
. 21
The Victory of Righteousness over Sin .
.
.
.22
Pictures of Pandemonium
.
.
.
.
. 23
Relation of the Saved to those who are Lost
.
.
.24
Necessity of Maintaining that the Lost become wholly Evil
.
. 25
Theory of Archbishop Whately that the Good can shake off all thoughts
of the Lost .
.
.
.
... 26
�IV
Bishop Copleston’s Inference from the Wide Prevalence of Evil
. 27
Season of Probation .
.
.
.
... 28
The Archbishop of Dublin on the Parable of the Pich Man and the
Beggar .
.
.
.
.
.
.29
Dr Trench’s Reference to the Opinion of Bishop Sanderson on the Rich
Man’s Good Things .
.
.
.
.
. 31
Dr Trench’s Judgment on those who do not admit his Theory of
Punishment
.
.
.
.
.
.31
Bishop Pearson on Endless Punishment
.
.
.
. 33
Mr Maurice on the Meaning of the Word Eternal
.
. 34
The Theory that Moral’ Obligation rests on the Conviction of Endless
Punishment .
.
.
.
.
.
. 35
Experience of Human Legislators
.
.
.
.37
Archbishop Whately on the Idea of Civil Penalties
.
. 37
SECTION III.
Philosophical Arguments Alleged in Depence
Endless Punishment.
of the
Dogma
of
The Argument from Analogy as Treated by Bishop Butler .
. 38
Butler’s Theory of Human Nature .
.
.
.
. 39
Contradictions between the Ethics of Butler’s Sermons and his Argu
ments from Analogy
.
.
.
.
.40
Butler’s Formal Notion of Government
.
’ ♦
.
. 41
His Argument from the Besults of Sin in this Life
.
. 42
Butler’s Beference to the Doctrines of Heathen Writers
.
. 43
Argument from Human Law .
.
.
.
.45
SECTION IV.
Present State of the Controversy as Bearing
Duties of the Clergy of the Church
Position and
England.
on the
of
Beal Reason for the Popular Theories of Inspiration .
.
Contrast between Belief and Practice in the Present Day .
Recent History of Beligious Belief in England
.
.
Its Effects on the Clergy of the Church of England
.
Duty of the Clergy
.
.
.
.
.
Judgment of the Court of Arches in the Case of Fendall r. Wilson
Charges of Evasion
.
.
.
.
.
Present State of the Controversy
.
.
. 46
. 47
. 48
. 49
. 49
. 50
. 51
.52
�ETERNAL PUNISHMENT.
--------- ♦---------
SECTION L
State of Belief with regard to the Doctrine of
Eternal Punishment.
HE Church of England has not declared expressly that
the probation,
defi
Tnitively with thetrial, orofeducation of man is endedmembers,
close
the present life. Her
therefore, are free to entertain the hope or affirm their
■assurance that hereafter, as well as here, the good and the
bad alike are in the hands of a righteous Father, who will
so deal with them that, when the last enemy has been
destroyed, God shall be all in all. Such is the decision
which has roused the wrath and indignation of certain
parties in the English Church, who wish to make the
acceptance of their own dogmas the exclusive test of
Church membership. Legally, their opponents have made
good their standing ground, and may afford to pass over in
silence the imputations of dishonesty or want of orthodoxy,
which are thrown out against them. But they have pro
voked a contest on the most vital of all questions : they
have undertaken to do battle with popular conceptions of
the Divine Nature ; and it would ill become them to take
shelter under legal bulwarks, as though these alone consti
tuted the strength of their cause. They may be safe from
legal prosecutions, but they have to convince the people
that, on the momentous subjects of Eternal Life and Eternal
Death, a number of propositions are still commonly main
tained, which are not sanctioned by the English Church,
�1
Eternal Punishment.
which are utterly opposed to the whole spirit of Chris
tianity, and which obscure or obliterate all distinctions
between right and wrong. Theological writers, who profess
to define the limits of historical criticism, find it convenient
to represent their position as the only foundation for
Christianity itself: and it becomes indispensably necessary
to declare that the real question at issue is one which will,
not be set at rest, even though the history of the Exodus,
were proved to be in every particular true. Behind all
discussions on the authority of the Bible lies the oneabsorbing subject of human destiny. It is better and more
honest to declare at qnce that on this question only one
answer will ultimately satisfy the English people ; and it
is no light thing that we are enabled now to assert thatthe Church of England has returned this answer. In herinterest, next only to that of truth and justice, we desireto speak. She is facing a great danger; but that danger
arises from the spread, not of historical criticism, but of a
feeling of doubt whether her voice is raised to proclaim
unreservedly the absolute righteousness of God. Her
authority is falsely claimed for a vast scheme of popular
theology. Amongst her ministers, some few openly de
nounce parts of this scheme, many practically ignore it,
while.others uphold it by arguments which would make it
indifferent whether we worship God or whether we worship
Moloch. It bodes no good to a Church when the great
body of its lay members suspect that the Clergy are up
holding a system of dogmas, in some part of which at
least they do not believe. It is a still darker sign if they
come to think that these dogmas impute what, amongst
men, would be called the worst injustice to a Being who is
represented as infinitely merciful and loving. It becomes,
therefore, a question of paramount importance to ascertain
what is, in fact, the practical teaching of the Clergy on the
subject of Eternal Punishment, and whether that teachingis consistent with itself and with the religion on which it
professes to rest.
It is impossible to put aside a subject which forces
itself upon all at every turn. The course of thought and
criticism at home, the practical and more urgent needs of
missionaries abroad, will again and again demand answers
�Eternal Punishment.
3
to questions which, all feel to be of greater moment than
any other. The age which has fearlessly scrutinized the
histories of Greece and Rome, which has laid down the
laws by which these are to be judged, and has applied these
laws with rigid impartiality to all researches or speculations
whether they tell for or against the orthodox belief, will
*
hot be hindered from examining the grounds of the
doctrines which fix the destinies of all mankind. If these
doctrines seem to be opposed to ordinary human morality,
little stress may for the present be laid on the inconsistency ;
but when they claim to be part of a Divine Revelation
which is contained in an infallible Book, it becomes a mere
question of fact whether they really belong to that Revela
tion, and whether the records, on which they rest, are
absolutely true. It may be long before these questions are
answered: but in the meanwhile the signs become daily
more and more apparent, that the thoughts of men are
running in this direction. The clergy, generally, are well
aware of this. The old language on the subject of hell
torments is not often heard at the present day; and the
passing reference to them is commonly followed by the
tranquil announcement of a just retribution for all sin.
While the clergy in this country feel that anything more
would be practically thrown away, they find it at once an
easier and a more worthy task to insist on those truths
which neither they nor their people in their secret hearts
deny. From time to time men of greater honesty and
greater courage give utterance to what is working in the
minds of others, and plainly show that not merely the
course of modern criticism, but- our first religious instincts
make the subject of Eternal Punishment the great, question
of the age.
Twice, at least, within the last twelve years, something
like a plain answer has been given to this question. The
* The criticisms of Sir Cornewall Lewis are directed with equal severity
against the reconstructed Assyrian History of Mr Rawlinson and the Egyp
tology of Baron Bunsen. The former is supposed to corroborate the His
tory of the Old Testament, the latter to upset it. To the historical critic
either issue is wholly beside the question; but, of course, his weapons may
strike that which he had no conscious intention of assailing. Minucius
Felix never thought of the labours of Samson when he thrust aside those of
Hercules by the famous criterion : “ Qute si facta essent, fierent; quia fieri
non possunt, ideo nec facta sunt.”
�4
Eternal Punishment.
Theological Essays of Mr Maurice roused an opposition
scarcely less vehement than ‘ Essays and Reviews ; ’ but
it was comparatively an easy thing to say that the former
lost half then- force by the writer’s seeming love of paradox;
while the latter have been commonly regarded as the
ambiguous utterances of men who felt more than they
dared to put down in words. The practical needs of the
missionary are not so easily set aside. It is one thing to
speak in this country of heathens as being destined to
torments which shall have no end, and another to insist
before the heathen themselves that all sin not repented of
at the hour of death will plunge the sinner into endless
misery. The inconceivable fearfulness of the penalty
deprives it, with many, of its force and meaning; and the
greatest vehemence in depicting its terrors is followed by a
deeper unbelief. It is a moral difficulty under which the
missionary may console himself with reflections on the
hardness of the human heart. There are other difficulties
of an intellectual kind, with which, if he is an honest man,
• he will find it more difficult to deal. But whether of the
one kind or the other, it is far better that they should be
forced on our attention from the actual wants of the heathen,
than by writers whose words may be attributed to a love
of restless speculation. In his commentary on St Paul’s
Epistle to the Romans, the Bishop of Natal admits that the
task of teaching Christian doctrine “ to intelligent adult
natives, who have the simplicity of children, but withal the
earnestness and thoughtfulness of men .... is a sifting
process for the opinions of any teacher who feels the deep
moral obligation of answering truly and faithfully and
unreservedly his fellow-man looking up to him for light
and guidance, and asking, 1 Are you sure of this ? ’ ‘Do
you know this to be true ? ’ ‘ Do you really believe that ? ’ ”
The Zulus of Southern Africa are not slow in drawing the
logical inferences from the dogma of Eternal Punishment,
as ordinarily understood and set before them: but they are
more ready to question its justice than to adopt the belief
which drove Antony and Macarius into the Nitrian desert.
Many a wife in England has asked her husband in anguish
of heart, how it could be right to bring children into a life
which may be followed by a doom so unimaginably dreadful;
�Eternal Punishment.
5
the Zulu knows well how to appreciate the sophistry which
seems to satisfy the mothers of Englishmen.
*
Thus far his questions concerned chiefly his own per
ceptions of the justness and fitness of things ; but it was
impossible that they could stop short here. Bishop Colenso
has had to answer others, not less searching, on the origin
and earliest condition of man ; and he has answered them
with equal truth and candour. He may have spoken to
them, in past years, of the Fall of Man as a time when
“ the vessel which God had fashioned for Himself” became
polluted with sin, and when His purpose seemed “ blighted
by the cunning of the Tempter;” but the questions of his
people have not failed to lead him in due time to a closer
scrutiny of the book from which these notions have been de
rived. He had come to the plain conclusion that the Ever
lasting Fire does not necessarily mean a punishment which
is endless ; the same earnest examination of the popular
belief respecting the Fall has led him to an equally clear
conviction that no such lapse from a state of perfect
goodness and purity ever took place. It is not merely that
modern science has set aside statements in the Book
of Genesis, and shown that physical death was not the re
sult of Adam’s sin, that the serpent from its creation moved
as it moves now, and that thorns and thistles sprang up
from the ground ever .since vegetable substances came into
being.f The fabric falls more .from its own want of cohe
sion than from any assaults of modern science. If the
second chapter of Genesis in almost every respect contra
dicts the first, if the whole chronology of the book simply
brings up a mass of insuperable difficulties, an inquiry is
opened which must be followed to its results, and of which
one result atTeast must be to dispel the idea that any texts
* At the least, the latter can be silenced by being told that the married
state has been pronounced holy, and that their children will be brought into
a world where they will have full opportunity of attaining to life unless
they deliberately choose death. The Zulu would probably think no answer
satisfactory which did not reverse the conclusion of Sophocles :
fii] (pvva.i
top airavTa vitca Xtyov.
t See Professor Owen’s-Lecture “On Certain Instances of the Power
of God,” delivered before the Young Men’s Christian Association at Exeter
Hall. Longman and Co.
�6
Eternal Punishment.
of the Bible can be suffered to override the plainest dictates
of the human heart.
These are things on which the nation at large will
soon have to make up its mind. But while the doctrine
of an Endless Punishment for all men dying with un
repented sin is still asserted by many to be the doctrine
of the Church of England, and while from time to time we
have explanations of its nature which leave us in doubt
of the speaker’s meaning, how are we to explain the fact
that it should be less and less frequently brought before
the people ? A real conviction of its truth would lead men
to dwell on it to the exclusion of almost every other, to
enforce it by night and by day with a vehement and
untiring energy. Instead of this, the Bishop of Natal
asserts, and asserts truly, that the dogma is “ very seldom
stated in plain words in the presence of any intelligent
congregation.” If prominently brought forward, it is
generally before the ignorant and before children.
Put in the simplest way, this doctrine asserts that the
condition of every man is irrevocably fixed at the moment
of his death, that owing to the Fall of Adam the natural
doom of all his children without exception is an unending
eternity of torments, that the death of Christ has, indeed,
redeemed mankind, but procured salvation only for those
who believe the Gospel and are baptized into His Church,—
that, further, every Christian must die in a state of peni
tence, and that any sin not repented of at the moment
of death consigns him to endless flames. Thus a sharp
line is drawn which divides all mankind into two classes,
while from the number of those who are saved not
only all openly evil-livers are cast out, but all heathen who,
having not the Law, have not been a law to themselves,
and among Christians all who have not died in the faith
of Christ. Thus, again, the gates of hell close on all who
may be set down as careless and indifferent, or as mere
moralists, or sceptics, or philosophers,-—all, in short, who
do not at the hour of death with true penitence place their
conscious trust in the Great Sacrifice of Christ. This
doctrine knows nothing of shades of character or degrees
of guilt; it may admit the salvation of really good heathen
men to whom the Gospel has never been preached, and
�Eternal Punishment.
7
possibly of all children dying before the commission
of natural sin. Ignorant Christians it regards as heathen,
and there can be no reason to exempt them from a doom
which awaits the vast mass, nay, almost the whole of the
latter.
This dogma may, of course, be enforced in ways indefi
nitely various. It may be so put as to make God’s hatred
of all sin the prominent idea, or it may be clothed with
the coarseness of the most vindictive passion. It may be
urged with the earnestness of the saint who is ready to
die for others, or with the horrible selfishness of the blas
phemer who professes to “ see the mercy of God in the
damnation of infants.” But, in whatever form it may be
put, the doctrine is in itself repulsive. Human nature
shrinks from a penalty which it cannot comprehend, and
of which it certainly cannot see the justice or purpose. In
the words of Dean Milman, “ To the Eternity of Hell
torments there is, and ever must be—notwithstanding the
peremptory decrees of Dogmatic Theology, and the reve
rential dread of so many religious minds of tampering
with what seems the language of the New Testament,—a
tacit repugnance.” * Doubtless there are many truths of
Christianity which may at first shock or startle those who
have grown up in a different philosophy. The cross of
Christ may be to the Jews a stumbling block and to the
Greeks an offence, but it is possible to mistake the nature
of this antagonism, or to exaggerate it until it becomes a
fiction. But there is no other doctrine which leaves on
the mind and heart an aching sense as of irremediable
pain—no other of which the real belief must throw a dark
shade over all human life, and tempt the believer to gird
himself with the cord of Dominic and Francis, and go forth
to snatch if but a few brands from the burning. There is
no other which sets the purest and most natural of human
affections in direct conflict with what is held to be the
Revelation of the Divine Will. If on the night of the
Passover there was not a house in Egypt in which there
was not one dead, there must be many dead in almost
■every Christian home, unless the terms of this dogma are
iP.
* Milman’s History of Latin Christianity. Book xiv., ch. 2, Vol. 6.
"Rd. TT
�8
Eternal Punishment.
set at nought. There is no man living who has not loved
those of whose conscious faith he can say nothing; there is
not one who does not still love some, perhaps many such,
on whose bodies the grave has closed. There is not one
who will not continue to love them till he himself comes
to die; and, in the meanwhile, he will vainly seek to under
stand how, after that time, he will become indifferent to
the doom of those whom he has loved and feels that ho
must love on earth.
It is clear that only the most stringent authority will
bring men to believe such a doctrine as this. Their own
conception of Divine Qualities and Attributes will neverguide them to it; they can only receive it on the express
revelation of God Himself that it is really true. Christians
have come to believe that God has actually revealed it,
and that the statement of this doctrine is found in the
Bible. They are conscious that it rests on nothing else,
and they feel that its hold on the human mind will be lost
if the authority of the -Book is assailed. They have to
believe that all morality falls to the ground if the endless
ness of hell torments is called in question; and hence to
all such doubts, however faint and however calmly urged,
the great barrier prescribed is the bulwark of Plenary
Inspiration. The very vehemence with which all doubts
are denounced as impious, seems itself to show that there
must be something which can only be maintained by the
exclusion or suppression of all doubts. The Roman Church
is under no necessity to assert the absolute truth even of
all doctrinal statements in the Old Testament or the New ;
she has not shown her wisdom when she has done so. The
dogmatic Protestant, who does not admit the existence of
any living infallible expositor of Truth, is compelled to rest
everything on the authority of a book ; and on this he must
take his stand the more obstinately, if he feels that there
is any one doctrine which only on such authority he would
himself maintain. The tendencies of modern thought are
sufficiently clear. Wild notions receive utterance and are
abandoned in rapid succession. The Positivist may look
forward to something not quite so attractive as the Nirvana
of the Buddhist. New schools of Psychology may main
tain that conscience and morality are the mere result of
�Eternal Punishment.
9
education and experience ; but it is manifestly against the
truth of facts to suppose that the tendency to a general unbe
lief is greater now than it was fifty years ago, or so great.
But although it may be true that the wants and
yearnings of the human heart are leading or will lead
men to a belief in the Incarnation, the Trinity in Unity, or
any other Truth flowing out of these, there are other
dogmas from which the very same wants and yearnings,
the same perceptions of the essential agreement between
Divine and human goodness, will altogether repel them.
The strong arm of Ecclesiastical authority, or the dictates
of temporal interest, or a dread of public opinion may lead
men to profess belief in them ; but if the doctrine of End
less Punishment were suffered to rest on the grounds which
have led some, who denied it before, to believe that Jesus
Christ is God and Man, no one can doubt that the great mass
of Englishmen would thankfully and indignantly reject it.
Nor would this rejection arise simply or at all from
merely selfish fears. Undoubtedly a doctrine which makes
the eternal doom of man dependent on the accident of his
condition at the time of death, and by which the sin of a
day, not repented of, nullifies the earnest obedience of a
whole life, may well make every man tremble for himself.
Still the main thought in the minds of the most sincere
believers will be not for themselves but foi’ others; nay,
the feeling of thankfulness at being rid of the dogma will
be the more intense, because now they can really and
without any sophistry or equivocation “ vindicate the ways
of God to man.” The charge that they who will not allow
the Everlasting Fire and Endless Punishment to mean and
to be the same thing, do so because they wish to introduce
a wild licence and crush all sense of law and duty, is an
idle slander or a childish dream. The Roman Catholic
consigns to the remedial fires of purgatory all who, though
dying penitent, have made little advance towards Chris
tian perfection; the Protestant, who in theory condemns
to endless perdition all but the few of whose faith and
goodness there can be no question, can hardly in practice
bring himself to speak of any as undergoing the pains of
hell. At the least he cannot so think of those whom hehas himself known and loved. He may have misgivings
�IO
Eternal Punishment.
as to the depth or sincerity of his friend’s faith and the
earnestness of his religious life ; but very large proofs of
actual vice will be needed to repress the confident assertion
that he has “ gone to Heaven.” Each Protestant, at least
in England, is loud in maintaining that all sinners are con
signed to Endless Punishment; each is equally anxious to
express his belief that his own friends are not to suffer
such a doom. Clearly then he, and not they who reject
his doctrine are making the laws of God of none effect,
and tampering with His absolute and unswerving justice.
By his system, they who are utterly unfit for so immediate
a change are transferred from the feeblest and most im
perfect Christian life here to the full blessings of the Saints
who have surrendered their will wholly to the will of God.
It is the orthodox Protestant and not his opponent who is
undermining the convictions of men that God is of a truth
the righteous judge. There is not the faintest evidence
that they who insist on gradations of punishment are
lessening “ the terrors of the Lord,” far less that they
are upholding any theories of what is called Univer
salism.
They have learnt, and their hearts tell them
that God hates all sin, and that all sinners must sooner
or later be brought face to face with his Everlasting
Wrath. They know that a man may shut his ears
to the voice of conscience here, but that the Undying
Worm, “ which writhed at times within him,” even in this
life, will then “ be commissioned to do thoroughly the work
which is needed.”* With the question of amount or
duration they resolutely decline to deal. The Wrath
of God must burn so long as there is any resistance to
be overcome; and to say that the soul will be delivered
after undergoing simply a certain fixed amount of painf is
to defeat the Justice of God and to impugn his Righteous
ness almost as much as it is impugned by consigning all
sinners to one and the same lot. They cannot in terms
deny that the resistance of the sinner may be infinite, or
presume in such case to determine the issue ; but they
maintain most strenuously that the Wrath of God will be
felt by all who need it without exception. “ The most
saintly character, when viewed in the light of God’s
* Colenso on the Epistle to the Romans.
P. 216.
f lb., p. 262.
�Eternal Punishment.
ii
Holiness, will have manifold imperfections, spots, and
stains, which he himself will rejoice to have purged away,
though it may be ‘by stripes,’-—by stripes not given in
anger or displeasure, but in tenderest love and wisdom, by
Him who dealeth with us as with sons.”* Nay, it would
seem impossible that the condition even of the sincere
penitent should have no reference to the condition of
others. “ When we consider how many of those who have
died in penitence may have been guilty themselves of cor
rupting and ruining others who have run a short course
of sin and been cut off in impenitence, have we no reason
to believe that, in some way or other, those who were once
the cause of this defacement of God’s image in the
persons of their fellow men or women, may likewise have
a share assigned to them in the work of restoration,—may
never attain (and, indeed, it is inconceivable that they
should attain, if the things of this world are at all remem
bered in the next, as we suppose they will be) their own
full joy, until the evil they have done shall have been, by
God’s Mercy, undone, and the powers of Hell vanquished
and swallowed up in life ?”f
Thus, in the present aspect of theological controversy,
we have a strange sight. Almost every science wins
ultimately into collision with some one or more state
ments of the Bible, and so calls into question indirectly its
general authority. The science of geology seems utterly
to contradict the cosmogony of the Book of Genesis;
astronomy knows nothing of any pause in the course of the
earth round the sun. The science of language appears not
altogether to favour the idea of an original unity of mankind, while the analysis of the speech and still more of the
mythology of the great Aryan race furnishes no proof
whatever that man started with high blessings which he
forfeited by sin.
Meanwhile, they, who uphold the
■orthodox belief, know well that these sciences, carried to
their utmost limits, are not likely to set aside, to use
Dean Milman’s words, “ the primal and indefeasible
truths of Christianity.” J They know that the keenest
* Colenso on the Epistle to the Romans. P. 202.
t lb., p. 218.
j Latin Christianity. Book xiv, ch. 10.
�12
Eternal Punishment.
scientific criticism cannot endanger the doctrine of that
Eternal Life, which belongs to all who do the will of God.
If these were the only truths to be defended, perhaps the
questions of Justification and Authority might be discussed
more calmly.
But there remains the one dogma of
endless punishment, which, if any flaw is found in the
popular theory of inspiration, must straightway fall; and
its defenders fight therefore with a vehement intolerance
only to be excused by their strange conviction that a denial
of it removes the ground-work of all morality.
In a few years the contrast will be more startling than it
is now. There yet live many who do not shrink from
putting forth this doctrine in its extremest and most un
compromising form. Men of great power, the spell of
whose eloquence has not yet been broken, draw out the
picture in its minutest outlines, well knowing that its
strength lies in concrete images and not in unsubstantial
generalities. There yet remain some, who seem (it can
scarcely be that they really are) eager to maintain that
“ utter unspeakable misery shall be the portion for endless
ages, for ever and ever ; alike for all, who are not admitted
at first into the realms of infinite joy,—that there shall be
no hope in the horrible outer darkness, for the ignorant
young child of some wretched outcast, who has been noted
by the teachers of the Ragged or the Sunday school as
having contracted some evil habit, it may be, of lying,
stealing, swearing, or indecency, any more than for the
sensual libertine, who has spent a long life in gratifying hislusts and has been the means of that child and others like'
it being born in guilt and shame, and nursed in profligacy.”*
Such, of course, are the logical results of the dichotomy
which severs all men at the hour of death into two
classes, and fixes accordingly their irrevocable doom. But
when Bishop Colenso asks, “ In point of fact, how many
thoughtful Clergy of the Church of England have ever
deliberately taught, in plain outspoken terms, this doctrine,
-—how many of the more intelligent laity or Clergy do
really, in their heart of hearts, believe it ?” the answer mustbe given that some whose names stand among the highest
in the land have set it forth in more glaring colours and
* Colenso on the Epistle to the Romans.
P. 207.
�Eternal Punishment.
*3
with more terrific minuteness than he has himself ventured
to imagine. It becomes nothing less than the duty of any
who know this from their own experience to show simply
under what forms this doctrine is presented to English men
and women, and still more to children, and what are the
conclusions boldly drawn and vehemently denounced from
axioms which utterly contradict them. The examples
shall be either from published works or else from oral
teaching, which doubtless the preacher would not care to
disavow.
SECTION II.
Teaching of the Clergy of the Church of England on
the Subject of Eternal Punishment.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the severance of all men into two
fixed classes at the hour of death more clearly and forciblv
stated than in a Sermon of Dr Newman on the Individuality
of the Soul.
*
Even over a dogma, to which, in Dean
Milman’s words, all have “ a tacit repugnance,” his singlehearted earnestness sheds some light and comfort, if not
for the dead, yet for the living. Knowing well that for the
good and the wicked Eternal Life and Eternal Death are
already here begun, he insists that the sinner is at present
under God’s Eternal Wrath, and not merely that he will be
so at some future time. Yet he shrinks not from complying
with the inexorable demands of his system. The invisible
line divides all mankind into these two classes ; and at the
moment of their death all who die unsanctified and unre
conciled to God pass at once into a state of endless misery.f
But he did not fail to see how little men generally believed
“that every one who lives or has lived is destined for
endless bliss or torment,” J and how the popular convictions
of Protestants opened the door of hope far more widely
than the purgatory of the Church of Rome. “Let a
person who is taken away have been ever so notorious a
sinner, ever so confirmed a drunkard, ever so neglectful
* Parochial Sermons. Vol iv., Serm. 6.
f Ib.} p. 103.
J lb., p. 100.
�14
Eternal Punishment.
of Christian ordinances, and though they have no reason
for supposing anything hopeful was going on in his mind,
yet they will generally be found to believe that he has gone
to heaven; they will confidently talk of his being at peace,
of his pains being at an end, and the like.”* If a theology
so lax rises in part from their inability to “conceive it
possible that he or that they should be lost,” he does not
forget that it is partly accounted for by natural affection.
“Even the worst men have qualities which endear them
to those who come near them;”f and therefore they
cling to the memory of the past and derive from it a
vague hope, which they do not care to sift too strictly.
But death not merely fixes the doom of the sinner; it
changes his nature, not in degree only, but in kind.
“ Human feelings cannot exist in hell.” J Others have not
shrunk from drawing out the many inferences involved in
their axiom; Mr Newman drew from it simply a warning
to fight the Christian’s battle more earnestly, and to hate
the sin against which the wrath of God is eternally burning.
In that Church, where he professes to have found both
refuge and solace, he has to propound a more merciful
doctrine. The two classes § remain, but the way of peni
tence and of hope is opened to vast numbers who, in the
strict belief of Anglicans, would be shut up' with the
sinners. Thus far in his new home he has been removed
some steps at least from “ the house of bondage.”
* Parochial Sermons. Vol. iv., Serm. 6. P. 103. f lb. 103. J lb., 104.
§ The tests laid down by Mr Newman, the Bishop of Oxford, and others,
are clear enough. The only question is as to their application. This
exhaustive classification has reference to the tares and wheat, the sheep and
the goats, in the parables of Our Lord. Mr Jowett (on the Epistle to the
Romans, &c., vol. i., p. 416, Essay on Natural Religion) will not say in which
of these two divisions we should find a place for the majority of mankind,
“ who have a belief in God and immortality,” but “ have nevertheless hardlv
any consciousness of the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel,” who “have never in
their whole lives experienced the love of God or the sense of sin, or the need of
forgiveness,” but who are often “ remarkable for the purity of their morals,”
for their “strong and disinterested attachments,” and their “quick human
sympathies,” and of whom “ it would be a mistake to say that they are
without religion.” The orthodox theologians would not share his hesitation.
These men confessedly, although members of the Church outwardly, do not
die consciously in the faith of Christ; and they must therefore be shut out
for ever from the presence of God. But they are just the men of whom
Protestants speak as having gone to Heaven, although their theory
consigns them to a very different doom.
�Eternal Punishment.
*5
The full meaning of Dr Newman’s axiom cannot be
comprehended until we bring before ourselves the various
shades of character which are included under the class of
impenitent sinners. One effect of such theology is to
paralyse the will for action where action is most of all
needed. If such a line of severance exists, there must be
those in heaven who were very nigh to hell, and some in hell
who were very near to heaven. To tell the young that
there are thousands in endless torment who have failed in
sight of the goal, thousands who have only not won the
prize, thousands who have been all
saved, is not likely
to supply the readiest motive to be up and doing. The
hardness of the conflict is yet further increased by theories
on post-baptismal sin, which tend practically to put it
almost beyond the reach of pardon; and faults which, if
committed before receiving the Sacrament of Regenera
tion, would be of but little moment, avail to crush down
the soul of the baptized for ever. But as long as the
exaggeration consists in making still more narrow the
strait road which leads to Life, no other difficulty arises
than the thought that God, who is All-merciful and Loving,
lays on his weak creatures a burden which they are scarcely
able to bear. When, however, we compare the teaching
of one man with that of others on the subject of Eternal
Punishment, we begin to see that tlieir doctrines not merely
represent the Divine Being as implacably revengeful and
utterly unjust, but rest on axioms which entirely contradict
each other, as well as certain articles of faith in which
all alike profess their belief. Dr Newman grounded his
description of the doom of sinners on the maxim that hell
is not the habitation of any human affections ; the teaching
of the Bishop of Oxford on this subject rests or rested on
a very different idea. Both would, of course, admit that
God awards to every man according to his work.
In a Sermon preached in the Parish Church of Ban
bury, on the 24th of February, 1850, the Bishop of Oxford
dramatised the Day of Judgment. He was preaching
especially to the young, to the boys and girls who had on
that day been confirmed by him; and he judged rightly
that nothing could enable them to realise the state of the
lost more vividly than a series of portraits representing
�i6
Eternal Punishment.
the several classes of impenitent sinners in judgment.
*
But, inasmuch as the example of the worst sort of mankind
would be of little practical use, he sought his warnings
•chiefly from those on whom the world would be disposed
to look favourably. The poet, the statesman, the orator,
the scholar and philosopher, the moralist, the disobedient
child, the careless youth, were in their turn described as
standing before the judgment seat. No touch was wanting
in each case to complete the picture ; and if the object was
to arouse the passion of fear, the preacher’s effort could
fail of success only with those who saw that that picture
was inconsistent with the constantly recurring statement,
that Hell contains nothing but what is simply and utterly
bad. As addressed to the young, it was, of course, neces
sary that his words should not do violence to a sense of
right and wrong, probably in most of them sufficiently weak,
or tend to lower or confuse ideas respecting the Divine
Nature, which were already sufficiently inadequate. How
far the Sermon was likely to produce such a result, may
perhaps be determined by taking a few of the examples
brought forward. After describing the death of the im
penitent, sometimes in torment, sometimes in indifference,
more often in self-deceit, the Bishop depicted them before the
judgment seat still possibly deceiving themselves until the
delusion is dispelled for ever by the words which bid them
depart into the lake of fire. “What,” he asked, “will it
be for the scholar to hear this, the man of refined and
* A discourse, addressed specially to children on their confirmation,
may be more fitly alleged as a specimen of ordinary parochial teaching than
a Sermon preached before a University audience. Yet the two Sermons oil
“ The Revelation of God the Probation of Man,” preached by the Bishop of
Oxford before the University in 1861, are entitled to all the credit due to
the Sermon at Banbury for plainness of speech. We cannot even enter on
an examination of the equivocal sophistry which runs through these
Sermons. We content ourselves with remarking that, on evidence which
has been much called in question, he makes a young man of great promise,
and much simplicity of character, die “ in darkness and despair''' before he
had reached the fulness of earliest manhood. The alleged cause is indul
gence in doubts,—of what kind, we are not told. Yet there is some difference
between the promulgation of an impure Manicheism and doubts on the accu
racy of the Mosaic cosmogony. Unquestionably, the Bishop is referring to
doubts of the latter kind ; and we need only say, that to condemn to endless
torments a young man of good life because he doubted whether the sun and
moon really stood still at Joshua’s bidding, is far worse than to consign to
the same fate the school-girl of the Banbury Sermon.
�Eternal Punishment.
17
elegant mind, who nauseates everything coarse, mean, and
vulgar, who has kept aloof from everything that may annoy
<or vex him, and hated everything that was distasteful.
Now his lot is cast with all that is utterly execrable. The
most degraded wretch on earth has still something human
left about him; but now he must dwell for ever with
beings on whose horrible passions no check or restraint
shall ever be placed.” 11 How, again is it with many, of
whom the world thinks highly, who are rich and well
to do, sober and respectable, benevolent and kind ?
Such an one has been esteemed as an excellent neighbour ;
he has had a select circle of friends whom he has bounti
fully entertained: he has prided himself on discharging
well the duties of a parent, host, and neighbour; and when
he dies there is a grand funeral and it is put upon his
tombstone that he was universally lamented, and that
society had suffered in him a real loss. What is the
ScriptufA comment on all this ? ‘ In hell he lifted up his
eyes being i\~? torments.’ ” He placed his hearers by the
death bed of the rfpk nian. “ See in the house of Dives
there are hurrying step,? and anxious faces; Dives is sick
and his neighbours are son’/ because he has been a good
neighbour to them, polite and nCsPdable and ever ready to
interchange the amenities of life. J’ives is sick, and his
brothers are sorry, because he has been & kind brother to
them, and now they must lose his care and ^assistance and
see him no more. Soon all is over. The b^ 'd^ bes in
state. His friends come together and attend it
tomb, and then place the recording tablet stating him to
be a very paragon of human virtues. Tor some months
they speak of their poor neighbour, how he would have
enjoyed their present. gaiety, how they miss him at his
accustomed seat; until at length he is forgotten. And
while all this is going on upon the earth, where is Dives
himself ? Suffering in torments because in his life time
he had received his good things.” But more terrible still,
and chiefly as being addressed to children, was the picture
of a school-girl cut off at the age of thirteen or fourteen.
In her short life on earth she had not seldom played truant
from school, had told some lies, had been obstinate and
disobedient. Now she had to bid farewell to heaven and
c
�18
Eternal Punishment.
to hope, to her parents, her brothers, and sisters ; and thenfollowed her parting words to each. What was her agony
of grief, that she should never again look on their kind and
gentle faces, never hear their well known voices ? All
their acts of love return to her again,—all the old familiar
scenes, remembered with a regret which no words can
describe, with a gnawing sorrow which no imagination can
realise. She must leave for ever that which she now knew
so well how to value, and be for ever without the love for
which she had now so unutterable a yearning. She must
dwell for ever among beings on whom there is no check or
restraint, and her senses must be assailed with all that is
utterly abominable. The worst of men are there, with
every spark of human feeling extinguished, without any
law to moderate the fury of their desperate rage. To com
plete the picture, the lost angels were mingled with thisb
awful multitude, in torment themselves and the instyd.
ments of torturing others. They stood round their auman
victims, exulting in their misery and increasing perpetually
the sting of their ceaseless anguish. T^e bodies of men
as well as them souls were subjected 'w their fearful sway,
and had to suffer all that fiend; ^ hatred.could suggest.
, .e /y11 ar iey seized
tortured by the instrument
? • ?S
?eran?eK
lustful man by the instrument of
hrs lust, the tyrant > the instrument of his tyranny.”
ver consi to' xP^ons involve some curious, and not
o-es't th^18
conclusions ; but chiefly, perhaps, they sugteent1 J ^ie (H®}rences between the ninth and the ninea centuries are not very great after all. The dsemono,gy of the Bishop of Oxford is almost more minute and
elaborate than that of Bede or William of Malmesbury.
'
*
But, leaving this, we have to mark that in this scheme, asin that of Mr Newman—
1. All mankind are divided into two classes at the hour
of death.
2. That hell is the abode of nothing that is not utterly
abominable.
* Bede, iii. 19; Malmesbury, ii. 2. It must be remarked that the details
of personal bodily torment imply physical contact of daemons, and run into
images which have their ludicrous as well as their fearful side.—See Mil
man’s Latin Christianity, Book xiv., ch. 2.
�Eternal Punishment.
x9
Bui it goes beyond the teaching of Mr Newman in
asserting—
3. That hell is a chaos of unrestrained passion, from
which all check of law and order has been permanently
withdrawn.
4. That all the inhabitants of hell are mingled together,
so that any one may attack another whenever he pleases,
and
5. That all, of whom we should be disposed to judge
most leniently, retain their better characteristics, remain
ing, in short, precisely what they had been on earth. This
last axiom seems scarcely to harmonize with those which
precede it.
On a subject of such fearful moment every statement
should be sifted with all sobriety and earnestness. It
might be not difficult to present illustrations, such as have
now been noticed, even under a ludicrous aspect; but it is
more seemly to ask calmly how, if these things are so, each
man is to be rewarded according to his works. The brutal
murderer and the blood-thirsty despot remain what they
were ; their cruelty is not lessened, their physical force
seemingly not abated. The philosopher and moralist, the
man of learning and elegant tastes, the child who has died
almost in infancy, remain also what they were ; and all,
murderers, philosophers, and children, are hurled together
into an everlasting chaos. The strong can choose out vic
tims who cannot resist them : the weak can find none to
torment in their turn, and, according to the supposition,
they have no wish to torment any one. Hell is not the
habitation of any human affection: yet the child carries
thither her love for her parents, her brothers, her teachers,
(the remembrance of good and holy lessons, which now she
has learnt to value, and for valuing which she must be the
better) nay, she yearns for their blessedness not only be
cause it is a condition free from torment, but because
they are with their Loving and Most Merciful Father.
The sceptical philosopher whose life was a pattern of
moral strictness, the man of refined habits, of ready bene
volence, and good feelings remain likewise what they were,
and they are to be punished by being thrown with those
who never had a thought or care whether for elegance,
�20
Eternal Punishment.
philosophy, or morality. The school-girl may be tormented
by Ahab or Caesar Borgia, Shelley may find himself as
sailed by Jonathan Wild or Commodus. It may well seem
*
profane thus to put names together ; but if such a theory
be true, the conclusion is perfectly justifiable, and we are
justified further in maintaining (1) that on this supposi
tion the punishment is wholly unequal, unless all have
committed the same amount of sin, and are equally steeped
in guilt (which yet they are admitted not to be) or unless
all become equally fiendish (which it is asserted that they
do not).
(2.) In either case the less guilty are the greater suf
ferers. If all are made equally diabolical by the mere
passing from this world into the next, still, in undergoing
this change, some will have lost much more good than
others, many losing very little, others losing a great deal.
And if they do not all become equally bad, then the sensi
tive and refined, the benevolent and honourable man will
be trampled on by furious beings, who will lead an endless
carnival of violence, and whom he can by no possibility
resist.
(3.) The latter class would scarcely be punished at all.
The remorse of conscience they may with whatever success
put aside, and on their passions there is to be, by the
hypothesis, no check whatever. Even while on earth,
they had shown only the faintest signs of good, and hacl
approached as nearly as possible to a delighting in evil for
its own sake. To take a number of the most hardened
criminals, and leave them shut up by themselves to their
own devices, would scarcely be called punishment in any
human code. To coop up with these other criminals of
quite a different stamp, weak, sensitive, and specially open
to softer and finer feelings, would indeed be punishment,
but it would be confined wholly to the latter, while it would
give a zest to the horrible passions of the former. But
further,—(4.) Evil, on this hypothesis, is to increase and mul
• To raise an objection on the score of mentioning names is to betray a
doubt as to the individual existence of all human souls after death ; nor did
Mr Newman fail to discern and to denounce all such hidden unbelief. See
more especially the Sermon already cited. (Vol. IV, Sermon 6.)
�Eternal Punishment.
21
tiply for ever. Bishop Butler’s Sermon on Resentment
will show clearly enough the course of that passion when
uncontrolled, even on earth. But here all check, divine
and human, is to be removed for ever. In some way or
other we are to suppose that all will feel the sting of
remorse ; but, according to this idea, they will at the same
time have the will and the power to repeat the sins for
which, they suffer, nay, to add to them sins incomparably
more tremendous.
(5.) But this notion puts almost wholly out of sight
the Undying Worm, and the Everlasting Fire of Divine
wrath. It represents the lost as preying on each other,
but it pictures none of them as brought face to face with
the Anger of God against all Sin. It reduces the punish
ment inflicted on sinners to mere vindictiveness, from
which even the idea of a stern though just retribution is
shut out. In other words, the sentence of an infinitely
Perfect Judge has nothing whatever moral about it. It is
a mere physical banishment, where sinners may or may not
feel the sense of an irreparable loss. The degree to which
they feel it has no reference to any action of God on their
hearts, but is determined wholly by the tenor of their life
on earth. In comparison with the sensitive moralist, the
ruffian will feel none ; and, in short, the Divine Hatred for
Sin will never be really brought home to him.
Yet further, the popular theology of the day leads the
mind to fasten on an utterly mistaken idea of the nature of
Eternal Punishment ■ it has led those who have indulged
themselves in framing theories of Universalism, to hold
that sin may be compensated by a fixed amount of punish
ment, like the definite penalties of human law. They who
maintain that all sinners suffer endless torment do so on
the ground that endless torment alone can be an adequate
recompense for any sin; it is no matter of surprise that
their opponents should believe in a deliverance from the
Eternal Fire after it has been endured for “ a sufficient
time.
Fixed penalties have no necessary tendency to
produce a change of character. “ It is true that human
laws, which aim more at prevention of crime than amend
ment of the offender, do mete out in this way, beforehand,
a certain measure of punishment for a certain offence.
�11
Eternal Punishment.
The man who covets his neighbour’s property may, if he
like, obtain it dishonestly, at a certain definite expense.
He knows that he may possibly escape altogether; or, at
the worst, he can only suffer this or that prearranged
penalty, after suffering which he may remain (so far as the
effect of the punishment itself is concerned, and unless
other influences act upon him) as bad and as base a
villain as before. But God’s punishments are those of a
Bather. . . . We have no ground to suppose that a
wicked man will at length be released from the pit of woe,
when he has suffered pain enough for his sins, when he has
suffered time enough, a 4 certain time appointed by God’s
Justice.’ But we have ground to trust and believe that a
man in whose heart there is still Divine Life, in whom
there lingers still one single spark of better feeling, the gift
of God’s Spirit, the token of a Father’s still continuing
Love, will at length be saved, not from suffering, but from
sin.”*
But the orthodox theology, which severs all men into
two classes, to be fixed at the moment of their death, still
maintains that the final cause of the Divine Government of
the world is the Victory of Righteousness over sin. It still
asserts that when the last enemy has been destroyed God
shall be all in all. Yet, according to the hypothesis of the
Bishop of Oxford, the vast majority of the whole human
race of all times and countries, all wicked heathen, all
wicked Christians, all children who die with faults not
repented of, all mere moralists, all men of indifferent or
negative characters, depart into a realm where Lawlessness
reigns supreme, and from which all external check has been
deliberately withdrawn. In this anarchy is involved the
permission and the power to sin afresh perpetually in
infinitely increasing ratio. Here undoubtedly the calcula
tion of numbers may, or rather it must, come in. The
children of Adam may be beyond any earthly census, but
they are not innumerable. As Mr Newman cautiously and
reverently expressed it, that which gives especial solemnity
to the thought of death “ is that we have reason to suppose
that souls on the wrong side of the line are far more
numerous than those on the right.”f It is dishonest and
* Colenso on Romans, p. 263.
f Sermons, Vol. IV (Serm. 6), p. 101.
�Eternal Punishment.
23
■cowardly to palter and dally with such a subject as this.
If the words of the Bishop of Oxford are true, then Satan,
who is the lord of this lawless realm, has for ever severed nine
tenths, possibly nineteen twentieths, possibly more, of the
whole human race from the Love and the Law of God.
Brom this vast Kingdom he has banished God; and in it
he may exult in the endless aggrandizement of sin. Some
very indisputable proof is needed for the belief that the
Victory of God means nothing more than this; and, ungu^stionably, no man
COLCOfi would ever speak thus
of any earthly King who had lost nineteen-twentieths of
his Kingdom, over which he had been obliged to abandon
all control. We might give him all the credit which a
qualified success deserves; we might say that he had put
bounds to rebellion, and prevented the rebels from harming
those who had not joined them; but it would be an absurd
mockery to say that he had overthrown and destroyed his
enemies and recovered all his ancient power. If popular
theologians speak truly, the Victory of God would be even
more partial, and Ahriman will indeed have triumphed
over Ormuzd.
We may dismiss from our thoughts such Pandemoniums
of unbounded ferocity. The most intense conviction of the
■endlessness of hell torments does not call for them., The
penalty of an undying remorse rather implies that they
who are lost shall not be suffered to torment each other.
The supposition that they are so permitted involves a per
petual miracle to keep such torture within due bounds, if
any pretence of justice in the measure of punishment is to
be maintained. It involves further the very strange idea
that they have the Divine Licence to commit a certain
amount of sin, and add perpetually each to his own amount
of guilt. The best form of the popular theology sweeps
.away all such monstrous absurdities, and interprets the
Undying Worm as an unavailing agony of remorse, an
indescribable and fruitless yearning after a Righteousness
.and Love which they have learnt too late to value. But if
it gets rid of some folly, it fails to meet or to remove the
.serious moral difficulties involved in the doctrine. It
asserts the strict apportionment of penalty according to
each man’s deserts; it leaves no room for any such just
�24
Eternal Punishment.
proportion. The very essence of proportion is the idea of
gradation; but “ can there be any possible gradation of
endless, infinite, irremediable woe ? . . . The very essence
of such perdition is utterly, and for ever and ever, to lose
sight of the Blessed Eace of God. . . . What would alL
bodily or mental pain whatever be, compared with theanguish of being shut out for ever and ever from all hopeof beholding one ray of that Light ? And even bodily or
mental pain, however diminished, yet if continued without
cessation or relief for ever and ever, how can this be spoken
bi aS ‘ fe'W stripes ’ ”* for any to whom few stripes are to
be apportioned ? It supposes the sinner to undergo .an
agony to which it will be impossible for him to realise any
increase ; to such an one the announcement that his neigh
bour’s sufferings are greater must appear only an idle and
malicious mockery. At the utmost he will only be able to
take in the difference by an intellectual effort. Is the
Divine Justice not concerned with convincing the sinner of
its own reality ?
But the orthodox theology has also to deal with the
relation of those who are saved to those who are lost.
Once, at least, they all meet for recognition before the
Throne of Judgment. There parents are to look on children
once loved and cherished, now appointed for the burning ;
there the husband is to see the wife whom he loved to the
last borne away into the lake of fire; there brothers, whose
love was one but whose lot is now different, are to take
their farewell, and to see each other again no more. That
the sinners shall mourn for the blessings which they have
lost, and. that their anguish should be increased by the very
consciousness that they who loved them once are blessed,
still, need perhaps in such a scheme present no great diffi
culty ; but the happiness of the righteous must not be
disturbed, and some solution must be found for the huge
perplexities so produced. No theologian ventures to assert
that we are to hate all sinners in this life ; rather, our love
should be deepened by the consciousness of their sin and need.
The miserable wretches who haunt the filthy courts of crowded
cities are to be sought out with the more tenderness and.
Colenso 'on Romans, pp. 199, 200.
�Eternal Punishment.
2$'
zeal, because they are exasperated against an order which,
to them, appears thoroughly iniquitous. Their blasphemies
are not to deter us from seeking to do them good; after a few
years are past, they will prevent God from so doing. In
some way or other, the Righteous in Heaven are to acquiesce
in a necessity which is laid on the Divine Being Himself.
We do not hate them now, but we shall hate them hereafter
nay, those who are lost shall retain their love for us long after
the last lingering feeling has been extinguished in ourselves..
We may struggle to escape from the labyrinth of unintel
ligible contradictions, but the conclusion remains that the
assurance of our own salvation will enable us to look with
serene indifference on the departure of lost friends into hell.
At the least, that conscientiousness will not be allowed to
interfere with our bliss. This can only be done by one of two
suppositions,—either we shall come to hate all sinners
because we detest sin, or we shall be able to forget sin and
sinners altogether.
But if it be impossible (as for men in this life at least
it would seem to be impossible) to feel an unmixed hatredfor any being not wholly evil, then the mere comfort of
those who are saved demands that all who are lost shall
cease to retain the least affinity with good. Hence it
became a logical necessity to maintain that hell is the
habitation of no human affections, or in other words that
the accident of death rendered wholly wicked those who
had been only partially wicked before. But if some
writers have discerned in the parable or history of the rich
man and the beggar, the evidence of this sweeping change,
the idea of hell torments enforced by the Bishop of Oxford
implies that over some at least no change has passed unless
it be one for the better. The philosopher and the moralist
retain their refined and kindly feelings ; the very essence
of their torture is that they do retain them and must retain
them for ever. The school-girl, who died with a lie on her
lips, still loves her kinsfolk and her friends, or, rather, she
has learnt to set on their love a value of which she had not
dreamed on earth. She has been taught to mourn over her
banishment from those who are good, over the thought
that she cannot with them share the love of God. The’
case may be put even more forcibly. According to
�26
Eternal Punishment.
Archbishop Whately, the terrors of the Day of Judgment will
be felt only by those “ who will then, for the first time, have
a faithful and tender conscience.”* That men should
have such consciences, is the special desire of the Divine
Spirit; and in this theory the Day of Judgment at once
accomplishes the victory of righteousness over sin by
■changing the hearts of all sinners. It is to this, then, that
the good have to look forward; and, if memory survives in
Heaven, it must tell them that the gates of hell have closed
-on faithful and tender consciences. The prospect may be
bewildering ; the retrospect would be intolerable. In two
ways only can men, during this life, deal with the thoughts
so forced upon them. All other feelings may here be
swallowed up in a fierce vehemence to save the souls of
■others and our own. The idea of endless vengeance may
send us forth to drive men into Heaven with the ecstatic
fervour of Knox or Loyola; or else our efforts may be
■centred on ourselves. The one aim of life may be to force
our way through gates which can be opened but to few.
We may learn to crush all natural feeling, and the selfish
ness so acquired we may carry into Heaven. The very
intensity of our joy may lie in the thought that we have
escaped the fires which are tormenting those whom we had
known on earth. Archbishop Whately shrinks from this
idea of a triumph worthy of Mahomet or Montanus. In
his belief, we shall be able in Heaven to do effectually what
we can only in part accomplish here. On earth a good
man, “ in cases where it is clear that no good can be
done by him, strives, as far as possible, though often
without much success, to withdraw his thoughts from evil
which he cannot lessen, but which still, in spite of his
effort, will often cloud his mind. We cannot, at pleasure,
■draw off our thoughts entirely from painful subjects which
it is in vain to meditate about,—the power to do this com
pletely would be a great increase of happiness.” The
blessed “ will be able, by an effort of the will, completely
to banish and exclude every idea that might alloy their
happiness.”f It might have been an easier, perhaps a
more merciful, solution to extinguish at once and for ever the
* Scripture Revelations of a Future State, p. 158.
t Scripture Revelations of a Future State, pp. 282, 283.
�Eternal Punishment.
27
memory of their life on earth. The theory of Archbishop
Whately is one which not a few good men would reject for
themselves in this life, and which the great founders of the
Mendicant Orders would have indignantly thrust aside. It
was the first characteristic of these merciful teachers, that
they could not and would pot dismiss from their minds the
thought of evil which they could not remedy. They
needed not the modern casuistry which takes “ the wide
prevalence of evil in the world as a proof that God cannot
-expect us to harass ourselves incessantly in resisting it.”
To Bishop Copleston it was the most difficult of questions
to determine “ with what degree of evil existing under
our eyes we might fairly indulge a feeling of complacency
and a desire for repose and enjoyment.”* They knew
nothing of repose and enjoyment, for beings who all their
life long must walk on the very verge of hell. They
believed what they professed: and they lived, therefore,
unlike those who are able to dismiss a mere dogma from
their mind. It may be more difficult for the comfort
loving theologians of the present day to explain how it is
that good men on earth rise above the selfishness of heaven.
Teachers of a sterner, if not a better school, find in
the dogma of eternal reprobation the paramount need of
crushing these instinctive or acquired longings for ease and
comfort: and as long as the penalty is regarded solely with
reference to ourselves, it serves most effectually to point
the warning and enforce the lesson. If the whole proba
tion of the sons of men is bounded to their life on earth,
then it is indeed fitting that our days here should know
nothing’ of feasts and merriment. If things go smoothly
with us, it is our business to make them go roughly. The
philosophy of Amasis and Poly crates is fully justified by
the conditions of the Christian’s life ;t and they who accept
these conditions, must feel it in truth a very small part of
their duty not to let the whole year go round “ without a
break and interruption in its circle of pleasures.The
case is altered when, from ourselves, we look on others;
* Bishop Copleston’s philosophy was probably right. It assumes the
aspect of a frightful apathy only when taken along with the dogma of end
less punishment, which there is no evidence that he did not hold.
f Newman’s Parochial Sermons. Vol. VI, Serra. 2, p. 27.
J Ibid.
�28
Eternal Punishment.
and it presents difficulties yet more grave when we come
to dwell on the method of Divine Government itself. In
some way or other the Justice of God who appoints an end
less torment for all who die with any sin not repented of,
must be consistent with an order of things in which
the time of trial may be cut short by an accident. If
natural feeling struggles against the' idea of an infinite
penalty for the sin of a mortal life, it demands still more
imperatively that, in such case, all should have the same
amount of trial. But the child is cut off at school; the old
man lives to heed or disregard warnings repeated through
the life time, perhaps, of three generations. Kay, the sloth
or thoughtlessness of mortal man may be the whole cause
which determines the endless torture of the unbaptised
*
infant.
Some live until they appear to love evil for
its own sake; others are cast into the lake of fire,
when, as theologians admit, they were all but fit for
heaven. The moment of death changes all alike into
beings of unqualified evil.
The loss of some is as
nothing compared with that of others ; and the doom may
come after a thousand warnings, or without any. Yet the
theology which maintains all this insists also that God is
infinitely merciful and loving. It must, at the least, be
admitted that, if in spite of all authority, they who
profess to believe these dogmas have to overcome a
natural repugnance, some among them at least have in this
task achieved no mean success. But they have to persuade
others to accept their own convictions. The decrees of
Councils, or the language of Canons and Articles, may suffice
for themselves ; but some attempt must be made to show
that their belief is enforced by passages of the Old
Testament or the New which seem to make against it.
Men do not at the first glance see how an endless punish
ment for all can be consistent with the few and the many
stripes, how others can suffer torments less tolerable than
those appointed for the men of Sodom and Gomorrha, if
* The theology of Augustine was almost more uncompromising. An
unbaptised infant lay sick: a convert, sincerely penitent, desired baptism on
his deathbed. The priest, when summoned, was asleep or at dinner, or he
would not go. It was the result of a Divine Decree that the child and the
convert should be damned.
f Colenso on Romans, p. 211.
�Eternal Punishment.
29
it be impossible to conceive of any increase to the latter.
If hell is the habitation of no human affections, it is hard to
understand why the rich man in Hades should appear to
be changed for the better rather than the worse. The
necessities of a theological position have provided the
solution; but the firmest believer would probably admit
that it will not generally suggest itself to the natural mind.
To men who have not received a higher illumination, the
rich man appears to be represented not as blaspheming or
even murmuring, not as hating God or exulting in the
ruin of others, but as anxious ’ that his brothers may
not fail to win the blessings which he has lost. To
such it would seem that our Lord assumed “ that even
in the place of torment there will be loving, tender
thoughts in a brother’s heartand they may be tempted
to reason further, that “ if there can be such, as they can
not come from the Spirit of Evil, they must be believed to
come from the Spirit of all Goodness. While there is life,
there is hope. In fact, the rich man is represented as less
selfish in the flames of hell than he was in this life. The
Eternal Fire has already wrought some good result in
him.”* But they who maintain the dogma of endless ven
geance can afford to look down on notions so crude as
these ; rather they feel it their duty to insinuate that none
but men of unclean lives can ever entertain them. To
them the prayer of the rich man to Abraham is simply the
blasphemous expression of a desperate irony, while his life
on earth was the result and token of a conscious and
definite unbelief in the existence of an unseen world.
During his mortal life he may have been sinful; now he is
*
utterly fiendish and diabolical. The teaching of the Bishop
of Oxford seems to involve conclusions not quite consistent
with these positions of the Archbishop of Dublin,f yet both
assert strenuously the endlessness of future punishment.
The former may countenance the notion that the greater
sin has the lesser penalty ; the latter appears to set aside
the ordinary meaning of words.
According to Dr Trench, the narrative was aimed
* Colenso on Romans, p. 214.
f Notes on the Parables, p. 454, &c. &c.
�30
Eternal Punishment.
against the Pharisees, and especially at their unbelief.
The rich man, or, if we must so call him, Dives, had fairly
brought himself to believe that the unseen world had really
no existence, and he calmly adopted and.clung to a course
of life consistently springing out of this cool intellectual
*
conviction.
The discovery of its reality, he made only
when it was too late. It may be. so; but the statement
seems to involve the conclusion that men cannot act as the.
rich man acted, with a clear knowledge of the consequences.
Yet the drunkard deliberately persists in his habit, knowing
not only that sobriety is a duty, but that his vice is ruinous
alike to his body and his soul. The settled purpose to
commit sin may coexist with a keen perception of the
misery of sin. Men may be, as Bishop Butler has insisted,
most unselfish in their viciousness, most disinterested in
deliberately putting aside what they know to be their
highest good.f The rich man in the parable may have acted
like Balaam ; but to assert that his unbelief arose from his
mental process of examination and rejection is as much an
assumption as the ascription to him of some human feeling
can possibly be. We are not told that his actions were
prompted by his belief; it is not implied that he knew any
thing about the beggar who lay sick at his gate ; and many
have fastened on his ignorance as conveying the most
fearful of all warnings to the thoughtless.^ The narrative
seems to represent him simply as putting aside the thought
of all responsibility, not as going through a mental process
in order that he may deny its existence, or as persevering
in the process until he has worked himself into full convic
tion. If it is not easy to see how a parable addressed
chiefly to Pharisees should dwell on extravagance rather
than covetousness, it is still more strange that an intel
lectual unbelief in an unseen world should be attributed to
men who believed a resurrection both angel and spirit.
But a closer scrutiny of the narrative will be rewarded
with further discoveries. It may teach us that the rich
man’s good things were “ good actions or good qualities
• Trench on the Parables, p. 456.
+ Sermon on the Character of Balaam.
j See especially Cope and Stretton, Visitatio Infirmorum, Office for a
careless sick person.
�Eternal Punishment,
3®
which, in some small measure, Dives possessed, and for
which he received in this life his reward.”* Dr Trench is
not prepared to reject the belief of Bishop Sanderson, that
“ God rewardeth those few good things which are in evil
men with these temporal benefits, for whom, yet in his
justice, he reserveth eternal damnation.” Bor nine days
Eblis feasted in his hall the beings who had bidden adieu
to hope ;f it was reserved for a Christian theologian to assert
that God bestows the means of a little sensual enjoyment
for the good qualities or deeds of the unconverted. If Dr
Newman urges sinners during Lent “ to act at least like the
prosperous heathen, who threw his choicest trinket into the
water that he might propitiate fortune,the Archbishop
of Dublin has been taught that “ the course of an unbroken
prosperity is ever a sign and augury of ultimate reproba
tion.” Doubtless the heart knows its own bitterness, and
there may be many breaks in a life of outwardly uninter
rupted success; but Dr Trench’s axiom might afford a
grim satisfaction to those who, in the midst of want and
wretchedness, regard the rich and the powerful as
unquestionably in the enjoyment of “ unbroken prosperity.”
There are probably not wanting those who may think that
this dangerous condition is fulfilled in Archbishop Trench
himself.
When a writer lays down such a criterion on his own
authority, it is hard to abstain from retorts and insinuations:
but the mere sense of truth and fairness must sometimes
call on us to speak, when we might have chosen rather to
keep silence. If Dr Trench is at a pinch to explain how
the sight of the lost, whom they are not suffered to help,
can fail to cast a shade on the happiness of the blessed, it
is simply because he has not availed himself of the ready
solution of his predecessor, Dr Whately. When he asserts
that the rich man’s request to Abraham is “ a bitter reproach
against God and against the old economy,” it might be
enough to reply that the narrative does not say so. But
the case is altered when Dr Trench proceeds to judge of
* Trench on the Parables, p. 474.
f Beckford’s Vathek.
$ Sermons, Vol. VI, p. 27. Dr Newman should rather have said
“ appease the jealousy of God <j>0ovep'ov to baip.oviov was the keynote of the
philosophy of Herodotus.
�32
Eternal Punishment.
the inward life of those who differ from himself. He has
a keen perception that, if suffering was already doing- its
work in the rich man, sufferings must be not “ vindicative,”
but “ corrective.” Such a doctrine, he believes, “ will
always find favour with all those who have no deep insight
into the evil of sin, no earnest view of the task and
responsibilities of life, especially when, as too often,
they are bribed to hold it by a personal interest, by
a lurking consciousness that they themselves are not
earnestly striving to enter in at the strait gate, that their
own standing in Christ is insecure or none.”* Dr Trench
is,' of course, not obliged to believe or to assert that such a
fear lies at the root of the convictions expressed by Mr
Maurice, or Mr Wilson, or the Bishop of Natal; but he
does most distinctly and unequivocally deny to them “ any
deep insight into the evil of sin, any earnest view of the
task and responsibilities of life.” The verdict of Dr Trench
might fairly justify us in rejecting the criterion that a tree
is known bv its fruits, or in questioning the truth that
charity thinks no evil. He seems to agree with Aquinas
that while the rich man asked that his brethren might not
come into his place of torment he was really longing for
their damnation. If his request was nothing but a blas
phemous scoff, Dr Trench can hardly think otherwise.
Yet surely he could not have alleged this opinion of Aquinas;
except from the mere necessity of maintaining a foregone
conclusion. It is impossible to conceive of a condition of
heart more thoroughly diabolical. In short, the being who
can indulge in such a wish must be wholly and intensely
bad. But absolute iniquity shuts out the idea of remorse,
and leaves no room for any suffering except that which is
physical, or any mental feelings except those of violent and
furious rage ; and these leave no place for that aching void,
that unavailing agony of sorrow for a good irrecoverably
lost, which is generally asserted to be the special sting in
the misery of the wicked. Nay, more; this idea that all
men become devils in hell, wild in their own unbounded
wickedness, alone constitutes the logical necessity for the
physical tortures of fire and brimstone, as well as for the
* Notes on the Parables, p. 478.
�Eternal Punishment.
agency of demons to inflict those outward stripes for which
only, on this hypothesis, any feeling will be left.
This logical necessity was clearly present to the mind
of Bishop Pearson. If it was certain that the pains of hell
were simply vindictive, and the same measure of endless
duration was the portion of all the lost, then the punish
ment of sinners must be regarded as something different
from the righteous wrath of God against all sin. If the
punishment was endless, the wicked must live through
endless time to suffer it. “ Otherwise there would be a
punishment inflicted and none endured, which is a contra
diction.”* Bishop Pearson had a quick eye for the incon
sistencies of his opponents ; on his own side he can see
none. He is careful to assert that punishment shall be
strictly apportioned to sin, “ so that no man shall suffer
more than he hath deserved.”f He insists also that they
shall be “ tormented with a pain of loss, the loss from God,
from whose presence they are cast out, the pain from them
selves in a despair of enjoying Him, and regret for losing
Him.” Modern theology has substituted a savage delight
in tormenting each other in place of this endless remorse.
Bishop Pearson was scarcely concerned with examining an
idea which probably never entered his mind. But the diffi
culty involved in the enormous differences between one man
and another at the time of death, belongs to all ages and
countries alike. Bishop Pearson knew, as the Bishop of
Oxford knows now, that young children have died in sin.
It is cowardly to evade the irresistible conclusion. The
little children are doomed, not less than the Devil himself,
to a punishment which “ shall not be taken off them by any
compassion.” These, the sinners of a day, whose sins lay
in playing truant and telling a lie to hide it, shall no more
than the great Tempter of Mankind .live to pay the utter
most farthing. They, not less than Herod or Alexander
VI., or Agathocles or Danton (it matters not whom we
take), shall suffer the endless “ horror of despair,” because
“ it were not perfect hell if any hope could lodge in it.” It
needs some special illumination to enable ordinary men to
see how these children suffer no more than they deserve.
* Pearson on the Creed, Art. xii., p. 463.
f lb., p. 467.
D
�34
Eternal Punishment.
The time has come when the whole subject must be
met calmly and fearlessly. There may be sophistry and
evasion on both sides. Orthodox theologians have not
withheld both these imputations from Mr Maurice, whose
worst fault is an indistinctness of expression which some
times assumes an air of paradox. Something’ of this
ambiguity lies at the root of his reluctance to extend the
idea of time into that of eternity. It may be true that
“ the continual experiments to heap hundreds of thousands
of years on hundreds of thousands of years,” do not
put us even on the way to the idea; but it seems
not less certain that we cannot conceive of existence
except as an extension of duration.
*
It is better to
say plainly and honestly that the idea of any end to the
life of the righteous involves also the idea of the most dis
interested injustice,—an injustice the more horrible in pro
portion to the greater advance of the good in conformity
to the Divine will. It is well to say not less honestly that
the idea of an end to the misery of the wicked involves no
such imputation, if at the same time it is maintained that
so long as there remains any resistance, so long must the
sinner abide under the burning wrath of God. Án infinite
resistance implies an infinite chastisement; nor can we
allege anything to prove that the wicked cannot prolong
their resistance for ever, except the difficulty of believing
that the Divine Will cannot finally subdue the disobedience
of every enemy.f Nor is it of much use to dwell on verbal
arguments drawn from the words which in our English
Bibles are represented by everlasting punishment and the
unquenchable fire. J But it is more than ever necessary to
* Christian Berrem' rancer, January 1854, p. 225. Art., Maurice’s Theo
logical Essays. This article presents the arguments for the doctrine of
endless punishments with perhaps as much force as they can be expressed ;
but the reviewer was apparently mistaken in thinking that Mr Maurice’s
main objections were merely verbal.
f It was this difficulty which led Scotns Erigena to affirm the final
restoration of the Devil himself, and to cite Origen and others in support of
this belief.—See Milman’s Latin Christianity, Book xiv., ch. 2.
J Probably not much will be gained by efforts to determine whether
the writers of the New Testament attached a distinct idea of duration to
the word anários, which, as coming from the root i, to go, originally ex
pressed the simple idea of motion. It is of the utmost importance to bear in
mind th:s first restricted and sensuous meaning of the word. (See Max
Müller, Lectures on the .Science of Language, Second Series, pp. 67, 249,
�Eternal Punishment.
35
meet assumptions by plain denials. Bishop Pearson may
rest his own belief on the fact that the same adjective is
applied in the Greek Testament to the state of the wicked
and the good; but it becomes a mere question of fact, to be
determined manifestly by each man’s judgment, when it is
asserted that the texts of Scripture declaring the endless
punishment of the wicked “ are so decisive and plain, that
they must be taken to mean what they appear to do, unless
some positive ground of reason or morals can be shown against
it.”* Such ground can be shown, and a man must indeed
have thrown dust into his own eyes, if he can think that a
sweeping assertion can put aside the distinction of the few
and the many stripes, of the more tolerable punishment of
Gomorrha than of Capernaum, of the fire which is to save
the men whose work of hay or stubble it shall nevertheless
consume. It is a profound casuistry which sees nothingbut diabolical blasphemy and rage in what is admitted to
be the only full picture given in the Gospels of the state of
the impenitent after death. One or two phrases of the
New Testament at the most may be wrested into the asser
tion that all those who die impenitent are tormented for
ever ; a far greater number appear altogether to contradict
it, and these must be taken to mean what they appear to
rnean, “ unless some positive ground of morals or reason can
be shown against it.” Morals and reason would appear to be
decisive against a dogma which issues in a labyrinth of in
explicable and almost ludicrous contradictions, and which
seems to impute to the Merciful God an intensity of vindic
tiveness which the human mind is utterly unable to realise.
But it is asserted that reason and morals call for the
maintenance of this dogma from another point of view.
It is urged that “ the release from the notion of Eternal
Punishment would be felt by the great mass as a relief
336, 527.) But it may be more tempting to lay a stress on the word
KÓAatris, which, according to Aristotle, is essentially temporary, end to
maintain that the English translators were not warranted in rendeiing
7rdp &(ri3e<rTov by fire that never shall be quenched. The verbal adjective
can at best express mere quality or capacity. But it seems idle to apply
such subtleties to the Greek of the New Testament. If it were not so, .
something might be made of the term fiicravos., as applied to sickness and
plagues; but it seems to be used precisely as we use the word trial without
reference to any intended effect on the sufferer.
* Christian Remembrancer, January 1854, p. 225.
�36
Eternal Punishment.
from the sense of moral obligation, and, relying on the
certainty that all would be sure to be right at last, men
would run the risk of the intermediate punishment, what
ever it might be, and plunge into self-indulgence without
hesitation.”* The reviewer of Mr Maurice knew of course
that men do so now in spite of this doctrine, and further
“ that there is no limit to the powers of imagination by
which men can suppress the reasonable certainty of the
future, and make the present everything.” But he thinks
that “ the belief in endless punishment is the true and
rational concomitant of the sense of moral obligation ”
and that “ a general relaxation of moral ties, a proclama
tion of liberty and security, the audacity of sins which had
before been abashed, carelessness where there had been
hesitation, obstinacy where there had been faltering, and
defiance where there had been fear, would show a world in
which the sanctions of morality and religion had been
loosened, and in which vice had lost a controlling power,
and got rid of an antagonist and a memento.”f It is im
possible to regard with indifference the least possible risk of
weakening the sense of moral obligation; but it is a mere
question of fact, and human experience may carry us some
little way towards deciding it. Men are, undoubtedly, able
to suppress the reasonable certainty of the future ; but they
are also able to heap sin on sin in spite of a penalty of
which they have almost an ever present dread. Hell is
emphatically the Italian’s bugbear. The Englishman can
talk about it, and dismiss it from his mind; but it haunts
the Italian by day and by night. His flesh creeps and
his blood runs cold in the silence of his secret chamber,
and the first temptation which crosses his path is followed
by his submission. But there are more sweeping methods
of evading this belief. The Church of Rome modifies the
dogma by the purgatorial fire: the popular belief of Pro
testants dispenses with purgatory altogether, and sends all
men practically to heaven. At the least, it answers the
question, whether there are few saved, by the implied
assertion that very few, indeed, are lost. Hence the belief
in endless punishment may be the rational concomitant of
* Christian Remembrancer, January 1854, p. 233.
f Christian Remembrancer, lb. p. 234.
�Eternal Punishment.
37
a sense of moral obligation; but its effects are practically
nullified, and its removal would only widen a little more
the road which is now held to lead to heaven those who
live the common life of all men.
*
Dean Milman admits
that there is a natural revolt against the doctrine: men
wish to evade it, and they consolidate their sophistry into
a system. None, or at the most but few, really maintain
now that all who do not die in the active Love of God
remain for ever face to face with His Anger. There would
be no such scruple in believing- that in all, without respect
of persons, the Eternal Eire will continue to purge away
the dross from the pure ore as long as any dross remains.
The check on sin would be increased in power, and the
sense of moral obligation quickened, because it would be
set free from a belief which to natural human instinct
appears self-contradictory and immoral.
But what is the experience of legislators in all ages and
countries ? If men will not be deterred by any penalty
short of endless damnation, that is to say, a penalty than,
which they can conceive none higher, then clearly all
apportionment of civil punishment must merge in the
one penalty of death. The idea is a very old one ; but,
whether in England or at Athens, it has simply defeated its
own ends, if that end be the diminution of crimes. Diodotos warned the Athenians that they might punish all
their enemies with death, but they would only induce them
still more to run the chances of escape.f The same
gambling spirit runs into things spiritual. The same
doctrine which tells the good man that if he dies with any
sin not repented of he will sink into hell still leaves it
possible that the wicked man may live to repent. Thou
sands believe with Balaam that the mere wish to die thedeath of the righteous man will somehow or other issue in
its fulfilment.
There remains yet the fact, which it is impossible to
ignore, that the mitigation of a penalty is not necessarily
followed by the multiplication of the offences for which it
is inflicted. When Cleon proposed to punish the revolted
Mitylenteans by an indiscriminate massacre of all the men,
* Jowett on the Epistle to the Romans, Vol. I, n. 417, &c.
t Thucydides, iii. 45.
�38
Eternal Punishment.
he was carrying out a theory of punishment which seems
to have been heartily accepted by Archbishop Whately. In
his belief, as in that of the Athenian demagogue, “the
object proposed by human punishment is the prevention of
future crimes by holding out a terror to transgressors.”*
Both alike put a part for the whole ; and, if the theory
were true, it would relieve judges from all duty of appor
tioning punishments for offences. English judges of the
present day feel this task of apportionment more and more
to be a very strict duty; and it would seem that people do
not steal more sheep and handkerchiefs because they
no longer run the risk of being hanged for the crime.
Undoubtedly, if there is but the one penalty of death for
almost all offences, the task of legislation is wonderfully
simplified. It implies no exalted idea of Divine justice if
we believe that its penalties are fixed by the same kind of
vindictive indolence. The legislation of England is more
and more making the reformation of the offender a co
ordinate object with the prevention of crime. According
to the popular theology, it has already risen to a higher idea
than is exhibited in the Justice of an all-merciful God.
SECTION III.
Philosophical Arguments alleged in Defence
Dogma of Endless Punishment.
of the
But from the contradictory theories and notions of popular
preachers and commentators, or even from the positive state
ments of Creeds, Articles, and Canons, we may pass into the
calmer regions of philosophical argument. The conditions
of our life here may teach us something about that which
shall be hereafter: and, if we believe that one and the same
God rules over all worlds, it is impossible to ignore and
foolish to depreciate the force of this argument from analogy.
But the name even of Bishop Butler must not tempt us to
* Scripture Revelations of a Future State, p. 219.
�Eternal Punishment.
39
draw a single inference which it does not fully warrant.
Every question connected with or arising out of it is, as
Butler liimself admits, a mere question of fact. We may or
may not be able to determine it; but on those which we fail
to answer we must be content to suspend all judgment. It
matters little whether Butler took a high or a low view of
religion ; but it can never be useless to show, if it can be
shown, that he lias in any instance overstepped the bounds
which must be set to all reasoning from analogy. The
most stringent scrutiny is needed to ensure that the alleged
dogmas of revealed religion shall not draw from the con
ceptions of natural religion an aid which the latter cannot
logically afford. If the argument is to carry any weight as
addressed to unbelievers, this rigid indifference becomes
an indispensable duty.
The Analogy of Butler may be as wearisome as a long
journey through deep sand; and we may miss in it “not
only distinct philosophical conceptions but a scientific use
of terms.”* It is of more moment to remark that the
science of the Analogy does not altogether harmonize with
the science of the great Sermons which have done more to
preserve his fame. The account given in the latter of
human nature may appear to allow but little scope for a
fervent or an ecstatic piety; but it asserts unequivocally
that the happiness or the misery of man is the direct and
inseparable result of his actions and his habits. Man stands
in an immediate relation to his Maker, not merely as being
the work of His hands, but as possessing affections and
desires which can have their complete satisfaction in
nothing less than God Himself. His work is to see that
the several parts of his nature are kept in due proportion
to each other, as well as in subordination to that higher
principle of reflexion which ought to be absolute in power
as it is supreme in authority. And throughout it follows,
that by the very necessity of His Nature, God, who cannot
■change, must regard with love every creature which seeks
so to conform its will to the Divine will, must acknowledge
them and draw them towards Himself, in proportion as they
thus strive to do their proper work. Hence the final cause
* Essays and Reviews. Ninth Edition, p. 293.
�4o
Eternal Punishment.
of man is conformity with absolute Righteousness and
unfailing Love. This conformity may also involve his hap
piness, but in the order of ideas it precedes it.
The Analogy introduces us to views of a very different
kind. In the Sermons the constitution of man involves
the need of conformity with the Divine Nature: in the
Analogy God annexes certain results to certain acts. In the
former Virtue is the natural condition of man,—implying
a necessary communion with the Source of all Truth and
Goodness : in the latter it is something which God has
promised to reward and which may yield to its pos
sessor a “ secret satisfaction and sense of security.” In
the Sermons the Love of God is represented as the
direct and necessary complement of human nature; in
the Analogy the idea of God as a master and governor is
the first to occupy the mind of man. In the formcr by
the very necessity of His Nature, God loves the creatures
whom he has made capable of being kindled by his Love ; in
the latter “ the true notion, or conception of the Author of
nature is that of a master or governor prior to the consi
deration of his moral attribute.”* The whole method of
Divine government becomes a complex machinery, admi
rably adapted, it may be, for its special purpose, but imply
ing the exercise of an arbitrary will which has prede
termined certain results without reference to an Eternal
and Unchangeable Law.f The Sermons speak of the con
stitution of a man as flowing directly from the nature of
God; the Analogy seems rather to separate the goodness of
virtuous men from the goodness of God, and to make
them independent centres of righteousness. Erom the
Sermons it follows, of necessity, that the end of human
life is not happiness but a conformity to the Divine
Nature; in the Analogy we are taught that God has
* Butler’s Analogy. Part I, ch. ii., p. 3S.
t It is as well to remember how rapidly this recognition of power as the
basis of the Divine nature may pass into a mere Baal worship. Congrega
tions have not unfrequentlv been edified and comforted by the assurance that
they .are in the hands of an all-powerful Being who happens also to be verv
merciful, and by the contrast of their fortunate position with the conceiv
able wretchedness of creatures made bjr a Deity whose delight lay simply
in tormenting them. Such talk might be dismissed at once, except as illus
trating the sort of argument which is sometimes used to reconcile the idea
of mercy with that ot an endless punishment of all sinners.
�Eternal Punishment.
4i
annexed pleasure to some actions and pain to others, and
that men “ act altogether on an apprehension of avoid
ing’ evil or obtaining good.” To use Butler’s favourite
phrase, God governs the world by a system of rewards
and punishments ; and apart from any dogmas of revealed
*
religion this conclusion is forced upon us by the analogy
of civil government.
Many probably, when they read that “ the annexing
pleasure to some actions and pain to others in our power
to do or forbear, and giving notice of this appointment
beforehand to those whom it concerns, is the proper formal
notion of government,” t will wonder whence Butler derived
his knowledge. That English legislation in his day was
not slow in inflicting pain for a vast number of actions, few
would care to deny ; it would not be so easy to give a list
of actions to which it annexed a feeling of pleasure. But
to what code of any age or people could this axiom ever bo
applied ? A paternal despotism in its palmiest days might
possibly exhibit some faint approach to such a system; but
otherwise human law contents itself mainly with pro
tecting persons and property and inflicting pains or penal
ties on those who injure either the one or the other. It is
careful to punish whatever it holds to be an offence; it
admits no obligation to reward all that men may regard as
generous or honourable. The very idea of equal govern
ment is, that it leaves good citizenship to be its own
reward, while it showers its rewards on a few, not because
they are better or more righteous than their neighbours,
but because they have had it in their power by whatever
means to do the state more service. It expects all citizens
to do their duty, without even telling them that they ought
* The Reviewer of Mr Maurice’s “Theological Essays” in the
‘ Christian Remembrancer,’ Jan. 1854, p. 209, earnestly denies that “analogy
is Butler’s primary argument for the truth of religion.” This is, of course,
quite true, if the Sermons and. the Analogy are taken together. Then,
undoubtedly his full system is grounded “ on an appeal to our consciousness
of a certain moral nature within us in the first place,” and “an immediate
inference from that moral nature in the next.” But the Analogy is pro
fessedly addressed to those who do not admit this consciousness of a certain
moral nature ; and for the time the argument from Analogy becomes his
primary argument. The result is a contradiction between the system
propounded in the Analogy and the Sermons.
t Analogy. Part I, ch. ii., p. 37.
�42
Eternal Punishment.
to feel pleasure in doing it, and certainly without caring
whether they feel the pleasure, or whether they do not.
The Athenian rose to a higher idea when he obeyed the
laws of his country, not because they might reward him
or give him pleasure, but from a simple sense of duty,
which rested neither on punishment nor reward. To lay a
special stress on these was at once the evidence of a mind
more or less degraded. Men of slavish natures might be
guided by pleasure and pain, and if they broke the law
might be chastised by those pains which are directly con
trary to the pleasures which they lose. The formal notion
*
of government was with Pericles something very different
from this.
It may, of course, be said that good citizenship must
bring pleasure ; but it does so by no appointment of human
law, and thus far the analogy is not conclusive. Still there
remains the general course of earthly things ; and to Butler
the popular belief of endless reprobation, perhaps, appeared
to be warranted by the physical effects of wickedness in
this life. A careful survey of them taught him that there
was no apparent proportion between the sin and its conse
quences, that the latter are frequently delayed till long
after the actions which occasioned them are forgotten, and
that after such delay they come “ not by degrees but
suddenly, with violence and at once.” It taught him that,
though after a certain amount of folly, it was often in the
power of men to retrieve their affairs, or recover their
health and character, yet real reformation was in many
cases of no avail towards preventing the miseries, sickness,
and infamy, annexed to folly and extravagance beyond that
degree. It further showed him (and on this he laid a still
greater stress) that “ neglects from inconsiderateness,
want of attention, not looking about us to see what we
have to do, are often attended with consequences altogether
as dreadful as any active misbehaviour from the most
extravagant passion.” There is something specious in the
supposed analogy ; but neglect and want of attention may
arise, and very often do arise, as much from weak mental
power as from an ill-regulated life; and their ill effects are
* Aristotle, Etbic. Nicom. X, 9,10. This great thinker expressly affirms
human punishment to be a process of healing, lb. II, 2, 4.
�Eternal Punishment.
43
quite as disastrous in the fomer case as in the latter. But
while the latter is morally worse as well as unfortunate,
we cannot assert this of the other. The results in this case
are external or physical, and will cease to affect the man
as soon as he is removed into a different condition of things.
Even with the other, some distinction must be drawn
between the will of the sinner and the physical conse
quences of his sin. The struggle of the will may begin
when the body has lost the power of obeying it. The
effects of intemperance last much longer than the seasons
of drunkenness ; and may be first felt in all their horrors
when the body has lost the power of resistance. The widest
inference from this cannot warrant the belief that these exter
nal results will be carried into a life which will not be physi
cal. We may feel absolutely certain that the opium-eater can
never regain a healthy condition of body ; but we cannot
deny that his will might at once begin to act effectually, if
the physical derangement in the lining- of his stomach were
*
removed.
The reason of the thing- can never prove that
the bodily misery so produced must accompany a man into
his future life. The physical results of sin may have been
on earth irremediable ; but Butler has allowed that many
who yet suffer them are reaKy penitent. At the utmost w
e
*
cannot, on the grounds of such analogy, deny that the
incapable will of the drunkard may recover its power when
the physical impediment has been removed ; and we cannot
possibly prove that it may not be removed by death.
From the analogy of the present order of things, Butler
passes to the sentiments of heathen writers on the subject
of future punishment. This subject, he rightly insists,
belongs most evidently to natural religion ; but he adds at
the same time that, “ Gentile writers, both moralists and
poets, speak of the future punishment of the wicked, both
as to the duration and degree of it, in a like manner of
expression and description as the Scripture does.”f It is
hard to deal with a sentence which, with a hundred others,
proves how little Butler aimed at “ a scientific use of terms.”
* Archdeacon Hare, in his “Mission of the Comforter,” refers to this
belief of Coleridge, that the loss of power in the will may be the punish
ment of such vices.
f Analogy. Part I, ch. ii., p. 42. Note.
�44
Eternal Punishment.
He has left us well-nigh to guess the meaning which he
attached to Scripture, Revelation, and Religion. The first
may mean a part of the Old and New Testament, or the
whole ; the second appears sometimes to mean the Bible,
sometimes a supposed communication made to Adam before
the fall or after it; the third is used to express sometimes the
law of God written on a man’s heart, and at others to mean
nothing more than the declarations of a particular book in
the Bible. But on the subject of future punishment it
seems useless to allege any argument in the statements of
heathen writers (supposing that all these had spoken alike)
with the statements of Scripture, when these are held by
antagonistic theological schools to prove directly opposite
conclusions. If, however, it be meant that Gentile writers
as a body maintain the endless punishment of all sinners
without reference to the measure of their sin, the statement
is not true.
*
The belief of almost all was at the best
shadowy and vague enough. Not a few refused to extend
their thought to any life beyond the present, or, if at times
they suffered their minds to rest upon it, it was to doubt
whether any but the noblest souls would be allowed to live
at all.f A still smaller number spoke out more clearly, but
it is impossible to wrest their words in support of the doc
trine of Bishop Pearson. Socrates does, indeed, draw a
distinction between pardonable and unpardonable sins, or
rather between sins which can and those which cannot be
healed; J but they who have committed the former are
purified without reference to their repentance before death.
It is the magnitude of the sin, not the disposition of the
sinner, which shuts him out from all hope of recovery.
But the class of sinners who are not benefited by their
sufferings is manifestly a very small one. It does not take
in the lying or dishonest little child, it pointedly excludes
* Due stress must be laid on the vast numbers among the heathen who
accepted the doctrines of Epicurus; and the full extent to which these
doctrines were carried is well shown in the fragments of Philodemus,
recently recovered amongst the Herculanean Papyri.—See the ‘ Edinburgh
Review,’ October 1862, page 346.
f “ Si non cum corpore extinguuntur magnae animre.’’ The doubting
hope of Tacitus was far too general not to weaken greatly the force of
Butler’s argument.
t icGma agapr^gara. Plato. Gorg. lxxxi.
�Eternal Punishment.
45
those who lead the common life of all men, it rejects those
■whom Dante would only not have thrust down into the
lowest dungeons of hell. Tyrants and kings and princes
are amongst them,—Tantalos, Sisyphos, and Tityos; but
the lot of Thersites is the happiest. It seems to be hard,
if not impossible, for a private citizen to enrol himself in
*
the company of transgressors who had sinned beyond all
hope of cure.
The course of human life on earth will show that sins
of the flesh produce physical consequences which may last
indefinitely longer than the time spent in committing them.
Ordinary experience teaches us that actions tend to create
habits, and that habits retain over us a strong and per
manent hold. Human legislation claims to visit certain
acts with pains and penalties, and demands obedience to
Law without promise of recompense or reward. In some
countries it rises to a higher level, and, while more carefully
apportioning punishment, seeks in a greater degree to
reform the offender, and, so far as may be practicable, to
lessen rather than to raise the penalty. There is no analogy
between such a state of things and an endless torment of
all sinners without regard to their spiritual condition.
Such an idea can challenge belief on grounds of authority
alone ; and out of the whole cycle of Christian doctrines it
is the only one which rests wholly on this foundation.-]"
* Socrates is represented as inclining to the latter opinion, ou yap, olpat,
¿iftv aura>. Mr Wilson, in “Essays and Reviews,” p. 206 (9th Ed.), says
that the Greek “ could not expect the reappearance in another world, for
any purpose, of a Thersites or an Hyperbolus.” The words attributed to
Socrates seem to imply not so much that such men are not among the
inhabitants of the other world, as that they are not aviaroi. Hence they
come under the class of men who are benefited by their sufferings ; Tantalos
and Sisyphos represent the few who have sinned too deeply to leave their
torments any purgatorial power.
f If any exception must be made, it would seem to be that of the Fall.
But a denial of the fact that Adam fell leaves the question of a “ taint or
corruption naturally engendered in his offspring,” with all its consequences
just where it was before. The question of the Fall itself leads us into a
mythological inquiry, on which we cannot enter here. Some remarks
bearing on the subject will be found in M. Michel Breaks admirable analysis
of the myth of Hercules and Cacus. Paris: Durand. 1863.
�46
Eternal Punishment.
SECTION IV.
Present State of the Controversy as bearing on the
Position and Duties of the Clergy of the Church
of England.
Hence it is that, in spite of the antagonism of modern
science, in spite of the tacit abandonment of some parts in
the narrative of the Old Testament, in spite of the acknow
ledged hopelessness of defining their limits and the condi
tions of inspiration, the theologians who uphold the
popular belief cling to some theory of inspiration with
greater tenacity, it would seem, than ever. Hence it is
that the Christian world is fast splitting up into two sec
tions,—the one half-tempted to believe itself in antagonism
with Christianity, the other regarding the progress of
modern thought with an alarm alike unreasoning and
useless,—useless, because it is impossible to check the rising
tide,—useless, because the flood which assails a mere tra
ditional teaching does not even threaten the Body of Truth
which is the real inheritance of Christendom,—useless,
because this Truth will shine out with unclouded lustre
when the artificial safeguards of an inconsistent theology
shall have been swept away.
It is, of course, possible for a man to reject and deny
any truth or dogma whatsoever; but it must surely be a
distorted vision which can see a growing tendency in the
present day to set aside the great body of Christian doctrine.
If there is more and more a revolting against theories
which regard Power as the basis of the Divine nature,
there is less reluctance to believe that God is dealing with
men for their good. But if there be any one dogma which
can produce no other sanction than that of authority, it
must undergo the stringent scrutiny of an age, which,
with all its shortcomings and all its sins, is bent on getting
at the truth of facts. Men will not be deterred from
closely sifting every argument which upholds a doctrine at
variance with all natural instincts and affections. They
see that the Clergy, who maintain it, do not really
�Eternal Punishment.
47
believe it, that no one really believes it. They know well
how to distinguish a genuine from a spurious belief. They
know that the time was when men might be said to have
this faith, when the thought of the broad gulf yawning to
receive all sinners heightened their convictions of the
essential impurity of all material things. They know how
that belief displayed itself. Bernard believed it when he
deliberately broke up the home which he loved ; Jerome
believed it when he did battle with the fiends of hell in his
cave at Bethlehem ; Francis of Assisi believed it when he
took poverty for his bride and gathered round him the
hosts which forswore every earthly joy to avoid the flames
of hell. The forms of the Sacrifice might vary ; its essence
was the same. Macarius might plunge himself naked into
a morass and brave the sting of insects which might pierce
the hide of a boar. Simeon on his Pillar might afflict soul
and body with the heat by day and the frost by night; but
in one and all, in proportion to the sincerity of their faith,
there was the same vehement rejection not only of every
earthly pleasure but of everything which could only be termed
not a torment or a plague. The teachers of our day go
about to reconcile their belief in the final ruin of almost
all mankind with a natural love of ease and a feeling of
self-complacency. There is much speaking, and in a few,
at least, some self-sacrifice ; but the curse which they believe
to rest upon the world, rests on it, it would seem, in name
only. It does not lessen their liking for the world’s good
things: it does not break their sleep by night, or
greatly afflict their souls by day. They look on man
kind as on beings of whom few can escape the day
of the great vengeance; but they can mingle still in
the world of science, or trade, or politics, and shape
their words by the dictates of time- serving expediency. In
the eyes of Benedict or Columba or Dominic no further
proofs would be needed of a complete and deliberate unbe
lief. But while some still insist loudly that God cannot
have mercy on men after their pilgrimage here is ended,
while they place in the same fire the lying child and the
pitiless murderer, the greater number are content to speak
in more measured words, and to tell their people that jus
tice is with God the consummation, and not the contra
�48
Eternal Punishment.
diction, of that which is justice with men. It is impossible
to deny that such is becoming more and more the teaching
of the Clergy of the Church of England. The fierce denun
ciations which paralyzed many hearts with terror thirty
years ago are, by comparison, rarely heard now. Preachers
resort less and less to the elaborate dsemonology of Dante
or of Milton ; they instinctively abstain more and more
from any attempts to define the method of future punish
ment. Is it possible to bring together more convincingevidence that the doctrine is not really believed ? Is it
possible to produce a stronger reason why they who know
that these things are so should come forward boldly and
honestly to declare it ?
This age is one of much serious thought, and the
efforts to arrive at truth for the truth’s sake are neither
feeble nor insincere ; but it is not pre-eminently an age of
martyrs or confessors. They who have thought most
deeply and anxiously are conscious that they have passed
through more than one stage of belief and faith ; and they
feel that the change which is coming cannot, on the whole,
be accomplished with the same weapons which fought the
battle of Teutonic against Latin Christianity. No great
experience is needed to show them that others have under
gone, or are undergoing, the like changes. Not a few who
now, if pressed to declare their belief, would assuredly
refuse to accept the Bishop of Oxford’s pictures of hell
torments, received their Orders with an unquestioningacceptance of all Anglican theology. Not a few passed
from this state of temporary repose into a hard struggle
which only did not issue in their submission to the Church
of Rome. The teaching which had impressed on them the
Unity of the Church and the unimaginable fearfulness of
schism, justified and enforced the inquiry which was to
determine whether they were in the right position them
selves. It was of no avail that they led the holiest lives, if
they questioned but one single point in all the faith of
Catholic Christendom; it was of no avail that their faith
and their lives were what they should be, if their belief
was professed and their works done where they ought not
to be done and professed. The rising of a doubt was the
signal for flight, for to doubt and linger and to die in that
�Eternal Punishment.
49
doubt, was to be lost for ever. The Church of Rome was
Catholic, even by the admission of her enemies; her orders
were allowed to be valid; her dogmas retained the faith of
the Church in all ages, although they may have overlaid it.
She could offer them security, and security was everything
under a state of things in which the accident of a moment
might remove the Christian beyond the reach of hope and
mercy. It was hard to escape from these doubts and fears
without casting aside the burden of sacerdotalism. It was
hardly possible to remain withodt the pale of Rome, while
the paramount necessity of Catholic Communion seemed to
thrust aside every other; but it was easy to emerge from
these mortal fears into the belief in a Divine kingdom
embracing all ages and all lands, into a belief which did
not dare to limit the mercy of God, which cared little to
speak of virtue and vice, of punishments and rewards, but
which placed the salvation of man in the conformity of his
will to the Divine will, in a constant dependence on his
Love and Grace.
Such as this has been the history of many an English
Clergyman during the last ten or twenty years. They may
pass now by many names; they may be regarded by the
world as belonging to the High Church or the Broad
Church, but they who search such matters closely may see
that the foundation of their faith is laid on the conscious
conviction of a moral government of Righteousness, Truth,
and Justice, as men with all their wickedness construe and
accept those terms. It is impossible not to see whither
these things are tending; it is mere hypocrisy to pretend
that we do not perceive it. The sentences of Ecclesiastical
Courts may possibly arrest, but they cannot turn back the
course of modern thought. They do not profess to concern
themselves with the Truth as such ; and the truth as such
is the one end and aim to which every channel of science
and research is converging.
And, finally, the charge to such of the Clergy as hold a
faith like this to quit their posts and set up some new sect
will fall on unheeding ears. Why should they abandon a
Church in the body of whose teaching their faith is deeper
than ever, why yield up the posts entrusted to their charge
because some choose to determine what the Church has left
�5°
Eternal Punishment.
undefined ? Why should they leave the centime of all happy
memories and all bright hopes when nowhere else can they
look to find the same peace and consolation ? Why should
the Bishop of Natal desert the Christian and the heathen
Zulus, for whom and among whom he has so long laboured
heartily and earnestly, because he will not and cannot
propound to them a dogma which makes the assertion of
Perfect Righteousness an unintelligible riddle ? Why
should he cease from the holy work of relieving from their
sadness the souls whom God had not made sad ? Why
should he not assure the trembling convert that his parents
are not thrust down into the lowest pit of hell simply
because they happened to die before the missionary came ? *
Why should he not go on to do his duty by entering his
most solemn protest against falsehoods which are “ utterly
contrary to the whole spirit of the Gospel,” and which
operate “ with most injurious and deadening effect both
on those who teach and on those who are taught” ? Plainly
he would be acting wrong were he not to do so. The
Church of England has accepted the task of preaching a
Gospel, nor can any say that she has wholly failed in
preaching it.
The judgment of the Court of Arches in the case of
Mr Wilson would, even if final, have availed little or
nothing on the other side. Dr Lushington insisted, in the
clearest language, that he was concerned not with the truth
of doctrines, but simply with the fact whether they are or
are not maintained by the Church of England. He accepted
the rule laid down in the Gorham case that “ if the Articles
of Religion are silent upon a point of doctrine, then, unless
the Rubrics and Formularies clearly and distinctly deter
mine it, it is open for each member of the Church to decide
for himself according to his own conscientious opinion.”
No one can assert that he wilfully narrowed the terms of
communion ; some may think that he has suggested evasions
even greater than any which had been acted on before. As
*
long as it is not in plain terms denied that the Holy Scrip
tures contain all things necessary to salvation, any one
* The Bishop of Natal cites a forcible instance of such teaching. Com
mentary on Epistle to the Romans, p. 211.
�Eternal Punishment.
5i
might affirm that not a single book was written by the man
whose name it bears, or even at the time and place to
which it has been assigned. He might interpret figurative
language as historical; he might resolve statements of
facts into a transcendental mysticism. The judge was not
concerned with questions of interpretation. He demanded
no more than the admission that the books, or at least
some part or parts of each book, were written “under
Divine guidance.” He was ready to concede all liberty, if
only the plain, literal, and grammatical sense of authoritative
formularies was not contravened. So far as regards the
doctrine of Eternal Punishment, they who deny that it is
of necessity endless for those who undergo it might most
honestly have accepted the issue.
It may, of course, be said that nothing more than an
accident enables the Bishop of Natal, or Mr Wilson, or Mr
Maurice to accept these words of the Athanasian Creed in
their plain, literal, and grammatical meaning. It may be
urged that the author of that creed meant something very
different, and that it is mere evasion, if they maintain their
ground in the Church of England on a mere superficial
agreement like this. It may be so. Yet it is an evasion
not so great as those which Dr Lushington has deliberately
allowed on the subject of Inspiration. But they who believe
that the Divine Spirit still lives and works in the Church
of England will scarcely regard as an accident that which
will enable all her members and all the world to, respond
heartily and unreservedly to the whole will of God.
We must speak still more plainly. It may have been
the belief of those who drew up the Athanasian Creed that
all sinners must undergo the same endless punishment. It
was a notion which might well prevail in a hard and violent
age. But whether by accident or by the over-ruling Provi
dence of God, Who is using the Church of England as a
special instrument for preaching the whole Gospel of
Christ to every creature, the notion cannot be found dis
tinctly enunciated in any of her Canons, her Articles, or
her Formularies. No one really and practically believes in
this notion ; thousands virtually ignore it, and the highest
Ecclesiastical tribunal has affirmed that such a belief is not
imposed on the Clergy of the Church of England. But it
�&
Eternal Punishment.
is time to speak out the whole truth. It is time to say that
this dogma does not form part of the Gospel of Christ.
It is time to reject it utterly from our teaching, and to bid
all others look the question fully in the face.
The Church of England has not fettered her Clergy to
any definite statement on the endlessness of future punish
ment ; but if such were her dogma, if she asserted clearly
that all who do not die in the faith and fear of God are
tormented necessarily for evei’ and ever, then it is better to
say at once that that dogma must be rejected with a deeper
and more vehement indignation than that with which
Teutonic Christendom rose up against the worst abuses
and superstitions of Latin Christianity. The coarsest
development of the doctrine of Transubstantiation, the
wildest absurdities of Manichean fanatics, were not more
thoroughly opposed to the first principles of Justice, Law,
and Truth than a dogma which makes no distinction
between a perjured tyrant and a lying child. Most happily
such a Reformation is not needed in the Church of England
now; but if ever it be made necessary, the men who shall
carry it out will not be wanting. That Reformation is
sorely needed elsewhere; is it too much to hope that the
Church of England may be the appointed instrument
for hastening that mighty change which shall sweep away
the deadly bondage of an ancient and groundless super
stition ?
�APPENDIX.
No. I.
The “ Christian Remembrancer,” in an article which has been
reprinted by its author, Mr Cazenove, from the number for
April, 1864, has entered elaborately on the defence of the dogma
of never-ending punishment. Enough has been already said to
render a detailed reply to that article altogether unnecessary ;
but a few words may suffice to show how utterly futile its main
arguments are to those who will not grant the assumptions with
which the writer starts. We have reasoned chiefly on the basis
of the authoritative statements of the Church of England as
found in the xxxix articles, nor are we called on to admit any
thing more than may be legally required of her Clergy. But
it may at once be said that the Reviewer’s definition does not
satisfy the teaching of the Bishop of Oxford, or Dr Trench, or
Dr Newman, and that, if his definition be correct, the actual
teaching of such men falls to the ground. “ The dogma,” says
the Reviewer, “ which we have to consider is this,—that there
is a degree of hardness and impenitence of heart which is fraught
with everlasting evil to those who persist in it, and that sucli
obdurate sinners will ultimately be banished from the presence
of Gon and condemned to a state of misery that knows no end.
Upon the details of this fearful condition, neither the Church of
England nor the Church Universal has presumed to utter any
formal or authoritative decision. The reality and the eternity of
the misery is affirmed authoritatively ; the precise nature and
qualities of the sufferings and the nature and locality of the place
where they are to be endured, are open questions, matters of
opinion, not of faith.” But, if this be so, what right has any
Clergyman to draw pictures of demons torturing men by the
members which were the special instruments of their sins, and
point to men like Gibbon and Shelley, nay, even to lying school
children, as suffering the torments of an endless hell ? What right
have any to say that all who do not die in the true faith and
�54
Appendix.
fear of God have entered into that horrible state ? What right
have they to involve themselves and others in a dilemma which
would be absurd if it were not frightful ? for, repudiating (as
they must) the doctrine of Purgatory, they are bound to maintain
that all who are not at their death fitted for heaven must, by the
very necessity of the case, enter hell, and that this must, therefore,
be the lot of nineteen-twentieths of mankind. All these teachers,
it must be noted, uphold a dogma which is not the same as that of
the Reviewer; and what must be the worth of a doctrine which is
stated philosophically by theologians in one way, and alwrays
enforced by preachers in another I To speak briefly, the Re
viewer in the “ Christian Remembrancer ” has made a string of
assumptions, each one of w’hich calls for a distinct denial.
(1.) He assumes that Clergymen (or Laymen) of the Church
of England are bound to believe in the existence of many things
on which its articles are wholly silent—e. g., in that of angels and
of “ those fallen and apostate ones who have Satan as their head
and Captain,” and to admit that the latter sinned in the very
courts of heaven, that man sinned and straightway was ashamed
and penitent, but the demons showed no signs of faith or con
trition. This may be all very well in a treatise on Christian
mythology, but that it should be gravely brought forward in a
paper addressed to educated Englishmen is simply astounding.
(2.) He assumes that the Bible upholds the truth of his
dogma ; and very possibly it may, if we grant his principle “ of
explaining obscure and doubtful passages by the light of those
which are distinct and clear.” No Clergyman of the Church of
England is bound to admit any such principle, and every critic
would at once repudiate it, if it be meant, as here it is meant,
that we may explain ambiguous passages in one author by a com
parison with clear passages in another. The rule would be
scouted as ridiculous if applied to Herodotus and Thucydides,
Aristotle and Plato ; and St Paul and St Peter are quite as
much distinct authors as any of these can be, although we may
happen to have bound up their writings as part of a single volume
which we call the Bible, but of which Jerome and Augustine spoke
only as “ The Books.” It is, indeed, as manifest and as open
to any one to say that St Paul taught unqualified Universalism
as to another to affirm that the notion of an endless punishment
may be found in the words of some other of the Biblical writers. It
has been decided judicially that the Church of England does not
sanction this notion, and the assertion that it is not to be found
in the Bible at once upsets a mere assertion on the other side.
(3.) The Reviewer thinks that he has found an impregnable
stronghold in the alleged universality of certain beliefs. All
mankind, speaking generally, believe he asserts in an endless
�Appendix.
5$
punishment ; and he cites the text of Aristotle o navi ¿>okei tovt'
eivai (¡>apev with the assenting comment of Cicero. To this we
need only say that we are in no way bound to accept without the
strictest scrutiny any statement of Aristotle, or Solomon, or Lord
Bacon himself. The axiom is one of those stupendous fallacies
which have led mankind in all ages to forge their own fetters.
The argument from the universality of a belief proves nothing,
or rather it would establish the truth of many beliefs which
have been given up as horrible, disgusting, and degrading. The
very belief in evil angels, which the Reviewer looks on with so
much favour, exists simply as a mutilated and barren stock ;
in other words, those who profess it do not really believe it. Jt
did produce its legitimate fruit once, when it drove all Christen
dom to believe in witchcraft, and consigned to unspeakable
tortures and a frightful death, hundreds of thousands of miserable
wretches who had the ill luck to be accused of an impossible
crime. There has been, it would seem, a time in the history of
man when every nation, tribe, and family was given over to the
practice of human sacrifices ; the distrust of the mercy and love
of God, the utter forgetfulness of the moral character of God,
•on which that loathsome worship was founded, exists still, and
is the greatest barrier in the way of true Christianity. When
the ignorant peasant doubts whether God can be merciful to or
love a being so worthless as himself, he is giving utterance to the
same feeling which led the Carthaginian matron to drop her new
born babe into the blazing mouth of the favourite god of the
Hebrews. It is the reiterated warning of Jewish prophets and
of Christian teachers, that this distrust is a delusion only the
more horrible and fatal because it is universal. There is not an
atom of foundation for it; what a mockery, therefore, of philo
sophical method is it to say that it upholds one dogma while it is
admitted to overthrow another ?
(4.) The Reviewer argues throughout as against persons who
deny the sinfulness and the misery of sin and the certainty of a
righteous chastisement and discipline, who make nothing of
iniquity, and set lightly by the most sacred responsibilities. He
is arguing against some phantom of his own raising. The school
which he anathematizes does not exist. The very essence of the
teaching of those Clergymen against whom he thus insinuates or
implies an utter unbelief, is that no one sin goes unpunished,
and that all men in the measure in which they need it shall
feel the chastening hand of God. They may be wrong : but it is
simply false to say that they leave men to riot in sin, unchecked
and unwarned.
(5.) He endeavours to divert men from an impartial examina
tion of the subject, by throwing doubts on the orthodoxy of those
�$6
Appendix.
who venture to question the dogma for which he is contending.
Any one who does this is sure to be found wanting with respect
to some cardinal doctrine of the faith (of course as these are
received by the Reviewer himself). Sir James Stephen assailed it,
but “ Mr Hopkins has shown his laxity and want of correct views
on the Incarnation ”; Mr Maurice impugns it, but “ is Mr Maurice
thoroughly trustworthy on the doctrine (z.e. the Reviewer’s doctrine)
of the Atonement ” ? Such insinuations are as irrelevant as they
are weak. Each of these doctrines is true or it is not true ; and it
argues mere unbelief to seek to ward off from any one of them
the most rigid scrutiny. What sort of reasoning is it to scare a
man from looking into one dark corner of his house, by telling
him that they who do so are sure to create disorder in some other
quarter’ ? But it is more to the purpose to say that the Clergy of
the Church of England are bound neither to the Reviewer’s dog
mas nor to his tests ; and they need concern themselves very
little to know wdiether he thinks them orthodox or not. To do
so would argue utter childishness. The theological world of
England is divided into sections, each of which impugns the other’s
orthodoxy. The High Churchman brands the Low Churchman ;
one school anathematises or more gently disapproves another ;
and then, forsooth, they who doubt whether God will commit to
hopeless pains the vast majority of his creatures, are bidden to
see that they be orthodox on all other points before they pry
into this one.
Finally the Reviewer, in utter contradiction to the Bishop of
Oxford and his followers, confines himself mostly to guarded
statements, which might lead the reader to suppose that this
fearful lot is reserved merely for an infinitesimally small fraction
of mankind ; but his hell is, nevertheless, one which contains
unbaptized infants (p. 477), and for Englishmen this is enough.
Dogmas which involve such admissions are not merely untrue,
but they are degrading and demoralizing to the last degree. At
the recent Bristol Congress Mr Keble was pleased to repeat to
the assembled Churchmen the remarks made to him by a poor
old widow, who, on hearing that the Church of England no longer
required her people to believe in the endless punishment of all
sinners, begged him not to tell her son, as she trembled for the effect
which these tidings would have upon him. Mr Keble’s inference
was that the decision in the case of Messrs Williams and Wilson
abolished all morality,—the plain fact being, nevertheless, that
the old woman’s wicked son had somehow or other convinced
himself that he would escape scot free. With such men the threat
of an inconceivable and utterly disproportionate punishment is
not likely to have much weight: to tell them that sin brings its
own punishment and that sinners if not here yet hereafter will be
�Appendix.
made to feel the wrath of God, may check them iu their .course,
but can never cause them to plunge deeper into sin.
This is the warning which they would most certainly hear
from such teachers as Mr Wilson and Mr Maurice, Dr Stanley
and Mr Jowett, the Bishop of Natal and Dean Milman. Like
the righteous prophets of old time, they maintain the absolute
and unswerving righteousness of God, while the upholders of the
popular dogma confuse the moral perceptions of mankind, and
give a fatal strength to the miserable sophistry by which men
cheat themselves into the idea that, be their lives what they may,
they will somehow or other come to die the death of the righteous
man.
No. II.
Remarks on a Sermon on “ Everlasting Punishment,” preached
before the University of Oxford on the Twenty-first Sunday
after Trinity, by E. B. Pusey, D.D.
While these sheets were passing through the press, Dr Pusey
has published a Sermon on which, as it misconstrues some state
ments made in the foregoing pages, a few remarks must be added.
It is certainly an unfortunate thing that the self-styled upholders
of the Catholic Faith should in the eyes of those who differ from
them appear always guilty of misconstructions or assumptions.
Dr Pusey’s Sermon so abounds on both as to make any attempt
at an argumentative reply mere labour lost. It is useless to
reason with those who are resolved to make use of ambiguous
terms, and who even themselves put on these terms more than
one meaning. But although the thought of convincing Dr Pusey
may be absurd, it may be of more use to arm others against his
assumptions, and perhaps against the general character of his
theology. If you answer the question, who is God ? what am
I ? honestly, you have, says Dr Pusey, subdued every difficulty
which men raise against the Faith. It may be so, if we admit
that the honest answer must be Dr Pusey’s answer. A second
assumption is based on a passage in the preceding paper,
p. 9, from which Dr Pusey draws the conclusion that “ human
reason is prepared to capitulate as to all the old difficulties which
it used to be so busy in parading, the Doctrine of the All Holy
Trinity or the Incarnation. ... It will even admit the mystery
of the Incarnation, and allow of that ineffable mystery of God
become Man, that God was born, was nourished at the breast,
E 2
�Appendix.
. . was nailed to the Cross, died." Dr Pusey heaps
assumption on assumption. A belief in the Trinity or Incar
nation is not necessarily his belief, and to the latter the Church
of England has certainly not committed either her Laity or her
Clergy. To the assumptions are added a few contradic
tions. “ What criminal,” he asks, “ ever by nature owned
the justice of the human law which condemned him ? If he admit
that he was in the wrong, yet what punishment does not seem to
him too severe ? ” We may perhaps be perplexed to know where
Dr Pusey has amassed these astounding experiences ; but it is
utterly impossible to reconcile them with the statement in the
very next page (7), that man’s conscience speaks out clearly that
punishment is the due reward of oui’ deeds. When he asserts
that .Reformation is not the object of Divine Punishment (6), he
assumes the very point in dispute, and allows his assumption to
lead him into a statement which should be well noted by English
men. He condemns what he calls the systematized benevolence
of modern legislation. “ Reformation of the individual offender
is proposed as the exclusive end of human punishment.” Dr
Pusey does not like this. We must suppose, therefore, that he
would like a little of the wholesome severity which Laud exer
cised on the ears of Prynne and Bast wick, and perhaps, in course
of time, we need not despair of restoring such pleasant exhibitions
as those which graced the execution of Robert François Damiens.
The next argument involves us in a discussion as to the meaning
of the word Eternity, which directly involves another question,—
what is Revelation ?-—a question equally assumed by Dr Pusey.
“ Who revealed to us,” he asks, “ that sin ceases in the evil, when
life ceases 1 ” (p. 9) ; and who revealed to us, we may ask, that it
goes on ? Dr Pusey’s conviction is founded on the existence and
the character of Satan ; and he must at once be told that the
Church of England does not commit her Clergy to any opinion
about either the one or the other, and they who reject the whole
of Dr Pusey’s dæmonology are, in her eyes, quite as orthodox as
he. They are not in the least bound to believe that Satan
belonged to the second order of beatified Intelligences, or that he
fell, or that he exists at all. Dr Pusey thinks he knows all
about him, and he also knows that the whole history of man
is confined to the last 6,000 years (p. 11). This is a matter
in which we may leave him to be dealt with by Sir C. Lyell,
or Professor Owen. But it is of little use to multiply words.
Dr Pusey builds on verbal expressions in the Gospels, thus
assuming again that evei-y word in those narratives forms part
of an indisputable history. Dr Pusey knows that the people of
England are beginning to doubt this, and he knows that the
reasons brought forward in a popular shape in “ Fraser’s Maga-
�Appendix.
$9
zine ” for January, 1863 (on Criticism and the Gospel History)
have not been answered. He cannot fail to know, further, that
the rich man in Hades is represented as better and less selfish
than he was on earth ; and yet he deals in pictures which would
do credit to the sensuous imagination of a Mahometan. “ Gather
in your mind all which is most loathsome, most revolting, the most
treacherous, malicious, coarse, brutal, inventive, fiendish cruelty,
unsoftened by any remains of human feeling : conceive the fierce,
fiery eyes of hate, spite, phrenzied rage ever fixed on thee,
glaring on thee, looking thee through and through with hate,
sleepless in their horrible gaze : hear those yells of blaspheming
concentrated hate, as they echo along the lurid vault of hell,
every one hating every one,” &c., &c. “ A deathlessness of hate
were in itself everlasting misery. Yet a fixedness in that state,
in which the hardened, malignant sinner dies, involves, with
out any further retribution of God, this endless misery.” (16.)
Shall we ever know what the upholders of this dogma mean ? Who
or what are Dr Pusey’s hardened and malignant sinners ? The
Bishop of Oxford shuts up in hell the lying school-girl and the
young man of excellent life who doubted whether the sun
and moon stood still at Joshua’s bidding : the Reviewer in
the “Christian Remembrancer” seems to think that unbap
tized children are there also. Do they suppose that people
will listen to them until they make their meaning plain,
or rather until they exhibit some better evidence that they
believe their own doctrine ? Before the Bishop and Clergy
of the Diocese of Oxford Mr Disraeli has made a mock of that
doctrine to point a contemptible jest against Mr Maurice
and Mr Jowett ; the ribald profanity of his taunt called forth
not the rebuke but the enthusiastic cheers of that reverend
*
assembly. We may therefore dismiss Dr Pusey’s pictures, with
the bare remark that they are drawn not from the teaching of
Christ oi- of St Paul, but from that Iranian dualism which made
the world a battlefield between Ormuzd and Ahriman. The
attitude which Dr Pusey has assumed makes it still more neces
sary to assert that his teaching is not the teaching of the Church
of England, which knows nothing of the Birth or Death of God.
Dr Pusey is not 'wise in parading phrases which, if they have
any effect, can only exasperate controversy and convert a gradual
process into a violent convulsion.
* Meeting of the Oxford Diocesan Society for the Augmentation of
Small Livings; as reported in the ‘Times,’ November 26, 1864.
Printed by C. W. Reyn ELL, Little Pulteney street, Haymarket, W.
�IH
i
�
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Eternal punishment: an examination of the doctrine held by the clergy of the Church of England on the subject of future punishment
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Place of publication: London
Collation: iv, 59 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Donated by Mr. Garley. Includes bibliographical references. Reprinted with additions from the 'National Review' no. XXXI, for January 1863. "With an Appendix containing a reply to the author on universalism and eternal punishment in the "Christian Remembrance" no no CXX, for April 1863, and some remarks on a sermon on everlasting punishment, by the Rev. E.B. Pusey". Date of publication from KVK (OCLC WorldCat).
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (<span class="highlight">Eternal</span> <span class="highlight">punishment</span>: an examination of the doctrine held by the clergy of the Church of England on the subject of future <span class="highlight">punishment</span>), 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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Eternal Punishment
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N -2-1'3
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCI «TY
Atheism
AND
A Reply
SUICIDE.
to
ALFRED TENNYSON, Poet Laureate.
BY
G-. W. FOOTE.
------- ♦-------
Mr. Tennyson has written some fine poetry in his old age,
and he has also written a good deal of trash. Most of the
latter has appeared in the hospitable columns of the Nine
teenth Century. Mr. James Knowles, the editor of that
magazine, is an excellent man of business and knows what
takes with the British public. He is fully aware that Mr.
Tennyson is the popular poet of the day, and with com
mendable sagacity, he not only accepts the poet-laureate’s
verses whenever he can get them, but always prints them in
the largest type. Mr. Tennyson opened the first number
of his magazine with a weak sonnet, in which men like Pro
fessor Clifford were alluded to as seekers of hope “ in sunless
gulfs of doubt.” That little germ has developed into the
longer poem on “Despair” that appears in the current
number of the Nineteenth Century.
The critics have lauded this poem. Nothing else could be
expected of them. Mr. Tennyson is the popular poet, the
household poet, the Christian poet, and scarcely a critic dares
give him aught but unstinted praise. The ordinary gentle
men of the press write to order; they describe Mr. Tenny
son’s poetry as they describe Mr. Irving’s acting; they are
fettered by great, and especially by fashionable reputations ;
and when the publi? has settled who are its favorites they
never resist its verdict but simply flow with the stream. In
the course of time there grows up a sanctified cant of
criticism. If you are rash enough to doubt the favorite’s
greatness, you are looked upon as a common-place person
incapable of appreciating genius. If you object to the
popular poet’s intellectual ideas, you are rebuked for not
seeing that he is divinely inspired. Yet it is surely indis
putable that ideas are large or small, true or false, whether
they are expressed in verse or in prose. When poets con
descend to argue they must be held amenable to the laws of
reason. The right divine of kings to govern wrong is an
exploded idea, and the right divine of poets to reason wrong
should share the same fate.
�2
Mr. Tennyson’s poem is not too intelligible, and with a
proper appreciation of this he has told the gist of the story
in a kind of “ argument.”
“ A man and his wife having lost faith in a God, and hope of a
life to come, and being utterly miserable in this, resolved to end
themselves by drowning. The woman is drowned, but the man
is rescued by a minister of the sect he had abandoned.”
Now Mr. Tennyson has not worked fairly on these lines.
The question “ Does Atheism, as such, incline men to self
destruction ?” is not touched. The Atheist husband of
“ Despair” loses more than belief in God and hope of a life
to come. His wife suffers from a malady only curable, if at
all, by the surgeon’s knife. His eldest son has forged his
name and ruined him, while it is hinted that another son has
sunk to a still worse depth of vice. And he describes him
self as “ a life without sun, without health, without hope,
without any delight.” All this is very inartistic. An
Atheist under such a burden of trouble might commit suicide
just as a Christian might. Dr. Newman well says that by
a judicious selection of facts you may prove anything, and
Mr. Tennyson has judiciously selected his facts. He could
not kill his hero with Atheism, and so he brings in bad
health, a diseased wife, cruel and criminal children, and a
ruined home. Any one of these might prompt to suicide,
without the introduction of Atheism at all.
Mr. Tennyson’s lack of art in this poem goes still farther.
He makes the husband and wife drown themselves theatri
cally. They walk out into the breakers near a lighthouse.
This is mere melodrama. Why did they not take poison
and die in each other’s arms ? The only answer is that Mr.
Tennyson wanted to use that lighthouse, and as he could not
bring the lighthouse to them he took them to the lighthouse.
He wished to make the husband think to himself as he
looked at its rolling eyes—
“Does it matter how many they saved? We are all of us
wreck’d at last.”
This is an old trick of Mr. Tennyson’s. He is always
making his wonderful and vivid perceptions of external
nature compensate for his lack of spiritual insight and
power.
The melodrama of “ Despair ” is continued to the end.
The wife is successfully drowned as she was not required
any further in the poem, but the husband is rescued by (of
all men in the world!) the minister of the chapel he had
�3
forsaken. He loaths and despises this preacher, yet he tells
him all his domestic secrets and reveals to him all his
motives. Nay more, he wastes a great of denunciation on
his rescuer, and vehemently protests his intention to do for
himself despite his watcher’s “lynx-eyes.” Why all this
pother? Earnest suicides are usually reserved and very
rarely make a noise. Why not hold his tongue and quietly
seize the first opportunity ? But Mr. Tennyson’s heroes are
generally infirm of purpose. He can make his characters
talk, but he cannot make them act.
Another defect of Mr. Tennyson’s heroes is their abnormal
self-consciousness. The hero of “ Maud ” rants about him
self until we begin to hope that the Crimea will really
settle him. The hero of “ Locksley Hall” is a selfish cad
who poses through every line of faultless eloquence, until at
last we suspect that “ cousin Amy ” has not met the worst
fate which could befall her. And the hero of “ Despair ”
is little better. After powerfully describing the walk with
his wife to the breaker’s edge of foam, he says that they
kissed and bade each other eternal farewell. There he
should have stopped. But he must go on with—
“ Never a cry so desolate, not since the world began!
Never a kiss so sad, no, not since the coming of man ! ”
This little speculation could not be verified or disproved. It
is one which selfish people usually entertain. They nearly
always think their own sorrows the greatest the world ever
saw. Fortunately, although it may be news to Mr. Tenny
son, all Atheists are not of that kind. Some of them, at
least, are capable of the heroic joys of life, and of con
suming their personal sorrows in the fire of enthusiasm for
lofty and unselfish aims.
Mr. Tennyson should remember the sad end of Brutus in
“Julius Caesar.” Perhaps he does, for some of his language
seems borrowed from it. Brutus has lost what he most
values. His country’s liberties, for which he has fought
and sacrificed all, are lost, and his noble wife has killed her
self in a frenzy of grief. He kills himself too rather than
witness the dishonor of Rome and minister to the usurper’s
pride. But he does not pule and whine. He also bids his
dearest left adieu—
“ For ever, and for ever, farewell, Cassius !
If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
If not, why then, this parting was well made.”
And Cassius replies in the same magnanimous vein. There
�4
is a large and noble spirit which can face even suicide with
dignity and without repining.
So infected with selfishness is Mr. Tennyson’s Atheist
that he doubts the utility of virtue—
“ Does it matter so much whether crown’d for a virtue, or
hang’d for a crime ? ”
Yes, it does matter; or why does he cry out against his
son’s wickedness ? If the young man’s crime “ killed his
mother almost,” other people’s crime injures mankind, and
that is its condemnation. The real Atheist has his moral
creed founded on fact instead of fancy, and therefore, when
things go wrong with him, he does not rail against virtue.
He knows it to be good in the long run to the human family
whatever may be his own fate.
The hero of “Despair” had evidently been a Calvinist.
He reminds the minister of his having “ bawled the dark
side of his faith, and a God of eternal rage.” And he
exclaims—
“What! I should call on that Infinite Love that has served us
so well ?
Infinite wickedness rather that made everlasting Hell,
Made us, foreknew us, foredoom’d us, and does what he will
with his own;
Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us groan !
Hell? if the souls of men were immortal, as men have been
told,
The lecher would cleave to his lusts, and the miser would yearn
for his gold,
And so there were Hell for ever! but were there a God as you
say,
His Love would have power over Hell till it utterly vanish’d
away.”
Now Calvinism is certainly not the creed any man could
regret to find untrue. And to our mind a man who could
live for years in the belief that the evils of this life are
ordained by God, and will be followed by an ordained hell
in the next life, is not likely to destroy himself when he finds
that the universe has no jailer and that all the evils of this
life end with it.
The man and his wife turn from the “ dark fatalist
creed ” to the growing dawn
“ When the light of a Sun that was coming would scatter the
ghosts of the Past,
And the cramping creeds that had madden’d the peoples would
vanish at last.”
�5
But when the dawn comes, they find that they have “ past
from a cheerless night to the glare of a drearier day.”
They are without a real God, for what deity remains is only
a cloud of smoke instead of a pillar of fire. Darwinism
they find to be very cold comfort, and they wail over them
selves as “poor orphans of nothing,” which is a comical
phrase, and one which we defy Mr. Tennyson or anybody
else to explain. If the Poet Laureate thinks that Darwinian
Atheists go about bemoaning themselves as poor orphans, he
is very much mistaken. He had better study them a little
before writing about them again. They are quite content
to remain without a celestial father. Earthly parents are
enough for them, earthly brothers and sisters, earthly wives,
and earthly friends. And most of them deem the grasp of
a father’s hand, and the loving smile on a mother’s face,
worth more than all the heavenly parentage they are satisfied
to lack.
Mr. Tennyson’s husband and wife, being utterly forlorn,
resolve to drown themselves, and the husband gives their
justication:—
“ Why should we bear with an hour of torture, a moment of
pain
If every man die for ever, if all his griefs are in vain,
And the homeless planet at length will be wheel’d thro’ the
silence of space,
Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race,
When the worm shall have writhed its last, and its last brother
worm will have fled
From the dead fossil skull that is left in the rocks of an earth
that is dead ? ”
Now all this will no doubt happen. Many millions of years
hence this world will be used-up like the moon; and there
fore, according to Mr. Tennyson’s argument, we should
commit suicide rather than put up with the toothache. It
will be all the same in the end. True ; but it is a long
while to the end. And people who act on Mr. Tennyson’s
principle must either forget this, or they must resemble the
man who refused to eat his dinner unless he had the
guarantee of a good dinner for ever and ever, with a dessert
by way of Amen.
Elsewhere they express pity for others as well as for them
selves—
“ Pity for all that aches in the grasp of an idiot power,
And pity for our own selves on an earth that bore not a flower;
Pity for all that suffers on land or in air, or the deep,
And pity for our own selves till we long’d for eternal sleep.”
�6
Mr. Tennyson may well make his Atheist husband say “ for
we leaned to the darker side.” This is an earth without a
flower! In every sense it is untrue. There are flowers of
beauty in the natural world, and flowers of greater beauty
in the human garden, despite the weeds. This suicidal pair
are fond of what Mr. Tennyson has himself called “the
falsehood of extremes.”
Sincere pessimists do not advocate suicide. Schopenhauer
himself condemns it as a superlative act of egoism. If here
and there a pessimist destroys himself, how can that make
things better for the masses who are governed by instinct
and not by metaphysics ? Mr. Tennyson does not see that
the most confirmed pessimist may, like George Eliot, believe
in Meliorism ; that is, not in perfection, but in improvement.
Nature, we may be sure, will never produce a race of beings
with a general taste for suicide; and it is therefore the duty
of those who deplore the ineradicable evils of life, to stay
with their brethren and to do their share towards improving
the common lot. If they cannot really make life happier,
they may at least make it less miserable, which is very much
the same thing.
Has Mr. Tennyson been reading that grand and powerful
poem of Mr. James Thomson’s, and is “ Despair ” the result?
If so, it is a poor outcome of such a majestic influence.
Mr. Tennyson has misread that great poem. Its author has
his joyous as well as his sombre moods, and he has himself
indicated that it does not cover the whole truth. Pessimists,
too, are not so stupid as to think that the extinction of a
few philosophers will affect the general life, or that a
universal principle of metaphysics can determine an isolated
case. They know also that philosophy will never resist
Nature or turn her set course. They see that she is enor
mously fecund, and is able to spawn forth life enough to
outlast all opposition, with enough instinct of self-preserva
tion to defy all the hostility of sages. And it is a note
worthy fact that the chief pessimists of our century have
not courted death themselves except in verse. Schopen
hauer lived to seventy-two ; Hartmann is one of the happiest
men in Germany; Leopardi died of disease ; and the author
of “The City of Dreadful Night’’has not yet committed
suicide and probably never will. It is one thing to believe
that, considered universally, life is a mistake, and quite
another thing to cut one’s own throat. The utmost that
even Schopenhauer suggested in the way of carrying out his
principles, was that when the human race had become far
�7
more intellectual and moral, and far less volitional and
egoistic, it would cease to propagate itself and so reaeh.
Nirvana. Whoever expects that to happen has a very farreaching faith. If the sky falls we shall of course catch
larks, but when will it fall ?
Atheists, however, are not necessarily pessimists, and in
fact few of them are so. Most of them believe that a large
portion of the world’s evil is removable, being merely the
result of ignorance and superstition. Mr. Tennyson might
have seen from Shelley’s writings that an Athest may
cherish the noblest hopes of progress. Perhaps he would
reply that Shelley was not an Atheist, but few will agree
with him who have read the original editions of that glorious
poet and the very emphatic statements of his friend Trelawny.
Does Atheism prompt men to suicide ? That is the
question. Mr. Tennyson appears to think that if it does
not it should. We cannot, however, argue against a mere
dictum. The question is one of fact, and the best way to
answer it is to appeal to statistics. Atheists do not seem
prone to suicide. So far as we know no prominent Atheist
has taken his own life during the whole of this century.
But let us go farther. There has recently been published
an erudite work * on “ Suicide, Ancient and Modern,” by
A. Legoyt, of Paris. He has given official tables of the
reasons assigned for suicides in most of the countries of
Europe; and although religious mania is among these
causes, Atheism is not. This dreadful incitement to self
destruction has not yet found its way into the officia
statistics even of Germany or of France, where Atheist
abound I
Suicides have largely increased during the last twenty
years. In England, for instance, while from 1865 to 1876
the population increased 14-6 per cent., suicides increased
27T per cent. In France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, Swit
zerland and Belgium the increase is still more alarming.
But during the same period lunacy has wonderfully in
creased ; and the truth is that both are caused by the everincreasing velocity and complexity of modern life, which
makes greater demands on our cerebral power than we are
able to answer. By-and-bye this will rectify itself through
* Ze /Swicicfe, Ancien et Moderne. Etude Historique, Philosophique
Morale et Statistique. Par A. Lïgott. Paris : A. Drouin.
�8
natural selection, but for the present our brains are not
strong enough for their sudden access of work. Hence the
increase of nervous derangement, lunacy, and suicide.
But it may be urged that religion keeps down the number
of suicides which would be still more plentiful without it.
That, however, is a mere matter of opinion, which can
hardly be verified or disproved. Religion does not restrain
those who do commit suicide, and that fact outweighs all
the fine talk about its virtue in other cases.
Some Christian apologists have made much capital out of
George Jacob Holyoake’s meditation on suicide in Gloucester
jail, when he was imprisoned for “ blasphemy,” or in other
words, for having opinions of his own on the subject of
religion. Mr. Holyoake’s mental torture was great. His wife
was in want, and his favorite daughter died while he was in
prison. Fearing that his reason might forsake him, and
being resolved that the Christian bigotry which had made
him suffer should never reduce him to an object of its derision,
he prepared the means of ending his life if the worst should
happen. “ See,” say these charitable Christians, “ what a
feeble support Atheism is in the hour of need! Nothing
but belief in Christ can enable us to bear the troubles of life.”
But our answer is that Mr. Holyoake did not commit suicide
after all; while, on the other hand, if we may judge by our
own notes during the past six months, one parson cuts his
throat, or hangs, or drowns, or poisons himself, on an
average every month.
Recurring finally to Mr. Tennyson, we say that his poem
is a failure. He does not understand Atheism, and he fails
to appreciate either its meaning or its hope. We trust that
he will afflict us with no more poetical abortions like this,
but give us only the proper fruit of his genius, and leave
the task of holding up Atheists as a frightful example to
the small fry of the pulpit and the religious press.
November 14iA, 1881.
PRICE ONE PENNY.
London : Fbeethought Publishing Company, 28, Stonecutter Street,
Farringdon Street, E.C.
�
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Atheism and suicide : a reply to Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate
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Foote, George W., 1843-1886
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Atheism
Suicide
Ethics
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Alfred Tennyson
Atheism
NSS
Suicide
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kl—R. P. A. CHEAP REPRINTS.
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The Evolution
I
>...
OF THE
Ideh
of
God
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THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD
�IN THE PRESS
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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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1903
��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
....
.**
II. Religion and Mythology
tM
__
III. The Life of the Dead ...
IV. The Origin of Gods
V. Sacred Stones
VI. Sacred Stakes
...
.„
«3
—
•M
32
40
50
—
VII. Sacred Trees
»«•
54
•W
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
...
...
....
...
•w
...
...
»w
«...
115
...
125
129
...
...
91
100
no
...
...
...
XIX. Survivals in Christendom
_
....
...
XVI. The Doctrine of the Atonement
XX. Conclusion
9
16
135
...
...
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
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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
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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,
�116
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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
�156
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
is the protoplasm of religion, while admit
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philosophical offshoot, theology.
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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 evolution of the idea of God. An inquiry into the origins of religions / revised and slightly abridged by Franklin T. Richards
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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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Watts & Co. (London, England)
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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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application/pdf
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English
God
NSS
Religion
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Text
Wherein they Differ.
CHARLES WATTS
Editor of “ Secular Thought/’
f th or of “ Teachilu/s of Secularisin Compared with Orthodox Christutn ityf'
**- F&dntum ami. Special Creatim^'1' Seeidarism: Ctn^tpuchiveand L>estmG^'e,” u Glori[^<jf Unbelieff “ Saints and Sinners: Which?"
J^ible 'Morality,’
Chrinanity: J ts Origin, Nature and;
- ii^lumtcef “ Agrwsticjgm and' Christian Theism: Which. is
the Metre Reasonable
“ Reply ta Father La'tnbert,"
- • ■
‘■‘■The Superstitionof the Christian Sunday: A
, i'iti ,' .■ Plea for Liberty wyd J> nd ice, ’ ‘fc The JSeprors
WfU,. d- ~ • of the French Rerohiidm," ttec., <£•«.<
■ t.
_
CO^EJ^S.
The Potency of Scienge.
The Bible and Science.
The Bible and Creation.
The Origin of Man..
Creation/, Time and* Mate
rial^ •
6. The BubEb Account
TTONg.
Soropto :
“ SECULAR THOUGHT ” OFFICE, *
'5 Adelaide,- St. East?
, /PRICE
of the
Qrigin of Death.
7. The I&ble Deluge.
8-. The Mosaic Account of the
FlooI) : Scientific Obj ec-’
15 CENTS.
��SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE:
WHEREIN. THEY DIFFER.
—BY—
CHARLES WATTS
Editor of “ Secular Thought.”
Author of “ Teachings of Secularism Compared with Orthodox Christianity,”
“ Evolution and Special Creation,” “ Secularism: Constructive and De
structive,” “ Glory of Unbelief,” “ Saints and Sinners : Which?”
“ Bible Morality,” “ Christianity: Its Origin, Nature and
Influence," “ Agnosticism and Christian Theism : Which is
the More Reasonable ? ” “ Reply to Father Lambert,"
“ The Superstition of the Christian Sunday: A
Plea for Liberty and Justice,''’ “ The Horrors
of the French Revolution,” de., de.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
CONTENTS:
Science.
6. The Bible Account
The Potency of
The Bible and Science.
The Bible and Creation.
The Origin of Man.
Creation: Time and Mate
rial.
ofthk
Origin of Death.
7. The Bible Deluge.
8. The Mosaic Account of the
Flood : Scientific Objec
tions.
TORONTO :
“ SECULAR THOUGHT ” OFFICE,
31 Adelaide St. East.
PRICE
15 CENTS.
A
��SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE:
WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
The Potency of Science.—The distinguishing characteristic of this
age is science; it is essentially an age of invention, experiment
and discovery. Knowledge is pushed into the field of physical
nature on all hands to such an extent that each day brings to light
something both new and unforeseen. We are ever on the alert for
wonders in the field of discovery which will not amaze, simply
because they are not unusual. All thought to-day is more or
less influenced by natural science. Old opinions, not only in the
domain of the material, but also in the intellectual and moral,
have to be remoulded or abolished in obedience to the dictates
of the higher knowledge that we have attained of the workings
of natural law. That which cannot reconcile itself to science
must disappear as out of harmony with the genius of the epoch.
We do not, of course, allege that physical science covers the
entire field of knowledge, but we do contend that there is no
phase of thought that is not very largely moulded by modern
discoveries. Scientific truth can no longer be successfully op
posed, even by the most dogmatic theologian, and it is now too
powerful and too widely known to allow itself to be even
ignored. Hence, whatever opinions are advocated, the pretence
put forward in their favour usually is that they are in harmony
with science. The difficulty too often lies in making good this
claim.
Science may be defined as being an investigation into the
phenomena of nature, and the best application of the lessons de
rived thereby to the requirements of life. It may be further
described as meaning facts reduced to a system ; not a fixed,
cramped, and exclusive system, but one which expands with the
acquirement of additional knowledge. “■ Science is the enemy
of fear and credulity. It invites investigation, challenges the
�4
SCIENCE AND THE BIRLE:
reason, stimulates inquiry, and welcomes the unbeliever. It
seeks to give food and shelter, and raiment, education and liberty
to the human race. It welcomes every fact and every truth. It
has furnished a foundation for morals, a philosophy for the
guidance of man......................... It has taught man that he cannot
walk beyond the horizon—that the questions of origin and
destiny cannot be answered—that an infinite personality cannot
be comprehended by a finite being, and that the truth of any
system of religion based on the supernatural cannot by any
possibility be established—such a religion not being within the
domain of evidence. And, above all. it teaches that all our duties
are here—-that all our obligations are to sentient beings; that
intelligence, guided by kindness, is the highest possible wisdom
and that ‘ man believes not what he would, but what he can.’ ”
It has been said that we can have no complete system of science.
To some extent this is true ; for no science is perfect, if by per
fection is meant that all that is knowable is known. But
sufficient information of a positive character has been obtained
in many fields of enquiry to justify conclusions that may be re
garded as reliable. Science has stamped its valuable impress on
the history of the world. By its aid man is enabled to explore
hitherto unknown regions; by its aid we can descend into the
depths of the earth, and discover truths which destroy theological
errors that have too long held captive the human mind; by its
aid we can not only avert many of the diseases which “ flesh is
heir to,” but can even bid the messenger of death pause in its
gloomy and desolating march. Science has conferred its mani
fold benefits upon the king and the peasant, the weak and the
strong, the healthy and the decrepit. It has transformed nations
from a state of barbarism to partial civilisation, and stimulated
man to emancipate himself from the curse of degrading super
stitions. That which was hidden from the gaze of the ancient
world has, by the magic wand of science, been exhibited to us
in all its pleasing aspects. To-day, though separated by the
broad and swelling ocean, we can in a few moments of time com
municate with our European friends by that cable which connects
nation with nation. By the mighty propelling power of steam
�WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
5
we can, in a comparatively brief period, penetrate the very
length and breadth of the land. As the late Prince Consort of
England said in 1855 : “No human pursuits make any material
progress until science is brought to bear upon them............. Look
at the transformation which has gone on around us since the
laws of gravitation, electricity, magnetism, and the expansive
power of heat have become known to us. It has altered the
whole state of existence—one might say, the whole face of the
globe. We owe this to science, and to science alone.” While
■contemplating the glorious achievements thus won, it is sadden
ing to remember how their progress has been retarded. In ages
long gone, never we hope to return, whenever a scientific truth
was manifested, it was sought to be crushed, or its infantine
purity was corrupted, either by despotic blindness or ignorant
misrepresentation. The history of science has been one continual
conflict with religious fanaticism and priestly intolerance. Too
frequently its usefulness has been impaired, and its exponents
have been tortured, and made to deny the evidences of their own
senses. True, from a theological standpoint we could not expect
aught else. A study of the histories of orthodox Bible believers
will scarcely justify the supposition that they would assist in
those discoveries which show so unmistakably the errors of their
faith.
The potency of science over the influence of theology was
never better presented than in the following eloquent language
by Col. Ingersoll : “ Science, thou art the great magician ! Thou
alone performest the true miracles. Thou alone workest the
real wonders. Fire is thy servant, lightning is thy messenger.
The waves obey thee, and thou knowest the circuits of the wind.
Thou art the great philanthropist! Thou hast freed the slave
and civilised the master. Thou hast taught men to chain not
his fellow-man, but the forces of nature—forces that have no
backs to be scarred, no limbs for chains to chill and eat—forces
that never know fatigue, that shed no tears—forces that have
no hearts to break. Thou gavest man the plough, the reaper and
the loom—thou hast fed and clothed the world ! Thou art the
great physician ! Thy touch hath given sight. Thou hast made
�6
SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE:
the lame to leap, the dumb to speak, aud in the pallid cheek thy
hand hath set the rose of health. ‘ Thou hast given thy beloved
sleep’—a sleep that wraps in happy dreams the throbbing
nerves of pain. Thou art the perpetual providence of man—
preserver of light and love ! Thou art the teacher of every
virtue, the enemy of every vice. Thou hast discovered the true
basis of morals—the origin and office of conscience—and hast
revealed the nature and measure of obligation. Thou hast
taught that love is justice in its highest form, and that even
self-love, guided by wisdom, embraces with loving arms the
human race. Thou hast slain the monsters of the past. Thou
hast discovered the one inspired book. Thou hast read the
records of the rocks, written by wind and wave, by frost and
flame—records that even priestcraft cannot change—and in thy
wondrous scales thou hast weighed the atoms and the stars.
Thou art the founder of the only true religion. Thou art the
very Christ, the only saviour of mankind. Theology has always
been in the way of the advance of the human race. There is
this difference between science and theology—science is modest
and merciful, while theology is arrogant and cruel. The hope
of science is the perfection of the human race. The hope of
theology is the salvation of a few and the damnation of almost
everybody.”
Notwithstanding the value, potency and grandeur of science
it is only of comparatively recent date that its usefulness has
been fairly acknowledged and its power duly appreciated.
Formerly new discoveries were tested by the Bible and encour
aged or discouraged according to their agreement or disagreement
therewith. Fortunately, the Bible test is no longer accepted as
the standard of appeal but the question of utility has taken its
plaqe. Science now holds its undisputed sway although many
of its revelations contradict the teaching both of the Hebrew and
Christian Records.
The Bible and Science.—The Bible has hitherto occupied
in the world a very exceptional position, and there is still
claimed for it “ divine authority and unerring accuracy.” In
�WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
7
the multiplicity of tests to which its claims might be sub
jected, the one above all others which it must face to-day, isthat of science. By this it must stand or fall. If true, it
should not fear this mode of examination, but whether it does
or not it must submit to this tribunal.
That modern science has demonstrated as fallacies much that
the Bible contains is now recognised by many professing Chris
tians, hence they assert that the Bible does not pretend to teach
science. Such a statement, however, is unfortunate for the or
thodox position, inasmuch that the Bible, which is supposed to
contain all that is necessary for mankind, ought to inculcate
that which has proved the greatest benefit to their general im
provement. The national and individual condition of society
would be lamentable indeed without the advantages of science..
For Christians, therefore, to assert that the Bible ignores science,
is to charge their God with being neglectful of the principal
wants and requirements of mankind. A book which professes to*
have been written under divine inspiration for the guidance and.
instruction of the human race, should not only teach science, butshould expound its truths in such a concise and practical manner,,
that while harmonising with the facts of nature, it should also
commend itself to the judgment and intellect of the humblest
of the land. But it is not sufficient to say that the object of the
book was not to teach science ; that it had a far higher and5
nobler purpose. There might be some weight in such an allega
tion if all its teachings were confined to regions that lie outside
the domain of modern research, though even then such teachingscould not escape being tested by the influence which science hasexerted over every form of thought, indirect if not direct. Un
fortunately, however, for those who take this view, the Bible
does refer to scientific subjects, and deals quite largely with
matters that fall within the region in which science reigns
supreme. This being so, we are certainly justified in ascertain
ing whether or not the two are in harmony. That such subjects
are.dealt with no one can doubt who is at all acquainted with
the teachings of the book. Kalisch says, “ The Bible is not silent
upon the creation ; it attempts indeed to furnish its history \
�8
SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE:
but iii this account it expresses as facts that which the researches
of science cannot sanction.” But the subject of creation is not
the only topic upon which the book states the very opposite to
what is correct. Surely when, and how, man was made, the
phenomena of the solar system, and the mode by which disease
and death entered the world, are scientific questions. These,
with other similar subjects, are dwelt upon in the Bible, and a
reference to its statements thereon will show that science and
the Bible are not on the most friendly terms. The fact is there
have been but few discoveries of any magnitude in science that
have not exhibited in some way the fallacy of portions of the
Bible. That which in the days of Moses might have been con
sidered right, and in accordance with the laws of nature, science
has since proved to be incorrect, and what Christ taught as
natural laws, subsequent experience has shown to be in opposition
to scientific discoveries. The antiquity of man has been proved
to be considerably greater than Moses alleges; geology has
demonstrated that the world existed thousands of years before
the time of creation stated in the Jewish account; the theory that
all mankind descended from one primeval pair is now given up
as unreliable ; the astronomy of the Bible has long been exploded ;
the universal flood mentioned in Genesis finds no scientific sup
porters ; the possession of devils by the human body, as believed
in by Christ, is regarded as an exploded superstition; the teach
ing of the New Testament that the world and its contents are to
be destroyed by fire, has but few believers ; a burning hell for
the “ wicked souls of the departed ” is deemed too revolting and
absurd to be regarded as more than a fiction ; hence science has
practically killed the belief in the devil and firmly closed for
ever his supposed illuminated habitation. The Bible teaches
that mankind has degenerated from a state of perfection;
science, on the contrary, indicates that the career of man has
been progressive, and that each age, profiting by experience, has
been superior to its predecessor. The Bible affirms that at a
certain command the sun and moon stood still; science declares
that such an event could never have happened. The Bible asserts
that all the kingdoms of the world were exhibited from a cer-
�WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
9
tain high mountain; geography teaches that there are many
parts of the world totally invisible from any one elevation. The
Bible says that an iron axe floated on the surface of the water;
experience proves this to be impossible. In almost every field
the “ sacred writings ” appear to be the very antithesis of the
teachings of science.
The entire account of man’s early history as given in the
Bible is flatly contradicted by scientific research. Many attempts,
indeed, have been made to harmonise the two, but without suc
cess. Sophistry, equivocation, denunciation, all the engines, in
short, of polemical warfare, have been brought forward to dis
prove the well-attested facts of science; while those who have
been honest enough to restrict themselves to argument have
usually ended by accepting the facts and giving up the theory.
The great strength of a scientific theory lies in the cumulative
proof of which, if it be a scientific theory, it becomes capable ;
while a fact of science may be attested in many ways. For in
stance, while the geologists have bden at work tracing the
history of the earth from its earliest beginnings, and in so doing
have discovered evidence of the co-existence of man with many
of the extinct animals, of whose remote antiquity there can be no
doubt, the archaeologists have been busy in another field of en
quiry, and proving the same fact in another way. When the
same fact is thus arrived at by independent enquirers, and
different sciences force the mind to the same conclusion, the evi
dence of its truth is such as to be irresistible. Now the very
converse is the case with the orthodox defenders of the Bible.
Working in the same field, on the same subject-matter, they
arrive at various conclusions, and the best we have is a number
of conflicting theories, and if they were to be accepted a means
of harmonising the harmonisers must be found. Of course they
serve their purpose for a time by deceiving the uninformed and
misleading the unenquiring. But for the intelligent and logical
enquirer a study of the Hebrew Records themselves is quite
sufficient to discredit theology, and to show beyond all reason
able doubt that the Bible and science do not agree ; the one is
stationary, the other is progressive ; the first is bound by the
�10
SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE :
ignorance of the past, the second is guided by the knowledge of
the present. Modern thought has neither hesitation nor regrets
in giving up the Bible as a monitor in the practical duties of life,,
for we have science remaining, and its light will shine with an
ever increasing brightness as the years roll on, until theological
ignorance and folly shall be replaced by a knowledge of natural
forces and a wisdom based on the experiences of a more un
fettered intellectual development.
The Bible and Creation.—The supposed creation of theworld and the origin of man as narrated in the Bible fur
nish striking evidence of the contradictory nature of the
teachings of that book to the revelations of science. If wo
accept the chronology of the Hebrew records as being correct,
there is no difficulty in ascertaining how long it is according
to the Bible since the world and man were created. For in
stance, in Genesis, we read that when Adam was 130 years old
his son Seth was born; when Seth was 105, Enos was born;
when Enos was 90, Cainsn was born; when Cainan was 70,
Mahalaleel was born ; when Mahalaleel was 65, Jared was born ;
when Jared was 162, Enoch was born; when Enoch was 65,
Methuselah was born ; when Methuselah was 187, Lamech was
born; when Lamech was 182, Noah was born. Adding these
dates up, we have from the birth of Adam to that of Noah. 1056yearr; 600 years after this the flood appears, making from the
creation of man to the flood, 1656 years. Then reckoning from
the flood to the birth of Christ, 2501, and from Christ to the
present time, 1890, we have a total of 6047 years since man first
appeared on the earth. Now in Exodus 20 it is said that “ in
six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that
in them is,” and in Genesis 1 we read that “ God created man on
the sixth day.” Thus, it is asserted, man was made six days
after the creation of the heavens and earth began. Is not this
adequate proof that the Bible teaches that "the world and man
have existed only a little over six thousand years ? This was
really admitted by the Rev. G. Rawlinson, Professor at Oxford,,
who, in his famous lecture on “ The Alleged Historical Difficulties
�WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
11
of the Old and New Testaments,” delivered on behalf of the
Christian Evidence Society, said :—“ The first difficulty, really
historical, which meets us when we open the volume of Scripture
is the shortness of the time into which all history is (or at any
rate appears to be) compressed by the chronological statements,
especially those of Genesis. The exodus of the Jews is fixed by
many considerations to about the fifteenth or sixteenth century
before our era. The period between the flood and the exodus,
according to the numbers of our English version, but a very little
exceeds a thousand years. Consequently, it has been usual to
regard Scripture as authoritatively laying it down that all man
kind sprang from a single pair within twenty-five or twenty-six
centuries of the Christian era ; and, therefore, that all history,
and not only so, but all the changes by which the various races
of men were formed, by which languages developed into their
numerous and diverse types, by which civilisation and art
emerged and gradually perfected themselves, are shut up within
the narrow space of 2,500 or 2,600 years before the birth of our
Lord. Now, this time is said, with reason, to be quite insuffi
cient. Egypt and Babylonia have histories, as settled kingdoms,
which reach back (according to the most moderate of modern
critical historians) to about the time at which the numbers of
our English Bible place the deluge. Considerable diversities of
language can be proved to have existed at that date; markedly
different physical types appeared not much subsequently ; civili
sation in Egypt had, about the pyramid period, which few now
place later than B.c. 2450, an advanced character; the arts existed
in the shape in which they were known in the country at its
most flourishing period. Clearly, a considerable space is wanted
anterior to the pyramid age, for the gradual development of
Egyptian life into the condition which the monuments show
to have been then reached. This space the numbers of our
English Bible do not allow ”
Turning to the great book of nature, and reading the geo
logical lessons inscribed therein, we find, in the words of Babbage
—a Christian writer—that “ the mass of evidence which com
bines to prove the great antiquity of the earth itself is so irre-
�12
sciteNcfe
and the bible
:
Sistible and so unshaken by any opposing facts, that none but
those who ate alike incapable of observing the facts and appre■ciating the reasoning can for a momeut conceive the present
state of its surface to have been the result of only 6,000 years of
existence. Those observers and philosophers, who have spent
their lives in the study of geology, have arrived at the conclu
sion that there exists irresistible evidence that the date of the
-earth’s first formation is far anterior to the epoch supposed to
be assigned to it by Moses; and it is now admitted by all com
petent persons that the formation even of those strata which are
nearest the surface must have occupied vast periods, probably
millions of years, in arriving at their present state.” In reply to
this, two different theories have been put forth in defence of the
Bible records with a view of bringing them into harmony with
science. The first theory is that a long period—countless ages,
in fact—elapsed between the time referred to in the 1st and 2nd
verses of Genesis, and that the creation spoken of in the first
two chapters of that book was only a re-adaptation of the chaos
of a previous world. If this were so, how is it no allusion is
made to animals or plants as being in existence before the time
referred to by Moses ? Is it not said by this writer that light
was created on the first of. the six days, and the sun on the
fourth ? Admit this to be true, and then, previous to that time,
there was no light nor heat, a condition of existence which
science pronounces an impossibility. Besides, have not geological
investigations discovered that the remains of animals and plants
found in the strata correspond with species now existing on the
-earth, indicating thereby that no new creation took place 6,000
years ago ? Clearly theie was and could be no such break in
the continuity of the chain of geological events as this theory
assumes. The remains of animals and plants found in the tertiary
are identical with those living to-day, and there was, therefore,
no new creation of fauna and flora at the time at which the
writer of Genesis declares the origin of the whole to have taken
place. If such had occurred evidences of it would be found in
those old records written in stone, which cannot err as docu
ments may do that have been produced by human fingers.
�WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
13‘
Besides, does it not look very much like a childish work of
supererogation to create by a special supernatural act a new set
of plants and animals, exactly like those already existing, who
would, as a matter of course, have propagated their species in
the ordinary natural way as they had been doing for generations
before ? Nor is there the slightest intimation in the book that
any sort of an interval of long duration occurred between the
. creation described in the first verse and that enumerated in the
subsequent account. It is evidently one continuous record, the
whole extending over just six days. The second theory is that
the days mentioned in Genesis are not literal days, but long
periods extending probably over millions of years. This is the
more popular of the two theories amongst orthodox Christians
at the present time. But, like the other, it is beset with insur
mountable difficulties. The light and the darkness are stated to
be synonymous with day and night, which alternate regularly
with each other. Epochs of light and equally long epochs of
darkness we know did not occur, for such darkness would have
been fatal to the vegetation which existed. Then the keeping
of the Sabbath day is enjoined on the principle that God worked
for six days and rested on the seventh, leaving the inference
conclusive that the days in the one case were the same as those
in the other. The most fatal objection, however, of all to the entire
theory is that the order of creation as described in Genesis and
that discovered by geological science are not at all the same. The
vegetable kingdom was not in its origin separated by millions of
years from the beginnings of animal life, as this theory would
make it appear to have been, one entire day or epoch coming
between them ; neither did the higher and lower forms of land
animals make their appearance at the same time. From any
point of view, no reconciliation between the Bible and science
appears to us possible, at least upon this point.
The Origin of Man.—Whatever lack of information may
exist as to the precise time when man first appeared on
the earth, it is as certain as anything can be that the
human family have been in existence much longer than
�14
SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE :
the time stated in the Bible. Professor Huxley writes:—
Sufficient grounds exist for the assumption that man co
existed with the animals found in the diluvium, and many a
barbarous race may, before all historical time, have disappeared
together with the animals of the ancient world.” Sir Charles
Lyell supports the statement, that “ North America was peopled
more than a thousand centuries ago by the human race.” Dr.
Bennett Dowler claims for a human skeleton discovered in the
delta of the Mississippi no less than 57,600 years. Baron Bunsen
■claims an antiquity for the human race of at least 20,000 years
prior to the Christian era, and traces in Egypt a double Empire
■of hereditary kings to 5413 B.C. “ It is now generally conceded,”
observe Nott and Gliddon, “ that there exists no data by which
we can approximate the date of man’s first appearance upon
•earth; and, for aught we yet know, it may be thousands or
millions of years.beyond our reach. The spurious systems of
Archbishop Usher on the Hebrew text, and of Dr. Hales on the
Septuagint, being entirely broken down, we turn, unshackled by
prejudice, to the monumental records of Egypt as our best guide.
Even these soon lose themselves, not in the primitive state of
man, but in his middle, or perhaps modern, ages ; for the Egyptian
Empire first presents itself to view, about 4,000 years before
'Christ, as that of a mighty nation, in full tide of civilisation, and
surrounded by other realms and races already emerging from
the barbarous stage...........These authorities, in support of the
extreme age of the geological era to which man belongs, though
startling to the unscientific, are not simply the opinions of a
few; but such conclusions are substantially adopted by the
leading geologists everywhere. And, although antiquity so ex
treme for man’s existence on earth may shock some preconceived
opinions, it is none the less certain that the rapid accumulation
of new facts is fast familiarising the minds of the scientific
world to this conviction. The monuments of Egypt have alreadycarried us far beyond all chronologies heretofore adopted ; and
when these barriers are once overleaped, it is in vain for us to
attempt to approximate even the epoch of man’s creation. This
•conclusion is not based merely on the researches of such arch-ae-
�WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
15
ologists as Lepsius, Bunsen, Birch, De Longperier, Humboldt,
etc., but on those of also strictly orthodox writers, Kenrick,
Hincks, Osburn, and, we may add, of all theologians who have
really mastered the monuments of Egypt. Nor do these monu
ments reveal to us only a single race at this early epoch, in full
tide of civilisation, but they exhibit faithful portraits of the
same African and Asiatic races, in all their diversity, which hold
intercourse with Egypt at the present day.......... In short, we
know that in the days of the earliest Pharaohs, the Delta, as it
now exists, was covered with ancient cities, and filled with a
dense population, whose civilisation must have required a period
going back far beyond any date that has yet been assigned to
the deluge of Noah, or even to the creation of the world.” The
two magnificent works of Nott and Gliddon, entitled “ Types of
. Mankind ” and “ Indigenous Races,” are too little read at the
present time. They contain some few errors, no doubt, but on
the whole they abound in erudition and furnish overwhelming
evidence both of man’s early appearance on the earth and of the
impossibility of supposing all the races to have had the same
origin. The Adam and Eve theory is shattered into fragments
by the facts produced in such abundance. No answer to these
books has been put forth, and we fail to see that any is possible.
“ The theory,” say Nott and Gliddon,“that all nations are made
of one blood, is entirely exploded.” Besides, if it were correct that
all mankind emanated from the “ transgressors in the Garden of
Eden,” it would be right to expect that the nearer we could
trace back to the original stock, the less diversity of race distincion characteristics would be found. Such, however, is not the
case. “We know,” observe Nott and Gliddon, “ of no archae
ologist of respectable authority at the present day, who will aver
that the races now found throughout the valley of the Nile, and
scattered over a considerable portion of Asia, were not as dis
tinctly and broadly contrasted at least 3,500 years ago as at this
moment. The Egyptians, Canaanites, Nubians, Tartars, Negroes,
Arabs, and other types, are as faithfully delineated on the monu
ments, of the seventeenth and eighteenth dynasties, as if the
paintings had been executed by an artist of our present age.
�16
SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE :
Hence, nothing short of a miracle could have evolved all the
multifarious Caucasian forms out of one primitive stock ; because
the Canaanites, the Arabs, the Tartars, and the Egyptians were
absolutely as distinct from each other in primeval times as they
are now; just as they all were then from co-existent Negroes.
Such a miracle, indeed, has been invented, and dogmatically
defended ; but it is a bare postulate, and positively refuted by
scientific facts. If then the teachings of science be true, there
must have been many centres of creation, even for Caucasian
races, instead of one centre for all the types of humanity.” Dr.
Samuel Morton states “ that recent discoveries in Egypt prove
beyond all question that the Caucasian and the Negro races
were as perfectly distinct in that country upwards of 3,000 years
ago as they are now. If, then, the difference which we find ex
isting between the Negro and the Caucasian has been produced
by external causes, such change must have been effected accord
ing to Bible chronology in about 1,000 years. This theory is
decidedly contradicted by science and experience.” Now, no
external causes are known that are capable of producing all
the varieties of mankind as we see them to-day. They appear
to be separated from each other by broad lines of demarcation
which nothing that we are at present acquainted with can bridge
over. No consideration of the influence of sun, climate, or geo
graphical position will aid us in solving the problem. If man
kind all sprang from the same stock, which of course is very
questionable, it must have been tens of thousands of years before
the time at which Adam is supposed to have lived. For, as Pro
fessor Draper observes :—“ So far as investigations have gone
they indisputably refer the existence of man to a date remote
from us by many hundreds of thousands of years......... We are
thus carried back immeasurably beyond the six thousand years
of Patristic chronology. It is difficult to assign a shorter date
for the last glaciation of Europe than a quarter of a million of
years, and human existence antedates that. But not only is it
that this grand fact confronts us, we have to admit also a primi
tive animalised state and a slow and gradual development. But
this forlorn, this savage condition of humanity is in strong con-
�WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
17
trast to the Paradisiacal happiness of the Garden of Eden, and
what is far more serious, it is inconsistent with the theory of
the Fall.” [“ Science and Religion,” pp. 199-200.] It is evident,
therefore, that the Bible is at fault in reference to man’s origin,
and no sophistry of explanation will make it agree with the
records of science.
Creation: Time and Material.—The’ disagreement between
the Bible and science as to the time occupied in the al
leged creation of the world is exceedingly clear. According
to the account in the Bible, this event occurred in six days.
There it is distinctly stated that the heavens and the earth and
all that in them is, were created in six days (Ex. 20 : 11). “For
in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that
in them is, and rested the seventh day ; wherefore the Lord
blessed the seventh day and hallowedit.” The Jews understood
the word “day” as embracing a common day of twenty-four
hours. From the 20th of Exodus it is perfectly certain that it
is to be understood literally. God commands the Jews to “ Re
member the Sabbath-day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou
labour, and do all thy work ; but the seventh day is the Sabbath
of the Lord thy God ; in it thou shalt not do any work, thou,.
nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man-servant nor thy maid
servant, nor thy ’cattle, nor the stranger that is within thy gates.”
Why ? Because—“ For in six’ days the Lord made heaven andi
earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested on the seventh
day ; wherdfore the Lord blessed the Sabbath-day and hallowed
it.” “ Now,” remarks S. J. Finney, “ if the word ‘ day ’ is an in
definite word, embracing a long and indefinite period of time,
how could the Jews know when to work or when to rest, and
how do we know when to keep the Sabbath at all ? If it means,
according to Dr. John Pye Smith, many thousands or even
millions of years, the Sabbath has not yet begun; men are fooling
away one seventh of their time on a false notion that it is
‘ holy.’ ” But it has already been shown that the epoch theory
entirely breaks down when tested by facts. Mr. Priaulx says
“ that in reviewing this creation we are struck by its division
�18
SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE:
into days. These days, though several of them are undetermined
hy any revolution of the earth round the sun, were, nevertheless,
no doubt, meant and understood to be natural days of twentyfour hours each.” Dr. Chalmers and Dr. Pye Smith represent
the creation recorded in Genesis as begun and completed in six
natural days, but as cut off from a previously-existing creation
by a chaotic period. Geologists, on the conti ary, declare that
■the various early strata of the earth have occupied enormous
periods of time during their formation, and that even in the
■vegetable and animal kingdoms the extinction and creation of
species have been, and are, the result of a slow and gradual
■change in the organic world.
Equally at fault is the Bible with reference to the sequence of
events. So diverse, in fact, are the accounts as furnished by
the Bible and by science up©« this zpoint that all attempts to
reconcile them must prove to be time wasted and labour thrown
away. Many years ago Dr. Sexton, who although now a Chris
tian is still & scientist, and would find some difficulty in replying
to his early writings, wrote as follows in his “ Concessions of
Theology to Science ” :—“ The greatest objection, and one which
is insurmountable to the understanding the term day in the first
chapter of Genesis as a long period, and therefore the six days
as including all the ages that have passed away, during which
those innumerable species of plants and animals have made their
appearance on our earth whose remains are embedded in the
rocks, will be found in the fact that the order of creation is not
the same in the two cases. According to geology, there is a
gradual progression from the lowest to the highest, plants and
animals running pari passu side by side, the simplest being
found in the early rocks, and the most complex in those more
recently formed. In Genesis, on the other hand, the whole of
the vegetable kingdom makes its appearance in one epoch, all
the inhabitants of the waters in another—the two separated
from each other by a long period, in which nothing was created
but the sun—and the land animals in a third. Moreover, the
organisms created in the last epoch include animals as low as
creeping things, and as high as man,, which certainly does not
�WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
19
accord with the facts disclosed by geology; and whales, which
are mammals, and therefore considerably high in the scale of
existence, are represented as having made their appearance with
the fishes, and long before the creeping things, which is also
contrary to fact. The sun, too, does not exist till the epoch after
the creation of plants, so that an enormous vegetation—such as
the immense forests which form the present coal-beds—must
have flourished in the absence of the rays of sunlight, which is
a perfect impossibility. Nor is the difficulty got over by the
theory that light had been previously formed, and that there
fore the sun was not requisite, since the actinic part of the sun’s
rays is equally as indispensable to vegetation as the luminous
portion that we call light.”
The Bible statement of the material from which man was
made differs from the facts discovered by scientific investigation.
We read irt Genesis that man was made from the dust of the
earth ; chemical analysis, on the other hand, has proved that
dust does not contain the elements found in the human organ
ism. The late Dr. Herapath, one of the leading chemists of
the day, wrote thus boldly upon this subject:—“ From our days
of boyhood it has been most assiduously taught us ‘ that man
was made out of the dust of the earth ; ’ and, ‘ as dust thou
art, so to dust thou shalt return.’ Now, this opinion, if literally
true, would necessitate the existence of alumina as one of the
elements of organised structure, for no soil or earthy material
capable of being employed by agriculturists can be found with
out alumina existing largely in its constitution, and clay cannot
be found without it. Therefore, chemistry as loudly protests
against accepting the Mosaic record in a strictly literal sense, as
geology, geography, astronomy, or any other of the physical
sciences so absurdly dogmatised upon weekly from the pulpits
by those who have neglected the study of true science, but still
profess to teach us that which is beyond all knowledge. That
man is not made out of the dust of the earth, but from organic
material or vegetable matter, properly digested and assimilated
by other organised beings, chemical science everywhere proves
to us incontestably.” Prof. Carpenter asserts that two-thirds of
�20
SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE :
the human body by weight is water. Such a proportion of this
fluid certainly cannot be found in dust, for we only apply that
ter<n to earth that is dry. Dust mixed with twice its own weight
of water would cease to be described as dust. Yet there is no
escape from the statement made in the Bible that of such ma
terial as dust man was formed. The literal reading of the ori
ginal, as all scholars agree, is “ dust from the ground,” that is,
ordinary dust such as we meet with on the ground. Now, it is
certain man was not made from any such material, and by no
legitimate stretch of language can it with anything like accu
racy or truth be said that he was. The principal elementary
. substances to be found in human bodies are oxygen, hydrogen,
nitrogen and carbon, but these are not to be found in ordinary
dust, with the exception of a very trifling modicum of oxygen.
Silicon, one of the main ingredients of dust, can hardly be de
tected in the human organism. The Lamaic creed supposes man
is the production of water. Priaulx suggests that, had the writer
of Genesis adopted this theory, he would have been somewhat
nearer the truth.
The Bible Account of the Origin of Death.—The Bible
alleges that “by one man sin entered into the world, and
death by sin; ” that is, that through the supposed disobedi
ence of Adam, death was introduced as a punishment for the
alleged offence. In the first place, death, so far from being a
punishment, i« to many “a consummation devoutly to be
wished.” Epictetus wrote : “ It would be a curse upon ears of
corn not to be reaped, and we ought to know that it would be a
curse upon man not to die. Are there not thousands who suffer
a life-long state of physical pain, who have not the strength or
opportunity to obtain sufficient food to satisfy the wants of
nature ? To such persons as these would not death be indeed a
welcome messenger ? Besides, upon the Christian hypothesis,
how can death possibly be a punishment ? To be ushered into
realms of bliss, and there to enjoy everlasting happiness, instead
of remaining in this “ vale of tears, ought certainly to be
accepted by the Christian as an improvement upon his condition.
�WHERMN THEY DIFFER.
21
But this theory of Adam being the cause of the introduction of
death involves many difficulties. If death had not been intro
duced, could the world contain its ever-increasing inhabitants ?
And would it have been capable of producing provisions sufficient
to support such an immense multitude ? Suppose the serpent
had not played its “little game,” could a man who had no know
ledge of swimming have fallen into the water without the
chance of being drowned ? Or could a person have remained in
a furnace and not be burned to death ? Or if he were in a coal
mine during an explosion, would he escape unhurt ? Further,
did the lower animals incur death through the act of Adam ?
If yes, did Christ give them immortality ? Because we read,
“ As in Adam all died, so in Christ shall all be made alive.” If,
however, they did not incur death, it may be asked why one of
theij; kind took a prominent part in what is termed “ the fall of
man ? ” The fact is, by our nature we must cease to live. Death
is a necessity, regardless of what Adam did or did not, and man
cannot but experience it while he is what he is. Change is an
universal law of existence, and we are no exception to that law.
As soon as we enter upon the stage of life we become subject to
that change until we progress to a given point; then our organ
isation begins to lose its vitality, and we slowly but surely
•exhaust life’s power, and death ensues as certainly as a fire will
cease to burn when no longer supplied with fuel. This condition
•of things has always existed so far as science can discover. But
the Bible says no ; before Adam’s “ transgression ” death was not
.a necessary consequence of life. Here, then, are antagonistic
statements. Which is reliable ? If Adam were constituted
similar to us, he must have been liable to death. If, on the con
trary, his organisation were of an entirely different structure,
how could he have been our first parent ? Children do not differ
in their nature from those whose offspring they are. Certain it
is that man’s constitution is such that he cannot avoid the
liability to death. He is so organised that all the influences
operating upon him, while for a time and under certain condi
tions they afford him sustenance and support, may yet, diverted
from their normal purpose, cause him to cease to live. Indeed,
�22
SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE :
it is impossible even to conceive of a human body which is pos
sessed of immortality. The phrase is used glibly enough, but let
one reflect upon it, and ask himself what is the meaning that he
attaches to the expression “immortal man.” A human being lives
by taking food, and that very food diverted from its proper pur
pose may cause death; anyhow, its absence will produce that
effect. Excretions of a poisonous character are continually being
eliminated, and should the glandular organ whose function it is
to remove these deleterious substances cease to act, then the
result is as fatal as though a poison had been swallowed. If it
be said that this would not occur because there would be no
disease, we reply that there is still the impossibility of supposing
an organism, whose existence is dependent on something outside
itself, being at the same time independent of all else.
Then there is the important fact that death was in the ^orld
millions of ages before the supposed existence of Adam and
Eve. There are, indeed, few persons of any education now who
can doubt that at least the lower animals died long before man
was created. Geology has brought to light their fossil remainsentombed in the various rocks which go to make up the crust
of the earth. They came into existence, played their brief part
on life’s stage, and passed away, not simply individually, but
in whole races, long before the era dawned which gave man bis
birth. They preyed on one another then as now, the carnivora
devouring the less ferocious tribes ; and both together becoming’
buried in the earth, their remains were preserved to tell their
history to future generations of men. Race followed race in long
succession, each to pass away as its predecessor bad done whilst
as yet man had not made his appearance upon the scene.
But it was not simply the lower animals that died before the
time assigned to the creation of Adam, It is now demonstrated
beyond the shadow of a doubt that man had shared the same
fate ages before. If our fabled first parents resided in the Gar
den of Eden six thousand years ago, they came far too late in
the history of the world to be the progenitors of the whole
human family. Whole races had flourished and had passed
away long before that time. Death had existed whilst the per-
�WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
petrator of original sin was not yet born. In no sense, there
fore, can it be a fact that Adam’s sin was the cause of death.
The Fall itself involves contradictions to science. Take, for in
stance, the curses pronounced on the ground, the woman, and
the serpent : the merest tyro in science knows that all these
are simply non-existent. Thorns and thistles are not accursed ,
on the contrary, they are highly useful plants. Moreover, they
were in existence long before the time at which the Fall is said
to have occurred. And they most unquestionably made their
first appearance, not as the result of any curse of God, but by
the ordinary laws of nature. Then the so-called curse on woman
is by no means universal. The pains referred to occur in their
severe form only amongst civilised peoples, and always as a re
sult'of artificial modes of living and the violation of natural
laws. Savage women are almost exempt from such pains, and
suffer no more than do the lower animals. The curse upon the
serpent is still more absurd : “ On thy belly shalt thou go,” as
though serpents ever practised locomotion in any other way.
Nor were serpents changed in their organisation at this time—
as some have suggested—for the remains of those found in
geological strata, whose existence dates back to a period pro
bably a million years before man appeared, show precisely the
same kind of organisation as their modern descendants. Thesecurses are, to say the least, very childish, and place the charac
ter of the Being who is said to have uttered them in a very
contemptible and degrading light. Fortunately, however, ac
cording to science, the whole story is regarded as fiction, not as
fact.
The Bible Deluge.—Modern researches have unmistakeably
established the fact that between science and the Mosaic ac
count of the flood there is an absolute antagonism.
The
Bible statement is, that less than five thousand years ago, God
discovered “ that the wickedness of man was great in the
earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart
was only evil continually.” Not two thousand years before
this, so the book relates, God had made man pure and
�24
SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE :
morally upright; had given him the advantage of divine super
intendence, and subsequently the edification of the preaching of
Noah. These precautions, however, did not, according to the
Hebrew narrative, prevent mankind from degenerating so rapidly
that the Lord repented “ that he had made man, and it grieved
him at his heart.” God possessed, it is .-aid, infinite power, wis
dom, and goodness, yet he either could not, or would not, devise
a plan of reformation for the human race, but resolved instead
upon wholesale destruction, and so drowned them all except one
family. This was a terrible resolve, opposed to every sentiment
of justice and to every feeling of benevolence. No being with a
spark of humanity in his nature would be guilty of voluntarily
exposing millions of creatures, men, women, and children, to the
agonies and struggles of a watery grave. Surely an omnipotent
God could have found other means to correct the work of his
own hands without bringing “ a flood of waters upon the earth,
to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under
heaven.” Besides, as a remedy and a warning, the cold water pro
cess proved a failure. The people are reported as being no better
after the deluge than they were before it.
If this deluge were a fact, what can be said of the God who
was the chief actor in it, and who was entirely responsible for
the great calamity—an event so fearfully cruel and so revolting
that one “ cannot think of it without horror nor contemplate it
without dismay.” How can we reconcile the drowning of a
whole world with the justice and goodness of the Almighty
One ? Say that the wickedne-s of man was great upon the
earth, was that any reason for destroying any chance of repent
ance ? What should we say of an earthly despot who acted in
a like manner ? The cruelty and supreme wickedness of the
action thus attributed to God has never been paralleled or even
approached by the greatest monster the world has ever seen ;
and on the part of infinite power the action mu-t partake of the
character of the actor and become infinite in its utter depravity.
Say that men were wicked, was it therefore just to overwhelm
in a common destruction the son with the sire, the little child
who had not yet learned to sin with those who were the real
�WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
25
sinners ? In the presence of this narrative, we can only say
that, if men were wicked, the being who destroyed them was
more wicked still.
Again, according to the orthodox version of this fearful
tragedy, man had fallen, Adam for his sin had been cast out of
Eden, and the redemption of man was impossible through any
efforts of his own. The Redeemer who was necessary had not
yet been sent. How, then, could it be consistent with infinite
goodness to punish for wickedness which was unavoidable, to
destroy man that he was sinful when he could not by any possi
bility be otherwise ? Moreover, be it observed that this narra
tion is a libel upon the character of God in other ways. By
this universal deluge a great change was effected, but no im
provement. The new generations were as wicked as those which
had gone before ; nay, the very man Noah, who had found grace
in the sight of God, was drunk in his tent immediately, and his
son Canaan, another of the saved ones, maketh shame of his
father. In the 9 th chapter of Genesis the whole disgusting ac
count may be found. The God who drowned the world to cure
the evil in it with no better results than this could not be a God
of any foreknowledge. Or, if it be said that he knew this
would be so, then the utter malignity of the drowning becomes
only proportionately increased.
Our present object, however, is not to dwell upon the inhuman
character of the flood, but rather to show that the account in
Genesis is utterly contrary to the result of modern investigations
and the revelations of science. This fact has become so palp
able that leading theologians, with a view to save the credit of
the Bible story, are driven to assert that the Noachian flood was
only partial. Were this assertion correct, the Bible would be in
error, inasmuch as it clearly teaches the universality of the
deluge, as shown by the following extracts from Genesis, ch. 6
and 7 : “ And the Lord said, I will destroy man, whom I have
created, from the face of the earth; both man and beast, and
the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air ; for it repenteth me
that I have made them'” “ And, behold, I, even I, do bring a
flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is
�26
SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE :
the breath of life, from under heaven ; and everything that is
in the earth shall die.” “ Every living substance that I havemade will I destroy from off the face of the earth.” “ And all
flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle,
and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the
earth, and every man. All in whose nostrils was the breath of
life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living
substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground,
both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of
the heaven ; and they were destroyed from the earth; and Noah
only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.”
Bishop Colenso says that the Flood described in Genesis, whether
it be regarded as a universal or a partial deluge, is equally in
credible and impossible. And the Rev. Paxton Hood, in his
work, “The Villages of the Bible,” remarks: “I am aware that
Dr. Pye Smith and some other distinguished scholars have
doubted the universality of the deluge......... I need not refer
more at length to this matter than to say it seems quite unphilosophical to maintain the possibility of such a partial flood ; this
seems to me even more astonishing than the universal.” Pro
fessor Hitchcock observes: “ I am willing to acknowledge that
the language of the Bible on this subject seems at first view to
teach the universality of the flood unequivocally.” Upon the
supposition that the flood was partial, it would be interesting to
know what prevented the water from finding its level. More
over, where was the necessity of drowning the innocent portion
of the local inhabitants ? It cannot reasonably be supposed that
no pure-minded women and guiltless children were to be found.
Besides, it was folly building the ark and collecting the animals
if this partial hypothesis were true; as Noah and his family,
together with “ two of every sort,” could have emigrated to
those parts which the deluge was not intended to visit.
In speaking of this flood, “ Julian,” one of the ablest Biblical
scholars in England at the present day, in his excellent .work,
“ Bible Words : Human, Not Divine,” has the following valuable
remarks upon the account as given in Genesis chapters 6, 7,.
and 8 :
�WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
27
“ Two of Evtry Sort.—Chapter 6 is Eloistic: the word ‘God’
is used. In verses 19, 20, we read: And God said to Noah he
was to take into the ark ‘two of every sort,’ to keep the race
alive; the two were to be a male and its female : ‘ Of fowls after
their kind, and of cattle after their kind; of every creeping
thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come
unto thee. And take thou unto thee of all food that is eaten,,
which thou shalt gather together for thee and them.’’
“ This writer evidently supposed that wild beasts and birds of
prey could feed on hay and eat ‘ straw like an ox ; ’ that the
number of animals was so small that two of every sort could be
stalled in an ordinary-sized church ; and that four men would
suffice to feed all the animals and remove the filth from the ark.
Why, a small travelling menagerie requires more attendants to
feed the collection and keep the place clean.
“ The writer supposed that wild beasts would consort with
their lawful prey—serpents with doves, hawks with sparrows,
owls with mice, and insectivorous birds with insects ; for, though*
daily food was to be taken into the ark, only two of every
sort of animal were to be saved, just enough to keep the race
alive.
“ Seven of Clean Animals and Birds.—‘ Two of every sort,’
Elohim says, and repeats the injunction—two of every sort,
remember; only two, and no more ; one male and one female of
each species of beast, bird, and reptile. The-next chapter (7) is
a Jehovistic one; for, instead of God, we read ‘Lord,’ or the
‘ Lord God ; ’ and here a distinction is made between clean and
unclean beasts, and between quadrupedsand birds. Mark what
is said : ‘ Of every clean beast (7 : 2, 3) thou shalt take to theeby sevens, the male and the female; and of beasts that are not
clean by two, the male and his female. Of fowls of the air by
sevens, the male and the female.’
“Here the direction is seven clean beasts and seven of all
species of birds, ‘ a male and its female.’ Now, as seven is an
odd number, it was plainly impossible to pair seven animals ; sothe writer must have meant seven pairs, or fourteen of every
clean beast and every fowl of the air. This, of course, would
�38
SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE:
require a much larger ark, and would greatly increase the daily
labour of Noah and his family.
“ This wise and sagacious writer saw plainly that birds and
beasts of prey could not live upon seed, so he increases the num
ber of animals for food. He also wanted Noah to offer sacrifice
after the Flood ; -and, had he killed one of his two clean beasts,
he would have extirpated the race ; so he makes Jehovah coun
termand the order of Elohim, and tell Noah that Elohim made a
mistake ; that he did not mean ‘ two of every sort of beast and
bird and creeping thing,’ but only of unclean beasts. All clean
beasts and all birds wTere to be collected by sevens (a sacred
number); but why seven pairs of eagles, vultures, condors,
toucans, parrots, lyre-birds, mocking-birds, cranes, owls, and so
on, is a mystery of mysteries.”
<
Scientific Objections to the Mosaic Account of the Flood.—
Among the many scientific objections to the account of the
Flood as given in the Bible are the following :
1. Geological. The study of this science proves to demonstra
tion that the present diluvian deposits found in the earth are the
result of time going back far beyond the Noachian period. The
evolutions in sea and on land, that for ages have been progress
ing, and are still in process, evidently extend in their connection
to the pre-Adamite antiquity. “ This conclusion,” says the Bev.
Alfred Barry, M.A., “ is the more undoubted, because so many
leading geologists, Buckland, Sedgwick, &c, who once referred
the diluvium to the one period of the historic deluge, have now
publicly, withdrawn that opinion.” Hugh Miller, in his “Testi
mony of the Rocks,” says: “ In various parts of the world, such
as Auvergne, in Central France, and along the flanks of Etna,
there are cones of long extinct or long slumbering volcanoes,
which, though of at least triple the antiquity of the Noachian
deluge, and though composed of the ordinary incoherent ma-'
terials, exhibit no marks of denudation. According to the calcu
lations of Sir Charles Lyell, no devastating flood could have
passed over the forest zone of Etna during the last twelve
thousand years.” Alluding to the remains to be found in certain
�WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
29
provinces of France, Kalisth, in his Genesis, observes: “Distinct
mineral formations, and an abundance of petrified vegetable and
animal life, bespeak an epoch far anterior to the present condition
of our planet.......... That extraordinary region contains rocks,
consisting of laminated formations of silicious deposits; one of
the rocks is sixty feet in thickness ; and a moderate calculation
shows that at least 18,000 years were required to produce that
single pile. All these formations, therefore, are far more remote
than the date of the Noachian flood ; they show not the slightest
trace of having been affected or disturbed by any general deluge;
their progress has been slow, but uninterrupted.” Thus geology
irrefragably demonstrates that, while the earth has been subject
to many floods, it has never been visited by such an one as that
described in the Bible.
The evidences of the Flood that have been sometimes quoted
are really funny. Not long ago Talmage declared that the flood
was proved beyond the possibility of contradiction by the fact
that sea shells and other remains of marine animals were often
found on the summit of the highest mountains. He forgot to
mention that the Flood was said to have been caused by fresh
water, and that consequently marine animals could have had no
place in its waters. These remans found on mountain tops are
due to other and well known causes. Geologically there is not
only no evidence that such a flood occurred as that described in
the Bible, but there is a mass of undoubted evidence to the con
trary. “ Julian ” observes : “ Such a cataclysm as the Flood
must have left its marks on the earth ; but geologists have not
succeeded in finding a single trace—no confusion of animal
relics, no huge water gullies, no stratum of alluvial earth, which
such a sweep of water would produce. We find relics of marine
animals inland, it is true, and on the tops of high mountains;
but these fossils are all in order, each in its own stratum. There
is no confusion of animals in these rocks, as if a world had been
stamped out in forty days.”
2. The Scarcity of Water. The account says: “And the
waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, and all the high
i
�30
SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE :
thills that were under the whole heavens were covered.” Further,
“ the mountains were covered.” Now, the height of Mount
Ararat is put down at 17,000 feet; the quantity of water, there
fore, required to cover this mountain would be, in the estimation
■of Dr. Pye Smith, Professor Hitchcock, and many other eminent
writers, eight times greater than what already existed. From
whence then came the tremendous mass of water required to
produce the Flood, and what became of it afterwards ? These
.are questions which Biblical students should answer or con
fess their inability to do so and admit the absurdity of the
.record.
3. The Size of the Ark. This vessel is alleged to have been
not more than 600 feet long, 100 feet broad, and 60 feet high ;
yet it is said to have held not only Noah and his family, but
“ two of every living thing of all flesh.” According to Hugh
Miller, there are 1,658 known species of mammalia, 6,266 of
birds, 642 of reptiles, and 550,000 of insects. Is it credible that
so small a vessel as the Ark is described to have been could have
furnished accommodation for this vast congregation ? Space,
too, must have been provided for food for the occupants of the
Ark. Under such crowded conditions how did ventilation ob
tain ? The atmosphere must have been fatal, at least, to some
forms of life. And whence was obtained the food to sustain for
so long a period the carnivorous and herbivorous animals—the
swallows, ant-eaters, spiders, and flies ? The Black Hole of Cal
cutta would have been a paradise to it. It is monstrous folly to
suppose all the animals of the earth, by twos and sevens, could
be squeezed into such a space. It is no less folly to suppose that
they would not all have been suffocated before one day had
passed. There is a little difficulty also about the light. There
were, it appears, three storeys in the Ark, and but one window.
Now, where was the window positioned ? In the upper storey ?
Possibly, then, the dwellers in the other two storeys of the Ark
were in the dark, where many of those have since been who
have relied on the Bible instead of profiting by the lessons of
science.
�WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.
31
4. The Collecting the Animals. The difficulties attending the
narrative of collecting the live stock into one happy family are
thus aptly put by the Rev. T. R. Stebbing, M.A.: “ To achieve it
he (Noah) must have gone in person, or sent expeditions, to
Australia for the kangaroo and the wombat, to the frozen North
for the Polar bear, to Africa for the gorilla and the chimpanzee ;
the hippopotamus of the Nile, the elk, the bison, the dodo, the
apteryz, the emeu, and the cassowary must have been brought
together by vast efforts from distant quarters....... Sheep, game,
caterpillars, beasts of prey, snails, eagles, fleas and titmice must
all have their share of attention. Unusual pains must be em
ployed to secure them uninjured. They must be fed and cared
for during a journey, perhaps of thousands of miles, till they
reach the ark ; they must be hindered from devouring one ano
ther while the search is continued for rats, and bats, and vipers
and toads, and scorpions, and other animals which a patriarch,
specially singled out as just and upright, and a lover of peace,
would naturally wish and naturally be selected to transmit as a
boon to his favoured descendants.”
5. Atmospheric and Botanical. The Bible assures us that,
after the waters began to subside, the inhabitants of the Ark
existed for nearly eight months in the temperature prevailing at
a spot “ 3,000 feet above the region of perpetual snow.” It surely
will not be contended that this statement harmonises with sci
ence any more than does the reeord of an olive tree retaining its
life after being under the pressure of several tons’ weight of
water for nearly three-quarters of a year. “ Naturalists tell us
that sun and air are needful for vegetable life; but neither sun
nor air could get to trees buried seven miles deep in water. And
even supposing the trees to have been in leaf, a wind sufficiently
high to dry up seven miles of water in 110 days would certainly
have stripped the trees, if it had not rooted them up altogether.’
Colenso says :—“ The difficulty, that so long an immersion in
deep water would kill the olive, had, no doubt, never occurred
to the writer, who may have observed that trees survived ordin
ary partial floods, and inferred that they would just as well be
�32
SCIENCE AND THE BIBLE :
able to sustain the deluge to which his imagination subjected
them.” Kalisch observes : “ It is agreed by all botanical autho
rities, that, though partial inundations of rivers do not long or
materially change the vegetation of a region, the infusion of
great quantities of salt water destroys it entirely for long
periods. But the earth produced the olive and the vine imme
diately after the cessation of the Deluge.”
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Science and the Bible : wherein they differ
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Science
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Text
IMPROVED DWELLINGS FOR THE INDUSTRIAL
CLASSES.
(Brounb JJlan anb Cilcbation
OF
LANGBOURN BUILDINGS,
MARK STREET,
PAUL STREET, FINSBURY SQUARE,
DESIGNED AND ERECTED FOR MR. ALDERMAN WATERLOW
BY MR. MATTHEW ALLEN:
WITH DESCRIPTIVE NOTES, AND AN APPENDIX,
BY
J. A. MAYS.
LONDON:
ROBERT HARDWiCKE, 192,
1863.
PICCADILLY
�*** The number of visitors who are flocking to the building,
which it was the purpose of the following notes to describe for the
benefit of those who were present at the Opening, renders a further
issue of them necessary.
An account of the proceedings at the Opening is now added.
J. A. MAYS.
�IMPROVED DWELLINGS FOR THE
INDUSTRIAL CLASSES.
The friends of the movement for improving the condition
of the dwellings of the working classes have cause to he
thankful, in one respect, to the projectors of the twentynine schemes now before Parliament, for extending and
completing the railway system of the metropolis, as great
good is likely to be accomplished by causing public
attention to be forcibly directed to the tremendous extent
of the evils under which hundreds of thousands of the
working population of London are suffering—evils arising
mainly from the overcrowded and unhealthy condition
of their dwellings. The success of the Underground
Railway seems to have given extraordinary vitality to
a whole host of metropolitan extension and junction lines,
the construction of which, while necessitating the appro
priation of some of the very few open areas that London
still possesses, and going further towards converting the
metropolis into a huge network of tunnels, aqueducts
and arches, will also necessitate the entire removal of
many hundred houses, the majority of which are occu
pied by the industrial classes. The unhealthy nature
and the insufficient extent of the accommodation with
which thev are already provided, coupled with the
sweeping and sudden destruction of the large number
of dwelling-houses which the carrying out of these
�4
projects involves, becomes a matter of serious incon
venience to the working portion of the population, and
of more than ordinary anxiety to the employers of labour
and to the legislature. It is perfectly needless therefore
to offer one word of apology in introducing the accom
panying drawings to public notice. The importance of
the project to which they relate, whether considered as
regards the furtherance of social reforms, the prevention
of disease, the extension of the railway systems of the
country, the general amelioration of the condition of the
labouring classes, or as purely a commercial speculation,
renders it of the deepest moment that everything in the
shape of practical experience, especially of that kind
which points to a remedy for a state of things which every
one deplores, should be placed before the public without
delay.
The nature and extent of the evils sought to be grappled
with by a well-organized scheme, having for its object the
rendering of the dwelling place of the working man a
home in its truest sense, need not be here depicted, as they
have been so often and so eloquently described by abler
pens ; but assuming that there is no longer any doubt as
to their existence, the object of the present paper is to
attempt the indication of a cure rather than to describe
the disease. Laborious efforts have been made of late
years, under the auspices of the two great Societies, and by
many benevolent persons, in attempting to surmount this
subject, beset as it is on every hand with apparently unap
proachable difficulties. Society is indebted to an incal
culable extent to the labours of the late Prince Consort,
the Earl of Shaftesbury, Miss Burdett Coutts, and many
other generous spirits who have been content to spend
large sums in this good work—a work which the noble
earl just named rightly appreciates when he says : “ This
�o
is a subject about which you cannot think or speak too
earnestly. The condition of the dwellings of the labour
ing classes is the besetting sin and difficulty of. the time,
for it stands in the way of every good moral impression.”—
It is due to the unremitting efforts of philanthropists,
under the auspices chiefly of the two great bodies,—the
Society for Improving the Condition of the Working
Classes, and the Metropolitan Association, coupled with
the beneficial operation of certain legislative enactments,
that the debasing condition of the dwellings in which so
many many thousands of our countrymen arc located
has been to some extent alleviated. A perusal of the
annual reports of these Societies shows the long period
over which their operations have extended, and the large
amounts which they have expended ; but it is with a pang
of heartfelt regret that one is forced to acknowledge that,
most praiseworthy as their exertions have been as
pioneering this good work, the success which might have
been expected to result, from their labours has not yet been
achieved. Though they have succeeded in producing in
certain cases houses which satisfy the requirements of
the working classes it is undoubtedly true that no
building has yet been erected which, while combining
the essential elements of comfort and respectability,
produces in the shape of rent such a return on the money
sunk in its erection as to induce capitalists to repeat
similar experiments on a larger scale for the sake of the
profits. It is obvious that if a scheme could be devised which
would in every case attain these important objects, espe
cially the latter, the matter would be set at rest at once
and for ever; and it is equally obvious that until this can
be done the subject must continue to be regarded as the
greatest social difficulty of the day. The late Prince
Consort indicated his clear perception of this truth some
�6
years since in the observation he made to the Honorary
Architect of Lord Shaftesbury’s Society—“ Mr. Roberts,
unless we can get 7 or 8 per cent, we shall not succeed, in
inducing builders to invest their capital in such houses,”
Instead of addressing themselves vigorously to the ac
complishment of what is here indicated, architects and
builders, on whom such a project would naturally devolve,
seem in a great measure to have relaxed their efforts
latterly, and to be content to allow the question to be con
sidered as one incapable of a profitable solution by any
known application of the materials at their disposal.
It would seem to be a matter of extreme importance,
therefore, to examine previous experiments, with a view
to ascertain in what respects greater economy in the cost
of construction may be attained, and whether at the
same time any of the buildings themselves present features
which may be judiciously avoided. Addressing one’s
attention to the last point, first let us notice incidentally
the Institutional appearance that many of them present.
It is unquestionable that in most of the buildings of this
class the long rows of windows have a dreary monotonous
effect, and impress on the mind the idea of a workhouse or
of a penitentiary. This is perhaps not altogether preventible where many suites of dwellings have to be arranged
in floors or flats one above the othei’; but it certainly
speaks volumes as to the great want of decent accommo
dation felt by the working classes, that although this
is an objection which is universally admitted, it does
not seem to operate to the exclusion of tenants ; still,
it is an objection that should, if possible, be obviated
in planning other buildings. Every opportunity should
be seized of providing, if possible, a home which in
every way tends to increase the self-respect of its occu
pant, and to engender that principle in the mind which
�7
indicates its presence in the cleanly appearance of the
home itself, and sometimes adorns it with flowers and
shrubs. It is advisable to give to each dwelling an
individuality of appearance; and also to dissipate the
feeling, unfortunately but too general, that the occu
pants of the “ model dwellings ” are the recipients of
charity. The next thing to be borne in mind is, that
every tenant should have complete and exclusive use
of all the essential accessories to a home ; such as water
supply, sink, copper, dusf-shoot, coal-place, and watercloset. In some cases economy both of space and cost of
building has been sought to be obtained by arrange
ments whereby two or more tenants have had the use of
these in common; but the divided use of such important
requisites, which ought if possible to be in a decent wellregulated home reserved to the exclusive use of only a
single family, is, I think, far from compensated by a
slight saving of space and cost of erection. It would
certainly be preferable to provide these appendages to
every dwelling, even though it should render it necessary
to adopt an exterior of tlic plainest possible description.
In some of the so-called model dwellings recently erected,
and to which the foregoing remarks would also apply,
that which must at once be characterized as a defect of no
ordinary kind is observable. Somewhat showy exteriors
have been obtained at a great sacrifice of internal comfort ;
—in the one case by the introduction, at a very great
expense, of elliptical counter arches over every window
and doorway in four large blocks of buildings containing
in the aggregate some hundreds of openings : and in the
other bv the use of ornamental stone columns at the door
ways. These architectural luxuries seem to me to be
sadly misplaced in buildings which cannot boast a
particle of either plastering or paper on their internal
�8
walls, and where every room, whether parlour, living-room
or bed-room, presents a repetition of the bare and cheer
less aspect of a prison cell. It is surely to be regretted
that money should be lavishly applied to the production
of that which is clearly unnecessary, at the expense of
denying to the tenants the cheerfid effect and air of
comfort that would be given to these dwellings by the
addition of a few yards of plastering and paper-hangings.
In no case save in the houses for working people would any
architect venture to ignore the power of appreciation on
the part of any portion of the community of the decencies
of a well-arranged dwelling, or to profess that a mere
whitewashed brick wall complies with the requirements
of a modern dwelling-house in respect to its internal
decoration.
I am not alone in believing that the
homes of workmen cannot by any possibility be rendered
too attractive, complete, and comfortable; and that while
they will often meet with stolid indifference anything of a
“ missionising ” tendency, the working classes gladly
welcome and warmly appreciate the efforts made to
obviate the evils and improve the condition of their
dwellings. What they very properly desire is, that,
if possible, homes shall be provided capable of meeting the
requirements of an English workman’s family—a home
which shall present an appearance not unattractive, and
the occupation of which shall not engender a feeling on
their part that their friends will regard them as being the
occupants of almshouses.
I am conscious that this brief introduction has already
extended beyond its proper limits; without indulging in
any further digression, therefore, let me at once proceed
to call attention to the peculiarities of the building repre
sented in the accompanying })lan and elevation of a block
of dwellings recently designed and erected by Mr. Matthew
�9
Allen, of Tabernacle Walk, Finsbury, for Mr. Alderman
Waterlow.
A patient and anxious consideration of the whole subject
led to the conclusion that the following were among the
most important points which required consideration :—
I. A ground plan easily adaptable to any plot of
ground, capable of repetition to any extent, and
presenting in the elevation a pleasing and attrac
tive appearance.
II. Suites of rooms at different rents, so planned as
to secure the greatest economy of space, mate
rials, and labour, in the erection of the building,
providing at the same time for the exclusive
use of each family, within the external door of
the lettings, every essential requisite of domestic
convenience.
III. The construction of a flat roof capable of being
used as a drying and recreation ground, so as to
leave as much space as possible available for
building.
IV. Planning the positions of the doors, windows,
and fireplaces, with reference to a suitable ar
rangement of the furniture of the apartments,
and the placing of proper fireplaces, cupboards,
shelves, &c., in every room.
V. An efficient system of drainage and ventilation.
VI. Making the joinery as near as possible to an
uniform size and pattern, so that machinery
might be brought to bear in economizing its
manufacture to a considerable extent.
VII. The discovery and adaptation of a new material
combining the properties of strength and dura
�10
bility, adaptability, attractiveness of appearance,
and cheapness, in an eminent degree.
VIII. The combination of these advantages in build
ings which, when let at fair rentals, would
produce a good return on the outlay incurred in
their erection.
IX. The selection of a locality where the ground rent
would not be excessive, although the tenants
would be sufficiently near* their work to enable
them to take their meals at home.
Let us now see to what extent these advantages have
been attained and combined in the present building. Its
general plan may be described as a parallellogram of 56
feet by 44 feet, divided into four sections by a party wall
in the centre and the two passages (EE) in the middle of
each wing. The two centre sections arc set back about
3 feet from the line of frontage, for the purpose of giving
space for a balcony of that width on each of the upper
floors. Each section comprises one suite of rooms, to
which access is obtained from the passages (EE) leading
(on all the upper floors) direct from the balcony (G). The
balconies arc reached by a fireproof staircase having a semi
elliptical form, the entrances to which are shown on the
elevation by the two doorways in the centre of the building.
This staircase is continued to and gives access to the roof.
The larger lettings, consisting of three rooms and a wash
house, occupy the end sections of the building. E D the
entrance door, g is a living room provided with a range
having an oven and boiler. Leading out of the living room
is tlie washhouse or scullery (ft) which contains in every
case what may be called the accessories of the dwelling,—
water cistern, sink, a small fireplace, washing copper, dust
shoot, water-closet, &c. It is expected that the fireplace
�11
in the washhouse will conduce greatly to the comfort of
the living room in the summer time. Q is a comfortable
bedroom having a fireplace; a capacious cupboard (H) is
arranged in the party wall between this room and the
entrance lobby, and over the latter is a useful receptacle
for the stowage of bulky objects. Passing out towards
the front parlour (0), is a series of shelves having
an artificial stone bottom and back, intended by its
proximity to the living room to serve as a cupboard for pro
visions, &c. 0 is a, spacious handsome parlour having two
windows : the fireplace is placed a little out of the centre
of the room, so as to leave a convenient space in which to
put an additional bed in cases where this would be
required to be used as a bedroom. On the other side of
the fireplace is a sideboard and cupboard.
The centre sections, comprising the smaller lettings,
consist of two rooms and a washhouse, &c. The wash
house A and the living room B are exactly similar to
those in the larger letting The bedroom Q can be con
veniently converted into a parlour by arranging a set of
curtains across the recess at the back of the room, and
thus dividing the part where the bed would be placed from
the rest of the apartment. WWW represent the win
dows. The plan is the same on each side of the party
walls, and every floor or flat is a repetition of the
other. Close to the ceilings of all the rooms a ventilator
is placed which communicates with air shafts running
through the centres of the chimney stacks. The air is thus
constantly rarified, and a system of natural ventilation is
produced. Besides this, it will be seen that by setting open
the windows a current of external air can be at one
passed through every room in the direction of the dotted
lines. The lower panes of the windows are filled in
with ornamental ground glass, so that no window blinds
�12
are necessary. The windows are constructed oil a some
what novel principle, being made to open outwards
like ordinary French casements, but the two lower
panes are not made to open, so that the danger of
children falling out, as well as the disadvantages of
the ordinary window sashes, are avoided. All the rooms
are 8 ft. 9 in. in height. The other dimensions are figured
on the plan, and need not be repeated here. Drainage is
effected by means of 4-in. stoneware pipes passing from
the top of the building, down the corners of the washhouses,
directly to the common sewer. The dust shaft carries the
dust to covered receptacles at the base of the building,
and each shoot is provided with an iron cover so as to pre
vent the return of dust and effluvia. The dust shafts are
also continued to the top of the building, and act as ven
tilators to the dust bins. The greater part of the rooms
especially the living rooms, have scarcely any external
walls, so that they will be always warm and dry. All
the rooms are plastered and papered, and the wash
houses are plastered and coloured. Every tenant has
his apartments completely to himself, and nothing
is used in common except the roof as a drying
and recreation ground. By extending the area of the
building three or four feet in every direction the size of
the rooms could be easily increased, and suites of rooms
obtained well adapted to the requirements of any class
of the community. With the view of judging of the
happy effect that a row of these buildings would produce,
the visitor is requested to stand a hundred yards away
from the building and imagine the pleasing appearance of
a street having several buildings like this on eacli side
of the way. The party walls on the roofs might be
dispensed with in cases where several blocks arc built
side by side, and the roofs thus connected together would
���observing the rapid and facile manner in which it is made
to assume any desired shape. Castings will be made and
removed from moulds in the presence of the visitors.
With respect to the window
dressings and sills it will, probably, be admitted that the use
of the new material is a vast improvement on the ordinary
York sills, and yet the moulded ornamental sill is actually
the cheaper of the two. In the case of the chimney pieces,
too, a marked improvement is recognizable. The com
monest Bath stone, got up in the plainest style, would
cost about twice as much as those of artificial stone with
ornamental sunk panels, and as there are seventy fire
places in the building, there is a great saving in the
aggregate. The effect when these are painted to imitate
marble is very tasteful. The Building Act renders
it imperative to make the stairs of fireproof materials ;
and when we compare the cost of the stairs formed of
this material with the price of ordinary stone steps, the
saving is found to be enormous. The patent material
possesses all the advantages of appearance and durability
of allrtland stone staircase at one-fifth of its cost, and at
half the price of even the commonest York staircase.
These stairs were all fixed in their places as the building
progressed, and they have endured the wear and tear of the
�1G
workmen s heavy boots for some months past—more wear,
probably, than they will suffer for the next three or foul
’s. In some cases they were “nosed” with Portland
nreprooi noors, m ordinary c
construction of 9-in. walls for their support, but here the
extraordinary lightness and strength of the material just
described enables 4-in. walls to be used with perfect safety.
The economy of materials and labour in this respect in a
building of five stories is so obvious that it need hardly be
referred to. Portions of the building will remain unoc
cupied for a few days after the opening for the inspection
of visitors presenting their cards, and opportunities of
making accurate comparisons of the superiority and
diminished cost of various articles formed of this material
and of the ordinary building stones will be afforded.
The judicious arrangements of the plan already alluded
to as securing the greatest economy of space and cost of
construction, combined with the application of this
beautiful material, overcome the great difficulty hitherto
felt in attempting to deal with the problem of reducing
the cost of such buildings to a sum that the net rent
would pay a good return in the shape of interest on the
outlay. The pleasure with which one greets the appear
ance of such a building is enhanced by the knowledge,
�17
based on experience, that similar erections can be under
taken at a cost of something like £110 per dwelling
(see account annexed at page 20). All that is now required
seems to be the judicious application of capital to the ex
tension of the system in the overcrowded districts of the
metropolis and the large towns of the kingdom.
It is earnestly desired to avoid the use of any names
which could have the effect of attaching to the buildings
the idea of their being intended for the exclusive use of
a particular class. It is feared that the somewhat indis
criminate use of the word “model” in connection with
this and kindred subjects, has had anything but a bene
ficial effect; it seems to be associated with the ideas of
centralization so repugnant to the feelings of Englishmen.
The Earl of Shaftesbury honoured the building with a
visit some few days since, and stated distinctly that a more
cheerful and attractive home had been built for £110 than
either of the Metropolitan Associations had produced at a
minimum of £180. On leaving, he expressed himself as
having spent one of the happiest afternoons of his life, as
he had that day seen that which he had been looking for
in vain for many years, viz., a clean, healthy, and desira
ble home for a mechanic, erected at a price that would pay a
fair return on the money invested.
The careful inspection of the friends of the movement,
with which the name of this noble earl is so honourably
associated, are cordially invited to afford the projectors the
benefit of their criticism. It is hoped that it will be easy
to engraft upon the plan as it stands any minor improve
ments that may be suggested by the experience and know
ledge of others.
It should not be forgotten that the buildings now under
review have been erected within a quarter of an hour’s
walk of the Bank of England, and therefore easily within
2
�18
the reach of the large number of artizans employed in
the City of London. This is a most important feature, for
the oftener a man takes his meals at home, and the more
he cultivates a domestic life, the less he is likely to yield
to the flaring attractions of the beershop and the gin
palace : the more he associates with his family, and sub
mits to the gentle influence of little children, the easier
will he be elevated in the social scale, improved as a
neighbour and influenced as a Christian.
Looking down from the beautiful flat roof of Lang
bourn Buildings, the eye-rests upon four or five acres of
ground covered with the most wretched houses, or rather
hovels, the majority of them containing only two rooms each
and having no back windows : the sight is saddening, and
would be most depressing if it were not cheered with a
knowledge that all these vile, tumble-down dwellings, so
close to the heart of the City of London, are now the
property of the Corporation of London, and will in 1867
revert to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners : there is some
hope that one or both of these public bodies, being so
deeply interested in the improvement of the homes of the
labouring classes, may devote a large portion of the site
to the accomplishment of so important an object.
In conclusion, it is possible that the objection may be
raised that the rents of the dwellings in Langbourn
Buildings (0.5. to 6-s. 6<7. per week) are beyond the means of
the working class. The reply to this would be, that, con
tiguous to the spot where this building stands, four other
blocks are to be erected ; and that long before this the first
block was completed, applications were received to a suffi
cient number to have filled the whole of the five blocks had
they been ready, and now that this one is ready for occupa
tion, not a day passes without bringing with it swarms of
eager applicants to be received as tenants at these and even
���APPENDIX.
THE OPENING.
After a minute inspection of the building in every part, and an
examination of the various uses to which the patent material had
been applied, as explained by the builder and inventor, Mr. Allen,
the company adjourned to the flat roof, where refreshments were
served under an awning.
Amongst the noblemen and gentlemen present were :—
Lord Radstock,
Lord Ebury,
W. A. Wilkinson, Esq.,
Samuel Morley, Esq.,
S. Gregson, Esq., M.P.,
C. S. Fortescue, Esq., M.P.,
Fredk. Byng, Esq., M.P.,
Edwin Chadwick, Esq., C.B.,
Wm. Hawes, Esq.,
Hy. Roberts, Esq ,
Benjamin Scott, Esq., F.R.S.S.,
Russell Scott, Esq.,
J. H. Friswell, Esq.,
Rev. W. Denton,
George Godwin, Esq., F.R.S.,
Revd. E. Bayley,
H. Barnett, Esq.,
Thos. Benton. Eso..
W. H. Collingridge, Esq.,
C. Reed, Esq.,
J. C. Colquhoun, Esq.,
Hy. Dawson Esq.,
Robt. Dimsdale, Esq.,
Edward Enfield, Esq.,
C. Gatliff, Esq.,
J. C. Conybeare, Esq.,
A. Haldane, Esq.,
C. J. Hilton, Esq.,
Jno. Hollinshead, Esq.,
H. De Jersey, Esq., C.C.,
D. Simms, Esq., C.C ,
Rev. A. P. Kelley,
W. J. Makwell, Esq.,
Rev. S. Minton,
Jno. Sperling, Esq.,
HrV. Tt TiinrwAll
Ebury.
The noble Chairman said that at the request of Mr. Waterlow he
proposed to say a few words in reference to the object which had
brought them together that day ; but it was a subject so extremely
interesting in itself, and of such extraordinary importance, that it
was really hard to say only a few words upon it. At that high
altitude and somewhat low temperature, however, he would endea
vour to be as brief as possible. Important and absorbing as had
�22
been the events of the past week in connection with the marriage of
the Prince of Wales, fraught as they were with interest to every one
present, and the excitement of which would be still fresh in their
minds, he yet felt that the circumstance which had brought them
together on the top of that house were of deeper interest and of far
more importance than those of which he was quite certain they all
had so lively a recollection, for upon the successful solution of this
great problem the welfare of our town populations entirely depended.
It was a subject upon which, as Lord Shaftesbury had eloquently said,
no man could think or speak too earnestly; for the condition of the
dwellings of the labouring classes was the besetting sin and difficulty
of the time, as it stood in the way of every good moral impression.
He was very sorry that that noble Lord was not present to share
their gratification, but he was quite sure that he would have been
there had it been possible. He saw before him a great number
of gentlemen who with himself had been long labouring in this
cause, and though they had met with somewhat bare success, he
was sure he was but speaking the feelings of all his friends and
fellow-labourers in saying that although they had not achieved
great commercial success, yet the work had not disgusted or
dissatisfied them, because they knew the real good they had effected
among certain classes of the people, and that in the commence
ment of an undertaking with the details and practical working of
which they were not practically acquainted they must expect to meet
with considerable failures. But to-day their interest in that under
taking centred itself in the project before them. He did not know
whether it was too early in the clay to say that the problem was
solved altogether ; but after having very attentively perused
the document which described the building, and having now care
fully inspected the building itself, he must say that, taking the
figures to be correct, and that it was capable of producing a rent
which would give a per-centage of seven or eight per cent, on the
outlay in its erection, a result had been obtained of no slight impor
tance, as it solved the difficulty over which previous experimentalists
had stumbled, and proved that building enterprises of that nature
could be rendered commercially remunerative. There were tides in
the affairs of men,—crises in the development of all great movements.
Buildings (5s. to 6s. 6c/. per week) are beyond the means c
the working- class. The reply to this would be, that, cor
tiguous to the spot where this building stands, lour othi
, 1 -]
J •) _ X J
-1 i 1
rftAll lUVfveti 111 villi
there to criticise the budding in every way, and he could tell him
that he had some severe critics there that day—critics who would
look to the proper accommodation of even the smallest child in the
establishment, and that had in fact been done; indeed,it was neces
sary that all these things should undergo the most careful scrutiny.
He could fairly say for himself, although he did not pretend to
possess the knowledge and experience of some of his friends around
him, that he could really find but little fault. He had looked at it
�23
in the most careful manner—he had felt it with his fingers—he had
walked about it—he had poked it with his umbrella, and he had
asked his friends’ opinion about it; and at that moment he had not.
been able to find anything of any importance to criticise. He was
quite unable to pick a hole in the undertaking, and he thanked God
that he had put it into the heart of a Christian man to do this great
and good work. (Cheers.) He thanked Mr. Waterlow from the
bottom of liis heart for the privilege of being allowed to be present
that day. He felt that this was a movement which laid at the
foundation of all social and religious progress, for it was impossible
to make impressions for good which could have any permanent
effect on the min<ls of the people, surrounded as they were in their
homes with that which tended only to brutalize and degrade. He
begged to propose Mr. Alderman Waterlow’s very good health.
(Loud cheers.)
In responding to the toast, Mr. Alderman Waterlow thanked
the noblemen and gentlemen present for their attendance there that
day and for their kind appreciation of his endeavours. He said that
his object in asking them there was twofold—first, of obtaining the
advice and criticism of men far better acquainted with the subject than
himself, before proceeding to the further development of his scheme ;
and he hoped also that the result of assembling together so many
distinguished philanthropists would be, that they would not separate
without laying the foundation of some broad and comprehensive
scheme for giving further stimulus to this most important movement,
in which he had endeavoured to render some assistance. He would
not dwell upon that which the Chairman had already urged with so
much clearness, as to the necessity of improving the domestic con
dition of the people before hoping to effect anything in the way of a
permanent moral reform, but he would <ask how much of the great
increase of that form of crime which was designated the social evil
owed its origin to the over-crowded and immoral huddling together
of the sexes. So long, too, as the working classes were compelled
to live in close, inconvenient, badly devised and overcrowded dwell
ings, it was impossible to make them thoroughly feel and appreciate
the great truths of the Bible. He was thoroughly convinced that
before the preaching and teaching of ministers of religion could have
that beneficial effect on the labouring classes which they all lookedfc >r ■
ward to, that the demoralizing influences which now surrounded the
poor in the condition of their homes must be removed. So strongly
had this been seen of late, that vigorous attempts had been made to
improve the dwellings of the poor. Without referring in detail to
the great efforts that had been already put forth in various quarters,
he would go at once to that which was undoubtedly the great diffi
culty of the matter—the apparent impossibility of obtaining a good
return on the outlay incurred in the erection of Improved Dwellings.
It was because of this failure of remuneration that capitalists could
not be found willing to continue the erection of such dwellings. He
wanted to show that 8 or 9 per cent. CQuld be obtained by the adoption of the present plan. He was constantly referred to the practical
�24
results realized by the Metropolitan Associations, and was told that
the return he predicted looked better on paper than would eventually
tarn out; but the Metropolitan Associations were the pioneers of
the movement—they had had to contend with and conquer diffi
culties which would now be avoided—they had gradually acquired
an experience of which others were reaping the profit; and their
own accounts showed a return of 4| per cent, on the Family Dwell
ings erected in St. Pancras Square on a cost of erection at the
rate of £160 per dwelling, but here the cost of such a dwelling
would be only £110, and the same rents were obtained: there
fore it was obvious that that which returned 4J per cent, on
£160 would amount to 7 per cent, on £110. But the average
return on the operations of the Metropolitan Association was not
encouraging. This society had spent about £80,000, and had
only realized a return of about 2| per cent. He felt certain that
it was on this point that he was able to demonstrate a remedy.
It was simply a question of reducing the cost of dwellings to such
a sum that the amount received by their rental should form a good
and encouraging return on the outlay. It was absurd to suppose
that the great body of working people were to be allowed to depend
on the efforts of charitable people to provide them with homes.
He was quite prepared, if any gentlemen were desirous of proof,
to show that these buildings, which were certainly quite equal to
those of St. Pancras, could be erected in any number for £110
each. He would say one word as to locality : he believed it to be a
m atter of the most essential importance, both as a matter of economy
and policy, that the working man’s home should be near enough to
his work to enable him to take every meal with his family ; it was
better, cheaper, and more comfortable in every respect. He believed
that the more a man was Subjected to home influences of a healthy
kind, the less he was likely to succumb to the flaring attractions of
the gin palaces. One of the best possible localities, he thought,
for carrying out an experiment of this kind was that in which they
then were,the freehold of which belonged to the Ecclesiastical Com
missioners, and held by the Corporation of the City of London, on
a jease expiring in 1867. If those two powerful bodies could be
influenced to give preference in reletting the ground to the pro
moters of a movement having for its object the removal of the
wretched hovels they saw around them, and the replacing them
with dwellings of a similar character to that on which they then
stood, a great advantage would be gained. The importance of such a
movement was admitted on all hands, and he thought that he had now
proved its feasibility. He did not, for one moment, mean it to be
understood that they were desirous of obtaining possession of the
ground on more favourable terms than others ; all that he wanted was,
the assurance of an ordinary lease on the ordinary terms at the
ordinary market value of the ground. In the present case, the ground
rent was twice that which it ought to be, in consequence of his
having had to negotiate with and pay large premiums to persons who
stood between himself and the freeholders. He would add a word
�25
or two further, before sitting down, when he would be prepared,
and anxious, to answer any question which might be put to him. The
piece of ground of which he had obtained possession was sufficient for
the erection of ninety homes such as they had just inspected, by
the removal of 32 two-roomed houses such as those around him ;
he felt that in the erection of these ninety homes, and in thus
assisting to prove the possibility of making such undertakings pay,
he was doing as much as could be properly expected of him as a
private individual; but he could not sit down without saying, that, in
his opinion, the figures and facts he had brought forward made out
a proper case for the operations of a public company, a body having
a large capital divided into two classes, the protected capital and the
unprotected capital, the former bearing a fixed rate of interest, 4 per
cent., the latter taking the commercial risk and the rest of the
profit. He made this suggestion because he was told, on very good
authority, that there were plenty of people who, if they could be
guaranteed a fixed rate of 4 per cent., would be glad to invest large
sums of money in such an undertaking; and he believed that the
public would be readily tempted to take up the unprotected capital,,
on the prospect of obtaining 10 or 12 per cent, for their money.
In this case he showed a return of over 9 per cent., even under the
disadvantage of the high ground-rent which he had mentioned 'r
but if they thought this overestimated, let them strike off 20
or 25 per cent., as a discount on his statements ; that would then
leave them more than 6 per cent., and the difference between
that and 4 per cent., which would have to be paid on the protected
capital, would bring up the other half—the unprotected capital—
to 9 per cent. If the suggestion was thought worth acting on, he
would be only too happy to do all in his power to carry it out.
He, was sure that there were many gentlemen present who were
able to offer valuable advice and criticism, and he assured them
that he was very anxious to hear everything they might have tosay. He begged to thank them heartily for the honour they did
him in drinking his health, and to express the great pleasure he
derived in seeing so many friends of the working classes present on
the occasion.
Edwin Hill, Esq., as an old director of the Metropolitan Associa
tion, claimed the privilege of saying a few words. He said that
the physical and moral good created by the erection of such a
building as the present extended far beyond its own area, as it
acted as a most powerful competitor with the dirty, squalid habita
tions by which it was surrounded, and that in many cases the
landlords of the latter had been compelled in self interest to
imitate the good example of cleanliness set by these kind of dwell
ings. He felt, moreover, that such a home greatly conduced tothe moral purity of its inmates.
Edwin Chadwick, Esq., C.B., said there could not be a doubt that
these buildings were a very large stride in economy of construction,
and that if the same economy had been enforced by the Metropo
litan Association they would have had 7 or 8 per cent. All the
�26
medical officers of health would agree with him that this building
was perfectly fever proof if they took care to prevent two people
occupying space intended only for one. This building might be
looked upon as well adapted to the requirements of the
Earl of Shaftesbury’s provision, that in future railway com
panies proposing to pull down a number of dwellings should be
compelled to erect a proportionate number of others in their place.
It was plain, in fact, that the railway companies would probably
make more money by the erection of such buildings than by the
construction of their lines.
Lord Radstock thought that as the gentlemen invested with the
disposition of Mr. Peabody’s munificent gift appeared to be
undecided as to how to apply it, it might go with some force
to them if those present were to unite in suggesting to them,
that before making any arrangement for its disposition they
should, at any rate, give this matter their most careful considera
tion. He was quite sure that any representation from such an
influential body of gentlemen as those then present would be apt to
attract more attention on the part of the trustees than would be
likely to be awakened by merely seeing the reports in the news
papers.
Mr. Alderman Waterlow had hoped that the trustees of the
Peabody Fund would have dealt with it in a different way, and he
thought that instead of turning their attention to building homes, it
would be better if they applied the money to the purchase of sites, to
be let at nominal reuts, under a stringent covenant that the lease
should be instantly void if the ground was at any time used for any
other purpose than providing dwellings for the poor. They would
thus be offering most direct inducements for the construction of good,
healthy, well-built dwellings; the ground would be constantly
increasing in value, and would remain in perpetuity as the poor
man’s site.
J. C. Conybeare, Esq., had been long convinced that the only
remedy for the existing evils was the use of some material which
would at once effect a great reduction in the prune cost of construc
tion, and he felt that that was obtained in the present building.
With regard to the proper carrying out of any undertaking for the
complete development of this very valuable idea, he would much
prefer to see it left in the hands of a London Aiderman ; he would
be glad to see it worked by a philanthropic citizen, aided by his
commercial and mercantile fellows of the citizen world of England.
It required to be taken up and prosecuted entirely as a business
matter. He would be sorry to see the Peabody Fund applied to
building any of these houses, but he thought that the suggestion
as to its acquiring sites was a remarkably good one. He was anxious
that something should be done, too, for the improvement of the
cottages of England ; he could speak from experience of the fact
that they were in a most disgraceful condition in several counties.
Samvel Morley, Esq., in moving the first resolution, “ That this
meeting having inspected Mr. Aiderman Waterlow’s model building
�27
ancl listened to the explanations afforded, is of opinion that the very
best moral and social results, and very fair expectations of an ample
return on the capital invested, would result from, the erection of
such buildings,” said, he had very great pleasure in meeting then
Lordships and the gentlemen present on that occasion for he could
not doubt that if the statements they had heard and the figures put
forward in the balance-sheet were borne out by the facts a great
stride had been made in the subject which laid so close to the great
social questions of the day. He joinedmost heartily in the encomiums
that had been pronounced upon the building.. He thought that the
builder had in a very prominent manner exhibited a degree of talent
in designing, and attention to his work in executing it, whic 1
deserved to be taken notice of by them, and that, at any rate, he
ought to receive the expression of their respectfid admiration. He
had read with great interest the pamphlet with which lie supposed
they had all been provided, and he quite agreed with the writer m
insisting that attention should be paid to the provision of every
necessary accessory of a home to the exclusive use of a single letting.
He sympathized also with the respectful attention, which it demanded,
to the comforts of the working-man. He would have been glad to
have seen the fulfilment of the promise which the late Mr. Pearson
made, by which arrangements could be made for large numbers ot
workmen living out of town. With regard to the rents, he accepted
the explanation offered in the pamphlet on that subject, andlie thought
at, the same time that the accommodation was well worth what was
charged. He was entirely in favour of carrying the matter further
under private supervision, and he was quite prepared to go into le
matter if Aiderman Waterlow would put himself at the head of such
an undertaking. He should go into it with a clear and distinct
expectation of receiving a good return on his capital. The amount
of money which could be used iu connection with such a scheme was
perfectly enormous, and he believed it could now be most, profitably
applied in this way.
.
m-Datn
The City Chamberlain (Benjamin Scott, Esq., f .K.b.b.) naci
great pleasure in seconding the resolution He did not know
whether he had been invited there in his official capacity or not,
but he felt that he should not be unduly committing himself, or the
other members of the Corporation who were present, in stating
that in the event of his advice being required as to whether the invest
ment of a portion of the Corporation’s large funds m this undertaking
was advisable, he should have no hesitation whatever in saying that,
in his opinion, such an investment would be a highly safe and proper
one, and that it would be likely to be productive, at the same time,
of the greatest moral and social benefit to the people of the metro
polis. They had gone into the consideration of the question some
years since, and obtained powers from Parliament to apply a large
portion of their spare capital in the erection of Improved Dwellings.
The question had, however, remained m abeyance, m consequence
of their finding they could not build them at a remunerative rate.
The building to which their attention was then directed, how
�28
ever, would, no doubt, lead to a revival of the subject. This building,
so far as his observation went, was a return to a practice uni
versal in the ancient world, and general at the present time in the
eastern world, of availing themselves of the pure air and light of
heaven which were to be obtained at the elevated position in which
they stood. Medical men would tell them that the cheerful
influence of the solar rays, and the refreshing breezes, were of as
much importance to health as a proper supply of good food and pure
water. He saw no reason why we should not, as far as possible,
adopt the salutary practice of the Turk, of constantly frequenting
the housetop.
Henry Roberts, Esq., F.R.S., said that he wished to give ex
pression to the great interest and satisfaction with which he had
gone over this building. It seemed to him to be one of the fruits
produced by the small building erected by His Royal Highness
Prince Albert at the Exhibition of 1851. He had seen that build
ing repeated in various forms, not only in the United Kingdom, but
in many places on the Continent; and he now saw the same build
ing extended and repeated here. Here were the open staircase and
gallery—the fire-proof floors and the flat roof—all of which were
leading features in the lamented Prince Consort’s model dwellings.
He was quite sure that, if they knew as he did, the great interest
with which His Royal Highness devoted himself to the subject,
they would feel especial pleasure in finding that this building was
a further development of the excellences which were so notice
able in those model dwellings of 1851. He would take that oppor
tunity of testifying to the fact that up to the closing scene of his
eventful life the subject before them had been to Prince Albert
one of unflagging interest.
Mr. Robert Cranston supported the resolution, and dwelt with
great force on his experience in connection with the erection of
buildings of a similar class in Edinburgh. He was prepared to
show a clear return of 8 per cent, as the result of his investments.
If a proper plan were adopted in the first instance, and a suitable
locality chosen, he could not have the slightest doubt that this re
turn might be always obtained. He might state that he was origi
nally himself a practical builder, and Mr. Allen had kindly allowed
him access to the figures in connection with this undertaking, and
in the presence of these and his own experience he hoped to hear
no more of the operations of charitable associations, as the necessity
for their help in the matter had now passed away, and it would be
only a matter of time to apply the natural remedy which was now
happily attained.
The resolution on being put from the chair was carried unani
mously.
W. A. Wilkinson, Esq. proposed the health of the noble Chair
man, and bore testimony to the readiness with which he associated
himself with every movement of a progressive nature.
The toast having been drank,
The Chairman thanked the gentlemen present for the compli
�29
ment, and said that the work in which they were engaged was bound
to go forward ; it had received an impetus that day which would
not allow of the question standing still any longer. There was one
omission to which he felt bound to call the worthy Alderman’s at
tention. He had invited only gentlemen to be present that day.
Now, the ladies were quite as much interested in the question, and,
whether they knew it or not, he believed that they had a great deal
more influence in it than the gentlemen. (Cheers.)
Mr. Alderman Waterlow explained that the building would
remain open for public inspection for two or three weeks, and he
hoped that would afford a better opportunity for ladies to inspect it.
The Chairman continued. There was a duty before them which
he was sure all would gladly discharge. They had inspected the
whole of this building, and were delighted with the completeness ofits arrangement in every part; but they ought to be mindful of the
fact that that which gave them so much pleasure to see realized
had been a matter of long-continued patient thought and effort on
the part of Mr. Allen. He could quite understand that there must
have been an enormous amount of really laborious work in re
arranging, and altering, and turning about in every way. He proposed
that they should drink the health of the architect and builder, Mr.
Allen, and wish success to the project which had been suggested.
The toast was drank with great cordiality.
Mr. Allen thanked their lordships and the gentlemen present
for the kind manner in which his name had been referred to, and
for the honour they had just done him. He could assure them
that this building had been a matter of the greatest anxiety and
interest to him for the past three or four years, but now that it was
completed he felt that it amply rewarded him for all the time he
had bestowed upon it. He was now only anxious that the number
of them should be greatly increased, and after what had been said
that day he had no doubt that the matter would be placed in
the hands of men capable of ensuring it the success which he was
proud to believe it deserved. (Cheers.)
The Chairman said that the whole subject seemed to him one of
such vital importance in every way that he proposed to ask the
Rev. Samuel Minton, with Mr. Waterlow’s permission, to offer a few
words of prayer for its success.
The Rev. S. Minton having complied with this request the com
pany dispersed.
���HEALTHY DWELLINGS FOR THE INDUSTRIAL
CLASSES,
LANGBOURN BUILDINGS, MARK STREET, PAUL STREET, FINSBURY SQUARE.
Designed and erected by Mr. Matthew Allen, for Mr. Alderman Wateri.ow.
��Ground Plan af a Flat, Nos. 1 and 4 having Four! Rooms, and Nos. 2 and 3 Three Rooms in each Letting.
The coloured parts indicate that the floors are constructed of Alien’s patent fireproof material, of which also the staircases and roofs are composed.
References: A-Wash-house
W
*_________________ ,_______________ _
___________________________________ ___________________ 56' 3‘
W
F' External Staircase
_____________________________________________________________________________________
HEALTHY DWELLINGS FOR THE INDUSTRIAL CLASSES,
LANGBOURN BUILDINGS, MARK STREET, PAUL STREET, FINSBURY SQUARE.
Designed and erected by Mr. Matthew Allen, for Mr. Alderman Waterlow
�
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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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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Improved dwellings for the industrial classes: ground plan and elevation of Langbourn Buildings, Mark Street, Paul Street, Finsbury Square, designed and erected for Alderman Waterlow by Mr. Matthew Allen, with descriptive notes, and an appendix by J.A Mays
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 29 p. : ill. (2 folded plates) ; 20 cm.
Notes: Incomplete: p.15/16, part cut away; p. 19/20 removed; p. 21/22 part cut away. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway,
Creator
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Mays, J.A.
Date
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1863
Publisher
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Robert Hardwicke
Subject
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Housing
Social problems
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (Improved dwellings for the industrial classes: ground plan and elevation of Langbourn Buildings, Mark Street, Paul Street, Finsbury Square, designed and erected for Alderman Waterlow by Mr. Matthew Allen, with descriptive notes, and an appendix by J.A Mays), 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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G5396
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Text
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English
Conway Tracts
Housing
Langbourn Buildings - London
London
Sidney Hedley Waterlow
Social Problems
Working Classes
-
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PDF Text
Text
APPEAL OF A PROTESTANT
TO THE POPE
TO RESTORE THE
LAW OF NATIONS.
REPLY TO SIX QUESTIONS
ON THE
BUSINESS FOR THE ANNOUNCED
SIXTH LATERAN COUNCIL.
BY
DAVID URQUHART.
“ When the true notion of Justice becomes obscured, material force
takes the place of Right.”—Pius IX.
LONDON:'
DIPLOMATIC REVIEW OFFICE,
24, EAST TEMPLE CHAMBERS,
1868.
�This exposition arose out of an application to the
writer to put down concisely the substance of several
conversations.
The heads were given as follows:
“ 1st. The former universal observance of Interna
tional Law.
“ 2nd. Its present total disuse.
“ 3rd. The absolute necessity if Society is to be saved,
of a general reacknowledgment of International Law.
“ 4th. The Catholic Church, with the Pope at its head,
the only power capable of enforcing this.
“ 5th. The approaching General Council the occasion
for doing so.
“ 6 th. The means to the end being (in part) the for
mation of a Diplomatic College at Rome.”
�THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL, &c.
The Priory, January 18, 1868.
If it were possible to be concise it would be superfluous to
write. What I have to say every one formerly knew. They
do not know to-day, because of the fallacious terms and erring
propositions, which form the sum of every man’s intellectual
being.
The removal of these—the unteaching—is the work. It can
only be done by conversation. If made in writing, the attempt
must consist in more than statement or indication. The case
itself would be all contained in these words : “ Do what is right,
“ you who have no interest in doing what is wrong.”
1st
and
2nd.
PASSAGE FROM LAW TO LAWLESSNESS.
The two first questions resolve themselves into one. It cannot
be said that the Law of Nations was formerly universally ob
served; nor that at the present time it has fallen into total
disuse. Both questions are directed to obtaining a definition
as to that portion of the public Law which has been disregarded,
and to fixing the limit of time at which such change has
taken place. It is in this manner, therefore, that I shall give
my answer.
The Law of Nations is a Code which regulates the intercourse
of communities, as if they were individuals. The difference be
tween an individual and a Nation consists only in number,
leaving rights, duties, and obligations precisely the same. In
a 2
�4
PASSAGE FROM
the one and the other case, all Law is founded on the Ten Com
mandments, and specially on the four:
Thou SHALT NOT kill.
Thou shalt not steal.
Thou SHALT NOT bear false witness.
Thou shalt not covet.
All which Commandments are broken collectively when a Nation
makes war upon another, without necessity, without just cause,
and without due form. That is to say, when it makes war with
a deliberate purpose of doing wrong, that wrong consisting in an
invasion or attack, which cannot be made without killing inno
cent individuals, without robbing and destroying their property.
Then these acts must of necessity be accompanied by alleging
falsely against the innocent guilty acts, and coveting that which
belongs to them.
The purpose to commit those things must exist somewhere
when they are committed. That purpose need not co-exist nu
merically with the community; it may be confined to a few, or
even to a single individual; it will be found in the brain of the
community, wherever that brain happens to be. Nevertheless,
the guilt is common to all, because it is the result of their acts,
whether perpetrated by their hands, or accomplished through
the taxes they contribute, and the assent which they give.
And as this co-operation and assent, in so far as it is blind, can
result only from the resignation of judgment in regard to
matters affecting religious conscience and political duties, the
guilt becomes twofold. Such a people is at once a felon and a
slave.
No war is made except in so far as one of the parties to it has
been reduced to this condition. When such an event has oc
curred, some one people has been thus guilty: whilst some other
people, resisting the crime, has become the protector of public
and private innocence and liberty throughout the World.
That the Law shall cease to be appealed to by the State that is
attacked, is the lowest condition to which humanity can be re
duced; it is the destruction of all human Society. It is our
present condition.
No nation can proceed honestly against another, save for acts.
It must suffer from these acts. Otherwise it cannot come into
court. It cannot proceed to pass sentence on such acts, and to
carry that sentence into execution by levying wrar, until it has
exhausted every means for obtaining redress or security, and has
thus put beyond the possibility of doubt or even cavil, the
existence on the earth of a Power resolved and prepared to dis
turb the repose of the human race. Such must be the course,
without any enactment, of an honourable or a wise nation. This
�LAW TO LAWLESSNESS.
5
also is what the law prescribes. This is the law and rule which
each people has to enforce the observance of, on its own Govern
ment. In this consists and is shown its domestic liberty. In
this resides the means, and the only means, of preventing wars
and preserving peace; that is to say, of preserving it when not
broken by a real necessity, such as the incursion of barbarous
tribes or the outburst of some military genius at the head of a
great martial people, itself alone superior to all its neighbours.
These are the rare but sole contingencies on which the know
ledge of the law by the various communities, and the enforce
ment of it on their sovereigns and his servants, would not suffice
for the preservation of peace. All the recent wars of Europe
have arisen solely from the cessation of this restraint; in other
words, from the absence of integrity in the men composing these
communities.
It may be useful to quote an instance :
A country (Hanover) can be invaded in full peace without
declaration of war, without ground or pretext of any kind on
which to found such declaration, there having been no act what
ever done by it. It can be, thereupon, conquered (through a
succession of military treacheries) and incorporated with an
other, while the rest of Europe remain unmoved witnesses of
the crime. The victim makes no appeal to the Law !
This can only be because the law is dead. The other nations
have not remained silent; they have applauded. They are led,
having lost the standing ground of integrity, by mercenary
writers of daily comments. This can be done, because the assault
of one body on another, having ceased to be judged of on its
own grounds, is judged of on other grounds which have no
connexion with the case itself. These grounds consist in the
emotions of each man’s mind, and may be resolved into and
classed as speculations on ethnography, on philology, on geography,
on forms of government, on dogmas of religion, out of which he
draws conclusions and says, “ This people shall be united to or
“ dissevered from that people ; this king shall reign in that
“ country! such country shall expel its king, and have a re“ public; that country shall abrogate its republic, and have
“ a monarchy. This being my desire, whoever achieves it is
“ an estimable person, and whatever means he adopts are good
il means.” Thus it is that at any and every moment the occasion
is open for the employment of the last resort of man—blood
shed. For bloodshed no reason whatever need now be offered;
no wrong need have been done, attempted, or so much as
dreamt of.
Here is the test by which to separate the base from the
Upright. Every man who, being himself upright would stop
�PASSAGE FROM
evil ancl reclaim his fellow-man, must discipline himself so as
to be able to convince and convict, by showing each man with
whom he converses that, in so far as he pursues a speculation
and indulges in desires in reference to the affairs of other people
with whom he has no business, he lives without law and without
faith in the world; and lends his aid, so far as it can go,
to that universal trouble, out of which will, in due course, be
brought the domination over all of one grinding political and
religious despotism. So true is it that the Law is the foundation
of States and the only security for peace and goodwill among
men, that when it becomes obliterated, as it is to-day, nothing
can be held permanent or secure, not even their own opinions.
This deplorable condition springs from the perversion of lan
guage through the use of false and ambiguous terms; thence
the unbridled passion for destruction. Whatever is not ourselves
is hateful to us, from overweening vanity and presumption in
regard to what we imagine ourselves to be.
It is not only that the truth is hateful to them; it is con
temptible. They despise it quite conscientiously, when by the
rarest of chances, any of them hears it. Thus you say to a man,
“ Bloodshed without cause is murder, no less on the battle-field
“ than in a dark alley.” He answers, “ Oh, you must be a
“ Quaker, and will have peace at any price.” You answer him,
“ I did not speak of peace, which is a consequence; but of
“ crime, which is the cause, and of justice, which is the remedy.”
He replies, “ Oh! all wars are unjust.” He does not see that he
is confounding the commission and the punishment of crime,
and substituting felon for judge, and judge for felon. If, by
management, you at last succeed in showing him his error,
instead of being rejoiced at being emancipated from it, instead
of earnestly and hopefully entering on the new field thus opened
to him, he is only angry because proved to have been wrong,
and has no thought save that of afterwards misrepresenting to
himself that which has passed, and of reviling to others the
person from whom he has heard it. Thus it is that the truth
cannot be known. Unless shame and repentance come with
sight, blindness is not removed. This period of compunction
and of shame has passed for our age, save for very powerful
minds, very young persons, or exceptional cases of remarkable
conscientiousness, which suffice to conquer the universal passion
of self-love.
Those who are the depositaries of this truth have, therefore,
to undergo a life of trial; suffering in the sight of the uncon
sciousness around them, pain in every attempt to remove it, selfreproach in every possible occasion unemployed, persecution as
soon as the nature of their thoughts and character is appre
hended.
�LAW TO LAWLESSNESS.
7
Physical truth (discovery) is gratifying to the investigator,
and is accepted with gratitude by the rest. Moral truth is the
discovery of error in all, and is hateful to those to whom it is
presented.
What the desire of food is for animal nature so is for the in
tellectual being the desire of being right. That is, it is the main
spring on which all depends. Each virtue has its corresponding
vice : this, which is not a virtue, but the source of all virtue,
must, therefore, have in its counterpart the source of all evil.
That counterpart is the fear of being found out to be wrong; in
other words, the desire to appear to be right. This condition is
expressed by the word self-love. To say, then, that this is the
character of an age, is to express the very worst condition to
which a people can be reduced. The sign of it is offence at
being told that they are wrong. It is conscience, the stay of
integrity, perverted so as to become its enemy. This is the
evil of our times, and it must be boldly looked in the face and
known to be the real enemy we have to combat, concealed
behind all the disguises it puts on of political opinion, philoso
phical maxim, and religious pretence.
When an individual murder is committed, the heart of every
man is moved; human indignation is at work to trace, detect,
and punish. The extensive organisations of police, criminal and
legal functionaries, pursue the guilty as a business and a trade.
The conscience of the guilty is itself at work, paralysing his pro
ceedings, betraying his steps, pursuing him during his defence,
and finally overtaking him on the scaffold or the death-bed.
What prevents these safeguards from exerting their power in
the case of multiple murder ? It is only that it is not seen to
be so. It is not so seen from the progressive servility of decay
ing nations before power; whilst neither secular nor religious
instruction has applied itself to inform them in childhood as to
the nature of crime and sin in this respect, and so brought them
up as just, virtuous, or even conscious men.
That association in India known by the name of Thugs pre
sent a striking and instructive analogy. Amongst these persons
the same sense existed as to individual murder that in modern
Christendom exists as to aggregate murder. A Thug, reverting
to the sense of crime in such acts and endeavouring to convict
his fellows of guilt, would have stood in reference to that com
munity in exactly the same position as an inhabitant of
modern Europe in making the same attempt in reference to his
contemporaries. Such a person will in vain appeal to the com
mon religion of the land, any more than to the common instincts
of humanity.
The picture is, however, entirely reversed if such words are
spoken by the highest religious authority, recognised already by
�8
PASSAGE FROM
millions as the vice-regent of God upon earth. The offence ceases
for them, at least, and all will exclaim, as at the Council of
Clermont “ Died le veut !” It is the will of God that there
be peace on earth and goodwill among men, which can be onlythrough justice. St. Paul preached the kingdom to come, but
he first preached of <( judgment and justice.”
The first step backwards and out of this labyrinth of darkness
consists in regaining a clear and distinct perception of the various
acts which we include to-day under the general term War, and
of those other acts to which the term no ways applies, but which
we equally include under it.
Wars have to be classed under three heads. First, necessary;
second, just; and third, lawful.
An unnecessary war may be one to which the character of
just also applies—that is, when the Declaration has been had
recourse to, without the other preliminary steps which might
have forced the adverse party to do justice, or when the requi
site business-like capacity has not been employed, to bring the
negotiation to a fortunate issue. Thus, when Mr. Disraeli
called the Russian war of 1854, “ This most just and most un
necessary war,” the idea was presented of a war that might have
been just had the means been adopted which should have ren
dered it unnecessary; implying, that though just by occasion
being given for it by guilty acts on the other side, it wTas so no
longer, when on our side the available means had not been taken,
either to prevent the acts of which we complained, or to force the
satisfaction which we demanded.
An unjust war is one in which that is demanded which we
have no right to claim, and the adverse party is under no obli
gation to concede. Such, for instance, as the war against
France in 1806, which was made after the adjustment of all
matters respectively affecting England and France; and when,
thereafter, England made further demands, unjust in them
selves, and put forward by a third Power (Russia). The re
course in such a case is to the constituted authorities of the
State against the Ministers ; but the formalities being observed,
such as the statement of the case (Rerum Repetition, the announce
ment of the Penalty (ultimatum), the Record in Chancery, the
Proclamation to the Subjects, the Denunciation to the Enemy,
and the Commission to “ kill, burn, and destroy,”—the military
oath of the soldier is saved, and weapons can be drawn and used
lawfully.
The third case is that which, being unnecessary and unjust,
has further been made without the due and above-stated forms;
and where, therefore, there is no warrant for the use of weapons.
Any man so using them exposes himself to the last of penalties,
�LAW TO LAWLESSNESS.
9
not only as regards the State assailed, but also as regards the
criminal and martial laws of his own country.
*
As regards the
world, this is piracy; as regards the country, it is the levying of
private war. When any case arises under it in our courts of
law, it will be disallowed, as carrying no legal consequences, as
was shown in the first Chinese war.}
Unlawful Wars have happened in the history of mankind; but
they have been of the rarest occurrence. Consisting chiefly of the
outbreak of hordes who have devastated extensive portions of
the Earth, they may be considered rather as convulsions of nature
than as operations of man. These cases have been indeed con
sidered by jurists, but only to dispose of them in a phrase to the
effect that they do not constitute war, but consist simply in
robbery and piracy.
Every man engaged in such enterprises is liable to be dealt
with, and ought to be dealt with, as a pirate; that is to say, hung
without trial if taken with arms in his hands. Thus it was that,
when Geneva, in 1602, was attacked without Declaration of
War by the Duke of Savoy, the inhabitants of that town
hung upon its walls every Savoyard they had captured. Stress
is laid upon The act by the Jurists, specially by Vattel, as a
precedent of authority. It is particularly noted that no attempt
at reprisals was made by the Duke of Savoy, and that a general
assent on the part of all Nations followed this display of vigour
and of justice, by which has been preserved the independence
of that small State.
.Unlawful Wars, when they did occur otherwise than as the
migrations of hordes were treated exactly as piracy on the high
seas, or the enterprises of Bandits in a forest; or as murders and
robberies in Town or Country.
It is to the latter category that belong the operations of fleets
and armies in this age. It may, therefore, be designated as that
of lawlessness. Those who receive and execute the commission
to murder and to rob are not aware that they are doing aught
* “ At the table of the Commander-in-Chief, not many years since, a young officer
entered into a dispute with Lieutenant-Colonel------ upon the point to which military
obedience ought to be carried. 4 If the Commander-in-Chief,’ said the young officer
like a second Scid, 4 should command me to do a thing which I knew to be civilly
illegal, I should not scruple to obey him, and consider myself as relieved from all
responsibility by the commands of my military superior.’ 4 So would not I,’ returned
the gallant and intelligent officer, who maintained the opposite side of the question.
I should rather prefer the risk of being shot for disobedience by my commanding
officer than hanged for transgressing the laws and violating the liberties of my
comtry. 4 You have answered like yourself,’ said His Royal Highness, whose attention
had been attracted by the vivacity of the debate ; ‘ and the officer would deserve both
to be shot and hanged that should act otherwise. I trust all British officers would
be as unwilling to execute an illegal command as I trust the Commander-in-Chief
would be incapable of issuing one.’ ”—Sir Walter Scott's Memoir of the Duke of York.
I See case of Evans v. Hutton.
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amiss, and those who suffer are not aware that they can protect
themselves by inflicting on the criminals their due punishment.
It is by the abstaining of the sufferers, through the loss of the
sense of law in their own breasts, from hanging the pirates who
assail them; and, on the contrary, treating them when captured
as innocent and honourable men, that is, as prisoners of war,
that that judicial blindness has fallen on the eyes of all. As
violence is not summed up in its particular performance, but
assumes to establish a despotic authority over the human race, so
is innocence when assailed invested with supreme attributes, if it
duly performs its duty of protest, resistance, and punishment. It
is in this sense that the maxim of Roman law — Justice is in
the keeping of the injured — receives its counter-application in
the present day.
Each of these crimes does not spring from the active pre
sence of so many millions of individual passions hurrying them
on. It springs solely from two causes: 1. Blind obedience to
the Executive; 2. Absence of penalty from the injured.
Having thus circumscribed the field, a very encouraging con
sideration presents itself. It is that of its simplicity. To ap
prehend it, neither legal, constitutional, diplomatic, nor historical
studies are requisite. The simple instincts of the most illiterate
of men suffice to embrace it and apply it. It only requires to be
stated to be accepted by all. There may arise difficulties in
reference to the means of rectification; but there can be none
as to the consequences to the human race, unless the remedy be
found.
As to the period of this momentous change, it cannot be fixed
to a year and by an event; it being in the course of nature that
change should be progressive. Unnecessary and unjust Wars
had long to be made and often repeated, before the new course
of ferocity became easy or possible. It may be needful severally
to trace these steps: and the more so, as the people of this
country is entirely ignorant of the acts done by itself.
As regards England, the first great disturbance took place
under the influence of polemical hatreds, and in connexion with
a Revolution, a change in the Succession of the Crown, and the
establishment on the throne of a Foreign Prince. This was the
war of the Spanish Succession. It arose out of a treaty in
which, for the first time, the legal and constitutional element
in an International proceeding, though not openly set aside, was
virtually extinguished. The signature of the Lord Chancellor
was appended to the blank parchment, which so transmitted to
William III., then in Holland, was filled in at his arbitrary
pleasure. To have protected this Empire, and with it Em-ope,
from the consequences of this crime, it would have been
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11
requisite to have put Lord Somers on his trial for his life. This
course not having been adopted, this first step was followed by
others in the same direction. All legal and all constitu
tional checks were successively withdrawn, whether as to the
making of wars, whether as to the negotiating and signing of
compacts with foreign States, out of which war arises. Simul
taneously the Royal functions were withdrawn from the super
vision of the body through which alone “ they could be exer
cised” and remitted to the disposal of an illegal body, to which
the designation of “ King’s Cabinet” was affixed. It is now
most falsely and most fatally held that the signing of treaties
and the making of war belong to the Royal Prerogative; whilst
such Royal Prerogative is held to be duly exercised, not by the
King in Privy Council, but by the accidental body brought
into power by a parliamentary majority, and which is called the
Cabinet.”
The wars, from that of the Spanish Succession, have been,
like it, unnecessary and unjust without exception, whilst, in carry
ing them on, the real power of England, in her naval means,
has been restrained rather than employed, by the successive
holders of office. But down to the close of the great wars of
the French revolution, a remnant of respect and of decency had
so far prevailed, that such forms as were of absolute necessity
to guard the consciences of soldiers and sailors were observed.
The warrant for destruction accompanied hostilities, and the
orders to kill, burn, and destroy were duly issued.
It is, then, since the European wars ceased, that commences
the era of uncloaked brigandage. The first incident (Navarino)
took place in 1827, which, though originating in a lawless treaty,
was not followed up by other operations (at least by England),
and was explained as the result of a mistake.
We have to come down eleven years nearer our own day for
the first positive and complete case of a buccaneering expedi
tion, undertaken and carried through by a constituted Govern
ment. This was the invasion of Affghanistan. The year
1838 may therefore be fixed upon as the period when war
ceased, and when the mere killing of men by the orders of
Governments commenced.
The Affghan war was made on the allegation that a certain
ruler was “ unfriendly” to England. This allegation, in itself
no ground for war, was supported by various sets of documents
presented to Parliament. These documents, being received by
the Envoy employed, they were declared by him to be a “ tissue
of falsehoods.” He consequently sent home for publication true
copies of his despatches. After many years and repeated motions
in Parliament, the original despatches were produced. The truth
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of the statement of Sir A. Burnes was then established; and it
was proved that the allegation against Dost Mahomed, and on
which the war to upset him had been explained and accepted, had
been made out, through an elaborate falsification of the official
despatches of the British Envoy.
The war therefore was unnecessary; it was unjust, for it was
not just to attack or upset a foreign Prince ; and being neither
necessary or just, it could not be, by any “ formality” rendered
legal, nor was there so much as the attempt to do so. The
document which appeared, though entitled a “Declaration,”
declared no war, but was restricted to observations in reference
to “ the service of troops across (beyond) the Indus.”
No ground was taken in Parhament on the law for resistance
to, or punishment of, this crime. After the whole of the ex
pedition had perished, a motion for mere inquiry was defeated,
and a second invasion was planned for the purpose of naked
vengeance.
But before this positive and hot-handed revolt against all laws
of God and man, preparations had been made for screening those
guilty in this respect from punishment. The English Government
negotiated with Spain a treaty (Elliot convention), according
to which they should no longer shoot the foreigners taking part
in the Civil contest then raging, and who were, and could only
be treated as pirates. The matter was managed with art.
There is no mention made of these foreigners. The English
Minister is only moved by the interests of humanity. It was
in the name of that great Moloch that both parties were called
upon not to shoot men after the battle was over.
*
In the Affghan war commencing the new era for mankind,
is found combined every order of guilt together with loss and
injury. It was to be expected that the licence thus obtained
should soon produce corresponding effects, and so it has proved.
Thirty years have now elapsed. During that time no Conqueror
has arisen: there has existed no necessity for war; yet wars, or
the operations to which the name has been affixed, have followed
uninterruptedly from that hour to the present; first in Asia,
then in Europe, after that in America, and now at last in Africa ;
all resulting either from the direct act of England, her indirect
encouragement, or through the operation of the general law
lessness which her practice has introduced or her authority
established.
This proceeding on the part of England awakened no atten
tion on the Continent of Europe. The sense of law was already
so far obliterated that the character of the new crime was not
• In the collection of Treaties published by the English Government this Conven
tion is wanting.
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13
perceived; the people against whom the blow was levelled wTas
remote ; they were looked upon as cc infidels” and (i uncivilised,”
and in respect to whom no Laws had to be observed. They did
not perceive that the reaction would afterwards fall upon Europe
herself. Indeed, France had herself a few years before com
menced the same lawless course in Africa, and had afterwards
continued it in Mexico and South America.
The invasion of Affghanistan was immediately followed by the
first Chinese War; a war, so far as the Chinese were concerned,
but piracy only on the part of Grreat Britain, as was formally
established.by the English Courts. Then came the destruction
of the British army in Affghanistan, and the second invasion for
the sake of vengeance. This was followed by the second and
third Chinese wars with their revolting incidents of atrocity
and barbarity. Then came the two Persian Wars, the two
attacks on Japan, the Bombardment of Jeddah, and now the
Invasion of Abyssinia. All these wars are of the same cha
racter, that is to say, unnecessary, unjust, profitless, and unac
companied by the forms requisite to make a just and necessary
War a lawful one.
It has to be remarked that whilst there was no gain to be
obtained by these operations, so was there no passion of an
internal kind to be gratified. The British Nation was on every
occasion surprised into them. Falsification of documents to the
extent of forgery, and every kind of misrepresentation were em
ployed to bring them about. These artifices were directed not
only against the public and the Parliament, but also against the
Colleagues of the Minister, and the Sovereign. And the im
punity, success, and pre-eminence of the sole Minister who
managed them, was secured by the idea that the honour of Eng
land was compromised and had to be maintained. Whilst, in
the universal sense of mental weakness and public insecurity,
confidence was given to the one man, in whom the rest recog
nised resolution and capacity.
Amongst the incidents of this order of which Asia has been
the field, we have to enumerate the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857,
it having been produced by the transmission from England to
India, in defiance of the standing orders of the department, of
cartridges prepared in a manner which inflicted pollution on our
Eastern subjects. The design in this case was the same as
in all the others ; and it was practicable and successful like the
others, only through the extinction of all the restraints hitherto
imposed on evil doers.
Thus from the year 1838 down to the year 1868 there has
been a scarcely uninterrupted series of piratical expeditions on
the vastest scale, the effects of which have been to shake the
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power of England in the East, to sap the basis of society and
the means of Government throughout these vast Regions, by
imposing heavy pecuniary obligations, and breaking down Con
stitutional restraints. Whilst, not there only, but throughout the
World, has the sense of law been obliterated from the minds of
men.
We have now to review the occurrences in our own quarter
of the globe.
The settlement of 1815 was one which, not restoring the con
ditions that had been disturbed and the rights that had been
infringed, prepared the way for what was to follow. It was
almost immediately followed by the Treaty called the Holy Alliance, which, pretending to establish a common right of Govern
ments to lend mutual aid to each other against their subjects,
had for effect that which was the object of its original proposer
—to generalise Revolution. All Governments were to lend
their troops against all subjects; all subjects were consequently
to combine against any Government. The distinction of alien
and subject was effaced, everybody could interfere with every
body and everywhere, and the right was established for every
man to fly at every other man’s throat. This heinous and sacriligious Treaty—for it pretended to act in the name of Christ—
introduced the unlawful system of Congresses. These generated
unlawful Wars; thus from it came the invasion of Naples by
Austria, and of Spain by France, and that general confusion
of opinions and affairs which has prevailed unto the present day.
Concurrently with these operations there was the intervention
in the East for the so-called “ Pacification of the Levant,” but
which was directed to the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire. The
Greeks had been insurrectionised by Russia. England, whom
it was found impossible to draw into the Holy Alliance, on the
withdrawal of the Russian Minister, made herself the organ of
Russia at Constantinople. The Turks resisting, a Treaty was
signed between England, France, and Russia, to constrain the
Turks. It stipulated that the means of action should be left
at the disposal of their representatives. This treaty was, there
fore, not a beneficent compact, but an outrage and an infamy.
It was, moreover, the surrender by each of the three Govern
ments of all control over their own actions, and placed their
respective forces at the conjoint disposal of their agents; that is,
of the one of these agents who happened to be more dexterous
than the others. Out of this came the butchery of Navarino,
and the destruction of the naval power of Turkey, followed im
mediately by the Russian invasion of Turkey, and the with
drawal of the representatives of England and France; so that it
was a common war of the three Powers against an Empire which
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15
two of them had entered into the negotiation with the avowed
purpose of protectingI
Meanwhile the Ruler of Egypt, secretly invited to revolt, first
by England and afterwards by France, twice rebelled, imperil
ling all Europe. After ten years of confusion, the result of
these negotiations and acts, a rupture was effected between Eng
land and France in reference to Egypt. A treaty sent from St.
Petersburg, and signed by England, Austria, and Prussia,
behind the back of France, all but produced a general European
war, and left everything in utter confusion, with an immense
increase of the warlike charges of France, and the fortifications
around Paris.
Not one of these steps could have been taken had there existed
in the Minister of any State “ respect for the laws or fears
“ for his person.”* They could not have taken place had the
Executives not usurped the power of making war without the
assent of the Estates of the Realm. They could not have taken
place had the Privy Council not been displaced from within the
Executive. They could not have taken place had the habit not
arisen of permanent Embassies, by which the internal condition
was invariably subjected to external considerations and influence.
Finally, they could not have taken place had the churches of
Christendom taught that murder in the aggregate was not less,
but the same sin, as murder in the individual. For then war
would no longer have been possible on the mere motion of the
Minister; letters and despatches would have remained without
effect to produce convulsion; and that maleficent power desig
nated “ moral influence ” would have been lifted off the human
race.
The pressure of taxation, the disturbance of every basis of
judgment; the absence of all authoritative exposition of what is
right in maxim, or profitable in practice; the periodical convul
sions arising from a fictitious monetary system; and the expen
diture of large sums of money and endless activity on the part
of one Government to organise secret and revolutionary societies,
had now prepared Europe for the repetition on a larger scale, in
1848, of the convulsion of 1830.
This event, to which our present state more immediately
belongs, was led and managed for Russia by England. It began
in Switzerland by double-dealing with the parties in the Civil
War. This was followed by the celebrated despatch of October,
1847, announcing designs of Austria on Italy, and threatening her
on the part of England. Then came the mission of Lord Minto
to all the Governments of Italy openly to impose on them in* Words used in the House of Commons, February, 1848, as applied to the English
Minister.
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ternal measures, and openly to invite the various populations to
revolt. No point of Europe was neglected. The ground was
everywhere mined by Russian revolutionary agents, whilst
England openly invoked rebellion. Thus, on a given day, in the
beginning of 1848, from Copenhagen and Bucharest, to the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic, every people was convulsed
and every throne upset.
When after a time the re-establishment came, there was,
in all respects, a difference. The Governments were more sub
servient, the people more discontented. The military organisa
tions were augmented, the debt and taxes were increased.
Hitherto the north of Europe had been spared; one people
in Europe was tranquil, had no factions, and was attached alike
to its institutions and to its Prince. It was now to be drawn
into the European vortex, and whilst made the victim of its order
and ‘loyalty, was to be converted into a more terrible lever of
convulsion than any other of the fragments of the confederacy
of European States, which had severally been used as dupes and
instruments. This people were the inhabitants of the Duchies
of the Eyder. The King of Denmark had been induced, on
perfidious councils from Paris, to infringe the rights of the
Duchies on the plea of including them in a general representative
constitution, which would make the “ United Danish Monarchy”
a barrier against Russia. Being thus prepared to be acted on
by the convulsion of 1848, a civil war with Denmark broke out,
which, by the management of England, was kept on for three
years. She interfered each Autumn by mediation, and prolonged
the situation till the warlike operations could be resumed in the
Spring, which were then allowed to take their course. Prussia
lent her aid to the same work by pushing on the Duchies,
getting the command of the conjoint forces, and then betraying
them in the field. After four years of this bloodshed and perfidy,
matters were brought to a head, and an arrangement took place
at Warsaw between the Russian Czar, as head of the House of
Oldenburg, and the King of Denmark, by which the succession
of the crown was altered, so that almost the whole of the inter
vening and numerous heirs were cut off; a successor named
to the Royal line, at the option of the Emperor of Russia, and
his own title as heir-general established, both to the Kingdom
and the Duchies.
Such a compact, unlawful as all the rest, was also offensive in
the last degree to Denmark, and alarming to all Europe. It was
impossible for the Danish Government to present to the Diet of
Copenhagen a law to carry it into effect. The Compact or Pro
tocol had been kept secret. To impose it on Denmark, and to
impose it on Europe, it was taken up by England. A Treaty,
�LAW TO LAWLESSNESS.
17
embodying the Warsaw Protocol, was signed in London, May
Sth, 1852, rehearsing that the arrangement had already been
made, and that the Treaty was only to give to it a “ European
sanction.” On this it was proposed to the. Danish Diet, as a
“ European necessity.” After repeated dissolutions, the constitu
tion was changed, and so the Treaty became law for Denmark.
These points are given, as out of this transaction—certainly
the most monstrous and insane, that the world has ever witnessed
—has come directly the phase of convulsion around us.
Whilst the Danish incident had been running its internal course
of five years, from the letters patent of 1846 to the Warsaw
Protocol of 1851, and its European course of fifteen years,
from that Protocol to the battle of Sadowa in 1866—in the
Italian Peninsula the harvest from the seed sown by the de
spatch of 1847 and the mission of Lord Minto was being
gathered in. Whatever the attractions for Russia of the Penin
sula itself, whatever the necessity of stopping a productiveness
which interfered with several, and endangered one of her own
staple products—whatever the occasion which it presented now,
as in all time, by the extended and exposed structure of the
*
land and the debased character of the people for exciting the
rivalries of neighbouring powers and bringing the fall of Dy
nasties—Italy, for Russia, meant the Pope. He was in Italy the
only real thing. He from Italy could restore law, order, and
peace in Christendom. He was head of the Western Church,
which the Czar works to destroy and pretends to incorporate.
The East was involved in Italy, no less than the West, and
Poland and Russia herself, no less than Europe and the East. To
revolutionize Italy was the means to reach the Pope. By that
process he could reach the sovereignty of the Bishop of Rome,
and so upset his spiritual power; that "is, that spiritual power not
exerted at present, but, as she well knew, capable of exercise in a
judicial fashion, and for which the first condition was that he
should be subject neither to a foreign Prince nor be protected
by foreign bayonets. That these must have been her desires
and her objects it is facile to perceive, and it is in evidence that
towards them, events have marched. But what is not so easy to
perceive, and might have appeared impossible to accomplish, is
what really did take place, and of which we possess the evidence.
It is that in bringing about this convulsion (1848) she concealed
from the Papal Government her part therein—concealed from
its eyes alike her secret connexion with revolution and with the
English Government, and made it believe that she was doing
her best to protect the Pope against both. She made the largest
* “ Divided by the Apennines ; surrounded by the sea.”
B
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offers in money ancl troops, and accepted the grateful acknow
ledgments of the Pope for having, by her influence, obtained
for his protection the presence of French troops at Pome.
*
It was not that the Pope had forgotten Poland, or the substi
tution by the Czar of himself for Patriarch, or his pressure in
the East on his spiritual subjects; but all were then powerless
to comprehend that Russia made use of revolution. They all
believed her to be its opponent. However, the anomaly of the
goodwill thus shown by the Russian Cabinet had to be explained.
The explanation offered and accepted was that St. Petersburg
and Rome were on “ the same line,” that being the “ line of
order.” It is curious that the Revolutionists at the very same
moment were attributing the pecuniary support they received
from her to the same cause, that of being “ on the same line
with her.” They understood that line to be “ disorder.”
The historian of the Revolutions of Europe remarks that,
from the commencement of the eighteenth century, history had
become difficult to write, in consequence of the non-observance
of public law. Now that the very idea of law has disappeared, or,
which is even worse, its name only used to misapply it and to
affix it to some monstrous deed, the affairs of mankind have be
come one mass of incalculable confusion. They now pretend
to substitute for the law they have abrogated, what they
call an “ International Law,” which is to consist of Treaties.
Strange as it may appear, it is not the less true that there has
not been a single treaty signed during this period, that of Vienna
inclusive, that has not been violated, till at last treaties are
looked upon as some miasma pervading the air.f The idea
of any value as resulting from a positive compact having disap
peared, they now propose to substitute them for the Law of
God and of Nations.^
* “So early as the mouth of February, 1848, the Cabinet of St. Petersburg thus
addressed itself to the Court of Rome :—
“ ‘It is beyond doubt that the Holy Father will find in His Majesty the Emperor
a loyal supporter in effecting the restitution to him of temporal and spiritualpower, and
that the Russian Government will apply itself to all the measures that may contribute
to this end, seeing that it nourishes in respect to the Court of Rome no sentiment of
rivalry and no religious animosity.’”—Farina Stato Romano,vol. Hi. p. 215.”—From
“ The East and the West,” by the Hon. H. Stanley.
f “ The Treaty of Gastein was now losing its vitality.”—M. Rouher.
j “ The most manifest and repulsive indication of that aspiration for Omnipotence
which popular sovereignty affects is the contempt of that elementary right which the
public honour and good sense have called the faith of treaties.”—M. A. Re Broglie,
in the Li Revue des Deux Mondes.” Thus the perception of the evil is powerless in
this age to lead to the perception of the cure. The first proposal of substituting
Treaties for Law and calling them Law was made by Russia, in 1806, as one of the
conditions on which she would have accepted the peace then on the point of settlement
between England and France. As a step towards this result, at the Treaty of Vienna
no anterior Treaty was restored, so that the peace became a generality.
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19
In former periods of anarchy and violence a remedy was pos
sible. The idea of it spontaneously arose. It was that of Law. At
that time—-that is to say, in all previous times, crimes only were
committed. The hearts of men were corrupted, but their under
standings were left to them; and speech, the instrument of
reason, was under each man’s hand to use if prompted thereto.
To-day the disturbance does not come from hordes lusting for
territory, or conquerors for battle-fields. Those who commit the
crimes suffer from them. It is the understanding that is per
verted; it is speech that is falsified; and therefore is the restora
tion at once most easy and most difficult—most easy, because all
would be on the side of right, did it find an interpreter; most
difficult, for where is the interpreter to be found in an age which
has fallen into this chaos by reason of false speech in use, and
true speech forgotten ?
When such terms as “ Public Opinion,” “ Civilisation,”
“ Progress,” can be uttered, who can speak of Law, of Justice 2
and how, therefore, can there be peace on earth and goodwill
among men 2
All these terms have been already condemned by the Pope ;
but in condemning them he has not analysed them to show their
vacuity. Let us take an instance. To say that the word
“ progress ” should not be used, is of the greatest service to any
human being who will obey the injunction ; because it will save
him from a large amount of distracting volubility, evil habits of
mind, and erroneous conclusions. But only abstaining from it
because it is forbidden, and not knowing it to be unmeaning, he
will not be freed from its effects when it falls from the lips of
others ; noi' will he be able to show to others why it is objection
able. Being incapable of giving a reason for his objection to its
use he will sink in the estimation of his interlocutor, and in his
own. The benefit of discipline is not secured to him. Instead
of the regenerating effect of discarding a false term, his obedience
only justifies the contempt of the “ man of the age,” who holds
religion to be superstition, and its professors to be weak-minded.
Let us suppose this Catholic to be instructed by his priest,
himself instructed by the Head of the Church, and so enabled
to deal logically, and not religiously or authoritatively, with a
logical perversion. How differently wrnuld he stand! He
■would then proceed to call his opponent to account, even as
Christ did in the time of the Pharisees, or as Socrates did in
the time of the Sophists. He would question him as to his
meaning; he would ask him to explain the relation between a
substantive of motion and a method of reasoning. He would
call for a definition of the geographic field over which motion is
predicated, and for the contents of the entity represented as
b 2
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marching over it. He would persist in drawing forth the forms
of the unknown future towards which the progress is to be made.
He would force him to declare whether his “ progress ” was
towards or away from knowledge of cases, the correct definition
of laws, the due regulation of constitutional checks, the restraints
on the exercise of political power, the control over the public
expenditure, the supervision of transactions between States, and
the inhibition of public acts not beneficial, not just, not lawful.
He would have always in reserve to show, and by questions to
bring out the avowal, that on all these heads, since the word in
question came into use, there had been a progressive deterioration
of the human species. Thus would he confound and confute
his antagonist, and show that to employ amphibologies is not the
perfection but the extinction of the human faculties.
Men can go on, with the pen in their hand, making phrases—
the weakest as well as the strongest. They are at once pulled
up by a question, and will equally be baffled by it—the strongest
as well as the weakest.
It is impossible to separate man and speech. There may be
base men using language correctly, but there can be no people
upright whose speech is debased. No branch of human science
can be followed, or even so much as exist, if the terms be not
defined. No legal act is binding into which terms not legal are
introduced. An article of faith consists entirely in the definition
of the terms.
What is here in evidence before us in the introduction of new
terms into all the languages of Europe, and that all these have a
double meaning: concurrently therewith, there has been a dis
turbance of all settled convictions.
The connexion is therefore established by two distinct pro
cesses. Ambiguous terms must bring, we say, malversation in
affairs and infidelity in belief. They have been introduced, and
have been accompanied by these results.
It follows, therefore, that the rectification must commence by
the exclusion of such terms ; and the Pope ha's put his hand to
this work, condemning as unchristian and uncatholic those
very terms which had already, on philological grounds, been
shown to be unmeaning and deceptive.
For doing this Catholics have a great advantage in the Sacred
Writings, having to study them, in the first instance, in the
natural sense. This is a preparation for confounding fallacy
by throwing men back on themselves, and for calling men to
Repentance without reference to dogma. These are among the
latent intellectual powers of the Catholic Church, which it knows
not itself, and which will be known either to itself or others only
when exerted.
�LAW TO LAWLESSNESS.
21
Concurrently with the obliteratiou of the common instincts of
man as regards the taking of life, there has arisen in Europe a
parallel change in the conduct of affairs, by which one subordinate
branch of government has been rendered supreme in each. The
department of Foreign Affairs dealing extra-nationally, has got
this mastery, and out of it has come an enthralling secresy. This
revolution has been worked out of the “ Intervention in the
“East.” That operation has converted international business
into a labyrinth. The very existence of which is unknown save
to those who had been connected therewith, before the Greek
episode commenced. Each Foreign Department uncontrolled,
unquestioned, can bring about wars, can, consequently, exert
“ moral influence ” on other states; and so can disturb internal
affairs, overthrow internal liberty, augment military establish
ments, increase charges, impose taxes, augment debt, produce,
indirectly, disloyalty and unbelief; and whilst directly foment
ing revolution in particularly selected countries, prepares for it
in all; tending in a direction, which at some point must render
all government impossible: and so preparing for the general
domination throughout Europe of some power or people whose
understanding and speech has not been similarly vitiated.
Before closing this branch it is desirable to revert to the act
of Geneva in 1602. It is not only a great lesson, but also a
prominent landmark. It is such a limit between two order's
of existence, such as that traced by Tacitus in summing up the
history of Rome, where he says, Hie finis cequi Juris. It explains
how small states have been in later times absorbed, and how
they remained up to these times, to be absorbed. When a crime
against which human nature revolts does not receive its due
penalty, of course it spreads, and, spreading, changes its cha
racter. So it has happened. Bandits being normally sent forth
by established governments, come at last to constitute themselves
on their own account, and to combine to assail this country or
that. The penalties having ceased to be applied to the first, are
then no longer applied to the second, so that a trade in piracy is
established, and the inducement of impunity, which would apply
to a band of false coiners, applies to the enterprises carried on
against the Sultan or the Pope. The Sovereigns so attacked,
not exercising the functions of sovereignty in this respect, be
come themselves in reality accomplices in this breaking down of
all things. They have, moreover, no passions to mislead them,
and no real or supposed advantage to gain. It is therefore the
result of weakness only—the greatest of all sins in the holder
of delegated authority. Firmness in some would at any moment
of past time have stopped the course of evil. Firmness would
stop it even to-day.
�22
SOCIETY TO BE SAVED ONLY BY THE LAW.
It is not, however, correct to designate these adventurers
as . Bandits or Pirates. The latter have a positive object of
gain in view. They may be driven to guilty deeds by ne
cessity. They have the excuse of degrading associations. They
incur positive danger; and, lastly, they are conscious of thenown acts. Far different is the man who imbrues his hands in
the blood of his fellow-creatures without such inducements,
such risks, or such consciousness, and who is moved by the
passions of the understanding—the most ferocious and' most
hopeless that can take possession of the human heart—the more
hopeless and base, the loftier and the holier the pretensions which
he puts forward to himself or others. The passions of the heart
are the passions of the animal or the wild beast which lie down
when satisfied. The passions of the understanding are those of
the human being perverted from the image of God to the pur
poses of the Devil. It is before this outburst that the execu
tioner gives way !
Had the hired assassins of the King of Sardinia met the
fate of those of the Duke of Savoy—had there been in 1862 a
township in Sicily with hearts of the men who lived in 1602,
Italy would have been spared, the “ making” she has had, and
the unmaking she will presently have to undergo.
3rd.
SOCIETY TO BE SAVED ONLY BY THE LAW.
The third question is already answered. It is more than an
swered, for the method to be adopted has also been shown. It
consists in the extrication of the mind from a few fallacies, all
which disappear of themselves, from the moment that a man
sees that to kill, to rob, to covet, to bear false witness, is no less
a crime when committed by many against many, than when
committed by one against one, or a few against a few. Not to
know this is to be under judicial blindness. Whilst that blind
ness endures, the case, as regards the conduct, conscience, busi
ness, and existence of a people is exactly such as, in regard to
material objects, it would be, if natural and artificial light were
suspended, and the human race were left to grope their way in
the dark. Efforts, if made, would avail nothing, resources un
bounded within his reach would satisfy neither hunger nor
thirst, and he would perish miserably in the midst of the stench
of his already putrifying fellow-creatures, despite all that Pro
vidence might have otherwise supplied for his comfort, and
fortune assorted for his pre-eminence.
�SOCIETY TO BE SAVED ONLY BY THE LAW.
23
The expression “International Law” has, however, to be put
aside. The epithet alone reveals this hopeless and abject con
dition. It reveals the intellectual debasement out of which that
condition has sprung; it reveals the loss of respect for the rule
of right, without which neither would the understanding have
been debased, nor circumstances disordered. The Law is
supreme, the Law rules, the Law is from on high. It is above
all. Thus the Law of Nations is a holy law; but the sacred
character vanishes before the preposition “ between.” In English
you could not say it. If you did, you would know that it was
nonsensical and feel that it wTas vile—“the between-NationsLaw.”
The Law of Nations is otherwise termed the “Law of
Nature,” and, again, the “ Law of God ”—of Nature and of
God because of its essence; of Nations, because ruling all and
accepted by all. It is the Ten Commandments as applicable to
communities. By observing these a people preserves its faith,
its honour, its liberty, its power, and, if capable in other respects,
will live for ever. When a people causelessly assails another,
it has lost innocence, honour, liberty, and faith. It contains no
longer one citizen, one Christian, or one gentleman, save amongst
the protestors, if there be any.
Finally, it is peculiarly the Law of Nations because it, and it
alone, deals with and adjudicates on their aggregate acts. It is
the civil and criminal municipal law applied to the whole com
munity. An eminent English judge has thus defined it:—
“ The Law of Nations,” says Lord Mansfield—“ that uni“ versal Law, which will be carried as far in England as any“ where—which is here adopted in its full extent by the Common
“ Law, and is held to be a part of the Law of England ; which
a Acts of Parliament cannot alter : which is to be collected, toge“ ther, together with the rules of decision concerning it, not from
“ Acts of Parliament, but from the practice of different nations
“ and the authority of writers; of which from time to time Acts
“ of Parliament have been made to enforce, or decisions to facili“ tate, the execution, and are, therefore, considered not as intro“ ductive of any new law, but merely as declaratory of the old
“ fundamental constitutions of the kingdom; and finally, without
“which the kingdom must cease to be a part of the civilised
“ world.”
This Law is, moreover, emphatically that of Nations, because
the Nations have themselves to enforce it. It is against their
Governments that they have to enforce it. It is by
taking care that their rulers “ shall do that only which is law
ful,” that peace can be possessed or preserved on earth. The
contrary must happen if that Law of Nations is remitted to the
�24
SOCIETY TO BE SAVED ONLY BY THE LAW.
agents, that is. the Governments, to apply, to interpret, and to
change at. their pleasure. It is thus that a people falls into the
last condition of<£ taking for law that which their rulers do.” To
recover them from it, some must arise different from the rest, to
reprove and to teach them.
There remains behind a still graver consideration for the
future. If the Law of Nations is not observed, it will neces
sarily come to be perverted, and its name, forms, and authority
will remain as a blight on the world. The Law transformed
into a mask and cloak for the designing will thus become the
most fruitful of all sources of war and discord.
A small chink lets in light. It is not willingly that nations
err, sin, slay, and suffer. Therefore is it that those who among
such a generation do see, are filled with zeal, 'are incessant in
toil, and endued with power. Few and insignificant, as in them
selves they may be, their work may bear fruits.
Operations depending on thought are independent of numbers.
This present condition of the human race has been brought
about by a single man.
n
It is not bloodshed alone that we suffer from, and that has to
be put a stop to, but lawless acts of all kinds; whether these
consist in commission or in omission : of wrongs perpetrated or
wrongs endured. Had there been a body of upright men in
England, there would have been no waiver of the means of co
ercing her enemy in 1854, no giving away of her maritime power
in 1856, no fitting out of Piratical vessels in 1863, no refusal of
reparation for their depredations in 1864-7, no endurance of the
transfer by sale of territorial possessions amongst our neighbours,
or any foreign Powers, no submission to Blockades where war
of no kind had been made, no interference in the internal juris
diction of Eastern States by our Consuls, no proposals to shake
the very bases of all society in destroying the indefeasible alle
giance of the subject;—none, in fact, of these novelties, which
come upon us to-day in overwhelming and inextricable shoals,
and which were unknown in the world among all its previous
generations. All these and all that are to follow are the neces
sary effects of dispensing ourselves from the observance of any
rule of conduct. Surely a remedy so simple and so comprehen
sive ought to have attractions, if only from its novelty. We do
run after new things and strange things; one more new or more
strange is not to be found than Justice.
�DUTY OF THE POPE TO RESTORE THE LAW.
25
4th.
DUTY OF THE POPE TO RESTORE THE LAW.
Whether the Catholic Church is capable of this restoration
must depend on the qualities of the men it possesses at this
hour. It is placed under the necessity of making the attempt,
both because of the new characters which crime has recently
put on, and because of the assumption of authority over the con
sciences of its flock.
The words spoken by the Pope, while containing a promise,
also suggest a fear. By them the Church steps out of its poli
tical disability, asserting its appellate jurisdiction. Four years
have elapsed since the pretension was advanced, but it has re
mained unexerted. No preparatory steps have been taken for its
exercise. The question therefore arises as to the sense attached
to the words themselves. In any case the position of affairs is
no longer the same after they have been spoken; for from that
hour the sanction of the Church must be assumed to have been
given in all cases where it has not rebuked and condemned.
It did not, however, require the assertion of this claim in this
authoritative manner to convey a religious sanction to political
crimes. It may be put in this very self-evident and simple
fashion : Granted that the Church of England or of Prussia is
not called upon to determine the lawfulness of a war made by
the respective Governments of these countries, it does not there
upon follow that the Church of Rome can dispense itself from
this duty, seeing that its pretension is to be universal, and that
its flock will be engaged on both sides; so that there is for it
no possibility of not sanctioning crime, as there is an impossi
bility of both sides being innocent.
The case has been stated by a distinguished Prelate (the
Bishop of Mayence) in the following terms :—
u In the last centuries, after abandoning the commandments
“ of God, an inert form has been substituted for them, derived
from the scales in which merchandise is weighed. . . . This
“ separation of the Rights of Nations and the Law of God—
“ this fiction that the end and means of Policy stand in a horizon
“ superior to those of vulgar morals and justice, brings an im“ mense peril for the peace of the world. This is war in perma“ nency, or a simple armistice—the prelude of a war of all
“ against all.
“ It is thus that we have to deplore bitterly that Religion has
“ been rendered the accomplice of this policy. They have been
“ very ill inspired who in these latter times, have suggested to
“ Religion and its ministers, to give a sort of religious consecration
�26
DUTY OF THE POPE TO RESTORE THE LAW.
“ to all these violences. For how many victories have TeDeums
“ been chanted that have no ways been for the glory of God,
“ but which were cursed by God from heaven ! ”
It is thus that the Bishop of Mayence—without having
perceived the distinction between wars that are unjust and those
that are unlawful, and taking the first ground alone, and sup
posing that to be the guilt and danger of our times—still with
grief and indignation, and also with horror, points to the
desecration of religion, in the blessing by it of opposing arms.
Here speaks a disturbed conscience and a grieving heart; but
how unavailing those emotions, even when combined with high
intellectual powers, to find and apply the remedy, when the re
quisite knowledge of circumstances is wanting, is singularly illus
trated in the veiy work from which the above extract is taken.
It is entitled “ Germany after the War of 1866,” and necessarily
deals with the causes which brought about that war. The
author sees none of them. He makes statements as to Denmark
which are not correct. He then speculates thereon. Finally,
he reverts to that terrible and sacrilegious compact, the Holy
Alliance, through which Europe has been convulsed, as a great,
and good, and beneficial operation, attributing to its non-iulfilment the present condition of things I
Although, therefore, the instances of Gregory the Great,
Gregory VII., and Innocent III. must necessarily present
themselves to any hopeful mind, whatever its religious pro
fession, and whether or not it admits of any faith or belief at all,
yet Popes are required nowadays for far graver purposes than
to interdict uncanonical marriages, to excommunicate Royal
assassins, to restrain unlawful taxes, or even to condemn unjust
wars.
At the present time it is no active interference that is called
for in the State; it is simply adjudication on criminal matters
that is required. The povrer so to be exercised will be appre
hended only after it has been exerted; and it can be exerted
only by the possession of those eminent qualities, that perfect
knowledge, and that unbounded self-sacrifice and devotion
which, in the person of Gregory, created that wonderful
system which we designate the Church of Rome; and which,
in the person of the present Pope, if it please Providence
to grant him time and aids in men, may restore that Church,
and with it retrieve and preserve human society—that society
which, in his own words, is “ crumbling to pieces.”
A French philosopher (unbeliever) says :—
“ Do not tell me that Gregory, Leo, Urban, Innocent,
“ and so many others were Saints a thousand years ago. . I want
�DUTY OF THE POPE TO RESTORE THE LAW.
27
“ you to-day to be one yourself, in order that all the moral world
“ may, without dispute, fall down at your feet.”*
A Protestant clergyman and the actual Dean of St. Paul’s, in
writing of the past, shows what is practicable in the present:—
“In the person of Gregory, the Bishop of Rome first
“ became, in act and influence, if not in avowed authority, a
“ temporal Sovereign. Nor were his acts the ambitious encroach“ ments of ecclesiastical usurpation on the civil power. They
“ were forced upon him by the purest motives, if not by actual
“ necessity. The virtual Sovereignty fell to him as abdicated by
“ the neglect or powerlessness of its rightful owners; he must
“ assume it or leave the people and the city to anarchy. His
“ authority rested on the universal feeling of its beneficence.”!
But the Pope is also a crowned head. He is one of the com
munity of Sovereigns; yet he has not taken part in those
proceedings which have reduced Europe to a chaos of mind and
affairs. He has never recognised the Treaty of Vienna which
is the fountain of these evils; he has unceasingly protested
against it. He has also specially and vehemently protested
against some of the crimes (in Poland and Italy) perpetrated
under the conjoint influence of the extra-national management
to which Europe is now subject.
It is, therefore, no less the duty of the Pope, as a king, to
protest against crimes in which he has no part, and of which he
is the victim, than for the Pope, as head of the Roman Catholic
church, to teach every adult as every child belonging to his
flock, that bloodshed without cause is murder; and to refuse
the offices of religion (as he does to the conspirators in England
known as Fenians) to any man directly engaged therein,
by planning or executing them, or indirectly by approving of
them, and contributing money towards them in the shape of
taxes. His kingdom is indeed small, but in the eye of the Law,
as of human reason, all sovereignties are equal. So also in our
circumstances, the smallest State in Europe can equal the
greatest. The affairs of all nations are interwoven. They are
all conducted in secret. The entire European community is
thus at the mercy of the most dexterous ; and being all destitute
of the requisite qualifications by which to detect what is being
done with them, the web is gradually woven round their eyes, as
the snares are prepared for their feet. There is no extrication
for them save integrity and capacity in some one government,
and such a Government however minute its territories, could
render them this service.
* “ Christianity,” by Quinet, p. 59.
f Milman’s “ Latin Christianity,” vol. ii., p, 130.
�28
TIIE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
But with these qualifications the Court of Rome becomes, at
a bound, the most powerful on earth; and it has already
taken its stand against that Government which manages all the
others, and is leading them on to their mutual destruction.
The acquisition of these intellectual means is, therefore, the
question. For this,. individual powers, the most rare in the
history of mankind, are requisite. An eminent ecclesiastic
has put it in a form which cannot be improved upon. “ For
this,” he said, “ giants are required; and there are no giants
“ to be found either within the Church or without it.”
Has the attempt, therefore, to be abandoned in despair ? By
no means. The first and greatest step is made when some have
recognised its difficulty.
5th.
THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
No Council is required for this work. There is nothing new
to be discovered or enacted, no new tribunal to be instituted. In
the Council there is danger only, and it is thus that it may
be counted gain.
These propositions are of the highest quality by their nature,
and of the vastest bearing in their application, now and in all
future time. If to any design the word great can be applied, it
applies to this one. Therefore can it be worked out only by
individual minds. A public assembly, however constituted, is
unfitted for the task.
The bases, metaphysical and legal, have been already laid
down by the Pope. The superstructure is wanting.
As respects terms, he has condemned them as erring; they
have to be shown to be unmeaning, to give intellectual life to his
flock, and enable them to make wai' on the fallacies in which all
error is enveloped and contained.
Among the vast resources available for this purpose is that
portion of education which in England is termed “ classical,” and
in France “ profane.” The literature so studied is that of States
(Greece and Rome) which, in their corruption and decay, are to
us at once warnings and models—warnings by their fall, models
by their thoughts. Homer is a code of the Law of Nations. In
Demosthenes we possess a remonstrance against our actual
habits, on which the seal of value has been impressed by the fall
of Athens, as a result of its neglect. Socrates has been held
by Fathers of the Church to have been the harbinger of Chris
tianity. His teaching consisted in unravelling the errors con
tained in false terms. During the flourishing, and therefore
�THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
29
corrupt, period of Rome, we have the two dangers constantly pre
sented, which threaten the communities of Europe to-day—false
terms and injustice—and the two are linked together. It is not
only moralists, but statesmen, favourites, and popular poets who
thus speak. I cite some of them, for these are the words which
meet our need.
Cato told his fellow-countrymen that they had lost true
speech by adopting false speech (“nos vera rerum vocabula
amisimus”). Seneca tells them that they no longer had law,
since they took for law “ whatever their rulers did.” Cicero,
in the sublime description of what a community ought to be,
which he places in the mouth of Africanus, has'these words :
“ The State (res publica) is not only synonymous with justice,
“ but exists only by and in the highest justice.” Virgil makes
the shades of Hades echo with the great voice of Theseus :—
“ Discite justitiam moniti et non temnere Divos.”
The lyric of the Augustan age presents Virtue unteaching men
their false terms, and thus securing a safe condition of life:—•
. Virtus populumque falsis
dedocet uti
Vocibus.”
“.
.
How is it that such things are known to the school-boys, and
are forgotten by the men of Europe ? How is it that there are
none to be found to take advantage of such teachings in the
past, to turn them to profit for the present, and so bring up the
Youth, knowing what is wrong, and loving what is right ? But
what did the fallacious terms of the Greeks or Romans amount
to? For the first, it was but meshes woven out of their own tongue.
For the second, it was but a very slight importation of Greek
terms. With us, it is a vast influx of both Greek and Latin
terms, and these jumbled up together and used in senses that
would be utterly unintelligible to Greeks or Romans; while
always displacing the simple and appropriate words of our own
tongue. The mass of these will astound when it is considered
that every word ending in ty, in ence, in ion, in ite, ism, and ze
belong to this category, when used in the second intention. The
effect on the human being placed in the hopeless condition of
having to learn these, and to believe that they mean something,
may be apprehended, when it is stated that every such term is
unmeaning in itself, illogical in its construction, and perverting
in its use. These terms may be used—have to be used—for
others. The danger lies in being used by them; that is, tbinking in them and through them, and imagining that there is
meaning in them.
It was the duty of the teacher to prevent the use by the child
�30
THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
of vague or unmeaning terms ; so would he have put a stop to
erroneous ideas which came in as the explanation of these
terms. The teacher has not done so. It is now for the Church
to render this service to the adult.
The task may be difficult, but the obligation is imperious. If
difficult, it is not impossible. If it -were so, there could be no
safety and no hope. If men arrive at false totals because they
are working with false figures, you may hope to put them right;
and strive to do so. But if you accept the figures as correct,
then there remains nothing to do. If the evil that is done arose
from a purpose in their hearts, again the task would be hope
less, and words would be without power. It is only because
they are deceived by their terms, and thereby cheated into doing
what they do not desire, that human speech can avail for human
good.
But for this there must be the perfect and absolute conviction
of the nothingness of all that is held to be, in this age, intellectual
power and philosophical culture. Any one can arrive at this
certainty for himself, who will take any sentence of any modern
writer, whoever he may be, and strike out of it the Greek and
Latin terms, and then read it over. He will then see that these
terms were all superfluous; that the sense, if sense there was,
comes out free, or that the fallacy remains naked and exposed.
It has to be made apparent that those speculations in which
modern society is engaged are not only politically futile, and re
ligiously and morally heinous, but also that intellectually, they
are contemptible.
This branch, then, the metaphysical, is the first which has
to be undertaken for the Council.
As regards crimes, the basis was equally laid when the Pope
asserted his “ power over the consciences,” not of individuals
only, but also “ of communities, nations, and their Sovereigns.”
This power he has never exerted, nor can he till he specifies the
Law. That has to be done not only in reference to wars, but
also in reference to Congresses, Treaties, and Protocols. For
besides the modern practice of making wars without form, has
come that of holding Conferences without cause; of making
compacts (Treaties) vicious in matter of form, and lawless in
substance; of substituting Protocols for Treaties; of violating
Treaties when made; and of superimposing on all this a new
invention, which they term “ Declaration,” and by means of
which the internal condition of each State can be reached and
upset. There has, therefore, a rule to be laid down according
to which, in all these respects, Catholics may be able to dis
tinguish what is lawful from what is criminal. Then, and then
�THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
31
only, can and will the Pope exercise “power”—judicial power
“ over communities, nations, and their sovereigns.”
It can only be attributed to the indistinctness that prevails in
regard to these matters being common to all, that the Pope,
being recently called upon to act magisterially by a most
heinous attempt of foreign bandits on his State, his subjects,
and himself; did not in his own courts vindicate the Law, and
use “ the power of the magistrate” for the repression of evil
doers and the protection of the innocent. Had he done so, he
would by his own act have commenced the restoration of
human society, and would have gained for the promulgator of
this new order (himself) the respect and confidence of mankind.
Crime leaves no option. It must be either pursued or accepted.
To condone crime, is to be criminal. It is so in the private man,
how much more so hi the magistrate ? How strange that these
things have to be said; how much more so to know that, speak
ing them, they are not understood.
This Code of “ Christian Legislation” having been enacted,
then no grander spectacle could be witnessed, and no holier
work conceived, than the assembling of the body of the Church
to accept it, ancl to take counsel together for its application.
The danger consists in the work being left to be done by a
Council composed of men who are ecclesiastics only, and neither
lawyers, metaphysicians, nor diplomatists; at a time when the
Church has ceased to be what it was in the middle ages, the
fountain of Law; in an age when the common talk is fallacy,
and when the affairs of nations are enveloped in a secret and
mysterious web of deception.
The superior minds who have somewhat approached the
subject have felt this danger. One of the most eminent has
used the words “ The Council will kill or cure.” In this__in
the perception of this danger—lies that hope which has been
above expressed, namely, that some will thereby be induced to
make the effort necessary to have the work for the Council done
and well done, beforehand.
It has to be considered that the whole field of public morals
has been left untouched by modern speculation. It remains to
be trodden by the Church. Among all the subjects submitted
to investigation, the stopping of wars has been omitted. In all
our speculations for the improvement of the human race, no
plan has been suggested for arresting the progress of public ex
penditure. In all our associations for protecting the injured and
the weak, not one has appeared for the protection of public
honour, morals, and interests. In all our projects of reform,
there has not been one for the restraining of the Executive, and
�32
THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
preventing it from disposing at its arbitrary pleasure of the
money and blood of the subject.
As this Council is not for the settlement of dogma or disci
pline, at least as primary objects, but to devise means for arrest
ing general disorder, it is not for Catholics only, but for
mankind. If the results obtained are for the good of any, they
must be also for the good of all. Those who are thus con
cerned should be admitted. At the Council of Trent, the
Protestant States were invited to attend by their represen
tatives. Such an invitation, it is true, would be accepted, if
accepted by the European Governments, only with the view of
preventing any just solution, and to produce confusion. But
the domain of Law, belongs not to Executives, nor even to socalled Legislative Assemblies, but to legists. An appeal, there
fore, to men whose studies have been so directed would natu
rally fall into, as it would be a necessary part of, such a design.
The Law of Nations, which overrules all Municipal Law, and
which, as regards England, is still part and parcel of the law of
the land, has never been enacted by parliamentary statute, nor
promulgated by royal authority. Its expounders have been, in
modern times, private individuals. The chief of these have
been Protestants (Grotius and Vattel). Their compilations
include the laws and practice of pagan times and people; and
especially of Ancient Rome, where the jus gentium was the
common law, but which had for its external application a
special judicatory. Processes with foreign States were referred
exclusively to that judicatory, and withdrawn from the civil
power. Neither King nor Consul, neither Senate nor People,
could so much as interfere in such matters, or could declare war
or make peace. The “ Government,” in such cases, "was con
sidered as a “party” merely in the dispute, and its acts were
inquired into. It was the Fecial College, a body having no
political character or functions, and which was invested with a
legal and religious character, into whose hands the case was
remitted so soon as a difference arose between the Roman Ex
ecutive and that of any other people.
It is therefore on the example of this gieat people that those
few private individuals whose minds have been turned to this
branch of human science, have chiefly relied in expounding
those principles which have obtained for them pre-eminent
authority in the courts of all modern kingdoms, and which
have, in so far as they have been maintained, secured order
and peace in the world. If private men, endowed with publicmindedness, have become the lawgivers and benefactors of
their species, what might not be effected by the Church of
Rome, if it entered on the task in a similar spirit, having no
�THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
33
longer laboriously to work out, but simply to employ and
apply the materials ready to its hand?
But Europe is not entirely Christian. A great Mahomedan
Power dwells on its soil, and holds possession of the point not
only of greatest geographical and political importance in Europe,
but in the world. This system, so far from being opposed to
the great design of the Pope, is associated therewith, and is
the only Government not directly and essentially opposed to it.
It is so not only as being, in common with the Pope, exposed to
the direct assault of bandits or to the insidious combinations of the
other Powers, but it is so also as having preserved in its constitu
tion the same laws and practices that prevailed in Pagan Rome.
The effects of this original constitution are still evidenced in this,
that it has alone abstained from forming designs against its neigh
bours, or combining to subvert their independence by interfering
in their affairs. The Sultan and Divan of Turkey can, no more
than could the Consuls and Senate of Rome, decree or levy war.
The Ulema in the one country, as the Fecials in the other, have
first to render their sentence (Fetva). Were a Sultan without
such warrant to declare war, he would find no one to obey him.
*
The common Mussulman soldier would make no distinction be
tween the individual murder of a fellow-citizen and the aggregate
murder of a foreign regiment. Without the Fetva of the Sheik
ul Islam, he would hold himself no more bound to obey his officer
in firing on such regiment, than an English soldier would do, in
firing on a mob without the reading of the Riot Act.
It will be, of course, supposed by Europeans, judging by their
own habits, that Turkey is not herself aggressive or intriguing, like
the other Governments, solely because she is the object of attack on
the part of others; but it is not so. Had it not been from her own
maxims and character, she would have been the most dangerous
Power in Europe, if, possessed, as she is, of the positions the
most important, she had yielded to the combined inducements
of unjust profits to make, and legitimate animosities to gratify.
Take as instance the year 1812, when, after suffering from the
several violences of England and France, an offensive alliance
was proposed to her by Russia, under which their naval and
land forces were to be combined, their joint fleets to issue into
the Mediterranean, and their armies to invade Lombardy. The
dream of Mahmoud H. was paraded before her eyes, and not
Italy only, but the Southern Provinces of France, offered
* In the only case of such usurpation presented by the annals of Turkey, the
Sultan (Mahmoud IV.) was put to death. He had recommenced war with Austria
before the expiration of a truce. Even under the new order commenced in this gene
ration, the most eloquent and popular preacher at Constantinople denounced the
surrender of Belgrade as an act of infidelity, as well as usurpation, no fetva having
been obtained for it.
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THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
to her ambition. The good sense of certain men might, in
deed, have sufficed to overrule the suggestions of the tempter;
but even if there had been found in the Divan a Kaunitz, a
Beust, or a Bismarck, still the craft and corruption of such
men must have failed in face of institutions which required
the plans of a Minister, before execution, to be submitted to a
public Divan and approved of by a legal Fetva. The Grand
Vizier at the Treaty of Belgrade said to the Ministers of Austria
and France, “You do not understand our Government. One or
“ two men cannot decide at Constantinople, as they do at Paris
“ and Vienna.”
This rule of the Boman State was that of all human society in
the origin (the Romans only copied those who were before them,
and specially the Etruscans). It is also that which we still hold
to in common practice. The “ Government,” and even the
“ Crown,” comes into the British courts exactly as a private indi
vidual, when it has a civil case to urge. So also it is itself brought
into court by private individuals when they are plaintiffs, and
the judge deals with it simply as a party in a suit, examining
its acts, and pronouncing sentence for it or against it, according
to the merits of the case and the law which determines it. So,in like manner, in regard to external operations of the nature,
now improperly termed, of war, when they affect the subjects,
not of Great Britain only, but of foreign States, and are of a
nature to be brought into court.
In the first Chinese war a case arose between shippers and
insurers in consequence of losses incurred through the operations
then being carried on. It came for trial, on the plea that the
loss was incurred through the effects of war. The judges unani
mously decided that there was no war.
Lord Mansfield, in trying a case in which Danish subjects
had been injured by acts of the British Government, when the
orders of that Government were quoted, said (case of the Diana},
“ The word ‘ Government ’ is not one that can be used in this
“ place, being nonsensical (without meaning). If the orders were
“ lawful, the law gave them their value; if unlawful, they could
“ not be rendered lawful, by the source from which they
“ emanated.”
In like manner, had a charge of murder of a Chinaman been
brought before the Central Criminal Court against any soldier,
private or officer, or sailor employed in China, that court must
have passed sentence of death on such soldier or officer. The law
is still there, only there are no men to enforce it.
It is true that in modern Turkey, these restraints on human
passions, these safeguards of the innocence and life of com
munities, preserved there from ancient times for our instruc
�THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
35
tion, are fading away before the pressure of European diplo
macy and the contamination of European ideas; but, never
theless, such ideas are not there, as in Europe, strange ; are
not incomprehensible nor offensive. The Government, after
all, is itself still composed of Mussulmans; it may and does ap
preciate the injury resulting from its own unwilling usurpations ;
it does feel the danger resulting from the pressure upon it of the
lawlessness of European Governments. It is therefore unques
tionable that the Sublime Porte would hail with joy the .proposi
tion of the Pope, would aid it to the best of its ability (and that
ability, in such a case, would not be small), and might thereby be
led to a wholesome return to the past, and a respectful considera
tion of the profound and beneficent maxims, lying neglected and
obscured in the foundations of its own institutions.
*
In the time of Christ Christians lived under the dispositions
of Moses. The “Church,” then in its most perfect form,
obeyed rules for the conduct of men in all essential matters of
life, viz. low taxation, cleanliness, charity, and politeness. Islam,
in common with all primitive religions, followed the same rule,
and prescribed how wars can be lawfully made; what taxes can
be lawfully levied; how and when the body is to be washed;
what proportion of a man’s income shall be given in alms; and
how a man is to salute his fellow-creatures. By rules on these
points society can alone be considered as duly constituted, or
capable of durability. The absence of these may make up, in
deed, a condition of “ civilisation,” but, clearly, a community
destitute of such restraints is not one that can be either reli
gious, virtuous, cleanly, charitable, happy, or durable.
These restraints being imposed by Religion, Religion became
sanctified to man by its benefits; and, consequently, that dis
belief which we now see spreading over Europe was unknown.
In the origin Religion was everything to man. It was Govern
ment as well as Faith. Secular Government arose from its
decay. Finally, Government having at last come “ to consist
“ of those practices which it was instituted to put down,”f re
pudiate Religion, as a guide for its acts, while it makes use
of its authority to sanction its crimes. Thus it is that Re
volution and Atheism prevail and spread. They have not yet
however made way among those nations that still hold to Law
as a part of Religion, and who have not drawn the distinction
now established in Christendom between the Law as applied to
the acts of the individual and to those of the community.
To judge of the view which the European Governments will
Not in the Mahomedan only, but in all the Asiatic systems. Law has always
been held a part of religion.”-—Thomson's Akklak-i-Nasiri^ p. 121.
f Lord Lyttleton.
c 2
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THE CECUMENIC COUNCIL.
take of the matter, we must consider what the consequences
will be to them of his success—consequences which they will
perceive at a glance.
The Pope will be successful when nations commence to
question acts in reference to their lawfulness. This will present
a new obstacle to despotic power. It will endanger that “ pre
rogative of peace and war” which has been usurped by Execu
tives from both Sovereigns and Representative bodies, or, as in
France, by the Sovereign from the Representative body.
*
Executives, no longer able to plunge their country in foreign
wars, will have to surrender ambitious schemes of conquest
and annexation.
Executives no longer able to kill men at pleasure on the
battle-field, words of menace will no longer be capable of
disturbing the world, whether spoken on a New Year’s Day
presentation, or written in despatches, or secret instructions, or
“ private” letters. Diplomacy will disappear. Danger and
alarm ceasing, military establishments will be reduced.
For the same reason taxes will be cut down.
Permanent embassies will be looked on with suspicion and
alarm.
On all points the tendency will be the reverse of that at pre
sent pursued ; it will be to escape from despotic executives, extra
national combinations, ruinous military establishments, and an
unbearable accumulation of taxes—all which constitute the
power of office and its attractions.
. But the appreciation of these effects will not be confined to
diplomatic, men, but extend also to the active and managing
spirits among the class of infidels and revolutionists. They, in
like manner, will perceive that it is a blow struck at their im
portance, and at their occupation. The food and fuel of infi
delity and revolution are public crime and national suffering—in
other words, . Wars and Taxes. Governments and clubs, the
ambitious Minister, the aspiring demagogue, the spirit of rest
lessness, on whatever side it breaks out, the powerful interests
of the press, which lives by news—that is, crimes and agitations
—are all smitten by this proposal of the Pope.
Indistinct and problematical as the benefits may appear to the
vast mass of well-disposed and indifferent men who are to reap
the profit, to the moving, acting, and ruling—though in numbers most insignificant—portion of the community, the loss is
very distinct and very positive. They clearly understand that
to attempt to restore the supremacy of the Law is to attempt to
supersede their calling.
* The Revolution of 1848 had withdrawn this power from the President (except,
in case of defence); it was regained by the Coup d’Etat.
�THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
37
The consequence of this judicial blindness has been, in an
other sense, fatal to the peace and well-being of communities,
and to the judgment and integrity of the individuals comprising
them. This consists in the putting away the idea of punishment
in regard to persons filling ministerial offices. The arm of the
soldier is placed at the mercy of the political adviser. He is
expected to slay when ordered to do so by the Minister, and the
law is not to reach him when, acting on the oath to obey “ lawful
orders,” he obeys unlawful ones. Then it was to be expected
that the acts of the political agent should be looked into with
peculiar severity, so as to bring the full responsibility of the
measures themselves on those who had acquired the facility of
causing their subordinates to overleap the law. But this is not
the case. The reverse has happened. First, these advisers are
suffered to give such orders without prior sanction or even know
ledge of so much as their intention on the part (in England) of
the body constituted to advise the Crown in its exercise of the
prerogative of Peace and War.
In the second place, they are not held responsible for their
acts after the event, however blamable or however disastrous; so
that at once every check has been removed from human frailty,
purpose or passion, whilst every possible encouragement is
heaped upon those persons to yield to such tendencies, in the
vastness of the uncontrolled power placed in their hands, in the
enormous sums of money afforded by modern taxation, and its
concession into military materials and troops.
It is not merely that the idea has vanished of punishing
Ministers for any act, but that the neglecting to clo so has
become a maxim, and a maxim which the present generation
pronounces with much self-satisfaction, as honourably distin
guishing them from, and placing them above all former times
and people. That maxim is, “ The days of Impeachment are
gone by.” To say that there should be a class of men who shall
not be punished when they do amiss—they not acting for or by
themselves, but by the power confided to them—is what could
not enter into the imagination of men, where such had not
become the practice: so is it impossible to cause the contrary
idea to enter into the imagination of men, where such has be
come the practice.
Nor is it that this class is held to be by nature free from
human imperfection. They are by no means considered sinless
and wise: while their acts are taken for law, their word is not
taken for truth. They are periodically expelled from office because
they are condemned or despised; and any one of them who
should put his own hand in the pocket of another, or knock off
his hat, would be taken up by the police. Nevertheless, un
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THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
questioned and unopposed, one of them can send hundreds of
thousands of his fellow-creatures to death, and cause myriads
of arms to be plunged in the pockets of hundreds of millions
of men, subjects of the Crown he serves, or aliens.
*
There have, during the last thirty years, been found some
individuals throughout Europe who have perceived, if but for a
moment, that unlawful battle was assassination, but no one
whatever has perceived that the present normal bloodshed and
convulsions are results of the maxim—that Ministers shall never
be exposed to punishment. But if the real nature of this practice
were understood, and human indignation were thereby evoked,
and directed itself to suppressing it, then would men naturally
turn upon those who, quietly and unendangered, in their closets,
ordered such crimes ; and the cry would be, “ The days of im“ peachment are not gone by.” All this the men of this class
feel and know, and instinctively connect with the general pro
position of applying the law to the conduct of States. Those
who propose to move in this matter have anxiously to ponder
and clearly to comprehend, what is the depth and intensity of
the opposition they will meet, and the vastness and variety of
the disturbing and corrupting influences that will be brought
to bear against them, in order to stop or frustrate their pro
ceedings.
No such dangers would assail, or pitfalls surround, the
attempt, were it made by any other Church save that of
Rome, as on the other hand, no corresponding benefits would
accrue. Had it been the Church of England which proposed
to restore the law, that restoration would only be, quoad
its own members. The purpose settled in its own mind,
it would only have to deal with its own Government. If so
minded, there could be no struggle and no difficulty; the
English Government could not make lawless wars in face of a
hostile Bench of Bishops, to say nothing of lay Peers, of
Members of the House of Commons, and the whole Anglican
community, resolved that wars should not be unlawfully and un
justly made. Neither France, nor Austria, nor Prussia, nor
Italy, nor any, nor all Foreign Powers, could in the slightest
degree, or for a moment, disturb or influence the decision of
such Church, nor would they, save indirectly, be affected
thereby.
The Anglican Church, like the Fecial College of Pagan
Rome, would have in view one side only: namely, its own
government. In a proposed war with Austria, it would be com* Since these operations commenced, dating them from the introduction of Lord
Palmerston into the Foreign Office and the sacrifice of Poland, the charges of Europe
for military purposes have increased threefold.
�THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
39
promised only in regard to the English Crown ; it is free, if our
side is just. Not so the Church of Rome. It would have to
bear on its conscience crime equally on both sides. It is not
free, if one side is just. Both must be in the right for it to be
blameless; and this is impossible. There is no possible escape
for it save by adjudication. 1st. It has to judge in reference
to the war; 2ndly. It has to excommunicate the side that is
in the wrong. No Community, great or small, can be called
just that does not exclude from its breast dishonourable men—
that is, excommunicate them. To fear to use the weapon of
excommunication is, above all things, to mistake the age in
which we live; which, more than any that has preceded it,
affords a field, and has in readiness a crown, for capable
daring.
Excommunication is a power which every individual possesses,
by which and which alone he retains, or can retain, his integrity.
We know a gentleman by this, that he will not know a dis
honourable person. This power is the safeguard of public as of
private morals. The real restraint over Ministers is this, that
public crime being also private guilt, honourable men will not
associate with them.
With Rome it is widely different. That Church is co-existent
with no State. Its decision has no reference to its own particular
State—not making itself unjust wars, or any wars; having never
used its power for the extension of its limits, when even that
power was the greatest in Europe; and not having engaged in
any of those diplomatic operations which are to-day directed
against the independence, not of the small States only, but of
the greatest also.
Its action, therefore, is without, and not within ; and with
out, it reaches them all and all equally. This action would in
effect be greatest on the States not publicly united to its faith ;
for the aggressive States which endanger the world are, with
one exception, not Catholic; and that one, Catholic in name,
is in essentials the reverse of Catholic, whether we term it
Gallican in its religion, or heathen in its Government. It is
therefore more logical to say that none of the dangerous Powers
are Catholic. These are four: England, Russia, Prussia, and
France. Of these, the three which are nominally not Catholic,
are those on which the action of the Court of Rome, under
our hypothesis, would be the greatest. The case can be only
stated here, not elaborated. Enough, perhaps, has been said
to show that the body of Catholics in England, or rather a
minute fraction of them, would suffice to stop nefarious and
injurious proceeding in the Government. Take from Russia
the active co-operation of England, and not only hei’ power
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THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
expires, but the process commences of restoring the power of
England herself. But, in like manner, Rome has spiritual sub
jects in Russia and in Prussia. The method of proceeding is
one for all. Rome has also a few subjects left in France.
All the political influence of these Governments will be
brought to bear on Rome, directly on the Pope and his Go
vernment, indirectly through the Prelates and Ecclesiastics
connected with each State; and here Austria, too, comes in,
and will prove of all the most dangerous. Finally, the
common talk of diplomatic and political circles will be directed
to the crushing out of whatever idea may arise that is just,
wise, and beneficial. The Church of Rome knowing what it
is about, the fallacies of argument and the shafts of ridicule
would fall harmless. But the bare threat of such an intention
will cause measures to be hastened for crushing the Roman
State. During the interval it will be agitated with troubles
and tortured with alarms. In the Council the Pope has
raised up a stone; a great, a desperate, and a saving effort is
required to prevent it from falling back, and to cause it to fall
on and crush the reproved of mankind.
“ When religion is banished from civil society, and Divine
“ Revelation rejected, the true notion even of justice be“ comes obscured and is lost, material force takes the place of
“ justice and right, and certain men dare to proclaim that the
“ will of the people, manifested by what they call public
“ opinion, constitutes the supreme law, independent of all right,
“ human or divine; and that, in politics, acts consummated, and
by the fact that they have become consummated, have the
“ force of right. (Facta consummata, eo ipso, quod consumu mata sunt, vim juris habere.)”
Such is, perhaps, the leading idea of the Allocution of 1864.
This is the flag wrhich is raised. It has to be observed to
those who would object, because not adhering to the Church
of Rome, or because adhering to no church whatever, that
this proposition is not a religious dogma, but an assertion
which every man can examine, and of which he must recog
nise the truth. For no one can deny that what they call
“ Public Opinion” exists only in substituting something else in
the place of right, and that the people of Europe do accept
whatever is done on no other grounds than that it has been done.
It is, therefore, for all who see that this is so, and that it is
wrong, and must bring evil consequences, to apply themselves
to find the means of effecting a change.
It has further to be remarked that for them (the non-Catholics
and unbelievers) this is simply the assertion of a man. It is a
man, like each of us, who calls on his fellow-men to warn them,
�THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
41
and who, moreover, invokes their aid to stop nefarious proceed
ings, distracting and endangering, not one only, but all the
nations, first of Christendom, and then, by their example and
their acts, of the entire world.
The Pope speaks, in the first instance, to his own flock;
they differ in no respect in conduct and idea from those who
are not Catholics. That they do possess a religion no ways
changes their position from that of those who have none.
They neither protest against public crimes, nor denounce
“Public Opinion,” nor refuse to accept “consummated acts.”
In fact, the separation of religion and politics has had for
effect that there is no difference in practice and perception
between the believer and the infidel; and that condition of
slavish submission, arrived at by the latter through the throwing
off of all religious conviction or restraint, has been arrived at
equally by the former, notwithstanding his observance of the
ceremonial, and his profession of the symbol, of a belief.
What is here proposed is no more than what it is the duty of
each individual to do for himself; for it consists of the means to
be taken, so that in thought, word, and act he may not err.
Whilst each nation lived by and in itself, when the incidents of
conflict occurred at the interval of generations only, no such
duty was imposed on ordinary men. Not so when all these con
ditions are reversed, and when there is an incessant forming and
expressing of opinions. These opinions must be false, unless
they are true; and there is no possibility of their being true
save by taking the necessary steps to discard error, and that is
by ascertaining the law by which on each occasion we have to
be guided, and the history of the events to which it applies.
To commence this study a man must be possessed of the con
viction that it is his duty to be right, and consequently of the
knowledge that the idea prevalent among bis compatriots that
it is impossible to be right, and that it is human to err, is the
mere result of their not having taken the trouble to understand
the matters of which they speak. In this respect the doctrine
of infallibility of the Catholic Church comes greatly in aid.
To it, at least, we can boldly say, “ You recognise the duty of
“ being right, since you profess yourselves to be incapable of
“ error.”
There is, however, an objection which has been raised, viz.
that this is “extraneous work” and must interfere with the
regular work to come before the Council. The answer is, There
is no work before the Council.
The minds of men are, indeed, filled with vague and tumul
tuous notions as to a vast number of things that ought to be
done, and which they fancy the Council will in some way be
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THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
able to reach. All these vanish on close inspection. It is first
of all expected that some dogmatic sanction will be obtained
for the “ Temporal Power.” When you ask how and in what
terms such an article is to be framed, you will get no answer;
and when you go on to say, “ The Temporal Power is simply a
ci state of possession, which can be disturbed only by an act of
“ violence; security against such is only to be found in the Ten
“ Commandmentsyou will have put the case in a form to
convince any one, not only that an article of faith cannot be
framed so as to meet the case, but also that it is superfluous, and
that the desired end can be reached only by a return to the Law
itself. The various’propositions may be classed under the fol
lowing heads:—
1. Temporal Power;
2. Secular Intervention in nomination of Bishops ;
3. Religious Education;
4. The Eastern Catholics ;
5. Relation of the Church to Governments (“ entre l’Eglise
et la Politique”).
As to the interference of Kings in the nomination of Bishops,
all that can be done by a Council has been done already by the
1st Article of the Council of Trent.
As to Education, it is a matter which regards the internal
legislation of each country. That legislation, as it exists, does
not, at least, prevent the priest from teaching the child what sin
is, and what the particular sin from which wTe suffer; which the
priest does not teach the child at present, because he himself
does not know, and which to teach is to stop.
In regard to the settlement looked to in the East (meaning
Turkey), there is nothing to do. The Porte leaves the Catholic
body perfect freedom on all the points on which Rome has been
at variance with the- Christian Governments of Europe. It does
not persecute, it does not constrain conversion, it does not con
fiscate property, it does not interfere in education, in the election
of Bishops, in the appropriation of testamentary bequests, or in
the public ceremonies. As to the discipline of that Church,
the Pope himself, and proprio mota, has made a change the
most momentous—that of assuming the direct nomination of the
Bishops. He has done so without consulting either the com
munities of the East, or the Consistory, or the Academia Sacra
at Rome. If he has determined the major point by reversing
immemorial practice, he can determine the minor ones, if so
minded, without the aid or intervention of a Council.
On the 5th and last point, “ the relation of the Church to
Politics,” it is difficult to imagine what it can mean.. This is
certain, that when the question is put nothing definite can be
�THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
43
extracted. The conclusion therefore is, that there exists at pre
sent no work foi’ the Council to undertake in the view of
realising its avowed purpose of “ preventing human society from
crumbling to dust.”
At the time of the announcement, the phrase was current at
Rome : “The Pope looks to the Council; the Cardinals to the
^Temporal Power,” meaning that the Pope had objects in
view which were not those of the Cardinals. Doubtless those
views are to be found in germ in the Allocution and the Syllabus.
But these are not all. There must lie at the bottom apprehen
sion of a new danger impending over the Church.”
Those who have considered the dangers that threaten Europe
from the disturbance of hereditary succession and from the matri
monial alliances of royal and princely houses, especially since the
new dynastic arrangements in Denmark and Greece, have had
one ground of consolation—namely, that the Pope was neither
an. hereditary monarch, nor capable of contracting matrimonial
alliances.
If the election of a Pope depended exclusively on a Conclave
of Cardinals, there might be grounds for such confidence. But
it is far from being so determined. Conflicting influences
operating from without prevail, and it is possible to suppose a
case when these influences, hitherto balancing each other, might
be combined. In such case, that elective source of the Papal
sovereignty, instead of affording any guarantee, would, on the
contrary, present the greatest of perils.
When a Frencli Sovereign conferred temporal possession on
the Bishop of Rome, it was in reason that precautions should
have, been taken to prevent the election from falling on a person
inimical to France, or in alliance or confederacy with those other
Governments with which France was in conflict, and for whose
rivalry and competition, Italy and the Papacy afforded the chief
field. In succession of time and events, other Governments
extorted and secured a similar guarantee. This consisted in the
right to.veto the election of one candidate. Three nations have
up to this time acquired this veto. These are France, Austria,
and Spain.
The first of these countries is in the hands of the man who
sent French troops to the Crimea. The second is in the hands
of a Minister who owes his position to Russia, and who has
declared himself openly against the Pope. Of the third, it
may at least be said that there is in it no capacity to take a line
of its own, and. that a Russian Ambassador has ruled as abso
lutely in Madrid as formerly at Warsaw.
To veto three candidates is to decide the election. Three
candidates amount to the number of eligible persons. By com
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THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
bining the vetoes, the negative faculty of three, as hitherto pos
sessed, is converted into the active faculty of one. To the holder
or suspected holder of this influence, all candidates and all
electors would look.
That the Pope sees this danger is unquestionable. It does
not follow that he connects it with Russia; at all events, he
must connect it with the Ruler of France. Louis Napoleon
has sought consecration at the hands of the Pope. The Pope
has refused it. Threats and offers (money included) have been
unavailing to move him from his purpose. The Pope must,
therefore, foresee that every means will be used to obtain a more
pliant successor.
If a Council convened on the occasion can interpose so as to
bar the foreign vetoes, then some light may be thrown on the
motives to which the Pope has yielded, and some explanation
afforded, for a difference in this respect between himself and
the Consistory. It would also explain how there should be
mystery in the matter. At all events, it is clear that the fate
of the Catholic Church may turn on the election of the next
Pope, and that with that election this Council is immediately
connected. It more immediately explains the vagueness of the
terms of the instruction to the Sub-Commission as to deter
mining the relations of the Church to Politics.
Nor is this all that would be explained. The vehemence with
which Russia has denounced the Council, the monstrosity of the
pretensions she has put forward in respect to it, could hardly be
accounted for by any dread as to the effect it would have in
withdrawing Europe from her control, and the more so as the
language so used has given to the act of the Pope an importance
in the eyes of Catholics which it by no means had before. But
if she sees in it the indication of a design to frustrate the action
of foreign diplomacy in reference to the next election, the
vehemence of her words and their apparent indiscretion will
be alike explained.
But the power of applying these vetoes to candidates likely to
maintain the independence of the Roman See, is only a subsidiary
one. Doubtless the candidate has been long ago fixed upon.
The election will be made to turn in the Consistory, not
on French or Austrian influence, not on Cis or Transalpine
doctrines, not on liberal or anti-liberal tendencies, but on the
maintenance of the “ Temporal Power.” Louis Napoleon
is placed on the Temporal line; the Consistory is on the Tem
poral line. His candidate will be their candidate. That can
didate will be the Russian candidate. It matters not that Russia
has not now, and may not have even then, a representative at
Rome. It may be advantageous not to have one there, so as to
�THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
45
awaken no attention. It may be, that for this very reason the
rupture of intercourse was managed. Besides she has already
declared herself (1848) for “ the restoration of both the Spiritual
“ and the Temporal authority of the Pope.”
If there be a member of the Consistory who desires to know,
or rather who does not shrink from knowing, the truth, let him
render to himself an account of the operations of Louis Napo
leon since his accession, both externally and internally. Let
him inquire into the circumstances and agency which placed
him on the Imperial Throne. Is it France that has benefited
by his enterprises abroad ? Is it any Government which can
profit by what he is doing within ?
The “Temporal power of the Pope” is a word that has been
got up, just as the “ Integrity of the Danish Monarchy” and the
“Pacification of the Levant.” It will be used for a similar
purpose. This is the particular danger that threatens the world
at this moment, and that in conjunction with all the others;
for all are interwoven. There is no escape but in unravelling
the threads of the web of fallacy out of which it has sprung, and
in clearing away the false conclusions and the passions resulting
from the long series of measures by which Italy has been worked
up to her present state—measures which commenced in 1795, in
which the hand of Russia can be traced from the beginning,
and in which France, England, Austria, “ Italy,” and “ Revolu“ tion” have all been made successively, severally, and conjointly
to play their blind, servile, and suicidal parts.
Russia’s operations are secular. Her antagonists, who are but
dupes, revolve in the narrow limits of months and days. She
acts; they speculate. The horizon of their universe is made up
of the emotions of their own minds, for which she has furnished
the pasture out of the anterior acts which she has made them per
form ; and which acts they themselves, nevertheless, have for
gotten, never having known what it is they have done, because
haying no law in themselves, their eyes are without sight.
It is the “ Commandments of the Lord ” which “ enlighten the
the eyes.” Escape from this present terrible and hopeless danger
can only be by restoring the Law of God and man. Thus only
can the Consistory or the World be made to understand that to
speak of “ the Temporal power of the Pope” is to utter words
base and shameful, and is to weave a snare for their own feet.
.Why are the words “ Temporal power” substituted for Sove
reignty in the case of the Pope alone ? No one speaks of the
Temporal power of the Emperor of the French or of the Queen
of Spain. Yet there is no difference in regard to these Poten
tates as to the nature and quality of the supreme functions which
they exercise as rulers. It is true that the Pope superadds to
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THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
the prerogative of Justices of Peace ancl War another quality
or Prerogative which is spiritual. But so does the Emperor of
Russia and the Sultan of Turkey, and yet no one speaks
of the “Temporal Power” of either. So does the King of
Prussia and the Queen of England, who dispose of the “ Tem
poralities” of their respective churches.
If, then, the “ Sovereignty” of the Pope has received a special
designation which is not applied to other sovereignties, it is that
there lurks beneath an insidious intention. That intention is to
deprive him of that Sovereignty by making men believe it to be
something different from other Sovereignties. Thus a discussion
can be raised respecting it on grounds which exclude all received
notions of right. It will so come about that men who would
not admit for a moment a proposition to take the crown off the
head of the Queen of England or of Spain, and to give it to
Victor Emmanuel because it- is a “ Temporal Power,” would
accept, and urge on that ground, the same proposition as regards
the Pope.
They will then go a step further, and say, “ We propose to
“ give—we who have no business therewith—the lands, cities,
“ and fortresses belonging to the Pope to the descendants of the
“ Dukes of Savoy (for that is the end in view), in order that
“ we may confer a great benefit on the Roman Catholic Church.
“We wish to improve and purify it. We wish to wash it clean
“ from all secular taints we desire to see it entirely spiritual, and
“ in all this we are actuated by the spirit of justice and the love
“ of Religion.”
Thus will this class of simple and perhaps devout persons find
themselves engaged in a common cause with those who seek to
“ abrogate all laws,” to revolutionise every Government, and to
upset every belief—men who not only work for “ disorder,” but
who avow to themselves that they do so.
To these, others join themselves with another motive—that of
Proselytism. They will see in this operation the breaking
down of the Catholic Church, and in the hopes of gaining con
verts to Protestantism, will join in the same clamour for the
“ unity of Italy.” Thus it is that the whole of England has not
only in effect aided and wildly applauded the atrocious proceed
ings of which Italy has been the theatre, but bowed itself down
before the man who has been the instrument employed for that
end, although as a man he combines every disqualification capable
of excluding him from intercourse with respectable persons.
This combination established, those on the other side will
“ accept the language of their enemies.”* Instead of unravelWords of the Bishop of Orleans at Malines
�THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
47
ling the fallacy of their terms, instead of exposing the immo
rality of their proceeding, instead of unmasking the perfidy of
their design, and the fatal consequences it must bring, they will
simply accept the term—which is accepting all—-and their rally
ing point will be to maintain the “ Temporal Power.” Thus it is
that a candidate coming forward as in favour of the “ Temporal
power” may be accepted by a future Consistory on that word
alone, and yet be the very agent selected for the undoing of
that very knot which links together this great and wonderful
system, which, unless it did possess a sovereignty in the sense of
territorial possession, could only be the dependency of some one
the Governments of Europe.
. It is in this sense that the case has been judged up to these
times by the Protestant Governments. They have always held
that the independence of the Pope was a vital point for them on
this ground : that the loss of his independence—which they saw
equally in external influence exerted at elections or in revolu
tionary movements affecting his authority—would be to the
benefit of some Catholic power and against themselves. It was
thus that England exerted herself, and at great expense, to secure
a free Consistory at Venice in 1799—Venice, which has now va
nished from the list of free states, and of which act she reaped so
signally the benefit a few years later, in being, by the aid of the
Pope, enabled to meet the effects of the Berlin and Milan De
crees. It was thus that she provided, at the settlement of 1814-5,
for the full restoration of the State and Possessions of the
Roman See.
Again, when the convulsions of Italy were beginning, and
the Revolutionists, expecting to be favourably looked on "by the
Protestant Governments, applied to the Representative of Prus
sia, they were told (by Mr. Bunsen) that they were “ greatly mis
taken if they thought that the Protestant Powers would favour
“ them because of religious differences with the Catholics.” The
above-stated reason .was then put in precise terms; the Prussian
Secretary of Legation explained why his Government could not
abet proceedings which, whatever the views and intentions of
those immediately engaged, could have no other result save that
of reducing the Pope to a condition of subserviency to some one
of the Catholic Governments, which then would turn his spiritual
supremacy over his flock, to its own advantage, against other
Powers.
The Pope has never sanctioned, or admitted, or employed,
the terms “Temporal power” as applied to his possessions. In
speaking of his sovereignty over the States of the Church, it is
always designated by him as the Civile Imperium, or the Principatus Civilis. (Syllabus, § ix. Errores de civile Romani Pontificis
4
�48
THE (ECUMENIC COUNCIL.
principati, Prop, lxxvi. et seq.) The word 44 Temporal Power,”
in Papal documents, refers to temporal judgments, and to the
effects attaching to excommunication. (Syllabus, § v. De Ecclesia ejusque Juribus Prop. xxiv. xxv. et al.) In fact it applies
to other Governments.
Those who desire to understand have got within their reach
the case of Denmark. There they may study Russia’s mode of
procedure in such matters. There 44 the Powers” combined to
impose a candidate. The internal laws were upset to let him
in. He was Russia’s nominee, yet she held aloof. She is now
mistress of Denmark, with all the advantages of not appearing to
be so. On that occasion the deceptive amphibology prepared for
men’s lips was “ The Integrity of Denmark.”
Who dreamt that there was anything in contemplation
against the Crown of Denmark, even on that morning (11th
May, 1852) when the Treaty was announced in the Times news
paper, although that profound and extensive conspiracy had
been in existence for eighty-five years ? Who has now compre
hended it, with the results before them1? If it be unquestionable
that those who do not anticipate events cannot counteract them,
so is it equally true that those who do not foresee them before
they happen, cannot understand them when they have taken
place. This is no reason for despair ; it is, on the contrary, an
inducement to strive, and in the first instance to study.
No doubt the Pope in the words he has spoken and in the
measures he proposes, offends the Catholic body This is his mis
*
fortune, not his fault. It is also his duty. He has the greatest of ex
amples to guide him, an example which is also a command. That
example is that of Christ. Our Saviour to the then 44 Church”
preached repentance. In the New Testament the words 44 con
vert” and 44 repentance ” are synonymous, so also 44 salvation.”
44 Saving the people from their sins,” is the expression used to
designate the object of the preaching of St. John, yet the sins
of that 44 Church” of Judea did not go to the extent of daily and
wholesale assassinations. St. Paul says of the 44 Christian”
after the crucifixion and ascension and the coming of the Holy
Ghost, 44 He that does not provide for his own household has
* The following words from the Monde show the schism introduced by the Syl
labus, “ Les divisions viennent de ceux qui refusent de comprendre les paroles de
Pie IX. dans le Syllabus : il y a injustice à mettre sur la même ligne avec eux les
Catholiques qui ne se sont pas départis des principes posés dans les Encycliques. Si
la voix du pasteur est écoutée, le camp des Catholiques se fortifiera, et leur action
peut devenir prépondérante. C’est à l’i/mon de VOuest et à la Gazette de France à en
prendre leur parti. Elles se bercent d’illusions si elles s’imaginent guider les Catho
liques, en restant dans leurs doctrines équivoques.
“ Elles croient servir la liberté; mais jusqu’ici elles n’ont servi que la liberté de
leurs adversaires. Ce métier de dupes ne vous va pas, quoique nous ne nous dissi
mulions pas que les Catholiques ne sont pas encore en mesure de faire prévaloir leur
volonté. L’inanité des doctrines modernes ramènera, après une longue expérience, et
s’il plaît à Dieu, les populations à uneyrnZ/i/yae chrétienne.-’
�DIPLOMATIC COLLEGE.
49
“ denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” Yet he
spoke of neglect only, and neglect in reference to things which
had they been done would only have proved useful. With what
feelings would the apostles to-day behold, and in what terms
denounce, that community calling itself Christian 1 A true
successor of those apostles will feel and speak in like manner.
Pius IX. combines qualifications at once so dissimilar and so
eminent, that he appears to have been Providentially raised for
the need of the World, being at once an Ecclesiastic who has
applied his mind to analytical inquiries, and a Sovereign who is
so not in name only, as the other Sovereigns of Europe, but in
power also.
But there is in him not only capacity and qualifications. He has
put his hand to the work ; and that work is rendered by his own
words better than by any Commentary. He has said, “The
“ World is lost in darkness; I have published the Syllabus to be
to it a light, and to lead it back to the road of Truth.” And
again :—“ When the Pope speaks in a solemn act, it is that his
“ words shall be taken in their literal sense ; and that which he
“ has said, he has intended to say.”
Were the Catholic World of the same mind as the Pope, the
work would be done, or rather, it would not require to be clone.
But unfortunately it is not so; his difficulties are with his
own flock, alike incapable of following the thought, and of com
prehending and admiring the courage, displayed on so many
occasions by the greatest Pontiff that has ever sat on the throne
of St. Peter.
6th.
diplomatic college.
The really important point, and on which all hinges, is the
knowledge of what is doing in the world.
The subject is so vast, that to travel over it volumes would be
required. But, fortunately, it is also so simple that it can be
taken in at a glance. It has been thus enunciated by a
Prelate :—“ It must be laid down as the very first point that the
“ Church is ignorant, and that that ignorance must cease.”
There is an immediate and a practical point pressing for
instant solution, and bearing specially on the Church of Rome,
as a Church.
Russia, assuming to be the Eastern Church, aims at the de
struction of the Western Church. It is now at last known
that she has employed revolution as her instrument. It is
D
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DIPLOMATIC COLLEGE.
now by her openly acknowledged that to this end of subverting
the spiritual authority of the Pope, she has thrown Italy into
the hands of the King of Sardinia.
* This (as all the other
troubles and convulsions of Europe and the world) has not been
brought about by the power of Russia acting on circumstances,
but by hei capacity acting on opinion. That capacity consists
in her drawing from without able men wherever they were to be
found, and causing her own men to pass through an elaborate
mid laborious, discipline, such as the nations of Europe them
selves do employ to obtain legists, surgeons, or engineers. If,
then, the Papal Government would defend itself against the
Russian, or even know whether defence be possible and easy, or
difficult and impossible, it must employ the process which Russia
employs, that is, educate men.
Twenty-four years ago this plan was under contemplation by
Gregory XVI., but time was not granted him for its execu
tion. Yet then the belief of universal peace prevailed. They
thought “ that there were to be no more wars.” j- Confidence
in general wisdom prevailed. The year 1848 was still at a
distance.
Nothing is done in the world, but because at some previous
moment day, month, or year—two or three Russian diploma
tists have sate down to devise it, and also because there have
been none to sit down to consider how it could be prevented.
Some private individuals, engaged on the other side, have
prevented much that was in progress. They have prevented
great wars. These things may come out hereafter, in posthumous
memoirs; but they may also be known now to any who will
study. They have delayed, at least, the march of events, so
far as to afford time for the Church of Rome, at last to act.
The Council may take years; and what years are before us !
It suffices for one man of authority in the Roman State to be
informed, for prevention and counteraction to commence. This
is easy beyond expression, for whoever knows what is doing, and
at the same time has access to the saloons of Ministers. It is out
of false measures in each State that Russia works her way.
These come either from delusions that are spread, perfidious
counsels that are offered, falsified news that is presented, or
traitors that are employed. A Papal Nuncio duly informed, or
say a Prelate or a Priest, or a simple Layman, in a position to
be listened to, can rectify such false conclusions, or unmask
The Moscow Gazette says:—“To Russia it is necessary that Italy should be
united; but united she cannot be except at Rome, her natural capital. Is not the
fall of the Temporal Powers the triumph of orthodoxy (the Greek Church) in Rome
itself? Yes, it is in a higher capacity than that of mere spectators that we watch
this culminating point of Italian history.”
t Mr. Stewart Mill.
�DIPLOMATIC COLLEGE.
51
such secret agent. Russia has only the vices of men to use
to the undoing of each particular State. We have the virtues
of men for our allies, and we work for the honour and interest
of each Sovereign and each people, and for the common good
of all.
The repugnance of the Governments of Europe to the forma
tion of Diplomatic men for themselves, has to be well considered,
and perfectly understood, to perceive, how the proposed measure
would affect the world.
No public man, in England, France, Germany, or Italy, will
refuse to admit, if pressed in conversation, the following propo
sitions :—
1. That Russia is more dexterous than any other State.
2. That it is dangerous to allow her to proceed unwatched,
seeing that the affairs of all countries are mixed up together, and
— are conducted in secret.
3. That she cannot be watched, unless by persons cognisant
of her purposes and methods.
4. That it would be very desirable to have a body of men,
chosen and trained, as she chooses and trains her Diplomatists.
If, on these admissions, it be proposed to him to introduce a
measure for the carrying out of such a design, he will decline,
and start back in fear or aversion. The cause of this repugnance
is, that each would consider the mere proposal an offence and an
insult to himself individually, for it implies not only that he had
been wrong, but also that he is ignorant, and unfit for the station
he holds, has held, or aspires to hold. Also that “ public opinion”
has been wrong, and is ignorant. Dread, aversion, and disgust
must therefore be excited by the proposition, proceeding from
a Sovereign who exercises a practical and social influence over a
large number of the subjects of every other State, many of
whom sit in the representative assemblies, in the Senates of those
States, and who approach the Sovereign and share his councils.
These Governments would stand towards such a body exactly
in the position of a society of criminals, or at least of persons
not hitherto under the restraint of police or fear of the law, to
wards a newly introduced court of justice.
.The Law of Nations is not the only law violated by a public
crime, but the municipal law also. In the preceding pages this
branch has not been referred to, but it must be noticed to com
plete the subject.
The Law of Nations requires that war shall be declared only
by the sovereign authority. The municipal law defines the
conditions under which such functions shall be exercised. In
this country the Prerogative of Peace and War, as all other
Prerogatives, can be “ exercised only through the Privy Coun
�52
DIPLOMATIC COLLEGE.
cil.” It .is, indeed, through the evading of this law, and by the
surreptitious substitution of another body, to which also the title
of council has been given (Cabinet Council), that the disorder
has crept in, and that causeless and lawless wars have been
made.
It may therefore so happen that a war may be lawful and
just and necessary as regards the enemy, and nevertheless cri
minal as regards the subjects and the servants of the Crown.
The Pope, in his endeavour to bring back public business to
a normal state, must take this matter into consideration, and lav
down the obligation in nations possessing such institutions,
though neglected now, to restore them.
In doing so he will, as regards England, point to a far more
practical means of prevention than any other, whilst it comes as
supplementary to the rest.
Further, in urging on the nations the adoption of legal and
constitutional means of controling the executives, and thereby
putting an end to the violences which have called for his inter
vention, he will, whilst pointing, out the most feasible means of
obtaining the desired end, prevent much of the hesitation, oppo
sition, or abuse which may be provoked by his act. He will
show that it is not power that he covets, but crime that he
.abhors.
Rome has a Diplomacy and a Diplomatic College already.
Objections and fears are therefore out of place. It is true that
it is not connected with treaties and ordinary transactions, but
with concordats, and confined to the religious aspect. The
basis, however, exists, and is capable of extension. The system
dates from the period which preceded permanent embassies, and
when, therefore, the intercourse of nations took place only when
there was something to do, not when a subsisting intercourse
was converted into the means of giving them something to do.
Diplomacy derives its origin from the Byzantines. The word
.signifies “ duplicate,” and the office was equivalent to what we
now term archivist. It was a record of contracts; it was not the
having of agents reciprocally located in the various courts to
interfere day by day in all affairs.
It is by no means the object of this proposal that the Court of
Rome should involve itself in this odious and maleficent system;
but, on the contrary, that, being cognisant of it, it should frus
trate the deceptions it produces, and counteract the false maxims
.which it propagates, and by which it is suffered to exist.
*
* Prince Adam Czatoryski, formerly Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, says, in his
work, “ La Diplomatie—■“ It passes belief that nations should allow themselves to be
disposed of by a body of men having another conscience and another God, and also
hat they should look thereon, not only without abhorrence and fear, but consider it
tust and proper.” This was written in 1826 !
�CONCLUSION.
53
The “Academia Ecclesiastica ” has a branch entitled “Diplomacia Sacra,” of the nature of the Byzantine College. It is
devoted to the record and study of concordats, and the jurispru
dence thereto belonging. Through it the Nuncios pass, to pre
pare them for their functions. A natural subdivision of this
body would be a college of Secular Diplomacy, the fundamental
and primordial studies of which would necessarily consist of
Jurisprudence and the Law of Nations. This would be the
most simple and natural course, but it is not the only one.
These studies are not special. It is requisite that every man
born into the world—far more every teacher of other men—
should be possessed of them. Duties have reference to circum
stances. Before the epoch of lawless wars, such studies were
not needed, being superfluous ; but they become of the last ne
cessity to every single conscience in an age, when no one knows
what constitutes a lawful war, and when, consequently, unlawful
ones can be made without hindrance or comment.
There is the whole Priesthood to be instructed. There are the
numerous regular Oommunities, with power, devotion, libraries,
and leisure, to be employed. The resources of the Church of
Borne are overwhelming from the moment that it is perceived
that it is by the culture of the intellectual arm that the war is
to be carried on against religious infidelity, social disorganisa
tion, or the plots of those who employ these means and spread
this corruption.
Conclusion.
Danger has come near. It has been seen under its most re
volting and alarming features. The Papal Court must now see
in the destroyer of Poland, the patron of Revolution, and the
mover and the director of all the Governments, of Europe.
But that Cabinet has now itself thrown off the mask and pro
claims its identification with Italian “unity,” not as directed to
subvert (as heretofore put forward) the “temporal,” but also
the “ spiritual ” authority of the Pope. It pretends, at the same
time, to enter the CEcumenic Council; not to enter only, but to
displace from it alike the Pope and the Western Church,
offering its faith and its power for the restoration of religion,
harmony, and political rest in Christendom. Warning cannot
further go, nor provocation.
In respect to courage, that great quality is not wanting.
The Pope has already defied Russia, denounced her, and dis
missed her 1 epresentative. The time must have come for him to
�54
CONCLUSION.
think of devising means to restrain and counteract her. These
have but to be sought to be found. This great power can come
into being only on the condition of perfect knowledge and
of perfect integrity. These may appear beyond the reach, not
of this, but of every age. Still, no more is required than that
which Russia possesses in every one of her Diplomatists, and
all would be achieved with such a man as England recently
possessed in Lord Stowell. Nothing more is wanted than
what could be obtained from a British Court of Justice to-day,
were a case framed so as to be brought before it.
The affairs of States which appear under the present condition
of secret mismanagement and malversation on the part of rulers,
and of confusion as produced by parliamentary discussion and
ephemeral comments in the Press, are in themselves of the
utmost simplicity, and present neither difficulty nor ambiguity
when approached with the knowledge of the law and with
sincerity.
Unless a stop be put to our present course, Christendom, after
passing through long agonies of internecine strife, must pass
under the Muscovite sceptre, and thus reap a just and merited
retribution.
Such are the convictions which inspire with fervour and in
dustry those who do see; and in all times of peril, the fate of
armies, or of nations, or of ages will and must depend on single
men : nor is their station and capacity much to be taken into
account; it suffices that they see where the others do not.
Slaughter on the battle-field, without just cause and due
warrant, is individual murder. This no man can deny when
the case is put to him. The question with which the Church
has now to deal is thus reduced to very narrow limits. It is—
TO DECLARE MURDER TO BE SIN.
On this simple issue depend all the afore-stated sequences.
On the one side, the acceptance of all causes of social degra
dation ; on the other, the reversal of the present course of im
morality, financial dilapidation, political despotism, agitation for
change, rebellion, and apostacy.
If Rome is to restore the law, it is in this fashion that it has
to be done—that is by making individuals upright; in other
words, by making them citizens and gentlemen. Ten just”
men might have saved Sodom and Gomorrah. Ten just men
can save England, by preventing successively each of the acts,
by which she is perishing.
The great compiler of the “Law of Nations” concludes in
these words:—
“ May God (who alone can do it) inscribe these things on the
“ hearts of those who have the affairs of Christendom in their
�CONCLUSION.
55
“ hands, and grant them a mind intelligent of divine and human
“ Right, remembering that it is appointed by Him to govern
“ man, a creature most dear to Himself.”*
Grotius was not a member of the Church of Rome. If
his life was expended on the study of that Public Law then
obscured, and overthrown by religious wars and animosities,
so likewise was his heart given to the composing of religious
strife, and the reconciling of the rival Churches which equally
acknowledge Christ as their head. The Protestant Grotius,
dedicated his work to the Catholic King of France, Louis
XIII. In doing so he appeals to him, in the name of Justice, that
he may “ revive her buried Laws, that he may oppose himself to
“ a declining age, so that it may submit to the judgment of that
£i former age which all Christians acknowledge to have been
“ truly and sincerely Christian : and thus restore peace amongst
“ men. The task,” he says, “ is difficult, but nothing is worthy
“ of such excellent Princes (Louis XIII. and Charles I.)
“ but that which is in itself difficult, and which is even despaired
“ of by all others? ”f
* St. Chrysostom. Serm. de Elemosyna.
f Difficile negotiatium, propter studia partium, glesentibus in dies odiis inflaminata:
sed tantis regebus nihil dignum, nisi quod difficile, nisi quod ab aliis omnibus des
peratum.
�NOTE ON GROTIUS.
*
Note
on
Grotius.
The Bishop of Orleans has recommended the study of
Grotius as an essential part of education. He has added,
as an inducement, that Grotius was about to adhere to
the Church of Rome at the time of his death. This does not
appear from his common biographers. Were it so, the case
would not be altered, as his work was composed whilst he was a
Protestant, and the authority of his writings depend, not on his
religious belief, but on the soundness of his propositions. He
has, moreover, drawn largely, not only from the Sacred Writings,
but also from the early Fathers, whose words are reproduced in
almost every page.
It might have been supposed that the Protestant character of
this writer would have been seized upon by the Bishop of
Orleans, and made use of, to urge his co-religionaries by very
shame to apply themselves to this, the highest and most essential
branch of human knowledge, the foundation of all society, and
the ^handmaid of all religion. It is true that at the time that
B
* ishop
the
of Orleans wrote his treatise on Education the
Syllabus of the Pope had not appeared, and no General Council
had been announced; so that nothing was then in contemplation
by the Church of Rome, as a Church, for the rectification of the
human understanding, or the arrestation of the decay of human
affairs.
THE END.
LONDON:
'UHINTBD BY c. "WHITING, BEAUFORT HOUSE, STRAND
�
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
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
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
Appeal of a Protestant to the Pope to restore the law of nations: reply to six questions on the business for the announced sixth Lateran Council
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 56 p. ; 21 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by G. Whiting, Strand, London. Contains bibliographical references.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Urquhart, David
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1868
Publisher
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Diplomatic Review Office
Subject
The topic of the resource
Catholic Church
Rights
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (Appeal of a Protestant to the Pope to restore the law of nations: reply to six questions on the business for the announced sixth Lateran Council), 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>
Identifier
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G5236
Format
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Catholic Church
Conway Tracts
Foreign Relations
International Law
Protestantism
-
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38dbe1d0ddf6a129c70fe63cdeceec78
PDF Text
Text
A PROPOSAL
FOR THE CONSIDERATION
f'
f
OF THE
FRIENDS OF PROGRESS
BY WM. LOVETT.
London:
Published by JOHN CLEAVE, 1, Shoe Lane,
AND SOLD BY ALL BOOKSELLERS,
Price One Penny,
�A PROPOSAL, &c.
Fellow-Countrymen,
Millions of our brethren, from their ardent desire to
promote such changes, social, political, moral and reli
gious, as they conscientiously believe will remove, or
greatly abridge, the present lamentable amount of po
verty, misery, vice and crime, may justly be considered
friends of progress.
Knowing that vast numbers of those friends are ac
tively engaged in their respective societies, as well as
individually, in forwarding each their peculiar views,
too often midst difficulties and discouragements ending
in disappointment, destructive of future efforts, 1 have
long been desirous of seeing some combined effort
made by which, as I conceive, all the various objects
of reform they are separately in pursuit of may sooner
be realised than can possibly be effected by individual
or isolated effort; while at the same time they are cul
tivating principles of peace, union and brotherhood,
which doubtlessly form the best foundation for social
happiness and national advancement.
To effect any great improvement in this country, po
litically or socially, we have learnt from experience the
great effort that is needed, as well as the amount of
money that must be spent before public opinion can be
formed and concentrated so as to influence our legisla
ture in favour of even one measure of reform, and yet
very many are needed to effect our social and political
salvation.
�3
Owing to this slow and tardy process of reform,
misery, vice and crime are perpetuated; thousands are
born and die in ignorance and vice; and thousands too
often lose health and hope in the continuous and pro
tracted struggle to make men wiser, better and happier
than they found them.
This slow progress for good is evidently to be attri
buted to the great variety of measures advocated by
different bodies of reformers ; to the contentious feelings
too often engendered in their onward progress, and the
consequent difficulty of uniting our brethren in favour
of any one object; and, above all, in the great difficulty
of abrogating old laws, or instituting new ones necessary
to effect or facilitate the reform desired by any parti
cular body of reformers, or portion of the people.
But as all those various classes of reformers are equally
the friends ofprogress, all zealous and desirous of bene
fiting their fellow-men, and, it may be, all equally active
in promoting the especial object they have espoused, it
will be useless to call upon any of them to give up
their particular object in favour of any one measure
that may by some persons be considered more practical
and important than another; for such appeals have
frequently been made, and as often disregarded.
As measures of progress they are all doubtlessly im
portant, if not equally so, and as they are all equally
desirous to check evil and promote good, and, it is pre
sumed, anxious to live to see the realization of some of the
objects they are contending for, the question arises,
whether, upon the Good Samaritan principle, of each
helping his fellow man, they can be brought to unite
the sooner to realize the objects they are severally in pur
suit of, and thus to carry forward simultaneously all
those measures necessary for accomplishing the greatest
good in the shortest possible period.
�4
In reflecting on the difficulties in the way of progress
it has struck me that something might be done to fa
cilitate such a desired object, in the formation of a
General Association of Progress, in which might
be combined all those measures of social and political
reformationfor which societies are established, or mankind
individually are now in pursuit of, as well, indeed, as
any other measure calculated to aid the great cause of
mental, moral, and political progression.
Anxious that something should be done in favour of
some combined effort for the progress of humanity, I
have presumed to address you, as well as to direct your
attention to the following proposal, as an outline ex
planatory of my views on the subject, which may be
improved or altered by any persons disposed to promote
or aid such an undertaking.
Proposal for forming a General Association of
Progress.
Its first object being to unite in one general union of
progress all those who are now separately, or in small
bodies, seeking the attainment of the following political
and social objects. Secondly, to devise some practical
measures for unitedly promoting and realizing such ob
jects in a shorter time than can possibly be done under
present arrangements, and this without interfering in
any way with the internal regulation of any present
association.
Political Objects of Progress.
1st. The Equal and Just Representation of the
whole people.
2nd. The abolition of all State Religion ; and the
right of conscience and opinion secured.
1
�Z
;
5
3rd. The absolute Freedom oe Trade ; and the
abrogation of all custom and excise laws.
4th. The Abolition oe all Taxes ueon Know
ledge, such as the tax and securities on newspapers,
stamps, and advertising duties, taxes on paper, books,
pamphlets, &c.
5th. The General Reduction oe Taxation, and
a more rigid economy of its expenditure.
6th. Direct Taxation on Property, and the abo
lition of all indirect means of raising a revenue.
7th. The Abolition of all Political Monopolies
and unjust Privileges.
8. The Legislative improvement, impartial execution,
and cheapening of Law and Justice for the whole
people.
Social Objects of Progress.
9th. General Education for the whole population,
provided by all, and carried out and enforced by all,
with the least possible government interference.
10th. The promotion of Scientific Institutions,
Schools for Adult Instruction, and Libraries for
general circulation among the whole population.
11th. The Promotion of Temperance, Sobriety,
Cleanliness, and Health, amongst all classes ; and
the securing of places of rational recreation for the
people, apart from intoxicating drinks.
12th. The devising means by which the working
and middle classes may have comfortable Homes,
and be gradually enabled to become Manufacturers,
Traders, or Farmers, on their own capital.
13th. To labour for the general abolition of War,
Slavery and Oppression, and the promotion of
�General Civilization and Christian Brother
hood throughout the world.
Sketch
of the
General Organization.
That any number of individuals uniting, or already
united, to promote any of the above objects may become
members of the association of progress, by complying
with the following conditions :
1. That they be united for one or more of the objects
specified, and be classified, for purposes hereafter
mentioned, one hundred persons in each class.
2. That they individually subscribe 2c?. each towards
a general fund weekly, the same to be collected
by one of their own body, and paid into the
District Bank of the Association.
3. That they signify by resolution that any sum
their class may secure by lot (or otherwise)
shall not be divided or applied otherwise than
for their declared object.
4. That they appoint one of their members to form a
Committee for the [District ; such Committee to
see that the sums collected by the Classes within
the district are paid into the Bank, as well as for
promoting the objects of the Association within
their respective districts.
General Committee.
That each District Committee appoint two members
annually to form the General Committee of the Associa
tion, such Committee to meet in London (or other large
town alternately) for the division and application of the
money thus raised, according to the rules agreed to;
as well as for the promotion of the general objects of
the Association, by all just and peaceful means.
�7
Application of the General Fund.
That the fund so raised be annually divided by the
Committee, into portions of £2000; such portions to
be appropriated by lot (or any other approved means)
among the different classes of the Association, and im
mediately handed over to those who may be so success
ful ; the same to be applied by them in promoting their
declared objects, without any further intervention.
Such is a mere outline of the plan proposed. It will
be seen that I have sought to include under the heads
of political and social reform all those measures which
are now advocated and contended for by different
bodies, as well as others which I deem desirable and ne
cessary, before right, knowledge and happiness can be
effected for our fellow-men.
I have not thought it necessary to enter into the
details of Rules and Regulations, as those can be best
matured by such persons as may be disposed to form
such an association.
As however a mere outline of the plan is set forth, it
may be necessary to explain, that the chief object of
the classification into hundreds is for the appropriation
of the fund raised, as well as to afford facilities for
persons not included in any existing Association to form
a part of the Association of Progress. As, for instance,
100 men, known to each other, may unite for the pur
pose of building themselves comfortable habitations, for
raising means to take a farm, to commence manufac
turing, or trading, or for any social or political object
embraced by the Association, and in this manner may
obtain £2000 capital to commence or forward their un
dertaking ; or if not successful directly in a pecuniary
�sense, they will, by their union, be indirectly benefited
by the reforms they would unitedly be able to effect.
If in this manner the friends of progress were only
combined to the extent of one million, that number,
paying 2d. each per week, would raise money enough to
give £2000 capital to 216 different classes every year.
The mere pecuniary advantages however would be
trifling, compared with the great and paramount object,
A Union of all Friends of Progress, all aiding
each other, in the spirit of Christian Brotherhood, the
better to accomplish the reforms they are anxious to
effect; acting in concert for the promulgation of their
respective views and objects ; seeking to smooth down
those contracted, prejudiced and contentious feelings
which now so much impede the progress of reform;
and uniting hearts and minds to remove the poverty,
misery and oppression of their land, and to extend the
blessings of peace, prosperity, knowledge and happiness
among all the nations of the earth.
That the friends of progress may speedily perceive
the necessity for some such plan of union, is the.sincere
wish of
WM. LOVETT,
Dec. 31st, 1847.
16, South Row, New Road.
PRINTED BY W. M. GURNEY. HIGH STREET, KiNGSDAND.
�
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
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
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
English
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
A proposal for the consideration of the friends of progress
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 8 p. ; 17 cm.
Notes: Printed by W.M. Gurney, High Street, Kingsland. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Lovett, William
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1848]
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
John Cleave
Subject
The topic of the resource
Social reform
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (A proposal for the consideration of the friends of progress), 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>
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G5214
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Church and State
Conway Tracts
Social conditions