[ p. 274 ]
A primitive community is wont to believe in innumerable powers belonging to innumerable objects and places. It fears some of them; it recognizes some of them as friends. They all have mysterious powers. The individual is surrounded by them; the world is full of them. One must not molest them, because one cannot do so safely. The clan gets together and feasts and dances and invites its ancestors to unite with it; there is a general exhilaration and exaltation in being present at such a celebration; something mysterious in the presence of the dead. The clan goes beyond the point of wishing not to molest; it wishes to propitiate. Its members do so by identifying themselves with the ancestors, imitating them in action, wearing their skins, if the ancestors were half animals, acting as tradition says they acted of old. The clan needs food. Getting more food is a mysterious operation; food is an animate volitive thing; it may not want to come. But it can be urged; the vital power of the food is half commanded, half entreated to reproduce itself, to become more. The mental horizon widens; instead of one spirit-power in each grain to be urged, it is observed that all the grains stop growing and die at the same time; so there must be a grain-power in general, which dies when winter comes. Will it revive again? The clan with one accord do what they can to ensure this. The spirit of vegetation must live again. A great one power has arisen where before were many little powers. The year-spirit or vegetation-spirit becomes lord of yearly productivity, [ p. 275 ] Lord of Progeny (Prajapati). But in the meantime, out of a thousand powers, others have become prominent, local powers of hill and storm, the distant sun-power (identified with Prajapati),[1] the fire-power, the waterpower, some generally, others locally important. A pantheon is already in process of formation; it is accepted; there are many gods. But they all have, each in his own domain, the mysterious more-than-human power. "What if all these powers were really the same power, appearing in different manifestations? Some sage of the Rig-Veda (c. 1000 B. C.) first speaks of “the one spirituality of the gods.” It follows (in India) that “all the gods are one,” forms of one power. Elsewhere all the other gods, who are still to be worshipped, are relegated to a place under one greater god and higher powder, a Bel Marduk. Or, again, all other gods and spirits are regarded as foes of one supreme god; hence they must be banished and he alone must be worshipped, Yahweh.
Through these three paths, of inclusion, of subordination, of exclusion, men ascend from their first vague idea of objects as power-possessing and special powerful phenomena to the idea of one great power, who either embraces other powers or rules over them or drives them out.[2] The first beginnings are not, as Durkheim imagines,[3] to be found in the “power exercised by humanity over its members,” that is, in society itself as the first object [ p. 276 ] of religious regard. Man does not begin by revering bis own “collective force objectified,” nor does be, to notice here a more popular error, imagine that each manifestation of power is part of one universal world-potency. The power of waterfall, of priest, of serpent, and of beaver are alike in being awesome, but the power of the beaver is not one with that of the waterfall. The “one spirituality” is predicated of gods; it was never said of the objects of primitive taboo. Mana is power and sundry creatures have power, but no savage ever thought the power of the priest identical with that of the shark. There was no one underlying object of taboo-fear as there was no one divinity, least of all deified humanity.
Of the three paths to supreme godhead the Greeks followed in general that of subordination, but they came to their goal by a more devious route than did the Semites and Hindus, whose gods, subdued in their respective environments, were not very alien to the conquering divinity. Fof the Aryan Greek invaders did not find as foes “noseless niggers,” as the Aryan invaders of India called the natives, but a people of old traditions of culture, who, however, differed from their conquerors in sundry important respects. They represented an older but lover religious stratum. They were matrilinear, did not object to polygamy, worshipped female divinities, lived, in fear of ghosts, and their religious interpreters were largely women. As we have seen in America that there was a subtle connection between women, earth-cult, and serpents, so in pre-civilized (Alyanized) Greece, women and earth-divinities and snakes, which rise as earth-spirits and ghosts of the underground, made a religious unit. It was essentially an earth-cult, with snakes, spirits of fertility, phallic males, reproductive mother-deities, many-breasted Artemis, Hera the cow-goddess, Demeter, mother earth, prolific as her rooting sow, a religion [ p. 277 ] of dark secrets, of ghost and sex and fear and purifications, probably akin to the religion of the early Hebrews in many regards. This is what the Aryan invaders found as they swept down from the North upon these women-ridden natives of the Mediterranean. They set their man-god Zeus of the bright sky over the cowering female divinities and made him the object of worship in all the ghost and grain mysteries, which had hitherto had no god at all or had been under some shadowy spirit. Already head of his own pantheon, Zeus now became head of all the spiritual world, preeminent in power, embodying a higher manly spirit, ethically more advanced than the dark spirits of witchcraft, as sky-father despising earth-spirits and ghosts, as Aryan upholding bravery, fidelity, and truth, guardian genius of domestic and tribal virtue, but related by marriage[4] and diplomacy to the sinister powers of the natives, so that there was nothing spiritual with which he was not concerned; universal because he represented no local shrine, and finally becoming the typically supreme power, “Zeus however called,” or simply The God (“one Zeus, one Hades, one Helios, one Dionysos, One God in all”) or the divine power, “first, middle, last, male and female, the soul of all.” And as in India the abstract power called Enlivener or Energizer became an epithet of the sun god representing what the worshipper desired, so the Greeks made Zeus take the place of some of these personified desires, that appeared at first as the shadowy forms above mentioned, such as the appeaser, Meilichios, who presided over the ghost-appeasing ritual in the form of a serpent (just as Zeus also replaced the old animal god, the Bull). These gods of personified desires serve too to strengthen the unification of gods. Nay, they may even become of themselves supreme, as in the case of the [ p. 278 ] Nahuan king who sorrowed and cried, “There mast be some god to comfort me,” and thus conceived of one supreme god as the Comforter, whom he called the Unknown God. But philosophy is less emotional than logical and here we have to remember that other American trend to monotheism made by the Inca who reasoned out God from the fact that his native supreme god, the sun, acted as a servant on a daily task, like an arrow shot from a how; hence (he said) there must be a still more supreme god, who sends forth the servant, shoots the arrow.
In an these approaches to unity in the godhead the ethical goes hand in hand with the philosophic or ideal. A god, to be supreme, must be the head of an organized system, not only of spirits but of ethics; he cannot rule an unorganized mob of disorderly spirits. Such creatures are the Rakshasas (demons) with whom he is at strife till they are subdued. His own court must follow recognized rules of conflict; he must, in a word, represent moral order. Hence we see on occasion Order itself, physical and moral, personified as Supreme Power, as in Rita (ritus and Eight) or, as in China, Heaven personifies both the right order of seasons and the right order of conduct of men. In this reconstruction the head-god of the Greeks had the advantage of being already a general god (of the invaders) not a local outgrowth of any one city or clan, so that the social advance which he represented was spread all over Greece. Yet even so the Greek idea of Fate tended to reduce the idea of God. But in fact, as Greek religion never succeeded entirely in freeing itself from the under-world or in freeing its gods from their passions, the monotheistic idea did not descend below the poets and philosophers. For the general public, the ethical result may be summed up by saying that religion here was raised higher, became more noble, made [ p. 279 ] for a wider fellow feeling, and introduced the idea of one supreme moral power as governing the world.[5]
In India, the first monotheistic trend did not pursue the process of elevating the sun or any other natural phenomenon to supreme place; that course led to pantheism. Bather it argued out first a creative power, then took that power as head of the pantheon, and finally recognized it as the Supreme God, to whom other gods were mere underling spirits. Probably, in all these eases, the idea of a dominant god went together with a more developed social state, as is the case even among African savages. So, as the Hindus raised a great empire, the rule of the head-god became more imperialistic. The gods even earlier were arranged in castes, but the notion of a Father god, whose children were all other gods and all beings besides, took the firmest hold. Despite the advancing growth of the pantheistic conception, despite the atheistic attitude of Buddhism, this faith was never destroyed, though it had its inception in philosophy and has drawn its strength from philosophic theologians.
But a monotheistic trend is still not monotheism. A host of lesser gods still survives even when their powers have been curtailed. The gods that endure must fill a lasting want and the lowest gods remain only for a time or only in the lo-west intellectual strata. Stones and trees and animals and disease-devils do not satisfy the growing needs of man. It is not necessary for a supreme god to destroy them; they are discarded for their insufficiency or linger only among the ungrowing part of the population. Gods of the higher phenomena are capable of more expansion and they remain longer, though always subject to the higher thought of which they are the reflection. Consequently in the end they are greatly modified. The [ p. 280 ] gods thus elevated arrange themselves gradually into groups reflecting the mental and social state of their worshippers. To the restricted outlook of the savage, local gods, rivers, forests, mountains, and ghosts are vastly more important than the heavenly gods, sky, sun, or moon. Each village has its own tutelary divinity, who may, as ghost, become a general god; but despite this, as compared with ghosts, the phenomena of nature make the chief gods, as in America, both North, and South, and in Africa. With a broader interpretation, such natural phenomena were also worshipped by the Aryans; even Zoroaster fought a vain fight against them. On the Semitic side, in Babylon and Assyria, sun, moon, storm, water, earth, hold the most conspicuous position and the same thing may be said of the Western Semites, to whom the spirits of storm and fertility, of sun and moon, especially appealed. In China, given over though it was to the worship of ancestral spirits, sky, sun, moon, hills, and streams were all objects of devout worship.
All this was intimately connected with the fact that men select their gods according to their needs. Tillers and hunters have different ends in view; rain and sun become of prime importance to the agriculturist; they may be ignored by the hunter but not by the farmer. Even ghosts become spirits of vegetation. Thus the nature-gods become an aristocracy; others remain what they were, low-caste demons. But as these demons are revered only by the lowly; so too with even the higher gods; their turn to fall comes as surely as that of the lower spirits. For man, as he rises, lets fall the gods he cannot’ raise with him. The twin Dioscuroi live a long time, but at last the Gemini exist only in “Jimminy”; as great Jove himself exists today only in a meaningless exclamation. Such gods may disappear before or, as names, may survive the natural expiration of their lives. The god [ p. 281 ] of a month will vanish with a changing chronology. In India, special gods lived only as month-gods. But, on the other hand, each month and each day was ascribed to a god in Egypt. The Zoroastrians named each month and day after saintly Yazatas, just as our Church has its days of favored saints. This process conserves many spirits and saints who would otherwise have been forgotten. The favored ones make a band of the élite. Similarly, the great natural phenomena, as gods, tend to fall into special groups of élite spirits, who act as court-attendants of the greatest god.
Monotheism : The trend toward monotheism is always found in some such environment as this, where a number of superior powers has already established itself as a select circle of high gods and it is not to be expected that any one god can, easily down other gods who have become exalted because of their efficient aid to man. The approach to monotheism is long and gradual; primitive monotheism is a modern dream. Even in present Christian and Mohammedan and Zoroastrian monotheism, popular belief has remained impregnated with a very vital polytheism. Christian Greeks still believe in the Fates and the Nereids; the Kelts have not quite renounced the old mythology of those now called fairies, brownies, dwarfs, and banshees; magic rites, implying belief in spiritual powers, the evil eye, and other remnants of an older general faith, still survive in a so called monotheistic religion.[6]
Even monolatry, which must be carefully distinguished from monotheism, was not reached without long divagations. [ p. 282 ] The Hebrews as a people were reluctant to worship one god exclusively and it never even occurred to them. that there were no other gods than their own. They perpetually reverted to the polytheistic attitude. Chemosh of the Moabites was to the Israelites as real as Yahweh (Judges 11:23-24), though they did not worship Chemosh; but they gladly worshipped Tammuz and other gods, despite the prophets. The Syrians believed in Yahweh also (“their god is a god of the hills,” I Kings 20: 23). A god was local; “thy god shall be my god; whither thou goest I will go.” One advance made, perhaps perforce, by the Israelites was in thinking that their god went with them through the desert; he was not after all a god of the hills solely; Sinai could not contain him. But, just as the gods that were worshipped before Buddha became ministering angels to him, just as Ormuzd retained earlier gods as spirits and angels under him, so the cherubim and seraphim, the dragon, the leviathan and the teraphim remained as final forms of ancient powers. The women who wept for Tammuz and the men who worshipped the sun were following strange gods, but the cherubim and teraphim (ghosts) were spiritual powers of the Israelites’ own past.
The Exile freed Yahweh as much as it enslaved the people; he became a god without bounds and hence without bonds. A wider horizon opened before his worshippers, whose intense if rather narrow patriotism of religion had refused to see in him a spiritual power greater than their country. Before this it had been a startling new thought that Yahweh was not necessarily bound to Israel (Amos 9:7) and it was the more startling because it was based on ethical considerations. Yahweh had always fostered ethical religion, even when he was himself a god of dubious morality according to the later norm, and he represented a great ethical advance over the gods [ p. 283 ] with whom he would have no dealings. He even preferred a pure heart to sacrifice. As he had shown mercy to his people, so he desired from them mercy and not sacrifice. The individual if righteous was now supported by Yahweh even against the State. Patriotism and religion were no longer coterminous. Thus arose gradually the figure of a god supreme over other gods, greater than any country, whose ethical demands were as cogent as his spiritual power. Prom then on there was but one god for the Israelites, one ethical, spiritual, supreme power in the world, one moral governor of the universe.
Yahweh becomes first of all the national god of Israel by a covenant, on account of which he helps his chosen people. It is not important whether he was introduced by Moses, whether he was a Kenite god of storm or hill or moon or plant; he was his people’s shield, their war-god, their savior; a person, dear to, but distinct from, his worshippers. Such a god cannot be conceived otherwise than as a person; he appeals to the people as an individuality. The worshipper feels that in fighting for him, he is fighting for a living god as well as for his country, for his home, for its sanctities; and, conversely, in fighting for all that he holds dear, he is fighting for God, a personal objective reality.
The Semites were not an imaginative race. They did not even deify the abstract powers so common in Greece and India; they had no such goddesses as the Hindus’ Goodness, Justice, Modesty, Strength, Concord, Beauty; they did not create a god called Power; they did not deify the Word or Speech.[7] Instead of creating thus a band of subordinate spirits, they spoke of Yahweh’s own spirits and ascribed abstract virtues to Yahweh; he was [ p. 284 ] Goodness and Justice; Wisdom was his spirit. According to later standards Yahweh is deficient. In the pre-prophetic period he is cruel, capricious; delights in blood and slaughter; sides with Jacob in deceiving Jacob’s father-in-law; himself deceives Ahab; inculcates a belief in witches, ordeals, etc. From the standard of today he has been described as a being “of limited intelligence animated by the same passions as the people themselves.”[8] Finally, Yahweh is the creator of darkness and evil (Isaiah 45: 7). The Mohammedan Allah inherits the position of Yahweh, or rather is Yahweh modified by a new environment; merciful, but judge rather than father, jealous rather than generous.
In other forms of attempted monotheism, polytheism survives, as in India and Egypt; or a practical ethical monotheism, like that of Zoroaster, is so rooted in polytheism that it ends by embracing many gods; or the attempt, as in Taoism, falls far short of accomplishment. In Greece, a moral philosophy gradually developed apart from the gods. The Hebrews alone united ethics, religion, and an anti-polytheistic philosophy. They kept on their course till they ended as ethical monotheists and as they advanced the character of Yahweh was purged of its defects, till the image of a pure ethical divinity emerged. He became not the only spirit, for angels are recognized in both Testaments and Satan still rages in the minds of many, but the only God. The system of religious philosophy thus expressed fails to harmonize the different aspects of the world into a unitary whole, but practically it is the only one which can appeal to the mass of people, partly because the antithesis of spirit and matter is easier to understand than their identity, partly because it is optimistic, partly because an active Power working in an intelligent manner seems to imply personal intelligence, [ p. 285 ] and partly because the emotions have a great deal to do with religion and an impersonal immanent Power is not one easily to be appealed to, as is a personal objective God, to whom one in trouble can turn for comfort and aid as “a very present help.”
Dualism: Hebrew monotheism is dualistic. God creates the world as he creates evil, but the two creations are not one with him. At the root of this view lies the old antithesis between matter and spirit, between good and evil. All religions as religions and not as philosophies are dualistic in the same way. Savages recognize a principle of evil opposed to a principle or god of good, as they recognize, that light is different from darkness. A. god is outside of his creation as a carpenter i,s separate from his car; a good god is not at the same time a bad god. He may seem to be capricious, but in that case he is not understood or is regarded as not quite good. A number of natural antitheses lead to dualistic conceptions of the universe, such as the difference between the sexes, on which a whole system of philosophy has been established in China; but the distinction most widely emphasized is not between male and female, or between soul 'and body,. or spirit and matter, but between good and evil. In the end, the good becomes the god, the daur becomes the devil. This contrast was united in Yoga philosophy with the antithesis between spirit and matter: spirit is changeless, male, good; matter is ever-changing, female, evil; varium et mutabile semper femina (‘matter’ is female); also, as in other Hindu systems, there is an antithesis of light and dark (in the Upanishads God is the great Light of the World). The Hebrews were content to let the problem stand as tradition had explained it; God created the world out of nothing; he creates darkness and evil; he is Lord of all, even of Sheol. But to the mind of Zoroaster the world ranged itself into two great camps [ p. 286 ] of warring Minds, the Evil Mind opposing the Good Mind, each with its own armies of spirits and separate creations. It is doubtful whether Zoroaster himself ever imagined that these two were forms of one (as the later system taught); but his religion was optimistic; he believed that in the end the Good Mind would overthrow the Evil Mind, and that Evil Mind himself with the rest of e%Tl would be finally overcome, a conception still lingering in Christianity, which is perhaps indebted to Zoroaster for its later conception of the Evil One, as well as for one or more of its greater angels, who were originally both male and female. Zoroastrianism then, though dualistic, was essentially a monotheism, teaching the existence of one supreme moral ruler of the universe, albeit the path trod by this god was one of long contest both with the powers of evil and with the supposed friends of the Good Mind, w^ho were really enemies in disguise; for all the polytheistic nature-powers who fought for the Good Mind were at bottom insidious foes, undermining the belief in one god with recrudescent belief in old Aryan divinities.
A more thoroughgoing dualistic religion is that of the above-mentioned Yoga in its earlier form as Shankhya philosophy. Here mind is an evolved form of matter, which is eternal and eternally opposed to spirit, or rather to innumerable spirits. It is the object of the Yogi to attain salvation by freeing himself from the bonds of matter through various devices of concentration and trance-producing states of aloofness, till he attains absolute “apartness” from all material taints. In its later development the Shankhya admitted the existence of one greatest spirit called Lord, whose spirituality was utilized as helpful rather than necessary, a sort of model of what a spirit might become rather than a god from which it came. The present Jain religion in India, which is [ p. 287 ] atheistic, conserves the older Shankhya view and its devotion is paid not to a god but to superior saints or embodied spirits of the past who have been teachers of men. Such teachers are also revered in Buddhism, but not with the understanding that there was an immortal soul or spirit in any one of them. In the Jain dualism there are spirits, eternal entities, eternal matter, and also mysterious principles of Eight and Wrong, wMeh are conceived as interpenetrating powers apparently eternal. None of these systems attempted to do away with polytheism; but the gods were interpreted as angels or demoniac powers of a lower order and were practically ignored as beings of no importance.
Pantheism: Philosophy is an expression of the “aspiration after a knowledge of an all-including unity” and as such originates in religion. Derived from the same polytheistic environment as monotheism but embracing, instead of discarding, other gods, pantheism starts with the unification of the spiritual world and then derives from it the material world. Prajapati, the terminus of Vedic thought as non-phenomenal supreme ruler, represented by time, by the year, but above all by the figure of a father-god, does not exactly create the world; but he becomes the world; he transforms himself into it. So in more advanced thought, the universe does not become God; God becomes the universe. It makes a notable difference, for if God be one with the universe he is no more intelligent or spiritual than is matter of which the universe is made. But if the universe be one with God, then it too is intelligent, divine. Philosophers in India, working on two theses, maintained both that matter was not really existent, a pure idealism (the All-Soul being without attributes) and that the world was actual as was the Highest Soul, a being superior to the individual soul. This highest soul became practically God in a theistic [ p. 288 ] sense, a supreme Power, not without attributes, to whom the faithful soul will go at death, enjoying pure bliss in the presence of the Lord God.[9] In either case, the religious element consists in the recognition of a spiritual environment, with which man feels himself identified, either entirely one with it or in closest union without absolute identification. The ethical standard of one who argues that Brahma or the Ail-Soul, being without attributes, is unmoral, is not based on imitation of any divine model but on knowledge. Through knowledge that man is one with God man rises above the distinction of good and evil, even as to God, the All-Soul, there is no such distinction; yet in the knowledge that all souls are one with himself every man is withheld from injuring others, since no man will injure himself. Knowing the true Soul of the World man cannot sin, as God cannot sin; “whoever is born of God sinneth not.”
In Greece, Xenophanes taught that “all is one” and the One is divine; his pupil, Parmenides, that being and thought are one. But, except for originating the idea of One God (which is how the poet and religious teacher interpret the God One), the views of Greek pantheists had no effect on religion apart from cultured circles, until the Stoics taught the immanence of God and, finally, Plotinus carried out Neoplatonic thought and invented his mystic monism. Many of the earlier expressions may be interpreted as monotheistic (see above) rather than pantheistic, as is true also of the so-called pantheism of Egypt.
One might imagine that an impersonal spiritual power, such as that conceived in the pure monism of the Vedanta, [ p. 289 ] would be lacking in religious qualifications, but it would be quite wrong to belittle the deep religious satisfaction which the philosopher draws from bis “knowledge” that the All-Soul (Atman as Brahma) is to be found in bis own self. As is said in the Upanishad: “Let all the world be sunk in God, all that exists upon the earth. Who all renounces winneth all. This Soul of All is far away, yet near at band; ’tis there, ’tis here. In every creature God abides. But be who in his very self sees God, and sees himself in God, who knows that God is all in all, be has no fear, naught troubles him. One with his God is be indeed, who knows the unity of all. What fear of death, what grief is bis, who is himself th’ immortal God I” “Knowledge” here and in the Upanishad religion generally is always the mystic rapt realization of oneness with God as the All-Soul or cosmic consciousness.
So much for the sage. But often for the ordinary man something more, or, as the sage would say, something less, is needed than an impersonal All-Soul. He demands, as has been said, a person who sympathizes, to whom he can make appeal.[10] This person he finds in the active God of the monotheist and pantheist alike. But both interpretations are philosophically awkward; the monotheistic, because God has to be regarded both as the unqualified Absolute and as the active sympathetic Father Creator; the pantheistic, because, in the end, God in this form is merely a form, docetic, not the Be-all of the universe.
Yet from a religious point of view both the Christian monotheist and the Vedanta pantheist have as a practical [ p. 290 ] object of belief a personal supreme moral governor of the universe, God. And more. Both monotheist and pantheist recognize that Absolute Divinity may assume a third form, not that of the Absolute, not that of the Supreme God, but that of the still more sympathetic divine man, Vishnu as incarnate in Krishna, and “I and my Father are one.” Moreover, as the atheistic philosophy of Buddhism gradually changed till it converted Buddha himself into divinity and at the same time recognized that an Absolute must lie behind phenomena, this religion also became an advocate of the view that the divine manifests itself in three ways.
But before discussing this subject in detail it will be advisable to say a few words in regard to the general religious significance of the triad.
Prajapati (the name contains the elements of progenies and despot, house-lord) is an abstraction but identified with sun and with year as productive power. ↩︎
The Hebrew Yahweh ousted other gods and spirits by defeating local tribal deities (the gods subdued are not as in India phenomenal of the same tribe), but at the same time he adopted their ritual and shrines and functions, so that it was a process of conquering but at the same time of absorption, especially in the case of demoniac possession, etc., where Yahweh acted as the earlier spirits had done, sending disease, inspiring men, etc. See L. B. Paton, Spiritism, p. 260. ↩︎
Durkhheim, op. cit., pp. 347, 363, 411. ↩︎
Hera, his spouse, was one of the chief female divinities of the natives. ↩︎
Compare Gilbert Marraj, Four Stages of Greek Religion (1912), and Clifford H. Moore, The Religion Thought of the Greeks (1916). ↩︎
Compare J. C. Campbell, Highland Superstitions, Witchcraft, and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Even the Buddhists had a cult of the dead. The early Hebrews worshipped the dead as ‘gods’ of a sort; tombs were shrines and refuges, where prayer and sacrifice were offered till Yahweh appropriated these still sacred places and made them holy to himself. ↩︎
Sanskrit Vac (Latin vox), deified in the Rig-Veda as a mighty spiritual power, was regarded by Weber as having influenced the Logos conception, but this view is now discarded. ↩︎
Professor A. H. Keane, in the Hibbert Journal, October, 1905. ↩︎
On the other hand, in the monistic Vedanta system, Brahma is not a being, but being; not an intelligent being, but intelligence. See below, on the Hindu Trinity. Pantheism was also a late outgrowth of Buddhism and of Chinese philosophy. ↩︎
This is not always the case. In Pericles’s great speech there is not a word of “religions consolation” only an intense patriotism, a devotion to an ideal rather than to an idol or a god, and the consolation that one has lived np to that ideal. But the speaker (or writer) was not an ordinary man. ↩︎