| LECTURE. V. MORAL AFFINITY NEEDFUL FOR THE KNOWLEDGE OF A PERSON | Title page | LECTURE VII. RELIGION IN PRE-CHRISTIAN HISTORY |
[ p. 138 ]
IT is natural that, in proportion to the strength of our belief in a Personal God, we should expect that He would reveal Himself to man; not merely to a favoured few, but to the human race as such. For the desire of self-communication is,’as we have seen, an essential function of our own personality; it is part of what we mean by the word; and we cannot conceive a Person freely creating persons, except with a view to hold intercourse with them when created. So necessary, indeed, is this deduction that, unless it were justified by historic facts, a strong presumption would be created against the truth of the belief from which it flows. Yet there can be no question that, on appealing to history, we do not at first sight find this expectation at all adequately met. Hence the importance of bearing in mind the many serious limitations under which, as we have seen above, any revelation must be made. For men often seem to anticipate too much, and for that very reason [ p. 139 ] to find too little evidence of a divine revelation in history. Our analysis of the nature of personality certainly leads us to expect, that God will reveal Himself as personal to every created person. But all that this expectation can ‘possibly involve is an ultimate revelation. It carries with it no further idea of how or when, of time or method. And inasmuch as our belief in God is intimately bound up with a belief in immortality, we have no shadow of a reason, a priori, for limiting His revelation to this world. Life on earth may be to many but an infant-school; and the savage may be called to leave it with no calculable progress made, no visible result attained; and yet with much inner preparation for the stage which is to come, even if it be confined to the bitter negative induction, ‘by the means of the evil that good is the best.’ If the end of education is fitness for fellowship with God, there is nothing surprising in the slowness ofits pace. For the two great obstacles to all improvement of character are indolence and impatience, and a premature degree of revelation would minister to both—by giving men more than their conduct as yet entitled them to ask, or their capacities as yet enabled them to use. We have already seen how many conditions, qualifications, limitations, hindrances modify the spiritual insight of all ordinary minds, even when in the presence of the holiest traditions, and under the influence of [ p. 140 ] the highest moral code. It should be no cause for surprise, therefore, that the signs of such insight grow more rare, as we travel back into the remoter regions of the past. And yet without insight revelation is impossible; for the fruition must presuppose the faculty.
While, then, we naturally anticipate some kind of universal revelation, we have no reason to be disconcerted, on finding that its evidence is less clear, or less abundant than we might have previously supposed. But, on the other hand, we must not for a moment allow the opponents of revelation to beg the question, by interpreting history upon an irreligious hypothesis, and thus neutralizing from the outset all the evidence that may exist. It is not unnatural that the collectors of religious phenomena—the religious archaeologists and antiquarians, the founders and frequenters of museums of comparative religion—should describe the facts which they discover from a purely external or scientific point of view: but we must remember that such description, in proportion as it becomes habitual, indisposes us to recognize a divine counterpart to human creeds ; and thus requires a continual correction of its bias. For only the religious can legitimately estimate religion. And the religions of the past can never be rightly understood, except in the light of the religion of the present. Faith and conscience must be known as they now are, [ p. 141 ] before their earlier manifestations can be recognized. We are often, indeed, warned against the fallacy of reading modern ideas into bygone ages; and the warning has its value. But it is equally fallacious to suppose that we can isolate the past, and study it without assistance from the present. For there are no such things as isolated facts. The simplest fact of observation is, as we have already seen, partly created by the observer’s mind; and the more complex a fact becomes, the more elaborate is its intellectual setting. Now, the facts of the far past, that have come down to us, are like fragments that have dropped out of their context; and to understand them properly we must reconstruct their context by an imaginative effort, in which analogies drawn from the present are our inevitable guides. In cases which do not admit of controversy this process often goes on unnoticed—as when we find a flint arrow-head, and immediately infer its purpose, and its author’s habits. But in controverted questions it sometimes seems to be assumed that we can avoid the operation altogether, whereas all that we can really do is to be accurate and heedful in its performance—discriminating the element of fact from the element of imagination, and taking care that facts shall not be first coloured by a theory, and then employed as evidence of its truth. The real danger lies, not in reading our own presuppositions into history, but in doing so without [ p. 142 ] being aware of it, and without calling attention to the fact, so that due critical precautions may be observed. When, for instance, we find it stated, as the result of a comparison of religions, that all religion is a human invention and therefore equally false, or that all religion is equally inspired and therefore equally true, or that the inspiration of one is emphasized by the conspicuous falsehood of the remainder, such extreme generalizations are obviously due to the unguarded prepossessions of their authors. The facts have been unduly qualified by the views which they are subsequently used to justify.
Now, the science of religions is at present in the position of all young sciences. Its accumulated phenomena are numerous and at the same time vastly incomplete ; while the interpretations of them are various and, in the words of a high authority, speaking of one section only, ‘so fundamentally opposed to each other that it seems impossible at present to take up a safe and well-founded position with regard to them[1].’
The Theist, then, is entitled to approach religious history with an initial presumption, provided that he do so with care. He believes in a Personal God; and the need of self-communication is part of what he means by personality. He believes that persons were created that God might hold [ p. 143 ] intercourse with them and they with Him; prayer and its answer being two sides of one spiritual fact. Consequently, he expects to find religion universal, from the time that man first was man ; and assumes that wherever its human manifestations occur, their divine counterpart must have been present also. This belief does not rest upon history, but upon his analysis of his own personality and religious experience ; and he brings it with him, not as a disguised induction, but as an antecedent expectation, to the study of historical facts.
And here we are met at once by the supposed objection to religion which is drawn from the antiquity of man. The picture of man’s slow evolution is by this time too familiar, and has been too often drawn to need repetition. Geology finds him existing at a date immensely earlier than had once been supposed ; and though this date can only be relatively determined, its distance from the dawn of history would seem, on the most moderate computation, to have far exceeded that from the dawn of history to the present day. Further, he existed during this long prehistoric period in a rude and uncivilized condition, as regards his method and appliances of life. Biology has added the conjecture that his physical frame, at least, was developed from some lower animal form ; and this, if true, as on the evidence seems to be extremely probable, would almost necessitate a still earlier date for his [ p. 144 ] first appearance than we might otherwise have been disposed to accept. Now, there is no question but that a strong atheistic presumption is created in many minds by this spectacle of the long savagery of man. The religious world has long been accustomed to the existence of irreligion on its outskirts, and is not seriously perplexed by the fact. For, at any rate, the immense mass of mankind, throughout the whole historic period, have been within the reach of religious influence. Egypt, Babylon, China and the great Indo-European family have all possessed sufficient religion to justify the theistic belief that, amid multitudinous human errors, God left not Himself without witness. And, in comparison with these great races, the scattered savage tribes, who have seemed to know no God, are relatively insignificant in their effect upon the imagination. Their state has been accounted for by gradual moral degradation; and though the religious mind has been distressed by it, it has not been overwhelmed. But when the whole proportion and scale of these things is suddenly transformed, and savagery, instead of representing the mere fringe of failure round human progress, is represented as the normal condition of our race, during far the greater part of its existence, the result is a stupendous shock to all our preconceived ideas. It is plausibly urged that those, who were no more civilized than modern savages, can have possessed no better [ p. 145 ] mortality or religious belief; and the question forces itself upon us with importunate insistence, ‘Can a race that has been left for such limitless ages to itself really have been the object of divine solicitude the while?’ Even the survey of religious development within the historic period has prompted a Christian writer to ask, ‘On the hypothesis that God had a gracious thought in His heart towards the human race… how can we imagine Him going about the execution of His plan for the good of humanity with such wearisome deliberation ?.. Is not the slow process too coldblooded, so to speak, for the warm temperament of grace?.. Is the slowness of the evolution not a proof that the alleged purpose is not a reality?[2]’ And such obstinate questionings come over us with a thousandfold intensity as we gaze down the long vista of the prehistoric ages. They do not really constitute any logical difficulty; but they raise an imaginative presumption of considerable weight and force, which leads many minds to approach the history of religion with a strong anti-theistic predisposition.
Now, we must remember that the facts in question are for the most part absolutely neutral, while such positive indications as they give point rather in a religious direction. They are thus summarized by a popular writer whose bias is distinctly untheological[3] : [ p. 146 ] ‘As regards religious ideas they can only be inferred from the relics buried with the dead, and these are scarce and uncertain for the earlier periods… . All we can say is that from the commencement of the Neolithic period downwards there is abundant proof that man had ideas of a future state of existence very similar to those of most of the savage tribes of the present day. Such proof is wanting for the immensely longer Palaeolithic period, and we are left to conjecture.’ Moreover, prehistoric man was not precisely in the same situation as the modern savage. There is all the difference between them of first and second childhood. The one represents the remnant of humanity that has failed to progress; the other must have contained in himself the germ of all the progressive peoples. Even the implements and weapons, which with the one are archaic survivals, must have been original inventions with the other. The similarity of their external condition need not, therefore, indicate too close a similarity of capacity and character. A man may have high thoughts amidst very low surroundings; and the most meditative nations have not always been the most progressive—as witness ‘the stationary East.’ If, therefore, we believe, as we do, that a divine influence is distinctly traceable throughout the historic period, there is nothing whatever to suggest its [ p. 147 ] absence from the prehistoric races, and the presumption is in its favour. ‘It matters little, as M. Reville well says, ‘that the dawn of the religious sentiment in the human soul may have been associated with simple and rude notions of the world and of the object of faith. The point of departure is fixed and the journey begins. In substance it comes to precisely the same thing to say, God revealed Himself in the beginning to man as soon as man had reached a certain stage in his psychic development, as to say Man was so constituted that, arrived at a certain stage in his psychic development, he must become sensible of the reality of the divine influence. In this sense…we would accept the idea of a primitive revelation [4].’
Thus the picture of man’s long infancy, which science has unrolled, in no way affects the reality of religion. It may modify our view of the method which God has pursued in His intercourse with men; but it contains nothing to shake our belief in the probability of that intercourse. And there is no need to be alarmed at what turns out, upon examination, to be no necessary verdict of facts, but only the old atheistic hypothesis read again into the new facts, without logical justification of any sort or form.
On passing from the prehistoric to the earliest historic ages, we are at once met by the broad distinction between cultus and mythology—that is [ p. 148 ] to say, between ceremonies, institutions, usages, ritual observances on the one hand, and the reasons given for them, their intellectual explanation or justification on the other—what we should now call religious practice and religious belief. Recent research has paid special attention to the former of these two elements of ancient religion —the ceremonial, or customary—as being older than most recorded mythology, more popular in extent and origin, more persistently tenacious of life, and calculated, therefore, to throw more light upon the spiritual condition of the early world. Indeed this priority of custom to creed has been utilized by a recent German writer[5] in the service of a theory which would explain away religion, by representing it as an artificial endeavour to account for what at first was irrational habit. But the fact that the reasons assigned for an ancient custom are mutually inconsistent, and in some cases demonstrably untrue, is no proof whatever that the custom in question had no original reason at all. Habits may become irrational or instinctive, but they can hardly begin by being so; nor can any number of habits which have no religious foundation possibly originate religious ideas, And accordingly the theory in question has to fall back for further support upon the old notion that religion was at first an artificial invention; but this is only a survival [ p. 149 ] of those obsolete views of the last century, which regarded society in all its forms as artificial, and which modern historic science has discredited for ever. Such a paradox, therefore, however ingeniously defended, is not likely in the present day to do much harm; while it may be of some use in drawing attention to the basis of fact upon which it rests—the extreme importance of ritual conduct in early society. For instance, there was the worldwide institution of sacrifice, whether viewed as a feast of fellowship and communion between gods and men, or as a tribute, a propitiation, an atonement. There were annual and seasonal festivals, whose customs of long-forgotten meaning linger on into the world to-day. There were agricultural and pastoral sacraments connected with the firstfruits of the field or flock, the sources of many a surviving rustic superstition and quaint provincial phrase. Then there were all the observances attendant upon birth and death; ceremonies of initiation on adolescence; marriage customs; funeral rites; fastings, flagellations, penances ; scrupulous systems of taboo ; the solemnities of the kindling of fire, of the drawing of water, of the felling of trees. These and other occasions and actions, too many and various to enumerate, were matters of ritual regulation, in which time, place, condition of body, posture, gesture, language, dress were minutely and carefully prescribed. Much of this customary religion, [ p. 150 ] of course, coincides with historic periods; but its prevalence can be inferred from early literature and folk-lore far beyond the horizon of recorded history. It has all the marks of immemorial age about it, and may well have dated from primeval man.
‘Political institutions are older than political theories, and in like manner religious institutions are older than religious theories . … ritual and practical usage were, strictly speaking, the sum total of ancient religions. Religion in primitive times was not a system of belief with practical applications; it was a body of fixed traditional practices to which every member of society conformed as’a matter of course. … A man was born into a fixed relation to certain gods as surely as he was born into relation to his fellow-men ; and his religion—that is, the part of conduct which was determined by his relation to the gods—was simply one side of the general scheme of conduct prescribed for him by his position as a member of society. There was no separation between the sphere of religious and of ordinary life. Every social act had-a reference to the gods as well as to men, for the social body was not made up of men only, but of gods and men:…in every region of the world, as soon as we find a nation or tribe emerging from prehistoric darkness into the light of authentic history we find also that its religion [ p. 151 ] conforms to the general type which has just been indicated [6].’
What was the dominant tone of this early religion? ‘The severe aspect of natural religion,’ says Dr. Newman, in a well-known place, ‘is the most prominent aspect.’ It is not ‘a satisfaction or refuge, but a terror and a superstition.’ ‘Its large and deep foundation is the sense of sin and guilt.’ And again, ‘wherever religion exists in a popular shape, it has almost invariably worn its dark side outwards[7].’ This view, for which Lucretius is continually quoted —Lucretius, the avowed enemy of all religion—is without doubt an overstatement of the case. And Professor Robertson Smith is as much in accordance with the facts as we now know them when he says, ‘The identity of religious occasions and festal seasons may be taken as the determining characteristic of the type of ancient religion generally [8].’ But the whole situation is best described by M. Reville: ‘Let us never forget,’ he says, ‘that whatever might be the notion which he formed in his own mind of the divinity, man has always experienced and cherished a special sense of comfort in being in normal relation with it, and that even when this divinity presented itself to him under terrifying aspects. … In the religious sentiment the sentiment of dependence is intimately [ p. 152 ] mingled with the sentiment of union, of reciprocity and of mutuality, which is no less essential to religion than the former. We may see here a double gamut or a double series of sentiments…
respect, veneration, fear, dismay, terror:
admiration, joy, confidence, love, extasy.
The two gamuts—one of which has fear for its fundamental tone, and the other confidence—are most frequently mingled in reality. It is sometimes one which prevails and sometimes the other, but with an infinite variety of shades, of half-tones, and, if we may say so, of quarter-tones[9].’ Much of this customary religion, when examined in detail, is crude, blundering, irrational; and its long dominion can hardly fail to suggest similar misgivings to those which we have considered in connexion with the antiquity of the race. But one fact stands out from it with startling prominence—the powerful, the tremendous hold of religion upon man. It is coextensive with his conduct, about his path and about his bed. He cannot shake it off. It comforts him, it controls him; it is natural, it is normal. He may feel himself to be now in fellowship with, now in alienation from his gods. But in either case he takes for granted a divine interest in his affairs; a response to his acts and aspirations from the divine side ; a divine desire for communication and communion [ p. 153 ] with himself. It may be granted that the intellectual conceptions which accompanied all this were of the vaguest. At a time when man had no clear notion of his own personality, as distinct from nature on the one hand, and from his family and tribe on the other, the outlines also of the supernatural and superhuman would be indistinct. But it is precisely this indistinctness which gives its evidential value to early religion. Man did not know what to think of it, stammered in the effort to explain it, and yet allowed it to bind him hand and foot. There was a reality about it which he could not, a necessity which he would not, evade. A power grasped him, and grasped him for his good. Now, that power ultimately rested either upon a fiction or a truth. However beneficial in operation, it was in its last analysis a lie, or it was God, amid and despite of superstition and ignorance and error, claiming men’s allegiance in the only manner and degree in which, at that particular stage of his development, it could be claimed. If there were no organic continuity in history, and the past were separated from the present by a gulf, this dilemma might remain unsolved. But the power in question is an earlier form of, and essentially identical with, the power of religion as we see it in the world to-day. We are, therefore, entitled to judge it by what it has become. As existing in the far past we can only view it from [ p. 154 ] outside; but as existing in the present we can view it also from within. And if the result of that inner acquaintance with religion has been to convince us of its truth, we may logically extend the conviction to its every bygone phase. The early prevalence of customary religion, with its subordination of creed to conduct, will then become additional evidence of its providential origin—as initiating with irresistible power a course of spiritual development, which its subjects at the time could neither foresee nor understand
To say this is not to force a fanciful theory upon the facts: it is merely to assert that those facts are more intelligible upon our own than upon any adverse theory. Historic science discovers facts which when once discovered are common property. And we are manifestly within our rights when we claim that the facts of early religion are far less compatible with its falsehood than with its truth; its crudity being no more than we should antecedently expect, while its hold upon life was too powerful and purposeful to be other than divine.
But however clearly it may be established that sacrifices, and observances, and rites of a religious nature preceded the great mass of recorded mythology, they still presuppose some kind of elementary religious belief; and the question again arises, Are the earlier forms of religious belief compatible with the thought of revelation? Three [ p. 155 ] views of the case are possible. There is, first, the theory of a clear monotheistic revelation to primitive man, which was subsequently lost by the majority of our race, and whose dim and distorted fragments, floating mist-like over the earth, have given rise to the various mythologies. This theory, though it has. met with a certain amount of scientific support,. was probably theological. in origin; being closely connected with that view of history which was once thought to be contained in Genesis; but which, at any rate, we English, as Professor Maurice pointed out, owe far more directly and immediately to Milton[10]. It cannot be better summarized than in the words of Doctor South[11]: ‘Adam, he says, ‘came into the world a philosopher’; and again, ‘Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam.’ We have only to compare such statements with the opening chapters of Genesis, to see at once how much arbitrary assumption they import into the text. The very form of the account in Genesis is too obviously Oriental and mythical to be pressed into history, in the Western sense of the word; while even as it stands it involves no one view more than another of the nature of primeval revelation. Its spiritual analysis of man is profoundly and eternally true, but is as compatible with a low as with a high state of [ p. 156 ] intellect and culture; and while it asserts the fact of divine intercourse with the human conscience, it cannot be said to indicate its method—
‘Whether of actual vision, sensible
To sight and feeling, or that in this sort
Have condescendingly been shadowed forth
Communications spiritually maintained
And intuitions moral and divine[12].’
Nor has the theory in question more scientific than Scriptural support. It has, indeed, been maintained that the earlier stages of the chief historic religions are more monotheistic than the later, and point, therefore, to an original monotheism behind them. But the language in which these early monotheistic tendencies are clothed, is too obviously rooted in more primitive modes of thought to admit of such an interpretation. It has all the air of a growth and not a reminiscence ; a development, not a degradation. And, further, there are, imbedded in religious literature and popular folk-lore, fossil fragments of earlier and cruder mythological formations, which would seem in all cases to have preceded the purer forms of the great historic religions.
Hence has arisen the extreme converse of the above theory—the view that the world’s theology began with the crudest and most childlike conceptions, such as are to be found among the lower [ p. 157 ] savages of the present day, and was thence gradually refined and developed to the high level which we find in the Vedas and Avesta, and in the earlier religion of Egypt. The details of this theory, full of interest as they are, have by this time become too familiar to need repetition. At the same time they have hitherto usually been represented as arguments against the reality of any revelation, But all that they could really disprove, if true, are hypotheses like that above mentioned, as to the method which a divine revelation has or ought to have pursued. When, however, we bear in mind the great law of education through illusion, to which we referred above, and also the frequent coexistence of strong personal religion with crude theology, we can easily believe that, if man was developed from a state of complete savagery, God may have revealed Himself to him by correspondingly slow degrees, and through appropriately limited intellectual conceptions, and yet all the while with sufficient certainty to make some degree of spiritual life possible.
‘ And those illusions which excite the scorn
Or, more, the pity of unthinking minds—
Are they not mainly outward ministers
Of inward conscience ?—with whose service charged
They came, and go, appeared, and disappear,
Diverting evil purposes, remorse
Awakening, chastening an intemperate grief,
Or pride of heart abating [13].’
[ p. 158 ]
But this extreme theory, if true, is as yet very far indeed from demonstration. There is an undue simplicity about it; and all attempts to arrange human progress in stages, whether empirically determined as by Comte, or rationally as by Hegel, have split upon this rock; they are inadequate to the subtlety and complexity of nature. As a matter of fact, mythology has been evolved from many sources—necessities of language, diseases of language, stupid mistakes of language, poetry, speculation, story-telling, priestcraft, inspired visions and immoral dreams. It is partly a natural growth, partly an artificial invention, partly the result of conscious or unconscious borrowing from one race by another. And it is a mistake to suppose that as a whole it was ever very closely connected with religion, even when we find it woven round the names and histories of gods. In the Homeric poems, for instance, a broad distinction may be palpably felt between the implied religion and the expressed mythology; a high and pure and simple and natural religious tone, such as could never either have been suggested or sustained by the celestial romance with which, nevertheless, it is inextricably interwoven. There are many similar cases in religious literature; and we may well believe, therefore, that in ruder ages a like difference existed, between the inner feeling which accompanied the prayer or rite or sacrifice, and the weird [ p. 159 ] fetichistic or totemistic fancies by which it was often overlaid ; and that then too, as so often since, the heart was nearer heaven than the head. If so, we might adopt an intermediate view between the two above-mentioned extremes, to the effect that God did first reveal Himself to the mind of man, under such simple mythical forms as seem to be necessitated by the very nature of early language and thought, but with sufficient clearness to make those myths an inspiring, ennobling, elevating influence, the beginning of a real religious bond between the human and divine. After all, the great natural sacraments of the evening and the dawn must have had something of the same strange spiritual attraction for the earliest man that they still have for us, with all our scientific knowledge of how their witchery is wrought; and love and death, the two great twin teachers, must have been as potent then as now to strain the human heart with yearning towards the mysterious sunset land. The hypothesis that these higher stages of natural religion were only reached after an age-long worship of stocks, and stones, and ‘four-footed beasts, and creeping things,’ is hardly so probable as the Pauline view, that the exact converse was the case. If the first of our two previously-mentioned theories overestimated the action of degeneracy, the second certainly very much underrates it. The moral and spiritual degeneration of races is an important fact [ p. 160 ] in history, and acts immediately upon the religious conceptions; and we may safely infer that it was equally active in prehistoric ages. And consequently when we meet with petty, grotesque, absurd, obscene, horrible objects and forms of worship, there is a reasonable presumption that they are largely due, not to original limitation of intellect, but to gradual moral deterioration and distortion. An intermediate view, therefore, which regards man’s original conceptions, as neither so high nor yet so low as is sometimes apt to be supposed, accords most nearly with the facts of comparative mythology as we at present know them; while it still leaves a wide margin, within which different minds will continue to differ, unless fresh facts ever throw a materially new light upon the subject. Thus myth, but not unmoral or ignoble myth, would seem to have been man’s first fashion of thinking about God—such myth as primeval thought and language would inevitably suggest, in speaking of the storms and seasons, the sun, the moon, the stars; and if so, myth may be regarded as God’s first instrument of revelation to the mind, as distinct from the conscience and the heart of man. ‘He left not Himself without witness.’
Thus the survey of the subhistoric age, the age of myth and custom, presents us with precisely such a picture of religion as we should expect after discovering the antiquity of man—a religion which, [ p. 161 ] though rudimentary, is recognizably real, since it is a link in a continuous chain, an inseparable part of a progressive system, whose later phases we have _ stronger reason for regarding as revealed. Christians, it should be remembered, from the days of Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria, have always been accustomed to take two broadly different views of the pre-Christian religions of the world; views which may be called respectively the polemical and the philosophic ; the one concerned with the falsehood in them, needing contradiction, the other with their relative truth, as preparing the way for higher things. The contrast may be well illustrated by a comparison of Milton’s treatment of the heathen gods in Paradise Lost, with that of Wordsworth in the fourth book of the Excursion. The natural tendency of our modern historic method, and our increased knowledge of the world’s sacred literature, has been to emphasize the latter, _ the Alexandrian, the Wordsworthian point of view. For no reader of the Vedas or the Avesta, the Accadian psalms or the Egyptian ritual of the dead, can fail to recognize in them the true ring of real religion. And the old form of apology, therefore, which endeavoured to establish the truth of Christianity by contrasting it with the falsehood of all previous creeds, has for us become a thing of the past. It lingers indeed still in certain quarters, but is no longer really tenable; as being not only [ p. 162 ] contradicted by the obvious facts of history, but also in its very nature suicidal, since it seeks to enhance the importance of a special revelation by discrediting the natural religion, to which such a revelation must appeal; to elevate the superstructure by destroying its foundation[14]. But all reactions may be carried too far,and we are perhaps in some danger at the present moment of overfacile acquiescence in doctrines of consistent religious progress. Progress there has undoubtedly been in the history of religion, but of a kind that is more easily felt than defined. To begin with, there is, as we have seen, no uniform agreement among authorities as regards its precise level of departure: nor can there be any more as to its goal, since an Agnostic, a Theist, and a Christian, with their different standards of religious perfection, must have different criteria of progress. Again, many of the dates, which would have an important bearing upon the relative priority of different systems, are at present unascertained, and perhaps for ever unascertainable. And then, too, the effect of degeneration is a wholly undefinable quantity, on which the widest variety of opinion will continue to exist. All these are considerations which should qualify our acceptance of glib generalities about religious evolution. Moreover, a still more important point to bear in mind is the distinction, previously [ p. 163 ] noticed, between what we should now call personal religion and theology. We are very apt to overestimate, as a source of evidence, what may be called the external element in early religion, from the fact that it has survived in literature, ritual and folk-lore, and consequently been handed down to us; while the personal religion which underlay it has passed unrecorded away. We read of seven thousand opponents of Baal-worship in Israel, when the eye of the contemporary prophet could see none. And the case is typical. There was domestic piety in the Rome of Juvenal, and. Christian life in the ninth and tenth centuries, those dark ages of the Church. And it must have been so throughout all religious history. We continually find among the uneducated poor of the present day an amount of religion which controls, comforts, and refines their whole life, combined with few theological conceptions, and those often of the crudest; while the most religious minds among the educated and cultured classes are the most acutely conscious of the inadequacy of language to portray the object of their faith; and the highest personal religion always tends to mysticism, a sense of spiritual communion which ‘lies all too deep for words.’ But it is precisely by the extent and intensity of this hidden life, the number whom it affects, and the degree in which it affects them, that the real vitality of a religion [ p. 164 ] should be judged ; while judgement is further complicated by the fact that spiritual revivals often tend to recur to archaic methods of expression, and present therefore to the eye of history an illusory appearance of retrogression. Of the two main factors of religion, therefore, we can only deal with the more external, that is the mythological and ritual remains. And this fact seriously detracts from the completeness of any generalizations that may be made on the nature and character of religious progress. We can gauge the intellect, but not the spirit of the distant past, and it is to the spirit that revelation is made. Separate races seem to have been dominated by separate elements of religious thought, each having its special type, its characteristic idea ; but the isolation of these elements has been much qualified in popular practice, and by an easy reaction has passed over into its opposite, leaving a general impression of fluctuation rather than of progress upon the mind; while ritual has been substantially identical the whole_ world over, and has persisted, with but little change, through successive refinements of interpretation, reformations of religion, changes of creed. But all these things tell us nothing of the inner hopes and fears, amid which, one by one, men lived and died.
In brief, then, we must remember that the science of religions has only a partial access to [ p. 165 ] the phenomena with which it deals; and, further, that it is still in the empirical stage, most of its generalizations being as yet more or less hypothetical, and needing careful scrutiny before they can become premisses, from which further conclusions may be drawn.
| LECTURE. V. MORAL AFFINITY NEEDFUL FOR THE KNOWLEDGE OF A PERSON | Title page | LECTURE VII. RELIGION IN PRE-CHRISTIAN HISTORY |
O. Schrader. ↩︎
Dr. Bruce. ↩︎
S. Laing. ↩︎
Proleg. to Philos. of Religion. ↩︎
Gruppe. ↩︎
Robertson Smith, Religion of Semites. ↩︎
Grammar of Assent. ↩︎
Religion of Semites. ↩︎
Proleg. to Philos. of Religion. ↩︎
Qu. in Maurice, Moral and Metaphys. Philos. ii. ↩︎
Wordsworth, Excursion. ↩︎
Wordsworth, Excursion. ↩︎