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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029057598 
 
PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 TO THE CHRISTIAN ERA 
 
 T. R. GLOVER 
 
 FKLLOW OF ST JOHn's COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE 
 AND PUBLIC OKATOR IN THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 LONDON 
 
 STUDENT CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT 
 
 32 RUSSELL SQUARE, W.C.i 
 1922 
 
 /V/; 
 
First Published September, 1922 
 
 :-ll, 77-/® 
 
 Printed by JurnhuU &^ Si>ears 
 at Edinburgh in Great Britain 
 
WILDE LECTURES OXFORD 1918 192 1 
 
 LOWELL LECTURES BOSTON 1922 
 
I HAVE to thank Dr John Skinner, 
 Principal of Westminster College, 
 Cambridge, for reading in manu- 
 script the chapters of this book that 
 deal with Hebrew and Jewish re- 
 Hgion ; my colleague Mr E. E. Sikes, 
 of St John's College, for reading 
 the rest of the volume ; and Mr 
 A. B. Cook for criticism of the 
 chapter upon Homer. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. Introduction .... 
 
 II. Early Man and his Environment 
 
 III. Homer ...... 
 
 IV. The Beginnings of Greek Criticism 
 V. Earlier Israel .... 
 
 VI. The Hebrew Prophets . 
 VII. The Great Century of Greece . 
 
 VIII. Plato 
 
 IX, The Greek World after Alexander 
 
 X. The Stoics 
 
 XI. The Jews after the Exile . 
 XII. The Gods of the Orient 
 
 XIII. Roman Religion .... 
 
 XIV. Judaism after Antiochus 
 XV. The Victory of the Orient 
 
 Index ...... 
 
 21 
 46 
 69 
 96 
 120 
 
 170 
 190 
 210 
 230 
 250 
 274 
 296 
 320 
 
 341 
 
 Vll 
 
PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Fascinating as the course of research has been among 
 the religious ideas of primitive peoples — and those 
 who caught the gleam of the Golden Bough a quarter 
 of a century since will not readily forget its appeal — 
 the history of Religion includes many races who are 
 not at all primitive. The time comes now and then 
 when it is less urgent to ask how religion began than 
 why it continues and what changes it has undergone. 
 In some quarters, one guesses, the view has prevailed 
 that, if the origins are lowly, the developed product 
 is discredited — that if religion began in the grossest 
 superstition or in close connection with it, and was 
 for long almost indistinguishable from magic, so 
 much the worse for religion. There has been an air 
 of polemic about the work of certain researchers, 
 which at least suggests this line of reflection. But 
 another line seems equally possible. If, in spite of 
 these unhappy early associations, rehgion has main- 
 tained itself in the respect of the peoples of the highest 
 cultures — if with every advance in thought, in powers 
 of seeing and feeling, in social culture and in morals, 
 religion has kept pace — then it may at least be argued 
 that religion is not a regrettable survival from a bad 
 past, a weakness of the feebler spirits of the race — an 
 accident at best — but something inseparable from the 
 rational life of man, something as inherent in human 
 nature and as essential to it as art or morality or any 
 other expression and means of human life. This 
 
 A 1 
 
PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 IS 
 
 arguable, at least. In any case, if the study of 
 origins is a legitimate subject for the human mind, 
 surely the study of what is developed from those 
 origins needs no defence. All our educationists 
 emphasize the value of child-study : can we suggest 
 that grown people are not a proper study of mankind ? 
 
 In any case, there are religions of the higher culture 
 — and, without beating about the bush, I am more 
 interested in them myself; I have studied them, 
 and I propose to continue to study them. So, with 
 no more apology, I turn to my subject — Progress 
 in ReHgion. 
 
 In Cambridge — it is our reproach — we are perhaps 
 a little more matter-of-fact than Oxford people, 
 a Kttle more content to confine ourselves to 
 verifying our references and to recording what 
 we find. I will not defend our habit of mind ; it is 
 so obviously useful and so essentially scientific. But 
 in this book my object is something different. I 
 am not aiming at making a complete epitome of the 
 history of religion from Moses to Mrs Eddy. I am 
 rather pursuing what one of the keenest guides of my 
 undergraduate youth somewhat truculently called 
 " the spirit of History emancipated from the bonds 
 of fact." I hope not to part company with fact, 
 but I do not want to be in bondage to it ; it is the 
 wood and its habits that I wish to understand, not 
 to count the trees. This will involve a tentative 
 use of theory as well as of fact. My endeavour is to 
 get hold of the factors that make for progress in 
 men's reUgious ideas — to understand why mankind as 
 a whole is always apt to be revising its religion and 
 cannot let it alone. I also want to master the factors 
 that make for retardation in this progress. I turn 
 naturally to the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean 
 world — the peoples who, since I first learnt to read, 
 have been my chief study, to whom I am not at all 
 ashamed to have given my life so far — and I propose 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 to draw from them the main part of what I have to 
 say on progress in religion. 
 
 The comparative study of religion began a long 
 time ago. Xenophanes, as we shall see, noted the 
 divergencies of men's conceptions of the gods. 
 Herodotus marked coincidences and shrewdly sus- 
 pected certain religious teachers, whose names he 
 would not mention, of plagiarizing their inspiration 
 from Egypt. Justin and TertuUian in the second 
 century of our era remarked similarities between the 
 rites of the Christian Church and of the heathen. 
 " This, too," says Justin, " in the rites of Mithras, 
 the evil demons have delivered to be done — in 
 imitation. That bread and a cup of water are set 
 forth in the initiation ceremonies, with certain for- 
 mulae — ^you know or may learn." ^ " The devil," 
 says Tertullian, " baptizes. He promises remission 
 of sins from his font. If I yet remember, Mithras 
 seals his soldiers on the brow " ; ^ and so forth. The 
 current explanation has generally been borrowing. 
 The devil and his daemons got early word of what 
 Christian rites would be — and borrowed. Or else, 
 say some modern scholars, the Christians, remember- 
 ing their old ways in religion, borrowed on their side. 
 The explanation of Justin and Tertullian seems a 
 little old and odd ; the fashion to-day is to find 
 analogies between Christian practice and the mystery 
 religions, and a little to discredit the Christian in 
 consequence. 
 
 The weakness of this line of comparative study 
 seems to me to be that it does not reckon with 
 development. Likeness in rite and ceremony, in 
 phrase and even in ideas, there may be ; and it may 
 be of singularly little consequence. The questions 
 to be asked are of the movement, the direction, the 
 guiding spirit, the purpose, the aspiration. Two 
 sacraments may be closely alike — to the distant student 
 
 1 Justin, Apoc. i. 98C. ^ Tertullian, De praescr. haeret. 4.0. 
 
4 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 —at a particular point of time ; and their influence 
 on human history unspeakably different. We have 
 always to bear in mind that there is a stage beyond, 
 and that what matters in the study of a religion is 
 what bears most upon the stage not yet reached. 
 The key is in the last stage, the highest development, 
 as Aristotle said. Our task is not to predict the last 
 stage, but to examine certain stages, and to discover, 
 if we can, the disturbing forces, the factors that have 
 from time to time made the future, that have driven 
 men forward in spite of themselves. 
 
 Let us begin by a broad contrast of what have 
 been and what are the commonly accepted concep- 
 tions of religion. At the dawn of History, and for 
 very long after, men conceived of religion as a matter 
 of practices — certain things were done, and done in 
 certain ways ; the way mattered, and the action 
 mattered, not the spirit, nor the belief that went 
 with it. To-day, on the contrary, we conceive of 
 religion as being above all things belief — as faith ; 
 and ritual and ceremony, however desirable, however 
 necessary some hold them, are admittedly only of 
 value as expressions of real belief, of faith. Religion 
 has changed, then, from being predominantly an 
 external thing to being the most intensely inward 
 and intimate of all things, a law, an intuition within. 
 It was a traditional thing — inherited, unexamined, 
 independent of reason, unconnected with moral judg- 
 ment or moral conduct ; but it is individual con- 
 viction, and even where tradition is given the utmost 
 value, it is as a result of criticism and thought, and 
 these are individual ; religion without reason is incon- 
 ceivable to us, and we hold its relation to morality to 
 be vital. It zoas racial or local; it is, and long has 
 been, even in pre-Christian times and non-Jewish 
 circles, universal, independent of race or place. It 
 was a system of polytheism with all the inherent 
 disorder that polytheism involves ; its gods were at 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 best doubtfully personal, or if personal, arbitrary, 
 non-moral, and irrational. To-day, Religion is 
 primarily monotheistic, or, at the worst, monistic ; 
 and where it reaUy lives, its God is personal, and 
 justice and goodness are the first of His characteristics. 
 
 These contrasts are patent, and certain consequences 
 follow. We obviously give a higher value to-day to 
 personality ; to the individual ; and religion gains 
 or suffers correspondingly. The strength of the old 
 religions lay in the fact that they were national, and 
 that is the weakness of Hinduism to-day. One might, 
 on the other hand, say that the strength of the modern 
 type of religion is that it is not national, it is at once 
 more and less than national. It is above nationality ; 
 and in every case of a really living nation and a really 
 vital religion, masses of the nation reject, or mis- 
 understand, or neglect religion ; those who are 
 convinced are religious with an intensity unknown 
 in the old days, while the rest make less and less pre- 
 tence of religion. We cannot have it both ways. 
 The savage emphasized the tribe and had a social 
 religion ; the Greek discovered the individual, and 
 we have to put up with the consequences. 
 
 Certain things, however, stand out from the con- 
 trasts which we have drawn. The emphasis on 
 personality affects all our thought of God and man ; 
 while a progressive attention to morality goes with 
 the discovery of the individual, and involves changes 
 as fundamental in religion. To these two points we 
 shall have to return again and again. 
 
 At this stage certain observations have to be made 
 on the general subject of the study of religious move- 
 ments, historical, primitive, and pre-historical. 
 
 First of all, as Andrew Lang emphasized, man is 
 
 not to be caught in a primitive state ; his intellectual 
 
 beginnings lie very far behind the stage of culture 
 
 in which we find the lowest known races.^ We are 
 
 ^ A. Lang, Making of Religion, p. 39. 
 
6 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 in a worse plight hy far than the geologists in their 
 worst difficulties. The ichthyosaurus had his day, 
 and lay down and died ; and nobody took the slightest 
 interest in him till Miss Anning dug up the first dis- 
 covered of his tribe at Lyme Regis a hundred years 
 ago. Nobody was concerned through the centuries 
 to explain that he was still an ichthyosaurus, semper 
 eadem as it were, or that he never had been an 
 ichthyosaurus at all. If another beast or bird died 
 on top of him, or under him, and their bones got 
 mixed, they were not so very hard to sort out ; and 
 I suppose that what applies to the beasts is true broadly 
 of the rocks, in spite of faults and the sea and the 
 volcanoes. It is very different with the anthropo- 
 logist's evidence. His fossils are graves and offering- 
 pits and sculptures — ^for inscriptions are as bad as 
 books ; and he has to explain his fossils by their living 
 representatives, which are worse again than books or 
 inscriptions. Religion, in particular, in its earlier 
 history and for long after, is to be studied in survivals 
 — in myths and usages and beliefs. But words change 
 their meaning without giving those who use them 
 any notice — change them to fit new outlooks on the 
 world, and in turn affect the beliefs expressed in the 
 words. Rites and usages are corrected to fit a theory 
 of a day — that is to say, they are restored, and we 
 know well how often restoration means complete 
 change. Silent adjustments, small misconceptions, 
 shame, apology — all confuse the evidence. As Pro- 
 fessor Lewis Campbell wittily asked, how far do the 
 practices of Scots on Hallowe'en or Hogmanay illus- 
 trate or explain Scottish religion ? They obviously 
 had some origin ; but it is History that will give the 
 clue to it, and History, as we shall soon find, is a much 
 more intelligent witness than Archaeology — arrives 
 later on the scene and thinks ; and that always 
 confuses the evidence. 
 
 Words do not very greatly help us ; and of words 
 
INTRODUCTION 7 
 
 the most treacherous are definitions, and the abstract 
 nouns associated with them. I am constantly im- 
 pressed with the havoc that our facile definitions, 
 our preconceptions, and our abstract nouns make of 
 our thinking ; and one large part of every student's 
 work is to achieve independence of the definitions 
 and technical terms of his teacher. A classification 
 does not necessarily advance knowledge ; I find in 
 King George's reign that what I knew in Queen 
 Victoria's reign I know no longer — that I have no 
 glimmering of things I once knew to satisfaction. 
 In every field of study it is the same — ^we do not add 
 to our facts by framing theories, even when our 
 theories are definitions. I shall have to speak a little 
 later on of Magic, and I have already burnt my fingers 
 over it and fallen out with my friends. And the 
 definition of Religion is hardly easier. I am not at 
 all convinced that primitive man was stricter about 
 his definitions than his descendants are. I am quite 
 sure that he did not draw all the inferences he might 
 have, and should have, from what he knew. At the 
 same time, it is not safe to assume that primitive man 
 was as simple and unreflective a creature as is some- 
 times half-suggested. In Pre-History — before what 
 we can call History began — how soon did man begin 
 to think, to imagine, to be an individual ? From 
 that date confusion began. His words meant one 
 thing to himself, another to his stupider son, and 
 something quite different again to his bright son. 
 His spiritual experience, the emotions he felt, the 
 laws he observed, may well have been simpler than 
 the inner history of his descendants, just as the colour 
 vision of the savage fails to distinguish shades and 
 even colours in vivid contrast for civilized man. But 
 he was no fool ; and his drawings and his skill in 
 hunting, with all the observation and the reflection 
 which these imply, suggest that we should rate him 
 rather by his progressive descendants than by the 
 
8 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 retarded or the reactionary. It is extremely hard 
 to be sure what primitive man meant and how much 
 he expressed of what he meant, what were the extra- 
 values of his thoughts, and so forth. In such inquiries 
 neither our evidence nor our definitions take us very 
 far. 
 
 What has been suggested as to Pre-History extends 
 to History. It is extremely difficult, even where we 
 are dealing with a race that keeps records and statistics, 
 to get at the history of a religious movement in its 
 early stages and in its formative period ; still harder 
 to recapture the impulses, the instincts and intui- 
 tions that lie behind it. When we deal with the 
 causes, it is generally the conditions that we mean ; 
 and the same conditions produce no effect whatever 
 on minds which seem to us quite as good as those in 
 which the movement began. 
 
 Contemporaries constantly jniss what matters most, 
 and their words reflect their failure. When they do 
 notice movement, they are surprisingly apt to mis- 
 understand it — to put down as irreligion what is in 
 truth the awakening of reason, the stirring of moral 
 feeling. 
 
 Two instances, both illustrative of our general 
 subject, may be taken. If we compare England in 
 1520, 1620, and 1720, we find extraordinary changes. 
 In 1720, Mr Lecky estimates, the Catholics were one 
 in fifty of the population. In 1620, whatever the 
 figures, everything was ripe for civil war on a religious 
 issue underlying a political issue. In 1520, to all 
 appearances, England was soHdly Catholic. The late 
 Dr James Gairdner's book on Lollardy and the Refor- 
 mation is a monument of the perplexity that the study 
 of mere records may produce. To his reader it seems 
 that there was nothing to effect the vast change 
 which we observe ; or else that Dr Gairdner missed 
 exactly what was most important to discover. For 
 the change was swift, drastic, dramatic ; and an 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 explosion rarely occurs where there are no explosives. 
 England must have been charged with forces which 
 escaped the record-keepers and the record-searchers. 
 Or, again, what were the antecedents of the mono- 
 theism of the Hebrew prophets ? Here history, it 
 would appear, has been re-written, more than once, 
 by the ancients themselves, but when the best 
 endeavour has been hiade to reach the real state of 
 things in Israel before the rise of the great prophets, 
 we find a people admittedly not monotheistic either 
 by instinct or reflection. Yet the prophetic move- 
 ment did capture Israel, and it had some antecedents 
 — unless here, as in Dr Gairdner's England, History 
 makes the leap that Nature refuses. And that is hard 
 to believe. 
 
 Or again, to take two outstanding theological 
 terms, how difficult it would be to write the history 
 of Sin and Redemption in human thought ! How 
 vital these conceptions are for the history of religion ! 
 — and how difficult to trace their development without 
 big gaps and great guesses ! Here, above all, the 
 history of a single word would give us all the pro- 
 blems we could solve. The term " holy," if we could 
 trace it through all its successive suggestions, would 
 be a tell-tale word, as it moved from the physical 
 and all but irrational onward through the moral to 
 the spiritual. Probably most of our tell-tale words 
 would be ethical terms, for even " truth " is as 
 essentially ethical as intellectual. 
 
 In the third place, we must observe that Progress in 
 Religion is apt to coincide with progress in social life, 
 in arts and crafts, in political life, and in philosophy. 
 We talk of men " thinking in compartments," and 
 there are those who so think ; but mankind never 
 really rests content with that habit. The mind 
 once quickened ranges in a new way over every aspect 
 of life. Religious awakening means political re- 
 generation, as we see in seventeenth-century England. 
 
lo PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Political stimulus makes for individual self-conscious- 
 ness, and that involves religion. Crafts develop into 
 arts ; and artists see things intensely, and rightly or 
 wrongly think swiftly — seldom quite wrongly ; _ and 
 whatever meaning they give to the word " religion," 
 their contribution to the range of the human spirit 
 requires of religion that it too enlarge its borders. 
 " Whatever widens the imagination," wrote Lecky, 
 " enabling it to realize the actual experience of other 
 men, is a powerful agent of ethical advance." ^ 
 
 Life is the great iconoclast, the great emancipator. 
 Life has a tendency to outgrow Religion in com- 
 plexity, and the question in every generation is whether 
 Religion will wake up to the new problems and over- 
 take life. Mankind, as it grows adult, will not have 
 old religions ; old forms it may keep but it re-inter- 
 prets them. Where re-interpretation fails and the 
 old forms are not shaken off, a race or people atrophies ; 
 for man is progressive or he is lost ; and the question 
 often arises, What will liberate a race from its religion ? 
 In Israel and in Greece that question rose, and 
 answers drastic enough (as we shall see) were offered 
 by Plato and Jeremiah. Contemporaries, no doubt, 
 thought them the enemies of religion ; and moderns, 
 whose definitions require them to distinguish between 
 religion and knowledge, may be driven to comments 
 as superficial. Yet these two men had no idea but 
 that they were working with religion, reaching the 
 heart of it ; and ever since their day those who have 
 deeply cared for religion and felt its power have 
 recognized the deep debt they owe to such men. 
 
 We have not to forget, however, cases that look 
 exceptional ; and here Rome is the outstanding 
 example. Roman religion, one is tempted to say, 
 never kept pace with the Roman mind. This is 
 partly true, and Rome paid terribly for it. But it 
 is not all the truth, for the Roman looked elsewhere 
 ^ History of Morals, vol. i. 
 
INTRODUCTION ii 
 
 than to the dim gods of his ancestors for real religion — 
 to Greece, to Phrygia, and to Egypt. 
 
 Plato and Jeremiah bring us to our fourth observa- 
 tion — the immense role of the individual in the 
 Progress of Religion. One feature, as we saw, in this 
 Progress is the heightened significance of the indi- 
 vidual ; and that discovery is made by the individual. 
 All progress in craft and art is the individual's doing ; 
 the guild and the caste are against him at first, perhaps 
 for ever. Justice is rarely done to the pioneer on any 
 side of life, either while he lives or after. The signifi- 
 cance of the Jews and of the Greeks in the history of 
 Religion is after all due to the intensity of individuality 
 in their prophets and thinkers. In India — and it is 
 true in measure elsewhere — it is in the sects that the 
 living forces of religion are felt, that the great move- 
 ments begin ; and the sects are produced by the 
 individual minds, and are far more dependent on 
 them than the main body is or need be. The real 
 life of Islam is Sufi-ism. The real life of Hinduism is 
 in the Bhakti sects ; they revolt, they influence the 
 great mass of opinion slowly, and the dead hand at 
 last gets hold of them, and they too grow petrified, 
 but a contribution has been made. It is much the 
 same elsewhere. The rebel starts the new idea and 
 forces it on the community. One could hardly 
 expect a great organization to leap with swift intuition 
 at a new truth, any more than a committee to write 
 English. The great Classics in every language are 
 written by individuals ; even the Authorized Version 
 of the English Bible has Tyndale behind it. The 
 feeling that slowly or swiftly brings the new certainty 
 is the individual's endowment. The great organiza- 
 tion stands for authority, for a decent consideration 
 of what our fathers found of truth ; if it demands 
 more, there are rebels ; and Progress in Religion 
 again and again has depended on the rebels making 
 good their point, and on the old organization appro- 
 
12 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 priating it when made. Great statesmen and great 
 journalists think in milHons, and their generalizations 
 very often screen life from them. The prophet and 
 the poet have fewer formulae, fewer phrases, few 
 dogmas ; they are less in bondage to routine and 
 conventions and interests ; they come from the 
 desert, the slum, the slave market, and the house of 
 pain, where sohtude and beauty, hunger, oppression 
 and sheer misery, set them free from conventions 
 and goad them into discovery of the real and the 
 spiritual. If they are canonized afterwards, it is, as 
 the briUiant French biographer of St Francis says, 
 " the bitterest irony in history." 
 
 Summing up what we have so far gathered, we shall 
 agree to handle our evidence carefully, to expect 
 gaps in our knowledge of origins, to look for progress 
 in religion where the activities of man's mind crowd 
 thickest and most distractingly, and to keep our eyes 
 upon solitary figures, to watch for the " voice crying 
 in the wilderness," the poet in exile, the unpopular 
 teacher in agony and bloody sweat. And as we 
 gather our evidence, and co-ordinate it, and begin 
 to understand it, we shall ask questions about one 
 religion and another, to learn their comparative value. 
 Our standard will be the standard of Progress. What 
 we learn will modify our conceptions of Progress, 
 no doubt, and will give it more content. One question 
 will suggest another, and they wiU all be related. 
 All our questions will, in one form or another, bear 
 on the fundamental issue of the relations of Religion 
 and Truth. But for clearness we will put separate 
 aspects of that issue separately, and here are some 
 of the questions we shall ask. 
 
 We shall ask pre-eminently about any religion a 
 number of questions as to its philosophy. That 
 perhaps is not the prevalent fashion of to-day, but 
 men have always intellectualized their religion — 
 inevitably, for man is incurably intellectual. The 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 progress in religion has been made at every stage by 
 the thinkers more than by the mystics, and incom- 
 parably more by both than by the adherents of the 
 cults. Man is always working at the unseen, to get 
 it reduced to intelligible law and order, to make it 
 more moral, more spiritual, more rational — to fit it 
 more to his mind, to adjust his thought in turn to 
 the unseen, to get a working unity in his experience 
 and his conceptions. There never is such a thing as 
 simple faith ; it is always intellectual ; and the simplest 
 faith is that for which thought has cleared the issues 
 and got them into order and perspective. 
 
 We shall ask, then, what a religion makes of man. 
 Does it believe in him enough ? This is the individual 
 again. Is it abreast of the best instincts of man, his 
 deepest intuitions ? (Some religions, as we shall see, 
 are conspicuously behind these.) Is it developing 
 these instincts still further ? Does it urge man to 
 look beyond the grave, whither certain instincts 
 point f Is man " a dream of a shadow," as Pindar 
 said, or a " heavenly plant," as Plato preferred ? 
 Man's instincts involve morality too. How wide, 
 then, is the religion's range in morality ? What 
 does it make of sin, of evil generally ? What does 
 it say of pain and suffering f All these questions 
 imply the individual from the start ; we are taking 
 our cue from the higher developments of Religion, 
 and we can hardly help doing so. But sin and 
 morality imply also the community, and one function 
 of religion is to induce the individual to sacrifice his 
 own interests, his fancies and feelings — yes ! and his 
 own rights, to his neighbours and to the community. 
 Does the religion, then, whichever we are considering, 
 comprise the community, and how wide is that 
 community ? Are women reckoned in, and slaves, 
 and foreigners ? 
 
 We shall ask, what a religion makes of God, whether 
 it speaks of Him in the singular or the plural, the 
 
14 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 neuter or the abstract. And here we shall find that 
 progress more and more depends on the personality 
 of God — that this militates against polytheism and 
 safeguards the personality of man and all the morality 
 bound up with the society of men. Personality and 
 morality will be somewhere involved in all the 
 questions we ask. St Paul, in a very remarkable 
 passage, with great insight traces all the corruption 
 and misery of the world to false views of God. God's 
 personality and man's personality are going to stand 
 or fall together. Does the religion claim enough of 
 God for man ; does it claim the utmost, including 
 immortality ? 
 
 We shall ask — for our conception of society and of 
 religion is dynamic rather than static — ^how far each 
 religion is adapted to meeting changes in society, 
 knowledge and thought. Another philosophical 
 question ; for the answer depends on how far the 
 tenets of the religion are avowedly related to experi- 
 ence, how close it is intended to keep to truth. Does 
 it prefer Truth — or something else, authority or 
 tradition, emotion, archaism, an easy mind, or 
 ecstasy ? And our question implies yet another on 
 its attitude to freedom. Does it stand for " more 
 beyond " or for a closed book — for a Holy Spirit, or 
 for a Koran or Shastras ? Is it, in fact, in day-by-day 
 experience, moving forward to higher intuitions and 
 their verification ? Is it attentive or inattentive to 
 art, to poetry, to science, to politics, to ideas generally 
 and the ceaselessly moving life of man ? Or is it 
 afraid of them ? Once again, we shall have to ask 
 what it makes of God. Is God away behind some- 
 where, or in front ? Is He in touch with what men 
 are doing ? 
 
 Following up this question, we shall ask at some 
 point, is the religion universal ? Does it carry any 
 conception it has of the unity of nature and the unity 
 of mankind to the corollary of propagandism ? This 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 is no mean test of a religion ; it involves the sense of 
 truth, the sense of the relevance of truth to mankind, 
 and mankind's turn for truth — the unity of mankind, 
 and monotheism itself and the Personality of God. 
 
 Some such series of questions seems inevitable, and 
 when we have put them and have begun to get our 
 answers into a sort of order, what foUows ? For my 
 part I find a certain progress in the religions, certain 
 stages, which, however uncertain their edges, are 
 themselves distinct and clear. This is not out of 
 the way. However many " missing links " we may 
 eventually discover, upwards or downwards from the 
 Piltdown and Neanderthal people, Homer and the 
 Chimpanzee have nothing to do with each other. It 
 is obvious at a glance that, a religion (in one sense) 
 being a system of thought, it may very well be imper- 
 fectly thought-out ; and in fact we may often find 
 in the same mind religious ideas which do not cohere, 
 which do not belong to one another and never will. 
 Nor is it only on the lower spiritual level that we 
 find this. St Paul was able to hold incompatible 
 ideas ; at least he held, or thought he held, ideas 
 which we realize to have been incompatible ; but 
 perhaps the explanation may lie in a distinction be- 
 tween ideas he held and ideas of which, as he says, he 
 was apprehended. I find, then, three great stages 
 in religious thought, and I find further that, distinct 
 as they are, certain historical religious systems have 
 shown and do show traces of more than one, some- 
 times of all three. I distinguish three great types 
 of Magic, Morality and Personal Relation. 
 
 In Magic we touch a term very difficult to define. 
 M. Reinach says simply that " every primitive ritual 
 is in its origin magical " ; ^ but then his definition of 
 religion is perhaps even simpler — religion is " a col- 
 lection of scruples which impede the free exercise 
 of our faculties." ^ I do not think things are quite 
 
 ^ Revue des Etudes Grec, 1906, p. 344. ^ Orpheus, p. 4. 
 
i6 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 so simple. Scholars differ a good deal as to their 
 definition of Magic. It has been called a " disease 
 of religion," but this is not clear ; it seems to imply 
 that religion precedes magic, and that magic is a 
 depravation of it. Sometimes religion does seem to 
 lapse into magic — and there magic will indeed be a 
 depravation of religion. Historically, in a broader 
 sense of the word, there is ground for finding in magic 
 an ancestor of science, of political and social morality, 
 and certainly of medicine. All these, and religion 
 too, are again and again found in association with 
 what we must call magic — cannot call anything else. 
 But there is a difference, and some thinkers find it 
 in the attitude of the man who uses the means. If 
 his main idea is to impose his will on god or spirit or 
 daemon, then his action is considered to lean to magic. 
 If his idea is to influence god or spirit or daemon, and, 
 failing this endeavour, then to submit — that is held 
 to lean to religion. 
 
 I am not going to risk a definition of magic myself, 
 but I am bound to try to indicate what I mean by 
 a magical type of religion. The dominant mark of 
 magic I take to be outclassed thinking, arrested intui- 
 tion, unexamined and unexaminable. Here I am 
 glad to have the support of Sir J. G. Frazer, who 
 regards magic as simply due to a misapplication of 
 the laws of the association of ideas. Mr Marrett says 
 this is too inteUectualistic, and that magic must be 
 studied on its emotional side.^ No doubt unchecked, 
 unexamined, emotion has a great deal to do with 
 magic as with all sorts of arrested developments. 
 Arrest seems to me the mark of magic ; it is commonly 
 sterile, it means no progress ; it is an antithesis to 
 progress. On the other hand self-criticism is a mark 
 of religion and one of the fruitfuUest of its charac- 
 teristics. Magic rests at last on fancy and is in- 
 spired by fear — by fear that paralyses thought and is 
 1 R. R. Marrett, Threshold, p. 29. 
 
INTRODUCTION 17 
 
 never transcended. Magic leaves men pre-eminently 
 afraid of the gods — too afraid of them to try to 
 understand them. As Professor Gwatkin wrote : " As 
 long as magic is stronger than science, the gods must 
 be supposed variable and weak of will." ^ Magic, 
 again, does not allow enough dignity and value to 
 the human mind, does not credit it with reason, 
 unless on reason's very lowest plane ; it condemns 
 man to the performance of dodges ; and it bans the 
 exercise of thought. It is non-moral and non-intel- 
 lectual — an impossible combination for the religion 
 of any people progressive in ethics or thought. 
 
 I am perhaps using — like others — the word magic 
 in a sense of my own ; but my purpose is not to define 
 magic but to explain what I mean when I say that 
 Religion has had a magical stage, that there have been 
 and are religions of a magical type. Whether modern 
 anthropologists approve or not, I am at least erring 
 with Plato, who, in the second book of the Republic, 
 draws the distinction which I am trying to make. 
 Indeed, I believe I got it from Plato, and his strong 
 words in that book bring me naturally to the second 
 type of rehgion which I have named. 
 
 Plato insists that religion is not the indulgence in 
 rites and sacrifices, with an element of jollification in 
 them, but no discernible moral purpose or moral 
 effect, no relation to conduct or to principle. 
 " Adorn the soul," he says, " in her proper jewels — 
 temperance, justice, courage and nobility and truth. 
 In these arrayed, the soul is ready to go on her journey 
 to the world below, when her time comes." It will 
 be seen in an instant that this is a religion of another 
 type altogether ; it has no relation to feast or heca- 
 tomb, to libation or sacrament. The adornment of 
 the soul is the thing, not the performance of any rite 
 or the securing of any charm ; there is nothing physical 
 or external about this type of religion. The ethical 
 1 afford Lectures, vol. i. p. 2.^0. 
 
1 8 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 virtues get all the emphasis — and they all have a 
 strong intellectual element ; especially, we may say, 
 Truth, the very last thing that has even the slightest 
 relation vs^ith magic, however we define it. Much 
 the same attitude was maintained by the greater 
 prophets of Israel toward the religion of sacrifice — 
 it had no relation to righteousness and therefore 
 could be of no interest to Jehovah, In emphasizing 
 the reference to a personal god, they struck a very ' 
 different note from Plato's : but with him they 
 represent that type of religion of which the essence 
 is morality. The Stoics will, in the pages that follow, 
 afford the most striking example of this type — a fact 
 that reminds us of its chief weakness. To religions 
 of this group a personal god is not necessary, or may 
 be irrelevant ; but they find it hard to carry mankind 
 with them to this point. 
 
 The religions of the third type are the most in- 
 teresting, and for Western thinkers St Paul is the 
 outstanding example. He devoted himself to religion 
 of the second type and gave himself in earnest to the 
 achievement of morality ; but as his insight deepened, 
 he realized that he was engaged upon an impossible 
 task ; he made a great change and became content 
 " not to have his own righteousness," to accept rather 
 than earn, and to live a life dependent upon Grace. 
 Though he is the outstanding instance of this type, 
 and became normative for Christianity, the type is 
 not only found in Christian thought. As I under- 
 stand it, all the schools of thought in India which 
 emphasize Bhakti belong in degree to this class. The 
 unhangs of Tuka Ram, the Maratha poet of the 
 seventeenth century — I only know them in English, 
 but the verse renderings of some of them, if sur- 
 reptitiously printed with Cowper's versions of Mme 
 Guyon, might pass without remark. The " Cat- 
 Theology" of the Tengalai followers of Ramanuja 
 in contrast with the " Monkey-Theology " of their 
 
INTRODUCTION 19 
 
 rivals seems to be of the same type.^ The cat herself 
 carries her kitten ; the baby monkey has to hold on 
 underneath its mother as she leaps about ; which is 
 the picture of the soul's relation with God ? Those 
 who decide for the cat stand for something very like 
 divine grace. Distinctions spring up when we ask 
 what it is hoped that divine grace will effect ; and 
 we realize that Tuka Ram and Mme Guyon have 
 very different hopes. Mme Guyon looks for salva- 
 tion from sin, Tuka from re-birth. I surmise that 
 the Shinshu sect in Japanese Buddhism shows some 
 affinity with this type of religion. One part of our 
 task will be to observe how, both in the Hebrew and 
 the Greek world, men kept moving to the conception 
 of real relations between God and man, even at the 
 cost of losing something in morality and of dropping 
 back into magic. 
 
 But to sum up, and to reach a conclusion. My 
 thesis is that a progress is to be observed in men's 
 conceptions of Religion. We shall look to find it in 
 the development of their sense of the value of the 
 individual man, both as an agent and as a passive 
 member of society, in virtue of his personality ; and 
 in connection with this, we shall find a progress in 
 men's ideas of conduct both as regards the individual 
 and society ; their conduct will depend on their 
 estimate of personality, and that, as already suggested, 
 on their sense of personality in their God. All his 
 relations with men will be interpreted in the light 
 of his personality and its bearing upon the per- 
 sonalities of men. The impulse to conceive in this 
 way of the relations of God and man, we shall find, 
 came partly along the lines of men's experience of 
 common life and their slow discovery of the value 
 and beauty of moral law, partly along the lines of 
 reflection upon God. We shall find a steady drive 
 to a morality that is ever higher, and a drive, as steady, 
 ^ Cf. Nicol Macnicol, Indian Theism, p. no. 
 
20 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 toward monotheism, while rehgion ever claims more 
 and more of life. We shall find that the soul refuses 
 to be satisfied on any level but the very highest, and 
 that, as a German thinker has said, " man is for 
 nothing so grateful as for the advancement of his 
 spiritual life." We shall find that man has a firm 
 belief that nothing but the truth will help him, and 
 an undying faith that he will find truth or that it will 
 be revealed to him ; and, in the end, that he and God 
 stand face to face for eternity and can adjust their 
 relations on no basis less than ultimate and perfect 
 righteousness. 
 
II 
 
 EARLY MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 
 
 To understand a man, an epoch, or a period, some 
 familiarity with antecedents is always inevitable. 
 Our present task will be impossible without some 
 general view of man's progress in religious thought 
 in the long period of his history, which in the West 
 ends with the poems of Homer and the beginning 
 of what we can definitely call Greek literature, A 
 general view of man's progress — not a history of 
 human thought — in a score of pages is an undertaking 
 formidable enough. It will be something like a 
 resume of a fifteen-hour journey in a half column of 
 Bradshaw, with this drawback that, while Kettering, 
 Leeds and Carlisle do convey very definite ideas to 
 the mind, our stages will be more like the stations in 
 the Delta of the Ganges, halting-places in the open 
 with only this to recommend them, that for the 
 moment they are out of the water. A progress is 
 discernible ; its history, especially its earliest history, 
 is too often conjectural. The main thing is plain 
 enough — it is the story of long and steady application 
 of intelligence, observation and reason to Religion, 
 and its slow but remarkable transformation in the 
 process. 
 
 Here and there there must be allusions to " primi- 
 tive man," of whom I have this to say at once. The 
 fact that some descendants of primitive men have 
 achieved civilization «nd clear thinking while others 
 have remained savage or become savage, and are 
 content with the minimum of thought, suggests that 
 primitive man was not a fixed type, and that the name 
 
 21 
 
22 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 should perhaps not be used, without caution, as a 
 constant term. We cannot put all the differences 
 down to Geography ; the Turk has lived for centuries 
 among the same scenes that Homer and his heroes 
 knew, and among civilized neighbours, and is still a 
 barbarian ; and it is not all due to his religion, for 
 the Persian also is Moslem. Why race differs from 
 race is a secret not yet wrung from Nature. Primi- 
 tive races do some things very much in the same way ; 
 and the evolution of tools and weapons can, down to 
 a certain point, be made out by laying together the 
 remains of different peoples who may be very widely 
 removed from each other ; they fill one another's 
 gaps, till at last a common progression in parallel 
 can be made out.^ Parallels, in like manner, with 
 limitations already considered, are to be traced in the 
 religious ideas of men ; and perhaps their develop- 
 ment followed similar courses. Perhaps ; but some 
 things are done in very different ways by different 
 races ; and in this sphere — perhaps even for ages 
 before the dawn of history — the individual counts 
 more than we are apt to allow. How early did man 
 begin to notice his environment and to explain it ? 
 How soon did he begin to be subject to trance, to 
 hysterics, to low spirits ? " Blessings on the man 
 who invented sleep ! " says Sancho Panza ; and who 
 invented the strange habits of the mind that foUow 
 hunger and disease, or result from the use of fruits 
 and fluids that have fermented ? 
 
 We shall have to look at some of those strange 
 things in Nature, in which man is apt to surmise that 
 there are feelings and a mind like his own — strange 
 things which surprise him with their ordered ways 
 and their apparent preference for law — strange things 
 which appear to refuse the very notion of law. We 
 shall then have to consider, in outline only, man's 
 habit of explaining to himself what he has observed, 
 1 Cf. Pitt Rivers, Evolution of Culture, pp. 102, 142, and plate xii. 
 
EARLY MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 23 
 
 of interpreting it, of getting it intelligible and orderly. 
 We shall have to leave a number of ragged edges ; 
 " primitive man " had the same difficulty ; but, as 
 we study him and his ways, we find a confirmation of 
 Carlyle's saying : " Is not all work of man in this 
 world a making of Order ? . . . We are all born 
 enemies of Disorder." An unwritten chapter of 
 Heroes and Hero Worship would be about these primi- 
 tive men who " got acquainted with realities " and 
 were " sons of Order." We shall not be able to write 
 it, but we shall come on the tracks of some very 
 genuine heroes. In the third place, we shall have to 
 glance at man's ways of arranging his relations with 
 the strange things he finds alive about him and credits 
 with powers beyond his own. This will bring us to 
 the factors making for progress and to those which 
 tell against it ; and then we must try to sum up 
 what results we have reached. If Aristotle pled 
 guilty to treating Ethics " in outline and not with 
 precise detail," another may ask forgiveness, if under 
 greater limitations he leaves some things unwritten, 
 and credits his fellow-students with memory and 
 imagination. 
 
 No one can tell where man's first observation began 
 of what we roughly call the superhuman. Nature is 
 full of strange and terrible things ; quite apart from 
 tempests and earthquakes, her common ways are 
 mysterious enough. The breeze, the cloud, the rain 
 are unaccountably wayward. Summer and Winter 
 are more orderly in their habits — not that mere 
 orderliness makes a thing intelligible. Leaf and fruit 
 come about their business but make little noise as to 
 their methods and minds. The moon's four weeks 
 come round, and round again, with some sameness ; 
 the sun's proceedings take longer to make out, but 
 are not quite beyond understanding, though why 
 these great lights behave as they do, and what their 
 relations to each other, and what (if any) to the stars. 
 
26 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 spoke through the lips of the unconscious figure, the 
 changed nature ? What did hysteria mean ? or 
 madness ? or any of the states we now call psycho- 
 pathic ? And when the mood, the affection, or 
 whatever we moderns call it, leapt from the one 
 possessed to another and another, and swept over 
 a community, what did it mean ? The modern 
 psychologist, when he sees such things, calls them 
 " primitive traits " ; ^ he speaks in a jargon that we 
 call " scientific " — not altogether wrongly, for it at 
 least sets us on a new track and so far makes for know- 
 ledge. He speaks of nervous instability as a funda- 
 mental trait of the primitive man ; of his remarkable 
 imitativeness, his lack of inhibition, and the extreme 
 plasticity that results. But the primitive man himself 
 — certainly some of his descendants, who are not 
 yet scientific — had a quicker way of explaining it. 
 A spirit, a god, a daemon, something like that, did 
 it all. For primitive man, as the same psychologist 
 tells us, is strong in perception, but weak in the 
 logical interpretation of what he perceives. He has 
 no large amount of accurate tradition by which to 
 check his perceptions, and he fills in his gaps by 
 imagination ; and what he imagines, he sees, and he 
 believes what he sees — as any common-sense person 
 does ; and the chain of evidence is complete — and 
 wrong ; but it holds with terrible strength, holds for 
 centuries. Now add mesmerism and all the varieties 
 of suggestion that work on the " suggestible," par- 
 ticularly when reason checks things so slowly ; and 
 grasp, if you can, how much in every initiation, in 
 every mystery, in every sacrament, is " suggested," 
 and we shall realize that primitive man had a good 
 many things to explain ; and here again the quick 
 way was to imagine the intervention of a spirit. And 
 then add prophecy and second-sight and mind-reading 
 and thought-transference, remembering the cases in 
 ^ Davenport, Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, p. i8. 
 
EARLY MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 27 
 
 which prophecies do come true, and the cases in which 
 the very making of them gets them fulfilled ; and 
 again you touch a world of wonder and things promptly 
 classed as superhuman. 
 
 In modern times we have a good deal of evidence 
 of the association of these strange activities and 
 passivities of the mind with religion, particularly with 
 new movements — with revivals in the United States, 
 with the development of pilgrimage centres in France. 
 The Greek poets made much of the strange experiences 
 of the Bacchanals,^ which I used not to believe, but 
 which I now see to be confirmed or confirmable by 
 modern observation, to be not out of the way but 
 normal for the region of experience concerned. The 
 Hebrews recorded of their Nebiim acts and states, 
 which the traveller to-day can see in the Dervishes 
 of the modern Semites in a religion descended from 
 that of the Hebrews.^ It is not an extravagant use 
 of hypothesis to suppose that primitive man saw and 
 did the same sort of thing as his descendant, white, 
 black and brown. 
 
 A great step forward was taken when man really 
 began to systematize his ideas of his ultrahuman or 
 spiritual environment. (Once again the adjectives 
 are too modern or not modern enough.) It appears 
 that to the earliest thinkers of our race all things were 
 isolated particulars ; they had so little notion of order 
 or connection, of a regular course of nature, that 
 miraculous and non-miraculous was not one of their 
 distinctions.* Superhuman and supernatural are 
 therefore not words that we can well apply when we 
 are deahng with their thoughts. But however apt 
 they were to entangle beast and human and what we 
 are driven to call divine or spiritual, the mind of man 
 
 ^ More upon this in Chap. IV. p. 86. 
 
 2 Cf. Chap. V. p. 115, and the reference there given to D. B. 
 Macdonald, Aspects of Islam. 
 
 ^ E. Caird, Evolution of Religion, i. 306, 307. 
 
28 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 makes for order and coherence; and we can trace 
 stages in the progress of men's ideas. For fifty years 
 the term Animism has been used to describe the 
 earliest of these stages, but Mr Marrett has of late 
 suggested that there was one still earlier, which he 
 calls (not very gracefully) Animalism — a stage when 
 a rock, a boulder, a meteorite, any oddly-shaped 
 stone, might be credited with vague but dreadful 
 attributes of power ; ^ before the spiritual was, in 
 homely phrase, sorted out, and the rock or meteorite 
 from being animate became merely the home of some- 
 thing animate. Then follows the animistic stage, 
 when all things, or nearly all, are credited with soul 
 or something like it, something vague but potent, 
 and divisible ; for the hair of the animal, the nail of 
 the man, the rag a man has worn, the water he has 
 washed in, the remnant of his dinner,^ even his shadow,' 
 carry something of his soul with them. In many 
 parts, even of Europe, there survive superstitions 
 which derive directly and not so distantly from such 
 beliefs. The whole world is infested with spirits, 
 erratic, incalculable and terrible ; and among them 
 are the souls of the dead. A man's soul may, as we 
 have seen, play tricks upon him even while he lives ; 
 how much more upon his kin when he is gone ? And 
 the mystery of death takes away the familiarity and 
 the friendship. He was a friend ; but what guarantee 
 is there in that, that his soul will be a friend ? 
 
 Animism is by no means dead yet ; there are 
 tribes and races the whole of whose outlook on 
 
 1 R. R. Marrett, Threshold, p. 1 8 ; cf. Sir Bampfylde Fuller, Studies 
 of Indian Life and Sentiment, p. 99, on the ammonite fossil as a god in 
 India. 
 
 2 Cf. F. E. Maning, Old New Zealand, p. 96. 
 
 * Cf. J. C. Lawson, .4«cfi?«/ Greek Religion and Modern Greek Folklore, 
 p. 265. Mr Lawson's life was saved by the rough benevolence of a 
 stranger, who dragged him back and adjured him to go to the other 
 side of a trench, that his shadow might not fall across the foundations 
 and be built in among them. 
 
EARLY MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 29 
 
 the unseen — soul, god, nature — is best classed under 
 this convenient name. But progress can be seen in 
 the movement of men's minds in several directions ; 
 though this is not to deny that the paths of thought 
 cross one another a good deal and sometimes run 
 together for long distances. 
 
 We can recognize the development of great spirits 
 or daemons, who acquire or have assigned to them 
 control over great departments of life — itself a step 
 towards order. Who or what these spirits are, and 
 the degree to which they assume personality, are 
 questions the answers to which depend on many 
 different factors. There are daemons in charge of 
 vegetation — or associated with it — many of them ; 
 and their stories vary. And now we have struck a 
 great factor in our survey of Progress in Religion — 
 the myth ; but it must wait a little. For the moment, 
 we must note that behind the great Demeter of 
 Eleusis, so human and so full of sorrow and gracious- 
 ness — behind the less attractive Cybele in Phrygia — 
 behind Isis — and all the differentiated gods and 
 goddesses of fertility — ^lie daemons, mere spirits, of 
 whom, to begin, little can be predicated. When my 
 motor-bus crossed the frontier into Travancore, a 
 little way beyond the custom-house, it pulled up at 
 a temple of some sort, and a priest begged of us. 
 " The temple," said an old Brahmin who had been 
 befriending me, " is being restored by public sub- 
 scription." " And what," said I, " is the name of 
 the goddess ? " " She has no name ; she is known 
 as the goddess at Mukandal." She belongs to a very 
 large family, none of whom have names, but many 
 of whom fill a large sphere without a name. Those 
 scholars who hold by " collective emotion " are apt 
 to find in it the origin of some of these vague powers 
 and (one is tempted to say) to look on them as the 
 real old aristocracy of all our pantheons. Palestine 
 in early days knew many of them, and called them 
 
30 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 vaguely Baals, lords. They lack character and per- 
 sonality, and when they begin to acquire myths, it 
 is a sign that they are passing out of this class. They 
 have not — it is hard to see how they could have — any 
 very clear relation to morality. 
 
 If the paths were not so interlaced, one might say 
 that from here the road divides. In some lands these 
 old vague great powers remain predominant ; in 
 others they are dimly felt to be in the background 
 behind younger and brighter figures. But from here 
 the paths seem to divide. Some of these powers are 
 associated with animals — are animals, in some queer 
 way, and never quite lose traces of their origins. 
 Sometimes, as with the Greeks, according to some 
 scholars, the god emerges splendid and human, and 
 the beast or bird sinks into a creature merely sacred 
 to him, and remains so in popular belief. Sometimes 
 it looks as if the god started to become human, changed 
 his mind, and halted halfway, and Anubis keeps the 
 jackal's head and Ganesh, or Ganpati, his elephant 
 head and trunk, while the rest of them is human — 
 dreadfully human, as one sees in every picture of 
 Ganesh in his heaven. The Greeks, as a rule, had 
 a very characteristic distaste for this sort of mixed 
 god, though traces of it are found in Arcadia.^ Where 
 the type became established, the one escape, when 
 the worshippers reached a higher, a more moral and 
 more reflective stage of culture, lay in some form of 
 mysticism.^ The mystic theosophy that pervaded 
 the later paganism of the Roman Empire is con- 
 stantly looking to Egypt. Only by allegory, and 
 that sometimes desperate, could this sort of religion 
 be brought into effective connection with morality. 
 Of totems, like Herodotus, " I do not speak," though 
 not for his reason ; for I do not know. 
 
 The other path was followed by those who, more 
 or less confidently and completely, humanized their 
 
 1 Farnell, Greece and Babylon, 79. 2 Pamell, Inaugural, 1 6. 
 
EARLY MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 31 
 
 gods — or found them grow human as they thought 
 about them. Whether the daemon definitely became 
 anthropomorphic, or whether the god proper came 
 some other way, I do not know. Professor Toy says 
 categorically that " it cannot be said that a daemon 
 has ever developed into a god." ^ Plutarch was quite 
 as definite to the contrary ; but it is possible that 
 they are using words in different senses and not con- 
 tradicting each other. Wundt explains the emergence 
 of the anthropomorphic god as the result of the fusion 
 of the " hero " and the daemon, the " hero " being 
 a new creation of the mental life of a later age, 
 when human personality enters into the very forefront 
 of mythological thought and the value set on per- 
 sonal characteristics is enhanced.^ The " hero " is 
 associated, he says, with the ancestor, who now re- 
 cedes. There is some suggestion of evidence for 
 this in Mediterranean lands. Homer's brilliant 
 Anthropomorphism belongs to the next chapter, 
 but while we think of his great Zeus, cloud-compeller, 
 lord of gods and men, we should not forget that there 
 was another story. The Cretans were always liars, 
 another poet tells us, and he finds their champion 
 lie in their statement that Zeus was buried in their 
 island. Tertullian, in his turn, made a great use of 
 this in supporting the thesis he borrowed from Euhe- 
 meros, that all the pagan gods had been men once — 
 and what a pity, he adds, they chose such bad men 
 to deify ! ^ But we must not digress to Tertullian 
 and his theories about the Olympian gods, which are 
 not Miss Harrison's, though we may note that he 
 stands in the great succession of revolt against them 
 in honour of morality. 
 
 To return to the " hero " for a moment before we 
 quite leave him. It is interesting to ask when the 
 
 1 C. H. Toy, Introduction to History of Religions, § 694 
 
 2 Wundt, Folk Psychology, p. 282. 
 
 ^ Tertullian, j^/ff/. 11 : Quot tamen potiores viros apud inferos reliquistis ? 
 
32 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 theory began to reign that he was of mixed origin, 
 the son of a god hy a mortal woman. We know it 
 in Homer ; but how much older is it ? The early 
 Semites believed there were marriages of human and 
 daemon, and, Plutarch tells us, so did the Egyptians.^ 
 Indeed, the curiously common explanation of twins 
 as one the child of a man and the other of a spirit ^ — 
 taken with all the legends of snakes, in dream and 
 otherwise, in the pedigrees of special heroes, ^ and 
 with the peculiarly naive notions of some surviving 
 savages as to conception — ^points to the primitive 
 idea of the daemonic origin of all life. But here 
 perhaps we are digressing again, a little way. My 
 defence must be that excessive relevance is no key 
 to the primitive mind. 
 
 Gods, however, do not all arise in the same way. 
 " The higher gods of the Rig Veda," says Professor 
 Macdonnell,^ " are almost entirely personifications 
 of natural phaenomena, such as Sun, Dawn, Fire, 
 Wind. Excepting a few deities surviving from an older 
 period, the gods are, for the most part, more or less 
 clearly connected with their physical foundations. 
 The personifications, being there but slightly de- 
 veloped, lack definiteness of outline and individuality 
 of character." These are gods, I understand, and 
 not the daemons of Miss Harrison and Mukandal. 
 We may note in passing that scholars who speak with 
 authority are very unanimous in holding that no 
 influence from the Vedas can be traced in the growth 
 of the Greek pantheon. 
 
 With the arrival of gods with names we reach the 
 outskirts of the higher culture.* The forward steps 
 are now clearer — they are not always easy ; perhaps 
 
 Li/i of Numa, 4. 
 
 1 
 
 ^ Cf. Rendel Harris, The Cult of the Heavenly Twins, chap. 1. 
 3 Sanskrit Literature, p. 69. 
 
 ^ Cf. C. H. Toy, Intr. Hist. Relig., § 539 : " When the true gods 
 appear, the totemic and individual half-gods disappear." 
 
EARLY MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 33 
 
 they never have been easy. Miss Harrison is against 
 us here ; she will not have us " assume oifhand that 
 the shift from nature-god to human-nature-god is 
 necessarily an advance." Yet all the progressive 
 peoples either make it, or, if conditions are too hard 
 for them, they try to make up for it, by borrowing, 
 by allegory, by interpretation ; and the old nature- 
 gods have to change their character to keep pace 
 with growing intelligence. Unless we are prepared 
 to say that thought is an evil, we shall not " assume 
 offhand " that even so charming a writer is necessarily 
 right on this point. 
 
 When men begin to deal with gods instead of vague, 
 impersonal, intangible and really unthinkable daemons, 
 thought has a chance to assert its right to control the 
 whole of man's life. Blind fear is, in the last resort, 
 the attitude of man toward the daemons ; the shift 
 to gods means a shift to thought. With all man's 
 avowed and surmised ignorance about gods, there is 
 the feeling that a god can be known. Modern men 
 feel that a law of nature can be known, but the old 
 daemon was not a law of nature, and his control of 
 nature was uncertain and incalculable. But, with all 
 the surprises of personality, personal gods had some- 
 thing in common with man, and they were intelligible 
 so far. And intelligible things all belong to the same 
 order. So the gods, with all their differences, can 
 be grouped and co-ordinated and related in some 
 rational way with the world ; and this process gave 
 rise to a good deal of Mythology. 
 
 Mythology in itself is a triumph of the human 
 mind. Myths have been divided into three main 
 classes — ^those which explain traditional practices and 
 rituals and the holiness of certain places ; and here 
 we must remember that in every case the myth comes 
 from the usage and not the usage from the myth ; 
 secondly, those which attempt to reduce the vast 
 congeries of local and tribal cults, beliefs and myths, 
 
34 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 to order ; thirdly, myths that embody the beginnings of 
 larger religious speculation.^ This grouping is frankly 
 logical rather than historical. If it is our object to 
 reach the earliest knowable stage of religion it will 
 appear that the ritual or practice (if we can recover 
 it) will be our best evidence ; but for the study of 
 Progress in Religion, mythology is incomparably more 
 important — particularly if we can trace its growth. 
 In ancient religions myth took something like the 
 central place that dogma has in the religions we know. 
 It was less thought out, less related to man's general 
 experience, and less authoritative ; sometimes alter- 
 native myths would be offered to explain the same 
 ritual ; and the worshipper might accept any of them, 
 or none, or all, provided the ritual was duly performed. 
 The primitive god required the rite ; he was not 
 interested in his worshipper's speculations. To the 
 modern student the myth is of value, for it will 
 generally be a sincere attempt to explain something, 
 and it will contain implicitly a faithful picture of the 
 god as man conceived him, and sometimes of the 
 first-beginnings of scientific thought. For there were 
 all kinds of myths in time — myths to explain the 
 origin of the world, of sun and stars, of man, of differ- 
 ing races and their social customs and their genealogies. 
 When once we reach civilized man, we find no new 
 myths of cosmogony; the task of explanation passes 
 over to the philosophers. Myth has the advantages 
 of being more or less fixed ^ and yet subject to 
 development — and the disadvantages.^ With time 
 the myths are told better and better ; there is more 
 literary skill and appeal about them ; crudities and 
 what offended the feehngs and morals of a later day 
 
 1 Robertson Smith, Earl;j Religion of Semites, p. i8. 
 
 2 Cinderella sticks to glass slippers ; Orestes goes barefoot and his 
 footprint is recognized from its likeness to the family footprint ; see 
 Veivall, Cioe/iioroi, p. Iv. Similarly with stories of the gods. 
 
 3 See C. H. Toy, Intr. Hist. Re/ig., chap. viii. §§ 819 if. 
 
EARLY MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 35 
 
 were toned down ; and as men gained a clearer under- 
 standing of the laws of nature and higher and more 
 intellectual conceptions of deity, these gains were 
 reflected in the tone of the myths. None the less, 
 for those who did not share these deeper views, who 
 preferred a tale as it was told to them, the rude features 
 of the old tale remain, and are inherited long after 
 they have ceased to be anything but a drawback to 
 thought and progress — an heirloom of reaction and 
 even of pollution. One class of myth we must not 
 forget — the myths of the world beyond ; for, while 
 perhaps not the oldest of myths, they were eventually 
 associated in men's thoughts with speculations upon 
 sin and righteousness and judgment, of the utmost 
 consequence to human progress. 
 
 With order as an instinct, and myth as a con- 
 venient tool, man began to group and arrange his 
 gods, a process a good deal easier than his next task — 
 as we shall see when we reach Homer, perhaps sooner. 
 For his methods were simple ; story is added to story, 
 for many stories may be told in many places of the 
 same god ; in them god is equated with god, and 
 there emerges a god with a number of names, some 
 to fall into the background and to be of only local 
 interest, some to coalesce into a single expression. 
 Phoebus Apollo is one person and one name — not 
 two ; but Smintheus is a little out of the way, though 
 still Apollo. 
 
 It was when morals began to take more and more 
 predominance in the thoughts of men that the 
 trouble began to be serious about the gods and their 
 characters. The accumulation of myths had gone on 
 without much reference to their moral implication. 
 Man was more concerned to unify Phoebus Apollo 
 than to morahze him ; but when this later and more 
 serious task had to be undertaken, there were all the 
 myths to be dealt with^ — some were toned down 
 already, some half-moraUzed, and some remained 
 
36 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 utterly unmanageable. They lived on and on, and 
 re-emerged again and again, and always for mischief. 
 The most desperate attempts were made to allegorize 
 them ; but in the end there was no remedy for them, 
 the gods they dealt with had to be thrown over. 
 Intellect and moral sense made Anthropomorphism 
 inevitable ; it was a step forward, the more significant 
 because the next step had as inevitably to be taken. 
 It made for clearer thought and thus was an impossible 
 resting-place. It implied the application of moral 
 standards as man knows them to the gods ; and the 
 moralization of the pantheon was the great battle- 
 ground of ancient thought. 
 
 There was only one end to the struggle. The old 
 myths and the old gods stood together, and both had 
 to go. There was nothing possible but monotheism 
 of some kind or other ; men were forced into it, some- 
 times by the instinct for unification, sometimes by 
 the passion for morality. And monotheism is unlike 
 other forms of belief ; it is intolerant, earnest to 
 fierceness.^ Plato, the Hebrew prophets, the Chris- 
 tian, the Moslem — they are all fierce. They are 
 fighting a battle for God and for mankind, and they 
 see that there is nothing so fatal, so damning for men, 
 as false thought about God. Love of men, love of 
 morality, love of truth, and eventually love of God, 
 give a force and a passion to all their work, an edge 
 to their thought and speech, an edge sometimes to 
 their temper. Why is man always re-modelling his 
 conceptions of God ? What drives him to it ? 
 
 Before we embark on any answers to this great 
 question, something must be attempted as to man's 
 ways of relating himself to the spirits or gods whom 
 he conceives to surround him. Our attempts will 
 for the present chiefly take the form of questions. 
 First of all, how many different ranges of ideas are 
 covered in man's various endeavours to make some 
 ^ Cf. E. Caird, Evolution of Religion, ii. 17. 
 
EARLY MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 37 
 
 accommodation, some working arrangement, with the 
 spirits, daemons or gods, with which he has to do ? 
 Obviously every type of idea that he has formed of 
 these beings will be reflected in his cult, and a good 
 many that other people have formed will also be 
 included, for the sake of safety. Even ideas which 
 intellectually he despises will influence him when a 
 sudden call means instant action. Some of his doings 
 we shall only be able to class with Magic ; some 
 have their origin in moral ideas ; and last of all (as 
 Paul saw) comes the spiritual as a factor in worship. 
 Minnehaha,^ the wife of Hiawatha, in Longfellow's 
 poem, goes through elaborate ceremonies in the 
 planting of Mondamin to assure a good crop of maize. 
 A similar motive and a similar ritual lie among the 
 origins of the Mysteries of Eleusis. Magic or religion ? 
 We cannot go back to that question ; even if it could 
 ever be answered categorically one way or the other, 
 it is not supremely relevant to our inquiry ; origins 
 are not of first importance for us. We shall see in 
 the story of Israel how moral ideas became associated 
 with ritual, till the idea of sacrifice dominated all 
 others, with a constant succession of developed 
 meanings. 
 
 A further series of questions, and these of import- 
 ance, will turn upon who does the sacrifice and 
 performs the ceremony and on behalf of whom ? 
 And here, wherever we can, we ought to date the 
 conceptions which we find to prevail. Is the sacrifice 
 a tribal act ? Does the chief, king or priest (the 
 titles and functions overlap) who performs it, do it 
 on behalf of the tribe, the community or city, or on 
 his own account ? Robertson Smith in his great 
 book. The Early Religion of the Semites, suggested 
 that sacrifice antedates historically the rise of private 
 
 ^ Her name, a Dakotah has told me, does not mean " Laughing 
 Water," but " Waterfall " ; the difference is made by the first H, 
 which is really a guttural. 
 
38 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 property.^ This means that certain values found later 
 on in Jewish and other sacrifice do not concern us 
 when we are dealing with origins. The sacrifice 
 done on behalf of a primitive tribe will probably not 
 be the outcome of moral, and still less of spiritual, 
 motives. It will be a practical transaction, an affair 
 of Magic, or of that undifferentiated Magic-f«7«- 
 Religion, which we find before they become distinct 
 spheres. As long as the tribe or community, col- 
 lectively (whatever the agent, king or priest) manages 
 its relations with the spirits or gods, the answer to our 
 next question will be fairly easy. Of what character 
 will the ritual be ? It will be what the Greeks called 
 dromena, doings, things done in a prescribed and 
 traditional way, where the detail of procedure is all- 
 important and the spirit of the proceedings is negligible. 
 When the individual begins to sacrifice for himself 
 or for his family, changes follow. He comes in with 
 his individual ideas, fears and hopes; and even if 
 he prays for the community, he is acting on his own 
 account, he has his own motives, and he plays for 
 his own hand. Both types of religion, tribal and 
 individual, exist together ; there is no very obvious 
 incompatibility ; the individual's action can hardly 
 hurt the community. Once again we note, as so 
 often, the appearance of the individual with his 
 emphasis, conscious or unconscious, upon himself, 
 as one of the great factors in the transformation of 
 religion. 
 
 Two chief types of sacrifice are recognized by 
 modern investigators — not incompatible, but distinct 
 and springing from different conceptions — the com- 
 munion type and the piacular type ; and I think 
 the former is the older. Here, first the tribe — later, 
 no doubt, as we shall see, the individual — seeks some 
 sort of union or communication with the spirit or 
 god; the tribe is perhaps, as Robertson Smith 
 
 ^ Early Religion of Semites, p. 385. 
 
EARLY MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 39 
 
 suggested, seeking to humour its spiritual protector, 
 or even to reconcile him ; they give him the blood 
 of the victim if they are Semites, or burn certain 
 parts of the body if they are Greeks, and in either 
 case they eat the rest, and they share wine. " The 
 fundamental idea," says Robertson Smith,^ " of 
 ancient sacrifice is sacramental communion, and all 
 atoning rites are ultimately to be regarded as owing 
 their efficacy to a communication of divine life to 
 the worshippers and to the establishment or con- 
 firmation of a living bond between them and their 
 god." It depends, as he shows, on a very ancient 
 belief in " the full kinship of animals with men " 
 (p. 365 ; cf. also p. 124). Bound up with it was the 
 feeling that the life of the sacrificed animal reinforces 
 both divine and human life.^ God and man drew 
 near together in a renewal of life and friendship. 
 This merry sacrificial feast is the centre of ancient 
 religion ; and it rests on the belief that with the help 
 of the gods life can easily be made all right, that the 
 gods are easy to deal with, content with themselves 
 and not exacting with their worshippers.* In the 
 Roman Empire this type of religion rose to new life, 
 and men made a practice of linking their lives and 
 souls to gods, who generally had no connection what- 
 ever with their tribes or races, in ceremonies the 
 meaning of which they could not explain and did not 
 think worth while to try to explain ; they rested on 
 the tradition that this was the way, and on the 
 assurance of their feelings that they had achieved 
 what they sought — on nothing more objective. 
 
 The other type has a gloomier aspect. Here the 
 worshipper offered a gift to induce the god to be 
 friendly, to get him to do something, or to go away. 
 The gift was a bribe, a form of wheedling, a bargain. 
 
 ^ Early Religion of Semites, p. 439. 
 
 ^ Jevons, Hist. Religion, p. 352. 
 
 * Cf. Robertson Smith, op. cit. 257, 258. 
 
40 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 The view of life implied was a severe one — ^life was 
 not easy at all ; the gods were awkward, even irritable, 
 and needed to be placated ; questions were asked. 
 Had the tribe offended ? had the man sinned ? To 
 the other type of sacrifice there properly was attached 
 no sense of sin ; to this type it emphatically belongs. 
 Here, though the tribe may be concerned, we can 
 see that the individual will be in the ascendant. On 
 one side this type of religion can be associated with 
 very crude magic ; on the other it is bound up with 
 elemental notions of morality. The Greeks leant to 
 the communion view, the sacramental conception of 
 sacrifice. The Hebrews gradually turned to think of 
 sacrifice as sin-offering. The development of the priest 
 seems logically to belong more closely to this type. 
 
 Both types are old, and both lived long ; the same 
 community could maintain both. If it were suggested 
 that the older of the two types is constantly associated 
 with reaction in religion, some religiously-minded 
 people might resent it, but perhaps without being 
 able to give any clear account yet of what happens 
 between the soul and God. This at least can be said, 
 that the piacular type emphasized an attention to 
 morality which is not carried by the other, and doing 
 so, it lent itself to the development of those con- 
 ceptions of Sin and of Conscience which have above 
 aU things been powerful in the advancement and 
 progress of religion. If the Stoics invented the word 
 Conscience, they assuredly did not invent the thing, 
 as Aeschylus and Plato bear witness. Darker things 
 than conscience go with the piacular type — terror 
 and the horrors it brings with it — ^human sacrifice, 
 too, which the theories of the ancients led them to 
 suppose older than animal sacrifice, and to which 
 fear, prompted by those theories (now held by many 
 to be false), drove them back in hours of national 
 strain and darkness. 
 
 For our own purposes let us note, before we pass 
 
EARLY MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 41 
 
 on, how, in this matter of sacrifice too, the discovery 
 of the individual and the growling emphasis upon 
 him, the attribution of very personal feelings to the 
 god or gods, and the gradual shifting of interest to 
 moral issues, all harmonize with what we discover 
 elsewhere in the field of religion. 
 
 It remains to make a brief survey of the factors 
 which historically have advanced and retarded the 
 progress of religion. Some have been touched upon 
 necessarily in dealing with other matters. Here, 
 for the sake of that instinct for order which primitive 
 man transmitted to us, we must try to group what 
 we are discovering ; and I think it can be done briefly. 
 
 One thing stands out for the student of religion — 
 that, in spite of our casual modern way of discrimi- 
 nating between sacred and secular, the story of 
 religion is bound up with things that we might off- 
 hand say had nothing to do with it. And there we 
 may begin. Primitive man was not always thinking 
 about the gods, even if we do concede that he was 
 never irreligious, as many of his modern descendants 
 are. His chief battle, as Carlyle said, was against 
 hunger — a long-drawn war indeed of many engage- 
 ments and many mishaps ; and in the prosecution 
 of it he too sought a place in the sun, he fought for 
 fresh woods and fertile acres where he might expand. 
 Where we can recapture at all even the bare outlines 
 of his history, it is a long record of migrations and 
 wars, invasions, enslavements and destructions. Look 
 at the savage wars of the Iroquois and Hurons, which 
 the French chronicled in Canada, in which to their 
 loss they meddled on the wrong side. The Iroquois, 
 from what is now New York State, raided the Hurons 
 in Quebec Province, as we call it, and with English 
 guns and powder swept them out and exterminated 
 them — drove the remnant of the tribe over to the 
 Lake that bears their name and pursued them there. 
 But they did not kill them all ; they had a way of 
 
42 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 incorporating lads in their own five tribes; and the 
 captive Huron boy grew up to be an Iroquois warrior 
 and to carry on the war against his own. Much the 
 same, though without guns and French historians, 
 must have been the story of antiquity. One tribe 
 drove another out of its forests and lands, captured 
 its daughters, incorporated its sons as slaves or 
 warriors — and suffered the same from a third. Clans 
 perished, men relapsed into brute life, and sank into 
 savages ; or they fled for refuge to other lands — mere 
 units with wife or child. In any case there was endless 
 crossing of stocks and of ideas. All the syncretism 
 of ancient religion is not the work of the Roman 
 Empire. Hundreds of years before Homer, Smin- 
 theus-es and Phoebus-es began to be amalgamated 
 with Apollo's. The captive bride taught her children 
 not quite what their grandmother had taught their 
 father ; and the children, born in exile, grew up with 
 little interest in the shrines and holy places from 
 which their fathers had been driven. But the holy 
 places became a concern to the conquerors ; lions 
 perhaps grew bolder in the devastated lands, and the 
 newcomers concluded that it was because they knew 
 not the manner of the god of the land, and got priests 
 of the old stock and served the old Lord of the land 
 and with him the gods they had brought.^ There 
 were changes in men's ideas of the gods — old sanctions 
 weakened, new fears prevalent, confusions of rites 
 and ceremonies, old priesthoods fused with new, 
 alien families kept as sacrificers and confusing familiar 
 and unfamiliar teaching. Sometimes one set of con- 
 ceptions will survive amalgamation with rites that 
 belong to another ; sometimes the rites prevail ; and 
 unconscious compromise must have been universal. 
 
 All this belongs to Pre-History ; and when History 
 (from which, not unnaturally, our definite illustra- 
 tions are taken) begins to dawn, it shows us much 
 
 ^ 2 Kings, xvii. 24-41. 
 
EARLY MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 43 
 
 the same processes at work in different ways. Tribes 
 are growing into nations, cantons into little towns, 
 and changing ideas mark every stage of such growth. 
 Wars are on a larger scale, but their effects are much 
 the same — disintegration and recombination ; and 
 the institution of slavery perpetuates the mixture 
 of races. Men begin to trade and to travel — to 
 learn new crafts and arts. Metallurgy progresses by 
 leaps and bounds, and makes new men of its crafts- 
 men, new states, and new theories of government, as 
 the chief sinks into the ranks of armed demesmen, 
 no longer alone possessor of bronze shield and sword. 
 And democracy knows other gods from the old clans ; 
 or, if they are the same gods, it knows them differently. 
 Instead of the broken tribe flying to new lands, we have 
 the ordered colony crossing the sea ; but it too finds 
 new gods and brings old ones ; it too finds the old 
 gods not quite the same in the new home and adds 
 something to the new gods. The Assyrian comes 
 down like a wolf on the fold ; or the Lydian slowly 
 conquers the Greek sea-coast and meddles with 
 Delphi ; or the Afghan sweeps all over India ; and 
 in every case religion shows the results. India knows 
 " more than fifty accepted external forms of Hin- 
 duism." ^ 
 
 Out of all this storm and stress, confusion of war 
 and tribe and tradition, one person emerges — more 
 secure of existence as every organized form of thought 
 and government collapses — the Individual. He has 
 to fly for his Ufe — his life, not the tribe's now ; he 
 marries a girl of another clan, with such rites as they 
 can manage, and they breed their children inevitably 
 to be little individuals. And then he shifts, with his 
 foreign wife and his half-breed children, to a colony 
 newly settling ; he picks up a new trade, perforce, 
 in the new place, and it suits him ; he works in im- 
 provements, and his boys take ship and sell his wares 
 
 ^ Meredith Townsend, Europe and Asia, p. 254. 
 
44 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 all round the Mediterranean and bring back wealth 
 and more foreign women and new ideas. Without 
 realizing what they are doing, that family makes a 
 revolution in thought. They were cosmopohtan 
 before Socrates, and the world knew hundreds of them. 
 Afterwards they drew a veil, in many communities, 
 over the mixtures of their origin, but the mixtures 
 told. There were larger ideas of human kinship ; 
 the Greek grew to be Panhellenic and then went to 
 Egypt and Babylon and Spain, and reached some 
 conception of a humanity larger than HeUendom. 
 And it is all reflected in speculation — ^unity grows to 
 be a larger and larger circle ; gods are fused more 
 than ever, interpreted in new tongues and domiciled 
 in new pantheons. In the Greek world a greater 
 unity than any pantheon begins to be conceived. 
 Nor is this all. Law emerges more and more in the 
 cities, and Justice takes a larger place in men's 
 thoughts ; then the gods must come under the reign 
 of law, for the cosmos cannot have a ragged fringe ; 
 and if law is to rule the gods, we must show the 
 heavens more just. All the while the alphabet is 
 working its miracles ; those handy letters, the traders' 
 useful device, serve other ends ; books spring up, 
 and books mean modernity. Science and Philosophy 
 seize their chance, and things are said in books that 
 make Olympus look strange and old ; it will need 
 overhauling, and it gets it. 
 
 But all is not progress. The sick child sweeps 
 the philosopher's family back into superstition ; the 
 foreign priest or prophet knows a new miracle to cure 
 that sickness, or the home priest remembers some- 
 thing done amiss. So the old things must be kept. 
 The marriage life of the community is pure, its ideals 
 for husbands and wives are high ; but the goddess 
 belongs to an old order, she is conservative, and her 
 temple is a focus for every evil instinct, where im- 
 purity is solemnly kept and maintained as religion 
 
EARLY MAN AND HIS ENVIRONMENT 45 
 
 with priests and priestesses saying, singing and doing 
 things in honour of the gods from which the children 
 of a decent house will be screened by their mother 
 and father.^ Or a great disaster impends upon the 
 state ; and we know the cry : " Hang morals ! I 
 want to win the war " ; and we have seen the moral 
 deliquium it brings. In Carthage once it involved 
 a human sacrifice of 300 lads — not slain by the enemy, 
 but by the priests to induce the gods to save the state.^ 
 The moral sense grows indeed, but still there is the 
 haunting fear that your fathers' old religion may be 
 true — that the gods may be unclean, bestial, filthy 
 and cruel, and must be worshipped in their own way. 
 You with your moral outlook may be all wrong ; who 
 are you to claim that the gods are morally ahead of 
 men ? they may be far behind — and then where are 
 we with our moral notions ? Best not be too good 
 to invoke the gods to help us on their own terms. 
 And the priesthood say so ; and if you hint that they 
 are never the intellectual pioneers of the community 
 and that they have reasons for crying : " Great is 
 Diana of the Ephesians ! " the child is sick, the enemy 
 is at the gates ; give the gods what they like — blood, 
 filth, folly — and be moral after the war.^ 
 
 Idolatries die everywhere, but they die hard ; 
 superstition lives long, and ceremony outlives even 
 belief in the gods to whom it is addressed. But 
 mankind is committed to morality and personality ; 
 and Truth prevails. 
 
 ^ This is true of Corinth, Comana and Madura alike. 
 
 2 Diodorus Siculus, xx. 14. 
 
 3 Strabo, c. 297, says everybody thinks women are leaders in super- 
 stition, and quotes Menander's evidence on the point. 
 
Ill 
 
 HOMER 
 
 It was the belief of the Greeks that their religion 
 owed a great deal to Homer and Hesiod. " They 
 lived, I think," says Herodotus, " four hundred years 
 before me, not more. It was they who made a 
 Theogony for the Greeks, and gave the gods their 
 added names ^ (eiroi'u/u.ias), divided among them 
 their honours and their arts, and described their 
 appearances " (ii. 53). Modern archaeologists have 
 warned us that this is rather the belief of an educated 
 Greek of the fifth century b.c. than a certain and final 
 verdict of History. The nineteenth century laid 
 bare from the soil of Greece and Asia Minor, and the 
 early years of this century in Crete, a mass of evidence 
 which we are probably right in assuming to have been 
 unknown to Herodotus and his contemporaries — 
 evidence the value of which, as happens so often 
 when we are dealing with matters of religion, we may 
 not ourselves estimate aright without a great deal 
 of care. 
 
 But our subject is not the archaeology of pre- 
 historic Greece, and we are not concerned to set out 
 with any detail what the earliest Greeks — or their 
 predecessors, their forerunners, or even their fathers 
 — believed. Our question is one more interesting, 
 and it concerns the Greeks themselves. How did 
 they come to get away from that group of old beliefs, 
 old rituals, superstitions and pre-conceptions, which 
 seem to be indicated by the remains that the archaeo- 
 
 ^ Patronymic and local names. 
 
HOMER 47 
 
 logisfs discover ? Here, as whenever we touch the 
 Greeks, it is with a certain sense of relief. 
 
 The readers of Herodotus had little doubt as to what 
 or who the Greeks were. We know who and what 
 Englishmen are. " The Greek race," says Herodotus 
 (viii. 144) " is of one blood and one speech ; it has 
 temples of the gods in common, common sacrifices, 
 and ways of like kind." Blood, speech, religion and 
 culture — these, shared, make a people, or a race, or 
 a nation, one ; he says nothing about politics. The 
 definition of a modern thinker would be more difficult, 
 for he knows a distinction between a race and a nation ; 
 he recalls very well nations of very different racial 
 origins, where religious differences are very great, 
 or look very great ; and yet he knows, and we all 
 know, more or less what we mean by English. The 
 ancients knew what they meant when they said Greek ; 
 they had no doubt at all as to the difference between 
 Greek and barbarian in spite of political or other 
 perplexity as to where the Macedonians were to be 
 ranked in the scale. 
 
 We do not know very well who or what sort of 
 people had the religious ideas indicated by the 
 archaeological data. They were not Greeks, and 
 yet, in a sense, they may have been ; as Hengist 
 and Horsa, who led our ancestors to Britain, were 
 English, but not the eventual English whom we 
 know. The truth is, a race is not so stable a thing as 
 for ethnological convenience we sometimes could 
 wish it to be ; it is a thing constantly in flux, for 
 ever developing. We may set the Veddahs and the 
 Arunta aside ; we know nothing of their history, nor 
 do they themselves. In the civilized world, in Burma 
 to-day, in India yesterday, in Asia Minor, Greece 
 and England, we know that race is always changing 
 somehow. The Greeks emerge ; and it may be true 
 — truer at least than the critics of Herodotus some- 
 times allow — that Homer and Hesiod shaped their 
 
48 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 religion. For Homer and Hesiod did a great deal 
 more to make the Greek race than Hengist and Horsa 
 to make the English. 
 
 Homer, then, is exactly the sort of witness we want, 
 if we may cross-examine him a little. He stands 
 between something that was not quite Greece and 
 something that pre-eminently was Greece. We can 
 believe that he inherited his language, and found a 
 diction and a metre something like what we read in 
 his poems. He borrowed his legends, very probably, 
 and used a theme or themes familiar to his hearers ; 
 perhaps he borrowed actual lays of a master or masters. 
 He found a civilization actually existing, or lingering 
 in the memories of tribes. He was familiar with that 
 quidquid agunt homines which is the neglected back- 
 ground of ordinary people and the raw material of 
 great poets. All this he found. We are reminded 
 of what Heine said of Shakespeare : " He borrowed 
 all the plots of his plays ; all he did was to give them 
 the spirit (Geist) that made them live (beseelte)." 
 Homer did something as miraculous, or even more so, 
 with what he found. He took what he wanted, he 
 used it, and Greek life and Greek thought began. 
 That eternal flux of things which we call human 
 history became rapid and momentous. 
 
 It is sometimes assumed that Homer gives us the 
 current views of his day upon the gods. But it has 
 to be realized that a man of genius, who gets his 
 thoughts well before the world, neither represents 
 things as they are nor leaves things as they are. The 
 latter we shall all concede ; the fallacy is in the former. 
 Things never are as they are ; as Heraclitus says, you 
 never step into the same river twice — no, nor once. 
 The human mind never took a photograph of a situa- 
 tion ; it is not rapid enough, nor stupid enough. 
 There never was in religion, there never is, a standard 
 state of things. Homer does not give us, could not 
 give*us, a picture of religion as it was in his day, nor 
 
HOMER 49 
 
 can any other great poet or thinker or even artist 
 do it. It has to be remembered, too, that Homer 
 was not a lecturer on Natural Religion, not even a 
 Manu or a Moses. His theme was not religion, 
 either in the sense where cult predominates or where 
 philosophy is the main thing. He was making songs, 
 poems, to sing or to recite, and not quite like Demo- 
 docos in his Odyssey. He told of men and of human 
 life — of their attitude to gods and to the unseen as 
 it bore on life or made life, of gods as they came into 
 the life of his heroes. Surely he could have given — 
 so little was he concerned directly with gods or cults 
 or beliefs — ^what we call an objective treatment to 
 these things ; but it could not be done. 
 
 A poet's art rests on selection, and many things go 
 to make his habits of selection — the limitations of his 
 subject and of his audience, their interests and beliefs 
 and fears, but above all his own mind, his own out- 
 look on life and humanity. Thus at the very dawn 
 of Greek history, as we know it, we find the most 
 characteristic Greek thing known to us — a great 
 mind handling and developing human life. We have 
 to ask, then, what Homer makes of religion ; and 
 this involves two types of question. What did he 
 find ? and what interested him ? 
 
 What he found, we can more or less surmise from 
 the poems themselves, taken in conjunction with the 
 data of Archaeology and the recorded practices of 
 later Greeks. The Archaeologists may be giving us 
 wrong data, or wrong interpretations of them ; and 
 the later Greeks may have got their practices from 
 neighbours and not from ancestors. I do not press 
 these suggestions, though it is as well to remember 
 them. Let us then assume that our teachers in 
 Primitive Religion — ambiguous as the phrase is, let 
 it go unchallenged for the moment — are right in all 
 they tell us about those forerunners of the Greeks, 
 about the fears, the fancies, and the instincts that 
 
50 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 make the religion of early man and backward man — 
 especially the latter — about their cults, and observ- 
 ances, their taboos, totems, fetishes, their daemons 
 and witches, their god-possession and devU-possession, 
 their ecstasy and prophecy, their sacred stones and 
 sacred trees, and all the survivals of savagery and 
 magic. It would be bold to say that they are right 
 in every particular, but let us assume it. What does 
 Homer make of it all ? I am reminded of what Renan 
 wrote when he read Amiel's Journal : — " M. Amiel 
 asks what does M. Renan make of sin — eh ! bien ! 
 I think I leave it out ! " (Je crois que je le supprime).^ 
 We must recall again that Homer was not writing 
 as an Archaeologist — that he was not called by his 
 subject to deal with the antiquarian aspects of Religion 
 — that he was looking to a constituency of laymen. 
 It is held by some critics, who have at least a right to 
 speak, that superstition and magic must have been 
 more rife than we should conclude from Homer's 
 poems, but that the Greek (or whoever he was 
 ethnically just then) was not apt to be daemon-ridden.^ 
 Conjectures are made as to the cults and beliefs of 
 the invaders who appear to have reached the Aegaean 
 world from the North, and of those whom they found 
 and conquered on their arrival. Later Greeks cer- 
 tainly show a good many traits in their religion which 
 it is agreed to call primitive. The great poet, how- 
 ever, chose a subject which did not involve him in 
 these discussions, which took him out of the twilight 
 into the open air, which meant for him not guesswork 
 as to the unknown but interpretation of what he knew, 
 what he had suffered, what he had been — in a word, 
 Et quorum fars magna fui. 
 
 His poem is autobiographical, as all great inter- 
 pretation is. 
 
 ^- Introduction to Amiel's Journal, Eng. trn. p. xl. 
 ^ Cf. T. D. Seymour, Life in the Homeric Age, 392 fF. Farnell, 
 Greece and Babylon, 158, 178. 
 
HOMER 51 
 
 Here I may seem to be digressing to Homeric 
 criticism, but one is surely allowed to cross-examine 
 a witness, to know whether one is questioning an 
 individual or a chorus. It is hard to believe that 
 in the Homeric poems we have not to do with a 
 personality and a very great one. There are diffi- 
 culties still, which suggest later hands. Others may 
 have added their quota to the work, differing here 
 and there it may be in their treatment of a character 
 or an episode, but the great original dominated his 
 school, he selected its interests, and he gave it its 
 tone. The more one studies poetry, the more one 
 feels the presence of a great nature behind great 
 poetry,^ and the great natures gravitate to the great 
 factors in life — inevitably. Homer wrote — or sang — 
 or whatever be the right word — of the gods ; and it 
 is irresistible that Homer thought about the gods. 
 If my point, already attempted, is right, even if he 
 meant to portray the gods exactly as ordinary people 
 conceived of them,^ he could not do it ; he was not 
 an ordinary person. Euripides is the only poet of 
 genius, known at all to me, who can be credited with 
 the plan of drawing the gods exactly as ordinary 
 men imagined them, and he did it for a purpose ; 
 his pictures are individual and characteristic of himself 
 to the last degree — the protest and the irony cannot 
 be escaped. But with Homer we do not think of 
 protest or irony ; his purpose is other. We might 
 even say he has no purpose but the artist's — to 
 present men otov? Set iroiuv,^ as they ought to be 
 drawn, and gods no less. 
 
 He is not conscious of making a challenge, we gather, 
 
 ^ Cf. Longinus, 9, 2, {(•vj/o; /jieyaXo^poalivrii a7r^')rq/ji,a. 
 
 ^ As commentators suggest ; e.g.. How and Wells on Herodotus 
 
 "• 53- 
 
 ' Sophocles on his own practice ; so Aristotle, Poetics, 25,11, 1460b. 
 
 Cf. J. W. Mackail, Lectures on Greek Poetry, p. 157, whose interpre- 
 tation of the famous phrase, more interesting than that of the editors, 
 serves my meaning best. 
 
52 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 nor does he expect to be challenged. Here as else- 
 where he keeps his own amazing serenity. So much 
 the better a witness he will be for us. But none the 
 less he wiU be re-creating what he interprets, adding 
 something and developing it. 
 
 Homer shows so many of the great Greek char- 
 acteristics that there is much to be said for the view 
 that the Hellen had come to his own already in that 
 day. Homer has already the strong preference for 
 clearness that marks the best minds of Greece — the 
 instinct for the fact and, above all, for the relevant 
 fact ; he has the turn for order in his ideas that all 
 thinkers cultivate, and in a high degree the Greek 
 loyalty to form and freedom as equal and indivisible 
 factors in all art and all sound thinking. In a word, 
 he has, without talking about it, the gift of criticism 
 — a natural turn for " examining life " (in Plato's 
 phrase^). All these faculties come instinctively and 
 unconsciously into play, when he thinks of the gods ; 
 and with them another gift of the artist makes itself 
 felt. He has that passion for personality, that is 
 the mark of great creative natures. Aristotle ^ re- 
 marked upon his way of letting men and women and 
 others develop their own characters in his story. 
 What he loves in men, he cannot deny to gods ; his 
 gods are inevitably personal and individual. 
 
 Miss Jane Harrison brings a fierce indictment against 
 the gods of Homer — " the Olympians," as she names 
 them with scorn. The Olympian god sheds his 
 plant or animal form, she tells us ; he refuses to be 
 an earth-daemon, or an air-daemon, or even a year- 
 daemon ; his " crowning disability and curse " is 
 that he claims to be immortal, which fixes a great 
 gulf between him and mankind ; he has personality, 
 
 ^ Apology, 38 A. There is a great deal more to be said for Matthew 
 Arnold's definition of literature as a criticism of life than some people 
 allow. 
 
 2 Poetics, 24, 7, ij^6oa. 
 
HOMER 53 
 
 individuality ; and he claims reality, " the rock on 
 which successive generations of gods have shattered." ^ 
 To all these charges — apart from the comments 
 interspersed upon them — Homer must plead guilty. 
 He has done all these things — ^he has re-created his 
 gods, rid them of their older and odder forms, and 
 given them the qualities denounced. His gods are 
 no longer the cosy, " delightful," homely. Brer Rabbit 
 affairs of the twilight, which primitive man imagined 
 and Miss Harrison prefers. 
 
 Two comments may be made at this point, and 
 then we may pass to a little more examination of 
 what Homer has done. As Professor Webb has 
 pointed out,^ the tendency, which has led to the 
 development of the " Olympian," is a necessary and 
 abiding factor in religion.^ And further, when such 
 a transformation is originated, or at least used and 
 developed,* by a mind and nature as rich as Homer's 
 — ^when it is associated with so great a forward move- 
 ment in national consciousness, in life and culture, 
 as we find accompanying the spread and ascendancy 
 of Homeric ideas — it wiU require some proof that 
 the transformation is not itself a necessary and helpful 
 stage of progress. 
 
 The gods of Homer are a community of persons, 
 of characters as markedly individual as the Greek 
 heroes themselves.^ Whatever their origins — and the 
 
 ''■ J. E. Harrison, Themis, pp. 447-477. 
 
 2 C. C. J. Webb, Group Theories, 172. 
 
 ' Cf. also J. Girard, Le Sentiment Religieux en Grke d'Homhe a 
 Eschyle, p. 42. 
 
 * Readers will recall the indignant attempts of some Shakespearean 
 scholars to discredit Coleridge's criticism of Shakespeare's subtlety in 
 giving Romeo a first love before Juliet, on the ground that the lady 
 was in the original story. The real point is that Shakespeare kept her. 
 Whatever may have been done in " Olympianizing " before Homer, 
 he used certain ideas and discarded others, and we must ask why. 
 
 5 Edward Caird, Evolution of Religion, i. 277, suggests that the 
 marked outlines are due to the poet's effort to realizte and to picture ; 
 popular religion could never have been so definite. 
 
54 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 descriptive epithets that pursue them through the 
 poems, those epithets which Herodotus seems to credit 
 Homer with inventing, are commonly taken, as we 
 have seen, to be relics of older and less glorious days,^ 
 and indications that the eventual god with his group 
 of epithets, local and other, is a conflation of a number 
 of divinities — whether the god was from the first a 
 single god of a tribe or a place, or whether he is 
 amalgamated out of a variety of predecessors, he is 
 individual, a person perfectly self-conscious, and as 
 thoroughly independent of his " sources " as an 
 American of his ancestors. The gods are not in 
 Homer, what the Stoics later on tried to make them, 
 personifications — one of grain, another of wine, a 
 third of some process or other,^ — not at aU, nor are 
 they even exactly gods of this and of that. Hades, 
 it is true, is god of the world below, Poseidon is god 
 of the sea,^ but much as Joseph Bonaparte was King 
 of Spain and Jerome Bonaparte King of Westphalia — 
 because in the allotment of a conquered universe 
 those kingdoms fell to them by lot or were given to 
 them by a supreme brother. Still less are they gods 
 of places, though they have friendly feelings for certain 
 places as they have for certain people. It is suggested 
 that they have gained somewhat by being, like the 
 heroes, themselves away from home, dissevered for 
 purposes of war from their ordinary business and, 
 to a large extent, from their cults and myths as well. 
 Like the heroes in the Greek camp, they are brought 
 to a common level, a common denominator, to new 
 relations. They may have their favourite heroes, 
 
 1 It is hinted, for instance, that boopts Hera was not merely " ox- 
 eyed" originally, but had a whole cow's head. Glauktph Athena 
 was originally the goddess with the eyes, or face, or aspects of an owl ; 
 and she was represented in art as an owl with human arms or human 
 head, before she became the anthropomorphic goddess with the bird 
 for her attribute. 
 
 2 Conflict of Religions, p. 95 ; Cicero, de Nat. Deor. ii. 60-70. 
 * Iliad, XV. 187 if. He " knew less " than Zeus. 
 
HOMER 55 
 
 but they are all relevant to all the combatants, Greek 
 and Trojan. 
 
 Here we have touched one of the main contributions 
 of Homer to Greek religion. Whether he had pre- 
 decessors who pointed the way we cannot guess. 
 Possibly he had ; " all art," it has been said, " is 
 collaboration." Observation of the modern world 
 and the records of the ancient tell us how poly- 
 theists instinctively accept the gods of others and 
 blend them — equate them with their own. But here 
 at this early stage of Greek history, before even the 
 term Hellenes was widely accepted as the name of 
 all Greeks, Homer creates or develops — or so empha- 
 sizes and vivifies as to all purposes to create — a Pan- 
 hellenic religion. There was, and there remained, 
 a parochial element in Greek religion — queer old 
 gods and goddesses, and local heroes, survived in 
 corners down to the period of the Roman Empire ; 
 perhaps they were there before Homer's day. But 
 they did not contribute to the growth of the Greek 
 consciousness. Why should an Argive regard the 
 gods of Corinth,^ or an Attic peasant of one deme 
 the family gods of the noble family of another deme ? 
 Even the gods concerned would not expect it. A 
 city wanted city gods as against gods of the clan or 
 gods of the canton ; and Greece gained something 
 from her PanheUenic gods. Common religion was, 
 as we saw, one of the strands of nationality accord- 
 ing to Herodotus ; and this was, in large measure, 
 the contribution of Homer. So much could a 
 great poet achieve — thinking his way instinc- 
 tively into human life, into religion, and giving 
 beauty to his interpretation of what he found. 
 His gods never made one nation of all the 
 Greeks, but every thinking Greek was influenced, in 
 his outlook on the Greek world, in his relations 
 
 ^ Xenophon thought the Argive should have regarded Corinthian 
 altars, Hell, iv. 2, 3. 
 
56 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 with his Greek neighbours, by the Panhellenic 
 Olympus. 
 
 There was progress, too, in another quarter.^ Far 
 away on the horizon are strange figures, divine and 
 monstrous — the Hundred-handed " whom the gods 
 call Briareus but all men call him Aegaeon " ^ — 
 Titans now in Tartarus ^ — things or beings that fought 
 against Zeus and fell. The father of Zeus was a 
 Titan and was dethroned by his sons. Zeus and his 
 dynasty represent something higher and better, 
 something more human, one says instinctively — mind 
 and reason rather than sheer brute force. Passion 
 may influence a god, like the hate of Poseidon for 
 Odysseus, but it is intelligible anger, it has a reason 
 which any rational being can grasp.* Poseidon is 
 a being with a mind, with a domain of his own, on 
 which he does not mean to have his brother Zeus 
 trespassing and he says so. Take, then, the pageant 
 of Poseidon, and remembering how strong are his 
 feelings, how clear and vivid his mind, ask what it 
 means. At Aegae, " in the sea depths, his famous 
 house is builded of beaming gold imperishable ; there 
 came he, and yoked beneath the car his bronzen-footed 
 horses, swift to fly, with long manes of gold ; and he 
 arrayed himself in gold, and grasped a golden well- 
 wrought whip and stepped upon the car, and drove 
 across the waves ; and the sea-beasts came from 
 their chambers everywhere, and gambolled beneath 
 him, knowing well their king, and the rejoicing sea 
 parted before him ; swiftly the horses flew, and the 
 bronzen axle was not wet beneath." He came to the 
 ships of the Achaeans with a purpose, " sorely wroth 
 
 1 See Girard, Le Sentiment Religieux, bk. i, ch. ii. 
 
 2 Iliad, i. 402. 
 
 ' Iliad, viii. 479. 
 
 * Odyssey, i. 68. My point is perhaps all the stronger, if Mr 
 J. A. K. Thomson is right in saying that the blinding of Polyphemus 
 is not the primary motive {Studies in the Odyssey, p. 1 2). 
 
HOMER 57 
 
 with Zeus." ^ This is the typical Homeric god — 
 the sort of picture that the Iliad, taken as a whole, 
 leaves on the mind. Ultimately impossible, yes, but 
 in the meantime splendid. As Dr Edward Caird 
 put it, the anthropomorphism humanizes the nature 
 powers and substitutes a relation to man for a relation 
 to nature, and so mediates a transition to subjective 
 religion. 
 
 Hints of the goal are given elsewhere by Homer. 
 At the very beginning of the Iliad, in a most vivid 
 scene, Athene plucks Achilles by the hair to check 
 him as he thinks to draw his sword on Agamemnon. 
 In the Odyssey she speaks to the mind of Odysseus 
 suggesting a thought rather than uttering a command. 
 But more striking is a passage where the poet says, 
 " As when the mind of a man runs up and down, a 
 traveller over much of earth, and he thinks in his 
 deep heart, ' Would I were here or there ' in his keen 
 desire ; as swift as that did the lady Hera fly." ^ The 
 swiftness of thought haunts Homer ; and here for 
 once he makes his goddess as spiritual in one aspect 
 of her being as thought itself. 
 
 Over all, and very nearly supreme, is Zeus. " Make 
 trial," he says to the gods, " if ye will, that all may 
 know ; let down a golden chain from heaven to earth, 
 and all ye gods and goddesses take hold, but ye will 
 not draw down Zeus, the most high Counsellor, from 
 heaven to the ground, no, not with much endeavour. 
 But were I to draw, and put to my strength, I could 
 fUpdraw you all, and earth and sea to boot, and bind 
 the chain about a horn of Olympus, and leave all 
 hanging." ^ He is the Thunderer, he sends cloud 
 and storm, rain and snow, and sets the rainbow in the 
 heavens, Olympus trembles at his nod. He rules 
 the issues of war, and dispenses joys and ills to men 
 {Iliad, xxiv. 527) ; he is the guardian of strangers and 
 
 ^ Iliad, xiii. 22-30 (Purves). 
 
 ^ IRad, XV. 80. * Iliad, viii. 1 8-26. 
 
58 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 suppliants. Neither God nor mortal, says Hermes, 
 can elude his notice or thwart his plans {Od. v. 104).^ 
 So Homer conceives of One who rules the world and 
 has a place for man in his thoughts. 
 
 But Zeus is not always omnipotent nor always 
 omniscient. Hera beguiles him, in a famous episode ; 
 sleep ensnares him ; his attention wanders {Iliad, 
 xiii. 7), and Poseidon takes advantage of it. Zeus 
 goes to feast with the blameless Aethiopians, apparently 
 unaware of the storm of trouble to break on the Greek 
 camp before he returns {Iliad, i. 424). Zeus himself 
 has to shed tears for Sarpedon, but he cannot save 
 him from death, nor Hector either, though he pities 
 him. He commits adultery, but he warns Aegisthus 
 not to do it {Od. 1. 37). He shows anger and enjoys 
 the bickering of his court. 
 
 In short, there are inconsistencies in Homer, as we 
 might expect. Some of them may, as scholars have 
 said, be due to differences of date and hand in the 
 final form of the poems. Some are obviously due to 
 the difficulty of expressing the unseen and the spiritual 
 in the language available. Homer as a rule tells of 
 nothing but what can be seen, or at least pictured 
 under conditions of sense ; and he has the drawback 
 of every great thinker, especially of poets — that 
 swiftness of mind which seizes a thought and trans- 
 forms it to vision there and then, regardless for the 
 moment of other thoughts ; which impulsively makes 
 a new conception its own and leaves a mass of ideas 
 to be corrected or transformed later on, if at all. If 
 he were a modern dreamer, if he were not an ancient 
 poet, supposed to be simple and naive, he would not 
 be expected to achieve consistency in his picture of 
 the divine in relation to man and the universe, 
 perhaps hardly even to aim at it. After aU, he does 
 give a fair representation, with the means at his 
 
 1 Cf. passages set out by T. D. Seymour, Life in the Homeric Age, 
 p. 421. 
 
HOMER 59 
 
 disposal (who could demand more of a poet ?), of the 
 difficulty and confusion of the world, of its subjection 
 to moral law and to ideal forces, and of the gaps that 
 men find with agony in the moral order itself. Those 
 ideal forces, the spiritual element in things — perhaps 
 because he has to represent them along the lines of 
 tradition, perhaps because his own niind sees and 
 feels all things in pictures — ^he represents in the shape 
 of other beings like men.^ The gods are not men, 
 but to bring gods and men together he has to get 
 them on one plane, visibly, actually, and Athene, 
 unseen by the others, takes Achilles by the yellow 
 hair and checks his fury {Iliad, i. 197). Homer is not 
 using metaphor of purpose, nor playing (as Virgil 
 sometimes does, or seems to do, and Spenser often) 
 with a hapless compound, an allegory half spiritual 
 principle, half material symbol, concocted for an 
 ethical purpose to the ruin of reality and art. He 
 sees what he tells, he does not moralize it — it is moral 
 of itself ; but, as Dr Caird says,^ he exercises an 
 instinctive selection, which is as enlightening as a 
 scientific man's deliberative selection of illustrations 
 to throw light on a law of nature. 
 
 To say what a great poet intends to teach is to 
 speak rather naively. Wordsworth, in his famous 
 Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns, deals with Tam 
 o'Shanter — " I pity him," he says, " who cannot 
 perceive that, in all this, though there was no moral 
 purpose, there is a moral effect." Poets do not, till 
 they decline into the autobiographical stage, tell us 
 their purposes. Homer, so far as we know, never 
 reached that stage, and we have to divine what he 
 " meant " and what he thought. His picture of the 
 world of gods is full of inconsistencies and impos- 
 sibilities ; and so far it fairly represents the order 
 and disorder of the world in which he lived and we 
 
 1 Using suggestions of Dr E. Caird, Evolution of Religion, 1. 288-291. 
 ^ E. Caird, Evolution of Religion, i. 288. 
 
6o PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 live. He has no theory of the universe, complete, 
 satisfactory, and water-tight. The authors of such 
 theories rarely live or gain acceptance. Homer gives 
 us views, impressions, intuitions ; some part of what 
 he gives is, no doubt, traditional, some of it is his 
 own ; a minute analysis of this is beyond us, but 
 happily it is not necessary. 
 
 Over all, perhaps over Zeus, we are told. Homer 
 finds Fate (Moira and Aisd)^ Perhaps he did, but 
 intermittently, and with no such interpretation as a 
 modern determinist gives to it. But his expressions 
 vary. Sometimes Fate is superior to the gods of 
 Olympus, sometimes it seems subject to them. 
 Sometimes it is associated vaguely with Zeus, and is 
 actually transcended (vTrep Atos aXcrav, Iliad, xvii. 321) ; 
 sometimes with a vague daimon or god {Odyssey, xi. 
 61, 292). No prayer is addressed to Fate ; how could 
 it be ? A man has his moira, and there it is ; there 
 is an end of it. Zeus himself laments the moira of 
 his son Sarpedon, who was fated to be slain by 
 Patroclus {Iliad, xvi. 434, 435), and he wavers as to 
 rescuing him ; but Hera reminds him that Sarpedon 
 was " long doomed by aisa " {iraXai neir pcofievov atcrrj, 
 441), and warns him that other gods will wish to save 
 their sons, and Zeus submits. Zeus, speaking of 
 Aegisthus, protests how vainly men blame the gods 
 for evils which they bring upon themselves {Od. i. 
 32). Sometimes it looks as if the will of Zeus were 
 itself Fate ; there is the " thought of mighty Zeus," 
 which is destiny (cf. Iliad, xvii. 409 and xviii, 329). 
 When Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel, and their 
 wrath sends many goodly souls of heroes to Hades, 
 " the counsel of Zeus was fulfilled," we are told ; and 
 we learn a little later that Zeus was away among the 
 Aethiopians at the time of the quarrel, and only later 
 at the prayer of Thetis planned death for the Achaeans. 
 But if Homer is inconsistent with himself when he 
 
 1 On all this, T. D. Seymour, Life in the Homeric Age, p. 419. 
 
HOMER 6i 
 
 speaks of Fate, who yet has spoken of Fate and escaped 
 inconsistency ? 
 
 The weakest point of Olympus is its morality. 
 Many of the scandals are due to the syncretism which 
 welded, as we have seen, many gods into one god, and 
 gave many legends to one Zeus. The Zeus of one 
 place has a hero son by one woman, the Zeus of another 
 shrine by another; but there is only one Zeus, so 
 the women and the sons and the scandals multiply, 
 and Homer, in a malicious mood, or more probably 
 an interpolator, seizes a chance to recite a string of 
 such episodes at once {Iliad, xiv. 314-327). Other 
 gods had their local legends, and they also paid the 
 same price for the splendid individual personality 
 that the poet gave them. But this is not the only 
 source of these legends of light love ; for it ran long 
 in the Greek mind that one of the real advantages 
 of power was its freedom to foUow impulse.^ When 
 the gods became anthropomorphic, they were given 
 human desires and human passions — an advance indeed 
 upon plant or animal life, and upon the dim bogey 
 existence, but not a final stage. They had reached 
 a point where moral judgments were inevitable. No 
 one could profitably apply moral criticism to a sea- 
 mist,* a river, or a tree. When the gods became 
 persons, they came under a higher law, at first fitfully 
 recognized. Mankind has long found it hard to 
 believe that absolute power does not absolve from 
 moral responsibility. Islam and the history of 
 Sultans and Roman Emperors bear witness to that 
 weakness of thought. But thought prevails, and 
 morality is inherent in a thought-out view of per- 
 sonality ; the gods had to become moral. In Homer 
 they are behind the best of the heroes in those qualities 
 
 ^ It was not till Euripides that protest was made against myths of 
 the loves of the gods ; Aeschylus, Pindar and Sophocles accept them. 
 
 * If Thetis comes up from the sea like a mist (Jliad, i. 359), she 
 came as a person, with a personal motive. 
 
62 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 which men recognize as highest ; and the point 
 could not escape notice. " Even in Homer," writes 
 Professor John Watson, "there are elements which 
 show that the Greek religion must ultimately accom- 
 phsh its own euthanasia. There was in it from^ the 
 first a latent contradiction which could not fail to 
 manifest itself openly later on." ^ It is a mark of 
 progress to have reached an impossible halting-place, 
 to be compelled to move onward. 
 
 When we turn to Homer's heroes to learn their 
 mind as to the gods, all is so simple and natural as to 
 occasion at first little remark. The priest Chryses 
 prays as simply and directly to Apollo as if he were 
 talking to a human being. " If ever I have laid roof 
 upon thy fair temple, if ever I have burned to thee 
 fat thighs of bulls and goats, fulfil my prayer." ^ 
 This is the regular line of appeal to the gods, and 
 they, expect it (cf. Iliad, ix. 953 fl. ; xv. 368 ff.). And 
 Apollo does fulfil the prayer. If Chryses had ever 
 been initiated, if he had known rapture, illumination, 
 identification with his god, we should never guess 
 it from his prayer and his attitude. After all, identi- 
 fication with Homer's ApoUo, or Homer's Athene, 
 is not an aspiration that would readily occur to any 
 one. They are definite persons — concrete, one might 
 say — ^not vague spirits, not influences. There is no 
 atmosphere of mystery about them — in any sense of 
 the word mystery. Homer knows of rites proper to 
 the gods concerned, of sacrifices to accompany the 
 cremation of the dead, of offerings to take Odysseus 
 safely into the realm of Hades and out of it again — 
 but he does not know of sacraments strictly so called ; 
 or, if he does know, he disregards them. While he 
 knows of priests like Chryses, most of the heroes 
 manage their own religion without priests. It may 
 
 •^ Christianity and Idealism, p. 29. 
 
 2 Iliad, i. 39 ; cf. Iliad, xxiv. 33, Apollo to the gods on the subject 
 of Hector's sacrifices. 
 
HOMER 63 
 
 be that in the Iliad the heroes are all away from home, 
 far from familiar or even recognized shrines, but in 
 the Odyssey most of the people are at home or near 
 home and are as little concerned with such things ; 
 and among the tales the heroes tell, among the long 
 fictions of Odysseus and the long reminiscences of 
 Nestor, nothing occurs that suggests the intenser 
 forms of religion which later Greece knew — no trance, 
 no ecstasy, no rapture. Nor are there very clear 
 traces of those earlier rituals, found among primitive 
 peoples, found too in a modified form among later 
 Greeks, rituals of sowing, reaping, and vintage — 
 mysterious " doings " to make the seed grow or the 
 vine bear. Once again, if in the Iliad the Homeric 
 people are abroad and away from home, in the Odyssey 
 they are not. 
 
 Arguments from silence vary in value a great deal 
 with the subject concerned and with the opportunities 
 of speech ; here silence does not seem accidental. 
 Either Homer did not know of such matters, or he 
 was not interested in them. Guesses as to the tribal 
 cults of the various peoples in his poems — ^Achaeans, 
 Northerners, the Mediterranean race ^ — have some 
 interest, but guesses as a rule do not greatly add to 
 knowledge. It is likely that some mysteries, some 
 agricultural " doings," were to be found in the world 
 round Homer ; but whether he sang to please his 
 hearers and we are to conclude their tastes from his 
 silences, or whether he sang to please himself — as 
 poets seem more apt to do — what he does say and what 
 he does not say are both significant. There is endless 
 debate on Shakespeare's mind, and no one can say 
 that his constituents or patrons (as one may prefer 
 to describe them) were not interested in religious 
 controversy ; are we to say then that it was only 
 because the law was against such discussion in the 
 theatre, that he kept off religious questions ? Or 
 
 ^ Cf. W. Leaf, Homer aud History, 258-262. 
 
64 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 did his mind move more naturally in other directions ? 
 One mark of genius is that it feels very little the 
 hamperings of tradition, accepts them, and goes its 
 own way none the less and finds the freedom that is 
 supposed to be denied it. 
 
 On the other hand, we have to consider the Lay 
 of Demodocos and how all the gods came to see Ares 
 snared in the arms of Aphrodite, and how one com- 
 mented lightly to another — and the stories of the 
 beguiling of Zeus by Hera, of the wounding of Ares 
 and of Aphrodite by heroes in battle, of the limping 
 of Hephaistos and the laughter of the gods. Are 
 they from the same hand as the rest of the poems ? 
 Interpolations are admitted ; are these interpolations ? 
 Are they from the same school ? Were these gods 
 worshipped ? Is there a " Milesian " irreverence 
 about the tales and about the tone, that implies either 
 that these gods had lost the faith of the people or 
 had not yet gained it — that " Olympianism " was 
 dying or had not yet got its foothold ? The answer 
 is that these questions are in the vein of Plato and 
 Protestantism ; they imply an intenser belief in God 
 than we find in such periods of religion as we are 
 considering. There is little to choose between Plato 
 and John Knox in the fierceness with which they do 
 battle for God and His character. But if we turn 
 to India — at any rate before European culture be- 
 came a factor in its thought — the legends of Krishna 
 were accepted more or less as they stood by men whose 
 religion was intensely personal and even spiritual. 
 The moral issue was not considered, or it was waived, 
 it was not relevant, and broadly it did not occur to 
 the mind as bearing on the reality, or the godhead, 
 of the god. It is when a community wakes up to 
 progress in religion that such an issue becomes vital 
 and of first importance ; and then the first defence, 
 as we see in Plato, in Plutarch, and in Hinduism, is 
 Allegory. But for Homer there is not Allegory, 
 
HOMER 65 
 
 despite his Stoic and Neo-Platonist commentators. 
 For Hesiod there is.^ 
 
 In the background, waiting for a congenial renais- 
 sance, are the gods of earth and grain, of mystery, 
 intoxication and psychopathic phenomena. They 
 are to re-emerge, but it remains that the first great 
 Greek — ^in the deepest and most Hellenic sense in 
 which anybody could be called Greek — was not inte- 
 rested in such gods ; and that is as significant as 
 any polemic. 'Ev 8k <^aei koX oKea-aov — says one of the 
 heroes ; " Kill me, yes ! but in the light." ^ Homer 
 stands in the daylight — a mind with the characteristics 
 of open air and sunshine ; and, as we gather from the 
 Fourth Gospel, a mind of that type is dynamic, vital 
 in its tacit criticism, in its telling effect. 
 
 There is for the Homeric hero a relation between 
 his gods and morality. Zeus does not himself punish 
 Aegisthus for adultery and murder, but he warns 
 him that he wiU not go unpunished {Od. i. 37). 
 " The blessed Gods love not wicked deeds " {Od. 
 xiv. 83). Zeus sends storms and floods in anger upon 
 men who give "crooked judgments " (cr/coXia9 difLia-Tai) 
 in the assembly v(7/iW, xvi. 387). " Of the Ten Com- 
 mandments of the IsraeUtes," writes Professor Seymour, 
 " the Achaeans in strictness had but two — ' Thou 
 shalt not take the name of a God in vain,' and 
 ' Honour thy father and mother.' " With respect 
 to Zeus, a third commandment may be formulated 
 as " Thou shalt have respect unto the stranger and 
 the suppliant to pity them " {Od. v. 447 ; ix. 270 ; 
 xiv. 404). 
 
 The two dominant conceptions which rule conduct 
 are Custom and Aidos. Custom we can still, even in 
 such an age as this, understand, if we do not give it 
 the old respect. It made a large part of life through- 
 out Greek history, as the complaint that tyrants 
 change old customs ' tells us. Custom is the pro- 
 
 ^ Cf. page 72. ^ Iliad, xvii. 647. ^ Herodotus, iii. 80. 
 
66 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 tective thing in religion. The element that makes 
 for progress is Aidos — a hard word to translate alike 
 in every passage — but a conception intelligible to 
 every simple and clear nature ; it includes reverence 
 for others, for the aged, the suppliant ^ and the dead 
 — self-respect and the sense of duty — ^honour. These 
 are the sides of life where education is continuous, 
 where by the unobtrusive play of sympathy and 
 human feeling the outlook broadens and the insight 
 deepens, and new gleams come of something beyond 
 custom and tradition. Horizons grow wider, as one 
 learns to know and to respect one's enemy — ^the man 
 one hales — ^the foreigner, the Trojan. Priam's help- 
 less age — ^his grief for his son — ^the laughter of Hector 
 and Andromache, as the baby turns his head away 
 from the nodding plumes — the tales of old Eumaeus 
 — the sight of the helpless dead ; do they bear on 
 religion ? How can they but bear on it ? " It is 
 not holy to boast over men slain " {Od. xxii. 412). The 
 gods, it is true, show little trace of Aidos. Zeus 
 twits Hera with her readiness to eat Priam raw and 
 Priam's children with him (Iliad, iv. 35). And yet 
 the gods too can be appeased by sacrifice and sup- 
 plication, if a man have sinned {Iliad, ix. 497 f.). 
 Athene enjoys the cunning and the lies of Odysseus 
 (Od. xiii. 287 ff.). She deceives Hector at the crisis 
 of his fate — " Athene hath betrayed me ! " {Iliad, 
 xxii. 296) ; indeed the gods habitually deceive men. 
 But "hateful to me as the gates of Hades," cries 
 Achilles, " is he who hides one thing in his heart and 
 speaks another" {Iliad, ix. 312). There hes the 
 promise of progress. 
 
 Homer moved everything forward when he gave 
 to the gods their bright personality, and made every 
 one of them so intensely individual, so human ; 
 when he brought religion into daylight, out into the 
 
 1 Cf. the great passage about Prayers, " Daughters of Zeus " {IliaJ, 
 '^- 497-S ' 2), and the coming of Priam to Achilles {Iliad, xxiv.). 
 
HOMER 67 
 
 field of battle, into the council chamber, away from 
 cave and shrine and twilight. He moved everything 
 forward when he turned his imagination on to the 
 life of heroes, when he conceived and worked out 
 Achilles in his heart and in his brain, when he woke 
 to the finer shades of honour and feeling, and wove 
 them into the characters of the men whom he gave 
 us to love and to admire. His decalogue is a short 
 one, but it can be summed up in words he never 
 spoke or hinted. He loved men and their life — their 
 fierce, keen, bright, tender spirits ; he was a " human 
 Catholic " indeed, and such men are never far from 
 the Kingdom of Heaven, He never told us to love 
 men ; he knew of no Kingdom of Heaven ; his other 
 world is very dim, very empty of life and personality ; 
 but he did believe in men. 
 
 ^^Tiat does a great poet achieve ? Let us borrow 
 words, and, altering a tense and a pronoun or two, 
 say : 
 
 He gives us eyes, he gives us ears, 
 And humble cares, and delicate fears, 
 A heart, the fountain of sweet tears ; 
 And love, and thought, and joy. 
 
 And these gifts are dynamic. Homer gave them to 
 his fellow countrymen. He made them Hellenic, 
 taught them how to see and what to look for. " Love 
 and thought and joy" may be an abstract way of 
 describing the effect of his work ; but it is true. He 
 made the Greeks, and he taught them to think and 
 to feel. The pictures he gave them of gods would 
 not endure — because he gave them something else, 
 the spirit that makes men ask more of themselves, 
 more of the universe, more of God. His heroes are, 
 morally and spiritually, ahead of their own gods. 
 Custom is reluctant to accept new views of the gods ; 
 Poetry forced new ideals upon the Greeks. Homer, 
 by making his gods so human, brought them into 
 the sphere where they must be amenable to the new 
 
68 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 ideals. The gods did not reach those ideals ; they 
 slowly died away into insignificance ; the ideals lived, 
 and the Greeks moved forward to a higher view of 
 God. But Homer also delayed their progress. He 
 had indeed, as Herodotus suggests, given form and 
 look and function to the gods ; he gave them per- 
 sonality ; he fixed their legends and made them 
 immortal by the beauty of his thought and the beauty 
 of his word. He gave currency to a conception of 
 the gods, which warred with the quickening of the 
 Greek mind. The spirit of the poet set things 
 moving ; his words, his pictures, retarded the move- 
 ment. The old quarrel of which Plato speaks ^ 
 between Poetry and Thought was fairly started — 
 started by Homer himself, and to both combatants 
 Homer gave the impulse. 
 
 1 Republic, x. 607 B. 
 
IV 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 
 
 The Homeric age of Greece passed — that is a state- 
 ment that no one will dispute ; but how it passed, 
 few will care to say with any tone of certainty. It 
 may be that the Achaean invaders, as happened with 
 the Normans in England and the Highland regiments 
 in Quebec, were merged in the peoples they found, 
 by the slow but sure processes of intermarriage. It 
 may be that this had already happened when Homer 
 made his poems. It may be that a destroyer, Minos, 
 overwhelmed the old civilization of the Aegaean basin 
 — that Homer's Agamemnon and the Mycenaean 
 king of the Archaeologists both met murder and 
 sudden death. I at least cannot speak of those times ; 
 what we call a dark age followed them — dark in any 
 case to the historian, dark enough and fuU of ominous 
 change for the men of the day. 
 
 One man of that age of change, whatever his 
 century, was Hesiod the poet, a man born to trouble. 
 His brother, he says, robbed him in the division of 
 their inheritance, with at least the hope of aid from 
 bribe-devouring princes.^ Hesiod appears to suggest 
 some fair arrangement which may disappoint the 
 false judges. Whatever was done, Hesiod gave a 
 great deal of good advice to his unfriendly brother, 
 with what effect we do not know, though we may 
 guess. Their father " was wont to sail in ships, 
 seeking a goodly livelihood : who also on a time came 
 hither, traversing a great space of sea in his black ship 
 from Aeolian Kyme, not fleeing from abundance nor 
 
 ^ Works and Days, z~] S. 
 
 69 
 
70 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 from riches and weal, but from evil penury, which 
 Zeus giveth unto men. And he made his dwelling 
 near Helicon in a sorry township, bad in winter, hard 
 in summer, never good." ^ Thucydides long after 
 said that Hesiod was murdered by the people of the 
 Locrian Nemea.^ So, waiving all the later legends, 
 there we have a summary of the times — penury, bad 
 towns, shipping, trade, settlers, robbery, unjust judges 
 and murder. " The earth is full of evils," he says, 
 " and full is the sea." ' It is the picture we have 
 glanced at already, but drawn by a gloomy man, " a 
 dour son of the soil," * whose one voyage was across 
 the Euripus, a sea-passage to be measured in yards.^ 
 
 Looked at more broadly, it is a period which sooner 
 or later saw great movements of races. Cimmerians 
 and Treres, and later on Scythians, broke into Asia 
 Minor and swept through it, away to Gaza and to 
 Mesopotamia, and back again to Lydia. Kingdoms 
 and nations rose and fell — Hittites, Phrygians and 
 Lydians westward ; and eastward, Assyrians, Baby- 
 lonians and Medes. The Greeks of the Asian shore, 
 in walled cities, on peninsulas, or bays girt by hills, 
 lived a kind of island life, trading and travelling to 
 escape from " evil penury," and with a desire already 
 to see the world. They built their ships and learnt 
 their seas and coast-lines, watching the stars above 
 and the eddies and currents of the sea below them, 
 and grew into that self-reliance which the sailor 
 always needs and generally develops, and into that 
 individuality which made the Greek race outstanding 
 among all the tribes of man. The sailor-people were 
 for democracy in their home-towns, as against the 
 land-holders, and the long series of Greek experiments 
 in government went vigorously on. We find men 
 
 1 Works and Days, 633 f. 2 ThucydUes, iii. 96. 
 
 * Works and Days, I o I . 
 
 * Cf. C. H. Moore, Reli^ous Thought of the Greeks, p. 28. 
 5 Works and Days, 648 ff. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 71 
 
 from these Asian Greek cities discovering Gibraltar,^ 
 fighting at Babylon," carving their names on the legs 
 of colossal statues at Abu-Simbel, hundreds of miles 
 up the Nile. In these cities began Greek philosophy. 
 The period before us is a long one, from Homer, whose 
 date I do not know, though I suspect it to be earlier 
 than thirty years ago it was fashionable to say — 
 down to the Persian wars — ^let us say, to the battle 
 of Salamis in 480. There will be every temptation 
 to linger and to wander in a period so long and 
 so full of interest of every kind ; we must try to 
 remember that our subject is Progress in Religion, 
 but not quite to forget how much this is conditioned 
 by social and economic environment. We must 
 remember, too, the forces working for and against 
 progress — ^how sentiment, ignorance and terror retard 
 it, how enquiry and thought and clearness, which are 
 Greek habits of mind, promote it. Greeks had one 
 advantage over Indians and over later Semites, Jews 
 and Moslems, in not having sacred books. Homer 
 wrote no Vedas ; and when the nearest things to 
 Vedas that Greece knew came into being, the habits 
 of the race were formed, and Homer was there to 
 overshadow all sacred and theogonic poetry. His 
 genius kept the Hellen in the open air. 
 
 Hesiod, however, is our present concern — named, 
 as we saw, by Herodotus (ii. 53) as one of the founders 
 of Greek tradition about the gods. He tells us him- 
 self, what Homer never did, how he became a poet — 
 a small hint of a new significance of the individual. 
 " The Muses of old taught Hesiod sweet song what 
 time he tended his' sheep under holy Helicon. These 
 words first spake to me the goddess Muses of Olympus, 
 daughters of aegis-bearing Zeus : ' Shepherds of the 
 fields, evil things of shame, bellies only ! We know 
 to speak many lies like unto truth ; we know, when 
 
 ^ Kolaios of Samos ; Herodotus, iv. 152. 
 " Antimenidas, brother of the poet Alcaeus. 
 
72 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 we will, the truth to speak.' So spake the daughters 
 of mighty Zeus, clear of speech ; and they gave me 
 a rod, a shaft of lusty laurel that they had p^acked, 
 wondrous to see ; and they breathed into me a voice 
 divine that I might tell of things to be and of things 
 aforetime. They bade me sing the race of the Blessed 
 that live forever, and always to sing themselves first 
 and last." ^ And he won a prize for song, a tripod, 
 on his one journey to Euboea, and offered it up to 
 the Muses ; and Pausanias saw it on Helicon in the 
 second century a.d. or one that passed for it.^ 
 
 Hesiod devoted himself to the collection and 
 ordering of the traditions of the gods. His verse 
 and language show the influence of Homer,* his cos- 
 mogony and theology other strains than the Homeric, 
 just as his scheme of life comprises more taboos and 
 more veiled suggestions of magic* He pursues his 
 gods into a remoter past. Chaos, Earth and Eros 
 come first ; Chaos engenders Darkness and Black 
 Night — Night is mother of Aether and Day. Earth 
 bore Heaven and the Mountains and the Sea, and 
 many more children by Heaven — monstrous and 
 odious children, till Cronos mutilated Heaven and 
 there was an end of it.^ The gross old story must 
 be very old ; but the steady systematization of all is 
 very modern ; it is next thing to criticism ; and such 
 accommodations of criticism and the uncriticized 
 prepare the future. The old myth and the new 
 allegory, the Titan, the monster and the personified 
 abstract noun (Memory, for instance, and Lying 
 Speeches) will not go together ; they belong to 
 different stages of thought, and a system that puts 
 them on one footing has written upon it its own 
 certain resolution into its elements. The tales of 
 
 ^ Theognis, zz fF. 
 
 2 Works and Days, 648 fF. ; Pausanias, ix. 31, 3. 
 
 ' Chadwick, Heroic Age, pp. 214, 230. 
 
 * J. E. Harrison^ Themis, p. 94. ^ Theognis, 160 fF. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 73 
 
 grossness and fear were to live long ; but some of the 
 newer ideas also were to thrive. 
 
 It is in Hesiod that we first find the distinction 
 drawn between gods and those intermediate beings 
 which later Greeks call " daemons " — beings more like 
 the later Hebrew " angels " than the " daemons " of 
 primitive agricultural Greece. These midway beings 
 were the very keystone of later Greek theology, and 
 Plutarch blesses the man who introduced them, 
 whether Zoroaster or Orpheus or an Egyptian ; he 
 remarks that Homer used " gods " and " daemons " 
 as synonyms, and that Hesiod was the first clearly to 
 distinguish the four orders of gods, daemons, heroes 
 and men.^ It was in Hesiod, Dr Adam notes, a 
 symptom of the tendency to remove the Supreme 
 God from direct part in men's affairs. And perhaps 
 something may be put down to poetic feeling. " For 
 near at hand, among men. Immortals take note who 
 by crooked decisions oppress each other, heeding not 
 the gods. For thrice ten thousand Immortals are 
 there on aU-feeding earth, warders of Zeus over mortal 
 men, who watch over justice and harsh deeds — clad 
 in darkness, passing to and fro over earth. Yea, and 
 there is the maiden Justice, born of Zeus, glorious 
 and worshipful among the gods that hold Olympus. 
 And when one injures her with crooked reviling, 
 straightway as she sitteth by Zeus her father, son of 
 Cronos, she telleth him the mind of unrighteous 
 men." ^ A line or two later he heightens what he 
 has said : " The eye of Zeus, that hath seen all and 
 marked all, looketh on these things too, if he will, 
 and he faileth not to behold what manner of justice 
 our city keepeth within." ^ Here at least heaven is 
 more righteous than in the Theogony, where the gods 
 are frankly non-moral and gross to a degree unknown 
 
 1 Plutarch, de dejectu oracuhrum, x. 414 F-415 A. Conflict of 
 ReRgions, pp. 97, 98. 
 
 ^ Works and Days, 249, 250. * fToris and Days, 267-269. 
 
74 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 in Homer. Here a step forward, and a great one, 
 is taken or chronicled. 
 
 The poet wavers as he looks at the bad world he 
 knows. " Wealth is not to be seized : god-given it 
 is better far. For if a man take great gain by the 
 violence of his hands, or plunder it hy the tongue — 
 as often befalls when Gain deceiveth the mind of men, 
 and Shamelessness treadeth Shame (Jidos) underfoot 
 — ^yet lightly the gods abase him and make that man's 
 house decay, and his gain attendeth him but a little 
 while. He that wrongeth a suppliant, and he that 
 mounteth upon his brother's bed, and he that in his 
 foolishness sinneth against fatherless children, and he 
 that chideth an aged parent on the evil threshold of 
 old age with harsh words — it is all one. Against him 
 surely Zeus is angry, and in the end for his unjust 
 deeds layeth upon him a stern recompense." ^ Con- 
 versely for those who deal justly by strangers and 
 citizens, Zeus sends peace " the nurse of children " ; 
 they know not famine ; the earth beareth them much 
 livelihood, acorns on the oak and bees within it, sheep 
 heavy with wool, children like their parents, " nor 
 do they go on ships." * Wherefore, continues Hesiod, 
 " with all thy might do sacrifice to the deathless gods, 
 in holy wise and purely, and burn glorious meat- 
 offerings withal, and at other times propitiate them 
 with libations and with incense, both when thou liest 
 down and when the holy daylight cometh, that they 
 may have to thee a gracious heart and mind, that 
 thou mayest buy the lot of another, not another 
 thine." ^ The whole passage is fiercely attacked by 
 Plato * — " the noble Hesiod ! " he exclaims with 
 contempt ; but Xenophon says that the first line 
 was a favourite quotation with Socrates.^ But after 
 all, Hesiod is not sure. Things go from bad to worse ; 
 
 1 fForks and Days, 320-334. ^ ffr^f^j and Days, 225-237. 
 
 * Works and Days, 336-341. 
 
 * Rep. 363. 8 Xenophon, Mem. i. 3, 2. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 75 
 
 he lives in the iron age ; there is no loyalty left, no 
 truth, no honour for the aged nor respect for the 
 guest ; and evil ways are growing. " Then shall 
 Shame {Aidos) and Awe {Nemesis) veil their fair faces 
 with their white robes, and depart from the wide- 
 wayed Earth unto Olympus to join the company of 
 the Immortals." ^ 
 
 After Hesiod, though how long after him I do not 
 guess, came the poets of the seventh and sixth 
 centuries b.c. They represent something quite 
 different from either Homer or Hesiod. If Homer 
 wrote for princes and Hesiod for peasants, these men 
 and women wrote for themselves and of themselves, 
 individualists all of them, self-conscious, restless, 
 reflective, Greek, and more like the later Greeks than 
 their two great predecessors. Few poets could be 
 more personal than Archilochus and Sappho. " Soul, 
 my soul, with troubles invincible surging," begins a 
 fragment of Archilochus ; and it was the legend of 
 antiquity that the poet " battened on hatreds," ^ 
 trouble at Paros, trouble at Thasos, trouble with the 
 father-in-law-to-be. Of Sappho's two short poems — 
 the three stanzas of passion translated by Catullus 
 and the ode to Aphrodite — I need not speak ; though 
 the latter seems to me less of a religious character 
 than some would have it — splendid, but hardly piety. 
 Theognis writes of the political changes of Megara, 
 moving about in worlds not realized : " Kyrnos, this 
 city is still a city, but the folk are other folk, who knew 
 not aforetime justice nor law, but wore about their 
 flanks skins of goats, and lived without this city like 
 the stags ; and now they are the gentlefolk ; and the 
 old highborn are base." ' " O my soul," he cries, 
 " amid all thy friends show a nature of many hues. 
 Have the mind of the folded polypus, who on his rock, 
 wherever he cling, is even such to see" (213 ff.). So 
 
 "^ Works and Days, 174—201. 
 
 ^ Pindar, Pyth. ii. 54. ^ Theognis, 53ft. 
 
76 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 far away are the days when Odysseus could chide 
 Thersites and smite him.^ We have to deal with 
 men thinking their own thoughts, wondering what 
 traditions will hold, and doubting of all. The times 
 are times of question and movement. 
 
 In such times men think of the gods in new ways — 
 they handle them more brusquely, they make peace 
 with them more abjectly. Life for Homer's heroes 
 was so good that the best life in Hades was incom- 
 parably worse than the meanest above ground ; but 
 life is not so good now. The gods leave everything 
 in confusion. " Dear Zeus," cries Theognis, " I 
 marvel at thee. Thou art King of all ; thou hast 
 honour and great power ; thou knowest well the mind 
 and thought of every man ; and thy power is supreme 
 over all, O King ! How then. Son of Cronos, doth 
 thy mind endure to have wicked men and the just 
 under one fate (/aoi/jt/), whether a man's mind be 
 turned to self-rule, or to insolence, as they trust in 
 unrighteousness ? Neither is any distinction made 
 by god for mortal ; nor a road, whereby if a man travel, 
 he may please the Immortals." ^ " Father Zeus, 
 would it might be the pleasure of the gods that in- 
 solence delight the wicked ! And would that this 
 too were their pleasure ; that whoso contrived hard 
 deeds in his mind and heart, recking nought of the 
 gods, himself should pay again for his evil deeds, nor 
 the follies of the father be thereafter a curse to the 
 children ! and would that the children of an unjust 
 father, who think justice and do it, regarding thy 
 wrath, O Son of Cronos, and from childhood love 
 justice amid the citizens, should not pay for the sin 
 of their fathers ! " * Dr Adam compares the striking 
 passage where Jeremiah puts in his way, more piously 
 but no less insistently, the same question : " Righteous 
 art thou, O Lord . . . yet would I reason the cause 
 with thee. Wherefore doth the way of the wicked 
 1 Iliad, ii. 245, 265. 2 Theognis, 373 fF. 3 Theognis, 73 1 ff. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 77 
 
 prosper ? " ^ The answer, toward which Jeremiah 
 led the way for Irsael, was not that given by Greek 
 thinkers. 
 
 But there are pious souls who dread to challenge 
 the gods with such questions, but who feel the 
 questions none the less, and go about getting an 
 answer in another way. They will surrender, and 
 look again into that dark world which interested 
 Homer so little. There had been those who main- 
 tained that justice is done, who did not feel the 
 distinction that Theognis draws between the sinner 
 and his kin. 
 
 Solon, traveller, poet and legislator, had dealt 
 sturdily with the problem in lines of real beauty. 
 Judgment comes like a devouring flame from a little 
 fire : " Zeus seeth the end of all things ; and on a 
 sudden, as a wind in spring quickly scatters the clouds, 
 stirs the depths of the barren wave-driven sea, and 
 over the wheatlands lays waste the fair work of men, 
 and Cometh to the high heaven, the abode of the 
 gods, and makes the clear sky to be seen, and the 
 might of the sun shines forth over the boundless land, 
 beautiful, nor is there a cloud left to behold ; even 
 so is the vengeance of Zeus, nor is he, like a mortal 
 man, quick to anger at every deed. But never doth 
 it for ever escape his notice, who hath a sinful soul, 
 and surely at the end it appeareth. One payeth 
 forthwith, another thereafter ; and if themselves 
 escape, if the doom of the gods light not upon them, 
 yet it Cometh none the less, and their children pay 
 for their deeds, or their race after them." ^ That 
 had satisfied Solon, but it does not satisfy Theognis. 
 The matter must be carried further. 
 
 But before we go on, one or two points should be 
 
 noted. The individual has come to be himself, and, 
 
 as already suggested, his children are individuals ; the 
 
 family has ceased to be a unit ; it is on its way to 
 
 * Jer. xii. i. ^ Solon, iv. 12 (4), 14 ff. (Bergk). 
 
78 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 modernity. Behind such views as Solon's, which 
 we also find in some of the Hebrew psalms, was a 
 long tradition, dim with age and soon to die — that 
 ancestors and descendants are one — that the living 
 and the dead are not without influences on one 
 another ; the old worship of ancestors may have gone, 
 but something is left that proclaims the family to be 
 an integer, and makes justice executed on the grand- 
 son balance the sin of the grandfather. This idea 
 died slowly, if it ever quite died. Perhaps it is truer 
 to say that ideas have ghosts that haunt the minds 
 of mankind — intangible as the ghost of Patroclus or 
 of Hamlet's father, yet not without power. But by 
 the end of our long period when Theognis lived each 
 man is himself ; he must be rewarded or punished, 
 himself and not another. Nothing else would be 
 justice. This is a new phase of the long-growing 
 demand for morality in the gods and in men. What 
 we have noticed from time to time already, assails us 
 again here in the unhappy complaints of Theognis 
 — ^that emphasis on personality and morality which 
 makes for Progress in Religion. 
 
 Let us turn now to the god to whom Theognis 
 addressed his complaint. It is still Zeus — the Zeus 
 of Homer, of Hesiod and of Solon. But, generally, 
 it is remarked in the lyric poets that Zeus is gaining 
 a greater ascendancy. We have only fragments to 
 deal with, so that our negative statements will hardly 
 be as secure as what we can say positively. The 
 negative first, then. There is an absence of reference 
 in our fragments to the old scandals of Olympus, a 
 refraining from some of the things said to Zeus and 
 about him in the Homeric poems. On the positive 
 side, while the other gods survived, while, as we 
 know from other sources, they were worshipped, 
 Zeus is gaining at their expense. When a man 
 questions, it is the government of Zeus that he ques- 
 tions. Zeus is hardly so personal as he was in Homer ; 
 
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 79 
 
 he is more like Providence, or Ultimate Justice, or 
 the power behind nature — all of which he became in 
 time under Stoic teaching. The Greeks are still a 
 long way from Monotheism, but the old society 
 of heaven is breaking up. Local gods and local 
 goddesses — and one great god over all ; this with 
 some reservations, when one thinks of corn and crop 
 and the world of the dead, seems the picture of 
 heaven that the period gives us. 
 
 Two points, then, are outstanding. Divine Justice 
 and Monotheism are not yet established, but in one 
 way and another men are beginning to ask for them ; 
 in the one case they are quite clear in their feeling, 
 that it is imperative to show the heavens more just. 
 In the other, an instinct, not yet thought-out, an 
 instinct which scholars tell us was in Israel as far 
 back as our records wiU reliably take us — an instinct 
 which TertuUian seized upon as a witness to the soul 
 being by nature Christian, which Muhammad found 
 even among heathen Arabs — ^is quietly impelling 
 men to think in the terms of a single supreme god. 
 Fear, tradition, and the sense of solitude compel 
 them to supplement that one god ; but, when we 
 survey from a distance the completed story of Greek 
 thought, we recognize here the beginnings of Mono- 
 theism. But there is another impulse, of which we 
 have so far had little evidence in what is left us of 
 early Greek literature. 
 
 Men ask for Justice in God ; and an instinct, which 
 works more slowly, drives them to conceive of him as 
 One. But what St Augustine summed up in his 
 most famous sentence has plenty of evidence outside 
 the range of Christian experience as well as within 
 it. " Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart 
 knows no rest until it rests in Thee." ^ The thought 
 is not one that seems to fit in with Homer or the 
 Greek philosophers of the sixth century B.C., but it 
 ^ Augustine, Confessions, i, i. 
 
8o PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 is quite clear that the impulse to seek peace with 
 heaven, to find some rest for the heart on the basis 
 of some relation with the gods, was powerful in the 
 centuries under our present survey. Primus in orhe 
 deos jecit timor, said Statius ; ^ but, even if fear was 
 the first factor, or even the only one, that drove men 
 into religious thought and rite, fear was allayed by 
 an effective relation with the gods. If the right 
 prayer were said, if the right offering were made, the 
 god would take the fear out of the human heart, either 
 by going away himself or by helping the man to over- 
 come it ; and, whichever was the way, it was managed 
 by intercourse ; and that depended on the assurance 
 that god and man understand each other. 
 
 When we were considering the Homeric gods, we 
 saw how natural and how inevitable is the movement 
 to Anthropomorphism. The gods must be rational 
 and intelligible, must be interpretable in human 
 terms. But they must also be just in their dealings 
 with men, and moral and perhaps dignified in their 
 relations with one another. And here the gods of 
 the Iliad and the Odyssey might seem defective to 
 people whose minds moved more slowly than Homer's, 
 who were framed (let us say) in a more pious mould. 
 Athene, Apollo and others of them are too like the 
 Greek tyrant ; intelligible enough, they are, however, 
 " outside the ordinary thoughts," ^ one of which is 
 the sense of responsibility. So, without renouncing 
 these brilliant creatures, men turned elsewhere when 
 they wanted gods who took a quieter view of life. It 
 may not be quite the whole story, to say that they 
 turned to gods less completely humanized. 
 
 Demeter and Dionysos had escaped the touch of 
 Homer's imagination, and remained indeed less human, 
 but what gave them their significance was something else 
 
 1 Thebaid, iii. 66 1 ; Petronius said it before him, fragm. 27 
 (Bacheler). 
 
 ^ Herodotus, iii. 80. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 8i 
 
 —something about each of them that remained unex- 
 plained. Demeter was kind and good, the giver of 
 crops and of life, the giver of laws ; her ways were 
 in the main very calculable ; but her power was one 
 of the most mysterious things on earth. Why should 
 grain grow by being buried ? Why should anything 
 grow ? How does it ? Dionysos is different. How 
 far he is to be regarded as initially a god of vegetation 
 or of the vine, I do not know. I lean to the idea 
 that he owed much of his significance to the play of 
 primitive Psychology upon psychopathic phenomena, 
 which it could not understand. 
 
 The Eleusinian Mysteries have piqued the curiosity 
 both of ancient worshippers and modern archaeolo- 
 gists ; and it is probable that if we could have a 
 complete history of their origin and development, 
 let us say from Demeter to Justinian, we should have 
 a complete revelation of everything that stirred in 
 Greek religion. For we have again to remind our- 
 selves at this point that religion is never quite static. 
 No religion ever was semper eadem. Every religion 
 is always being re-translated, re-interpreted. Even 
 the most orthodox speak the dialect of their day ; 
 and, as they of all people are least alive to the strange 
 ways of words, they think in the dialect of their day 
 and never realize that they are doing it ; so they also 
 re-translate their faith. Translation never leaves an 
 idea unchanged ; least of all when it is unconscious 
 translation. 
 
 For us the definite history of Eleusis begins with 
 the so-called Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is not 
 from the immortal hand and eye that framed the 
 Odyssey. Thucydides thought, or assumed, with the 
 men of his day that Homer wrote the hymns, but the 
 great Homeric scholars of Alexandria did not.^ The 
 hymn to Demeter is generally allowed to belong to 
 
 1 Andrew Lang, Homeric Hymns, pp. 3, 4. Allen and Sikes, Homeric 
 Hymns, p. liv. 
 
82 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 the beginning of the sixth century b.c. The rest of 
 our evidence is later, some of it very late indeed, and, 
 vi^hat is worse, of uncertain date. If our business 
 were to write the history of Eleusinian faith and 
 practice, it would be a long and difficult task to trace 
 the growth of the mass of myth, legend and fable, 
 the development of ritual and the transmutation of 
 ideas associated with the mysteries, and to find the 
 sources Thracian, Egyptian or Philosophic from which 
 those ideas were reinforced. But our task is much 
 simpler. The hymn tells us a good deal about the 
 religion at the date when it was composed — a good 
 deal but not aU. Like other writers of hymns, the 
 author, and perhaps his revisers, chose what he would 
 emphasize, and assumed that those who would use 
 the hymn knew more than he wrote, e.g., about the 
 ritual. They had the advantage of us there ; but 
 history, archaeology, and anthropology have given 
 the modern student data and criteria that the 
 worshippers hardly wanted. It seems generally agreed 
 that behind the hymn, a long way perhaps behind it, 
 was a ritual on the border-line between Magic and 
 Religion — z ritual which would promote the growth 
 and health of crops. Some vague daemon of vegeta- 
 tion was involved-— daemon or daemons, but the matter 
 could not be left there. The ritual needed explana- 
 tion, and an anthropomorphizing instinct played upon 
 the daemon or daemons ; and out of the double 
 process came the beautiful myth of Demeter and 
 Persephone, which at last the hymn gives us with a 
 new beauty and tenderness of its own, fixing its out- 
 line and its details and making it immortal, not 
 without some hint of kinship with Homer and the 
 gods that Homer drew. Something more followed, 
 which is briefly told us at the end of the Hymn. 
 
 When the goddess had sent up the grain from the 
 rich glebe, and the wide earth was heavy with leaves 
 and flowers, she showed unto Triptolemus and Diodes 
 
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 83 
 
 the charioteer and mighty Eumolpus and Celeos, 
 leader of the people, " the manner of her rites, and 
 taught them her holy mysteries, which none may 
 violate, or search into, or noise abroad, for the great 
 curse from the gods restrains the voice. Happy is 
 he among deathly men who hath beheld these things ! 
 and he that is uninitiate, and hath no lot in them, 
 hath never equal lot in death beneath the murky 
 gloom." ^ 
 
 The corn ritual, the corn daemon, Demeter the 
 Mother, Persephone and the pomegranate — and then 
 Immortality and Joy for the initiate. Even if, with 
 Sir James Frazer, we were to say Demeter began as 
 a pig — and he prefers a lowly origin for gods, as some 
 people do for self-made men, though for the opposite 
 reason — ^we have left the pig a long way behind ; and 
 Mr Andrew Lang tells us it was never on the main 
 track at all.^ We have reached a point at which men 
 are definitely fixing their eyes and their attention 
 upon Eternity, and a differentiated Eternity — a re- 
 ligion intensely personal. It is not suggested by the 
 poet that a man's moral character will bear directly 
 on his immortal life ; that seems to have been a gap 
 in the teaching of the mysteries throughout. The 
 indignant question of the Cynic philosopher remains : 
 " Shall Pataikion the brigand, because he was initiated, 
 fare better after death than Epameinondas ? " ^ It 
 is plain enough that the priests of the mysteries made 
 little enquiry as to the character of those they 
 initiated. Mr Lang would not allow the view of 
 Lobeck that there was no ethical teaching in the 
 mysteries ; he urged that everywhere primitive peoples 
 have associated moral instruction with mummeries 
 and rituals, and that this association may have sur- 
 vived. " Holy " and " pure " are words with long 
 and strange histories, and their exact meaning at any 
 
 ^ Lang's translation. ^ Homeric Hymns, Intr., pp. 63-66. 
 
 ^ Diogenes Laertius, vi. 39. 
 
84 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 stage must be learnt before we can do much with 
 them. In any case the strongest moral impulses 
 have not been given to mankind by the guardians of 
 ritual and sacrament ; they have come from without ; 
 that at all events is true in Greece. Little can be 
 added to what Aristotle says : " The initiated learned 
 nothing precisely, but they received impressions and 
 were put into a certain frame of mind, for which they 
 had been prepared " — " and evermore," adds Omar, 
 
 " Came out by that same door where in I went." 
 
 As we saw before, however, moral effect is sometimes 
 not quite to be measured by moral purpose, and 
 whatever the purpose of the writer of the Hymn to 
 Demeter, the poem must have contributed to the 
 education of Greece in some of the things that matter 
 most. 
 
 There were other mystery religions in Greece, and 
 one of the most important movements of Greek 
 religious thought now demands our attention. But 
 one or two points may be recalled, and perhaps 
 developed, first. We have seen the growing self- 
 consciousness of the Hellen as the world about him 
 becomes more and more complex and unintelligible, 
 and we must not omit to notice that the Hymn to 
 Demeter, in that epilogue about the world beyond, 
 recognizes the individual and his personal outlook on 
 religion in a way that is almost modern. A man 
 chose to be initiated, or remained uninitiated by 
 choice.^ In other words, a change has come in re- 
 ligion, though its implications are not broadly recog- 
 nized as yet. Once to share in a cult had implied 
 a blood relation (real or presumed) of the whole 
 tribal circle worshipping, and the possession of the 
 god by the tribe or group of tribes — ^he was " our 
 god " ; or the cult was a local one jealously guarded ; 
 
 ^ F. B. Jevons, History ofReli^on, p. 328. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 85 
 
 and in any case everybody belonging to the tribe, or 
 the group of natives of the place, was ipso jacto a 
 subject for initiation and was initiated. But the 
 sixth century bears witness to an innovation — choice 
 in religion ; and this carries with it, in germ, a good 
 deal — the weighing of the claims of conscience, heart, 
 tradition and philosophy, and the habit of reflection 
 in religion, of speculation. Eleusis, further, was 
 practically international, or became so. " Demeter," 
 writes Isocrates,^ about 385 B.C., " came to the country 
 and gave two gifts, the greatest of gifts — the crops 
 which have saved us from the life of mere animals, 
 and the rite, whereof who partake have sweeter hopes 
 for the end of life and for all time ; and our city, in 
 piety to god and man, grudged not but gave to all 
 what she had received." He implies a tradition, 
 dating from the incorporation of Eleusis in Attica 
 perhaps in the seventh century, and the opening of 
 the rites to all Athenians. A universal religion, then, 
 is in sight, and one in which the individual speaks 
 the decisive word — ^he will, or he will not, have it. 
 Meantime, the normal and established religions or 
 cults are not felt by their maintainers to be in any 
 way challenged by the new development. This was 
 partly because polytheism never is endangered by the 
 acceptance of an extra god, and partly because there 
 was really nothing revolutionary about the ceremonies 
 at Eleusis ; aU was old and traditional, as the goddess 
 had given it ; there could be no harm in it. The 
 dangers for a local religion that we now see to be 
 involved in a universal religion, for a religion wholly 
 tribal in one where the individual chooses, were not 
 obvious at the stage reached ; indeed, they never 
 were very serious till the universal religion be- 
 came definitely monotheistic. India has assimilated 
 or tolerated every religion except Islam and 
 Protestantism. 
 
 ^ Panegyriiy, 28 ; Jevons, History of Religion, p. 359. 
 
86 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Orphism^ is the greatest religious movement of 
 the age under our consideration. It is a complex of 
 many elements, assimilating ideas that perhaps had 
 little to do with it in its earliest form, and adapting 
 itself to them. The tradition was that it began in 
 Thrace, among communities admittedly savage ; and 
 some of its features confirm this. The tearing to 
 pieces of living animals was a rite of several primitive 
 religions, notably among the Semites ; it is found 
 to-day among Indians in British Columbia.^ To the 
 Greeks this was startling enough, and not less were 
 the other accompaniments of the religion, its influence 
 upon women, who left their homes, ranged the hills, 
 cried their god's name, and showed a heightening of 
 muscular strength along with trance and hallucination 
 — symptoms which we group to-day as psychopathic 
 and consider to be of no intellectual or religious 
 value. In those days the phenomena had, as they 
 have elsewhere to-day, only one explanation — viz. 
 god-possession. They were evidence of the presence 
 of a god and of his effectual union with the natures 
 of the persons affected.^ There can be little doubt 
 that the phenomena so explained were the first cause 
 of the great spread of Orphism. The modern psycho- 
 logist tells us how such waves of impulsive social 
 action originate among people who have least in- 
 hibitory control, and how they spread by imitation, 
 intensifying as they go. The ancient explanation 
 undoubtedly contributed to the spread, and the 
 contagion swept all over Greece, so irresistibly that 
 the older shrines had to recognize the new god, who 
 
 1 See John Burnet, Greek Philosophy, pp. 85 f. ; Bury, Greek 
 History, i. pp. 316-318. 
 
 2 Or perhaps yesterday ; my statement rests on a paragraph in a 
 Kingston, Ontario, paper in the autumn of 1896. The animal 
 used by the Indians was a dog. 
 
 ^ Even this vague statement may be too precise. " Union " and 
 " nature " are words that raise many questions. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 87 
 
 proved himself of such power. Apollo admitted his 
 " brother " to Delphi ; and he found a place at Eleusis, 
 at Athens, at Sicyon. 
 
 Then fresh elements appear, whether due to 
 another movement or not, or to a teacher identifiable 
 with Orpheus ; and the religion, which began with 
 psychopathic disturbances, is equipped with myths, 
 a theology, a philosophy of the soul and its origin and 
 destiny, a system of life and ritual a good deal quieter 
 than the original one, and an extensive literature.^ 
 Here again it is hard to make out an order of events ; 
 the Orphists put Orpheus earlier than Homer, which 
 Herodotus rightly would not believe.^ Among them 
 they developed a Cosmogony, not free from variants ; * 
 they told, for instance, how Ocean first married 
 Tethys his sister and begot various gods, how Dio- 
 nysus- Zagreus, the child-god, was mutilated and 
 devoured by the Titans, but was rescued by Athene 
 and swallowed by Zeus to re-appear as the new 
 Dionysus, while from the ashes, to which the Titans 
 were reduced by a thunderbolt, sprang man, of two- 
 fold nature, god and Titan, an uneasy union of good 
 and evil. Another similar myth tells how Zeus 
 swallowed Phanes, in whom, as the offspring of the 
 world-egg, were all seeds or potencies ; and how, as 
 a result, sky, sea, earth, ocean, Tartarus, rivers, gods 
 and goddesses, all that was or would be, was in the 
 belly of Zeus, in confusion.* The soul, so the Orphics 
 taught more certainly, was not at home but in prison 
 in the body, buried as it were {crw/ia, cr^/ia), but 
 desirous of freedom.^ Sin before birth sent it there, 
 
 ^ The innumerable books, cf. Euripides, Hipp. 954 : Plato, Rep. 
 364E. 
 
 * Herodotus, ii. 53. 
 
 ^ Dieterich, Abraxas, § 9, pp. 126-135. 
 
 * Cf. Eugen Abel, fr. 53, 121, 122, 123, quotod by Adam, 
 Religious Teachers, p. 96. Cf. Aristophanes, Birds, 693 ; Plato, Timaeus, 
 40D; and see passages set out in Diels, V'orsokratiker,yo\. ii. 66B. 
 
 ^ A favourite idea with Plato. 
 
88 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 for the transmigration of an immortal soul was among 
 their tenets. Herodotus (ii. 123) attributes to the 
 Egyptians the credit of first teaching the immortality 
 of the soul; and perhaps the doctrine was only in- 
 corporated in Orphism after Pythagoras. It seems 
 that the full Egyptian doctrine differed in essential 
 particulars from the Orphic ; Egypt appears not to 
 have taught transmigration ; nor is the Orphic 
 doctrine precisely what we find in Hinduism. 
 Orphism taught a possibility of escape on other lines 
 than Ramanuja's. 
 
 If our ancient evidence is indistinct as to dates and 
 origins, a series of discoveries of small gold tablets 
 buried with the dead gives us a sure foothold. In 
 one the soul of the dead is bidden (in Greek hexa- 
 meters) to say : " I am a child of Earth and of Starry 
 Heaven ; but my race is of Heaven. This ye know 
 yourselves. And lo, I am parched with thirst and I 
 perish. Give me quickly the cold water flowing 
 forth from the Lake of Memory." ^ In another, he 
 says : — 
 
 " Out of the pure I come, Pure Queen of them below, 
 Eukles and Eubouleus and the other Gods Immortal, 
 But I also avow me that I am of your blessed race 
 But Fate laid me low and the other Gods Immortal, 
 
 '■ , ^„ , , ^ Istarflung thunderbolt, faccusativel 
 
 the Greek engraverj ) 
 
 I have flown out of the sorrowful weary wheel. 
 
 I have passed with eager feet to the Circle desired. 
 
 I have sunk beneath the bosom of Despoina, Queen of the 
 
 underworld. 
 
 1 have passed with eager feet from the Circle desired. 
 Happy and Blessed One, thou shalt be god instead of mortal. 
 
 A kid I have fallen into milk." 
 
 Eusebius, in his Preparation of the Gospel, and some 
 other writers quote a poem of Orpheus,^ which, of 
 
 ^ J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena, pp. 574 and 586. Diels, Fragtnente 
 der Vorsokratiker, vol. ii. No. 66, p. 480. 
 
 2 Abel, Orphica, fr. 123 ; Praep. Ev. iii. 9. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 89 
 
 whatever date, gives a striking portrayal of Zeus. 
 " Zeus was the first, Zeus last, lord of the thunder ; 
 Zeus head, Zeus midst.^ From Zeus all things are 
 made, Zeus was male, Zeus was the immortal feminine ; 
 Zeus foundation of earth and of the starry sky ; Zeus 
 breath of the winds, Zeus rushing of tireless fire ; 
 Zeus root of the sea ; Zeus the sun and the moon ; 
 Zeus king ; Zeus himself source of all beginnings. 
 One might, one daimon was he, great leader of all, 
 one royal body, wherein all these revolve, fire and 
 water and earth and aether, night and day. And 
 Wisdom, first begetter, and Eros manifold of delight. 
 For all these things lie in the mighty body of Zeus " ; 
 and so forth. 
 
 Let us sum up what we have so far gathered, and 
 ignore the question as to the part of Pythagoras in 
 Orphism. Here is a religion linked with most primi- 
 tive rites and witnessed to by phenomena quite 
 inexplicable till explained by modern Psychology — a 
 religion which teaches a thorough-going pantheism, 
 the divine origin of the soul and its immortality and 
 deliverance. To find a parallel we must, I think, go 
 to Hinduism. Orpheus, whoever he was — Orphism 
 has left the Homeric Zeus with his golden chain on 
 his Olympus, and teaches another more wonderful, 
 but markedly less personal. Homer had said that 
 the wrath of AchiUes sent many souls of heroes to 
 Hades, but gave themselves to dogs and birds. Here 
 the soul is the real thing ; and an explanation, perhaps 
 more than one, is offered of its situation and its 
 difficulties in the body along with a clear promise of 
 its release. Life is brought under the discipline of 
 religion to this end ; there is ritual, there is rapture 
 and identification with the god ; there is ascetic 
 practice and abstinence from animal food. We 
 are not told by the Orphics, as in India, that 
 
 1 The form of the Greek appears to support the idea that Plato 
 quotes this line, Laws, 71SE. Cf. Diels, Fonokratiker, ii. 66 B6. 
 
90 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 metempsychosis is the reason for vegetarianism ; but 
 a caustic quatrain directed by Xenophanes against 
 Pythagoras helps us to that conclusion. 
 
 So the soul is asserting itself ; the immortal per- 
 sonality of the man is getting recognized. God is 
 somewhat stripped of his personality, but there is a 
 suggestion of Justice about what is left of him, so far 
 as Pantheism allows or needs him to be just, and so 
 far as emphasis on ritual allows a place for justice. 
 And the Thracian stories witness to the unquestion- 
 able reality of the god who inspires the Maenads, and 
 to an effective union with him. The old tribal and 
 local lines of division are growing blurred, this religion 
 is universal and it gives the individual freedom of 
 choice. But there were marked drawbacks about it. 
 It stereotyped the primitive ; it emphasized the 
 irrational as the highest manifestation of God ; and, 
 whatever it may say about purity and holiness, by its 
 attention to taboo, to ritual, to asceticism and the 
 external, it shifted the interest of its worshippers 
 away from the moral law and from the spiritual side 
 of life ; and finally, by its myths and its symbolism it 
 militated against clearness of thought. There are 
 those who hold that there was a danger of Orphism 
 swamping Hellenism,^ as Hinduism has swamped and 
 sterilized Indian life and thought ; but I do not find 
 evidence for this. Orphism re-emphasized in its way 
 the need of the individual human soul and its instinct 
 for God, its craving to find rest in Him — so much 
 must be conceded — but there is the testimony of 
 Plato and of the greater Christian fathers that the 
 via prima salutis is in another direction. 
 
 For the time, it is clear that the set of opinion was 
 all for sacraments, initiation and holiness. There 
 was no organized church or priesthood to formulate 
 teaching, to regulate ceremony, or to ordain minis- 
 trants ; and there was an immense demand for special 
 ^ Cf. Bury, Greek History, p. 3 1 6 f. 
 
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 91 
 
 intercourse with heaven. From what Uterature we 
 have that bears on the age, we can see how the world 
 began to swarm with priests and prophets, initiating, 
 purifying, and bringing men by private ways to terms 
 with the gods. Old rites were revived, as happens 
 at such times ; and often the more savage and primi- 
 tive they were, the more repulsive and bizarre, the 
 more virtue lay in them. Many of them were dis- 
 gusting^ — natural perhaps for the savage ; but the 
 times were civilized. Then the state stepped in, 
 accepted the new gods and the new notions, the new 
 individualism, and controlled the new rites, as at 
 Athens the Thesmophoria and the Dionysia, and the 
 ceremonies of Eleusis were regularized if not regulated 
 by the governing powers. It recognized thiasoi, 
 eranoi, orgeSnes — ^groups of initiates. In historical 
 Athens we do not hear of the Thracian psychopathic 
 phenomena. But the state did not eliminate what 
 may be called the naturalistic element in these cults — 
 the filth and indecency. A state is not often morally 
 ahead of its citizens. 
 
 The criticism came from elsewhere. " If it were 
 not in honour of Dionysus," says Heraclitus,^ " that 
 they were ordering their procession and singing a song 
 of phalli (he is more explicit), their conduct would 
 be utterly shameless. Hades is one with Dionysus, 
 for whom they go mad and celebrate." " If they 
 are gods," he asked,^ " why do you mourn for them 
 as dead ? If you mourn for them, count them no 
 longer gods." So much for living and dead gods 
 and men's worship of them. Xenophanes * looked at 
 the legends — " Homer and Hesiod fastened upon the 
 gods everything that is shame and blame among 
 men — theft, adultery and trickery." Xenophanes 
 
 '^ Heraclitus, fr. 15; Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. i. 
 12B 15. 
 
 * Heraclitus, fr. 127 ; Diels, I.e., 12B 127, a doubted fragment. 
 
 * Xenophanes, fr. 11, 1 6, 15 ; Diels, /.c, vol. i. llB. 
 
92 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 suggested a question that went deeper yet — " The 
 Ethiopians make the gods flat-nosed and black ; the 
 Thracians make them grey-eyed and red-haired " ; 
 and cows and horses, no doubt, if they had hands, 
 would make the shapes of the gods like their own. 
 How are we to conceive of God ? Certainly not, 
 these thinkers would urge, as immoral ; certainly 
 not as asking indecency and calling it worship. The 
 moral sense of Greece had waked and reached man- 
 hood. The story of Greek religion shows extreme 
 reluctance to give up the old rites and the old myths ; 
 it turns to them again and again, explains them, 
 apologizes, allegorizes, but in vain. From Xenophanes 
 and Heraclitus through Plato to the Christians the 
 same indignant reaction is to be traced against 
 associating God in any way with immorality, whatever 
 holy name it wears. 
 
 The great gain that the new philosophy brought 
 to Greece was the direct look at the world. The 
 mystic's mind tends to take a " knight's move ; " but 
 whatever may be allowed in chess, neither the bodily 
 nor the spiritual eye can see round a corner ; and 
 symbolism is essentially an attempt at that. The 
 mystic sought to save his soul — to be comfortable 
 about it ; but these great pioneers sought truth 
 first. 
 
 It is wonderful to realize how great a world these 
 men grasped, over what a range of space and time 
 their minds moved. Xenophanes hit upon the true 
 explanation of the fossils in the Sicilian hills ; and 
 Geology may lend a steadying hand to Theology. 
 They meant to know and to understand the universe 
 taken as a whole and as a unity. " Nature tries to 
 hide herself " (fr. 123) ; and " eyes and ears are bad 
 witnesses to such as have barbarian souls " (fr. 107), 
 said Heraclitus. The harmony of all things will not be 
 obvious ; indeed " a hidden harmony is better than 
 an obvious " (fr. 54). But, in any case, underlying 
 
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 93 
 
 the variet7 of things is unity ; and they speculated, 
 with a boldness amazing then or at any time, as to 
 what that unity is. Is water the substance of all 
 things, or fire, or the vaguer " infinite " ? They 
 extended the reign of law to all phenomena. Think 
 what a god the sun was ; think of the grim, avenging 
 figures of the Erinnyes in art and legend ; and then 
 think of this saying of Heraclitus : " The sun will 
 not overstep bounds ; but, if he does, the Erinnyes, 
 helpers of Justice, will find him " (fr. 94). We are 
 in another world from that of the Orphic — a world 
 of larger spaces and of air more open ; and, as the 
 proverb says, " nothing of all this concerns Dionysus," 
 Anaximander held that " there are created gods, 
 rising and disappearing at long intervals, and that 
 these are the innumerable worlds." ^ Xenophanes, 
 whose caustic criticism we have seen upon the forms 
 of his country's gods, is not only destructive. Four 
 short fragments,^ perhaps of the same poem, speak of 
 another god than Greece had yet adopted or con- 
 ceived, though we have had hints of him. 
 
 One God there is 'mid gods and man the greatest, 
 
 In form not like to mortals, nor in mind ; — 
 
 He is all eye, aU mind, aU hearing he ; — 
 
 He without toil rules all things by his will ; — 
 
 Ever unmoved, in one place he abideth, 
 
 Him it befits not here and there to go. 
 
 Points of contact are noted here with Orphism, but 
 the scorn he poured upon Pythagoras for recognizing 
 the voice of a lost friend in the cry of a beaten dog 
 (fr. 7), and his quarrel with Epimenides, the pro- 
 fessional purifier from Crete, suggest the same inde- 
 pendence of mind that we find in him throughout. 
 There has been much controversy about the phrase 
 " greatest among gods " ; but James Adam, using 
 
 1 Cicero, t/e Nat. Deorum, i. 25 ; Adam, Religious Teachers, 187. 
 * Xenophanes, fr. 23-6. 
 
94 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 parallels from the Hebrew psalms, concludes that he 
 meant definitely to affirm the unity of God in 
 opposition to Homeric polytheism, and that further 
 this God is the visible world, but yet perhaps a 
 personality. 
 
 As for the soul of man, " the bounds of soul," said 
 Heraclitus, " thou couldst not by going discover 
 though thou didst travel every road ; so deep a logos 
 hath it " (fr. 45). Logos is one of Heraclitus' chief 
 contributions to philosophy, a cosmic principle, 
 actively intelligent and thinking, and operative in 
 man and in all nature, rational and divine. And here 
 he led the way for Plato and the Stoics, for Philo and 
 the fourth Evangelist. 
 
 Now, in conclusion, to survey what we have seen. 
 The Greek world has travelled far from Homer. 
 Heraclitus and the philosophers have a new outlook 
 altogether, see a new world, a world vaster, more 
 ordered, more thinkable, but a world, as they admit, 
 of problems. " Guess is over all," said Xenophanes 
 (fr. 34). The Orphic has his philosophy of all exist- 
 ence, but a practical problem occupies his energies — 
 the management of something with the gods that 
 will save his own soul and give him peace. The two 
 groups are looking different ways — ^not without some 
 contempt for each other ; and from now onward the 
 endeavour of some of the greatest teachers of Greece 
 is to bring them together. Religion may be reformed ; 
 its squalid fears, its sensual sacrifices, its phallic songs 
 and foolish myths and symbols might be swept away 
 — or, if not quite swept away, explained away or toned 
 down. Plato stands for thorough reform, Plutarch 
 for explanation and apology. And Philosophy might 
 be brought to bow the knee to Religion, to find a 
 justification for cult and tradition, to humanize itself 
 to the extent of recognizing the poor frail soul of man, 
 unequal to high thought and speculation, full of 
 fears and in desperate need of God or of something 
 
BEGINNINGS OF GREEK CRITICISM 95 
 
 it can persuade itself to be God, on which it might 
 lean in its uneasy transits through a world of daemons 
 and dangers. But neither will quite take the trouble 
 to understand the other. The abstract world-soul 
 will not do for the devotee, and " truth or something 
 that might pass for it " revolts the philosopher ; the 
 one does not realize the passion for truth and the 
 other hardly grasps the passion for personality in 
 God. 
 
V 
 
 EARLIER ISRAEL 
 
 The contrast between Greece and Israel is perhaps 
 nowhere more marked than in the story of their 
 religious development, but certain tendencies are to 
 be traced alike in both. Greece and Israel, each in 
 its own way, knew the impulse to moralize religion 
 and to personalize the divine ; both felt the drive to 
 monotheism, both grew more and more conscious of 
 the significance of the individual, and both pursued 
 his story beyond the gates of Hades. The greater, 
 then, the contrasts, the more important is the common 
 experience, the more suggestion too for us, when we 
 find the minds of men so different in race, in outlook 
 and habits of thought, responding in the same way 
 to human experience. 
 
 It is in some ways a great deal harder to follow the 
 course of the story of Hebrew religion than of Greek, 
 because the history has been confused. The Greeks 
 theorized about their ancient history, but they never 
 deliberately rewrote it. Plato denounced the influ- 
 ence of Homer as a religious teacher, but he never 
 got the Iliad and the Odyssey expurgated or re- 
 modelled. But in Hebrew literature the hand of the 
 reviser is everywhere ; nothing escapes him but by 
 accident ; and the sound principle that the detail 
 must be explained by the general tenor has been 
 misapplied by the commentator, who failed to remark 
 that his documents were not in anything approaching 
 their original form. Luther, four centuries ago, 
 however, " denied the Mosaic authorship of part of 
 the Pentateuch ; he declared Job to be an allegory ; 
 
 96 
 
EARLIER ISRAEL 97 
 
 Jonah was so childish that he was almost inclined to 
 laugh at it ; the books of Kings were ' a thousand 
 paces ahead of Chronicles and more to be believed.' 
 Ecclesiastes has neither boots nor spurs, but rides in 
 socks, as I did when I was in the cloister.' " ^ It 
 was two centuries, however, before Astruc made the 
 suggestions from which date the modern methods of 
 criticism that have brought what order is possible 
 into Old Testament History. We are now taught 
 to recognize four or five hands, where once that of 
 Moses alone was seen — four or five at least, with 
 corrections and modifications by more still. I do 
 not need here to speak in detail of the Jehovist and the 
 Elohist, whether individuals or schools, the Jehovist's 
 work completed, as some think, by about 840 b.c, the 
 Elohist's by about 775 b.c. ; nor of the man or men 
 who fused the two narratives into one. Deuteronomy, 
 which existed at least in nucleus about 620 b.c, marks 
 a stage in the religious development of Israel ahead 
 of the other two. The Priestly Code, which grew in 
 and after the exile, only concerns us for the purposes 
 of this lecture in a negative way ; we have to beware 
 of the influence of its authors in every quotation we 
 make. For, last of all, by man of letters or by school, 
 the great combination that we know as the Penta- 
 teuch was formed of all these very diverse materials 
 — and, fortunately for the modern scholar, the work 
 was not very efficiently done. Compilers and har- 
 monizers are not apt to do their work well ; if 
 they had the literary sense needed for their task, 
 they would have as a rule the instinct to be doing 
 something else. 
 
 One tendency marks all the documents with which 
 we have to deal — a tendency with two distinct 
 features. We, aU of us, unconsciously re-create the 
 past in the light of the present, import the present 
 into the past and find the ideas of to-day operative 
 ^ Preserved Smith, Life and Letters ofM. Luther, p. 268. 
 
98 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 there, see our own convictions in our spiritual 
 ancestors and our political and religious opponents 
 in those who opposed them. This is natural, and it 
 is more legitimate than some historians allow, for 
 the past was at least once alive, and its greater minds 
 were in fact more modern than contemporaries could 
 imagine, or than matter-of-fact historians under- 
 stand. On the other hand, controversy always seeks 
 weapons from the armoury of the past, and a great 
 point is made when it is shown, or even asserted, 
 that the innovation of which our opponents complain 
 is " the oldest rule in the book." Hebrew history 
 was re-written with a purpose, and it was profoundly 
 altered. " See," writes Wellhausen, " what Chronicles 
 has made out of David ! The founder of the kingdom 
 has become the founder of the temple and the public 
 worship, the king and hero at the head of his com- 
 panions in arms has become the singer and master 
 of ceremonies at the head of a swarm of priests and 
 Levites ; his clearly-cut figure has become a feeble 
 holy picture, seen through a cloud of incense. . . . 
 He has had now to place his music at the service of 
 the cultus and write psalms along with Asaph, Heman 
 and Jeduthun, the Levitical singing families." ^ 
 
 Disentangling the history as best we can, with the 
 help of modern scholarship, the main movements 
 become fairly clear for us. The detail, as ever in 
 stories of religious development, is often very far 
 from clear. Words, as we have seen, even when we 
 have no doubt of their authenticity, are ambiguous 
 witnesses. Here we are always haunted with the 
 doubt as to whether our witnesses are personated. 
 But still, when we take a survey of centuries together, 
 the main points stand out ; and it is these that we 
 want. 
 
 The Greeks, as we saw, in obedience to a universal 
 instinct personahzed their gods ; and under the stress 
 ^ Prolegomena, p. 182. 
 
EARLIER ISRAEL 99 
 
 of what seems a necessity of thought they moved 
 toward some sort of ultimate monotheism ; but 
 almost in proportion as their god grew to be One, 
 he lost personality and sank into being a principle. 
 Here is the first and perhaps the most striking con- 
 trast with Israel. The Hebrew moved much more 
 definitely, and it would seem more naturally and at 
 an earlier stage, to monotheism ; and with each step 
 — till we reach the end of the prophetic period — the 
 personality of Jehovah grew more distinct, more 
 individual, and more intensely real and significant 
 for every worshipper. The Greek monotheist was a 
 philosopher and in intellectual habit an aristocrat ; 
 he never believed that the people could take in the 
 conception of One God or that they would be content 
 with it if they did. He conceded polytheism to the 
 vulgar, and with it idolatry — with the result that 
 his monotheism remained a paradox or an irrelevancy, 
 a discussion of the schools, not a conviction of the 
 market-place. When the Greek philosopher became 
 Christian, he carried his habit with him — and, con- 
 vinced that the vulgar would never be satisfied with 
 One God, he once more conceded a practical poly- 
 theism in the worship of the saints ; and heathen 
 Artemis yielded her functions to her own genitive 
 case transformed into Saint Artemidos.-^ So the world 
 saw the religion of Jesus infected with image-worship. 
 The Hebrew monotheist was a man of the people, 
 even when he was a priest or a land-owner. One of 
 the most striking of the prophets was a herdsman. 
 The Hebrew, then, assumed that his people could 
 perfectly well take in the idea of One God, and he 
 was proved right by the history of Israel and even 
 more remarkably by the history of Islam. So far 
 from monotheism being unintelligible to the vulgar, 
 it becomes a glorifying and ennobling passion ; there 
 
 1 Hamilton, Incubation, p. 1 74 ; J. T. Bent, " Researches among the 
 Cyclades " {Journal of Hellenic Studies, v. p. 46). 
 
100 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 is no god but God, and Muhammad and countless 
 millions are his prophets, fervid and clear, every 
 one of them. And with Hebrew monotheism there 
 developed a hatred of idolatry. When the Hebrew 
 became Christian his new religion saw him still a 
 passionate monotheist, a hater of idols ; and where- 
 ever a genuine pulse of the Old Testament religion 
 still beats in Christendom, there is the monotheist 
 still, uncompromising. 
 
 On the other hand, the contrast is only less sur- 
 prising between the Greek and the Hebrew in their 
 views of the individual man. One might well have 
 expected to find Egyptian influences potent in 
 Hebrew religion ; but where Egyptian thought and 
 usage laid most emphasis the Hebrew laid none at 
 all. The elaborate care which the Egyptian took 
 of the dead, the mummy, the " Book of the Dead," 
 the pyramid — they all point back to a theory, a con- 
 viction of a personal immortality ; and the Hebrew 
 is hardly interested in it at all. We are told that 
 there are only four clear allusions to immortality in 
 the Old Testament ; stranger still, none of them is 
 in Jeremiah, and Jeremiah was as individual and 
 self-conscious as Archilochus or Sappho, and the 
 interest of his life centred in his personal relations 
 with Jehovah. Eventually the idea of immortality 
 developed, as we see in Apocalyptic literature, but 
 how late, when we think of the Homeric hymn to 
 Demeter, of the mysteries of Eleusis and of Plato's 
 Phaedo ! 
 
 I know of no explanation for these contrasts. 
 Renan once spoke of a primitive Semitic tendency 
 to monotheism ; but that is no explanation, it is a 
 mere re-statement of our problem — to say nothing 
 of the verdict of modern and perhaps less rhetorical 
 scholars that it cannot be maintained.^ The his- 
 torian, confronted with the Hebrew prophets, turns 
 1 G. A. Barton, Semitic Origins, p. 321. 
 
EARLIER ISRAEL loi 
 
 almost by instinct to the earlier history of Israel to 
 find at least the germs of their amazing monotheism. 
 He will ask : What is the origin of this Jehovah ? 
 What makes him so different from Chemosh, the 
 god of Moab ? In view of Greek and Hindu amalga- 
 mations of their gods, how could this God escape 
 being swamped among the Baals of Canaan, and 
 identified with them ? We know that there was at 
 times a strong probability that this would happen ; 
 and it did not happen ; but why ? An Egyptian 
 king. Amen Hotep IV (Ikhn-Aton), established a 
 very remarkable monotheism as the state religion of 
 Egypt, and it lasted till the end of his reign and was 
 gone ; the Egyptian people would not have it.^ Why 
 would Israel have Jehovah ? To reply that Jehovah 
 began as their own tribal god is not to answer the 
 question. Athene was perhaps the cantonal goddess 
 of Athens, but she did not keep out Dionysus or 
 dozens of other gods either. Why did the mono- 
 theistic worship of Jehovah capture Israel ? Why, 
 to put the question differently, were there always 
 monotheists in Israel, enthusiasts for Jehovah ? And 
 finally, why and how did Jehovah manage to remain 
 so personal, when Zeus became a dogma, an abstract 
 noun ? It is again not a complete answer to say that 
 there were many Zeus-es, each so personal, that, 
 when they were all fused, the resultant Zeus was 
 impossible, a negation of all decency. Jehovah was 
 not fused with other gods ; he annihilated them ; 
 and slowly the people of Judah recognized this. The 
 wonder is that it happened at all. 
 
 Of course, it is clear that the agents by whom all 
 was achieved were the prophets. Then they have 
 to be explained, and I find a Semitic scholar of note 
 conclude a long and learned research into Semitic 
 origins with the admission that " the moral standards 
 
 ^ See the interesting chapter (with the king's hymns) in Breasted, 
 History of the Ancient Egyptians. 
 
I02 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 of the prophets and their conceptions of God are 
 utterly unaccounted for by their environment." ^ 
 The explanations which I have seen attempted 
 seem to me to fail in two ways : they rest a great 
 deal too much on conjecture ; and their authors do 
 not appear to reaHze that it is a question of dynamic, 
 and they offer nothing with force or life enough in 
 it to be the real source of what we have to explain. 
 This is not to dispute their reconstructions, I am not 
 qualified to do that ; they may be right in every 
 particular ; but the sum of their particulars seems to 
 me to omit just what I want to find. I am not pre- 
 pared with a hypothesis myself ; that could only be 
 when I am a great deal surer of my ground. Some- 
 thing, however, is really gained when we admit the 
 existence of a problem which we have not solved. 
 The prophets stand with the great poets, and of both 
 we have to confess that their grounds and impulses 
 are beyond the average mind ; happily so. 
 
 When we reach the prophets, the question of Moses 
 at once rises ; it rises, and, like so many more, it waits 
 an answer. The modern student must often echo 
 the cry of the Israelites : " As for this Moses, we wot 
 not what is become of him " (Ex. xxxii. i). Once he 
 was as clear and well-known a figure as Agamemnon ; 
 but since then, like Agamemnon, he has had his very 
 existence doubted. To-day, however, scholars in a 
 good many fields incline to accept the existence of 
 the great law-givers of the peoples ; perhaps even 
 Lycurgus, stripped of every legend, may struggle 
 into History again. We have at least to ask what 
 may be said of Moses and his work that will stand 
 the test of historical criticism. 
 
 The Hebrews believed that they owed their escape 
 from Egypt and the foundations of their religion to 
 Moses, and to these modern scholars add the begin- 
 nings of the nation. Moses, they suggest, gave the 
 ^ G. A. Barton, Semitic Origins, p. 306. 
 
EARLIER ISRAEL 103 
 
 various tribes — some of them — the beginnings of 
 that process which saw them for two reigns a united 
 people. So much would probably be conceded in 
 the case of a nation known to what used to be called 
 secular history. The book of Deuteronomy, dated 
 about 621 B.C., implies a very strong tradition ; but 
 if the date of Moses is about 1300 b.c, we have a long 
 gap to fill. Working back, we find Elijah about 
 850 B.C., who does not indeed mention Moses, but 
 whose story implies what is really of more concern 
 to us, a sense that for Israel to worship another god 
 instead of Jehovah is a national apostasy. As the 
 habit of worshipping other gods along with Jehovah 
 was an ingrained temptation with the Hebrew people, 
 we are carried back a good deal farther. The narra- 
 tives of Jehovists and Elohists which tell of Moses 
 are dated 300 years after his death.^ Working down- 
 ward, we find in Judges (xviii. 30) the adventures of 
 a grandson of Moses — adventures so discreditable to 
 the descendant of the founder of the religion as later 
 conceived, that, while we can understand the quiet 
 emendation of the grandfather's name, the impro- 
 bability and unsuitability of the grandson's conduct 
 go some way to guarantee the grandfather. It is 
 what a modern scholar in another field would call a 
 " pillar-text." The foundation seems a slight one ; 
 but we have to remember that epochs of thought 
 and epochs of national life are normally the work of 
 some significant man, of some hero, as Carlyle called 
 him ; and in this story we have both kinds of epoch 
 associated with a name, embedded firmly in national 
 memory. Despite the case of Persia, which forgot 
 the Achaemenids, this weighs a good deal with 
 scholars. Moses may well leave Agamemnon in the 
 limbo where Odysseus found him and come back 
 into History — not as the hero of a hundred episodes, 
 but as a national hero of long ago, who gave a people 
 1 J. P. Peters, Re/igion of Helreus, 85. 
 
104 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 a new consciousness of itself and a new sense of relation 
 to its god. 
 
 The god was Jehovah, and he is associated with the 
 tradition of the exodus from Egypt ; but whose god 
 Jehovah was before that, or what his relation to Israel, 
 is disputed. The Old Testament, as it stands modelled 
 to ultimate Jewish orthodoxy, refers Jehovah's first 
 dealings with Israel back to Abraham ; but Abraham 
 raises more problems than we need wait to solve, and 
 scholars to-day emphasize some curious passages in 
 Exodus. The Elohist and the Priestly Code narrate 
 that the God who spoke to Moses told him that he 
 had not previously been known by the name Jehovah ; ^ 
 the patriarchs had known him as El-Shaddai, and the 
 Elohist says (Joshua xxiv. 14) that in Egypt the Israel- 
 ites were idolaters. It is maintained, too, with some 
 plausibility, that Jehovah was the god of the Kenites, 
 into which tribe Moses married (Ex. xviii.), and 
 that Heber the Kenite " officiated as though intro- 
 ducing Moses into a new cult " ; and the covenant 
 between Israel and Jehovah follows. For centuries 
 Sinai was regarded as the home of Jehovah, far away 
 from his people's land, from which mountain he swept 
 down to aid them in battle, as the ancient poem of 
 Deborah tells us. The Kenites, moreover, to the south 
 of Judah remained loyal to old ways of the desert, 
 to old religion, down to the day of Jeremiah (xxxv.), 
 and they had lent a hand to Jehu in the extirpation 
 of Baal- worship in Northern Israel (2 Kings x. 15). 
 Though conscious of a distinct descent, they were 
 reckoned as in Judah ; and the Jehovist document, 
 which is supposed to be of Judaean origin, shows no 
 consciousness of Jehovah-worship being anything but 
 primeval. Jehovah was a god of war, and he carried 
 the people covenanted with him to victory ; and so 
 
 1 G. A. Barton, Semitic Origins, p. 276 ; E in Ex. iii. 1 3 f. ; P in 
 Ex. vi. 2 f. ; J. P. Peters, Religion of the Hebrews, p. 89 ; Budde, 
 Religion of Israel, p. 1 3 iF. 
 
EARLIER ISRAEL 105 
 
 began the great development which we find on far 
 loftier heights in the prophets. 
 
 Such is the reconstruction of modern scholarship, 
 not indeed unchallenged, but strongly supported.^ 
 I am not competent to offer an opinion on its value, 
 and happily it is not of first importance to us to 
 determine if Moses or Abraham first realized Jehovah. 
 Here as with the Greeks, and as Aristotle pointed out, 
 the end is the explanation of the beginning and of 
 more consequence. Nor need we spend time on the 
 Decalogue of Moses ; that he was a law-giver is the 
 tradition of Israel, and there is no improbabihty in 
 this. Whether he had reached the stage to give his 
 people the familiar Decalogue, has been much de- 
 bated. It is pointed out that it comes in the Elohist's 
 section (Ex. xx.), while an alternative decalogue is 
 given by the Jehovist (Ex. xxxiv.), a series of com- 
 mandments dealing much more with ritual and much 
 less with ethics, and therefore more likely to be 
 primitive. The second commandment, " Thou shalt 
 make thee no molten gods," seems a protest against 
 luxurious and costly images rather than a prohibition 
 of all images whatever. In any case Hebrew religion 
 took a long time in reaching the observance of this law. 
 
 Little need be said here of the origins of the Hebrew 
 people. They hardly concern us, except as showing 
 the strange and confused elements from which a nation 
 may arise ; and it may be noted that such fragments 
 of fact as we get do not throw much light on the 
 early history of Jehovah. Among the Tel-el- Amarna 
 tablets ^ (which are written in Babylonian script, 
 and are dated about 1400 b.c.) are some letters of 
 Abdikheba of Jerusalem, which tell of people called 
 Khabiri invading Canaan. There are references to 
 Egyptian over-lordship over a crowded land full of 
 
 ^ See G. A. Barton, Semitic Origins, p. 275. 
 
 ^ Cf. G. A. Barton, ofi. cit., p. 273 f. ; Budde, op. cit., p. 5 ; 
 Skinner, Genesis, p. xvi. 
 
io6 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 walled towns of Babylonian culture and full of war — 
 not such a land of pastoral spaces as we had pictured 
 from the story of Abraham and Isaac. We learn 
 also of places called Jakob-el and Joseph-el. A stele 
 of the Egyptian king Meren-Ptah (discovered by 
 Flinders Petrie in 1896) places Israel among enemies 
 whom the king destroyed in Palestine — ^roughly about 
 the date of the exodus. These fragments of fact are 
 a little difficult to adjust to the Pentateuch as it 
 stands. Possibly the Khabiri were not the Hebrews, 
 but a tribe of the same type. In Greek history we 
 have odd and perplexing hints of tribes and peoples, 
 whose numbers and movements we do not know, 
 engaged in war and migration about the Aegaean lands, 
 and at last Homer comes out of the confusion. So 
 it is with these Hebrews ; their origins we do not 
 know (what people's origins do we know ?), and then 
 we find them in Palestine, more or less masters of the 
 country — tribes of perhaps various stocks, but not 
 incapable of settling down into a common race, as 
 Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Celts and Danes made English. 
 Some at least of the tribes had been in Egypt, and 
 had come triumphantly away. Gad was at once the 
 name of one of the tribes and of the Aramaean and 
 Phoenician god of Luck ; Asher may be a divine 
 name or a place-name. As sometimes happens in 
 such matters, the twelve tribes are a little difficult to 
 adjust, as the number is obviously an arbitrary one, 
 and at least thirteen tribes formed Israel. Our oldest 
 documents upon the tribes are the Song of Deborah, 
 which is contemporary with the events it describes, 
 and the Blessing of Jacob, which is old and obscure 
 but belongs to a period centuries later than the date 
 of Jacob, if he had a date at all. 
 
 So far we have been moving in a world only dimly 
 revealed to us in fragments and guesses ; but when 
 Israel, in some general sense of the name, enters 
 Canaan, we find some agreement among our guides, 
 
EARLIER ISRAEL 107 
 
 Jehovist, Elohist, the author of the Priestly Code, 
 and the modern scholars. Not about everything — 
 not about Joshua, nor even David, but about that 
 struggle between the worship of Jehovah and the 
 cults of Palestine which ended in the victory of 
 prophetic religion. It is agreed that now the issue 
 was whether Jehovah was to be merged among the 
 gods of the land. Whether he was known to Abraham 
 .first or to Moses does not greatly matter ; nor if 
 neither of them knew him at all. The period before 
 us shows a people who do know Jehovah, but are 
 uncertain so far as to his position and his character. 
 
 Scholars have little difficulty in giving us the 
 general outlines of Semitic religion, and much that 
 they tell us is found far beyond the range of Semites. 
 The great literature of Babylon, the archaeological 
 remains of Canaan, reveal peoples akin to this Israel 
 which now concerns us. There are great differences 
 among them in culture, and some in outlook, as a 
 result of their different experiences in settlement 
 and wandering. Life in the desert differentiates a 
 tribe from its agricultural or town-dwelling kindred ; 
 and their reHgions will show the reaction of the 
 circumstances. Israel's religion, by its separation 
 and desert-life, had, we gather, escaped some features 
 which had developed in Canaan. But now Israel was 
 to live in Canaan, and the conquest was such a con- 
 quest as, we are gradually learning, generally accom- 
 panies a settlement in a new land. The Achaean did 
 not exterminate the " Mediterranean race," nor the 
 Saxon the Celt, nor the Norman the Saxon, nor the 
 Spaniard the Inca. In every case it was amalgama- 
 tion, slower or quicker ; and in Canaan, we learn, it 
 was amalgamation. The Deuteronomist, six hundred 
 years later, represents Moses as inculcating exter- 
 mination just as he represents him emphasizing 
 worship in that place alone which the Lord shall 
 choose ; ^ but in both cases he is re-moulding history 
 ^ Deut. xii. 5. 
 
io8 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 nearer to his heart's desire. Intermarriages, it is 
 evident, if only from the story of Ruth, were frequent, 
 and that is a constant source of religious change. 
 Intermarriage went on down to the days of Nehemiah. 
 And when the stock of religious ideas on both sides com- 
 prised so many held in common, the wonder grows that 
 the religion of Jehovah was not swamped altogether. 
 
 Semitic religion covered a wide range of beliefs 
 and superstitions and practices.^ The Semites, like 
 other primitive peoples, worshipped the dead (cf. 
 Deut. xxvi. 14), sacred stones, sacred trees, sacred 
 wells, sacred animals, and spirits of all sorts — of birth 
 and disease, of the house and the desert. They 
 honoured the objects of their devotion with sprinkled 
 blood, by circumcision, by offerings of milk and hair, 
 by kissing,^ by feasts, and sometimes by human sacri- 
 fices. A story, thrown back into patriarchal times, 
 tells how in the persons of Abraham and Isaac God 
 forbade human sacrifice. Scholars generally agree 
 that this rite is not strictly primitive, and is more 
 prevalent among the semi-civilized than among 
 savages. It rests on several beliefs — e.g. that the gods 
 want attendants, or are appeased by the death of a 
 wrongdoer, or that they like human flesh ; and the 
 rite becomes a form of insurance, in war, in famine, 
 in time of plague, and it recurs in history when trouble 
 gets past a certain point. Children were buried under 
 foundation stones, as the archaeologists have shown. 
 
 Canaan was no new-found land ; it had been long 
 inhabited, and it was like such lands, full of holy 
 places. " Bethel and Beersheba, Dan and Gilgal, 
 were the principal, but Mizpeh, the top of Tabor, 
 and Carmel, perhaps Penuel, were also conspicuous 
 among the countless high places of the land." * 
 Gilgals were many — ancient stone-circles, and Mizpehs, 
 which were watch-towers, seers' stations. Beth-el 
 
 1 See Addis, Hebrew Religion ; Marti, Religion ofO. T., p. 80 fF. 
 
 2 I Kings xix. 18. ^ G. A. Smith, Twelve Prophets, i. p. 37 f. 
 
EARLIER ISRAEL 109 
 
 was a house of God, Beersheba had a sacred well, 
 where Abraham planted a " grove " (or tamarisk : 
 Gen. xxi. 33) ; and all over the land were standing 
 stones, at Shechem, Gilead, Gibeah, En-rogel and 
 elsewhere — Massebas — at once altar and idol in one,^ 
 perhaps at last a god's abode. And groves and sacred 
 trees meet us at every turn, till the prophet indig- 
 nantly declares that there is idolatry " under every 
 green tree " — much as we see it in India still. When 
 a place is once holy, it is apt to remain holy. There 
 are Moslem holy-places in Asia Minor which have 
 been Christian and were heathen before that. In- 
 vaders, like the Israelites, take over such places — 
 cromlechs, holy wells, pillars, trees and graves, from the 
 people they conquer, and take with them the cult 
 and ritual of each place. Sometimes the suggestions 
 of the place are changed to suit the ideas and pre- 
 conceptions of the newcomers. Sometimes it is 
 the other way. The Elohist writes of Bethel and 
 other places, sacred to the mind of Northern Israel, 
 and gives them new legends ; his story of Bethel is 
 a beautiful one, but Bethel must long have been a 
 holy place (Luz, Judges i. 23). But long before the 
 legends were re-made, Israel took over shrine and 
 cult, and the thoughts of the god that went with the 
 cult. " Even the technical terms connected with 
 sacrifice were in great part identical. The vow, the 
 whole burnt-offering, the thank-offering, the meat- 
 offering, and a variety of other details appear on the 
 tablet of Marseilles and similar Phoenician documents 
 under their familiar Old Testament names, showing 
 that the Hebrew ritual was not a thing by itself, but 
 had a common foundation with that observed by 
 their neighbours." ^ 
 
 Every holy place had its Baal, or lord, the god who 
 gave the land its fertility, to whom therefore was 
 
 1 W. Robertson Smith, E. R. S., p. 205 fF. 
 ^ Robertson Smith, Prophets, p. 56. 
 
no PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 due the tribute of first-fruits and worship along the 
 hnes of the fertiUty he gave.^ This, too, Israel took 
 over, and learnt under the name of holiness an un- 
 cleanness he had not known in the desert. Temple 
 harlots are a feature of Semite religion, as of Hinduism, 
 and a prohibition in Deuteronomy (xxiii. 17) is a sure 
 sign that Israel knew them — temple harlots and 
 worse, and all in the worship of God. Qedesha — 
 dedicated or " holy " woman — is a tell-tale word. It 
 was one of the iniquities associated with religion 
 against which Amos and Hosea inaugurated the 
 protest.^ Jerusalem was a new shrine, but the power 
 of the influence of Canaanite and Phoenician religion 
 is seen in the things that Josiah did away with in his 
 reformation — ^vessels dedicated to Baal, priests who 
 burned incense to Baal, to sun and moon and planets, 
 and all the host of heaven, the " grove " or sacred 
 trees, the sodomites, the horses of the sun, and all 
 sorts of altars and images, and " he defiled Topheth 
 which is in the valley of the children of Hinnom, 
 that no man might make his son or his daughter pass 
 through the fire to Molech " (2 Kings xxiii. 4-14). 
 The later associations of the names Tophet and 
 Gehenna have thus some historical justification. The 
 history as we have it tells us that other kings before 
 Josiah made similar clearances, and the evils came 
 back, as they seem to have done after Josiah's refor- 
 mation too,^ in honour of the Queen of Heaven. 
 
 It may well be asked how in such an atmosphere 
 the religion of Jehovah was to survive ; or if the 
 truer question be, how was it to emerge, it is no 
 easier to answer. The problem, age after age, is to 
 find a religion that will avail for a world in flux — 
 a religion which will safeguard mankind against its 
 own old impulses, freer, it would seem, age by age 
 
 1 Robertson Smith, E. R. S., p. 94 fF. 
 
 2 G. A. Smith, Twe/fe Prophets, i. p. 259 ; Amos ii. 7 ; Hosea iv. 13. 
 
 3 H. P. Smith, O. T. History, p. 336. 
 
EARLIER ISRAEL in 
 
 by the wearing down of old sanctions, and stronger 
 as every generation grows more conscious of power 
 and of individuality. A fixed religion for a world 
 of change is not the wisest thing ; for a religion must 
 keep pace with the demands upon it, and these grow 
 greater as man realizes himself. Here, then, was a 
 people stepping from the desert into a comparatively 
 old civilization with a religion which we may call 
 older still. The temple harlot was perhaps the last 
 squaHd memorial of a social morality long outgrown. 
 Canaanite and Babylonian had reached the conception 
 of the sanctity of marriage, if their gods and goddesses 
 had not ; for them religion was no longer a force 
 purifying life, it was corrupting it, and giving the 
 sanction of God's name to vices that revolted decent 
 thinking men and women and that tended to make 
 human society impossible. The effect of it upon new- 
 comers must have been twofold — to fascinate and to 
 repel ; but it was the way of the gods of the land. 
 
 Israel by entering Canaan transformed themselves 
 to an agricultural people ; and their religious festivals 
 changed their character to meet the new situation. 
 It is not sound to say that the desert promoted mono- 
 theism, but the cultivated land at least made the 
 complexity of life greater and introduced men to new 
 fields of wonder and reflection. But Canaan, as we 
 have seen, was no mere prairie-land ; it had known 
 the neighbourhood of two great lands of culture — 
 Babylonian and Egyptian had already fought over 
 its length, and had sought to possess or to control it ; 
 for, apart from anything it had of its own, it was the 
 pathway to regions of more importance. When the 
 armies ceased to waste it, the traders would foUow — 
 ministers of change no less potent. Philistines, too, 
 had come from Caphtor, as the Old Testament tells 
 — not the barbarians suggested by the German slang 
 which Matthew Arnold naturalized, but, as we should 
 expect of people coming from pre-historic Crete, 
 
112 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 and as archaeologists now assure us, a race with a 
 culture of their own, and a religion which gave them 
 an epithet of distinction from the Semites. If David's 
 ancestress was a Moabite woman, his early associates 
 and his guards to the end were Philistine. Solomon 
 married an Egyptian princess, and other foreigners 
 after her. Eighty years after Solomon's death, Ahab 
 married a princess of Tyre and fought against the 
 Assyrian at the battle of Karkar (854 b.c). New 
 modes of domestic life, the field instead of the desert, 
 intercourse with the city-folk of Canaan and Philistia, 
 Weltpolitik involving them with Egypt, with Tyre, 
 with Syria and Assyria — all these things make for 
 comparison, for criticism, and for change. If Israel 
 brought a pure or even a potential monotheism into 
 Canaan, it was bound to be tested fiercely in the new 
 surroundings ; and in spite of the Kenites it is almost 
 certain that any tendencies that Israel had toward 
 monotheism were as yet faint and undeveloped. 
 
 Jehovah, we are told, would hardly have demanded 
 exclusive worship. He was the god of the federation, 
 and there would be gods of the home. If there was 
 a Decalogue at all in those days, whether the com- 
 mandment forbade molten images only or all images 
 molten and graven and every other kind, the accepted 
 story makes it clear that there were images none the 
 less, and plenty of them, public and private. If 
 Moses' degenerate grandson — though there is no 
 suggestion in the tale that he was so reckoned — was 
 an apostate from his grandfather's religion when 
 he ministered to the teraphim, or graven image, 
 stolen from Micah and set up in Dan (Judges xviii. 
 30, 31), David at least is a hero of Jewish story, and in 
 his house was another teraphim, of considerable size, 
 and mistakable, in a bed, for the hero himself (i Sam. 
 xix. 13). In the eighth century the Elohist tells 
 how Rachel, the ancestress, stole her father's teraphim 
 and sat on them to prevent his recovering them ; 
 
EARLIER ISRAEL 113 
 
 and she incurs no censure (Gen. xxxi. 19), even if 
 they are to be counted as among the " strange gods " 
 put away a little later (Gen. xxxv. 2-4). These all 
 look like private gods, gods of a family. 
 
 It is more startling when we realize that, in spite 
 of the familiar denunciations of Jeroboam, the son 
 of Nebat, who " made Israel to sin " by setting up 
 golden " calves " at Bethel and at Dan and making 
 " priests of the lowest of the people which were not 
 of the tribe of Levi," ^ it was in reality long before 
 any feeling manifested itself that it was unsuitable 
 to worship Jehovah in the form of a bull. " The 
 state worship of the golden calves led to no quarrel 
 between Elisha and the dynasty of Jehu ; and this 
 one fact is sufficient to show that, even in a time of 
 notable revival, the living power of the religion was 
 not felt to lie in the principle that Jehovah cannot 
 be represented by images." ^ The Elohist takes 
 pains to associate Bethel, the seat of this " calf " 
 worship, with Jacob the founder of the race and with 
 his God. What is more surprising is that Amos him- 
 self, though he denounced the cult at Bethel, did 
 not accuse Israel on the score of idolatry or poly- 
 theism, or suggest that in this way they had really 
 apostatized from the true God's revelation of himself.* 
 Hosea, some years later, appears to be the first 
 prophet to denounce idolatry.* Jeroboam himself, 
 according to the story, called his son Abijah — 
 " Jehovah-is-his-father " — a name which does not 
 suggest conscious apostasy ; so that it is possible to 
 accept the suggestion that he was moved by zeal for 
 the God of Israel when he dedicated to him images 
 in accord with the accepted symbolism of the times. ^ 
 
 1 I Kings xii. 3 1 . 
 
 * Robertson Smith, Prophets, p. 63 ; cf. J. P. Peters, Religion of the 
 Hebrews, p. loo. * H. P. Smith, O. T. History, p. 215. 
 
 * I find it hard to trace an allusion to the Decalogue in his words, 
 Hosea iv. i, z. 5 h. P. Smith, O. T. History, p. i8i. 
 
 H 
 
114 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 We need not give too facile a belief to the orthodox 
 Jewish account of Jeroboam's priests. It bears the 
 mark of controversy, and there is little to show that 
 they were much worse or any better than other priests 
 of a people at that stage of culture. The evolution 
 of the priest is an interesting theme. The patriarchs 
 generally did without priests, unless Melchizedek's 
 kingship is secondary to his priesthood. Saul, David 
 and Solomon built altars and sacrificed for them- 
 selves ; and Samuel, priest or prophet, was an Ephraim- 
 ite, not a Levite. The Hebrew priests, we are told, 
 were primarily seers ; they interpreted oracles and 
 consulted Jehovah on behalf of his people, and re- 
 vealed his will in T6r6th — and his will bore directly 
 upon every form of calamity. Urim and Thummim 
 are not very lucid words to us to-day, but a hint of 
 their use lies behind the text of i Sam. xiv. 42, 
 implied by the Septuagint. " O Jehovah, God of 
 Israel," prays Saul, " wherefore hast thou not answered 
 thy servant this day ? If the iniquity be in me or 
 in Jonathan my son, O Jehovah God of Israel, give 
 Urim ; and if it be in thy people Israel, give, I pray 
 thee, Thummim." But the day came when Jehovah 
 answered Saul " neither by dreams, nor by Urim nor 
 by prophets " (i Sam. xxviii. 6) ; and Urim and 
 Thummim become the right of priest and Levite — 
 " and of Levi he said, Let thy Thummim and thy 
 Urim be with thy holy one " (Deut. xxxiii. 8). There 
 were of course other ways of learning the god's will — 
 the flight of birds or the whisper of the trees. The 
 priests were, naturally, in charge of the shrines — 
 Canaanite shrines, as we have seen — and of the ark 
 while it existed, and at an early date we can see the 
 beginnings of their insistence on privilege ; they 
 claimed a part of the sacrifice (i Sam. ii. 13-16), 
 and eventually a monopoly of the right to sacrifice, 
 till at last, as sacrifice came to fill a larger place in 
 religion, the priest became central in religion. Cere- 
 
EARLIER ISRAEL 115 
 
 mony and ritual were in his hands, and he " taught 
 for hire" (Micah iii. 11). When we reflect upon all 
 this, and remember his associates at many of the shrines, 
 the Qedesha and her like, we shall not expect to find 
 in the priesthood the impulse that transformed 
 Jehovism into the purest and most fervent of mono- 
 theisms. Broadly speaking, we find all over the 
 world that the priest's business is rather the main- 
 tenance of estabHshed beliefs and the performance 
 of accepted rituals than the development of fresh 
 aspects of religious truth. That is left for the prophets, 
 but not for all of them. 
 
 For even in those earlier times Israel had prophets 
 — Nebi'im — and in some considerable numbers. A 
 story of the reign of Ahab numbers the prophets of one 
 god and another by hundreds (i Kings xviii.). The 
 Deuteronomic prohibition of " any one that useth 
 divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, 
 or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar 
 spirits, or a vsdzard, or a necromancer " (Deut. xviii. 
 10, 11), coupled not insignificantly with "any one 
 that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through 
 the fire," teUs a tale in its negative. There were 
 such people — men who, as Robertson Smith puts it, 
 had on the physical side of their being relations with the 
 godhead — " in the mysterious instincts of their lower 
 nature, in paroxysms of artificially produced frenzy, 
 dreams and diseased visions." ^ The words of Balaam 
 picture the type : " Balaam the son of Beor hath 
 said, and the man whose eyes are open hath said : 
 he hath said, which heard the words of God, which 
 saw the vision of the Almighty, falling down but 
 having his eyes open " (Num. xxiv. 3, 4) ; and the 
 narrative tells us that he spoke after " the spirit of 
 God came to him." By ventriloquism the wizards 
 made those who consulted them hear, or think 
 they heard, the voice of ghosts rising from the world 
 1 O. T. J. C, p. 285. 
 
ii6 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 of the dead (i Sam. xxviii. ; Isa. xxix. 4) ; and they 
 were paid for their trouble. Saul consults Samuel 
 as to lost asses, and has a quarter shekel ready for 
 him (i Sam. ix. 8). There is nothing peculiar to the 
 Semites in all this ; it is found all over the world, a 
 potent agency for fraud and cruelty. 
 
 When all their neighbours knew Nebi'im, it is not 
 to be supposed that Israel could be ignorant, even 
 before the entry into Palestine. Of that period our 
 records are slight and uncertain, but when History 
 begins to speak with clearer utterance, we find the 
 first king of Israel powerfully affected by the Nebi'im 
 associated with Jehovah. More than once we read 
 how the sight of them prophesying worked upon him : 
 " the spirit of God was upon him also, and he went 
 on and prophesied, until he came to Naioth in Ramah. 
 And he stripped off his clothes also, and prophesied 
 before Samuel in like manner, and lay down naked 
 all that day and all that night," king of Israel as he 
 was (i Sam. xix. 24). It is plain from the narrative 
 of Saul's life that he was mentally unstable ; and 
 insanity is still associated by the Arabs with a peculiar 
 relation to God. One of the most brilliant of English 
 explorers in Arabia, it is said, owed a good deal to 
 the Arabs supposing him to be mad. Music in Saul's 
 case, and in Elisha's, is mentioned as having a powerful 
 influence on the man's state. The prophet who 
 anointed Jehu made the impression on Jehu's friends 
 of a " mad feUow " (2 Kings ix. 1 1), though they 
 quickly accepted his suggestion. Professor D. B. 
 Macdonald's friendly account of modern dervishes 
 in Egypt gives a picture closely parallel,^ and makes 
 it clear that sincerity is or may be an element in this 
 form of approach to the unseen. Muhammad, he 
 points out, was himself a pathological case, and his 
 revelations came to him in trance; lika all trance- 
 mediums he had strangely perverted ideas, but an 
 ^ Aspect! of Islam, Lectures V. and VI. 
 
EARLIER ISRAEL 117 
 
 impostor he certainly was not — not at least till 
 the last ten years of his life.^ He compares the 
 actions of the dervishes, whom he saw, with the 
 tumultuous shrieking, leaping and crying aloud upon 
 their god by the priests of Baal and the cutting- them- 
 selves with knives ; and adds, " it was all perfectly 
 genuine." ^ More strangely, a convert to Chris- 
 tianity told him that there had been a certain element 
 of spiritual advantage in it all — " then I vras a saint ; 
 but now I am a Christian," he concluded — " with a 
 plainly regretful if also humorous tone in his voice." * 
 
 We may form our own opinions of the spiritual 
 value of such practices — the East is against the West 
 on this question, but the East's interest in it has been 
 less scientific, because the East has accepted posses- 
 sion and trance as direct evidence of contact with 
 God and has not compared or cross-examined its 
 witnesses. If I am right in accepting the view (to 
 which I think the bulk of the evidence — all the 
 evidence — leads a candid mind) that in every case 
 of trance or mystical state a man becomes conscious 
 of what he has met before, and in no case gains fresh 
 facts or fresh knowledge — ^however much he main- 
 tains that to see the old in a new way is to make 
 a new discovery — then we may conclude that the 
 NebVim of Jehovah depended upon suggestions that 
 had reached them in their normal state, and we may 
 draw something from our conclusion. The heighten- 
 ing which trance gave to their conception of Jehovah, 
 trance gave also to the conceptions that others have 
 had of Baal, of Kali, of the Virgin Mary — the same 
 heightening, the same conviction, with this result* 
 that we must look elsewhere for the real values. 
 
 The NehVim of Jehovah were saved from morbid- 
 ness, we are told, by their enthusiasm for Israel ; * 
 but probably, if we knew more, we might find the 
 
 1 Ibid., pp. 72, 74. 2 ibid,^ p. 95. * Ihid., pp. 170-172. 
 
 * G. A. Smith, The Twelve Prophets, i. p. 25. 
 
ii8 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 same nationalism among the NebVim of Chemosh/ 
 only with Moab for its centre. National feeling is 
 not always a sure guarantee of sanity or of truth. 
 NebiHrn play a large part in public affairs in Hebrew 
 history, advising and deposing kings, urging to revolt, 
 to murder and to war. The real progress of religious 
 thought, however, will come from the stable rather 
 than the unstable ; or if a man is both by turns, as 
 sometimes happens, it will come from Paul when he 
 is not speaking with tongues. 
 
 Something the NebVim must have done, as the 
 Orphics, so like them in Greece, did. They detached 
 religion in some degree from its estabKshed sanc- 
 tuaries and from its officials ; they bore a confused 
 and doubtful witness to Jehovah — -doubtful, for Baal 
 had witness as good, and they kept alive the tradition 
 of a national worship, of a national god, of which 
 saner heads were to make a great deal more. 
 
 Man was wrestling already with the problems that 
 always face him. Baal was clearly obsolete in his 
 morals ; a normal man would not wish his own wife 
 or daughters to be attached to Baal's shrine, what- 
 ever a desperate man might do ; and what people 
 in desperation about children will vow in India, we 
 know. Let us stick to the normal man. He thinks 
 out moral problems quietly, and one day he will be 
 ready for a great lead, he will follow a new prophet 
 who, on the basis of moral sense, proclaims a revolu- 
 tion in religious thought. Religion in old Israel had 
 its usual varieties — ^it was local, national, liturgical, 
 ceremonial ; it was merry-making before the Lord ; 
 and here and there it was personal. The spirit of 
 Jehovah came upon a man — ^sometimes through the 
 influence of a prophet band — sometimes in solitude ; 
 and where the man was strongly founded on ethical 
 thought and observation, both morality and Jehovah- 
 worship gained by it. Jehovah so far had little to 
 say or to suggest about a world beyond the gates of 
 
EARLIER ISRAEL 119 
 
 Death ; it was very long before Jehovism looked so 
 far, Jehovah, again, was admittedly a god among 
 gods ; every people had its god, its Chemosh or its 
 Dagon. Israel had Jehovah, though he, unlike some 
 of these gods, had his seat, not in the land which he 
 gave to his people, but away upon Sinai. One thing 
 more we can say of Jehovah even at this early period 
 which we have not evidence to let us say of the other 
 gods. His cult was not inconsistent with the moral 
 development of his people. The abominations of 
 religion which we have noticed might be incorporated 
 in his worship, but they belonged elsewhere more 
 properly. Michal's indignation at David's ecstatic 
 dancing before the ark ^ is a hint of a change of mind 
 coming over the Hebrews — curiously, here, on the 
 women's side, for in religion the pioneers have been 
 most usually men. 
 
 Our inquiry has not taken us very far. The future 
 of the world's religion lay with Israel, but Israel had 
 not so far realized Jehovah. That was to come, and 
 its coming is as mysterious as all the deepest things 
 in man's story. Meanwhile Jehovah wakes a real 
 poetry in his people and gives a promise of greater 
 days. Then sang Deborah ^ : — 
 
 I, even I, will sing unto Jehovah. 
 
 I will sing praise to Jehovah, the God of Israel. 
 
 Jehovah, when thou wentest out of Seir, 
 
 When thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, 
 
 The earth trembled, the heavens also dropped, 
 
 Yea, the clouds dropped water. 
 
 The mountains Howed down at the presence of Jehovah, 
 
 Even yon Sinai at the presence of Jehovah, the God of 
 
 Israel. . . . 
 O my soul, march on with strength. 
 
 ^ 2 Sam. vi. 20. ^ Judges v. 
 
VI 
 
 THE HEBREW PROPHETS 
 
 Israel began with the two old Semitic convictions 
 about his God — ^that Jehovah was the God of Israel, 
 to stand or fall with Israel and involved in maintaining 
 Israel — and that Jehovah's religion was essentially- 
 one of ceremonial, of rites and sacrifices, and that 
 when these received due attention, all was well in a 
 normal way.^ There might be searchings of heart 
 in days of darkness, but religion was a clear and 
 straightforward thing, and normally a happy and 
 cheerful affair, its centre a jollification with the God. 
 If there was, as we are sometimes told, a bias toward 
 the ethical in Jehovism from the beginning, so there 
 is, we observe, in every religion where the religious 
 reflect upon life and experience. The real interest 
 of the Old Testament for the modern student lies 
 not in the evidence it offers of yet another people 
 with a religion of a common type — national, cere- 
 monial and sacramental — but in the emergence of 
 men who protest generation by generation against 
 the beliefs of their countrymen, and who, though an 
 insignificant and unpopular minority, compel their 
 people, by the sheer weight of their teaching and their 
 personality, to re-think every conception they have 
 formed of God, till Israel reaches a faith without 
 parallel in the ancient world. 
 
 The use of images in worship was an axiom in 
 ancient religion. This is shown by Tacitus' epigram, 
 when Pompey entered the Holy of Holies and found 
 in it nothing whatever, vacuum sedem et inania arcana^ 
 
 1 G. A. Smith, Twelve Prophets, i. p. 102. ^ Tacitus, Histories, v. 9. 
 120 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 121 
 
 a grotesque discovery to make in a shrine so much 
 talked of all over the world. It is shown further 
 by the instinctive feeling of the ancients in spite of 
 centuries of philosophers, that the Christians must 
 be atheists, since they had no temples, no altars and 
 no gods. EUjah and Elisha, as we have seen, had 
 no quarrel with the " golden calves " at Bethel. Men 
 of real religious instinct to-day in India have as little 
 quarrel with their countrymen's regard for the sacred 
 bull and the still stranger things which India has to 
 show. To Western minds nothing can be more 
 repulsive than the worship of the lingatn and its use 
 in personal names ; and nothing more unintelligible 
 than that pure-minded people can make it the centre 
 of their religion. The explanation appears to be 
 that the thing is so familiar that no one realizes what 
 it is, no one thinks about it. In spite of the inter- 
 pretation put by the established text upon Jeroboam's 
 religion, it would appear from the story about Aaron 
 that the bull had been from time out of mind the 
 standard, or a standard, embodiment of Jehovah. 
 It seems Hkely that the brazen serpent was another 
 of the kind at Jerusalem. The trouble taken in the 
 Pentateuch to explain it gives a new and perhaps 
 suspicious significance to the phrase in Kings — " the 
 brazen serpent that Moses had made." ^ Jehu (840 
 B.C.) was a champion of Jehovah against the Baal- 
 worshipping house of Ahab, Ahab had not, how- 
 ever, renounced Jehovah but named his sons for him, 
 and Jehu maintained the bull-shrines. 
 
 The legends of Elijah and Elisha are supposed to 
 have been reduced to writing about 800 b.c. The 
 author of the Elijah story, at least, writes with an ease, 
 a grace and a vividness that appeal to every reader. 
 
 ^ " A very ancient emblem of an original serpent worship, later 
 converted into an emblem of Jehovah." So J. P. Peters, ReUg. of 
 Hebrews, p. 238 ; see Kings xviii. 4, Num. xxi. 4 if. Cf H. P. 
 Smith, O. T. History, p. 239. 
 
122 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 He moves in the atmosphere of miracle. Fire comes 
 from heaven at the prophet's call ; the dead are 
 raised, and leprosy is inflicted with a word. Fifty 
 years later Amos writes down his own prophecies — 
 a herdsman, whom Wordsworth might well have 
 quoted in support of his views of language, a master 
 of form, whose style is as clear and direct as his thought. 
 He deals in no miracles ; he sees and thinks like a 
 modern, watches events, reasons from facts, and 
 trusts the truth of his message to find its way to the 
 consciences of men. We are in a new age — a world 
 as modern as that of Pericles or Napoleon — one 
 generation away from a Middle Age of miracle. We 
 have reached a period of suffering and of hard think- 
 ing, when religion gained a new profundity and took 
 on a new character, when it became in large measure 
 what we stiU hold it to be. 
 
 The period falls into two parts ; the dividing 
 point is the fall of Samaria in 721 b.c. Before that 
 we are concerned with Northern Israel and the 
 prophets who spoke to a kingdom unshaken and 
 prosperous. After that Northern Israel passes utterly 
 out of history and is absolutely lost to us — ^unless the 
 guess, a mere guess, is right that the Beni-Israel of 
 Bombay Presidency are a last surviving handful of 
 them.^ Thereafter all the interest shifts to Judah, 
 a smaller kingdom, with a century and quarter before 
 it full of unspeakable menaces without, of reformation, 
 reaction and despair within ; and then it too falls 
 in 586 B.C. Cyrus indeed " restored " the Jews in 
 538 B.C., but the exile and the restoration come at a 
 later point in our story. 
 
 Jeroboam II. reigned over Israel for forty-one years 
 (783-742 B.C.), " and Jehovah said not that he would 
 blot out the name of Israel from under heaven ; but 
 he saved them by the hand of Jeroboam." ^ What- 
 ever be the historical value of the detail added, it 
 1 See p. 232. 2 2 Kings xiv. 27. 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 123 
 
 remains that Jeroboam H. was a warlike and pros- 
 perous prince, that Syria was decadent, and Israel, 
 outwardly at least, flourished exceedingly in his reign. 
 But long and successful wars with small neighbours 
 did not build up the national strength ; they told 
 heavily on the poorer freemen, and war, famine and 
 plague left the country all the weaker to face the 
 Assyrian.'- Twenty years of usurpers followed, and 
 then Sargon took Samaria ; he records how he trans- 
 ported 27,290 of Israel, and the Hebrew narrative 
 adds how he put' foreigners from Babylonia and else- 
 where in their place (721 B.C.). Twenty years later 
 abject submission did not save Hezekiah of Judah 
 from seeing his land ravaged, two hundred thousand 
 of his people carried away, and his city besieged. How 
 his city escaped capture is recorded in the book of 
 Isaiah (ch. xxxvii.), and something analogous is told 
 by Herodotus (ii. 141). Meantime a new power 
 was rising in Egypt. Psammetichus, Herodotus says 
 (ii. 152), received an oracle that vengeance would come 
 from the sea, when bronzen men appeared ; and they 
 did appear — Ionian Greeks and Carians in armour ; 
 and they enlisted in his army and remained the 
 strength of the Egyptian forces till Cambyses con- 
 quered Egypt. The Egyptian king Necho comes 
 into Judah's story and defeats and kills Josiah at the 
 battle of Megiddo (608). Herodotus also tells us of 
 Scythian invaders of Asia, to whom Jeremiah refers.^ 
 They spared Jerusalem, but they were the ruin of 
 Assyria. That great nation, great in war and con- 
 quest, had worn itself out, and in_^6o6 b.c. Nineveh \ 
 was taken by the Medes. The prophet Nahum has 
 a picture of the siege and the fall that throbs with 
 passion. He sees the warriors in red, the horses 
 prancing, the rush of the chariots ; and then : 
 
 1 Robertson Smith, Prophets, p. 95- 
 
 2 Herodotus, i. 104-106 ; Jer. iv. 5-26. 
 
124 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 The river-gates burst open, the palace dissQlves, 
 
 And Hnssab is stripped, is brought forth, 
 
 With her maids sobbing like doves, 
 
 Beating their breasts. 
 
 And Nineveh ! she was like a reservoir of waters. . . . 
 
 Plunder silver, plunder gold, 
 
 Infinite treasures, mass of all precious things ! 
 
 Void and dread and desolate is she.^ 
 
 After Nineveh came Babylon, and tvs^ice Jerusalem 
 was stripped of her best, and the Babylonish cap- 
 tivity began. 
 
 This is a poor, short summary of great events. What 
 a challenge to easy orthodoxy four years of world-wrar 
 can make, we know ; and at no moment in those 
 years were the issues so awful for thinking men as 
 throughout the long period we have surveyed in these 
 few paragraphs. What the condition of the people 
 was, with an Assyrian army in the land, the boasts of 
 Sargon and Sennacherib hint. But take things at 
 their best in Jeroboam's reign, and look at the life 
 that Amos describes, its contrasts of splendour and 
 oppression. Here are the rich. " Ye that put far 
 away the evil day, yet bring near the reign of violence ; 
 that lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves 
 upon their couches, and eat the lambs out of the 
 flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall ; 
 that sing idle songs to the sound of the viol ; that 
 improvise songs like David's ; that drink wine in bowls, 
 and anoint themselves with the chief ointments, but 
 they are not grieved for the afflictions of Joseph " 
 (Amos vi. 3-6). And " they have sold the righteous 
 for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes, who 
 trample to the dust the head of the poor and pervert 
 the way of humble men ; they lay themselves down 
 beside every altar upon clothes taken in pledge, and 
 in the house of their God they drink the wine of 
 them that have been fined " (ii. 6-8). " Gather 
 
 1 G. A. Smith, Tie Twelve, ii. 107, 108 ; Nahum, ii. 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 125 
 
 upon the mount of Samaria and see ! Confusions 
 manifold in the midst of her ; violence to her very 
 core ! Yea, they know not how to do uprightness, 
 saith Jehovah, who store up wrong and violence in 
 their palaces " (iii. 9, 10). Religion flourished bravely 
 in all this time of splendour. Pilgrims sought the 
 shrines, and enjoyed their visits to them, with feasts 
 and temple women — " whoredom and wine and new 
 wine," said Hosea (iv. 11). In the south it was much 
 the same. After the fall of Israel, Judah plunged 
 uneasily into reformation and reaction by turns. If 
 reformation failed to get all they wanted from Jehovah, 
 they would try elsewhere — 
 
 Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta moveho. 
 
 The joyousness of the old religion was gone, and men 
 turned to god after god in desperation at the national 
 outlook ; their temper is shown by their persecuting. 
 The very refugees in Egypt tell Jeremiah that, while 
 they burnt incense to the Queen of Heaven, " then 
 had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no 
 evil. But since we left off to burn incense to the 
 Queen of Heaven, and to pour out drink offerings 
 unto her, we have wanted all things and have been 
 consumed by the sword and by the famine " (Jer. 
 xliv. 17, 18). 
 
 Here, once again, we have the factors which we 
 saw in the Greek world after Homer — saw or thought 
 we saw, for the records were fewer and more confused ; 
 but the same Scythians at least were there, and the 
 same upheaval of life, peoples in movement, rich and 
 poor in conflict ; and the agony of a nation going 
 down, city by city, before the power of Lydia — 
 misery, scepticism and devotion ; and the deeper 
 minds driven to inquire why Zeus keeps his world 
 in such confusion, neglects the good, rewards the bad, 
 and perplexes men's hearts so with doubt and fear. 
 Something more is asked of Zeus, and something 
 
126 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 more is asked of Jehovah, some explanation, some 
 principle. 
 
 The Hebrew prophet and the Greek philosopher 
 are concerned with the same problems : 
 
 To justify the ways of God to men. 
 There are differences between them, but there are 
 great likenesses. There is the same emphasis on 
 clearness of thought ; the same feeling that righteous- 
 ness matters — Homer " deserved to be whipped and 
 driven out " ; ^ the same instinct for a unity in the 
 world and all its affairs, for law and principle. The 
 Greek seeks his way along the lines of a common 
 substance underlying all things and 3;^ reign of law, 
 to the One in Many. The intellectual problem 
 moves him most ; indignation he leaves to the leader 
 of the Demos. The Hebrew is more stirred by the 
 sight of moral wrong, of undeserved suffering, and 
 he goes direct to Jehovah and cries aloud for explana- 
 tion. Neither is much interested in cult or ritual, 
 neither in initiations and sacramental revelations. 
 The Greek reckons on reaching God by analyzing 
 God's intellectual processes, mind discovering mind 
 by natural affinity ; the Hebrew feels that righteous- 
 ness is the key to understanding God. 
 
 It will be hard not to digress into the study of the 
 characters of one or two of the prophets, but that is 
 rather aside from our purpose. Something, however, 
 must be said of the type of the prophetic mind. In 
 the " Cottar's Saturday Night " Burns speaks of 
 
 The rapt Isaiah's wild prophetic fire ; 
 and plenty of readers make nothing whatever of most 
 of the prophets. What threads or clues there ever 
 were to the prophet's thought — and such natures, 
 it must be allowed, drop their links — are obscured for 
 us by the desperate state of the texts and the blank 
 inadequacy of word-for-word translation to convey 
 
 1 Heraclitus, fr. 1 1 9 (Bywater) ; cited by Diog. Laert., ix. i . 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 127 
 
 any meaning. And then, in modern commentary, 
 the rapt Isaiah appears as a shrewd statesman and 
 Amos as a sociaUst. The fact is that both Burns 
 and the commentators are right. The prophets are 
 thinkers who will have their facts in clear, hard out- 
 line, intelligible to the utmost, and who insist on men 
 returning to facts, and facing them, and thinking 
 them out. But there is another quality, or faculty, 
 about them. They do not report facts they have 
 amassed and deductions they have drawn. They are 
 men — some of them, at least — of the type upon 
 which a whole situation will flash at once, like a 
 countryside in a storm of lightning at night, men to 
 whom things speak — no, to whom God speaks Him- 
 self authentically and unmistakably. The book of 
 Amos begins : " The words of Amos, who was among 
 the herdsmen of Tekoa, which he saw " ; and the 
 third verse starts, " Thus saith Jehovah." The point 
 must be remembered, but it should not be over- 
 emphasized. In the spiritual ancestry of Amos are 
 the Nebi'im, men convinced of the immediacy of 
 their contact with Jehovah. They are not in the 
 pedigree of Heraclitus. However we may criticize 
 our fathers, we inherit from them a habit and a 
 vocabulary which react on each other. 
 
 " The characteristic of the true prophet," writes 
 Robertson Smith,^ " is that he retains his conscious- 
 ness and self-control under revelation." The pro- 
 phets are always emphasizing knowledge and reflec- 
 tion. " Israel doth not knoto, my people doth not 
 consider," says Isaiah (i. 3). " My people perish for 
 lack of knowledge," says Hosea (iv. 6), and " Ephraim 
 is a silly dove without brains" (vii. 11). They 
 eliminate the irrational from all that concerns religion, 
 from intercourse with God. Not ghosts, and familiar 
 spirits, but God, says Isaiah (viii. 9). Not wizards 
 that peep and mutter, not the leaping and howling 
 1 O. T. J. C, p. 289. 
 
128 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 psychopathic votaries of Baal, but men sobered by 
 the words of God. God " speaks to his prophets, 
 not in magical processes or through the visions of 
 poor frenetics, but by a clear intelligible word 
 addressed to the intellect and the heart." ^ "I have 
 heard," says God to Jeremiah, " what the prophets 
 have said, that prophesy lies in my name saying, I 
 have dreamed, I have dreamed — even the prophets 
 of the deceit of their own heart. . . . The prophet 
 that hath a dream, let him tell a dream ; and he that 
 hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. 
 What is the straw to the wheat ? saith Jehovah. Is 
 not my word like as fire ? saith Jehovah ; and like 
 a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces ? " (Jer. 
 xxiii. 25-29). The mark of the prophet is that he will, 
 in Cromwell's great phrase, " speak things." " It is 
 a fundamental principle with us," wrote John Wesley, 
 " that to renounce reason is to renounce religion, 
 that reason and religion go hand in hand, and that 
 all irrational religion is false religion." ^ 
 
 Such a habit does not lead to the easy solution of 
 problems ; it is rather apt to multiply them, for 
 clearness always emphasizes our ignorance. In a 
 passage that recalls one we have seen of Theognis, 
 Habakkuk^ asks the same urgent question, in weari- 
 ness and perplexity : — 
 
 How long, O Jehovah, have I called ? and Thou hearest not. 
 I cry to Thee, Wrong ! and Thou sendest no help. 
 Why dost Thou make me to look upon sorrow, 
 And fiU mine eyes with trouble ? . . . 
 Art not Thou of old, Jehovah, my God, my Holy One, 
 Purer of eyes than to behold evil. 
 And that canst not gaze upon trouble ? 
 Why gazest thou upon traitors ? 
 
 Why art thou silent, when the wicked swallows him that is 
 more righteous than he ? 
 
 1 O. T. J. C, p. 289. 
 
 ^ Quoted by Davenport, Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, 
 p. 145. 3Hab. i. 2, 3, 12, 13- 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 129 
 
 His contemporary, Jeremiah, deals with God as 
 explicitly : " Righteous art thou, O Jehovah, when 
 I plead with thee ; yet would I reason the cause 
 with thee. Wherefore doth the way of the wicked 
 prosper ? Wherefore are all they at ease, that deal 
 very treacherously ? " (xii. i). In very striking words 
 Habakkuk answers himself ; he will, in modern phrase, 
 take a wider outlook, he will take time and trouble 
 to know. 
 
 Upon my watch-tower I will stand, 
 And take my post on the rampart. 
 I will watch to see what he will say to me, 
 And what answer I get back to my plea. 
 
 Hesiod, as we saw, speaks of the Muses meeting 
 him and speaking to him ; and this was the source 
 of his matter-of-fact poetry. But one wonders what 
 element of inspiiation at all lies behind the pleasant 
 story ; is it just an amplified imitation of Homer's 
 invocation ? The Hebrew prophets speak of a call 
 of God Himself as the ground of their action in going 
 with His message to their people. Isaiah tells us 
 how he saw Jehovah high and lifted up, and how the 
 sight fiUed him v/ith a sense of his own uncleanness 
 (Isa. vi. 1-5). There is no gay adaptation of the 
 conventional about that ; it is a story wrung from 
 the heart. Jeremiah confesses to having resisted the 
 call ; he was not the man for the task, a mere child ; 
 but he had to obey — and obedience again and again, 
 we can see, meant misery and humiliation to that 
 gentle and sensitive spirit (Jer. i. 6 ; xx. 9). Amos 
 in a brief parallelism (iii. 8) says simply : " The lion 
 hath roared, who will not fear ; the God Jehovah 
 has spoken, who can but prophesy ? " And in a 
 memorable and vividly-drawn scene he tells the priest 
 at Bethel that prophecy was no trade of his ; he was 
 a herdsman ; but he had no choice ; " the Lord 
 took me " (vii. 14). It is hard to imagine experience 
 
130 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 more authentic in the history of religion ; there is 
 nothing psychopathic here, the men are what Carlyle 
 called " sons of fact " ; they draw their materials 
 from " conscience and history," ^ 
 
 The habit of seeing fact and of basing oneself on 
 principle is not yet so common that we should suppose 
 the prophets to be representative men. I have heard 
 a minister praised as " more sympathetic to the 
 common opinions of the day " than another — a 
 eulogy which it is notorious the great prophets never 
 achieved, and never sought. " Behold, now," said 
 an envoy of the court to an earlier prophet, " the 
 words of the prophets declare good unto the king 
 with one mouth ; let thy word, I pray thee, be like 
 the word of one of them and speak that which is 
 good." ^ " As Jehovah liveth, what Jehovah saith 
 unto me, that will I speak," is the answer, and it is 
 the badge of all his tribe. They are pioneers, who 
 penetrate to the mind of God ; and the common 
 opinions of the day are irrelevant. They were not 
 popular, but neither was Socrates, " The posses- 
 sion of a single true thought about Jehovah," says 
 Robertson Smith,^ " not derived from current re- 
 ligious teaching, but springing up in the soul as a 
 word from Jehovah Himself, is enough to constitute 
 a prophet, and lay on him the duty of speaking to 
 Israel what he has learned of Israel's God." This 
 brings us to the teaching of the prophets, to those 
 ideas of God which they set forth and which to some 
 extent were assimilated in the thought and life of 
 Israel, though not whoUy — ideas which in spite of the 
 teaching of Jesus himself are still very largely foreign 
 to the minds of men, unintelligible and repugnant. 
 
 Let us start with Amos, with whom the roU of 
 the great prophets begins. From the wilderness of 
 Tekoa, the very verge of civilization, he suddenly 
 
 ^ Mazzini, quoted by G. A. Smith, The Twelve Prophets, i. p. 89. 
 2 I Kings xxii. 13, 14. ^ Prophets of Israel, p. 182. 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 131 
 
 appears at Bethel, the holy place of Northern Israel, 
 and he makes a series of announcements from Jehovah 
 — startling in their character and impressive in their 
 form. " Thus saith Jehovah : For three transgres- 
 sions of Damascus and for four, I will not turn it 
 back." What was it ? There is something that 
 moves in the vague Quos ego of the formula, which 
 comes with each doom. Twenty years later the 
 Assyrians explained what it was. " The people of 
 Syria shall go into captivity." A judgment upon 
 Syria was not a message to trouble Israel. The pro- 
 phet went on : " Thus saith Jehovah : For three 
 transgressions of Gaza and for four, I will not turn 
 it back . . . the remnant of the Philistines shall 
 perish." StiU a message likely to be popular, for 
 these were the hereditary enemies, North and South. 
 Then came the turn of Tyre, a slave-trading town 
 like Gaza, selling human beings in herds to Arabia 
 and to the west ; and then of Edom and Ammon ; 
 and then Moab ; and always the same prelude, " For 
 three transgressions and for four," and always the 
 same awful menace, " I will not turn it back " — a 
 stirring series of God's judgments, good to hear, good 
 to dwell upon — but the prophet was not done. 
 
 " Thus saith Jehovah : For three transgressions 
 of Judah and for four, I wiU not turn it back." ^ 
 Judah, too, was an enemy from time to time ; but 
 let us hear the sins of Judah. The sins of the other 
 peoples were the common barbarities and treacheries 
 of Semitic warfare — mere outrages on humanitarian- 
 ism. It was odd perhaps that Jehovah should be so 
 squeamish, especially when, in the case of Moab, it 
 was Edom and not Israel that suffered. But what 
 had Judah done ? " They despised the law of 
 Jehovah ; his statutes they did not observe ; their 
 false gods led them astray. But I will send fire upon 
 Judah and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem." 
 
 ^ Some critics think the doom upon Judah a later addition here. 
 
132 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 And then, *' Thus saith Jehovah : For three trans- 
 gressions of Israel and for four, I will not turn it 
 back. They sell the honest man for silver, the poor 
 man for a pair of shoes ; they trample to the dust of 
 the earth the head of the poor and pervert the way 
 of the humble folk. A man and his father will go 
 in to the same temple-woman, to profane my holy 
 name. By every altar they lay themselves down 
 on garments given in pledge, and the wine of those 
 that have been fined, they drink in the house of their 
 God " (ii. 6-8). So doom, the prophet thinks, is to 
 come upon Israel, for a mere matter of social 
 righteousness. 
 
 The most brilliantly civilized of Greek states, 
 when she sacked Melos, Histiaea, Scione, Torone, 
 Aegina — and, the historian adds, many other towns 
 of the Greeks — killed the men and sold the women 
 and children for slaves, and when she fell, it came 
 home to her what she had done : " that night no 
 man slept." Plato deprecated such treatment of 
 Greeks by Greeks ; it might serve for barbarians. 
 Amos drags it into the cognizance of Jehovah ; it 
 matters to Jehovah — this common usage of war which 
 all states understand and practise when they can. 
 " They sold the captives ; they ripped up the women 
 with child — to enlarge their territory." And God, 
 Amos says, judges, — " I will not turn it back." More 
 still, for barbarity in war is not charged against Israel 
 at this point — we know that David practised it — 
 Jehovah is concerned with the oppression of the poor, 
 with the cold and hunger to which the needy are 
 exposed, with the lust and uncleanness associated 
 with His temples. He has His eye upon the palaces 
 where the great " store up violence and robbery," 
 on the tribunals and the judges with itching palms. 
 And all the piety and devotion of His people go for 
 nothing — ^for less than nothing, for they anger Him. 
 " Come to Bethel," He says in irony ; " come to Bethel 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 133 
 
 and sin ; come to Gllgal and multiply transgression ! 
 Every morning your sacrifices, every three days your 
 tithes ! and offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving " (iv. 4). 
 " I hate, I despise your feast-days, and I will not 
 smell your sacrifices in solemn assembly. Though 
 you offer me burnt-offerings and meat offerings, I 
 will not accept them ; your thank-offerings of fatted 
 calves, I will not look at them. Take thou away 
 from me the noise of thy songs ; for I will not hear 
 the melody of thy viols " (v. 21-23). 
 
 We have remarked among Greek thinkers — and 
 perhaps more still is it to be remarked among the 
 plain people of Greece, men who loved their wives 
 and daughters, and gave themselves to making . men 
 of their boys — an instinct which grows slowly to a 
 conviction, that morality and religion do belong 
 together, that Zeus must be just, that the gods must 
 be clean. To that feeling in Greece we shall return 
 at a later point. But, after all, in Greece the con- 
 viction grows slowly ; it comes up like a quiet tide. 
 In Amos it sweeps upon Israel like the inrush of the 
 whole sea at once after an earthquake. Religion ? 
 Jehovah hates and despises your religion ; smell and 
 smoke and tinkling tunes, and robbery and unclean- 
 ness. He is not interested in priests and shrines 
 and rituals. 
 
 From vice, oppression and despair 
 God save the people ! 
 
 Plato and Amos reach the same point. Religion 
 without morality is a lie, and God damns it. Plato's 
 subject in that sentence may be vague or plural, but 
 the predicate is definite enough. With Amos it is 
 the subject that has all the emphasis, terrible as the 
 predicates are ; " thus saith Jehovah." " Woe unto 
 you that desire the day of Jehovah ! to what end is 
 it for you ? The day of Jehovah is darkness and not 
 light ; very dark, and no brightness in it." 
 
134 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 It is little wonder that Amaziah, the priest of 
 Bethel, was for sending Amos away. " O thou seer, 
 go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there 
 eat bread [there the priest speaks by his trade] ; pro- 
 phesy there. But prophesy not any more at Bethel ; 
 for it is the king's chapel and it is the king's court " 
 (vii. 12, 13). And with the doom of that priest the 
 personal history of Amos ends. But his clear associa- 
 tion, his identification of religion with morality, rings 
 on through all the great religious teachers of Israel — 
 for Israel and for all who hear. 
 
 Ethics, however, are very well in the abstract, but 
 the issue lies always with religion ; that at least is 
 practical. And in religion all turns on how men 
 conceive of God. Without attempting to deal with 
 the prophets in detail, any more than elsewhere with 
 the poets and philosophers, let us push to the con- 
 clusion of the whole matter — ^what do they make, 
 individually and collectively, of Jehovah ? 
 
 The first point to be noted is made appallingly 
 clear by Amos. He links Israel with Gaza and with 
 Tyre for judgment, in one and the same formula. 
 Jehovah is not tied to Israel. " Are you not as the 
 negroes, the children of Ethiopia, unto me, O children 
 of Israel ? saith Jehovah. Did not I bring up Israel 
 out of Egypt ? Yes, and the Philistines from Crete, 
 and the Syrians from Kir " (Amos ix. 7). This was 
 to give the lie direct to all early notions of the 
 inter-dependence of god and tribe. Jehovah can do 
 without Israel — a terrific discovery, and a very un- 
 patriotic one. It is remarked that Amos never calls 
 Jehovah " God of Israel " ; He is God of Hosts.^ 
 Amos has little hope of Israel ; " hate the evil and 
 love the good ; it may perchance be that Jehovah, the 
 God of hosts, shall be with you, as you say " (v. 14). 
 They said so, and here is Jehovah's reply, detached 
 enough : " You only have I known of all the families 
 
 1 Wellhausen, Prolegomena, p. 472. 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 135 
 
 of the earth. Therefore I will punish you for your 
 iniquities. Can two walk together, except they be 
 agreed ? " (iii. 2). The covenant of Jehovah with 
 Israel had apparently two sides ; there was a pre- 
 dominant partner. And Jehovah, as we saw, will 
 punish Moab for what Moab did to the doomed 
 people of Edom (ii. i). The prophets look further 
 afield than the patriots. Isaiah recognizes in Assyria 
 a tool of Jehovah's — it is difficult for us to grasp the 
 extreme daring of the thought, the bold extension 
 of Jehovah's sovereignty far outside His own land, 
 and the insight that subordinates the intolerable 
 menace of Assyria to the purposes of God. The 
 language is contemptuous beyond translation : " In 
 the same day shall Jehovah shave with a razor that is 
 hired — viz. the king of Assyria — the head and the 
 hair of the feet, and it shall also consume the beard " 
 (Isa. vii. 20). Ezekiel, in language of more sympathy, 
 says of the next great oppressor of Israel, that Jehovah 
 announces : " I will strengthen the arms of the king 
 of Babylon, and the arms of Pharaoh shall fall down, 
 and they shall know that I am Jehovah, when I shall 
 put my sword into the hand of the king of Babylon, 
 and he shall stretch it out upon the land of Egypt " 
 (Ezek. XXX. 25). Later on, the second Isaiah hails 
 Cyrus : " Thus saith Jehovah to his anointed, to 
 Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue 
 the nations before him. ... I will go before thee 
 to make the crooked places straight, I will break in 
 pieces the gates of brass and cut in sunder the bars of 
 iron ... for Jacob my servant's sake, I have called 
 thee by name, though thou hast not known me. I 
 am Jehovah, and there is none else ; there is no God 
 beside me " (Isa. xlv. 1-5). Small wonder the early 
 Christian read /cu/)tos for KS/dos and apphed the 
 great language to another. Amos struck the key- 
 note, and the crown of all is in that second Isaiah : ^ 
 ^ Verses not quite in order, from Isaiah xl. 
 
136 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 " Have ye not known ? have ye not heard ? hath it 
 not been told you from the beginning ? have ye not 
 understood from the foundations of the earth ? He 
 that is enthroned above the circle of the earth and its 
 inhabitants are as grasshoppers, that stretcheth out 
 the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out to 
 dwell in. Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, 
 and are counted as the small dust of the balance ; 
 behold, he taketh up the isles as a very little thing ; 
 he hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand. 
 Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath 
 created these stars, that bringeth out their host by 
 number : he calleth them aU by name by the greatness 
 of his power ; not one faileth. Why sayest thou, O 
 Jacob, My way is hid from Jehovah ? Hast thou 
 not known, hast thou not heard, that the everlasting 
 God, Jehovah, the Creator of the ends of the earth, 
 fainteth not, neither is weary ? there is no searching 
 of his understanding." 
 
 " The sun wiU not transgress bounds ; or else the 
 Erinnyes, avengers of Justice, will find him out," said 
 Heraclitus.^ about this time, using the language of old 
 poetry to express the reign of law, for " Nature loves 
 to be hid." ^ The Hebrew boldly asserts the per- 
 sonal rule of Jehovah, and we have seen how the 
 prophets have built up that personality — ^how it has 
 been revealed to them, they would say. Jehovah, 
 as Amos saw, stands for law and for morality ; for the 
 great law that sways sun and star, as the second 
 Isaiah saw, and for a greater law in accordance with 
 which He punishes — He and no mere Erinnyes — the 
 nation and the man who do evil and call it holiness, 
 who omit to see justice and dream that religion can 
 matter without it. He is, as Habakkuk of the Watch- 
 tower said, " of purer eyes than to behold evil, and 
 
 ^ Heraclitus, fr. 94. (Diels, Vorsokratiker, i. p. 75) ; fr. 29 (Bywater) ; 
 Plutarch, de exi/io, n, p. 604, 
 
 2 Heraclitus, fr. 123 (Diels) ; fr. 10 (Bywater). 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 137 
 
 cannot look upon iniquity " (Hab. i. 1 5). The Hebrew, 
 however, knew the shrinking of the Greek from a 
 crude anthropomorphism. The Elohist, we are told,^ 
 reaches a higher level of reflection than the Jehovist 
 in dealing with the old legends of his people ; he 
 tones down his theophanies, he has a more spiritual 
 conception of revelation, while on the human side 
 he strikes a deeper vein of subjective feeling; he finds 
 the sense of tears in things, feels the appeal of tender- 
 ness, and is more careful in his treatment of right 
 and wrong. Both varieties of sensitiveness are felt 
 in the prophets, and they escape the depersonalizing 
 tendency that undid philosophic religion among the 
 Greeks, because that sense of the pathos of human 
 life never leaves them. " Thou shalt love Jehovah 
 thy God " is the eventual Hebrew religion. Not 
 so spoke the Greek. " friendship or love," says 
 Aristotle,^ " we speak of where there is return of love ; 
 but love of God admits neither return of love nor 
 indeed love at all. For it would be an odd sort of 
 thing if a man were to say he loved Zeus." It would, 
 indeed ; but Jehovah was thought of on other lines. 
 And this began in earnest with Hosea, one of the 
 most remarkable of the prophets. Hosea and Jeremiah 
 may be called the tenderest spirits in Hebrew religion. 
 It is not necessary to tell again the dreadful story 
 of Hosea, more miserable and more splendid as one 
 feels one's way into it. He has the prophet's habit 
 of basing himself on fact, and an eye for nature com- 
 parable to that which we find in Jeremiah and in the 
 parables of Jesus. It is remarkable that he was, it 
 would appear, the first to observe the effect of national 
 licentiousness in diminishing population.^ He was 
 also a psychologist, and to some effect, who read 
 deeply in the human heart. He found that his wife 
 
 ^ Skinner, Genesis, pp. liii. and xlvii. 
 
 * Aristotle, Magn. Mor., ii. 1 1, 1208 b., 28 ft. 
 
 * G. A. Smith, The Twelve, i. pp. 233, 284 ; Hosea ix. 1 1, 14, 16. 
 
138 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 was unable to stand alone, too animal a nature to 
 choose purity or too weak to hold to a resolve ; that 
 she lacked character and personality ; and that her 
 one chance lay in his helping her, not once, but 
 always ; that if he let her go, there lay nothing before 
 her but ever deeper infamy. He found, too, that 
 he himself was not unwilling to help her ; that he 
 could not, in fact, do anything else ; that he could 
 not let her go ; that he could forgive her and keep 
 her whatever she had done. He asked, it would seem, 
 whence came these feelings ? And he drew the 
 greatest of all inferences — that Jehovah Himself, 
 Maker of all, is the source of tenderness, that Jehovah 
 must therefore be good and tender beyond man's 
 dream. He applied this to Israel — to Israel unable 
 to stand alone, to be true or loyal, ever in need of 
 fresh forgiveness and of perpetual support. " How 
 can I give thee up, Ephraim ? " he hears Jehovah 
 say. " How can I cast thee away, Israel ? My heart 
 burns within me, my compassion is all kindled. I 
 will not execute the fierceness of my wrath, I will 
 not turn to destroy thee ; for I am God and not man, 
 the Holy One in the midst of thee " (xi. 8 f.). " O 
 Israel, return unto Jehovah thy God. ... I will 
 heal their backsliding, I will love them freely, for 
 mine anger is turned away from him. I will be as 
 the dew to Israel ; he shall bud forth as the lily and 
 strike his roots as Lebanon " (xiv. i f.). " O Israel, 
 thou hast destroyed thyself, but in me is thy help " 
 (xiii. 9). The language is so extraordinarily personal 
 that it is hard to realize that it is addressed not to an 
 individual but to Israel, to the nation. The fuller 
 place of the individual in the thoughts of Jehovah 
 comes with Jeremiah. 
 
 Hosea, however, is a pioneer in the exploration of 
 God, who has marked several points which remain 
 for ever. He was the first of the prophets to recognize 
 the malign significance of idols. To Amos the calves 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 139 
 
 were a part of that cult which he saw that Jehovah 
 despised. To Hosea they are symbols of apostasy — 
 " and now they sin more and more, and have made 
 them molten images of their silver, even idols accord- 
 ing to their own understanding, all of them the work 
 of the craftsmen ; they say of them, Let the men 
 that sacrifice kiss the calves " (xiii. 2). With the 
 horrible symbolism before him, in which the ancient 
 religion expressed the relation of heaven and earth, 
 rites of fertility, and with his own domestic parable 
 in his heart, he uses the metaphor of marriage to 
 describe the union of Jehovah and Israel, and in the 
 idols he sees the lovers for whom Jehovah's wife has 
 forsaken him and " played the harlot " (iv. 15, 17). 
 
 He was, further, the first teacher of repentance. 
 This involved a new treatment of the whole question 
 of Sin — a subject on which the contribution of Israel 
 to the thought of mankind is incomparably richer 
 than that of Greece, and only approached by that 
 of early Roman Christianity. The Greek practically 
 omitted Sin, like M. Renan ; ^ and when he put his 
 mind to it, he treated it in two ways. Sin might be 
 a meddling with the whims and fancies of a divine 
 or daemonic being of no moral qualities whatever ; 
 or it might be a blunder which involved a man in 
 consequences entailed by a breach of laws quite 
 impersonal, as a short-sighted man's stumble may 
 entail breakage of bone or vsrrenching of muscle as a 
 result of man's natural construction and the hardness 
 (let us say) of stone steps. In neither was the act of 
 much import apart from its consequence ; it did not 
 carry the whole man with it ; and it did not, apart 
 from daemons, bring him into collision with another 
 personality — and the daemons which might have to 
 be reconciled were only partly personal, much less 
 so than the man himself. The Stoic, indeed, coined 
 the word " conscience," but it was a religion of 
 
 ^ See p. 50. 
 
140 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Hebrew ancestry that used it. The Hebrew, where 
 Hosea led the way, conceived of sin as an attitude of 
 mind, apostasy, " harlotry " in the phrase of Hosea, 
 and on either side saw a genuine personality. If 
 " Israel " is not quite personal, the stories of the call 
 of Isaiah and Jeremiah show strongly the emergence 
 of the individual. 
 
 Sin is, then, for the Hebrew an attitude of mind 
 determining conduct toward God. The whole 
 situation is changed by the emphasis on the per- 
 sonality of God ; it is further changed by the strong 
 conviction that God is righteous and moral, which 
 the common gods of Greece never were ; the third 
 development follows, when Hosea brings forward, 
 as a necessary implicate of God's personality. His 
 personal affection for His own, His tenderness and 
 His yearning desire to have His own again. " How 
 can I let thee go ? " Sin stands in a clearer light 
 than ever before, interpreted by this psychologist 
 who could not get over his love for a disastrous wife. 
 Repentance, then, is a change of mind — and that is 
 one reason why Hosea so constantly emphasizes 
 knowing and not-knowing and understanding. Israel 
 has " rejected knowledge " (iv. 6) and " the people 
 that doth not understand shall be overthrown " 
 (iv. 14). And his appeal is : " Oh, Israel, return 
 unto Jehovah thy God . . . take with you words 
 and return unto Jehovah ; say unto him. Take away 
 all iniquity and accept that which is good ; so will 
 we render as bullocks the offering of our lips " (xiv. l) 
 — a change of attitude which means a new type of 
 religion, not one of external gifts, of slain bullocks, of 
 blood out-poured and incense burnt, but one where 
 the inner man meets God face to face — a change 
 of attitude which involves an entire re-modelling of 
 conduct and makes it possible for Jehovah to give in 
 the spirit and on the scale which the prophet sees to 
 be His desire. Hosea is the forerunner of the New 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 141 
 
 Testament doctrine of Grace — the " greatest of all 
 Catholic doctrines," as Renan said. 
 
 The contrast of all this with the highest thought 
 vipon God that we find among the Greeks is more 
 remarkable as we study it more. Once again I find 
 it hard to discover anything like it in the earlier 
 history of Jehovah-worship, as it is generally described. 
 Even if the later developments are in the traditional 
 way put down to Abraham and his age, the change 
 of century does not make the facts less strange. The 
 whole habit of mind and outlook of Hosea and Jere- 
 miah is irreconcilable with the conceptions on which 
 early religion as a rule rested ; and one feels the 
 justice of Professor Barton's conclusion, already quoted, 
 that the moral standards of the prophets and their 
 conceptions of God are not accounted for by their 
 environment.^ 
 
 The slow recognition of human personality was 
 one point in which we saw that the Hebrew differed 
 from the Greek — and very surprisingly. One wonders 
 whether the scholars can be right who assure us so 
 definitely that all the messages of Jehovah are for 
 the nation. It is quite clear at last that the indi- 
 vidual had his messages too. The call of the prophet 
 is as intensely an individual transaction as a proposal 
 of marriage to-day. It is inconceivable that Jehovah, 
 with such a character of tenderness as Hosea draws, 
 could call a man and use a man, and have no further 
 interest in him. That point is made good by Jere- 
 miah, whose whole life is, in a way, a dialogue with 
 Jehovah. In the long run he extends the relation 
 of Jehovah to every man, and two things may be 
 traced as contributing to this. His own personal 
 religious life, a deeply individual life of battle, despair 
 and divine grace and re-consecration, will take him 
 a long way. Jeremiah, too, like Amos, saw that God 
 is not tied to people or place — if He can do without 
 1 See p. loz ; Barton, Semitic Origins, p. 306. 
 
142 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Israel, He can do without Judah. If Jerusalem 
 escaped Sennacherib, it is not necessarily sound 
 thinking to talk on about " the temple of the Lord, 
 the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord''^ 
 (Jeremiah's iterations are not accidental). Jehovah 
 can do without His temple ; He is not dependent 
 on Jerusalem. Temple and tower may go to the 
 ground, and Israel may go into exile. Amos told the 
 priest he would die " in a polluted land " ; for Jere- 
 miah there is no polluted land; he sees that the 
 religion of Jehovah is detachable from Jerusalem : — 
 
 Where'er we meet Thee, Thou art found 
 And every place is hallowed ground. 
 
 Yes ! and it is detachable from race as well as from 
 place. God has, in a sense, failed with Israel. Israel 
 will not have Jehovah. But is Jehovah baulked of 
 his purpose by a foolish people ? Amos thought 
 not. Sheer ruin, failure, disaster and collapse are 
 the drastic teachers of Jeremiah ; they drive him into 
 deeper and deeper research into the ways of Jehovah. 
 He discovers the individual to be the key to God's 
 thoughts. Men talked of people and of family — 
 the life of Israel, the continuity and unity of the 
 family. Their proverb ran that " The fathers have 
 eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on 
 edge " (Jer. xxxi. 29). Jeremiah denied it — " every 
 man that eateth sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on 
 edge " ; and then he goes on to unfold what is implied 
 in this new individuality of the individual. The 
 passage which follows has had a great history in reHgion 
 and in literature, and gave its name to the most famous 
 of aU books some centuries later ; for its meaning was 
 seen at last. 
 
 " Behold, the days come, saith Jehovah, that I will 
 make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with 
 the house of Judah, not according to the covenant 
 
 ^ Jer. vii. 4. 
 
THE HEBREW PROPHETS 143 
 
 that I made with their fathers, in the day that I took 
 them by the hand, to bring them out of the land of 
 Egypt ; which my covenant they brake, although I 
 was an husband unto them, saith Jehovah. But this 
 is the covenant that I will make with the house of 
 Israel : After these days, saith Jehovah, I will put my 
 law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I 
 write it ; and I will be their God, and they shall be 
 my people. And they shall teach no more every man 
 his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, 
 Know Jehovah : for they all shall know me, from the 
 least of them unto the greatest of them, saith Jehovah : 
 for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I 
 remember no more " (Jer. xxxi. 31 ff.). 
 
 Beautiful words ! no wonder the early Christians 
 laid hold of them and quoted them so often ! And 
 the inference of personal immortality seems to lie 
 so near, and he did not draw it ! One thing, how- 
 ever, was assured. When the day came that Jews 
 would draw the inference, there were certain fixed 
 points. The personality of God and the personality 
 of man were established, and their inter-relation made 
 it clear that the inference would not take the form 
 of transmigration of souls. Mankind was to have an 
 alternative to the cycle of eternal re-dying, the 
 " sorrowful weary wheel." 
 
 Let us sum up what the prophets did. A religion 
 is always conditioned by the character it gives to 
 God. The Hebrew prophets kept the personality of 
 God — ^kept it triumphantly, and abolished all other 
 clairiiants to Godhead. God is personal, and God 
 is one ; God is righteous, and God is kind — they are 
 four great tenets on which to base any religion, and 
 they were not lightly won. They were the outcome 
 of experience, hard, bitter and disillusioning — a gain 
 acquired by the loss of all kinds of hopes and beliefs, 
 national and personal, tested in every way that man 
 or devil can invent for the testing of belief. The 
 
144 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 prophets got the religion of Jehovah detached, or 
 detachable, from shrine and cult, just when the 
 deportation and the exile in Babylon made it im- 
 perative that the religion must do without shrine 
 and cult or perish for ever. They cut it clear 
 from priesthood and tradition and law-book, though 
 their successors entangled it with these again. They 
 struck the blow of which idolatry died. They made 
 righteousness a thing no more of ritual and taboo 
 but of attitude and conduct and spirit. They set 
 religion free from ancient follies and reviving horrors. 
 " Wherewith," says Micah (about 720 b.c), " shall 
 I come before Jehovah, and bow myself before the 
 high God ? Shall I come before him with burnt 
 offerings, with calves of a year old ? Will Jehovah 
 be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten 
 thousands of rivers of oil ? Shall I give my first- 
 born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for 
 the sin of my soul ? He hath showed thee, O man, 
 what is good ; and what doth Jehovah require of thee, 
 but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk 
 humbly with thy God ? " * 
 
 So wrote Micah — ^in impressive contrast with old 
 Hebrew religion, with Greek religion and with what 
 we find in the Roman Empire and in modern India. 
 But there was another chapter of religion yet to write, 
 and Hosea and Jeremiah saw what it would be about. 
 They did not read, nor yet divine, all its contents ; 
 but they knew that it would turn, not on what Jehovah 
 requires of man, but on what Jehovah will do for 
 man, how He feels for him and what He will give 
 him. For the days were coming when the Hebrew, 
 like the Greek, would ask a great deal of his God — 
 Immortality, for a beginning, and other things more 
 wonderful. 
 
 ^ Micah vi. 6-8. 
 
VII 
 
 THE GREAT CENTURY OF GREECE 
 
 No period of ancient history has been more studied 
 than the fifth century b.c, the great age of Athens ; 
 and yet one of the acutest thinkers in the classical 
 field to-day tells us that " the beliefs of sixth and 
 fifth century Greece are not yet fully ascertained. 
 The country is but partially mapped out, and any 
 one who sets foot in it risks losing his way." He 
 points out that to-day so many forms of religion 
 beside the Olympian have to be considered — " Orphic 
 mysteries with a highly spiritual teaching, Dionysiac 
 religion emotional and enthusiastic, and the pro- 
 pitiation of formidable Chthonian deities." ^ We 
 are told elsewhere, with at least enough emphasis, 
 that it is the three last forms of religion which are 
 important ; but Mr Livingstone points out that 
 the Olympian gods retained significance enough to 
 draw upon themselves the successive attacks of Euri- 
 pides and Plato, of the early Church, of Lucian of 
 Samosata, and finally of St Augustine, while Orphic 
 and Chthonian worship escaped, in the main or alto- 
 gether, the attention of reformer and satirist — an 
 indication surely where the real strength lay. If 
 the contention which we have been studying so far 
 is valid — that some instinct or impulse, something 
 natural within him and inevitable, drives man to 
 personalize his god, we shall not be altogether sur- 
 prised at this conclusion. However vague the reli- 
 gions of Dionysus and Demeter may have been at the 
 beginning, and for long after the beginning (whatever 
 ^ The Greek Genius and its Meaning for Us, p. 49. 
 K "5 
 
146 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 and whenever that was), whether they are at first 
 mere responses of fear and hope to observed facts of 
 alterations of personality and the fruitfulness of the 
 soil, both Dionysus and Demeter developed legends, 
 and the very slightest touch served to link them to 
 the hierarchy of Olympian gods. It may be that the 
 superficial psychology of the common man, and his 
 undeveloped wonder at natural processes, served to 
 keep a basis of experience under these two divinities, 
 which some gods lost early if they ever had it ; none 
 the less they too were Olympian and personal. The 
 Chthonian powers may well have kept their significance 
 for people who were tender or timid rather than reflec- 
 tive, just as water-spirits and (more vigorously) ghosts 
 retain for long their hold on some types of mind, and 
 luck and one's star keep it still longer. But they cannot 
 be called very relevant to our immediate subject of 
 Progress in Religion, unless obstacles are to be reckoned. 
 But no one, I think, who seriously studies ancient 
 history will contend that the real importance, the 
 real value, of that fifth century b.c. is to be looked 
 for in the worship of Chthonian gods. Matthew 
 Arnold used to distinguish between the permanent 
 and the historical value of literature ; certain books 
 were of moment to those who studied the period in 
 which they were produced, but they had ceased to 
 be living literature in any sense.^ The student of 
 the fifth century must indeed recognize that the 
 Chthonian cults continued then, and no doubt for 
 long after ; superstitions die hard. Yes, they die 
 hard, but there are things of more interest. There 
 is an interest in the beast-lore of Elizabethan days — 
 
 Spring-headed Hydraes, and sea-shouldring Whales, 
 Great whirlpooles which all fishes make to flee, 
 Bright Scolopendraes, arm'd with silver scales, 
 Mighty Monoceroses with immeasured tayles — 
 
 ^ Essays in Criticism, ii. No. i., pp. 6 fF. : " the fallacy caused by the 
 estimate which we call historic." 
 
THE GREAT CENTURY OF GREECE 147 
 
 but the study of Nature is more interesting. M7 
 analogy is not quite perfect ; but my meaning, as I 
 have tried to say aheady, is that what matters at any 
 stage is the movement, or impulse, or idea that makes 
 for the next stage. In the fifth century no one 
 would claim that for Chthonian gods. Wherever 
 and whenever they are in the ascendant, one may 
 look for retrograde thinking and decline. 
 
 It was the age when Greece became more con- 
 spicuously and gloriously Greece than ever before, 
 when all the powers of the human mind flowered at 
 once and then bore fruit as they never had done in 
 a period of the same length nor perhaps did again 
 till the early years of the sixteenth century a.d. ; and 
 on that fruit mankind has lived with a satisfaction 
 always intense, and its seed has in turn been fruitful 
 in every civilized race. Our business now is to see 
 what that age had to say for itself in religion — not 
 what it inherited and kept through filial aifection, 
 timidity, or mere inattention, but what it thought 
 out on its own account and found interesting to 
 itself. 
 
 Many things went to make the fifth century alert. 
 There is a sense of power pervading all its men — a 
 power stimulated and made conscious by the sub- 
 jection of the world to man, by exploration and 
 geographical discovery, by trade and adventure out- 
 side the range of old knowledge. But exploration 
 took place in other regions than the Mediterranean ; 
 " the rise of mathematics in the Pythagorean school," 
 we are told in a suggestive sentence, " had revealed 
 for the first time the power of thought," ^ and mathe- 
 matics were not the sole revelation of this. Travel 
 had brought Greeks into contact with men of many 
 minds and had raised many questions, difiicult and 
 new ; it had brought them face to face with customs 
 not their own, with fauna and flora, rivers, mountains 
 ^ J. Burnet, Greek Philosophy, i. p. 67. 
 
148 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 and lands full of wonder, and all to be explained. 
 Criticism was born. The impulse to understand, 
 the impulse to co-ordinate, were immensely quickened ; 
 and the habit grew, which marks all Greek philosophy 
 at last, of taking one's stand as " the spectator of all 
 time and all existence." ^ The phrase is Plato's, and 
 the thought is developed by Longinus when he speaks 
 of Plato — " for the contemplation and thought within 
 the reach of man's mind not even the whole universe 
 together suffices ; but our conceptions often pass 
 the bounds of space ; if one were to look around upon 
 life on every side, and see how in aU things the strik- 
 ing, the great and the beautiful stand supreme, he 
 will soon know for what we were born." * Longinm 
 lived long after our period, but he interprets it aright. 
 The range of the human mind was immensely in- 
 creased, and the freedom with which it treated the 
 hugest of conceptions and the subtlest of laws. 
 
 To this sense of power and to the widening of range 
 we have to add an intellectual discipline far severer 
 than any other race had ever known. Greek science, 
 geometry, astronomy — and, I expect, medicine — 
 went beyond the science of Egypt and Babylon, 
 whatever they gave of stimidus. The mathematics 
 meant discipline of thought, and they were accom- 
 panied by logic and dialectic, by criticism that became 
 more and more acute and penetrating — ^in aU, a 
 training that makes every other race of mankind 
 seem rather provinciaL 
 
 Criticism and art do not often go together, but in 
 this age of Greece they did. Whatever we make of 
 the naive notion of more commonplace Greeks that 
 poets are pre-eminently teachers — ^Horner of tactics, 
 Hesiod of farming, and so forth — ^the three great tragic 
 poets of Athens were teachers indeed, and diey tau^t 
 things far beyond the practicaL They put before 
 the Athenians, and gradually before all Greeks, pro- 
 
 1 Pbto, Refubtic, vi. 486 A- * Longinm, ms-. 
 
THE GREAT CENTURY OF GREECE 149 
 
 blems in human destiny, in character and conduct, 
 and in such a way that the spectators must ponder 
 them out even unconsciously. The fall of Agamemnon, 
 the tragic results of Deianira's indirectness,^ the 
 moral grandeur and pitiful fortune of Hecuba in the 
 Trojan Women, will occur to us at once. If tragedy 
 declined into mere pathos and quibbling, as we are 
 told, argument and fierce argument was at its heart 
 from the first. " God's law or man's ? " asks Anti- 
 gone. " God's justice or man's interest ? " asks 
 Hecuba. 
 
 If gods do deeds of shame, the less gods they ! 
 
 cries a character of Euripides ; and gods, so myth and 
 legend and rehgion announced, had done many deeds 
 of shame, and men began to feel it. There is argu- 
 ment there ; but more potent was that appeal to 
 moral instinct {Aidos) which tragedy made ; for by 
 appealing to it tragedy developed moral instinct, 
 and when once that wakens, there is nothing so 
 educative. Men said the gods must be right, they 
 jelt the gods were wrong, and it was vain to urge that 
 laws are made for the little and do not apply to the 
 big. The gods had been human since Homer's day, 
 and now men were coming to feel what that " human " 
 meant. If pity and terror were purged by tragedy, 
 once purified they reacted on men's religious belief 
 — an awakened pity and an educated terror rose up 
 with more sympathy for human pain and a grip on 
 moral principle that robbed religious darkness of many 
 of its vague alarms. 
 
 But it was not only by starting intellectual pro- 
 blems and moral problems that tragedy influenced 
 Greek thought. Side by side with sculpture, it 
 brought a new aesthetic sense to bear on all life. The 
 
 '^ Sophocles' Trachiniae seems to me to turn, like his Phtloctetes, on 
 the tragic failure of indirect ways. 
 
ISO PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 influence of a feeling for beauty upon religions is 
 extraordinarily subtle ; it is very hard, or impossible, 
 to limit its scope ; it hurts and it heals and it trans- 
 forms. The new Dissenting chapel that replaces 
 the barn has curious effects upon ceremony, and 
 ceremony upon thought ; and when you reach West- 
 minster Abbey you have travelled still further from 
 the upper room in Ephesus where Paul talked half 
 the night. The sharp edges of thought that squared 
 with the barn seem out of place, and they are apt to 
 go ; and it is often an open question whether they 
 ought to go. Right and wrong, heaven and hell, 
 seem in sharper antithesis at the street corner than 
 in the cathedral ; and I think both Plato and Paul 
 would say that they cannot be in antithesis too sharp. 
 Why does art make us want to soften contrasts which 
 philosophy counts vital ? There we touch again 
 " that ancient quarrel between Poetry and Philo- 
 sophy " that troubled Plato.^ If Art toned down 
 old story, if it softened ancient prejudice, it made 
 something immortal — but was the something true ? 
 Plato asked ; and if it is not true, does Art help us ? 
 These are great questions, and that age raised them, 
 perhaps for the first time ; and as my illustration 
 from English reUgion suggests, we have not quite 
 solved them yet. But Art with all her magic was 
 there, transforming gods and legends and fixing their 
 form for ever — the friend and enemy of Religion in 
 that exasperating and alluring way which troubles 
 and charms us still. We cannot compute her influ- 
 ence ; but we must not forget it. One thing we 
 must note — that Art brought god and man so near 
 together, gave to the god such human lineaments, 
 whispered to man such hints of his own god-likeness, 
 that either Religion must be the most natural and -at 
 last most tender of all necessary modes of life, or it 
 must be the most false and deadly of all drugs that 
 ^ Plato, Republic, x. 607 B. 
 
THE GREAT CENTURY OF GREECE 151 
 
 bewitch the soul and lay waste the nature. Art 
 drew men very close to the gods, ^ or with its " lies " 
 and symbols it abolished God. Art stereotyped God, 
 and that is the beginning of falsity ; " there is no 
 heresy but finality." * 
 
 So much for the effect of Art on one side of Religion ; 
 and I have only suggested a few of the questions 
 and answered none of them. Art, however, is one 
 of the most individualizing of all man's gifts. If 
 Art transforms Athene in the Parthenon, and gives 
 her beauty and form for ever, what is its effect on the 
 artist himself and on those who enter in any degree 
 into his thought f He and they gain a new self- 
 consciousness — partly power and partly claim. The 
 journeyman may be put on one side ; the real artist 
 is the most individual of men in his sense of power, 
 more still perhaps in his feeling that he must have 
 the meaning of things, not an abstract general 
 meaning, but what they definitely intend to convey 
 to him. His mind — intellect, imagination, emotion, 
 everything included — is the last great court of appeal. 
 God or gods, ethics, nature, society, wait his inter- 
 pretation ; and as he interprets, they will be. Even 
 those who are not great artists, who lack the force of 
 mind and the moral qualities of the greatest, have the 
 obvious gift of the artistic temperament. That it 
 was not at all unknown in Greece, we are reminded 
 by Plato's brilliant and amusing sketch in his Ion ; 
 the rhapsode there describes himself unmistakably as 
 an artistic temperament, and has that strong sense 
 of the supremely significant Ego which we know so 
 well in the type. Those who dabbled in Art, Sculp- 
 
 1 Cf. Dio Chrysostom, Or. xii. 53. Pheidias' Zeus abolishes men's 
 earlier conceptions of the god ; Quintilian, xii. I o, 8 : The beauty of 
 his Zeus adjecisse aliquid etiam receptee religionl vldetur ; Livy, xlv. 28 : 
 Aemilius Paullus, at the sight of the statue, lovem velut praesentem 
 intuens motus animo est. 
 
 2 G. Steven, Psychology of Christian Soul. 
 
152 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 ture or Poetry, and those who went deeper and under- 
 stood the problems and the endeavours, came out, 
 in higher degree or in lower, more individual than 
 they went into it. 
 
 If there were those in whom Art failed to waken 
 and to stimulate the Ego, the Sophists were there to 
 take them a nearer way to the meaning of the indi- 
 vidual. They did not in the long run bear a good 
 name, but they contributed to the growth of the 
 Greek mind, and incidentally, but inevitably, to the 
 remoulding of Greek religion — a genuine contribu- 
 tion, and of value, even if we discount their services 
 for their excessive rationalism. But that danger is 
 one that besets the young and the shallow, and 
 Society is saved by the one growing in experience and 
 by the other sinking into nonentity ; and the great 
 gains remain, of the emphasized Individual and of 
 emphasized Reason. 
 
 Finally, on this part of our subject, there was the 
 greatest Sophist of all, the Athenian public itself ; 
 and here we must not ignore the converse of 
 Plato's condemnation.^ TldXis dvSpa StSacr/cet, said 
 Simonides long before, " the city teaches the man " ; 
 and Athens taught her sons to be themselves — " demo- 
 cratic men," if one likes to borrow Plato's dreadful 
 picture, but something better, too. Who were the 
 men she honoured f Not only those who echoed 
 her ideas, but an Aeschylus, a Sophocles, a Pericles, 
 a Protagoras — anyone who would think something, 
 or do something, or be something, distinctive. Ei 
 Se Tvxy Tts ephoiv ^ — " if one accomplish aught of 
 doing " — that was it ! Athens loved and honoured 
 it, and invited her sons to be. The great funeral 
 speech of Pericles, whether he spoke it or Thucydides 
 wrote it, is a paean upon individuality. 
 
 Let us sum up what we find, then — an age full of 
 the sense of power, interested in ideas, full of contrast 
 
 1 Plato, Republic, vi. 492 A. ^ Pindar, Nemeans, vii. 1 1. 
 
THE GREAT CENTURY OF GREECE 153 
 
 and contest, absorbed in " the spectacle of all time 
 and all existence," and keen in its interest in every 
 man who was individual. Such an age cannot keep 
 altogether off the question of Religion, and it will 
 have something to say worth hearing. Its alertness 
 and its experience will give it a right to speak — ^if it 
 be only to question — and it will say more than was 
 ever dreamed or mumbled in the rituals of Chthonian 
 gods. 
 
 Herodotus has been credited with a simplicity 
 verging on imbecility, and with a cynical humour 
 to vie almost with Gibbon ; quite unjustly, I think, 
 in both cases. He is a larger nature than some of his 
 critics realize, and his simplicity is that of genius. 
 He is open-eyed and open-minded for all he hears 
 about the gods, and he weighs what he is told. He 
 does not approach the matter with a theory ; let 
 that be our first point, and it is an important one. 
 Around him are men who worship abjectly, and men 
 who blatantly proclaim their lack of interest. Hero- 
 dotus avows his interest, and he collects and notes 
 facts that bear on the question, and he comments 
 on what he gathers. He notes things that suggest 
 divine intervention — miracles, judgments, alleged 
 theophanies, and, above all, oracles. But he does not 
 commit himself to all he is told ; this or that " they 
 said — ^which another may believe, but not I," he 
 says sometimes ; and again he emphasizes that he 
 tells what he has been told, that is his function ; but 
 not necessarily to believe everything men have told 
 him (vii. 152). He says frankly that he does not say 
 anything against oracles, that he does not allege them 
 to be anything but true (viii. 77), and he gives telling 
 instances of oracles fulfilled ; but he recognizes that 
 oracles have been faked or counterfeited (i. 66, 75 ; 
 V. 91 ; vii. 6). He feels that the gods did intervene 
 in the Persian war ; they sent the storm that wrecked 
 the fleet of Xerxes (viii. 1 3) ; ' he traces Providence 
 
154 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 in the fecundity of certain animals — design in nature 
 (iii. 1 08). He has a sort of pious reticence in 
 speaking of Egyptian religion ; but he makes shrewd 
 comments on the evidence it supplies as to the origin 
 of Greek gods, cults and theories. He believes that 
 Greece learnt the names of her gods from Egypt 
 after worshipping them for ages without names 
 (ii. 50-57). He holds that the Egyptians, first of 
 all men, taught the immortality of the soul and 
 its transmigration — " certain Greeks have used that 
 doctrine, some of old, some lately, as if it were their 
 own. I know their names ; but I do not write them " 
 (ii. 123). Commentators suggest he means Empe- 
 docles, though Pythagoras is the name of which one 
 thinks first ; but he does not, we are told, speak of 
 any but contemporaries in this way. It certainly 
 looks as if he sympathized with the Scythian criticism 
 which he quotes upon Dionysus — that " it was not 
 fitting to invent a god like this who impels men to 
 frenzy " (iv. 79). He was interested, too, in Persian 
 religion — " Images and temples and altars they do 
 not account it lawful to erect, nay, they even charge 
 with folly those who do these things ; and this, as it 
 seems to me, because they do not account the gods 
 to be in the likeness of men, as do the Hellenes. But 
 it is their wont to perform sacrifices to Zeus, going 
 up to the most lofty of the mountains ; and the 
 whole circle of the heavens they call Zeus " ; and so 
 forth (i. 131). This was a stage in the history of 
 Comparative Religion, which was perhaps the child 
 of Xenophanes. Herodotus is prepared to reconcile 
 Geology and Religion ; men said the gorge of the 
 Peneios was made by Poseidon ; he thought it looked 
 like the work of an earthquake ; well, Poseidon is 
 the author of earthquakes (vii. 129). Once he raises 
 the whole problem of prayer. While the storm 
 raged against the Persian fleet at Artemisium, the 
 Magians did sacrifice and chanted and " stopped 
 
THE GREAT CENTURY OF GREECE 155 
 
 the storm ; or else it flagged and dropped of its own 
 accord " (vii. 191). On the other hand, he pulls 
 himself up once at the end of some speculation — 
 " now that I have said so much, may the gods 
 and heroes be gracious ! " (ii. 45). And when the 
 Great King plans his expedition against Greece, 
 Herodotus tells stories to show that the king was 
 forced into it by divine agency, and the divine bidding 
 was made clear to him in dreams (vii. 12-18). 
 
 There is in all this a good deal of wavering, and 
 it answers to the feeling of the age. It was a question 
 whether the gods did all they were credited with 
 doing ; did they look after the affairs of men, inter- 
 vene in them, guide them ? did they give oracles ? 
 did they even exist ? Herodotus is interested in all 
 these speculations ; he is not the author of them, 
 but they aU wake something within him, and he 
 keeps his eyes open, as I said, for evidence. He 
 represents the age — eager for the odd event, the 
 striking coincidence (as we call it, not without a 
 theory of our own perhaps) — curious as to customs 
 and the light they throw on origins— ready to specu- 
 late in a great way, as Herodotus' own reflections on 
 the Geology of Egypt show — and yet not desirous 
 to break with the gods, in case they are gods. 
 
 In spite of the movement of Illumination, which 
 we associate with it, the fifth century had its strong 
 under-currents of piety and orthodoxy. Cimon 
 brought back the bones of Theseus from Scyros to 
 Athens, and that this was not merely like the return 
 of the dead Napoleon from St Helena to Paris, is 
 shown by the emphasis which Sophocles lays on the 
 advantage to be derived by Attica from the dead 
 Oedipus. "I wiU show thee," says Oedipus to The- 
 seus, " the way to the place where I must die. But 
 that place reveal thou never unto mortal man — tell 
 not where it is hidden, nor in what region it lies ; 
 that so it may ever make for thee a defence, better 
 
iS6 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 than many shields, better than the succouring spear 
 of neighbours." ^ 
 
 Foreign gods came in with foreign settlers — ■ 
 Adonis, Sabazios, the Mother of the Gods, and so 
 forth ; but their significance for our present purpose 
 lies in the fact that their worship was in Athens a 
 matter primarily of private judgment — a point noted 
 before in the case of the mysteries. Further, the 
 Mother of the Gods, at all events, was destined to have 
 a long and a great history ; she was Olympianized 
 more or less, but she remained a possible divinity 
 for world-wide worship — a goddess of universal sway. 
 For such there was a great role reserved, though the 
 age was not ripe for them, in spite of tentative 
 identification of Greek gods with Egyptian. They 
 waited for Alexander. 
 
 It is sometimes said that Apollo exercised a wide 
 influence for good in Greek morals and politics. I 
 am not clear what the evidence is for this ; but in 
 our period the power of Apollo was materially 
 weakened by his desertion to the Persians in the great 
 invasion ; and later on the definite support which 
 he promised Sparta in the Peloponnesian war^ must 
 have made it still further clear how little basis the 
 oracle reaUy had in the divine, that it was an affair 
 of priests who had their price. But a rationalism, 
 political or religious, that cuts men off from heaven, 
 is little joy. We even find Socrates sending Xenophon 
 to consult the god as to whether he should go to 
 Cyrus. And Apollo gave oracles down to Plutarch's 
 day, who boldly said that the god had not lost his 
 glory of three thousand years. Men wished to 
 believe ; and in times of fear not only wish but 
 panic swept them back into a fierce orthodoxy. The 
 expulsion of Anaxagoras, the prosecution of anybody 
 who could be suspected of the mutilation of the 
 Hermai, the hemlock-cup given to Socrates, remind 
 1 Sophocles, O.C., 1520. 2 Thucydides, i. 118. 
 
THE GREAT CENTURY OF GREECE 157 
 
 us how slowly mankind accepts progress in religion. 
 Yet progress there was, and not the less genuine for 
 being largely unconscious — " veiled progress," as 
 Professor Lewis Campbell called it. 
 
 We must now consider more specifically certain 
 points that have occupied us already. First we 
 must see what the men of this time have to say of 
 the gods ; next, what are their thoughts as to moral 
 law, righteousness and sin ; and finally what hope 
 or thought they had of immortality. In every 
 direction we shall find great development. 
 
 Dr Adam grouped Pindar and Sophocles as the 
 most religious of Greek poets — for reasons which I 
 do not quite guess. I should have said that Euripides 
 had more religion in him than the pair of them. 
 Pindar, however, stands at the beginning of this 
 century a great figure, a master of sound and colour, 
 a poet who alternately amazes his reader with his 
 wealth and with his poverty of thought. His poetry 
 is full, as we all know, of gods and myths and legends. 
 He is pious, aristocratic, brilliant, imaginative, and 
 common-place ; and what he finally believes it is 
 hard to divine — beyond the happiness of good fortune 
 and good birth with wealth, the wisdom of prudence, 
 and, of course, explicitly and fundamentally the 
 supreme value of Poetry. " God is in heaven and 
 thou upon earth ; therefore let thy words be few." 
 So the Hebrew thinker said (Eccles. v. 2), and Pindar 
 might have borrowed his phrase. A poet's words 
 can hardly be few, however, and we do not ask of 
 him the Severity and immediate consistency of a 
 philosopher. He has many thoughts upon the gods ; 
 and of most of them we can at least say this — that 
 they would not clash with what an orthodox patron 
 would hold. 
 
 " God," says Pindar — and we may note at once 
 the large general term, half monotheistic in its vague- 
 ness — " God accomplisheth every end whereon he 
 
158 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 thinketh, God who overtakes the eagle on the wing, 
 and passes the dolphin in the sea, who bendeth the 
 high-minded in his pride, and to others he giveth 
 deathless glory " {Pyth. ii. 50). To express the 
 abstract idea of omnipotence he uses pictures of 
 power and speed that touch the imagination with 
 a sense of the wonder of God. And in an age of 
 change and chance and disorder, that omnipotence 
 is inscrutable. " Why askest thou me ? " says 
 Cheiron to Apollo. " Thou, who knowest the certain 
 end of all things, who knowest aU paths. How many 
 leaves the earth sendeth forth in spring, how many 
 grains of sand in sea and river are rolled by waves and 
 the winds' stress, what shall come to pass, and whence 
 it shall be, thou discernest perfectly " {Pyth. ix. 44). 
 Apollo " gave heed to his own wisdom, his mind that 
 knoweth all things ; in lies it hath no part, neither 
 in act or thought may god or man deceive him " 
 {Pyth. iii. 29). It is so that omniscience is brought 
 home to the mind. All the gods are apt with Pindar 
 to have all divine quality,^ yet not to be exempt 
 from impulses and passions that in men would be 
 called lawless and animal. It is interesting to see 
 that meanwhile Pindar tones down certain of the 
 ancient legends. Men said that a god ate part of the 
 shoulder of Pelops at the table of Tantalos. " Verily," 
 says Pindar, " many things are wondrous, and haply 
 tales decked out with cunning fables beyond the truth 
 make false men's speech concerning them. . . . Meet 
 is it for a man that concerning gods he speak honour- 
 ably ; for the reproach is less. Of these, son of 
 Tantalos, I will speak contrariwise to them who 
 have gone before me. . . . To me it is impossible to 
 call one of the blessed gods cannibal ; I keep aloof ; 
 in telling ill tales is often little gain " {01. i. 35 if.). 
 But tales of lawless love he tells many ; tales that 
 
 1 L. Campbell, Religion in Greek Literature, p. 1 7 1 ; G. F. Moore, 
 History of Religions, p. 4.80. 
 
THE GREAT CENTURY OF GREECE 159 
 
 Euripides set in their true light, naked, horrible and 
 cruel, in his Ion ; Pindar feels no shame in them. 
 He wrote poems in honour of an unspeakable dedica- 
 tion to Aphrodite at Corinth — Pindar, who will tell 
 no ill tale of God, omnipotent, omniscient. " Forget 
 not to set God above everything as the cause thereof " 
 {Pyth. V. 23). " Zeus giveth this and that (good and 
 evil) ; Zeus, lord of all " (Jsth. v. 52). It is a strange 
 blending of old story and new moral sense, of destiny- 
 over all, and the gods of Homer and of the Semite. 
 Pindar keeps gods and men well together — sons of 
 Zeus and daughters of men produce heroes ; man's 
 deeds and end are of the gods' giving and disposing. 
 " One race there is of men and one of gods, but from 
 one mother draw we both our breath, yet is the 
 strength of us diverse altogether, for the race of 
 man is as nought, but the brazen heaven abideth, 
 a habitation steadfast unto everlasting. Yet withal 
 have we somewhat in us like unto the immortal's 
 bodily shape or mighty mind, albeit we know not 
 what course hath Destiny marked out for us to run." ^ 
 If the problems of God and destiny from time to 
 time rise before the mind of Pindar, they are the 
 dominant preoccupation of Aeschylus. Dr Adam 
 conceded to Aeschylus " a greater intensity of moral 
 purpose, and a far profounder treatment of moral 
 and religious problems, than either the subjects of 
 Pindar's odes or the peculiar quality of his genius 
 allowed." ^ How this should leave Pindar more 
 religious, I do not see. Professor Lewis Campbell, 
 indeed, found a progress in Aeschylus' thought on 
 these matters, as might well be with a man who gave 
 himself so intensely to the greatest of problems. For 
 a man's mind grows with the tasks he puts upon it 
 and with the questions to which he consecrates it. 
 In the Suppliants the legend of lo transformed to a 
 
 ^ Pindar, Nemean, vi. i ; cf. Adam, Vitality ofPlatmism, p. 39. 
 * Adam, Religious Teachers of Greece, p. 139. 
 
i6o PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 heifer almost jostles the conception of the Almighti- 
 ness of Zeus. 
 
 That ancient saying declared aright 
 
 " The purpose of Zeus there is none may trace." 
 
 To him lieth bare in his own fierce light 
 All — though he shroud it in blackness of night 
 
 From the prying eyes of the earth-born race. 
 
 The thing that Zeus by his nod hath decreed, 
 
 Though ye wrestle therewith, it shall ne'er be o'erthrown ; 
 For, through tangled ways and shadowy, lead 
 The paths of the purpose that none may impede. 
 By no eye to be scanned, by no wisdom known.^ 
 
 Suppl. 86-95. 
 
 In the Prometheus the problem is one of recon- 
 ciliation, though the end is lost to us, as we have only- 
 one play of the trilogy ; but Fate and Zeus and 
 Prometheus have issues to settle, which can only 
 be settled on the lines of justice. In the Persians, 
 with a deep sense of the Hellenic triumph and a 
 sense still deeper that divine laws were working 
 through the conflict, the poet traces an awful 
 vindication of moral law in the defeat of Xerxes — 
 not accident, not the envy of the gods, but Justice 
 determines all. 
 
 Zeus sits on high, a chastener of thoughts 
 That soar above man's reach, a judge austere. 
 
 Pers. 827. 
 
 The great sin of man is Hybris — " Jeshurun waxed 
 fat and kicked," is the contemptuous phrase of the 
 Hebrew poet, and the very word comes in the 
 Agamemnon. 
 
 " Struck by the hand of Zeus ! " ay, truth indeed. 
 And traceable : 'tis the act of will decreed 
 And purpose. Under foot when mortals tread 
 Fair lovely Sanctities, the Gods, one said. 
 The easy Gods are careless : 'twas profane ! 
 Here are sin's wages manifest and plain. . . . 
 ^ A. S. Way, altered a little. 
 
THE GREAT CENTURY OF GREECE i6i 
 
 The Rich man hath no tower, 
 
 Whose Pride, in Surfeit's hour. 
 
 Kicks against high-enthroned Right 
 
 And spurns her from his sight. Agam. 379.^ 
 
 And in all the difficulties and perplexities which life 
 flings round a sentient nature — ^the fall and rise of 
 fortune, the strife of good and evil — ^Aeschylus divines 
 a law of God, just and inevitable, and in it he finds 
 comfort. 
 
 Zeus whosoe'er he be — 
 
 In that name so it please him hear, 
 Zeus, for my help is none but he ; — 
 Conjecture through creation free 
 
 I cast but cannot find his peer ; 
 With this strange load upon my mind 
 So burdening, only Zeus I find 
 
 To lift and fling it sheer. Agam. 170.^ 
 
 Justice he finds in God ; but as he passes out of 
 the influence of old legend into the sphere of thought, 
 the turn of pious phra;se " Zeus whosoe'er he be " 
 more than hints that it is a law rather than a per- 
 sonality that rules. He has moved beyond Pindar ; 
 for he has felt more deeply, and thought more 
 intensely, and has suffered ; and he has reached a 
 promise of peace. God, in whatever sense we use 
 the name, is righteous ; and that is a discovery that 
 bears on life in every aspect, that wUl take men deep 
 into new secrets of God, and that will re-create at 
 last the whole conception of God ; the old legends 
 will have to go, and man's life will need to be thought 
 out anew. This was the task of Euripides, heir, here 
 at least, to Aeschylus. 
 
 But in the meantime there were other thoughts 
 with which men had to reckon. A century earlier 
 the philosophers had sought a primal unity into 
 which to resolve the variety of the world and of all 
 being — ^water or fire, it might be, or the vague 
 
 ^ Walter Headlam. 
 
i62 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 " unlimited." These thoughts were not dead ; they 
 had gained currency. In this century Diogenes of 
 ApoUonia was pushing Air as the great original. 
 " Air," he said/ " as it is called by men, seems to me 
 to be that which has intelligence ; all things are 
 steered by. Air, and over all things Air has power. 
 For this very thing seems to me God, and I believe 
 that it reaches to everything and disposes everything 
 and is present in everything. . . . The soul of all 
 living creatures is the same, viz. air warmer than 
 the air outside us in which we live, but much colder 
 than the air about the sun." Air he held to be 
 " great and strong and eternal and knowing many 
 things." ^ In other words, Diogenes holds a kind 
 of pantheism, along the lines of matter. Adam 
 called him a Stoic born out of due time. His con- 
 temporaries might have asked him, as Plutarch 
 asked the Stoics, what became of God and righteous- 
 ness on his terms ; and what of the soul ? and his 
 answer must have satisfied them as little as the Stoics 
 satisfied Plutarch. God, righteousness, and the im- 
 mortal soul — all swept into matter and impersonality ; 
 Religion moves another way. The solution of 
 Diogenes will fail, but it remains a challenge to 
 religion. 
 
 Anaxagoras was the first Greek to try to distinguish 
 mind and matter,* and that he impressed his times 
 we can conclude from the fact that the wits of the 
 Athenian streets nicknamed him Nous, and that the 
 orthodox of the anti-Pericleian party prosecuted him 
 for impiety. But the ground of the prosecution 
 may have been his conclusion, after some study of 
 meteorites, that the sun was merely a large mass of 
 
 1 Adam, Religious Teachers of Greece, p. 266 ; Diels, Vorsokratiker, 
 
 2 Fr. 8. 
 
 * See discussion by Adam, Religious Teachers of Greece, p. 259, and 
 the evidence of Plato, Phaedo, 98 B. 
 
THE GREAT CENTURY OF GREECE 163 
 
 incandescent stone. Anaxagoras held that Mind, 
 which " has all knowledge about everything," " has 
 power over all things that have life " and " owns no 
 master but itself," " set in order all things that were 
 to be " and started that rotatory motion which made 
 the world. Plato represents Socrates as complaining 
 that, while Anaxagoras started well with his con- 
 ception of Mind, he fell back too soon on material 
 forces and causes. 
 
 Philosophy, says Callicles in the Gorgias, is a good 
 thing up to a certain point ; but you can go too far. 
 There were people in the fifth century who wanted 
 to see how it all bore on the gods and on religion ; 
 they felt that religion really was something ; every- 
 body had said so ; now what did all this philosophy 
 make of the gods ? Protagoras bluntly said he did 
 not know ; he did not even know whether gods exist 
 or not ; his working scheme was a hand-to-mouth 
 pragmatism — " other people think differently," as 
 we say in England ; and there the thing rests. 
 Nobody can know, but then everybody can think ; 
 and what you think is true for you, if it is false for me. 
 But everybody believes in gods of some kind. Pro- 
 dicos explained that " primitive man deified the sun 
 and moon, rivers and fountains, in a word, whatsoever 
 things benefit our life, on account of the services they 
 render, just as the Egyptians deify the Nile." Here 
 was Comparative Religion again ; Egypt once more 
 gave the clue, and the physicists were still in the 
 ascendant. Critias went further ; ^ the gods were 
 not, as Prodicos suggested, the creation of a natural 
 instinct; they were the contrivance of an ingenious 
 man who, because governments could not control 
 everything, imposed them upon the vulgar as an 
 invisible secret poHce, remarkably effective in main- 
 taining decency — a lie, of course, but a very good one, 
 
 1 Verses by Critias, quoted by Sextus Empiricus, adv. Math. ix. 54 ; 
 Dials, Vorsokratiker, vol. ii. no. 81, p. 620. 
 
164 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 with truth somewhere or other in it. Three centuries 
 later Polybius is found with much the same idea ^ — 
 and Polybius is a much less flippant figure than Critias. 
 It will be noted for what it is worth, that this view 
 associates the gods with morality. 
 
 If any of these views be right, what becomes of the 
 gods ? Thucydides was not a typical Athenian, but 
 he shows how little the gods were conceived by 
 ordinary Athenians as being concerned with morality, 
 personal or international. Nicias was pious enough, 
 and ruined Athens at Syracuse. The repulsiveness 
 of the political immorality avowed by Athenian 
 diplomats at Melos would not, the Athenians thought, 
 alienate the sympathy of the gods. The common 
 man, then, after all these ages of thought, was at the 
 primitive point of view — that religion and morality 
 have nothing to do with each other. And, one is 
 tempted to add, there he is still, whenever he is really 
 frightened. 
 
 The uncommon man took a different view. 
 
 If gods do deeds of shame, the less gods they ! 
 
 So said Euripides. He found " great confusion among 
 things divine, yes, and mortal things too " (Ifh. Taur. 
 572). Sometimes he seems to lean toward Diogenes 
 of Apollonia and his identification of god and air : — 
 
 Thee, self-begotteiij who in aether rolled 
 Ceaselessly round, by mystic links dost bind 
 The nature of all things, whom veUs enfold 
 Of light, of dark night, flecked with gleams of gold, 
 Of star-hosts dancing round thee without end. 
 
 Fr. 593. 
 
 Pantheism is as susceptible of splendid language as 
 the orthodoxy of Pindar. But to come to the brute 
 facts of life, and they were many ; " O Zeus ! " cries 
 Euripides, 
 
 ' In speaking of the Romans and the pains of hell, vi. 56 ; cf p. 283. 
 
THE GREAT CENTURY OF GREECE 165 
 
 O Zeus ! what shall I say ? that thou seest men f 
 Or that they hold this doctrine all in vain, 
 And Chance rules everything among mankind ? 
 
 Hec. 488. 
 
 With relentless hand he drew gods doing deeds 
 of shame — not new ones, but the old deeds of 
 shame consecrated in legend — " these be thy gods, 
 O Athens." It was quite clear that he was an 
 atheist, as Aristophanes said ; and he did well to go 
 to Macedonia. A self-respecting nation is better 
 without men who think for themselves ; they only 
 make trouble. So the Peloponnesian war taught the 
 Athenians. " Dulness and modesty {dixadia /x,era 
 a-(i)(f>po<Tvvr}s) are a more useful combination than 
 cleverness and licence. The simple sort generally 
 make better citizens than the more acute." So said 
 the great Athenian leader.^ What does a nation 
 engaged in a great war want with intellect ? So 
 Euripides went to Macedonia ; but before he goes 
 let us hear him once more on God and Righteousness 
 — before the hemlock is given to Socrates and the last 
 voice of all of this century is silenced. 
 
 stay of earth, who hast thy seat on earth, 
 Whoe'er thou art, ill-guessed and hard to know, 
 Zeus, whether Nature's law, or mind of man, 
 
 1 pray to thee ; for, on a noiseless path, 
 
 All mortal things by justice thou dost guide. 
 
 Troades, 884. 
 
 Here are echoes of Aeschylus, and of Diogenes of 
 ApoUonia, perhaps — the cry, at all events, of a heart, 
 racked with every question the mind ever framed, 
 crying aloud for God and Righteousness — the voice 
 of one crying in a wilderness of problems and theories 
 and darkness, alone, individual. 
 
 So much said about the gods, the outlines of the 
 discussion of Righteousness, divine and human, are 
 
 ^ Cleon, in Thucydides, iii. 37, 38. 
 
1 66 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 laid down. The Greek conception of the state implied 
 law ; but Greek thinkers had no term which quite 
 answered to ours. They called the laws of the state, 
 Nomoi ; but Nomoi also meant customs — its more 
 usual meaning at first. Reflective Greeks saw the 
 significance of this likeness of law and custom ; 
 " Custom rules all," says Pindar as Herodotus quotes 
 him (vii. 104). But in Nature, as opposed to human 
 society, they saw something else. " If the sun pass 
 bounds, the Erinnyes, aiders of Justice, will find 
 him," as we saw. That is poetic language ; in plain 
 prose. Nature manages her business by compulsion, 
 by necessity, Ananke. Between Nomos and Ananke 
 there is a broad gulf — between Nature and usage. 
 
 Where are we to place what Pericles calls " those 
 unwritten laws, the transgression of which brings 
 admitted shame " ? ^ Where are the sanctions and 
 basis to be found for that social morality on which 
 the well-being of state and individual so obviously 
 depends ? That was the question. Pindar called 
 Truth " the daughter of Zeus " {01. x. 2), and 
 Aeschylus, as we have seen, found the closest of 
 associations between Zeus " whoever he be " and 
 Righteousness. Even Euripides, with all his hesita- 
 tions, had the same feeling. But what if Protagoras 
 is right, if Truth is not the daughter of Zeus, but 
 your own notion of the moment, if right and wrong 
 are exactly what you make them ? We reach the 
 conclusion of Callicles, the practical man in the 
 Gorgias — echoed instinctively by many other practical 
 people in many lands and ages — that " Right is the 
 interest of the strongest," That was a sturdy Athenian 
 conviction which Plato had to refute ; and it took some 
 refutation, for every ancient community rested on 
 slavery ; and what justification was there, or is there, 
 for any slavery, however well disguised, but just this 
 " interest of the strongest " ? It followed that Right 
 
 ^ Pericles, in Thucydides, ii. 37. 
 
THE GREAT CENTURY OF GREECE 167 
 
 and Wrong are merely charms, mantrams, with which 
 the many humbug or hypnotize one another — sheer 
 nothings with no foundation in Nature or anywhere 
 else. Meanwhile the cults continued in the old way, 
 with the old notions — conspicuously Nomos all of 
 them, mere custom, and more obviously unreal, as 
 men entered into the philosophic conceptions, pan- 
 theism, natural law, and the relativity of all morals. 
 The priests and prophets made money out of it, and 
 talked about sin and holiness ; but what were sin 
 and holiness ? The language was old and unreal. 
 No doubt there was something in Sophocles' praise 
 of the " kindly soul " {O.C. 495) ; but then Sophocles 
 always took the safe way and steered clear of the 
 questions that racked Aeschylus and Euripides. 
 " Hard it is," said Simonides long ago, " to be good 
 in truth, hands and feet and mind foursquare, wrought 
 without blame." It w.s harder than ever now. And 
 yet, in spite of questions, or because of them, man's 
 instinct for righteousness was growing. It was this 
 that nerved Euripides' attack on the current opinions 
 of the gods, as it inspired Plato's a generation later. 
 Only, a reasoned and understood foundation had to 
 be found. 
 
 The course of Greek thought is very different from 
 that of Hebrew — ^here, as in the matter of God's 
 personality. The Greek never developed any strong 
 sense of sin, as he never succeeded in making or keeping 
 God both personal and righteous at the same time. 
 
 Finally, on Immortality, what could be said ? 
 The cults went on as before, with their talk of things 
 in Hades ; but if God and the soul are air, and death 
 mingles two wafts of air, where is the man ? and 
 what is the use of initiation ? What can it do ? 
 The " holy " — and the meaning of that word was 
 as essentially the creation of Nomos as anything ; it 
 had nothing to do with Nature, or Righteousness, or 
 anything recognizable — the " holy " were on one 
 
1 68 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 side and the reflective on the other. Pindar in his 
 second Olympian drew islands of the blest, round 
 which ocean breezes blow, where golden flowers are 
 glowing, where the good, set free from labour, possess 
 a tearless life, with the honoured of the gods, whoso- 
 ever had pleasure in keeping of oaths, whosoever 
 were of good courage and refrained their souls from 
 all iniquity. Wonderful vision ! but, says Euripides 
 in his Hippolytus : 
 
 But if any far-off state there be 
 Dearer than life to mortality^; 
 The hand of the Dark hath hold thereof 
 And mist is under and mist above ; 
 So we are sick for life, and cling 
 On earth to this nameless and shining thing. 
 For other life is a fountain sealed, 
 And the deeps below us are unrevealed, 
 And we drift on legends for ever.^ 
 
 In the curiously explicit phrase of the Greek here, 
 Pindar's pictures fail " through non-demonstration." 
 
 Let us sum up what Greece has reached in the 
 centuries so far, and not forget the Hebrews. Greece 
 at least has discovered the individual, and made him 
 the centre of all religion. With all that men tell 
 us of Greek conceptions of the City and the State, 
 it is remarkable that the religious thinkers of Greece 
 had so little to say of State or City ; they offer no 
 very clear account of the relation of the ultimate 
 divine to anything but the universe and the indi- 
 vidual. When the world broke up under the suc- 
 cessors of Alexander, these were the two fixed points 
 with the Stoic. All Greek history and literature 
 was a preparation for the Stoic emphasis on the 
 individual. The Stoic indeed coined the terms for 
 " conscience " and " will," and much else, but the 
 individual was a discovery of earlier days. 
 
 The Greek talked much of God and gods ; he 
 
 ^ Euripides, Hippolytus, 191; Gilbert Murray's translation. 
 
THE GREAT CENTURY OF GREECE 169 
 
 personalized his Pantheon and left it behind. He 
 did not listen to God as the Hebrew prophets did ; 
 he never had a " Thus saith the Lord," The ultimate 
 divine was too impersonal to speak ; it was not Lord ; 
 it was hardly interested in any man or in any thing. 
 But Law in one form or another the Greek discovered. 
 Law or Reason, or both, ruled Nature. Morality 
 was written in Nature, and the Stoic at last made the 
 centre of his teaching the Law of Nature. 
 
 Greek religion failed. Religion and philosophy 
 parted company. The Greeks looked outside them- 
 selves for religion, and one and another religion they 
 found, and intellectualized them, in turn. But great 
 as their influence has been they left the centre of 
 things vague and abstract, and the heart of man will 
 not have it so. 
 
 So far as we have reached, we have so much. Man 
 has an inward instinct, a drive within himself, to 
 unify his experience, to personalize God, to ask 
 morality of his God and to impose it upon himself, 
 and finally to demand of God the recognition of his 
 personality and of all that it implies. Greek and 
 Hebrew move toward the same goal, propelled by 
 the same impulses. The whole world, as Paul said, 
 groans together in travail. The cost is great, as 
 prophet and philosopher found ; but what is once 
 gained is never quite lost again. Slow and fluctuat- 
 ing, there is a progress in man's conceptions of God, 
 and mankind moves forward with a surer hope of 
 reaching Truth. 
 
VIII 
 
 PLATO 
 
 There is a certain audacity, not unlike the violence of 
 those who take the Kingdom of Heaven by force, an 
 audacity almost shameless, about a mere historian who 
 wiU endeavour out of the thoughts and the impulses 
 of a " myriad-minded man " like Plato to make a 
 single chapter in a story, of Progress in Religion. 
 Professed Platonists will count it irreverent ; they 
 will find the treatment inadequate ; and they may 
 not hold it a sufficient apology when the historian 
 pleads guilty to their charges. But Plato has been 
 the study of centuries, men have given their lives to 
 him, and it is not wanting in reverence to use their 
 results, their judgments and conclusions. And there 
 are other lines of defence. Plato was not the writer 
 of a coterie ; he took pains to write in such a way as 
 to charm his readers, and, when he has captured them, 
 to put forward certain lines of thought with such 
 clearness and power that his readers cannot miss them, 
 and with such life that he starts trains of reflection 
 in their minds, which work on independently of books. 
 The Greek world lost the manuscripts of Heraclitus ; 
 it nearly lost Aristotle's ; but it kept Plato, read him, 
 submitted to him, and transmuted him into Greek 
 life, and thence into much else. Like St Paul, Plato 
 was a mind irreducible to a system, too progressive 
 through eighty years to be harmonized with itself 
 by smaller minds. Indeed with such men it is common 
 to find that they hardly attempt this task themselves ; 
 they are more keen to discover and to assimilate truth, 
 reality, nature, than to reconcile their own views past 
 
 170 
 
PLATO 17J 
 
 and present. The endeavour is always there to make 
 unity of all they find ; the conviction remains that 
 all reality is in unity with itself ; but they outgrow 
 and discard their own thoughts and move onward. 
 It is this habit of mind that above all gives them their 
 influence and makes it wide-reaching. For, like St 
 Augustine, Plato is the father of many schools ; the 
 mystics of antiquity, of the Middle Ages and of the 
 Renaissance, found their stimulus and their exemplar 
 in him, while he gave mankind the real impetus to 
 overcome or to correct mysticism in his insistence on 
 the rational basis and inter-relation of all that is, and 
 on its intelligibility to the human mind. 
 
 It is not necessary to tell at length the story of his 
 life or to attempt to date his works ; but certain 
 outstanding factors may be noted in passing. He 
 was the child of the great period of Athens and of 
 Greece ; and like other children of genius he criticized 
 home arid parents as genius only can. To get his 
 point of departure we must recall the grandeur of that 
 fifth century — its sense of power in every sphere that 
 appeals to the human mind. The Greek had con- 
 quered sea and sky, navigation, astronomy, geography ; 
 he had triumphed over the foreigner ; he had tasted 
 empire. He drank too deep of power, and his sense 
 of power led him away from reality ; and the reaction 
 against Greek and Athenian perversion of power and 
 truth is to be seen in Plato as well as in Euripides. 
 The most gifted community that the world had seen 
 or has yet seen gave the hemlock-cup to Socrates — 
 and this in its hour of sobriety and reformation, and 
 on the proposal, not of the wilder demagogues, but 
 of quite respectable citizens. Democracy had failed 
 under the test of the Peloponnesian war ; and here 
 was a worse failure. Again and again, as we have 
 seen, the forward steps in religious thought are taken 
 under the stress of social breakdown, of human failure 
 on a large scale. Plato's nature was not so easily 
 
172 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 satisfied as that of Anytos, who impeached Socrates ; 
 democracy, human nature, Greek achievement failed 
 to content him, and the old problems of God and 
 righteousness, of society and the soul, rose again. 
 
 This time they were handled by a man of genius 
 beyond comparison with anything that Greece had 
 seen. It was his ideal to be " spectator of all time 
 and all existence," ^ to understand, and to base him- 
 self on reason ; and, at the same time, in him, as 
 Dr Caird says, " the poet generally spoke before the 
 philosopher." ^ A Puritan with a sense of humour, 
 with an intense feeling for beauty, an inexorable 
 reasoner, a man of friendships, a human being sorely 
 tried by national and personal suffering and humilia- 
 tion, and a man of genius whose very mistakes are 
 more fertile than another man's escapes frora error — 
 he could leave nothing as he found it. He must 
 handle " the whole tragedy and comedy of life," ' 
 and what he made of it must change the thinking of 
 mankind. It was part of his contribution to human 
 progress that he knew when he had not completely 
 solved a problem. His myths have had an immense 
 influence ; to some they were revelation ; to others 
 they meant rather the holding of the door open, the 
 suggestion that Reason would at last discover what 
 Intuition divined. Euripides refused, or tried to 
 refuse. Intuition ; Plato used it, but he was as clear 
 as Euripides that, however akin to Reason, it is not 
 Reason. 
 
 So far, in following the movements of religious 
 thought, we have remarked from the first a pro- 
 gressively strong tendency to emphasize the unity 
 of experience, the unity of the universe, to bring, in 
 Plato's own phrase already quoted, all time and all 
 existence under one survey. That assumed, men go 
 
 ^ Republic, vi. 486 A. 
 
 * E. Caird, Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, i. p. 93. 
 
 ® Philebus, 50 B. : t^ tov /3iov ^v/jLTrdtrrj rpayifSCif Kal KtafM^iif,. 
 
PLATO 173 
 
 on to attribute personality and at last unity to the 
 god-head ; they bring God and man and the universe 
 under one law of righteousness, and they make more 
 and more of man's personality till finally they demand 
 for him a fuU and real immortality. When one 
 reflects upon these things, one is half tempted to think 
 them taken directly from Plato himself, so large a 
 place do they occupy in his thought. 
 
 In one memorable phrase after another Plato brings 
 out that the unity of all things is no accidental quality, 
 no mere fact, but the essence of their being. The 
 doctrine of ideas, of the spiritual counterpart, of 
 " the pattern in the heavens," brings the phenomenal 
 into closer relation with the real world than was ever 
 achieved before. When he relates all ideas to the idea 
 of good, he carries this essential unity of all things 
 further stiU. Man, he says, is " a heavenly plant, 
 not of the earth " ; ^ he too belongs to the realm of 
 the unseen and the eternal. " God," says Plato, 
 " made soul prior to body and older than it." ^ 
 World-soul and man's soul are all of God. " When 
 he framed the Universe, he set Reason in soul and 
 soul in body, in order that he might be the author 
 of a work that in its nature should be as beautiful 
 and good as possible." * That is how he looks at all 
 time and all existence, and the conception of the 
 unity of aU things glows with warmth and colour in 
 a new way. 
 
 A man's religious outlook, and not necessarily less 
 if he be a great man, is affected by the current 
 religious ideas of his day, whether Jtie sympathize 
 with them or be repelled by them. We have seen 
 already something of the various attitudes of ordinary 
 men and philosophers toward the gods. Socrates 
 was given the hemlock because he did not satisfy 
 an Athenian court that his teaching about the gods 
 was correct. They knew that many of the philosophic 
 
 ^ Timaeus, 90 A. ^ Timaeus, 34 C, ^ Timaeus, 30. 
 
174 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 teachers, if not downright atheists, were what we 
 now call agnostic — that was avowedly the position 
 of Protagoras ; they suspected that Socrates had 
 gods of his own, not those of their city ; and they had 
 evidence of the most dreadful and unmistakable kind 
 that his piupils were enemies of god and man, were 
 men of corrupted mind and nature, whoever had 
 corrupted them. The Athenians were steadily loyal 
 to a traditional piety which bore nq relation, appar- 
 ently, to astronomical or other scientific discovery, 
 and still less to any morality of a progressive kind. 
 Homer was still learnt by heart,^ and many people 
 were in their religious thinking still at a pre-Homeric 
 point of view. The mysteries still gave men and 
 women what they supposed to be revelations of the 
 gods, and by exciting certain feelings inspired them 
 to believe that their immortal happiness was assured. 
 Orphic priests and others of their kind held more 
 private initiations and offered reconciliation with the 
 gods on lines independent of the intellect and of 
 morality, and on terms tainted with the sordid 
 suggestion of money profit. Not all Athenian religion 
 was of this rather primitive and emotional type. For 
 when Xenophon represents Socrates as believing in 
 constant and reliable relations between gods and men, 
 and as holding " that the gods know all things, what is 
 said, what is done, what is planned in silence, they are 
 everywhere present and give signs to men about all 
 the affairs of men," * as recommending Hesiod's 
 famous line : 
 
 Give all thou canst in sacrifice to heaven,* 
 
 it is clear that he is trying to show how closely in 
 line his great teacher had been with what the best 
 Athenians counted real religion. With all these 
 
 1 Xenophon, Symposium 3, 5-6. 2 Mem., i. i, 19. 
 
 2 Mem., i. 3, 2 ; Hesiod, IVorks and Days, 336. 
 
PLAT9 175 
 
 types, atheist and traditional, charlatan and genuine, 
 Plato was brought into contact, and sooner or later 
 into conflict. 
 
 When Plato wrote the Laws, he traced all unholy 
 acts and all lawless words to one or other of three 
 beliefs about the gods ; a man who acted or thought 
 amiss must have supposed one of three things — 
 either that the gods did not exist ; or, secondly, that 
 if they did exist, they took no care of man ; or, thirdly, 
 that they could easily be appeased by sacrifices, or 
 turned from their course by prayers.^ Perhaps even 
 more explicitly he said the same, in earlier days, in 
 the Republic : ^ " Still I hear a voice saying th^t the 
 gods cannot be deceived, neither can they be com- 
 pelled. But what if there are no gods ? or suppose 
 them to have no care of human things — ^why in either 
 case should we mind about concealment ? And even 
 if there are gods, and they do care about us, yet we 
 know of them only from tradition and the genealogies 
 of the poets ; and these are the very persons who 
 say that they may be influenced and turned by 
 ' sacrifices and soothing entreaties and by offerings.' * 
 Let us be consistent, then, and believe both or neither. 
 If the poets speak truly, why, then, we had better be 
 unjust, and offer of the fruits of injustice ; for if we 
 are just, although we may escape the vengeance of 
 heaven, we shall lose the gains of injustice ; but if 
 we are unjust we shall keep the gains, and by our 
 sinning and praying and praying and sinning the 
 gods wiU be propitiated, and we shall not be punished. 
 ' But there is a world below in which either we or 
 our posterity will suffer for our unjust deeds.' Yes, 
 my friend, that will be the reflection, but there are 
 mysteries and atoning deities, and these have great 
 power. That is what mighty cities declare ; and the 
 
 i Laws, X. 885. 2 Rep., ii. 365 D. 
 
 3 Referring to the passage quoted before in 364 D from I/iad, ix. 
 497-Soi. 
 
176 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 children of the gods, who were their poets and 
 prophets, bear a like testimony." 
 
 Thus the conception of God is not an abstract 
 thing, a question of the study ; it becomes the most 
 practical thing in the world, the centre of all life ; 
 and on it depend character, righteousness, and the 
 very existence of society. Accordingly nothing is 
 so relevant to the statesman or to anyone who has 
 the good of the state at heart as " the type of divine 
 tale " ^ commonly told to the young. " God," Plato 
 says, " must always be represented as he is, whatever 
 the sort of poetry we write, epic, hymn or tragedy." * 
 This was to introduce a new principle, at once into 
 theology and into education ; for, so far, speculation 
 and belief about the gods had not commonly been 
 considered in relation either to conduct or to the 
 training of the young. The orthodoxy of Aristo- 
 phanes, of popular legend, of the mysteries, was not 
 inconsistent with the ascription of the most disgusting 
 savagery and obscenity to the gods Heraclitus * had 
 made caustic comment on the combination of piety 
 and filth which still prevailed and was to prevail long 
 after Plato's days ; but Plato was more in the heart 
 of society than Heraclitus, he was less a critic from 
 without and more constructive in both instinct and 
 attitude. If the ideal life of men and women and 
 states is to be attained, the first thing is to " represent 
 God as he really is." 
 
 The very foundations of education were thus to be 
 changed. Plato left no shadow of doubt about his 
 meaning. Such tales as that of Hephaistos binding his 
 mother Hera, or that of Zeus sending him flying for 
 taking his mother's part when she was being beaten, and 
 all the battles of the gods in Homer would not be 
 admitted at all in an ideal state.* Nor must we listen 
 to Homer or any other poet who tells us that two 
 
 1 Rep., ii. 379 A. 2 ;j^^ ^ j; ^^^ a. 
 
 3 See chap, iv., p. 91. * Rep., ii. 378 D. 
 
PLATO 177 
 
 jars stand at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one 
 of good and one of evil, and that, drawing from these 
 as he will, Zeus is dispenser of good and evil to us ; 
 for God is not the author of evil at all.* Nor does 
 God prompt to lies or to strife ; nor, though Aeschylus 
 said it, does God plant guilt among men when he 
 desires utterly to destroy a house.^ Nor does God 
 change shape or take disguise, or indeed submit to 
 variation at all ; for God is no wizard, and God will 
 not lie ; * nay, God cannot lie : " the superhuman 
 and divine is absolutely incapable of falsehood ; God 
 is perfectly simple and true both in word and deed." * 
 This was to give the lie direct to that teaching of 
 Homer in which the majority of Plato's contem- 
 poraries still believed, and to all poets who modelled 
 themselves on Homer, There was " an ancient 
 quarrel between poetry and philosophy " ^ — there 
 always is — so, though " a certain friendship, a re- 
 verence, from the days of boyhood " checks Plato 
 when he would speak of Homer, he speaks none the 
 less ; and his conviction carries him further into a 
 condemnation of a great deal of poetry and a great 
 many poets. " We will fall down and worship him 
 [this genius in " imitation "] as a sweet and holy and 
 wonderful being ; but we must also inform him that 
 in our state such as he are not permitted to exist ; 
 the law will not allow them. And so when we have 
 anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool 
 upon his head, we shall send him away to another 
 city. For we mean to employ for our soul's health 
 the rougher and severer poet or story-teller only." ® 
 
 To this criticism of Homer there was already current 
 a type of reply which long survived. There were 
 hidden meanings in the great poet. Theagenes of 
 
 1 Rep., ii. 379 C, D, referring to IliaJ, xxiv. 527. 
 
 2 iJ<f/>., ii. 379 Ei; Aeschylus, /-d^ro. 160. 
 
 ^ Rep., ii. 381 E. < Rep., ii. 382 E. s Rep., x. 607 B, 
 
 * Rep., iii. 398 A. 
 
 M 
 
178 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Rhegium about 525 b.c. began the allegorical inter- 
 pretation of Homer ; Hera was the air, Aphrodite 
 was love ; moral and physical meanings intermingled 
 and confused the story .1 This was a game at which 
 everybody could play — and did play, more and more 
 as men grew progressively uneasy about the truth 
 and value of the traditions and legends inherited 
 from the ancient days ; and the method passed from 
 Greek students of Homer to Hebrew students of the 
 Old Testament and to the Christian church. It 
 flourishes independently in India to-day ; the legends 
 of the gods and their representations in art may strike 
 the uninitiated grossly, but they are renderings of 
 philosophic and mystical truth. And the same retort 
 avails, and admits of no reply. " Shimga goes bitt 
 its songs remain," is the Marathi proverb about the 
 festival of the god Kondoba ; mystical or not, the 
 songs are obscene and have their effect. " We must 
 not receive " the stories of Homer " into our state," 
 says Plato, " whether they are allegories or not alle- 
 gories." ^ A young man cannot judge what is 
 allegory and what is not ; and anything that he 
 receives into his mind at that age is hard to wash out, 
 and is unalterable. So it is the more important that 
 what they hear first should be stories of beauty that 
 direct the mind to " excellence." 
 
 Plato's thought centred upon God ; and he realized, 
 as any man will who is serious, how God outgoes our 
 best thoughts. In a long life of eighty years a mind 
 so active must have many conceptions of God ; and 
 it is possible to say that not so much any single con- 
 ception, or even an attempt to link and harmonize 
 as many as may be of those conceptions, is so significant 
 
 1 See Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, i. pp. 379, 574 ; C. H. Moore, 
 Religious Thought of the Greeks, p. 350. 
 
 2 Rep., 11.378 D, E. It seems that Plato's contemporary Metro- 
 dorus, a pupil of Anaxagoras, explained that Agamemnon was the 
 aether ; cf. Gomperz, op. cit. 
 
PLATO 179 
 
 as the fact that the man is in the great succession of 
 the " God-intoxicated," that he is always thinking of 
 God, that God is his centre, his atmosphere, his 
 universe. Commentators will of course vary, age 
 by age, in their interpretation of his ideas, as they 
 do in Paul's case ; all depends on what element in 
 the teacher's experience touches most closely ex- 
 perience of their own. It was Plato's belief, Professor 
 Burnet says,^ that no philosophical truth could be 
 communicated in writing at all ; it was only by some 
 sort of immediate contact that one soul could kindle 
 the flame in another. The novelist William de 
 Morgan put Plato's idea in the language of our day — 
 " the congenial soil in which the fruit of Intelligence 
 ripens is Suggestion, and the wireless telegraphs of 
 the mind are the means by which it rejoices to com- 
 municate." 2 A good deal depends on the " receiver " ; 
 if that instrument has defects — and most have — the 
 message will not be complete ; things will not be in 
 the same proportion as when transmitted. Plato and 
 Paul have " communicated " to all sorts of " receivers,'^ 
 and the emphasis has been found all over the message, 
 now here and now there. This clash of interpretation 
 is supremely of use ; it tells of the teacher's greatness 
 and variety, and it means quickening. " The Maker 
 and Father of this all," says Plato, " it is a hard task 
 to find ; and when a man has found him, it is impossible 
 to declare him to all men " ' — a significant confession 
 which the sympathetic Clement of Alexandria loved 
 to quote. 
 
 I do not propose to discuss in its variety and 
 profundity the teaching of Plato upon God ; but, by 
 recalling a few outstanding features of that teaching, 
 by quoting again a few well-known sayings, to try 
 to show how they bear on the line of inquiry which 
 
 1 Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Part I. p. i. 
 
 ^ William de Morgan, Somehoto Good, p. 331. 
 
 3 Timaeus, z8 C. 
 
i8o PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 we have been following. So far, we have seen Greek 
 gods achieve personality, at the cost of coming 
 under a law of righteousness which made them 
 progressively impossible ; and we have seen philoso- 
 phers speculating, with little thought of the divine 
 as men conceived it, as to what was the origin of 
 the universe, what underlies it, what it is. They 
 leaned a great deal to physical substance — " Water 
 is best," quotes Pindar — sometimes to what we 
 should call force, for " fire " is surely what our 
 physicists call " heat," though the conceptions are 
 not quite the same. Anaxagoras lifted the subject 
 to a higher plane when he said " Mind," and then 
 left it there, as Socrates complains, to decline to the 
 discussion of " air and aether and water and other 
 eccentricities." ^ 
 
 Now, whatever the commentators conclude to 
 have been the eventual relation of God and " the 
 idea of good," the very suggestion that there might 
 be any relation at all between them is an immense 
 step forward ; for it links God at once with all 
 existence and on its most spiritual side, and it gives 
 to the universe a moral unity and intelligibility, a 
 certain warmth too and value, which it had not had 
 before. Plato's contribution may be measured when 
 we compare his view with that of Diogenes of Apollonia 
 a generation or less earlier, that Air is the basis of all 
 and has intelligence and is good.^ At all events God 
 was not to be swamped in physical theory ; and here 
 it is well to recall that the Pantheism on which the 
 Stoics were continually falling back, in spite of splendid 
 maxims which seemed to imply the personality of 
 God, Plato counted as equivalent to atheism. God 
 is not a " form " but a soul, the self-moved mover 
 of the best motions.* We touch here the borders^ 
 of the most difficult of the problems of thought, 
 
 1 Plato, Phaedo, 97, 98. 2 gee p. 162. 
 
 * Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Part I. p. 337. 
 
PLATO i8i 
 
 questions hard enough for us still, that wake in our- 
 selves the cry of Plato that " it is hard to find God " ; 
 but enough is said, perhaps, to show how the whole 
 question has been moved forward by the long work 
 of Plato. 
 
 The ancients were divided as to whether the 
 Timaeus was to be reckoned with the myths of Plato, 
 or was to be taken literally, whether it represented 
 Plato's own doctrine or not. In any case it was a 
 fertile work. In it Plato explains why God made 
 (as we say) or took in hand the universe : " He was 
 good, and the good has never at any time a feeling 
 of jealousy towards anything, so he wished everything 
 to become as like himself as possible " (29 E). Three 
 points here may receive comment. Greeks believed 
 for ages that " the divine is envious," but Plato says 
 with emphasis here and elsewhere that " Envy stands 
 without the divine chorus." ^ Likeness to God is, 
 according to Plato, the end and object of creation, 
 and it is the aim of every man who sees aright to 
 become like God. Protagoras had taught that " man 
 was the measure of all," truth was what a man made 
 it, the individual was his own standard. With this 
 doctrine in his mind, Plato in the Laws (iv. 716 C) 
 says explicitly that " God would be the measure of all 
 things most really and far more than any man, as 
 the saying goes." God being the measure or the 
 standard, creation moves to his likeness, and man, 
 " heavenly plant and not of earth," finds his true 
 nature in " likeness to God." " He who would be 
 dear to God," Plato continues after his allusion to 
 Protagoras, " must, as far as possible, be like him and 
 such as he is. The man who rules himself is the 
 friend of God, for he is like him." " As far as 
 possible " — the phrase recurs, for Plato finds a re- 
 fractory element, an " errant cause " {irkavaiLivrj cdTia) 
 in the universe, which resists the efforts of God and 
 ^ Phaedrus, 247 A. 
 
1 82 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 man. Mind is confronted by Necessity, Nous by 
 Ananke ; " even gods cannot fight with necessity," 
 Simonides had once said (8, 20) ; and the word comes 
 again in Plato, hard to interpret exactly, but not far 
 from our experience. " Evils, Theodoras," says 
 Socrates in the Theaetetus {ij6 A), " can never quite 
 pass away ; of necessity there must be something 
 somehow antagonistic to good. Yet they have no 
 abode among the gods ; that cannot be ; but of 
 necessity they haunt mortal nature and this earthly 
 sphere. So we must endeavour to escape hence to 
 yonder with all speed. And our escape is to become 
 like God so far as we can, and to become like him is 
 to become righteous and holy, not without wisdom." 
 However, to return to the making of the world: 
 though God thought out creatures of air and sea and 
 land, he did not himself make them, but delegated 
 their creation to intermediate gods whom he had 
 made — ^gods, but neither immortal nor beyond dis- 
 solution altogether, yet exempt from dissolution and 
 death because they had in his will a bond mightier 
 and more sovereign. He would not himself create 
 the lower beings, for, if by his hands they were made 
 and from him received their life, they would be equal 
 to gods. So upon the gods, whom he addresses in 
 a strange phrase as " gods of gods," he lays the charge 
 of making the other beings, but he gives them an 
 element of soul that they may interweave mortal 
 with immortal.^ So came man, with being ; and his 
 ultimate Author, according to this myth, is at an 
 infinite distance in the heavens, out of contact with 
 the world of evil.^ These intermediate gods, some 
 of them stars,^ whatever be the measure of stress that 
 Plato meant to lay upon them, were disastrous in the 
 later development of religion. A later age hardens 
 
 1 Timaeus, 41 A-D. 
 
 * Adam, Religious Teachers of Greece, p. 372. 
 
 3 Cf. C. C. J. Webb, Studies, p. 125. 
 
PLATO 183 
 
 the suggestions of genius into authority and makes 
 dogma out of the phrase, the playful word, the myth 
 that carries no such weight for the man who made it. 
 Plato was not a Thomas Aquinas, at the end of an 
 age developing and bringing to full expression con- 
 ceptions exhausted, and destined soon to be thrown 
 aside. He was a pioneer, a radical, a reformer. With 
 his conception of righteousness as progressive likeness 
 to God he could have nothing but contempt for 
 " the noble Hesiod " ^ and his prudential virtues — 
 the good peasant's faith that piety makes the crop 
 heavier and the fleece thicker. " Still gayer (vea- 
 vLKcoTepa) are the blessings that Musaeus and his son 
 Eumolpus give the righteous at the hand of the gods ; 
 they take them down into the world below, in their 
 story, and make them lie on couches, a banquet of the 
 holy, and picture them garlanded, passing their whole 
 time drunk ; their idea seems to be that the fairest 
 reward of virtue is immortal drunkenness. This is 
 the style in which they praise justice." ^ This was 
 not excessive parody, it rested on evi^nce ; and it 
 shows how far removed from common belief was 
 Plato's conception of the real nature of righteousness 
 and its real significance. People praised not " right- 
 eousness itself " ^ but the advantages that accrue from 
 an established reputation for righteousness ; and one 
 great problem of the Republic is to show that right- 
 eousness or justice, even if stripped of every advantage 
 and associated with all the penalties of unsuccessful 
 unrighteousness, is none the less worth while. If 
 we define it as likeness to God, and conceive of God 
 and the universe as Plato did, then Hesiod and Musaeus 
 and the moralists of the market-place are talking of 
 what they do not understand and with the irrelevance 
 of fundamental ignorance. 
 
 With their notions of divine reward and punishment, 
 
 * Re/>., ii, 363 B ; Hesiod, Works and Days, 230. 
 
 2 Rep.,'<\. 363 C. 3 Rep.,n. 361 C. 
 
1 84 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Plato swept away as indignantly their conceptions of 
 relation with God. If God is without envy, these 
 teachers, one would presume, would conclude with 
 the modern animist that it is waste of time to con- 
 ciliate him ; a good God does not come into practical 
 politics ; it is gods who are envious and evil who hold 
 the central place in every-day religion — so much is 
 evident to the prudent. But the idea that gods can 
 be bought to frustrate justice, can be influenced by 
 entreaties and by gifts, though Homer be quoted in 
 its support, is blasphemous. Mendicant prophets 
 may go to the rich men's doors and persuade them 
 that they have . a power committed to them by the 
 gods of making atonement for a man's own sins or his 
 ancestor's sins by sacrifices or charms, and to heal 
 them in a course of pleasures and feasts ; they may 
 quote the books of Musaeus and Orpheus ; ^ but it is 
 all immoral, irreligious, and a negation of the real 
 truth about God and righteousness. It is not on 
 such lines that access wUl be found to a good God 
 whose chief concern is to have his creatures good and 
 like himself to the uttermost. Escape from the body 
 (soma), the " tomb " (sema) of the immortal soul, is 
 the real way to God ; and Plato leans unmistakably 
 to what later days called asceticism and commended 
 as the one path that can take men out of the sensuous 
 and the material ; he too urges " withdrawing from 
 the body so far as the conditions of life allow," " dis- 
 honouring," mortifying It, and " making life one long 
 study for death." ^ 
 
 If Plato dismisses the whole apparatus, intellectual 
 and mechanical, of sacrifice, he must find some other 
 means of contact or relation between the human soul 
 and God. For, as we have seen, the development 
 of experience had been calling for it, and the strength 
 
 1 Re/>., n. 364 B, E. 
 
 2 Cf. R. W. Livingstone, Greek Genius, p. 191 ; Phaedo, 65-7; 
 Phaedrus, 250 ; Rep., 61 1. 
 
PLATO 1 8s 
 
 of the mystery-cults and the less regular initiations 
 lay in their promise of eflFecting it. Plato finds the 
 secret of this contact with heaven in the very nature 
 of the soul itself. When the great God set the gods 
 of his creation to create in turn the rest of beings, he 
 himself gave them, as we saw, the element of soul that 
 they might interweave immortal with mortal. So 
 Plato puts it in the form of myth ; but, whatever 
 suggestion of " non-demonstration " (to use the word 
 of Euripides) recourse to myth may carry, it was the 
 fixed and reasoned belief of Plato that the soul is of 
 divine origin despite its earthly wrappings. Here 
 as elsewhere he comes near the Orphic position, and 
 his language has, or seems to have, echoes of Orphic 
 phrase ; but his contempt for Orphic priests and 
 teachers, and his insistence on reason, make it clear 
 that he must have another and very different basis 
 from that of Orphic religion. Had not Socrates 
 suggested that virtue, if it does not understand itself, 
 is no better than vice ? A religious conviction must 
 rest on some less sandy foundation than feeling. 
 Right opinion, he says in the Meno (98 A), Is like the 
 miraculous images of Daedalus, apt to run away unless 
 fastened down ; and the fastening is the " considera- 
 tion of the cause," and this gives it " the nature 
 of knowledge," and with it security. If, for the 
 moment, he is dealing with " recollection " as " the 
 tie of the cause," he means more. Recollection points 
 to something larger and of greater scope ; it is a phase 
 of the soul's activity, which follows from its nature ; 
 and the whole must be understood, if the part is to 
 be intelligible ; the two go together. There must 
 be some fundamental kinship between the soul and the 
 nature of reality (whatever it prove to be), if there 
 is to be any knowledge that is more than fancy or 
 guessing. 
 
 In the Meno (81) Plato quotes certain wise men 
 and women, priests and priestesses and poets (like 
 
1 86 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Pindar and other inspired men), for the " true and 
 splendid " belief that the soul of man is immortal and 
 at one time has an end, which is termed dying, and 
 at another time is born again, but is never destroyed. 
 To cite such authority is playful " irony " ; he means 
 to base the belief on something more, and what 
 immediately follows goes far beyond priest and 
 priestess, and if it rests on " inspiration," it is on 
 Plato's own inspiration. " The soul, as being im- 
 mortal, and having been born many times, and having 
 seen all things that are, whether in this world or in 
 the world below, has knowledge of them all ; and it 
 is no wonder that she should be able to call to re- 
 membrance all that she knows about virtue, for, since 
 aU nature is akin and the soul has learned all things, 
 there is no difficulty in eliciting, or, as men say, learn- 
 ing, all out of a single recollection, if a man is strenuous 
 and does not faint ; for all inquiry and all learning is 
 but recollection." 
 
 In the Phaedrus^ in the famous picture of the 
 qharioteer with the two horses, one noble and one 
 ignoble — a symbol of the soul, guided by reason and 
 drawn by spirit and passion ^ — Plato describes how 
 the immortal soul rises into the ideal world, there to 
 behold beauty, wisdpm, goodness and the other things 
 of God by which the soul is nourished, to behold 
 Zeus, lord of heaven, as he goes forth in his winged" 
 chariots and the array of gods and demi-gods and of 
 human souls in their train — glorious and blessed 
 sights in the interior of heaven, and he who will may 
 freely behold them ; for jealousy has no place in that 
 divine chorus. The gods can rise still higher, for the 
 horses in their chariots are all noble, and they behold 
 the world beyond — " of the heaven which is above 
 the heavens no earthly poet has sung or ever will sing 
 
 1 Jowett's words, in introduction and translation, are freely used 
 in what follows. 
 
 * Phaedrus, 253, 254. 
 
PLATO 187 
 
 in a worthy manner." That is the sphere of true 
 knowledge. The divine intelligence, and that of every 
 other soul rightly nourished, is fed upon mind and 
 pure knowledge ; and it is with joy that such souls 
 gaze on Being, that they feed on the sight of Truth, 
 and behold Justice, Temperance and Knowledge 
 absolute. So the gods live ; but with human souls 
 the sight of that world beyond is fugitive, the driving 
 of the steeds is hard ; but he who is most like God, 
 and best follows God, sees most. The vision passes, 
 but the memory of it abides ; and in this world the 
 sight of beauty recalls that ideal beauty which the 
 soul has seen on high ; this is love. " Love therefore 
 is the intermediary between God and man, the desire 
 of the beautiful which is also the good, an earnest of 
 the divine excellence which resides in heaven, simple 
 and unalloyed." ^ Perhaps for an English reader the 
 best rendering of Plato is to be found in Spenser's 
 Hymnes in Honour of Love and Beautie, and in their 
 sequels upon Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beautie. 
 So Plato 
 
 Buries us with a glory, young once more, 
 Pouring heaven into the shut house of earth. 
 
 The soul that is capable of such vision of God 
 is akin to God, must be, cannot but be ; and it is 
 susceptible of likeness to God if it keep the eyes open 
 for Truth. That is the real preparation for the world 
 beyond — the quest of Truth. For the world beyond 
 is real and earnest ; judgment and righteousness are 
 the foundation of all existence, and in all existence 
 there is nothing so real as soul, the gift of God from 
 his own nature. " Every soul is immortal." ^ 
 
 Such, in rough and stammering summary, is the 
 teaching of Plato. Argument and myth are inter- 
 
 1 R. W. Livingstone, Greek Genius, p. 185 ; quoting Phaedms, 
 247-251 on. 
 
 2 Phaedrus, 245. 
 
1 88 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 woven, as reason and intuition work together to point 
 the mind to truth. Reason is not intuition, nor is 
 myth argument, as Euripides saw ; and Plato was no 
 duller-witted than the great poet himself, but he 
 saw in intuition a promise which Euripides did not. 
 "We drift upon myths to no purpose," said the 
 poet.* " I dare say," we read in the Phaedo (85 C), 
 " that you, Socrates, feel as I do, how very hard or 
 almost impossible is the attainment of any certainty 
 about questions such as these in the present life. 
 And yet I should deem him a coward who did not 
 test what is said about them to the uttermost, or whose 
 heart failed him before he had examined them on 
 every side. For he should persevere until he has 
 attained one of two things : either he should discover 
 and learn the truth about them ; or, if this is impos- 
 sible, I would have him take the best and most 
 irrefragable of human words (Xoyot), and let this 
 be the raft upon which he sails through life — not 
 without risk, as I admit — -if he cannot find some word 
 of God which will more surely and safely carry him." 
 And in the moral law Plato found his raft. " Of all 
 that has been said " in the Gorgias, the dialogue 
 concludes (52) : " Nothing remains unshaken but the 
 saying that to do injustice is more to be avoided than 
 to suffer injustice, and that the reality and not the 
 appearance of virtue is to be followed above all 
 things ... for you will never come to any harm in 
 the practice of virtue, if you are a really good and true 
 man." As for the myths, " a man of sense wiU not 
 insist that these things are exactly as I have described 
 them. But I think he will believe that something 
 of the kind is true of the soul and her habitations." ^ 
 God, then, and the soul and righteousness are 
 the fixed points in religion, and in all time and all 
 existence they belong together and cannot be thought 
 of apart. This is the great contribution of Plato. 
 * Hitj>olytus, 197. » Phaedo, 114. 
 
PLATO 189 
 
 Greek thought had been moving tentatively to this 
 conclusion for centuries ; Plato gave it an immense 
 lift forward. That he did not solve all the questions, 
 a genius of such glory did not need to be told ; his 
 critics have never been his peers. He left gaps and 
 difficulties ; his star-gods made trouble ; he seemed 
 to fluctuate between God, gods and the vague 
 " divine," perhaps wavering less than the phrase of 
 the moment suggested to duller minds, perhaps still 
 hovering over a difficult question. But he became 
 the teacher of all the thoughtful, of all the religious. 
 They fell far below him ; but, till he became a canon 
 and a dogma, Plato was to every age of the Greek 
 world, and to all who have loved that world, though 
 born themselves 
 
 Beyond the sea, beyond Atlantic bounds,^ 
 
 an inspiration and a glory. " It is written in its 
 nature that the soul takes wings," said Longinus, " at 
 the very sight of the true sublime, and soars on high 
 with proud uprising, as full of joy and triumph as if 
 she had herself produced what she sees." ^ And that 
 has been the constant effect of Plato's teaching. 
 
 ^ Euripides, Hip/)o/ytus, 1053. 
 
 * Longinus, On the Sublime, vii. 2. 
 
IX 
 
 THE GREEK WORLD AFTER ALEXANDER 
 
 The age of Greece which Homer sums up is far 
 removed from that which reaches from Hera- 
 clitus to Pericles ; but hardly less is the difference in 
 character between Periclean Athens and the Hellenistic 
 cities of Antioch and Alexandria, Thought and 
 society react on each other. An age when social 
 landmarks are swept bodily away will, as we have seen, 
 show great changes in the ideas of men ; the funda- 
 mental preconceptions will be altered. Even a very 
 short experience of social chaos will shatter men's 
 best-established intellectual cosmos, and conversely a 
 new idea will revolutionize society. France took 
 seriously the idea of equality with liberty, and her 
 revolution was the precursor of a revolution still 
 greater, if less vividly dramatic, over the whole world. 
 The idea of the survival of the fittest, and the 
 philosophy moulded upon it, have already had 
 results, but the full outcome of them we cannot even 
 forecast. The sophistic movement in Greece is 
 beyond doubt connected with the Greek expansion 
 over the Mediterranean, and the development of the 
 Greek city, and above all of the Greek individual. 
 The age produced by such factors could not be like 
 that pictured by Homer, however strong the family 
 likeness. 
 
 It is a commonplace that, while Aristotle was 
 making his collection of the constitutions of the Greek 
 cities, Alexander, as much by his career as by any 
 action in particular, had relegated the cities and their 
 constitutions to the dead and irrecoverable past. 
 
 190 
 
GREEK WORLD AFTER ALEXANDER 191 
 
 Even with the European war fresh in our memories, 
 with the new Europe and its new nations before our 
 eyes, its new politics and principles, the League of 
 Nations and the direct action of labour upon the 
 state, it is hard for us to realize how completely a 
 short span of years may transform the world. Philip 
 of Macedon died in 338 b.c. ; it was to be expected 
 that his empire would fall to pieces, that the people 
 he had welded would break up into its original tribes, 
 that Macedon would be again in the welter of civil 
 war with no principle beyond the interest of this 
 pretender and that, that Greece would go on as before, 
 weakening herself as one city claimed and lost leader- 
 ship of the Greek world after another. " The thing 
 that hath been, it is that which shall be " (Eccles. i. 9). 
 But it was not to be. Fifteen years later Philip's 
 successor died — not in Greece, not in Macedon, but 
 in Babylon. The world he left was as little like the 
 world he found, as the nineteenth-century Europe 
 was like the fifteenth-century Europe. 
 
 Alexander had led his conquering Macedonians 
 to lands that lay almost beyond the knowledge of man. 
 Of Indians Greeks had long spoken, but not with much 
 very close knowledge. Herodotus tells us that early 
 morning is the hottest part of the day in India and 
 that the heat grows less towards noon.^ So the 
 historian had conjectured on the basis of his physical 
 theories scarcely more than a century before, but 
 Alexander's soldiers knew better when to look for the 
 cool of the day in the Panjab. Common men had 
 ranged outside the map, had seen things and been 
 in places which in the great days of Greece had been 
 almost mythical. The God Dionysus, legend said, 
 had conquered the world, but a later day modelled 
 his adventures on those of Alexander — a fact that may 
 
 '^ Herodotus, iii. 104 ; but see H. G. Rawlinson, Intercourse be- 
 tween India and the Western World, pp. 21-24, for the real knowledge 
 of India shown by Herodotus. 
 
192 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 serve as a sort of symbol for us.^ Alexander, then, 
 had given the world a new Geography, vastly larger 
 than it had had before, and based on knowledge ; for, 
 beside marching over strange lands himself, he had 
 sent his admirals to explore the rivers and the Southern 
 Sea ; * and he involved the whole ancient world in 
 new conceptions of godhead. Dioiiysus was not the 
 only god to feel his influence ; all of them felt it, as 
 all the human inhabitants of the world felt it. Life 
 in every aspect responded to the new knowledge and 
 the new conditions. 
 
 The great new idea of Alexander has been summed 
 up as " the marriage of Europe and Asia " — an epigram 
 and an ideal to which he gave symbolic form, in a 
 terribly concrete way, by marrying some thousands 
 of captive Oriental women to his Macedonians.' 
 What befel the victims of this experiment in idealism, 
 when the lord of the husbands died at Babylon, we 
 are not told. A prosaic mind might have prophesied 
 failure for that experiment and for the larger experi- 
 ment of uniting Asia and Europe in one kingdom 
 under one head. The kingdom endured for the last 
 two or three years of Alexander's reign, and then it 
 fell to pieces ; it too was a failure. It is the function 
 of prosaic minds to predict failure almost automatically. 
 But it is only the practical people who fail utterly j 
 if the first crude embodiments of the great ideas come 
 to nothing, the ideas do not perish. The long Persian 
 wars, the long intrigues of the Persian court with the 
 dominant cities of Greece — ^were they the real world, 
 or a hideous perversion of it ? Was the East East 
 and the West West ; were the twain never to meet f 
 Or was the world one, and humanity one — the bright 
 
 ^ Cf. story quoted but not believed by Arrlan, Anabasis, vi. 28, 
 about a triumph celebrated in Carmania by Alexander in the style 
 of Dionysus. See W. S. Ferguson, Hellenistic Athens, p. 1 2, n. 
 
 * See Arrian, Anabasis, vi. 18, 19, 20. 
 
 3 Arrian, Anabasis, vii. 4, 4-8. 
 
GREEK WORLD AFTER ALEXANDER 193 
 
 varieties of race and speech and religion all significant 
 of a higher life yet to be, all contributions to an ideal 
 mankind ? Once Greek travellers and thinkers had 
 unconsciously accepted the larger world ; Xenophanes 
 had corrected Colophon by North Africa, Herodotus 
 had drawn on Egyptians, Persians, and even Scythians 
 for ideas that would enrich Greece; Xenophon had 
 sketched the ideal ruler in the Persian Cyrus. But 
 the intrigues of peace perhaps had effected what open 
 war had not, or it may be that Greek culture grown 
 self-conscious was alone to blame ; Greece had com- 
 mitted herself to the view that the Greek is Nature's 
 aristocrat, the rest of men slaves by Nature's design 
 in many cases, and nowhere much better.^ It was 
 a shock to this frame of mind to see Macedon rise 
 swiftly in twenty years from being a welter of tribes 
 and cantons to be mistress of the Greek world. But 
 the shock was softened by the reflection that Mace- 
 donians were a sort of Greeks — not the best sort, but 
 poor relations, a cadet branch if not a shade illegiti- 
 mate, intellectually unequal, but Greek enough to 
 save the theory.^ The Persian nobles with whom 
 Alexander consorted, with whose daughters he and 
 his captains married, were not Greek at all and could 
 never be disguised as anything but what they were — 
 barbarians. 
 
 The great Empire broke up, but certain things 
 remained. The world had been one, actually and 
 politically, if only for a few years. That of itself 
 was a revelation, a stimulus to thought, a challenge, 
 a prophecy. The unwieldy unstable kingdoms that 
 succeeded the Empire, and their hideous wars — ^wars 
 vulgar for the want of any ground higher than mere 
 personal ambitions, and waged by troops with as little 
 principle as the kings to whom they were bound by 
 
 1 Aristotle, Politics, i. 6, p. 1255a. 
 
 * Cf. Herodotus, v. 22, on the claims of the earlier Alexander 
 and his family to be Greek. Demosthenes ranked them as barbarians. 
 
 N 
 
194 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 the cash nexus alone — there seemed to be little of the 
 ideal in these. Yet ideal there was, vulgarized for 
 the moment, but an echo of the great idealist himself, 
 and again a prophecy ; the unity of the world under- 
 lay all these confusions, and nerved the vulgar hope 
 of each mock Alexander.^ It was no longer in 
 Nature that East and West should be separate. Our 
 modern belief in the mailed fist, in efficiency and the 
 survival of the fittest, is not after all quite new. 
 Nature, as sophists and soldiers saw her then, " red 
 in tooth and claw," shouted aloud that the world 
 was one and awaited the Conqueror. " To the 
 strongest," murmured the dying Alexander,^ when 
 his guards asked what should be done with his empire. 
 Nature said the same, and offered the strongest One 
 World for his own. This drastic expression of the 
 unity of all existence was a lesson which humanity 
 could not fail to grasp,, however badly the dynasts 
 failed to achieve their purpose. 
 
 To pass from kings to commoners, lowlier men but 
 not more vulgar, the new era gave them a world with 
 barriers swept away. When the Roman Empire was 
 at last established after three centuries, men from 
 Plutarch to Claudian remarked with a wonder, which 
 perhaps surprised us in the days before the war with 
 its submarines and peace with its passports, that all 
 the lands and all the seas were open for every man. 
 Alexander was the great opener of the world, Greeks 
 from Antimenidas to Herodotus had travelled the 
 East and the West ; but in the track of Alexander's 
 battalions traders and settlers and would-be civil 
 servants followed in swarms to the new centres to 
 which trade was shifting. To be an exile was a tragic 
 thing in the old days, bitterest of experiences ; now 
 
 1 Compare what Polybius (v. 102) says of Philip V. of Macedon 
 in 2 1 7 B.C. : " a family which atove all families has somehow a tendency 
 to aim at universal monarchy" ; also v. 104. 
 
 2 Arrian, Anabasis, vii. 26, 3. 
 
GREEK WORLD AFTER ALEXANDER 195 
 
 it was preferable and natural. Then the Greek was 
 driven out of his city by violence ; now he chose to 
 go and live at Antioch or Babylon, and the little 
 provincial town among the hills could carry on its 
 high politics without him. The vulgar Greek had 
 found out what the kings had learnt, that all the 
 world was one. To trade or to fight or to administer 
 at the foreigner's expense, he left the homeland for 
 ever ; he was done with the parish, he chose the world. 
 
 The thoughtful element in Greece made the same 
 discovery. When it was suggested to Socrates that 
 he might break prison and live in Thessaly, " What 
 would one want to live in Thessaly for ? " ^ he asked, 
 and he might well ask. Isocrates, his younger con- 
 temporary, makes it abundantly clear, as do the lives 
 of the philosophers, that educated people preferred 
 one city to all others. Education and culture drew 
 men from their own lands to Athens, as art draws 
 English and Americans to Italy, to live there. 
 Gradually other centres sprang up which had similar 
 attractions. Alexandria was not the least like Athens, 
 as little like it as New York is like Oxford ; but, as in 
 our modern parallel, it was not hard to surmise that 
 a man of culture might prefer the larger place and 
 have reason, intelligible enough, for his choice. Or 
 if he did not care for Alexandria, there were Antioch, 
 Rhodes, and Pergamum, and further afield Seleucia 
 on the Euphrates. 
 
 The spread of Greeks all over the eastern Medi- 
 terranean and into the lands of Seleucus, to Babylonia 
 and to Bactria, produced many by-products. To-day 
 in India the Indian himself will wear European 
 boots and trousers and sun-helmet ; he will have a 
 European house in a hill-station ; he will send his 
 son to England to be educated ; he may remove to 
 England himself ; and all this despite barriers of 
 colour and creed that were non-existent in that ancient 
 1 Cf. Plato, Crito, 53, 54. 
 
196 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 world. It is not the product of government policy; 
 it is the result of contiguity, of intercourse. So in 
 that ancient world, men everywhere learnt Greek, 
 read Greek, talked Greek, and at last thought Greek. 
 The Hellenization of the world had begun. 
 
 The Greek spirit made its way into the strongholds 
 of what we may call the old world ; for the Greek 
 spirit is always new, the Greek " ever young, a child 
 in soul," as the old Egyptian in Plato's story said to 
 Solon. Barbarians, as Celsus conceded in his attack 
 on Christianity, are able to discover religious truth — 
 religious ideas, we might translate it, dogmata is his 
 word ; but to criticize and to establish what the 
 barbarians have discovered, to develop it and bring 
 it to bear on virtue (the Greek arete is hardly trans- 
 lateable in any of our modern barbarian tongues) — 
 the Greeks, he held, are better at that task.^ To 
 criticize, to compare, to judge — that is the Greek 
 gift ; the foreigner shall amass the evidence, the 
 Greek shall sum it up and give the verdict. All was 
 confusion, says the Greek philosopher speaking of the 
 universe, but Mind came and made a cosmos of it. 
 So the Greek was to do in the world of the mind ; 
 and men responded, obstinately and slowly, but under 
 the irresistible compulsion and charm of higher 
 thought. The dynasts made the world one ; they 
 abolished the old ways of life, city and king and cult ; 
 they opened new trade routes to bring the nations 
 together ; and the Greek came and made the whole 
 intellectually right, and therefore first tolerable and 
 then natural. The man who thought on Greek lines 
 had, more emphatically than the trader, emerged 
 from the parish ; he lived and thought, a citizen of 
 the world. The eyes of mankind were opened and 
 they had a new spiritual justification for the largest 
 life. The dialects recede in speech ; Attic becomes 
 the one language of letters, the language of govern- 
 
 ^ Celsus, quoted by Origen, adv. Celsum, i. 2. 
 
GREEK WORLD AFTER ALEXANDER 197 
 
 ment used hy the Macedonian kings, modified in- 
 evitably ; ^ and in the world of thought and spirit 
 it is the same ; the rustic is shed, the local discarded, 
 and men of all origins become mutually intelligible. 
 This is no slight thing ; it has invariably spiritual 
 consequences of the most momentous. The inter- 
 national exchange of writers and thinkers is one of 
 the greatest and most hopeful factors of the modern 
 world. This was one part of Hellenization. In the 
 ancient world it took another form. Men of every 
 race virtually became Greek ; they did their thinking 
 in Greek, and made their contributions in Greek. 
 The Greek language and literature became a sort of 
 clearing-house of ideas. Man became " cosmopolitan " 
 — the word was newly coined by Diogenes ^ — they 
 were citizens of the world ; and it has been shrewdly 
 noted that the world as a rule was as Greek as the 
 word.^ 
 
 It is never an easy thing to make out the pedigree 
 of an idea. The collection of literary parallels is a 
 beginner's game ; sometimes it tells us a little, but 
 as often nothing. Macrobius, or anybody else who 
 has scissors, can show us that Virgil read Homer, or 
 that Milton read Virgil, or both Euripides. But 
 quite as often, or more often, the great influences are 
 not to be catalogued in this simple way. No book 
 perhaps has had more influence on modern thinking 
 than Darwin's Origin of Species ; that influence is 
 not to be demonstrated like that of Homer upon 
 Virgil, but it is not the less real. If Zeno the Stoic 
 became a Greek, and one of the greatest forces in Greek 
 thought, his first lessons in thought were given him 
 by Phoenician mother or nurse ; and however efEective 
 a man's conversion or perversion in religion or race 
 
 ^ J. H. Moulton, Grammar of New Testament Greek, pp. 30 fF., on 
 the rise of the " Common Greek " as a by-product of Alexander's 
 achievement, in the great armies, and in the new cities. 
 
 ^ Cf. Diog. Laert., vi. 63. * Beloch, Gr. Gesch., III. i. p. 412. 
 
198 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 may be, it is never complete ; his sub-conscious mind 
 never loses its earliest acquisitions. The Semite 
 might be Hellenized and meet the Greek on equal 
 terms, but unconsciously his Greek friends would 
 absorb from him ideas not primarily Greek — not 
 inconsistent perhaps with their Greek training and 
 Greek ideas, but not of the original stock. Inter- 
 marriage invariably blends types of mind as it does 
 types of race ; he is a father of strong character whose 
 children are not more moulded by their mother. 
 Even foreign servants, as English parents in India 
 know, can do almost as much ; sometimes it might 
 be truer to say they do more. The Macedonians, 
 says Livy, degenerated into Syrians, Parthians, and 
 Egyptians.^ If men did not speak then as now of 
 Levantines, none the less Levantines there were. 
 There were half-castes long before Alexander's ex- 
 periment in international intermarriage. Anti- 
 sthenes the Cynic was said to be the son of a Thracian 
 woman — i.e. a foreigner and a slave-woman. Birth, 
 adoption, migration, reading, and, as ever, talk, were 
 factors making for a new world. These are forces 
 ever with us. 
 
 But in that world more than these permanent and 
 natural factors were at work. The kings were Greek, 
 or sufficiently Greek to be conscious that they must 
 be quite Greek, must make good any gaps in their 
 qualifications. The simplest way was to emphasize 
 Greek culture ; to be missionaries of Hellenism. 
 Ptolemy Soter founded the Museum in Alexandria, 
 a library, a place of study, a University — if the word 
 may shed enough of its Latin origin to suggest studies 
 and students with a minimum of organization, learn- 
 ing without examinations and degrees, but not without 
 disorder and other diversions — 
 
 The due vicissitudes of rest and toil. 
 
 ^ Livy, xxxviii. 17. 
 
GREEK WORLD AFTER ALEXANDER 199 
 
 The example was, more or less, followed by the 
 Seleucids at Antioch and by the Attalids at Pergamum 
 — by both with very conspicuous results. Schools 
 sprang up or were founded elsewhere ; sophists or 
 lecturers travelled everywhere, and taught and lec- 
 tured as they went. Books were cheaper ^ and were 
 multiplied. Politics there were none, and patriotism 
 was difficult ; to what could a man be loyal ? The last 
 of the Attalids bequeathed his kingdom to Rome, 
 probably the best thing for the kingdom in such 
 times, a kingdom without race or nationality, with- 
 out a past, and without self-government. Men who 
 wished to live were driven to thought or to art. 
 
 For thought the world was in many ways better 
 equipped than ever before. Men had not indeed the 
 political sense, which only personal experience of 
 politics can give ; but the training of the old days 
 was not all lost. To it was added the consciousness 
 of a larger world, of a great expansion of experience, 
 of the value of the contributions of other races and 
 other times. There was Geography, there was natural 
 science, there was the great brotherhood of the human 
 race, never so fully realized, so painfully or so gladly. 
 Above all, everything was reduced at last to a common 
 denominator, if we may so put it ; it was possible to 
 compare things at last, which could not before have 
 been brought together. And the man who was to 
 do the thinking had a new standpoint. Athens would 
 have none of Anaxagoras ; it gave Socrates the hem- 
 lock ; that was how the most cultivated and developed 
 community of antiquity stood towards the philo- 
 sopher's position, how it regarded " the contemplation 
 of all time and all existence." By now all that was 
 gone ; the thinker was set free — free as the mercenary 
 soldier to voyage where he would, and battle as he 
 pleased, in the realms of thought ; and the religious 
 
 ^ Cheap, and inaccurately transcribed ; cf. Strabo, xiii. i, 54, 
 p. 609. 
 
200 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 was as free. It was no matter of choice ; the freedom 
 was forced on men by the kings who blotted out the 
 past and made nothing of frontiers old or new. The 
 very chaos of .the world and of Society made recon- 
 striiction easier and more inevitable. The comfortable 
 systems were gone, so far as they had ever existed. 
 The thinker had to start again, with a new freedom 
 and a wealth of material that might be stimulating 
 or might paralyze. 
 
 He must start as an individual face to face with 
 the universe ; and there lies the key to most of the 
 thought of the period. The universe is the most 
 splendid of societies, but compared with Athens or 
 even with Phlius it is a dull club ; it is impossible to 
 know the members, and there is no blackballing ; it 
 is like a university without colleges. The best a man 
 could do was to pick up with whom he could, as one 
 does on ship-board ; and, as on ship-board, the 
 antipathies are dulled. You sit next a foreigner, but 
 it is not for long, and by and by the courtesies of the 
 table open your minds ; so in that world there was 
 no longer any sense in race-feuds, and very little in 
 any feuds at all. If the ties that bound a man to his 
 neighbours were all loosed, the barriers that kept 
 him from his enemies were broken. Theban, Athenian, 
 and Corinthian, how they had warred in the 
 past ! ^ Now they lived in the same king's camp as 
 their grandfathers had in Xenophon's in perhaps the 
 same regions ; they traded on the same quays in 
 the Nile or the Euphrates ; and among barbarians 
 the old stories grew dim and the race-hatreds with 
 them. Courtesy, kindness, the good turn received 
 and repaid — they were nothing, the mere decencies 
 of ship-board ; but, being nothing, they came to be 
 something — the expression, half conscious, of a new 
 sense of common humanity. So the solitary thinker 
 brought to his task of the reconstruction of the uni- 
 1 Cf. p 251. 
 
GREEK WORLD AFTER ALEXANDER 201 
 
 verse an unconsidered equipment of new human 
 feelings, the more potent for being half-conscious, 
 natural, and not based on a view of life or a philo- 
 sophy ; and in time they passed into his philosophy 
 and contributed to it more than might have been 
 expected. It was easier for the Stoic to reach and to 
 teach his dogma of our common humanity, when he 
 and we had fallen into the way of recognizing it by 
 instinct, without the horrible disturbance that the 
 old hatreds of neighbour cities had once made. 
 
 There, then, is the new world, larger, vaster, stranger 
 than the old ; traditions broken, the future uncertain ; 
 but the human soul as ever gaining something out of 
 loss, finding freedom and friendship in chaos, and 
 bravely setting about a permanent home for itself 
 where all was fugitive. For those whose theme is 
 progress in religion, there could hardly be a more 
 promising field. It is when an old world breaks up 
 past repair, that it is possible for new truth to inspire 
 souls set free to divine a new cosmos and a larger God 
 behind it. 
 
 The re-thinking of God in the age after Alexander 
 was, as it always is, conditioned by the dominant 
 thoughts and experiences of the time. The move- 
 ment of thought, when it does move, has always been 
 towards unity and personality in God, to a heightening 
 of the emphasis on man's personality, to a demand 
 for justice in the relations of God and man, for 
 righteousness in the Universe. Greek thought in 
 the great old days had been more apt to recognize 
 the unity than the personality of God. The Greek 
 had been conscious of law and of mind in the universe, 
 and polytheism was already some generations before 
 Alexander losing its hold upon thinkers ; though 
 there were still now and then reminders that Athens 
 had its national gods and counted it important that 
 the education of youth should include them, that 
 people perhaps still believed that those gods made. 
 
202 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 national prosperity depend upon national piety. But 
 Alexander, it would seem, had declared to all men 
 that the local gods of Athens were politically negligible. 
 Not that he said so, or even thought so, any more 
 than Athens perhaps had felt about the gods of Melos 
 eighty years before ; but his career gave men new 
 conceptions of the physical world and new know- 
 ledge of the ideas of other men, and the result was 
 a decline of interest in the gods of the city state. 
 
 Men would seem to have reflected that these gods 
 had never been of much account outside their little 
 frontiers, and the world was very wide indeed, very 
 much larger than one could associate with those 
 gods. If one can imagine how an English villager, 
 who migrated to the New World and became a 
 millionaire, might feel toward the squire and parson 
 of the parish where he grew up, the analogy may help 
 us. There the squire is with his old acres, the parson 
 with his little school, laying down the law and receiv- 
 ing local homage as of old; the returning emigrant 
 may find them absurd or pleasant as may be, but he 
 will certainly feel them to be narrow and trivial in 
 outlook and sympathy, unrelated with the new large 
 world he knows, and unintelligent of his own experi- 
 ence — his inferiors, in short, unless they have special 
 grace. This special grace the old gods of the city 
 state had not. Their statues had it, because a sculptor 
 of note made them — " a sculptor who," the returning 
 soldier of fortune reflected, " will make my statue 
 one of these days," and who probably did it better, 
 finding portraiture more congenial than creation. 
 
 What made the gods more absurd was the practice 
 that flourished in the third century and onward, of 
 deifying adventurer princes — ^Demetrius is the great 
 classical example, a god of very present help in trouble, 
 as the famous Athenian hymn ^ said about him, 
 bluntly adding that the other gods were of little use ; 
 ^ Quoted in Athenaeus, vi. p. 253. 
 
GREEK WORLD AFTER ALEXANDER 203 
 
 they either did not exist or did not attend to men ; 
 Demetrius was not stone nor wood, but real. There 
 are more points of view than one from which these 
 deifications may be considered ; there is a philosophic 
 defence of them which we shall have to consider later 
 on ; but to any one who knew Demetrius personally 
 the hymn and the consecration made both the 
 Athenians and their gods absurd. None the less, 
 like the squire in the parish, the local gods maintained 
 themselves in their own homes, as is proved by 
 coinage and dedication. 
 
 The real gods must in any case be beings more 
 really related to the world men know ; a god like 
 the squire of the old village does not fit with the new 
 world that Alexander rules. Alexander is better, or 
 even Demetrius, as the Athenians said. But Deme- 
 trius would not do. The real gods must have range 
 of mind, and actual power, beyond even Alexander's. 
 And gods, or more often goddesses, were found, as 
 we shall see, whose sway outran and outlasted the 
 great king's — ^gods of life and death, goddesses of birth 
 and re-birth, of this world and the world beyond. 
 
 Simultaneously, another disaster befel the old gods ; 
 the deification of army leaders inspired the suggestion 
 that they too like Demetrius had originally been men 
 and women. Euhemerism discredited the old gods ; 
 but it did not touch the deities who -give life and who 
 rule death, and the sole defence for the old gods 
 became the plea that they are subordinates of these 
 greater gods, or, better still, that perhaps they are 
 the greater gods, named or mis-named in each 
 locality. They began gradually to lose their per- 
 sonality as the many Zeus-es of the days before Homer 
 became fused, as we saw, in the Homeric father of 
 gods and men. 
 
 The new gods, however gracefully accommodated 
 in the Greek pantheon, were patently of foreign 
 origin. It could never be obscured that Isis belonged 
 
204 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 to Egypt and Cybele to Phrygia. But somehow they 
 had the power, that Greek gods and goddesses lacked, 
 of extending their frontiers with a sweep like Alex- 
 ander's. If the gods of the Greeks imposed their 
 names on those of the Romans, it was for literary 
 purposes chiefly ; but with Isis and Cybele it was 
 quite different. They gradually captured the world 
 and held it long. The barbarians, it would appear, 
 really were better at discovering religious beliefs, at 
 discovering gods. But the Greeks brought their 
 minds to bear on the gods and goddesses so discovered, 
 and gave a rather different explanation of them. 
 They became functions of something else, more 
 divine or less divine as one chose to regard it, but 
 probably less personal if more powerful. But what 
 it was, was a problem not easily solved. 
 
 There were two sets of phenomena to explain, 
 even if one did combine them and call the compound, 
 the totality of all experience, the underlying reality. 
 Nature. The word was by now an old one, long used 
 by the Sophists, and to be used again and with more 
 grandeur by the Stoics. But the explanation men 
 give of gods and laws and experience often needs 
 itself to be explained ; and how was one to reconcile 
 the facts of Law and the facts of Lawlessness ? The 
 beautiful cantos of Spenser's incomplete seventh book 
 of the Faerie Queene remind us of the difficulty of 
 Mutabilitie in a Universe of Law. Let us look at 
 what the citizen of the world found. 
 
 He found, as his great-grandfather had found, a 
 world ruled by law — ^generation, growth and death, 
 controlled by laws whose action could be observed, 
 even if their causes were hard to divine. Summer 
 and winter, seedtime and harvest — all seemed fixed 
 by law. We know the effect of scientific research 
 and scientific theory in the nineteenth century, and 
 we can appreciate that Reign of Law (I borrow the 
 phrase from the title of a book now forgotten) which 
 
GREEK WORLD AFTER ALEXANDER 205 
 
 the ancients observed, not indeed over so wide a 
 sphere as our fathers, but over one wide enough to 
 stimulate thought and to suggest tempting generaliza- 
 tions. But what has happened in our own day befel 
 also in the era of the Macedonian kings. What Bio- 
 logy has done of late years. Astronomy did then ; it 
 gave a heightening to the idea of Law, and weight to 
 the conception of the unity of the universe. Whether 
 the stars, as some people began to say under Eastern 
 influence, were gods, or were brute matter controlled 
 by Necessity, that vague term which served Greece 
 for our Natural Law — ^was it not possible in a world, 
 which certainly appeared to be one, which might, 
 not inconceivably, be a living being itself, that the 
 various parts of that world were members one of 
 another, that not merely crops and blights, and 
 possibly the tides of those larger seas about the world's 
 outer edges, were ruled and given their seasons by 
 the heavenly bodies, but that the lives and destinies 
 of men also were controlled and shaped by those 
 " bright rulers, gleaming in aether, bringers of summer 
 and winter to men " ? ^ After aU that the philo- 
 sophers had said of Mind in man, it was clear there 
 was Mind of some sort beyond him ; was his mind, 
 was he, independent of the greater Mind ? Was 
 that thinkable ? So the steps were taken that led 
 men to the conception of Fate — HeimarmSne, that 
 absolute inevitable control of all things by the power 
 that wheels the stars, we should say and expect them 
 to say, but many of them said " by the stars " and 
 left it there. The emphasis on the unity of the 
 universe can hardly go much further. 
 
 But there were other phenomena which it was 
 hard to reduce to law, hard to make intelligible to 
 reason at all, hard to find any sense in whatever. To 
 many the collapse of the old order was a mystery with 
 no solution, beyond solution, and it had all turned 
 
 ^ Aeschylus, Agam. 5, 6. 
 
2o6 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 on the accident of Philip having a son of genius, or 
 (a more desperate thought) on the accident of 
 Alexander having an incredible run of luck. Four 
 hundred years later Greece was still capable of debat- 
 ing whether Alexander owed his greatness to genius 
 {arett) or to luck. In 312 b.c. Seleucus was a beggar 
 at the court of Ptolemy ; next year he was King of 
 the East. Thirty years later he defeated Ptolemy 
 Ceraunus in battle, took him prisoner, forgave him 
 for his father's sake, and was murdered by him. " The 
 Queen died on Sunday. What a world is this, and 
 how does fortune banter us ! " ^ The ejaculation of 
 the English eighteenth century gives the only clue 
 that some could find to the history of Alexander's 
 successors and their sons. Luck made a man king, 
 luck saved a crown, luck established a dynasty; and 
 luck became a candidate for the throne of the Universe. 
 Tyche was no new word in Greece, but now it gained 
 new significance ; Tyche ruled the world, prince and 
 beggar.^ Men lost faith in order ; things happened, 
 whatever a man might plan, however he might work ; 
 virtue, vice, wisdom, folly were irrelevant ; all was freak 
 and whim, or if that imply some sort of personality 
 behind phenomena, all was pure fluke, like the falling 
 of dice. As Menander said, fluke was God : — 
 
 TavTOfiarov ecrriv ws eoiKe ttov 0eo?. 
 
 1 Bolingbroke to Swift. 
 
 2 Cf. the story which Polybius (viii. 22) tells of the tears of 
 Antiochus when Archaeus was brought before him in chains and 
 he saw rh SvcnpvXaKTOV kcu trapaXoyov rZv ck tijs ti^X'^s 
 a-vfi^aivQVTdiv ; cf. Bevan, House of Seleucus, ii. pp. 5-13. See 
 also the comment of Demetrius of Phalerum (Polybius, xxix. 21) 
 on fortune's freaks in fifty years, the fall of the Persians, the rise 
 of the Macedonians, and Fortune still uncertain what to do with 
 them. One may recall the lines quoted, it is said, by Brutus before 
 he killed himself at Philippi {Dio Cassius, xlvii. 49) : 
 
 3 tX^juov aperq, Xoyoi ap ^crd', iyio 8e ere 
 ws epyov 7]<rKovv ■ <tv S' ap iSavkeves ''^XV- 
 
GREEK WORLD AFTER ALEXANDER 207 
 
 If the stars are ruled by Law, and all human affairs 
 by Chance, what can be made of life ? The riddle 
 was insoluble, and the only outcome of attempting 
 to solve it was despair. There was a painter, says 
 Sextus Empiricus,^ who tried again and again to paint 
 the foam on a horse's mouth ; he lost his temper at 
 last, and in anger threw his sponge at his picture ; 
 the sponge hit the mouth of the horse, and produced 
 the foam that skUl could not achieve ; so with the 
 thinker — ^he thought hard, wrestled with the problem 
 in vain, and then he too (as we say) threw up the sponge, 
 and found peace in so doing. So came the Sceptic. 
 
 But scepticism is not a working basis of life ; a man 
 cannot maintain a family on scepticism. Faith and 
 hope are the foundations of the family, and they are 
 laid by love, unconscious of its great spiritual venture 
 in laying them. Men felt there must be some reality 
 somewhere, or something that would serve for reahty ; 
 but everything broke down that a man touched ; 
 thought failed to solve the problem of man's life and 
 the problem of the universe ; righteousness did not 
 achieve reward in comfort or in happiness; trade 
 and business were wrecked at any moment by the 
 meaningless war of some foolish greedy despot ; the 
 human mind was reduced to desperation. There 
 were the children ; what was to become of them ? 
 If the physician could not hit the cure for their 
 ailments, perhaps the quack could ; or the old bar- 
 barian nurse who loved them might remember some- 
 thing her people far away had practised. If the gods 
 of Greece had collapsed, if the philosophers were 
 reduced to throwing up the sponge — ^well, in this 
 world, where we are learning that there are other 
 people besides the Greeks, perhaps some of the bar- 
 barians know of gods or daemons, something or other 
 effectual, that, if not final, will tide us over the 
 interim. The interim was the urgent problem ; 
 ^ Sextus Empiricus, adv. Mathematkos, i. 25-30. 
 
2o8 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 the mysteries of the universe and their eventual 
 solution could wait. Isis and Cybele may be eventually 
 as fugitive as Alexander or Demetrius, things of a 
 longer day, but ephemeral too ; well, our day is 
 shorter, and they may avail to help us and our children. 
 
 Melancholy and depressing as is this all-round despair, 
 there is in it still a heightening of love, a keener sense 
 of individual needs. The state was gone, the race 
 was going ; Alexander had swept the state away, 
 the races were being merged in one another, for if 
 he too was gone, his work went on — still the family 
 remained, and the ego found a new interest in it, 
 where it could face the venture. There were indeed 
 many who would not take the risk; the philosophers 
 generally did without children, and common people 
 of means began to limit their numbers ; and race- 
 suicide did not go unrecognized.^ Still, where men 
 dared to live, where the venture of the family was 
 made, some attempt must be made for what Plato 
 called a " raft " to take men over the sea of life. 
 Gods of some sort seemed the obvious solution ; and 
 if philosophy will not support us in our new alliances, 
 well, philosophy has nothing to offer us, and facts of 
 a sort, facts however temporary, " rafts " however 
 precarious, are better than instant drowning. 
 
 To sum up, the new age found the problem of God 
 immensely hard. All the facts of experience pointed 
 to the unity of the universe ; that received more and 
 more emphasis. But Law and Chance disputed the 
 throne, both impersonal in themselves, both enemies 
 of human personality. Once more pain and bereave- 
 ment were emphasizing personality. The world 
 baulked it and mocked it, and men began to look 
 beyond the world for righteousness. There could 
 be no restoration of nerve till mankind was off the 
 waters of uncertainty, free of the quicksands, the 
 rocks, the incalculable tempests. The problem was 
 ^ See p. 253. 
 
GREEK WORLD AFTER ALEXANDER 209 
 
 certainty. Men craved, as ever, a divine personality ; 
 they felt that their own personality was real, or ought 
 to be real ; they demanded fair play of the universe. 
 So much emerges from the actions and reactions of 
 thought and religion and scepticism in this strange 
 period. To trace more fuUy some of these move- 
 ments as they illustrate our subject of Progress in 
 Religion is the task before us. 
 
X 
 
 THE STOICS 
 
 It has been remarked that none of the great Stoics 
 was a native of Greece proper. Zeno was a Semite 
 — " with no Greek charm about him," it has been 
 added, and unable to write Attic Greek.^ Stoicism, 
 to look Westward, was of all Greek philosophies that 
 which most appealed to the more serious Roman 
 mind. But, whatever its antecedents and whoever 
 its followers, it was intensely Greek. The East, the 
 West, and the influence of Greek — ^it sums up the 
 new world in which Stoicism grew ; and in many 
 other ways Stoicism shows in its very texture the 
 milieu and the date of its origin. It is a curious 
 coincidence, too, that with the coming of the Northern 
 peoples, who were to break up that society of the 
 world in which Stoicism began, the last great Stoic 
 name is written in history. Alexander abolished the 
 nations, the Germans brought them back, and in the 
 interval flourished this great system of Cosmopoli- 
 tanism, humanitarianism, and pantheism — and, we 
 may add, of rationalism ; for no body of teaching, 
 at least before the advent of modern physical science, 
 has perhaps ever had so strong an influence, and made 
 so great an impact on mankind, with so little of the 
 romantic and so little of the religious. 
 
 The general teaching of Stoicism is so familiar, it 
 has been handled so often and so ably by modern 
 
 1 Beloch, Griech. Gesch., III. i. 466 : ohne alle hellenische Anmuth. 
 Cf. Edwyn Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, 1 7, on " an Asiatic darkness 
 of skin, a long, straggling, ungainly body," and his gaunt bluntness in 
 speech and life ; following Diogenes Laertius, vii. 16. 
 210 
 
THE STOICS 211 
 
 English writers, that it will not be necessary for us 
 to survey the whole of it. We may pause to remark 
 this modern appeal of Stoicism, for it will do some- 
 thing to explain its rise and its influence in antiquity ; 
 and then it will suffice to consider in turn the bearing 
 of Stoic thought upon the four lints along which we 
 have been tracing the progress of religion, and the 
 evidence given by the fortunes of the system to the 
 validity of our deductions. 
 
 First, then, a few words on the modern revival of 
 Stoicism. Renan said that Marcus Aurelius is the 
 saint and exemplar of Agnosticism. The very word 
 Agnostic is a nineteenth-century coinage ; and, if 
 popular use identifies it with Sceptic, that was not 
 Huxley's intention when he launched the word. Nor, 
 one may add, was it the idea of the ancient inventors 
 of the term Sceptic that it should imply the dog- 
 matism of the closed book, the affair judged, the 
 case dismissed. Agnostic and Sceptic by first intention 
 do mean the same thing, so that for once popular 
 usage is perhaps justified. Stoicism rose in an age 
 of uncertainty and flourished again in the nineteenth 
 century, naturally and properly. Its fixed points 
 appealed to the better minds of the nineteenth century ; 
 its great principle of reference to Nature, its instinct, 
 as great and as sound, that duty must be somehow 
 real — these are the cardinal points both for its earlier 
 and for its later floruit ; and its failure in either period 
 sheds light on the other. 
 
 Stoicism was the offspring of Cynicism. The long 
 debate of the Sophists about Nature and Convention, 
 the many battles whose echoes we find in Plato's 
 dialogues, produced their inevitable effect in the 
 fourth century b.c. There can hardly be a more 
 splendid defence of the idea of a state than in the 
 Funeral Speech of Pericles, which Thucydides records, 
 not vdthout traces of his own mind and hand. 
 Fifteen years later Euripides wrote his Trojan Women, 
 
212 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 wKich won no prize from the Athenian people, which 
 he could not have expected to win a prize. The will- 
 to-power of Nietzsche was already familiar to thinking 
 Athenians ; the survival of the physically fittest is in the 
 horrible Melian dialogue in Thucydides. Euripides 
 showed in his Trojan Women that there is something 
 just as sacred as the so-called state ; that the state 
 may be a lie against humanity ; or, if that is too 
 abstract, that, if a state kills my son and starves my 
 wife and daughter for an abstract idea like power, 
 or even equality, or for the squalid ambition of the 
 merchant to capture another huckster's trade, that 
 state is a lie, and shall end. The Peloponnesian war 
 wrote the doom of the particular variety of that 
 type of state which the ancient world knew ; and 
 Alexander fulfilled it. The sixty-seven miserable years 
 between the end of the Peloponnesian war and the 
 accession of Alexander showed that the ancient state 
 had ceased to be real ; it lasted on, struggling to 
 seem real ; but it was a survival, a simulacrum, an 
 anachronism that warred against life.^ 
 
 The great philosophers saw clearly that the state 
 needed a new justification. The ideals of " the man 
 in the street," which the Cleons and their modern 
 equivalents grasp so well and utter with all needed 
 blatancy, do not justify a state. Plato sketched a 
 state on a new basis, in bitter revolt against " man- 
 in-the-street " democracy ^ — a state with a coherent 
 aim, with a central idea. Other philosophers, and 
 some very unlikely ones, wrote their Republics too. 
 These were all visionary, but they all point to one 
 thing : the state as men knew it was an anachronism, 
 impossible and undesirable. It was reserved for the 
 thinnest and poorest nature of them all, as sometimes 
 happens, to forecast the actual future, absurd and 
 
 ^ Cf. Polybius' stories of the Spartan, AetoHan and other wars of 
 the century before him. 
 
 2 See Plato, Rep., viii. 557-562, on the democratic man. 
 
THE STOICS 213 
 
 unpractical as all sensible men must have realized 
 him to be. Isocrates saw at last that Macedon must 
 be the Prussia to unite Greece and rule the world. 
 Philip achieved this, but achievement is not always 
 justification. The Cynic was as little moved by the 
 success of Philip as by that of Pericles ; all he wanted 
 of Alexander, according to the story, was that the 
 Macedonian would stand out of the sunshine. There 
 was the issue nakedly enough ; Alexander, empire, 
 HeUenization, the " marriage of Europe and Asia " 
 on the one hand — Diogenes and the sunshine on the 
 other. It was more crudely put, more adapted for 
 the intelligence of the meanest intellect, the anti- 
 thesis of the Trojan Women ; Menelaus, victory, glory, 
 national efficiency and the vengeance which the vulgar 
 call justice — or Hecuba and the natural relations of 
 wife and son. Diogenes for the time impressed men as 
 the Trojan Women had not. 
 
 Antisthenes, the first of the Cynic school, was, as 
 we saw, the bastard son of a Thracian slave-woman. 
 Well, if he was, he said, many of the great in 
 Greek legend came from abroad ; and the Athenians, 
 if they were the children of the soil, shared that 
 origin with the insects. He was human; he had 
 character ; and he was a pupil of Socrates, he would 
 define his terms, know what he meant and get back 
 to the real. From one point of view, there is nothing 
 more real than the actual man. Thracian or Greek 
 is a trivial distinction ; slave or free is accident, accident 
 in the philosophic sense, accident in the popular 
 sense. So Antisthenes anticipated the Stoic insist- 
 ence on the common humanity of all men, of all 
 ranks, of both sexes. Diogenes went further. A 
 curious mixture of charlatan, or at least advertiser, 
 and genuine thinker, he had, like a popular preacher 
 of to-day, the gift of getting his idea, generally a 
 simple one, into the intelligence of everybody. The 
 idea might be repugnant to common notions of 
 
214 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 decency or of religion ; he took pains to say things 
 about marriage, to do, or to suggest the doing of, 
 acts in holy precincts that were taboo ; and his 
 audacity, his studied absurdity, suggested the train 
 of thought which he meant to start. The Stoic was 
 less bizarre ; he was more sober, and a good deal less 
 amusing ; his paradoxes were heavier and more 
 laboured ; but Cynic and Stoic pointed the same 
 way, both emphasized Nature. 
 
 The Sophists had raised the question of Nature. 
 Plato had gone deeply into it ; all he says of the soul, 
 of righteousness, of immortality, is based on their 
 ultimate nature. The Stoics set Nature in the very 
 forefront of every argument ; they made Nature 
 not merely their last court of appeal, but their first, 
 and where they could not as it were lay their hands 
 on Nature visible and obvious, they took the next 
 thing to it. The consensus of mankind was not 
 exactly Nature, but it raised a fair presumption that 
 Nature was behind what Nature suggested. So far 
 as it goes, the presumption is sound. The probability 
 is that error will be corrected out, if we take a large 
 enough group of observers ; it is still more likely that 
 we shall escape the errors inherent in our own local 
 and national traditions, and so far get nearer to the 
 universal. So much for the central principle ; all 
 now turned on the range and sureness of observation, 
 and on the use made of what was observed. 
 
 The Stoic, beginning with Nature, had his principle 
 of unity at once ; and he carried it faithfully through 
 all his thinking and, as suggested above, he gave it 
 every emphasis that he could think of. In one 
 picture and another he tried to carry it into every 
 man's business and bosom. " He of old said, ' Dear 
 city of Cecrops,' " writes Marcus Aurelius, alluding 
 to Aristophanes and Athens, " and thou, wilt not 
 thou say, ' dear city of Zeus ? ' " i That thought 
 ^ Marcus Aurelius, iv. 23. 
 
THE STOICS 215 
 
 runs through all Stoic teaching ; it is no abstract 
 
 dogma, it is the foundation of all life and all thought. 
 
 The universe is the " great city." Every Greek 
 
 knew the meaning of ttoXi? ; the empires had not 
 
 abolished that glorious memory. A virtual republic, 
 
 of which all are citizens, of which the laws are at once 
 
 intelligible, just and unalterable, an equality and a 
 
 fraternity — " the common home or city of gods and 
 
 men together " ^ — it is a great and an invigorating 
 
 conception. The forces of Nature and the details 
 
 of Nature, man's mind and the external world, are 
 
 all delicately adjusted to one another, in profound 
 
 and eternal sympathy. We remember how this idea 
 
 reappears in Wordsworth, and what happiness it 
 
 brings with it ; and, in passing, we may recall and 
 
 link with this conception the " Ode to Duty " — 
 
 exactly the sort of poem a Stoic would have written, 
 
 if only he had the poetic feeling and genius ; Cleanthes 
 
 was very far from having Wordsworth's gifts. The 
 
 world was not a mere mass of material, of brute stuff 
 
 out of which life was to be carved, a wilderness into 
 
 which man might hack his way and slowly, in such 
 
 corners as he might make his own, induce order ; it 
 
 was order. 
 
 Cosmos is no new word in the Greek vocabulary, 
 but it gains a new meaning and a new thrill. The 
 wise husband, in Xenophon's pleasant tale, in- 
 culcates order, and bidding his little wife see the boots 
 and shoes in a row, " for all their different sizes, how 
 beautiful it is ! " he cries.^ The order of the universe 
 was a joyous discovery ; the thought that this order 
 is not one of parts, but of the whole ; that it is the 
 order, not of boots on a shelf, not of a museum, but 
 
 ^ Cicero, N.D., ii. 62, 154. 
 
 2 Xenophon, Oeconomkus, 8, 19. I should like to refer to Mr 
 J. A. K. Thomson's lively discussions (in Greeks and Barbarians) of 
 the Greek finding romance in order, not in disorder, in the disciplined 
 society rather than in Mexican ideals. 
 
2i6 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 of an engine, a splendid mechanism, better still of an 
 organic body or even being — this was a conception 
 to make the heart beat. What is true of all great 
 discoveries and advances in the realm of spirit and 
 intellect, is true here also. The Stoic conception 
 of the Cosmos and its living beauty has never been 
 lost. They passed it on to all sorts of thinkers, and, 
 in its joy and its wonder, it is a permanent endowment 
 . of the race. If others led the way, the gift of the 
 Stoics to mankind is not lessened. Genius perhaps 
 more often shows us the value of what we have than 
 it gives us what we have not. 
 
 Stars and seasons and souls of men, a living vital 
 principle animates them, a principle intelligible 
 because it is one in all things and all men, a principle 
 that is intellectual, a Logos, and yet the seed and 
 source of life, Spermaticos. The kinship within the 
 great polls is real to the utmost. If man and star 
 are made of one matter, that is kinship ; but if the 
 soul in both is one, the kinship is a deeper and dearer 
 thing ; and that this is true is shown by their mutual 
 adaptation, and clinched by the fact that man under- 
 stands what he sees, that his reason can deduce law 
 and principle, and that Nature verifies what he finds. 
 The whole is the outcome of Providence ; if the Stoics 
 did not invent this great word, they gave it conno- 
 tation and currency. With us Providence almost 
 inevitably involves personality, but, as we shall see, 
 this is only very doubtfully the Stoic view. Law and 
 principle — if we draw our deductions rigidly, and 
 the Stoic did — may reduce freedom to a minimum ; 
 and the Stoics sometimes, proceeding from the laws 
 of Nature, contracted the area of human freedom 
 with a speed and a drastic incisiveness only equalled 
 by men of science to-day who start from the same 
 point. The Stoics would have none of the lyche 
 that the vulgar believed to rule the world ; all was 
 order, all was law, all was fate. The course of the 
 
THE STOICS 217 
 
 universe was ordained ; it moved steadily on, and, 
 v^hen its course was coniplete, a conflagration dis- 
 solved it ; and then, like the phoenix from its ashes, 
 it emerged again to pursue precisely the same course. 
 In prose and verse they laid this down — all is Law ;. 
 
 Fata regunt orbem ; certa slant omnia lege?- 
 
 So Stiff a determinism inevitably affected the Stoic 
 conception of God. A uniform doctrine in a philo- 
 sophic school is not to be expected ; the Stoics were 
 many, and, as happens in other groups, different 
 teachers emphasized different points. Stoic teachers 
 fluctuated a good deal upon God, but on the universe 
 they were generally agreed ; and that was central 
 in their thinking. A universe, where all is determined 
 by unchangeable law, leaves little room for a God of 
 much personality, unless we hold that he leaves that 
 universe very generally to itself or, with some of the 
 Stoics in certain moments, that God and the universe 
 are an identity. They credited this universe with 
 some sort of self-consciousness or intelligence, to 
 which their doctrine of Providence may seem to be 
 attached. " Constantly picture the universe as one 
 living thing," writes Marcus (iv. 40), " with one 
 substance and one soul ; and mark how all things are 
 referred to the single perfection of this ; and how all 
 things act with one impulse, how aU. are joint causes 
 of all existing ; and of what sort is the contexture and 
 concatenation of the web." The system is pantheism 
 — the triumph of science over theology, Julius Beloch 
 calls it.^ When the Emperor Tiberius dropped 
 all religious observance, because, as Suetonius says, 
 " he was addicted to astronomy and full of the con- 
 viction that all things are done by fate," * it was not 
 an illegitimate inference. There was, as Bishop 
 Lightfoot pointed out, a contradiction between Stoic 
 
 ^ Manilius, iv. 14. ^ Griech. Geschkhte, III. i. 453. 
 
 ^ Suetonius, Tiberius, 69. 
 
21 8 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 dogma and Stoic hymnology. To the latter we may 
 now turn. 
 
 The hymn of Cleanthes is famous, and a few lines 
 from it in James Adam's translation will give some- 
 thing of its quality — and land us in fresh perplexities. 
 
 O God most glorious, called by many a name. 
 Nature's great King, through endless years the same, 
 Omnipotence, who by thy just decree 
 Controllest all, hail Zeus, for unto thee 
 Behoves thy children in aU lands to caU. 
 We are thy children, we alone of aU 
 On earth's broad ways that wander to and fro. 
 Bearing thy image wheresoe'er we go. 
 Wherefore with songs of praise thy power I will forth show. 
 
 The philosopher then pictures the universe circling 
 round the earth, willingly ruled, and controlled by 
 the thunderbolt — 
 
 Vehicle of the universal Word, that flows 
 Through all, and in the light celestial glows. 
 
 No deed is done on earth apart from thee, he con- 
 tinues, neither in the divine aetherial sky nor in the sea, 
 save such acts as evil men do by their own folly. God 
 knows how to make the crooked straight, to order the 
 disorderly ; and things unlovely are to him lovely ; 
 so has he fitted all good to evil that there is ever one 
 Reason, or one account, of all for ever. This, however, 
 evil men fly from and neglect, pursuing advantage and 
 finding the opposite. And he ends with a prayer to 
 Zeus to save men from ignorance, " that honoured 
 we may requite thee with honour, hymning thy works 
 for ever as befits a mortal ; for neither for mortals 
 nor for gods is there greater gift than justly to hymn 
 the universal law for ever." " What else can I do, 
 a lame old man," asks Epictetus, " but hymn God ? " ^ 
 God is responsible for all, except man's folly ; but 
 how that lies outside his responsibility is not explained. 
 
 ^ Epictetus, D., i. i6 ; Conflict of Religions, p. 62. 
 
THE STOICS 219 
 
 Plutarch's attack on the Stoics shows that he, and 
 others, saw the inconsistency ; it may even imply 
 that some Stoics definitely credited God with every- 
 thing done, as genuine pantheism involves. In other 
 words man seems to have as much freedom as God, 
 perhaps more ; and man has, as far as we can see, a 
 good deal more personality. What volition the uni- 
 verse has, it is hard to learn. In fact, God is not 
 the main interest of the Stoic. " I put myself in the 
 hands of a Stoic," says Justin Martyr, " and I stayed 
 a long time with him, but when I got no farther in 
 the matter of God — for he did not know himself, and 
 he used to say this knowledge was not necessary — I 
 left him." ^ Law, order, cosmos appeal to the Stoic ; 
 on God he is content to be indefinite, at least in public 
 speech. Zeus or Jupiter will serve when he writes 
 poetry or preaches ; but Plutarch's school saw how 
 little it meant. The gods of the Stoic, said Plutarch, 
 melt in the general conflagration like wax or tin ; 
 they have as little final permanence as man resolved 
 into elements.^ The Stoic more or less conceded 
 gods to the vulgar ; but, when their nature was 
 understood, they were in general less than mankind 
 wanted — temporary expedients, that will carry a man 
 some way, but not all the way, comfortable for the 
 time, if you can shut your eyes to the future. 
 
 " The gods," says Seneca, in a letter not without hints 
 of characteristic eloquence, " are not scornful, they are 
 not envious. They welcome us, and, as we ascend, 
 they reach us their hands. Are you surprised that 
 man should go to the gods ? God comes to men, 
 nay ! nearer stiU ! he comes into men. No mind 
 {mens) is good without God. Divine seeds are sown 
 in human bodies." * And, in another place, Seneca 
 
 1 Justin, Dial. c. Tryphone, 2 (about i6o a.d.). 
 * Plutarch, de comtn. not. adv. Stokos, c. 31 ; and de def, orac, 
 420 A, c. 19. 
 
 3 Seneca, Ep., 73, 15, 16. 
 
220 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 puts the other side : " We understand Jove to be 
 ruler and guardian of the whole, mind and breath of 
 the universe, lord and artificer of this fabric. Every 
 name is his. Would you call him Fate ? You will 
 not err. He it is on whom all things depend, the 
 cause of causes. Would you call him Providence ? 
 You will speak aright. He it is whose thought pro- 
 vides for the universe that it may move on its course 
 unhurt and do its part. Would you call him Nature ? 
 You will not speak amiss. He it is of whom all things 
 are born, by whose breath (or spirit, sptritu) we live. 
 Would you call him Universe ? You will not be 
 deceived. He himself is this whole that you see, 
 fills his own parts, sustains himself and what is his." ^ 
 That, after all, is the last word of Stoicism on God. 
 
 Epictetus, as we saw, proposes like Cleanthes to 
 hymn God ; the nightingale does the nightingale's 
 part, man a rational creature ought as he works, 
 digging, ploughing, eating, to sing to God and tell 
 his benefits.^ But Seneca is as explicit, and a good 
 deal more rhetorical, and perhaps more intelligible 
 in forbidding everything that common people called 
 worship — the lighting of lamps on the Sabbath, the 
 morning salutation, the tender of towel and strigil 
 to Jupiter, or of the mirror to Juno. " The beginning 
 of worship is to believe Gods exist, and then to attri- 
 bute to them their own majesty and goodness. Would 
 you propitiate the gods ? Be good. He has wor- 
 shipped them enough who has imitated them." ' 
 So, while the gods resolve themselves into phenomena, 
 allowed a sort of honorary degree of existence, worship 
 becomes virtue and sinks sometimes to being mere 
 endurance, submission to Fate in its inevitable sweep. 
 
 So far we have bandied quotations to and fro, pro 
 and con ; and they have for us such interest as a 
 scheme of thought wiU allow, that is on the whole 
 
 ^ Seneca, Nat. Qu., ii. 45. ^ Epictetus, D., i. 16. 
 
 3 Seneca, £/., 95, 47-50. 
 
THE STOICS 221 
 
 dead or alien. It is interesting to remark the fluctua- 
 tions between pantheism and popular nomenclature, 
 between hymns of piety and philosophic definitions 
 — ^to watch the human spirit hovering between personal 
 names for God or gods and a thoroughgoing im- 
 personal conception of a Law. It reveals to us the 
 conflict and the difficulty that filled the religious 
 arena in that day, that are not unknown in our own 
 day. The battle over the personality of God was 
 reaching its second phase. The personal gods had 
 vanquished the dim figures that held the field before 
 them ; now they are going down before an inter- 
 pretation of the universe reached by a larger and truer 
 thought ; yet we feel that the conquering new dogma 
 does not cover the whole experience of man. So we 
 reflect in looking back. But how did they feel, for 
 whom it was not a question fetched from the past, 
 who had not the use of nineteen centuries of experi- 
 ence, which, whatever we make of them, do come 
 into the story and do suggest possible alternatives — 
 experience not then so available .? What did Stoic 
 teaching mean to " God-intoxicated " souls, to men 
 who wished profoundly to relate themselves and their 
 lives to some sort of real and effective personality, 
 more reliable than the most inspiring of abstract 
 nouns ? Stoicism, in its teaching of the universe, 
 made, as we have seen, a very great contribution to 
 human thought — but a contribution, not a complete 
 and exhaustive answer to all our questions ; and 
 there were plenty of people at the time who felt they 
 could accept the contribution, provided it was not 
 to be taken as a substitute for what they felt to be 
 more urgent. But before we turn to their criticism, 
 we must see how the Stoic treated human personality, 
 a separate issue indeed, but of first importance along 
 with the being of God in the story of progress in 
 religion. 
 
 Plato had struck the note of human grandeur ; 
 
222 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 what the poets had made clear In great story, he put 
 in the explicit language of the philosopher, in glowing 
 sentences that could not die, but must quicken the 
 mind of man for ever. The Stoic, with his concep- 
 tion of the universe and of God filling it and 
 moving it, seemed able to go even further. It was 
 a proper conclusion from his premises, that man also 
 is filled and moved by God ; and he did not hesitate 
 to draw it. No teachers of classical antiquity set 
 man so high in the universe. Man is " a little portion 
 of divine breath," ^ " a holy spirit (or breath) inhabits 
 within him " ; ^ man is a " son of God," ^ " a frag- 
 ment of God." * The " fiery breath," the Spermatic 
 or life-giving Reason, that animates all Nature, reaches 
 consciousness in man. The Stoic sage at last main- 
 tains that he and God are equal ^ — a paradox resting 
 on the conception of their common nature, but (as 
 Seneca's confessions show) not to be pushed too far. 
 A being, who is indeed a part of God and consciously 
 so, must be at home in a universe which is, in a sense, 
 merely the rest of himself. Reason in man, in the 
 universe, in God, is one and the same thing — a genuine 
 bond of kinship. So says Epictetus, " our souls are 
 bound up and in touch with God, parts of him and 
 portions of him " ; ^ and Marcus Aurelius emphasizes " a 
 kinship, a community of mind " (xii. 26). Thought 
 and reason are not accident in man ; they are his 
 essential nature. " Slaves and women, the Stoics 
 felt, should be philosophers," said Cicero.'' This 
 was to make us all citizens of the universe, indeed, 
 in far more than phrase. 
 
 The Stoic did not leave man with this new con- 
 sciousness of Divine kinship and membership without 
 a call to use it and to live in a new way. " The things 
 
 ^ Horace, Sat., ii. 2, 79. ^ Seneca, Ep., 41, i, 2. 
 
 ^ Epictetus, D., i. 9. * Epictetus, D., ii. 8. 
 
 5 Plut., Adv. Sto., 33. ^ Epictetus, D., i. 14. 
 
 ' Cicero, N.D., iii. 25. 
 
THE STOICS 223 
 
 in thine own power " is a recurring note, now of 
 warning, now of encouragement. There are things 
 which are not in a man's power — storms at sea, for 
 instance, and the conduct of other men and women. 
 But there is nothing in these which interferes with 
 or limits a man's power of keeping a balanced mind, 
 unswayed by the forces that overset the vulgar, desire, 
 fear, pleasure, and pain. " Enough," vnrites Horace, 
 " to pray Jove for what he gives and what he takes 
 away ; let him give life, let him give resources ; I 
 myself will provide the calm mind," ^ That is in 
 Horace's recurring Stoic vein, which crosses his Epi- 
 cureanism so often and so charmingly and perhaps 
 more than half seriously. It is writ large in later 
 Roman history ; for this strong and glorious Stoic 
 doctrine undoubtedly made men, where the material 
 was available. Thought was fired by the conscious- 
 ness of the divine element within and the divine 
 without, and their unity ; and men reached a level 
 of courage, a tenacity of endurance, and even a height 
 of cheerfulness, which make them signal figures in 
 an age of depression and weakness. 
 
 At the same time, while Stoicism emphasizes and 
 develops fortitude by its doctrine of the kinship of 
 the universe and of the sympathy of all beings with 
 all other beings, that outcome of kinship and sympathy, 
 which would seem to us most natural and spontaneous, 
 is markedly wanting in the Stoics. It might be put 
 epigrammatically that they have no sympathy, that 
 the outcome of their doctrine of the sympathy of the 
 universe is that " savage and hard apathy " which 
 Plutarch denounces in them.^ The Stoic really 
 failed to use his doctrine to the full ; and he failed as 
 a result 65 at least two causes — first, he was holding 
 the fort in a world very alien to him in spite of his 
 belief in its sympathy ; and, secondly, he was wholly 
 
 ^ Horace, Ep., i. 18, 102. 
 
 2 Plutarch, Consol. ad ApolL, 3, 102 C. 
 
224 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 dependent on himself, he had nothing in the way, of 
 personal touch or fellow-feeling to look for from God, 
 in spite of the hopeful language about the gods and 
 their friendship which he addressed to his acquaint- 
 ance in the world. The walls of his fortress would 
 be sapped by emotion, by human ties — the beauty 
 of a man's own wife may undo him, and the charm 
 of his child ; they will tempt him into desire or fear, 
 they will make him wish in his power what is not in 
 his power. A man cannot be " self-sufficient," as 
 the Stoic felt he must be, if he depends on the smiling 
 caress of his little son ; no, he must fortify himself, 
 as Epictetus said, by murmuring as he kisses the child, 
 " To-morrow thou wilt die." ^ Human relations on 
 such terms are intolerable — all pain, all weakness, 
 and little reinforcement. The Stoic, in spite of his 
 great doctrine, did not really believe that the uni- 
 verse, apart from its main current, its drive forward, 
 its major laws, does contribute. Marcus Aurelius 
 wrote in his diary, " Decay is in the material sub- 
 stance of all things — ^water, dust, bones, stench " 
 (ix. 36). The comparison of Stoicism with Words- 
 worth's philosophy has often been made ; but what 
 a contrast is here to the poet's mind, as for instance 
 shown towards the end of the Lines written above 
 Tintern Abbey ! The humanity, which the Stoic 
 emphasizes, is incomplete in what we feel to be one 
 of its most significant and valuable aspects. 
 
 It is indeed a curious thing that with all their 
 important contributions to Psychology, including a 
 new vocabulary which held its place in the Greek 
 world and holds it still in translation, the Stoics 
 made so little of emotion, that they missed its 
 higher significance, and could suggest little beyond its 
 repression or extermination. This was a defiance of 
 that Nature which the school deified, a defiance that 
 cost them much. It made demands of men which they 
 
 2 Cf. Epictetus, D., iii. Z4 ; iv. i ; M., 11, 26. 
 
THE STOICS 225 
 
 might not have logic to resist but which instinct made 
 them refuse. It wrecked the chance of Stoicism 
 achieving more than the discipleship of a few, how- 
 ever much in eclectic days might be borrowed from 
 the system by other schools. It reacted unfavourably 
 on the disciple ; it made him hard, self-centred and 
 self-pleased, as well as self-sufficient. Add this spec- 
 tacle of the isolated sage to the want of motive, the 
 Apatheia, declining into apathy, which the system 
 involves for most men ; and the ultimate failure of 
 Stoicism was inevitable. Again, the Stoic missed 
 development as the key to man's nature ; their cycle 
 of being, that returned again and again after eich 
 periodic conflagration, made progress meaningless 
 as the stone of Sisyphus. Here as with their gods, 
 the interim is all ; everything is make-shift for the 
 meantime ; there is no real achievement. The most 
 striking outcome of this attitude is to be seen in 
 Marcus Aurelius, working for ever for the good of his 
 subjects and more than half convinced that, in spite 
 of all his labour and thought and care, nothing worth 
 while would ever be effected. 
 
 These were heavy deductions to make from per- 
 sonality, much as the Stoics had done to establish it 
 with their incessant emphasis on " the things in thine 
 own power," and their deliberate development of it 
 in their pupils. The word personality, it has been 
 noted, is lacking in their vocabulary, a gap in the 
 equipment of all ancient thought. Cut off from 
 emotion, deprived of the real hope of progress, human 
 personality suffered almost desperate loss at the hands 
 of the Stoics, set adrift from its own nature. For, 
 if the school forbade emotion. Nature gave it ; as 
 she gave that instinct to act, to stand for right, to 
 work for the good of mankind, which the school 
 encouraged indeed by the appeal to duty and dis- 
 couraged by the withdrawal of hope. These defects 
 in the system man, subconsciously, tended to make 
 
226 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 good for himself — instinct proving too strong for 
 thought, without reason necessarily noticing what 
 was happening. But there was worse, for Stoicism 
 forbade man's supreme hope. From days before 
 Plato men had been reflecting upon Immortality. 
 Plato had held by the faith in it — " the venture is 
 a glorious one." As the perplexity of the world 
 deepened and intensified the fear of life, with every 
 fresh exhibition of the intolerable instability of things 
 mundane, with every fresh reminder by the kings 
 and the soldiers to the individual that he was an 
 individual, a mere item and nothing else, man was 
 more and more driven in upon himself and found in 
 his own personality, and the personalities of those 
 whom he loved, all he could have or hope to have. 
 And now when he kisses his little son he must say : 
 " To-morrow thou wilt die." 
 
 In the Dream of Scipio Cicero sketches a future 
 state of glory among the stars for those who serve 
 their country. Glory — ^yes ! but Virgil's sixth Aeneid 
 shows a tenderer reahzation of the meaning of that 
 instinct which makes men " reach forth hands in 
 longing for the further shore." Beyond the grave 
 are — or ought to be — those whom we loved in this 
 life, those whom we love still. 
 
 Venisti tandem tuaque expectata parenti 
 Vicit iter pietas ? 
 
 But the Stoic addressed himself to the individual 
 whom he had trained to apathy. He must practise 
 resignation ; he can begin on a broken cup, a coat, 
 and then a puppy, and so on to children, wife or 
 brothers. While the ship is taking water aboard at 
 a port, you stroll on the beach and pick up a shell or 
 pluck a flower ; but when the call comes, you drop 
 it and go aboard ; " so in life suppose that, instead 
 of some little shell or plant, you have something in 
 
THE STOICS 227 
 
 the way of wife or child, very well ! " ^ So the deaths 
 of those we love are dismissed ; cockleshell or eldest 
 son, something external to self, " not in thine own 
 power." And if a man, faced by prospect of death, 
 lament : " But my family will hunger," what then ? 
 Does their hunger lead them to another goal ? Will 
 it not come to the same for them and you ? ^ 
 
 What is death ? " It pleased me," wrote Seneca, 
 " to inquire of the eternity of souls — nay ! to believe 
 in it. I surrendered myself to that great hope." ^ 
 " How natural it is ! the human mind wiU have no 
 bounds set to it unless they are shared by God." * 
 Nature is invoked ; but reason and dogma have some- 
 thing to say to Nature when she is interpreted by 
 such simple instincts in so popular a way. Seneca 
 wrote a Consolation to Marcia for her son, and, after 
 speaking of his future life, he remembers the ultimate 
 conflagration. " Then we also, happy souls who 
 have attained eternity, when God shall see fit to 
 reconstruct the universe, when all things fall, we too, 
 a little element in a great catastrophe, shall be resolved 
 into our ancient elements. Happy is your son who 
 already knows this ! " So it is only a temporary 
 immortality, a fugitive eternity, and then like a sleep 
 comes for all the conflagration, with a new start for 
 the universe, and no Marcia and no son and no 
 Seneca for how many myriad years ? Elsewhere 
 that dissolution into primal elements seems even 
 nearer to Seneca — "Why should I be wasted for 
 desire of him who is either happy or non-existent ? " ^ 
 
 Epictetus is blunter than Seneca ; there were 
 fewer ties in his life, and his was a spirit of less range, 
 if more intense and of harder metal. God opens the 
 door and calls man " to nothing terrible, but whence 
 you came, to the dear and kin [both adjectives are 
 
 ^ Epictetus, Manual, 7. ^ Epictetus, D., iii. 26. 
 
 3 Seneca, Ep. 102, 2. * Seneca, Ep. 102, 21. 
 
 6 Ad Poly b., 9, 3. 
 
228 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 neuter] the elements. What in you was fire shall 
 go to fire ; earth to earth, air to air, water to water." i 
 " Death is a change, not from what now is into what 
 is not, but into what is not now. You will be, but 
 you will be something else, of which the cosmos has 
 just now no need. You came into existence, not 
 when you wished, but when the cosmos had need." ^ 
 So the great individual personality, sternly repressing 
 the emotions that might waste him, keeping his eyes 
 fixed on God (whatever God is, concrete, abstract, 
 personal, or Destiny), firmly obeying the order of 
 the universe, resolutely concentrated upon the things 
 in his own power, is as unstable and fugitive as a 
 chalk sketch on a blackboard that a schoolboy wipes 
 out when the master's step is heard. It is resolved 
 into atoms of chalk on duster and floor ; it has not 
 perished ; it is something else. What stuff it all is ! 
 Who would say that a house burnt to the ground 
 with all it contains, furniture, books gathered by one 
 who loved them, pictures of friends and kindred, is 
 the same thing as the ashes to which it is reduced, 
 because there is the same quantity of carbon in the 
 charred heap and in the gases liberated in air ? The 
 personality is gone, and men who laid such stress on 
 personality knew it. 
 
 Men and women who did not philosophize, but 
 who felt, and now and then thought on the basis of 
 what they felt, knew also what this teaching of the 
 Stoics meant. For centuries, as we have seen, the 
 individual had been growing in self-consciousness, 
 realizing his place in the scheme of things, and now 
 he is told to be for the moment supremely more than 
 ever he was before, with the prospect of being utterly 
 blotted out by death. 
 
 Progress in religion, we have seen, is marked by 
 emphasis on the unity of existence, on the personality 
 of God, on righteousness, on the personality of man. 
 ^ Epictetus, D., ili. 13. * Epictetus, D., iii. 24. 
 
THE STOICS 229 
 
 The Stoic taught nobly of the unity of the cosmos ; 
 of righteousness his discourse was full; here too 
 he made contributions of a great kind, in giving 
 righteousness a purpose and a centre — life " agreeably 
 with Nature." But if there is to be righteousness in 
 the universe, something more is due to the human 
 soul, some fuller recognition of its nature and of its 
 claims. The Stoic magnified personality and blotted 
 it out ; and God he left an enigma — an enigma more 
 enigmatic for all the emphasis he laid on the wonder 
 and glory and wisdom of all God's works. 
 
XI 
 
 THE JEWS AFTER THE EXILE 
 
 Three great landmarks divide the history of Judaism. 
 The first is so hidden in myth and legend that it is 
 hard to be certain of more than the bare fact, and even 
 sane criticism may hesitate about tnat. But that 
 Israel was delivered from Egypt, that this deliverance 
 was associated with Moses, and that a new epoch 
 began then in the national and the religious history 
 of the people, is implied, as we have seen, in every 
 retrospect of prophet and psalmist, and is generally 
 conceded by historical critics. What precisely Moses 
 did or was, what was the nature of the " covenant," 
 whether Jehovah was a new or an old god of the people, 
 and how far his religion was what we have learnt to 
 call spiritual, or mere cult, or something of both — 
 these questions are, as we saw, harder to answer, but 
 happily definite answers to them are not essential for 
 our present theme. The other two landmarks involve 
 no historical doubts whatever ; Judah was carried 
 captive to Babylonia by Nebuchadnezzar — Jewish 
 graves have been found at Nippur ; and Titus 
 destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 a.d. 
 
 The rise and progress of Jewish religion down to 
 Jeremiah, the most modern and the most moving 
 personality of the Old Testament, we have already 
 considered. Slowly Israel had come to recognize 
 the unique and dominant position of Jehovah. 
 Jehovah was no longer a god of a tribe or a land, 
 as at one time good Israelites had supposed ; ^ He 
 was Lord of the ends of the earth, He had given the 
 ^ Cf. I Sam. xxvi. 19. 
 
 230 
 
THE JEWS AFTER THE EXILE 231 
 
 nations their lands, He and not Chemosh and Dagon 
 and other abominations. He had not been defeated 
 and overthrown by Nebuchadnezzar and the Baby- 
 lonians ; on the contrary, He had caused His people 
 to be carried captive ; it was His design and His doing, 
 and He knew His thoughts toward them.^ 
 
 The 137th Psalm is a tragic document of the 
 captivity — ^vivid, personal and passionate beyond any 
 consecutive nine verses of the Old Testament. The 
 writer has seen his city sacked, his home destroyed, 
 and on its threshold the blood-stained remains of what 
 he loved best in the world. With the rest of the 
 well-to-do and noble of the kingdom, he has been 
 marched northward through Syria, across the desert, 
 down the Euphrates, to the land of captivity. There 
 his captors, companions of the long march and now 
 home again, singing their native songs, ask him for 
 " one of the songs of Zion." They did not get it. 
 Instead he broke away, and wrote a song that throbs 
 to-day with the terrible passion from which it came. 
 His central question sums up the problem of his 
 people in exUe. " How shall we sing the Lord's 
 song in a strange land ? " Long after, the answer 
 was given by another poet of his race in the 139th 
 Psalm, happily placed beside his own in the Psalter, 
 whether by accident or by an editor who saw the 
 relevance of the two poems to each other. 
 
 It is a good test of any product of human brain 
 or spirit to see how far it will bear transplanting. 
 Will your wit keep its flavour in the next parish, across 
 the border or the channel ? Will your poem attract 
 translators, or will they capture enough of it to make 
 it a household word in the new tongue, like Homer 
 and Shakespeare ? Aristocracy was never really rooted 
 in English America ; poverty, the forest and the 
 Indians made too hard a soil for it ; in French 
 Canada it was planted, but its life depended on 
 ^ Jer. xxix. 4. 
 
232 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 the governors and bishop's sent from old France. 
 Buddhism and Islam do not prosper outside the 
 tropics and the subtropical regions ; the climate is 
 against the ascetic and against Ramadan, and the 
 Northern peoples believe in activity, in the strenuous 
 life ; in their latitudes blood and brain call for it, 
 it is the condition of survival. Athene, as we have 
 seen, had little to do in further Asia ; Adrastus 
 nothing ; Zeus had to be translated into a dogma. 
 But the uprooting of Judah and the destruction of 
 the temple were the making of Judaism. 
 
 Judah had listened only casually to the Prophets. 
 " He is a dreamer ; let us leave him ; pass ! " is the 
 attitude. But, as commonly happens, the practical 
 man was wrong ; the dreamer, who quarrelled with 
 his people's ideas and common-sense, was right. Jeru- 
 salem fell ; the policy and the cunning of its rulers 
 had been silly, and it proved futile, as the greater 
 prophets had foreseen it must ; the floods had washed 
 away the refuge of lies.^ If the people in exile was 
 to survive at aU as a distinct entity, only a religion 
 could save it. India shows how small racial groups, 
 protected by a rehgion, become castes and maintain 
 themselves for centuries in extraordinary detachment. 
 The story of the Beni-Israel in the Bombay Presi- 
 dency is the closest parallel to the Jewish captivity 
 in Babylon. No one knows how or when the Beni- 
 Israel came to India ; they were discovered there in 
 the Middle Ages by Jews from Cochin. Their Jewish 
 ancestry and religion are recognized by themselves 
 and all other Jews, but inter-marriage with the Jews 
 of Southern India, the Bagdadis or the Jews of Europe, 
 is not practised. Their religion has kept them and 
 stiU keeps them ; and there they are still — a. little 
 people of 6000 persons, not rich, but people of brain, 
 who gave officers to Indian regiments, till caste became 
 the basis of recruiting, and the Beni-Israel could only 
 
 1 Isa. xxviii. 17. 
 
THE JEWS AFTER THE EXILE 233 
 
 be officers to one anotKer. But had those earlier 
 sons of Israel a religion strong enough to keep them ? 
 If it was to be a religion of the high places, of altar 
 and sacrifice and ceremony, then, in the absence of 
 all these things, it must die. It is true that a curious 
 modern discovery of papyrus about 1907 has revealed 
 a Jewish lemfle at Yeb or Elephantine in Upper 
 Egypt.^ This temple, its maintainers say in the sur- 
 viving document, Cambyses spared and authorized 
 when he conquered Egypt and destroyed Egyptian 
 temples (about 520 e.g.) ; but, they lament, their 
 heathen neighbours, egged on by the priests of 
 Chnum, the ram-headed god of the island, have 
 destroyed it (about 410 B.C.). A later Jewish temple 
 at Leontopolis in Egypt is attested as having 
 existed. 
 
 In Babylonia, however, the religion, cut off from 
 its old supports, learnt to stand alone ; and the loss 
 of its old associations threw its adherents back upon 
 thought ; and thought is individual. The leaders 
 of religious thought had been the Prophets ; their 
 writings and records had been preserved, and now 
 they were read and understood. The national tie 
 was temporarily broken ; men thought and began 
 to choose for themselves. The weaker spirits prob- 
 ably fell away Into new attempts to combine the 
 worship of Jehovah with the cults of the land, not 
 unlike those made for centuries in Palestine ; and all 
 such syncretisms were inevitably avenged by the 
 merging of those who made them Into the com- 
 munities among which they lived. Fusion in religion 
 meant fusion In blood and the utter disappearance 
 of the newcomers in the course of a few generations. 
 Syncretism was no doubt defensible on philosophic 
 grounds as well on the more vulgar grounds of super- 
 stition and social and economic gain ; it could be 
 
 ^ Cf. Driver, Schuieich Lectures, pp. 28-30 ; Charles, Apocrypha and 
 Pseudonyma, i. pp. 180, 187, 194. 
 
234 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 described as a larger life, a broader outlook, a re- 
 cognition of other spiritual values — ^we know the 
 insidious jargon, shallow with its brag of width, 
 and we can understand how it meant religious and 
 national death. But if the shallower and the feebler 
 fell away, there was a growth of stronger fibre in the 
 fittest of spirit who survived. When the prophetic 
 religion became the centre of national existence, the 
 centre of thought, it began to react more and more 
 upon aU life ; it drew to itself passion, it became, 
 in Seeley's phrase, enthusiastic and was safe. Mono- 
 theism proved then for the first time what it has been 
 triumphantly since then all over the world and in 
 all sorts of races, the most powerful and the most 
 permanently attractive and inspiring type of religion ; 
 and further it showed its independence of what till 
 then had been regarded as the essentials of religion. 
 Jeremiah had prophesied of what we call personal 
 religion ; there would be a new covenant with Israel, 
 every man would know Jehovah, none would need 
 to teach his brother, but in every man's heart the 
 laws of Jehovah would be written.^ Religion began 
 to become an individual thing, conviction not tra- 
 dition. Thus in Israel, as in Greece, the breakdown 
 of the national preconceptions, the collapse of state 
 and temple and old belief, worked out in new emphasis 
 on the universal reach and significance of God and a 
 new weight and stress thrown upon the individual. 
 The spiritual conception of religion had gained a 
 victory, the results of which have never been lost. 
 
 Israel, it has been said, went into exile a nation 
 and came back a church ; and it is true in more ways 
 than one. The old tendency to lapse and lapse again 
 into idolatry is gone ; Israel is solid for Jehovah and 
 there are (eventually) no other gods. He overtopped 
 them all, and gradually they fell into utter non- 
 entity ; they simply did not exist. The transforma- 
 
 ^ Jer. xxxi. 31 ; cf. p. 142. 
 
THE JEWS AFTER THE EXILE 235 
 
 tion of Israel's belief was the transformation of Israel ; 
 the national character took a new development ; the 
 Jew became distinct among Semites, definite, pro- 
 nounced, exclusive. Heine's Princess Sabbath reads 
 like a fairy tale and it is history ; and the Jew is the 
 only race with such a history, with such a fairy tale. 
 Polytheism for all its legends is a squalid unromantic 
 thing ; but Judaism has always had its elements of 
 passion and romance. But when Israel is described 
 as a church, more is indicated than pure spiritual 
 religion. The Israel that returned from exile is not 
 so much the Israel of Jeremiah as of Ezekiel. A 
 church is always associated with organization, and 
 often overshadowed by it. Side by side with the 
 individualism and the romance of Hebrew religion, 
 there has been an element of legalism — an element 
 that grew progressively in its hold upon all life and 
 its influence upon all thought. 
 
 Ezekiel was hereditarily a priest of the Jerusalem 
 temple, a student of the earlier religious and ritual 
 customs, legends and traditions of Israel, a man who 
 read books and who perhaps found the pen a more 
 natural and ready means of expression than the voice. 
 Symbol and art appealed to him, where Nature moved 
 Jeremiah. When Jeremiah is stirred, pictures of 
 nature, of animals of the desert and the farm, rise 
 in his mind. Ezekiel's pictures are of cherubim, of 
 eagles, bulls and lions as they are, not in the desert, 
 but on the monuments.^ Babylon is written in his 
 mind. The future religion of Israel will be a 
 development of the past ; a priest can never forget 
 the past ; to maintain and transmit it is his trade 
 and his instinct. Ezekiel begins that fusion of 
 priestly and prophetic religion which makes the 
 later Judaism. He and Ezra are the two great 
 figures of the revival, as significant in their way as 
 Moses. Indeed, a modern scholar says that Ezekiel 
 ^^^Cf. J. P. Peters, Religion of Hebrews, p. 286. 
 
236 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 had a profounder influence on Judaism than any one 
 naan. He is a pastor of souls, the dreamer who builds 
 a sanctuary, a system and a law, which become the 
 inspiration of the people. The Temple, Judaism, the 
 Torah — ^these things are Israel's religion ; and not 
 one of them is of first importance, or perhaps of any 
 importance at all, to Jeremiah. Free of the past 
 and yet devoted to it, the new type of religious 
 Israelite can develop the past and transform it with- 
 out realizing how revolutionary is his work. The 
 very distance from Jerusalem made the city more 
 significant and more easy to remodel. The law 
 itself is rewritten ; the code known as the Priestly 
 takes shape, and at last — the process and the dates 
 do not concern us at the moment — the Pentateuch, 
 as history knows it, is evolved. The anthropo- 
 morphisms of the older books are toned down, the 
 sensuous imagery reduced. God becomes transcen- 
 dent ; He no longer shapes man of clay. He speaks 
 and it is done ; He breathes no breath into man's 
 nostrUs, He plants no garden, nor is heard walking 
 in one. When He will communicate His will to 
 man, it is by intermediaries, by angels. 
 
 The history of the Jews in Palestine from the return 
 under Cyrus to the invasion of Alexander is obscure. 
 The policy of the Persian was in general not to inter- 
 fere with local religious practices — in spite of what 
 Herodotus was told about Cambyses in Egypt. If 
 a nation is happy in having no history, the Jews 
 perhaps were happy then. But the story of Nehemiah 
 around the year 444 b.c. shows how small and anxious 
 the Jewish state was. The mutilation of that attrac- 
 tive autobiography, in order to its fusion with the 
 poorer matter now combined with it, is the worst 
 editorial crime committed on the Old Testament. 
 Nehemiah and Ezra between them achieved the 
 victory of particularism among the Jews. Worship 
 was at last concentrated at Jerusalem, if we neglect. 
 
THE JEWS AFTER THE EXILE 237 
 
 as we may, the heretical offshoot at Gerizim, The 
 High Priest became, like a Greek patriarch in old 
 days at Constantinople, the head of the nation. In 
 this period the Pentateuch was not only given its 
 present form, but became the book of the religion, the 
 code of the community. The national history shared 
 the fate of the national law ; it too was rewritten, 
 adjusted to the law-book ; the good kings were 
 good because they observed the law as rewritten 
 after the exile, the bad were bad because they 
 did not. 
 
 In this period, however, we must date the rise 
 of the Synagogue alongside of the Temple — a natural 
 simple development which has outlasted the Temple 
 by many centuries, and which, in spite of the enor- 
 mous importance attached by Jews and by a too 
 imitative Christian Church to the Pentateuch, has 
 had a greater influence than the Temple on mankind. 
 The Temple had the fate of temples ; its hereditary 
 priesthood became like other priesthoods, worldly- 
 minded, conservative and important. The High 
 Priests were practically princes, and like the prince- 
 archbishops of the later Middle Ages they shaped 
 their conduct by the maxims and policies of the world, 
 secure that the religion which gave them their place 
 could maintain it without the help of their example. 
 Deuteronomy enacted three pilgrimages to Jerusalem 
 a year to be made by every adult male. Of course 
 this was impossible for Jews living in Babylon or 
 Upper Egypt, as it was impossible, later on, for Jews 
 in Italy and beyond ; and if the religion was to conT 
 tinue effective, some plan must be devised for keeping 
 Jews together and in touch with the essence of their 
 religion. The Synagogue managed this. It began, 
 we can believe, unofficially, a gathering of Jews on 
 Saturday ; and in the casual references of New 
 Testament writers we can make out the general 
 course of proceedings. The Pentateuch and the 
 
238 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Prophets were read aloud ; ^ the psalms were sung ; 
 there was prayer ; persons spoke. To the Gentile 
 the whole thing was queer and rather absurd. Wor- 
 ship without a proper temple — ^without sacrifice and 
 altar (for there could be neither in the synagogue ; 
 both were concentrated at Jerusalem) — ^without a 
 priest (for the synagogue ministrants were technically 
 laymen) — ^without a god (for there was no idol or 
 other symbol) — the idea was ludicrous. Call the 
 Jews however a nation of philosophers,^ and it might 
 pass ; the synagogue was more like a school than a 
 temple. As a manifestation of religion it was an 
 innovation and a daring one ; and not only so from 
 the Greek but from the Jewish point of view. 
 
 The Synagogue was a visible expression of some of 
 those tendencies in religion which we have been 
 studying. It meant the universality of Jehovah 
 and the unity of God ; or it was meaningless. Its 
 democratic ways recognized practically what the 
 Christian Church later on called the priesthood of 
 all believers. The reading of the Prophets and of 
 the Law, remodelled with some of the prophetic 
 inspiration, kept the great standard of Monotheism 
 before men ; more, it kept before their minds the 
 great conception of the personal God Jehovah ; no 
 abstract noun, no dogma, but God Himself was the 
 centre of this philosophic school. Again, the ex- 
 position of Law and Prophets, not strictly official to 
 begin with, meant that religion was the real business 
 of every man ; he must understand what he was 
 doing, the prophets were not irrelevant to him. 
 
 ^ Josephus, c. Apim. ii. i8, "to hear the Law and to hear it 
 accurately." W. Fairweather, Background of Gospels, 25-27 ; 
 J. P. Peters, Relig. Hebr., 381-392 ; 397. 
 
 2 Clearchus, the Peripatetic, appears to have written a dialogue, 
 in which Aristotle says that philosophers among the Indians are called " 
 Kalanoi, among the Syrians Judaioi, and adds that he met in Asia 
 Minor a Jew with a Greek soul. Josephus, c. Apion. i. 22, p. 454, 
 cited by Eusebius, Praepar. Evang., ix. 5, p. 409 C. 
 
THE JEWS AFTER THE EXILE 239 
 
 The great principle that Paul long after laid down, 
 when he said " I will sing with my understanding ; 
 I will pray with my understanding," underlay the 
 practice of translation and explanation pursued in 
 the Synagogue ; it was an attempt, not designed 
 perhaps, but the more effectual for being spontaneous, 
 to fulfil the prophecy of Jeremiah, that every man 
 should know and understand to keep the law. 
 Hebrew was becoming an obsolete language, main- 
 tained for religious purposes, while Aramaic was the 
 current speech of Syria and reached eastward to the 
 Euphrates.^ The device of keeping sacred texts in 
 Hebrew and translating them in the Synagogue into 
 Aramaic was a characteristic compromise. Later 
 on the Old Testament was translated into Greek 
 under the Ptolemies. Legend ^ gave the translation 
 a fixed date, a royal origin, and the sanction of 
 miracle ; but probably its real source was a higher 
 thing — the sense that the individual has a right to 
 know the mind of his God in the language that comes 
 most naturally to him. Schiirer compared the effect 
 of the Septuagint with that of Luther's German 
 Bible ; it was the very foundation of a religion. 
 
 It may be remarked that, while no competition 
 was felt or suggested between Synagogue and Temple 
 — indeed later on we find special Synagogues in Jeru- 
 salem itself — the two centres of religion evolved 
 types markedly different. The Temple produced, 
 as already said, a hereditary priesthood, more in- 
 terested in the performance of ceremony than in the 
 progressive discovery of truth, conservative in ideas, 
 but for all its orthodoxy, more amenable to easy 
 Hellenistic ways than those whose religion was more 
 reflective.* It was a real gain to Judaism, and to the 
 
 ^ J. P. Peters, Rel. of Hebr., 397 ; Neh. xiii. 24, contrast 2 
 Kings xviii. 26. 
 
 2 See R. R. Ottley, Handbook to the LXX, pp. 3 1 ff. 
 
 ^ Strabo, c. 761, says they were much involved in brigandage. 
 
240 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 world, that concentration in Jerusalem kept the 
 priesthood from exercising a preponderant influence 
 on the scattered Jewish people. In the synagogues 
 there rose another sort of man, the Scribe, a layman, 
 a student of books, a teacher, and in real contact 
 with his people, more open to movements in re- 
 ligion, a democrat without knowing it, a pioneer 
 in religious thought in spite of himself, as he read 
 and thought and possessed himself of the problems 
 that bore hard on the ordinary honest people he 
 met. 
 
 It was the Scribe who made the new Judaism, and 
 who, himself more responsive to Greek thought than to 
 Greek ways, maintained against heathen influences a re- 
 ligion which meant more and more in time — a religion 
 of men deepened by the battle with doubt, made at 
 once harder and more tender by their experience of 
 life, and ever more deeply rooted in Jehovah. Jesus 
 was probably far from being the only visitor to the 
 temple who was shocked by its naked commercialism, 
 its shallowness and vulgarity, who felt the contrast 
 between the house of prayer and the den of thieves.! 
 The Synagogue was a house of prayer ; so on a smaller 
 scale was the Proseucha, if it was not the same thing ; 
 in both religion was for the time real, nursed in 
 freedom of speech, in spiritual traditions free from 
 the mechanical taint of priest and sacrifice, not yet 
 overborne by conservative erudition — the Wonder 
 House of the Princess Sabbath ; for the Synagogue 
 transformed the Sabbath too from a day of taboos 
 (though these indeed survive) to a day of worship, 
 of spiritual deepening and spiritual imagination. 
 The Psalter in the main belongs to this period and 
 
 1 Dr Theodore H. Robinson has suggested that, quite apart from 
 money-changers and traders (who at tourist centres and places of 
 pilgrimage might merit the hard name), the sanctuary at Jerusalem 
 drew to itself a more openly recognizable thief element, as sancfuaries 
 have done elsewhere. 
 
THE JEWS AFTER THE EXILE 241 
 
 gives a vivid picture of the religion. The extreme 
 ease with vs^hich the Christian Church annexed the 
 Psalter and found in it the word for much of its own 
 richest experience, is evidence enough of the char- 
 acter of the community and the religion from which 
 the Psalter came. In this case the adoption of the 
 book meant neither a false system of interpretation 
 nor a violent return to pre-Christian and indeed 
 pre-prophetic notions. 
 
 But even the most alive and progressive religion 
 is exposed to the danger of conservatism. The old 
 man, the old place, the old ways, have an appeal 
 to which all human beings are susceptible, an appeal 
 legitimate but seductive. In the Gospels and in the 
 Talmud we have evidence of how settled and how 
 wooden a living religion may in time become. Pro- 
 phets emancipate reUgion and priests re-enslave it. 
 In every man there is some element of prophet 
 and some of priest ; and timidity, routine, the lapse 
 of years tend to atrophy the prophet in all of us and 
 to develop the priest. When religion begins to succumb 
 to tradition, and when progress and the broader 
 and higher Hfe which it means begin to be associated 
 with a body of ideas actually or supposedly hostile to 
 religion, we know by now what dangers await the 
 spiritual life of a people ; we have seen it again 
 and again in history ; we are face to face with 
 those dangers to-day. Judaism was saved from those 
 dangers by a storm of persecution that threatened 
 its existence. 
 
 Little is known of any real relations between 
 Alexander the Great and the Jews.^ Later Jewish 
 historians filled the gap in knowledge with legend. 
 It is curious how uniformly generation by generation 
 
 1 Josephus says that Alexander visited Jerusalem ; Arrian has no 
 such story nor the other historians of Alexander, and it is not believed. 
 See Niese, Griech. Gesch., i. p. 83, n. 3, who agrees with Ewald that 
 it is an invention of the first century b.c. 
 
 Q 
 
242 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 the Jews re-wrote their history.^ A certain parallelism 
 may be noted with modern Hinduism, and may 
 suggest a common explanation. There is the same 
 writing up of the glories of the past ; the same extra- 
 vagant claim that the foreigner owes all his inventions, 
 his poetry, his philosophy, to borrowed models — the 
 Greek to the Jew in the one case, the Greek and 
 others to the Hindu in the other ; there is the same 
 want of criticism, the same indifference to real history, 
 the same absence of seriousness. Side by side with 
 these more outward expressions of national feeling, 
 we may note further the same exclusiveness in life, 
 in marriage and food taboos, and the same rigidity 
 of law, while the sicarii and zealots of Roman Pales- 
 tine have their parallel in the bomb-throwers and 
 Tilaks of British India. The Jews re-wrote their 
 history, filling it with imaginary glories and false 
 records of persecution gloriously overcome. As a 
 result, little is known of actual history for several 
 periods, which were obviously formative. But with 
 Antiochus Epiphanes we reach real history, and a 
 strong clear light falls upon the people at a critical 
 moment. The story is familiar, and the detail does not 
 concern us at present. 
 
 Antiochus,^ a king with a slight hint of genius, a 
 great deal of the charlatan, and something of the 
 madman, came of a family of princes progressively 
 declining from the solid merits of their founder, the 
 sturdy general of Alexander. It was about a hundred 
 years after the death of his ancestor Seleucus that 
 he returned to Syria, to be king. After a childhood 
 in a Seleucid palace, he had lived in Rome for about 
 thirteen years as a hostage. He liked Roman ways, 
 and, as a good successor of Alexander, he believed 
 
 1 Cf. Wendland, hell.-r'om Kultur, 197 ; Sir George Adam Smith, 
 Jerusalem, ii. 407. 
 
 2 Polybius, xxvi. I ; Livy, xli. 19 ; Bevan, House of Seleucus, ii. 
 chap. 25 ; Jerusalem, pp. 74 ff. 
 
THE JEWS AFTER THE EXILE 243 
 
 in his mission to extend Hellenic culture ; but he 
 was a sultan by inheritance and by long residence a 
 foreigner. He did not know the vital facts of the 
 situation. If the Jerusalem prince-priests, as degener- 
 ate as he, were ready to be HeUenized, it did not 
 follow that all the Jews were equally ready. We 
 have seen that Temple and Synagogue represent two 
 distinct types of religion, linked by tradition, by 
 sacred books, and by race, but different in spirit, in 
 ideal, and in life. The Temple was quickly HeUenized 
 by the king — ^polluted, good Hebrews said. Next 
 a royal mandate prohibited the practice of Jewish 
 religion (i Mace. i. 44). Then came the real struggle 
 with the people for whom Jehovah was real, and a 
 family of heroes led them. As has happened so 
 often in history, the seed of the future is saved by a 
 happy series of irrelevant chances.^ Properly led and 
 organized, the forces of Persia could have crushed 
 the Greeks, always ready to betray one another. If 
 Antiochus had had his hands free — but that sort of 
 man never has his hands free ; the man who acts on 
 imperfect realization of a situation is always falling 
 over himself, as Thucydides said of Xerxes.^ The 
 Greek proverb put it that " the dice of Zeus fall aye 
 aright." ^ Providence, in spite of our cynicisms about 
 the biggest battalions, manages in spite of them. 
 The forward movements do survive against the pro- 
 babilities ; the irrelevant chances saved Judaism in 
 Palestine. If it had been crushed there, as it was 
 two centuries and a half later by Titus, there were 
 still the synagogues elsewhere. However, not to 
 speculate on what might have happened and did 
 not happen, Judaism survived Antiochus. It gained 
 from the struggle a new dynasty which contributed 
 to it in two ways, giving it heroes and ideals to begin, 
 
 Tacitus, Hist., v. 8 ; Antiochus was prevented by a Parthian war 
 from civilizing a horrible race. 
 
 ^ Thucydides, i. 69, 5. * Sophocles, Fr. 763. 
 
244 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 and, later, oppressors and reactions ; and in both 
 ways the Maccabaeans did service. But the spiritual 
 gain from the struggle with Antiochus was independent 
 of any dynasty. 
 
 The Maccabaean movement has been well called 
 the watershed of those centuries.'^ Before it the 
 nation showed signs of religious decay. Haggai and 
 Zechariah had had difficulty in getting the Jews to 
 rebuild the Temple. Ecclesiasticus, a book which 
 is roughly coeval with Antiochus, gives a picture of 
 Judaism as it then was — none the less telling a picture 
 for the writer being highly satisfied with himself and 
 his outlook. A cultured and liberal ^ and yet genuine 
 Jew — orthodox, moderate and canny — ^he shows us 
 to what the national religion might come. He is 
 monotheist, of course, and he says the usual and proper 
 good words about God, for whom he has respect 
 without warmth. He emphasizes the glory of the 
 Law, and lays stress on the central idea of personified 
 Wisdom. He believes Judaism superior to Hellenism, 
 as a good Jew should ; but he is not very nationalist. 
 He is not interested in angels nor very much in a 
 Messiah ; he has no great hope of Immortality nor 
 much desire for it. " What pleasure hath God in 
 all that perish in Hades, in place of those who live 
 and give him praise ? Thanksgiving perisheth from 
 the dead as from one that is not ; he that liveth and 
 is in health praiseth the Lord " (xvii. 27, 28) : " Fear 
 not death ; it is thy destiny . . . this is the portion 
 of all flesh from God, and how canst thou withstand 
 the decree of the Most High ? Be it for a thousand 
 years, for a hundred or for ten, that thou livest, in 
 Sheol there are no reproaches concerning life " 
 (xli. 3, 4). 
 
 After the crisis that Antiochus so suddenly broughi^ 
 upon Judaism, everything is altered. As in so many 
 
 ^ Fairweather, Background of Gospels, p. 128. 
 
 2 Cf. Ecclus. xxxii. 3-6, music ; xxxviii. medicine. 
 
THE JEWS AFTER THE EXILE 245 
 
 times of crisis, a great call is made on God ; God has 
 to answer many more demands of the human spirit, 
 which in days of smug prosperity, like those reflected 
 in Ecclesiasticus, are deadened. God must be more 
 interested in Israel than in days of peace ; He must 
 take more care of the individual Israelite. Once 
 more, as in the captivity, emphasis falls on God and 
 on human personality. The individual reaches a 
 new level of self-consciousness. The sense of having 
 a real witness to bear for Jehovah raises the nation 
 to dignity. The misery and anxiety of the struggle 
 throw thinkers back upon the former days when the 
 arm of the Lord was revealed, when fire would not 
 burn His confessors nor lions tear them, when the 
 Lord intervened and saved His own. Antiochus 
 first, and later on the degenerate Maccabaeans, and 
 la,ter still Herod and the Romans, drive men to range 
 into the next world for truth and comfort and 
 salvation. Fierce as the antithesis of Judaism became 
 to Hellenism, the Greek had made some contribu- 
 tions, or had asked some questions, in the matter 
 of God and the soul. Contribution and question 
 are often the same thing. From the Maccabaean 
 resistence to Antiochus we may date the later Judaism, 
 self-conscious, nationalist, and yet more universal 
 than before in outlook. 
 
 Hellenism made its effect at once by charm and by 
 repulsion, by insidious appeal and by bold challenge. 
 The Jew could no more escape this influence than 
 any other thinking people. By way of reminder let 
 us look again at what Hellenism did and made men 
 do. It drove them to think of all the world at once ; 
 this habit of mind it might call philosophy, but it 
 is an integral part of religion as we have seen, a 
 tendency operative wherever religion is to be deep 
 and real. Where Hellenism came, men could no 
 longer be provincial. Local and racial tradition must 
 be re-examined, universalized. The Hebrew might 
 
246 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 call Jehovah God of the whole earth ; but was He ? 
 Many a trivial King of kings is known to history who 
 was not King of kings. Our own coinage proclaimed 
 our kings for centuries kings of France when they 
 were nothing of the sort. Was this Hebrew claim 
 for Jehovah the language of Temple-praise, or did 
 it answer to discoverable fact ? Was He anything 
 like Plato's " father and maker of all things " ? 
 Did He stand actually behind all Creation, in it ? 
 Hellenism, again, always emphasized the individual by 
 claim and question. He shall stand up and challenge 
 the universe to be intelligible to his mind, to be 
 endurable to his heart, to explain itself and submit 
 to him. And then he shall ask that self of his, what 
 is it and for how long ? Do his powers of mind suggest 
 or promise anything to his soul or to his heart ? 
 
 We must now deal with the new views of God, 
 which emerge and grow more and moje dominant 
 in the five centuries after Cyrus and the return from 
 the captivity. The period is a long one, but our 
 task is not to chronicle ; it is to watch for movement, 
 to mark progress. While we try to relate religious 
 thought to the personal and national history of the 
 thinkers, our main interest is in its development, 
 and that is not to be recaptured by an annalistic 
 method, even if for years we substitute decades or 
 sometimes half centuries. Later on we shall have 
 to inquire as to the way in which this developing 
 God is conceived to manage man and his affairs, to 
 intervene in history, and (most Greek idea of all) 
 to plan, to geometrize, to economize, the whole 
 story of our universe and our race. 
 
 We have already noticed one feature of the 
 newer conception of God, in the elimination of the 
 anthropomorphisms of older story by the authors 
 of the Priestly Code. There are scholars who find 
 the same desire shown by Septuagint translators ; ^ by 
 1 W. Fairweather, Background of Gospels, 329. 
 
THE JEWS AFTER THE EXILE 247 
 
 slight but subtle alterations the adaptation to the 
 Hellenistic standpoint is made, and the path becomes 
 plainer for those who seek to reconcile Hebrew religion 
 with Greek philosophy — the inevitable outcome of 
 the meeting of the races. With this impulse to 
 obliterate the old naive notions of a God visible and 
 audible, as He walks in the garden, and susceptible 
 of feelings very like the emotions of man, there is a 
 tendency to remove God to a higher and higher eleva- 
 tion, which makes relations with man more difficult. 
 There is a loss of some of that tenderness which Hosea 
 portrays in God for Israel.^ God must be transcendent, 
 they feel. The God of the Levitical cultus is a far- 
 off God, aloof from sinful men, jealous in guarding 
 His holiness ; ^ into His holy place only the priests 
 may go, and they with precautions ; and men become 
 growingly anxious to avoid using His name. Jehovah 
 is replaced by Adonai. 
 
 The distresses of the time brought men face to 
 face with the problem of evil. God had to be 
 separate from evil, and this involved a dualism in 
 religious belief. Slowly there grew up the con- 
 ception of a war in the spiritual sphere, a war of 
 Satan and his hosts against God — a vivid and even 
 dramatic way of figuring the division of good and 
 evil in the universe ; it acquitted God of all 
 responsibility for sin and suffering. 
 
 But God could not be left out of touch with the 
 world, and under influences whose origins are looked 
 for Eastward, Judaism began to develop angels and 
 ■ other intermediaries. They are found in Ezekiel ; 
 while Daniel shows a much later stage of their growth. 
 Michael is there and other Princes presiding over 
 the nations.* At the end of that century, the second 
 B.C., there are more elaborate groupings of the angels 
 
 1 J. P. Peters, Rel. Hebr., 392-3. 
 
 2 A. B. Bruce, Apobgettcs, 286. 
 
 3 Cf. Deut. iv. 19, b [LXX] ; xxxii. 8, b. 
 
248 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 in the Book of Jubilees, including angels set over the 
 Gentiles to lead them astray from God (xv. 31). In 
 that strange congeries which forms our present book 
 of Enoch there are whole hierarchies of angels. But, 
 says the author of Jubilees (xv. 32), there is no ruler 
 set over Israel ; God Himself is Israel's ruler. In 
 Tobit^ we learn that God hears prayers through 
 angelic mediation — a doctrine which puts God very 
 far away. 
 
 There are noble conceptions of how God communi- 
 cates with men. His Glory is all but personalized.^ 
 His Name becomes a reality in itself — a notion which 
 reopens the door to a great deal of primitive magic 
 which religious thinkers had been driving gradually 
 out of the house of Religion.^ But above aU, the 
 most fertile of all these attempts at finding an inter- 
 mediary was that which chose God's Wisdom for the 
 role. Wisdom begins by being an attribute of God ; 
 there follows a poetic personification ; and at last 
 Wisdom becomes a divine personality subordinate 
 to God, distinct yet not distinct from God. It 
 receives a large number of striking names — Providence, 
 supreme Power, Justice, Mercy, and more significant 
 still, Holy Spirit and Word.* Some Greek influence 
 may be suspected behind the last, so markedly does 
 it fit in with the Stoic Logos. But meanwhile Wisdom 
 achieved all that the Logos was needed to do, and it had 
 its place in the canonical Proverbs. Wisdom and 
 Logos ran together, and enabled those who sought 
 reconciliation between religion and philosophy to 
 find a way. The identification had a great history ; 
 it is the basis of Philo's philosophy ; in the Fourth 
 Gospel it gained a central place in Christian Theology. 
 
 1 Tobit xii. 12. ^ Tobit xii. 15 ; xiii. 14. 
 
 * Tobit xiii. 11 ; viii. 5. 
 
 * Fairbrother, Background of Gospels, 342 ; Wisdom of Solomon, \x. I, 
 Word; xviii. 15, Almighty Word; ix. 17, Holy Spirit; see also 
 Drummond, Philo, i. p. 214, ff. 
 
THE JEWS AFTER THE EXILE 249 
 
 Something was lost for the time of the Personality of 
 God ; for personality at such a distance and mediated 
 through angels and abstract nouns seems something 
 less than itself. But Jehovah even at a distance is 
 personal. Judaism has kept what Hellenism had 
 never gained, a fundamental conviction of God's 
 personality ; it has cleared God of the evil that 
 haunted Greek conceptions of deity ; and, even if 
 the device of personifying His Wisdom is clumsy, it 
 has yet managed to keep God in relation with the 
 world. 
 
XII 
 
 THE GODS OF THE ORIENT 
 
 Alexander, as we saw, made a new world out of an 
 old. He shifted the centre of gravity for all things 
 human and divine, and he gave men new outlooks 
 and new ideals in politics, thought and religion. 
 The old gods of Greece remained as they had 
 been ; which, when . everything was changed round 
 about them, meant that they stood no longer in 
 the old relation to life ; that, remaining the same, 
 they too were changed. The Stoics brought to bear 
 upon human life, minds emancipated from the local 
 and the temporary; strong, clear intellects that 
 rationalized all human relations as well as the divine, 
 and did it with a swiftness and a thoroughness that 
 was ruthless and really unscientific. Everything was 
 submitted to reason, and had to be quick in explaining 
 itself. As a result a good many permanent features 
 of the human mind were brushed away as weaknesses. 
 Perhaps in the contemporary expression of them 
 there was weakness ; but even a weakness when it 
 is recurrent, when it is virtually universal, calls for 
 attention and explanation. A system which is built 
 on the strength of the human mind to the neglect 
 of its weakness, is not destined for permanence. A 
 religion that is to endure must recognize the weak- 
 nesses of men ; it may do so by accepting them as 
 inevitable and not combating them, or it may do so 
 by overcoming them, by bringing a force into play 
 that outweighs them. Stoicism did neither ; and 
 the weak, the vulgar and the irrational elements of 
 life militated against it, and not these alone ; the 
 
THE GODS OF THE ORIENT 251 
 
 natural affections which it trampled down rose up 
 again ; they too were Nature, and Stoicism paid the 
 penalty of being insufficiently loyal to its own great 
 principle. 
 
 The little states and the loose-hung hegemonies 
 of the Greece best known to literature were, as we 
 have seen, gone for ever.^ City and region alike were 
 details in one or another great empire, and were 
 ruled by foreigners, the agents of a great king who 
 perhaps never visited them himself. The citizen 
 sank into the subject ; he was driven in upon himself, 
 to be more individualist than ever. Whether he 
 preferred the temporal or the eternal, it was his own 
 affair ; he must help himself. 
 
 If he chose the temporal, the new age offered him 
 new opportunities of enjoyment, unburdened by new 
 ideals to replace the old. The traditions of society 
 were changed; new men, mercenaries and traders, 
 had wealth that made the old families look beggarly ; 
 and new cities which the Macedonian princes planted 
 all over the Orient did much to depopulate Greece, 
 and to change what was left of it. The passing 
 of old standards in duty and morals, in wealth and 
 ideals of comfort, in the unrecognized backgrounds 
 of thought, gave the individual a new freedom ; the 
 world was all before him where to choose. The most 
 obvious choice was not the highest. One of the 
 inevitable consequences of the break-up of the old 
 society and of the enormous pillage of further Asia 
 was a great development of luxury. Alexander's 
 zest for the style and pomp of the Persian court was 
 aped by his successors in Egypt and Syria ; and what 
 in a great nature was perhaps ennobled by imagination 
 and love of symbol became in successors of poorer 
 
 1 I do not forget the weary wars that Polybius records, exactly 
 like the wars of the great age of Greece, except that these were 
 formative and the later ones echoes ; then the intense nationalism had 
 quickened the Greek mind, now it simply wore it out. 
 
252 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 grain rank vulgarity, however cloaked by culture 
 and etiquette. Palaces full of marbles and bronzes, 
 of mosaics and pictures, of gold and silver plate ; 
 great gardens ; personal adornment, flowered robes 
 and bleached hair ; famous cooks ; theatrical page- 
 ants, parades of strange beasts ; professional athletes, 
 dancers and singers, organized in societies with high 
 privilege and exemption from military service — these 
 meet us in the new age. Even Sparta succumbed to 
 the taste for luxury.^ Women gained a new freedom ; 
 and as happens with people new to freedom, their 
 use of it was not always wise or helpful to the com- 
 munity. Men of letters sank to gathering the witty 
 sayings (not very witty) of the adventuresses who 
 hung about prince and parvenu, and telling their 
 stories in the metre of Sophocles. 
 
 Simultaneously a certain exhaustion of the human 
 mind was widely felt. This is a curious experience 
 which the race has known from time to time, chiefly 
 perhaps when social change is swifter than intellectual 
 adjustment. It is not always true that the human 
 mind really is declining at such periods ; but, for the 
 moment, missing what is called the " integrity " of 
 its age, and out of its bearings, it is afraid of its great 
 task of creation, and, beating about to find itself, it 
 turns to criticism. Thinkers, artists, and poets no 
 longer have, consciously or unconsciously, with them 
 or in them the sense of the community, the sense of 
 humanity, the sense of the universe, as the great 
 Greeks had it — ^Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato. They 
 are solitary except for the past, the great dead ; and 
 where they do not give themselves to science, they 
 are antiquaries — a safe and happy trade. The old 
 is revived, reproduced, interpreted ; and attempts 
 at originality suffer from over-consciousness of the 
 great triumphs of genius in the past as much as from 
 the sense of inadequacy to get any effective grasp, 
 1 J. Beloch, Griech. Gesch., III. i. pp. 415-423. 
 
THE GODS OF THE ORIENT 253 
 
 to achieve any real synthesis, of the present. Men 
 cannot be themselves in the presence of the old 
 masterpieces ; they are driven to emulate or to rebel, 
 and neither course leads to great achievement. So 
 they take refuge in the pretty, the sentimental, the 
 small mastery, the art and literature of re-£olt or the 
 clique. Not that the human mind was not inactive 
 in this period ; scholarship, geography, astronomy 
 and other natural sciences flourished ; but these did 
 not give, they never give, the same sense of freedom 
 and grandeur that is received from genius more 
 original ; and vsrithout it their flourishing was not 
 to be for long. 
 
 The quiet individual, then, revolting from the 
 luxury and display in which the adventurer spent 
 his new wealth and gradually extinguished his faculties, 
 and conscious of sharing the decline that was over- 
 taking the world, was faced by despair. The old 
 gods were not what they had been ; philosophy 
 trampled on human nature ; right and wrong were 
 confused ; genius was dead ; what was there worth 
 while ? There is world-weariness in this age, weari- 
 ness of culture,^ fear of life, " failure of nerve," 
 as Professor Bury puts it. The Stoics ministered to 
 the relief of this feeling by teaching the lawfulness 
 and propriety of suicide. True, Seneca later on 
 urged that " you should leave life, not bolt from it," 
 exire non jugere ; but the pace is nothing, the exit 
 was permitted. But a form of surrender as fatal 
 and requiring less resolve, is race-suicide. " In our 
 time," writes Polybius,* " all Greece was visited by 
 a dearth of children . . . and a failure of productive- 
 ness followed, though there were no long-continued 
 wars or serious pestilences among us.. If, then, any 
 one had advised our sending to ask the gods in regard 
 to this, what we were to do or say in order to become 
 more numerous and better fill our cities — ^would he 
 
 ^ Wendland, Die hell-r'im Kultur, p. 40. ^ Polybius, xxxvii. 9. 
 
254 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 not have seemed a futile person, when the cause was 
 manifest and the cure was in our own power ? For 
 this evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting 
 attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion 
 for show and money and the pleasure of an idle life 
 and accordingly either not marrying at all, or, if they 
 did marry, refusing to rear the children that were 
 born, or at most one or two out of a great number, 
 for the sake of leaving them well off or bringing them 
 up in extravagant luxury." It sounds very modern. 
 Probably another factor operated — a sense of despair 
 of raising the human crop in a world of war and 
 anarchy, of the futility of effort, the feeling that the 
 man travels best who gives fewest pledges to fortune. 
 Again, the reaction will take the form of a heightened 
 sense of solitude and forlornness ; and the solitary 
 and forlorn are apt to be the prey of emotion, especially 
 when the level of culture is not very high. 
 
 A man must have some anchor, some haven of peace 
 and security. If domestic happiness gives it, he is 
 not apt to range much further. But here was a 
 world where all the higher instincts seemed to be 
 mocked — genius, love of country, family feeling. 
 One permanent instinct of man was left which was 
 not denied, which could not be denied, its satis- 
 faction by any combination of adventurers. There 
 was the unseen world, and to it men turned with a 
 hunger unexampled in the story of Greece — a Craving 
 for something that they might believe, for some 
 explanation of the horrors of life, for some hope that 
 would carry them through this mortal scene, through 
 the uncharted beyond, for something that would 
 guarantee family love and natural affection, for some- 
 thing universal. The Stoic might laugh at such 
 desires in another and suppress them in himself. But 
 natures that were of softer fibre, less logical, less 
 courageous, owned to these cravings — and natures, 
 too, that were truer to the large human instincts. 
 
THE GODS OF THE ORIENT 255 
 
 When philosophy gave so little help, small wonder 
 men went elsewhere in their need. 
 
 The days were past when the enlightened and the 
 intellectuals dominated the field of thought. The 
 reaction was signalized by the hemlock given to 
 Socrates. The piety of Xenophon is called pietism 
 by some German critics ; but whichever it be, his 
 attitude to the gods strikes strangely on a reader of 
 Thucydides who remembers that the later historian 
 tried to finish the work of the earlier. But as in the 
 Roman Empire, as in France after Waterloo, men, 
 who had been shocked by what atheism could 
 mean, swung back to ancient paths. The successors 
 of Alexander might be deified by their own rescripts 
 or the votes of abject allies ; but their godless lives 
 of luxury, licence and war must have made many sigh 
 for gods real and effectual, belief in whom would control 
 life and lift it back to the level of an idealized past. 
 
 So, conscious of his own needs and fears,^ of his 
 spiritual solitude in a terrible universe, the individual 
 man wanted friends whom he might know, who would 
 care for him, not as an item in a community but as a 
 personality. He craved communion, in a new way, 
 with gods. Homer's heroes had their contacts and 
 conflicts with gods, but not as men now sought inter- 
 course with heaven. The relation must be more 
 personal and more conscious. Reason is one thing, 
 feeling another ; feeHng was what they wanted. They 
 wanted to feel secure, to feel happy, to be conscious 
 of the touch and protection of gods. With the long 
 story of the disastrous effects of unchecked emotion 
 upon religion open before us, it is easy to see how 
 this emphasis on feeling opened the door to all sorts 
 of spiritual and intellectual insincerity. Men were 
 
 ^ For the fears, some of them, see Theophrastus, Characters, xxvii., 
 The Superstitious Man ; who, however often purified, confines him- 
 himself to Greek rites — unless Sabazius is still foreign. The book 
 probably belongs between 322 and 300 B.C. ; cf. Jebb(ed. Sandys), p. 7. 
 
256 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 living under conditions which led them to despair 
 of reason ; the philosophers were so hard and so 
 abstract, and the practical rationalism of kings like 
 Philip V of Macedon led to so much cold-blooded 
 horror. Probably feeling had never monopolized 
 so much of man's attention in Greek history. 
 
 The soul had been drawing to itself the interest 
 of thinkers more and more since the days when Plato 
 enunciated that philosophy is preparation or practice 
 of death.^ It was an inevitable movement of thought, 
 a real progress ; and it illustrates anew and with force 
 that tendency to lay stress on human personality 
 which we have found so powerful in the history of 
 religion. More and more was asked of the Universe, 
 was asked of God. By now Immortality was becom- 
 ing the centre of religious aspiration, a natural out- 
 come of the emphasis on the individual enforced by 
 all the features of contemporary life. Something 
 beyond the grave must make amends for this world. 
 The conviction grows that personality is a thing 
 that must outlast death ; and every man conscious of 
 it has a progressively imperative instinct that he at 
 least must not be blotted out. This new self-con- 
 sciousness, this new demand for life, for fuller and 
 richer and more enduring life, distinguishes this period 
 of Greek life from the classical. Stoic psychological 
 observation, religious impulse, the cry for life beyond, 
 all bring the soul into a new significance. The 
 development of the soul is to be the real thing in life ; 
 the body and its fugitive interests may occupy the 
 great and the trivial, but for the earnest and the 
 thoughtful, men or women, the world beyond is the 
 real. The world beyond and the world within ; for 
 they are the same thing. The care of the soul is man's 
 chief task, and it involves questions. In the old days 
 any sense of sin that there might be was concerned 
 
 1 Plato, Phaedo, 81 A ; cf. Rep., x. 608 S. See James Adam, 
 Vitality ofPlatonism, p. 66 f. 
 
THE GODS OF THE ORIENT 257 
 
 with acts ; now it attaches itself to the condition 
 of the soul. The soul, then, its sinfulness and its 
 purification, draw to themselves an attention which 
 would have seemed ludicrous to the illuminated in 
 the fifth century at Athens, and to the common man 
 too. That marked shifting of interest from the out- 
 ward to the inward which the spiritual interpretation 
 of History brings into such prominence,^ is seen again 
 here. Nor is it accident. The trend of thought 
 and experience has been steady. Orphic teaching, 
 Pythagoras, Plato, the pressure of the world and 
 its problems — everything has been reinforcing the 
 necessity of this transition. 
 
 When once Immortality and the sense of sin ^ 
 become master factors in man's thinking, a new 
 seriousness attaches to all religion. It ceases to be 
 conventional. Ritual and tradition do well enough 
 for those who do not think and feel. The really 
 religious spirit must have certainty. The orthodoxy 
 of Aristophanes, local and conservative for all his 
 wit, was flippant and shallow. It was easy to be 
 orthodox about what did not supremely matter ; 
 but for men with an intense belief in truth and in 
 God conventional orthodoxy will not serve. Still less 
 wiU serve the doubts of Protagoras and the sophists. 
 It is a question of where the interest centres, of what 
 matters most. Neither Aristophanes nor Protagoras 
 seems to have been interested in his soul's salvation. 
 
 The Epicurean dismissed the whole matter and 
 emphasized the senses and the life of sense. Cicero's 
 magnificent refutation of Epicureanism by citing 
 tragic figures from the dramas of Ennius touched the 
 real weakness of the system.^ 
 
 ^ See Shailer Mathews, Spiritual Interpretation of History. 
 
 * It will be remembered here that Sin is not a term with one 
 fixed meaning. 
 
 ^ Cicero, Tusculans, iii. 1 9, 44-46 ; the rendering was made by a 
 pupil of mine, who fell in the war. 
 
 R 
 
258 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Now what help. 
 On what protection may I call, and win ? 
 Where now in exUe or in flight find aid, 
 Who am bereft of citadel and home ? 
 Whither now turn, to whom address my prayer ? 
 For lo ! where stood my home, my fathers' gods 
 And altars aU are fallen, broken down ; 
 Their thrones by flame despoiled ; the lofty walls 
 Rear fire-marred heads, where crackling pine has flamed. . . . 
 
 O father ! O land of my fathers ! 
 
 O palace of Priam the king. 
 And temple, where gates on high hinges 
 
 No more through the silence shall ring ; 
 All ruined ! and yet I have seen you 
 
 When the host of our army stood nigh 
 With ivory wrought and all golden, 
 
 A blaze of glory on high. 
 
 Andromache widowed, childless, robbed of city and 
 home — ^will pleasures of the moment, a cushion or 
 a cup of mead, or the memory of former cups and 
 cushions, take from her the pangs of the soul ? 
 Never ! So Epicurean criticism fell on deaf ears. 
 The Epicurean did not understand the human pro- 
 blem ; he knew nothing of the depths of human 
 nature ; and there were those who hinted that his 
 second-hand natural science was not very sound and 
 did not go far enough. His easy neglect of the gods 
 was well enough for men who needed no gods. But 
 gods were the prime demand of humanity. 
 
 How the Stoic failed, we have aheady seen. He too 
 missed the real springs of the human spirit in spite 
 of his psychology ; and when he turned the gods 
 into abstract personifications of grain or water or of 
 the processes of growth, when he included his gods 
 among the other items of the cosmos which would 
 periodically be dissolved into atoms, and utterly 
 annihilated, he showed how little he understood the 
 cry of the human heart. He might be loyal to truth 
 
THE GODS OF THE ORIENT 259 
 
 and great of spirit, but he had missed something 
 real. 
 
 The immortal mind craves objects that endure — 
 
 above all, its gods must be real, they must give the 
 soul fixity and certainty ; and men turned away in 
 disappointment from the Stoics. Sadness haunts 
 Stoicism. If Epictetus is conscious of no sadness, 
 it marks a defect in him ; Seneca has an under -current 
 of melancholy, and in Marcus Aurelius it is the 
 dominant note. " Either gods or atoms," says 
 Marcus Aurelius — a question-mark at the very heart 
 of things. 
 
 But was it so certain that real knowledge of the 
 gods was unattainable ? Men were, in Plato's telling 
 phrase, " examining life " anew and getting closer, 
 it seemed, to reality. Julius Beloch suggests that 
 the decline of polytheism was itself a symptom of the 
 deepening of religious feeling.^ Abstracts of larger 
 implication begin to appear in men's speech ; to 
 Oaov, " the divine," rules the world, to hai-iioviov ; or 
 the bold vague masculine singular, 6 ^eos, God, 
 comes naturally to men's minds and lips. Even 
 Tyche, chance, has at least a grammatical unity about 
 it, a poor enough principle to which to reduce pheno- 
 mena, but a single one in a sort of a way ; it brought 
 all things under one idea, if a bad one. So much was 
 the outcome of long years of thought, filtering into 
 the regions of the less original and less thoughtful. 
 At the bottom, then, of all phenomena and of all 
 experience lies — the Divine ; and the Divine is one, 
 and so far it is intelligible. 
 
 But if the Divine is one, there is not one Divine 
 for the Greek and another for the Phrygian and a 
 third for the Egyptian. No ; Egyptian and Greek 
 and Phrygian are handling the same evidence, or very 
 nearly the same evidence, of the same one great 
 
 ^ Beloch, Griech. Gesch., vol. III. i. \\\. 
 
26o PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 underlying reality. If one man says Zeus and another 
 Osiris, the presumption is that they are trying to 
 interpret a similar experience. When the Egyptian 
 king in Herodotus' story found the untaught children 
 crying bekos, and learnt that the Phrygians give the 
 name bekos to bread, he drew the deduction that 
 Phrygian is the oldest, the primeval, language ; 
 bread he took to be a constant, however much the 
 languages of men may vary. So God is a constant ; 
 and perhaps, if the older peoples give to God a 
 different name from the Greeks, it may be that they, 
 as the oldest exponents of God, are not wrong but 
 right, nearer the original.^ What if other nations, 
 dealing with the same Divine, coincide more nearly 
 with the traditional religions of Greece than with 
 Stoic or Epicurean ? When Vincent of Lerins enun- 
 ciated his principle Quod semper, quod ubique, quod 
 ab omnibus, it was not quite new, nor is it yet quite 
 obsolete or absurd. The Stoic, as we saw, took 
 the consensus of human belief as a valid index to 
 truth ; the modern man of science attaches more 
 weight to a law deduced from observation over a 
 wide field, over the widest field, by the largest number 
 of independent observers. For the different observers 
 correct one another's errors ; and, when they reach 
 one conclusion, there is a strong presumption in 
 favour of our acting upon it as true, until it is dis- 
 proved, or until it is merged in some larger and more 
 universal law based on still wider knowledge ; and 
 in the latter case it is really confirmed. The gods 
 of Sicyon may not have much currency in Argos, less 
 in Athens, less stiU in Thessaly, none at all in Persia ; 
 that is to say, the names given in Sicyon to divine 
 
 ^ Compare the view of Megasthenes in the third book of his 
 Indica (cited by Clem. Alex., Strom, i. 15 ; Muller, F.H.G., vol. ii. 
 p. \i'],fr. 41) : " All that was said about nature by the ancients is 
 said also by the philosophers beyond Greece, some of it among the 
 Indians by the Brahmans, some of it in Syria by those called Jews." 
 
THE GODS OF THE ORIENT 261 
 
 power may be unknown elsewhere, but that in Sicyon 
 divine power is recognized and is named, is a fact 
 that confirms and encourages other thinkers who 
 elsewhere have recognized it, even if they have given 
 it other names. Conversely, when the man from 
 Sicyon draw5 this deduction from observations made 
 in his travels in Thessaly and Egypt, even if he thinks 
 less of the name used in the old home town, he is 
 confirmed in believing in the Divine. 
 
 When the issue was put so, both Stoic and Epi- 
 curean admitted the validity of the reasoning ; both 
 conceded gods and the existence of gods. The 
 Epicurean, however, persisted that gods may exist, 
 but that they have not necessarily on that account 
 anything to do with us ; Indians also existed, but 
 they did not come into practical politics in the Medi- 
 terranean world. The Stoic refused this last limita- 
 tion of the gods ; if gods exist, and the consensus of 
 mankind is fair evidence for presuming that they do, 
 then they are relevant to us, in a universe which is 
 an integer with nothing in it that is, properly con- 
 sidered, irrelevant to anything else in it. If the 
 Stoic, like the Epicurean, persisted in a dogma of his 
 own about the gods, if he grouped them among 
 phenomena of only temporary significance, he had 
 at least conceded — they had both conceded — a prin- 
 ciple that was giving important results. The evidence 
 of the foreigner was relevant to Greek theology ; 
 how far you were to go in using it, was another point. 
 It might be possible to use the conceded principle 
 to yield further knowledge and bring men to a firmer 
 grasp of reality. 
 
 For centuries Greeks had been impressed by the 
 East, and especially by Egypt.^ Herodotus had held 
 
 ^ Breasted, Hist. Anc. Egyptians, p. 400, says that the Greeks never 
 correctly understood Egyptian civilization, and greatly over-valued 
 Egypt's intellectual achievement : the Greeks were vastly superior to 
 what they so much venerated. 
 
262 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 that behind Greek theology lay Egyptian. He had 
 been interested in Persian thought, so far as he could 
 get at it through interpreters.^ The conquest of 
 Alexander had, as we have seen, brought Greek and 
 Persian and Egyptian together far more closely than 
 ever, and under his successors more deliberate attempts 
 than ever before were made to make the religious 
 ideas of the nations intelligible to the Greeks. The 
 Ptolemies, the shrewdest and most successful of the 
 world's rulers, saw a political value ^ in bringing 
 Greek and Egyptian together on a religious basis, 
 for at first blush the Greek had an ill-disguised con- 
 tempt for Egyptian worship. Herodotus had observed 
 with curious but kindly eyes what moved the mockery 
 of later Greeks. People who could really worship 
 cats and crocodiles, sing hymns to them alive and 
 mummy them dead, who could worship leeks and 
 onions, were obviously contemptible.^ Contempt, 
 freely felt and expressed, rarely consolidates kingdoms. 
 So stress was laid on another side of Egyptian religion, 
 and the priests were probably content with a wise 
 king, who might modify detail but respected and 
 improved their position. Serapis became the great 
 Egyptian god fot mankind at large. It was a cult 
 fortified by the rejection or modification of gross or 
 repugnant elements and by new emphasis on its 
 mystical features. In other words, it was Hellenized ; 
 it became " the most civilized of all barbarian re- 
 ligions ; it retained enough of the exotic element to 
 arouse the curiosity of the Greeks, but not enough 
 to offend their delicate sense of proportion, and its 
 success was remarkable." * The Athenian sculptor 
 Bryaxis gave the new or re-discovered god a form 
 which Cumont ^ calls " one of the last divine creations 
 
 1 See p. 154. 
 
 ^ Cf. Mahafiy, Empire of Ptolemies, p. 72. 
 
 ' Cumont, Oriental Religions, p. 78. 
 
 * Cumont, ib., p. 79. * lb., p. 76. 
 
THE GODS OF THE ORIENT 263 
 
 of Hellenic genius " ; it became the standard and the 
 prototype of all portrayals of him. 
 
 Political attempts, like this of the first Ptolemy, 
 are significant only when they are based on some 
 real factor of the day ; and in this case the real 
 factor was a genuine desire for approximation in 
 religion. Manetho, a priest of Heliopolis, who is 
 credited with a share in leading Ptolemy to this 
 development of Serapis,^ took the trouble to compile 
 for Greeks . an account of Egyptian religion. Even 
 if his work, as we are told, was careless and uncritical,^ 
 and tedious into the bargain,* so that the Greeks left 
 it on one side in favour of still less exact and exacting 
 writers, it was a sign of the movement of interest. 
 The king and the priest had hit the moment ; and 
 the Hellenized religion of Serapis was spread through 
 the ramifications of trade all over the world before 
 the century was out.* The god had Greek monks 
 devoted to him as well as Egyptian, and recent finds 
 of papyri tell of the life in his Serapeums. If much of 
 Egyptian religion remained un-Hellenized, a contact had 
 been established which produced the greatest effects. 
 
 In the same way, in this period, the Chaldaean 
 priest Berossos, under Antiochus Soter, wrote in 
 Greek a short history of Babylonia on the basis of 
 cuneiform tradition, setting forth in dry enough 
 fashion a list of kings reaching back to 468,000 years 
 before Cyrus, and adding mythological and astro- 
 logical sections. If the vast antiquity of the East 
 could guarantee the eternity of the gods of the Orient, 
 surely Berossos had done good service ; but it is not 
 surprising to learn that he too was little read.* 
 
 * Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, c. 28. 
 
 2 Breasted, Hist, of Ancient Egyptians, p. 26 ; Eiman, Egyptian Re/i- 
 gion, p. 217, calls it " a melancholy piece of bungling." 
 8 Beloch, Grieci. Gesch., Ill, i. 489. 
 
 * Beloch, Greich. Gesch., III. i. pp. 446-449. 
 5 Beloch, ib., p. 489. 
 
264 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Asia Minor lay still nearer to the Greek, and it 
 was familiar ground, and for a long time influences 
 had been felt from here. The kings of Pergamum, 
 another very astute dynasty, transferred to their 
 capital the great black stone which either was Cybele 
 or was her dwelling, and so doing they gave and 
 gained a new significance. Athens and Rome at 
 once became more attentive to the goddess.^ The 
 Seleucids, on the other hand, tried to establish 
 Greek cults and festivals in Syria. What response 
 their efforts met among the Jews, we know ; how 
 their other subjects received them, is not so well 
 known. Syria had long ago sent Adonis to Greece 
 and now began to contribute other gods — ^Atargatis, 
 who became identified in the spirit of the times 
 with Astarte,^ and Adad or Hadad, who had a bookish 
 celebrity through the similarity of his name with the 
 Syriac word for one.^ 
 
 In all this story we have to remember that we are 
 not dealing with monotheists and their fierce temper 
 and exacting Theology, but with polytheists easier 
 of habit altogether. It was not hard to identify 
 one's native god with the foreigner's god; it was 
 just as easy to worship both. Gods were taken 
 over as lightly then as religious ideas are from 
 popular magazines to-day. Indeed the mood of vague 
 catholicity and loose thinking that has made the 
 success of theosophy in India and in America was 
 not strange to that age. It is not to be supposed 
 that the pious and the superstitious, the austere and 
 the prostitute, who worshipped Isis side by side, had 
 any exact knowledge at all of the history of the goddess. 
 The literature of the foreigner remained a sealed book 
 
 1 W. S. Ferguson, Hellenistic Athens, p. 229. 
 
 2 Cumont, Oriental Relig., p. 104, suggests that the identification 
 is wrong. 
 
 ^ Macrobius, Sfl/wr«(?/M, i. 23, 17 ; Adad . . . Ejus nominis interpre- 
 tatio significat Unus unus. 
 
THE GODS OF THE ORIENT 265 
 
 to the Greek ; he did not want to read what bar- 
 barians wrote ; he picked up a journalist's knowledge 
 of their ideas, and filled the gaps in his information 
 with guesswork.^ The philosophers smiled benignly 
 on the result and treated the religions of the Orient 
 as " philosophies." 
 
 For our present inquiry the grounds of appeal of 
 these barbarian religions are more important than 
 the cults themselves. We have to consider what 
 the Greeks and others supposed themselves to find 
 in them ; and then to see how the evidence we gain 
 bears upon our subject. 
 
 We have seen that the immense antiquity of these 
 Eastern religions had always impressed the Greek, 
 and that a feeling, not at all improper, existed that 
 truth was to be sought even outside the Greek philo- 
 sophic schools. As Celsus said long afterwards — ^the 
 saying will bear repetition — " the barbarians are 
 equal to discovering religious truths (dogmata) while 
 the Greeks are better at criticizing and establishing 
 them when discovered." ^ But that was only one 
 line of appeal ; for, quite apart from the quest for 
 truth, there was an appeal to imagination and to 
 emotion in the ancient ceremonial, in the claim to 
 superior and esoteric knowledge, in the promise of the 
 communication of new life in the mysteries. Where 
 religion and magic are not clearly distinguished, there 
 is an additional appeal in ritual. A later age gave 
 a " scientific " account of the value of ritual as 
 Mrs Besant does in India to-day. There are affini- 
 ties almost chemical between spiritual natures and 
 material substances ; ^ the physical nature of matter 
 can be modified or supercharged by formulae ; or, 
 at least, you can beHeve that some such processes 
 
 ^ Wendland, die hell.-rijm Kultur, p. 39 ; Beloch, Greich. GescL, III. 
 i. 488. 
 
 2 Af. Origen, c. Cels., i. 2. Cf. p. 196. 
 * Cf. p. 32s. 
 
266 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 and contacts may be possible ; and then what pros- 
 pects open before the worshipper of rapture, of 
 vision, and, above all, of feeling ! 
 
 There was in the Eastern religions no great moral 
 teaching, any more than in the religion of the Greek 
 temples ; that was never a feature of ancient paganism ; 
 morals, on the contrary, as we saw, came from the 
 philosophers and the fathers of families. But Egyptian 
 religion had much to give to the mind — the sensation 
 of exercise, for instance, and the impression of receiv- 
 ing truth. Its linen, its tonsures, and its rites of wash- 
 ing — writes easy, natural, and refreshing in a hot climate 
 with a great river always near — ^gave the suggestion of 
 purity.^ Its occasional taboos of sexual intercourse, 
 its daily ministry to the gods ^ (closely resembling 
 Hindu practice), the unity, precision, and eternity 
 of its ceremony, all suggested a seriousness, which 
 to loose-thinking minds, careless of the distinction 
 between symbol and thought, was impressive in the 
 highest. We know to this day the appeal of " holi- 
 ness," in spite of wrong or confused thinking that 
 may go with it. The teaching of judgment after 
 death and the promise of salvation by Serapis,* the 
 claim to control gods or cosmic powers by prayer 
 and holy formula,* seemed to take the worshipper 
 into regions beyond common experience, to promise 
 him what was above all the desire of men in that age 
 of trouble and uncertainty — assurance and certainty. 
 If questions were raised about gross traditions and 
 rituals, about worship of lowly reptiles, recourse was 
 had to allegory and symbol. If, says Plutarch, a 
 god is content to be worshipped in an idol, how 
 much happier is it to symbolize him in a living 
 
 1 Cumont, Or. Relig., pp. 91, 92. 
 
 2 Cumont, Or. Relig., pp. 95, 97, cites Porphyry, de Abstin., iv. 9 ; 
 Arnobius, vii. 32 ; Apuleius, Metam., xi. 20. 
 
 ' Julian, Oration, iv. 136 A, B. 
 
 * Cf. the theory advanced by lamblichus, vi. 6. 
 
THE GODS OF THE ORIENT 267 
 
 thing ! — e.g. a crocodile, which like God has no 
 tongue.^ 
 
 Side by side with Eastern religion came Astrology. 
 Professor Burnet and Cumont alike urge that the 
 much vaunted Astronomy of Babylonia was empirical 
 — " an elaborate record of celestial phenomena made 
 for purposes of divination." ^ This was not the 
 view of the Greeks. Diodorus Siculus (ii. 29, 30) 
 contrasts the flimsy amateurish way in which the 
 Greeks handle the science, " touching the philosophy 
 late, studying it up to a point, distracted by the needs 
 of life . . . making a trade of it for gain," with the 
 serious training of the hereditary Chaldaean astrol- 
 ogers, who are the descendants or heirs of the most 
 ancient Babylonians, who have the most accurate 
 observations of the movements and influences of the 
 stars.^ The planets they call " interpreters," because 
 they move and foreshow the future and interpret 
 to men the goodwill of the gods, and they name them 
 " as our astrologers do " after the gods Ares, Aphro- 
 dite, Hermes, and Zeus, though Cronos (or Saturn) 
 they call Helios. Greek astrologers had not always 
 used these names ; the planets had been Pyroeis, 
 Eosphoros, Stilbon, and Phaethon, and Saturn had 
 been Phainon, until in the fourth century B.C. the 
 divine names replaced the old ones.* The planet 
 week came into use in Hellenistic times.* The 
 philosophers had started the idea that the stars were 
 gods ; Aristophanes had remarked that the Orientals 
 
 '^ Flnturch, his and Osiris, 75, 381 B. Cf. Strabo, xvii. 38, c. 812, 
 on worship of sacred crocodile. 
 
 2 Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Part I. p. 5. Cumont, Astrology and 
 Religion, pp. 7, 8. 
 
 ^ Cf. Strabo, p. 639 C, on Chaldaean astronomers, especially 
 Kidenas, identified now with Ki-din-nu read on a lunar table ; 
 Cumont, Astrol. and Relig., pp. 63, 64. 
 
 * Cumont, Astrol. and Relig., pp. 45, 46 ; Dreyer, Planetary Systems, 
 p. 169 n. 
 
 ^ Cumont, Astrol. and Relig., p. 165. 
 
268 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 worshipped the Sun and the Moon. With the break- 
 down of old local gods, the deification of adventurer 
 princes, and the theory of Euhemerus that all the 
 Greek gods were deified men, a place was open, as 
 we saw, for gods who were universal and unquestion- 
 able, who did not depend on popular .votes for their 
 godhead ; and Astrology offered them. It is pointed 
 out that Astronomy only reached Egypt itself about 
 the sixth century B.C., from which time its significance 
 increased rapidly and the Egyptians began to claim 
 the credit of being the pioneers in the Science.^ On 
 the Hellenistic mind, Astrology fell, as Professor 
 Murray puts it, " as a new disease falls upon some 
 remote island people." ^ 
 
 Once the identification of stars and gods was made, 
 the door was open for much more. To a certain 
 type of mind, when it is explained that the gods are 
 the stars and the stars the gods, a new certainty 
 seems to foUow ; religion reaches a new plane of 
 truth and eternity, and all sorts of riders and deduc- 
 tions follow.' The planets began to have influences, 
 to be tutelary powers of days, hours, and centuries, 
 to be " world-lords " (/cocr^oK/octTo/aes) ; to each were 
 attached plants, metals, stones, and colours. The 
 sun becomes " the heart of the universe." Lest it 
 should seem that the creature replaced the creator, 
 the new theologians devised a god beyond the sun, 
 to whom the sun was a subordinate power, of whom 
 it was an expression in the world of sense, a Jupiter 
 summus exsuperantissimus. Then as life came more 
 under planetary control, the planets became gates * 
 through which the soul passes in descent to earth and 
 again in ascent to the world of being, at each of which 
 it picks up or lays down qualities — e.g. from Mars 
 
 ^ Cumont, Astrol. and Relig., p. 75. 
 
 * Murray, Tour Stages, p. 125. 
 
 ^ Cumont, /isirol. and Relig., pp. 1 19-1 31, 135. 
 
 * Cumont, Astrol. and Relig., p. 198 ; Oriental Religions, p. 269 n. 
 
THE GODS OF THE ORIENT 269 
 
 it gets anger, from Venus desire ; or, it may be, the 
 soul loses some aspect of real being with each gate 
 through which it passes.^ Stoic pantheism fitted in 
 weU with aU this ; and if the stars too were to pass, 
 as stricter Stoics would urge, they had at least a look 
 of eternity that might encourage the believer to hope 
 that things were not so bad as was said. 
 
 Not everybody accepted this new revelation. Aris- 
 tarchos of Samos taught of a heliocentric system, 
 " upsetting the hearth (hestia) of the universe." ^ 
 Seleucus of Seleucia, a rationalist indeed, is credited 
 with utterly rejecting astrology, with holding to the 
 heliocentric idea, and offering an explanation of 
 tides.* But such men were a minority ; they differed 
 so strongly from current opinion that they could not 
 be right, and they unsettled what was becoming the 
 fixed basis in religion. When we recall how in 
 modern times of unsettlement there has been pas- 
 sionate return to common consent, to tradition, as 
 the sure foundation of religious life, we can under- 
 stand in measure the attitude of the Hellenistic world. 
 No real reaction was made against Astrology till 
 Christians, orthodox and unorthodox,* began to turn 
 their criticism on it ; and the fierceness of the 
 struggle then shows what was involved. The cer- 
 tainty of the old religion had in Astrology what we 
 should call a scientific basis ; the order of the heavens, 
 the uniformity and intelligibility of the cosmos, were 
 linked by pure assumption to a traditional religion. 
 The weakness of the link escaped notice in the relief 
 of finding certainty, and the certainty itself was not 
 too closely examined. The Greek passion for know- 
 
 ^ Macrobius, Comm. Somn. Scip., i., li, 9 ; 12, I. 
 
 ^ Beloch, Gr. Gesch., III. i. 480 ; Dreyer, Planetary Systems, 
 p. I36f. ; the criticism quoted is Plutarch's and very characteristic, 
 de facie in or be lunae, 6. 
 
 ^ Dreyer, ibid., p. 140 ; Strabo, cc. 6, 739, and especially c. 174. 
 
 * E.g. Bardaisan's book on Fate. 
 
270 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 ledge was cheaply gratified, and the clinging soul was 
 given a sure support. And the rest followed. 
 
 Of the stages hy which the various religions con- 
 quered the world, or of the detail of teaching and 
 cults, it is not necessary now to speak, except as they 
 bear upon our general inquiry. 
 
 First of all, the individual is promised a surer 
 recognition by the gods. The meaning of all that 
 ancient wealth of ceremony was again and again a 
 real contact between God and man. Symbol as much 
 of it was, symbol and transaction ran into one another, 
 where (as we saw) magic and religion were insufficiently 
 distinguished, where thought was not alert, and 
 where the quest of truth was not the main object. 
 God and man could meet and know each other ; 
 mystically or even to the bodily eye god and goddess 
 would show themselves to the faithful, who, duly 
 purified, performed aright the set course of ritual, 
 and in the appointed way was initiated and prepared. 
 The very difficulty of initiation, the seven grades 
 through which the Mithraist was conducted, the 
 strangeness, all heightened the impression, and where 
 criticism or reflection was impiety, brought con- 
 viction to the adept. Of the processes of mind by 
 which certainty was achieved, of deliberate impos- 
 ture and conjuring by the priests, of suggestion and 
 suggestibility, of the will to believe, of the desperation 
 of the religious temperament in the world we have 
 been surveying, much might be said. But for us 
 the main point is this : in aU the mental and moral 
 degradation of these Eastern religions, as they spread 
 over the Mediterranean world, the factor of importance 
 is the conviction that man, as an individual, as a 
 personality, with real needs of soul and nature, must 
 have an effective relation with god, gods, or goddesses, 
 a great reassertion, in a terribly misleading and 
 humiliating way, of the principle which we have 
 found throughout — the growing significance of the 
 
THE GODS OF THE ORIENT 271 
 
 individual and the imperative call for his recognition 
 by the Divine. 
 
 When we analyse further the objects of these initia- 
 tions, we get still clearer light on this point. The 
 word " salvation " begins to appear in religion. How 
 ahen, how unintelligible, to Homer's Greeks the word 
 would have been, it is hard to imagine. In the age 
 of Pericles and Anaxagoras it would have been strange. 
 But in the period before us, it becomes a keyword in 
 religious thought. A careless assumption puts on 
 one level all ancient religions which speak of salvation ; 
 but the word obviously is susceptible of many mean- 
 ings, which wiU vary with the outlook of the speaker. 
 
 Salvation is not a fixed idea ; much turns on what 
 it is from which a man seeks to be saved — whether 
 he fears eternal reincarnation, or death physical or 
 eternal, or the pollution and paralysis of his soul by 
 sin. 
 
 In the age under our study men sought salvation 
 from three main fears — ^from daemons, from fate, and 
 from death. The planet " world-lords " had done 
 more than establish religion ; they had brought all 
 life under their iron rule. Fatalism began to paralyse 
 the thoughts of men ; a doom, a destiny, was read 
 in the stars, and it was at once inevitable ; the very 
 belief in it made it so, and life became a thing of 
 horror and dread. Was it possible to break the bars ? 
 India has seen a similar endeavour to escape from the 
 pitiless law of Karma, with its menace of eight million 
 rebirths into the world of sense till all consequences 
 of all acts are worked off to the utmost ; by Bhakti, 
 or union with a god, it is taught, a man may be 
 " carried across the stream of the world." The re- 
 crudescence of old superstitions and the invasion of 
 new ones from the East had filled the minds of men 
 and women with heightened fears of daemons. Once 
 the outlook of the day was accepted, the consensus 
 of mankind was in favour of belief in a " world all 
 
272 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 devils o'er " ; and magic and religion gained a new 
 value as means of protection against the terrors of 
 the spirit world. It is not easy to understand, apart 
 from the evidence, the lengths to which terror can 
 carry men and women ; but Cicero and Plutarch 
 and even Horace give us material for a judgment, 
 which is supported by testimony painfully similar 
 from the animistic peoples of to-day. 
 
 Tempers more strictly religious turned to the gods 
 and to the initiations, which linked men with them, 
 for something higher. The soul they came to think 
 of as a prisoner in the body — an idea borrowed from 
 the Orphics by Plato ; and they went to the gods 
 for assurance of immortahty. The creature's blind 
 dread of extinction was one factor in this impulse, 
 but surely with the growth of the sense of individuahty 
 we may recognize a nobler strain too. All the travail 
 of all the world to produce a creature born to reach 
 strange heights of being — ^and to be extinguished ! 
 No, that must not be ; the gods must have other 
 purposes ; so to the gods men went for deHverance. 
 Another motive, not wholly disentangled from strange 
 antecedents of taboo, was a consciousness of sin and 
 of moral weakness. The forgiveness of sins was not 
 a gospel to appeal at once to a world unconscious of 
 sin. Introspection, self-criticism, was a regular part 
 of the Stoic management of life ; but there were 
 men who did not forgive themselves their sins with 
 the resolute phlegm of some of the Stoics. It is 
 clear from our evidence that not all men conceived 
 of sin as spiritual ; there were many crude and im- 
 mature thoughts upon it, and men had much to learn 
 here from Jesus of Nazareth. But the whiter souls, it 
 is fair to expect (though the evidence for this is slight), 
 were turning to shrine and temple for spiritual help in 
 the mending of life and the cleansing of conscience. 
 
 Thus, in one way and another, men were led to 
 think of salvation and to look for it from the gods. 
 
THE GODS OF THE ORIENT 273 
 
 The Stoic might tell them to save themselves, might 
 question them as to the use of prayer, might set them 
 a great example of a self-contained, high-minded life. 
 But in the breakdown of society, amid the crumbling 
 of ideals and the failure of the old gods, the human 
 heart was still reaching out for a religion that made 
 it sure of three things — of the reality of human per- 
 sonality, of some fundamental righteousness in the 
 universe as the basis of all transactions, human and 
 eternal, and of God. 
 
 Whatever criticism has to be passed upon the 
 developments of religion in the Hellenistic world, 
 and criticism there must be on many scores — 
 cowardice in the facing of facts, a defective sense of 
 truth, sentimentalism, shallowness, and so forth — 
 it remains that even this phase of human history 
 bears witness to great instincts. 
 
XIII 
 
 ROMAN RELIGION 
 
 In studying Greek and Hebrew religion we have to 
 deal with peoples who did their own thinking. From 
 first to last, whatever foreign elements are added by- 
 barbarians " more skilled to discover religious truths 
 {dogmata) than to develop them," the Greek world 
 thought on its own lines, even when it fell shortest 
 of its own standards. The Hebrew was influenced 
 by his neighbours, friends or enemies, and found his 
 religious ideas modified in one way and another by 
 the peoples he met, above all by the Greek. But 
 the story of Roman religion is very different. The 
 oldest religious ideas of the Roman people, so far as 
 we can lay hold of them and speak of them, continue 
 to the end — down to the final victory of Christianity, 
 and, it is possible to add, after it. The affair of the 
 Altar of Victory at the end of the fourth century a.d, 
 cannot be called political ; to call it religious would 
 need explanation. A group of nobles representing 
 a very ancient past, a past far more ancient than the 
 records of their own families, make it a point of rehgion 
 to retain an antique ritual, a worship of Victory ; 
 but we know from other sources that at the same time 
 what we should call their religious life moved about 
 cults and ideas that were originally not Roman at all. 
 For six hundred years, if we take the date given us 
 by a Roman poet for the arrival of " the Muse with 
 winged foot," ^ the same confusion exists in Roman 
 religion ; the old persists, maintained by superstition, 
 by sentiment and tradition, but what real or spiritual 
 
 ^ See p. 280. 
 274 
 
ROMAN RELIGION 275 
 
 ideas are attached to it, it is impossible to be certain. 
 Native Roman religion became atrophied, failed to 
 develop, perished in fact ; but a Roman would have 
 spoken otherwise, and would have maintained that 
 it continued. 
 
 The phenomenon is not by now a strange one. 
 In Central Africa the negro becomes Muhammadan 
 and repudiates his old religion, however many ideas 
 he carries over to cornipt the faith of Islam. In the 
 South Seas in island after island the old heathenism 
 has utterly disappeared, as it has among American 
 negroes ; what survives is not religion, it is magic 
 now, hardly even superstition. The fact is that 
 primitive religion cannot maintain itself against the 
 thought and faith of races that have progressed. In 
 spite of Miss Harrison's enthusiasm for cosy and 
 delightful gods without personality, mankind has 
 never been able to maintain them against personal 
 gods, except in a vague helpless way, in fear and con- 
 fusion of mind ; they prove unthinkable, and man- 
 kind insists on religion being thinkable. Where such 
 old forms of religion meet Monotheism, they perish 
 utterly, either by direct repudiation as in the cases 
 just given, or are transformed as far as possible by 
 philosophy and mysticism, as the religions of the 
 Roman Empire were, or as Hinduism to-day is being 
 slowly driven into non-entity by its apologists. The 
 Roman, in his great career as conqueror, lawyer and 
 ruler, early met the Greek, and, in reality, very 
 quickly saw that in all that bears upon religion and 
 philosophy the Greek was on a higher plane than 
 himself. He moved over to that higher plane, and 
 the problem now was what to make of the traditional 
 religion of his fathers. He maintained many of the 
 old forms. Some family cults lapsed altogether ; 
 in others when once the formal procedure was accom- 
 plished, no further attention was paid to god or cult. 
 Where god and cult received the compliment of 
 
276 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 thought, the problem was what meaning or value 
 to attach to them at all. 
 
 Jewish reHgion kept festivals which belonged to 
 an earlier stage of civilization and society, trans- 
 forming them as best it could. Roman religion had 
 the same problem. Agriculture is not very strictly- 
 tied to the calendar, especially when the calendar 
 is inaccurate. But festivals, once given a fixed place 
 in the calendar, keep it, Rome ceased to be pre- 
 eminently an agricultural society ; and as the festivals, 
 through the vagaries of calendar-making, were less 
 and less recognizable as agricultural, while the people 
 who kept them were more and more out of touch 
 with their own origins, less and less meaning came 
 to be attachable to the old religious usages. The 
 gods of the country-side hardly fitted into urban life. 
 Even great antiquaries like Varro were often unable 
 to explain what the ceremonies meant. Some of 
 them took on new meanings. Whatever the Satur- 
 nalia had been, it came to be a midwinter holiday 
 for townspeople and their slaves.^ 
 
 And what were the old gods ? Here is what Aust, 
 translated and endorsed by Dr Warde Fowler, says 
 of them : " The deities of Rome were deities of the 
 cult only. They had no human form ; they had 
 not the human heart with its virtues and vices. They 
 had no intercourse with each other, and no common 
 or permanent residence ; they enjoyed no nectar 
 and ambrosia . . . they had no children, no parental 
 relations. They were indeed both male and female, 
 and a male and female deity are often in close relations 
 with each other ; but this is not a relation of marriage 
 and rests only on a similarity in the sphere of their 
 operations. . . . These deities never become inde- 
 pendent existences ; they remain cold, colourless 
 conceptions, numina as the Romans called them, 
 
 '^ Warde Fowler, Religious Experience of Roman People, pp. 102, 
 103. 
 
ROMAN RELIGION 277 
 
 that is, supernatural beings whose existence only 
 betrays itself in the exercise of certain powers." ^ 
 In the fourth and third centuries bx. the pontifices 
 drew up lists, known as indigitamenta, in which they 
 set out the names of what Augustine calls a " crowd 
 of petty gods." ^ Modern scholars attribute a good 
 deal of their work to their own in\ention, prompted 
 by a love of formalism which they shared with their 
 people.^ 
 
 Such an achievement went far to neutralize any 
 instinct the Roman people might have had for pro- 
 gress in religion. The people had, like other primi- 
 tive races, a firm belief in divination ; and how 
 tenacious their belief in portents was, is shown in the 
 lists given to us by Livy of menacing absurdities 
 which worried the popular mind during the war 
 with Hannibal. All that was worst in their view of 
 life seems to have been maintained by the influence 
 of Etruscan religion close beside them. Etruscans 
 had from time to time held Rome, and through 
 centuries of Roman history Etruscan priests and 
 soothsayers and quacks generally had a hearing and 
 a position in Rome that we might call extraordinary, 
 if the same attention had not later on in a period of 
 more culture been largely transferred to " Chaldaeans." 
 But in our days we have seen two great Anglo-Saxon 
 peoples invited to believe that their real religion is 
 to be found in Tibet. Mankind has always with it 
 a type of mind for which truth is bound up with the 
 exotic and the unexamined. Roman religion produced 
 no cosmogonic myths, and no poetry worthy of mention 
 gathered about it.* It remained more archaic than 
 
 ^ Warde Fowler, Religious Experience of the Roman People, 
 
 p. IS7- 
 
 ^ Augustine, de Civ. Dei, iv. 9 : turba minutorum deorum. 
 
 3 Warde Fowler, Religious Experience of the Roman People, pp. 158, 
 286, 287. 
 
 * Gwatkin, Gifford Lectures, ii. 129, 131. 
 
278 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 any which we can trace with much clearness in the 
 Greek world. 
 
 It is worth while to pause to ask why Roman rehgion 
 followed this strange course. It may seem like evading 
 the question to speak of the genius of a people, but 
 races differ, in reality as well as in historical common- 
 place. Roman history and Greek show an extra- 
 ordinary contrast of national types. We might, 
 almost without paradox, say there is no history of 
 Greece ; that there never was a Greece tiU Rome 
 conquered it, as there was no India till England gave 
 the unity in one rule, one language, and one culture. 
 One Greek state found it as hard to co-operate even 
 in the smallest and most obvious things with another, 
 as one party in either of them did with rivals it met 
 daily in the little market square. Greek history 
 swarms with individualities ; if a typical name were 
 sought, it might very well be Alcibiades ; there is 
 more than one phase of truth in Aristotle's unkind 
 quip that " History is what Alcibiades did." ^ But 
 what would be a typical name in Roman history ? 
 It would probably be AemiHus or Cornelius, or even 
 Marcus ; John Doe and Richard Roe, or their Latin 
 equivalents, represent Roman history far better than 
 any individual. Roman nobles made friends with 
 Varro after he had lost the battle of Cannae; they 
 did it to save the state. Athens never really made 
 friends with Alcibiades. Broadly — and remember- 
 ing there is always error in a sentence that begins 
 with Broadly — ^we might say the individual is every- 
 thing in Greek history and next to nothing in Roman. 
 Corporate feeling was the most difficult thing to 
 create or evoke in a Greek city state ; in Rome, city, 
 land or empire, it could be taken for granted. This 
 difference underlies the greatness and the weakness 
 both of Greek and Roman. For aU that requires 
 
 1 A rather loose and colloquial version of Aristotle, Poetics, 9, 4, 
 p. 145 1 B. 
 
ROMAN RELIGION 279 
 
 co-operation Rome is transcendent ; she can develop 
 law and win loyalty ; she can govern ; but she cannot 
 do what the Greeks do. Does religion in our judg- 
 ment seem to fall more within the sphere of Greek 
 or of Roman ? Corporate religion the Roman knew 
 and managed and maintained, as he did so many 
 admirable things, largely by his faculty of not thinking 
 about them. Where he thought at aU, the key- 
 thought was the community ; but if he went beyond 
 this, he was lost, as is seen in the rapid collapse of 
 social morality and government and everything else 
 in the second century b.c. Whatever group-think- 
 ing and corporate religion may be, if they are anything 
 at all, they do not take a race or an individual very 
 far when the mind and the soul become self-conscious. 
 Moribus antiquis stat res Romana virisque,^ said 
 Ennius in a memorable line, and Cicero, looking back, 
 quotes the line with regret ; he too feels that the 
 old type of character and the old type of man were 
 indeed the foundation of Rome ; but the old char- 
 acter is forgotten and obsolete, lost through " penury 
 of men." In his book On Laws Cicero writes that 
 " To maintain the rituals of the family and of the 
 fathers is (since antiquity draws closest to the gods) 
 to uphold religion as it were a gift of the gods." ^ If 
 he was speaking less from the heart here, none the less 
 ancient religion and ancient character seemed in 
 retrospect to belong together. When Ovid con- 
 gratulated himself on the age of his floruit, because 
 " it suits his character so well," what was to be said ? 
 Is the Ovidian character the outcome of a develop- 
 ment of intelligence past a stage at which the old 
 religion was credible or possible ? What had made 
 
 ^ Ennius, Annales, xv. 5 B ; (Muller, Ennius, p. 50) ; rescued from 
 a lost book of Cicero (de Rep. v.) by Augustine, de civ. Dei, ii. 21. 
 
 2 Cicero, De Legibus, ii. 11, 27: lam ritus familiae patrumque 
 servare id est, quoniam antiquitas proxume accedit ad deos, a dis quasi 
 traditam religionem tueri. 
 
28o PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 it possible ? Is the inevitable production of Ovid, 
 and his like, sufficient proof that a line of development 
 has been wrong ? What was it that changed the 
 type so disastrously ? 
 
 Rome had welded Italy, broken down Carthage, 
 and made the acquaintance of Greece. Masons and 
 artists from the Greek towns in Italy had long fre- 
 quented the city. But in the second Punic war 
 more forces than the Muse with winged foot invaded 
 the fierce and warlike breed of Romulus.^ Greek 
 rites were introduced early during the struggle with 
 Hannibal, and before it was over Cybele was brought 
 from Pergamum — ^new religion in both cases fused 
 with old Roman religion under stress of fear, and a 
 turning-point marked in the religious history of Rome, 
 after which " the old Roman State religion may be 
 said to exist only in the form of dead bones which 
 even Augustus wiU hardly be able to make live." ^ 
 The war was hardly over when Philip V of Macedon 
 required attention, and Rome was started upon her 
 career of negotiation and conquest in the Balkan 
 peninsula ; and " captured Greece took her fierce 
 conqueror captive and brought the arts into rustic 
 Latium." So Horace wrote long after.^ 
 
 In less figurative and more autobiographic vein 
 Polybius tells how his intimacy with Scipio Aemilianus 
 began.* He was one of the Achaeans detained in 
 Italy, and it was contrived that he should remain in 
 Rome. One day Scipio asked why Polybius directed 
 all his conversation to the elder brother (Fabius) and 
 passed him over ; could it be that Polybius counted 
 him far below the true Roman character and ways, 
 because he did not care to plead in the law courts ? 
 
 ^ Cf. the two lines of Porcius Licinus, quoted by Gellius, Noct. Att., 
 xvii. 21, which supply the exact date and the adjectives. 
 
 2 Wissowa ; cf. Warde Fowler, Religious Experience of the Roman 
 People, p. 319. 
 
 3 Horace, Epist. II., i. 156. * Polybius, xxxii. 9, 10. 
 
ROMAN RELIGION 281 
 
 That had not been in Polybius' mind, and from that 
 day they were as kinsmen. But in Polybius' descrip- 
 tion of the times, of the outburst of dissolute living 
 and the reasons he gives for it, we see what is coming. 
 " In the first place, it came from the prevalent idea 
 that, owing to the destruction of the Macedonian 
 monarchy, universal dominion was secured to them 
 beyond dispute ; and in the second place, from the 
 immense difference made, both in public and private 
 wealth and splendour, by the importation of the 
 riches of Macedonia into Rome." ^ Mr Warde 
 Fowler borrows the phrase of another to say the 
 same ; Rome gained the whole world and lost her 
 own soul.^ Side by side with this Polybius noted 
 " a large number of learned men from Greece, find- 
 ing their way into Rome." ^ Foreign religion, empire, 
 the wealth of a great Macedonian kingdom, and 
 Greek ideas — everything came at once, to a people 
 unprepared. 
 
 The old religion had not been thought out ; the 
 old gods had represented nothing beyond the vague 
 fears of primitive man and his conceptions of the 
 powers that stirred in the life of the fields. Rome 
 had stood on the old character ; that too had rested 
 on unexamined instinct, or on a sense of the com- 
 munity that was now giving way. In the hour of 
 triumph the fear, the hope, the self-restraint, the 
 ambition that had kept her together had no longer 
 any clear object ; all was achieved. Character and 
 self-discipline may be proof against danger, even 
 against defeat, and yet go to pieces in victory. Conduct 
 had never been closely related to religion in Rome, 
 or perhaps in any people in its earlier stages. By the 
 second century b.c. the old religion was to the modern 
 thinker fabulous ; it was at most an affair of magic 
 
 ^ Polybius, xxxii. 1 1. 
 
 2 Warde Fowler, Religious Experience of the Roman People, p. 331. 
 
 ^ Polybius, xxxii. 10. 
 
282 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 to secure crops or to frustrate portents ; but objective 
 truth, reality, moral teaching, moral sanctions it had 
 none. Latin literature really began with Ennius, 
 and Ennius had translated Euhemerus ; and his 
 tragedies, modelled on those of Euripides, emphasized 
 his view of the irrelevance of gods to human 
 questions. Nor had conduct a base in philosophy, 
 for Rome had no philosophy. There was nothing 
 " to fasten down the images of Daedalus." ^ For 
 centuries boys had learnt, and for another century 
 they continued to learn, the Twelve Tables by heart 
 — a discipline that explains much of the greatness 
 and some- of the defects of Roman nature.^ It made 
 Rome a nation of lawyers, a people who never thought 
 with ease except in legal terms ; it shaped the most 
 enduring part of the heritage of Rome ; but Law by 
 itself is an insufficient education. No Homer, no 
 Hesiod even, had " made a theogony " for Rome ; 
 what poetry there had been, seemed rude and primi- 
 tive, as no doubt it was ; and, when Greek litera- 
 ture was revealed, Latin song was allowed to die. 
 
 Without Homer, without Plato, without Israel's 
 discipline of prophecy and captivity — ^her gods seemed 
 to have left Rome without any glimmer of light, to 
 have allowed her to reach a national maturity and a 
 power, greater and more enduring than any Assyrian 
 or Persian king ever knew, but without a vestige of 
 that training in thought and feeUng that make? men 
 human. The absence of thought-out views of 
 morality, of God and the soul, left Rome a prey to any 
 scattered and unrelated notions that she might pick 
 up by accident from the conquered peoples. The 
 wonder is, not that corruption swiftly invaded Roman 
 character, but that the marvellous structure of Roman 
 empire held together so long. , 
 
 It was the Roman view, says Professor Gwatkin,'' 
 
 1 Plato, Meno, 98 A ; see p. 1 85. ^ Cicero, de Legibus, ii. 23, 59. 
 * Knowledge of God (GifFord Lectures), ii. 138. 
 
ROMAN RELIGION 283 
 
 that truth belonged to philosophy, and had nothing 
 to do with religion. People in the second century 
 B.C. began to be clearer about this distinction and to 
 draw inferences from it. The judgment of Polybius, 
 as he looks at a stage that is passing and another 
 beginning, is significant : " The most important 
 difference for the better which the Roman common- 
 wealth appears to me to display is in their belief about 
 the gods. For what in other nations is looked upon 
 as a reproach, I mean a scrupulous fear of the gods, 
 seems to me to be the very thing which keeps the 
 Roman commonwealth together. To such an extra- 
 ordinary degree of tragic effect is this carried among 
 them, so ingrained is it, both in private life and public 
 business, that nothing could exceed it. Many people 
 might think this unaccountable ; but in my opinion 
 their object is to use it as a check upon the common 
 people. If it were possible to form a state wholly 
 of philosophers, such a custom would perhaps be 
 unnecessary. But seeing that every multitude is 
 fickle, and full of lawless desires, unreasoning anger 
 and violent passion, the only resource is to keep them 
 in check by mysterious terrors and tragedy of this 
 sort. So, I think, the ancients were not acting without 
 purpose or at random, when they brought in among 
 the vulgar those opinions about the gods and the 
 belief in the punishments in Hades ; much rather do 
 I think that men nowadays are acting rashly and 
 foolishly in rejecting them." ^ He goes on to speak 
 of the superior probity of Roman officials to Greek, 
 though elsewhere he speaks of a falling off in honesty.^ 
 Polybius, as we have seen, was anticipated in this 
 opinion as to the origin and purpose of religion by 
 Critias.* It is not so certain, as these writers suppose, 
 
 1 Polybius, vi. 56. See Juvenal 2, 149-152, on the rejection of 
 belief in Hades. 
 
 2 Polybius, xviii. 35 ; xxxii. 11. 
 
 ^ See his verses, abridged, on p. 163. 
 
284 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 that this association of gods with morality is really 
 primitive at all, or at least that such vague ideas of 
 such an association as early men may have had were 
 very effectual in fact in promoting morality. It 
 would seem to belong to a developed stage of religion 
 when men have reflected more comprehensively upon 
 life, and a great deal depends on what they have 
 balanced against the pains of hell. Plato, we saw, 
 rejected as immoral the common belief that punish- 
 ment for sin could be averted by the trivial sacrifices 
 and initiations that the religious of his day recom- 
 mended as efficacious. Nor is it quite clear that 
 fear of penalty has actually been an effective deterrent 
 from sin ; the fear perhaps more frequently has 
 followed the act, and has been a motive to something 
 else. In any case Polybius and Critias both think 
 hell and gods a useful contrivance to influence the 
 vulgar. Critias was not vulgar, far from it, he was 
 a gentleman, and the " pleasant lie " of the witty 
 inventor did not disturb him ; it was useful to him 
 in helping to keep the demos in its proper place. Nor, 
 one would imagine, were the honest Romans, who 
 in magistracies and on embassies handled immense 
 sums of money and unlike the Greeks stole none of 
 it, exactly to be classed with the vulgar. Still the 
 passage of Polybius is of value, for it shows us that 
 the influence of the old religion at Rome was declining, 
 that simultaneously common honesty was on the 
 wane, and that shrewd and patriotic observers were 
 beginning to foresee the horrible developments of the 
 century that followed. 
 
 Atrophy of the spiritual nature proved indeed a 
 poor preparation for the immense and sudden enrich- 
 ment of life in material and intellectual resources. 
 Apart from tradition and the example of parents and 
 society, both very strong factors in Rome, there was 
 nothing to stimulate to moral endeavour, there was 
 nothing to prompt to progressive education of con- 
 
ROMAN RELIGION 285 
 
 science. Slavery avenged itself on the slave-owning 
 community by sapping marriage ; the plundered 
 wealth induced the temper of conquerors and wastrels ; 
 pleasure became the guide and motive in life. The 
 individual became conscious of himself, but in Rome 
 religion neither prompted this new self-consciousness, 
 nor solaced it, nor restrained it. To relate this new 
 individuality to the universe, to find within the 
 universe response either in personality or in law, the 
 Roman had of his own neither religion nor philosophy 
 that availed. 
 
 If we have been right in our tentative conclusion 
 that there is in the human mind an instinct that 
 drives for the personality of God and of man and for 
 righteousness as the necessary basis and condition of 
 their relations, we should expect such a position as 
 that in which the Roman found himself to be intoler- 
 able. The vacuum must be filled, if not by the thought 
 of Roman pioneers, then by the achieved results of 
 thinkers of other stock. Epicureanism and scepticism 
 were never without their representatives in Roman 
 society ; the former was indeed the earliest philosophy 
 to make its appearance at Rome, and in Lucretius 
 it found an expositor of a genius such as it has never 
 known elsewhere. 
 
 Yet even Lucretius had in him, as M. Martha pointed 
 out, an anti- Lucretius, and in a famous passage he con- 
 fesses to an instinct of the heart quite contrary to the 
 reason he works out in his head. " When we look up 
 to the great expanses of heaven, the aether set on high 
 above the glittering stars, and the thought comes into 
 our mind of the sun and the moon and their goings ; 
 then indeed in hearts laden with other woes, that 
 doubt too begins to wake and raise its head — Can it 
 be perchance, after aU, that we have to do with some 
 vast divine power that wheels those bright stars each 
 in its course ? " ^ Our task is to look for the factors 
 ^ Lucretius, v. 1 204-1 210. 
 
286 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 of progress, and surely this sudden and unwelcome 
 rebound of mind, which the Epicurean poet feels, this 
 instinct for a power intelligible to the human mind, 
 for a divine mind that can organize a world of real 
 beauty, is evidence for us of the living power of the 
 ideas which we have traced so far and which we might 
 not have looked to find alive in such a region. 
 
 Nor is the transformation of the Roman gods without 
 significance for us. Roman religion had been amaz- 
 ingly colourless ; but, when contact was really estab- 
 lished with Greece, following a practice they always 
 pursued, the Romans began to identify their dim 
 gods with the bright figures of Greek legend. Venus 
 absorbed, for purposes of art and literature, all the 
 charms and graces of Aphrodite ; Proserpina became 
 poetic in the garb of Persephone ; Mercury had a 
 Homeric hymn to give him personality and character. 
 How far such identifications reaUy affected the religion 
 (in the strictest sense) of the common people, it is 
 impossible to guess. For the Roman without Greek 
 culture did Venus gain divinity, awe or power from 
 the identification ? For the artist, she gained in- 
 finitely in colour and movement, but when it came 
 to religion, did he worship her more, or less, or not 
 at aU ? Did the wall-painters of Pompeii, did Horace, 
 promote religion ? Had Praxiteles really helped Greek 
 religion ? The case of Jove raises these questions still 
 more urgently, as we shall see. But at least, the 
 Roman deities, by being " Olympianized " gained 
 something of personality, real or conventional. 
 
 Cybele was fetched to Rome by the government 
 during the Hannibalic war, to quiet the nerves of 
 the people — a function which our ovvti rulers during 
 our war considered proper to the churches. For 
 four centuries she maintained herself there, and grew 
 to be perhaps the chief power of the Pantheon, till 
 Isis at last gained a place of equal or greater import- 
 ance. When Lucretius wishes to describe the lavish 
 
ROMAN RELIGION 287 
 
 grandeur and wealth of the pageant of Spring, he 
 draws a parallel picture of the procession of Cybele. 
 Augustine speaks of her priests with whitened faces 
 and mincing gait still anticking about the streets in 
 his day. What they were, Lucian and Apuleius tell 
 us. It is impossible not to feel religion degraded by 
 such a goddess and such priests, yet Cybele herself 
 contributes evidence to our inquiry. What gave her 
 such pre-eminence ? How did ritual so foolish, so 
 unbalanced, so magical, so evil, appeal to men and 
 women ? The answer is that the native gods of 
 Rome and Italy had no personality, were nothing, 
 and were incapable of becoming anything. Greek art 
 and literature for people of culture might give them 
 a literary and artistic interest, but scarcely a religious 
 value. Cybele was much more personal ; she was, 
 or she wielded, universal power, and she recognized 
 personality in her worshippers. Whatever her rela- 
 tions with the State, and I am not sure what these 
 were, her main concern was with the individual ; 
 she offered man or woman an endless field of activity, 
 excitement and sentiment, and it was the attrac- 
 tion, and the fatal weakness, of her religion, that its 
 moral claims were not exigent. So far, positively and 
 negatively, she too confirms our deductions as to the 
 progressive factors in religion. 
 
 If the government invited Cybele to Rome, other 
 gods did not wait for an invitation. Bacchus came 
 unasked, and the staider elements of Roman society 
 were inexpressibly shocked by what he brought with 
 him.^ Religious ecstasy did not commend itself to 
 them ; there had been Greeks, to whom it was shock- 
 ing, much more did it shock Romans, especially 
 when it so soon became associated with gross immor- 
 ality, in fact or in report. Rome for the time believed 
 the worst ; and whether Livy's story of the discovery 
 
 ^ Livy, xxxix. 1 6- 1 8 ; Warde Fowler, Religious Experience, pp. 
 344 f. ; W. E. Heitland, Roman Republic, II. §655. 
 
288 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 is only " an interesting romance " or more than that, 
 the worst is easily credible of religions where excite- 
 ment is of the essence of the cult, where thought and 
 examination rank as something like hostility or apos- 
 tasy, where feeling is the supreme criterion, and 
 where secrecy strengthens the spell of organization. 
 Of other cults from the East, it is not needful at this 
 point to speak further. As with Cybele's religion, so 
 with these ; the empty house invited them ; they 
 satisfied for the unreflective the instinct that seeks 
 personality in God and the recognition of the indi- 
 vidual. With right and truth they had little concern, 
 and their adherents paid the inevitable penalty that 
 attends forgetfulness of these things. 
 
 Minds more serious and less amenable to the sway 
 of emotion turned to Greek philosophy rather than 
 to- Asiatic cults. God or truth was to be reached 
 rather by the most divine thing in man, that part 
 of him which is noblest and leads to least shame and 
 fewest regrets, his reason. Sentiment betrayed men 
 into folly and superstition, and all the fear and horrors 
 and shame that superstition involved.^ Of Greek 
 philosophers, the Stoics were most akin to the Roman 
 of the best type. Romans who thought or speculated 
 at all, did so in terms of law, and they had reached 
 a conception very near to Universal Law in their 
 Jv.s Gentium. The Stoic Law of Nature at once 
 appealed to them ; it was the Law which they had 
 been feeling after in the usages common to all th~e 
 tribes and communities they knew, the same but 
 higher and grander and of more universal scope, free 
 from the accidents of race and place — a law of 
 Righteousness. Like and different at once, it appealed 
 to the greater Roman lawyers and led them on to a 
 broadening and humanizing of thought, the reaction 
 of which upon Roman law is one of the great contribu- 
 
 1 The writings of Cicero {de Divinatione, ii.) and of Plutarch (de 
 Superstitione) may be recalled here. 
 
ROMAN RELIGION 289 
 
 tions of Greek philosophy to human progress.^ Greek 
 thought saved the better Romans from the effects of 
 Oriental superstition and gave a new basis for the old 
 Roman character — ^how sound and true a basis w^e 
 can read in the series of great Romans of history. 
 For, however much legend glorified the past, the 
 really great and interesting men of Rome come rather 
 after than before the wars with Pyrrhus and Hanni- 
 bal. Yet, even so, Stoicism among the Romans is 
 amenable to the same criticism as among Greeks. 
 Its relentless honesty and its imperfect psychology 
 together led to omissions and negations fatal for 
 religious development. 
 
 But as in Greek history our minds turn perhaps 
 too exclusively to the fifth century B.C., in Roman 
 history the first century b.c. occupies us above all 
 others, and the pre-occupation is less open to criticism. 
 Cicero and Virgil and their contemporaries lived in a 
 time of decline and of rebirth ; they were bridge- 
 builders from the old to the new across a gulf of chaos. 
 However interesting to the anthropologist the earliest 
 ages of Roman religion, if recoverable, may be, for 
 our purposes the peoples of higher culture are more 
 important, and our concern is with the factors that 
 make for progress. Till Rome fell, and when Rome 
 had fallen, the last years of the Republic and the 
 earliest of the Empire gave its great direction to 
 Roman thought. Caesar made the framework on 
 which society modelled itself down to 1 1 November 
 191 8; Cicero far more than Plato — odd as it may 
 seem — shaped the thoughts of Western Europe down 
 to the Renaissance ; Virgil and Horace — a strange 
 pair of names, however familiar, with Virgil always 
 in the ascendant — quickened imagination, and, as 
 originaUty declined, stereotyped the modes of poetry. 
 
 ^ Lecky, Morals, i. 294.-7, refers to the effect on the Reformation 
 of the renewed study of Roman Law. See also Gwatkin, Giffbrd 
 Lectures, ii. 137. 
 
290 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Whatever Greece and the Orient contributed to 
 Rome, for thinking people those influences were 
 mediated by these great men. Disregarding a strict 
 chronology, we will turn at once to them and take 
 them in the wrong order. 
 
 Whether we deal with the politics, the loves or the 
 religious ideas of Horace, the great thing is not to take 
 them too seriously. He was, he said, an adherent of 
 no school, not even an eclectic — 
 
 Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri — ^ 
 
 a Matine bee that covered a good deal of ground and 
 gathered honey from opening flowers of many kinds.^ 
 Nor must it be forgotten, while he preaches — always 
 on the same theme and with perhaps more iteration 
 than was needed — that he was a man of humour, 
 who would say less than he meant or more, and both 
 without explaining to the reader (like a certain modern 
 tutor) that " of course he was only jocose." Horace 
 then has moods of the most charming piety. Faunus 
 frequents the poet's country farm and protects his 
 goats, while the rocks ring to the poet's rustic pipe; 
 " the gods protect me ; to the gods my piety is dear, 
 my Muse is dear." * When the accursed tree * sent 
 its branch crashing on the poet's head, Faunus was 
 there and turned aside the blow.^ He sees Bacchus 
 amid distant hills, the nymphs around him ; though 
 posterity, bidden to believe, has hesitated.* Jupiter 
 thunders from a clear sky, and the poet, a careless and 
 intermittent pietist, as he confesses, retraces his steps 
 and abandons an insane philosophy.'' If old acquaint- 
 ance tempt one to linger over these poems, it is not 
 altogether idly. In early life Horace had been frankly 
 Epicurean,^ careless of these matters, and a literary 
 conversion rather implies growth in humour than in 
 
 ^ Epp., i. I, 14. ^ Odes, iv. 2, z'],plur'mum circa nemus. 
 
 ^ Odes, i. 17, 13. * Odes,u. 13, i. » o^w, ii. 17, 28. 
 
 ® Odes, ii. 19, i. ' Odes, i. 34, i. 8 Ci,Satires,i. 5, loi. 
 
ROMAN RELIGION 291 
 
 grace. Yet it must be clear that Stoic teaching 
 came to interest him. Of course Stoic paradox and 
 eccentricity are as amenable to playful handling as 
 the gods and nymphs of the Odes, though less 
 charming. But Horace clearly gave more of his 
 mind to Stoic books. Like Robert Burns, where 
 he is most solemn and impressive, he is least serious. 
 He may picture Augustus recumbent and sipping 
 nectar with purple lips between Pollux and Hercules ; ^ 
 he may speculate as to what incarnation Augustus 
 really is,^ and pray for delay in his return to heaven ; 
 but he knew Augustus, and he did not push himself 
 on the Emperor's acquaintance. In all, Odes and 
 Epistles give us the religion of a charming man of 
 letters in comfortable circumstances, a bachelor in 
 every implication of his being, possessed of culture 
 and humour, and owner of a good library. He has 
 never been vates Gentilium ; even if, a priest of the 
 Muses, he chanted lordly lays, unheard before, to 
 virgins and to boys, the idea of being a prophet to 
 lighten the Gentiles would have amused him.* 
 
 Cicero had far more influence. A lost philosophical 
 book of his was the first thing to stir the mind of 
 Augustine. He gave Europe its philosophical ter- 
 minology ; he wrote in his Dream oj Scipio the best 
 religious apologue of Latin literature ; * he discussed 
 gods and divination and the purpose of life in books 
 that his countrymen treasured. Yet it is hard to 
 find in him a religious spirit. However religious and 
 spiritual he might have been at heart, it would not 
 have been to Atticus perhaps that he could most 
 comfortably have revealed this side of his nature. 
 To his wife's religion he refers in a notable letter at 
 the moment of his exile ; " The gods whom you have 
 always sedulously worshipped, have not helped us, 
 nor men whom I have always cultivated." Yet when 
 
 » Odes, iii. 3, 1 1. 2 Od'«, i. 2, 41 f. 
 
 * Odes, iii. I, 2. 4 See page 334. 
 
292 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 TulHa his daughter died, he craved to think her 
 immortal, to deify her and preserve her memory in 
 a shrine. But shrine-memorials suggest troubled 
 affection more than clear thinking. What did he 
 think ? It is noted that his books on religion belong 
 to the last two years of his life, when the world crumbled 
 under his feet and his TuUia was gone. But the 
 Cicero, who lived in the stream of the world, who 
 was alert and alive to politics, to literature, to all the 
 gleam and interest of life, drew his philosophy and 
 his religious ideas from books. He had not lived in 
 religious thought, and he is critical of it. Such a 
 mind will inevitably weigh and criticize idea or 
 proposition that comes from another, and at last all 
 that itself produces. " Perhaps " is its last word in 
 religion — " perhaps " followed by a silence and a sigh. 
 We must not miss the self-criticism of that last word 
 and of the sigh ; contemporaries caught them and 
 knew that they must turn elsewhere for certainty. 
 Teacher as the Cicero of the speeches and of the 
 treatises was, charming as his correspondence is still, 
 he too was no prophet of the Gentiles. 
 
 That name was given to Virgil by a later and a 
 Christian generation. Who gave it, I do not know, 
 perhaps it is not known ; ^ but the Christian world • 
 and Dante accepted it ; and common Christian 
 feeling, reinforced by genius of such greatness, is 
 no bad guide. The last fact and the first about 
 Horace and Cicero for students of religion is that 
 they were not religious spirits ; but Virgil was, pre- 
 eminently. His transcendence as an artist may hide 
 his religious quality from some readers, but he is not 
 Sophocles. In his youth he was Epicurean. The 
 
 1 Tyrrell, Latin Poetry, p. 156. The rubric of Rouen includes a 
 ceremony for Christmas Day, when the priest says : — 
 
 Man, Man, Fates Gentilium 
 Da Christo testimonium, 
 and Virgil replies. 
 
ROMAN RELIGION 293 
 
 graceful Scazon verses, that announce his purpose 
 to study with Siro and free his life from all care, are 
 genuine enough and quite clear in import. By and 
 by he is reconciling Silenus with Epicurus ; he sets 
 the god singing in Lucretian tones a cosmogony that 
 drifts toward Pythagoreanism. Reconciliation is his 
 work ; perhaps if we take it as a true outcome of 
 interpretation, it is the work of every poet. But 
 Virgil attempts it not quite as the Stoics did. The 
 world let Posidonius go ; at the best he effected a 
 compromise that worked for a while and then was 
 more and more patently wrong.^ Virgil's com- 
 promise was hopeless from the first. Olympus was 
 not and could not conceivably be as he' drew it ; 
 " Jupiter's chance," says Mr Warde Fowler in a 
 brilliant sentence, " was destroyed by the Aeneid" ^ 
 Virgil's Jupiter had traits of the Zeus whose loves 
 are portrayed in the wall-paintings of Pompeii, traits 
 too of the Stoic Zeus, traits of the Homeric and of 
 Fate ; and at the end of the Aeneid Jupiter has to 
 throw the thing up, he cannot settle Aeneas' affairs, 
 nor his own, he does not know who he- is or where 
 he \s—fata viam invenient. The Virgilian com- 
 promise wiU not serve ; Virgil had not been an 
 Epicurean for nothing. But reconciliation there must 
 be, and he saw it — or, rather, felt it. His heart 
 clearly leaned to the old impossible Italian gods, far 
 more native to him than any Homeric Zeus, however 
 Stoical, with time and popular teaching, Zeus had 
 become. Virgil felt the need of the heart for God ; 
 his solitary unhappy Aeneas, like Marcus Aurelius, 
 drags along the path of duty, brave and indomitable, 
 but his goddess-mother never really understands her 
 son. Virgil understood him. 
 
 Goethe once said that man's business is not to solve 
 the problem of the universe but to understand it. 
 
 ^ For Posidonius, see p. 332. 
 
 ^ Warde Fowler, Roman Ideas of Deity, p. 141. 
 
294 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 This latter task Virgil achieved, and, for those who 
 can feel, the great question is set out in his poetry. 
 The human heart is there, conscious of its own needs, 
 and those needs are, as we have seen already, God 
 and righteousness and the assurance of one's own 
 personality. The philosophers were discarding two 
 of them, the pietists in the Oriental cults the other. 
 Virgil keeps the problem open. Whatever the theme 
 or the object of his Aeneii, the poet's heart is unveiled 
 in it — the supreme thing in poetry, and it answered 
 to the heart of man. When the Roman world 
 accepted Christianity, it threw over Cybele and Isis 
 and Mithras, as it had thrown over the Stoics long 
 before, but it kept Virgil. 
 
 Rome gave up its old religion, and borrowed from 
 Greek and Oriental, and all its borrowings are sig- 
 nificant. But as Virgil borrowed from Homer, and 
 what he borrowed ceased to be Homeric and became 
 Virgilian, so the Roman gave something to what he 
 took. To the world's stock of religious ideas he 
 added those of order and law and the sense of the 
 practical.^ These were not new, but he gave them 
 another significance than they had for Greek and 
 Oriental. His religion had been associated with 
 morality, by instinct rather than by reflection. His 
 emphasis on law and on conduct gave men new views 
 which developed into the concept of sin — ^an idea 
 closely germane to that tendency to Righteousness 
 which we have so often remarked, a legitimate pendant 
 to it, which has been fruitful in human thinking. 
 He re-created the Law of Nature and made it a more 
 effectual thing. He emphasized the community in 
 religion — a new interpretation of the principle of 
 righteousness. Some of his contributions to the 
 world's stock of religious ideas have been less happy. 
 Roman Stoicism influenced Christian views of God 
 
 "^ To discuss this at all adequately would take us too far into the 
 history of the Christian Church. 
 
ROMAN RELIGION 295 
 
 and of society too much. Law and order have again 
 and again been over-emphasized by minds of the 
 Roman cast, and the individual has been lost in the 
 over-orderly community.^ Thus by vi^hat he had 
 not and by what he had, the Roman contributed to 
 progress in religion, as a strong and virile race always 
 wiU. 
 
 ^ I believe this to be the most potent reason for the fall of the 
 Roman Empire. 
 
XIV 
 
 JUDAISM AFTER ANTIOCHUS 
 
 Antiochus Epiphanes, as Tacitus ^ put it, was pre- 
 vented by a Parthian war from civilizing a very- 
 horrible race. He failed to HeUenize the Jews in 
 his sense of the word ; Judaism survived, and with 
 a new consciousness that Hellenism and Judaism 
 were two things. The " peaceful penetration " of 
 Israel's religion by Greek influences was abruptly 
 ended ; the two things were alien and represented 
 different histories, different outlooks, principles that 
 definitely clashed and that could not be mistaken, 
 that could not slide into one another. The third 
 stage of international relations was reached. The 
 interaction which began unconsciously or semi-con- 
 sciously was brought to a new stage hy the Seleucid 
 king's violence ; the violence that failed. Hence- 
 forward such relations as there are between the peoples 
 and the ideals are conscious. Contact or conflict, 
 whichever it be, men have their eyes open and know 
 what they are doing. 
 
 For contact and for conflict there were more and 
 more opportunities. The Jew had not to leave the 
 promised land to find Greek cities with all their 
 challenge — the naked athletes, the theatre, the idol's 
 temple, the deified king, the philosopher, the Greek 
 hat, all the accursed things that had been the prelude 
 to the attack of Epiphanes. " Jason," says the writer 
 of Second Maccabees (iv. 1 1), " introduced new customs 
 forbidden by the law ; he deHberately established a 
 gymnasium under the citadel itself and made the 
 ^ Tacitus, Hist. v. 8. 
 
 296 
 
JUDAISM AFTER ANTIOCHUS 297 
 
 noblest of the young men wear the fetasos. And 
 to such a height did the passion for Greek fashions 
 rise . . . that the priests were no longer interested 
 in the services of the altar, but despising the sanctuary 
 and neglecting the sacrifices, they hurried to take 
 part in the unlawful displays held in the palaestra 
 after the quoit-throwing had been announced." Jeru- 
 salem was indeed purified ; but the tone of the writer, 
 and the things that he selects as specially horrible, 
 show how a patriotic Jew might feel towards cus- 
 toms and practices that would not strike everybody 
 as particularly depraved. The Hindu to-day has 
 a somewhat similar feeling for many things that 
 Europeans do without any conscioi:isness that they 
 are unclean or offensive ; and to this day the hat is 
 a symbol — there are some sixty varieties in Bombay, 
 all with significance, the Parsi horse-shoe hat being 
 that which is most easily recognized by a newcomer. 
 But the Jew did not confine himself to the land God 
 gave to his fathers ; he was settled as a permanency 
 in Babylon, as we have seen, and in Egypt. A quarter 
 of a century after Antiochus, a Roman magistrate 
 achieved glory and a name by ordering in 139 B.C. 
 the expulsion from Rome of all Jews and other 
 Orientals with them.^ Of course they returned, 
 and, as the New Testament and Tacitus ^ tell us, 
 they were expelled again, to return again. The 
 Jew was making the world his own, but travelling 
 as a self-conscious foreigner. Herodotus, Greek as 
 he was, essentially Greek, travelled and observed 
 with much less detachment. But, however much 
 one may make detachment a practice or a principle, 
 the milieu always tells. One's sympathies with per- 
 secuted co-religionists may be immense, but one 
 does not necessarily wish them in the railway car- 
 riage ; they may be more alien than their reprobate 
 
 ^ Valerius Maximus, i. 3. 3 ; the man was Hispalus. 
 * Tacitus, Annals, ii. 85, vile damnum. 
 
298 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 persecutor. The milieu tells ; the chance remark, 
 the attitude, the written page of the Greek, his quick, 
 bright ways, his shrewd tongue, penetrate the 
 defences. The Jew remains a loyal Hebrew, he 
 resents the criticism, but he cannot ignore it ; to 
 meet it he must do a lot of rethinking ; is that 
 contact or conflict, or both ? But the contact was 
 far more deliberate. 
 
 With aU that Greeks now and then talked about 
 the religions and the philosophies of barbarians, they 
 seem to have given little attention to their languages 
 and literatures. Berossos, Manetho, and Megasthenes 
 are names that stand out ; ^ but when one recalls 
 that Plutarch * only once refers to a poetic litera- 
 ture, so near and so obvious as the Latin, and that 
 only to confirm some historical fact from a passage 
 of Horace, it is not surprising that Greek knowledge 
 of things Egyptian or Assyrian was very sUght, of 
 things Indian next to negligible. But the Jew is not 
 amenable to this reproach. To mingle in the world 
 at all, he had to know Greek, and the evidences of 
 his interest in Greek literature are abundant. Long 
 before Josephus Jews were writing their history in 
 Greek ; they composed tragedies on Greek models 
 about the Exodus from Egypt ' and so forth, they 
 compiled sibylline oracles in Greek hexameters, and, 
 more significant than all, they read deeply in Greek 
 philosophy. The " Dispersion," of course, had most 
 points of contact ; Alexandrian Judaism would neces- 
 sarily meet Hellenism and be influenced by it more 
 readily than Palestinian ; and Galilee would be more 
 susceptible to foreign ways than Jerusalem. In the 
 period now before us we find in Jewish thinking a 
 heightened Nationalism, clearly resulting from the 
 
 ^ See p. 263. 
 
 2 Trench, Plutarch, p. 9 ; Plutarch, LucuUtts, 39. 
 ^ Considerable extracts from Ezekiel, the tragic poet, are given by 
 Eusebius, Praef. Evang., ix. 28, 29, pp. 436-447 
 
JUDAISM AFTER ANTIOCHUS 299 
 
 persecution of Epiphanes and perhaps other similar 
 movements, but also a developed Internationalism, 
 cosmopolitan, but Jewish still. A short notice of 
 two characteristic books may serve as well as 
 generalization. 
 
 The book of Tohit may be " certainly pre-Mac- 
 cabaean " ^ or it may have been written about 150 
 B.C. It was certainly not a contemporary story of 
 the man whose name it bears, even if he be historical. 
 It shows easy habits of travel, a wide acquaintance 
 with foreign lands and a free adoption of legends 
 and folk-lore from sources outside Judaism. The 
 writer has liberal sympathies, and lacks that hatred 
 of the heathen which animates much of later Jewish 
 literature. The contact with the strange story of 
 Ahikar, which, we recently learned, existed in Aramaic 
 in the fifth century b.c, is a point of interest ; and 
 scholars note the absence of references to later Jewish 
 ideas, such as the personified Wisdom of God, the 
 Messiah, and the belief in resurrection or immortality. 
 Even the dog in the story becomes an indication of 
 an attitude not very Jewish. Whose dog was it ? 
 critics have asked, the author's or an interpolator's ? 
 And yet this book of many affinities is the story of 
 a good Jewish family. It has always been popular ; 
 it was translated to and fro in the languages of 
 antiquity ; it has given subjects to art. " Is it his- 
 tory ? " wrote Luther. " Then it is holy history. 
 Is it fiction f Then is it a truly beautiful, wholesome, 
 and profitable fiction, the performance of a gifted 
 poet." In any case it gives us a picture of Israel 
 among the nations, not yet antagonized. 
 
 The book of Wisdom is variously dated between 
 130 and ICO b.c, after 50 b.c, and under the Roman 
 Empire. The writer reveals himself to us in every 
 page as a reader of Jewish and Gentile literature, a 
 
 ^ D. C. Simpson in Afocr. and Pseudepigr., i. 183 ; Sir G. Adam 
 Smith, Jerusalem, ii. p. 395. 
 
300 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 stylist, a thinker. If he is over rhetorical at times, 
 he learnt that from the Greek schools of his day, but 
 the judgment is a sound one that calls his book the 
 highwater mark of Jewish thought between the Old 
 and New Testaments. The author's mind, of course, 
 runs upon morals, like the author or authors of those 
 Jewish writings with which his book is allied. But 
 he thinks of God in a central way, and he has con- 
 ceptions of God which are not of the Hebrew type. 
 That God is the creator of the world and of all things 
 in it, the Hebrew Psalmists teU us in language of 
 beauty which is a sign of their delight in Nature.^ 
 This writer has the same thought, but he gives a 
 different turn to it. Men, he says, by not giving 
 heed to the works miss the Artificer ; they have 
 deified fire, wind, the swift air, the circling stars ; 
 but " if, through delight in their beauty, they took 
 them to be gods, let them know how much better 
 than these is their Sovereign Lord ; for the first 
 author of beauty created them" (xiii. 1-4, o tov 
 KoXkovs yeve(Tidp^r)<s). The Hebrew God created 
 the world out of nothing ; this man's Creator made 
 it "of formless matter" (xi. 17, i^ oiiJi,6p(f>ov vXr}<;). 
 To find in this expression evidence for his belief in 
 the eternity of matter, is perhaps to make him too 
 severe a Platonist ; but he platonizes clearly. This 
 reference to matter is followed by a variant on " God 
 always geometrizing " — " By measure and number 
 and weight thou didst order all things " (xi. 20). He 
 reasserts " eternal Providence " again and again 
 (xvii. 2) : — " Thy providence, O Father, steers the 
 ship on the sea " (xiv. 3) ; God " thinks ahead, is 
 provident, for aU " (vi. 7) ; " The spirt of the Lord 
 fills the world " (i. 7) ; God can be known and under- 
 stood by the righteous and thoughtful. But the 
 most striking expression of God's nature and char- 
 acter is this : — " Thou lovest all things that are, and 
 ^ Cf. especially Psalm civ. 
 
JUDAISM AFTER ANTIOCHUS 301 
 
 abhorrest none of the things which thou didst make ; 
 for never wouldst thou have formed anything if thou 
 didst hate it. And how would anything have endured, 
 except thou hadst willed it ? Or that which was 
 not called by thee, how would it have been pre- 
 served ? But thou sparest all things because they 
 are thine, O Sovereign Lord, thou Lover of souls " 
 (xi. 24-26). Is it Plato or a Hebrew inspiration 
 here ? For we have reached a thinker whose con- 
 ception of God is a very signal one. He has a strong 
 Hebrew feeling for the personality of God, he does 
 not decline like a Greek upon abstracts, though ■ he 
 can use them ; and he emphasizes the most personal 
 thing in personality — ^love, and makes it the motive 
 of the creation and preservation of that universe to 
 which he gives its great Greek name of cosmos. In 
 virtue of the terms and spirit of its creation, he can 
 say of it : " The universe is a champion of the 
 righteous " (xvi. 17). The Hebrew Psalmist had said 
 " the angel of the Lord " ; but this in its way is a 
 greater saying. The Stoic could have said this of the 
 universe-— did, in fact, say it in one phrase and another 
 — and fell into pantheism, said it because he was a 
 pantheist ; but the writer of Wisdom, as we have 
 seen, escapes pantheism altogether. 
 
 As St Paul did later on, the writer of Wisdom traces 
 to idolatry a great deal of the evil of the world — 
 " the devising of idols was the beginning of fornica- 
 tion, and the invention of them the corruption of 
 life " (xiv. 12). The origin of idolatry he explains 
 in a Greek way, following Euhemerus, as Christian 
 writers did after him. The image of the dead child 
 or of the distant king became a god (xiv. 15-17) and 
 Art helped the delusion (xiv. 19). The consequences, 
 and here he is strictly historical, were " slaughtering 
 of children in solemn rites, celebrating secret mys- 
 teries, holding frantic revels of strange ordinances," 
 followed by every sort of moral disorder ; and " that 
 
302 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 raultitude of evils they call peace " (xiv. 22). Idolatry 
 God judges, and its consequences, but not vindictively. 
 Even to the Canaanites He gave opportunity for 
 repentance (xii. 10), but they would not take it ; they 
 were (perhaps he forgets another belief of his here, 
 in a moment of eloquence) " a seed accursed from 
 the beginning" (xii. 11); and they were destroyed 
 " that the land which in thy sight is most precious 
 of all lands might receive a worthy colony of God's 
 servants " (xii. 7). Thus Israel's possession of the 
 land with the extermination of its older inhabitants 
 is justified ; for he is a Jew, however much Greek 
 thought influences him. But he hints at Nemesis, 
 which is Greek, while he exults as a Jew over the 
 Egyptians in their plagues — " The doom they 
 deserved was dragging them into this end " (xix. 4). 
 Similarly, when he deals with conduct and righteous- 
 ness, he blends the Jewish and the Greek ; he has 
 the four cardinal virtues which the Stoics took from 
 Plato ; but he makes the centre of life, as a good 
 Hebrew would, to seek God, to trust God, to be 
 faithful to Him and to love Him (iii. 9) — and then 
 must needs give it a Greek turn again, for it is " to 
 think of the Lord with a good mind" (i. i), since 
 " crooked thoughts separate from God " (i. 3), and 
 " the holy spirit of discipline will flee deceit " (i. 5). 
 
 It is, as Dr Drummond wrote, hazardous to fix 
 on him any defined eschatology ; it more and more 
 becomes clear that no eschatology will stand defini- 
 tion. Aut videt aut vidisse futat is the most that 
 can be said of any eschatologist ; and of another 
 school of Jews Dr Schechter assures us that " what- 
 ever the faults of the rabbis were, consistency was 
 not one of them." Our writer, however, strikes a 
 great keynote (however he is to adjust the rest of his 
 music to it) in saying at the start : " God made not 
 death, neither delighteth He when the living perish : 
 for He created all things that they might have being 
 
JUDAISM AFTER ANTIOCHUS 303 
 
 . . . nor hath Hades royal dominion on earth " 
 (i. 13-14). " God created man for incorruption, 
 and made him an image of His own proper being ; 
 but by envy of the devil death entered into the world, 
 and they that belong to his realm experience it. But 
 the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God. 
 . . . Their hope is full of immortality " (ii. 23 ; iii. 4). 
 He seems to imply the pre-existence of souls, Greek 
 again here. " I was a child good by nature and a 
 good soul fell to my lot ; nay, rather, being good I 
 came into a body undefiled" (viii. 19, 20); and in 
 distant reminiscence of Plato he adds : " A corrup- 
 tible body weigheth down the soul" (ix. 15). But 
 of a bodily resurrection he says nothing. StiU, when 
 we link his doctrine of God's love for all He has made, 
 and the thought that the souls of the righteous are 
 in His hand, we see that this brilliant writer is moving 
 somewhat ahead of his ancient people and is teaching 
 what accentuates and emphasizes personality. 
 
 A man's doctrine of God gives us his centre ; this 
 man's treatment of the Wisdom of God is significant, 
 and it heralds further developments. The Stoics 
 taught a divine interpenetration of all phenomena, 
 a world-soul ; it was the heart of their pantheism. 
 This writer felt the attraction of their language, and 
 again and again he emphasizes how the Spirit of the 
 Lord fills the universe (i. 7). Upon this Spirit, 
 sometimes called Wisdom and sometimes the Spirit 
 of Wisdom, he heaps one beautiful phrase after 
 another (vii. 22 ff.) : — 
 
 There is in her a spirit of understanding, holy, 
 Alone in kind, manifold, subtil, freely moving. 
 Clear in utterance, unpolluted, distinct, that cannot be 
 
 harmed, 
 Loving what is good, keen, unhindered, 
 Beneficent, loving toward man, 
 Steadfast, sure, free from care, 
 All powerful, all surveying. 
 
304 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 And penetrating through all spirits that are quick of under- 
 standing, pure, subtil ; 
 
 For Wisdom is more mobile than any motion ; 
 
 Yea, she pervadeth and penetrateth all things by reason of 
 her pureness. 
 
 For she is a breath of the power of God, 
 
 And a clear effluence of the glory of the Almighty ; 
 
 Therefore can nothing defiled find entrance into her. 
 
 For she is an effulgence from everlasting light, 
 
 And an unspotted mirror of the working of God, 
 
 And an image of His goodness. 
 
 And she, though but one, hath power to do all things, 
 
 And remaining in herself reneweth all things ; 
 
 And from generation to generation passing into holy souls 
 
 She maketh them friends of God and prophets. . . . 
 
 Being compared with light she is found to be before it. . . . 
 
 She reacheth from one end of the world to the other with 
 full strength, 
 
 And ordereth all things well. 
 
 No one, I suppose, could fail to miss the influence 
 of Greek thought in this fine passage. Word and 
 idea betray it ; and, as with Greek thought generally, 
 word and idea are fruitful and inspire the writers 
 and thinkers who come after. But no one, on the 
 other hand, could mistake the passage for one of purely 
 Greek origin ; the writer is a Hebrew, nursed in 
 Hebrew religion and full of the Hebrew's passion for 
 God. Greek and Hebrew at once, he speaks of the 
 future of the world's thinking ; he typifies Alexander's 
 Marriage of Europe and Asia ; and when the universal 
 religion came, its adherents found in him phrase and 
 conception ready to express their own central ideas 
 of God. 
 
 The Jewish world was not all of one texture — far 
 from it. A race so alive must show great divisions 
 of mind, much party warfare. Four main groups 
 are outstanding — all interesting, at once in their 
 initial ideas and in the development to which the 
 reaction of these ideas and of the circumstances and 
 influences of the day brought them. There are the 
 
JUDAISM AFTER ANTIOCHUS 305 
 
 priestly party, the Pharisees, the Apocalyptic writers 
 and the great mass of the " Dispersion," influenced 
 variously by all three of them, and conscious of problems 
 of its own, suggested by its Hellenistic environment. 
 
 After the exile Jerusalem, as we saw, became the 
 great centre of worship. Here stood the restored 
 Temple ; here alone might sacrifice be performed ; 
 here the priesthood was massed. Here, if anywhere, 
 orthodox Judaism should have been found. But 
 Uving faiths are never very orthodox, or orthodoxy 
 must change its meaning. The Mosaic Law, as 
 written, re-written, revised and combined, triumphed, 
 and for Jerusalem the last word in religion was said. 
 Consequently at Jerusalem the religion loses vitality. 
 Nationalism is not always a pure and unmixed exalta- 
 tion of the human spirit ; and it did not cover the 
 sins of the Jerusalem party. They held by the old 
 ways, and made profit out of them. The new, the 
 progressive, the spiritual conception of religion did 
 not appeal to them. They compromised with Hellen- 
 ism on its secular side, and missed the inspiration 
 which Greek thought gave to the more spiritually- 
 minded. We need not linger with them ; progress 
 in religion is not here. 
 
 The decline of the Maccabaean patriot clan into 
 tyranny and the secularism of Jerusalem provoked 
 what we may caU a Puritan reaction. The Hasidim 
 first (the beloved, the pious, or the saints) and the 
 Pharisees later (the separated) stood for a higher type 
 of religion. They maintained the same Law of God, 
 but they approached it from a different angle. They 
 were more zealous for God, less careful of their own 
 prerogative. The Law was not to be for them a 
 Magna Charta of privilege as for the priestly party ; 
 it was the revelation of God in the form of a call to 
 righteousness and piety. We have noticed more than 
 once the invincible tendency in religion, apart from 
 the cults, to emphasize righteousness ; and this is the 
 u 
 
3o6 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 explanation of the Pharisee movement, and it carries 
 with it the two other great tendencies which we have 
 remarked. For the Pharisees righteousness had its 
 centre and its motive in a personal God who required 
 it of the human individual and who thereby recog- 
 nized and emphasized human personality. They are 
 the successors in part of the prophets, inheritors of 
 everything the prophets had, their first-hand in- 
 spiration excepted and their authentic vision of God. 
 It was in the Synagogue rather than in the Temple 
 that Pharisaism had its birthplace and its home ; 
 where the Prophets as well as the Law were read, 
 where the psalms were sung, where religion was not 
 obscured by sacrifice and ritual. They represented 
 in measure the party of suffering, the thinkers for 
 whom the world offers problems that must be solved, 
 men who live for something not visible. Where 
 religion lives, where thought is still trusted, law is 
 less dangerous than elsewhere, and for long it is clear 
 that Pharisaism helped to develop the moral sense 
 of the Jewish race, to quicken their thinking. How 
 far the Law and ^the Prophets had thought pre- 
 eminently of Israel as a people, and how far they had 
 recognized the individual and his life, is a difficult 
 problem. One great part of the work of the Pharisees 
 was to individualize the interpretation of both, so 
 to make relevant to the individual what the Prophets 
 had taught of God in relation to the people, as to 
 develop Judaism into one of the most supremely 
 individualist of the world's religions, a religion where 
 God and man come close together as personalities, 
 intelligible to each other. The Pharisees were, it has 
 been said, " simply Jews in the superlative " ^ as the 
 Wahabis are the true Moslems. 
 
 The weak spot of Pharisaism was the closed canon, 
 the holy book from the past, the document susceptible 
 of interpretation but not of addition. The holy 
 ^ Quoted by W. Fairweather, Background, p. 138. 
 
JUDAISM AFTER ANTIOCHUS 307 
 
 book naturally fell into the hands of commentators, 
 and originality is not the badge of that tribe. It is 
 the way of the commentator to make claims for the 
 work of genius, that genius would not make. The 
 Law was less, far less, the work of genius than were 
 the prophetic writings ; and it was on the Law that 
 the Scribe chiefly occupied himself. Rabbi and 
 Scribe vied in paradox to exalt the Law, to magnify 
 its claim upon the good Jew, till common sense reacted. 
 For paradox is no substitute for genius, and it rarely 
 means insight of the type which greatly helps under- 
 standing forward. The reaction of common sense 
 against paradox is as little apt to quicken the human 
 spirit as paradox or accumulative learning. What 
 genius Judaism still had for origination in religion 
 found vent elsewhere, and was rejected at last — not 
 unintelligibly ; and Judaism settled down to common- 
 sense orthodoxy, to nationalism, to the completed 
 book and the closed gates. 
 
 Mr Claude G. Montefiore, in his very interesting 
 book entitled Judaism and St Paul, sketches what, 
 from available Jewish evidence, of a rather later date 
 than the Christian era, he conceives to have been the 
 Judaism of Palestine in the days of Paul. If he should 
 prove not to have been warranted in this thesis, his 
 picture will stand as faithful to a later stage ; and 
 whatever the date, it serves our purpose as representing 
 the outcome of this development of Hebrew religion. 
 There are curious traits in the picture ; but Mr 
 Monteliore's very evident sympathy with the type 
 of mind which he portrays is a guarantee that it is 
 free from conscious parody. God was the creator 
 and ruler of the world, and at the same time the 
 Father of Israel and of every Israelite (p. 25) ; great 
 and awful, but merciful and loving (p. 26). He did 
 not delegate His relations with Israel to any angel or 
 subordinate ; no human priest obtruded on this 
 simple and immediate relation of God and every 
 
3o8 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Israelite (p, 26). Israel's belief in angels was highly 
 undogmatic (p. 27) and may be disregarded. The 
 Law was given to Israel " as a means by which happi- 
 ness and goodness may be secured " — a means by 
 which God also manifests His own Kingship and glory 
 (p. 28). " It was the grace of God which was made 
 visible in the Law" (p. 31). "To the Rabbinic 
 Jew, who conformed to average and type, the ob- 
 servance of the Law was in no wise a burden. How 
 should it be so ? . . . He has told you to fulfil certain 
 moral and ceremonial laws to the best of your ability 
 (p. 31) . . . these laws are His laws, and in the 
 observance of them you will find satisfaction and 
 joy, the highest life on earth and the most blissful 
 life hereafter. . . . The laws were not a burden 
 but a delight " (p. 32). " They were indeed taught 
 to believe that the average and decent-living Israelite 
 would inherit the world to come, would be ' saved,' 
 to use other and more familiar phraseology. But 
 they were not taught to believe that this result would 
 follow as the guerdon of their own merits ; it would 
 rather befall them as the effect of God's love and 
 God's grace " (pp. 35-6). " God's love for Israel, 
 His love of the repentant sinner. His inveterate 
 tendency to forgiveness, together with the merits of 
 the patriarchs, would amply make up for their own 
 individual deficiencies. Their religion was, therefore, 
 happy and hopeful " (p. 36). " The Rabbinic Jew 
 did not worry himself much about the theory that 
 the whole Law (with all its enactments) has to be 
 obeyed. He took a practical view of the situation. 
 . . . There is no commandment which he cannot 
 fulfil more or less " (pp. 41-2). " But is not God 
 angry at man's violation of the Law ? Yes, He is 
 very angry. . . . Let a man repent but a very little 
 and God will forgive very much. . . . The Day of 
 Atonement is the day on which both man and God 
 are, so to speak, engaged in doing nothing else than 
 
JUDAISM AFTER ANTIOCHUS 309 
 
 repentance and forgiveness " (pp. 42, 43). " Salva- 
 tion was the privilege of every Israelite who, believing 
 in God and in His Law, tried to do his best, and was 
 sorry for his failures and his lapses " (p. I'f). 
 
 Mr Montefiore rather enjoys explaining that these 
 Rabbinic Jews were " not theorists and had little 
 philosophy " (p. 79). It was " a joyous, simple religion : 
 yet also an intellectual and rational religion in its own 
 special way . . . but not a religion which passed 
 constantly and rapidly into mysticism, a religion 
 more usually (to use the now familiar words of WiUiam 
 James) of the ' healthy-minded ' and of the ' once- 
 born ' . . . without sacraments and without mys- 
 teries. It knew of no rapid change from bad to good 
 by any secret initiation or any second and higher 
 birth " (pp. 48-50). The Jew gave up the search 
 for proselytes ; " but what I am most keen to empha- 
 size is that this indiflference, dislike, contempt, par- 
 ticularism — this ready and not unwilling consignment 
 of the non-believer and the non-Jew to perdition and 
 gloom — ^was quite consistent with the most passionate 
 religious faith and with the most exquisite and delicate 
 charity " (p. 56). This remarkable sentence is a sort 
 of Rosetta stone that gives us a clue to Mr Montefiore's 
 language. The Judaism of the Dispersion he believes 
 to have been inferior to the Rabbinic type, " more 
 anxious and pessimistic, more sombre and perplexed " 
 (p. 114). "Hellenistic Judaism . . . had to look 
 outwards rather than inwards, and began to invent 
 theories and justifications of its religion instead of 
 accepting it as a delightful matter of course. . . . 
 Some of them may have begun to worry about their 
 salvation and the ' state of their soul ' " (pp. 96-7) ; 
 they were " disposed to take a gloomy view of the 
 universal domination of sin " (p. 98). They would 
 not take their religion for granted ; and there, Mr 
 Montefiore holds, lay their error. " Directly you 
 have to justify a thing, it becomes a little external ; 
 
3IO PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 you hold it at arm's length and examine it curiously. 
 If you live with it, and grow with it, and accept it 
 as a matter of course, you love it without asking why, 
 and it becomes a part of your own very self. You 
 do not compare it with anything else. It is just 
 your own, a sheer privilege and delight. Perhaps 
 the Hellenistic Jew was too much surrounded by other 
 people to feel like that about the Law " (p. 99). 
 And the God of the Rabbinic Jew was very like 
 him — " very personal and childlike ; He did not care 
 for system and theories ; but at all events He was 
 always there when wanted, and He managed His own 
 affairs Himself. He loved and was loved. The 
 grandiose conceptions of the Apocalyptic seers, and 
 the influence of Greek philosophy made Him more 
 august and majestic, but less gentle and kindly " (p. 95). 
 Paul's universalism " probably needed the stimulus of 
 external and non- Jewish influences " (p. 82). " The 
 author of the 4th book of Ezra gives up the whole 
 question of the heathen as an impossibly hopeless 
 puzzle. ' Touching man in general. Thou knowest 
 best, but touching Thy people I will speak ! ' " (p. 1 10). 
 
 It is a curious story. Rabbinic Judaism was heir 
 to the Law and the Prophets ; it inherited other gains 
 of seer and thinker ; but it rested on the fact achieved, 
 it refused Hellenism — ^provoked, no doubt, by persecu- 
 tions and by war, and it refused progress. On Mr 
 Montefiore's own showing, it escaped the harassment 
 of thought, it would not wrestle with problems ; it 
 was contented with an easy-natured parochial God, 
 and it dismissed the great world to damnation, while 
 Israel and his God moved about on the surfaces of 
 things, content to compromise on an easy-going 
 morality. 
 
 But, dismissing criticism, we cannot help noting 
 that Rabbinic Judaism did not historically do much 
 to influence the world's thinking. Like modern 
 Parsi-ism, it was the religion of a small community. 
 
JUDAISM AFTER ANTIOCHUS 311 
 
 racially and religiously closed. Israel's religious ideas 
 as expressed by Prophet and Psalmist have had an 
 incalculably great effect ; they still exert an influence 
 beyond computing. The successors of Prophet and 
 Psalmist include indeed the Scribes and those who 
 gave its grandeur to synagogue religion, and made, 
 as we have seen, a great contribution to mankind ; 
 but more interesting to scholars for the moment are 
 the writers of Apocalyptic books. It is more than 
 possible that the significance of Apocalyptic is being 
 exaggerated ; Professor A. B. Bruce indeed held that 
 " the great heart of humanity has only one duty to 
 perform towards it, and that is to consign it to 
 oblivion." ^ Whatever attention we pay to it, we 
 have to remember that it was the Jews of the 
 Restoration and their successors in the synagogues 
 who established the first real Monotheism, who claimed 
 all for spiritual religion, who set worship free from 
 the external and the obsolete, and concentrated the 
 mind of the worshipper on God and the human soul 
 and righteousness. All that the Apocalyptist did 
 was to develop this — not in the lettered and scholarly 
 way of the Scribe, but more as a poet would — a poet 
 of broken wing. 
 
 Once again, we have to look at the environment — 
 at the unhappy land of Palestine, the thoroughfare 
 of rival kings of Egypt and Syria as of old, at the 
 growing chaos and meaninglessness of the world in 
 the last two centuries before Christ, at the helpless 
 posture of true religion between Seleucids, Herods, 
 and Romans without and false friends within, libera- 
 tors turned tyrants, and priests proved secular-hearted. 
 Once again there was much to endure, much to ex- 
 plain ; and, as in such times, questions were asked ; 
 religion needed " theories and justifications " if it 
 was to go on ; Antiochus was too serious a problem 
 to leave religion " a delightful matter of course " ; 
 1 A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, p. 293. 
 
312 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 the thinker had once more to justify the ways of God 
 to men, and it was no easy task. 
 
 The questions were the old ones that have haunted 
 Greek and Hindu thinkers, that perplex us stOl. Why 
 does God forsake His people and cease to be gracious ? 
 Is the fault in God ? Is His arm shortened ? Has 
 He grown obsolete and inefficient among the mailed 
 fists and the cultured dynasties of a later day ? Is 
 the religion, in plain fact, an absurdity, a falsity ? 
 Or is the fault elsewhere ? is it in Israel ? Has Israel 
 as a nation failed in the loyalty to Jehovah that would 
 merit or control His support ? Was the nation itself 
 a hopeless dream ; and, if so, what was left for the 
 individual ? What explained his private pain, the 
 failure of his hopes, the vanity of his life, his intoler- 
 able solitude in a world where Prophet and Psalmist 
 had promised the presence of God ? Death swept 
 heedlessly over the land ; good and evil fell unreckoned ; 
 and Gentiles were talking more and more of Chance 
 ruling all ; were they right ? AU this meant, as we 
 have seen before, a fresh emphasis on individual 
 personality ; and every such fresh emphasis is apt to 
 mean real progress in Religion. 
 
 The first and most obvious feature about all this 
 Apocalyptic literature is that none of it was written 
 by the men whose names it bears.^ The authors 
 were not Enoch and Ezra, to name those to whom 
 more books were attributed than to any others. The 
 canon of the Old Testament was closed, and men 
 mistrusted fresh revelations ; neither they nor their 
 contemporaries, they felt, were the sort of mouth- 
 pieces that God would use. Consequently, when 
 a man had a message, he gave it to the world, not like 
 the old Prophets, as what the Lord had spoken to 
 him, but as a revelation made long since in the days 
 of miracle and prophecy to one of those great figures 
 
 ^ Cf. the curious episode of the discovery of the Books of Numa, 
 Livy, xl. 29 ; Warde Fowler, R.E.R.P., p. 349. 
 
JUDAISM AFTER ANTIOCHUS 313 
 
 of Jewish history like Moses or Ezra, or of world- 
 history like Enoch, to whom it was more credible 
 that God would show His mind. The books had 
 been mislaid, or (better) had been preserved as mys- 
 terious and secret literature, and now came to light 
 with prophetic teaching wonderfully apposite to the 
 present posture of affairs. As literature Apocalyptic 
 is trivial; its permanent contribution to thought is 
 slight — facts proved by the wholesale neglect which 
 overtook its products. Judaism by and by would 
 have none of it ; indeed Professor F. C. Burkitt goes 
 so far as to say that Judaism succeeded in surviving 
 because the Jews dropped the conviction that had 
 produced the Apocalypses.^ No one who had ever 
 enjoyed a Greek book could find any pleasure (let 
 us say) in Enoch as literature. Enoch is not a book ; 
 it is a medley of bits of books ; or, if it is not, it has 
 lost its one apology. It is iterative, inconsecutive, 
 absurd, tasteless, and trivial, but it has its interest 
 as a magazine of what mankind has been content 
 to forget, a curiosity shop of folklore, fancy, history 
 interpreted, forecast and allegory.^ But Enoch, as 
 some of the minor writers of the New Testament 
 remind us, offered more than the shadow of a borrowed 
 name ; it purported to reveal God's purposes, and 
 something in its story appealed to men's sense of the 
 fitness of things. Thus Apocalyptic, too, wiU serve 
 us as a guide to the movements of thought. The 
 personahty of God, the claims of man's personality, 
 the fundamental righteousness of the universe — the 
 beliefs to which we have seen men moving with steady 
 intensity, these are stiU the magnets which group 
 the workings of man's mind. 
 
 The great problem was God. Apocalyptic was 
 
 '^ Burkitt, Schweich Lectures, 19 13, p. 15. 
 
 2 " A logical Apocalypse," as Prof. Burkitt says, " would iriost 
 likely be a dull Apocalypse" (ScAtveici Lectures, 191 3, p. 49). They 
 are dull enough without logic. 
 
314 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 an attempt to get that problem cleared. The very- 
 fact that God cared enough for men to communicate 
 to Enoch a sort of philosophy of history was evidence 
 of God — of His existence, of the quality of His mind, 
 of His providence. Tiresome as we, the pupils of 
 Greece, find all, or nearly all, this literature — for the 
 Book of the Secrets of Enoch, if it is Jewish at all,^ must 
 be excepted — it presupposes God as a thinking, 
 planning, provident being ; God " geometrizes " 
 again, as Plato said. The universe is not a rather 
 meaningless cycle of cause and effect, wheeled into 
 chaos and out of it by a force that is as nearly non- 
 moral and non-intelligent as so great a power could 
 be. God, not Necessity, is at the head of it, at the 
 heart of it ; and He is interested enough in His 
 creatures — the sentient, thinking, suffering children 
 of Israel — to explain to them through His saints and 
 His chosen something of the mystery of a universe 
 of tears and death. 
 
 One constant feature in Apocalyptic is its emphasis 
 on history. Fanciful as the Apocalyptist may be — 
 and wild exuberant fancy plays too large a part in 
 his work — ^he is apt to base himself upon the recorded 
 experience of man and of Israel. Using or seeming 
 to use the future tense he tells over and over again 
 the story of the Jewish race, 
 
 immense 
 With witnessings of Providence. 
 
 Jewish writers, from the Chronicler downwards, had 
 retold their national history, they had recast it, to 
 bring out its moral value, and the Apocalyptists did 
 it once more. God is justified in all the story which 
 the reader identifies as behind him, and a presumption 
 is created that, in the remainder of the story, to be 
 unfolded in the future, God will again be justified. 
 The troubles of Israel in the past were largely of his 
 
 ^ It is said to be of Slavonic origin and medieval in date. 
 
JUDAISM AFTER ANTIOCHUS 315 
 
 own making, the outcome of his unfaithfulness ; but 
 not always, for God had purposes of testing and dis- 
 cipline, a design to prove who are indeed His faithful 
 and to develop them. Hence, and the deduction 
 follows naturally in a tale of one texture and one 
 tense, it may be taken that the troubles of the present, 
 so faithfully foreseen thousands of years ago by the 
 great antediluvian or the national hero or the great 
 regenerator, have the same value ; they are not 
 accident nor evidence of the failure of God. 
 
 The Wisdom literature affords an interesting 
 parallel here. Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesias- 
 ticus, show minds wrestling with the problem of 
 individual suffering. There is the simple assertion 
 that there is no problem ; all is straightforward 
 (Prov. xii. 21 ; xiii. 21) ; and there is as direct an 
 assertion that there is no solution (Eccles.). Do the 
 sinners' children suffer, and they righteous ? (Eccles. 
 xi. 28 ; Job V. 4 ; xxi. 19 ; xxvii. 14). Would that 
 be just ? It is the question of the prophets, who 
 had to deal with the popular proverb of the parents 
 eating sour grapes and the children's teeth set on 
 edge (Jer. xxxi. 29 ; Ezek. xviii. 2). But is punish- 
 ment disciplinary, if the sinner escape and the innocent 
 children suffer ? Another theory was that the wicked 
 had his punishment on the day of his death (Ecclus. 
 xi. 26) — a desperate solution, without evidence or 
 likelihood, and affording loopholes, but a proof of 
 the seriousness of the interest in the question. The 
 writer of Job takes refuge in God, author of the world 
 and of its beauty, and implies, if not exactly a future 
 life, yet an assurance of something after death to 
 verify the reality of religion.^ 
 
 To all this discussion the Apocalyptists were heirs, 
 
 and they offered a series of new propositions, which 
 
 are rather difficult to fit into any system, and some 
 
 of which show ideas marked by an advance on any- 
 
 ^ See W. Fairweather, Background of Gospels, pp. 82, 90. 
 
3i6 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 thing in the Old Testament. The Greek doctrine 
 of the immortality of the soul is adopted, and gradu- 
 ally it is discovered to be the very crux and centre 
 of the discussion. Clearness was no ambition of the 
 Apocalyptic school, but it is an intellectual necessity 
 which we have inherited from the Greeks. So that, 
 without going minutely into detail, or considering 
 various writers in particular, we may look first at the 
 work of the school on the future of Israel and then 
 at its thoughts upon the individual and his destiny. 
 
 First, as to the Nation. God, to be faithful, must 
 fulfil His promises to the chosen race. He had always 
 kept faith in the past ; He had called His son from 
 Egypt, He had redeemed him from Babylon. Then 
 it is clear that the Lord will have mercy on Zion 
 yet and will restore the kingdom to Israel ; David 
 will perhaps return.^ The triumph of the early 
 Maccabaeans tended to bring the kingdom well into 
 sight, as a possibility in the land of Palestine itself, 
 but the character of later Maccabaean rule relegated 
 the kingdom to heaven, or to some strange age and 
 condition, and made it the future work of another 
 Anointed one, no Maccabaean, but a greater altogether. 
 Nearer or further away, a fluctuating hope, the dream 
 is a register of the moods of Israel, a register too of 
 progress in religious ideas. The Messiah's kingdom 
 will be an earthly Paradise, to which the dead return 
 with bodies given them to fit them for its mundane 
 joys. But that again will not serve ; it is spiritualized, 
 and dead and living alike will receive spiritual bodies, 
 whatever they are. Then the kingdom is transferred 
 to heaven ; quick and dead are to be absent from the 
 body ; but how are you to reconcile this with the 
 other solutions ? ^ David and the Messiah, the 
 kingdom on earth, the kingdom in Heaven, resur- 
 rection, immortality — the ideas are disparate enough^ 
 
 1 J. P. Peters, Religion of the Hebrews, p. 428. 
 ^ J. H. Leckie, World to Come, p. 30. 
 
JUDAISM AFTER ANTIOCHUS 317 
 
 and the Jewish ideas among them begin to be over- 
 borne by the Greek ; and all are crossed with the 
 problem of justice, the sin of the individual, his 
 righteousness and the claims which it gives him on 
 God ; and perhaps after all the kingdom wiU not 
 be a mere national affair, nor can be, but must be 
 universal. Then is it a kingdom any more ? or is 
 the idea wanted ? Will not immortality serve ? 
 
 The Messiah, too, is a problem — ^David or not 
 David, or not even Davidic ? Some Apocalyptic 
 writers have no place for him ; the writers of the 
 ^ Assumption of Moses, of Wisdom, of Fourth Maccabees, 
 Fourth Esdras and Second Baruch ignore him. The 
 Book of Jubilees recognizes him, but not as of primary 
 import, while the Similitudes of Enoch give him high 
 significance. The writer of these, whose work is 
 incorporated in Enoch (chapters xxxvii.-lxxi.), and who 
 lived perhaps between 94 and 64 B.C., gives us the 
 high-water mark of Apocalyptic teaching on the 
 Messiah. He is described as the Righteous One 
 (xxxviii. 2 ; liii. 6) ; the Elect (xl. 5 ; xlv. 3, 4) ; and 
 the Son of Man (Ixii. 14) — all titles that reappear 
 in the New Testament. He possesses Righteousness 
 and it dwells with Him (xlvi. 3) ; he has sevenfold 
 gifts (xlix. 3 ; Ixii. 2) ; Wisdom is in him (xlii.), 
 the Spirit of Him who gives knowledge (xlix. 3) and 
 the Spirit of power (xlix. 3). He is the revealer of 
 all things, He will recall to life the dead who are in 
 Sheol and hell (li. i ; Ixi. 5) ; he will be Judge (Ixix. 7 ; 
 li. 2 ; Iv. 4 ; Ixi. 8 ; Ixii. 2, 3) ; he slays sinners and 
 unrighteous with the word of his mouth (Ixii. 2).^ 
 
 That the idea of the Messiah rooted itself in 
 popular imagination was in measure due to thinkers 
 and writers who conceived of the Messiah so nobly. 
 That it did, is evident from the Gospels and from 
 
 ^ See R. H. Charles (to whom I owe the collection of these refer- 
 ences), Book of Enoch, Intr. p. cix. ; and index, s.v. Messiah ; and 
 also his Eschatology, pp. 260-264. 
 
3i8 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 the history of those two unhappy centuries of rela- 
 tions with Rome which end with Bar-Cochba (c. 117 
 A.D.). But it is conceivable that, if Jesus had not 
 adopted or accepted the title, and given it a wholly 
 new value derived from his own personality, the very 
 idea might have perished. For, despite the glowing 
 language quoted from Enoch, it was hard for thinkers 
 to explain to themselves that a Messiah was really 
 needed for the tasks assigned to him by Apocalyptic 
 writers and by popular enthusiasm. Certainly 
 political Messiahs were long since a conspicuous 
 mistake, disastrous to the nation and indeed a negation 
 of its true spiritual life. Even after the rescue of 
 the idea by Jesus, it was transformed by its fusion 
 with the Greek idea of the Logos, to which Philo had 
 given a Jewish tinge without obscuring its Greek 
 origin and meaning ; and it is a question whether 
 Logos or Messiah has been the more fruitful name 
 for Jesus of Nazareth. In any case he only distantly 
 resembled the popular conception of the Messiah. 
 Once again the Greek doctrine of Immortality cut 
 across the national imagination. If all men are 
 immortal, if justice is in any case done to all men in 
 some world beyond, what place and function is there 
 for a Messiah ? That Jesus found worth in the idea 
 is a hint to us, as it was to his followers, to re-think 
 it ; but, as so often in his teaching, the borrowed 
 idea receives so many new values, that it is hard to 
 dissociate it from them and to realize how much 
 more was done for it by the borrower than by the 
 originators. 
 
 Immortality — ^that is the conception to which all 
 these national hopes and dreams, and visions of God, 
 had to be adjusted. It becomes the touchstone of 
 men's ideas of God. There is very little about it 
 in the Old Testament ; the nation, not the individual, 
 was the main problem of those writers, though Jere- 
 miah (as we have seen) has grasped that the real 
 
JUDAISM AFTER ANTIOCHUS 319 
 
 crux is the individual. But the idea gains ground, 
 and we watch it make its way in Jewish thought, 
 adjusted as best may be to Jewish views, but slowly 
 transforming them. All Israelites are to rise (i Enoch 
 li. I f.) — or rather the Just alone (i Enoch Ixxxiii.-xc. ; 
 xii Testaments) — or, better, all mankind (4 Esdras, 
 2 Baruch). Then it is transcendentalized ; the body 
 and its resurrection recede in interest, and the emphasis 
 falls on the soul. It swings clear of Messiahs and 
 Messianic Kingdoms, yes, and of Jewish nationality. 
 Sheol is progressively moralized ; Righteousness 
 invades the grave and brings it also into order. 
 Reward and Punishment do not turn on race, just 
 as Right and Wrong are not local or racial but uni- 
 versal. " If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou 
 art there " (Ps. cxxxix. 8). 
 
 Thus once more the Individual claims his own in 
 religion; he must have Immortality for himself or 
 for his child, and the proper consequences of his acts, 
 his life and character. Righteousness has asserted 
 itself against nationalism ; the new aeon will not be 
 a mere reign of Israel, it will be a triumph of God, 
 and it will be shared by every man and woinan who 
 has been loyal to God. The writer of Ecclesiastes 
 might sneer all this away, but mankind was against 
 him ; and the harassing experience of Israel reas- 
 serted and proved again the force of the impulse that 
 drives men to emphasize human individuality and 
 Righteousness, and God the author and the guarantee 
 of both. 
 
XV 
 
 THE VICTORY OF THE ORIENT 
 
 In a famous passage Milton pictures the delights of 
 reading the philosophy of the ancients : — 
 
 Or let my Lamp at midnight hour 
 Be seen in some high lonely towr, 
 Where I may oft out-watch the Bear, 
 With thrice great Hermes, or unsphear 
 The spirit of Plato to unfold 
 What Worlds, or what vast Regions hold 
 The immortal mind that hath forsook 
 Her mansion in this fleshly nook : 
 And of those Daemons that are found 
 In fire, air, flood, or under ground. 
 Whose power hath a true consent 
 With Planet or with Element. 
 
 The linking of Plato with Hermes Trismegistus strikes 
 the modern reader oddly, but for a long time after 
 the Renaissance (as The Faerie Queene shows) Plato 
 was read with the eyes of the Neo-Platonists ; and 
 our passage sums up a great deal of the thinking of 
 the early centuries of our era. The immortality of 
 the soul, daemons of air and underground, planets 
 and elements, and their " consent " with human 
 affairs, are features of religion, some of which seem to 
 have little affinity either with Plato or with each 
 other. Hermes Trismegistus, too, with people who 
 preferred dogma and the dimness of fancy to clear 
 thought, perhaps even outweighed Plato. Fancy, 
 ritual, mysticism, unsound science, are triumphant for 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE ORIENT 321 
 
 the time, and are united in a tremendous cam- 
 paign against truth and sense. The Victory of the 
 Orient over Western thinkers is the subject before 
 us — a dismal chapter in the history of religious 
 thought. 
 
 Centuries of war in the Eastern Mediterranean 
 worked for what Otto Seeck has called the " extermina- 
 tion of the best." The very factor which, it is said, 
 has retarded the development of the negro over 
 millenniums, brought about the degradation of the 
 Greek and his neighbours. Independent pohtical 
 thinking in a Greek city, any sense of individual 
 responsibility, ambition, capacity, marked a man 
 down. In war or civic tumult such a man was liable 
 to be cut off, and his influence and spirit were lost, 
 while the humdrum and the cautious survived. It 
 was a bad effect of Alexander's conquest of the world, 
 and of the great empires of his successors, that 
 government and civil service usurped more and 
 more of the proper activities of mankind. Authority 
 is very well in its place, but it is never content with 
 its place, and it becopaes as dangerous to human 
 development as Anarchy. " True Art's a Republic's," 
 says Browning in a poem of desperate rhymes. We 
 have already seen how decline overtakes Art, Thought, 
 Poetry, everything that needs independence of mind, 
 as the successors of Alexander and the Romans in 
 turn tighten their grip on mankind. The world went 
 through a long period of imitation and dictionary- 
 making ; collections of extracts and universal histories 
 compiled without criticism were favourite forms of 
 Uterature. In crafts and manufactures the same 
 holds. Slavery was more naked and undisguised 
 there, and it is noted that for centuries there was no 
 improvement in tools — a sure sign that progress 
 generally will be slight. Why should a slave improve 
 his tools ? Slavery, in one form or another, e.g. the 
 colonate and serfdom, strengthened its hold on 
 
322 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 society .1 Why should a man think, when thinking 
 makes him suspect with the government, and when 
 there is no Switzerland or Holland to which he can go ? 
 Constant pressure from above deadened the mind, and 
 men slipped to lower levels of intelligence. 
 
 We have already seen how Sextus Empiricus com- 
 pares the Greek painter, who in disgust threw his 
 sponge at his picture, and by despair achieved what 
 he could not by art, with the Sceptic, who, failing to 
 find peace in thought, abandoned thought in disgust, 
 and suddenly was surprised to find that he was at peace. 
 That is not the mood of the early Sophists ; there 
 was a gaiety, a truculence of youth, about their 
 procedure ; their doubt took the form of challenge 
 and emancipation. This later scepticism is sheer 
 fatigue ; but fatigue does not eliminate fear, and it 
 is a fertile field for superstition. Fatigue invades 
 every branch of thought in that Graeco-Roman world 
 The science of Eratosthenes ebbs away in the note- 
 books of Seneca, Pliny and Plutarch ; quotation 
 and guess-work replace observation and thought. 
 Authority triumphs in reUgion, because, like the 
 throwing of the sponge, it seems to achieve what 
 intellectual effort cannot. Meanwhile the steady 
 resolve of the governments that men shall have no 
 outlet for energy in this world perhaps contributed 
 to turn their minds to another world — but minds tired 
 and timid, no longer qualified nor wishful to handle 
 evidence for what they dealt in, anxious for safety, 
 and ready to find it in eclecticism, the subtlest form 
 of scepticism. 
 
 The great characteristic feature of Oriental religion 
 as it sweeps over the Roman Empire is, as we saw, its 
 
 1 Cf. W. E. Heitland, Agrlcola, p. 425, on the steps to serfdom ; 
 p. 436, "step by step they sink under the loss of effective freedom, 
 though nominally free, bound down by economic and social forces ; 
 influences that operate with the slow certainty of fate until their 
 triumph is finally registered by imperial law." 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE ORIENT 323 
 
 vagueness. The Greek had never had as close a 
 knowledge of Egyptian, Persian or Phrygian religion 
 as he supposed ; still less the Roman. " When the 
 eclectic Plutarch," says Cumont,^ " speaks of the 
 character of the Egyptian gods, he finds it agrees 
 surprisingly with his own philosophy " ; and we may 
 interpose that Plutarch's philosophy was a pious 
 impressionism, as little thought out as it was emo- 
 tional and respectable ; and lamblichus found the 
 same freedom. " The hazy ideas of the Oriental 
 priests enabled every one to see in them the phantoms 
 he was pursuing," is Cumont's summary. " The 
 individual imagination was given ample scope, and 
 the dilettantic men of letters rejoiced in moulding 
 those malleable doctrines at will. . . . The gods 
 were everything and nothing ; they got lost in a 
 sfumato." Fog is religion's vital breath in this period. 
 Modern Hinduism, in very much the same mood of 
 fear and reaction, exhibits at once the advantages 
 and disadvantages of a religion, which is anything 
 you like to make it except monotheism, or even mono- 
 theism in a sense that makes it meaningless, while it 
 is never anything that you can either grasp or criticize. 
 Whatever feature strikes the Western observer as 
 objectionable or of doubtful value, is sure not to be 
 Hinduism ; even caste, you will be told, is not Hindu- 
 ism ; what actually is Hinduism, you are less likely 
 to learn, unless it is virtue and spiritual sensitiveness 
 beyond European standards. Oriental religion, as 
 Greek and Roman knew it, was just as odd and 
 heterogeneous and indefinite. 
 
 The mind of the Graeco-Roman world in general 
 had reached a stage in which it was unequal to the 
 task of really examining an idea. The unexamined 
 life, if we may pervert the phrase of Socrates, was the 
 only one liveable for a real human being ; in this 
 age the Socratic passion for definition and for exact 
 1 Cumont, Oriental Religions, pp. 87, 88. 
 
324 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 ideas was lost. Men re-acted to suggestion and to 
 sentiment, now to this, now to that ; coherent think- 
 ing was beyond them. Even Stoicism, in spite of its 
 central principles, had, as we saw, its unexamined 
 elements, doctrines insufficiently explored and too 
 loosely related to the facts of Nature. The intellectual 
 effort (such as it was) of Scepticism was beyond most 
 men ; and, except when disguised in bodily and social 
 comfort. Scepticism would seem never to have appealed 
 to women. Fear overcame what power of thought 
 was left, and fear ruled once more in religion. 
 
 No doubt, qualifications have to be made in all 
 this ; every universal statement is liable to need 
 them. But as one surveys the literature of the Roman 
 World, when once Cicero and Virgil are gone, one 
 cannot help noticing how very second-rate the best 
 of it is, Greek, Jewish, and Latin ; and the literature 
 of an age is apt to reflect pretty accurately its thinking 
 power. Tacitus,^ perhaps the most powerful mind 
 among them, balances the opinions of the ancients 
 and their modern disciples as to whether fate or chance 
 rules all mortal things ; and, without deciding that 
 point, he concludes by observing that the mass of 
 mankind cannot get rid of the idea that " there is a 
 lot in Astrology," but that astrological forecasts mis- 
 carry through the ignorance or trickery of those who 
 make them. Pausanias, about a.d. i8o, travelled 
 over Greece, and was initiated here and there where 
 opportunity offered ; he was frankly a believer in 
 the religion of the day and as frankly third-rate. 
 Lucian's Lover of Lies is a witty parody of what edu- 
 cated people could talk and believe in the way of 
 marvels. It reminds one of to-day, though with a 
 suggestion of extravagance in invention ; but as one 
 reads in the literature of that period, it grows clear 
 that the parodist is a good deal closer to what he is 
 mocking than one supposed, that it is far from being 
 ^ Annals, vi. 22. 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE ORIENT 325 
 
 mere travetsy. Celsus, in his True Word, written 
 against the Christians in a.d. 178, assumes the reality 
 of the theophanies and miracles of the pagan shrines. 
 Aristides believes in the healings of Asclepios at 
 Epidaurus as surely as the most ignorant French 
 peasant believes in those of Lourdes, and with as 
 little idea of the real explanation of them. 
 
 Stoic teaching of the sympathy of Nature, of the 
 correspondences between everything in the world 
 and everything else, gave a philosophic basis to the 
 beUef in what we must call Magic. Even to this 
 day certain types of mind cannot distinguish between 
 proof that a thing may happen and proof that it has 
 happened, and as little between evidence that some- 
 thing has happened and evidence that the explanation 
 tendered for it has any relation to the matter under 
 discussion. To assimilate more or less the idea of 
 chemical action being possible between all or most 
 elements in Nature, is enough to warrant some people 
 in concluding that all thought and all religion are 
 chemical products. The ancients had more excuse. 
 Their terminology betrayed them. Pneuma meant 
 perhaps " breath " or " wind " to start with ; it 
 came to mean " spirit " in something approaching 
 our sense of the word ; and in speaking of Delphi 
 Plutarch uses it much in the sense of the modern 
 " gas," but he does not realize that " spirit " and 
 " gas " really mean two distinct things. It is easy 
 for him to believe that the " gas " coming (or sup- 
 posed to come) from the crack in the ground at Delphi 
 affects the " spirit " of the priestess or is the prophetic 
 " spirit " in which she speaks, or in less modern phrase, 
 is the " spirit " that enters into her and speaks through 
 her lips.i The poem entitled Lithica teaches that, 
 with the proper stone in hand and the proper prayer- 
 formula, a man may influence or control the god 
 whose affinity is with that stone or who is amenable 
 
 ^ Plutarch, de defectu oraculorum, 432 D-435 A ; 437 C. 
 
326 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 to that formula.^ Perhaps ; but it was never demon- 
 strated that the god or any other god really was 
 attached to that stone, gem or other, or that the belief 
 that it was " in sympathy " with him (in " true 
 consent," to use Milton's words), was anything more 
 than the very loosest assumption. Still, for the 
 quick thinkers, given sympathy, there was the system 
 of gem and formula justified, access to gods established, 
 and even control of gods assured — " proved," as 
 loose-thinking moderns of the same type say, " by 
 Science." 
 
 But, even apart from philosophic or scientific theory, 
 the reUgious ideas of the period rested on experience, 
 though the evidence of experience was handled as 
 loosely as this doctrine of sympathy. Mysticism is, 
 as Dean Inge has reminded us, one of the most care- 
 lessly used of words, more indefinite even than Social- 
 ism. So-caUed mystical experiences may be induced 
 in a number of ways, notably by hunger and by certain 
 drugs ; and when they have such origins, it is hard 
 to believe that they can really contribute to a man's 
 religious knowledge. When instead of hunger we 
 say " fasting," and when the man is one with religious 
 interests or preconceptions, a different problem 
 occurs. It seems likely that no one sees, feels or hears 
 anything in the mystical state which he had not 
 already laid up in conscious or sub-conscious memory ; 
 but it is commonly said that what comes in the mystical 
 state comes with a new emphasis, a new value and 
 meaning. I incline to think that new emphasis is 
 more near the truth than new meaning ; and I believe 
 that some part of the new attention given to the idea 
 
 •^ Cf. Lithka (Eugen Abel), 226-7 5 ^nd 330-3 (the magnet 
 bends the gods). On this book, see W. Von Christ's Gesch. Gr. Lit. 
 (5th ed.), vol. ii. p. 376 ; he says it is a poetic rendering of a prose 
 book of the second century a.d., attributed to Damigeron the 
 magician, a work which a medieval bishop eventually got into Latin 
 verse and which in that form had a wide influence. 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE ORIENT 327 
 
 so emphasized is due to the strangeness of the phe- 
 nomenon and to the theory that it is of directly divine 
 origin — divine in a way that respiration and digestion 
 are not so reckoned. A man once told me how in a 
 trance a certain text was given to his father, " which 
 he had never heard before." It is notorious that 
 memory does not advertise all her methods, and that 
 words are frequently found to have been stored of 
 which no notice was taken at the time ; but the two 
 men had only one theory — ^the text came by special 
 divine communication. 
 
 From our records of religious experience in the 
 period of Graeco-Roman culture with which we are 
 dealing, it is plain that much attention was given to 
 phenomena of this kind, and that, as in the case just 
 mentioned, there was only one explanation available. 
 Men believed the evidence of their senses ; they had 
 seen, they had heard, and there was an end of it. 
 And behind their experience stood that of others, and 
 a theory that fully explained everything. Then, by a 
 swift deduction, aU was true that the Oriental priests 
 taught of religion. Science in the form of Astrology, 
 Philosophy and Experience aU combined to rivet the 
 chain of superstition. 
 
 Certain common features are to be found in these 
 cults of the East. We know little of any ways in which 
 they recruited or trained their priests. Our records, 
 which are generally satirical, suggest very great loose- 
 ness of organization in some of the religions. But 
 the priest is a constant factor, an inevitable adjunct 
 of worship, a celebrant in a daily ritual, an interpreter 
 and a mediator between gods and men. The sacra- 
 ment is his business, and without sacrament and 
 priest there could be no communion with heaven. 
 The mystical trance was prepared for systematically. 
 Even if it came of itself, it was the business of the 
 priest to lead the worshipper from stage to stage. 
 The classical document on this is the last book of 
 
328 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Apuleius' Golden Ass. Apuleius describes one stage 
 after another, all associated with deep emotion, some 
 blest with actual vision of the gods in person, and all 
 more or less expensive. Abstinence from food and 
 other things for the purpose of immediate religious 
 action, penances for specific acts, and asceticism on 
 a larger scale, went together.^ A feeling, still not 
 uncommon, that the body and its concerns are on a 
 lower plane than the soul and its preoccupations, was 
 reinforced by a theory, more general and of high 
 antiquity and authority, that matter was inferior 
 every way to spirit, a negation, somehow, in the long 
 run, of God. This theory the philosophers accepted ; 
 and a conception of holiness arose which made it 
 largely an external and negative thing. 
 
 The power of these Oriental religions and of the 
 beliefs they carried with them may be recognized by 
 their effect in two distinct regions. The Roman 
 government, as we have seen, was at first far from 
 friendly to the cults that brought their exotic appeal 
 to bear so strongly on Roman men and Roman women. 
 From time to time the cults were driven out of Rome, 
 but they returned, and "in proportion as Caesarism 
 became more and more transformed into absolute 
 monarchy, it tended more and more to lean for support 
 on the Oriental clergy." ^ This movement reached 
 its height under the dynasty that succeeded the son 
 of Marcus Aurelius — a curious illustration of time's 
 revenges. How far the Christian Church stood 
 from the ideas of the Oriental cults is written in every 
 page of the Gospels ; and as one learns more of what 
 the cults taught, and of the ideas and preconceptions 
 on which they worked, and which became more and 
 more the background of religious thinking in the 
 Graeco-Roman world, the bright independence of 
 Jesus of Nazareth grows in significance. Even Ignatius 
 
 ■^ Juvenal, vi. 522 f. 
 
 ^ Cumont, Astrology and Religion, p. 96. 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE ORIENT 329 
 
 can write to the Ephesians : " What ye do even after 
 the flesh, is spiritual ; for ye do all in Jesus Christ." ^ 
 Yet Ignatius has a rather magical view of the sacra- 
 ments, for he writes, in the same letter, of the Ephesians 
 " breaking one bread, which is the medicine of immor- 
 taUty and the antidote that we should not die but 
 live for ever in Jesus Christ." ^ 
 
 The common background of all religious thinking 
 outside Judaism was made by the mystery religions. 
 Their conceptions gave men what they would have 
 called in our speech their " natural " ways of thought ; 
 but the word " natural " is one of those epithets 
 which, the logicians say, beg questions. The Christian 
 vocabulary shows many parallels with the language of 
 the mysteries, or, more strictly, many terms occur 
 in both, and these terms of great significance. The 
 Christian and the adherent of the mysteries may 
 describe central points of their religions in the same 
 language ; but this does not imply that they meant 
 the same things, or that they started from the 
 same premises or looked to the same goal. The 
 same term may be used, but it is the mark of a 
 beginner to suppose that words can have the same 
 value when used by genius and by common people. 
 Spiritual insight differs ; and however alike the lan- 
 guage of two thinkers may be, it is the measure of 
 their spiritual insight that gives meaning to their 
 words. Wit, for example, is in ordinary life an idea 
 that divides people ; fortunately we have not aU the 
 same conception of it. In religion the great terms 
 habitually divide men who think deeply about them. 
 
 But that the language of these mystery religions 
 found its way into the Christian Church — and very 
 often the ideas behind the language came with it — as 
 the practice of them imposed itself on the state, is 
 for our purpose very significant. The early Christian 
 owed a great debt to Plato and to the Stoics, which 
 
 ^ Ignatius, Efh., 8, 2, ^ Ignatius, Eph., 20. 
 
330 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 again and again he was glad and proud to acknowledge, 
 though at times he explained it by a previous in- 
 debtedness of Greek philosophy to Moses ; Plato was 
 " Moses talking Attic." ^ His relations with the 
 mystery cults were different ; they were of the devil, 
 and any parallels that could be drawn between them 
 and Christianity were, as Justin and TertuUian said,^ 
 due to the devil's having stolen the ideas of God, and 
 of course depraved them, as the devil naturally would. 
 But the explanation is interesting in another way; 
 it seems to imply that, behind the parallel of usage 
 and borrowed speech, there lies for those who care 
 to look a more real parallel in religious consciousness. 
 The heathen in these borrowed and debased forms 
 is seeking to meet the same needs that the Christian 
 feels and meets in a nobler way. He is asking for a 
 personal god, who shall be susceptible of relations 
 with men, for the recognition of all that is implied in 
 human nature and for immortality. 
 
 The whole story of heresy in the Christian Church, 
 in the early church, is of struggles to adjust the new 
 impulse from Palestine with the religious inheritance 
 of the Orient generally, modified by the influence of 
 Greek philosophy. In one heresy philosophy plays a 
 larger part, in another Oriental cult. This ferment of 
 ideas is characteristic of the Roman Empire. With 
 all the weakness and indolence of thought which 
 we have noted — ^perhaps in some degree the very 
 consciousness of weakness was part-cause — ^men were 
 seeking ultimate truth in the pooling of ideas. The 
 barbarians, in that phrase of Celsus which I have 
 quoted so often in these pages, discovered the dogmata 
 somehow, and the Greek tried to give them, or to 
 educe from them, that intellectual coherence which 
 should make their value plain, to relate them to " all 
 time and all existence." For six centuries, for two 
 before and four after the Christian era, we may say 
 
 •'• Clem. Alex., Strom., i. 150, 4, quotes this. ^ See p. 3. 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE ORIENT 331 
 
 that this was the chief task which thinkers had before 
 them. It was handled in many ways. 
 
 Plutarch for instance— Sir J. P. Mahaffy held there 
 was " no more signal instance of this stagnation than 
 the sayings and counsels of Plutarch on politics and 
 religion " and art.^ Then Plutarch is a representative 
 man. He shows how common minds were occupied 
 with this business of reconciliation. A patriotic 
 Greek could have no doubts about the wisdom of his 
 people — ^Epicurus excepted and Herodotus, Greek 
 philosophy was a mine of truth, and if one looked at 
 its teachings in a certain way they were not really so 
 inconsistent with Oriental religion. Or perhaps it 
 was that by some unconscious selective instinct he 
 chose in Oriental religion what, by virtue of its in- 
 herent vagueness and his own gift of confusion, he 
 could suppose to harmonize with Plato. How little 
 it did harmonize with Plato is seen in his treatment 
 of obscene myth and statue. " Myth is a rainbow 
 to the sun of truth," he said ; ^ and if the image of 
 Osiris seemed obscene, triply obscene, it was an allegory 
 in the round, a symbol of the divine origin of all 
 existence. There is nothing that Plutarch cannot 
 talk himself into believing to be right — ^though, to 
 be fair, he stopped at human sacrifice and some 
 obscene rituals which he attributed to evil daemons. 
 For the rest, allegory did wonders. But, said Plato 
 long before, we are not at liberty to tell lies about 
 God, whether they are allegories or whether they are 
 not allegories ; ^ and the study of Plutarch and his 
 contemporaries * confirms one in the conviction that 
 Plato's instinct in this was sound. Plutarch did not 
 mean Truth, his aim was apology ; he was afraid. 
 His father, as he teUs us, deprecated inquiry of a 
 
 1 Silver Age of Greece, p. 371. 
 
 2 Plutarch, I sis and Osiris, 20, 358 F. 
 
 3 Plato, Rep., ii. 378 D ; cf. p. 178. 
 
 * Plutarch's dates are (rather roughly) a.d. 50-120. 
 
332 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 certain sort ; it unsettled faith, it weakened or 
 destroyed the very foundation of all religion ; and 
 Plutarch's whole attitude to life is the same, though 
 less explicit. The religious usages of his day minis- 
 tered to his peace of soul ; the " dear Apollo " was 
 the friend of man ; the religion of Isis and Osiris was 
 not inconsistent with the dignity of Greek thought. 
 He too is a witness to the demand of the human soul 
 for three of the things in religion which we have traced 
 so far ; but the other, the life-nerve of all, he does 
 not recognize so clearly, the demand for Truth, the 
 insistence on fundamental Righteousness. His religion 
 satisfies every desire of the human heart except that ; 
 and on that failure it was ultimately wrecked, and 
 mankind ceased at last to take any interest in it 
 whatever. 
 
 A figure of more interest with scholars to-day than 
 Plutarch is the earlier scholar Posidonius.^ It is 
 partly that his works are lost in the Greek and that 
 he oflEers accordingly a richer field for conjecture — 
 omne ignotum fro magnifico ; partly that he led the 
 way for that reconciliation of religion and philosophy 
 which pervades the ancient world in the period under 
 our review ; partly that he appears to have been a 
 philosopher, and not a blundering, if amiable, moralist. 
 It is ungrateful to speak so of Plutarch, who had 
 obviously claims to survive which Posidonius had not. 
 Posidonius was born at Apamea on the Orontes 
 about 135 B.C., but it is not known whether he was 
 of Syrian or of Greek extraction. He served as 
 ambassador from Rhodes to Rome in 86 B.C., and 
 Cicero attended his lectures in Rhodes in 78 b.c. It 
 is held that large parts of Cicero's philosophical works, 
 e.g. his criticism of Epicureanism and his account of 
 divination, are translated from his teacher, or at least 
 
 ^ Cf. E. Bevan, Stoics and Sceptics, 85 ff. ; Cumont, Astrology and 
 Religion, ^-p. 16, 6<),ii\.i.,<^'i, loi ; J. B. Mayor's Cicero, </^ A'.Z)., ii., 
 Intro., pp. xvi-xxii ; Dreyer, Planetary Systems, p. 176. 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE ORIENT 333 
 
 closely modelled on him. He was primarily a Stoic, 
 but he discarded the rigidity of the school and modified 
 its doctrines to meet the teaching of Plato and Aristotle. 
 He was the first thinker to establish the true theory 
 of tides 1 — a matter that earlier Stoics would have 
 considered trifling. The same intellectual energy, 
 with perhaps some inherited interest, turned him to 
 Asiatic astrology ^ with less fortunate results, to 
 daemonology, too. The influence of Posidonius is 
 felt in the Astronomica of ManiKus, a work which 
 reveals a mind of rare purity and signal in its detach- 
 ment from superstition. But the system of the 
 world conceived by Posidonius was disfigured with 
 a credulity about forecasts derived from the stars 
 which we have learnt — as Augustine ^ had to learn 
 — ^to caU childish. His style, which Strabo rather 
 unkindly calls " his congenial rhetoric, his enthusiasm 
 in hyperbole," * appealed to his day, and so did the 
 great range of his outlook. 
 
 1 Strabo, iii. 3, c. 229. Cf. Rice Holmes, Ancient Britain, p. 
 219, n. 4. Mr Rice Holmes (p. 499) says peremptorily that 
 " there is absolutely no evidence that he ever crossed the Channel " 
 in spite of an allusion to British tin trade (Diodorus, v. 38, 5) 
 attributed to him. Mr H. F. Tozer in his attractive book, History of 
 Ancient Geography, p. 191, is as definite that Posidonius did visit the 
 interior of Britain and study tribe life. But this belongs perhaps 
 more to the history of Britain than of Religion, though the discussion 
 may help us to realize the man. 
 
 ^ Augustine, de Civitate Dei, v. 2, Posidonius vel quilibet fatalium 
 siderum assertor ; v. 5, Posidonius magnus astrologus idemque 
 philosophus (cf. Warde Fowler, Roman Ideas of Deity, p. 142, "the 
 philosophical wizard Posidonius") ; a discussion of astrology as it 
 bears on the careers of twins. See Garrod, Manilius, Astron., bk. ii., 
 pp. Ixv f., for a discussion of astrology at Rome ; and p. xcix, 
 "Thinking men in Rome necessarily, in the period in which 
 Manilius lived, breathed an atmosphere of Posidonius, very much as 
 thinking men to-day may be said to breathe an atmosphere of 
 Darwin." Manilius did not exactly write with a copy of Posidonius 
 open before him. 
 
 * Augustine, Confessions, vii. 6, 8. 
 
 * Strabo, iii. c. 147. 
 
334 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Here, then, was a teacher of genius who really 
 did " survey all time and all existence," tides and 
 stars, Plato, Zeno, and the learning of the East, and 
 he wove all into one fabric in a reasonable or at least 
 presentable way, and pronounced that man's task 
 was not only to survey but to interpret — ov fiovov 
 deaTTjv dWa Koi i^yqTrjv?- He recognized a greater 
 power in the passions than orthodox Stoicism allowed ; 
 there is an irrational element in man's nature — the 
 source of evil which is not an external thing. He gave 
 a place to mysticism in religion, which stricter Stoics 
 denied.^ He is thought to have believed in the 
 spiritual aid of daemons and to have given a great 
 stimulus to Sun-worship at Rome.^ His aim, in Mr 
 Edwyn Sevan's happy phrase, was " to make men at 
 home in the Universe " ; * and if, as is suppossd, 
 Cicero's splendid and stimulating Dream of Scipio is 
 inspired by his teacher,^ it is easy to understand the 
 appeal of Posidonius. Here the world's best Astronomy 
 is related to the strong sterling instinct of the Roman 
 to serve the state and to the belief in the immortality 
 of the soul. Nor was the idea that souls that do well 
 ascend to the stars, confined to books ; Cumont 
 appeals to an " unlimited choice of examples " of it 
 among inscriptions. " The venture is a glorious 
 one," as Plato says in the Phaedo ; Cicero's picture 
 stimulates and stirs ; but the subtler needs and 
 aspirations of the soul are not there. With Cicero 
 these would be lacking where he deals with religion ; 
 and we only know Posidonius through his pupils. 
 They were many and their influence was widespread ; 
 but the world let Posidonius go at last. It is sug- 
 
 ^ Cumont, Astrology and Religion, p. loi. 
 
 2 Wendland, hell.-rom. Kultur, p. 134. 
 
 * Warde Fowler, Roman Ideas of Deity, p. 58. 
 
 * Bevan, Sceptics and Stoics, pp. 112, 98. 
 
 ^ Cumont, J strology and Religion, p. 178 ; Warde Fowler, Religious 
 Experience of the Roman People, p. 383. 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE ORIENT 335 
 
 gested by Mr Warde Fowler that he was not really 
 in touchy with the utmost reality of what he spoke 
 about ; and Mr Bevan's judgment coincides.^ 
 
 Great reconcilers are rarely the world's real leaders ; 
 they sum up the past, and however much they may 
 be hailed at the time, however necessary their work 
 may be, it is temporary, both work and fame. Even 
 rhetoric does not save them. For us it is of import 
 to remark that Posidonius owed his influence to his 
 acknowledgment of those instincts in religion which 
 the stricter Stoics ignored. So far he was right and 
 contributed ; but in spite of his brilliant discovery 
 about the tides, his science was defective, and he 
 rested too much on tradition. His scheme was 
 perhaps too facile ; and it lacked the power that would 
 carry it past the breakdown of the traditions it em- 
 bodied. As we have agreed already, it is the factor 
 that makes the future that is significant. The religion 
 of Posidonius re-made the present — a long present it 
 was ; but it lacked the life that a competitive religion 
 was soon to show, and the power that goes with life 
 of out-growing and discarding error. 
 
 The Stoic, as we saw, taught the individuality of 
 man, but urged that it was a temporary and fugitive 
 thing, which at death broke up into the various ele- 
 ments. Posidonius recognized personality as some- 
 thing of more moment ; and he, or those whom he 
 influenced, leant to the view that divine or half- 
 divine beings come in touch with human personality, 
 and that it survives death. Once again we note the 
 discovery of the reality of the human soul by the 
 philosophers. The religious had held to it all along, 
 but on grounds that remained suspect. But now 
 philosophy is driven into accepting the belief ; only, 
 as we have seen, it accepted it insufficiently rationalized, 
 and with too much of the hastily drawn consequences 
 of the religious of the time. The central thing is 
 ^ Bevan, Sceptics and Stoics, p. 94. 
 
336 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 of moment, and everything in religion depends upon 
 it. Ancient religion gave way because that central 
 truth was not disentangled from the temporary, the 
 trivial and the false. When challenged, it had only 
 authority to plead and that false reverence (not yet 
 extinct) which pretends the " holy " to be exempt 
 from examination. " When religion," said Kant, 
 " seeks to shelter itself behind its sanctity, it justly 
 awakens suspicion against itself, and loses its claim 
 to the sincere respect which reason yields only to that 
 which has been able to bear the test of its free and 
 open scrutiny." But reason, as we have seen, had 
 in those days grown very nervous. 
 
 So far we have traced the progress of religion from 
 the days of Homer or before. We have seen how 
 man's experience reacted again and again on his 
 judgment of the universe, on his religion ; how he 
 came to ask more of the universe for himself and his 
 own ; how he insisted upon God too being personal 
 and on righteousness as the base of all relations 
 between man and man, between man and God, the 
 foundation of all existence. This way and that 
 opinion swayed, as men laid stress on one or another 
 phase of the problem of God and the soul. Over- 
 emphasis on sheer reason to the neglect of emotion 
 provoked reaction against philosophy. Men and 
 women felt that, in spite of childless theorists, there 
 was something real in their feelings for one another 
 and for their children, that there was in fact nothing 
 else at all so real, that love was not a fugitive and 
 irrational sentiment linking for the time two aggrega- 
 tions of senseless atoms, but the necessary and reason- 
 able expression of personality. The philosophers had 
 discounted what mattered most, and the priests 
 emphasized it. World-Weariness, failure of nerve, 
 decline of the race — call it what one may, religion 
 and thought were not working together. If the 
 Stoic preached the righteousness of the universe, as 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE ORIENT 337 
 
 he did fervently, it was a righteousness that ignored 
 personality in God and still more in man. But 
 religion, as we find it in that Graeco-Romain world, 
 is also astray. It has recognized personaUty indeed, 
 based itself upon its recognition, even pandered to 
 it, and missed the other things. 
 
 The reconciliation of religion and philosophy would 
 not do, for neither was building on really thought- 
 out principles. The philosophy was doctrinaire, the 
 religion traditional — ^both were in the hands of pupils 
 who did not understand their masters. The philo- 
 sophers belonged to schools, except where they escaped 
 into the false freedom of Eclecticism ; " all eclectics," 
 said Novalis, " are sceptics ; the more eclectic, the 
 more sceptical." The religious were, not quite un- 
 consciously, following guides of lower powers than 
 their own, savage ancestors and Oriental charlatans, 
 much as men turn to the riiedieval to-day — Chappy in 
 an atmosphere that was fatal to mind, to independ- 
 ence, at last to manhood. None of them were 
 fundamentally concerned with truth as an organizing 
 vital principle ; they pieced it together as a puzzle 
 at best. Their data were doubtful, and they had 
 lost the instinct for examination. A structure, how- 
 ever ingenious, however cleverly wrought of old and 
 new, modern fancy blended with archaeology, can 
 never be very secure when the foundation is unsound ; 
 and here it was unsound. 
 
 There was no finality about this Graeco-Roman 
 synthesis of creed and cult and dogma, becailse truth 
 and ethics were made of less account than emotion 
 and sensation. The religion was beneath the best 
 men ; moral sense revolted at much of its teaching 
 and practice, and men tried to deceive themselves 
 with words, as Plutarch did, into thinking they had 
 a right to accept what they knew to be unclean and 
 untrue. Secure of the help bf their gods — ^gods 
 borrowed from the peoples of lower culture and of 
 
338 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 retarded growth — ^gods conspicuously obsolete for 
 men taught by Plato to think deeply of right and 
 wrong — 'they might live on the lower level, if they 
 had by sacrament and ritual made things right with 
 their gods. Asceticism and libertinism went to- 
 gether.i They were sure of personal immortality 
 and of all they wanted for themselves,' and there was 
 not the perpetual challenge of a clear view of pro- 
 gressive righteousness. They were carried away by 
 an excessive individualism, developed by natural 
 reaction under a government that discouraged indi- 
 viduality, action, and any broad or deep concern for 
 the good of mankind. < 
 
 The religion was doomed to fail, because it reverted 
 to a conception of God that was not the highest. 
 The motives for this reversion were mean ones — a 
 sure sign that the thought would be wrong some- 
 where. The gods were personal, it is true, in a 
 certain sense, but they were not righteous ; every 
 tradition cried aloud of outgrown morality ; the 
 worshippers were above their gods in development ; 
 but, cho(j)sing the lower, they declined to it. Above 
 all, with all their juggles about deity, they had in 
 practice refused the Monotheism which philosophy 
 had begun to conceive and now in reality abandoned. 
 That Monotheism had been itself defective in the 
 personal, so that even in its abandonment there is 
 a hint of right instinct. 
 
 It is a picture of a world astray. All the right 
 instincts are there, but they are scattered ahd working 
 against one another. Those who believed in divine 
 personality gave up divine righteousness ; those who 
 believed in right and in the unity of God, under- 
 valued personality in God and man. Neither way 
 could there be progress. That could only begin 
 again when the scattered elements were re-united, 
 and what belonged together came together again. 
 1 Wendland, hell.-rSm. Kuliur, p. i68. 
 
THE VICTORY OF THE ORIENT 339 
 
 The future was for a religion that should set the 
 highest value on personality in God and in man and 
 make righteousness, ever more deeply conceived of 
 and understood, supreme. Meanwhile, the world was 
 in a pitiful welter of half-truths — manifestly wrong 
 at every turn ; and yet, as Robert Burns says, 
 
 And yet the light that led astray 
 Was light from heaven. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abu-Simbel, 71 
 
 Adam, James, -j^, 93, 157, 
 
 159, 218 
 Aeschylus, 1 59-1 61 
 Alios, 65, dd 
 Alcibiades, 278 
 Alexander the Great, 190- 
 
 194, 241, 250, 251, 262 
 Alexander, successors of, 
 
 194, 198, 255, 262 
 Alexandria, 195, 198 
 Allegory, 30, 33, 64, 178 
 Amen Hotep IV, loi 
 Amiel, 50 
 Amos, 113, 122, 124, 127, 
 
 130-135. 136, 138 
 Anaxagoras, 162 
 Angels, 236, 247, 248 
 Animal gods, 30 
 Animatism, 28 
 Animism, 50 
 Anning, Miss, finder of 
 
 ichthyosaurus, 6 
 Anthropomorphism, 31, 36, 
 
 57, 61, 80, 82, 236, 246 
 Antioch, 195, 199 
 Antiochus Epiphanes, 242- 
 
 245, 296 
 Antisthenes, 198, 213 
 Apocalyptic, 100, 31 1-3 1 8 
 Apollo, 35, 42, 62, 156 
 
 Apuleius, 287, 328 
 Archilochus, 75 
 Aristophanes, 165, 214, 267 
 Aristotle, 4, 23, 51, 52, 84, 
 
 105. 137. 170. 190. I93» 
 278 
 
 Art and religion, 49, 149- 
 
 152, 286, 287 
 Artemidos, St, 99 
 Artistic temperament, Plato's 
 
 description of, 151 
 Assyria, 112, 123, 131, 135 
 Astrology, 267-269, 327 
 Attalid Kings, of Pergamum, 
 
 199, 264 
 Augustine of Hippo, 79, 145, 
 
 171, 277, 287, 291 
 
 Baals, 30, 109 
 
 Babylon, 107, 124, 135, 148, 
 
 195, 231, 235, 263 
 Bacchanals, 27, 86 
 Bacchus, 287 
 Balaam, 115 
 Barbarians, 193, 196 
 Barton, G. A., 100, loi, 141 
 Beauty, in relation to 
 
 Religion, 300, 315 
 Beni-Israel, 122, 232 
 Berossos, 263 
 Bhakti, 11, 18 
 
 341 
 
342 
 
 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Bryaxis, 262 
 
 Burns, Robert, 59, 126, 339 
 
 Caesar, Julius, 289 
 Caird, Edward, 36, 53, 57, 
 
 Callicles, in Gorgias, 163, 
 
 166 
 Cambyses, 123, 233 
 Campbell, Lewis, 6, 157, 
 
 159 
 Canaan, 105, 108-111 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 23, 41, 
 
 103, 130 
 Carthage, 45 
 Celsus, 196, 265, 325 
 Chaldaeans, 277 
 Chance, 206-207, 259 
 Chryses, 62 
 
 Chthonian gods, 145, 146 
 Cicero, 226, 257, 258, 279, 
 
 289, 291, 292, 332 
 Cinderella, 34 
 Cleanthes, Stoic, 218 
 Cleon, 165 
 
 Cosmopolitanism, 197, 200 
 Cosmos, 215, 216 
 Critias, 163, 284 
 Cybele, 29, 280, 286, 287 
 Cynics, 83, 197, 198, 213 
 Cyrus, 122, 135 
 
 Daedalus, the images of, 
 
 185, 282 
 Daemons and spirits, 3, 24- 
 
 26, 28, 29, 73 
 Davenport, Primitive traits 
 
 in Religious Revivals, 26 
 
 David, 107, 114, 119, 132 
 
 Decalogues, 105 
 
 Decline of Ancient World, 
 
 271, 281, 321 
 Demeter of Eleusis, 29, 80 
 Demetrius, 202, 203 
 Dervishes, 116, 117 
 Deuteronomy, 103, 107 
 Diodorus Siculus, 267 
 Diogenes of ApoUonia, 162, 
 
 180 
 Diogenes the Cynic, 83, 
 
 197, 213 
 Dionysos, 87-91, 191 
 
 Ecclesiastes, 319 
 Ecclesiasticus, 244, 315 
 Egypt, loi, 105, 106, 123, 
 
 148, 233, 251 
 Egyptian religion, 100, loi, 
 
 163, 261-263 
 Eleusis, 37, 81-85 
 Elijah, 103, 121, 122 
 Ennius, 258, 279 
 Enoch, ^2, 313 
 Epameinondas, 83 
 Epictetus, 218, 220, 222, 
 
 224 
 Epicureanism, 257, 258, 
 
 261-7 
 Etruscans, 277 
 Euhemerus, 31, 203 
 Euripides, 51, 159, 164, 165, 
 
 166, 168, 171, 172, 188, 
 
 211, 212 
 Ezekiel, 135, 235, 247 
 Ezra, 235, 312 
 
INDEX 
 
 343 
 
 Fate and Fatalism, 60, 205, 
 217, 220, 228, 269, 271 
 
 Festivals, transformed or 
 dropped, iii, 275 
 
 Fowler, W. Warde, ch. xiii. 
 
 Frazer, Sir J. G. {Golden 
 Bough), I, 16 
 
 Gairdner, James, 8, 9 
 
 Ganesh, 30 
 
 Goethe, 293 
 
 Greek genius, 48, 49, 61, 
 
 65, 67, 68, 84, 92, 147, 
 
 148, 152, 196, 316 
 Guyon, Mme, 19 
 Gwatkin, H. M., 17 
 
 Habakkuk, 128, 137 
 
 Hades, 283 
 
 Hallowe'en, 6 
 
 Harrison, J. E., 31, 33, 52, 
 
 275 
 Hasidim, 305 
 Hebrews, 105, 106 
 Heine, H., 48, 235 
 Hellenic race, 47 
 Hellenism and Hellenistic, 
 
 196, 197, 198, 213, 243, 
 
 244, 245, 246, 247, 296, 
 
 297 
 Hellenistic age, 201, 251-255 
 Hera, 54 
 Heraclitus, 91, 92, 93, 94, 
 
 126, 136 
 Hermes Trismegistus, 320 
 Herodotus, 46, 47, 87, 88, 
 
 123. 153-155, 191, ^9h 
 260, 262, 297, 331 
 
 Heroes, 31, 32 
 
 Hesiod, 46, 65, 69-75, 129, 
 
 .183 
 Hiawatha, 37 
 Hinduism, 5, 11, 43, 64, 
 
 85, 90, 121, 178, 266, 271, 
 
 323 
 History, Jewish, remodelled, 
 
 98, 237, 241, 242, 315 ; in 
 
 Greek, 298 
 Homer, 24, 46-68, 87, 89, 
 
 96, 126, 174, 176, 177, 178 
 Homeric hymns, 81 
 Horace, 223, 280, 289-291 
 Hosea, 137-139, 140 
 
 Idolatry, 108 f., 112, 113, 
 301 
 
 Ignatius, 329 
 
 Immortality, 20, 83, 87, 88, 
 89, 96, 100, 143, 167, 
 168, 182, 186, 187, 226, 
 227, 244, 256, 257, 272, 
 292, 303, 316, 318, 319 
 
 India, 191, 195, 264, 265 
 
 Individual in Religion, 41, 
 
 43» 77, 100 
 Iroquois, 41 
 
 Isaiah, 127 
 
 Isaiah, Second, 135, 136 
 
 Isis, 29 
 
 Islam, II, 22, 36, 61, 85, 
 
 109, 275, 306 
 
 Isocrates, 85, 195 
 
 Jehovah, ioi, 104, 105, 107, 
 no, 112, 119, 120, 121, 
 127-144, 233, 234, 247 
 
344 
 
 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Jeremiah, 'jS, loo, 129, 
 
 141-143, 234 
 Jeroboam, 113 
 Jerusalem, 121, 125 
 Josiah, 123 
 Jubilees, 248 
 Justice personified, 73 
 Justin Martyr, 3, 219 
 
 Kant, 336 
 Kenites, 104 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 5, 83 
 Law, natural, 166, 169, 205, 
 
 288, 294 
 Lecky, W. E. H., 8 
 Lithica, 325, 326 
 Livingstone, R. W., 145, 
 
 184, 187 
 Logos, 216, 248, 318 
 Longinus, 189 
 Lucian, 287, 324 
 Lucretius, 285, 286 
 Luther, Martin, 96, 97, 299 
 
 Maccabaeans, 244, 245, 305 
 Macdonnell, A. A., 32 
 Macedonians, 47, 191-193, 
 
 198, 281 
 Macrobius, 197 
 Magic, 7, 15-17, 37, 38,72, 
 
 82, 265 
 Manetho, 263 
 Manilius, 333 
 Marcus Aurelius, 211, 214, 
 
 217, 222, 224, 225, 259, 
 
 293 
 
 Marrett, R. R., 17, 28 
 
 Medes, 123 
 
 Messiah, 317, 318 
 
 Metallurgy, 43 
 
 Metempsychosis, 90, 93 
 
 Micah, 144 
 
 Milton, John, 320 
 
 Mithras, 3, 270 
 
 " Monkey " Theology, 18 
 
 Monotheism, 36, 78, 93, 
 99, 100, 234, 235, 264, 338 
 
 Montefiore, C. G., 307-310 
 
 Morality and Religion (see 
 also Sin), 17, 19, 44, 45, 
 61, 64, 65, 73, 74, 90, 
 125, 126, 131, 132, 133, 
 
 139. I59» ^7S^ 181 
 Moses, 49, 102-105, 112, 230 
 Mukandal, 29 
 Mysteries, 81-85, I4S> ^^^^ 
 
 328 
 Mysticism, 326-328 
 Mythology, 33-35, 72, 331 
 
 Nahum, 123 
 
 Nature and natural law, 
 166, 169, 194, 205, 211, 
 214, 215, 216, 221, 224, 
 225, 227, 229 
 
 Nebiim, 27 
 
 Nebuchadnezzar, 230, 231 
 
 Nehemiah, 108, 236 
 
 Novalis, 337 
 
 Olympian gods, 31, 52-66, 
 
 146, 156 
 Orphism, 86-91, 94, 146, 
 
 174, 183, 184, 185, 272 
 Ovid, 279 
 
INDEX 
 
 345 
 
 Pantheism, 89, 90, 180, 217, 
 
 218, 301 
 
 Paul of Tarsus, 14, 15, 170, 
 
 i79»239 
 Pausanias, 324 
 
 Pentateuch, 97, 103, 104, 
 105, 236, 237, 305 
 
 Pergamum, 195, 199, 264 
 
 Persia, 103, 154, 192 
 
 Pharisees, 305, 306 
 
 Pindar, 13, 157-159, 166, 
 168 
 
 Planets, 267, 268 
 
 Plato, 13, 17, 36, 40, 52, 
 64, 68, 94, 96, 132, 133, 
 150, 151, 162, 170-189, 
 214, 221, 272, 330, 331 
 
 Plutarch, 64, 94, 156, 194, 
 
 219, 223, 266, 298, 323, 
 
 325. 33i> 337 
 Pneuma, 325 
 
 Polybius, 206, 253, 281, 283, 
 
 284 
 
 Polytheism, 14, 31, 32, 33, 
 
 35, 36, 42, 44, 53, 54, 78, 
 
 99, 109-112, 158, 163, 
 
 164, 178, 182, 189, 202, 
 
 203, 233, 259, 260, 264 
 
 Pompeii, 286 
 
 Poseidon, 56 
 
 Posidonius, 293, 332-335 
 
 Priestly Code, 97, 104, 246 
 
 Primitive man, 21, 24, 25, 41 
 
 Prophets of Israel, 99, 114, 
 
 115-118, 120-144, 232, 
 
 233j 238 
 Protagoras, 166, 174, 181 
 Pythagoras, 88, 89, 93 
 
 Rabbinic Judaism, 307-310 
 Race-suicide, 253 
 Rebel originator, 1 1 
 Reinach, Salomon, 15 
 Renan, E., 50, 100, 211 
 
 Sacrifice, 38-40 ; human, 
 
 45, 108 
 Salvation, 271, 272 
 Scepticism, 207, 211, 324, 
 
 337 
 Science, in ancient world, 
 
 199, 322 
 
 Scribes, Jewish, 240, 307 
 Scythians, 125 
 Seleucus, 195, 206 
 Semitic religion, 107-110, 
 
 120 
 Seneca, 219, 220, 222, 227 
 Septuagint, 239 
 Serapis, 262, 263, 266 
 Sextus Empiricus, 207, 322 
 Shakespeare, William, 48, 63 
 Simonides, 152, 167, 182 
 Sin and cognate ideas, 9, 
 40, 50, 65, 73, y6, 83, 87, 
 118, 1 31-134, 139, 140, 
 167, 175, 184, 218, 247, 
 '^SJy 272, 301, 308, 309, 
 
 3.15 
 
 Smintheus, 35, 42 
 
 Smith, Robertson, 37-39, 
 
 115 
 Socrates, 163, 173, 174, 195, 
 
 199 
 
 Solon, JJ 
 Sophists, 152 
 Sophocles, 155, 157, 167 
 
346 
 
 PROGRESS IN RELIGION 
 
 Statius, 80 
 
 Stoics, 18, 40, 139, 162, 168, 
 180, 201, 210-229, 250, 
 25i> 253, 254, 256, 258, 
 259, 261, 272, 273, 288, 
 289, 294, 301, 303, 334 
 
 Sympathy (in universe), 325, 
 326 
 
 Synagogue, 237-240, 306 
 
 Syncretism, 233 
 
 Syria, 264 
 
 Tacitus, 120, 324 
 
 Tel-el- Amarna tablets, 105 
 
 Temples, Jewish, no, 113, 
 132, 230, 233, 235, 236, 
 237, 239, 243, 244, 306 
 
 Tengalai, 18 
 
 TertuUian, 3, 31, 79 
 
 Theognis, 75-78 
 
 Theophrastus, 255 
 
 Theseus' bones, 155 
 
 Thought, Criticism, Philos- 
 ophy, and Religion, 4, 9, 
 10, 12, 13, 14, 23, 33, 34, 
 36, 52, 16, 77, 81, 91, 92, 
 127, 140, 148-150, 161, 
 196, 201, 245-247, 282, 
 283, 302, 309, 310; see 
 also Plato 
 
 Thucydides, 164, 165, 211, 
 
 243 
 Tiberius, Emperor, 217 
 
 Titus, Emperor, 230 
 
 Tobit, 299 
 
 Toy, C. H., 31 
 Trance, 25, 117 
 Tuka Ram, 18, 19 
 Twelve Tables, 282 
 Tyche, 205-207, 259 
 Tyndale, William, 1 1 
 
 Universal religions, 85, 
 201-204 
 
 Varro, 276 
 
 Vedas, 32, 71 
 
 Virgil, 197, 226, 292-294 
 
 Watson, John, 62 
 Webb, C. C. J., 53 
 Wellhausen, 98 
 Wisdom Literature, 244, 
 
 299-304* 315 
 Wisdom, 299-304 
 
 Wordsworth, William, 59, 
 
 67, 122, 215, 224 
 
 Wundt, 31 
 
 Xenophanes, 3, 91-93, 94, 
 
 25s 
 Xenophon, 174, 193, 255 
 
 Yeb, Jewish temple, 233 
 
 Zeno, 197, 210 
 
 Zeus, 31, 56, 57, 58, 72, 73, 
 74, 76, 77, 78, 89, lOI, 
 125, 159-161, 176, 177, 
 218, 219