5i' ^-^^m^c:^ (o S.'p ^^a^^vot *»'"'*»' ^..,,^^ PRINCETON, N. J. BL 80 .M39 1893 I Matheson, George, 1842-1906.. The distinctive messages of ^^ the old religions ^ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/distinctivemessaOOmath THE DISTINCTIVE MESSAGES OF THE OLD RELIGIONS THE DISTINCTIVE MESSAGES Of THE OLD RELIGIONS BY THE EEV. GEOEGE MATHESON M.A., D.D., F.R.S.E. MINISTER OF THE PARISH OF ST EEEXARD's, EDINBURGH NEW YORK ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH AND CO. EDINBURGH AND LONDON WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS MDCCCXCIII PREFACE. I NEED not say that my design in this little book is not to describe the old religions, but to photo- graph their spirit. To describe any religion would require a volume twice the size of the present. But a photograph must be instantaneous or abor- tive. It is a generalised result ; it only dates from the time when all the materials have been arranged in order. It does not involve work, it presupposes work. When you have completed the perusal of some elaborate encyclopaedic article descriptive of a religious faith, the question which rises in the mind is this. Such being the facts, what then ; what is its mental contribution to the life of the world ? In our days this question has been dwarfed by another — the problem of development. In intel- lectual circles the whole inquiry has been how any one faith has passed into a different faith. ]N"ow, vi Preface. I am a firm believer in development, and thoroughly alive to its value. But before a thing can fass it must he. It must originally have had a worth for itself alone and not for another. No object, no ideal, could have exercised for centuries a sway over thousands, which had no other cause than the contemplation of that final link by which it was to pass away. To the men of these centuries the power lay in the faith itself — in something which was not only potent but present. This I have called its distinctive message. By the distinctive message of a religion I mean, not an enumeration of its various points, but a selection of the one point in which it differs from all others. My design is there- fore more limited than that of some volumes of equal size. I do not seek the permanent elements in religion with the Bishop of Eipon, nor the uncon- scious Christianity of Paganism with F. D. IMaurice, nor the moral ideal of the nations with Miss Julia Wedgwood. I seek only to emphasise the dividing lines which constitute the boundary between each religion and all beside. In the concluding chapter I have tried to reunite these lines by finding a place for each in some part of the Christian mes- sage. I have given a sufficient number of references for a book which is not meant for a contribution to Preface. vii linguistic research, but simply as a mental study. This is not a matter in which the linguist has any advantage over the unprofessional, pro^dded only that the details, so far as they are known, have become common property and are sufficient to warrant a conclusion. It is a doubt on this last point which has induced me to omit from the present generalisation the otherwise interesting re- ligions of Assyria and Chaldea. CONTENTS. CHAP. I. INTRODUCTION, II. THE COMMON ELEMENT IN RELIGIONS, III. THE MESSAGE OF CHINA, IV. THE MESSAGE OF INDIA, V. THE SUBJECT CONTINUED, . YI. THE SUBJECT COMPLETED, . YII. THE MESSAGE OF PERSIA, . YIII. CONTINUATION, IX. THE MESSAGE OF GREECE, . X. THE MESSAGE OF ROME, XI. THE SUBJECT CONTINUED, . XII. THE MESSAGE OF THE TEUTON, XIII. THE MESSAGE OF EGYRT, XIY. THE MESSAGE OF JUDEA, XV. THE SUBJECT CONTINUED, . XYI. CONCLUSION : CHRISTIA^"ITY AND THE I^IESSAGES OF THE PAST, PAGE 1 61 93-^ 113 141 162 178 193 215 231 247 275 297 312 327 THE DISTINCTIVE MESSAGES OF THE OLD RELIGIONS. C H A P T E E I. IXTPvODUCTIOX. There are two questions which are often confounded — What is the nature of religion ? and, What is the origin of religion ? We frequently hear it said that religion has its origin in certain feelings of the mind. We are told sometimes that it is the product of fear, sometimes that it is the fruit of superstition, sometimes that it originates in a sense of absolute dependence. How^ever true such statements may be, they can in no case reach the root of the matter. They may tell us what religion is ; they cannot tell us whence religion comes. If we should succeed in reducing the religious faculty to an experience of fear, or a feeling of primitive superstition, or a sense of absolute dependence, we sliall not have A 2 Messages of the Old Beligions. gained one step in the solution of the great problem, whence and how. What we want to know is, how came this fear, whence arose this superstition, what wakened this sense of dependence ? There is no reason why primitive man should have been more subject to these influences than cultured man ; there is, a jJTiori, every reason to the contrary. The ex- perience of fear increases in proportion to the mind's development. The feeling of superstition, or presentiment of a violated law, demands that already in the heart of the man there should exist some knowledge of law. The sense of dependence is not a primitive instinct, but only reaches its flower when primitive instincts have been super- seded. How comes it that these states of mind, which we should naturally expect to arise in the later stages of life, have found their crowning mani- festation on the very threshold of human existence ? There is a question which I have often asked myself and which leads directly into the heart of this subject, AVliat is the reason that in the primi- tive stages of life the individual man does not begin by deifying himself? He possesses a wonder- ful power of canonisation. There is scarcely an object in heaven or earth or the waters under the earth which he does not make divine. He deifies the stars ; he deifies the hills ; he deifies the rivers ; he deifies even a block of wood and a piece of rag. His bestowal of divine honours is by no means Introduction. 3 regulated by the grandeur of the object. On the contrary, with the full perception of the visible universe, he begins by selecting for worship pre- cisely those things which are not fitted to attract the eye, which, when they do attract the eye, are conspicuous by their want of beauty. These are facts patent and undeniable, but they are none the less suggestive, and they do not seem to me to have received adequate attention. For, the point to be considered is, that amidst this almost universal canonisation of the universe there is one object which the primitive man does not canonise — his own souL He canonises the souls of others; he worships the spirits of his ancestors ; but it never occurs to him to bow his head in reverence to that mysterious life which dwells within his own breast. Why is this ? The life within him is tlie nearest object to him in all the universe, the only object in all the universe of which he has any real know- ledge. One would naturally have expected that with the dawn of the tendency to worship, the earliest object of his adoration would have been precisely that mysterious life which manifested it- self in contact with all other things, and without whose contact no other thing could be perceived. Why is it that the primitive man turns away from that which is nearest to him and bestows the gift of divinity originally upon those objects which are seemingly the most alien to his own nature — upon 4 Messages of the Old Pidigions. a petty piece of timber wliich his foot has accident- ally struck, or a miserable bit of rag which has been lifted by the passing wind ? Now I believe it is possible to arrive at a solution of this question. If we want to know why the primitive man deifies everything but his own in- dividual soul, we have only to ask whether he can discover in his own individual soul any imperfection which he cannot find in the objects around him. Is there any respect in which the things of sur- rounding nature seem to have an advantage over this indi^■iduul life which beats within him ? There is, I think, one. When the primitive man looks within himself, he becomes conscious of something of which he is not conscious when he looks at any thing outside of him ; he becomes aware of a limit to existence. In casting back his individual memory he is almost immediately arrested by a blank. He can retrace his steps some forty, fifty, or sixty years, and then he is stopped by a stone wall. There is a point beyond which he cannot go and at the back of which there is oblivion. In the recognition of that point and the oblivion beyond it the prim- itive man arrives for the first time at the definite conception of a beginning. He f(;els that there was a time when he was not, and that the existence of which he is now conscious has had a distinct origin. There must have been something- to cause that ori- gin. Two facts lie before liim — the fact that he Introduction. ' 5 is now an individual being, and the fact that a few years ago he was individually nothing. Even to his primitive consciousness it is already clear that two such contrary states cannot have followed one another without the intervention of a third agency. If yesterday he was nothing and if to-day he is something^, there must have intervened some mediat- ing power to effect the transformation from the one state into the other. It is in the felt necessity for such a mediating power that the primitive man aw^akens for the first time to the conception of a cause in the universe. It will he seen that the view I have here taken is essentially different from the view taken by Paley. Paley, as is well known, regards the prim- itive man as ariivin<^ at his notion of a universal cause by an observation of the objects of nature. He tells us that, if a savage found a watch, his im- mediate conclusion would be that there must have been a watchmaker. He intends to teach by an- alogy tliat, when the primitive man first beheld the mechanism of the universe, he would come at once to the inference that it must have had a creator. Now, of course we all understand tliat whenever an object is beheld as a piece of mechanism, it must at the same moment be beheld as requiring a maker. But the question is, Would either the watch or the universe or any part of the universe suggest to the primitive man the conception of a piece of median- 6 Messages of the Old Religions. ism ? I believe that it would not. I believe that the primitive man would look upon all objects in movement in the same manner as a child looks upon all objects in movement. A child's delight in lookino- at a steam-boat lies precisely in the fact that to the child the steamboat is not a piece of mechanism, but an independent and self-acting agent, moved by its own power and impelled by its ow^n will. A man has no such joy in the percep- tion, just because a man has arrived at the notion that the appearance of self-agency is a delusion. The primitive man's first sight of nature is a sight which awakens wonder; but why does it awaken wonder ? It is precisely because he seems to find in the universe something which he has found to be lacking in himself — i.e., a principle of self-origina- tion. He has arrived already at the conviction that he himself is not independent. He has reached that conviction by the blank in his own memory. He has found that his individual life has come into existence at a very recent date, and that there- fore it must be dependent for its being on the ex- istence of some other thing. What is that other thing ? Where shall he seek it ? Where can he seek it more naturally than in the objects which strike his eye ? These objects arrest him in the first instance just by their seeming contrast to him- self. He has arrived at the conviction tliat he is a poor, passive thing, that yesterday he was nothing, Introduction. 7 and that he owes the breath of to-day to the in- tervention of some other agency. When he opens his eyes upon the universe he sees in it a collec- tion of objects which appear to be more privileged than himself. They do not suggest to him the notion of a beginning. They seem to stand out in contrast to his own limited existence. He finds that they have been already on the field before his coming and independently of his coming. Ls it not natural that, instead of seekinsr an origin for them, he should seek in them an origin for himself ? Is it not to be expected that, instead of saying " who made these V he should begin by saying " have not these made me " ? He has come to the universe not in search of a cause for the universe, but in search of a cause for the only limit he has hitherto found in nature — the limit to his own existence : is it not to be presumed that his earliest pursuit of such a cause will be amidst those objects of the material world which are not subject to the limits of his human consciousness ? I do not think, however, we are entitled to sup- pose that the primitive man will find in every object of the universe an equally probable source of his own origin. There is a fact to be accounted for in the history of religions — the fact that the earliest objects of worship are precisely those things which are not in themselves the crrandest. We should have expected that the primitive man would have 8 Mc66a(jC6 of ilic Old lieliyiuns. fixed his first reverence on tlie most exalted things. We should have thousrlit that he would have looked up to the sun and moon and stars and yielded to them his earliest trihute of praise. On the contrary, his gaze is riveted to that which is not above his head but beneath his feet. Instead of looking up to the heavens he casts his eye downward upon the earth. He takes up the pebble from the beach, or the stone from the causeway, or the piece of cloth that has been wafted to his feet by the passing breeze, and he invests each or all of them with a magical power. Why is this ? It is clearly an act performed in the fall exercise of choice. It is not as if his senses had been origiually defective and incapable of taking in distant objects. His perception of the heavenly bodies is as distinct and lucid as is his perception of the pebble or the piece of cloth. In selecting the one in preference to the other he is determined by some principle of judgment. What is that principle of judgment ? Would we not expect that the sun and moon would present by their very activity more likeness to his own spiritual nature than would be seen in the sluggish inertness of the stone ? Why, then, does he pass the former by and concentrate upon the latter his whole attention and his earliest reverence ? Now I take the reason to lie precisely in the fact that seems to constitute the ground for an opposite conclusion. I believe that the primitive Introduction. , 9 man prefers the stone to the star just because he finds in the stone less hkeness to himself than in the star. Eemember the conclusion which he has reached with reference to his own spiritual nature. He has found it to be a poor, perishable thiug, a thing which yesterday had no existence and which is dependent for its present life upon the agency of some other powder. He comes to the sight of nature with a prejudice against himself. If he seeks in nature for a cause of himself, his hope to find it shall certainly rest in those objects which seem to him most foreign to his own being. What are those objects which seem most foreign to his own being ? Clearly not the highest but the lowest things of the universe. The higher objects of nature exhibit to the eye the appearance of a continual change. The glory which the heavens declare is a perpetually shifting glory. The sun rises and sets, and even during the time of its abiding it reveals stages of fluctuating light. The stars which one moment are bright are in .the next obscured by a passing cloud. In these appearances the primi- tive man beholds simply a repetition of his own image, and it is his own image which he wants to avoid. He wants to find some object in nature which shall not suggest the idea of a beginning. The higher objects of nature do suggest such an idea. They seem to rise and fall with circum- stances. They convey to his mind the same sense 1 . Messages of the Old Religions. of limitation wliicli he has experienced i)i contem- plating his own life. Where shall lie meet with an opposite suggestion ? Clearly he ninst seek it in the things of the lower sphere. When he turns from the star to the stone he seems to find all that he is in search of. Here is an object which, so far as he can observe, exhibits no fluctuation and is subject to no structural change. It does not rise or fall in its apparent magnitude ; it does not vary in its intensity with the circling of the hours. It suoaests to the mind of the beholder no beginninf^, no origination, no need of an outward cause. Its very inertness, its very passiveness, its very im- perviousness to surrounding impressions, invest it with a semblance of eternity. Upon this, therefore, the eye of the primitive man fastens. It seems to him that he has found here the object best suited to meet and to explain his own sense of depen- dence. In the shifting feelings of his individual life he has reached the conclusion that his own being is short-lived. Here is an object which ex- hibits no shifting, which to all appearance is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Is not this the eternal something which lies at the base of the other fleeting things ? Is not this changeless substance the power on which depends the human spirits that are born and die, and the physical stars which rise and set ? May he not rest here in his search for causes, and recognise in this Introduction. 1 1 abiding object the origin and the source of all things ? This I believe to be tlie explanation of the nn- doubted fact that the earliest manifestation of wor- ship is what is called Fetichism — the worship of the lowest things. It is not denied that the primitive man seeks his first object of adoration not in the stars of heaven but in the fragments of wood and stone which he picks up from the earth. But in the view which I here have taken, I have departed essentially from the reason commonly assigned to this pheiiomenou. It is popularly said that the primitive man reverences the lower in preference to the higher objects because his own nature is as yet too lowly to be aspiring. He is supposed to be seekim,^ thiii!:js on a level with himself. To mv mind, on the other hand, it is exactly the reverse. I believe that the primitive man in preferring the stone to the star is actuated by precisely the opposite desire. Instead of being attracted to the stone by its level ness with his own nature, he is drawn to it by its appearance of superiority to his own nature. He sees in it something which presents the aspect of a being above his own. He finds in his individ- ual life the evidence of fluctuation and change ; he finds in this inert piece of matter the evidence of steadfastness and immutability. Its very inertness marks it out to his mind not only from the world within but from the liigher portion of the world 1 2 }fLSsages of the Old Beligions. wilhuut. Accordingly lie gives it the pre-eiiiiiieiice. Jjut ill giving it the pre-eminence he is mnnifest- iug not the absence but tlie presence of aspiration. He comes to it not l)ecause ]jis level is low, bnt because he is in search of a standard higher than himself, and one that shall be free from those limi- tations wliich he has found in his inmost nature. He has been tauqht to reverence above all tilings the attribute of longevity, eternity, everlastingness. He has been taught to reverence that attribute just because he has found it wanting in himself. He l)elieves it to be wanting in himself bv reason of the changes and fluctuations in his own thoughts and feelings. This belief is a delusion, but it is none the less present and strong. He flies for refuge to the things whicli seem free from change and not subject to fluctuation. He finds them not in the highest but in the lowliest forms, and he makes these forms his gods. He is unaware as yet tliat they owe tlie aspect of changelessness not to their perfection but to their imperfection, not to the presence of power but to the absence of life. His worship is based upon an erroneous premiss; yet it is the expression of an instinct tliat is true and real. The man has reached the knowledge of his individual nothinoness, and lie has made an honest attempt to pay some tribute to the source of his being. I would not have it thought, however, that in Introduction. 13 this attitude of the Fetich - worshipper we have reached any real recognition of the nature of reli- gion. We have arrived at the orirjin of religion, but not at religion itself. Man has come to the knowledge of his own absolute dependence ; but religion can only begin where absolute dependence ceases. The sense of individual nothingness has led him to the recognition of an outward cause; but what is to lead him into communion with that cause ? Clearly it must be something above and beyond the feeling of absolute dependence, must in some sense be a counteraction of that feeling. Eeli- gion is not merely a getting ; in its deepest essence it is a giving. It begins with the sense that it derives everything from another, but it must cul- minate in the persuasion that it has something to give back. It has its root in the feeling of depen- dence on the divine ; it must reach its flower in the desire to rise to the divine. Before it can reach that flower the thing wdiich has been first sown must die; the sense of absolute dependence must be broken. The primitive man can attain the knowledge of a first cause by the realising of his own nothingness, but he can only commune with that cause by arriving at the sense of liberty. Communion is a giving, and he who gives must feel himself to be free. The stage of passiveness must be superseded before religion can begin. Now the defect of the Fetich-worshipper is his 1 4 Messages of the Old lidiyions. state of passiveness. His sense of dependence is too absolute; before he can rise it must be broken. I am aware that I am here in direct contradiction to the popular view. The popular view regards the primitive man as having fallen into error by select- ing an object of worship from things too far beneath him to be reverenced. Paradoxical as it may seem, I Jiold the error to lie in the opposite extreme. The object of worship selected by the prhnitive man is, to my mind, too far above him. The piece of wood or rag or stone to which he bows is a detrimental object of reverence precisely from the fact that it is reverenced by reason of its transcendentalism. He has chosen it because it is unlike himself, because it is removed from everything which his experience has ever realised. He recognises it as divine because it seems to be free from what he regards as the limits of the human spirit, because it reveals no spontaneity, no inward movement, no structural change. His earliest worship is directed to that which is most remote from his own humanity; his reverence for the divine is dictated by his repudia- tion of the human. How, then, is this dream to be broken ? How is the primitive man to be brought to the recognition of the truly religious life ? There are two possible ways in which the delusion might be dispelled — either by the depression of the Fetich, or by the elevation of the spirit. If the Fetich-worsliipper Introduction. 15 were permitted for a sufficiently long time to ex- amine the object of his reverence, he would cer- tainly come to see that it did not possess that attribute of changelessness in which he has clothed it. He would come to see that the pebble on the beach is as certain to be worn away as is the life of the individual soul. But it so happens that the Fetich-worshipper cannot get a sufficiently long time to make any such observation. The pebble on the beach will survive him, and, in spite of its constant diminution, it will during his earthly life never seem to get less. There is no hope, therefore, of breaking the illusion through the depression of the Fetich. But there is another and a higher method. What if, instead of depressing the Fetich, it were possible to raise the spirit ? What if the primitive man could be brought to change his first conclusion ? What if he should be led to alter his mind as to his own nothingness ? He has fled to the Fetich as a refuge from that fleetingness and short-lived- ness which he has found within himself. What if he should find that after all he is not fleetino- not short-lived ? He has arrived at his first notion by the discovery that his individual life had a beginning in the past; what if he should come to the discovery that a beginning in the past does not involve an end in the future ? Would not the effect of such a revelation be to lift the spirit of the man out of its sense of dependence into a sense 1 6 Messages of the Old Religions. of exaltation, and to clothe with the attribute of divinity that which in days of yore liad been the symbol of creature-life ? Now this is exactly what happens in the history of religion. The stage of Fetich- worship is broken not by the depression of the Fetich but by the eleva- tion of the spirit, and the spirit is elevated by losing the sense of its own short-livedness. It loses its sense of short-livedness by reaching the conclusion that a beginning in the past does not involve an end in the future — in other words, by arriving at the conception of immortality. As long as the primitive man believes himself to be mortal, he worships the pebble and the rag. As long as he associates changefulness with death, he deifies that which appears to have no change. But if he should cease to associate changefulness with death, if he should come to believe that an object may be per- manent which has yet a life free from monotony, the effect must inevitably be to withdraw his ad- miration from the things which he first worshipped, and to concentrate his thoughts upon a new and an opposite ideal. The question, then, is, how is the primitive man to be brought to the belief that changefulness needs not be associated with fieetingness — in other words, how is he to arrive at the notion that the spirit of man, though it has a beginning in the past, may be without end in the future ? Eemember that the Introduction. 17 primitive man does not need to reach the idea of immortality ; he has already reached that idea. Xob only has he reached it, it has been the master-light of all his seeing. It would not be too much to say that it is the idea of immortality which has made the primitive man a Fetich- worshipper. We have seen in our previous analysis how he was first led to the search for a cause in nature by the recognition of his own individual nothinc,niess. AYe have seen why he began by adoring the lowest and not the higliest objects of the universe. We have seen that he invested with divinity the pebble in preference to the star, just because he fancied that he found in the pebble a greater permanence than in the star. But what does all this amount to? To nothing less than a search for immortality, a search for some principle in nature wdiich shall prove an abiding principle. The idea of immor- tality, so far from being a superstructure in the religious temple, is itself the foundation-stone of that temple ; it lies at the base of all worship and constitutes the condition of all faith. The idea of immortality is not only at the base of all religion ; it is at the foundation of the human intellect itself. How has the Fetich - worshipper come to the conception of a cause ? It is just by arriving at the notion that his own individual life has been too short-lived in the past to be itself a cause. He has been from the beginning impelled B 18 Messages of the Old Beligions. by the very sense of his nothingness to seek before all other things for an object in the universe which shall suggest abiding permanence, and he has come to the idea of causation because his earliest con- sciousness has been the conviction that tlie fleetint; life of man depends on a life that is not fleeting. It is not, then, the idea of immortality which the primitive man requires to reach. His error as a Tetich-worshipper does not lie in the absence of that idea. He has all along recognised the necessity for an immortal principle in nature ; the mistake he has committed has been in finding^ that immortal principle in the wrong place. He has not souglit it in the soul, but in the pebble, in the wood, in the rag. The transition wliicli he has to pass through must be a transition not into the idea of immortality but into the sjphere of immortality. He must learn to see in the soul what he has only seen in the pebble, the wood, the rag. He must lose his fear of the changeful. He must cease to believe that variety of experience is incompatible with continu- ance of existence. He must be broui^lit to the conviction that the human spirit, with all the shift- ings of its scenery, may be itself the most per- manent thiu!^ in tiie universe, and that the chancfes in the lile of inan may themselves be prompted by the movement of a life which is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. How is tlie primitive man to be bi'ought to such Introduction. 19 a conviction ? — or rather, how has he heen brought to it ? The transition from the immortahty of the Fetich to the immortality of the human soul became very soon an accomplished fact : if we find the first generation worshipping the piece of wood or stone, we find the second worshipping the spirits of their ancestors. What is it that has effected this transition ? What is that experience in human life which has caused human life itself to assume an exalted position in the eyes of those who yesterday looked upon it as a debased and worthless thing ? Mr Spencer would explain it by the phenomena of dreams ; I think it would be more correct to say that it was produced by reflection on the waking out of dreams. It is quite true that to the primitive man the dead come back in the visions of the night, and, if none but the dead came back, it would be easy to see how he should mistake the visions for realities. But to the primitive man everything returns in sleep as well as the dead. The memory of the dead is not an isolated pheno- menon of the hours of night ; the whole past day comes back with all that ever w^as in it — its lights and its shadows, its suns and its systems, its men and its women. There is no account taken of the difference between the things which still exist and the things which in the interval have passed away ; it is a universal memory. And this universality must even to the primitive mind deprive the memory 20 Messages of the Old Religions. of the dead of all significance. How can it have significance wlien it is only one phase of a vast landscape which has all equally and in every detail been reproduced by the liand of sleep ? I cannot, therefore, accept the view that the memory of the dead in dreams had any large share in awakening the primitive mind to a sense or a hope of its own immortality. But I think that the phenomena of dreams do, from a totally different direction, suggest a solution of this difficult problem. It is not in the sphere of dreaming itself that I would look for an explanation, but in that other and more inter- esting phenomenon — the awakening out of dreams. When the primitive man reaches the stage of reflec- tion, is not the study of this fact of all others best suited to raise him into the hope of his individual immortality ? For, what is the fact that is here contemplated ? It is tlie sensation of a continuous life which has preserved its continuity through a change of consciousness. I do not think that anv other experience in the world is so fitted to convey to the primitive mind this impression — not even the experience of the awakening out of dreamless sleep. The awakening out of sleep would in itself suggest only a repetition of the first miracle, a repetition of that process by wliich the individual life was originally lifted out of nothingness. It could have no other effect than to impress tlie untutored mind with an additional and reiterated Introduction. 21 sense of its own impotence. But the transition from dreamland into waking consciousness is a very different thing. Here, the mind is itself an agent, an actor in its own changes. It is quite conscious that it has passed from one world into another world, and that in the course of that passage it has kept its continuity. It has been recipient of experiences not only varied but contrary, yet through all the contrariety it has remained the same. It has made a transition from one stage of existence into another and an entirely different stage of existence, and between them it can find no thread of connection. But it has awakened to the fact that it is itself the thread of connection. It has come to the con- sciousness that it has an identity quite independent of circumstances and quite irrespective of similar experiences. It has been taught the new and the desiderated truth that the individual life of man may keep an unbroken continuity amid the constant breaking of every outward association and amid the perpetual shifting of all extraneous things. Now, when the primitive man arrives at this thought, he arrives at a new revelation. He learns for the first time to associate the idea of immor- tality with the life of an individual soul. Hitherto he has associated that idea only with things from which individuality is absent. He has given the palm for longevity to those objects of nature which display the greatest monotony, and therefore mani- 22 Messages of the Old Religions, fest the least individual power. But wlien there breaks upon him the reflection of what an individual soul really is, there comes inevitably a transference of his ideal. When he finds that the human spirit within him is capable of living in two totally dif- ferent worlds and yet remaining the same, when he discovers that the life which he believed to be so fleeting is able to subsist in the midst of a transition the most complete and the most radical, the effect will assuredly be to invest that life in his imagina- tion with the attribute of immortality. His human spirit will cease to be a poor contemptible thing by reason of its shifting scenery ; that which was once its weakness shall be deemed its glory. The test of immortality shall be no longer the power of an object to remain unchanged : it will be the powder of an object to abide in the presence of changes ; and his own individual life, wdiich has first manifested that power, shall receive his first association with the thought of everlasting being. You will observe that when the primitive man has reached this stage he is no longer primitive. The detection of what is involved in the transi- tion from dreamland into waking consciousness demands already that the man should have arrived at a period of reflection. Accordingly, I would place the recognition of the soul's immortality in the second and not in the first stage of the history of religion. As far back as the eye can reach, we Inlroductim. 23^ are confronted by the spectacle of two forms of faith dwelling seemingly side by side — the worship of the inanimate Fetich, and the worship of departed souls. Yet, though seemingly side by side, it does not follow that they are really so. For, just as in the world of space things which in reality are far apart seem in the distance to be grouped close together, so, in the world of time, systems which appear to be contemporaneous forms of thought may be actually separated by many generations. The Fetich - worshipper and the worshijDper of de- parted spirits cannot have had their origin in the same hour of the day. Both are in search of an immortal principle, yet they seek it by different roads and by roads wdiich indicate a different plane of development. The Fetich-worshipper seeks tlie immortal principle amongst the thiugs which are changeless and monotonous ; the worshipper of departed spirits looks for it amidst the varied manifestations of life. The forme;- is certainly the earlier, because it is the lower and inferior form. The latter could never have begun to be until the man began to think. Before he could reverence tlie spirits of the dead, he must begin to reverence the spirits of the living, must begin specially to reverence the only spirit which he directly knows — his own individual life. Why is it that he comes to invest the dead with a consciousness and a personality outside of the present world ? It is 24 Messages of the Old Beligions. because he liimself has already become conscious of having lived in two worlds — the world called dreamland and the world called waking. When he becomes conscious of that fact in himself he transfers it to those around him, transfers it especially to the spirits of the departed. He says, "If two worlds are mine, may two worlds not also be theirs ? If I have been able to keep my continuity through a transition so marked and so complete as that from dreamland into waking, may not those whom I call the dead have also preserved their continuity in a transition from the things of earth to the things beyond the earth." And when he has made this reflection the man changes the object of his reverence; he transfers it from the Eetich to the soul. He turns from the worship of bare matter to the worship of pure spirit. He had begun by rever- encing nothing but the form; his tendency now is to reverence the spirit without the form. The souls of his ancestors are not originally conceived as clothed in an earthly garment. He thinks of them as shadowy, impalpable presences, for the most part invisible and inaudible, manifesting themselves through imperceptible avenues and influencing the mind by subtle agencies. The man in his first moment of reflection revolts entirely from the ideal of his primitive days. It would almost seem as if he designed to compensate the human soul for the dishonour he had done her. In his primitive Introchidion, 25 age he had denied the divinity of spirit because he had found it subject to change ; in his reflective age he denies the divinity of matter because he finds it unable to keep up with the changes of the spirit. Have we now reached the completed idea of religion ? No ; there is one stage remaining to render it perfect. Hitherto the miad of man has vibrated between two extremes. The Fetich- wor- shipper has reverenced the body where it has least life ; the worshipper of departed spirits has rever- enced the life wdiere it has least body. There is wanted something which shall unite the extremes. The reflective mind lias revolted from the tendency of the primitive mind, but it has revolted too far. In its recoil from the inanimate wood and stone, it has deserted too much the clothing of the temporal form. The spirits of the departed before whom it bows are too ethereal, too shadowy. They are in want of flesh and blood to take away their vagueness ; they wait for some earthly covering to invest them with the attributes of the human. Accordingly, there is wanted a principle of religion whereby that which has been unclothed shall be clothed upon. The bodily element is dead without the spirit, but tlie spirit is equally dead without the body. The stage of completed religion must be one in which there is recognised a union betw^een body and soul, one in which the Fetich is lifted out 26 Messages of the Old Religions. of its meanness by being filled with the spirit of life, and in which the spirit of life is emancipated from its vagueness by being incorporated in the form of the fetich. The whole subsequent history of religion is an accomplishment of this process — a narration of those steps by which the spiritual life finds in- creasingly its embodiment in outward things. Per- haps the first stage is the spiritualising of the Fetich itself. The man takes the piece of wood and the piece of stone and carves them into a human imasfe. When he has done this we ojive him for the first time the name of idolater. And yet, nothing is more certain than that we have used the name in the wrong place and time. If it was applicable at all, it was to the earlier period. It is when the man reverences the unconscious Fetich believing it to be unconscious, that we ought really to call him an idolater. When he comes to form the Fetich into a likeness of himself, when he begins to carve the wood and stone into the image of the human, he has already in the deepest sense ceased to be an idolater. He is no more an idolater than the little girl is an idolater when she dresses and speaks to her doll ; in fact the two cases are almost identical. The little girl speaks to her doll not as a doll but as something more. If she realised the fact that it was a doll, she could not speak to it. It is because she invests Introduction. 27 it with her own girlhood, with her own prospective womanhood, that slie is alone able to make it an object of communion. So is it with the childhood of man. He begins to dress in his own likeness the forms which he sees around him, and then he proceeds to commune with the image he has made. But it is essential to the very existence of such an intercourse that he should have ceased to view these forms merely as what they are. It is essential that he should see them transfigured into his own likeness, lit up by his own intelligence, permeated by his own spirit. It is essential that he sliould think of them as responsive and capable of re- sponding to the aspirations of his human heart through the possession of a kindred nature and the sharing of a common life. I do not think, however, that the childhood of the human race can long continue to rest in the adoration of these lower forms. It seems to me that, when man has once arrived at the notion of the glorification of spirit, he will naturally be most attracted to those objects which require least trans- figuration. We have seen how in the earliest age he was drawn to the lower rather than to the higher objects of nature from the fact that he found the latter too like himself. That fact will now have the exactly opposite tendency; it will attract instead of repelling. He has come to find that the cap- acity for cliange is not a mark of perishableness 28 Messages of the Old BeUgions. but of permanence. Accordingly, the things which he once avoided on account of their cliangeful- ness shall be precisely the things which he shall now most earnestly seek. The higher regions of nature shall be to him a more congenial sphere of worship than the monotonous materials from which he selected his Fetiches. He will go with most alacrity to the things most like himself, the things most allied to the movements of life. He will go to the sea, to the winds, to the rivers, to the stars, — to everything that exhibits motion and indicates con- tinuance in change. His new Pantheon will be filled by the gods of the upper air, because in the gods of the upper air he shall find the objects nearest to his own being. He shall interpret their movements after the analogy of spirit, shall clothe them in the attributes of his human life, and shall reverence in them the vision of that profound mystery which he himself has found to be living within him. It is a very barren subject of inquiry to ask whether at this stage of his religious history the man shall worship many gods or one. If I brought a company of children into a large room in whicli I had previously placed a variety of toys, what would be the effect of this variety ? Would the children be attracted simultaneously to all, or would they fix their minds upon one and the same ? Clearly, they would follow neither of these alternatives Introduction, 29 They would d either be united in the admiration of the whole, nor would they be agreed in recognising the superior excellence of any single object; but each would fix his attention upon that particular thing which best suited his own ideal. One might be drawn to the image of a wooden horse, another to the imitation of a ship, a third to the similitude of a steam-engine. But the point for us to observe is that, whatever the object might be on which the attention of each child should be fastened, this object to that chihl would become, for the time, supreme. Whether it were horse or ship or steam- engine that first attracted its admiration, the object of attraction would, for tlie instant, be the only object in its universe. It would hold sway to the exclusion of all others. The period of its reign might be short-lived ; it might last a few hours or it might expire in a few minutes ; but during tlie time of its continuance it would rule alone and unrivalled. Every other form would vanish from the sphere of the child's observation. When it entered the room it would find many objects ; but, the moment it had made its choice, it woidd see only one. It would regard the possessions of the other children with a species of contempt, and the other children themselves with a certain amount of pity. It would say of its own new-found idol, " There is none among the gods like unto thee." Xow all this is highly pertinent to the present 30 Messages of tlu Old Religions. question. The children of the human race are exactly in the position of my hypothetical child. They are brought into a large room which has been already stored witli a multitude of attractive things. These things are not equally attractive to all. Each child gravitates towards a different object — one to the sun, one to the moon, one to the stars, one to the rivers or winds or seas. But whatever tlie object of choice may be, it is, while it lasts, supreme. He who worships the winds worships them exclusively, sees in them the arbiters of all other things. It is another question altogether, how long that worship will last; the childhood of the race cannot, any more than the childhood of the individual, retain for a lengthened period one object in its admiration. To-morrow in all probability its allegiance will be transferred from the winds to the sun or to the river. The one point for us to observe is that during the time of its allegiance it recognises no other form but that which has first attracted it, admits into its worship no other object of adoration than that before which it has already bowed. This is not Polytheism and it is not Monotheism ; it is what Max MuUer calls Henotheism.^ It cannot be said to be either the recognition of many gods or the recognition of one ; it is the recognition ^ Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Religions of India, p. 285. Introduction. 3 1 of one 2focl at a time. The child-world does with o the objects of its religion what the child-life does with the objects of its play — selects that which suits it best, and keeps it until it is tired of it. In this religious stage, therefore, there is an element both of Polytheism and of Monotheism which is yet different from either. I do not indeed think it possible that Polytheism as an actual experience) ever existed. I do not believe that the human mind at any stage of its being is really capable of fixing its attention on more than one thing at a time. I say really ; apparently it is the reverse. The transitions of human thought are so rapid, and the combinations of human thought are so multiform, that one is apt to be deceived. It often seems as if the mind were contemplating two objects at once, wdien in reality it is fixed upon a single object. It is quite possible, for instance, to have in view at one moment the different parts of a house. Yet in this case the object of contemplation is really one; the house constitutes a single image, and all its different parts are comprehended at a glance as things which make up this image. So is it, I believe, with the systems called Polytheism. There have been times when men have seemed to bow down before a multitude of gods, and to recognise the sovereignty of many heavenly rulers. Yet, closely looked at, the rule of the many will be found to melt into the crovernment of the one 32 Messages of the Old Eeligioiis. Tliis so-called polytheism is in reality the recogni- tion of one vast building — a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. The apparent diver- sity in the objects of worship is really nothing more than the diversity subsisting between the different parts of an eartlily dwelling. Looked at singly, each part lias a function of its own, and each part may be described in distinction from the others. But, viewed in connection with the whole, there is no plurality; there is in truth one structure and only one, and all the varieties in the formation of the separate angles are lost and overshadowed in the unity of the completed building. I hold, then, that as a matter of fact Polytheism is impossible ; that there never really existed or could exist a time in which the mind of man had its attention simultaneously fixed upon two objects of worship. The nearest approach to the worship of more gods than one is the stage called Henotheism, in which there is indeed recognised a plurality of heavenly objects, but in which the place of honour is occupied by each in turn. Even here, there is no real plurality. Each ruler may have a short reign, but, while it lasts, his reign is absolute. The attention of the worshipper is at no time fixed upon more than one god, and is at all times dominated by one. If now it be asked, What is that point of transition in which the one object of worship Introduction. 33 becomes a permanent object ? I answer, it will be found at that stage in which the mind's attraction passes from a sensuous admiration into a principle of love. What is the difference between a child's devotion to its toy and a man's devotion to his friend; why is the one so much more short-lived than the other ? The reason lies in the fact that the bond of attraction is in each case fastened to a different object. The child is attached to his toy through a cord that communicates with the eye ; the man is attached to his friend through a bond that communicates with the heart. The tran- sition from the many gods to the one God will be accomplished in that hour when a corresponding transition has been made from the attraction of the eye to the attraction of the mind. It is in my opinion a great mistake to imagine that man's sense of the divine unity was originally awakened by his sense of natural law. I believe that it came before the coming of science, before the knowledge of nature, before the perception of law. I believe that it was awakened not by the intellect but by the heart, not by the sense of material fixedness, but by the recognition within the soul of a perma- nent love. If the child's toy were adequate to tlie child's whole nature, the toy would hold over the child a perpetual sceptre. The reason w4iy to- morrow it changes the object of to-day is the fact that the object of to-day is only sufficient for the C 34 Messages of the Old Belirjions. day; to-morrow the child's nature will be bigger and will need a larger toy. So is it in the world of religious history. The childhood of the race will have a new god each day as long as each god shall only suffice for each day. But whenever the race shall find an ideal whose attractiveness shall be coextensive with all the instincts of humanity, whenever it shall fix its heart upon a form whose beauty shall be unafTected by the changes in natu- ral beauty, it shall at that moment enter into the recognition of an object of worship which shall not only be supreme but permanent in its duration. It is, then, a barren question to inquire at what time the race of man passed from the recognition of the many gods into the recognition of the one. There was, I believe, no such time, no settled date at which the collective human species made a simulta- neous transition from Henotheism into Monotheism. It depended entirely upon the progress of the in- dividual mind. Those men who had received from their object of worship the deepest satisfaction of their nature would keep their object longest ; those who had received from it the satisfaction of all their nature would keep their object alwayfi. In one community there might exist side by side tlie representatives both of the old faith and of the new — some who were still each day exchanging one image for another, and some who had fixed tlieir hearts upon a foundation that could not be moved. Introduction, 35 But while it is useless to seek a precise stage in history when the worship of the many passed into the worship of the one, there is a search for unity which is far more legitimate and far more satis- factory. Instead of trying to determine at what time the many gods were combined into the single Deity, it would be of infinitely more purpose to determine what made it possible at any time for such a combination to take place. Is it not trans- parent on the very surface that, if the many have become the one, it can only be because there is already within the many a principle of unity. When tw^o are made one it is because the two are already harmonious : a true marriage has its begin- ning not in the tying of the nuptial cord, but in that unity of life which has existed implicitly in the lives of the separate individuals. Even so is it in the religions of the world. If to every race there has come a time when the worship of one God has supplanted the worship of many deities, it can only be because in the worship of these many deities there has existed from the beginning one common element, one underlying principle whicli has made them already a unity. The marriage is not the cause but the effect of their union, the last result and the outward expression of what has been all along latent within. What is thia prin- ciple of union that exists already in the diversities of worship ? It is a far more important question 36 Messages of the Old Beligions. than the historical question of when Monotheism began to be. If Monotlieisin ever began to be, it was only by reason of a preceding and a pre- existent unity. Kay, if ever the time shall come when all men shall worship together one God, one faith, one baptism, it shall only be because in their separate faiths and in their separate baptisms there has been a connecting bond which has ensured tlieir ultimate union. What is this bond ; what is that common element which underlies religious diversity and makes it possible for religious diversity to pass away ? The consideration of this subject demands a separate chapter. The Common Element in Religions. 37 CHAPTEK 11. THE COMMON ELEMENT IN RELIGIONS. There are few spectacles which have habitually appeared more sad than the variety of forms assumed by religious worship. To the eye of every missionary the number and the variations of human creeds have always seemed amongst the things most to be de- plored in the world. The question is, Why ? No man will say that the sight of variety is in itself more sad than the spectacle of monotony : every one must feel that it is the reverse. No one regards it as a blemish in the art of poetry that it embraces within its pale so many different forms of poetic thought. No one looks upon it as a blemish in the art of painting that it holds within its sceptre so many different ideals of the painter's power. Why should it be thought a blemish in the aspect of religion that it is found throughout the world in ever-varied shapes and in ever-changing garbs ? In every other department of study the existence of variety is reckoned a triumph. Why should the 3^ Messages of the Old RcUyions. sphere of religion be the only exception ? Why should the multiplicity of religious beliefs and the diversity of religious schools be viewed by earnest minds as indications of the depravity of human nature and as signs of incipient development in the life of the soul ? Now I think it will be found that the reason of this difference lies in something deeper — lies, indeed, in the fact that religion is not habitually regarded either as a science or as an art. The scientific man seeks the presence of law beneath every form ; the poetic man seeks the presence of beauty beneath every form ; but the religious man tends originally to recognise only one form. Every nation looks upon its own mode of belief as an accidental privi- lege — something which has fallen from heaven as a special gift to itself. Accordingly, it feels con- strained from the very outset to magnify that element in its faith which most separates it from other faiths. It not only glorifies the form — which is legitimate — but it feels bound to disparage every other form. It has received its own religion not by a law of human nature, but by a miracle which has set the law of human nature at defiance. It has been elevated above the worship of other lands as far as heaven is distant from the earth. The worship of other lands is therefore to it only a falsehood and a blasj)hemy. The variety in the religious opinions around it is a source of inex- The CommDn Element in Religions. 39 pressible sadness. Every divergence from its own form of faitli is a divergence from the path of holi- ness. Its missionary zeal is prompted and inflamed by the sense of this surrounding destitution. It feels impelled to establish uniformity of worship, and to make itself the pattern of this uniformity. Yet even in its missionary efforts it xloes not hope to reach the hearts of men through a human chan- nel. Its own faith has come to it by miracle ; by miracle must it come to others also. The only chance for the establishment of religious unity lies through the suppression of humanity ; for the human is the antithesis of the divine, and God is only reached by the annihilation of man. Xow, if this view be the true one, religion is the most unscientific, the most inartistic, the most in- human thing in the world, and the longer the world lasts, the more unscientific and the more inhuman it must become. The tendency of all mental pro- gress is to reduce phenomena under one law. Every advance of thought has in other departments been an advance in unity. If religion should elect to linger behind, its position must ultimately be one of absolute solitude. But is religion to linger be- hind ? For some time back there have been signs of the contrary. In nothing has our age been more distinguished from previous ages than in the revolt from this first conception of the nature of faith. It is not in the looseniuGr of its creeds and formulas 40 Messages of the Old Relirjions. that the nineteenth century is distinguished as a Broad-Church century. Creeds and formulas have been loosened before ; the age of the Eeformation was more pronouncedly an age of religious licence than ours. The peculiarity of the nineteenth cen- tury lies in this, that the loosening of its creeds and formulas is not a cause but an effect, not the inau- guration of a movement but the result of a move- ment already inaugurated. It is not a negative but a positive tendency that has produced the liberalism of the nineteenth century. The minds of men have relaxed tlieir interest in details only because they have found an interest in the existence of a general principle whose being was hitherto un- suspected. They have awakened to the recognition of the fact that in addition to religions there is a religion. They have come to believe tliat beneath the various forms there is something which is com- mon, that, underlying the diversities of creed, there is already existing an element of unity. If rever- ence for the form has declined, it is only in order that there may be more room for tlie operation of the spirit. The movement towards the recognition of a common element in religion has been, strictly speaking, a purely modern one. It found its initial note in the latter half of last century. It was inaugurated by Lessing in his " education of the liuman race." It was taken up by Herder in his search fur a common principle of universal cvolu- Tlie Common Element in Eeligions. 4 1 tion. It was carried on by those systeins of German illuminism wliich during tlie first quarter of tlie nineteenth century made the field of speculation itself a region of romance. It was borne into our own country by the very increase of those mechani- cal appliances which are supposed to minister only to the outer man. The increased facilities for travel opened np lands w^hich w^ere before unknown, and in proportion as they became known, the points of difference between them and us were minimised. The spirit of liberalism in England has been exactly contemporaneous with her power of locomotion. It is popularly said that travel liberalises. The saying is true, but it is not true for the popularly given reason. It is not because the man of travel is brought into contact with many diversities that he becomes enlarged in his sympathies. It is rather because beneath these diversities he recognises for the first time a common bond of unity. It is because he wakens to the conviction that human nature is very much the same under all circum- stances, and that, underlying the differences of cus- toms and modes of life, there beats within the heart the same impulse and the same instinct. In short, it is because the man of travel arrives at a sense of the world's essential smallness, amid its wide- ness, that he ceases to believe in the exclusiveness of his own privilege or in the monopoly of his own creed. 42 Messages of the Old Beligions. Such has been the position of our country duiing the last half- century. It has obtained ever-in- creasingly a door of entrance into other lands, and the result has been to minimise its sense of their religious differences. It has found beneath these differences an underlying unity. Its search has been stimulated mto a new direction. It has ceased to seek for the points of divergence between other faiths and its own; it has begun to study the points in which other faiths do not diverge from its own. It is trying to find in tlie sphere of religion what it has already found in every other sphere — an element of contact between separate forms. Just as it has discovered a principle of unity between the anatomy of the higher and the anatomy of tlie lower organisms, so it essays to find a principle of unity between the religion of the developed and the religion of the undeveloped races. If the effect of this tendency has been to abate the ardour of missionary enterprise, it has also been greatly to increase its facilities. The pioneers of a reh'gion, the men who seek to carry their own form of faith into other lands, no longer need to dejoend on the influx of a force purely supernatural. Tiiey can henceforth be stimulated by the thought tliat in the minds of those wliom they wish to proselytise there is already existing an element of concord with tlieir own. They can be fortified by the knowledge that beneath all its diverse forms there is even now The Common Element in Religioris. 43 in operation one common religion, and that the diver- sities in the form are themselves only able to endure by reason of that principle of unity which abides ever the same. What, then, is this principle of unity which un- derlies the different forms of religion ? When we look on the surface of the surrounding faiths it almost seems as if there were no such bond. It cannot be said that tliere is any single doctrine of religion on which the worshippers of every creed are agreed. Even those beliefs which to modern development seem elementary have at no time com- manded the simultaneous assent of the united world. The belief in a personal God has occupied little place in the religious philosophies of India. The doctrine of individual immortality has had no share in the development of Buddhism. The recognition of a moral government in the universe has been a comparatively late fact in the history of religion. If even in its most elementary aspects the study of human worship reveals little trace of unity, the diversities which it displays must be still more broadly marked when we pass from first principles to secondary details. On the whole, it may be fairly concluded, that wherever religious unity is to be found, it cannot be found in the acceptance of a common object of worship. It may be doubted if, even within the pale of any one religion, there is really recognised a common object of worship. "We 44 Messages of the Old Religions. do not make an object common by giving it a single name. Millions of human beings are united in the recognition of Jesus Christ as the highest ideal in the universe ; but it may be questioned if to any two individuals amongst them the ideal is exactly the same. The Christ of the middle ages is no more like the Christ of modern times than the Jupiter of ancient paganism is like the God of scientific evolution. A universally-sided character can never be universally seen in precisely the same light. The Christian claims for Christ such a char- acter, and as the result of that claim he must be prepared to give up the hope of any unity which shall be based upon the sight of one outward form. Is there any other direction in which w^e can look for religious unity ? If we cannot find it in a common object of worship, is there any other region in which we may hope to discover it ? There is ; let us turn from the object of worship to the atti- tude of the worshipper. And to facilitate our search in this direction, let us take an analogous case, the case that of all others presents to my mind the nearest analogy — the sphere of the poet. No man will deny that there is in the world a thing called poetry. No man would ever dream of believ- ing that the various specimens of rhythmic thought which meet the eye from all quarters constitute, each of them, a separate subject of study. We all feel that the points of separation between them The Common Element in Religions. 45 are nothing in comparison to the point in which they are agreed. We feel, in short, that they are pervaded by one and the same spirit — a spirit of poetry. But if we ask what is this spirit of poetry, if we ask where lies the point of union which makes these separate verses the parts of a single science, the answer is not at first very easy. If we look on the surface here, we shall have very much the same experience which we had when looking on the surface of religion — a sense of diversity everywhere. Here also it may he said that the unity cannot lie in the subject-matter. It cannot be held that there is any one subject on which the attention of poets has been simultane- ously concentrated. Every sphere of nature has been ransacked in search of materials for the poetic mind. The mountain and the valley, the grand and the commonplace, the strong and the gentle, the grave and the gay, have at one and the same moment been the theme of the sons of song. Xor can it be said that song itself has been the medium of union. Poetry needs not be rliyme, needs not be verse, needs not even be rhythm. Thomas Carlyle is the most unrhythmical of writers, communicates his thoughts in sentences that defy the possibility of scansion ; yet Thomas Carlyle is worthy of a place amongst the greatest of the poets, worthy of a place amongst that band of poets whose form of diction has been specially rhythmical — the prophets of 46 Messages of the Old Belirjions. Israel. In all these respects the idea of finding a point of union for poetic minds is shown to be abortive. And yet it remains true that, in spite of these variations of form, no one can fail to recognise that there is a point of union. Every one feels that there is a line of demarcation between poetry and prose, and that this line of demarcation is marked with equal distinctness whatever the form or the subject of the writing may be. What is this line of demarcation ? "What is it that enables a man instinctively and instantaneously to say of any composition, " This is poetry," " That is prose " ? The feeling is patent to all ; is it possible to trans- late the feeling into the terms of science ? I believe it is. I believe that it is possible to define in logical terms that line of boundary which separates the sphere of the poet from the sphere of the prose-writer. I think it will be found that the distinction between a poetic and a prosaic state- ment lies essentially in one principle — incarnation. The definition I would assign to poetry is the "in- carnation of truth." The poet gives to every thought a body. He clothes one thing in the likeness of another thing. His mission is to find the analogies of nature. He is to the man of science what John the Baptist was to Christianity — a forerunner, a pioneer. If it is the province of the man of science to discover a common law, it is the pro- vince of the poet to discover a common likeness. The Common Element in Beligions, 47 In every object of nature and in every thought of mind he sees, or dreams that he sees, the similarity to some other thing. He unclothes each form in order that he may clothe it anew, in order that he may behold it dressed in the similitude of some- thing else. He gives to matter the garb of spirit, and to spirit the form of matter. If he looks upon the "gadding vine," he sees in its gadding the grief for Lycidas. If he beholds the dawning of the day, he interprets it as the rosy hand of morn unbarring the gates of light. If he hears a record of the miracle of Cana in Galilee, he explains the trans- formation after the analogy of life — "The conscious water knew its Lord and bliislied." Not only does the poet clothe one object in the likeness of another ; he clothes himself in the like- ness of everything he depicts. Emerson says that if you want to paint a tree, it is not enough to describe the tree, you must he the tree. The poet must be everything of which his theme discourses ; he must flow with the stream, bloom with the flower, glitter with the sunbeam, whisper with the zephyr, sparkle with the fountain. It is, in short, in the idea of incarnation that all poetry begins, continues, and ends. There may be the widest differences in subject, in form, in treatment, but in this one respect there must be a common soul. That which separ- ates everywhere and always the poetic from the 48 Messages of the Old Religions, prosaic mind is the power to say, " Let the word be made Hesh." Now all this is not irrelevant; it has a strict bearing upon the question on which we are en- gaged. If there is any point where the secular blends with the sacred, it is in the sphere of the poet. Poetry and religion have always been re- garded as the children of one family; whatever parentage be assigned to the one must be assigned to the other. I think it will be found that the com- munity of origin is accompanied by a community of essence, and that what constitutes the poetic spirit amid all diversities of form is what constitutes the religious spirit amid all diversities of belief. In the religious world, as in the poetic world, the point of union between different schools is the idea of incarnation. The essence of religion is not the belief in a particular object of worship, but it is the belief that, whatever the object of worship may be, the worshipper himself is made in the image of that w4iich he adores. This I believe to be the one element which lies at the root of all religion, wliich is common to all diversities of form, and in- destructible by the suppression of these diversities. Everything else is but the body of worship ; this is its souL It is popularly thought that the old narrative of Genesis is peculiar in its doctrine that man is made in the image of God. This is a grand mistake. The Book of Genesis may be peculiar in The Common Element in Religions. 49 the view which it has of God; it is not singular in holding that man is made in the image of God. No sacred writing, no religious ceremony, no the- ological dogma, no act of faith or prayer, could possibly be based upon any other foundation. The postulate of all religion, the condition preliminary to all worship, is the conviction that between the worshipped and the worshipper there exists from the very outset a bond of connection. You can only believe what you can conceive, and you can only conceive what is already in your nature. No man can figure in his imagination any object human or divine whose elements are not at the present moment within his own consciousness. The question is not between a God bearing our own image and a God bearing a different image; it is between a God bearing our own image and no God at all. There may be any amount of diversity in the superstruc- ture, but the foundation is uniform. The religions of the earth constitute not a series of temples, but a single temple. The Father's house may have many mansions, but the house itself is one and indivisible. Every form of faith, every mode of worship, every approach of the human to the divine, rests upon one and tlie same foundation — the belief that the human is already in the image of tlie divine ; other founda- tion than this can no man lay. It is well to bear this in view, because it is one of the subjects on which there has been a great D 50 Mess'-igcs of the Old Bdifjions. misconception. It is often thought that the belief in the identity of the human with the divine image is a belief which stamps the worshipper as belonging to a stage of primitive development. Accordingly, three forms of reverence have been proposed, each of which is regarded as a more developed mode of faith on the ground that it denies this identity. These three forms are — Deism, Pantheism, and Scientific Evolution. Each of these is supposed to mark a higher stage in the progress of thought, because each of them is supposed to emancipate the miud from the old doctrine that man is made in the image of God. Now, whether these be or be not higher stages of development I shall not here inquire ; but one thing is certain, they are not higher on the ground alleged. Neither deism nor pantheism nor scientific evolution is really a de- parture from the old principle. They differ in their view of what constitutes the dominant Power in the universe; they are all based upon the belief tliat whatever that Power be, man is made in its image. The briefest possible examination will tend to make this clear. Deism is the reaction against the idea of a God manifested in the flesh. It has had two great movements in history — the one in England, the other in India ; the one directed against Christianity, the other against Brahmanism ; the one rising in the eighteenth century and becoming extinguished in The Common Element in Bcligions. 51 the flames of the French Eevolution, the other originating in the nineteenth and continuing to the present day. But alike of the English and the Indian movements it must be said, that how- ever true or however false they may be in them- selves, they are both failures so far as their purpose is concerned. That purpose is to establish an object of worship upon a basis above the world, to unveil the statue of a God whose nature shall be free from all the limits of humanity. It is to present to the eyes of men the portrait of a Being dwelling not in tabernacles of clay but enthroned in the highest heavens — a Being omnipotent, omniscient, and eternal, full of all benevolence, rich in all wisdom, pervaded by all love. Yet, what is this conception but an incarnation, a God manifest in the flesh ? It is the wildest delusion to imagine that a man escapes either Christianity or Brahmanism by run- ning into deism. He has simply lifted his God on to a higher physical platform. The attributes which he reverences in the object of his worship are essentially human attributes ; his God is still in his own image, though the image is placed in heaven. When you attribute to the object of your worship a sense of omnipotence, what else have you done than to assign Him a human limit ? What is a sense of omnipotence but the conscious- ness that one has power to overcome any obstacle ? When I say " I can do this," do I not express the 52 Messages of the Old Rdigions. fact tliat I feel a force within me which is capable of overcoming a force that I perceive without me ? The very statement implies the idea of an effort on my part, and the idea of an effort is inseparable from the idea of a limit. To attribute to the object of your worship the power to say "I can," is to clothe your God in the likeness of a human envi- ronment. As long as you reverence that whicli is personal you can no more escape the idea of in- carnation than you can escape your own shado^v. It does not matter where you place the personality : you may lay it in the heavens above, or you may deposit it in the depths beneath. Assign it what locality you please, it is an incarnation still, and an incarnation equally. It is an incarnation because it is personal. It is a manifestation of the human not because it inhabits a human locality but because it is local anywhere. The moment I have said of my God, "Lo here," or " Lo there," I have given Ilim a special habitation, and the moment I have given Him a special habitation I have embodied Him in a material form. The effort of deism to transcend humanity has only ended in tlie old ideal of a God walkinGf in tlie ion of despair. It liad no hope whatever for the present world, and it made no effort to redeem it ; its only hope was to he redeemed from it. The future to which it looked forward was a personal annihilation — a state in which the soul should be freed not only from every remembrance of the earth, but from every earthly form and human embodiment. As the child of such a mother, Buddhism came by nature into an inheritance of pessimism. Yet it must be confessed that she did not accept that inheritance without modification. Her whole aim was to improve it. Her leading purpose was the reverse of pessimistic ; it was the attempt to find a break in the cloud of Brahmanism. Buddhism started on her path with the determination to discover in the world itself a ground for hope. I do not know what views she had about the state beyond the world. Her idea] was a paradise called Nirvana. Whether in the future state it meant annihilation or merely rest, I cannot say ; the most eminent Eastern schoLars arc still on this point divided.^ But the point for us to observe is that, in the original view of the Buddhist, the attainment of Nirvana was not limited to a future state; it might be reached here and now. ^ See, for example, on the one side Max Miiller, 'Buddhaghosha's Parables,' xxxix.-xlv. ; on the other Gogerly, ' Journal of the Roy a] Asiatic Society,' Ceylon Branch, 1867-1870, Part i. p. 130. 154 Messages of the Old Helir/ions. In Biiddhisin, as in Christianity, there comes a message of peace on earth and goodwill to men — of peace on earth heccmse of goodwill to men. There comes a message to the individual soul that, by fixing its thoughts upon the universal sorrow, its own troubles will melt away. This is the prospect of a present heaven,^ of a life of rest which is to be reached in the earthly sphere, and to be reached through the very struggles which the earthly sphere involves. A religion wdiich could formulate such a doctrine may be secular indeed, but cannot be wholly pessimistic. It must have in it something beyond pessimism, something which recognises a silver lining in the cloud, and which, through the present gloom, discerns the coming day. I arrive, then, at this conclusion : There is in Bud- dhism an element of pessimism and an element of optimism ; but the element of pessimism is derived, the element of optimism is original. The former is the fruit of her parentage ; it is received by inheritance from Brahmanism. The latter is the result of her own native energy, and is the attempt to modify the natural conditions of her life. Now, in estimating the influence of Buddhism, it will be necessary to take into account both these elements ^ Rhys -Davids indeed says that no Buddhist noiv expects Nirvana on earth (article "Buddhism" in 'Encyc. Britan.,' ninth edition) ; it may be so, but modern Buddhism makes up for tliis by its more definite view of the future. The Message of India. 1 55 — the pessimism wliicli she has derived from her parent, and the optimism which she has received from her own nature. The influence of Buddhism has been great, yet I think I shall be generally borne out in the assertion that it has been disappointing. It has fallen short of the claims set up by the re- ligion. These claims were universal; it aimed at nothing less than the emancipation of mankind, the redemption of all sorts and conditions of men. Has its influence been universal ? has its effect been adequate to its claim ? Assuredly not. It may have embraced numerically a larger number of vot- aries than any other religion, but numbers are in this sphere not the test of success. It may have proved the light of Asia, but to the eyes of Europe it has presented the aspect of a very dim twilight. The question is, Why ? It is a religion with a beautiful theory, a theory very nearly identical with that of Christianity ; why has Christianity succeeded where Buddhism has failed ? It is because there is something in Buddhism which has prevented the realising of its own theory. And I think it will be found that this retarding element has been pre- cisely the point adverted to — the blending of pessi- mism and optimism in its constitution. I think it will be found that the progress of Buddhism has been doubly impeded, and impeded from opposite sides. It has been arrested on the one hand by the natural pessimistic tendency which it derived from 15G Messages of tlic Old Ikliyions. its ancestral descent ; it lias been arrested on the other by that native optimistic tendency which be- longed essentially to its own nature, and by which it strove to ameliorate the misery which it had been taught to seek in man. We begin with the former — the pessimistic im- pulse which it derived from Brahmanism. This original pessimism is, in my opinion, one great source of its failure to realise its own theory. What is that theory ? It is the doctrine tliat, by fixing the love of the heart on universal man, the burdens of the individual heart will fall. Very good ; but on what ground are we to fix the love of the heart on universal man ? The Buddhist answers. On the ground of human misery. He tells us that the mo- tive for our love to man is to be a sense of pity — an impression of the ntter lielplessness, and the perfect degradedness, and the supreme hopelessness of the life of the human community. Now the question is, Can such a motive lie the basis of love ? Is it pos- sible that the practical benevolence of the heart can ever take its rise in a simple sense of pity unac- companied by a gleam of hope ? I think not. In point of fact there is no instance of a missionary effort which has not its root in a sense of the inherent possibilities of the objects to whom it is to minister.. The lower animals occupy a very degraded position in comparison with man, yet no one ever dreamed of organisintr a mission for their The Message of India. 157 improvement. Why ? Simply because it is felt from the outset that such a scheme would be impossible. If the case of humanity \Yere deemed from the beginniug as hopeless a case as it appears in Brah- manism, it is safe to say that there would be the utter absence of any stimulus sufficiently strong to accomplish the elevation of human nature. And it is just here that, as it seems to me, the main distinction lies between Buddhism and Christianity. IJ^Christia^it^^^^ on human nature which Buddhism has failed to produce, it ]s because Christianity has an idea of the possibil- ities of man which Buddhism has failed to realise. The religion of Christ has started with a perception of human guilt and sin, but for that very reason it has started with an impression of man's inherent greatness. There can be neither guilt nor sin where there is no responsibility, and there can be no re- sponsibility where there is not power. The Christian conception of man is therefore in its root not the conception of a degraded being. He is contemplated from the beginning as one who occupies a sphere which is infinitely below him, and it is here that his degradation is supposed to lie. He is living beneath himself: he is dwelling in a far country; he is subsisting upon food wliich was only meant for swine. The call which Christianity gi\es to man is not a call which is dictated by mere pity; it comes ultimately from a sense of human possi- 158 j\[cssages of the Old Religions. bility. It is stimulated by the belief that this being, who is crushed down by labour and heavy-laden- ness, was yet made for rest, and has the capacity to attain rest. Therefore it is that Christian work for man has been so much more successful than Bud- dhist work for man. It has started from a different basis — a basis of hope. It has been prompted by no mere sense of compassion, but by an impression that the object is worth working for, and that the work will repay our pains. It has been begun and continued in the consciousness that the life for which we labour is essentially divine, and that the latent divinity within it shall sooner or later make it great. But, as we have said, there is another side to the subject. If Buddhism is pessimistic by descent, it is optimistic by nature, and to this native optimism, as well as to its derived pessimism, has much of its failure been due. Buddhism has no hope for the life of the universe, but it has great hope for the life of the individual, and it is the hope, and not the despair, which impels it. Its primary motive is individual rest. It prescribes work for the sake of Nirvana. It advises each man to take upon himself the burdens of the universe, just in order that his own burden may fall. It tells him that, by lifting the universal load, his own weight shall disappear ; that when the sorrows of others have cast their shadows over him, his sorrows shall The Message of India. 159 be buried in the sea. This is all very well and all very true ; but it is one thing to reach it as an ex- perience, it is another and a very different thing to start with it as a theory. Every self-sacrificing man shall find the reward of his sacrifice in the death of individual pain ; but if he makes that reward the motive of his sacrifice, will it not lose its sacrificial character? Buddhism, strange as it may seem, is in one aspect a selfish creed, as selfish as any system of pleasure-seeking. That which it seeks is not pleasure, but only an absence of pain ; none the less is it sought for the sake of individual advantage. It aspires to lift the burdens of life in order that, in lifting the burdens of another, each man may rest from his own labours. This may be very prudent and very far-seeing ; it is certainly very optimistic. But is it in any real sense sac- rificial? Is it an impulse of spontaneous love, originating in devotion to humanity, and impelled by no other force than its intrinsic power ? Is it not, on the contrary, a process of studied calculation, in which benevolence is contemplated with the view to a personal end, and in which the service of man is proposed in the interest of a selfish calm ? Let me put the matter in a nutshell. In an early Christian document I find these words written of the founder of another religion, ''Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, de- spising the shame." Here is a profession of open 160 Messages of the Old Relujions. optimism. But let us observe carefully its differ- ence from the Buddhist optimism. Christianity declares that she is impelled towards her mission of benevolence by a prospective joy. But what joy ? >/It is the joy of hoping and believing that her mission will be successful, that her labour will be crowned, that tlie humanity for which she toils will ulti- mately be redeemed. Is that the Buddhist optim- ism ? It is the reverse of that. The Buddhist has no hope for the redemption of the race ; that is not the joy which is set before liim. The joy which is set before him is the prospect of emancipation from IKvsonal care. The hope which impels him towards benevolence is the hope that, in pursuit of the uni- versal burden, the sense of individual want shall be forgotten, and the soul of the individual man shall enter into iSTirvana. Christianity is hopeful; Buddliism is hopeful also, but it is not hopeful likewise. The hope of Christianity is the prospect of a redeemed world ; the hope of Buddhism is the search for a Stoic's calm through the sense that the world is incapable of being redeemed. And the reward of each has been proportionate to its aim. Christianity lias spread its light over a sea of wave and storm, and its light has mingled with the wave and subsisted through the storm. Buddhism has poured its beams over a windless, waveless ocean, and its beams have lost their movement and entered into the ocean's repose. Buddhism has had its Tlie Message of India. 161 message for the world — a noble, a divine message 1 in relation to the Brahmanic past. But its message \ has long since been delivered, and its mission has I long since been fulfilled. It has no voice for the progressive life of the West, no movement witli the ' waves of the modern sea. It has sought a Stoic's calm, and a Stoic's calm has been its ooal. It remains still as a monument of noble effort and a '\ record of high aspiration ; but its record extends not \ beyond the range of ancient times, and even at its loftiest zenith it subsists only as the "Light of Asia." 162 Messages of the Old llelijions. CHAPTER VII. THE MESSAGE OF PERSIA. PARSis.-\r, or tlie religion of Persia, is the second attempt of the ancient world to explain the great problem of human suffering. All religions of the world, whether ancient or modern, have had their rise in an effort to explain that problem. Even the unspeculative mind of China was induced to con- struct a religion by a sense of the social difficulties which prevailed in the natural state of man. But China did not encounter the problem; when brought face to face with it she ran away. Her whole system is based upon the presentiment that the evils of social life have their origin in social development, and that the only way to get rid of these evils is to go back to a primitive type having its roots in the far past. China, accordingly, does not attempt to grapple intellectually with the difficulties that sur- round the path of man. She is content to leave these difficulties unsolved. Her whole eftbrt is to avoid them, to get into a state of life where they do The Message of Persia. 163 not exist; and she believes that she will compass this aim by retracing her steps into a region of primitive simplicity over which the forms of subse- quent civilisation exei t no power. It is to India that we must look for the first de- liberate effort to face the problem of human suffer- ing. We have seen how, in India, the awakening to that problem was somewhat slow. We have seen how her earliest view of life was rose-coloured, and therefore false. We have seen how she started witli the belief that tliis world is a pleasure-ground, a place where men are put to sport and play. And we have seen how this belief \vas broken into frao;- ments by the stern facts of experience. India woke from her delusion to an even exaggerated view of the misery of life. She passed from an unqualified optimism into an unrelieved pessimism, an antag- onism to things as they are. Unlike the Chinese empire, she did not Hy back from the shadow^ that she liad conjured; she prepared to meet it, to face it — if possible, to account for it. She felt, and rightly felt, that when an evil is explained, one half of its sting has vanished. Accordingly India set herself to explain this evil. She accomplished her objVct in a manner satisfactory to herself, and by a method short and easy. She had found the optim- ism of life to be a delusion ; she decided that its pessimism was also a delusion. She came to the conclusion that earthly life, as such, did not exist — 1 64 Messages of the Old Religions. that everything in this worhl below was but part of a dream. This life which man calls human was in reality the dream of God. The divine Spirit liad passed into a state of sleeping consciousness; in which the images and forms were unreal, and in which the most tangible experiences were but shadows of the night. This world was a vain show, an appearance, an illusion. The only reality was that which dwelt behind it, and that which dwelt behind it was the Almighty. The dream implied a dreamer, but the dreamer could only be reached by the annihilation of the dream. Things were not what they seemed, and he who would attain their reality must awake to the conviction of their im- aginary character. Let us consider, in passing, the extreme fascination of this idea. It was not merely fascinating as an intellectual speculation ; I believe its main attrac- tiveness lay in its influence over the moral nature. There are times in which we of modern days feel the same attractiveness, experience almost a wish that it might be true. As we look abroad upon the sin and sorrow of the world, as we contemplate the apparent inequalities in the destinies of men, as we survey the misery and squalor and penury which dwell side by side with prodigal wealth and lavish luxury, we ask a thousand times for a vindication of the justice of God. At such seasons the thought sometimes enters the mind, What if it is all a The Message of Persia. 165 dream ? What if we should awake and find that the things we wept over, prayed over, agonised over, had never any existence outside our own imagining ? What if those experiences of life which suggested a doubt of the justice of God should be themselves illusions, apparitions of the fancy, nightmares of the sleep ? Would not the very thought of such a possibility convey to the mind a sense of present calm, and suggest at l^ast a method by which, in the days to come, the plans of Omnipotence might be vindicated ? Such I believe to have been the moral strength of Brahmanism. Its mere fantasticness would have been against its continuance, its pronounced specu- lativeness would have been adverse to its popular- ity ; but its suggestion to the trembling heart was the secret of its power. It held out to the hour of trouble the idea that the trouble was an illusion. It told Job that his sufterings were inflicted by his own imagination, and that the Being whom he blamed for them had never once extended an aggres- sive hand. In stimulating such a belief, Brahman- ism did something for the moral life ; it helped it to rest under the shadow in the conviction that the shadow was no part of the divine. Neverthe- less it was impossible in the light of reason that such a view could lom>' maintain itself. It was inevitable that a time should come in which men would enter on a deeper questioning. Whence this 166 Messages of the Old Rclifiions. dream, and whence its sadness ? Is not the sorrow of a dream as real as the sorrow of a waking lioiir — as real in feeling, thougli imaginary in its cause? Are not the pains of the sleeping consciousness quite as genuine in their nature, and sometimes as hurtful in their effects, as the pains of the outer life ? And is not the universe as responsible for the former as for the latter ? Is it not specially responsible for the former on the Brahmanical supposition that this dream is the dream of the Absolute Spirit ? If it originates in the nature of God, must there not in the universe be some barrier to the nature of God ? Must there not be some- thing radically wrong — wrong at the core, wrong in the essence of things ? That which interferes with man may be only a relative evil ; but surely that which interferes with God must be evil absolute and eternal. Such was the question which at last was asked by a religion that originally belonged to the same family as the men who compiled the Vedas.^ At what time it separated itself from that family I cannot, tell — whether it remained behind in some old dwelling after tlie other inmates had left, or whether it itself went out to seek- a dwelling more commodious than theirs. l)e this as it may, we do ^ lu proof of this see Max Miiller's "Last Results of the Persian Researclies, " as reported in Bunsen's ' Philosophy of Universal His- tory,' i. 112 ; also Spiegel, ' Avesta,' 1-5 : Leipzig, 1852. The Message of Persia. 167 know that ultimately this religion, which we now call Parsism, assumed, under the name of a dis- tinguished prophet, an attitude of antagonism to the old Brahmanic faitli. That prophet was Zoro-'' aster. Carlyle has said that great men have short biographies; Zoroaster has no biography at all. He comes to us like a shadow, and like a shadow he goes. There has gathered round his name a series of sacred writings whose latest echoes have come down to us in a collected form under tlie title of the 'Avesta.'^ But the figure round whom they gather is a veiled figure. God is said to have concealed from the Hebrews the body of Moses ; He has concealed from all men the bodily life of Zoroaster. Wlio was the man ? AVhat was his ancestry ? Where was his birthplace ? When was his era ? ^ Did he live in the thirteenth cen- tury of the old world, or did he live in its sixth century, or did he ever live at all ? All these questions have been asked and have been vari- ously answered. That Zoroaster did live at some time is almost certain ; that he flourished some- what contemporaneously with Buddha is highly probable ; beyond this nothing can be known of tlie man as a personality. We are made to feel 1 Translated with commentary by Pi'ofessor De Harlez. Second ed., Pari.s, 1881. - See a list of the conflicting testimonies with i-espect to his age in Dr John Wilson, 'The Parsi Religion,' pp. 398-400: Bombay, 1843. 1G8 Messages of the Old Religions. that he fills a gap in history, but he fills it in- visibly. We are sometimes conscious that tliere is a presence in the room even where there is no sight and no sound. Some such sensation we ex- perience in contemplating the presence of Zoro- aster. We see him not, we hear him not, yet we feel that he occupies a space wliich naturally would be vacant, and therefore we know that lie is there. What is the filling of this space wliich is occu- pied by Zoroaster? What is the nature of that 7 message wdiich he is supposed to have given to the world, and which appears in the writings that have circled round his name ? As 1 have indicated, it strikes a note which was neglected by the Indian Pantheon.^ That neglected note was the reality of an obstructive element in nature. The Indian religion, in all its phases, denied this obstructive element. Brahmanism took a gloomy view of the world, but she held her own view to be a delusion. Human life was in her eye a sad and imperfect thing, but human life was at the same time to her an unreality. It was a dream, an illusion, a vision of the niglit, a phantom in the brain of a higher life — the Absolute Spirit itself. All the sorrows of existence were but stirrings in the sleep of ±he ^ The antagonism appears in the fact that many of the gods of India are the devils of Parsism. See Pi-ofessor K. Geldner, article "Zoroaster," ' Encycloprcdia Britannica,' nintli edition. The Message of Persia. 169 Almighty, partial interruptions of that rest which the^ Divine Life had enjoyed fj'om of. old. Zoro- aster asked, Whence this interruption ? He said, " If there be in the universe something which can interrupt the stream of the Divine Life, that some- thing must be itself not only outside of the Divine, but equal to it in power. That which can oppose God must be not only alien to God, but possessed of an alien strength. If this life be a dream of the Absolute Life, whence comes the dream ? ShaU you say that the stream of the Divine vitality is inadequate to supply the whole course of its way ? Is it possible that God in Himself should faint or grow weary ? And if He does faint and grow weary, must there not be some other than Himself ? Must there not be in the universe some element obstructive to the Divine — an element which is strong enough to oppose the Absolute AVill, and powerful enough to paralyse its operations ? " This in effect was the question of Zoroaster. He felt, and rightly felt, that it is no explanation of the feeling of suffering to say that it is a sensation in a dream — that the problem will always remain, Whence arose this dream ? He felt that Brahman- ism had stopped short of the ultimate inquiry, that she really escaped no difficulties which her system was designed to escape. Accordingly Zoroaster stood forth in the midst of the universe, and declared that tliere was something wrong in it. He proclaimed ^ 170 Messages of the Old Belirjions. in stentorian tones that there was a crack in the machine, and a crack from the beginning. This is the first note of his message to tlie world. I shall show in tlie next chapter that it involves other and deeper notes, and shall endeavour to estimate the value of that thought which he revealed. But meantime I wish to mark the fact that this message of Zoroaster is the first deliberate and systematic testimony given by the Aryan religious consciousness to the exi sten ce of^sin.^ Commonplace as it sounds to the modern ear, it was to the ancient ear very nearly a paradox. It struck a chord which, almost in its subject and altogether in its intensity, was new. Hitherto the ancient world had been directed either by the terrible, the beautiful, or the specula- tive. Men had worshipped from fear; they had worshipped from admiration ; they had worshipped from philosophic instinct. They were now to be directed to a new source of adoration — the testi- mony of conscience. In Zoroaster the Aryan race opened its eyes upon the great problem of morality — the fact of sin. In a more pronounced sense than even Judaism, Parsism emphasised the power of moral evil. AVith the Jew there is always in the background a conviction, half latent and half ex- ^ Professor Wilson has pointed out that, although there are a few exceptions, the large majority of the Vedic prayers are for purely temporal blessings, and that the moral consciousness is mostly in abeyance (Lectures, pp. 9, 10. Oxford, 1840^\ The Message of Persia. 171 pressed, that sin, with all its liorrors, has still been made the servant of God, been compelled against its will to minister to the divine purposes. But in Parsism no such accommodation is either im- plied or permitted. Sin stands out not only as the enemy of God, as it does in Judaism, but as a frustrator of the plan of jGi^h A Jew would never liave admitted tliat anything could frustrate God's plan ; to him the wrath of the wicked itself was made to praise God. But to the follower of Zoro- aster every evil deed was for ever outside the gates of the divine kingdom. The acts of luunan sin could never be made stoii.es in the temple of holi- ness. The development of goodness could only be promoted by goodness ; there was no possibility of things evil being made to work together for a higher goal. The stream which flowed from the fountain of wickedness was a stream which never mingled with the waters of the pure sea ; it held on its desolating w^ay independent and alone. For it is the doctrine of Zoroaster that this uni- verse is not the work of a single being ; it is the work of two. It has come from the hands both of a Principle of good and of a Principle of evil. This world has been made by two agents, Ormuzd and Ahriman. Ormuzd is the principle of good. He is en) bodied in the light, which is at once His garment and His symbol. He is the source of all beauty, the fountain of all purity, the origin of all morality ; 172 Messages of the Old Religions. from Him cometh down every good and every perfect gift. Ahriman is the principle of evil. His embodi- ment is the darkness, and this also both clothes and symbolises him. He is the source of all deformity, the fountain of all vileness, the origin of every vio- lation of moral law ; from him ascend those foul vapours which disturb the atmosphere of the world. Between these two agencies the life of the universe is divided. TJiere are angels of light, and there are angels of darkness — the one obeying the will of Ormuzd, the other following the behests of Ahriman. The creatures beneath the angelic line are not sep- arated by so hard-and-fast a division. Some have more of Ormuzd in them, some have more of Ahri- man — all have something of both. This world, therefore, instead of being a dream, is a stern, ^ waking battle-field, in which two comp)etitors_con- tend for empire. It is in all its parts a struggle between light and darkness, in which light strives to expel darkness, and darkness labours to exclude light. The struggle reaches its climax in man. Man is the microcosm of the universe. In him the forces that elsewhere play on a large scale at once diminish their scale and increase their in- tensity. Here Ormnzd and Ahriman meet in their deadliest conflict. Man, like everything else, has in, him something of both; but, because he is man, he has more of both than all other things. The struggle in him is therefore at the fiercest. One The Message of Persia. 173 part of his nature is overshadowed by the darkness, the other is basking in the light. His soul is the battle-field between two competitors, and night and day the struggle is maintained with alternating suc- cess and with unvaried fury. What is man's own part in this conflict I shall consider in the next chapter. In the meantime I want to ask, What position does this doctrine hold in the development of the religious consciousness ? That it is unscientific is beyond a doubt. That this /_ world is the work of two principles is an idea which was too crude even for Brahmanism, and which is incompatible with the modern standpoints of evolu- tion ; though, singularly enough, something very like it has been promulgated in our day by one of the greatest English thinkers — Mr J. S. Mill.^ Waiv- ing, however, this point, and conceding the unscien- tific character of the system, the question remains, What is its moral bearing ? At first sight it might seem to indicate a religious decline. When we hear of a God whose power is limited by another power, our earliest impression is that we stand in the pres- ence of a low spiritual life. But if we look deeper, and specially if we consider the historical circum- stances of Parsism, we shall, in this case at least, come to an opposite conclusion. We have been taught from childhood to praise the choice of Solo- mon — to admire that state of mind which could ^ See his posthumous essay on Theism. 174 Messages of the Old Bell j ions. prefer the treasures of wisdom to tlie treasures of wealth. But now imagme that this narrative had been presented to us in another form. Let us sup- pose that before the eyes of Solomon there liad floated the alternative of a choice not between wis- dom and wealth in the abstract, but between wisdom and wealth in the nature of God. Let us conceive that in some critical hour it had been revealed to him that the constitution of this universe could no longer be deemed compatible with the existence both of perfect power and of perfect love, and that it would be necessary for him to give up from his creed either the one or the other. Let us suppose that in these circumstances Solomon had decided to hold by tlie ideal of perfect love, whatever else might go; what would our impression be of such a choice? Would it not be that the man had displayed a won- derful amount of moral insight ? Should we not deem that, in preferring morality to physical strength, he had, for an Eastern, reached a remarkable heiglit of development, and a height which was altogether above the ordinary level of his nation — a nation which habitually measured a man's moral purity precisely by the ratio of his outward and physical prosperity ? Xow, the case of Zoroaster is exactly parallel to this. He lived in an age when men had come to realise the difficulties of human life and the arduous- ness of the struggle for existence. The problem of The Message of Persia. 175 divine Providence had pressed upon his soul. It had become clear to him that, with his present amount of knowledge, he must adopt one or other of two alternatives : he must either hold that the Author of the universe was imperfectly good, or that He was imperfectly powerful. It was the clioice of Solo- moii~repeated, but repeated in the nature of God. Zoroaster was asked not to choose between morality and wealth for himself, but between morality and wealth for his Creator. Without hesitation he chose morality. He had every Eastern incentive to do the contrary. He was the member of an empire whose tastes and aims were physical — an empire which had set before itself the ideal of outward conquest as the highest goal of kinghood, and which was prosecuting that ideal with unflinching pertinacity. Would it have been surprising if a man trained in such a school should have preferred the physical to the mental, and should have deemed that attribute most divine which expressed most of sensuous power ? And when, in his hour of crisis, in which he was called to choose between God's omnipotence ancL_His holiness, he made his choice in favour of the latter, what can we think of such a decision ? What but that the man who made it was far advanced in the spiritual life above the measure of his contempo- raries ? Is not his choice a declaration that to him the grandest thing about God is not that which men have hitherto worshipped — that the tiling which he 17G Messages of the Old Religions. deems most di\ ine is not the thunder and tiie earth- quake and the tire of sensuous majesty, but the still, small voice which preaches purity of heart ? He has before him the alternatives of a God of limited miglit and a God of limited love, and without hesitation he takes the former. Does he not thereby declare that for him the worshipful element of the universe is not sense but soul, not height but heart, not depth but desire, not power but purity ? And if he did exaggerate the power of evil, if he did invest the awful fact of sin with an importance too great even for itself, let us remember his pro- vocation. Zoroaster was a protestant — a man who X protested against an existing state of things. The first protestants always exaggerate ; they have no choice but to do so. The very fact that they are the earliest on the field of battle causes them to strike more vehemently. Luther went too far in justifica- tion by faith ; Calvin went too far with the divine decrees ; Knox went too far ih his opposition to images ; and Zoroaster went too far in his estimate of the power of sin. He attributed its influence to the agency of a Force which was strong enough to compete with God, and in that he doubtless erred. But into that error he was provoked by a still gi^eater error on the other side. The Brahman had said that moral evil was a dream, that the sins and sorrows of life were but the fantastic and illusory images of the sleeping brain. Zoroaster was roused into the ' The Message of Persia. 177 opposite extreme. He declared them to be not only real but eternal realities, part and parcel of the con- stitution of the universe. His vindication for such a statement is the fact of his protestantism. He was the first in the history of Aryan religions who was called to make a stand in favour of the claims of conscience. He made that stand against heavy odds — against intellectual abstractions which had buried the instincts of the heart, against nature- worship which had exalted power over morality, acrainst an ideal of heroism which had substituted the strength of the body for the beauty of the soul. If, in gainsaying this practice of long an- tiquity, he said too much and went too far, his excess was itself the result of his moral bias, and the exaggeration of his doctrine was the propliecy of a larjijer life. M 178 ^fessages of tlte Old Belvjions. CHAPTER VIII. CONTINUATION. "VVe have now arrived at a paradox. We have seen ]iow the foregoing religious systems arose out of an eirort to grapple with some burden of life. Parsisni also arose from an effort to grapple with life's burdens. But Parsism, unlike the foregoing re- ligions, ended by adding a new burden. Like Buddhism, it approached the problem of this world with a view to emancipate the human mind from tlie weight of its sufferings. Yet the conclusion to whicli it came was very different froui that of Buddhism. Buddhism proposed that the individual should emancipate himself by taking up the cares of the race. Parsism discovered that the deepest sufferings of life came from a burden which ori- ginated in the individual alone — a burden which in its nature was untransferable, wdiich a man might pity and sympathise with, but could not lift from the shoulders of his brother. That burden was sin. To the mind of Zoroaster moral evil was The Message of Persia. 179 the root of all evil, and moral evil belonged to the individual man. In assigning this as the cause of human suffering, he deepened the weight already pressing on humanity. One would have thought that the effect would have been to crush still more utterly the development of the human mind. In the preceding Aryan races, that development had already been almost entirely suppressed. The will of man had sunk into lethargy beneath the weight of a mystery which it could neither shake of!' nor explain, and the waters of human life had become a Dead Sea. The impartation of an additional burden might seem to have only completed the process, and to have effected the final extinction of that spirit whose powers had been already prostrated. Yet, strange to say, the effect was the reverse, and it is just here that the paradox arises. Parsism, in adding to the existing burdens the new burden of sin, seemed to have put the final stone upon the sepulchre of man. In reality it began the process of his resurrection. For the first time in the history of Aryanism, the human mind, in the re- ligion of Zoroaster, breaks forth into spontaneity. The sleep of ages appears to pass away, and there begins an age of vital and of waking activity. India had no history, because one day was the same as another, and every event was but an illusion. In Persia, history in the Aryan world may be said to have begun. Here the letharcrv of 180 Messages of the Old Religions, ages is broken, and man breaks forth into the activity of outward life. In Persia we see the anticipation of Eome. We see a nation aiming at wideness of dominion, not so much by crushing as by incorporating. AVe see an empire struggling towards a headship wliich shall in some sense represent the relation of the human head to the human members. The sovereignty of the Persian king is the sovereignty of a feudal superior. He does not seek to reign alone, he only desires to reign supreme. He allows the existence of em- pires within the empire, of kings and governors who shall have power within their own sphere if only they shall acknowledge their common subjec- tion to himself. It is a Eoman ideal of imperialism, because it is a Eoman ideal of the rights of man. The Persian has awakened, to a sense of freedom, ,and it colours even his politics. He moves through lii story with a free step, and builds his institutions on the foundations of personal liberty. . Eut the paradox is still more marked when we turn from the political to the spiritual region. The creed of Zoroaster, with its revelation of human sin, might have been expected to have crushed the soul. On the contrary, it removed the thing which crushed it. The proclamation of the additional burden made man free. The cause of tlie paradox we shall presently consider; in the meantime we have to note the fact. AYhen the Aryan race recognised its The Message of Persia. 181 bondage to sin, it woke for the first time to a sense of freedom.^ There dawned within the spirit of man the conviction tliat he was a responsible being. There rose within him the thought that he was not a machine, not a product of necessity, not the result of an inexorable law. He began to feel that he was answerable for his actions. He ceased to think of the universe as dependent entirely on one Supreme Will; he came to the belief that man is a fellow- worker with. God. He felt that in the battle between Ormuzd and Ahriman the human creature was not a mere possession to be striven for. The soul of man was itself an agent in the strife; it could help either the one side or the other. Every human act, every human thought, every human confessip;!,- every human aspiring, was a weight thrown into the scale, and made for either good or evil. AYhether it should make for good or evil depended on the will of man, and for that will he ^ was responsible. Every day and hour man was under the judgment-seat of God. There was a re- cording angel who was writing down the result of his every deed in a book whose letters were in- delible.^ At the hour of death from out that book there would be made a reckoning of his actions and an estimate of the sum of them. "When he ^ The doctrine of human freedom is clearly expressed in the Avesta, Yasua, 31, 11. ^ See Avesta, Vendidad, 19-27. 182 Messages of the Old Religions. passed from this mortal scene lie would have to cross the Accountant's Bridge — a structure which metaphorically represented the transition from time into eternity. Here at last would be determined the moral import of his life, and according to^its import its reward would be. If the sum of good had outweighed the sum of evil, he w^ould pass into the bright land of Ormuzd. If the sum of evil had outweighed the sum of good, h"e~vvould travel into the dark shades of Ahriman. If the balance of good weighed equally against the balance of evil, he would be consigned into a state intermediate between sorrow and joy, waiting for that con- summation — the final judgment-day which shall decide the fate of all things. These are the facts ; what is the interpretation of them ? How are w^e to account for the circumstance y that the Aryan race first came to its sense of respon- sible freedom when it realised its burden of sin ? There is nothing accidental in the conjunction. It is the inevitable result of a great principle. As a matter of fact, man's sense of powder is always con- temporaneous with his sense of moral humiliation. He only comes to tlie recognition of his dignity when he comes to the realisation of his depravity. Nowhere does the fable of the Phoenix risinci; out of its own ashes find so perfect an illustration as in the ? spirit of man. Tlie first idea which he recei3:£s of his greatnes s in the scale of being is directly derived The Message of Persia. 183 from his expericDCG of moral blame . The point is so suggestive, and at first sight so paradoxical, as to merit a few moments' consideration. If it be asked where man gets his sense of freedom, the natural tendency is to answer, " From the powers of his mind." And yet so far is tliis from beincj true, that the contrary is the truth. It is not too much to say that it is from the exercise of his intellectual p)owers that man first learns the sense of his bondage. At the beginning of his life he is conscious neither of freedom nor of necessity ; he lives as a plant lives. He arrives at the knowledge of his prison-house only by putting forth his hands. It is when he begins to exert his powers that for the first time he learns their feebleness. The freedom of the Indian mythology was but the freedom of a child, the spontaneity that exists only because it has never experienced the sense of contradiction. It was the infant putting forth its hand to catch the moon. When the infant found it could not catch the moon, it became a Brahman — gave up the universe as an impossible speculation. The Indian mind in its later stage was the child of abortive effort, the product of a despair which had arisen from the sense of intel- lectual incompetency. In the search for universal knowledge man learns that he is a slave. o Nor is the problem of human freedom much nearer to solution when the intellectual powers of man turned from the contemplation of nature to the con- 184 Messages of the Old Religions. templation of suffering. This was the transition actually made in the passage from Brahmanism to Buddhism. Man, having failed to make the intel- lect a source of absolute knowledge, tried to make it a source of absolute calm. The effort was not altogether unsuccessful. Buddhism, as we have seen, has become the Dead Sea of man. But even in reaching this calm, Buddhism did not reach the sense of freedom. She helped a section of mankind to be resigned to inevitable law, but she left the law inevitable still. The triumph of the human intellect in Buddhism was simply the triumph of discovering that the law was inexorable. It was the resignation of the soul to a supposed fact — the fact of human bondage. Man was deemed to have reached the pinnacle of wisdom in the discovery of the truth and in the submission to the knowledge that nothing is to be expected from life; the mind's charter of peace was the sense that it could not be free. The human intellect, therefore, has failed to give to the mind of man the idea of its own liberty. Is there any other source from which such a revelation can arise ? There is, and, strange to say, it is found in the realising of a new burden — the burden of sin. It is in the experience of moral want, and in the humiliation incident to that experience, that man reaches the sense of freedom. What the intellectual powers could not do is done by another power — that state of mind which we call conscience. What is Tlie Message of Persia, 185' tlie testimony of conscience ? It is the announce- ment that we have clone wrong. But what is implied in that announcement ? Strange as it may seem, it contains a double implication ; it proclaims at once the degradation and the glory of man. On the one hand, it involves a feeling of humiliation ; but on what ground ? On the ground that we are worthy of blame. What is blame ? It is the sense that we could have done better. The testimony of conscience is not merely the testimony that I am not in a good state ; that could be said of a withering tree. But what conscience tells me is not simply that I am in a withering condition, but that I have myself to thank for it. It tells me that, if I had done other- wise, things would have been otherwise, and in that message it says that I am free. It proclaims that the law under which I suffer is not a law of neces-, sity — that I had power, if I willed, to shake it off and to walk forth in freedom. I am not discussing the Tightness or the wrongness of that testimony; it is always open to the man of science to say, as he often; does say, that it is a delusion. But even the man of science will not deny that, whether real or delusive,; it is there. Whatever be the value of its testimony, conscience does testify tliat man is free; the sting of; remorse itself is simply a revelation that the hurnan soul has done its dieeds under no mechanical neces- sity, but under the influence of a power which it was always within its province to control. 18G Mcssar/es of the Old Ildifjions. Xow, it is here that tlie strength of Parsism lies. It has received one burden more than every other Aryan faith ; but that one burden more is the moral conviction, of sin. The result is that the additional weight has become a wing, and the element whicli threatened to bring Parsism to the very dust of humiliation has become tlie means of its rising above- -7 all surrounding religions. []X is not difficult to trace the process by whicli, from its waking sense of human corruption, this faith has climbed into the vision of an all liut perfect day. In the conviction of sin it reached the feeling of blame. In the feeling of bhime it reached the idea of responsibility. In the idea of responsibility it reached the belief in freedom. In the belief in freedom it reached the knowledge that there existed within the universe a power called "Will. In tlie recognition of that power it learned, for the first time, that there is a" force which is not material, but antecedent to matter and independent of its mutations — a force which mechanical combinations did not create, and which the dissolution of mechanical combinations needs not destroy. Finally, from a vision of this indepen- dent existence it reached the belief in a personal immortality — an immortality in which the individual should at once be preserved and sublimated, lifted from the dust of earth, and intensified by the life of heaven, 'j Thus, as from a germ-cell, there rose out of con- The Message of Persia. 187 "science a revelation of all things — fr,e©4oni. person- ality, God, immortal life. Parsism, bv its definite recognition of the existence of a moral world, came to a definite recognition of a world of religions thought. But let ns understand that, in order to realise the power of conscience, it was necessary to^ realise the power of sin. It is because Parsism is the religion of stru^crle that it is the relidon of morality and immortality. Conscience only begins where disturbance begins ; here as elsewliere, it is the cloud that reveals the sunshine. As lonoj as my nature flows on in a stream of uninterrupted good, I am unconscious even of the stream. In order to become conscious I must be arrested in my flow. Something must intervene to break the uniformness of the rhythm of life. The beauty of virtue first- asserts itself when I liave tried to violate it ; the' box of ointment gets its fragrance by being broken. Parsism climbed further than all Aryan faiths, because it struggled more than all — nay, because first among these faiths it experienced the sense of struggle. It was the child of moral conflict, and out of its moral conflict came its revelation of God. If now it be asked what, according to Parsism, is to be the outcome of this conflict, the answer is by no means directly at the door. It is popularly said to be an optimistic creed. Measui-ed by Brahman- ism and Buddhism, it is certainly optimistic ; these were the religions of despair, this is to some extent 188 Messages of the Old Eeligions. a religion of hope. The children of light are not for ever to remain in darkness ; Ormuzd is to get the vic- tory over Ahrinian. But who are to be the children y/^ of light ? How many are ultimately to be included in the great salvation ? Is it in the last result to comprehend all men, or is it to be limited to a part ? What is to be the fate of the rejected part? Are they to exist in eternal misery, or are they to be submerged in a sea of annihilation ? These are questions on which the commentators of Zoroaster are divided. Probably in this respect there is tlie same ground for divided opinion as exists in Chris- tianity. In the one as in the other there are various interpretations of the same words. In the one as in the other there are passages of the sacred books which seem to make for either side. In the one as in the other there are opposite castes of mind — those who by nature are swayed by the dictates of law, and those who by disposition are dominated by the sentiment of love. We shall waive, then, the question whether, ac- cording to the doctrine of Parsism, there is or is not prognosticated a final restoration of all things. ]>ut even when we leave this question in the background, there is an element in this religion whicli makes us pause before investing it with the attributes of optimism. Even though this faith had declared without ambiguity that all the sons of men were ultimately to share in the triumph of good- The Message of Per sia» 189 ness, I would not feel justified in saying that Parsism was an optimistic religion. What is optim- ism ? It is not merely the belief that all things shall at last be well ; it is the belief that all things shall at last be found to have conspired to the universal wellbeing. It is not enough for me, when I am passing through the shadow of grief, to be told that a time is approaching in which the shadow shall pass away and the full light shall come. That may be very satisfactory, but it is an animal satis- faction after all ; it is the gratification of being freed from pain. What I want in my deepest nature is more than that ; I want to have the pain vindicated. I want to have the dark past not only expunged but explained — to some extent expunged in leing ex- plained. It is all very well that the years of shadow have come to a close ; but they have been years. From the standpoint of the natural eye they have involved a loss of time, a waste of being, a dissi- pation of energy. If I am to call my life optim- istic, I must be made to feel that the shadow was a part of the light. I must be convinced that the seeming waste was no waste, that the apparent void was full of possibilities, and that the desert potenti- ally contained within it the blossoming of the rose. Now, it is in this respect that Parsism fails. Irre- spective altogether of the question whether it does or does not cherish a universal hope for man, it regards the sorrows of life as real sorrows — as 190 Messages of the Old Religions, absolute blots and bleiiiislies in the constitution of nature. A human soul awaking in another world might, according to this system, be impelled to say, " Ormuzd has made it all right now." But even such a soul, under such circumstances, would not bo impelled to say, " Ormuzd has been making it right all along." There can be no joy of retrospect in the creed of Zoroaster. Parsism may enable its worshippers to exult in the knowledge that what was once dark has become day, but it can never enable them to rejoice in the vision that the dark- ness was but a shadow of the day. The darkness came from Ahriman and remains with Ahriman ; it has neither part nor lot in the final consum- mation. It lias had nothing to do with the de- velopment of the kingdom of God ; it has simply retarded that development. Whatever happiness the soul has reached has been reached in spite of it, in the face of it. The soul's joy must be the joy of an escaped bird; it can have no place for retrospect except a place of horror. It may revel in its acquired good, but it cannot say that all things have worked together for that good. Only the half of things have worked together — the things of Ormuzd ; the working of Ahriman has been all for bad, and, even in the final reckoning of accounts, can have served no purpose in contributing to the sum of happiness. And, with peculiar emphasis is this defect of The Message of Persia. 191 Parsism accentuated in its doctrine of sin. Zoro- aster calls upon all men to be saved, and opens up to many men the way of salvation. But even those who have readied that way must be im- pressed that there is something wanting. It is not enough that a man should be redeemed, not enough that he should be loosed from his shackles and told that he is free. What about that life which he has lived idtltm the sliackles ? What about the deeds done in that dark past from which he has been liberated ? It is all very well that he himself has been emancipated from the sinking ship; but the ship is sinking still, and it is sink- ing througli his blame. Can anything be done to undo the past deeds of the man ? Parsism answers, and on its principles can only answer, "Xo." There is no atonement in this religion, no redress of former wrongs, no times for the restitution of all things. The sweetest note of Christianity is its promise of a cancelled past, its message to the weary soul that the evil deeds it has done sliall be made to work out a beneficent end. The joy of a Paul was not only that all things had been made new, but that old things had passed away. He felt that if he liad planted tares in the past, it was not enougli for him to know tliat he had now ceased to plant them. He must be told, if he would be happy, that the tares he had sown would themselves be made conducive to the production of a riper wheat. 1 92 Messages of the Old Religions, That is what Parsisiu could not tell liiiu, could not tell any man. It could promise to Moses a salva- tion from his ark of bulrushes ; it could predict for Joseph a liberation from his Egyptian dungeon ; but it could. not tell Moses that he had been magnified through his peril, nor Joseph that the dungeon itself Lad made him free. To the furthest horizon of its vision Parsism remains dualis.tic still. Even on that view of its most sanguine disciples, which looks for- ward to a salvation of universal man, the dualism continues unbroken and unmodified ; for the past is itself unredeemed, and the errors of yesterday are written in everlasting colours. The glory of Parsism has been to exhibit the natural gulf between the pure and the unholy ; it has been reserved for a loftier faith to construct a bridge between them. The Message of Greece. 193 CHAPTER IX. THE MESSAGE OF GREECE. He who would photograph the spirit of religions iiinst distinguish carefully l.ietween what is spon- taneous and what is reflective. The former is a worship ; the latter is a philosophy. Tlie religion -of a nation is its impulse towards an ideal ; it is therefore in all its forms essentially a sacred move- ment. But the philosophic culture of a nation is a secular and a secularising process; even where it relates to a religious subject, it breathes the air of the common day. Xor can it be strictly said tliat the philosophy of any nation is a product purely national ; it is always, to a great extent, the result of conscious appropriation from the best minds of many lands. Men like Thales and Parmenides, like Aristotle and Plato, like Epicurus and Zeno, cannot be said to be simply the offspring of tlieir age and clime. AVe are very significantly told tlmt before they wrote they travelled. Their writing was there- fore a conscious and deliberate effort to emancipate 194 Messages of the Old Religions. themselves from what was purely local and na- tional, and to reach a basis of tliought the ground of whose recommendation to the world should be the fact that it was itself grounded on a universal soil. Accordingly I shall, in the course of the present studies, deal with the philosopliic sects of Greece as I have dealt with the philosophic sects of India ; I shall pass them by. I shall confine this study of Greek reliction to an examination of its earliest message — that message which preceded all intellec- tual culture, and was revealed to the spontaneous instincts of the heart. The period of its nature- worship is really the distinctive period of Greek religion ; all its other times and modes are the re- suit, more or less, of foreign influence. What, then, is this earliest message of the Hellenic faith ? Is there anything peculiar about it, anything which marks it out from other forms and gives it the right to a distinct place among the religions of .the world ? It is popularly called a system of Poly- theism ; but there is nothing new in that. It is essentially a reverence for the things of nature; but neither in this is there anything new. If it is to be assigned a distinctive place in theology, it must be on otlier grounds than these — on grounds which make its Polytheism unique and its nature-worship singular. Does there exist in this faith such au element of peculiarity ? : The Message of Greece, 19'5l I think there does. I believe it will be found= that there is one respect in which the religious worship of the Greek differs essentially from the. religious worship of all other nations, whether Aryan or Semitic. If I were asked to express epigram- matically the difference between this religion and the forms of faith already considered, I might put it thus : The message of Ch.ina is to teach the glories of yesterday. The message of India is to trace the development of the day. The message of Persia is to exhibit the struggle between the day and the night. The message of Greece is to reveal the intensity of the hour. When we: have reached this last point, we have touclied hitlierto untrodden ground. China led us back to the past ; India drove us forward to the future ; Greece keeps us chained within tlie present. Here for the first time man looks upon the passing scene, and con- templates it not as passing but as permanent. Here for the first time man casts his eye upon the world as it actually exists, and sets himself to justify -.^ nay, to reverence — things as they are. Other faiths had sought their object in the glorification of things; the faith of Greece seeks its object in that which is manifested to the common eye. India descended from the heavens to the eaitli ; Greece ascends from the earth to tlie heavens. On earth she is always more at home. Her earliest and her latest philosophy starts from the reverence of things pro- 196 Missaycs of the Old Eel i'j ions. saic. Her earliest came from the men of lonia.^ Instead of looking up like the Indian to the shining heavens, tliey adored the wnter, the air, and the fire ; they found food for their religious contemplation in the most common and the most commonplace things. Her latest was tlie Stoics, the men of prosaic mould — whose motto was common-sense, whose creed was sobriety and self-restraint, whose practice was to check the flight of the emotions, and whose ideal was bounded by the horizon of material things.^ Xow, these tendencies were inherited tendencies ; they came from the primitive religious instinct. The religion of Greece was essentially and dis- tinctively the worship of the hour, the investiture with reverence of the things amongst which she lived and moved. Her object was to realise tlie joy of perception, as distinguished from the joy of retrospect and the joy of prospect. China had lived in the former; Persia had lived in the latter; Greece sought to occupy the middle ground. In order to occupy that ground unmolested, she put a wall on either side ; she strove to shut out at pace the memory of the past and the foresight of the future. She aimed to enclose herself within the bars of the present, and to find there her ^ Dollinger regards the Ionic school as materialistic. ' The Gen- tile and the JeAv in the Courts of the Temple of Christ,' London, 1862, i. 250 sq. ; &ee also Cousin, * Histoire Gc'n^rale de la Philosophie,' Paris, 1867, i. 110. 2 See DUllinger, ibid., i. 349. The Mtssage of Greece. 197 perfect satisfaction. Hers has been called an op- timistic creed, yet, in strict accuracy, I doubt it* the name is applicable. Optimism is bound to take a survey of the universe on every side, to compare its present with its past, and its future with its present. Greece does not do that ; she keeps rigidly witliin the environment of the hour. In those early days whicli constitute her distinctive days, she has no space either for memory or fur anticipation. She does not look back to reflect on the years that are gone ; the past is to her a sealed book. As little does she look forward to contemplate the years that are coming. The Greek has no bright prospect in the sky of the future. His only chance of keeping his optimism is to shut his eyes on that future. Beyond this life all to him is dark. Of the existence beyond the gra\'e he has the most gloomy presentiments. It is to him a half-life, a st'ate of partial consciousness, an assemblage of unsubstantial shadows. Every time he thinks of it he is made sad.^ As he is deter- mined not to be sad, he refuses to think of it. He imprisons himself within the moment ; he crowns the world as it exists now and here. He uncovers his head to the joy of the scene before him, and ^ Achilles says in Homer's ' Odyssey ' (bouk xi. line 4SS) that he would rather serve on earth than reign among the dead, dm- trast the subsequent view in Plato's ' Plucdo ' ; this, however, i:s uo longer the pure product of the Greek mind. 198 Messages of the Old Religions. declines to worship aught but his native land. The object of the Greek's adoration is Greece — Greece as it presented itself to his youthful im- agination, and as it appeared on the surface to his outer eye. Like the Chinaman, he "may be said to have his heaven and his earth in the land of his nativity ; but, unlike the Chinaman, he sees them in the present hour. His worship is the worship not of yesterday but of to-day ; it is the reverence for things as they are. Accordingly, in Greece every object receives a crown, and receives a crown precisely as it ministers to the national mind. The things of nature are adored not because they are natural but because they are Grecian, and they are adored in those special colours with which the Greek soil has in- vested them. There is a strong analogy between the faith of the Greek and the faith of the Jew — an analogy all the more strongly marked because it manifests itself amid tilings otherwise contrasted.^ The Jew recognised a divine presence in every- thing that related to his country ; he made no distinction between events important and events trivial; all alike were the voice of God. The Greek also recognised a divine presence in his national life, and to him, as to the Jew, that pres- ^ The points of contrast will be found very well indicated in an article entitled " Greek Mythology and the Bible," by Julia Wedgwood, 'Contemporary Review,' March 1892. The Message of Greece. 199 ence filled all things. The difference lay not in the fact but in the ideaL The national life of Judea wjis not the same as the national life of Greece. Judea was the life of history ; Greece was the life of perception. Accordingly, while the God of Judea •was seen in events; the God of Greece was beheld in objects. And as the Jew attributed to his God the most opposite events, the Greek imputed to his divinity the most diverse objects. In one sense the Greek is in this respect more remark- able than the Jew\ AVIiile to the son of Israel all acts were ultimately divine acts, the larger part of them were acts of penalty. But to the son of Greece there was no place for penalty. In giving .to every object a divine significance, he gave it that significance absolutely, unqualifiedly. He filled his universe with God, not as an avenger, or a vindicator, or a rectifier, but as a presence and a power, for its ow^n sake precious and in its own light beautiful. I have used the word " God " instead of " the gods," in order to mark the fact that the presence was universal. The Greek adored separate divinities, but he saw them everywhere. There was not a space of his world unoccupied by the divine. It was not enough that there should be a Spirit of the grove ; it was not even enough that there should be a Spirit of the tree ; there must be a Spirit for every leaf of the tree. The result is that the Greek enfolds in his Pantheon 200 Mcssctges of the Old Beligions. the most contrary species of tilings — forms the niost diverse, ideas the most opposite. Goethe says that we weaNe for God the garment by which we see Him. The Greek wove no garment for God ; he simply cut out patches from the garments of his fellow-men, and put them together unmethodi- cally and heterogeneously ; he deified the things around him just because they vcre around him. Accordingly, his religion presents a strange medley. It attributes divinity to objects the most diverse and sometimes the most opposite. He looked out upon the manifestation of nature's physical power, and he called it Zeus — the origin of all things. He looked in upon the manifestation of mental power, and he called it Athene — the principle of wisdom. He contemplated the ideal of manhood in its strength and beauty, and he called it Apollo; he surveyed the ideal of womanhood in its chasteness and pur- ity, and he called it Artemis. He gazed upon the turbulent and wayward forces of the world, and in his admiration of the power that kept them right, he gave that power a name — Poseidon, the god of the sea. But he beheld other forces which were -wayward, not from their strength but from their stupidity. He felt that the sheep in the meadow needed a protector as much as the waves of the ocean, and therefore he gave the shepherds also a god — Pan. He surveyed the field of war, and he .deemed it worthy of a presiding divinity — Mars was The Message of Greece. 201 Lis god of battle. 13ut when he turned inward to the domestic hearth, he was equally impressed with the divineness of a contrary scene, and he signified his reverence for the life of the family altar by placing it under the patronage of Hestia. He bowed before the serious aspects of nature; he deified the power that forged the thunderbolt. But he had equally a place of reverence for the pleasure-hour; he had his god of wine as well as of fire. He had a seat in his Pantheon for the god who directs the prosaic courts of law; but he had an equal throne for the god who stimulates the poetic flights of eloquence. He recognised a presiding divinity over the incipient movements of life, and crowned Demeter as the fosterer of the grain. Yet, singularly enough, lie liad a temple also dedicated to the movelessness of death ; and he was not afraid to assign a divinity to tliosc very precincts of the grave which he him- self so utterly loathed.^ The reader vrill be impressed with the fact that we have here a very remarkable and a very unique kind of optimism. In its usual form optimism says, " We believe that it will be all right in the long-run, though it is dark now." The Greek religion says, "We know nothing about the long-run ; but it is all right now." The long-run was to the Greek an invisible ' Wlioever wishes to study the subsequent symbohsm grafted upon these divinities may consult Sir G. W. Cox, 'Mythology of the Aryan Nations.' 202 Messages of the Old Religions. quantity, and he liad no synipatliy with the invisible.^ Tlie limit to liis sympathy was the boundary-line be- tween the seen and the unseen. Parsism looked for- ward to a time when tlie struggle with material things would be lulled to rest; the joy of Greece was tlie perception of the struggle itself. He liad no place for hope ; he lived in present experience, and that which made life to him glad was just the sense of its conflict. And tlie reason is plain. The Greek was by nature an athlete. His Isthmian games were only the ex- pression of his deepest nature. Competition was liis very atmosphere. He was a born wrestler, a man w^ho felt from the very beginning that his destiny was to strive. Is it surprising that he should have deified in nature that in whicli he seemed to find a resemblance to himself ? Is it wonderful that he should have projected his own ideal into the earth and sea and sky of his native land ? At all events, he did project it. He saw in the world around him a reflex of that world which he felt within him. He recognised in nature the same elements of struggle which he found in himself, and he consecrated nature on this ground. He worshipped things as they were • — as they exhibited themselves in the daily struggle for survival. And because his ideal of excellence .was the power to strive, he bowed liis head to things ^ The Eleatic and Platonic schools are of course exceptions ; but these are attempts to graft Eastern thouglit on a Western soil. Epicurus, ou the other hand, has an echo of the native ring. ■ The Message of Greece. 203 of opposite quality. Strife demands opposition; it demands a sense of difficulty on the part of tlie combatant. The Greek reverenced the powers of nature and the powers of mind more from their aspect of imperfection than from their semblance of completeness ; he loved them because they seemed to. make their way through opposing clouds and re- tarding storms. It is by this that I explain the strange combinations of thought that meet in his worship, the number of dissimilar things that dwell .side by side in his temple. He puts them side by side, that out of their contrast there may come con- flict, and that out of their conflict there may arise the ideal which he loves. Let me try to illustrate this. One of the most prominent objects of worship ;in ancient Greece is Apollo. In later times he is .the sun -god, but this was a light into which he grew.-^ Apollo became the sun as a reward for :Work done on the earthly plane. That work was the service of man. He is from the beginning the representative of ideal humanity, the embodiment of all that is pure and noble in tlie huumn spirit. -He is to the mind of Greece what the names of the canonised are to the mind of Medievalism— .a symbol of the saintly life. It is this purifying power which is sought to be indicated when he is ^ In the Homeric poems Apollo is viewed as quite distinct from the sun -god ; see, for example, the opening of the ' Iliad.' 20-4 Messages of the Old Belujwns. called the god of medicine — the restorer and pre- server of that physical health which has so much to do with tlie health of the soul. Apollo stands for the perfect man, tlie man unspotted by the world. }3ut then, side by side with this picture, tliere is another and a different one, and the two are made to blend together. Apollo is the saintly man, but he is at the same time the gay man. He is unspotted by the world, but he is also at the very heart of the world. Pure himself, he holds in his hand everything that is supposed to be a temptation against purity. He has the hot blood of youth in his veins ; his mildness is not the result of a cool temperament, but dwells beside a river of rushing passion. He is always represented with a bow and with a lyre. It is intended to mark the fact that he is the embodiment at once of the martial and the musical. He is the leader of men in the ranks of war, and he is the delight of men in the ranks of peace. He supplies at once the sources of physical strength and the means of social enjoyment. These are elements not com- monly associated with the saintly life ; they are supposed to furnish incentives to temptation, seduc- tions from the path of that life. Wiiy, then, are they associated here ? Is not the reason plain ? Is it not clear that the Greek put these temptations into the hand of Apollo just because they iceve temptations, just because they supplied an oppor- The Mcssar/e of Greece. 205 tuiiity for llmt struggle in which the Greek above all things delighted ? When he invests the pure man with the bow and with the lyre, it is because lie wants purity to be not an empty thing, not the result of mere mental vacancy or of simple inanity, but the product of a deliberate choice and the fruit of a determinate struggle. The Greek has been here true to himself, true to his country, true ta his national ideal. He has given Apollo the wreath of purity because he has won that wreath by con- quest. He has worshipped his unspottedness be- cause it has been an unspottedness where spots might have been — a whiteness which has remained uncontaminated amidst conditions and amidst en- vironmsnls in wdiich the incurring of contamination seemed almost a necessary thing. Again. If Apollo was the Greek's ideal of man- hood, Artemis was his ideal of womanhood. In fixing upon Artemis as his type of womanhood, the Greek has done honour to himself. Artemis is the representative, of chastity. Out of all the possible excellences which are associated with the name of woman, he has selected tiiis one as the most glorious and the most desirable one. He has passed by his own natural predilection for the beautiful ; he has subordinated his instinctive tendency to give prom- inence to the symmetry of form ; he has made selection of a quality which is of all qualities the least distinctive of his race, and has thereby- 206- Mcssctges of the Old Religions. indicated an aspiration beyond his own environ-' ment. When the Greek crowned ^voman with the wreath of divinity, he encircled her head with that laurel which he deemed the most precious, and which doubtless ^cas to him the most precious, because amongst tlie actual women of his land it was the most rare. He proclaimed the divineness of cliastity, because cliastity w^as as yet the most transcendental thing, the thing most removed from positive experience. But here again we are con- fronted by a remarkable combination. Artemis is the representative of chaste womanhood, but she is not the representative of ascetic womanhood! If she is crowned as the goddess of chastity, she is also crowned as tlie goddess of the chase. To her belongs the pleasure of the hunting -field — the exercise of limb and the strength of arm. She incarnates in herself all that is manly in sport, all that is vigorous in pastime. She incorporates in her nature the attributes of the other sex along with the distinctive qualities of her own. She is beautiful in feature but not gentle in expression,- •miceful in form but not feminine in mould ; she i^ the woman in the man. And here again, can one fail to recognise the deep meaning that underlies the picture ? Why has the Greek made the goddess of chastity the goddess of the chase ? Clearly that tlirough the chase he may give more value to the chastity. He wants the cha^^teness of Artemis, like The Message of Greece. 207 the pureness of Apollo, not to be the result of an empty heart nor the product of a shallow life, but to be the expression of a nature which has known both sides of the question, and which adlieres to virtue because it has made a deliberate choice. He wants it to be an abstinence which springs not from the fact that she has been immured in cloistered cell or hid from the temptations of the passing hour, but from the deptli of a conviction that has come from worldly experience, and arrived at its determination by weighing the alternatives on either side. The Greek has been led to deify two natures in one person through his own admiration for struggle, through his consciousness that virtue is only beautiful when it stands out in contrast with that which would seduce it. I shall give yet another illustration, because it is one which is deep and far-reaching. Let us take that god whom the Greeks called Hephaistos, and the Komans Yulcan. He is the god of fire, the maker of war-instruments, the man who forges the thunderbolts for Jove. Yet this herculean labour has to be performed by an imperfect body. Yul- can is both lame and deformed, and his movements are naturally slow^ ; he is represented in himself as an object of laughter to the gods. The problem is why such a conception should have been deified and worshipped by man, specially why such a con-r cei)tion should have been deified and worshipped 208 Mcssa[/cs of tlic Old Bdirjion!^. by tlie Greek. In later times tlie Greek did nob scruple to invest the objects of his worship with human passions and mental weaknesses, and this has always seemed a marvel. But to my mind the earlier fact is far more marvellous — that the Greek sliould have reverenced a being whom he had in- vested with bodily defects. Let us remember what ^vas to him the highest manifestation of life's glory ; it was the exhibition of the beautiful in nature, in art, in man. Beauty was to the Greek the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end of all perfection. There was no flaw to him like a flaw against symmetry ; there was no error to him like an error against taste. One would have expected that wherever he had an object of worship, and what- ever might be the endowments of that object, he would at least have invested it with an ample measure of beauty. Very startling therefore is it when we find him reverencing a being in Avhom there is no form nor comeliness, bowing down before a presence in whose outward aspect are the marks of an image more marred than the sons of men. How are w^e to account for this ? How are \ve to ex])lain the fact that the beauty-loving Greek has deserted his own ideal of beauty — that the man who habitually reverences above all tilings the symmetry of form, should have yielded his adora- tion to that which is distinguished for its want of symmetry ? The Message of Greece. 209 The reason again is plain. Ifc is because the Greek in his deepest nature is an athlete. He values a possession in proportion as that possession has been won. Even beauty would not be valuable to him if it were the rule and not the exception. It is the fact that, in the struggle for existence, some forms have been able to maintain not only their existence but their symmetry, which makes the possession of that symmetry to him a joy ; the beau- tiful itself is only accepted as a road to the strong. In this light Vulcan's position becomes clear. There has fallen to him a herculean work to do ; he has to forge those bolts of fire which shall execute the mandates of the universe. What more natural than that the Greek should make it more herculean still, should exaggerate the difficulty, to lend more glory to the strength ? Accordingly he has done so. He has made the god of fire and of the thunderbolt a god with bodily defects ; he has invested him with lameness and with the elements of physical imperfection. He has so invested him that he may magnify the execution of his task, that he may exhibit in more strong relief the greatness of his actually exerted power. Some worshippers would have reverenced the object of their worship in proportion as it found all things easy; the Greek bestows his reverence on the opposite ground. To him the glory of life, even of divine life, is its struggle. The powers of nature are reverenced by 210 Messages of the Old Religions. him because they are athletic powers — forces which act and react upon each other, and which keep their place by conflict. Whatever emphasises the con- flict, whatever intensifies the obstacle, is prized and appropriated as a means to the ultimate eff'ect, and is permitted even to share by anticipation in that glory which the ultimate effect shall secure. I cannot but direct attention to the remarkable an- alogy which in this respect the mythology of ancient Greece bears to a system which is generally held to be, and which in many respects is, its contrast — the religion of Jesus Christ. If one were asked to put liis hand upon that form of belief which of all others is most foreign to Christianity, he would probably select the Hellenic worship of nature. And yet it is in this Hellenic worship of nature that we find the germ of that which in Christianity appears in full development — the glorification of weakness. The sensuous Greek and the self-sacrificing Christian have alike distin- guished themselves from other forms of faith by in- corporating in their Pantheon the shadows of human life ; to the one, as to the other, weakness is a condi- tion of strength. ISTo doubt there is a vast difference in their respective reasons for this. The Greek in- corporates weakness in his Pantheon in order that he may lend to him who overcomes it a larger meed of praise. The Christian admits weakness into liis Pavilion for precisely the opposite reason — in order that the man who strives may be taught the lesson The Message of Greece. 211 of his own nothingness. Yet, when we look deeper, it may perhaps be found that these two views are not so discordant as they seem ; that there is at least a point in whicli for a moment they find a meeting-place. The Greek magnifies strength, and the Christian magnifies humility; but does not the Christian magnify humility as an ultimate source of strength ? Is it not because he sees in self- forojetfulness the road to self-enlarirement, because he recognises in the spirit of sacrifice the promise and potence of life, that he insists before all things on the soul becoming unconscious of itself? Is not weakness here also contemplated as a means of struggle, and crowned as a road to victory ? Thus strangely do these two forms of faith, so different in their origin and so divergent in their general aspects, exhibit at one corner an attitude of con- cord and alliance — an attitude which may have found its ultimate realisation in that singular union of the son of Abraham with the son of Hellas which marked the close of the Jewish Theocracy, and con- stituted the dawn of the Christian day. And if the Greek mythology presents a point of union with Christian thought, it presents equally a point of union with that which at first sight seems more pronouncedly its opposite than the religion of Jesus ; I mean the speculations of modern science. I f there are two things which at the outset appear irre- concilable, they are the dreams of the ancient Greek 2 1 2 Messages of the Old Bdigions. and the conclusions of the modern evolutionist. The one stands at the beginning, and the other at the close of human development. And yet in the optimism of ancient Greece, there is something which finds an analogy with tlie speculations of modern evolution. As the mornincj is more like the evening than any other part of the day, so the earliest phase of humanity resembles its latest mani- festation more than its intermediate phases. Modern science is on the whole optimistic. It believes that the development of man is an upward development, and that when the creature is fully adjusted to his environment he will find peace. But this ultimate optimism of modern science implies much more ; it implies that every step of the process has been a step in the right direction — in the direction of the goal. If ever the time should come in which the millennial age of the modern scientist shall be reached, he himself will be the first to proclaim that it has been reached by the accumulation and combination of all the events which have preceded it — prosperous and adverse, good and bad. He will tell the world of his day that the prosperity to which men have attained has been simply the last result of the whole foregoing panorama, the ultimate issue of that long train of circumstances which is called the course of time. He will make no dis- tinction in his retrospective survey between the defects and the symmetries of nature. The defects TJic Message of Greece. 213 will themselves appear in the light of symmetries, because to the eye of the scientist they shall appear as workers in the building. Every step of the preceding evolution shall be found to have been a necessary step to the production of the actual goal. The absence of aught which seemed a blemish, the leaving out of anything which was called a defect, shall be regarded by him as an impossible concep- tion. He will be constrained to say in scientific retrospect what an apostle said in religious faith — that all things have w^orked together for good. If modern science is optimistic at all, it must be opti- mistic all through. It cannot be hopeful about the whole without being sanguine about the part, for the very marrow of its doctrine is the belief that the whole is involved in the part. It cannot be opti- mistic regarding the future without being optimis- tic in relation to the passing hour, for it is itself based on the principle that the future sleeps in the present, and that the passing hour enfolds the germ of the completed day.^ And, to tell this was the message of Greece. That she told it in rough language is true ; that she expressed herself very badly is undoubted ; but be- neath the grotesqueness of the form there abides the spirit of that truth which she meant to convey. It is a truth unique amongst the messages of religions. ^ All this is conceded even by such a negative writer as Lange in his 'History of Materialism.' 214 Messages of the Old Religions. Hitherto the creeds of men had deified the objects of life after having lifted them out of life ; they first idealised them and then crowned them. But here the objects of life are crowned without being idealised ; they are crowned as they are — in all their present forms, and with all their present imperfec- tions. The Greek has put his hand upon the world as it is — struggling, commonplace, unfinished. He has uncovered his head before the aspect of nature which meets him every day, before the events which befall him every hour, and he has not scrupled to assign divinity to the images of creation as they actually float before him. In so doing, he has sup- plied a desideratum in the objects of religious wor- ship. Eeligious worship had deified everything but the common day. It had deified the past in China ; it had deified the future in Persia; it had deified even the hour of death in the Buddhism of India ; but it had put no crown upon the objects and the events of the living hour. It was reserved for Greece to supply the want in the temple of humanity, and by this she, being dead, yet speaketh. The Message of Borne, 215 CHAPTER X. THE MESSAGE OF ROME. I REGARD the Eoman religion as the earliest attempt at religious union. Its distinctive message to the world was to proclaim the possibility of destroying the distinctive, of erasing those lines of demarca- tion which tend to divide the faiths of men. From the very beginning, from the very constitution of her nature, Eome sought a principle of eclecticism — a principle which should unite and rivet the lives of the multitude. In every department of her history slie pursued the same end ; her religious instinct only moved in unison with her national reason. As surely as on the life of the bee there is imprinted the necessity to construct an incorporative hive, there was from the outset imprinted on the Eoman constitution the necessity to construct an incorpo- rative empire — an empire which in its extent and its vastness might yet leave room for the action of many powers within it. The unity at which Eome aimed was not a uniformity. She did not seek 2 1 6 Messages of the Old Bcligions. merely to compress the nations by conquest under her own sceptre. She was perfectly willing — nay, earnestly desirous — that the nations should not be compressed, that her conquests sliould be of such a nature as to leave them in a measure free. She wanted an empire whose glory should consist in holding other empires within it, as a drop of water holds within it a multitude of separate lives. Her political aim was unity, and unity is ever the com- bination, not the destruction, of the many. Her whole history, with all its changes, is an effort to conserve in the new the elements of the old. When Augustus aimed at undivided empire, he aimed at it in the Eoman method ; he did not break with the institutions of the past, but gathered them around his own person.^ It is but an instance in miniature of what Eome sought to do in the gross. She was willing to permit the institutions of the world to re- main ; she only asked that they would assume her own name. Now, the Roman religion follows the plan of the Roman politics; strictly speaking, it is but a part of those politics. It never aspires to originality ; it would scarcely be too much to say that it aspires to be not original. Originality would have destroyed the Eoman design. The Roman design in every sphere was incorporation. Incorporation demands ^ See this point very clearly stated in Dean Merivale's article "Augustus," 'Encyclopaedia Britannica,' ninth edition. The Message of Rome. 217 eclecticism — tlie selecting of that which is best in surrounding systems. Eome's eagerness to incor- porate made her unwilling to be originative. She was too anxious to gather in the old to be a founder of the new. Her aim was to find a meeting-place for the creeds of the nations. Books on popular Church history have often been misled as to her character by her attitude to Christianity. Viewing her in that attitude, they have represented her as a persecuting power. The truth is, it was the nature of Christianity and not the nature of Eome which gave rise to persecutions. Eome would have toler- ated any religion which would consent to nestle under her banner. But this Christianity would not consent to do. Christianity claimed exactly what Eome claimed — to be the wide-spreading tree upon whose branches all other faiths miglit rest. She claimed to be the principle of union which formed a possible nucleus for the reconciliation of rival be- liefs. She claimed to have been herself the uncon- scious source of all other aspirations — the light which had lighted the worship of every man. Christianity, therefore, could never have accepted the terms of the Eoman Pantheon, could never have consented to serve in a house where she asserted the right to rule. Her distinctive characteristic was that she refused to be tolerated, insisted to be recognised alone and supreme. She brooked no rival, and she would admit no second ; she demanded, like Eome herself, 218 Messages of the Old liclif/ions. the suffrages of all other faiths. It is unfair, there- fore, to regard Rome's attitude towards Christianity as an exception to her usual policy. She was as willing to extend her toleration to Christianity as to any other creed, and she only exchanged her tol- eration for hostility because Christianity refused to tolerate her. The result of this eclecticism is that the religion of Eome exhibits not one but many elements. Just as within her body politic there repose side by side the characteristics of many lands, so within the membership of her religious system there sleep the phases of many faiths. Eome brings no new mes- sage into the world ; her mission is to collect, and, if possible, to combine, those messages which the world has already received. Accordingly, the faith of Eome is a many-sided faith ; it would have been universally sided if every aspect of religion had in its day been represented. It took whatever it found. It gathered stones from all surrounding temples, and out of these it built a temple of its own — a temple not very symmetrical indeed, not very harmoniously welded nor aptly adjusted, yet exhibiting a faithful and honest attempt to find in one Pantheon a place for many minds. Let us look at one or two of the different sides of this religion It has one aspect in which it bears a resemblance to the faith of Judea. Whence that resemblance or- iginates we cannot tell, but it is highly probable that The Message of Rome. 219 the far-travelling and eagerly incorporating spirit of Eome came at an early date into contact with Judaic forms of thought.^ Be this as it may, it is certain that in Eome, as in Judea, we find the union of two tendencies which, so far as I know, are in no other faith found combined — the tendency to dwell in the past, and the impulse to push forward into the future. China has exhibited the one, and Parsism has revealed the other; but it has been reserved for Judea and Eome alone to find a meet- ing-place for both. In Eome, as in Judea, we see hands stretched out in opposite directions — one pointing backward to the gates of a golden para- dise, the other pointing forward to the gates of a future kingdom. In the one, as in the other, we behold the spectacle of a mind divided between the pride of a high origin and the expectation of a lofty destiny, vibrating, between a glory which has been and a splendour which is coming. If Judea goes back to her Eden, Eome goes back to her Troy ; if Judea looks forward to her Messiah, Eome looks forward to her universal dominion. The actual life of each is bounded by two paradises — the glory of a lofty ancestry and the glory of an omnipotent posterity. And in the life of each ^ Kenan says that it is probable Judaic thought would reach Rome earlier than even nearer parts of the empire. See his * Influence of the Institutions, Thought, and Culture of Rome on Christianity and the Development of the Catholic Church,' Hibbert Lecture, 1880. 220 Messages of the Old Bcligions. the power which mediates between the one and the other is the power of law. In Judea and in Rome alike, the minds of men are developed from the para- dise of the past into the paradise of the future by a colossal system of jurisprudence, by which the will of each man is subjugated, and the will of each adjusted to the will of all — a jurisprudence which in both cases has left upon the ages an everlasting impress, and has exerted a permanent influence upon institutions and civilisations foreign to its own. It will be seen from this that at the root of the Pioman religion there lies an element not com- monly found in the faiths of the pre - Christian world — the element of morality. In Eome, as in Judea, the conception of law is an ethical concep- tion ; it is founded on tlie reciprocal duties of man to man, and on the duties of all to the body politic. The result is that in the early stages of her history the religion of Eome exhibits, as IMommsen remarks, an aspect of great seriousness.^ It is unlike otlier systems of Polytheism in the solemnity witli whicli it approaches the problems of life. If it deifies tlie powers of nature, it does so not on tlie ground of their contribution to sensuous joy, but on the ground of their possible service to humanity. The object of the Roman's reverence, like the object of the Jew's 1 Momtnseu, indeed, shows how, afterwards, the corruption of the Roman mind destroyed this primitive reverence. See his 'Home,' book iii. chap, xiii. The Message of Rom e. 221 reverence, is that collection of individuals compre- hended under the name of the State. Everything which is worshipped by him is worshipped by reason of, and in proportion to, its service to the common- wealth. The conceptions of Church and State are not two conceptions, but one ; the life of politics is identified with the life of piety. The good citizen and the good man are synonymous terms. There is no difference between treason and sacrilege, no separation between sin and crime. The man who violates the law of his country has violated thereby the divine law, and his expiation to the law of his country is accepted as an expiation to the law of heaven. And because the Eoman reverenced the State, he reverenced also the family; here again emerges his resemblance to the Jew. Every family was viewed as a state in miniature, an image or simulacrum of that great commonwealth of which it w^as a part, and whose laws it was bound to mirror. The word piety, which receives its origin from him, means originallj the affection of a son for a father, the devotion of a member to the head of a family. The derivation is significant. It shows that in the mind of the Eoman the idea not only of religion but of morality was inseparable from the State, insep- arable from the relation of the subordinate to the superior. And it is highly significant of this fact that the word "patriotism," which is also derived from him, means by etymology the love of country 9 99. Messages of the Old Religions. viewed as a family and a home. It was because the Itoman and the Jew reverenced equally the origin and the climax of things, that they each found a place in their system both for the family and for the nation. The family represented the small be- ginning, the stream out of which the nation rose; the nation represented the family completed, the perfect development of the individual household. But if Eome had one aspect turned towards Judea, she had another side turned towards the natural opposite of Judea — Greece. From Greece Eome borrowed wholesale. She conquered Greece by arms, but she allowed Greece to conquer her by peace. She took the Hellenic gods into her Pan- theon and bowed down before them. She changed their names, indeed; she called Zeus Jupiter, and Poseidon Neptune, and Ares Mars, and Athene Minerva. Along with their names she changed also much of their garments ; she stripped them of their beautiful and poetic dress, and clothed them in commonplace and prosaic attire. But when all was said and done, they were still the old gods ; they were reduced in personality, but they preserved their original function. Now, this is one of the hetero- genous things in the Eoman system. We should have expected that a religion which started from the basis of morality and reverenced the abstraction of law, would have lifted up its eyes to an abstract and invisible Lawgiver. This was what Judea did, and The Message of Rome. 223 in this Judea was consistent. But Eome was con- tent to be inconsistent. What she wanted was union — a principle of co-operation amongst the nations, of which she herself would be the centre. To secure this she was willing to pay any price — to sacrifice logic, consistency, symmetry. If the stones of other temples were content to be incorporated in her Pantheon, she on her part was willing to receive them without perfect cement. Accordingly, she took the gods of Greece as they were — the personifica- tions of the forces of a world existing in a state of struggle. It was for a state of struggle that she wanted them. Her problem was not how to reach a higher life, but how to make the best of this life. She did not desire the minds of her citizens to be centred on the things above ; she wished them to be fixed on the things below. She desired that they should reverence the empire itself, that their religion should be bounded by the length and the breadth, the height and the depth of its possibilities. She sought the aid of no gods with any other end than this. If they did not minister to the needs of the empire, there was no other need to which she wished them to minister. Her very morality was a utilitarian morality. Lofty as it was in its aspirings, and severe as it was in its requirements, it was, still, ever con- templated as a means and not an end. If the Eoman was to be courageous, it was because he belonged to a military nation. If he was to be just, it was 224 Messages of the Old Religions. because he was only one member of a vast empire where vastness could not be preserved without the perfect adjustment of all its parts. The empire itself was the real object of his reverence, and nothing else was reverenced except in so far as it ministered to this. In incorporating the gods of Greece, he was mainly infl uenced by the fact that the gods of Greece were no transcendental product. He was attracted by their earthliness. He was impelled to receive them, because he saw that they did not set up a high standard, did not profess to represent perfection. He perceived that their worship would not lift the national mind out of its nationality, would not draw it away from the contemplation of mundane things, specially from the contemplation of imperial inter- ests. Himself of an unpoetic nature, and more prone to reverence the strong than the beautiful, he was willing to recognise these forms of aesthetic beauty, provided they would consent to favour the growth of his power. But here there arises a third aspect of the Eoman religion, and one in which it differs essentially from cither of the two foregoing. I have said tliat tlie main end of Eoman morality was the service of the empire. In this service, however, tliere was de- manded, when occasion required, a readiness for the sacrifice of life which can nowhere else be found out of India. Materialistic and utilitarian as is the Ptoman genius, there is blended with it an element The Message of Borne. 225 which originally had its source in that which is the reverse of materialism aucl the opposite of utilitarian — the element of Buddhism. Li\'ing, as he does, for this world in its most external aspect and its most mundane interests, the Eoman, in the earlier stages of his history, is prepared, in the defence of these interests, to exhibit a sacrifice which is purely un- worldly, and a self-surrender which is distinctly spiritual. One has only to read the pages of his opening story in order to be impressed with the fact that, from whatever source it has come, there has entered into his religion a breath of Indian worship. Mythical as in most of its parts that early story is, its very mythology reveals the presence and the in- fluence of this thought of self-abnegation. Again and again we are confronted by the spectacle of a man sacrificing himself for his country, offering up his own life to appease that wrath of the gods which is supposed to have brought calamity upon the for- tunes of his native land. Such stories would not be told if the ideal of heroism which they teach did not exist in the national mind. The very word religion, which is a word derived from Eome, implies in its most probable etymology^ that a man's primary duty is self-sacrifice. It signifies a binding back, a re- ^ The etymology I refer to is that which derives it from religare. See Augustin, De Civitate Dei, x. 3, edit, of Benedictiues, Paris, 1838 ; and Lactantius, Insti. Div., iv. 28. Cicero, however, derives it from rcUyere (Xat. Deor., ii. 28). P 226 Messages of the Old Fuiigions. straint of the individual life. Each man is viewed as a victim bound to an altar of sacrifice. His being is offered up not really to the gods but to the State ; the office of the gods is simply to approve and to reward. The man is at all times called upon to regard himself as a possible sacrifice to his country's good, as one who may at any moment be required to become an expiation for some national sin. It is highly significant that when a great Christian teaclier wanted to exhibit Christianity as an atonement of the one for the guilt of the many, he embodied his view in an epistle to the Bomans. He could not have sent it to a better quarter, nor to a quarter more likely to appreciate it. The Jew had no adequate sense of what was required from the individual man ; he offered animal sacrifices for the wellbeing of the theocratic kingdom. The Eoman in this respect saw deeper. He saw that if a kingdom of heaven was to be reached on earth, it must be reached through the surrender of each for all, through the willingness of every individual to give himself up for the whole. This was not Jewish, but it was Indian. It was a practical manifestation of Buddhism with the old intensity but with a new motive. It was no longer a sacrifice for the sake of death; its aim was the conservation and intensification of the national life. Yet it sought its end by the old means — the Bud- dhist means. It called upon the individual to sur- render at the outset all individual desires, to give up The Message of Borne. 227 liis own personality, to resign his own interests. It called upon liiiu to view himself only as one member of a vast body, and a member which ought to be am- putated if the wants of the body required it. It incorporated with Western civilisation a breath of the Eastern day, and united to the activity of Europe the passive sacrificialness of Asia. Nor in this wondrous Pantheon which thus sought to collect the varied thoughts of men, was there alto- gether wanting a place for Parsism. It is the last form of thought which we should have expected to have had a place there. Parsism started originally from exactly the opposite basis. The earliest vision of Piome was a vision of unity ; the earliest vision of Persia was a vision of duality. Pome from the outset beheld the prospect of a world gathered around one centre ; Persia began by seeing the impossibility of a common centre. One would have thought that a form of faith which saw in this world an empire divided between two, could never have been incor- porated in a creed which proclaimed an empire governed by one only. Yet in the creed of Pome there is found such an incorporation. It comes out with great prominence in its doctrine of good and evil geniuses — in the belief that families and indi- viduals may be advanced or retarded by the patron- age or by the opposition of some spiritual power. Just as in the Persian hierarchy there were angels that fought for Ormuzd and angels that strove for 228 Messages of the Old Religions. Aliriman, so in the popular mythology of Eome there were spirits which aided the life and there were spirits which impeded its progress. The medieval doctrine of f^uardian ancjels on the one hand and of besetting demons on the other, has its parentage in classic and pagan soil ; it is a survival of that Eoman culture in the midst of which Western Christianity has its cradle. That Eome took it from Persia I do not believe ; but she took it from a phase of human nature which Persia made her own. She adopted it through her eclectic tendency to give a place to everything, to iind room in her constitution for all forms of man. Nor was there wanting an element in her nature which made even this phase of faith in some sense congenial. Eome from the outset felt that her mission was conquest, that the unity to which she aspired could only be purchased by struggle. It was not wholly inappropriate that the struggle whicli she experienced in politics should be accepted also in the realm of spirit, and that tlie battle between strength and weakness should be accompanied by the strife between the powers of good and evil. I have given tliese illustrations merely as speci- mens, as representative instances of that great prin- ciple on which the Eoman constitution acted. That principle was one of incorporative union. The mes- sage of Eome to the religious world was essentially a message of peace. It sought to put an end to all The Message of Rome. 229 clashings by allowing room for the co-existeuce of contrary tendencies, whether these tendencies be- longed to the world of politics or to the sphere of religion. As in the world of politics it gave per- mission to the existence of empires within the empire, in the sphere of religion it gave permission to the existence of faiths within the faith. Tlie one great faith of Eome was the belief in her own destiny, the maintaining and enlarging of her- self. She was willing to incorporate within her temple every shrine that would favour such an end. The bond of unity which she sought between the different religions of men was the bond of a com- mon devotion to the political interests of the empire. Hers is the earliest attempt to reach an evangeli- cal alliance in the etymological sense of that ex- pression, — to promulgate a message which shall furnish a meeting -place for the messages of other faiths. This is the true significance of the Eoman religion, the secret of its protracted stability, and the cause of its long success. Yet it has not been ultimately successful ; its attempt at union has eventually proved a failure. With the destruction of Eome's political fabric, the slirines incorporated within her temple have again been severed. The unity of faith which she has sought to secure has melted as utterly as the unity of empire which she actually established, and the fall of the one has been contemporaneous with the fall of the 230 Messages of the Old Religions. other. Tlie question is, Why ? What is the reason that tlie earliest attempt at religious union, based as it was on such a broad foundation, and con- ducted on such a princely scale, has proved in the long-run so entirely abortive ? Why is it that an effort so persistently planned, and for a time so brilliantly achieved, has left behind it even fewer traces of its influence than those which survive of the effort at political unity ? The answer to a ques- tion so suggestive and so practical demands the con- sideration of a separate chapter. The Message of Borne, 231 CHAPTER XI. THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. The peculiarity of the Eoman religion does not lie in its identification with State interests ; this is an attribute which it shares in general with the whole ancient world.^ What distinguishes the religion of Eome from surrounding and from past religions, is its effort to construct a universal Church by the formation of a universal State. Of course, in the old regime, the former was inevitably involved in the latter ; if State and Church were one, the securing of a universal dominion was the securing of a universal Church. The peculiarity of the Eoman worship lies in the fact that it did secure an absolute dominion by becoming the worship of an absolute State. And it is out of this fact that the great problem arises, Why lias it failed ? If it had not succeeded in its aim, there would be no ^ Canon Westcotb points out that the history of the Gentile world exhibits a gradual process of the secularising of religion ('Gospel of the Resurrection/ 2d edit , chap, i,, xxxiv.). 232 Messages of the Old Religions. room for wonder ; but having succeeded, why has it proved abortive ? The idea at which Eome aimed is by no means an obsolete idea; on the contrary, it is one of the most modern things in ancient liistory. The conception of a civic Church, of a Church which shall regulate its membership not by creed but by character, not by services done for the sanctuary but by duties done for man, is one that, with the advance of civilisation, has more and more been coming to the front. In countries holding the Protestant principle, it has been espe- cially and increasingly powerful, and it finds in modern England a growing number of advocates.^ It is distinctively a Western conception, and it had its home and origin in the "West — in that great empire which sought to embrace the world. What is the reason that, as devised and promulgated by this empire, the scheme has proved so illusory ? Why has the most gigantic effort to promote it been the most conspicuous for its failure ? In inquiring into a subject of this kind, the first question ought to be a consideration of the formula under which it is proposed to compass religious union. All religious union must be on the ground of some formula. Home's formula I would express 1 I find, for example, this view advocated by Mr W. T. Stead in an article entitled "The Civic Church," in a periodical styled 'Help,' supplement to the 'Review of Reviews,' March 1892, vol. ii.,^^o. 3. The Message of Rome. 233 thus, " Whatever gods exist, exist for the sake of the Eoman State." It mattered not whether they actu- ally existed, provided that those who believed in them would recognise them as patrons of the gov- ernment. Now, I concede at the outset that this formula has an advantage over most other formulas, both ancient and modern ; it is based not on the recognition of a fact but on tlie expression of a desire. The Eoman creed is virtually a prayer; it unites men by the subscription to one article — the obligation to aspire towards the wellbeing of the republic. I have always felt that if ever a creed shall be formed which shall obtain universal suffrage, it shall be on such a basis — the basis of a common prayer. I have sometimes imagined that a subscription to the Lord's Prayer would consti- tute a point of union not only for all Christians, but for some who are popularly regarded as outside the pale of Christianity. It seems to me that the Eoman formula constitutes the only deliberate at- tempt which has been made in the direction of a creed based on aspiration, and it is probably to this that it owes what measure of success it has attained. The question remains wdiy it has not been successful throughout. The principle of the formula is good and makes for union ; why has it not achieved union ? Clearly there must be some- thing defective in the formula itself, something which has nullified or weakened the force of the 234 Messages of the Old Bclirjions. aspiration. A moment's consideration will show us that it is here where the vitiating element lies. The object contemplated by Eoman religion is the identification, of the Church with the State. It aspires to make the religious duty of man coincident with his political duty. The question is, If such a union were perfected in all the members of the body politic, would it amount to a religion of humanity ? And the answer must be, No ; it is exactly here that the religion of Kome has failed in its design. It would have been a very different matter if Eonie had contemplated the identification of the State with the Church, — if she had said that every man, by reason of the act of worship, was entitled to political privileges. But when she said that the Church was to be identified with the State, she really limited the Church. The State as under- stood by Eome was not coextensive with the Church as understood by Christianity. The Church as un- derstood by Christianity comprehends every man who is willing to recognise his own weakness; the State as understood by Eome comprehended only tliose men who were able to exercise certain political powers. Accordingly, when Eome made the Church identical with the State, she really cut off from religious membership a vast section of human- ity. There were in the Eoman empire, there are in every empire under heaven, a multitude of human beings who have no relation to the State except that The Message of Rome. 235 of hindrance— who are simply a blot and a barrier upon the constitution and the progress of the body politic. In modern life it is generally conceded that it is the duty of the State to care for these ; but the very statement implies that they are a drag upon the wheels of the social fabric, that they con- stitute one of the elements which prevent any State from being a perfect government. There are those who are so defective in body as to be incapable of bearing their part in the conflict of life. There are those who are so defective in intellect as to be in- capable of realising what it is to be in conflict. There are those who are so defective in morality that they are led to the commission of crime with an instinct seemingly as unerring as that by which the bee is led to the construction of its hive. Xo one will maintain that these are members of a State as such ; no one will contend that they are anything less than a retardation of the political mechanism. If, therefore, the Church be identified with the State, it logically follows that the Church is to be barri- caded from a large section, and that the most needy section, of humanity. Eome saw the logical consequence, and she did not shrink from it. It was in her power to have altered or relaxed her formula; she preferred to abide by it, and to accept the inevitable conclusion. That conclusion was the sternest imaginable ; it practically consigned to oblivion some millions of 236 Messages of the Old Religions. the human race. The mentally and bodily defec- tive were no aid to the movement of State mechan- ism. Eome said, "Let them be taken out of the way." She not only said it, but up to her power she did it. She laboured by every means to sup- press incompetents. She had not found the secret of suppressing their incompetency ; the shortest and easiest method she knew was to annihilate them. She sought to lay the axe to the root of the tree. She recommended infanticide in cases of deformity, desertion of infants in cases of hopeless destitution. She exposed the life of the slave to the sword of the gladiator. She inculcated as a doctrine of moral heroism the practice of suicide when any life was too hard to bear. She left unprovided those forms of mental alienation which, because they are not seen on the surface and not recognised in the first stage of development, were allowed to escape the remedy of infanticide. These blots on the Eoman constitution are popu- larly regarded as a sign of the low religious life to wliich the old world had sunk, a sign of how little power the religion of the empire really possessed to influence the lives of its members. And yet a moment's reflection should convince us that this is not the legitimate conclusion. It certainly proves that the religion of the empire was a form of faith very defective in theory and very inadequate in scope ; but it does not prove that it was a form Tlie Message of Bom e. 237 of faith which had lost its practical influence. The conclusion is exactly the contrary. It \Yas not by a fall from its religious principle that Eome became neglectful of the maimed masses of society ; it was precisely by the carrying out of its religious prin- ciple. Eome neglected the maimed bodies in the State because her principle of religion taught her to regard these as no part of the State. She was never more religious than in the cold eye she turned towards the halt and the blind. It was no impulse of impiety which prompted her to pass these by on the other side, which induced her to seek for their elimina- tion and extermination. It would hardly be too much to say that in her neglect, and even in her seeming cruelty, she acted under the impulse of religion, under the impulse of that faith which she had made her own. Her ideal was empire; her worship was the reverence of empire ; her religion was the service of empire. To her the good citizen and the pious devotee were one. The religious duty of every man was to support those influences which made for the welfare of the State; it was equally his duty to discourage and to suppress those influ- ences which impeded the welfare of the State. In his efforts to eliminate hindrances, in his attempts to extinguish incompetents, in his measures to re- press the multiplication of those noxious or useless growths which interfered with the life of the col- lective body, he might well on his principles believe 238 Messages of the Old Pieligions. that he was doing piety good service. The error of Home must be sought, not in lier unfaithfuhiess to her religious ideal, but in tlie defectiveness of tliat ideal itself. The object of her reverence was not being but force, not existence but energy, not thought but action. She valued everything for what it could do, measured everything by its dynamical result. She had no place in her Pantheon for that whicli had no arithmetical significance. She rated every man by what he could bring, valued every man by the amount of strength he could add to the republic. If he could bring nothing — if, instead of contribut- ing to the State, he required the State to contribute to him — he was there and then regarded as a blot on tlie political constitution, and a hindrance which ought to be got rid of. The effect of this appeared in the sequel. Eome ended by reverencing an incarnation or embodi- ment of that political power which liad always in the abstract been the object of her adoration; she ultimately worshipped her own emperor. Let us understand the significance of this act : it has been often misunderstood, and it has frequently been misinteipreted. In books wTitten with a view to show the downward tendency of Paganism, it lias been often said that the heathen world reached the lowest depth of its abasement in the Pioman deiti- cation of the human. There is a famous antithetical sentence whicli has expressed tlie thought thus: Th e Message of Bom e. 239 "The living God became man at the time when a living man was worshipped as God." And yet nothing is more certain than tlie fact that tlie antithesis between the religion of Christ and the relii^ion of Eome does not lie here. So far is the deification of the human from being the last stage of a downward development, there is no stage of religious development which is not founded upon this article. I have already exhibited the principle that not only the root but the very presupposition of all religion is the belief in incarnation, the belief that the human is in the image of the divine. Without this presupposition the only alternative is agnosticism, and agnosticism without end. If the divine be different in essence from the human, there is no possible communion in any world between the human and the divine. It speaks volumes for the discernment of Judaism that, although by nature prone to emphasise to the uttermost the distance between God and man, it asserted from the ^'ery foundation that man was made in the image of God. In recognising in man the stamp of divinity, Eome was in strictest alliance with the whole de- velopment of religion. But the point of divergence lay in her ideal of man himself. It is not too much to say that, in conferring divine honours uj^on her emperor, Eome erred not by deifying man too much but by deifying him too little. Her doctrine of incarnation, instead 2 10 Messages of the Old Bcligions. of going too far, did not go far enough. Her error consisted in putting the crown of divinity on only a part of humanity, and in leaving uncanonised the other part. When Eome put the divine crown upon the head of her emperor, she deified the in- carnation of power. She selected from all the attributes of humanity this one attribute, and im- pressed it with the stamp of divinity. She said that the one element in man worthy to be reverenced and fit to be consecrated was his capacity to put in motion the physical forces of the universe. Slie deified him in his power to move masses, in his ability to wield the sword, in his strength to con- struct empires, in his force to exact and maintain obedience. She reco2;nised, in short, the incarnation of humanity in so far as humanity was capable of becoming a State-power. The defect of this ideal was its narrowmess. It lay, not as some think, in tlie presumption of the creature, but in the creature failing to aspire sufficiently high. It did not exalt a large enough number of the elements of man. In crowning his capacity for the exercise of physical power, it left in the background other and more glorious capacities. It forgot to note that there were attributes in the human spirit which ex- hibited a divine strength precisely in their in- capacity to exercise physical power. It omitted to observe that there is a force which consists not in doing but in bearing, a strength which lies not in The Message of Rome. 241 acting but in lying passive. It was oblivious of the fact that in the display of this strength there inidit be manifested a heiofht of heroism and a depth of human resources compared with which all the past achievements of the empire were but the exhibitions of child's-play. Eome failed to realise the union of humanity because she failed to perceive the many-sidedness of man. Now, it is here that there emerges the real con- trast between the latest growth of the Eoman religion and the manifestation of that faith which arose in the very midst of the empire — the gospel of Jesus Christ. The difference between them lay not in the idea that the one glorified the creature and the other did not. Strictly speaking, they both glorified the creature — both took hold of a human life and lifted it into the presence of the divine. Tlie difference lay in the fact that the life which Christianity lifted into the presence c)f tlie divine was a life of larger and fuller humanity than that which Piome exalted. Piome crowned humanity only in one of its aspects — the aspect of physical power. Christianity crowned man all round, in every sphere of his nature, in every promise and potence of his life. It deitied him as the prophet, the priest, and the king, and in so doing it ex- hausted all the possible fields of his action. When it deified him as the king, it was, so far, in unison with the Eoman empire ; it recognised the truth 242 Messages of tlte Old Beliyions. tliat there is indeed sometbiiig godlike in man's power over the physical forces. AVhen it wor- shipped him as the prophet, it was in unison Loth with the Greek and with the Jew; it recognised the truth that in the revelations of human thouglit and in the glimpses of poetic genius there are seen the flashes of a light divine. But when it adored him as the priest, it was in unison neither with Ptoman nor Greek nor Jew ; it transcended all, or rather, it went down beneath all. It took up a part of humanity which had always been regarded as its contemptible part — the susceptibility to pain. It put a crown upon the head of that in man whicli had hitherto been despised by man himself. It proclaimed a doctrine which to the old world was certainly a paradox. It said tliat the kingdom of God recognised amongst the trophies of its glory a multitude of souls whom the kingdoms of this world regarded as State hindrances. It declared that man might be as great in his weakness as in his strengtli, as heroic in his pain as in his power. The priest liad, even with the Jew, existed as a representative of human nothingness ; with Christianity he stood forth as a representative of something whicli in man was divine — the power to be touched with the feeling of infirmities. Hence it is that the incarnation taught by Chris- tianity has been more thorough and fearless than the incarnation taught by Eome. The religion of The Message of Rome. 243 Christ has prevailed over the religion of Eome, simply from the fact that it has been less afraid to exalt the human soul. Eome only canonised man as an emperor ; Christianity proclaimed the essential sacred ness of humanity in all its attributes. There arose in the heart of the Eoman empire the con- ception of another empire called the kingdom of heaven. It partook somewhat of the soil in which it grew. It aimed at finding a meeting-place for all thinGjs — a brotherhood amonojst the nations and a point of union with the divine. But it aimed at more than that. It was not content to establish a brotherhood of nations; it w\anted a brotherhood of souls. It was not satisfied to find a point of union with the divine; it desired the divine and the human to be united along the whole line. It called itself the kingdom of heaven, not to separate itself from the kingdoms of earth, but to indicate its wider comprehensiveness than any earthly king- dom. It proposed to found a State which should embrace amidst its members not only the active but the passive units. It proclaimed for the first time to the world what has since become a commonplace — that they also serve who only stand and wait. In that aphorism there is at once involved an enlargement of the whole idea of empire. The conception of the kingdom of heaven was itself a revelation to the old world. It told men that they had made an inadequate census of the population, 244 Messages of the Old Religions. that they had failed to enrol in tlie State the full complement of its members. It told them that they had not snliiciently estimated the actual strength of any community, that in limiting their view to the labourers and ignoring the heavy-laden, they liad left out of account the strongest proof of national resources, the highest evidence of imperial power. When it included within its borders the heavy-laden as well as the labouring, it for the first time reached the idea of a State coextensive with the Church, be- cause coextensive with the needs of humanity. It was fated, then, that the message of Rome should be actually fulfilled within its own dominions and within its own era. It was to be fulfilled, however, not by Home herself, but by another and a humbler power. The office of Eome was, after all, only that of John the Baptist; she prepared the way. Her relation to Christianity was, indeed, no merely negative one. She did not simply, as cliurch historians affirm, help to create a longing for the light by increasing the power of darkness. Her contribution to the world was a contribution of light, and of light in the direction of Christianity. She aimed at the construction of a universal king- dom, and in so doing she was on the lines of the coming faith. Her error was that her universal kingdom did not embrace a universal humanity. She gained all that she sought, but she sought too little. The Roman empire was less comprehensive Tlie Mcssarje of Borne. 245 than the kingdom of lieaven, and it was less com- prehensive because it was less microscopic. It measured forces too much by tlie extensiveness of their range, and too little by the intensiveness of their pressure. It incorporated tlie length and the breadth, but not the de^^tli of humanity. Tlie king- dom of heaven went down to the roots of human nature — to its wants, to its sins. If I were allowed to express the difference epigrammatically, I would say that the religion of Eome and the religion of Jesus were united in the first three petitions of that Christian aspiration called the Lord's Prayer. Eome said with Christianity, " Hallowed be Thy name " ; she was prepared to assert and to maintain the dignity and the solemnity of that imperial structure which she reverenced. She said with Christianity, " Thy kingdom come " ; her perpetual prayer was for the establishment of her ideal kingdom. She said with Christianity, '' Thy will be done " ; she undertook no enterprise until she had first inquired whether that enterprise should be favoured by heaven. But there the concord ended and the difference began. When Eome passed from the divine to the human, she proceeded to halt in her petitions. She had no prayer for the pure and simple forgiveness of moral debts ; she could only ask what atonement would be accepted by the gods. She had no prayer to be led out of the way of temptation ; she depreciated the danger on this side 2 46 Messages of tlic Old Edigions. of life. Slie liad not even an nnqiialitied prayer for the distribution of daily bread ; she had not learned the full sense of the word " ourT Eome had a distinct mission, but it was not a mission of finality ; she must be content to occupy the place and to bear the reputation of a forerunner. Her crowning glory must rest in the fact that she devised a scheme of religious union the largest and the most com- prehensive which the ancient w^orld had ever seen, that she made an honest and earnest attempt to carry out that scheme into practical realisation, and that she succeeded in the attempt in a measure far beyond what could have been anticipated from a mechanism which, after all, was constructed of such inadequate materials. The Message of the Teuton, 247 CHAPTER XII. THE MESSAGE OF THE TEUTON. The name " Teuton " is the term under which are comprehended the Scandinavian and German races. Letween both the speech and the mythology of these races there exists a very close affinity.^ The result is that, notwithstanding the varieties of detail which distinguish the worship of their different nations, there is one common spirit pervading the whole. The contrariety indeed seems to exist in another direction. It does not strike us so much when we survey the aspect of the ancient Teuton nations, as when we compare the ancient aspect with the modern. It seems strange at first sight that the religion of the ancient Teutons should be so different from the spirit of the modern Germans. Between the earliest and the latest forms of most faiths we can detect a strong analogy. China, through all the changes of the centuries, has retained her original ^ See Jacob Grimm's 'Teutonic Mythology,' of which there is an excellent English translation. 248 Mcssajcs of the Old H el i// ions. bias. India, through the circles of the suns, has preserved her native spirit. Ev^en Rome, amid the complete transformation of her Pagan into her Chris- tian life, has retained certain marked resemblances which indicate to the eye of the observer that he is looking on the same fabric. But when we turn to modern Germany, we seem to find an utter con- trast between the past and the present. The lapse of time which intervenes between the life of the ancient and the life of the modern Teuton is not so great as the lapse of time which intervenes be- tween the life of ancient and the life of modern Eome. And yet, in the former case, the gulf is far wider and the hiatus far more marked than in the latter. There is an analogy between the saints of the Eoman calendar and the gods of the Eoman Pantheon ; but where shall we find an analogy be- tween the speculations of the modern German and the faith of the primitive Teuton ? The one is tlio ancestor of the other, yet the chasm betwixt them appears impassable. Modern Germany is confessedly the sphere of the highest theological culture and of the most abstruse religious thinking; primitive Teu- tonisni is on the surface the most crude of all beliefs and the most childish of all worsliips. Is there any- where to be found a bridge that connects them, any- where a point of union between the dawn and the meridian day ? I think there is. If we look closely and beneath Th e Message of ill e Teuton. 249 the surface, we shall see that there are features in the Teuton mythology which reveal something behind them. AVe shall see, above all things, that this mythology does not exhibit a uniform surface ; that, however crude it may be, it is at least decreas- ingly crude. Every mythology exhibits variety ; the Teuton mythology reveals progress in its variety. It is here that, I think, the real bridge is to be found between the old faith and the new, between the religion of the primitive Teuton and the relig- ion of the modern German. If w^e take the Teuton mythology as a whole, and confine ourselves to its distinctive elements, we shall find that its message to the world is summed up in a single word — development. It is here that, in my opinion, the point of difference lies between this mythology and earlier mythologies. It has features in common with the earliest creed of India, with the primitive worship of Greece, and with the original faith of Eome ; but it differs from these in the fact that hero we have features of development. If it be so, we are ushered into immediate contact with the modern spirit of the Teuton race. The spirit of modern Germany is essentially that of evolution. Even from medieval days it has been the pioneer of human progress, and in the nineteenth century it has led the van. To the German races, in whatever land they have been called to dwell, has been committed the task of revealing the development of humanity. 250 Messages of the Old Beligions. Tlie pliilosophy of Hegel has traced back that de- velopment on tlie lines of spirit ; tlie philosophy of Parwin has traced it back on the lines of matter; but both liave equally had one aim — to exhibit the connection between the future and the past. If the Teuton mythology can be proved, even amidst its crudeness and rudeness, to have evinced a glimmer- ing sense of the unity of history, we shall plant our feet upon the bridge that identifies the old spirit with the new. I^Tow, there is one element in this Teuton myth- ology which deserves careful attention. It is tlie fact that, notwithstanding the fantastic nature of its materials, these materials, when taken together, blend themselves into a system. I waive altogether any reference to its cosmogony, although even there, I think, it would be possible to trace a plan of progressive development. But, dealing as I am with the element of religion itself, I shall here as else- where confine myself to the view taken of the heavenly powers. It would not be at all remarkable that the Teuton mythology should describe a progress in the acts of creation. But what strikes me as very remarkable is that this mythology, when taken as a whole, describes a progressive development in the life of the gods themselves. Nowhere does the ancient Teuton mind approach so near to the modern Teuton mind as in the fact here indicated. The peculiarity of German philosophy has not been its The Message of the Teuton. 251 attempt to trace a development in history ; that has been done by many systems. Its peculiarity lies in its endeavour to show that the development of human history is the development of the divine mind. It is this which constitutes at once its bold- ness and its originality. But if it sliould be found that this tendency exists in the Teuton races from the beginning, if it should be seen that it belongs to the earliest as well as to the latest phase of German thought, it will furnish a strong presumption that the message of the Teuton has been one distinctive to himself, and one which by nature he of all others has been best qualified to give. Xow, we find that the history of the gods em- braced in this Teuton mythology consists of three ages. The first age is a period of peace ; it is a time in which the heavens are silent, free from war, undisturbed by commotion — a time in which the industrial arts flourish, and the value of life is measured by the amount of its beneficial resources. This, in the Teuton mythology, is represented as the golden age. It is rather curious that it should be so. A man's conception of heaven is in general only a transference into the air of the state in which he lives on earth. But the state in which the Teuton lived on earth was a state of war. The beings whom he deifies are representatives of those powers of nature which are distinguished for their strength — a fact which proves conclusively that in 252 Messages of the Old Bclirjions. the world of his day the power most needed was the capacity for conflict. At the head of tlie Pan- theon stands AYoden, a name symbolic of all phys- ical majesty and all warlike strength. On a step heneath him is Thor, the god of cloud, rain, and thunder, enormously strong, and wielding a hammer that can split the mountains. Next comes Tin — professedly the god of battle, the source of martial honour, the inspirer of military prowess. At a considerably lower remove stands Loki, the being who presides over the element of fire, and who is in future to develop into the great adversary of goodness. But the strange thing is that he is not yet become Satan ; he has at the outset his place amongst the angels. Should we not have expected that a race like the early Teutons, living amidst perpetual war, and feeling every day the neces- sity for a strong protective hand, would have in- vested the adversary from the beginning with his aspect of Satanic terror, and represented the fields of heaven as from the outset fields of incessant battle ? Yet the first stage of the Teuton mythology is peace. The natural conclusion is that the first stage of his liistory had been peace, that originally he had lived in a state of primitive simplicity, the memory of which still lingered. I do not think he would have assigned this to the gods if he had not experi- enced it and enjoyed it in himself, for our ideals of The Message of the Teuton. 253 heaven were first our ideals of earth. There are traces, too, in this early Pantheon of the existence of such a time. Side by side with the gods of mus- cular strength, there are seats for female divinities. AYherever the divinity of woman is recognised, it may be assumed that in the national life there has once been an element of culture. When I learn from the hymns of ancient India that she had a place in her early Pantheon for the female side by side with the male, I know assuredly that in the early life of the race there was no place for tlie zenanas ; women could never have been ad- mitted to the fellowship of the gods above, if they had been secluded from the fellowship of men below. Even so, when in the mythology of the ancient Teuton I read of female divinities dwelling beside the sons of thunder — when I hear of Trigga, the goddess of the inhabited earth, free, beautiful, lov- able ; when I am told of Freyja, the Yenus of the Teutons, representing the softer emotions of the heart,^ I am led to the inevitable conclusion that there was a time in which peace and not war was both the practice and the ideal. I am constrained to believe that the first ac^e of the Teuton was an age of more culture than the second, and that it ^ It is true that in the elder Edda, Freyja is represented as dividing the slain with Woden, but this is probably the result of the corruption of first ideals. Edda is the name given to two col- lections of national myths — the elder compiled in the twelfth, the younger in the thirteenth centujy. 254 Messages of the Old Rdirjions. was through the lingering memory of that culture that he made the beginning of heaven a scene of calm. By-anJ-by the curtain falls upon this scene, and wlien it rises again there is a complete change. The calm is broken and the storm has begun. If the first age is a day of peace, the second is a night of war. The heavens of the new period are no longer in calm but in commotion. Loki has revealed him- self in his true colours. He has ceased to be the servant ; he has become the adversary, the Satan. He has sot himself in deliberate antagonism to the powers of heaven, and has become the origin of evil. In so doing, he has become at the same time the origin of good, for the one cannot be known without the other. Hitherto the life of the gods had been neither good nor evil; it had been simply natural. They had dwelt in peace, merely because there was no place for war, no opposition to the original cur- rent of the stream. But with the rebellion of Loki the opposition began, and along with it came the revelation of the tree of knowledge. The appearance of war for the first time revealed peace. Before this time peace had been an unconscious possession ; war made it a realised possession. Accordingly, it is significant that, with tlie emergence of Loki upon the scene, there emerges also another being on the other side — Balder. If Loki is the principle of evil, Balder is the first conscious and deliberate principle 'The Message of the Teuton. 255 of good. The legends that surround his name con- stitute some of the most beautiful portions of the Edda. He is the personification of all possible virtues. He is transcendently beautiful, possessing a form of radiant light He is immaculately pure, and into his heavenly mansion nothing unclean can enter. In him are united the attributes at once of tlie male and the female. Like Thor, he is also the son of Woden, and therefore in him there are found the traces of martial firmness. His judgments are irre- versible and beyond repeal ; in this appear the quali- ties of the male. But the female is represented in the mode of execution. The outward r(^gime is one of conspicuous mildness ; force has given place to persuasion, and the influence of mind has succeeded to the rod of authority. Balder, in short, seems to me to represent the effort to find a union between the gold of the ideal past and the iron of the actual present. He unites in his own person the calm of the one and the strength of the other. He stands as a symbol of the truth that gentleness needs not be weakness, that silence is not incompatible with power, and that the intuitions of a feminine nature may express a decision of character which is un- matched by any exhibition of merely muscular force. ■ Let us pursue the narrative. The powers of good and evil are now for the first time face to face with one another. A conflict is inevitable, and we stand breathlessly expecting the issue. Balder also stands 25 G Messages of the Old Reliyions. in expectation, and liis expectation is of the most gloomy character. His forebodings are of the worst. He is tormented by horrible dreams, in which he sees himself extinguished by the powers of evil. It is a fine and subtle indication of tlie fact that the bur- den of sin falls upon the sinless, and that the shadow forecast by wickedness obscures most the path of the good. To assuage the dreams of Balder, his mother, Fricjcja, takes an oath of allecjiance from all creation. She exacts a promise from every object in the uni- verse that it will do her son no hurt, — from every object but one. Slie forgets tlie mistletoe ; she prob- ably thought it too contemptible a thing to be dan- gerous, too parasitic a thing to have any indepen- dent efficacy. She ignored it by reason of its small- ness, and because its life was so closely attached to other lives. That one act of negligence becomes the death of Balder. The gods, by way of experiment, throw missiles at him composed of darts, stones, and all things supposed to be of greatest natural danger, and when he remains unhurt by these, they are com- forted as to his safety. But the real danger lies in the apparently soft and inoffensive thing. The dan- ger of sin is not its openness but its subtleness, its resemblance to that which is good and pure. That this is the thought of the myth is to my mind be- yond all question. The missile that destroys Balder is not only the seemingly harmless mistletoe, but it is the mistletoe thrown by tlie hand of one who is The Message of the Teuto'ii. 257 blind. Loki, the principle of evil, does not discharge the dart himself ; he guides to the enterprise the hand of a sightless being — the war-god, Other. Will any one say that such a conception is accidental ? Can it be thought for a moment that a convergence of circumstances so unlikely and so inappropriate could have been dictated by anything but the delib- erate design of establishing a particular idea ? And is it not as clear as daylight that the idea designed to be established is the subtlety of the power of sin ? Is it not manifest, almost on the surface, that the Teuton is struggling to embody the truth that the danger of temptation to a human soul is not its ugliness but its plausibleness ? He wishes to give expression to his belief that the snare which besets the heart of youth lies not in the attraction to any form of sin revealed as sin, but in the fact that sin prefers every form to its own, and habitually clothes itself in the disguise of purity. In rude figures, in coarse emblems, in imperfect metaphors, the mind of the Teuton has given utterance to a truth as old as creation and as modern as the latest day— that the serpent is more subtle than any beast of the field. Let us still pursue the narrative. Balder is slain by the mistletoe ; goodness is blotted out from the world by the subtlety of evih When it is blotted out its power begins to be felt. Balder is never so greatly reverenced as when he is gone ; the strength li 258 Messages of the Old Religions. of his presence is for the first time realised by the blank of his absence. There is a universal weeping amongst the gods, and a deputation is sent to the goddess of the grave supplicating his return. It is answered tliat the prayer will be granted, provided that all things living and dead shall mourn his loss. The condition is almost universally fulfilled. Every object in creation, whether in liea\en or on eartli, mourns for Balder, with one solitary exception — an emissarv of the Power of evil. It is a strikino: alle- gory of the permeating influence of goodness. It rep- resents the truth that every department of nature, is in some sense indebted to morality. For is it not true that the loss of Balder is a loss to all things, even to things which originally seemed to occupy a foreign soil ? Is it not true that poetry owes half its beauty to tlie moral sentiment, that art is largely indebted to the sacrificial instincts of the soul, that eloquence receives its point and f(jrce from the promptings of right and wrong, that warlike prowess has its root as much in the conscience as in the arm, that success in life is powerfully influenced by the concentration of moral purpose, and that the polit- ical ties which bind a nation are closely or feebly riveted in proportion to the social ties that bind tlie family ? All this was felt by the Teuton mind, and all this is expressed in the fact that creation wee[)s for Inalder. Living amid the sinews of war, the liardy Norseman had discernment enougli to perceive that TJi c Message of tli e Teuton. 259 the sinews of war could never form the body of a State. He perceived tliat the root of all strength was something behind it — that very element of morality which is popularly thought to be the source of soft- ness. He saw that to loose the mind from its ethical moorings was to dissolve the whole fabric, social and ])olitical, and to reduce to a collection of atoms that structure of imperial power which he believed to dwell in the region of the heavens. Accordingly, we are not surprised to find that to the mind of the Xorseman the death of Balder be- comes the beginning of all calamities. The demand for his return has been almost universal, but not altogether; it has been resisted by the Power of evil. By that one act of resistance his return is rendered as impossible as if the whole world had opposed it. And the loss is total. "We must re- member that in the conception of the Xorseman, the death of Balder is not merely the loss of an in- dividual; it is the extinction of an ideal. I have often been struck with the words of St Paul in 1st Corinthians ii. 8, where he says that if the princes of the Eornan empire had only known the secret of their national strength '' they wouM not have crucified the Lord of Glory." Ife is cleiirly speaking of a moral and not a physical crucifixion. He feels that what the princes of this world wanted to do was not simply to put a man to death, but to put an idea to death ; that what they desired to 260 Messages of the Old Beliyions. crucify was not tlie outward life of Jesus, but the thought of Him, the spirit of Him, the ideal of Him. And it is just because the deatli of Christ was to them tlie death of an ideal tliat Paul liolds them to have made a mistake. He tells them that, by taking away from the young men of their em- pire the portrait of moral heroism exhibited in tlie Man of Xazareth, they have deprived the spirit of youth of its greatest and noblest stimulus, have deprived theui of that very physical courage on whose foundation they have mainly sought to build. Such, in more extended form, I conceive to have been the thought expressed in the Teuton's grief for Balder. It is the cry not over a man but over an ideal, the tears for the departure of one who is not simply an individual but the embodiment and incarnation of moral purity itself. Hence in his loss the Teuton sees the loss of all things. He forecasts his mythology into the future, and it is a forecast of gloom. He sees a deepening of the conflict between the Powers of hell and heaven, and, ever increasingly, hell prevails. It is in vain that Loki is chained to the subterranean sulphur spring; he bursts his bonds and is free. There is seen ap- proaching a time of unheard-of tribulation— a time which the Eddas signalise as " the twilight of the gods." It is a time of cutting frost, of piercing winds, of sunless air, of winter without spring. It is a time of war and bloodshed, when nation shall Tlte Message of the Teuton. 261 rise against nation, and when, above all, a man's foes shall be those of his own household. The father shall be at variance with the child, the brother shall lift his hand against the brother, the ties of the household shall be rent in twain. At last the crisis shall come ; the Powers of good and evil shall gather themselves together for a final con- flict — the Armageddon of the Teuton mythology. On the plain of Yigrid shall be fought the great battle that is to decide the fate of the universe. It is to be a battle of unexampled fury, of pro- tracted tenacity, and of mutual destructiveness. The two contending hosts are alike to be annihilated. Loki, the Power of evil, is to fall, but Woden and Thor are also to perish. At last the heat of battle is to set fire to the universe. In the warmth of conflict there is to be kindled a spark which shall dissolve both friends and foes, and, like a mimic scene, this whole vast creation shall disappear in lurid flame. The earth shall be burned up, the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the powers of the heavens shall be shaken, and, over the spot where raged the roar of battle, universal silence shall reign. And here the curtain falls upon the second great epoch of the Teuton mythology. Neither of the two epochs has attained perfection. The first was the age of innocence, when there was virtue in heaven, simply from the fact that there was no war ; 262 Messages of the Old Jleligiuns. it was sinlessness in the absence of temptation. Tlie second was the age of conflict, when the existing state of things was resisted by the Power of evil, and Balder appeared as the antagonist of Loki; it was no longer the age of innocence but the age of law. Yet very sublimely is it said that, even in this time of comparative advancement, the days for Balder had not come. Balder w\as the personifica- tion of holiness, and holiness is just as incompatible with conflict as with innocence. He cannot live in a world where there is a struggle of the will; he demands a surrendered will The reign of law can- not exist side by side with the reign of grace, for law is virtue by restraint, grace is virtue by nature. Accordingly, Balder had to go away until the times of conflict were completed. Th3 beauties of holiness could only exist in spontaneity, and the presence of contending hosts was the absence of spontaneity. If Balder should come back, it must be by the anni- hilation of the hosts that contended, and by the destruction of that age of restraint which is incom- patible with spontaneous love. But now this second age has been destroyed, and on both sides the contending hosts are still. The age of conflict has followed the age of innocence ; it has ceased to be. Out from the universal silence there comes a new voice of creation. From the under-world, from the world of the dead below the sea, Balder returns. In the place where the old The Message of the Teuton. 2G3 paradise stood there rises a lle^y abode for the good, • — an abode of perfect beauty and of waveless peace. Here is to begin afresh the life of humanity, on a larger scale and with higher possibilities. Yet, very significantly, it is suggested that tliere is to be a thread of continuity between the old life and the new. The inhabitants of the revived world are to find the golden tablets which their race had possessed at the beginning of time. It is a striking metaphor of the belief that the state to which they have finally attained had its germ in the state from which they originally came. The abode of the gods had been originally the home of spontaneous virtue. It was a spontaneity which came, indeed, only from ignorance ; none the less was it the natural and normal state of man. By-and-by the spontaneity was broken by the conflict on the Mount of Tempta- tion, and innocence fled away, never to return. But though the innocence could never return, the spon- taneity could. There are two ways in which a life may become spontaneous ; it may be so by ignor- ance of conflict, or it may be so by overcoming conflict. The former method was past, and past for ever, but the latter method was to come. There was to open an age like the first, yet different, an age in which virtue was asjain to become natural to man, but in which the naturalness was to spring not from ignorance but from habit. It was to be an age in which the life of the universe was once more to 264 Messages of the Old Religions. become a life of peace, no longer merely becanse there were no materials for war, but because tlie materials for war had been seen and discarded. The third state of the Teuton, in short, was to be a new paradise, exhibiting all the appearances of the Gar- den of Eden, but exhibiting them on a totally op- posite ground — on the ground of a virtue which had met and conquered the tempter, and become by that conquest the undisputed master of the field. Will it be said that the view I have here taken attributes to the Teuton an amount of subtlety beyond the reach of a primitive age ? I answer that conscious mythology is necessarily subtle. Mythology, as I take it, cannot belong to a primi- tive age; it marks rather the twilight than the dawn of early religious belief. It indicates the sta^e in which the forms of nature are no Ioniser sufficient of themselves, and can only preserve their reverence by receiving the clothing of the mind. Mythology is in every instance an effort of the poetic imagination — an effort to make one thing wear the attributes of another, and, as such, it demands and involves a long course of thought and a considerable power of culture. Subtlety, therefore, is inseparable from conscious mythology, and the only question is whether the explanation I have given is, in the circumstances, the most natu- ral. It is only fair to state that mine is but one attempt out of many. Tlie ex[)lanations of the myth The Message of tlte Teuton. 265 of Balder have been beyond measure numerous.^ It lias been a favourite practice to see in it an allegorical exposition of the outward processes of nature. Max Miiller, for example, regards it as designed to describe the conflict between the winter and the summer — the temporary sub- mergence of nature beneath frost and snow, and its ultimate rising in the spring. I do not deny it. It seems to me beyond all question that the Teuton perceived the conflict of his life in the struggles of the orb of day. But why did he perceive them there ? Simply because he had first felt them in himself. We are so familiar with the metaphor of the sun struggling through clouds as to be in dan- ger of forgetting that it is a metaphor. There is nothing in the fact of the sun making its way gradually through clouds that could ever suggest the idea of struggle, if that idea were not already in the mind. The idea of struggle is a purely mental conception ; it is derived from consciousness alone. It is received by our experience of a sense of resist- ance, by our meeting with some impediment to the exercise of the will. AVhen, therefore, I look up to the heavens and figure there the battle between light and darkness, I attribute to the heavens some- thing which exists in myself alone. I paint upon the walls of the universe a thouciht which belonri-s <-> o ^ For a review of this subject see Weinhold, "Die sagen von Loki," in Ilaupt's ' Zeitsclirif t fiir Dcutsclies AUerthum' (Leip., lS-49). 2G6 Messages of the Old Bdigions. only to inj own spirit, and which never could have been known at all except through the movements of that spirit. I write upon the doors of the outward world an inscription which belongs to my inner nature, and seem to receive from without an im- pression which has really been imported from within. It is in vain, therefore, to say that the Teuton derived his conception of Balder from beholding the ])henomena of the heavens ; it is true, but it is irrelevant. If he derived his conception from the heavens, it was because he had first given it to the heavens. The alternations of the outward light had been to him simply a mirror in which he had seen reflected the movements of his own soul. AVhen he constructed the idea of Balder from looking on the strucjo-les of the summer sun, he merely took back from that sun the thought which he himself had oriuinally lent to it. The ultimate exijlanation of the myth must lie in the region of the mind. Balder himself is a personification, and so is the sun in the heavens ; the one as much as the other requires to be explained on mental grounds. If so, the explan- ation ought to be very simple, and can be notliing else than what has here been indicated. Balder in the field of history, and the sun in the field of the h(,avens, are alike and equally the embodiment of a great thought — the thought that the life of man pro- ceeds from peace to conflict, and from conflict back The Message of the Teuton. 267 to peace. But if it be so, it follows beyond all con- troversy that the message of the Teuton is the mes- sage of development. To him distinctively amongst the votaries of the religious world there has fallen the task of exhibiting the progressive nature of the divine life. The votaries of other faiths have been concerned with other elements. The Brahman has seen the God above the world, and the Greek has seen the God in the world ; to the Teuton has been assigned the part of describing the divine life above the world and the divine life in the world, as sep- arate stages of one and the same existence, as steps of progressive development in the unfolding of the universal plan. And let it be remembered that to the playing of this part the Teuton has been true. The message of the primitive race has been the message of the race in its phase of highest culture. At the begin- ning of this century there appeared in Germany a form of thought which has revolutionised all previ- ous philosoj)hies, and exerted an influence even over unsympathetic schools ; I allude, of course, to that system called Hegelianism. It is supposed to be a system defying tlie understanding of ordinary mor- tals. Yet, when looked at dispassionately, and divested of abstruse language, it will be found to be simply a refined reproduction by the Teuton mind in maturity of that which in primitive days it conceived in germ. Hegel says that in the uni- 268 Messages of the Old Belvjiuns. verse as a whole, and in every part of the universe, there are three successive movements. The first is one of unimpeded motion — of motion without oppo- sition, and therefore without recognition, A man running at full speed on a seemingly boundless plain, and with no memory of having ever occupied any other attitude, would never say even to himself that he was free. The idea of freedom could only Le reached by an interruption to tlie seeming bound- lessness, could only be realised in the meeting with a barred gate. Accordingly the barred gate appears, and marks the second stage of the universal life. The unimpeded movement is interrupted, the un- qualified affirmation is contradicted, and the day of spontaneous growth is succeeded by the day of con- ilict. It is an hour of apparent decline, but of real progress, the spirit of life has lost its first riches, but in the act of losing, it has learned for the first time what it is to be rich. Then comes the final stage, in which the contradiction itself is reconciled, and the spirit for the second time is actually, for the first time consciously, free. The barred gate is found to have, itself, an opening; it yields to the pressure of the arm, and tlie struggling soul is again unimpeded on its way. Yet the last stage is by no means a repetition of the first. It is freedom, but it is freedom won. It is no longer the mere rushing over a plain that is boundless; it is the emancix