The childhood of religions: embracing a simple account of the birth and growth of myths and legends

Preface

In a little book entitled ' The Childhood of the World/ which was received by the public with unlooked-for favour, an attempt was made to convey to young persons the knowledge concerning man s early condition which has been gathered during recent years, and it is to the Second Part of that work, which treate,-.?of his advance from lower to higher stages of religious belief, that the present volume, which deals mainly with the expression and embodiment of that belief in certain great religions of the East, is intended to be supplemental.

The question which forces itself upon all who are interested in the education of the young, is what they shall be taught regarding the relation of the Bible to other sacred scriptures, and to the declarations of modern science where they fail to harmonise with its statements ; and it is as a

PREFACE.

humble contribution to the solution of that question, that the present and preceding volumes have been written.

In an age which has been truly characterised by a leading thinker as one of i weak convictions/ it seems to me incumbent on those who, in accepting the conclusions to which the discoveries of our time point, regard the inevitable displacement of many beliefs without fear, because assured that the great verities remain, to be faithful to their convictions, and to show that the process of destruction is removing only the scaffolding which, once useful, now obscures the temple from our view.

In the absence of any like elementary treatise upon subjects regarding which much ignorance and apathy prevail, and the treatment of which is at present confined to works for the most part high-priced, and not always accessible, I hope that this book may not be regarded as needless, however far it falls short of the requirement which appears to me to exist, and which it ventures to temporarily supply.

The mass of material at one's disposal renders

PREFACE.

its clear presentment within a moderate compass somewhat difficult, but I have been at pains to select the essential portions, and, in view of those to whom the body of the work is addressed, to choose the simplest language which the several subjects permit. If the style is thus more familiar than dignified, I hope it may with greater success attract the ear of the youthful reader.

The Notes which are placed at the end of the book may be found useful to parents and teachers, as well as to those who may hereafter desire to pursue the matters to which it is designed to serve as a simple introduction, while the references affixed will indicate some of the authorities to whom I am under obligation. The number of these prevents specific acknowledgment, but I cannnot omit expressing much indebtedness to Profs. Max Muller, Whitney, and DeGubernatis, and to Drs Muir, Tylor, Legge and the lamented Dr Deutsch, for the aid afforded by their works in the preparation of this book. The contributions of Professor Max Muller and Dr Muir to the subject of Comparative Theology are of the highest value to the student, while in all

PREFACE.

that relates to the development of mythology and religion among mankind the study of Dr Tylor's unsurpassed volumes on ' Primitive Culture ' is indispensable.

E. C.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. INTRODUCTORY .... 1

II. LEGENDS OF THE PAST ABOUT THE CREATION 10

Appendix

Note a. On the likeness between certain Chaldean and

Jewish legends .... 255 b. On the origin of the Solar System . . 258 C. On the punishment of animals and lifeless objects as the cause of injury to Mankind . 259 d. On the supposed birthplace of Mankind . 260 E. On the common origin of Fairy Tales . 262 E. The sacred books of Hinduism . . 264 G. On the words Brahma or Brahm and Brahma 270 H. The sacred books of the Par si religion . 271 I. Legends relating to the birth of Buddha . 273 k. The sacred books of Buddhism . . 275 l. The sacred books} or Classics, of the Chinese 277

INDEX .

THE

CHILDHOOD OF RELIGIONS.

Chapter I. Introductory

A POET who has put many wise and tender thoughts into verses full of music, once wrote some lines on the birthday of a great and good man, whose life's delight was in listening to all that Nature has to tell, and who not long since passed away from earth to learn new lessons in some other part of the wide universe of God.

The poem tells us that as the boy lay in his cradle,

4 Nature, the old nurse, took The child upon her knee, Saying : "Here is a story-book Thy Father has written for thee."

* u Come wander with me," she said,

" Into regions yet untrod ; And read what is still unread In the manuscripts of God."

* And he wandered away and away With Nature, the dear old nurse, Who sang to him night and day The rhymes of the universe.

' And whenever the way seemed long, Or his heart began to fail, She would sing a more wonderful song, Or tell a more marvellous tale/

It is some fragment of the wonderful story s without an end ' to which Agassiz (for it is he of whom Longfellow speaks in the poem) listened so gladly, a story as true as it is wonderful and as beautiful as it is true, that I want to tell you, if you too wish to open your young eyes to the sights that ever grow more charmful, and your ears to the sounds that give forth no unsweet notes ; otherwise the story is not for you.

To learn well the lessons which Nature is ever willing to teach, we must begin while we are young, for then the memory is 'wax to receive and marble to retain.' The mind, like a knife, quickly rusts if it be not used. Unless the eye is trained to see, it becomes dim ; unless the ear is trained to hear, it gets dulled ; and this is why so many, careless to sharpen their wits on the whetchap, i.] INTRODUCTORY. 3

stone of outlook and thought, enter into life and pass away from it, never knowing in what a world of beauty, of bounty and of wonder they have lived.

So I would have you treasure the joy which earth and heaven yield as riches that no moth or rust can corrupt or thief break through and steal ; that make the poorest boy who smiles his thanks for the bit of blue sky that roofs the murky court in which he lives, happier, and therefore wealthier, than the richest lord whose sunlit acres of woodland and meadow call from him nothing but a yawn.

I think you will be interested in listening to a few curious stories in which men of old have striven to account for the universe, how it all began to be and what keeps it going. Some of these stories have only come to light during the last few years, and this through the patient labours of learned scholars, who have found them buried in the sacred writings of certain religions of the East. We will then see what our men of science have learned from the story-book of Nature about the earth's history in the ages long, long ago, when as yet no man lived upon it ;

4 INTRODUCTORY. [chap. i.

when no children, with eyes laughter-filled, made nosegays of its flowers, and ran after the jewels which they were told lay sparkling where the rainbow touched the ground ; but when God, ever-working, never-resting, since work and rest with Him are one, was fitting it to be the abode of life.

Following the same sure guides into that dim old past, we will learn a little of the mighty changes which, wrought by fire and water, have given to the earth's face its rugged, ragged outline, and also a little about the strange creatures that lived and struggled and died ages before God's highest creature, man, was placed here. Then after telling how the earliest races of men slowly covered large parts of the earth, the way will be clear for an account of the great parentnation whose many children have spread themselves over nearly the whole of Europe, over large portions of Asia, and, since its discovery by Columbus, of America. We will learn something about the life these forefathers lived while together in one home, the language they spake, the thoughts that filled their breasts, and how those chap. I.] INTRODUCTORY.

thoughts live on among *us and other peoples in many shapes, both weird and winsome.

For I expect it will be news ' to some of you that the dear old tales which come now-a-days bound in green and gold and full of fine pictures, such as Cinderella, Snow- White and Rosy-Red, Beauty and the Beast, are older than any schoolhistories, and were told, of course in somewhat different form, by fathers and mothers to their children thousands of years ago in Asia, when Europe was covered with thick forests, amidst which huge wild beasts wandered.

I must stay here a moment to say that only a very little of what is now known concerning the matters already spoken of has been gathered from books. Men of science, wistful to learn more of that long before out of which we have come, have deemed none of its relics too trifling for their study. They have searched on the slopes of valleys through which rivers once flowed for the stone tools and weapons wherewith the first men worked and fought, and explored the caverns which from early times gave shelter to man and beast ; they have opened great earth-mounds and

6 INTRODUCTORY. [chap. i.

tombs for remains of the dead laid within them ; they have spelled out the picture-words painted on the walls of temples choked with the drifted sand of centuries, the wedge-shaped letters cut on rocks and stamped on sun-dried bricks, also the writing on crumbling papyri, dried palm-leaves, barks of trees and other substances ; they have traced words in common use to the roots from which they sprang, and fairy tales and legends to the home of fancy where many of them were born ; and thus has come to us, in ways undreamed of by our forefathers, rich treasures of knowledge.

Lastly, though by no means the least, we will open some of the sacred books of India, Persia, China, Arabia and other lands, to see for ourselves what the wisest and best of the ancients have thought about this wondrous life and what is to come after it. For thought rules the world. It makes no noise, but lives on and reigns when all the bustling and the shouting that seemed to stifle it are hushed, and whilst the great works which it guided the hand of man to do have perished, or remain to tell of pomp and glory gone for ever, it is with us in the words of wisdom that ' shall chap, i.] INTRODUCTORY.

not pass away/ and to which we do well to give heed.

I have said how much life gains in joyfulness if our ears be kept open to the sweet voices of nature, and our eyes awake to its lovesome sights, and I would add how much it gains in trustfulness by even a slight knowledge of the religions which are at this day the hope and stay of hundreds of millions of our fellow -creatures. We learn therefrom how very near to his children the All-Father, to use the forceful name by which the old Norsemen called Him, has always been ; near now, near in the days that are gone ; and that there never was a time when He dwelt apart from men, caring not whether they were vile or holy, but that all age and place and human life is sacred with His presence. We shall learn, too, —

' That in all ages Every human heart is human ; That in even savage bosoms There are longings, yearnings, strivings, For the good they comprehend not ; That the feeble hands and helpless, Groping blindly in the darkness, Trust God's right hand in that darkness, And are lifted up and strengthened,'

8 INTRODUCTORY. ^ [chap. i.

so that when we read how poor wild souls, craving after the Power which they feel about them, are not able to rise above the worship of bunches of feathers or piles of stones, we shall know that it is the living God for whom they are feeling, and be sure that He will at last lead to Himself these children ' crying for a light/

It gave men larger and grander views of God when they learnt that the earth is one among many bodies circling round the sun, and that the sun himself is one of numberless suns that are strewn as star-dust in the heavens, and it will give each of us, whose nature is made to trust, a larger trust in, and more loving thought of, Him to learn that our religion * is one among many religions, and that nowhere is there an altogether godless race.

To use a homely figure, we shall see that the religions of the world are like human faces, all of which have something in common ; nose, eyes, mouth, and so on ; while all differ, some being more beautiful than others. And we shall also see that wherever any religion exists which has struck its roots deep down into the life of a chap. I.] INTRODUCTORY, people, there must be some truth in it which has nurtured them, and which is worth the seeking". For the hunger of the soul of man can no more be satisfied with a lie, than the hunger of his body can be appeased with stones. I am most wishful to impress this upon you, because you will never read the meaning of this world aright if you are content with that halfknowledge of the beliefs of other races, both savage and civilized, which most people have, and which suffices to give only false ideas of those beliefs. Remember that where ignorance is, there is darkness ; but that where knowledge dwells, light abides ; and as knowledge of God, which comes from the study of man and his dwelling-place, the world, ' grows from more to more/ sunnier views of Him make glad the heart, chasing away the false ideas about Him that frightened poor timid, tender souls ; that made even strong men shake, and bring their noble powers, tied and bound, before the grim Being they were taught to fear; that caused beauty to disfigure itself, as if ugliness was acceptable to Him, who 'hath made everything beautiful in its time.'

Chapter II. Legends Of The Past About The Creation

In every land and age man has looked up to the great, silent heaven, with its unresting sun, moon and stars ; and upon this earth, with its robe ot many folds and colours, and asked, ' Did these things make themselves ? Had they a Maker ? If so, how did He make them, and how long ago ? What can He be like ? ' And the questions have had all kinds of answers framed to meet them, and not a few strange stories woven to explain the hard matter.

It is well known to you that among many beliefs, now found to be wrong, which were held in bygone days, people thought that the earth was a flat and fixed thing, for whose sole benefit the sun shone by day and the moon and stars by night. Now, such a belief as this is no matter for wonderment, because it was the only belief then possible. People must speak of things as chap, ii.] LEGENDS OF THE PAST. n

they appear, and we still talk of the sun rising and setting, although we are sure he does nothing of the kind. If you had not learnt anything from books and other helps about the roundness of the earth and its movements in space, and had been shut up all your life in some wide plain where no hills broke the long, low line around, and gave you a sight, let us say, of the sea hiding in the distance the hulls of ships, you would have believed the earth to be flat and fixed, and lighted by the sun travelling daily across the sky, because your senses led you to such belief. Neither could you have learnt anything of the vastness and' distance of the sun and stars, and you might have made the most simple guesses about these matters, as did some of the wise Greeks. One of them said that the moon was as large as that part of Greece once known as the Peloponnesus, but now called the JVIorea, and was laughed at for his boldness ; while another held that the pale belt of light which is named, from a pretty myth, the Milky Way, and which we know consists of millions of stars, of which our sun is one, was the place where the two halves of the sky are joined

12 LEGENDS OF THE PAST [chap. n.

together. And it was a very long time before people would believe that there were millions of mankind who were walking with their feet opposite to ours on another part of the earth.

But as the mind of man searched deeper into things many of them were found to be other than they seemed, and thus all truer knowledge as to what they are has been gained by slow and sure correction of that which the senses first told about them. It would fill a bigger book than this to tell through what paths of darkness and danger the master-spirits of old cut their way to light, amidst what silence and fear they worked, and with what trembling they told their discoveries to a trusted few, but the story is one you will do well to study. And now let us look at a few of the old legends about the beginning of things. They are for the most part but little known, and although the forms in which some of them are cast are crude and foolish, they are worth more than a smile. They were very real to those who framed them, and the wise will gladly find in them this truth : that in the presence of the great fact of earth, sea and sky, man has seen a greater chap. XL] ABOUT THE CREATION. 13

fact than they, even a Cause without whom they had never been, a Cause to whom he has given many a different name and paid worship in many a strange fashion.

The spirit in which these early guesses at truth should be read is well enforced in this story, which comes from an ancient book added to one of the Vedas or sacred books of the Hindus.

A father tells his vain-minded son, in whom no sense of wonder dwells, to bring him a fruit of the huge banyan-tree or Indian fig-tree. ' Break it/ said the father; 'what do you see?' 'Some very small seeds/ replied the son. 'Break one of them ; what do you see in it V asked the father. ' Nothing, my father/ answered the son. 1 My child/ said the father, ' where you see nothing there dwells a mighty banyan-tree/

By way of comparing them with the stories which follow, it may be well to set down in simple outline the two accounts of the Creation which are given in the Book of Genesis.

In the first account, which is contained in chap. i. 1 , to chap. ii. 3, we are told : ' In the

H LEGENDS OF THE PAST [chap.ii.

beginning God created the heaven and the earth/

On the first day light was created and divided from the darkness, thus causing day and night.

On the second day an expanse was formed above the earth, dividing the waters upon the earth from those which were to be stored as rain. (As Genesis vii. 11 shows, this expanse or dome was believed to be full of windows, which were opened whenever it was needful to let the rain through. The notion that the sky is a great roof covering in a flat world is an idea easily framed by the unlearned ; the Polynesians, for example, call foreigners ( heaven-bursters/ as having broken in from another world outside.)

On the third day the remainder of the waters were gathered together as seas, and the land was made to bring forth grass and herb and tree.

On the fourth day God made two great lights, the sun and moon : ' He made the stars also/

On the fifth day He peopled the waters with fishes and the dome above with birds.

On the sixth day the work of creation was ended by the earth bringing forth four-footed chap.il] ABOUT THE CREATION. 15

beasts and creeping things ; man and woman, as the last and chiefest, being made ' in the image of God/ Who looked upon all that He had made, saw that it was good, and on the seventh day rested from His work.

The second account, which is given in Genesis ii. 4 to the end, speaks of the earth as without water and plants and trees, because there was no rain and not a man to till the ground.

Then the earth was watered by a mist, and man was made of the dust of the ground by the Lord God, "Who breathed into his nostrils the breath of life so that he ' became a living soul/

Man was then placed in the garden of Eden with leave to eat of the fruit of every tree except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Then beasts and birds were made and brought to Adam that he might give them names. Last of all, the Lord God made a woman from a rib taken from Adam's side while he slept.

At this point you may ask, How are we to read these and other Bible stories ? What they tell us about the creation, the early state of man, the

16 LEGENDS OF THE PAST [chap.ii.

universe in which we live, the age of the earth, and other kindred matters, differs so very much from what lesson-books on these subjects teach, that we feel puzzled which to believe.

The answer which I will try to give to this question before we pass on to the other legends may save you the irksome work of unlearning much in after years which is often taught upon these matters.

Since that which has to be said about one Bible legend applies to all the rest, we will deal with those already given about the Creation.

In bygone years people believed every word of those legends to be true, and there is a large number who still believe this, strangely overlooking the fact that the account given in the first chapter of Genesis of the mode and order in which things were made differs from the account given in the second chapter, and therefore that one of them must be wrong. After a time the Bible story seemed to be contradicted by the witness of those remains of the past which are found deep down in the earth, and although many books have been written with the view of showing that there is no chap. II.] ABOUT THE CREATION. 17

real contradiction, each has failed to prove this. For this reason others have cast aside the narratives in Genesis as idle and meaningless tales which common sense and science alike bid us reject. From this you will see that three different views are held, upon each of which somewhat must be briefly said.

1. There are those who believe that God made all things in six days, that He fixed the sun and moon in the sky on the fourth day after the shedding forth of light and between the creation of plants and animals, because they find it thus written in the Bible.

Now it is not wise to accept anything as true only on the ground that we find it in a book, because if it turns out that the writer of the book was mistaken, that his knowledge is imperfect and his statements opposed to facts, the foundation upon which our belief rests is taken away and the belief goes with it. In reading books on history, science and any other subject, we believe that the writers have set down to the best of their knowledge all that can be said upon the matter, iS LEGENDS OF THE PAST [chap. ii.

and we are glad to learn what they have to tell us, and, since very few have either time or talent to search for themselves, to rely thereon. But wre are none the less ready, as are the writers themselves, to give up all if it is proved to be wrong, and to welcome the newer knowledge which the ages bring.

That we must apply this to the reading of the Bible I have sought to show at page 230. The unknown authors of Genesis, who it is thought compiled that book from older writings, and to whom the legends of other nations were known, as the likeness between the Jewish, Babylonian and Persian testifies, speak of the earth as made before the sun, and as arched over by a solid firmament. It was to them a flat thing that moved not, and since no voice has ever come from the unseen to instruct man in things which God has given him powers to find out, these writers were not wiser than the wisest of the age in which they lived. But the round earth was none the less moving in its course at the rate of nineteen miles in every second of time, else spring and summer, autumn and winter, had not then been.

chap. II.] ABOUT THE CREATION. 19

If among the different sacred books of the world, for which, as will be seen hereafter, the same claims to be inspired every word are made by those who believe in them, there was one book quite free from mistakes and into which no blunder could by any means enter, we would gladly learn of it, since the truth-seeking can have but one desire, namely, to know what is true. But none such has ever existed, and never will exist, because every book is the work of man and therefore liable to error. That only is perfect which the finger of the Almighty has written on the rock-ribbed earth.

2. Those who hold that there is no real difference between the statements of the Bible and the facts of science, argue that when God is said to have made the heaven and earth in six days, it is not days of twenty-four hours each that are meant, but c ages ' or ' periods ' of unknown yet vast duration.

We must all admit that it is very dangerous to force any meaning into words which, by unsettling what the user of them intended to convey, destroys their plain intent. They are far too sacred to

20 LEGENDS OF THE PAST [chap. ii.

have tricks played with them, and to give words more than one meaning is to make them mean whatever the fancy invents,

4 For what the lips have lightly said, The heart will lightly hold.7

There can be no doubt that days are meant as such in Genesis, since to each day a < morning ' and an 'evening' is given (see chap, i., ver. 5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31), and this, together with the fact that the appointment of the seventh day of the week as the Jewish Sabbath was based upon the hallowing of that day by God, proves that ' periods ' and suchlike words which convey no idea of fixed lengths of time were not in the writers mind.

The use of the number seven reminds us that certain numbers were accounted sacred by ancient nations, and that the old mystery about them still survives in foolish and unreasoning fears, and in proverbs as to the luck or ill-luck that attends them. The early worship of the sun, moon and five planets may explain the choice of seven as a sacred number among some eastern and western peoples, and so also may the apparent changes in chap, ii.] ABOUT THE CREATION. 21

the shape of the moon, known as her^p/iases, which every seven days bring with them, and which account for the very early division of time into weeks.

This sacredness seems to have linked itself to the tradition of a creation in seven days and to the frequent use of that number in the Bible; these in their turn linking it to many legends of the Middle Ages, while the stories of seven sleepers, seven wise men, seven wonders of the world, and so on, also show what importance was given to it in olden times.

S. It is not wise or well to cast aside the Bible story. We can afford to be just to the past, and our debt to it is greater than we can pay, since its guesses made possible the sure knowledge of our time. However childish the ancient explanations of things may seem to us, they were the best that could be had. They were the work of honest men who, were they living now, would gladly correct their narratives by the great discoveries of these latter days. And those narratives contain for all time this truth, that every effect has a cause, and that this ' mighty sum of things for ever speak-