The growth of religion

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Preface

IN the very large literature which we now have concerning the origin and development of religion, there is either too generous an element of speculation or the facts are arranged in an order which does not plainly suggest the actual order of evolution. In this work an attempt is made to distribute the known facts in such succession that they do present, as far as possible, the real chronological development of human culture. The most primitive fragments of our race are rigorously separated from higher tribes, and the stage of religious development at which they linger is very carefully determined. In the selection of these primitive peoples the teaching of modern anthropology is closely followed, and many tribes which are usually quoted as primitive are withheld until a later stage. By this procedure a view of the origin of religion is reached which differs from that presented in the majority of recent works on the subject.

Various groups of peoples at succeeding stages of culture are then studied, and an attempt is made to determine the development of the religious sentiment, or belief or practice, from the germ which the primitive level affords. But an encyclopedia, or a work reaching the dimensions of an encyclopedia, would be required if one sought to arrange all the peoples of the earth in this evolutionary Vv vi PREFACE order, and the author has to be content to pursue the subject in the form of an essay or sketch which at least outlines the real course of development. For this purpose separate regions of the earth have been chosen, and the author has sought to show how, from the primitive level which generally lingers in a few. backward peoples of each region, the religious belief and practice have naturally developed until they reach the form in which we find them in the civilization which dominates the region. Thus for Asia and America the aim is to show how the primitive religion grew into the elaborate cults of China and India, Mexico and Japan.

For Europe and nearer Asia the streams are followed with special regard to their ultimate union in the river of Christian tradition. That Christianity is but the latest natural development of the evolving religious sentiment hardly an authority on the subject would now question; but few care to arrange the material of comparative religion so as to give prominence to this culminating fact of the inquiry, Here again the author sketches what he believes to be the actual order of development, and follows the method which he deems more scientific. The work is substantially a compilation of facts from the best original authorities on each people ; the author claims only the merit of arranging them in a more natural and more instructive order than is usually done. The authorities are quoted in their respective places, and need not be gathered into an imposing bibliography.

J. M.

PREFACE

I. THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

II. THE EARLIEST TRACES OF RELIGION

Contents

Til, THE MEANING OF THE FACTS -

IV. THE THICKETS OF SUPERSTITION GROW - V. THE LESSON OF AFRICA -

VI. THE RELIGIONS OF AMERICA

Chapter I The Evolution Of Religion

In the year 384 there occurred one of the last attempts of the old Roman religion to stem the advance of Christianity. For fifty years the leading Romans had seen their life invaded increasingly by the new religion. The Emperors were now Christian, and, though they rarely lived at Rome, it was felt that the path to their favour lay through the Christian Church. The more sober and more cultivated of the Romans saw with regret the passing of their old gods. Certainly they believed no longer in the childish legends of the adventures of Jupiter and Venus; nor had they any vestige of the belief of their fathers, that the happiness of a home depended upon due respect for its Lares and Penates, and the welfare of the State upon the worship of the greater gods. If they believed at all in gods, they followed either Epicurus, who lightly placed these thin and disputable shades in a remote region of space and said that they were entirely indifferent to man’s affairs, or Plato, who saw one great invisible spirit brokenly reflected, as the setting sun is upon the western clouds, in all the idols and legends of the people.

But men said—we understand it well, for many 1 i say just the same thing to-day—that the Roman State was irreplaceably built upon the old religion, and would fall into ruin if that foundation were removed. In the year 384, therefore, when a fresh encroachment upon the old religion was contemplated, the Roman Senators sent their most distinguished orator, Symmachus, to Milan to plead for the gods. Do not ask where Symmachus thought the thunderbolts of Jupiter were that he should be compelled to use his poor human eloquence to prevent the banishment of the god. Once more, . ‘in our time, the heavens are silent, while thousands of tongues and pens plead for the retention of deity. Symmachus wrote and delivered a magnificent oration. Round the boy-Emperor Valentinian, who must have understood very little of it, were grave statesmen and bronzed soldiers who listened to, and seemed to favour, the plea. But behind the throne of the fourteen-year-old Emperor was St. Ambrose, the greatest Christian leader since Paul; and in a short time the answer of Ambrose circulated through ltaly and extinguished the last hope of the Pagans. -

It was a remarkable answer. Fifty years ago the Christian Churches were confronted with what is called the doctrine of evolution, and from London to Moscow, from New York to San Francisco, they execrated and ridiculed it. A few scientific men fought for the truth, and one by one the various departments of nature passed under the dominion of the new ruler. The stars had been gradually formed out of loose clouds of cosmic dust; the rocks had been compacted during millions of years out of this ingathered material; the animals and plants had slowly ascended a vast scale of organization ; man himself—it was at last irresistibly shown—was but the present flower of that age-long development. But when scholars went on to claim that man’s beliefs and institutions had been similarly evolved, and not communicated from another world, the storm of opposition rose to a gale.

And during all these years there was, unread by any, in the Migne collection of the writings of the Christian Fathers the famous argument by which Ambrose had silenced the Pagans in the year 384. It was, in effect, the evolutionary argument. It was an appeal against conservatism to the constant changefulness and progress of nature. Ambrose looked round the world for what we should call, in modern language, the laws of nature, and he found that the supreme law was change. Was religion alone, he asked, to be an exception to the law? Were they to cling to old rites and legends when the voice of nature on every side spoke of change, advance, the death of the old, the birth of the new? Ambrose won; and Hurope, ever since, has forgotten his argument and adopted that of Symmachus and the Pagans.

The rhetorical argument of Ambrose has now become a science or a philosophy. The most comprehensive, the most conspicuous, the most illuminating law of natureis evolution. From the atom of matter to the star, from the little Alga swimming in the pond to the orchid, from the worm to the human being, from Niagara Gorge to the Alps, from the corroboree of a group of Australian savages to a symphony, from the primitive life of a community of Bushmen to the civilization of the United States—all was evolved. Whether things were evolved quite gradually or by spurts, whether natural selection had a larger or smaller part in the process—in other words, whether the correct way to conceive the evolution is Lamarckism or Darwinism or Weis- _lmannism or Mendelism—men may dispute; but the fact and universality of evolution none dispute. Religion falls under the law. It was evolved.

So far, again, there is no dispute. ‘The various religions or religious sects which raise their temples among us to-day, or are preserved in the temple ruins and sacred books of yesterday, were evolved. The aim of the science of comparative religion to-day is to arrange them all in one vast evolutionary family; to trace their common roots in the mind of primitive man, and show how each religion of savage tribe, or of present or past civilization, is a branch of the great tree.

Here, naturally, there arise the difficulties and disputes which cloud every science in its infancy. We have, in the first place, the difficulty of describing early stages which belong to a remote period of the past. In a great measure the savages of to-day, who are the primitive men of yesterday, preserve these stages for us. But the very earliest stages or germs of what, in the broadest sense, is called religion belong to a phase of human development which is preserved in no living race of men. Between the highest animals and the lowest existing human beings is a deep cleft. Once the chalk-cliffs of France were continuous with those of England. During the lifetime of humanity the sea has severed them, and it is only by the use of the scientific imagination that we can confidently reunite them. So it is with man and the highest of the lower animals. ‘The various phases of earliest human development, the hundreds of thousands of years of evolution which lie between the man-like ape of the Miocene period and the ape-like man of the Old Stone Age (who survives in our lowest savages), are dissolved and buried in the mould of the earth. It was in that lost world that religion was born, and we will take especial pains, in the early chapters of this work, to reconstruct the process of development.

But no one now doubts that it was a natural and gradual development. Jor a time there were those who pleaded for a primitive revelation. The situation was just a repetition of what it had been in the days of Darwin and Huxley. When theologians were convinced that there had been evolution, they still maintained that the first low forms of life had been created. No scientific authority in the world now admits that; and our religious writers are being tardily awakened to the humour of their pitting their opinions on a question of knowledge of nature against the united authority of scientific men. In the same way they pleaded that the first germs of religion were divinely implanted in the soil of the human mind. And the scientific authority on religion smiles and says: ‘‘I don’t see the need.” We'shall see these crude primitive ideas in the next chapter, and we shall understand the smile. It is, in fact, now generally admitted by religious writers that primitive forms of religion were evolved.

In tracing the development of these primitive religious forms we shall also have the answer to those who would ascribe to man a special “ religious sense’’ or “religious faculty.”’ The idea of “ faculties’ is not in favour in modern psychology. What used to be called faculties are so many aspects or special applications of the mind. If this “religious sense’ means that the human mind only, as distinct from the dog-mind or ape-mind, is capable of constructing religious ideas, we agree. But it is, we shall see, no more remarkable than the political sense, the moral sense, or the esthetic sense. If any person is disposed to see any particular meaning in the fact that these are all “spiritual” powers, we may remind him that man’s distinction is just as marked on the mechanical side. ‘These are merely so many different aspects or measures of his general mental superiority to the lower animals. We shall see that this general superiority in intelligence is enough to account for the origin of primitive religious ideas.

If it be urged that there is at least some peculiar significance in the fact that all known peoples have religious ideas, we must conceive precisely what we mean. What is religion? In the appendix to Professor Leuba’s Psychological Study of Religion there are fifty different, and generally contradictory, definitions of religion. Fifty others might be added to the collection. These definitions are in many cases framed by men who start with the assumption | that all men have religion, and they therefore make their definitions vague enough to embrace the ideas or practices of what they understand to be the lowest specimens of humanity known to the anthropologist. We shall see, however, that in nearly every case these writers have failed to study the really lowest peoples known to us, and their assurance that all peoples have religion, in their sense of the word, is inaccurate. 3 I have just mentioned the admirable work of Professor Leuba, a liberal and conscientious writer on religion, and I am tempted to illustrate my point from it. “It is now generally conceded,” Professor Leuba says (p. 76), “that, as one approaches the original conditions of the race, religious practices dwindle away, while magical behaviour is everywhere in evidence.’ He at once, as most writers would do, quotes the Australian aboriginals. But we shall in the next chapter consider a half-dozen peoples who are culturally lower than the Australians, and admittedly nearer to the original conditions of the race; and we shall find that some of them at least are not acquainted with magical behaviour. Professor Leuba is more seriously mistaken, and his error is the more regrettable in that it will serve the purpose of a certain type of religious controversialist with whom he is not in sympathy, when he goes on to claim that even the lowest known peoples believe in some kind of a God. He says :— It is an old opinion that even the lowest savage entertains a belief in a Supreme Being, however dimly conceived and little reverenced...... Although this opinion suffered temporary discredit from the discovery that in several instances the alleged. monotheistic beliefs really proceeded from the teaching of missionaries, recent anthropological researches furnish geneee evidence to warrant a return to this view.’

He instances, as is usual, Australia, Africa, and Melanesia, where we do not touch the lowest human level; and he concludes with the dogmatic statement that “there exists among the most primitive peoples now living the notion of a great god high above all others, to whom is usually assigned the function of creator.” ” |

Dr. Jevons, Dr. Menzies, and other writers on comparative religion make the same statement with less disinterestedness, but I prefer to illustrate the point from so impartial a writer as Professor Leuba. The statement is inaccurate. The facts in regard to Australian belief we shall see later, but at least in the case of such peoples as the wild Veddahs and _ several others there is no belief in a Supreme Being of any kind whatever, as will be shown in the next chapter. Therefore, if religion is defined to mean a belief in or worship of gods, in the most liberal sense of the word, it is untrue that all peoples have a religion. If by religion is meant some sort of cult of or dependence upon “spirits,” there are a few peoples who must be described as destitute of it. If it is reduced to a belief in a vague impersonal

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power which pervades nature, like the mana of the Melanesians, there are many peoples who have no religion. If, in fine, the definition of religion is narrowed to a belief that a man does not cease to exist at the moment which we call death, we shall still find it impossible to assert positively that all peoples have religion; we shall touch’ a grade of intelligence so low and hazy that it has never considered the question, and does not assert the survival of man.

There is, in a word, a small group of very lowly peoples who are rarely noticed even by modern writers on the beliefs of primitive peoples, yet they are of supreme importance in this connection. I propose therefore to state the facts concerning what is called their “religion” fully and plainly before entering upon any speculation concerning the origin of religion, or attempting to give any definition of it. Indeed, I am not interested in the verbal quibble whether the lowest savages have religious ideas or believe in gods. Whatever such childlike specimens of our race believe is wrong, and it is merely perplexing to find religious writers of our time straining to prove that they have some broad kinship in ideas with the Yahgan or the Botocudo. ‘The relation of the beliefs and practices of these lowest peoples to the question of the evolution of religion is a very different and much more important matter, and the next chapter will be entirely devoted to stating the facts. As a rule, the writer on the evolution of religion either starts with a theory and selects his facts to support it, or he starts with a collection of facts taken from peoples at very different levels of culture, and quite commonly takes a secondary or even tertiary level of religious development to be the lowest known to us. We shall find a set of facts below the starting-point of nearly all these writers, and we will postpone theory and definition until we have studied them.

We shall then take the facts relating to a secondary level—the Australians, Melanesians, Africans, and so on—which are generally, and improperly, made the starting point, instead of the second phase, of discussion. Here gods and priests and sacred places and ritual, of dim and grotesque shapes, begin toarise. We must attempt to trace the continuity of these things from the crude earlier level, and follow it into the rich variety of religious forms which will succeed. At this stage we have no difference of opinion in principle. All admit that savage religions represent various stages of development of the primordial germs, or forms directed and distorted by the special environment of the tribes among whom we find them to-day.

Nor is there any fundamental difference of opinion until we reach the stage where the historic religions, or the beliefs and practices of civilized peoples, arise. Here again we have a parallel to the controversy about biological evolution. The theologian once claimed that the first germs of religion, like the first germs of life, were created. Few informed theologians would now claim this, but they hold their position more obstinately at the other end of the evolutionary scale. In effect, they now generally say that every form of religion was evolved except their own. The Hebrew rabbi will generously grant that all creeds except the Hebrew creed represent a slow and blundering human development; that even Christianity is but a mass of material borrowed from Judaism and other religions, and moulded into a new shape in the course of the first century. But his creed was revealed to man. The Christian theologian will now usually admit that Judaism is a product of evolution, but will emphatically assert that his creed is the grand exception to the law of human development. The Mohammedan teacher in an Hgyptian or Hindu college, through whose windows there now come the echoes of Huropean teaching, protests that his creed is the only genuine exception to the law of natural development. And if this doctrine of evolution were presented to a Parsee or Brahmanic teacher of India, a lama of .Thibet, or the head of a Buddhist monastery in China, he would, with _ the same impressive accent of conviction, assure you that it: was immaterial to him whether you ascribed all other religions in the world to the devil or to evolution, but Azvs creed was revealed.

We have to see how each of these historic religions, including Christianity, evolved from the nebula of primitive religion. Here we have a second general defect of the literature on the subject. As soon as it approaches the crowning part of its work, the evolution of the religion which to-day fills the civilized world and is therefore entitled to especial attention, it becomes timid and evasive. We shall gladly notice the few writers who frankly discuss the question, but they are few. It is probable that at least nine out of ten of the modern writers on the evolution of religion or comparative religion have not the least sympathy with the belief that there is anything ‘“‘ revealed’ in Christianity. But they avail themselves of the fiction of the neutrality of science, and they generally draw up a scheme of the evolution of religion in such fashion that a Christian reader may continue to believe that his creed does not fall under the comprehensive law. Here the facts will be gathered and stated with entire candour. ‘There was no arrest or diversion or miraculous increase of the stream of religious development nineteen hundred years ago. It flows quite evenly through the records of the first century B.c. and the first century A.D. One cannot even say that at this point a branch of the great stream entered rapids and underwent a remarkable natural transformation of its character. It is owing only to the timidity of historians and writers on comparative religion that this idea is still so widely held. The few centuries before and after Christ—the period of the Greek and Roman civilizations—were, from circumstances which we will consider, peculiarly fruitful in new religious developments. Many religions as novel and as elevated im sentiment as Christianity arose. ‘They proselytized and throve equally in the Greco-Roman Empire. Then, from further circumstances which we will consider, Christianity obtained a privileged position, and destroyed even the very records of its rivals. Thus a fiction of unique distinction and miraculous growth was created in the mind of Hurope: a modern history is far less courageous in assailing that fiction than was history in the derided days of the Georges and Victoria. Here there is no reason for reticence.

Closely connected with this is the question of the relation of the evolutionary account of religion to the validity of religious beliefs. The few writers who venture to include Christianity in their evolutionary scheme hasten to protest, as a rule, that they are not thereby raising any prejudice against the truth of Christian doctrines. Almost all writers on this subject declare at the outset that they must not be understood to question the validity of the beliefs and practices they describe. One soon finds that this reserve has limits. The legends and practices of uncivilized peoples, and even of the Greeks and Egyptians, they do not for a moment profess to regard as possibly valid; nor do they bow very reverently before the tenets of Taoism, Buddhism, or Mohammedanism. It is the Christian doctrines and the fundamental doctrines of all religion which they refuse to judge. ‘The work of science is, they say, description, not the appreciation of values.

In this sense the present work is not scientific. It is entirely based upon research in the recognized authorities for each religion which is noticed, and the author is bold enough to claim that the material thus gathered is arranged more scientifically, for the purpose of deduction, than in nine out of ten of the academic works on the subject. But he does not consider himself bound by any law or custom of neutrality, and he does believe that the majority of readers are at least as deeply interested in the question of the truth of religion as in the question of the development of religious beliefs and practices. He is even convinced that the evolution of religion throws much light upon the validity of religion, and a, consideration of this may terminate the introductory chapter.

It is at once apparent that a complete belief in the evolution of religion is inconsistent with the formal teaching of every branch of the Christian Church > and the emphatic conviction of nine out of ten, if not forty-nine out of fifty, Christians. If Christianity — was evolved from pre-existing religious material, the Christian claim of revelation and supernatural action falls. If Christ was merely a man who by—if you please—his moral genius raised the religion of his time and country to a higher level, the official creed of the Christian Churches and the belief of the overwhelming majority of Christians are inaccurate. Now I doubt if one in ten of our modern authorities on the subject of comparative religion—F razer, Lang, Roth, Hartland, Crawley, Marett, Farnell, Tiele, Preuss, Reinach, Loisy, Marillier, King, Leuba, Brinton, Toy, Achelis, Roskoff, D’Alviella, Wundt, Réville, Jevons, and the innumerable writers on special religions—believes that there is anything revealed or supernatural in Christianity. Possibly the whole of the above writers with one exception would say that the doctrine of the “ uniquism ”— as my friend Bishop W. M. Brown puts it—of Christianity has been abandoned. It has, no doubt, been abandoned by the well-informed few in the Churches, but it is certainly still cherished by the overwhelming mass of the laity and the great majority of the clergy, higher and lower.

On that account it seems inadvisable to slur over this most material point of the evolutionary scheme; to imply, or timidly suggest, that the Christian religion is a natural branch of the great family of religions, but give the point so little prominence that the majority of readers will continue to cherish an illusion which the science of comparative religion entirely discredits. The claim of popular Christian writers on behalf of their religion is as obsolete and parochial as the claim, which many of them still press, that man’s mind was not evolved from the mind of a lower animal. The one is Just as decisively discredited by modern culture as the -other. And in an age which confronts such strenuous tasks as ours does, an age in which men must, if they would survive, substitute realities for phrases, it seems a pity to prolong the life of popular illusions by timid compromise or prudent evasiveness.

The plan of this work is therefore revealed. Its chief ambition is to throw further light on the origin of religion, and to make plainer to the general reader how all the historic religions, including Christianity, were evolved out of the cruder material of earlier religions. Within the limits which are imposed much of the work must be done sketchily.

There is not the least pretence of making an exhaustive study of each phase or aspect of religion, or each tribal or national embodiment of the religious sentiment. But special care will be given to the study of the earliest and most primitive traces or rudiments of religion, and to the evolution of Christianity in particular. The vast world of developing forms which hes between those two extremes will be treated only in so far as it is necessary in order to give the reader a synoptic view of the religions of the world as so many branches, in different stages of development, of one great tree.

Whether the result will afford the reader any positive light on the validity of religious beliefs may be left to his experience. Many people cannot survey this procession of religions through the ages without feeling that it is, in the words of Professor Sergi, “a pathological phenomenon,” a diseased growth parasitical upon man’s vitality. That impression cannot be sanctioned as a conviction until it is checked by a severe audit of the accounts of religion; an impartial estimation of the benefits it has conferred on man in strict relation to the energies and resources put at its disposal by man. ‘This kind of social bookkeeping cannot be attempted here. It belongs to history. Therefore I do not venture here to say whether this portentous phenomenon of religion, dawning in the mind of primitive man and growing until it fills and enthrals the world, has been worth while. Some day, when comparative religion and history have completed their research and cast off the restraints which a prevailing creed imposes upon them, the account will be made. I envy the social historian who will have before him the mighty ledger, representing a hundred thousand years of human life, at the close of which he can register the great verdict.

But if the use of religion is not here in question, the question of its truth is not entirely excluded. We shall find that in the early stages religious ideas and practices were unquestionably unsound in themselves and based upon unsound reasons. ‘The unsoundness of the reasoning of a Hottentot or a Kaffir does not, of course, bear any relation to the soundness or unsoundness of the reasoning of a Plato or an Augustine. But the study of the development suggests one material point. There came, comparatively soon, a stage in which a special caste of men—medicine-men, wizards, or priests— was set aside and supported for religious purposes. It became in time the vital interest of a powerful and rich organization in every country that the beliefs should be maintained; and through the ignorant and superstitious masses these priests were usually able to make life very uncomfortable for sceptics like Socrates, Christ, or Giordano Bruno.

In the circumstances the sceptically-minded cast about for reasons which would accommodate their consciences to the substance of the received traditions. They were ethically and socially useful. They inspired philanthropy. They met an eternal need of human nature. They soothed the afflicted.

They had a nucleus of truth. And so on. ‘Thus r did men speak in ancient Athens and Rome; and thus do they speak to-day. When the popular beliefs at length disappeared, these diplomatic considerations became the philosophic base of a new religion. In short, a niche for an idol had been constructed in the economy of human life, and there were powerful bodies interested in seeing that the niche was never left empty. There were also philanthropists. We remember how the wicked Heine explained the philosopher Kant’s progress from his early promise of Agnosticism to his later Theism. He had brought the idol down in ruins in his study. Then he found his aged servant Lampe weeping over the ruins of his god, and, from kindly feeling, he put the fragments together again and provided a new pedestal.