WE have now travelled far, apparently, from that primitive stage of god-making where the only known gods are the corpses, mummies, skulls, ghosts, or spirits of dead chieftains or dead friends and relations. The God of Christianity, in his fully-evolved form, especially as known to thinkers and theologians, is a being so vast, so abstract, so ubiquitous, so eternal, that he seems to have hardly and points of contact at all with the simple ancestral spirit or sacred stone from which in the last resort he appears to be descended. Yet even here, we must beware of being misled by too personal an outlook. While the higher minds in Christendom undoubtedly conceive of the Christian God in terms of Mansel and Martineau, the lower minds even among ourselves conceive of him in far simpler and more material fashions. A good deal of enquiry among ordinary English people of various classes, not always the poorest, convinces me that to large numbers of them God is envisaged as possessing a material human form, more or less gaseous in composition; that, in spite of the Thirty-nine Articles, he has body, parts, and passions; that he is usually pictured to the mind’s eye as about ten or twelve feet high, with head, hands, eyes and mouth, used to see with and speak with in human fashion; and that he sits on a throne, like a king that he is, surrounded by a visible court of angels and archangels. Italian art so invariably represents him, with a frankness unknown to Protestant Christendom. Instead of 410being in all places at once, pervading and underlying nature, the Deity is conceived of by most of his worshippers as having merely the power of annihilating space, and finding himself wherever he likes at a given moment. His omniscience and omnipotence are readily granted; but his abstractness and immateriality are not really grasped by one out of a thousand of his believers in Britain.

The fact is, so abstract a conception as the highest theological conception of God cannot be realised except symbolically, and then for a few moments only, in complete isolation. The moment God is definitely thought of in connexion with any cosmic activity, still more in connexion with any human need, he is inevitably thought of on human analogies, and more or less completely anthropomorphised in the brain of the believer. Being by origin an offshoot of the mind of man, a great deified human being, he retains necessarily still, for all save a few very mystical or ontological souls, the obvious marks of his ultimate descent from a ghost or spirit. Indeed, on the mental as opposed to the bodily side, he does so for us all; since even theologians freely ascribe to him such human feelings as love, affection, a sense of justice, a spirit of mercy, of truth, of wisdom: knowledge, will, the powers of intellect, all the essential and fundamental human faculties and emotions.

Thus, far as we seem to have travelled from our base in the most exalted concepts of God, we are nearer to it still than most of us imagine. Moreover, in spite of this height to which the highest minds have raised their idea of the Deity, as the creator, sustainer, and mover of the universe, every religion, however monotheistic, still continues to make new minor gods for itself out of the dead as they die, and to worship these gods with even more assiduous worship than it bestows upon the great God of Christendom or the great gods of the central pantheon. And the Christian religion makes such minor deities no less than all 411others. The fact is, the religious emotion takes its origin from the affection and regard felt for the dead by survivors, mingled with the hope and belief that they may be of some use or advantage, temporal or spiritual, to those who call upon them; and these primitive faiths and feelings remain so ingrained in the very core of humanity that even the most abstract of all religions, like the Protestant schism, cannot wholly choke them, while recrudescences of the original creed and custom spring up from time to time in the form of spiritualism, theosophy, and other vague types of simple ghost-worship.

Most advanced religions, however, and especially Christianity in its central, true, and main form of Catholicism, have found it necessary to keep renewing from time to time the stock of minor gods—here arbitrarily known as saints—much as the older religions found it always necessary from year to year to renew the foundation-gods, the corn and wine gods, and the other special deities of the manufactured order, by a constant supply of theanthropic victims. What I wish more particularly to point out here, however, is that the vast majority of places of worship all the world over are still erected, as at the very beginning, above the body of a dead man or woman; that the chief objects of worship in every shrine are still, as always, such cherished bodies of dead men and women; and that the primitive connexion of Religion with Death has never for a moment been practically severed in the greater part of the world,—not even in Protestant England and America.

Mr. William Simpson was one of the first persons to point out this curious underlying connexion between churches, temples, mosques, or topes, and a tomb or monument. He has proved his point in a very full manner, and I would refer the reader who wishes to pursue this branch of the subject at length to his interesting monographs. In this work, I will confine my attention mainly to the continued presence of this death-element in Christianity; but by way of illustration, I will preface my remarks 412by a few stray instances picked up at random from the neighbouring and interesting field of Islam.

There is no religion in all the world which professes to be more purely monotheistic in character than Mohammedanism. The unity of God, in the very strictest sense, is the one dogma round which the entire creed of Islam centres. More than any other cult, it represents itself as a distinct reaction against the polytheism and superstition of surrounding faiths. The isolation of Allah is its one great dogma. If, therefore, we find even in this most monotheistic of existing religious systems a large element of practically polytheistic survival—if we find that even here the Worship of the Dead remains, as a chief component in religious practice, if not in religious theory, we shall be fairly entitled to conclude, I think, that such constituents are indeed of the very essence of religious thinking, and we shall be greatly strengthened in the conclusions at which we previously arrived as to a belief in immortality or continued life of the dead being in fact the core and basis of worship and of deity.

Some eight or ten years since, when I first came practically into connexion with Islam in Algeria and Egypt, I was immediately struck by the wide prevalence among the Mahommedan population of forms of worship for which I was little prepared by anything I had previously read or heard as to the nature and practice of that exclusive and ostentatiously monotheistic faith. Two points, indeed, forcibly strike any visitor who for the first time has the opportunity of observing a Mahommedan community in its native surroundings. The first is the universal habit on the part of the women of visiting the cemeteries and mourning or praying over the graves of their relations on Friday, the sacred day of Islam. The second is the frequency of Koubbas, or little whitewashed mosque-tombs erected over the remains of Marabouts, fakeers, or local saints, which form the real centres for the religion and worship of every village. Islam, in practice, is a religion 413of pilgrimages to the tombs of the dead. In Algeria, every hillside is dotted over with these picturesque little whitewashed domes, each overshadowed by its sacred date-palm, each surrounded by its small walled enclosure or temenos of prickly pear or agave, and each attended by its local ministrant, who takes charge of the tomb and of the alms of the faithful. Holy body, sacred stone, tree, well, and priest—not an element of the original cult of the dead is lacking. Numerous pilgrimages are made to these koubbas by the devout: and on Friday evenings the little courtyards are almost invariably thronged by a crowd of eager and devoted worshippers. Within, the bones of the holy man lie preserved in a frame hung about with rosaries, pictures, and other oblations of his ardent disciples, exactly as in the case of Roman Catholic chapels. The saint, in fact, is quite as much an institution of monotheistic Islam as of any other religion with which I am practically acquainted.

These two peculiarities of the cult of Islam strike a stranger immediately on the most casual visit. When he comes to look at the matter more closely, however, he finds also that most of the larger mosques in the principal towns are themselves similarly built to contain and enshrine the bones of saintly personages, more or less revered in their immediate neighbourhood. Some of these are indeed so holy that their bones have been duplicated exactly like the wood of the true cross, and two tombs have been built in separate places where the whole or a portion of the supposed remains are said to be buried. I will only specify as instances of such holy tombs the sacred city of Kerouan in Tunisia, which ranks second to Mecca and Medina alone in the opinion of all devout western Mohammedans. Here, the most revered building is the shrine of “The Companion of the Prophet,” who lies within a catafalque covered with palls of black velvet and silver—as funereal a monument as is known to me anywhere. Close by stands the catafalque of an Indian saint while 414other holy tomb-mosques abound in the city. In Algiers town, the holiest place is similarly the mosque-tomb of Sidi Abd-er-Rahman, which contains the shrine and body of that saint, who died in 1471. Around him, so as to share his sacred burial-place (like the Egyptians who wished to be interred with Osiris), lie the bodies of several Deys and Pashas. Lights are kept constantly burning at the saint’s tomb, which is hung with variously-coloured drapery, after the old Semitic fashion, while banners and ostrich-eggs, the gifts of the faithful, dangle ostentatiously round it from the decorated ceiling. Still more sacred in its way is the venerable shrine of Sidi Okba near Biskra, one of the most ancient places of worship in the Mahommedan world. The tomb of the great saint stands in a chantry, screened off from the noble mosque which forms the ante-chamber, and is hung round with silk and other dainty offerings. On the front an inscription in very early Cufic characters informs us that “This is the tomb of Okba, son of Nafa: May Allah have mercy upon him.” The mosque is a famous place of pilgrimage, and a belief obtains that when the Sidi is rightly invoked, a certain minaret in its front will nod in acceptance of the chosen worshipper. I could multiply instances indefinitely, but refrain on purpose. All the chief mosques at Tlem莽en, Constantine, and the other leading North African towns similarly gather over the bodies of saints or marabouts, who are invoked in prayer, and to whom every act of worship is offered.

All over Islam we get such holy grave-mosques. The tomb of the Prophet at Medina heads the list: with the equally holy tomb of his daughter Fatima. Among the Shiahs, Ali’s grave at Nejef and Hoseyn’s grave at Kerbela are as sacred as that of the Prophet at Medina. The shrines of the Imams are much adored in Persia. The graves of the peers in India, the Ziarets of the fakeers in Afghanistan, show the same tendency. In Palestine, says Major 415Conder, worship at the tombs of local saints “represents the real religion of the peasant.”

I had originally intended, indeed, to include in this work a special chapter on these survivals in Islam, a vast number of which I have collected in various places; but my book has already swelled to so much larger dimensions than I had originally contemplated that I am compelled reluctantly to forego this disquisition.

One word, however, must be given to Egypt, where the cult of the dead was always so marked a feature in the developed religion, and where neither Christianity nor Islam has been able to obscure this primitive tendency. Nothing is more noticeable in the Nile Valley than the extraordinary way in which the habits and ideas as to burial and the preservation of the dead have survived in spite of the double and rapid alteration in religious theory. At Sak-karah and Thebes, one is familiar with the streets and houses of tombs, regularly laid out so as to form in the strictest sense a true Necropolis, or city of the dead. Just outside Cairo, on the edge of the desert, a precisely similar modern Necropolis exists to this day, regularly planned in streets and quarters, with the tomb of each family standing in its own courtyard or enclosure, and often very closely resembling the common round-roofed or domed Egyptian houses. In this town of dead bodies, every distinction of rank and wealth may now be observed. The rich are buried under splendid mausolea of great architectural pretensions; the poor occupy humble tombs just raised above the surface of the desert, and marked at head and foot with rough and simple Egyptian tombstones. Still, the entire aspect of such a cemetery is the aspect of a town. In northern climates, the dead sleep their last sleep under grassy little tumuli, wholly unlike the streets of a city: in Egypt, to this day, the dead occupy, as in life, whole lanes and alleys of eternal houses. Even the spirit which produced the Pyramids and the Tombs of the Kings is conspicuous in modern or mediaeval Cairo in 416the taste which begot those vast domed mosques known as the Tombs of the Khalifs and the Tombs of the Mamelooks. Whatever is biggest in the neighbourhood of ancient Memphis turns out on examination to be the last resting-place of a Dead Man, and a place of worship.

Almost every one of the great mosques of Cairo is either a tomb built for himself by a ruler—and this is the more frequent case—or else the holy shrine of some saint of Islam. It is characteristic of Egypt, however, where king and god have always been so closely combined, that while elsewhere the mosque is usually the prayer-tomb of a holy man, in Cairo it is usually the memorial-temple of a Sultan, an Emeer, a viceroy, or a Khedive. It is interesting to find, too, after all we have seen as to the special sanctity of the oracular head, that perhaps the holiest of all these mosques contains the head of Hoseyn, the grandson of the Prophet. A ceremonial washing is particularly mentioned in the story of its translation. The mosque of Sultan Hassan, with its splendid mausolem, is a peculiarly fine example of the temple-tombs of Cairo.

I will not linger any longer, however, in the precincts of Islam, further than to mention the significant fact that the great central object of worship for the Mahommedan world is the Kaaba at Mecca, which itself, as Mr. William Simpson long ago pointed out, bears obvious traces of being at once a tomb and a sacred altar-stone. Sir Richard Burton’s original sketch of this mystic object shows it as a square and undecorated temple-tomb, covered throughout with a tasselled black pall—a most funereal object—the so-called “sacred carpet.” It is, in point of fact, a simple catafalque. As the Kaaba was adopted direct by Mohammad from the early Semitic heathenism of Arabia, and as it must always have been treated with the same respect, I do not think we can avoid the obvious conclusion that this very ancient tomb has been funereally draped in the self-same manner, like those of Biskra, Algiers, and Kerouan, from the time of its first erection. 417This case thus throws light on the draping of the ashera, as do also the many-coloured draperies and hangings of saints’ catafalques in Algeria and Tunis.

Nor can I resist a passing mention of the Moharram festival, which is said to be the commemoration of the death of Hoseyn, the son of Ali (whose holy head is preserved at Cairo). This is a rude piece of acting, in which the events supposed to be connected with the death of Hoseyn are graphically represented; and it ends with a sacred Adonis-like or Osiris-like procession, in which the body of the saint is carried and mourned over. The funeral is the grand part of the performance; catafalques are constructed for the holy corpse, covered with green and gold tinsel—the green being obviously a last reminiscence of the god of vegetation. In Bombay, after the dead body and shrine have been carried through the streets amid weeping and wailing, they are finally thrown into the sea, like King Carnival. I think we need hardly doubt that here we have an evanescent relic of the rites of the corn-god, ending in a rain-charm, and very closely resembling those of Adonis and Osiris.

But if in Islam the great objects of worship are the Kaaba tomb at Mecca and the Tomb of the Prophet at Medina, so the most holy spot in the world for Christendom is—the Holy Sepulchre. It was for possession of that most sacred place of pilgrimage that Christians fought Moslems through the middle ages; and it is there that while faith in the human Christ was strong and vigorous the vast majority of the most meritorious pilgrimages continued to be directed. To worship at the tomb of the risen Redeemer was the highest hope of the devout medi忙val Christian. Imitations of the Holy Sepulchre occur in abundance all over Europe: one exists at S. Stefano in Bologna; another, due to the genius of Alberti, is well known in the Ruccellai chapel at Florence. I need hardly recall the Sacro Monte at Varallo.

For the most part, however, in Christendom, and especially 418in those parts of Christendom remote from Palestine, men contented themselves with nearer and more domestic saints. From a very early date we see in the catacombs the growth of this practice of offering up prayer by (or to) the bodies of the Dead who slept in Christ. A chapel or capella, as Dean Burgon has pointed out, meant originally an arched sepulchre in the walls of the catacombs, at which prayer was afterwards habitually made: and above-ground chapels were modelled, later on, upon the pattern of these ancient underground shrines. I have alluded briefly in my second chapter to the probable origin of the cruciform church from two galleries of the catacombs crossing one another at right angles; the High Altar stands there over the body or relics of a Dead Saint; and the chapels represent other minor tombs grouped like niches in the catacombs around it. A chapel is thus, as Mr. Herbert Spencer phrases it, “a tomb within a tomb”; and a great cathedral is a serried set of such cumulative tombs, one built beside the other. Sometimes the chapels are actual graves, sometimes they are cenotaphs; but the connexion with death is always equally evident. On this subject, I would refer the reader again to Mr. Spencer’s pages.

So long as Christianity was proscribed at Rome and throughout the empire, the worship of the dead must have gone on only silently, and must have centred in the catacombs or by the graves of saints and martyrs—the last-named being practically mere Christian successors of the willing victims of earlier religions. “To be counted worthy to suffer” was the heart’s desire of every earnest Christian—as it still is among fresh and living sects like the Salvation Army; and the creed of self-sacrifice, whose very name betrays its human-victim origin, was all but universal. When Christianity had triumphed, however, and gained not only official recognition but official honour, the cult of the martyrs and the other faithful dead became with Christian Rome a perfect passion. The Holy Innocents, 419St. Stephen Protomartyr, the nameless martyrs of the Ten Persecutions, together with Poly carp, Vivia Perp茅tua, F茅licitas, Ignatius and all the rest, came to receive from the church a form of veneration which only the nice distinctions of the theological mind could enable us to discriminate from actual worship. The great procession of the slain for Christ in the mosaics of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo at Ravenna gives a good comprehensive list of the more important of these earliest saints (at least for Aryan worshippers) headed by St. Martin, St. Clement, St. Justin, St. Lawrence, and St. Hippolytus. Later on came the more mythical and poetic figures, derived apparently from heathen gods—St. Catharine, St. Barbara, St. George, St. Christopher. These form as they go a perfect new pantheon, circling round the figures of Christ himself, and his mother the Madonna, who grows quickly in turn, by absorption of Isis, Astarte, and Artemis, into the Queen of Heaven.

The love-feasts or agapo of the early Christians were usually held, in the catacombs or elsewhere, above the bodies of the martyrs. Subsequently, the remains of the sainted dead were transferred to lordly churches without, like Sant’ Agnese and San Paolo, where they were deposited under the altar or sacred stone thus consecrated, from whose top the body and blood of Christ was distributed in the Eucharist. As early as the fourth century, we know that no church was complete without some such relic; and the passion for martyrs spread so greatly from that period onward that at one time no less than 2300 corpses of holy men together were buried at S. Prassede. It is only in Rome itself that the full importance of this martyr-worship can now be sufficiently understood, or the large part which it played in the development of Christianity adequately recognised. Perhaps the easiest way for the Protestant reader to put himself in touch with this side of the subject is to peruse the very interesting and graphic 420account given in the second volume of Mrs. Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art.

I have room for a few illustrative examples only.

When St. Ambrose founded his new church at Milan, he wished to consecrate it with some holy relics. In a vision, he beheld two young men in shining clothes, and it was revealed to him that these were holy martyrs whose bodies lay near the spot where he lived in the city. He dug for them, accordingly, and found two bodies, which proved to be those of two saints, Gervasius and Protasius, who had suffered for the faith in the reign of Nero. They were installed in the new basilica Ambrose had built at Milan. Churches in their honour now exist all over Christendom, the best known being those at Venice and Paris.

The body of St. Agnes, saint and martyr, who is always represented with that familiar emblem, the lamb which she duplicates, lies in a sarcophagus under the High Altar of Sant’ Agnese beyond the Porta Pia, where a basilica was erected over the remains by Constantine the Great, only a few years after the martyrdom of the saint. The body of St. Cecilia lies similarly in the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. In this last-named case, the original house where Cecilia was put to death is said to have been consecrated as a place of worship, after the very early savage fashion, the room where she suffered possessing especial sanctity. Pope Symmachus held a council there in the year 500. This earliest church having fallen into ruins during the troubles of the barbarians, Pope Paschal I., the great patron of relic-hunting, built a new one in honour of the saint in the ninth century. While engaged in the work, he had a dream (of a common pattern), when Cecilia appeared to him and showed him the place in which she lay buried. Search was made, and the body was found in the catacombs of St. Calixtus, wrapped in a shroud of gold tissue, while at her feet lay a linen cloth dipped in the sacred blood of her martyrdom. Near her were deposited the remains of Valerian, Tiburtius, and Maximus, 421all of whom are more or less mixed up in her legend. The body was removed to the existing church, the little room where the saint died being preserved as a chapel. In the sixteenth century, the sacred building was again repaired and restored in the atrocious taste of the time; and the sarcophagus was opened before the eyes of several prelates, including Cardinal Baronius. The body was found entire, and was then replaced in the silver shrine in which it still reposes. Almost every church in Rome has thus its entire body of a patron saint, oftenest a martyr of the early persecutions.

In many similar cases, immense importance is attached to the fact that the body remains, as the phrase goes, “unco............