Religions, ‘working hypotheses’—Newman’s illative sense—Origins of religions—Ghosts and spirits—Fetishes—Nature-worship—Solar myths—Planets—Evolution of nature-worship—Polytheism, pantheism, and theism—Evolution of monotheism in the Old Testament—Evolution of morality—Natural law and miracle—Evidence for miracles—Insufficiency of evidence—Absence of intelligent design—Agnosticism—Origin of evil—Can only be explained by polarity—Optimism and pessimism—Jesus, the Christian Ormuzd—Christianity without miracles. Having thus, I may hope, given the reader some precise ideas of what are the boundaries and conditions of human knowledge, we may proceed to consider their application to the highest subjects, religions and philosophies.
In the introductory chapter of this work I have said that all religions are in effect ‘working hypotheses,’ by which men seek to reconcile the highest aspirations of their nature with the facts of the universe, and bring the whole into some harmonious concordance. I said so for the following reasons. In a discussion at the Metaphysical Society on the uniformity of laws of nature, recorded in the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ Huxley is represented as saying that he considered this uniformity, not as an axiomatic truth like the first postulates of geometry, but as a ‘working hypothesis’; adding, however, that it was an hypothesis which had never been[147] known to fail. To this some distinguished advocates of Catholic theology replied, that their conviction was of a higher nature, for their belief in God was a final truth which was the basis of their whole intellectual and moral nature, and which it was irrational to question. This is in effect Cardinal Newman’s celebrated argument of an ‘illative sense,’ based on a complete assent of all the faculties, and which was therefore a higher authority than any conclusions of science. The answer is obvious, that complete assent, so far from being a test of truth, is, on the contrary, almost always a proof that truth has not been attained, owing either to erroneous assumptions as to the premises, or to the omission of important factors in the solution of the problem. To give an instance, I suppose there could not be a stronger case of complete assent than that of the Inquisitors who condemned the theories of Galileo. They had in support of the proposition that the sun revolved round the earth the testimony of the senses, the universal belief of mankind in all ages, the direct statement of inspired Scripture, the authority of the infallible Church. Was all this to be set aside because some ‘sophist vainly mad with dubious lore’ told them, on grounds of some new-fangled so-called science, that the earth revolved round its axis and round the sun? ‘No; let us stamp out a heresy so contrary to our “illative sense,” and so fatal to all the most certain and cherished beliefs of the Christian world, to the inspiration of the Word of God, and to the authority of His Church.’ ‘E pur si muove,’ and yet the earth really did move; and the verdict of fact was that Galileo and science were right, and the Church and the illative sense wrong.
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In truth the distinction between the conclusions of science and those of religious creeds might be more properly expressed by saying that the former are ‘working hypotheses’ which never fail, while the latter are ‘working hypotheses’ which frequently fail. Thus, the fundamental hypothesis of Cardinal Newman and his school of a one infinite and eternal personal Deity, who regulates the course of events by frequent miraculous interpositions, so far from being a necessary and axiomatic truth, has never appeared so to the immense majority of the human race: and even at the present day, in civilised and so-called Christian countries, its principal advocates complain that ninety-nine out of every hundred practically ignore it. It is not so with the uniformity of the laws of nature. No pal?olithic savage ever hesitated about putting one foot after another in chase of a mammoth from a fear that his working hypothesis of uniform law might fail, the support of the solid earth give way, and with his next step he might find himself toppling over into the abyss of an infinite vacuum. In like manner Greeks and Romans, Indians and Chinese, monotheists, polytheists, pantheists, Jews and Buddhists, Christians and Mahometans, all use standard weights in their daily transactions without any misgivings that the law of gravity may turn out not to be uniform. But religions theories vary from time to time and from place to place, and we can in a great many cases trace their origins and developments like those of other political and social organisms.
To trace their origins we must, as in the case of social institutions, look first at the ideas prevailing among those savage and barbarous races who are the best[149] representatives of our early progenitors; and secondly at historical records. In the first case we find the earliest rudiments of religious ideas in the universal belief in ghosts and spirits. Every man is conceived of as being a double of himself, and as having a sort of shadowy self, which comes and goes in sleep or trance, and finally takes leave of the body, at death, to continue its existence as a ghost. The air is thus peopled with an immense number of ghosts who continue very much their ordinary existence, haunt their accustomed abodes, and retain their living powers and attributes, which are exerted generally with a malevolent desire to injure and annoy. Hence among savage races, and by survival even among primitive nations of the present day, we find the most curious devices to cheat or frighten away the ghost, so that he may not return to the house in which he died. Thus, the corpse is carried out, not by the door, but by a hole made for the purpose in the wall, which is afterwards built up, a custom which prevails with a number of widely separated races—Greenlanders, Hottentots, Algonquins, and Fijians; and the practice even survives among more civilised nations, such as the Chinese, Siamese, and Thibetans; nor is it wholly extinct in some of the primitive parts of Europe.
This idea obviously led to the practice of constructing tents or houses for the ghosts to live in, and of depositing with them articles of food and weapons to be used in their ghostly existence. In the case of great chiefs, not only their arms and ornaments are deposited, but their horses, slaves, and wives were sacrificed and buried with them, so that they might enter spirit-land with an appropriate retinue. The early Egyptian tombs were as nearly as possible facsimiles of the house in[150] which the deceased had lived, with pictures of his geese, oxen, and other possessions painted on the walls, evidently under the idea that the ghosts of these objects would minister to the wants and please the fancy of the human ghost whose eternal dwelling was in the tomb where his mummy was deposited.
Another development of the belief in spirits is that of fetish-worship, in which superstitious reverence is paid to some stock or stone, tree or animal, in which a mysterious influence is supposed to reside, probably owing to its being the chosen abode of some powerful spirit. This is common among the negro races, and it takes a curious development among many races of American Indians, where the tribe is distinguished by the totem, or badge of some particular animal, such as the bear, the tortoise, or the hare, which is in some way supposed to be the patron spirit of the clan, and often the progenitor from whom they are descended. This idea is so rooted that intermarriage between men and women who have the same totem is prohibited as a sort of incest, and the daughter of a bear-mother must seek for a husband among the sons of the deer or fox. Possibly a vestige of the survival of this idea may be traced in the coat-of-arms of the Sutherland family, and the wild cat may have been the totem of the Clan Chattan, while the oak tree was that of the Clan Quoich, with whom they fought on the Inch of Perth. Be this as it may, it is clearly a most ancient and widespread idea, and prevails from Greenland to Australia; while it evidently formed the oldest element of the prehistoric religion of Egypt, where each separate province had its peculiar sacred animal, worshipped by the populace in one nome, and detested in the neighbouring one.
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By far the earliest traces of anything resembling religious ideas are those found in burying-places of the neolithic period. It is evident that at this remote period ideas prevailed respecting ghost or spirit life and a future existence very similar to those of modern savages. They placed weapons and implements in the graves of the dead, and not infrequently sacrificed human victims, and held cannibal feasts. Whether this was done in the far more remote pal?olithic era is uncertain, for very few undoubted burials of this period have been discovered, and those few have frequently been used again for later interments. We can only draw a negative inference from the absence of idols which are so abundant in the prehistoric abodes explored by Professor Schliemann, among the very numerous carvings and drawings found in the caves of the reindeer period in France and Germany, that the religion of the pal?olithic men, if they had any, had not reached the stage when spirits or deities were represented by images.
For the first traces therefore of anything like what is now understood by the term religion, we must look beyond the vague superstitions of savages, at the historical records of civilised nations. As civilisation advanced population multiplied, and rude tribes of hunters were amalgamated into agricultural communities and powerful empires, in which a leisured and cultured class arose, to whom the old superstitions were no longer sufficient. They had to enlarge their ‘working hypothesis’ from the worship of stocks and stones and fear of ghosts, to take in a multitude of new facts and ideas, and specially those relating to natural phenomena which had roused their curiosity, or become important to them as matters of practical utility. The establishment[152] of an hereditary caste of priests accelerated this evolution of religious ideas, and from time to time recorded its progress. The oldest of such records are those of Egypt and Chald?a, where the fertility of alluvial valleys watered by great rivers had led to the earliest development of a high civilisation. The records also of the Chinese, Hindoos, Persians, and other nations take us a long way back towards the origins of religions.
In all cases we find them identical with the first origins of science, and taking the form of attempted explanations of natural phenomena, by the theory of deified objects and powers of nature. In the Vedas we see this in the simplest form, where the gods are simply personifications of the heavens, earth, sun, moon, dawn, and so forth; and where we should say the red glow of morning announces the rising of the sun, they express it that Aurora blushes at the approach of her lover the mighty Sun-god. It is very interesting to observe how the old Chald?an legend of the creation of the world has been modified in the far later Jewish edition of it in Genesis, to adapt it to monotheistic ideas. The Chald?an legend begins, like that of Genesis, with an ‘earth without form and void,’ and darkness on the chaotic deep. In each legend the Spirit of God, called Absu in the Chald?an, moves on the face of the waters, and they are gathered together and separated from the land. But here a difference begins: in the original Chald?an legend ‘the great gods were then made; the gods Lakman and Lakmana caused themselves to come forth; the gods Assur and Kesar were made; the gods Anu, Bel, and Hea were born.’
The appearance of the gods Lakman and Lakmana[153] was the primitive mode of expressing the same idea as that which is expressed in Genesis by saying that God created the firmament separating the heaven above from the earth beneath; Assur and Kesar mean the same thing as the hosts of heaven and the earth; the god Bel is the sun, and so forth. It is evident that the first attempts to explain the phenomena of nature originated in the idea that motion and power implied life, personality, and conscious will; and therefore that the earth, sky, sun, moon, and other grand and striking phenomena, must be regarded as separate gods.
As culture advanced astronomy became more and more prominent in these early religions, and solar myths became a principal part of their mythologies, while astrology, or the influence of planets and stars on human affairs, became an important part of practical life. The Chald?an legend referred to contains a mass of astronomical knowledge, which in the Genesis edition is reduced to ‘He made the stars also.’ It describes how the constellations were assigned their forms and names, the twelve signs of the zodiac established, the year divided into twelve months, the equinoxes determined, and the seasons set their bounds. Also how the moon was made to regulate the months by its disc, ‘horns shining forth to lighten the heavens, which on the seventh day approaches a circle.’
In the still older Egyptian pyramids we find proof of the long previous existence of great astronomical knowledge and refined methods of observation, for these buildings, which are at once the largest and the oldest in the world, are laid down so exactly in a meridian line, and with such a close approximation to the true latitude, as would have otherwise been impossible. In[154] fact there is every reason to believe that while they were constructed as tombs for kings, they were at the same time intended for national observatories, for the arrangement of the internal passages as such is to make the Great Pyramid serve the purpose of a telescope, equatorially mounted, and showing the transits of stars and planets over the meridian, by reference to a reflected image of what was then the polar star, a knowledge of which was essential for accurate calculation of the calendar and seasons, for fixing the proper date of religious ceremonies, and very probably for astrological purposes.
The prevalence of these solar and astronomical myths among a number of different nations separated by wide intervals of space and time is very remarkable. Egyptians, Indians, Babylonians, Chinese, Mexicans, and Peruvians had myths which were strangely similar, indeed almost identical, based on the sun’s annual passage through the constellations of the zodiac. His apparent decline and death as he approached the winter solstice, and his return to life when he had passed it, gave rise to myths of the murder of the Sun-god by some fierce wild boar, or treacherous enemy, and of his triumphant resurrection in renewed glory. Hence, also, the passage of the winter solstice was a season of general rejoicing and festivity, traces of which survive when the sirloin and turkey smoke upon the hospitable tables of modern Christmas. One remarkable myth had a very universal acceptance, that of the birth of the infant Sun-god from a virgin mother. It appears to have originated from the period, some 6,450 years ago, when the sun, which now rises at the winter solstice in the constellation of Sagittarius, rose in that of Pisces, with the constellation of the Virgin, with upraised arms[155] marked by five stars, setting in the north-west. Anyhow, this myth of an infant god born of a virgin mother holds a prominent place in the religions of Egypt, India, China, Chald?a, Greece, Rome, Siam, Mexico, Peru, and other nations. The resemblances are often so close that the first Jesuit missionaries to China found that their account of the miraculous conception of Christ had been anticipated by that of Fuh-ke, born 3468 b.c.; and if an ancient priest of Thebes or Heliopolis could be restored to life and taken to the Gallery of Dresden, he would see in Raffaelle’s Madonna di San Sisto what he would consider to be an admirable representation of Horus in the arms of Isis.
The planets also, still more mysterious in their movements than the sun, and therefore still more endowed with human-like faculties of life, power, and purpose, were from an early period believed to exercise an influence on human affairs. Of the universality of this belief we find traces in the names of the days of the week, which are so generally taken from the sun, moon, and five visible planets—Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn—to whom special days were dedicated. If every seventh day is a day of rest, it was originally so because it was thought unlucky to undertake any work on the Sabbath, Saturday, or day of the gloomy and malignant Saturn.
As time rolled on and civilisation advanced, this simple nature-worship and deification of astronomical phenomena developed into larger and more complex conceptions. Following different lines of evolution, polytheism, pantheism and monotheism began to emerge as religious systems with definite creeds, rituals, and sacred books. These lines seem to have been determined[156] a good deal by the genius of the race in which the religious development took place. The impressions made on the human mind by the surrounding universe are very various. Suppose ourselves looking up at the heavens on a clear starry night, what will be the impression? To one, that of awe and reverence, and he will feel crushed, as it were, into nothingness, in the presence of such a sublime manifestation of majesty and glory. Another, of more ?sthetic nature, will be charmed by the beauty of the spectacle, and tempted to assign life to it, and to personify and dramatise its incidents. A third, of a scientific turn, will above all things wish to understand it.
Thus we find the impression of awe preponderating among the Semitic races generally; and as in their political relations, so in their religious conceptions, we find them prone to prostrate themselves before despotic power. With the Greeks again the ?sthetic idea almost swallowed up the others, and the old astronomical myths blossomed into a perfect flower-bed of poetical and fanciful legends. The Chinese never got beyond a simple pantheism, which looked upon the universe as being alive, and saw nothing behind it; while the more metaphysical and physically feebler races of Hindoos and Buddhists refined their pantheism into a system of illusion, in which their own existence and the surrounding universe were literally
such stuff
As dreams are made on,
and to be ‘rounded with a sleep’ was the final consummation devoutly to be desired.
Monotheism developed itself later, partly from the[157] feeling of the unity of nature forcing itself on the more philosophical minds; partly from that feeling of reverence and awe in presence of the Unknown which swallowed up other conceptions; and partly, in the earlier stages, from the feeling which exalted the local god of the tribe or nation, first into a supremacy over other gods, and finally into sole supremacy, degrading all other gods into the category of dumb idols made by human hands. In the Old Testament we can trace the development of this latter idea in its successive stages. Until the later days of the Jewish monarchy it is evident that the Jews never doubted the existence of other gods; and their allegiance oscillated between Jehovah and the heathen deities symbolised by the golden calf, worshipped in high places, and contending for the mastership in the rival sacrifices of Elijah and the priests of Baal. But the prophetic element gradually introduced higher ideas, and in the reigns of Hezekiah and Josiah the worship of Jehovah as the sole God became the religion of the State; and old legends and documents were re-edited in this sense in the sacred book, which was discovered and published for the first time in the reign of the latter king. The subsequent misfortunes of the nation, their captivity and contact with other religions in Babylonia, strengthened this monotheism into an ardent, passionate national faith, as it has continued to be with this remarkable people up to the present day. Christianity and Mahometanism, children of Judaism, have spread this form of faith over a great part of the civilised world; and of the three theories of polytheism, pantheism, and monotheism, it may be said that only the two latter survive.
Polytheism was bound to perish first, for slow as[158] the advance of science was, the uniformity of most of the phenomena, which had been attributed to so many separate gods, could not fail to make an impression; and as ideas of morality came slowly and tardily to be evolved as an element of religion, the cruel rites and scandalous fables which so generally accompanied polytheistic religions became shocking to an awakening conscience.
It is worthy of remark that this element of morality, which has now gone so far towards swallowing up the others, was the latest to appear. Even in the Jewish conception Jehovah was for a long time just as often cruel, jealous, and capricious, as just and merciful; and St. Paul’s doctrine that because God had the power to do as He liked, He was warranted in creating a large portion of the human race as ‘vessels of wrath,’ predestined to eternal punishment, is as revolting to the modern conscience as any sacrifice to Beelzebub or Moloch. If we wish to see how little necessary connection there is between morality and monotheism, we have only to look at Mahometanism, which, in its extremer forms, may be called monotheism run mad.
The Wahabite reformer, we are told by Palgrave, preached that there were only two deadly sins: paying divine honours to any creature of Allah’s, and smoking tobacco; and that murder, adultery, and such like trivial matters, were minor offences which a merciful Allah would condone. He held also that of the whole inhabitants of the world all would surely be damned, except one out of the seventy-two sects of Mahometans, who held the true faith and dwelt in the district of Riad. This illustrates the insane extremes into which all human speculations run, if a single idea—in this[159] case that of awe, reverence, and abject submission in presence of an almighty power—is allowed to run its course without check and obtain undue preponderance.
Apart from these extreme instances we may say that the two religious theories which have survived to the present day in the struggle for existence, are monotheism and pantheism. Pantheism is, in the main, the creed of half the human race—of the teeming millions of India, China, Japan, Ceylon, Thibet, Siam, and Burmah. How deeply it is rooted in their conceptions was very forcibly impressed on me in a conversation I had on board one of the P. and O. steamers with an English missionary returning from China. He told me how he had dined one evening with an intelligent Chinese merchant, and after dinner they walked in the garden discussing religious subjects, and he tried to impress on his host the first principles of the Christian religion. It was a starlight night, and for sole reply the Chinese gentleman stretched his hand to the heavens and said, ‘Do you mean to tell me all that is dead—do you take me for a fool?’ The Chinese ‘illative sense’ was as absolute in its conclusions for pantheism, as that of Cardinal Newman for theism. In fact pantheism, though not the whole truth, and almost as inconsistent as polytheism with the real facts of the universe as disclosed by science, has a certain poetical truth in it, to which chords of human emotion vibrate responsively, and is perhaps not so widely in error as some of the extreme theories which treat matter as something base and brutal. Wordsworth’s noble lines—
A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
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And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion, and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things—
are pure pantheism, and yet we cannot but feel ourselves to a great extent in sympathy with them.
So also the well-known lines of a greater than Wordsworth, Shakespeare, are pure Buddhism:
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
No one can read these lines without feeling that the Buddhist conception is as far as possible from being a trivial or vulgar one, and that the triviality and vulgarity are rather with those who cannot, up to a certain point, understand and sympathise with it.
The religions of the East are very philosophical, and have kept very clearly in view this fundamental distinction between the knowable and the unknowable. In the ‘Century Magazine’ of July 1886, there is an interesting account of a conversation between an American missionary and the Bozu or chief priest of the great temple of the Shin Sect of Buddhists at Kioto in Japan. The priest was an intelligent and highly educated gentleman who spoke English, and was well versed in the speculations of modern philosophy. The conversation turned on theological questions, and when pressed by the argument for a Divine Creator, from design shown in the universe implying intelligence, he replied:—
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‘No; God cannot make matter. Only artificial things show design, only things which can be made. What do you mean by saying a thing shows design? You only mean that by trying a man could make it.’
And he proceeded to illustrate it thus:—
‘You show me a gold ring; the ring shows design, but not the gold; gold is an ultimate element, which can neither be made nor destroyed. When men can make a world, then they can prove that this one shows design, for the only way they know of design is by what they make.’
He went on to argue for the immortality of the soul, and as a consequence for its pre-existence and the transmigration of souls, from the conservation of energy; and concluded his argument against the creation and government of the world by a comprehensible, anthropomorphic Creator, by adducing the existence of evil.
‘There is a sickness,’ he said, ‘called fever and ague; what do you call the medicine to cure that?’
‘Quinine.’
‘Yes; now we have not found that long; a good God would not have let so many people suffer if He could have given them that. A man found it by chance. The sickness and suffering in this life are for wrong done in another life.’
We may not accept this unproved theory of the cause of sickness and suffering, but it is very interesting to find that candid and intelligent minds, brought up in a society and religious beliefs so widely different from our own, have arrived practically at the same conclusions as John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and other leaders of advanced thought in modern Europe, and drawn almost identically the same line between that[162] which is knowable and that which is unknowable by the human mind.
But, however large-minded we may become in seeing the good in other forms of creed, we English of the nineteenth century are not going to turn either pantheists or Buddhists, and practically the contest of the present day is between the supernatural or miraculous, and the natural or scientific, hypotheses.
According to the former the operations of the universe are carried on to a considerable extent by what may be called secondary interferences of a supernatural being, who with will, intelligence, and design, like human though vastly superior, frequently interposes to alter the course of events and bring about something which natural law would not have brought about. The other hypothesis cannot be stated better than in Bishop Temple’s words, that the Great First Cause created things so perfect from the first, that no such secondary interferences have ever been necessary, and everything has been and is evolved from the primary atoms and energies in a necessary and invariable succession. The supernatural and the natural theories of the universe are thus brought into direct antagonism.
For the supernatural theory it must be conceded that it is quite conceivable, as is proved by the fact that it has been the almost universal conception of mankind for ages, and remains so still for the greater number. It is, as I have said, the inevitable first conception when men began to reflect on the phenomena of the universe, and to reason from effects to causes. I have always thought that Hume went too far in condemning miracles as absolutely incredible a priori. It is a question of[163] evidence. A priori, I can conceive that the true explanation of the universe might have been natural law, as the general rule, supplemented by miracles; just as readily as that it is law always, and miracle never. The verdict must be decided by the weight of evidence. The two theories must be called, face to face, before the tribunal of fact, and its decision must be respected. This is exactly what has been going on for the last two centuries, and specially for the last half century, and the record of decisions is now a very ample one. In every single instance law has carried the day against miracle.
Instance after instance has occurred in which phenomena which in former ages were attributed without hesitation to supernatural agencies have been conclusively proved to be due to natural laws. Take the obvious instance of thunder. When Horace wrote:—
Jam satis terris nivis, atque dir?
Grandinis misit Pater, et rubente
Dextera sacras jaculatus arces
Terruit urbem,
he wrote to a public to whom it was an undoubted article of faith that thunder and lightning, hail and snowstorms, came direct from the Father of the gods in the sky. Even to a late period this was the general faith, and the prayers in our rubric for rain or fine weather remain as a survival of the belief that these things, when unusual or in excess, are supernatural manifestations. But Benjamin Franklin said, ‘No, there is nothing supernatural about lightning. I will bring it down from the clouds and manufacture it by turning a wheel.’ Appeal being made to fact, the verdict is that Franklin was right, and that lightning-conductors protect ships and houses better than prayers or incantations.[164] Again, when Galileo and the Church joined issue as to whether the earth was round or flat, inspiration and authority were cited in vain for the received theory; fact said it was round, and it was proved to be so by men sailing round it. The law of gravity was considered a very dangerous heresy, and for a long time pious divines held out against its conclusions, and contended that it was no better than atheism to doubt that comets were signs of God’s anger sent to warn a sinful world. But Halley calculated the time of his comet’s return according to the laws of gravity, and appeal being made to fact, the comet returned true to time.
This has occurred so often that few are left who doubt the universal prevalence of law in the material universe, where former generations saw miracles at every turn. Nor is the defeat of miracle less conspicuous in the spiritual world. Where former ages and rude races saw, and still see, possession by evil spirits, modern doctors see fevers, epilepsies, or insanity. Once more appeal being made to fact, the old medicine-men administered incantations, the new ones quinine—which cure the most patients?
In like manner demonology and witchcraft, with all their train of cruelties and horrors, once universally believed even by men like Justice Hale, have passed into oblivion as completely as the Lami?, Phorkyads, and oth............