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408 Ionian revolt and the burning of Sardis—events which led up to the Persian attacks on Greece; Book VI describes the punishment of the Ionian cities and the first invasion, ending with the glorious victory of Marathon; and the remaining books record the great invasion of Xerxes. Herodotus's inspiration came largely, no doubt, from the time in which he lived. He was born early in the fifth century, and so was of the next generation to those who took part in the Persian struggle. He must have known and talked with many men who had fought at Marathon and Salamis. His own native city, Halicarnassus in Caria, was subject to Persia, so that he must early have learned to know and to fear the Persian power. Fate and inclination seem to have combined to make him a traveler. He was twice exiled from his native city, and was for many years "a man without a country," until at last he obtained citizenship in the town of Thurii in southern Italy, a sort of international colony which had been established by the Athenians in 443 B. C. on the site of the old city of Sybaris. He certainly spent some time in Athens, where he enjoyed the friendship of Sophocles, and doubtless of others of that brilliant group of writers and artists whose works have made the "Age of Pericles" a synonym for the "great age" in Greek literature and art. There are traditions that he gave public readings at Athens, Olympia, Corinth, and Thebes; and he speaks with first-hand knowledge of many other places in Greece.

THE RANGE AND PURPOSE OF HIS TRAVELS

But the journeyings of Herodotus were not confined to Greece and its immediate neighborhood. From his own statements we learn that he had traveled through the Persian Empire to Babylon, and even to distant Susa and Ecbatana; had visited Egypt and gone up the Nile as far as Elephantine; had gone by sea to Tyre and to Libya; and had made a journey to the Black Sea, visiting the Crimea and the land of the Colchians. He seems also to have traveled through the interior of Asia Minor and down the Syrian coast to the borders of Egypt.


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Rh The purpose of these travels presents an interesting problem. The simplest and most natural supposition would be that they were undertaken simply as a means of preparation for writing the History. But many other theories are possible. It has been thought that Herodotus was a merchant and that his journeys were primarily business undertakings. Against this it may be urged that the History shows no evidence of a commercial point of view, and that Herodotus speaks of merchants as he speaks of many other classes, with no suggestion of special interest. Again, it has been maintained that the journeys were made simply to collect evidence about foreign lands, with no direct reference to the History. Those who hold this theory believe that Herodotus was a professional reciter, like the rhapsodes who recited the Homeric poems, only that he took as his subject, not the great events of the heroic age, but the description of distant countries and their inhabitants—that he was, in short, a sort of ancient Stoddard or Burton Holmes. To such a belief the tradition that he read parts of his work at different places in Greece and the amount of space devoted to the aspect of foreign countries and the ways of foreign peoples in the History itself lend a certain amount of color. Finally, it is possible that some of the journeys had a political significance. Most of the countries which Herodotus visited were regions of which a knowledge was of great importance to the Greek statesmen of the fifth century, especially to Pericles, with his well-known scheme for founding an Athenian Empire, and it is pointed out that the large sum of ten talents (over $10,000) which Herodotus is said to have received from the Athenian Assembly can hardly have been paid simply for a series of readings, but must have been a reward for political services. All these theories suggest interesting possibilities, but none of them can be proved. Herodotus himself merely states that his History was written "that the deeds of men may not be forgotten, and that the great and wondrous works of Greek and barbarian may not lose their name." In any case, the fact remains that he did at last put his materials into the form in which we have them and thus established his fame as the first writer of history.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text: Folk-Lore/Volume 2/The Legend of the Grail, 1


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410 THE VERACITY OF HERODOTUS

The fitness of Herodotus for the task that he undertook is another question which has been vigorously debated. Even in antiquity the History was violently assailed. Plutarch wrote an essay "On the Malignity of Herodotus," and a late grammarian, Aelius Harpocration, is said to have written a book entitled "The Lies in the History of Herodotus." In modern times, the judgments passed upon the work have often been severe, and even the greatest admirers of the historian are forced to admit that it shows many serious defects. Like most of his contemporaries, Herodotus knew no language but his own, and he was therefore forced to rely on interpreters or on natives who spoke Greek. He himself is perfectly frank about the matter, and usually tells the source of his information. "This is what the Persians say," "Thus the priests of the Egyptians told me," are types of expressions which recur again and again. Even when Greek matters are involved, he seems usually to have relied on oral tradition, rather than on documentary evidence; he rarely mentions an inscription as the source of his information. It is not quite fair to call him entirely credulous and uncritical, for he often questions the truth of the statements he records and tries to weigh one theory against another, as when he discusses the inundation of the Nile. But in him, as in the majority of his contemporaries, the critical faculty was not developed, and his work suffers in consequence. He was, moreover, an inveterate story-teller, and it often seems as if he recorded stories for the mere love of telling them. Not a few of the tales he tells, like the story of the treasure chamber of Rhampsinitos, belong rather to the realm of folklore than to that of history.

THE RELIGIOUS ELEMENT IN HERODOTUS

Another quality in Herodotus which resulted disadvantageously for his History was his strong religious bent. His was still the age of faith, when men saw the hand of the gods revealed in all human affairs, and Herodotus was deeply imbued with this belief. In the History, therefore, much attention is paid to oracles and signs, and the chapters that treat of foreign lands are filled with attempts to correlate the gods of the barbarians with the gods of Greece. The


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Rh Second Book, with its constant striving to prove an Egyptian origin for many of the Greek divinities, is only the most striking example of a general tendency.

Regarded as history, therefore, the work of Herodotus suffers from grave defects, and it is not to be wondered at that ancient and modern critics have vied with one another in pointing them out. The attitude of many of these critics is well expressed by an Oxford rhyme:

Yet it must be said that in spite of much adverse criticism, few people have been led to believe in any bad faith on Herodotus's part. The defects which his work betrays are defects of his race and his time; and to offset them he has many merits. Few Greeks of any age showed themselves so fair-minded in dealing with barabarian nations. He is as ready to praise what seems good in the customs of foreign races as he is to praise the customs of the Greeks. If he is too fond of stories to be a good historian, at least he is a prince of story-tellers. His style is lucid, simple, and straightforward, showing everywhere the "art which conceals art"—a wonderful achievement, when one considers that this is the first literary prose that was written in Europe. Finally, few writers of any age have succeeded so well in impressing on their work the stamp of personality. As we read the pages of the History, the picture of the author rises vividly before us. We can almost see him as, tablet and stylus in hand, he follows the interpreter or the priest through the great cities of the Persian Empire or the temples of Egypt, eagerly listening and questioning, quick to notice differences from his own Greek way of doing things, courteous, sympathetic, always on the watch for the story that will adorn his narrative. Quite apart from its value as a record of facts, the History of Herodotus is intensely interesting as a human document, as a record of the beliefs and the impressions of a remarkable member of a remarkable race at the period of its highest development.


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MONG the many manifestations of the spirit of intellectual inquiry which marked the Renaissance in Europe, the new impetus toward geographical exploration is one of the most notable. The discovery of the New World by Columbus in 1492 had given this a fresh start, and not many years had passed before Spain had followed it up by large settlements and annexations of territory, chiefly in Central and South America. Spain was in the sixteenth century the leading Catholic power in Europe, and after England under Elizabeth had definitely and finally broken with Rome, her position as leading Protestant power added a religious motive to that of political ambition to lead her to seek to share with her rival the wealth and dominion of the Americas. Further, there was a powerful commercial interest in this rivalry. The peaceful development of England under the great Queen led to a need for wider markets, and besides the hope of plunder and the settlement of colonies, the Elizabethan merchant adventurers were seeking to build up a large commerce overseas. Curiosity, piety, patriotism, and trade were, then, the leading motives that led these daring "sea dogs" on their perilous voyages to the ends of the earth.

THE EXPANSION OF ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND

The diversity of routes traversed in these quests is not always realized. It was not merely the Spanish Main to which these men looked for profit and adventure. Seeking a northeastern route to China in 1553, English sailors found themselves in the White Sea and made their way to the Court of the Czar, thus establishing a trade route to Russia which rendered them independent of the Baltic route previously blocked by the jealousy of the Hansa league. They


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Rh pushed into the Mediterranean, sending expeditions to Tripoli and Morocco, and trading with the Greek Archipelago. Others cultivated intercourse with Egypt and the Levant, and, penetrating Arabia and Persia, carried their samples overland to India, while still others reached the same goal by way of the Persian Gulf or round the Cape of Good Hope. Here they came into competition with the Portuguese; and in 1600 was founded the East India Company, and with it the beginning of the British Empire in India.

THE SPANISH MAIN

But it was in the regions where they came into conflict with the Spaniards that those exploits occurred which most touched the imaginations of their contemporaries, and of which we have preserved the most picturesque accounts. The three voyages of Sir Francis Drake, Sir Humphrey Gilbert's "Voyage to Newfoundland," and Sir Walter Raleigh's "Discovery of Guiana," all printed in The Harvard Classics, are good representative records of the manner and results of these expeditions, partly scientific and religious, but more patriotic and piratical. Few narratives are more absorbing than these, with their pictures of courage against terrible odds, of endurance of the most frightful hardships on sea and land, of generosity and treachery, of kindliness and cruelty. Drake was still young when he first voyaged to the west, and in 1572 he made the expedition against Nombre de Dios in which they all but secured the contents of the great King's Treasure House. "By means of this light," says the narrator, "we saw a huge heap of silver in that nether room; being a pile of bars of silver of, as near as we could guess, seventy feet in length, of ten feet in breadth, and twelve feet in height; piled up against the wall, each bar was between thirty-five and forty pounds in weight"—altogether over 360 tons, as it turned out. This vast treasure, with as much more in gold, they left untouched, however, preferring to save the life of their wounded captain. How they plagued the Spaniards in spite of this abstinence may be judged from the summary statement at the close of the narrative: "There were, at this time, belonging to Cartagena,


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414 de Dios, etc., above 200 frigates ... the most of which, during our abode in those parts, we took; and some of them twice or thrice each; yet never burned nor sunk any unless they were made out men-of-war against us, or laid as stales to entrap us."

CONTRIBUTIONS TO GEOGRAPHY

To the narratives of these adventurers we owe much of our early knowledge of America and its aborigines. The information they give, it is true, is not always to be taken at its face value, and often is more of the nature of travelers' tales than scientific geography. But it has value, and, reflecting as it does the inflamed imagination of the time, vast entertainment. Thus in an account of one of Hawkins's voyages we read of the crocodile: "His nature is ever, when he would have his prey, to cry and sob like a Christian body, to provoke them to come to him; and then he snatched at them! And thereupon came this proverb, that is applied unto women, when they weep, 'Lachrymae Crocodili': the meaning whereof is, that as the crocodile when he crieth goeth then about most to deceive; so doth a woman, most commonly, when she weepeth." The wondrous properties of tobacco are thus described in the same narrative: "The Floridans, when they travel, have a kind of herb dried, who with a cane and a earthen cup in the end, with fire and the dried herbs put together, do suck through the cane the smoke thereof; which smoke satisfieth their hunger, and therewith they live four or five days without meat or drink. And this all the Frenchmen used for this purpose; yet do they hold opinion withal, that it causeth water and phlegm to void from their stomachs." The potato is hardly less glorified: "These potatoes be the most delicate roots that may be eaten; and do far exceed our parsnips or carrots. Their pines be of the bigness of two fists, the outside whereof is of the making of a pine apple, but it is soft like the rind of a cucumber; and the inside eateth like an apple, but it is more delicious than any sweet apple sugared."

Besides descriptions of plants and animals, these stories of travel and conquest contain much interesting information, though colored by fancy, of the native tribes encountered and of their habits of


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Rh life. Especially is the reader struck by the vast riches in gold and pearls ascribed to the Indians, such description as that of El Dorado, quoted by Raleigh in his account of the Emperor of Guiana, sounding like a fairy tale. Not content with kitchen utensils of gold and silver, the Emperor was believed to have adorned his pleasure gardens with flowers and trees of the same precious metals.

BEHAVIOR OF THE EXPLORERS

These stories, as the reader is not likely to forget, are all told from the English point of view. Religious animosity and political and commercial rivalry whetted the English hatred of Spain, and produced accounts of Spanish cruelty to the natives and to English prisoners which must be taken with much modification. For the English adventurers themselves were no saints. Many of them were nothing more than pirates, and many were engaged in the slave trade between Africa and the Indies. At times our admiration for their intrepid courage and persistence, and for their loyalty to one another and to the Queen, is overcome by the evidence of their inhumanity in the treatment of their human cargoes, and their lack of all consideration of the rights of negroes as men. They contracted for the delivery of African slaves to the West Indies precisely as if they were cattle or hides, and in case of danger at sea they lightened their ships of these miserable wretches with apparently little less compunction than if they had been mere bales of merchandise.

Yet, amid all the horrors induced by lust of gold and conquest, one finds often enough incidents of striking generosity to enemies, of tender affection to their own people, and of a code of honor and an adherence to the rules of the game as they understood it, which go far to brighten the picture.

THE STYLE OF THE NARRATIVES

Nothing was farther from the minds of the writers of these voyages than the production of literature. The glorification of their captains and their country, the inciting of their fellow citizens against the enemy, and the fondness of the returned traveler for narrating


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416 his adventures, these were the main motives which induced them to write; and they told their stories with no thought of style or ornament. They have thus almost the flavor of actual conversation, and reveal, none the less truly because unconsciously, the temper of the writers and the spirit of the time. It was a time of great enthusiasms and boundless ambitions, of undertakings conceived under the influence of an almost fantastic imagination, and carried out with absolute unscrupulousness, but with complete devotion and invincible courage. The modern world has largely outgrown the temptation to many of the vices which beset these buccaneers, but our blood is still stirred by the spectacle of their magnificent energy, and our imaginations are roused by those

heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.


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 IV. THE ERA OF DISCOVERY

ITH the close of the fifteenth century the Dark Ages came to an end. The great mediaeval institution of feudalism was everywhere losing its hold, for the growth of monarchical power and the rise of standing armies made the feudal system no longer necessary. Small states were being consolidated into nations—Castile and Aragon had become the kingdom of Spain; the various provinces of France were now welded together under the House of Bourbon; while England had settled her internal quarrels and was now safely unified under the dominant Tudor dynasty. With this consolidation and unity came national consciousness and a desire for territorial expansion. The revived study of geography, moreover, and the adaptation of the compass to marine use were features which led mariners to proceed more boldly away from the shores, so that when the Turkish conquests shut off the old trade routes between the Mediterranean ports and the Orient, the time was ripe for venturesome voyages out into the western ocean.

THE VOYAGES OF COLUMBUS

It was altogether appropriate that the first successful expedition of discovery into the New Hemisphere should have been under the guidance of a Genoese navigator in the service of the Spanish crown. Genoa was one of the first commercial cities of the Mediterranean; Spain was one of the most powerful and progressive among European monarchies. Columbus had the maritime skill and daring of his own race together with the financial backing of a nation which from its location had much to gain from western discoveries. The story of his thirty-three-day voyage to the new Indies, his reception by the natives, and his glowing accounts of the new lands are known to every American schoolboy; but never can it be better recounted


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418 than in the discoverer's own words. It is true that the honor of having been the first to touch upon the shores of the New World has been claimed by others. Nearly four centuries before Columbus set sail from Palos, some Norse navigators under the leadership of Leif Ericson, son of Eric the Red, are said to have sailed from the Norse colony in Greenland and to have reached the coasts of Wineland the Good. Whether this Wineland was Labrador or Nova Scotia or New England is something upon which historians have never agreed; but the general drift of opinion at present is that Leif and his followers in all probability never came south of Labrador, if, indeed, they proceeded so far. But in any event these Norse forays never led to any permanent colonization; the planting of a new nation was reserved to those who followed where Columbus led the way.

The return of Columbus with his news concerning the wealth and resources of Hispaniola made a profound impression upon the imagination of all Europe. The Spanish Court hastened to follow up its advantage by sending Columbus on further voyages in order that the entire fruits of the discovery might be monopolized. The navigators of other nations also bestirred themselves to get some share of the New World's spoil. Among these was the Florentine sea captain Amerigo Vespucci, who made his way across the Atlantic in 1497, and on his return presented the geographical information which led the map makers of Europe to name the new continent after him. Likewise the Cabots, father and son, sailed from Bristol in the same year under the auspices of King Henry VIII, and by their explorations along the Labrador coast laid the basis of later English claims to great regions of North America. France, for her part, sent Jacques Cartier on his errands of discovery and in due course established French claims to the valley of the St. Lawrence in this way.


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Rh PLANTING NEW NATIONS IN AMERICA

But to get secure possession of the new territories it was necessary that European nations should do more than discover. They must make settlements and colonize. Spain, being first in the field, directed her energies to those regions which seemed to constitute the largest prize, that is to say, the West Indies, Central America, and the western slopes of the South American continent. In the Indies there was a fertile soil which could be made to yield its increase without much labor; on the mainland there were great areas of gold and silver ore. Portugal, coming hard on the heels of her peninsular neighbor, went still further to the south and took as her patrimony the sea coast of Brazil, a region which also promised a rich tribute in precious metals. England, being rather slow to follow up the beginnings made in her behalf by John and Sebastian Cabot, was forced to be content with territories north of the Spanish claims—the coast from Florida to the Bay of Fundy—where there were no great stores of mineral wealth to attract the adventuresome. In the long run, however, this selection proved to be the most prudent of them all. France, coming last into the field, found herself pushed still farther northward to the regions of Acadia, the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Other countries of Europe, Sweden, and the Netherlands, were also in the race and both managed to get a precarious foothold in the new territories, the former on the Delaware and the latter on the Hudson. But both were in due course dislodged and these colonies passed into English hands. So did the territories of France after a century of conflict.

VIRGINIA AND NEW ENGLAND

In the region along the Atlantic seaboard which England claimed for her own, two settlements were made at dates not far apart. Early in 1607 a group of about one hundred settlers established at Jamestown in Virginia the first permanent Anglo-American colony, and through the inevitable hardships of a pioneer community managed to hold the settlement on its feet. With them they had brought a royal charter couched in the legal diction of the time, and in due course established their own system of local self-government with its


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420 boroughs and its House of Burgesses reproducing in miniature the old English administrative system. Farther to the north unsuccessful attempts to found settlements had been made near the mouth of the Kennebec as early as 1607; but it was not until 1620 that the Mayflower Pilgrims made their landing at Plymouth and laid the foundations of New England. The Pilgrims had gone first from England to Holland, but finding that they were being drawn into the vortex of an alien environment, reached a decision to set forth for a new land where they could create their own surroundings. Before they went ashore the Pilgrims made a political compact among themselves whereby they created a "civill body politick" and covenanted each with each to enact just laws for the welfare of the new community. The early years of this settlement were passed in great hardship and the population grew very slowly. Ten years after the disembarkation at Plymouth Rock it numbered but three hundred in all. The first economic and social system was communistic, but in due course this was abandoned and by dint of persistent effort the colony rounded the corner on the road to prosperity.

A more important settlement in New England, however, was that made by John Winthrop and his followers on the shores of Massachusetts Bay. In 1630 Winthrop brought to Salem a body of nearly a thousand settlers, and these, during the ensuing two years, founded a half-dozen towns, including Boston. The colonies of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay continued a separate existence for more than a half-century after their foundation; in 1690 they were amalgamated into the province of Massachusetts.

By 1630, therefore, Englishmen had firmly established their outposts on the Atlantic seaboard both to the north and to the south; their next enterprise was to dominate the interval between. From Massachusetts the settlers, driven forth in some cases because of their refusal to observe stringent religious requirements, moved southward into the Rhode Island and Connecticut territories. William Penn, Lord Baltimore, and others proved ready to undertake colonization as a private enterprise and, being favored by the


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Rh Crown in their ambitions, laid the foundations of Pennsylvania and Maryland. The Swedes on the Delaware and the Dutch on the Hudson were overpowered and their lands brought under English control. Then having possessed herself of the whole region from Virginia to Massachusetts it was England's next task to expel France from her menacing position still farther above.

INTERIOR EXPLORATION AND TRADE

This colonizing movement went hand in hand with the exploration of the interior. During the seventeenth century the Great Lakes and the Mississippi were traversed by the French voyageurs, while the hinterlands of the New England colonies were penetrated by the English fur traders. Missionaries followed in the footsteps of the traders and in due course the two chief colonizing powers of North America were using both as agents for enlarging their respective spheres of influence. Even before the earliest settlements were made to the westward of the Alleghenies, the initial skirmishes of a long struggle for the possession of these territories were taking place. The French colonists, though inferior in numbers and in material resources, were far more daring, more enterprising as explorers and as coureurs-des-bois, and more persevering than their southern neighbors—that is why the task of securing and enlarging the English frontiers proved so difficult. But in the end sheer numerical superiority determined the issue, and England, for the time being, became master of the whole area from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.


text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Religion I.


text: Folk-Lore/Volume 2/The Legend of the Grail, 2


text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Religion II.


text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Religion III.


text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Religion IV.


text: Folk-Lore/Volume 2/Remarks on preceding article


text: The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Religion V.


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HERE are two ways of reading the documents of religion. In the first place one may read the book of one's own faith, as the Christian reads his Bible. In this case one reads for instruction or education in some source to which one attributes authority, and finds there the familiar and well-loved symbols of one's own belief and hope. Such a relation between a man and a book is only possible under peculiar conditions. It is the work of time and tradition and social experience. A book does not become a man's "bible" unless it has been the principal quickening influence in his spiritual life and the source of his illumination, so that he returns to it when he needs to reanimate his purposes or confirm his belief. A "bible" is the proved remedy to which a man confidently resorts for the health of his own soul. It becomes associated in his mind with all that he owes to it, and all that he hopes from it; so that it is not only an instrument, but a symbol. The sacred book of any racial or historical religion is, of course, more than such a personal bible, by as much as a race is more than an individual or history than a lifetime. But it is the personal relation, that between a man and the book that has become his sacred book, that I want here to emphasize. It is evident that in such a relation the reader's attitude will be unique; it will differ from his attitude to any other book. Religious documents are usually and normally read in this way. Each man reads his own bible. And it is only when a document is somebody's bible in this sense that it is a religious document at all.

But there is a second way in which such documents may be read, and it is this second way that must be adopted by those who wish to


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428 read religious literature with any comprehensiveness. One may read another man's bible. Now this requires a quite different attitude, and one that may need to be cultivated. It will not do to look for the same value which one finds in the book of one's own religion; or to judge by one's own peculiar spiritual standards. For then the other man's bible will seem cold, repugnant, superstitious, or heretical. Nor will it do to read another man's bible as so much secular literature, for then it will appear curious, fantastic, or at best poetical. It is necessary to bring one's self by imagination and sympathy to an understanding of the other man's outlook and needs. The outward aspect of Mohammedanism is to the Christian traveler only a curious local custom. But, "I would have you," says H. Fielding in his "Hearts of Men," "go and kneel beside the Mohammedan as he prays at the sunset hour, and put your heart to his and wait for the echo that will surely come." It is in the inward value of this outward posture that its religion lies. And the same is true of any sacred writings. Their religious meaning is relative to the believer whom they exalt, stir, comfort, enlighten, or strike with awe. And no one can apprehend that meaning who cannot bring himself at least for the moment into the believer's attitude.

Perhaps this seems to ask too much. How can one convert oneself in turn into a Buddhist, a Mohammedan, a Christian, a Brahman, and a Confucian? There is, however, a saving possibility. May there not be some attitude common to all believers? May one not divest oneself of what is peculiar to one's own religion and yet retain a something which is in all religion, and by this come to a better understanding of each religion? An Englishman may understand a Frenchman by becoming less English and more human. Similarly it is possible that a Christian may understand Mohammedanism by becoming less Christian and more religious. "No matter where you go," says Fielding, "no matter what the faith is called, if you have the hearing ear, if your heart is in unison with the heart of the world, you will hear always the same song." There is, in other words, a sameness in all religion, which is the link between one special cult and another; and by coming to know and feel this common religion one may pass beyond the limits of one's native religious province.


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Rh There is a danger that this important truth should be misunderstood. Some years ago a Parliament of Religions was held in connection with the World's Fair at Chicago. It was a spectacular and impressive event which no doubt did much to liberalize and broaden religious opinion in America. But it encouraged the mistaken opinion that because all religions are equally religious they must be equally good or true. It would be equally reasonable to argue that because all forms of political organization are equally political, one must be as sound or equitable as another. All polities arise in response to the same fundamental need for order and justice, and in so far as they are accepted and persist, they must to some extent satisfy that need. And to understand a foreign polity I must see how it accomplishes in its way and for its place and time what my polity accomplishes in another way for me. But it does not follow that the two are equally sound in principle, or that the one might not be corrected in the light of the other. Similarly religion arises in response to the same fundamental need, a need that is world-wide and for all time. But one religion may meet that need more genuinely and permanently than another; it may be based on a truer notion of man or God, and so deserve preference in a comparative and critical study.

It is also important to avoid the error of supposing that religions should lose their individuality and retain only what they have in common. A religion which consisted only of what it had in common with all other religions would probably be no religion at all. There are peculiar needs as well as common needs. A religion must satisfy the concrete community or individual, and not the abstract man. Perhaps, in all strictness, there must be as many religions as there are believers or worshipers. But this is quite consistent with the important truth that there is one constant factor in life from which all religions spring, and which makes of religion a common necessity. And if one is to study the forms or read the literature of a religion that is not one's own, one must see them in this light. One must become for the purpose simply religious; one must become alive not only to one's peculiar needs, but to that deeper and identical need from which all religions have sprung.

I have suggested that this attitude requires cultivation. This is


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430 doubtless the case with the great majority even of enlightened readers of the present day, and is very apparent in the history of European thought. By a curious working of the laws of habit and imitation we are for the most part blind to the meaning of our commonest social practices. How many men who obey law and authority, or who are loyal to the peculiar political institution under which they live, reflect upon the utility of government? Most men take government for granted, or fail to think of it at all; and merely assert their factional differences or personal grievances. Similarly for most men religion as a general fact, as a human institution, does not exist. They are conscious only of their particular religious differences; or they identify religion so thoroughly with a special religion that they can think of alien religions only as irreligion. For the vast majority of Christians to be religious means the same thing as to be Christian; not to believe as they believe means the same thing as to be an "unbeliever." Nevertheless a great change has taken place in the course of the last three centuries, and it will be worth our while briefly to trace it.

NATURAL versus POSITIVE RELIGION

As everyone knows, modern thought arose as a protest against a tendency in the Middle Ages to take too many things for granted. Reason was to be freed from authority, tradition, and pedantry. But this meant, at first, only that man was to exercise his reason in the fields of physics and metaphysics. It was supposed in the seventeenth century that he could do this and yet not question the authority of the state, the church, and the established ethical code. The man of reason was to be internally free, but externally obedient. Institutions, in short, were still to be taken for granted. But in the eighteenth century the liberated reason was directed to institutions themselves, and there arose a rational ethics, a new political science, and a theory of "natural religion." Hobbes, a century earlier, was the forerunner of this movement, and so the original author of all modern social revolutions in so far as these arose from ideas and not from immediate practical exigencies. Of religion Hobbes wrote as follows: "In these four things, opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion toward what men call fear, and taking of things casual for


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Rh prognostics, consisteth the natural seed of 'religion'; which by reason of the different fancies, judgments, and passions of several men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man are for the most part ridiculous to another." This passage appears in the "Leviathan," published in 1651. In 1755 Hume wrote a treatise bearing the title "The Natural History of Religion," in which he contended that polytheism is the original form of religion, and that "the first ideas of religion arose not from a contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the incessant hopes and fears which actuate the human mind." Agitated by "the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite for food, and other necessaries ... men scrutinize, with a trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity." Both of these passages represented a manner of regarding religion which was revolutionary and offensive to the conservative opinion of the time. They meant that in a certain sense Christianity must be regarded as on a par with the most despised superstitions, since all spring from the same seed in human nature, or from the same general situation in which all men find themselves. It is man's fear of fortune, his hope of controlling the deeper forces of nature for his own good, from which his religion has sprung, and all religions alike may be judged by their power to dispel this fear and fulfill this hope. So there arose the difference between "natural religion," religion conceived as springing from the constitution of man and the common facts of life, and "positive religion," which consists in some specific institution, tradition, and dogma. One now has a new standard by which to judge of religion. Just as one may compare monarchy and democracy with reference to their utility as instruments of government, so one may compare Christianity and Buddhism with reference to their fulfillment of the general religious need. Which is the better religion, in the sense of doing better what a religion is intended to do? And quite apart from the question


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432 of comparative merits there is a new field of study opened to the human mind, the study of religion as a natural historical fact.

COMPARATIVE RELIGION

Hume's "Natural History of Religion" has developed in two directions. First, the emphasis in the nineteenth century on history and evolution, the interest in the sources and manifold varieties of all growing things, promoted the development of what is now called "Comparative Religion." Missionaries, travelers, and in recent years students of anthropology and ethnography have collected the religious literature and described the religious customs of India, China, and Japan, as well as of primitive and savage peoples in all parts of the globe. Ancient religions have been made known through the development of archæology. Most important of all for the recovery of the past has been the increased knowledge of languages. The knowledge of Sanskrit opened the way to an understanding of the sources of the ancient Indian religions; the translation of hieroglyphics and cuneiform characters has brought to light the ancient religions of Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria. More refined methods have shed a wholly new light upon Greek and early Semitic religions. The possession of this wealth of material has made possible new generalizations concerning the generic character of religion, or concerning its origin and evolution.

The work of Tylor, Spencer, Max Müller, Andrew Lang, and Frazer may be said to signalize a genuinely new branch of human knowledge in which religion as a universal human interest or aspect of life is made an object of dispassionate and empirical study.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION

Second, toward the close of the nineteenth century a great impetus was given to the science of psychology, and this is reflected in another extension of Hume's "Natural History of Religion," in what is called "Psychology of Religion." There is the question of the genesis of the religious consciousness from instincts and sentiments such as fear and reverence. There are psychological types of religion such as James's "sick soul" and "religion of healthy mindedness." There is the elaborate analysis of the mystical experience, with its


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Rh "rhythm," its "disconnection," and its characteristic stages. Special psychological importance attaches to religious crises, such as "conversion," and their relation to physiological conditions such as adolescence. Certain religious states border upon hysteria and belong to the domain of abnormal psychology, others illustrate the play of the great social forces of imitation and suggestion. Professor James's great book has given currency to its title "Varieties of Religious Experience," and these varieties are being collected, described, and catalogued by an ever-increasing body of observers.

But both Hobbes and Hume, as we have seen, attempted to name the generic essence of religion. What amid all its varieties external and internal, amid its bewildering manifoldness of ritual, dogma, and mental state, is its common character? Were these authors correct in tracing all religion to man's fear of the influence of the deeper causes of nature on his fortunes? This question is still the interesting question which vitalizes the patient empirical studies in comparative religion and the psychology of religion, and constitutes the problem of philosophy of religion.

THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION

To what universal fact does religion owe its existence? Is it perchance a fact concerning human nature? It has often been taught that man possesses a distinct and original faculty called "the religious consciousness" by which he forms the idea of God. All men, possessing the same mental constitution, will thus agree in conceiving of a God. But this view is based upon an obsolete psychology. It is now generally believed that a man is born with instincts and capacities which enable him to cope with his world, but which do not predetermine his ideas. These result from experience, from the interaction between his instincts and capacities and the environment in which he is called upon to exercise them. As respects religion in particular it has become fairly evident that it calls into play various factors of human nature, such as the instincts of fear or of curiosity, no one of which is in itself peculiarly religious. The religious consciousness, in other words, is complex and derived rather than original; a product of experience rather than an innate possession of the mind. How then is the universality of religion to be accounted


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434 for? There is a second possibility. Perhaps God, the object of religion, is a common and familiar object, like the sun so palpable, so ubiquitous that no man can fail to acquire a notion of it. But if one sets aside all preconceived ideas and looks out upon one's world with the eye of a first discoverer, or of a Martian just arrived upon earth, one does not find God. God is not an evident fact in any ordinary sense. Herbert Spencer attempted to trace religion to a belief in ghosts founded upon the experience of dreams. To one who interprets dreams naively it is doubtless a fact that persons "appear" after death and seem to speak and act where their bodies are not. But in so far as a ghost is such a commonplace and evident fact it is not a God. It is merely one sort of curious creature that inhabits this teeming world. And the religious man finds objects of worship in what is most substantial and least ghostlike. It is a forced and far-fetched hypothesis that would have us explain the worship of the sun, or the sea, or the Creator, by supposing that man has projected into nature the substances of his dreams. God is not a substance. He is not more vaporous or incorporeal than he is liquid or solid, except in sophisticated theologies. And it is certainly only in a careless or figurative sense that God can be said to be manifest in his works, in the splendor or terrors of nature. He may be inferred or interpreted from these, but he is not perceived as literally present in their midst. "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork," but not to the eye of the mere observer of fact even though it be placed at the end of a telescope.

There seems to me to be only one alternative left. We must, I think, conclude that in so far as religion is universal it arises from the conjunction of man and his environment. Its seed is the situation in which man finds himself, a situation made up of two interacting parts, man and his world. Let us see if we can describe this situation so as to see the inevitableness of religion.

Life may be broadly described as seeking something under given circumstances. Man is impelled toward ends, and limited by an existing situation. If we view our world dramatically, and assign to man the role of hero, the fundamental fact is his dependence on environment. He exists, as it were, despite the environment, which,


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Rh though it has given birth to him, is ever threatening to devour him; and whatever he gains must be wrung from that environment. Life must be conducted, in short, on terms dictated by its environment. But before religion we must suppose life to have already conquered something of nature and made it its own. When man finds himself, there is already much that he can control. He can move about freely on the surface of the earth; he can manipulate physical objects and so procure himself food and shelter; and through individual prowess or through combination he can control other men. Within certain limits, then, man has the upper hand, and may make his fortune as he wills. But these limits are narrow. They are, of course, most narrow in the early stages of human development. But there has been no time in which they have not been pitifully narrow. Man may deceive himself. He may so magnify his achievements or be so preoccupied with his affairs as to enjoy illusions of grandeur and self-sufficiency. But it is a question if our Western, modern, and "civilized" boastfulness does not betoken a more imperfect sense of proportion than that consciousness of dependence which was once felt more keenly and is still felt wherever man finds himself in the immediate presence of the unharnessed energies of nature. In any case man is periodically reminded, if he is not perpetually mindful, of the great residual environment that is beyond his control. Man proposes, but after all something beyond him disposes. Floods, droughts, pestilence, rigors of climate, subjection, error, failure—these are the facts that teach and drive home the lesson of dependence. The most impressive and unanswerable fact is death. The whole fabric of personal achievement, woven by innumerable painstaking acts, all the fruits of struggle and of growth—possessions, power, friendship—are apparently annihilated in an instant, and with an ease that would be ridiculous if it were not so deeply tragic.

Now how shall man profit by this bitter lesson? He must not despair if he is to live; for to live is to hope for and to seek a way out of every predicament. To live in the consciousness of finitude and dependence means to look for help. If the forces that man cannot control do actually determine his destiny, then he must seek to win them over, or to ally himself with them. Here, I believe, is the root of religion: the attempt of man, conscious of his helplessness,


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436 to unite himself with the powers which do actually dominate. Religion is a sense of need, a conviction of the insecurity of any merely worldly advantage that he may gain for himself, and a way of salvation through coming to terms with that which controls his destiny. Religion is both founded on fear and consummated in hope.

It will perhaps seem strange that one should thus have attempted to describe religion without referring to deity. But the reason for the attempt lies in the fact that deity is not the cause of religion, but the product of religion. God is not, as we have seen, a manifest fact among facts; but is an object invoked to meet the religious need. Let us consider briefly the various types of deity to which religion has given rise.

TYPES OF DEITY

The commonest of all objects of worship is some prominent aspect of nature, such as the sky, sun, moon, and stars, the earth, the sea, rivers, winds, the seasons, day, and night. Before the development of science man cannot control the operations of these phenomena. Whether they shall favor him with moderate rains, fertility, a calm passage and temperate weather, or torture and destroy him with drought, flood, storm, and the extremes of heat and cold, he can neither foretell nor predetermine. He can only wait and tremble, hope and pray. That he should hope and pray is inevitable. It is the instinct of any living thing toward that which is to decide its fate and which it is impotent otherwise to control. The sun thus regarded as able either to bless or to destroy, and therefore an object of importunity, already begins to be a god. But there is lacking a factor which if it be not absolutely indispensable to deity, is almost invariably present. I refer to what is commonly called "personification." What is worshiped is the "spirit" in the sun, or the sun construed as spirit. But this factor, too, arises, I believe, directly from the practical situation and not from any metaphysics on the part of the worshiper. It is the sequel to the familiar fact that we impute interest or will to any agency that helps or hurts. I do not mean that there is any express judgment to that effect, but that our emotional and practical response is similar to that which we accord to other living individuals. The animal will exhibit rage toward the rod


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Rh with which he is prodded, the child will chastise the blocks which "refuse" to stand up, as his father will revenge himself upon the perverse golf stick by breaking it across his knee. Similarly it is natural to love, eulogize, caress, or adorn any object to which one owes pleasure or any other benefit. These responses are equivalent to imputing an attitude to their objects, an attitude of malice or hostility when the effect is hurtful, and one of benevolence when the effect is helpful. This, I believe, is the root of religious personification. The sun, in so far as its effects are good, is an object of gratitude for favor shown; in so far as its effects are bad, it is an object of solicitous regard in the hope that its hostility may be averted and its favor won. The sun so regarded or worshiped is the sun god. The extent to which the will or intent, and the power over man, are divorced from the visible and bodily sun and regarded as a "spirit" is of secondary importance; as is also the extent to which such a god has a history of his own apart from his treatment of man. For the exuberant imagination of the Greeks the sun god becomes an individuality vividly realized in art, poetry, and legend. But for practical people like the Chinese, "it is enough," as Professor Moore points out, "to know what the Gods do, and what their worshipers have to do to secure their favor, without trying to imagine what they are like."

A second type of deity is the ancestor; the actual human ancestor, as worshiped by the Chinese, the mystical animal ancestor of totemism, or any deity adopted as ancestor, as the Christian God is claimed as Father by his believers. The idea of kinship with the object of worship is very widespread, and its motive is clearly intelligible in the light of what has been said above. Kinship implies alliance, the existence of friendly support and the right to claim it. One's departed ancestors belong to that world beyond from which emanate the dread forces that one cannot control. Their presence there means that there are friends at court. Man is not surrounded by indifferent strangers, but by beings bound to him by nature and inseparable ties, partisans who are favorably inclined.

A third type of deity is the tutelary god, conceived ad hoc to render some special service. He may be the personal, tribal, or national


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438 protector; or the good genius of some human or social activity, such as is the god who presides over husbandry, war, or navigation, or the homely household god of the hearth and the "cooking furnace." Here the insistent need invents and objectifies its own fulfillment. All three notions of deity may be united in a local tribal deity, "who on the one hand has fixed relations to a race of men, and on the other hand has fixed relations to a definite sphere of nature," so that "the worshiper is brought into stated and permanent alliance with certain parts of his material environment which are not subject to his will and control."

THE IDEA OF A SUPREME DEITY

There is one further notion of deity that demands recognition in this brief summary, the notion, namely, of the supreme deity. As men develop in intelligence, imagination, and in range of social intercourse, it is inevitable that one god should be exalted above all others, or worshiped to the exclusion of all others. Such a religious conception arises from the experience of the unity of nature or of the unity of man. There is an evident hierarchy among the powers of nature; some are subordinated to others, and it is natural to conceive of one as supreme. Most evident to sense is the exultation of the heavens above the earth and the intermediate spaces. So we find Heaven to be supreme God among the Chinese, and Zeus among the Greeks. On the other hand, there is a hierarchy among tutelary and ancestral gods. As the patron gods of individuals, of special arts, or of tribes and provinces are subordinated to the national god, so the national god in turn is subjected to the god of a conquering nation. Allied with the idea of universal conquest is the idea of an all-dominant god, the god of the ruling class. Or a tutelary god may be universal in proportion to the universality of the activity over which he presides. The gods of the same activity though belonging originally to different cults may come to be identified; so that there arises the conception of a god that shall be universal in the sense of presiding over the common undertaking in which all men are engaged. And similarly the god from whom all men are descended will take precedence of the gods of families,


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Rh tribes, and nations. Thus there are several more or less independent motives which may lead to a universal religion, such as Christianity, whose god is a god of all men, regardless of time, place, race, or station.

Deity, then, in the generic sense common to all religions, high and low, is some force beyond the range of man's control, potent over his fortunes, construed as friendly or hostile, and so treated as to secure, if possible, its favor and support. It is important in the next place to point out two different motives in worship, connected with two different ways in which the worshiper and his god may be brought into unison. To put it briefly, one may propose to have one's own way, or surrender to the god's way. This is the religious application of the fact that there are two ways to obtain satisfaction and peace of mind; to get what one wants, or to want what one gets. Religion may be said always to lie somewhere between these two extremes. It is natural and reasonable to try the former method first. And this is undoubtedly the earlier motive in worship. Man wants food, and long life, and victory over his enemies, and he seeks to gain the deity's support in these undertakings. But there is never a time when he does not recognize the necessity of making concessions. He pays sacrifices, or observes taboo, or adopts the code of conduct which his god prescribes. And it is the common religious experience that the conditions of divine favor become more exacting, while the benefit is less evident. Thus there arises what philosophers call the problem of evil, of which the classic Christian expression is to be found in the Book of Job, who "was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil," and nevertheless was visited with every misery and disaster. In so far as Job solved this problem he found the solution in entire surrender to the will of God. "Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." Nevertheless in the end "the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before." Certainly a religion of utter renunciation would be no religion at all. There would be no motive in worship unless one were in some sense blessed thereby. The tendency in the evolution of religion is to substitute for the


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440 carnal or worldly blessing for which one had at first invoked divine aid a new and higher good which one learns to find in the mode of life which religion prescribes. Religion becomes thus not merely instrumental, but educative. From it one learns not so much the way to satisfy one's natural and secular wants, as the way to despise those wants and set one's heart on other things. It is this mingled self-assertion and self-surrender in religion that makes reverence its characteristic emotion. God is both the means by which one realizes one's end, and also a higher law by which one's end is reconstructed.

THE RELIGION OF RENUNCIATION

The religion in which entire renunciation is most closely approximated is the philosophical or esoteric religion of India. All the varieties of this religion reflect one fundamental attitude to life, the feeling that no good can come of persistent endeavor. The attempt to fulfill desire is hopeless. The Indian does not abandon himself to despair; but he differs from his occidental brother in this, that whereas the latter hopes by divine aid, or in the distant future, to achieve either personal happiness or the perfection of what he calls "civilization," the former regards the whole attempt as founded on error. Its inevitable failure does not signify real failure, but the adoption of a wrong standard of success. According to the teaching of the "Upanishads" even separate individuality is an illusion perpetuated by desire.

When all the passion is at rest That lurks within the heart of man Then is the mortal no more mortal, But here and now attaineth Brahman.

In Brahman, the deeper unity of the world, the individual has his true being and is saved.

The importance of regarding the conception of God, not as the root of religion, but as the product of religion, appears when we come to the consideration of Buddhism. For Buddhism is, in fact, a godless religion, paradoxical as that may seem. It is true that


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Rh Buddha himself has come like Confucius to be an object of religion. Every founder of a religion is almost inevitably deified by his followers. But Buddha did not deify himself. He taught men to regard even the soul itself as a transient and illusory experience. Suffering is the universal law of existence. Existence is the penalty of desire, a rebirth owing to Karma, the dispositions and desert which are the precipitate of a previous existence. There is a fatal recurrence of existence, for life tends ever to create the conditions of its own reincarnation and continuance. Salvation means not successful existence, the realization of actual desires, but escape from existence, through the conquering of desire. In such a religion there is no god, for there is no ulterior power in or through which man is to fulfill his positive longings. But it is nevertheless religion, in that it is a release of man from his predicament. Nirvana is perhaps from all other points of view equivalent to annihilation; but from the point of view of man, conscious of his helplessness and failure, it means salvation. It is a philosophy of life, an accord between man and his world by which he wins the greatest good that he can conceive.

In order to understand the general scope of religious literature it is not sufficient that one should grasp the general principle of religion. One must know something of the forms which religion assumes in human life; and especially important is it to know something of its relations to science on the one hand, and to art and poetry on the other hand.

RELIGION AND SCIENCE

By science let us understand knowledge founded on fact or rigorous reasoning. How far is one to construe religious literature as science, that is, as the work of man's theorizing and cognizing faculties? There is probably more confusion in this matter at the present time than there has ever been in the past. The increase of doubt, the scientific refutation of beliefs once authorized by religion, have led to various attempts to retain these beliefs by a sheer act of "faith," or on account of their subjective and imaginative values. Since the ascendancy of Catholic orthodoxy in the fourteenth century there has been a steady tendency to regard one Christian teaching after another, the story of Jonah and the whale, the account of


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442 creation in Genesis, and now even the miracles of the New Testament, as fictions which are to be valued as symbols, tradition, poetry, or as parts of a system of faith which as a whole is to be judged not by reference to historic fact but by its comforting or regenerating effect upon the believer. But if we recall to our minds that original human need in response to which religion arises, it is unmistakably evident that there must be a nucleus of truth in a religion if it is to meet that need at all. In religion man seeks to relate himself profitably to things as they are. He seeks to save his soul by adopting the course that is consistent with the deeper reality. If he is misled as to the nature of reality, then his whole plan is founded on error and is foredoomed to failure. If the forces of nature have no power, or are not to be influenced by human importunity, then it is folly to worship them. If there be no deeper cause that guarantees the triumph of righteousness, then the Christian's hope is illusory, and his prayer and worship idle. In short, every religion is at heart a belief in something as true, and if that something be not true, then the religion is discredited.

Nevertheless, although there is a scientific nucleus in every religion, that nucleus is but a small fraction of it. In the first place religion differs from science proper in that it deliberately adopts a view of things according to which man is the central fact of the universe. Religion is interested in cosmic affairs only in so far as they bear upon human fortunes. Hence it finally expresses itself not in judgments of fact, but in emotion, such as hope, fear, confidence, despair, reverence, love, gratitude, or self-subjection. Its object is the cosmos or some ulterior cosmic agency, construed as helpful or hurtful, colored by the worshiper's solicitude. Hence much religious literature, such, for example, as the Psalms, or St. Augustine's Confessions, are essentially expressions of the religious emotions, characterizations of deity not by the use of cold scientific formulas, but by the use of epithets that signify the feelings and attitude of the worshiper himself.

A second non-scientific factor in religion is that contributed by the imagination and by social tradition. Religion differs from theory in that it comes after and not before belief. Religion is not effective,


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Rh does not do its work, until after some interpretation of cosmic forces has been adopted by an individual and has become the accepted basis of his life. Buddhism begins as a religion when the individual enters upon that course of discipline by which he hopes to attain Nirvana; and Christianity begins when the believer actually follows the way of salvation by prayer, obedience, and good works. And in all important historical religions the underlying dogmas are assimilated not only to personal but also to social life. They are commonly and collectively believed, and have become the unconscious presuppositions of a community worship. The office of the religious imagination is in making these scientific presuppositions vital and effective. A religion of hope is not a series of propositions concerning the favorable bearing of cosmic forces, but a vivid realization of the purport of such propositions, a hopefulness translated into emotional buoyance or confident action. By the imagination religious truth is made impressive, so that it evokes the affections and motivates action. The social counterpart is found in tradition and symbolism, which secures the continuity and solidarity of religious feelings and practices. In brief, then, we may expect to find in all expressions of religion, such as religious literature, certain underlying assumptions which are capable of being converted into scientific propositions; but these will be overlaid and obscured by an imaginative and symbolic representation in which their meaning is emotionally and practically realized.

There is another important respect in which religion differs from science, namely, in its proceeding beyond the limits of evidence. There never was and never will be a religion which possesses the same verification that is demanded in the case of a scientific theory. Religion is a leap in the dark. The reason for this is evident. For practical purposes it is necessary to conclude matters that for strictly theoretical purposes one would postpone in the hope of further light. Life is an emergency, a crisis, or as William James has said, a "forced option." One must make up one's mind quickly, or live altogether at random. What shall one make of this world, and what shall one do to be saved? The decision cannot be postponed; and yet the evidence is, strictly considered, inconclusive. Faith means


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444 to believe what seems probable, and to believe it not half-heartedly, but with conviction. For if one believes half-heartedly, one cannot proceed according to one's belief, or attain salvation by it. The element of sheer faith may be more or less, according to the degree of critical and philosophical power which the worshiper possesses. But in every case there will be some basis in experienced fact and in inference, and also some "will to believe" or reliance on authority. And we shall consequently find in religious literature a note of dogmatic certainty and of willfulness, which is as inevitable in such a context as it would be intolerable in science.

RELIGION AND MORALITY

There is one further topic to which even so brief an introduction as this must allude. What is the relation between religion and morality? Are we to regard ethical teachings such as those of the Book of Proverbs or the Sayings of Confucius as religious? To answer this question, we have only, I think, to bear clearly in mind the generic meaning of religion. A mode of life becomes religious only when it is pursued under certain auspices; only when it is conceived as sanctioned by the general nature of the cosmos, and as constituting a way of salvation. If justice be prized as a means of social welfare, it is ethical; if it be adopted as a means of winning the favor of God, or as a means of achieving Nirvana, it is religious. The moral life takes on a religious character when it is in some way connected with the cosmic life. In the so-called "ethical religions" the mode of life prescribed by religion tends to coincide with that prescribed by the moral consciousness, and righteousness is conceived as the way of salvation. Needless to say, such a contraction of morality greatly enhances its impressiveness and appeal. In all ethical religions that are inspired with hope, religion adds to a good conscience the sense of ascendency or victory over nature. Right living takes on the aspect of ultimate reality. To sheer duty is added confidence, inspiration, the expectation of limitless and durable achievement. Even in pessimistic religions of the ethical type, morality acquires prestige as having supreme importance for escape from the misery of existence. And from the religious consciousness


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 II. BUDDHISM

HE life of Gotama, the Enlightened One, or Buddha, a life of eighty years, is divided into two parts, one of thirty-five years and one of forty-five, by the event of his Enlightenment or Bodhi. This seeing of a new light is to a Buddhist the one supreme event of the incalculably long aeon now current, just as is the birth of Jesus in Occidental chronology. Those first thirty-five years are again divided into two parts, the period of his life as a prince or the time from his birth until (at the age of twenty-nine ) he forsook the world to struggle for the Supreme Enlightenment, and the period of the six years of that struggle. Of these thirty-five years we have elaborate accounts. Of the last forty-five, tradition has little to say in the way of entertaining story, but very much by way of reporting "the Teacher's" teachings. These teachings as laid down in the canonical scriptures of Buddhism are in very deed his life in the truest sense.

THE BIRTHS OF BUDDHA

The belief that a man must be born and live and die, only to be born and die again and again through a weary round of existences, was widespread in India long before Buddha's day. And accordingly the "biography" of a Buddha must include an account of some of those former "births" or existences. The story of Sumedha is one of these. The "Jātaka," the most charming of all Buddhist story books, contains the narrative of not less than 547 former existences of Gotama. Next after all this prenatal biography comes the account of Buddha's birth into the existence which concerns us most nearly,


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Rh the actual one of the sixth century before Christ, and this forms the subject of the second of Warren's translations, "The Birth of the Buddha." That translation is from a later work. It is most instructive for the student of religious tradition to compare the meager statements of the oldest canonical account with such an account as this, in order to see how the loving imagination of devout disciples may embellish a simple and prosaic fact with a multitude of picturesque details. Thus the presages of Buddha's birth are quite comparable, except for beauty of poetic diction, with those of the birth of Jesus in Milton's hymn "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity." As an example of new accretions to the older story may be cited the later tradition that Buddha was born from his mother's right side, a trait that appears not only in the Lalita-vistara and in St. Jerome, but also in many of the sculptured representations of the scene.

THE TEACHINGS OF BUDDHA

The teachings of Buddha are indeed his life, his very self. In the house of a potter the venerable Vakkali lay nigh unto death. The Exalted One (Buddha) came to his pillow and made kindest inquiries. "Long have I wished to go to the Exalted One to see him, but there was not enough strength in my body to go." "Peace, Vakkali! what should it profit thee to see this my corrupt body? Whoso, O Vakkali, seeth my teachings, he seeth me." Here the Teacher identifies himself with his teachings no less completely than does Jesus when he declares unto Thomas, "I am the way." And yet, despite Buddha's merging of his personality in his doctrine, it is of utmost importance to remember two things: First that Buddha most explicitly disclaims acceptance of his teachings on the score of authority; and secondly that it was, after all, their intrinsic excellence which (whether we take it as the fruit of a transcendental illumination or as the outcome of his personality) has maintained them as a mighty world power for five and twenty centuries.

First then his position as to authority. The Exalted One, when making a tour through Kosala, once stopped at Kesaputta, a town


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Rh cure. True, we had heard from our childhood that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But how was the ounce of prevention to be had? Doubtless by finding out the cause of disease. And this is on the whole the most significant achievement of modern medicine. Now it was precisely this problem in the world of the spirit that Buddha claimed to solve, the ætiology of man's misery. His solution he publicly announced in his first sermon, the gist of which was destined to become known to untold millions, the sermon of the Deerpark of Benares.

His most important point is the cause of human suffering, and that he finds in the craving for existence (no matter how noble that existence) and for pleasure. If you can only master these cravings, you are on the road to salvation, to Nirvana. This, so far as the present life is concerned, means the going out of the fires of lust and ill will and delusion, and further a getting rid thereby of the round of rebirth.

BUDDHISM AND OTHER RELIGIONS

Without attempting to discuss so many-sided a subject as Nirvana, or rightly to evaluate Buddha's prescription of the abandonment of all craving, it is clear that his ethical teachings, like his spotless life, have stood and will stand the test of centuries. The Deerpark sermon urges the excellence of the golden mean between the life of self-castigation and the life of ease and luxury, and propounds the Noble Eightfold Path, which is, after all, in brief, the life of righteousness in thought and word and deed. Many notable similarities between the teachings of Buddha and those of Jesus have been pointed out. These need not surprise us. Nor is there any à priori reason for assuming a borrowing in either direction. If I make an entirely original demonstration of the fact that the inner angles of a triangle amount to two right angles, my demonstration will agree in essence with that of Pythagoras because mathematical truth does not differ from land to land nor from age to age. Nor


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450 yet does goodness. And accordingly many of the teachings of the great teachers of righteousness must coincide.

On the other hand it is interesting to note that Buddha's teachings lay great emphasis, and lay it often, upon things about which in the Gospels comparatively little or nothing is expressly said. Don't hurry, don't worry, the simple life; don't accept a belief upon the authority of me or of anyone else; don't let your outgo exceed your income; the relation of master and servant; the duty not only of kindness but even of courtesy to animals: these are some of the themes upon which Buddha discourses, now with a touch of humor, now with pathos, and always with gentleness and wisdom and cogency.

To the readers of Warren's faithful translations a word is due as to the extreme repetitiousness of much of the Buddhist writings. The charming stories are free from it. Not so the doctrinal discourses. Scientific opinion upon this strange and tedious fault is rapidly clearing. These texts that claim to be the actual "Buddha-word" are in reality the product of conscious scholastic literary activity, and of a time considerably subsequent to that of Buddha. This is quite certain. But no less so is it that they do in fact contain the real sayings of Buddha. "Be ye heirs of things spiritual, not heirs of things carnal." This, we may confidently assert, is in its simplicity and pregnant brevity, an absolutely authentic utterance of Gotama Buddha. At the same time it is the substance, and indeed we may say the entire substance, of a discourse of about four hundred Pali words attributed to Buddha. Of the lengths to which perverse scholasticism may go, the case is a luculent illustration.


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 III. CONFUCIANISM

ONFUCIANISM, although spoken of with Buddhism and Taoism as one of the "Three Teachings," or three major religions of China, can hardly be defined as a religion in the precise way in which we can define Mahayana Buddhism or Roman Catholic Christianity. It has neither creed nor priesthood, nor any worship beyond what Confucius found already established in his day. The commemorative service, performed by local officials throughout China in spring and autumn in the red-walled shrines known as "Confucian temples" is not worship of the sage, but a civil rite in his honor, quite compatible with the profession of another religion. Indeed, when a few centuries after his death veneration approached to worship, and women began offering prayers to Confucius for children, the practice was stopped (A. D. 472) by imperial edict, as something superstitious and unbecoming. Confucianism may be said to have a bible in the nine canonical books associated with the sage's name; but it claims for them no divine revelation, nor other inspiration than such as speaks for itself from their pages. What these books yield to one who would define Confucianism is a conception of enlightened living, a social ideal which entails some allegiance to an old national religion blending nature worship and ancestor worship. One might say that the essence of Confucianism is a type of "eligible" life, the regimen of which includes a worship only indirectly Confucian, much as Stoicism among the Romans included as a matter of principle some adherence to the established worship.

THE TEACHING OF CONFUCIUS

Confucius can be appreciated only in his historical setting. It has been made a reproach to the sage that his vision was retrospective and conservative; but he cannot be charged with a mere desire to


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452 bring back "the good old days." When, at the court of Chou, he first inspected the ancestral shrines and the arrangements for the great annual sacrifices to Heaven and Earth, he exclaimed: "As we use a glass to examine the forms of things, so must we study the past to understand the present." The past, moreover, really held models of statecraft from which his own times had fallen away. The great Chou dynasty, which through a succession of able princes had ruled the whole valley of the Hoang Ho, had in the sixth century B. C. dwindled to a shadow of its early power. The emperor (or rather king for the title Huang-ti was then applied only to deceased monarchs) was reduced to a headship merely nominal, and the old imperial domain was broken up among turbulent vassals, each fighting for his own hand. The China of Confucius was pretty much in the condition of France before Louis XI broke the power of the feudal dukes and counts. With the tradition behind him of a nation united by wise leadership, Confucius is no more to be blamed for looking back than is Aristotle, whose Ethics and Politics show plainly that his sympathies were not with the advancing career of Macedon but with the old polity of Athens.

The first group of the Confucian books, the Five Classics, are fruits of this regard for the past, the sage being the reputed compiler of four of them, and author of the faith. These classics are the "Shu Ching" or "Book of History," made up of documents covering a period from the twenty-fourth to the eighth century B. C.; the "Shih Ching" or "Book of Odes," 305 lyrics dating from the eighteenth to the sixth century; the "Yi Ching" or "Book of Permutations," an ancient manual of divination; the "Li Chi," a compilation of ceremonial usages; and the "Ch'un Ch'iu," annals (722-484) of Confucius's native state of Lu. The second group in the canon, the Four Books, convey his actual teachings. They are the "Lun Yü" or "Sayings of Confucius" ; the "Ta Hsueh" or "Great Learning," a treatise by his disciple Tsang Sin on the ordering of the individual life, the family, and the state; the "Chung Yung" or "Doctrine of the Mean," a treatise on conduct by his grandson K'ung Chi; and the "Book of Mencius," his great apostle.


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Rh The distinctive features of Confucian doctrine may be summarized as follows:

(1) Filial piety is the cardinal social virtue. A dutiful son will prove dutiful in all the five relationships: those of father and son, ruler and subject, husband and wife, elder brother and younger, and that of friend. Such a tenet was naturally acceptable to a social system like the Chinese, with its patriarchalism and insistence on the family rather than the individual as the unit of society. Loyalty to family it raises to a religious duty in the rite of ancestor worship. Here Confucius did no more than emphasize with his approval a national custom—mentioned in the earliest odes—of offering food and wine to departed spirits. How far this family cult is to be construed as actual worship is disputable: some would compare it merely with the French custom of adorning graves on All Souls' Day. But it effectively strengthens the family bond, impressing as it does the sense of family unity and perpetuity through the passing generations.

(2) Between man and man the rule of practice is "reciprocity." "What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others." Benevolence—an extension of the love of son and brother—is the worthy attitude toward one's fellows, but it should not be pressed to fatuous lengths. When asked his opinion of Lao-tse's teaching that one should requite injury with good, Confucius replied: "With what, then, will you requite kindness? Return good for good; for injury return justice."

(3) The chief moral force in society is the example of the "superior man." By nature man is good, and the unrighteousness of society is due to faulty education and bad example. Virtue in superiors will call out virtue in common folk. The burden of Confucius's teaching is therefore "superior" character—character so disciplined to a moral tact and responsive propriety that in every situation it knows the right thing and does it, and so poised in its own integrity as to practice virtue for virtue's sake. "What the small man seeks is in others; what the superior man seeks is in himself."

(4) Toward the world of spiritual beings the Confucian attitude is one of reverent agnosticism. The sage would have nothing to


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454 say of death and the future state. "We know little enough of ourselves as men; what, then, can we know of ourselves as spirits?" In his habit of referring to "T'ien" or "Heaven," Confucius may not have deliberately avoided the more personal term "Shang-ti" (Supreme Lord), and expressions of his are not lacking which suggest a personal faith: but speculation on the nature of being and the destiny of the world he treated simply as a waste of time. On a report that two bereaved friends were comforting themselves with the doctrine that life is but dream and death the awakening, he remarked: "These men travel beyond the rule of life; I travel within it."

In summary one might say that Confucius did not found any religious system, but transmitted one with a renewed stress on its ethical bearings. His interest was in man as made for society. Religious rites he performed to the letter, but more from a sense of their efficacy for "social-mindedness" than from any glow of piety. His faith was a faith in right thinking. The "four things he seldom spoke of—wonders, feats of strength, rebellious disorder, spirits"—were simply the things not tractable to reason.

THE GROWTH OF CONFUCIAN INFLUENCE

Confucianism has so long dominated the intellectual life of China that western scholars have fallen into the habit of speaking as if there were a sort of preestablished harmony between it and the national mind. As a matter of fact it has had to win its way against vigorous criticism and formidable rivals. The two centuries following Confucius's death were rife with conflicting theories of ethics. Yan Chu presented a cynical egoism: death ends all; so make the most of life, every man for himself. To this doctrine Mo Ti opposed a radical altruism, with universal love as the cure of misgovernment and social disorders. Lao-tse impugned the Confucian idea of man's inborn goodness. Man's nature no more tends to goodness than water tends to run east, or willow wood to take shape in cups and bowls. Against all these contentions the teaching of Confucius was defended and elucidated by the greatest of his followers, Meng-tse (372–289), whose name has been Latinized as Mencius. But Confucianism had to meet systems of thought that carried a more


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Rh religious appeal than it admitted of. Taoism was already in the field, preaching a wise passiveness toward the Way of Heaven, and enlisting in Chuang-tse one of the most brilliant writers that China has produced. His teaching was mystical: "The universe and I came into being together; and I, with all things therein, are One." The repulse of this doctrine by that of Confucius is perhaps correctly explained by the historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien: "Like a flood its mysteries spread at will: hence no one, from rulers downward, could apply them to any definite use." But the reticence of Confucius as to the state of departed spirits left an opening for Buddhism, which describes that state with the full detail craved by popular imagination. The pessimistic philosophy of Buddhism was indeed alien to the Chinese temperament, but its missionaries won a ready response to its doctrine of retribution and its offer of salvation. From the fifth century on it was increasingly in conflict with Confucianism, and succumbed only after sharp persecution. Even in its decline it has contributed many ideas and practices to the old animistic religion of the masses. The triumph of Confucianism in its fall, moreover, was not a mere reassertion of the teaching of Confucius and Mencius. Taoism and Buddhism had raised questions of cosmology which could no longer be ignored. The Neo-Confucianism, therefore, that began with Chou Tun-i (1017–1073) built upon the Yi Ching a cosmic philosophy, describing the world in terms of two principles: a primal matter and an immanent intelligence, which give rise on the one hand to the five elements and all sense data, and on the other to all wisdom and moral ideals. The greatest name in Neo-Confucianism is Chu Hsi (1130–1200), whose commentaries on the canonical books are now authoritative, and whose manuals of domestic rites and manners have brought the Confucian code into the homes of the people.

In 1906 Confucius was "deified" by imperial decree. With the rise of republicanism, however, there has appeared a disposition to reject not only such a canonization of the sage, but the whole conservative tradition for which he has stood. The movement has at the present writing called out a reaction, but the future of Confucianism amid the intellectual currents now flooding in from the West, can be only matter of conjecture. One may hope that the ethical code that has


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 IV. GREEK RELIGION

REEK religion includes all the varied religious beliefs and practices of the peoples living in Greek lands from the beginning of history to the end of paganism. In contrast to Christianity it had no body of revealed teachings, no common dogma or fixed ritual binding at all shrines and on every worshiper, but each locality might have its own distinctive myths and practices, and the individual might believe what he pleased so long as he did not openly do violence to tradition. No priestly orders attempted to interpose their decrees upon society; local habit alone determined both ritual and belief.

The religion of the Greeks exhibited at every stage its composite character. As early as the second millennium B.C., so far as we can judge from the results of excavations in Greece proper and in Crete, the inhabitants of these lands had anthropomorphic ideas about some of their deities, that is, they thought of them and represented them in their art essentially as human beings; on the other hand, we find in the later centuries such primitive elements as the worship of sacred stones, trees, and symbols still existing. Yet it is a mistake to suppose that Greek religion had its origin in a worship of natural objects and forces; undoubtedly the worship of natural phenomena and of inanimate objects, of ancestors, and possibly of animals, all contributed to the religious sum total, but it is impossible to trace to-day all the factors which made up religion in historical times. We can only say that the Greeks worshiped a multitude of spiritual beings who filled all nature and were to be found in every field of activity. Man, therefore, was always in social relation to the gods. The ordinary Greek felt that the world was filled with divine beings of varying ranks whose favor he must seek or whose ill nature he must propitiate by offerings and prayer. Only the most enlightened ever attained to anything like monotheism.


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458 RELIGION IN HOMER AND HESIOD

The earliest Greek literature, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," shows a circle of gods bound together in a social organization similar to that of the Homeric state. At the head is Zeus, father of gods and of men, possessing a power on Olympus like that of Agamemnon among the Greeks before Troy. With Zeus, Apollo and Athena hold the first rank; Hera, although the wife of Zeus, is in the second rank with Poseidon; Ares and Aphrodite represent little more than the passions of rage for slaughter and love; the god of fire, Hephaestus, Artemis, the sister of Apollo, Hermes, the higher servant of the greater gods and the companion of men, and others are of still lower rank; while Demeter and Dionysus, although known, have no place on Olympus. All these divine beings are represented as larger, stronger, wiser than mortals, but they are no whit less subject to the passions of body and mind; their superiority over men lies chiefly in the possession of immortality. Now no such system of gods was ever worshiped anywhere in the Greek world. It was created by a process of selection and elimination from local cults, and adapted to please the Ionic courts at which the epics were intended to be recited. These epic gods did not drive out local divinities; but the Homeric poems acquired such universal influence in Greece that wherever possible the local divinity was assimilated to the Homeric type, so that Athena, for example, the patroness of Athens, was endowed with the characteristics given her in the epics. There was a constant tendency in literature and art to represent the greater gods in the Homeric way.

Hesiod (about 700 B. C.) also had a great influence on later times through his "Theogony," which was the first attempt to criticize myths and to bring the various accounts into a consistent and harmonious whole. Moreover, the Hesiodic poetry displays certain religious elements which have little or no place in the Homeric epics. Of these the most significant is the worship of the dead and of heroes. On the side of ethics also we find higher concepts of justice and of the moral order; and in general there is much more reflection on man's relation to the gods and to society than we see in Homer.


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Rh In spite of the influence of Homer and Hesiod, no single god or system of gods ever became wholly universal, but each divinity was connected with some locality. The simple Greek conceived of his local god as individual, largely distinct from any other god of the same name, very much as the Greek peasant to-day thinks of his local saint. Yet with the growth of cities, when it became inconvenient to resort often to the ancient localities which might be remote, new shrines, offshoots of the old, were established in towns, so that there was, for example, at Athens, a certain concentration of cults. Furthermore, the chief divinity of a city acquired a position as patroness of a considerable area, as Athena of all Attica, but without completely overshadowing or expelling other gods. Likewise certain religious centers developed which served more than one state, such as the shrine of Apollo at Delos, which became a center for all lonians, or that of Zeus at Olympia, where representatives of all the Greek world assembled every four years.

GROWTH OF PERSONAL RELIGION

It will thus be seen that Greek religion was largely social and local. The members of the family, the clan, the tribe, and the state were bound together by worship in which the individual shared by virtue of his membership in the social body. These conditions gave solidarity to society and made religion the common and permanent concern of all citizens; yet this common worship tended to check all tendencies to personal religion. But from the eighth century B. C. on, many influences operated to bring the individual to self-consciousness. Men began to be dissatisfied with the sacred tradition of the state and to seek to establish such personal relations with the gods as should give them as individuals religious satisfaction. This desire found outlet from the sixth century B. C. in the Orphic Sect, whose members tried to secure satisfaction for religious emotion and to gain the warrant of a happy life hereafter through the mystic worship of Dionysus and a fixed method of life. At about the same time the Mysteries began to be prominent. Of these the most important were at Eleusis in Attica, where a festival in honor of Demeter and certain associated gods had existed from a remote period. This festival was originally agricultural, intended to secure fertility and


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460 for all admitted to it; but before 600 B. C. it had been transformed into an eschatological mystery, by initiation into which the individual was assured of a blessed future life. The movements thus started in Greek religion tended to break down men's real dependence on social worship, although the old cults continued to the end of paganism. Yet, in Athens especially, political events during the fifth century checked the individualistic movements in religion temporarily. From the conflict with Persia (490–479 B. C.) Athens emerged as the chief state in Greece; during the fifty years which followed she enjoyed an unprecedented prosperity and an imperial position which bound all citizens closely together, in spite of the strife of political parties. Now in the preceding century Peisistratus had done much to exalt and establish the Olympian type of religion at Athens; and it was natural that in the time of the power of Athens the ideal of the state religion should predominate. All citizens united in dedicating to the gods their material wealth and their noblest art.

RELIGION IN GREEK TRAGEDY

In this same time lived the great tragedians Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who were also great religious teachers. Æschylus endeavored to interpret the higher truths of religion as he saw them, and to bring these truths into relation with morals. He dwelt on the nature of sin, the stain it brings to each succeeding generation, the punishment of wrongdoing which the divine justice must inflict, and on the disciplinary value of suffering. These characteristics of his tragedies are well illustrated by the "Prometheus" and by the Trilogy. Sophocles emphasized the divine source of the higher moral obligations which transcend all human laws. He further taught that pain may have its place even when the sufferer is innocent; and that purity of heart, faith in Zeus, and acquiescence in the divine will are fundamental principles of righteous life. These doctrines underlie the "Antigone" and "Œdipus the King." Euripides belongs in temper to the rational age which followed him. He had no consistent message to his time. On the whole he contributed to the rejection of the old Olympic religion, but at the same time he